Cage of Souls, page 28
Destavian was a sharp-cut image in darkly gleaming blue and green. If I had attached wings to his back you might have taken him for a dragonfly. His duelling jacket had broad sleeves to the elbow, then bands of cloth to the wrist, with semicircular padded guards over the backs of his hands. Likewise his trousers were loose and baggy to the knee then followed the muscles of his calves down to thin boots that kept the big toe separate from the others, the better to balance. He wore a headband to keep the sweat from his eyes, and his face was a study in composure. I want to digress a moment into something Trethowan wrote about predators, contrasting a cold-blooded and a warm-blooded animal as the latter took over the former’s habitat. He pointed out all the advantages the warm-blood had: speed, power, grace. He was unusually poetic about the subject even in shorthand. He also showed that the warm-blooded killer that usurped the older, colder species was a distinctly higher-maintenance monster, demanding more food, more space. This is what Peter and Destavian reminded me of. Peter was a touch shorter, broader, drab in the dull uniform of an Island Warden. His movements were loose and minimal. Jonas Destavian was a high society figure decked out in his personal duelling colours, and he had speed, power and grace aplenty. The crowd roared like jungle beasts themselves when they saw him.
Peter took the dagger in his left hand, the staff in his right. I would have taken it for a two-handed weapon myself, but it was light and perfectly balanced and he spun it through his fingers much as Jon de Baron could do with a pencil. He took a single, deep breath, with a ragged edge to it, and stepped into the circle. I imagined a kind of silence closing over him, as though he were going underwater. There was a bit of sun, then, and it lit us all but most especially it lit Peter’s face, finding it calm, with a strange, sad smile on it. For we prisoners, the worst had happened. We had been sentenced to our hell. Peter had been falling ever since the knife had entered Jon Anteim’s throat, and now he had hit bottom. Only the actual fact of the fighting was left. I think he was relieved.
Jonas Destavian stepped into the ring, moving on the balls of his feet. At the same instant, he and Peter both had their staves up over and behind their heads, points jutting towards their opponents like the tails of scorpions. I thought it was a salute, but it was the fight starting. They ran at each other full tilt, and each brought his staff down at the other with all the strength he had. The weapons clacked sharply on one another, and the daggers both lunged in, traded two or three thrusts, and then Peter and Destavian were slamming away with their staves, a rapid patter of connecting wood as fast as three men hammering a wall at speed. They constantly stepped into one another, round one another, striking at the other’s back, circling continuously, feet never still and daggers always waiting for an opening. Then they broke and their circling became wider, almost to the edge of the ring. It had all been so perfectly executed that it might as well have been choreographed. It was like chess: just a standard opening, such as you often get with two experienced players who knew the best moves. All of that strike, parry and counterstrike had been nothing but a tired old mainstay.
Peter and Destavian were constantly stepping into the centre to strike at each other, gliding sideways around the riposte, staves flashing and darting like serpents, daggers held raptly still, save that the point angled like the head of a hunting thing towards the heart of the other man. Peter would dash in, arc the staff for Destavian’s head, change that into a strike to the legs, then to the side, then to the head again in a whirling figure of eight, all the time trying to stay ahead of his opponent’s parries. Destavian would catch his staff and flick it aside and drive back at him, his face a model of care. Then it would be Peter stepping ever backwards across the circle, shadowing Destavian’s staff with his own, trying for that one parry that would turn things around. Sometimes they would lock staves, under Peter’s arm or in the crook of Destavian’s elbow, and then they would trade dagger-thrusts with brutal efficiency, arching backs and sucking in guts to avoid them, until one would spin away, and they would resume their pacing.
It became clear soon on that Destavian was the better. When the two of them moved, it was to his beat. When Peter attacked he was ready for it, and his own attacks seemed to be coming forever closer. He clipped Peter’s shoulder once, and Doctor Mandri called out a hit, but Shon and I, at Peter’s signal, denied that it had ever happened. The Governor, eager to see more substantial losses from our side, agreed with us. It was clear to me that the Lady Ellera had discovered who had taken Kiera in and she wanted Peter destroyed as much as the Anteims. The Governor was only too happy to give her her way.
