34

“He’s a strange one,” Desdaio said.

Taking another spoonful of venison from the pie in front of him, Atilo felt rather than saw her smile. She’d trimmed the meat herself, chopped root vegetables, ground Indian pepper and cut stale bread to serve as plates. He had a cook to do all that. Just as he had a serving woman to stand behind his chair and top up the glass Desdaio refilled from a jug.

He sat at the head of his long oak table in the piano nobile, with Desdaio at his right. Although light from a candelabrum made his glass sparkle, it barely reached the high-beamed ceiling overhead, and he sat with her in a puddle of brightness surrounded by shifting shadows. Both of them ate using forks. A habit Byzantium had adopted from the Saracens, its enemies. A princess brought the fashion to Venice two centuries before when she married the doge.

“Maybe three,” Atilo admitted.

Desdaio nodded to indicate she was listening.

The rest of Italy still ate with knives and their fingers and regarded Serenissima’s use of the two-pronged forks as proof the city was corrupted by its links with the Levant. As Gian Maria of Milan jeered, “What needs man with a fork when God gave him hands?” He would have been even less impressed to know the implement’s heathen origins.

“I have to go out later,” said Atilo, putting down his silver fork and wiping his mouth with his hand. Desdaio would be disappointed. She’d found a harpist from Brittany. On the run from something, Atilo imagined. He was to play for them that evening. It was meant to be a surprise.

“Can’t it wait?”

“Probably not,” Atilo said. “Council business.”

Desdaio’s face fell. Nothing came before the Ten. The daughter of a Venetian lord, the great-granddaughter of a rich cittadino, she understood that.

“You’re taking Iacopo?”

“Tycho,” Atilo said. “I’ll be taking Tycho.”

“He’s a strange one,” Desdaio said. As before, Atilo said nothing, simply waited for Desdaio to put her thoughts in some sort of order. People thought her beautiful but simple. She was not. She simply thought slowly. “He scares me,” she admitted finally.

“Why?” Atilo was interested.

“Something about him.” Desdaio bit her lip. She hesitated, considering her words. “He could be a prince,” she said finally. “When he’s not sulking in corners like a beggar. I’m not saying he is. Just sometimes, when he looks at us…”

“He seems… princely?”

“Don’t laugh at me. He eats castradina with his fingers, but stands up when I enter a room. And he watches always. I find him in rooms and don’t know how he got there. He’s like a shadow. Always there, except when he’s not.”

“And Iacopo doesn’t scare you?”

“That’s different.”

“In what way?”

Desdaio blushed, looking towards the fire as if shifting logs had suddenly caught her attention. All men looked at her, Atilo knew that was what she wanted to say. Iacopo was simply one of those.

“Should he scare me?” she asked instead.

He’s knifed a dozen men and cut a child’s throat without hesitation, simply because those were my orders. He uses his fists freely on whores, and more often than not takes them and forgets to pay. When he thinks I’m not looking, he leers at you as if he would deflower you on the spot if not for me.

And, God forbid I was to order it. But if I did, he would knife you now, weight the sack containing your body with stones and row it beyond the Giudecca himself, returning for breakfast with his appetite intact.

“That was just an example.”

“Something about Tycho is wrong.”

“He’s been living on the streets,” Atilo said. “We don’t know what’s been done to him.”

“It’s what he’s done to others that worries me. Oh, I don’t know he’s done anything. It’s just… The way he barely speaks.”

“Give me a month,” Atilo said. “If he still worries you the Black Crucifers can have him.” It was a lie, of course. He could no more give him to the Crucifers than he could tell Duchess Alexa he’d changed his mind and he no longer wanted the boy as his heir. And that would be a lie in its turn. He wanted the boy, just on his own terms.

“You’d let Crucifers torture him?”

“My dear,” Atilo began, and changed his mind. Let her think that was what he meant, rather than what he had meant. That Tycho could join the Order, being darker in temperament than even them.

