49

Steam from the heat of a hundred bodies sweated the dungeon’s stone walls and rose from the water’s filthy surface in a parody of lagoon mist. It swirled through rotting tread steps, disturbed by the wheel’s movement. Settling only when a shift changed, breaking into fresh flurries as soon as the wheel resumed turning.

The faces around him were also parodies. Deprived of light, bleached by the mist. Skin withered and puckered and rotten from years of immersion.

Sometime later, the flickering torch visible through the grating burnt out to leave the pit in darkness. It had to be late, because the gaolers barely bothered to rattle the grating as they passed. Contenting themselves with pissing through the grill, or defecating and kicking their shit on to the prisoners below.

Tycho slept in shallow five-minute naps.

A skill he’d developed in childhood, when not rushing to answer Lord Eric’s call meant a beating and even less food. He could flash from slumber to fully awake in an instant.

“Why did they put you in here?” Tycho asked Pietro.

“Didn’t want me to talk about that night, did they?” he replied with the certainty of an eight-year-old who’d thought it through.

“When Rosalyn died?”

Tycho held Pietro by his shoulders while the small boy fought bitter sobs and won. He felt embarrassed comforting the boy. When Tycho held it was to kill, or take. But the boy mourned his sister. And Tycho having killed Rosalyn’s murderer was not enough to make that good. Not even close.

“Found yourself a friend?”

Spinning, Tycho saw a red-headed girl in rags.

A’rial was older than Pietro by a few years. Her hair tied up in a clumsy knot and fixed with a raven’s bone. She stank like a fox. A purple light shimmered around her. When Pietro crossed himself, she grinned, her teeth glowing white.

“No one else can see us,” she said.

Sure enough, a translucent haze enclosed the three of them and the pump’s noise had faded.

“I’ve come with an offer.”

“For me or him?” Tycho said, nodding towards the boy.

“You, obviously… The duchess knows.”

He’d upset A’rial with his flippancy. Because she stopped there, leaving him to imagine what Alexa knew. That Prince Leopold was alive? That Tycho let him get away. That Lady Giulietta also lived…?

“Yes,” A’rial said. “That one.”

Pietro was staring at the oubliette beyond the edge of A’rial’s magic. He’d moved as far from her as he could without actually touching the shimmering bubble that contained them.

“Go,” A’rial told him, tearing a gap in the haze.

Tycho grabbed the boy. “He stays.”

“Collecting pets?”

“Is that what the duchess does?”

Tycho’s blow struck home, because flint entered A’rial’s eyes. Thinning the haze, she pointed to the relentless wheel and the oubliette’s dripping walls. “You want to stay here?”

Even inside her magic the air was fetid, hot and stinking.

“Except you can’t, can you?” she said. “At one minute after midnight the Black Master arrives to question you himself.”

Pietro gasped. “Kill yourself while you can. Use the knife.”

“What knife?” A’rial’s gaze sharpened.

“This one,” said Tycho, putting his blade to her throat. What Pietro saw was Tycho face one direction, then suddenly face another. But Tycho knew he’d moved the way a normal person moves, simply faster. Much faster. A’rial’s fingertips lit and Tycho twitched his hand. “I can strike faster than you.”

“Impossible.”

“You willing to risk being wrong?”

Tension drained from A’rial’s body and she smiled. He waited for her to try to trick him but she kept smiling. Looking for all the world like an eleven-year-old told to deliver a message by her mother or mistress.

“The duchess watched you fight Prince Leopold. She says you were magnificent. But you can be more. Embrace your nature. Complete the…”

Tycho wasn’t listening. He was more concerned with another question. How could she have watched? His guts churned. What had she seen? The start of the battle? He could handle that. Giulietta’s sudden appearance? The girl offering herself in return for Prince Leopold’s life?

“Yes,” A’rial said.

“Stop that.” Tycho raised his blade.

A’rial shrugged. “I’ll try, but it takes effort. And you do the same, don’t you? You do it all the time.”

“I need touch to sense thoughts.”

“No. You just think you do,” she said crossly. “You’re your own worst enemy. My mistress can save your life.”

“And in return?”

The small girl sighed. Reaching for Pietro, she wrapped her arm round his shoulder, and drew him close. For a second, the small boy rested his head against her, believing the embrace genuine. But the face she showed Tycho was distant and strange. “Make Alexa an army of immortals.”

“No,” Tycho said, stepping back.

Pietro looked between them, his face puzzled.

“He’s going to die anyway. After you’ve gone, they’ll kill him simply because you favoured him. So what difference does it make? Come to that, why this fuss about feeding. You’ve done it before. And beggar children? A dozen die every week of cold or hunger. Do you try to save them?”

“That’s different.”

“No,” A’rial said. “It isn’t. Claim him. Save yourself.”

