One Velvet Glove

by Dave Duncan

  Burl and I hauled Dragon’s corpse off our blood-soaked ward, hoisted him to his feet, and ran with him. We were both right-handed, so I was forced to hold my rapier in my left hand, but I let Burl have the advantage because I knew that his edged sword would be much deadlier than my rapier in the sort of melee that was about to catch up with us. We necessarily followed Silvio, because he alone seemed to know what he was doing.

  The wind was coming in great gusts, still mostly blowing seaward, toward the storm. Surf was making the boats plunge and dance, while buckets and creels and casks were rolling around the decking on the pier. Masts swayed wildly. I could hear the sounds of boots drumming on the planks behind us, drawing closer. Then Donato, our postilion, came running to meet us. He and Silvio took Bannerville’s arms and urged him onward, ignoring his shrill protests at being manhandled by underlings.

  That left Burl and me to turn and face the pursuit. Six of the Espadachim Real were almost upon us, sabres drawn.

  “Throw down your swords!” shouted the leader. His helmet and breastplate were shiny and very fancy, but he had no gorget, so I parried his cut and stabbed him in the throat. Burl got the next one with a slash of Thunderbolt—also to the throat, I think, but I was too busy to watch. I hurdled the leader’s thrashing corpse, and ran Fortune into the next man’s eye. He hadn’t been expecting me quite so soon or at that angle. That left three... no, two. Burl had taken another. It was a very unfair contest. The last pair could reasonably have run back and waited until reinforcements arrived, and it is to their credit that they didn’t. So they died also.

  The score was then: Blades six, Espadachim one, and no prisoners would be taken after that.

  I could see the next squad of swordsmen running along the pier, at least eight of them. I screamed, “Run!” and we ran.

  So I was a killer now? I remember thinking that this was what I had trained for since I was a child and it didn’t make any difference. It did, of course, but at that moment I was too much afire to have scruples.

  To my horror, I saw my ward running back toward me. How he escaped from Donato and Silvio I neither knew nor cared. What mattered was that a gang of guardsmen was closing in on us, every one of them inflamed by the deaths of six of their comrades, and Bannerville was clean out of his mind. Gibbering nonsense, he tried to take hold of me.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop! You mustn’t do this, Spender. That boat is not safe. We have to explain that it was an accident, that Gudge wasn’t told to—” His babble ended when I buried my fist in his solar plexus. There are precedents described in the Litany.

  There was no way we could carry our ward and fight off the Fitish attack at the same time. “Back here!” I told Burl, and we dragged Bannerville five or six feet, to where a fish-drying rack narrowed the space available for the Espadachim’s attack. On the way, Burl scooped up a heavy iron kettle. When the enemy was close enough, he hurled it at them as if it were a javelin.

  And then, I suppose there was one less to worry about, but I cannot remember the resulting fight at all. All I recall is ringing steel, stamping feet, and screaming wounded. Then it was over, and I was leaning against the drying rack, gasping for breath, streaming sweat, and wondering where all the blood was coming from. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that I had been run through and only my binding was keeping me alive and upright. The dock was littered with bodies, only two of which were showing any signs of live at all. Which one of the corpses or casualties had wounded me, I have no idea. Burl was on his feet, but supporting himself by leaning on his sword. He was putting no weight on his left leg. In the distance, two of our opponents had retreated to a safe distance, but another squad was running along the pier and they carried crossbows. We could not fight those.

  “Go!” Burl shouted hoarsely. “Take him. I’ll hold off the two ninnies.”

  I said, “Right. Well fought, brother.” But I knew I was saying farewell. Turning, I saw that my ward had risen to his knees. He was weeping. I slid Fortune back in her loop, staggered over to Bannerville, hauled him upright, and began hustling him seaward.

  Hearing more slashing steel, I glanced back briefly and saw Burl die. He was standing on one good leg while swinging his “bastard” sword one-handed against two men with sabres. One of them managed to hit his good leg. He fell, and they went for him in a mad flurry of strokes as if they wanted to hack him in pieces.

