Before Vito could reply, one of the soldiers hurrying shouted toward the far end of the platform. It was short, sharp and urgent, asking whether to advance.
"Zaccaria!" the man called, the rest of it swallowed by the racket.
"Secure the perimeter! Nobody goes past the stairs until I say so!"
The fellow passed the command to the others.
The name struck Vito deeper than thought and took hold with an ease that made no earthly sense. Here was a man he’d never laid eyes on, and yet hearing his name felt as natural as reaching for the latch of your own front door in the dark and finding it without a miss.
He figured the unfortunate owner of his body knew the man, and let it be.
"Only halfway through mourning me?"
Vito grinned in spite of the blood drying stiff across his hands. "I’d have sworn you loved me more than that."
Zaccaria laughed so hard it hardly felt they were in the middle of war. He caught Vito by the back of the neck with a rough hand and shook him, as if he wanted to be sure there he was no ghost.
"Just look at you."
His eyes went over the two dead soldiers, the blood, then the shattered rings of mail hanging from Vito’s shoulder. When he spoke again, it landed as a scolding and a boast.
"Couldn’t wait for the rest of us, eh, Barozzi? Had to leave yourself all the fun."
"If only you weren’t taking your sweet time."
Vito flexed the arm the spear had cut and regretted it immediately.
"Let me guess, too busy making a grand entrance?"
Zaccaria barked another laugh.
"Fashionably late! There’s a difference."
He thumped Vito across the good shoulder hard enough to stagger him half a step, laughing loudly enough that a few nearby heads turned toward the commotion.
"Next time you decide to plant your flag on a tower, wait for your barba."
Below them, the battle showed no sign of exhaustion. Steel kept striking steel, soldiers kept screaming, and the noise climbed the walls in one thunderous wave after another. Farther down the wall, another tower answered with a crash that felt like the assault had directly broken through the stone.
"They’re breaking."
Zaccaria followed Vito’s glance.
"Just enough of them."
The grin slipped barely for business to show through, and he turned below the way a hound catches a scent.
"Either way, that’s enough sightseeing."
He was already waving the company toward the stairs.
"Come on, plenty more of them still need to be show their cause is lost."
Vito joined them down in single file, the stairwell narrow enough that shoulders scraped stone on both sides. Overhead, the noise of the fight disappeared with each step, until all that was left was boots and breathing, suddenly very loud in the dark of the stairs.
A short soldier with a scar splitting one eyebrow fell in beside him, said nothing at all, and just pressed a wineskin into his hand like it was the most obvious thing in the world. By the time Vito realized he’d been given it, his fingers had already closed around it on their own.
He shrugged and took a drink.
It tasted like wine watered by a personal grudge.
"Mind that shoulder, Barozzi."
Behind him, one of the younger ones, cocky enough already to be dangerous, called out through a grin Vito didn’t need to see to recognize.
"Leave it in one piece or the ladies of the Rialto will have to find some other fool to warm their beds."
"Most of them have been widowed twice already. They’ll manage a cripple just fine."
The laugh that followed was considerably dirtier than the joke deserved, and the line kept their way down before Vito could think of anything fit to throw back.
The stair spat them out into daylight one at a time, the file breaking apart the moment there was room for it, with the soldiers off left and right.
Vito found himself in the thick of them, shoulder to shoulder with familiar strangers.
The street beyond the tower gate was so narrow that three men would have had to make friends before walking it shoulder to shoulder. The houses leaned toward each other overhead like old fellows swapping secrets where nobody else could overhear them.
Some cart had tipped onto its side across the lane, one wheel still turning lazily.
Nearby, a goat complained to the empty street after being forgotten by whoever had fled.
More smoke drifted low between the buildings, thick enough to blur the dome farther into the quarter, some church whose bells had gone silent with everything else in that part of the city.
Vito looked at it for the space of half a heartbeat.
Some stubborn corner of his mind was already reaching for a name, a date, a story he ought to know as well as his own birthday.
The company shoved past him before any of it could rise to the surface.
