The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini Read Free Page B

mouth and backed away from Atilo.
    The Moor grinned sourly. She was learning. Give him the girl for a few months and he’d give her aunt and uncle something worth keeping, and not just keeping alive. But they didn’t want something to keep. They wanted something unbroken they could trade.
    In a miracle of luck and poor judgement the third most junior Assassino hurled himself at the creature in front of him, ducked under a claw and managed to stab his sword into the beast’s sidebefore the
krieghund
struck. The young man died with his neck broken and his throat spraying blood.
    “Kill the beast,” Giulietta begged.
    “I don’t have arrows to waste.” Sweeping his gaze over the small, dark square, Atilo concluded fifty people must be watching from behind shutters. Houses this poor lacked glass. So they could hear as well.
    None would help. Why would they?
    “Look,” he told her, pointing at the
krieghund
on its knees. As she looked, the beast began to change, its face flattening and its shoulders becoming narrower. Giulietta took a second to understand what she was seeing. A wolfthing becoming a man, who stopped howling and started trying to shovel loops of gut back into his gaping stomach.
    “Now we kill him.”
    Out of the darkness came an Assassino, his sword already drawn back to take the dying man’s head. Blood pumped in a fountain and fell like rain. The battle was ferocious after that. Beasts and men hacking at each other. And then men lay dead in the dirt. Most in riveted mail, a few naked.
    “My lord…”
    Giulietta was finding her nerve, addressing him politely now. She still looked pale in the moonlight. They all looked pale to him. At least she’d stopped shivering and now held his dagger more confidently. There was an old-fashioned Millioni princess in there somewhere.
    “They’re advancing…”
    “I know,” he said, raising his bow.
    The officer who took orders originally glanced over, bowing slightly in reply to Atilo’s nod, to acknowledge whatever passed between them. He signalled to those of the Assassini who remained and they attacked as one.
    The last stages of the fight were brief and brutal.
    Swords slashing, daggers sliding under ribs, blood spraying. The stink was the stink of the abattoir; of shit and blood and open guts. The men died well, but they died, and, in the end, most corpses were clothed, a handful were naked and one furred half-corpse lurched towards Atilo, a dagger jutting from its ribs.
    “Kill it,” Giulietta begged.
    Sighting his crossbow, Atilo fired for the creature’s throat.
    The beast staggered, but kept coming. Straight into a second arrow. Hooking back his string, Atilo slotted a third, and would have fired had the
krieghund
not slashed the bow from his hand.
    Never thought I’d die like this.
    The thought came and went. There were worse ways to go than facing a creature from hell. But he had Marco III’s niece behind him and he couldn’t just… “Don’t,” he shouted. He was too late, however.
    Stepping out from behind him, Giulietta rammed her stiletto into the
krieghund
’s side, twisting hard. She went down when the creature cracked its elbow into her head. It was stooping for the kill, when a piece of night sky detached itself, dropping in a crackle of old leather and dry clicks. Atilo took the opening. Stabbing a throwing knife into the beast’s heart.
    “Alexa…?”
    The square of leather bumped into ground-floor shutters, crawled between rusting bars and hung itself upside down. Wings folding to a fraction of their previous size as golden eyes glared from a face disgusted with the world.
    “Giulietta’s still alive?”
    Kneeling, Atilo touched his fingers to the girl’s throat. “Yes, my lady.”
    “Good. We’ll need her now more than ever.” The bat through which Giulietta’s aunt had watched the battle turned its attention to the
krieghund
’s death agony. “You’ve upset him.” The words were thin. A whisper of wind forced