Alvantes dropped to his knees. He looked surprised — whether at Ludovoco seeing so easily through his ruse or because his body had finally refused to stay up, I couldn’t guess.
When Ludovoco took a step closer, Alvantes flailed for his legs. Ludovoco blocked, forced Alvantes’s blade down, and — so quickly I could hardly register it — sliced Alvantes’s arm. As his sword slipped from his grasp, Alvantes cried out for the first time, a sob of hopeless rage. He made to cradle his bleeding right wrist with his left hand. Then, realising the impossibility, he pushed to his knees and tried instead to fling himself at Ludovoco.
Ludovoco sidestepped; his foot crashed into Alvantes’s ribs, sent him tumbling sideways. An instant later, it was followed by the point of Ludovoco’s sword.
Behind me, Estrada screamed — a sound so naked and pained that I couldn’t believe it could come from a human throat. It was almost loud enough to muffle Alvantes’s own choked cry.
Ludovoco stepped round, careful to avoid Alvantes’s hand, which still grasped spasmodically for his ankles. He put his foot on Alvantes’s shoulder; it seemed to take only the slightest pressure to drive him down into the mud. Ludovoco levelled his sword, adjusted its angle carefully.
“A last mercy, Guard-Captain,” he said. “A quick death. Much more than you deserve.” As he raised his blade, I saw where it would land: across Alvantes’s bared throat.
“Stop, damn you!” Mounteban’s roar was huge amidst the unnatural silence; it actually froze Ludovoco in place. “Captain Lunto Alvantes is incapacitated,” Mounteban cried. “Your fight is with me now.”
Ludovoco looked as if he had every intention of going through with his execution, regardless of what Mounteban or anyone else thought. But Mounteban already had his own sword in hand, had already halved the distance between them; in the time it would take to end Alvantes’s life, Mounteban would be on him. Reaching a swift decision, Ludovoco stepped away and dropped easily into a defence.
Mounteban hit him like a bull charging — and Ludovoco actually staggered. He span away into clear space, a half dozen quick steps carrying him free of Mounteban’s first furious assault. Caught off guard, Ludovoco seemed momentarily to forget just who he was fighting, for when he scythed a blow towards Mounteban’s left side, his steel span off a buckler in place of Alvantes’s missing hand. Mounteban shoved the almost-delicate stroke aside and continued to chop wildly, pressing Ludovoco back still further.
Did Mounteban really think he could beat a fighter of such calibre by chopping like a woodsman? But whatever else he’d achieved, he had managed to drive Ludovoco away from our fallen guard-captain. As the two fighters paced round each other like angry dogs, Estrada was already running to recover Alvantes. Without quite thinking about it, I fell in behind her. As we drew near, Alvantes managed to push himself up onto hands and knees. He was alive, then — for the moment, at least.
Meanwhile, Mounteban had barely paused in his attack. Nor had it become less clumsy; it was still more a charge than an assault. I couldn’t see what he hoped to gain by so inelegant a tactic. Rather than trying to hit his foe, it was almost as though Mounteban were flinging himself at him — which meant that for Ludovoco, it could only be a matter of waiting for the right opening.
Yet, for all its inevitability, when the end came it still caught me by surprise. One moment, Mounteban was hurling another blow at Ludovoco’s head. The next, Ludovoco had flicked his entire body sideways, stepped with feline grace inside his opponent’s defence. His sword wove a sinuous pattern in the air; it danced from Mounteban’s thigh to his arm, and ended in a leisurely swipe across his forehead.
If Ludovoco had expected to stop him, however, he was bound for disappointment — for all the injuries did was make Mounteban press on all the harder. Though he was limping, hardly holding his sword, half blinded by blood, Mounteban opened his mouth and bellowed mindlessly and ploughed forward. Ludovoco’s eyes went wide with shock that edged straight away into fear. For an instant, I thought he might really be in trouble.
Then the fear vanished, composure returned, and Ludovoco ran his sword clean through Mounteban’s stomach.
Mounteban let go of his sword, watched vaguely as it tumbled earthward. His gaze drifted on, to note the blade run cleanly through his prodigious gut. Still clutching the hilt, Ludovoco made no effort to withdraw his weapon; only held his enemy’s eyes and smiled. This time, however, there was relief mingled with his usual cruel glee — and I tried to take some slight comfort from that. Mounteban might have thrown his life away and all of ours with it, but at least, for a moment, he had made the bastard doubt himself.
Then, rather than try to pull away, Mounteban threw his arm around Ludovoco. He drew the other man close.
“What…?” asked Ludovoco, in horrified surprise. He was already struggling to get free, but Mounteban was a great deal bigger than him, surely twice his weight, and there was barely a thing Ludovoco could do. Mounteban reached with his free hand inside the folds of his cloak and then flung that arm too around Ludovoco’s back, dragging the Pasaedan even more fiercely into his embrace.
Ludovoco’s eyes went wide. He tried once more to force his way free, twisted in Mounteban’s arms — but without any great enthusiasm this time. Like drunken dancers, the two turned before us. I saw Mounteban’s left hand first, tight-clenched, pressed against Ludovoco’s back. Then his fingers opened, his hand dropped away.
Where it had been, amidst a spreading stain just visible against the black of Ludovoco’s cloak, there stood out a hilt and a finger’s breadth of blade.
In width, the knife was little more than a needle. But I had no doubt of where it had come from, or what it was doing right then to Ludovoco’s insides. I knew enough to recognise one of Franco’s speciality knives, a weapon for an assassin or a street brawler rather than any duellist. It would have cut through mail and meat like a hot axe through butter.
Mounteban let go of Ludovoco then and slid backwards, flopped into the mud with a sigh. Ludovoco, for his part, looked round at us with vague disgust. He reached for the hilt protruding from his back, but rather than try to remove it, he merely patted around it with his fingers, as if curious. Then, his eyes still holding us, still showing nothing but contempt, he crumpled face down in the mire.
By then, Mounteban was lying on his back, knees hunched. He too was looking in our direction — or rather, I realised, at Estrada. He tried to mouth something, coughed, and flecks of blood sputtered from between his lips.
Estrada ran to him, slid to her knees. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right, Castilio. Hold on, will you?”
“Marina,” he said — and her name brought with it another splash of crimson.
“Shush. It can wait.”
Mounteban tried to shake his head, found the effort too much. “Listen…”
“I am listening,” murmured Estrada. “But you have to stop talking.”
“For you. It was.”
“You stupid, stupid man. Lay still, Castilio.”
“Forgive…” he tried again.
But the sentence would have to stay unfinished; for there was no more blood seeping from between his lips, nothing behind his eyes. And perhaps it was a small kindness, because it meant he would never have to hear Estrada’s reply. “Oh, I wish I could,” she whispered.
Yet, despite what she’d said, she was the only one who seemed concerned by Mounteban’s passing, perhaps the only one besides me who’d even noticed. Excepting Kalyxis, the remainder of our number were clustered around Alvantes; at that precise moment, Navare was striving ineffectually to convince his captain that he shouldn’t be trying to stand.
“It’s not over yet,” Alvantes was saying. “Don’t waste time with me.” His voice was a growl, barely audible. Yet, despite the fact that half his blood must have leaked out by then, his gaze was clear and fixed ahead.