The lane bent sharply past the tipped cart, and beyond it the buildings pulled back just enough to let in more daylight. Shadows moved in that open ground ahead, too many to be stragglers, and the company surged toward them without breaking stride.
About a dozen or more soldiers waited. Greeks, they planted their feet with shields raised and shouted for the rest to stand fast.
"Κρατήστε τη γραμμή!" an older soldier roared, blood pouring down one side of his face as he dragged a younger man back into rank by the collar.
Another voice answered, cracked nearly in two by panic.
"Είμαστε
Zaccaria raised his sword without looking back, and the company answered as one.
Shields overlapped where they could, blades and axes ready behind them, until they slammed into the waiting force with a crash that shook the streets. The ranks held for only a heartbeat before the press dissolved into a dozen separate fights, the narrow lane swallowing every semblance of order.
A giant of a fellow Vito had somehow failed to notice until then marched straight into the middle of it, laughing like he’d wandered into a festival instead of a fight. He swung a mace one-handed as though it were no heavier than a walking stick.
"Is this all?!"
He bellowed, knocking a spear aside with his forearm as though the weapon had insulted his mother.
"Stop dying so easy! I’m only just warming up!"
Beside him, one wiry man clutched a little wooden medal of a saint in his free hand and kept up a stream of prayer mixed so thoroughly with insults that it was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began. Between sword strokes he crossed himself with determined speed.
"San Marco, forgive me. San Teodoro, forgive me. Let me live to tomorrow and every church in Venice will have a candle from me."
He finished the prayer, drove his sword through the man that charged against him, then blinked at the result as though the saints had taken him entirely by surprise.
"Pellegrino, you owe the saints enough candles to set Venice on fire."
The big man cheerfully kicked another soldier off the way.
"Then they’d finally notice I’m grateful, Orso!"
Through the confusion, Vito noticed one enemy soldier that separated himself from the others.
The fellow already had his blade up and charged over.
His first cut came in steady, nothing reckless.
Vito met it cleanly.
The steel rang against steel, and the shock climbed his wounded shoulder hard enough to make his teeth come together.
This one knew his trade.
Good.
The last fight had been spent discovering what this borrowed body could do by accident.
He preferred learning that lesson on purpose.
They exchanged another pair of blows, then another, each strike ringing bright through the streets. The Greek neither yielded an inch nor tried to force one.
By the fourth exchange, Vito caught a tiny habit. The man’s shoulder twitched before every slash.
That was all he needed.
On the fifth exchange, Vito slipped inside the cut before it had its full strength. His shoulder brushed the man’s chest as he rammed the sword beneath the ribs and kept driving until the hilt struck mail.
The man’s breath broke into a strangled cry and blood spilled down the blade as his knees gave way, and he collapsed in a heap at Vito’s feet.
Vito stood over him for one breath before a grin found him again.
"There you are."
He wiped his blade across his own sleeve.
"That one I actually meant to do."
Meanwhile, whatever had been holding the Greek ranks together chose that moment to give up.
Two men broke first.
The rest decided they had better imitate the example.
They scattered down the streets, and nobody bothered chasing them farther than a dozen strides before deciding the effort wasn’t worth it.
What remained behind was noise.
Joyful, happy noise.
The whole company whooped together, hammering sword hilts against shields while somebody somewhere shouted Vito’s name as though it belonged in a drinking song.
Orso spread both arms, his mace still dripping, and roared after them, "Run if you must! I’ll still be hungry tomorrow! And if one of you knows a brother twice your size, send him along! I’ve been eating nothing but little soldiers all morning!"
The cheers spread through the streets before it broke apart beneath a scream from farther ahead.
The company turned toward it almost together as a wounded companion came reeling out of the smoke, clutching at his side before an axe struck him from behind and threw him onto the stones in a spreading pool of blood, his scream collapsing into a wet gurgle.
The figure that followed walked without hurry.
He stood taller than any man there, even Orso. Fair hair spilled beneath a helmet nothing like the conical ones scattered across them while he planted one boot on the corpse’s back and wrenched the axe free in a wet spray of blood, letting the heavy weapon rest in both hands.
Varangian.
The Emperor’s Elite Guard.