Traitor's Blade (The Greatcoats)

by de Castell, Sebastien

  ‘Trin, get back in the carriage with your mistress,’ Feltock growled. ‘It’s not safe here.’

  Trin, her eyes lowered, ignored the command. Brasti favoured her with a sly smile and a wink before calling out to the carriage, ‘My lady, I thank you for your kind intervention in this matter, but we were just about to leave. Unless perhaps I could kiss the hand and gaze upon the face from which this beautiful voice issues?’

  The captain was grumbling to the man next to him.

  ‘Five bested by one – what did you mean, exactly?’ Kest asked, and suddenly I had a terrible feeling. The only thing that really interested Kest these days was the opportunity to get into some awful odds and see if he could get me killed while trying out his latest sword technique.

  ‘I mean what I say,’ the voice from the carriage said. ‘Your leader against five of my men. If he wins and none of them are dead, I will hire the three of you. But for every one of my men he injures beyond use, you will provide me with one of your men at no cost.’

  These kinds of market challenges were common enough – after all, how else could you assess the abilities of the men you hired? But five against one wasn’t a challenge, it was a beating – and even if I could take on all five of these road-tanned buggers, there was no way I could do it without injuring them. And if I injured three of them, we’d be working for free.

  ‘Forget—’

  ‘Agreed,’ Kest shouted back.

  I turned to him, trusting Brasti to keep an eye on the caravan captain and his men. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ I murmured. ‘I can’t take on five men and not injure them – no one can.’

  ‘It can be done; trust me.’

  ‘You’ve never done it,’ Brasti said, still watching the caravan guards, ‘and you’ve never been bested.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Kest said. ‘Falcio beat me in a duel.’

  Brasti’s eyes went wide.

  ‘It’s true,’ Kest said.

  Well, it was technically true. The Greatcoats weren’t just wandering Magisters. We were trained to be the best duellists in the world. It sort of went with the job, since sometimes the only way to enforce the King’s Laws was to challenge the Duke himself and face his champion. If you won, the Duke would usually capitulate. If not, they sent home your remains wrapped in your coat. So our training involved competing with each other – and no wooden swords, either. A Greatcoat should be able to wound a single opponent enough to stop him without killing him. That’s how good we were – or how good we were supposed to be, as it didn’t always turn out that way.

  So when the King held a tournament, the winner to become First Cantor of the Greatcoats, I really wanted to win– more than that, I decided I would win. I believed in what we were doing more than anyone else did, and I wanted to lead them more than anyone else.

  And I fought through the rounds one after another until it was just Kest and me vying for the prize.

  I suppose I had hoped he might slip up before it got to that point, or that he would have lost interest – that happens with Kest, when someone doesn’t meet his standard or the fight is too easy, he’ll sometimes just walk away from it. But this time he didn’t, so we fought and I won, and I’ll never tell another soul how I did it. Even Kest doesn’t know – which is probably why he likes to put my life in danger now.

  ‘Hells, Kest, you yanked a bolt from my leg just a few hours ago and now you want to send me off to fight five men – why don’t you go and duel bloody-faced Saint Caveil-whose-blade-cuts-water?’

  ‘When the opportunity presents itself, I’ll do just that,’ Kest replied, looking strangely upset.

  ‘You’d fight the Saint of Swords? You really are completely mad, aren’t you?’

  ‘A Saint is just a little God, Falcio. If I meet him, rest assured, I’ll fight him.’

  ‘Oh Gods, you’re serious, aren’t you?’ I said, turning away. If Kest ever becomes a Saint, the transcendent expression of an ideal, he’s going to be Saint Kest-who-never-fucking-learns. Unfortunately, my need to live up to his expectations of me has always been slightly stronger than my desire to punch him in the face.

  ‘Fine,’ I said to the caravan captain. ‘Clear a damned space and let’s get it over with.’ I figured that if I could just put up a good showing, the caravan owner might still take us on.

