Tales of the Greatcoats

3. The Delusor

3

THE DELUSOR

Gavelle dove underneath val Mond’s lunge, coming up on the Greatcoat’s right flank and driving the sharpened quillion of his smallsword’s guard into his side. The point tore through the leather and lining only to smash against the slender yet infamously durable bone plate sewn within.

Gavelle grinned. These duelling magistrates relied too much on their coats for protection, and regardless of how val Mond had learned about his coming, Gavelle knew something very important about Falcio as well: the location of a previously cracked plate in the front of his coat.

Let’s play a while, you and I, he thought, shoving the off-balance Falcio away as he prepared his next attack. But I know the exact inch of your body where my blade will end you.

‘Was it Lucinda who betrayed me?’ Gavelle asked.

Falcio already appeared shaken. Tired. When he had to move, he did so with fierce speed, but in between, he slowed, conserving his strength.

‘Do you love her?’ Falcio asked.

Gavelle found the question unseemly, and punished his opponent with a flurry of thrusts from the high inside line to the lower outside line, ending with a s***h that would’ve taken out the Greatcoat’s left eye had he not fallen back.

‘Love is an awkward pastime for an assassin,’ Gavelle said, pretending to give Falcio time to recover even as he reached behind his back for the hidden pocket in his night-black duelling vest that hid a small satchel of blue powder. Another of the client’s gifts.

Falcio smiled at him, and what was most strange about that smile was that it appeared genuine. ’An awkward pastime for many of us, my friend.’

‘Ah,’ Gavelle said as he secreted the powder in the palm of his rear hand. ‘You speak of your wife. Is it true that she’s the new Saint of Mercy?’

Falcio’s grin turned rueful. ‘She’s not particularly merciful with me.’

A Saint. Now those could be trouble. If rumours were true, their mystical awe could bring even the most willful of men and women to their knees.

‘A pity she’s a hundred miles from here,’ Gavelle said. ‘I paid a few silver from my fee to ensure that fact before coming. I didn’t want you to have to die in front of her eyes.’

‘My gratitude,’ Falcio said.

Their blades engaged at the sharpest and weakest points. Gavelle’s was the lighter weapon, and Falcio attempted to use his blade’s greater weight to gain leverage in an envelopment nearly sent the smallsword flying from Gavelle’s hand.

‘Damn, but you’re good,’ he muttered.

Falcio gave another curt nod, but didn’t reply. There was a glistening on the skin of his forehead, and his mouth was open.

He’s breathing hard, Gavelle thought. Just as the client predicted!

First, a feint with the point of his smallsword – a thrust above the eye that forced val Mond to duck. Next, Gavelle flung out his rear hand, sending the glittering flecks of blue powder right into his opponent’s face at the exact moment he gasped for breath. When Falcio val Mond stood up again, swinging his rapier wildly to keep his foe at bay, his face was a mask of terror.

‘Dashini dust,’ Gavelle explained. ‘I’m told you’ve trained yourself to be resistant to it, as much as anyone can at any rate. Alas, my aim isn’t to disable you, merely to weaken you piece by piece.’

Falcio’s mouth was working, mumbling like an old codger haunted by nightmares.

‘Tell me,’ Gavelle said eagerly. ‘What do you see? What terrors does the dust bring upon you? Your new wife murdered in the same fashion as your first? The child inside her slain before it can be born? Perhaps your comrades in the Greatcoats, Kest and Brasti, hunted down and murdered in ways that will make your own soul shriek from beyond the grave?’

Falcio shook his head, but the effects of the toxin wouldn’t be so easily dismissed. Gavelle circled the confused, frightened man, the tip of his smallsword evading Falcio’s blade easily, delivering shallow cuts to his hands, his face, his neck.

‘You fought a Sanguinist once,’ Gavelle said. ‘Bottio claims it’s the worst way to die – a hundred tiny cuts bleeding you out drop by drop until you’re begging for a more merciful death. Is that what you desire from me now, Falcio? A quick end? Come, you’re the finest – well, the second-finest now – duellist the country’s ever known. Call me brother and ask me for the final blessing of my blade.’

