I took a step forward, reaching for her hand but afraid to touch it, needing to and knowing I should not. “You’re right,” I said. “You’re right. But whatever happens, it won’t be because of you. It was my choice. I’m sorry I dragged you into it.” I pulled my hand back, feeling suddenly very foolish. “No one has to die.”
“But you said—”
“We have to fight if our seconds can’t talk and resolve our differences, which they won’t, but first blood’s enough. I’ll strike the first blow and have done. I swear it.”
Her lip curled. “What about solving problems? What happened to”—her tone changed, mimicking my earlier words with frightening accuracy—“Gilliam acting with impunity, trampling over everyone in his path?”
“That isn’t fair,” I said. “Do you want me to fight him or not? You can’t have it both ways.”
It was her turn to look away, arms crossed. She didn’t say anything.
“I can’t apologize any more than I already have,” I said truthfully. “I can’t back out, and I can’t run away. But I will try to make things as right as I can.” My words died slowly, growing softer, losing force. “I hope . . . I hope you will forgive me.” More softly still I added, “I don’t want to kill anyone, Doctor Onderra.”
“Valka,” she said at last. “Call me Valka.”
CHAPTER 59
ON THE EVE OF EXECUTION
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN made to contemplate your death? Locked in a tower cell, perhaps, or in some bastille of the Chantry to await your end on the edge of the White Sword? Have you ever sat there through a sleepless night and counted the seconds you have left like grains of sand? I pray that you have not. It is one thing to die and quite another to have suffered the fear of death and survive. I wish neither for you, who has suffered both. You stand as does the solitary candle in chapel, flickering against the Dark. A darkness not of space but of time, of the yawning maw of some empty, echoing future forever barred to you.
It is comforting to know the sun will always rise—that is, until it does not, until it dissolves into cold ash and the universe runs down, or you do. Fire fades. And life. Or it is snuffed out. For the chapel candle, that is no tragedy—the candle knows not when it is extinguished. It is only a symbol, only the avatar of the unconquered sun lit to keep watch through the night in the Chantry temple. But the human flame knows, and it shivers not from the wind but from fear. From the sickness of the heart. And so I shivered in my cloying bed and on the floor beside it when I could lie amongst its folds no more. Though I was but one score and three years old—next to nothing compared to the centuries I have since counted—I felt my age and the specter of my fleeting mortality. I felt the ache in every once-broken bone, felt every scar from every wound healed on the street and in the Colosso.
I have made many mistakes and done many terrible things on purpose. For fifteen hundred years I’ve haunted our galaxy and gathered regrets. Perhaps Gilliam Vas deserved to die. He was not a good man. He was wicked, petty, cruel as nature was cruel to him, as others doubtless had been cruel, too. I have stopped believing that it is up to any man to decide what other men deserve. I have met saints punished for their virtues and monsters praised for their monstrosity. I have been both sorts of creature.
Not long ago I said that I have always considered myself agnostic, but I believe that men must have souls. It was not always thus. I used to think that we were only animals, and thinking that justified the way some of us were treated as only animals. Thinking that helped me to turn a blind eye to the ugliness of the world. I know better now. Whatever Gilliam was—and there was little good in him—he was a man like any other. But I had made a choice, as we each must always do. I was young and angry, embarrassed and afraid. I did not want to die and did not want to kill, and I did not wish for Valka to hate me.
I had to choose.
Life is never about what we deserve. I do not know if there is a God, be it Mother Earth or the icona or one of the uncreated gods of old, but if there is, God alone may dispense perfect justice. It is not to be had in our fallen world. We can only strive for it. Perhaps Gilliam deserved to die. Perhaps I did. Perhaps we ought to have killed one another or made peace without the use of steel. It doesn’t matter, nor is it for me to say. I had made a choice, and I have made several choices since. That is all we can ever do, then live by our choices and by their consequences. Judge me as you will. What gods there are may yet forgive me and have mercy on his soul.