  Lightning flashed, as if giving a signal, and blinding rain roared down.

  I had no idea where I was going until I saw Joel appear, dancing up and down about fifty feet ahead of me. There was no sign of Donato and the others, so I suppose they had hidden in the boat when they saw the archers coming along the pier. As I drew closer, Joel vanished again, following them, and then I heard orders being shouted behind me. I stopped and turned, pretty much leaning now on Lord Bannerville.

  The bowmen were lined up across the deck with their crossbows loaded and aimed straight at us. They were so close that I could look along the stocks into their aiming eyes. Not one of them would miss at that range. Their commander stood behind them.

  “Throw away your sword, Chivian!” he shouted.

  My ultimate aim must be to save my ward. If I refused the order, he would probably be shot, too. I drew Fortune, but held on to her, still undecided. I could charge the enemy and hope to kill or at least wound one man, but I would die and Bannerville probably would also. There was a faint chance that he would be allowed to live if I surrendered.

  But all the bows were pointing at me, none at him. So I could draw the bolts away from him. I yelled, “Starkmoor!” and charged. I should certainly have died at that moment, had fate not intervened. As we all well know, chance is elemental, and I was saved by one of the rebel ships. Winds and waves had carried them out, and one of them now was blown, bow first, into the side of the pier, right behind the bowmen. The impact made the deck jump like a spooked filly.

  The shock came exactly as their leader shouted, “Shoot!” Bolts went in all directions. One of them hit my thigh, shattering the bone. Another, although I did not know it then, struck Bannerville a glancing blow on the top of his head. We both went down.

  That saved us from the archers, because the wind swung the ship around, and her bowsprit swept the deck clear, sweeping them away as a cook scrapes onions off a chopping board. It hurled most of them into the sea, and probably killed or wounded the rest, but it passed clean over me and my ward.

  Screaming orders in a piercing soprano, Joel brought Donato, Xande, and Silvio, and they dragged the two us to the comparative safety of their leaping little boat. I don’t remember, but I must have been loaded aboard like a sack, and I expect my ward was also.

  Chapter 11

  So in the end Lord Bannerville’s Blades failed to save him. It was the flunkies he had hired in the alleyways of Lindora who carried him to the boat—Xande, Donato, and Silvio, directed by the boy Joel. Anselmo, the fisherman whose boat it was, cast off, and we escaped, I without my honour, my sword, or my brothers.

  We had survived the battle ashore, but were at the mercy of the storm. Anselmo struggled to raise the sail despite the efforts of his landlubber crew to assist. By the time I began to come around, we were fighting our way clear of the shore and in just as much danger from the wind and sea as we had been from the king’s army. The boat was a single-masted fishing skiff, cramped, dirty, and rank.

  I had a hole right through my abdomen and a shattered thigh, and there are limits to the damage even a Blade can survive. I remember Joel desperately trying to stop my bleeding, but by then I was hurting too much to care. I do not remember being carried ashore through the surf, long after dark and the departure of the storm. I understood that my ward was still alive. That was all that mattered, and even that mattered very little.

  So what did happen on that chaotic morning? It was many months before I learned the outcome, and there is much I still do
not know. Prince Luis walked into a trap and died in the battle. I never found out whether the man Desidéria had introduced us to the previous day was the genuine rebel prince or not. The one who died was, but I never caught a glimpse of him.

  Crown Prince Rodrigo survived Gudge’s attack, although the knife had penetrated a lung. The king, who had known there was going to be fighting, had arranged for several teams of healers to be on hand, and his son was rushed to treatment as a priority patient. What was Gudge’s motive? I still believed that he was a snoop from the Dark Chamber, but I never established this for certain. He may have thought that he could settle the trade problem and thus satisfy the Bannerville’s mission’s purpose, by killing the king. It seems more likely that he believed that the king was behind Robins’s murder and wanted revenge. That is what I believe, because when he heard the drums and bugles starting and realizing that Afonso was now unlikely to come within his reach, he settled on the crown prince instead. He certainly did not live long enough to explain.

