Saint's Blood: The Greatcoats Book 3 (30 page)

‘Who . . . are you?’ he mouthed, his gaze soft and confused, as if he had forgotten who I was, who he was, what he had done.

‘My name is Falcio val Mond,’ I replied. ‘I am First Cantor of the Greatcoats. When you get to hell, tell your God who sent you.’

For a moment Beltran looked as if he were about to spit at me, then a thunderous crack sounded in my right ear and a puff of grey-black smoke filled the air between us. Beltran fell forward, his weight driving me down to the floor beneath him. There was a large hole in what was left of his face.

I lay there, the dead man’s body on top of me, the smell of him stifling me. My ears were ringing, my throat choking on the smoke. People were moving around us.

None of it made sense to me.

‘Are you all right?’ a voice asked from very far away, but I didn’t answer. My eyes were still fixed on Beltran. Then several hands lifted his body off of me and carried it a few feet away down the hall. The men carrying him were wearing sturdy grey coats.

‘Falcio, can you hear me?’ I recognised the voice, but I couldn’t put a name to it until I turned my head to see Quentis Maren standing over me. The Inquisitor’s long wheellock pistol was still in his hand and thin wisps of smoke were seeping from what I now saw were two separate barrels.
He could have shot me first if he’d wanted
, I thought absently.
He could have said I got in the way and no one would have questioned it.

He knelt down and reached out a gloved hand to grab me by the shoulder and haul me to my knees. ‘The Church will keep Saint Ethalia safe now,’ he said.

I looked into his eyes to see if I believed him.

He looked angry. ‘I
warned
you, First Cantor. You knew these madmen were out there. You knew they were hunting Saints, but you took her from our protection. The Greatcoats are too few and too weak to fight this, Falcio. The Saint of Mercy nearly died because of your arrogance.’

I think I would have preferred it if he’d shot me.

It’s never a good sign when people debate whether they should move you or not after a fight.

‘I could use your body as a medical textbook,’ the small, bespectacled doctor who’d introduced herself as Pasquine informed me. I found her derision and lack of sympathy mildly reassuring. Doctors are usually nicer to you if they think you’re about to die.

Long grey coats swirled around us on the second-floor gallery as Quentis set his men to securing the hallways while he focused his attentions on convincing Ethalia to accept the protection of the Church. Whether out of loyalty to me or distrust of Quentis, she refused.

I wondered if I was about to find myself facing off against a dozen Inquisitors without so much as a broken cane for a weapon, but the Ducal Protector’s own palace guards arrived and I was able to lie back and enjoy the unusual and rewarding experience of watching two different groups of people who generally antagonised me beyond reason threatening each other over questions of jurisdiction.

Quentis left his subordinates to deal with the guardsmen while he bombarded Ethalia with questions of a largely supernatural nature regarding the God’s Needles. I took some small measure of satisfaction at his annoyed look when she explained exactly how I’d figured out they were only masquerading palace guards. ‘But could you not
sense
them?’ Quentis asked. ‘Is there no way to detect their presence?’

‘I noticed nothing,’ Ethalia replied, ‘until the larger man’ – she gestured to Beltran’s body on the floor – ‘grabbed my ankle, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of . . .
wrongness
, of . . . the only word I can think of is desecration.’

Well
, I thought, feeling a little punch-drunk on pain and exhaustion,
at least there are some people out there she finds more disgusting than me.

‘Forgive me,
Sancti
,’ Quentis began, possibly hoping his use of the archaic title would sway her, ‘but I would feel better if you would allow us to—’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Ethalia said, closing off the discussion. She glanced over at me, looking more than a little concerned for my current state of health, and I gave her what passed for a smile in my current condition by way of telling her that it was all right to leave me. Ethalia tried to give me her own reassuring smile before heading back down the hall to her rooms. Of the two of us, I felt I was the better actor.

Quentis turned his attention to the doctor. ‘What is his condition?’ he asked Doctor Pasquine.

‘None of your business, Cogneri,’ she replied pleasantly. I was starting to like her more and more.

‘Am I going to live?’ I asked, then added, ‘I will consider it no reflection on your talents if the answer is no, I promise you.’