  The captain chuckled and moved some of the horses out of the way. He pointed out five of his men and they stripped to the waist and took up arms: two war-swords, a spear, double-knives and an axe. Damn, I hate fighting against axes. You spend so much time hoping they’re not going to hit your blade and shatter it that you forget to watch out for your skull. I had one advantage, though: these were all strapping young fellows, and they obviously wanted to show off their fine muscled chests for the ladies in the crowd that was starting to form. I, on the other hand, had no intention of taking off my coat, and that would give me some protection against these bastards.

  I pulled out my rapier and drew the second, which was sheathed in front of my saddle.

  ‘Falcio?’ It was Kest.

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  He almost looked sheepish, which is an awkward expression for Kest.

  ‘Well, it’s just that they aren’t fighting in armour, so really—’

  ‘Just you shut your Gods-damned mouth right now, Kest, or I swear I’ll stick a sword through my own belly just to embarrass you.’ I turned on the five men in front of me. ‘Any of you want to wear armour, you go right ahead,’ I said.

  They smirked at me.

  Keep smirking, boys. At least a couple of you are going to have fine scars to show off to your children. Unless I cut off your balls first.

  Brasti thankfully pulled Kest away, and I focused on my opponents and my two problems. Problem number one: how not to get killed; problem number two: how not to kill any of them. I chose to leave problem number two aside for a moment and concentrate on not getting killed. I was a good thinker when I set my mind to it. Being a Magister wasn’t just memorising the King’s Laws. You had to sift through the evidence or work out how to enforce the law, or figure out the best way to break out of some Lord’s jail.

  I decided I’d rather fight one battle at a time than five at once. I wasn’t likely to get them all to agree to that, but my mouth has got me into enough trouble over the years that I’m pretty good at building up enthusiasm over who gets to punch it first.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said as the men started to circle. ‘We said five men. This isn’t fair.’

  The caravan captain looked at his men, then at me. ‘There’s the five of them there – what’s your complaint?’

  ‘What, are you blind? We said five men. Men.’ I pointed with my left rapier at the smallest of the group, the one carrying the spear who looked a lot like the one with the double-knives. ‘That one’s barely a boy. His mother will weep, and I don’t need to have his drunken, cow-born half-piece whore of a mother muttering curses in my name at night. I have enough trouble sleeping without that on my conscience.’

  The spearman swore at me. ‘Call me boy? You bloody tatter-cloak, I’ll show you who’s the boy here.’ He barrelled at me with his spear, not realising that the point of my left sword was already in line with his chest. I used my right blade to knock aside the tip of his spear as it came towards my belly and he stopped with the point of my sword six inches from his chest. He tried to pull back, but I used the same trick on him as I had with the constable earlier: I stepped on his spear. But he was a lot stronger, this one, so he kept a grip on it. Stronger, and dumber. I did a little stunt Kest and I used to practise as boys and ran right up the length of his spear, forcing him to drop it to the ground and letting me get within a foot of him, then I shifted my hands around so the points of my rapiers were aiming away from him and struck him on both temples with the pommels. I didn’t have to do it that way, but I had a plan, and that required that I really embarrass him.

  Spear-boy dropped like night in winter and I started t
alking to his unconscious body. ‘Now don’t you go telling your whore mummy that you got beat up at the caravan today.’

  I heard a yell from my right side and turned to see Double-knife coming at me. So I was right about that, at least, and now big brother was going to come and save the family honour. If there was one thing I’d learned in life, it was that honour just gets you into trouble.

  Double-knife had good technique, though. He had the look of a rigger, the one who keeps the wagons repaired. A lot of riggers tended to be former sailors who for whatever reason couldn’t get work on a ship any more.

  He kept in close so I couldn’t make use of the reach of my rapiers. If you’ve ever seen a sailor really go at someone with knives, you know the idea of parrying is preposterous. The knives are moving too fast and by the time you’ve parried one thrust, you’ve grown four other holes in your belly. You have to thrust into the attack and take a few cuts to the arm. The only problem there is that you can’t do that up close with something as long as a rapier – thrusting becomes impossible. But I’ve been fighting double-rapier since I was eight, and I have a few of my own tricks. If you’ve got limber wrists and you’re willing to grow a couple of scars, you can windmill the blades fast enough to give your opponent twice as many cuts as he gets on you.

