The Shadow Master (2 page)

“Capitano!” his mate called out, still up in the rigging. “It's… whales!”

“What?” he asked, as if not comprehending. He strode to the ship's rail and looked over into the waters below. It had to be a Lorraine trick. But it was whales. At least three of them. He looked at their dark rough-skinned backs, looking like some leather-clad machines of Leonardo's, under the water there. But these were alive. Each as long as the ship's width, and they were attacking the
Windseeker,
nudging it backwards towards the maelstrom. “No!” he said. It was as impossible as… He searched futilely for the metaphor that might make it too incredible to be really happening. But the whales rammed the ship again, knocking him off his feet. A cry of panic ran up from the men at the oars as some took up their talismans in both hands while others tried to follow the order to row, so that the oars quickly became tangled with each other. They had lost forward movement and the ship started drifting backwards.

Capitano Manzoni started ranting in panic, not unlike a triple-inbred Umbrian peasant might, and he called to the first mate to try to regain order with the slaves as he tried to rush back to the tent with his instrument case. But his fingers were so stiff and clumsy and he knew he knew he would have no time. No time! The crew at the back of the ship were already pointing at the waters behind them in alarm. The whales were now pushing them back steadily and he felt the stern of the ship start to spin as the swirling waters fastened their grip on it.

Like a submerged beast devouring its prey, he thought. A good metaphor he'd never be able to share. They were dead. They were all dead. He would never retire after ten voyages and would not raise any more children with his darling Alaria. And Capitano Manzoni found all his teachings deserting him as he clasped the gold charm his wife had given him and cursed both the Medici and Lorraine Houses for killing him, and then blew on his thumbs and turned around three times in the opposite direction of the maelstrom as it sucked his vessel down into its embrace.

 

 

II

The assassination attempt was a bloody and clumsy thing. But that may have been a part of the careful planning of it, to distance any suspicion from those stealthy murderers employed by the Lorraine family. If they had used poison or employed a night-creeper to enter the Medici bedrooms while they slept, suspicion would have immediately been cast upon the Lorraines. But to attempt to stab Cosimo Medici and his brother Giuliano when they were attending a service inside the Grand Cathedral of the Walled City – surely only a madman or fanatic would attempt that?

If it had succeeded and the assassins had escaped into the crowds, the city would have been thrown into utter turmoil. Undoubtedly the Lorraines would have quickly produced unknown corpses to accuse of being the assailants. Foreign spies could have been blamed. The city guard would order everybody off the streets and the Lorraine family would offer to bolster the guards with their own much larger militia. The High Priests would have to support them for the sake of order and once granted military power over the city, the Lorraines would never relinquish it.

But that was not quite the way things had turned out. Only one of the Medici brothers lay dead and one of the assassins had been captured. And the city's bells rang out to let all citizens know to that chaos had descended upon them all.

Cosimo and Giuliano had been near the front of the crowd in the Great Cathedral during the service, as was their habit. Unlike many of those around them they had shown neither signs of fervour nor boredom during the long and near-hysterical tirade of the High Priest, as was also their habit. They'd appeared to be listening patiently to his rantings, but if they had actually been pondering the supply of spice, or the improbable attack of the whales upon their ship and what it might really have been, they had shown no sign of what they thought of the High Priest. Every now and then one of the brothers had turned his eyes to the heavens, but it might have been that he was studying the beautiful and ornate frescos high up on the huge domed ceiling of the cathedral, or counting the penises on the many cherubs, as most bored children did. The frescos showed layered scenes of how the world was viewed by the ancients, with the angels and saints sitting in heaven at the top of the huge domed arch above them, and the lower levels representing the lower celestial realms, with the Earthly realms at the edge of the dome, and finally the underworld of demons and punishment creeping down the pillars and walls closest to the congregation. Perhaps the Medici brothers pondered that they belonged to the higher orders on the dome. Not, perhaps, with the gods, but certainly above the common human masses.

