Free The Outcast Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

pruning roses in the garden glanced up, then looked away and kept working, hoping his indiscretion had gone unnoticed. It hadn’t, of course. Nothing in Ca’ Ducale ever did.
    “Do you know…?”
    “Who poisoned him?” Her aunt hesitated on the edge of saying something and decided against it. When Giulietta swallowed her disappointment at being treated like a child, Aunt Alexa nodded her approval and Giulietta then wondered if she was wrong about being treated like a child. Life in the palace was complicated.
    Leopold had told her that life in all palaces was complicated.
    It should be thought of as being like trying to play chess when you could only see the board in a mirror and half the pieces you did have were invisible.
    “I’ll have my guards see you home.”
    Giulietta understood what calling Ca’ Friedland
home
must cost her aunt, so she smiled, shook her head gently, and said, “I have two of my own.”
    “Well, take care of yourself. After Marco…”
    Giulietta scowled. She wanted her aunt to finish the sentence.
After Marco I love you most. After Marco I couldn’t bear if something happened to you
. Or simply,
After Marco we need to take care…
    She wished she knew which.
    Did her aunt love her? If she did, why didn’t she ever say it? Giulietta needed the comfort of knowing someone other than her baby loved her. Her husband had. And Tycho…
    But being loved by someone you hated was no use to anyone.
    “Aunt.” Kissing Alexa’s cheek, Giulietta bobbed a curtsy asbefitted a niece bidding a duchess goodbye and left, taking with her thoughts of how hard being Aunt Alexa must be. When she’d arrived in the city, Alexa was the daughter of a minor khan and called something else entirely.
    She found herself, a Mongol girl, in a strange city that still had nightmares about the Golden Horde. Now Prince Tamburlaine – who was a distant cousin, for all he addressed Alexa as
aunt
in his letters – had conquered China and ruled an empire stretching from the Yellow Sea to the edges of Byzantium.
    Silks flooded into Alexa’s adopted city from Cathay, spices from northern India and silverwork from Samarkand; while Western goods went east, carried by Venetian caravans, and the profits returned to Venice’s coffers.
    Venice
needed
Aunt Alexa for her kinship with the khan of khans. It made Giulietta thankful to be herself.
    As she walked home accompanied by her guards, Lady Giulietta spotted Dr Crow on some jetty steps near San Giovanni in conversation with two men shabby enough to be beggars. “Fresh, this time,” she heard him say. “I’m not paying for…”
    “No, sir. Of course not. I promise you that the… That tonight’s catch will be better.”
    She hurried on, glad the alchemist hadn’t seen her and suspecting his blindness was simply because he didn’t expect to see her. Well brought up Venetian women used gondolas, one of the reasons Giulietta liked walking. It was only later she wondered what Dr Crow was doing talking to fishermen and why he didn’t buy from the market like everyone else.

12
    Burning the dead was forbidden by tradition and religion. Of course, religion tended to be given short shrift in Venice unless it agreed with the city’s own views. (Even excommunication, and the threat of an eternity in hell, wasn’t enough to make the city obey the Pope.) Tradition was another matter.
    Venice liked tradition.
    And then there was
resurrection
. Which wasn’t really religion or tradition. More a matter of common sense. How could you come back from the grave at the last trump if your body had no skeleton to hang its flesh on?
    The sexton at San Giacomo, a parish in the slums between Cannaregio and the dockyards of Arzanale, didn’t worry about such niceties. He’d have happily burnt bodies if the city paid him. Unfortunately the city wanted its dead buried.
    Still, there was money in burying the bodies. And for the sexton’s cousin, if not for the sexton himself, even more money