  I’ll give the man his due: judging by the white scars all over his forearms he obviously wasn’t afraid of being cut. Or maybe he was afraid of being cut, but was also really clumsy. Whatever it was, he soon realised he was getting the worst part of the deal, so he changed his style, binding my right blade back and trying to come in under my left to get at my neck. It almost worked, and I had to take the pain of leaning all the way on my wounded leg. But then I saw my opening and since I was already putting all my weight on my bad leg, I decided to take a chance.

  Knife fighters tend to ground themselves hard: they fight with both feet flat on the ground, and only move to step in on you. They never think about protecting themselves against anything but their opponent’s blades and the occasional head-butt, so it came as a complete surprise to him when I rammed the heel of my left boot as hard as I could just below his kneecap. I heard a crunching sound, as satisfying as the contented sigh of any lover, as his knee broke, and he tumbled down next to his brother. Bless you, Saint Werta-who-walks-the-waves; your children are as thick as boards.

  The captain ran over to his man just as the two men with war-swords started towards me.

  ‘Leg’s busted,’ the captain said. ‘He won’t be much use to us now.’

  The lady in the carriage laughed. ‘That’s one of yours for mine, Trattari.’

  ‘Damn, Falcio. You’re losing us money now, you realise that?’ Brasti said.

  I muttered a curse in his mother’s name and tried to shake off the pain in my leg as the swords came at me. Fighting two swords is obviously more than twice as hard as fighting one, but that wasn’t what was bothering me; I was more concerned that the man with the axe didn’t come with them. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that I could keep baiting them into fighting me one at a time – so why would he not take advantage of the situation and come at me from behind?

  I put the questions out of my head and focused on the two men in front of me. One was blond and slim, and the other was black-haired and burly, with a beard reaching halfway down his chest. I decided to call them Blondie and Blackbeard. Not very original, maybe, but I wasn’t planning on knowing them for long. They were both around the same height, which was good for me and bad for them. Fighting men of different heights means having to change your own stance all the time, which I couldn’t have done with my injured leg.

  ‘Ifodor, Falcio, use ifodor,’ Brasti shouted needlessly. Maybe he thought he was helping.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ I shouted back. Ifodor is a technique Greatcoats use to fight against two swordsmen; it literally means ‘enclose the blades’. It involves a lot of forearm strength, and you have to be ambidextrous to do it. I would have found the suggestion somewhat less insulting if I hadn’t been the one who taught Brasti how to do it.

  Imagine two opponents, each of whom wants to outflank you, so they try to move apart from each other and circle towards you in an attempt to get either side of you. You, on the other hand, clever fellow that you are, don’t want to let them get on either side of you because it means you’ll get killed. So you step backwards, and occasionally follow the same circle towards one of them, so that the other is slightly out of reach of you, and now you’re only fighting one man for a moment and you have a chance to eliminate one enemy. Your opponents, on the other hand, bright fellows that they are, don’t want you to do this, so they keep adjusting their footing to keep you at equal distance from them, putting you in an arrow-head position with you at the point and them at the sides of the triangle. This sounds elegant, but in reality it mostly looks like two men jabbing repeatedly at one man who is trying his best to bat aside their blades with roughly the same amount of grace as a cow trying to step on a mouse.

  And then we come to ifodor, enclosing the blades. You have to wait for the perfect moment, when both your opponents, through the natural rhythms that gradually bind all men together, suddenly try to thrust low at the same time, and when this happens, if your blades are in an upper guard position you can circle them downwards and enclose each of your opponents’ blades with one of your own. Now comes the tricky part: you’ve got both your opponents’ points out of line and your own swords on the inside. You flip your points up and step straight forward, keeping your blades in contact with the lower half of their swords – and thrust your points into their bellies.