They were starkly different for brothers. Giuliano was tall and thin, with a face dominated by his chin and nose, while Cosimo was shorter and more solidly built, with a flat and brutish face. Their nicknames amongst the populace were the Horse and the Bull, though of the two only Giuliano's nickname was said with any affection. They made a formidable duo – Cosimo with his brutal simplicity, and Giuliano with his skills at diplomacy – and together they increasingly outwitted, out-manoeuvred and out-imported the Lorraines. Until the appearance of the whales in the harbour.

The High Priest looked down at both Houses, proclaiming, as he did during nearly every service, that it was the sins of mortal men that had brought the plague to devastate the Earth, and it was only the hand of the Almighty that kept it from the Walled City. But the Almighty could remove his protective hand from any that were deemed to have sinned, he warned. Any that were driven by avarice. Any that engaged in the heretical practices of science. Any that put themselves above the Almighty in any way.

The service lasted a full half candle, though it seemed longer, for those not carried away by the High Priest's sermon, and when the good citizens were extolled to return to the light of the outside city under the guiding, yet watchful, eye of the Almighty, Cosimo and Giuliano began pushing their way to the rear of the cathedral with the others. In any other building, that might have been a cause for concern for the two men, or the family body guards, but inside the cathedral they did not even consider the possibility of danger. Not one of them would put a hand to a dagger's hilt, even involuntarily, or look around warily, until they had stepped outside onto the flagstones at the bottom of the cathedral's steps.

As ever the crowd was very slow to emerge from the vast building. The doorways were small and, with several thousand citizens either pushing forward or stepping back to perhaps allow a women to pass before them, it was a very tight throng at the doors to the building and the Medici brothers hung back a little, letting their guards push forward to clear a path for them. And that's when the assassins struck. There were three men, dressed in monk's robes with hoods over their faces, who suddenly drew daggers and leapt at them. The first that Giuliano knew he was being attacked was the sharp stab of steel in his back. Then again and again, pushing him to the ground.

But Cosimo, who had been half turned, saying something to his brother, saw the look of murder on the face of the man coming towards him. He knew he was in danger before he ever saw the flash of the dagger's steel. The assassin lunged forward, but had to push his way past a man in a dark cloak who suddenly stepped in front of him. It gave Cosimo time to throw up his hands and step back a little. The dagger found a mark, but only a glancing blow on his neck. It drew blood, but Cosimo acted as if he didn't feel it. He took a step back and met the assassin's eyes and the other man paused a moment, perhaps seeing the sudden rage and power in Cosimo. Perhaps seeing his own death. And in that brief moment the future of the Walled City hung.

The assassin stepped forward again for a second thrust. Already Giuliano was falling to the ground under the combined frenzy of the two men assaulting him, hissing like tormented wild cats as they continued stabbing into his back and head. One of the men stabbed so hard that his blade became stuck fast in Giuliano's head, and he was wrenching and twisting it to try and free it. If they had been a little more careful they might have prevented him from screaming, “Murder!” as he crumpled to the cold stone floor, the single word echoing around the high frescoed ceilings and booming back to the crowd like a voice from the Almighty above, as all turned to witness the attack.

They saw Cosimo face his attacker head on, his only defence a fearless glare. Then he stepped into the man's thrust. While the dagger struck him again in the neck, it did less damage than the first blow. Cosimo was a thick-set strong man who had killed many enemies on the battlefields and when the assassin raised his arm for a third blow, he found the strong fingers of the leader of the Medici family suddenly around his throat, the thumbs digging at his windpipe. He changed the direction of his blow and stabbed down at Cosimo's arms, hoping to dislodge them. But although the blade again struck home the grip on his throat did not lessen. He looked into the dark eyes boring into his own, as if they too had the strength to strangle him and he dropped the dagger as he realised that the death he had been preparing for all through the service was going to be his own.