At first, the Greatcoat was silent, trying a dozen different manoeuvres to create distance between himself and Gavelle, but at every turn he failed, all the while shaking his head, growling like an animal as he fought to stave off the fear slithering inside his heart.

I’ll soon kill that snake for you, Gavelle thought.

Through gritted teeth, the Greatcoat asked. ‘Do you even know why you’re doing this? Why someone would pay you a fortune to kill a retired Greatcooat?’

Gavelle had asked Lucinda the same question, two months ago when the contract had first come.

‘You’ve made too many enemies, brother. Foiled too many ambitions. There is a line of powerful men and women a mile long who wish to see you humiliated like this, taken apart one precious piece of your soul at a time, and finally put down like a dog. As to why I was chosen? It is because I’m the best there is, Falcio.’

Gavelle saw an opening and swung the flat of his smallsword against val Mond’s exposed left knee. The Greatcoat went down with a scream that filled the entire reading hall.

‘It was inevitable, if you think about it,’ Gavelle went on, circling him. The effects of the hard candy were dissipating now, and his own muscles complained from the exertions he’d put them through, but he was still more than fast enough to make the kill, and far less injured than his prey. ‘You should’ve known someone would seek out the greatest living master of the art of death and send him to you.’

Falcio tried to rise, failed, and landed hard on his knees, his rapiers clattering against the ruined library floor. He cried out again as he forced himself upright. There was courage in this man or belligerence at the least. He wanted to face his enemy as he died.

‘Call me brother,’ Gavelle urged. ‘And let’s make an end of it.’

‘Brother . . .’ Falcio murmured, his eyes barely open now. Gavelle had to reach out and grab him by the jaw to force him to meet his gaze even as he placed the tip of his smallsword against the spot on his Greatcoat. The one the client had informed them was already broken. The one through which steel would pierce flesh, slip between ribs, and kiss the heart of the legendary Falcio val Mond.

‘Call me brother again,’ Gavelle commanded. ‘I like the sound of it.’

Falcio looked up at him, panting from pain and exhaustion. ‘You know, I really thought I was better than this. I thought . . .’

‘You thought you were still the best. But you couldn’t be, you understand that, don’t you, Falcio? No duellist can fight so many battles, incur so many injuries over the years, without weakening.’

He nodded, and his empty hand gestured back to the reading desk. ‘That’s why I’d been thinking about old Errera Bottio and his depressing duelling manual.’

Gavelle glanced over at the rotting book. ‘The Delusor. The Eighth Duellist. The one who masters deception to defeat his opponent before the fight has begun. Too bad you waited too long to find the book.’

‘Oh, I found it months ago,’ Falcio said. ‘Shortly after my wife informed me we were to have a baby. It occurred to me that eventually, someone was going to send whoever the latest and greatest murderer for hire might be after me.’

Gavelle had been about to thrust his blade through the flaw in the coat and into the man’s heart. ‘Too bad you waited too long to find the book’ had seemed an excellent line on which to memorialize his victory. But his sword arm hadn’t moved, and he found himself staring into the too-calm eyes of his victim.

Falcio nodded, sweat-soaked hair pasting itself over his forehead. ‘As you said, it was inevitable. And sure, I might beat one or two assassins, but eventually, I’d find someone like yourself – someone too good for me.’

Gavelle leaned back and pressed the tip of his smallsword a fraction deeper against the flaw in Falcio’s coat. ‘Someone who knew all your weaknesses.’

‘Exactly. Funny thing about that. How exactly did you learn all these details about me.’ Before Gavelle could answer, the Greatcoat raised a finger. ‘Ah, the client, right? This mysterious benefactor who gave you Dashini dust and hard candy and the location on my coat where the damned bone plate split a while back.’

Suddenly aware that something was very wrong, Gavelle drove the tip of his smallsword into the weakened spot . . . only to have the point meet impenetrable resistance. Before he could withdraw and make a second attempt, Falcio’s hand flung out, and suddenly Gavelle’s face was immersed in dust. He tried to step back, but his limbs betrayed him, unmoving, leaving him teetering like an old pillar by the canal waiting to fall in the waters at last.

