Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

“I’m going to kill you,” Yurl said, spitting onto the ground, “just the way I killed your little bitch down in the Hole when Balendin was done with her.”

“You,” Valyn said, his heart a block of ice threatening to choke him.

Yurl shrugged. “Along with the leach.”

It was just more talk, more tactics, but Valyn could feel the rage rabid inside him. His teeth were bared as though he planned to leap on the other man and tear out his throat. Hot blood slammed behind his eyes in a frantic, murderous tattoo.

“Too bad she’s not here to help you now,” Yurl continued with a shrug. “Might have made for a passably interesting fight.”

Oh, Valyn realized, the memory striking him like a slap across the face. Oh .

As the pain flared in his shoulder and side, he shifted to his left. He was losing blood, and with it, speed. Yurl’s next attack would come hard and fast, which meant Valyn had one play left, and suddenly, he knew what it had to be. A vision of Ha Lin’s smile ghosted through his mind. He was only ten years old when she first saved his ass, dragging him through the end of a long swim after his legs cramped, keeping his head above the slapping chop, alternately cursing and encouraging him, her pinched child’s face angry, stubborn, determined. That was the first time she’d bailed him out, but it wasn’t the last. Even now, even dead, the girl wouldn’t quit.

With a roar, he threw himself into a bull’s horns lunge. It was a desperate gambit, an insane attack that left him open to all manner of riposte. Only, in order to riposte, Yurl would need to settle back, to set his leg, his left leg. As Valyn fell through the night, both blades outstretched, he could hear Ha Lin’s voice soft in his ear: I got in some shots of my own … the left ankle … maybe something you could work with.

Yurl’s face twisted in confusion at the unexpected lunge. His step back was basic reflex, the kind of thing drilled into every Kettral over thousands of days in the arena, the motion trained and trained and trained until it was threaded into muscle and bone alike. His body obeyed the training flawlessly, sliding fluidly down and away, dropping him into the standard off-guard crouch as he swept aside the horns of Valyn’s attack, the horns that weren’t the true attack at all.

Valyn rolled, ignoring the stone scraping over his wounds, lashing out with a foot at that flexed ankle. It was a feeble blow, off balance and poorly timed, but he connected just as Yurl was transferring his weight, loading the foot for the counterstrike. The ankle buckled. Yurl staggered, his own blade sliding just wide of Valyn’s neck, his face twisted with rage, and fury, and, beneath it all, another emotion blossoming, something new: the sweet, hideous flower of fear.

“Lin told me you weren’t the only one to land some blows up on the bluffs,” Valyn said, dragging himself back to his feet.

Yurl snarled wordlessly, dropped to a knee, struggled unsteadily to his feet, raised his blades once more, hesitated, then turned and stumbled into the deeper darkness beyond the light of the flares.

The darkness, Valyn thought grimly, is my territory. Ever since the Hole, the darkness is my home.

He closed his eyes and let the scents and sounds of the chill night wash over him. Yurl was out there-not far. Valyn could smell him-the sweat, and blood, and steel, and beneath it all, the acrid animal odor of fear. A feral smile tugged at his lips. Hendran would never approve of racing into the dark, but then, Hendran hadn’t gorged himself on the bilious tar of the black egg. He let out a low growl, turned away from the light, and slipped into the endless realm of shadow.

There were a hundred smells: stone, and dirty snow, and the whisper of rain from the clouds above. A thousand currents of air tugged at his skin, teased the hair on his arms, on his neck. With some sense he knew but failed to comprehend, he could make out dozens of faintly adumbrated forms, echoes of shapes. Beneath his feet he could feel the stones grating against his boots. Bared swords held before him, he turned silently in the night, slowly, slowly.… He could feel it radiating from a few paces away-heat, where there should be no heat. Breathing. That same sick fear lacing the hard scent of the mountains. Yurl .

He felt rather than heard the blade slicing through the darkness, felt the air eddy and part and, without a thought, flung himself into a rolling lunge as the steel hacked a huge arc out of the space above him, smashing sparks from the rock. Behind him, Yurl cursed, and Valyn turned silently to face his foe.

The Wing commander had both blades drawn, holding them in front of him in the defensive half guard the Kettral had studied for fighting blind. He can’t see me, Valyn realized. He knows I’m here, but he can’t see me. Evidently Talal had been right. All slarn eggs conferred a benefit, but none so great as the great black monstrosity from which Valyn had drunk.

A hundred paces off, the flares were still sputtering, and somewhere off to the left, Pyrre and Ut hacked at each other, the sharp sound of steel grinding against steel shattering the night again and again. Valyn could hear the Aedolian cursing and gasping, and beneath that the skullsworn’s quieter, quick breaths. None of it mattered. Yurl was before him now, fumbling blindly.

“It’s over,” Valyn said.

The gravel beneath Yurl’s feet crunched as he shifted. Again, there was a swirl of air, a whisper of breath, a hint of fear, and Valyn knocked his attacker’s sword aside. He felt at home, he realized, here in the great darkness, and closed his eyes, allowing the sounds and scents of the world to wash over him. His tongue flicked out, tasting the night.

Hull, what did you do to me? he wondered, but it was too late for such questions. It had been too late for a long time now, he realized, for what seemed like forever. The strange alchemy in his blood wasn’t the whole story, either. Something in his heart had withered when he found Ha Lin’s body crumpled on the floor of the cave, some part of him that loved the light and hoped for the morning had broken. After all, when he carried his friend out into the sun, she was still dead. Better to stay in the darkness . Tears were running down his cheeks, blurring his vision, but then, he didn’t need his vision.

“You can’t win,” Valyn said, following the echo of Yurl’s heat. “Drop your blades now, tell me what you know, and I’ll give you a clean death.”

A clean death . Even as he said the words, he felt that they were a lie. He wanted to cut the youth down and tear him apart. He wanted Yurl to hurt, to cry out in the darkness and to have only his own agony for an answer.

“Go to ’Shael,” the Wing leader snarled, lashing out with both swords at once in an attack the instructors back on Qarsh called the Windmill’s Vanes. It was either a very arrogant move, or a very desperate one. Valyn rolled to the side easily, dodging the blow. Even from two paces away, he could feel the labored breath, the panicked heat rolling off his foe, could taste the terror.

It feels good, Valyn realized, some part of his brain recoiling at the thought even as he bared his teeth in a snarl and stepped forward.

“Who’s behind the plot?” he demanded.

“If I tell you, you’ll kill me,” Yurl replied, retreating through the darkness, his voice tight and desperate.

With one quick, clean motion, Valyn lashed out. He felt the steel bite, severing flesh, then tendon, then bone, and half a heartbeat later, Yurl screamed and a sword clattered to the rocky ground. His wrist, Valyn thought, nodding to himself. There was blood on the air now, Valyn realized, inhaling deeply-sharp, coppery blood.