He tried to mumble something. Perhaps a call for help or a curse upon Cosimo Medici, but his tongue would not obey him and lolled out his mouth insensible. The assassin's knees then began to bend, but Cosimo did not let him fall. He held him up, and shook him like one might shake a mangy dog one wanted to be rid of, and the man gurgled just before his windpipe collapsed. Just before his eyes rolled back in his head.

Cosimo was still holding him when his bodyguards reached him, to protect him, and he cast the corpse into their arms. By then the crowd were joining in the echoing call of murder and pushing even harder to get out of the cathedral doors. One of the two men who had assailed his brother had succeeded in throwing off his robes and joining in with the panicked crowd, but the other had been bludgeoned to the floor by the bodyguards while still trying to extract his dagger from Giuliano's skull. They had a blade to his throat now and were searching him for any poison or concealed weapon he might use to try and take his own life.

Cosimo walked across to him, dripping blood from his wounds, and stood on the man's neck. It took Cosimo a few moments to clear his head and understand that his brother was dead, lying there at his feet, in a puddle of darkening blood. It filled him with a black rage that strangling a dozen men would not diminish. Giuliano had been stabbed over forty times and Cosimo had already decided that a man would die for each stab wound. As he had already decided that the Lorraines were behind this attack. It would only take the required amount of torture on this surviving assassin to prove it.

His men were trying to press ornate cloths to the wounds on his neck and arms, but he shook them off and said, “I want all the bells of the city to be rung like the pealing from the heavens at the end of days. I want it to be known that my dear brother is slain and the two Houses are at war. And every citizen must declare himself. For whoever is not for us, is against us.”

And then he spat on the assassin and said, “And keep this one alive. He'll have a tale to tell us, even if I have to cut it out of him.”

 

 

III

“Show me again how the hands work,” Lucia whispered to Lorenzo. He took up her hand again and spread the fingers with his own. “Inside your hand are three bones for each finger,” he said. “And each bone is joined with a hinge, like on a door. And each joint has small wires that are attached to muscles that are like cogs or pulleys, that pull this way or that way, making it move.” He closed his fingers around hers and she closed her fingers around his in turn.

“It is the same in the arms then?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, releasing her hand and tracing his index finger along her bare arm. “There are longer bones here, but they are also hinged, here and here.” He touched her wrist and elbow. “And inside the arm are the same wires and cogs that move them.”

Lucia felt goose bumps rise across her body as his finger touched the inside of her elbow. But it wasn't an altogether unpleasant sensation. She had been waiting for Lorenzo all evening. No, to her mind she'd been waiting for him for years. Waiting for him to climb up the outer wall of her tower with the use of those ingenious metal claws on his hands and feet, and enter her very bed chamber.

They had been aware of each other for years, since they first saw each other on the streets and each had given the other a smile. As if they had already met. And as they grew, their friendly smiles grew into something more knowing. Even when her mother took her away from the Walled City when she was twelve, to visit her relatives to the north, she had looked for his face amongst the boys around her. And when they had come hurrying back to the city, pursued by the plague, it was his face in the crowds she had looked for. His smile to reassure her that everything would be alright.

She chose to spend most of her time in her tower chamber, now, working on a large mural across one wall. It was the view of the city outside her window. But not just the city she could see. The city she wanted it to be. She wished that Leonardo were able to tutor her in painting more often, but he was always busy these days working on strange devices for her father, the Duke. She had once loved this city, but now saw it as a prison, keeping all of them captive. So she painted it anew, demolishing buildings that displeased her. Ridding the streets of the militia of the two Houses. Tearing down their stranglehold over the city. Taking away the large wall around them and adding flat green lands and rivers. Every time she fought with her father or mother she would come back to her chamber and paint away some of their power. Remove more towers and ships. And then she would paint small houses here and there, which she imagined she and Lorenzo would live in. Sometimes in the city overlooking a plaza, or sometimes in the countryside nearby.