She opened my coat and looked less than thrilled by what she saw. ‘Bruises on top of bruises and fresh cuts on top of those barely healed.’ She tore open the front of my one decent shirt.
Well, it used to be a decent shirt
, I reflected, looking down on the grit, dirt and blood embedded in it.

You never think about things like clean clothes when you’re going from one life-threatening crisis to another. Once the fight’s done, though, you really do start to wish you didn’t have to smell your own stench on top of that of the men you’ve just killed. Fortunately, once exhaustion takes over you stop caring quite as much.

Boots on the stairs alerted me to Brasti coming to my rescue, with Kest alongside him.

‘It’s a little late,’ I said, though I doubt they heard me. I was having rather a difficult time staying focused.

Brasti’s right arm was in a sling, but he was still trying – rather clumsily, as far as I could see – to nock an arrow as he approached. Kest’s face was contorted with that mysterious pain that washed over him every time he drew his sword now, ever since the day he’d lost his hand, along with his Sainthood. A strange sadness swept over me as I watched the two of them trying so hard to be the men they once were.
Look at us
, I thought, feeling myself drifting in and out of consciousness,
three broken men trying to pretend we can continue living in the past . . .

‘Step aside,’ Brasti said cheerily to the Inquisitors who had moved to bar his path. ‘We wouldn’t want to dirty the floor with more blood than necessary.’ He glanced over at me. ‘Though Falcio seems to have done a pretty good job of it already.’

. . . blustering our way through one crisis after another, trying in vain to bring back a world nobody wants . . .

Quentis Maren signalled his men to let them pass and Kest paused to look at me, no doubt wanting to make sure I was still breathing before he went to examine the bodies of the two God’s Needles on the floor.

. . . all the while struggling to make sense of things far outside our understanding.

I watched Kest with no little amusement as he went over the wounds on their bodies one after another, working out exactly how many moves it had taken me to defeat them, no doubt preparing to scold me with a recitation of the ways I could have ended the fight quicker, had I only been more efficient in my use of the walking stick I’d picked up for the first time a couple of hours ago.

Brasti stood over him. ‘You have to admire their dedication, what with biting off their own tongues rather than risk being interrogated.’

The doctor smoothed a thick white ointment across my chest and neck which sent cold chills through me even as it burned my skin. ‘Ow,’ I said.

She smiled at me even as she continued to rub the ointment into my bruised flesh. ‘“Ow”? You survive all this bloodshed and it’s the medication that makes you moan like a child getting his first toothache?’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I said, too tired to explain. I reached into my pocket for the last piece of the hard candy that Kest had given to me months ago. I’d been saving it for a special occasion.

‘Hold it,’ Doctor Pasquine said, grabbing my wrist.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just the King’s hard candy. We use it to—’

‘I know what it is.’ She sniffed at it and then let go of me. ‘“Hard candy”. Makes it sound like something you give to children rather than a deadly toxin.’

‘It’s saved our lives on a number of occasions,’ Kest observed, still inspecting the bodies, apparently oblivious to the rather intense scrutiny of Quentis’ Inquisitors standing behind him.

The doctor looked up from her painstaking work cleaning a wound on my upper shoulder. ‘I don’t doubt the toxin is effective. I’m simply saying that someday you’re going to take it one too many times and wonder why your heart has just burst out of your chest. There are costs to these things, you know.’

I looked down at the tiny piece in my hand. How many times had I relied on the hard candy to keep my sword arm strong, to keep me awake, to keep me from just lying down in a ditch and giving up?

‘What costs?’ I asked her.

‘What do you mean? I told you, it can kill you if—’

‘Yes, but you said “costs”, plural. What other costs?’

She wrapped a loop of bandage around me. ‘I don’t know the exact formula King Paelis’ apothecaries devised, but I do know that these kinds of concoctions play havoc with the vital fluids of the body, and those in turn can put a terrible strain on the mind.’

Brasti chimed in, ‘Oh, don’t worry about Falcio. He knows all about insanity – he used to go berserk all the time.’ He peered down at the ruin of Beltran’s body. ‘Apparently he still does. Saint Laina’s tits, Falcio, how long did you keep hitting this guy after he was dead?’

‘I didn’t,’ I replied. ‘The bastard just wouldn’t die.’