The calm of feeding on Giulietta was beginning to fade, and Tycho’s hunger was tiny threads of twisting smoke looking for a way into his mind. With A’rial’s words came knowledge that there was a step beyond where he was. There would always be another step until he was no longer human.

If he’d ever been human.

Remembering Prince Leopold’s agony as his muscles ripped and tendons broke, and his body became wolf, Tycho said, “I won’t.”

If he closed his eyes he could see it happen. Skin splitting, flesh tearing and bones being twisted into new shapes by invisible hands. Bad enough the Black Crucifers would torture him. Why would Tycho do it to himself?

“That’s twice,” A’rial said. “I won’t offer a third time. But you call, I’ll come to you then.”

“Never.” Tycho was firm.

“Don’t count on it,” A’rial said.

There were two tides a day. A low and a high. The first mattered neither here nor there to those in the pit, who were removed from the festering mud banks of Venice’s edges, and the stink of sour water, as backstreet canals revealed rubbish, puddles and the occasional corpse with every ebbing tide.

The second did concern them.

At high tide, lagoon water flowed along ditches, for a few minutes to as much as an hour, and splashed into the oubliette below. One day’s tide left half the central island still exposed. Two days’ drowned it, but left prisoners able to stand. Three days’ killed those unable to swim. Only by constantly working the pump could everyone stay alive. Exquisite cruelty. Hard work for the sake of it. More than this, it stopped prisoners trying to escape. You worked the wheel; slept, woke and worked again. No one was allowed to slack. The oubliette was self-controlling, self-containing.

In it, Tycho saw Serenissima.

The varied councils, the courts within courts, the Arsenalotti at war with the Nicoletti, the cittadini jealous of the patricians, the patricians divided into old house and new, rich and poor. No one in Venice got off the wheel.

Beyond the city, Serenissima’s colonies fed the capital, the Venetian navy fought the Mamluk pirates; the Moors allied themselves with whoever the Mamluks opposed. The Germans offered support, claiming Byzantium was Serenissima’s greatest threat. The Byzantines claimed the German emperor’s ambition was a greater threat and offered support in turn. Tmr’s Mongols conquered ever larger slices of the world, threatening to recreate the sprawling empire of his hero Genghis Khan.

And the wheel went round and round and round…

“What did she mean save yourself?” Pietro said. The first words he’d spoken since A’rial vanished.

“It doesn’t matter.”

The boy looked embarrassed to be caught asking. But he continued watching Tycho with concern. High above them guards arrived, bringing fresh torches. “If you can save yourself, you should.” Pietro sounded far older than his age.

“How did you first get involved in this anyway?”

Pietro told him.

Being hunted by Wolf Brothers sounded terrifying. And listening to the boy’s tale of street rumours and outright lies, Tycho realised this was an old battle, one begun long before he reached the city. Maybe before Atilo even controlled the Assassini.

“We should have hidden,” Pietro admitted.

That was what he’d been told to do. And that’s what he’d done, as had his friends, until the battle was almost over. They had seen only the end. Admitting it, after Tycho had been captured, was their mistake.

“Tycho…” a guard yelled.

Pietro grabbed him. “It’s the Black Master,” he whispered. “Into the water. Hide now.”

The grate clattered as it was thrown back. Crossbowmen pointed their weapons into the pit and a long wooden ladder dropped, squelched into the mud and sank several inches. This was enough to stop those on the wheel. For a second, total silence filled the pit, then a voice shouted, “Tycho, move yourself.” Captain Roderigo stood lit by torchlight. He had his hand to his nose to shield himself from a rising stink Tycho had already forgotten existed.

“I said no,” Tycho protested.

“No what?” Roderigo shouted down.

Tycho couldn’t remember the stregoi’s name. He knew it once but he’d forgotten; perhaps that was part of her magic.

“The duchess’s… girl,” he finished lamely. “That red-headed one. She asked… She said…” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“Up here now,” Roderigo barked. “Stop wasting my time.”

Tycho pushed Pietro ahead of him, jeers and sneers following after. Pietro refused to climb. Tycho made him. And faced with Tycho armed here, and crossbowmen above, Pietro chose to avoid the here and now. Atilo would cure him of that weakness, Tycho was sure.

Roderigo stood beside the Black Master, who wore nightclothes. His lips were thinned to a slash of fury. Behind him waited a gaoler and a turnkey, in a uniform of filthy silk with a tatty and sad-faced winged lion embroidered on his chest.

“Who’s this?” Roderigo demanded.

“Atilo’s new apprentice.”

“My lord…” The turnkey said. “Your order specifies one only.”

Until then, Roderigo intended to toss the boy back. Now his pride refused. The turnkey opened his mouth to insist and shut it at a snarl from the Black Master.

“The duke is waiting.”