The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini Read Free

Giulietta was over, he cut the remaining rope and jumped for safety as the boat drifted away.
    “Where are we going?”
    “I have a house,” he said.
    “Ca’ il Mauros?” Her heart sank. To reach there from here, they’d need to cross the Grand Canal by gondola twice, or walk round it, which would double the distance and take them down one of the most dangerous streets in Venice.
    “A different house,” he told her.
    When he reached for her hand, it was not to comfort her, but to grip her wrist and start dragging. He wanted her to walk faster.
    “Atilo, you’re…” Giulietta shut her mouth. The old man was trying to save her. He was furious, in a way she’d never seen, his face a battle mask, his eyes hard in the darkness.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    He stopped, and Giulietta thought… For a second, she thought he’d forget himself and slap her. Then there was no time to think more of that, because a grotesque figure watched them from a square ahead.
    “This way.”
    A yank on her wrist hurled her towards an alley. Only thatway out of the new square was blocked as well. As were the other two exits.
    “Kill yourself,” Atilo said.
    Giulietta gaped at him.
    “Not now, you little fool. If I’m dead, and they’re dead…” He pointed to silhouettes appearing in the shadows. Some stood near the grotesques who blocked the exits, others stood on rooftops or balconies. “Don’t let yourself be taken.”
    “They’ll rape me?”
    “You can survive that. What the Wolf Brothers do you don’t survive. Although you might be more use to them alive and unharmed. Which means you must definitely kill yourself.”
    “Self-murder is a sin.”
    “Letting yourself be captured is a worse one.”
    “To God?”
    “To Venice. Which is what matters.”
    Serenissima, the name poets gave to the Serene Republic of Venice, was an inaccurate term. Since the city was neither serene nor, these days, a republic.
    In Atilo’s opinion, it was most like a bubbling pot into which some celestial threw endless grains of rice. And though each morning began with the bodies of beggars against walls, new born infants in back canals, paupers dumped to avoid the inconvenience of burying them—those unwanted, even by the unwanted—the city remained as crowded, and as packed, and as expensive, as he remembered it ever having been.
    In summer the poor slept on roofs, on balconies or in the open air. When winter came, they crowded squalid tenements. They shat, copulated, fought and quarrelled in public, seen by other adults as well as by their own children. The stairwells of the tenements had a permanent odour of poverty. Unwashed, unloved, stinking of sewage, and a greasy misery that oiled the skin until it looked and smelt like wet leather.
    A dozen scholars had drawn maps of Venice. Including a Chinese cartographer sent by the Great Khan, who’d heard of this capital with canals where roads should be and wanted to know how much of it was true. None of the maps were accurate, however, and half the streets had more than one name anyway.
    Running through what he thought of Venice, Atilo il Mauros wondered, in retrospect, why he felt reluctant to leave it and the life he’d made here. Was it simply that this was not the way he’d intended to die? In a squalid
campo
, near a ramshackle church, because every
campo
had one of those. Although not usually this run-down. A church, a broken wellhead, ruined brick houses…
    He’d hoped to die in his bed years from now.
    His wife, beautifully stricken, backlit by a gentle autumn sun; a boy at the bed’s foot, staring sorrowfully. To have this, of course, he’d need a wife. A wife, a son and heir, maybe a couple of daughters, if they weren’t too much trouble.
    After the siege of Tunis, Duke Marco III had offered him a deal. The duke would spare the city and Atilo would serve Venice as Admiral. If Atilo refused, every man, woman and child in the North African city would be slaughtered;