Then Peter, who had just been retreating steadily in a lazy circle, took several rapid steps back to the very edge and then one forwards, bringing his staff down to the floor and vaulting with it, kicking out at the other man at near head height. Destavian slid back smoothly, but Peter was already landing right beside him in a crouch, dagger parrying dagger, one leg scything round to catch his adversary behind the knee. Destavian seemed about to fall backwards, but he balanced with his own staff and swung the kicked leg around, ending up standing, facing away from Peter. His staff flicked backwards to bounce away Peter’s blade, and Peter’s own staff jolted against his upper arm.
Peter scowled and stepped back crabwise, but Doctor Mandri was conceding the hit on his own fighter, and Peter shrugged at us. We could hardly dispute a hit in our favour. The Governor looked unimpressed, but waved his hand to pass it, and the first round was abruptly over. Shon showed me then that Destavian had set the whole thing up. Rather than speeding things along by striking Peter, he had forced Peter to strike him. The first round was the easiest to stall in, Shon told me, and we had lost that advantage now.
I handed the heavy mace-spear to Peter, who was looking annoyed. “Should’ve seen that coming,” he said. He did not seem in the least out of breath although there were beads of sweat dotting his forehead and dampening his hair. “Didn’t do him any damage,” he continued, stripping off his uniform tunic to the iron-coloured shirt beneath. Across from us, Destavian was detaching the sleeves of his own, unwrapping the bands of cloth from his forearms. He looked over without expression and took his own weapon one-handed. Like his clothes, like his staff and dagger, it was shaded blue and green. I knew that his Ropa sword, when produced, would have in its enamels the faded exemplar of those colours.
Peter was tugging on the gloves Destavian wore already: palms lined with deep grooves for grip, and padded to absorb the shock. They stepped into the ring together, Destavian letting the heavy spear just dangle at the end of one arm, Peter gripping the haft in both hands. They stood for a moment, looking at each other, each weighing up the other. The stakes had gone up.
Destavian moved first, snapping the spear out into a point-first lunge that carried him past Peter’s evasion, turning the strike into a swinging arc at Peter’s back. The steel shaft of Peter’s weapon deflected the tip with a high metal sound and he swept at Destavian with the heavy head, meeting an identical move with a thunderous clang of abused steel. Three times they smacked the lead-filled weights together with absurd force, then stepped away, watching one another. I think that Destavian had seen that Peter was stronger, but you could not tell it from his face. He was as still as a mantis.
I assumed that this was how it would go from now, a brutal slugging match until one of them ran out of steam. That was what the weapons seemed designed for. Instead, Destavian levelled his and approached slowly, almost delicately. Peter was trailing his spear point along the slats of the ground, feigning fatigue. He almost waited too long. Destavian was well within reach, feet inching, feeling for purchase on the uneven flooring. The champion duellist’s slow advance was swaying, almost hypnotic, and when he exploded into action, I was not ready for it. He whipped the head up, spun it for momentum and brought it down hard, all in one movement. Peter had seen it coming, back-stepped a foot and a half and made a killing lunge at Destavian, hoping to find him off balance after his strike. Destavian simply bounced the head off the springy wood of the floor, knocked Peter’s strike wide, and then was boring in with one of his own. Peter lost two feet of ground and they were moving in slow circles, spearpoints just touching, grating against each other, each man seeking the inside line. It was the world’s most delicate dance performed with the world’s most cumbersome weapons.
Then Destavian had taken his spear like a sword, both hands near the hilt, and brought it down straight at Peter’s head. Peter fended it off in the same style, and then struck back and forth, lunging and swinging, with precise, heavy strokes. There was no overextension, no wild swinging: that would have been fatal with such massive weapons. Each move was brought to a shuddering halt as soon as it had missed its target, dragged into line for the next block and counter. Even through the gloves, the punishment of the weapons meeting must have been agony through every bone of their hands, but neither man showed it.
