Vito stayed on one knee longer than any sensible man’s pride ought to allow, and by then the hole in his thigh finally required the attention it had been asking for ever since it was cut open.
Behind him, what was left of the Varangian Guard unraveled the way an old rope does once the last good strand snaps. Word that the Emperor had fallen outran every pair of legs in the street, and the Norsemen who had stood stubborn against an entire company began giving way at last beneath the sheer weight of numbers.
One after another they fell, still swinging until there was nobody left to swing at.
The silence spread thereafter.
First came the ordinary kind, soldiers lowering their weapons and discovering they were, by some miracle, still standing. They drew exhausted breaths, then patted at their ribs and shoulders as though they suspected their own bodies might be lying to them.
Then came the other sort of silence.
It crept through the company slow as evening, beginning with the first fellow whose eyes wandered toward the heap of purple cloth and gilded armor lying in the gutter. From there they drifted to the man kneeling beside it, his knuckles still dark with another man’s blood.
One by one, the words stopped.
Nobody spoke the truth aloud. It simply sat there among the smoke, plain enough for anybody to see, and putting it into words would only have made it seem smaller than it was.
Vito stayed where he was and let the silence do whatever business it pleased.
Alexios should have had months left.
That was the part his mind kept tripping over. Not the killing itself, but the neat timeline history had promised.
A flight through smoke into an enemy camp and one blind rival taking this Emperor’s eyes for reasons every history book repeated without explanation. Then captivity, then a public execution in some grand square before a crowd willing to pay good money to watch a man’s last day.
It was a tidy ending, polished smooth by eight hundred years of scholars copying one another until it felt less like history than some scripture.
Instead, it had all been cut short in some narrow streets in Constantinople because Vitale Barozzi happened to be standing in the right place with a spear in his hands.
Inside that future he had just erased, an old blind rival would spend a long while waiting in his own camp for a prisoner who was never coming. He would keep waiting, too, and die without ever learning why.
Orso broke the silence, which surprised absolutely nobody.
He threw both arms into the air, spear and all, and bellowed loud enough to make the walls earn their keep.
"THE EMPEROR IS FUCKING DEAD! La Serenissima just killed an Emperor of the Romans with a fish spear and a foul temper!"
That was enough.
Whatever had been holding the company together burst apart.
The cheering started rough, then swelled into one great roar as men who had expected to die before noon discovered they still had enough breath left to celebrate instead. One fellow began pounding a sword hilt against a shield, and three more thought it looked like good work and joined in.
"Fish spear."
Pellegrino crossed himself and stared at Vito as though the man had suddenly grown another head. "San Marco... I don’t even know what sin this counts as. Killing an Emperor has to be halfway to murdering a piece of God."
Orso was already slapping backs hard enough to stagger grown men. "The good sort, the kind they build a damned basilica over."
"Basilicas are for saints, Orso. This is a man who gutted an Emperor in a back alley."
"They’ll canonize him out of sheer confusion."
A soldier near the cart tugged at the sleeve of the fellow beside him.
"So... does that mean we get his boots?"
"I’d let him cool off first, unless you fancy a direct trip to eternal damnation."
Zaccaria cut in before the argument could grow legs of its own, even if the grin on his face never shrank a bit.
"Come on, you pack of vultures. There’s still a city waiting to lose."
Beyond the rooftops, thick smoke still climbed into the sky over neighborhoods that had no notion any of this had happened.
Zaccaria caught Vito’s eye through the crowd and laughed under his breath. "I’ve commanded men who caught storms, ran aground in broad daylight, and once managed to misplace an entire galley. I was beginning to think I’d seen everything a Venetian could do to surprise me."
He glanced at the Emperor.
"I ought to have known you’d find something new."
Before Vito could think of a reply, a dozen hands grabbed him and the ground disappeared altogether.
The company hoisted him onto their shoulders as though he weighed no more than a sack of feathers. His wounded thigh protested loudly enough for him to hear, though nobody else could over the cheering, and the bruise in his ribs, one he hadn’t properly made the acquaintance of yet, decided it deserved equal attention.
"Gently! I’m a patron, not a sack of grain! Show a little respect for the merchandise!"
The words came easily.
They were exactly what the men wanted to hear.
Vito flashed them a broad grin large enough to hide the wince beneath it.
The fellas struck up a song about lions and the Republic, despite having only enough verses for half a tune and Vito played along with every bit of it, spreading his arms and accepting the cheers as though they belonged to him by right.
Nobody looking up at him could have guessed there were really two men standing there. One basked happily in his own legend. The other couldn’t stop to glance at the purple cloak settling deeper into the blood behind them.
Vito made certain nobody noticed the second one.
Like every good blaze, the celebration eventually burned through its first excitement.
By the time they lowered him back onto his own feet, the roaring had dwindled into clusters of men telling the same three stories over and over, each one improving a little with every telling.
Vito drifted a pace away, taking cautious breaths around battered ribs, and that was when familiar glowing words appeared before his eyes for the first time since this madness had begun.
🪙 [SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
Quest Complete : Baptism by Fire
Reward : 10 Fate
Reward : Knowledge — The complete memory record of the original body.
Any moral hesitation regarding the wholesale slaughter of ordinary people disappeared considerably faster than projected, shortly afterward you murdered the imperial incumbent. The escalation was abrupt, but not especially surprising in retrospect.
It seems your previous employment as a professional henchman was more valuable than your résumé suggested.
"That’s almost a compliment. I’ll take it."
Vito was already putting together some clever reply about the quip, the sort of question likely to make the voice wish it’d stayed quiet, when the reward arrived before he could get the words out.
It came in broken pieces, tumbling over one another too fast to follow.
A name that belonged to him, but also didn’t felt like his. The face of a woman he’d never met yet he felt an ache that he already missed. Home, as familiar as his own hands despite the fact he had never crossed its doorway.
Nothing stayed still long enough to examine.
The memories struck him, coming from every direction at once, each piece shoving the last aside before he could hold on to any of them.
The street tipped sideways before he’d given it permission.
The knee that had stood firm against an Emperor’s own blade quit taking orders altogether, and every injury the day had handed him came calling together like creditors who had been patient long enough.
The fellows nearby were still laughing, a heartbeat behind everyone else.
"Vitale?"
Zaccaria’s voice reached him, yet it kept drifting farther away, every trace of humor gone.
"Vito, look at me. Vito!"
The street disappeared first.
Then the noise.
Everything else followed.