‘Aeltheca,’ Falcio said, grimacing as he rose to his feet. ‘Foul stuff. Paralyzes you for an hour or so. You should’ve gone with that instead of the Dashini dust. But I guess I forgot about it when I was drawing up the assassination contract.’

Of course, Gavelle thought, his mind whirling as he sought out the means to turn the tables back in his favour. His eyes could still move a little, and he gazed out at the reading chamber in this abandoned library. The perfect place to mount an assassination, but even more so if your desire is to ensure no one else can interfere with a ruse. That’s how he knew my name. Lucinda never betrayed me! Falcio val Mond is the client!

Gavelle tried to speak, first to curse this man who’d tricked him so dishonourably, than to attempt a negotiation.

He never kills a fallen foe, Gavelle told himself. It’s not his way.

But then Falcio val Mond put a hand on his shoulder, not in anger or to push him over, but almost as a comrade might. A brother.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If I were younger, if I were as good at duelling as people believe, I could afford to have arseholes like you come after me at their leisure. But I have a wife now, and soon – assuming her supposed “Saintly insight” isn’t just a load of bollocks – a daughter.’

He sighed, and looked almost lost for a moment.

‘I need them to fear me, Gavelle. All these Lords and Viscounts with their petty plots of revenge. I need them to . . . to be in awe of me, so they won’t try this again.’

Again he patted Gavelle’s shoulder, though Gavelle was having trouble feeling it now.

‘The hard candy you took. I had it mixed with a portion of what we call the “soft candy”. It’s what we used to carry so that if we were in danger of torture, we might have a gentler, kinder death. The apothecaries promised the passage would actually be quite pleasant.’

No, Gavelle thought, raging against the effects of the aeltheca powder and the damnable poison he’d willingly ingested. Such ends are for feeble, aging fools like yourself, Falcio, not men of pure will . . .

He set his resolve against the paralysis, commanded idle muscles to contract. It was like trying to push through stone.

It can’t end like this, he swore silently to himself, to the Gods, but most of all, to thrice-damned Falcio val Mond. Then, almost at the moment he was ready to give up, the fingers of his right hand twitched. Of course! he realized, exulting in the feeling of his fingertips returning. The fool measured the dosage for himself, but he’s older than I am, weaker. The would-be Delusor has unwittingly tricked himself!

With a single movement, smooth as silk against silk, Gavelle’s hand reached into the cuff of Falcio’s own coat where the Greatcoats were known to secret one-inch blades, found the weapon, removed it, and before val Mond even understood what was happening, drew a red smile across his throat.

‘Good . . .’ the man gurgled, and blood so bright it shone like liquid rubies as it began to pour from the wide gash in his neck. ‘Good . . .’

‘Oh, better than good,’ Gavelle said, though for some reason he couldn’t hear himself speak. Perhaps his tongue needed more time to awaken.

‘Good . . .’ Falcio repeated.

Why did he keep saying that over and over? Or had he only said it once? Was it, in fact, only the beginning of an utterance, caught in this single moment of time?

Something terrible happened then. Something that should have been impossible: the blood seemed to flow back up into Falcio’s throat, and the fatal cut Gavelle had inflicted on him faded as if it had never been there.

No . . . he thought as the light in the reading hall began to fade and val Mond’s words returned to him: ‘The apothecaries promised the passage would actually be quite pleasant.’

Gavelle felt himself drifting into another dream, this one in Lucinda’s bed as he recounted his daring victory over the supposedly undefeatable Falcio val Mond, but he resisted. Even as life dripped out of him like the leaks in the library floor, he forced himself to witness the world as it was, not as his own lethal vanity had promised him it would be.

Falcio was still there. He was manoeuvring Gavelle’s body towards the windows and the light from the stars shining down on the canal. Then the Greatcoat walked away, leaving Gavelle Sanprier to meet his end, the strained limp of the Greatcoat’s footsteps stopping only briefly when he said, ‘Goodbye, brother.’

THE END