I was still staring at the hard candy held between my index finger and thumb.
What if it’s as simple as this? What if these God’s Needles don’t really gain supernatural abilities from drinking the blood of Saints? Maybe they’ve just got something like the hard candy, only much, much stronger?
‘Kest, could a human being – I mean, not a Saint or whatever – have survived all those injuries and still kept fighting?’

‘I . . . suppose it’s possible,’ he replied.

‘But highly improbable,’ Quentis said, taking a sudden interest in our conversation. ‘Look at the wounds on this man’s body. Who could—?’

Kest cut him off. ‘Many of the wounds are fatal, but none of them would necessarily kill a man instantly. It’s just a matter of ignoring the pain and not going into shock.’

‘“Just ignore the pain and don’t go into shock”,’ Doctor Pasquine repeated as she wrapped an endless roll of bandages around my torso. ‘You make it sound so easy.’

‘But it’s possible, isn’t it?’ I persisted.

‘In theory,’ she replied. ‘But I suspect any compound capable of producing such an effect would destroy the internal organs, and no doubt the mind as well.’ She ran the last loop of bandages around me before sealing them with a clear, sticky substance. ‘Now, on the subject of madmen determined to kill themselves, if you could see your way clear to avoiding any strenuous activity for the next few days, there’s a possibility you might live. Get some rest.’

‘He can’t,’ Brasti said, reaching down a hand to help me up. ‘Falcio has a very important meeting of the Greatcoats to attend. Vital matters of law and justice and—’

‘Brasti heard about a tavern in town that stays open all night,’ Kest said.

‘Not just
any
tavern,’ Brasti corrected, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. ‘Apparently it’s chock-full of ladies-in-waiting, lonely to the point of desolation with nothing to do while their mistresses amuse themselves in the palace.’ He straightened the shoulders of my coat. ‘Now look, Falcio, I know you’d rather find someone else to try and kill, but Ethalia’s safe, Aline’s got half the guards in the palace around her and Valiana is busy meeting with the Dukes, who, by the way, have the rest of the guards. As magistrates we must now turn our attention to saving a small but potentially very open-minded portion of the country from a fate worse than death.’

‘Which fate is that?’ I asked.

‘Never knowing the joy of kissing a Greatcoat.’ He gave me an appraising look. ‘Best take the hard candy first, though. Nobody wants to dance with a corpse.’

The doctor threw up her hands. ‘I give up.’ She started to walk away. ‘Do whatever pleases you, Trattari. Go and fight duels or bed noblewomen to salve your self-worth. Just don’t go kissing girls with weak hearts or very old people.’

I had no intention of kissing anyone, young or old, but the comment struck me. ‘Why not?’

Doctor Pasquine stopped and pointed to the fragment of hard candy in my hand. ‘Those sort of compounds pool in the tongue. You go slithering your tongue in some poor girl’s mouth who’s never been exposed to the stuff and she’s liable to have a heart attack then and there.’

‘What happens to a healthy one?’ Brasti asked, looking interested.

She grimaced up at him. ‘Likely she’ll be fooled into thinking your kiss sends her all aflutter.’

‘Why, that would be just terrible,’ Brasti said. He reached out a hand to me, palm up. ‘Can I have the rest of your hard candy, Falcio?’

Kest said something then, but I didn’t hear it, for my eyes were fixed on Beltran. His mouth was still hanging open, displaying the ruin of his tongue, encased in dried blood and spit. We’d all assumed the assassin who’d gone after Aline had been trying to make sure we couldn’t torture any answers out of him, but Beltran had already known he was dying.

‘Falcio?’ Kest asked, and I realised then that he was holding me upright.

What was it the doctor had said about the cost of using these compounds?

They put a terrible strain on the mind
.

I lifted my hand to my mouth and swallowed the small fragment of hard candy. The familiar metallic taste hit me first, followed a second later by the sensation of my heart beating faster, my blood going hot in my veins. Within seconds I felt strong and focused.
But not as strong as Sedge and Beltran were.
So whatever they had in their veins was much more powerful than the hard candy, which meant the adverse effects would also be stronger.
They knew it, too. That’s why they bit off their tongues.