The Shadow Master by Craig Cormick

stairs, together, as if dancing arm in arm, as they had once delighted in.
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XVII
    Cosimo Medici had enough of dealing with the bumbling fools who purported to be deathseekers. He needed to find the one man that even the deathseekers feared. If they had only been half as good as they had claimed to be when they came into his employ, the Lorraine household would be mourning their dead. But instead all he had for the gold coins he had wasted on them was two missing deathseekers and a pie delivered to his household with a turd baked inside it.
    It was another Lorraine taunt, of course, and one that he would not tolerate. It was bad enough that he had been humbled in front of both his and the Lorraine fighting men by that monstrous Lorraine eagle, and that his insolent servant Galileo would not meet his wishes, but this was too much.
    He wondered if the turd came from the Duke himself. There were stories that the ancients could weave a spell to control a man if they had a part of the man’s body to use. It usually referred to nail clippings or his hair, but he wondered if that didn’t include a man’s turds as well.
    He pushed the thought from his mind, as it was only making him angry. That was its purpose of course, to fill him with rage and cloud his judgement. But he wouldn’t give the Lorraines that control over him. They were undoubtedly right now planning to dispatch a deathseeker to attack him. They would surely have spies in his household as much as he had them in theirs. Had had them, he corrected himself.
    He knew enough about deathseekers’ methods to be able to avoid much of the possible danger they posed to him. He knew when they attacked, and their main methods. He knew about the poisons they could employ, that could be placed in a man’s food, or even upon his clothes. He knew they could conceal blades about their body that seemed small enough to be harmless, but could kill a man by being plunged into his eye, or into the base of his brain. And, he suspected, the reason the Lorraines employed such crude assassins to attack him and Giuliano in the cathedral was to throw suspicion away from them.
    He did not want to spend every hour of every day having to fear every servant and soldier who came near to him, staring into their eyes to see if they might be seeking his death. Having his meals tasted before they reached his lips. Having to sleep alone with a ring of men around him, each watching the other suspiciously. He had to gain the upper hand over the Medicis and quickly. And that meant finding the one man whose name the deathseekers muttered in awe. The assassin known as the Nameless One.
    He sat in the alcove in the family chapel patiently. The Nameless One was not a man you could summon at will to your chambers. He protected his identity fiercely and it was rumoured he would even slay those who contracted him if he thought they even suspected who he might be. It was said that he was so skilled that he could slay a man and even the apothecaries would not be able to determine how he had died. Unless there were a need for everyone to see how he had been slain. There were stories that he was a noble man of one of the minor houses in the city. And there were also stories that he was a soldier who had been greatly disfigured by the plague. There were also stories that he was more spirit than man.
    But it was a man’s voice that whispered suddenly from the other side of the partition. “You wish my services, my lord?” Cosimo tried not to act surprised. The man had arrived as silently as smoke enters a chimney.
    â€œYou know well I do,” he said. “As I suspect you know exactly what I want of you.”
    â€œThe removal of the thorn from your side?”
    The man would only speak in metaphor, he knew, never agreeing to actually kill a man that had been named. “Yes,” said Cosimo. “The great thorn must be removed. As soon as possible, before