22

“You got Mamluk blood?”

Tycho shook his head.

“Told you,” Pietro said triumphantly. He swept straggles of black hair from his childish face, spreading the dirt more evenly. “They’re killing Mamluks,” he explained. “Rosalyn thought…”

He glanced across.

“Well, the City Watch want you. And a black girl with braided hair. So Rosalyn thought you must be Mamluk…”

“If he’s not,” said Rosalyn, “he must be a slave.”

“That’s it.” Josh nodded. “Your master’s important enough to use the Watch.” He looked suddenly worried. “He’s not Ten, is he?”

Rosalyn scrambled to her feet.

She bared her teeth when Tycho stopped her. Behind him, Pietro grabbed half a brick. “You hurt my sister…”

“I won’t.” Tycho put his fingers to Rosalyn’s head and saw Josh’s eyes narrow and his face harden at the sight.

“I mean it,” Pietro said.

Tycho nodded, but kept his fingers in place.

I can do this, he told himself. If it can happen by accident, it can happen intentionally. He let the question trickle through his body, feeling how it flowed from his fingers to her mind. The black girl she talked about was the Nubian he’d seen earlier. The Watch looked like thugs everywhere.

“Witchcraft,” Rosalyn said, stepping back.

Pietro raised his brick and Josh reached for a dagger in his belt.

Tycho might have had to fight them, maybe kill one, but the moon stopped the fight before it began. Sliding from behind cloud, it lit the door of his ruined wooden warehouse. It also lit his face, although Tycho only realised this when Rosalyn’s own softened and she shifted, almost unknowingly, to put herself between Josh and Tycho.

“Wait,” she said.

They stood as they were. Pietro with his raised brick, Josh scowling and Tycho swaying on his feet. Rosalyn looked into the bleakness in his eyes. “Are you a slave?” she demanded. “Is that why they’re hunting you?”

“I was,” he admitted. “But that was before here.”

“And I suppose your mother was a princess?” Josh said spitefully. “Your father was captured in battle? No doubt your grandfather lived in a palace.” He rolled his eyes derisively. “Never met an escaped slave who didn’t claim he was a prince.”

Tycho wondered how many he’d talked to. And then, wondered how many escaped slaves there were in Venice. A dozen, a hundred, more? What happened when they were caught?

“Were you a prince?”

“Rosalyn…” Josh sounded exasperated.

“Just asking. Did you have a palace? Was your mother a princess?”

“My mother died when I was born. She was a slave before that. I don’t know, maybe she was a princess before she was a slave. No one ever said. The woman who brought me up called her, Lady…”

Rosalyn tipped her head to one side. “Maybe that’s the truth,” she said. “Otherwise he’d say his palace was huge.”

“And perhaps he’s just being clever,” Josh said flatly. “He looks clever. Maybe he’s a Jew. His hair is strange enough.”

“Jews aren’t slaves.”

Josh spat. “They should be.”

Rosalyn flushed, her face darkened and she bit her lip, hugging herself. This only made her small breasts jut. And that only made Josh smirk. There was a tension and strangeness to the night. A chill wind holding scents that demanded Tycho find their origin even as they told Rosalyn to flee.

“You hungry?” she asked him.

Tycho shook his head.

“Rosalyn.”

“What?” The girl looked nervously at…

Who? Tycho wondered. Her brother? Her lover?

Strays, thrown together by chance? He looked more closely, seeing if he could guess which. Siblings, perhaps. There was a family likeness. Unless that was simply the hunger in their eyes and the dirt.

As if hearing his thought, Rosalyn said, “Josh is my boss. Pietro my brother. We’re going to San Michele. You should come.”

“It’s an island,” Pietro added.

“He knows that…”

“How would he?” Josh demanded. “He’s foreign. He doesn’t know anything.” Jerking his head at Tycho, he said, “I say we leave him.”

Tycho thought of telling them that crossing water made him feel sick. That even crossing bridges made him uneasy. But he didn’t want them to know that. So he watched them go instead, seeing Josh snarl when Rosalyn looked back.

The sacking of the sultan’s fondak lasted until daybreak. A stranger would have thought one house on a canal was attacked by all the others. That was wrong. The area inside the walls was Mamluk. As foreign as France or Byzantium itself. Just easier to sack, with less distance to carry the spoils.

Screaming told Tycho he was near.

He could feel lightning in the air. Looking up, he expected thunderclouds, but found a sliver of moon that tugged at his mind.

Hunger was the missing fact of his life.

Around Tycho, Venetians slurped stolen pomegranates, licked their lips and looked satisfied. Beggars hunched over dried figs like misers over gold. Dogs fought for pastries looters had taken, half eaten and discarded as too strange for their tastes. It made Tycho certain something was missing in himself.

He could no longer distinguish flavours. Eating or not eating made little difference to his happiness. It didn’t even seem necessary to keep him alive. And yet, he’d lied to Rosalyn about not being hungry. He had a hunger no food could fill. A hunger he dragged after him like a shadow, always half seen and oblique to the world in which he lived.

The dead were dead to him now. Either they’d abandoned him or he’d abandoned them. The empty city, below this one, he tried to avoid revisiting. It was too strange, too lonely, too much like him. The beasts roaming it terrified him. He was beyond being able to meet his fears in its distorting mirror.

The empty city called him, of course.

But not as fiercely as the women’s screams from up ahead. He was almost at their source when a Nubian with silver-tipped braids stopped him. “So are you going to kiss me this time…?” She smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

He flinched as she reached for him, scared of the silver thimbles glittering in the moonlight. “Don’t reveal your weaknesses,” she said. “Only your strengths. And if you don’t yet know what those are, keep silent.”

Tycho tried to say he was silence’s closest friend, but she hadn’t finished. “Change is painful,” she told him. “But not to change is…”

“To die?”

“You don’t have that option. The longer you fight against who you are the harder your transformation will be. Believe me,” she said. “We are different enough to be alike.” The closer she stood the more scents Tycho recognised. Sweat and shit and garlic and cloves, and something else.

The Nubian laughed softly. “What drives your hunger?”

“I don’t know.”

“Most boys want this.” Slipping her hand under her skirt, she touched herself. Smearing her finger across his face, she laughed. “Trust you to be different.”

“I’m not,” Tycho lied.

“You want… What?” Looking up, she found the moon. “Not the Goddess exactly. Although your hunger grows as she does. But her blood tides are not the blood you need…” Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone older. And there was a strangeness in her eyes that made him shiver.

“You will feed,” she said.

“I’ve tried eating…”

Her slap snapped his head sideways. “Listen to me,” she hissed. “Twice I’ve helped you now. Once kindly, this time not. When we meet again it will be as strangers. Understand me?”

Tycho didn’t. “Where am I?”

“Here,” she said. “As opposed to there. Dust and ashes, dead and done with. Bjornvin spent what Bjornvin earned. You will never go back. No one does. No one can. There is nothing to go back to. Go now, feed.”