  Blades guarding their wards are notoriously hard to kill. The impalement ought to have done for me by bleed-out or blood poisoning, but it didn’t. My thigh was shattered, and it was a long time before the swelling went down enough for Joel to bind it in splints. That hurt so much I wanted to break his sweet little neck.

  It was many days before I became aware of my surroundings. I knew I was in a poky cottage and very close to the sea, for the sound of waves never stopped. I was in considerable pain, so it was a long time after that, even, before I realized that the woman weeping over me and begging me to live was Graça.

  She told me later that I suddenly opened my eyes and said, “Will you marry me if I do?”

  She said, “Of course,” so I said, “All right,” and from then on I began to get better. It made a nice story, but I cannot vouch for it.

  She told me later that very soon after we had left Lindora, bound for Castelo Velho, Senhor Ernesto had called her in to tell her that I had been wounded, and had been asking for her. Graça agreed to go and nurse me, and was promptly sent off with a man who refused to answer any of her questions. A boat delivered her to the cottages below Castelo Velho the next day. Bannerville and I arrived a few hours later. This makes no sense, because it means that news of my injuries reached Lindora before they happened. It was weeks before I could ask questions, and by then memories were fading and it didn’t matter anyway.

  My ward survived also, although he had taken a serious blow to the head. A fraction lower, and the bolt would have shattered his skull and killed him. As it was, he lost a strip of scalp and half his wits. He was damaged more by the realization of utter failure. Ambassador or not, he could expect death if King Afonso caught him, and little less if he escaped from Fitain and survived to report to King Ambrose.

  Four of us lived in that cottage that winter: Graça, Bannerville, Joel, and me. Graça tended the patients, Joel kept the fire going, gathered driftwood, brought water from the spring, and generally did the work of three grown men. Every day, despite howling winter storms, he climbed the path to Castel Velho to fetch food. Later, when I was asking questions, he refused to say who provided it. The castle was just a ruin now, he insisted, although he did try to convince me that sometimes it was a ruin and sometimes it wasn’t. Either the kid was a compulsive liar with a high-power imagination, or he was telling us what Desidéria wanted him to.

  My ward’s external head wound healed, but the damage inside did not. He spent all his waking hours either staring into the fire, or stalking the beach alone, which drove me insane because I couldn’t go with him.

  By the time spring arrived and we began to see sails on the sea, I was capable of walking on crutches, and even responding to Graça’s caresses in bed. My ward had improved, also, but he had aged ten years and was not the man he had been.

  One evening, when the four of us were eating a superb fish stew that my love had prepared by some miracle over an open fire with almost no utensils, the haggard old man who had once been Lord Bannerville suddenly asked me, “When are we going to leave here?”

  “I have no idea, sir,” I said. “If the authorities catch us, we will almost certainly hang. Unless, of course, Prince Luis won the war.” I looked enquiringly to Joel, who was busily eating. He was still a mystery to me. At times he chattered like the child he seemed, while at others he was as tightlipped and steadfast as an emperor’s chancellor. Sometimes I could almost believe his fairy tales of being immortal.

  “He didn’t.”

  “And the marquisa isn’t up at the castle?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then how long do we stay here?”

  He swallowed. “Two more days. There’s a boat coming for you. It’ll take you out to a ship bound for Chivial.”

  I growled. “How do you know that?”

  He grinned. “I dreamed it.”

  Dreamed or not, it was valid information. I think Senhor Ernesto paid our passage home. That morning Joel wished us all fair voyage, and walked up the path, out of our lives. Anselmo’s fishing boat returned and ferried the three of us out to a whaling ship. Three weeks later we landed in Brimiarde, ragged and emaciated, looking like risen dead.

  Chapter 12

  The captain told the harbour master, who sent word to the port warden, who came to see for himself before summoning the innkeeper of the Queen Godleva to warrant that we were indeed the earl and Blade who had stayed with him a year ago, although he wasn’t quite sure about me. I looked older than Bannerville, and still hobbled painfully on crutches.

