The Mirror Thief(177)

Five more sbirri appear at the opposite end of the bridge. The clever one from the White Eagle, Lunardo, is among them. He dismisses two of the others immediately, sending them for reinforcements. Good evening, dottore! he calls, raising an arm. I’ve worn my gloves, you see! Just as you asked. Now, come across the bridge!

Lunardo wears a rapier and an offhand dagger, and two of his men—one is the scar-faced ruffian—wield cudgels. A defense against such variety will be difficult to maintain. Crivano floods his lungs with air, shakes out his legs. His wrists are trembling.

I should tell you, Lunardo shouts, that many more of us are on the way. Some will come on boats, and will moor in the campiello behind you, thus to envelop you. These men will not kill you, dottore. They will be armed with clubs, and they will beat you, and break your hands and feet, and they will deliver you to the Council of Ten. The Council will have you tortured, and strangled, and put in the lagoon. Much as you put that mirrormaker in the lagoon, isn’t that so? Hardly a death a man would choose, dottore. But you have other choices, don’t you? I think you do. So, then. Shall we wait? Or shall we pass the time by killing one another? Come across the bridge, dottore.

Crivano doesn’t reply. He measures the space he stands in, pacing the width of the planks between the smooth wooden cart-curbs, the distance from the fallen man to the pavement. The light dims suddenly in the west, then turns orange: a boat is passing the canal’s terminus, eclipsing the reflection of the moon on the water; someone aboard bears a blazing torch. After a moment the boat slips from view, and the light is as it was.

Lunardo squats on his haunches at the canal’s edge, smiling, bobbing to stretch his legs. Crivano cleans the gore from his blade, then steps onto the bridge, over the dying sbirro. He will go no farther. Lunardo salutes as he comes forward, but Crivano doesn’t reciprocate. Beneath their feet, the planks are daubed with dark medallions.

They begin. The walkingstick fouls Lunardo’s sword with semicircular parries; soon Crivano opens small cuts on the sbirro’s thighs and arms and cheek. Lunardo is an adequate swordsman, but no master, and although the stick grows heavy in Crivano’s weaker left hand, it gives him the advantage of reach. He presses his attacks, wanting to finish this man quickly.

Again and again Lunardo falls back to the pavement; Crivano takes these opportunities to catch his breath, measure his steps. He finds these attempts to lure him over the bridge insulting. Lunardo must know by now that he won’t prevail without bringing his men into the fight; Crivano can read calculation in his stoat-like eyes.

Just as Crivano’s decided that his opponent lacks the courage to make the charge, it comes: Lunardo hurls his main-gauche over the canal and lunges with a cry, sprawling forward, scrambling on his knees and emptied hand, slashing wildly with his rapier. Crivano glances the crown of the man’s skull with his stick, but he’s forced to fall back; he steps over the dying sbirro, onto the end of the bridge. Lunardo keeps coming, as he surely knows he must, accepting a hard blow to the right shoulder to block Crivano’s final desperate riposte: it opens a gash on his side, but his ribs turn the point away. The men collide with an ugly sound of jarred bone, and when they return to their feet, they’re both standing on the pavement.

Another sbirro is already across the bridge, swinging his cudgel; in the time it takes Crivano to parry him, Lunardo has retrieved his thrown dagger. Soon Crivano is fighting a third man as well, a wild-eyed Genoese with a rapier, and the faceless cyclops is not far behind, at the bridge’s midpoint, awaiting his opening. Crivano can do nothing but hold his ground, and that only poorly. The snaplock pistol still hangs in his belt, but he’ll have no chance to withdraw it. He tries to keep calm, to encourage their confidence. He fights like an automaton, distributing his attention to the periphery of his vision. Watching for a mistake. He needs to kill someone very soon.

But now he sees lights flicker in the glazed windows around him: torches coming at his back. The sbirri’s reinforcements have arrived. Crivano is beaten. He hopes he can fight hard enough to die here, to avoid capture. He gauges the approach of the sbirri behind him by the spread of the lupine grins on his adversaries’ faces. He keeps his stance forward, waiting until the last moment, hoping to gut at least one before their bludgeons pulverize him. He and his opponents have all grown shadows: the fires are close. Then, as Crivano readies himself to drop and pivot, he registers a flicker of confusion in Lunardo’s eyes, and stops.

A diminutive figure darts past, a torch in its outstretched left hand, and sets the Genoese’s hair on fire. Then a belaying pin smashes the Genoese’s foot. Lunardo’s mouth falls open in alarm, and Crivano lunges: the rapier’s tip is stopped by the man’s breastbone, but Crivano passes forward and redoubles and lands the stick’s ferrule on the bridge of his nose. Lunardo drops with a cry.

Crivano turns and kills the panicked Genoese, then looks over his shoulder for more attackers, but no one else is behind him. The sbirro with the cudgel is swinging at the torchbearer, who ducks, throws the belaying pin, ducks again, and catches a blow in the side. Narkis! Crivano thinks—the torchbearer is similarly slight—but it isn’t Narkis: the yelp of pain is high-pitched, childish. Somehow familiar. One of the linkboys?

Crivano hears a distant twang, and a loud crack nearby: someone has fired a crossbow. He spins, searching the surrounding windows and rooftops, but they’re all clear. The sbirro raises his club to strike the torchbearer again; Crivano sweeps forward and stabs him in the chest. The blade reemerges from the man’s back, below the inner edge of his right scapula, then snaps inches above its hilt as he stumbles and falls. The torchbearer is curled on the pavement, moaning through clenched teeth, clutching his ribs. The torch lies beside him, sputtering and hissing.