The Fallen Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Author:Jon Courtenay Grimwood [Grimwood, Jon Courtenay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Vampires, Historical, Horror, 01 Fantasy
ISBN: 9780316074391
Google: RbS-lwEACAAJ
Amazon: 031607439X
Goodreads: 7976029
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2011-01-26T11:00:00+00:00

38

A roof tile slid beneath his feet, skating towards the roof’s lip, and Tycho followed it over the edge, pushing off from the overhang and catching it on the way down, to land silently in the tiny garden of an insignificant palace in San Polo.

A scrap of black leather followed him.

He ignored the scrap. Since magic was best ignored in his opinion.

A leap for the garden wall, a roll over the top and he was in a private alley, with a wrought-iron gate at one end. Beyond the alley was an underpass. And since he couldn’t leap over the iron gate he lifted it off its hinges, as silently as rust and age allowed, then replaced it.

Unless the palace’s owners looked carefully for prints in their overflowing flower bed they would never know he’d passed through there.

Two down, three to go.

He scrabbled to the top of the first church he found beyond the sottoportego and found the scrap of black leather already waiting. It stared at him with amber eyes. “Are you going to follow me all night?”

It opened its mouth, displaying tiny needle-like teeth.

So Tycho ignored it again, inhaled the wind, and searched for the scent he was after. In there, like a missing note, was a gap where the scent he’d been hunting the night Duchess Alexa trapped him should be. He missed finding it, but ignored the hollowness this opened in his belly. The hardest lesson in a hard year of training. One that had seen spring turn to summer and leaves finally begin to fall.

This test mattered, which was not to say others didn’t. Simply that Atilo placed a greater value on this one. He’d tried not to let Tycho know, but the youth had become expert at reading the emotional currents swirling through Ca’ il Mauros. So he breathed deep, filtering out bass notes of sewage and tanneries.

Five prisoners from the pit released, one deserving to die. The others mere prisoners. Kill the right one and the others went free. Kill the wrong one and everyone died. That was meant to be his incentive. A call on his sympathy. But up here in the wind, on the tower of a San Polo church, Tycho had no sympathy for those sleeping below while the night crawled around them.

He wanted to get it right because he wanted to get it right.

Quickly, in the early days he’d reached a point where he judged himself only against what Atilo could do. Even Amelia, better than Iacopo, couldn’t move as silently as Tycho could. And a handful of months after that, he’d stopped judging himself against Atilo and started judging himself only against himself.

He was his own competition. The only person he was interested in beating was himself. It made the world a private place and most of Tycho’s life was lived inside his head. This, he suspected, suited everyone just fine.

Atilo, he knew, expected him to try to escape. That he didn’t worried the old man far more than Tycho trying to escape would have done.

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