  Ifodor is a hard technique to perfect, but it’s devastatingly effective, and I was just about to do it when I heard Kest cough and realised I was about to kill two men and end up either dead myself or working for free. At the last second, I dropped the points lower to hit their legs. I got Blackbeard, but missed Blondie by an inch. Fortunately for me, he tried to sidestep and got his left leg tangled up in my blade. I pulled it hard and fast across his inner thigh and heard a collective gasp from the men in the crowd as I scored a wicked cut just below his nether region. I pulled my right blade out of Blackbeard’s leg with a twist that sent him down and got the point of my left rapier just under Blondie’s chin.

  There was a sweet moment of silence when all I could here was my own breathing. Then I heard someone clapping. Blondie backed away, and I saw that the applause was coming from the axeman. He was smiling. He must have been six and a half feet tall, and he looked about twice as strong as me. I was already tired, and my right leg was ready to give out.

  The axeman stopped clapping and started putting on armour. I swore a little curse in Kest’s name, that he should one day get to see the blood-red face of Saint Caveil. This man knew what he was doing. He had watched my style and he had seen that my right leg was wounded. He could tell I was tired, and he knew that rapiers weren’t much good against plate armour. The only way to stop an armoured opponent was to get your point up between one of the plates, and even then you would have a tough time getting through the chain-mail undershirt. Rapiers are duelling weapons, not war weapons, and he knew it. And that’s why he was smiling. The real question was: why was I smiling?

  ‘Damn,’ I heard Kest saying to Brasti.

  ‘What is it?’ Brasti asked.

  ‘I just wish he hadn’t smiled at Falcio like that, that’s all.’

  ALINE

  In Pertine, we say, ‘Life is a deal you make with the Gods.’ If you want to be a soldier, then you swear to fight hard and true your whole life, and you make a deal with War and shed blood in his name. And War, in turn, grants you strong bones and thick blood. If you want to be a merchant, then you swear to travel the lands and cheat only a little, and you make a deal with Coin, and in return Coin grants you safe journeys and gullible customers. I made a deal with Love, and swore my heart to one woman for my whole life. And, in return, Love gave me sweet smiles and warm nights, for a v
ery short time.

  Aline was wonderful and beautiful to me, and I won’t waste your time describing her to you because you might not agree, at which point, I would have to teach you the first rule of the sword – or worse, you might fall in love with her yourself, and that would bring you only a small piece of the sorrow that fills my life.

  We were seventeen when we met and twenty when she died. We married, loved, argued, talked, faced famine, fought neighbours, barely survived a curse placed on our home and, once, almost made a baby together. And in the end, she died for no better purpose than that the Duke who ruled our land wanted to bed her.

  I loved King Paelis, but I hated all Kings before him and none more than his father, King Greggor.

  I don’t know why it was that the King and the Duke and their men came down the road past our cottage. Perhaps they were looking for wild game as they began their trip to Castle Aramor, the King’s home in the south. Perhaps one of our neighbours who craved our land had played some trick on us. Perhaps Love, offended by my lack of prayers, decided to break our deal. But however it came about, the King’s party rode right past our cottage, and the Duke asked him to stop for refreshment.

  It is the Lord’s Right that anyone in his duchy can be called upon to provide sustenance in times of war or civil unrest. The Duke had a loose interpretation of war, and so demanded that we provide what food and drink we had to him and the King. We brought everything we had, even our winter stores. I was as miserly as the next man and twice as belligerent, but I was not stupid and I didn’t play games with Kings.

  Yered, Duke of Pertine, actually looked pleased with what we brought. King Greggor showed no interest and neither one included their men in the meal so I counted myself lucky that there might be something left for us after they were done. I was foolishly optimistic.

  ‘You are one of my subjects, are you not?’ the Duke asked.

  The question wasn’t quite as stupid as it sounds; we lived on the border between Pertine and Luth and there was always some dispute with the neighbouring Duke, Holm, as to who we should pay our taxes to.