  Two days later Sir Felix and Sir Raptor of the Royal Guard arrived to escort us to Grandon. They were extremely polite to Chinless, although they left no doubt about his destination. Me they regarded with all the warmth of polar ice, because a Blade who had lost his sword and brought back a grievously damaged ward was not worth spit. I could not argue with that. Since we were clearly incapable of travelling on horseback, they had to hire a coach, and that pleased them even less. When they had to admit that we couldn’t appear in court in what we had on our backs and then had to dip into their personal purses to clothe us, I began to see the joke.

  We duly reached Grandon and Greymere Palace. Graça was as impressed as I was. Bannerville was a quivering jelly, knowing that he must report to the king. The king was not there that day, but Commander Montpurse was, and he handed me down from the coach himself. There was no reproach in his sky blue eyes, only sympathy and horror. He saluted Lord Bannerville and also Graça when I presented her. He delegated four men to guard my ward, so that he could detach me for a private talk. He took me to his private quarters and settled me on a comfortable chair with a glass of excellent wine in my hand. He sat on the edge of a bench and said, “Now talk.”

  When I reached Marquisa Desidéria and her castle, his flaxen eyebrows rose. “You will have to repeat all this to the king and Grand Inquisitor, you know.”

  “I can only tell them what I saw, and if I can’t tell how much was real, how can they? If I’m crazy, then so is my ward, for he saw it too.”

  The commander shuddered when I described the battle at Casa Marítima. “The Fitish ambassador reported that your ward was in league with the rebels and tried to assassinate the crown prince.”

  “Gudge did.” I saw that even Montpurse did not believe me then. He had known Gudge.

  The next day I was summoned before the king. As I had to take stairs one step at a time, I was carried up by a couple of footmen lest I keep my sovereign waiting. That was the first humiliation of a hellish morning.

  The council chamber was a gloomy, high-ceilinged room, panelled in dark wood, with mullioned windows at one end. Chairs stood all around the walls, but no one was using them until I arrived. King Ambrose was already there, huge in his silken peacock splendour. He glared at my crutches and told me to sit. Then he scowled even more horribly at Bannerville, who was shaking as if he h
ad an ague. Ambrose told him to sit down also. This was extremely unusual.

  Grand Inquisitor was a tall and hugely fat woman garbed in black, with unblinking fishy eyes in a pudding face, but she was left standing on her flat feet. A Blade always stood by the door when the king was in council, and that day Montpurse himself was doing the honours.

  “I am distressed to see you so out of sorts, Everard,” Ambrose said. “What ails you?”

  Lord Bannerville tried to explain and began to weep.

  His Majesty turned his glare on me. He looked much more menacing than he ever had at Ironhall. “Spender, isn’t it?”

  “Aye, sire.” I was not much impressed with the royal memory now, being certain that he had heard my name mentioned within the last hour or so.

  Being then so bidden, I told him what was wrong with my ward—that he had seen his valet murder the crown prince, that he had been rushed away like a parcel by his Blades until Sir Dragon had fallen on him, soaking him in blood and brains, and soon after he had been struck on the head with a crossbow quarrel, only to be dragged to the edge of the pier and manhandled aboard a boat.

  “The healers can do no more for him?”

  “He hasn’t seen any healers, Your Majesty. For the last six months—”

  Ambrose had heard enough. He roared at Montpurse, who hastily opened the door and summoned a couple of the Blades on duty in the anteroom, and they rushed Lord Bannerville off to the palace elementary to be conjured. I could have used some healing myself, but instead I was left to tell the whole unbelievable story while the king paced restlessly up and down the chamber and Grand Inquisitor stood and stared at me with unblinking pebble eyes.

  It went well enough until I mentioned that Master Robins had started to convert Chivian letters of credit into Fitish scrip, and that reminded His Majesty of all the money he had sent along with his new ambassador.