Free The Outcast Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page B

great enemy, Emperor Sigismund, had put a price on his head. Venice’s other great enemy, the Byzantine emperor, once tried to have Dr Crow killed. The Pope in Rome had excommunicated him for heresy. (Mind you, the Pope once excommunicated all Venice. It didn’t seem to do anyone much harm.) Only Millioni patronage kept him safe.
    “Nothing less than three silver.”
    “And if he offers two?”
    “We take it. What else are we going to do?”
    When the sledge he was dragging towards the mud flats suddenly lightened the sexton’s cousin thought the corpse had fallen off. He died without realising his mistake. His half-brother wasn’t so lucky.
    She bit out his throat.
    Her eyes had changed since the girl last saw the world. The colours were deeper and there were more of them than there used to be. The stink of the grave was stronger than she expected, the scent of the mud richer, the water saltier. She knew this instinctively because her knowledge was animal.
    Her rebirth had been slow, and she had not been conscious to see it, feel it, or understand it. Inside her body, invisible fingers unravelled threads and changed the knots in the very fabric of what once made her human.
    Only then did they repair the flesh they found.
    The fingers moved swiftly for their size; but their size was soimpossibly small even Dr Crow, looking through his most powerful glass, would have seen nothing. And they worked in the worst of conditions: without light, without air, without what they usually needed to do what they did.
    All the same, they’d persevered.
    As the horizon brightened, the girl looked at the light and glanced behind her. The hole she’d been dragged from would provide shadow; but the stink of bodies was close to unbearable and she’d had to shovel aside the dead while sensing which way led to freedom. The groundwater had weakened her. In fighting to escape it she’d found drier earth, which became warm earth, ending in a baked crust that stopped her digging free.
    Until the sexton’s cousin came.
    As the girl scrambled into the pit and pulled earth over her, she thought of nothing. She had no sense of what she was. No sense of why she was there. Her fear of daylight was atavistic. The old her would have feared the grave’s dampness, realising the groundwater might steal too much of her strength to let her dig free again. This her had no room for such worries. It simply knew darkness was better than light. Wet earth safer than facing the sun.
    It was unusually hot that day.
    The first of three dawns that warmed the lagoon and made even the wider canals begin to stink. Mud banks hardened and fishing nets grew brittle. Beggars died of the heat as they died of cold, because beggars always died.
    They died and needed burying.
    Giorgio, the sexton at San Giacomo, was happy with this. His parish was poor and its closeness to Pauper Island its only asset. The money he made as sexton from the burials kept his wife fed and his house standing.
    On the third day after his cousins went missing, Giorgio was ordered to bury those who had died in the recent heat wave. Itwas only when he reached Pauper Island with his cargo of dead beggars that he discovered his cousins.
    When he reported their deaths to the Watch and said he believed demons haunted the island, they suggested he keep that opinion to himself. And across the island city, in the dampness of his cellar, Dr Crow accepted his bodies weren’t coming, cursed the inefficiency of the locals and wondered, not for the first time, where else in Europe a man of his brilliance might be welcome.

13
    Tycho missed the sunshine. He missed the daylight. He missed its warmth and its brightness and its brilliance. His memory of bright days and blue skies fuelled his longing for something that would kill him if he let it.
    Glancing at the horizon he found it lacked even a stain of the sun’s afterglow. Reds and oranges had paled through yellowy purple into cold blue before he woke. The