Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

He saw the Beetle girl shift, coming half to her feet before the Wasp dragged her back down.

‘Look at them,’ Thalric snapped, his eyes not on the fight but on the Salmae’s followers. ‘See how many of them? And if you break the rules and interfere, why not them?’ And then, perhaps in answer to some stubborn expression on the girl’s face, ‘And if you interfere by

… other means, do you think they’d not know? They must have some two-stripe conjuror amongst them, if I’m to credit any of it.’

And Che sagged in his grip, but her eyes had never left the antagonists.

Tynisa backed and backed again, keeping Isendter away from her, but he simply walked into her reach, unhurried, careful and inexorable. When she tried to use this against him, to pin him at the far extent of her sword’s length, he slipped by her guard like water, and his claw was already ready for more blood. Her little wounds were beginning to work at her as a pack, snagging at her every time she moved, trying to drag her down. Inside she was fighting a similarly losing battle with her fear. She had never realized just how bitterly she wanted to keep on living, for a tenday, a single day, an hour more. How terrible it was to have already seen her last dawn.

She worked up some alchemy to transmute that fear to anger, and her next strike almost caught him off balance, breaking the rhythm that she had let herself succumb to. For a precious few steps she was driving him before her, the air suddenly filled with the dull clatter of steel. He parried and parried, his gauntlet making circles in the air as he took her sword’s point aside, over and over, but her blade was as insistent as a fly over food, and she nearly blooded his arm, nearly gashed his ribs, then flicked a drop of blood from his ear. Now you fear!

But he was calm, weathering the storm until she overreached, and was then ready to take the initiative from her as easily as if she had held it out for him to grasp. That last strike went too far, he had taken only a half step, and her sword’s point went past his head. The claw was ready, its metal darkness driving for her throat as he snapped his arm out. She kicked back, trying to regain her distance, too slowly, but from somewhere she got her off-hand up, slapping for the side of the blade.

She felt the keen, cold razor of it slide across her fingers, stumbled back on to one knee and then forced her legs to lift her up again. Her left hand was awash with blood, the wound so sharp and clean that she barely felt the actual pain, though it was waiting for her just a little way distant.

He let her back off, yet again, and she now felt that she knew him better than she had known any opponent save her own father. This fight was an intimacy she had shared with nobody else. She had learned respect for Isendter Whitehand the hard way. She could not hate him, or even dislike him. Her Mantis nature, however much she might wish to deny it, recognized the rightness of this moment. There was no shame in a duellist’s death at the hands of a master.

He was coming again. From his expression, he judged her an encouraging student, whose education he would rather complete than cut short, but such was life. Learn, his look seemed to say to her. Improve. She backed off, intently watching his face, his eyes.

The justice of your cause? he had asked her. Simply by being here she had vouched for the thieves and thugs behind her, and his regard for her had not suffered. When she had turned the question back on him, however, as he must have known she would, she had seen the pain in his eyes. He was a man worth more than his service here, and she could only think how even the seneschal Lisan Dea had seemed to turn on her mistress, there at the end. How much more, then, would a creature of honour like Isendter wish to walk away? Understanding that, she deciphered his expression at last.

So help me, he wants me to win, she realized with a shock. He had no faith in the noblewoman he was championing. He would far rather lose the duel and see justice done. But he could never fight to lose. To do so would slur his honour far more than would fighting for a bad cause. He was willing Tynisa to improve, to match him blow for blow and let him lose with dignity.

She was not equal to it, however. She risked repeated assaults on his perfect defence, and came back wounded and bleeding each time, like someone trying to reach into a thorn bush, suffering a thousand cuts. She had not let him land a fatal stroke on her, not yet, but even her best defence could not keep him from whittling her away.

She put some additional distance between them, because that thought had led to another, darker one. She remembered old Kymon drilling her and the other College students in the Prowess Forum. What is the most important aim of the duellist? And always some fool would pipe up, To hit the enemy, Master Kymon. And the old Ant would snap back, By no means! It is to avoid being hit!

But she had failed at that. Her best skill had already gone into minimizing the damage that Isendter had caused her. She had no more resources to bolster her defences with. His siege of her swordcraft breached the walls further with every foray.

She wondered if she had read it in his eyes, but it was a terrible bleak thought, more fearful almost than his claw as it hunted her, twisting the hundred paths in the air between them, closer and closer with every motion.

A quick exchange of steel, a gash to the back of her hand, and she was clear again. The thought sat like a leaden weight within her, no, not that, even as she planned out how it might be achieved.

For a moment she thought he stumbled, the sloping ground treacherous beneath his feet, and she leapt for this opening instantly, faster than thought. Thought, catching up, cried, It’s a feint! but she had taken the bait already, lunging in even as he struck out at her whilst twisting aside from her blade.

There was barely an impact felt, but she heard a scream and thought it must be her own. Her sight was filled with red, and the slope of the ground seemed to roll under her feet, pitching her half a dozen reeling steps downhill, sword raised to ward him off, blindly covering one of a hundred approaches his blade might make.

It was Che who had screamed, she now realized. She herself kept silent as the tomb. There was blood in her eyes, and she drew a sleeve across them. That hurt, a burning pain shooting across her face where his blade had lashed her. My face One eye was still running with blood, but she had the other one clear, enough to see him approach again, steady and measured in his pace. The searing pain had not stopped, but she forced it away, locking it in the depths of her mind, perhaps in one of those chambers where Tisamon had so recently resided. Her mouth was full of blood, refilling each time she spat it out. He had cut her across her face. .. her face.

She had lived in two worlds, once. The Mantis child in her had fought, the Spider had smiled and plotted, painted herself in the mirror, charmed her enemies and made them fools. She had even smiled a path all the way to the Imperial palace at Capitas, because swords could not be relied on to win every fight.

She felt the Mantis path before her feet now, all others cut away. One-eyed, she met his gaze, and thought that he would understand. It was not true that every Mantis tragedy ended with a body on the floor. Some had two.

When he came for her next, she turned her body in a vain attempt to let his blade slide off her, while her own blade was already in motion. Her expected parry did not come, that he angled his blade to anticipate. Instead she dragged her hand back and up, the point of her rapier remaining almost motionless as she pivoted the rest of the sword around it in the air. The solid shock of contact came as his claw drove into her hip, driving a choking gasp out of her as she spat blood. His own left hand was lifting to catch her blade, but she drove it down anyway, calling on every ounce of strength to speed it on its way.