It all fell apart when Peter lunged high into Destavian’s face and the other man dropped right to the ground, knee and one hand, and swept Peter’s legs out with the haft of his spear.
Peter was already kicking out for purchase when Destavian came down right at him, point first. I thought that was it, that we would not have a third round, but Peter writhed out from beneath the spear, and it stuck deep into the wood of the floor. He did his best to take advantage of it, twisting up to stab raggedly at his opponent, but Destavian, rather than tugging his spear free, pulled back on the shaft, straining the point against the slats of the floor, and then released. In a remarkably executed move the butt whipped into Peter’s face and struck him in the eye.
Even as he reeled back, Doctor Mandri was calling for a hit. Peter, one hand to his face, was waving at Shon and I furiously, and I knew that if he went straight into the third round like that he would die in seconds. “No hit!” Shon was calling. “I object!”
The Governor stared at him, making me very aware of the fact that we were the only ones there in prisoners’ greys. Shon glanced back at me the once and then faced up to the Governor and his mistress and said, “I submit that the contact doesn’t count because it was only with the butt. Although obviously it is up to the wisdom of the judge to decide, it has frequently been ruled that strikes with the butt of the weapon are not sufficient for the purposes of progressing a duel.”
Doctor Mandri made the point that there had also been cases where the opposite applied, and that this was all sophistry. By this time, though, I had come up with the concept that since Doctor Mandri had not called a hit when Destavian had pulled Peter over with the haft of his weapon, he had tacitly admitted that contact with anything other than the head did not count, or otherwise (Shon added) that Destavian had unlawfully continued the second round after a hit. I sensed that the Governor was becoming somewhat lost in the legal technicalities.
What this had done, of course, was give Peter some time to recover his wits. He had a furious red mark across his left eye socket, neatly framing the existing bruise courtesy of the Marshal. He did not seem to be blind or dazed, and he was ready when the Governor finally ruled in our favour and decreed that the second round should continue.
Destavian had spent the time in taking off his headband and replacing it with a new one. When the Governor gave his signal he was ready, and launched straight in at Peter, who spent the next dozen moves simply fending him off. They were closer now, well within distance, and the lead-weighted heads often missed by inches only. Destavian put his butt straight into Peter’s stomach, taking advantage of the Governor’s ruling, but Peter found it in himself to kick his opponent savagely in what should have been the groin, but was only the hip after Destavian twisted away. They parted again, and there was a long still moment, both men breathing heavily, Peter with shoulders heaving and the remains of his calm poise streaming in tatters from him. He was on the run and everyone sensed it.
He gave out a shout without warning and was at Destavian, lunging, stabbing, jabbing down, getting almost chest to chest with the spears pinned between them. He grabbed the slighter man, bore him to the ground and rolled over twice before parting with a shriek of metal. I saw a line of blood across Destavian’s arm and was about to cry out in triumph for a hit when I saw the source of the blood. There was a sister line cut across Peter’s left pectoral, through his shirt and into the flesh. It was shallow, but it was a hit. I think neither man could have said precisely when in that mad scramble it had occurred. Doctor Mandri barely had to say anything. Peter was already trudging over, hand held out for the Ropa blade.
Shon bundled the awkward thing over to him, and Peter took it with some effort. I wanted to see to his wound, but apparently that was not allowed until the fight was over, when – his tone seemed to say – it would be a moot point anyway. He held the blade away from us to do something to the controls, and I heard a very faint hissing from it like air leaking out of some invisible pinhole. Peter was abruptly holding the sword one-handed, as though it weighed nothing at all, making small passes with it and watching light run off the stony blade. Opposite, Destavian had his own blue-green death machine out and was handling it equally lightly.