She’d let him stay now. She’d probably have let him stay if the alternative was Tycho being accepted as an order acolyte. Desdaio hated the Black, not understanding the purpose they served. The White Order protected Cyprus and guarded caravans in the Middle East. The Black extracted every last sin with torture, before forgiving the lot. The Black Order’s purpose was to ensure no prisoner faced God with crimes on his conscience.

“Can you row?” Atilo asked, when he and Tycho stepped on to the landing beyond the watergate of Ca’ il Mauros.

No, of course I can’t… The boy shook his head.

“Then learn quickly,” Atilo growled, settling himself into a vipera and sitting back. The night was clear and full of stars, an old moon hung above the city, already tired in that way fading quarter moons are. “And when I ask you a question you answer. And you call me my lord. Understand?”

Tycho nodded, too nauseous to speak.

Atilo hissed in irritation.

Their trip across the mouth of the Grand Canal was a vomit-inducing nightmare. One that took five times longer than necessary according to Atilo. Glowering at his master, Tycho wondered if he knew the only thing standing between him and drowning was Tycho’s fear of being left alone on the water. Although he had been told what would happen if he rebelled. He would be given to the Black Crucifers. An order so fearful Desdaio crossed herself when he asked what they did.

Jumping from the vipera, Tycho slipped and fell, hitting his face on the slippery boards of the new jetty. Dark water taunted him through its gaps. So he rolled sideways a couple of times to reach land, lying there gasping, while stars left trails in a spinning sky.

Having tied the boat for himself, Atilo stamped over to Tycho and kicked him. “You’re afraid of water?” Tycho’s reply that water made him sick earned another kick. “This is ridiculous.”

“Not at all.” Stepping out of the shadows, Hightown Crow yanked Tycho upright before swinging round to face Atilo. “Did I or did I not fashion boots he was to wear? And did I or did I not ship him to you in a cabin floored with earth?”

The fat little man with his absurd beard and wire spectacles glared at the Moor who towered over him like a wooden carving of a hard eyed god. And all the while Tycho knelt by the jetty, hands pressed to the dirt as he willed the sky to stop spinning. A dozen late-night revellers staggered by, ignoring the little tableau as if such things happened every night.

“We train in bare feet.”

“He wears what I provide. Unless you want this to happen every time you take him across the lagoon? God knows, he gets sick simply crossing the Rialto bridge. How can you be so stupid?”

Atilo glowered. “Why are you here?”

“To watch him train.”

Atilo wanted to say no one watched. But since the only other person to know where Tycho trained tonight was Alexa, Dr. Crow’s presence meant she’d sent him. Which meant he stayed. Atilo was wise enough not push the point.

They woke a cobbler at random in a tiny alley to the west of Piazzetta San Marco, a stone’s throw before la Volta. Once he recovered from his fright, and realised he’d been selected not for his sins, such as they were, but because his was the first sign they’d seen, he vanished into his shop and returned with second-hand boots and shoes. Many were simply heels designed to be sewn to leggings. More than a few were designed for women. It looked as if the man had simply obeyed Dr. Crow and brought every piece of footwear in his shop.

“Try these ones,” Dr. Crow suggested.

Having selected the softest and most worn pair, these being the ones least likely to rub, Dr. Crow ordered the cobbler to rip free their soles and heels. Then he went into a nearby campo’s church, unlocked the crypt by passing his hand over the key plate and scraped dirt from the lid of an old coffin.

The cobbler was ordered to trim a new sole from the best leather he had, cut away its centre and sew what remained to the boot. He was to fill the cutaway space with the dirt before fixing the original sole over it.

“My lord…”

Taking the shoes, Dr. Crow gave them to Tycho, saying, “These will also make it easier to cross bridges.” To the cobbler, he said. “This never happened. Understand?”

“I understand, my lord.”

“Good,” said Dr. Crow, tossing him silver.

They were fifty paces beyond the shop when Atilo vanished. A few minutes later he caught them up again, tossing the alchemist his coins. “There are better ways to buy silence,” he said, wiping his blade on a scrap of leather.