Shon had a metal bar out, three foot long and scored every two inches. I think it came in the case. He held it far out at arm’s length and gestured for me to get back. With a single fluid motion Peter brought the Ropa sword in an arc and cut six inches clean off without a sound. Destavian did the same, slicing neatly through his bar at the first two-inch marker. I understood that this was in the nature of a test.
The two duellists stepped into the circle for the final round. I saw Bewley Anteim’s deep-set eyes gleam with malignant glee, assured of the outcome. Doctor Mandri straightened his collar and I sensed that, with these awesome weapons, he would always be a little worried. They were so ludicrously dangerous.
Peter and Destavian closed carefully, swords outstretched. They made a few practise feints and passes. Peter would send his blade lunging in, then drag it back to fend off the other’s. As it bounced away with a sharp, electric sound, he would spin with the motion and turn it into another attack, whilst Destavian retrieved the course of his own sword and got behind it. I think I was the only person present to understand quite what it was that made the motion of the Ropa blades so bizarre, because I had studied all that was left of the old sciences. Whatever power made the blades light enough to be used rid them of weight, but not of mass. They had no bond with gravity, and the duellists could throw them every which way, but they were slow to start moving and even harder to stop. Both men kept their blades in almost constant motion, as though they were fighting with weighted chains: spinning them in deadly arcs and wheels that constantly brought them back towards the body of their opponent. When the blades touched, they bounded away from one another with a crackle and hiss, but no solid sound of contact. Perhaps they never did quite touch.
Peter tried to be the aggressor at the start, hoping to fence Destavian in behind a web of wheeling moves. He passed the blade through figures and sigils and diagrams in the air, constantly trying to home in on his nimble opponent. Destavian stepped back and away, retreating parallel to the line of the circle, his own blade passing gracefully before him to ward off Peter’s. His face was blank, save that something had finally reached his eyes and they had come alive.
He fell forwards, or that is what it looked like. I was sure that he was going to go straight into the path of Peter’s sword, but he had calculated the course of that ever-moving blade and it was well clear of him, with Peter trying to arrest its flight. Destavian tucked into a roll and came up turning on the ball of one foot, advancing. It was all Peter could do to keep clear of a blade that moved like a dragonfly itself, Destavian handling it with an ease and deftness that defied belief. In contrast, Peter was a lumbering amateur, barely getting out of the way of each blow and staggering, missing his footing, lurching ever backwards. Destavian’s eyes were deadly now, and behind them all the cogs and springs of his brain churned out the precise moves he needed to drive in for the finish. He so nearly had it two moves later, save that Peter stumbled too far, and the blade cut close above his head. I saw a switch of Peter’s fair hair go dead white with passage of that lethal field, but Peter caught his balance only to go on backing up, always backing up. When I saw his face it had been stripped of all the easy charm and carelessness. Now he was desperate. Now he wanted to live, when events had conspired to make that impossible. I wish I had never seen his face like that. I wish I had never seen Peter Drachmar afraid.
Destavian’s trap was shutting on schedule. I will say this for him: there was no enjoyment in his face, just a terrible concentration. Peter fell back against the edge of the circle, against the jeering, catcalling Wardens who used to be his peers. Destavian made the killing strike.
What you must remember is Trethowan’s analogy: the cold-blooded and the warm-blooded predators, and the fact that warmer blood means higher maintenance. Jonas Destavian fought in the best arenas of Shadrapar, where the audiences watched with polite appreciation as he dissected his adversaries. Peter was a backstreet pit fighter used to rough crowds and dirty play. More, Peter had been on the Island for the best part of the year, Destavian had arrived the day before. The new blue headband was already black with sweat, the air around him hotter and more humid than back home. It was easy to forget the differences, after so long.The climate, the noise, the smaller confines of the circle, all of these must have contributed to what happened next.
Peter did not miraculously get in a death-stroke of his own. He fell away to one side, the only way he could escape. Destavian arrested his lunge, but the tip of the blade cut an inch of cloth from one of the spectator’s jackets, and the man just died. The field of the Ropa blade did indeed stop his heart. I had not believed Peter, before.