CHAPTER 60
THE SWORD, OUR ORATOR
THERE WERE WORSE PLACES to die, I decided, tightening my brown dueling jerkin. The grotto overhanging the white grass field was carved with the figures of Blind Justice, Wide-Eyed Fortitude, and Death herself, sheltered from the rain by a natural facade of raw sandstone. It was the same stone from which most of Borosevo Castle was fashioned. This altar, invoking the shrines of ancient pagan deities on Earth, stood at the narrow end of an elliptical garden hedged by terranic yew, the deep green leaves black in the burnt rust of Emesh’s sun. They carved a lovely contrast against the bone-grass, white as milk, that carpeted the strange place.
And then there were the flowers.
They were native, those blooms, and large as a man’s head when closed. They suffused the high hedge walls, their copper-colored blossoms wet and heavy on their golden vines, filling the air with a heady perfume so lovely it made the sweaty air bearable. And they moved, opening and closing like the beating of hearts or the somnambulant blinks of so many hundred eyes. I felt transported, as if the arched gate into the grotto were a portal into faerie, as if this little garden were a slice of Cat’s forests on Luin.
My wounds from the encounter with the Umandh still itched. Count Mataro had seen to it that I’d received the best of care following that afternoon in the warehouse, and truth be told I was astonished by how quickly I’d healed. The flesh had knit back together well enough, but the new skin still prickled where the correctives had been applied. Scratching, I glanced back over my shoulder at my small crowd of supporters to offer an encouraging smile. Valka was absent, a fact of which I was equally glad and aggrieved, but Switch was there, standing in as my second—he had already negotiated this spot with Gilliam’s second. Both Anaïs and Dorian had come, much to my surprise, though they stood somewhat apart among their guards. Even more surprising was the figure of Sir Elomas Redgrave. The old man was seated on a bench, sipping tea from the cap of a heating bottle as he spoke softly to Switch. I watched them both a moment, a frown creasing my face. Had Valka asked him to come? Was he her eyes?
“Scared, Marlowe?” Gilliam glowered at me from his camp across the white grass field, attended by a pair of Chantry anagnosts in black robes. The gargoyle himself wore high boots and black trousers, and even the leather of his jerkin was black. Without the heavy robes to disguise him, the myriad imperfections of his form screamed for attention: the pronounced hunch, his uneven legs, the way he carried himself as if he teetered on the edge of some abyss.
I bowed my head. “Not at all.” I had been a myrmidon for years and a student of Sir Felix Martyn for more than a decade before that. I was tall, healthy, my blood untainted, my limbs straight and clean. What threat could the intus possibly pose? I watched him scuttle crab-like over the grass.
“The combatants will not speak!” piped the plebeian officiant, a square-faced man with thinning brown hair swept from a high and furrowed brow. That stopped the intus responding.
Switch hurried over, ducking round a pair of officiants in the uniforms of city prefects. “They’re almost ready to start. You got this?”
The square-faced officiant drew a pair of matched backswords from a padded box. Dutifully the short plebeian checked the edges against his thumb, made a note on his wrist terminal. “I’ll cut him first and have done.” I shook my head. “The doctor was right. I shouldn’t have done this.” Gilliam brushed his attendants off, tugging on a black fenc
ing glove that looked tailored for his oddly shaped arm. I frowned at that. It looked well used.
“Yeah, no shit, Had,” Switch said reflexively. From the corner of my eye, I saw him freeze, stiffen. “Sorry, sir, my lordship, sir.”
“Stop that, would you?” I seated myself on a flat stone and unzipped my boots. “I am exactly the same person I always was.”
Switch shifted uncomfortably and looked away. “It don’t . . . It doesn’t feel like that.”
I had a real talent for alienation, it seemed. Looking up, I tugged my boots free and peeled my black socks off to bare the thick sheets of callous on my soles. Switch had seen the routine a thousand times in training, so he didn’t ask. “Switch, thanks for being here. It means a lot. Truly.”
He never replied, for at that moment the officiant with the thinning hair raised his clear, nasal voice. “The combatants shall approach!”
“That’s my cue,” I said to the myrmidon, trying to appear jovial. I wasn’t sure I’d carried it off. Barefoot I crossed the bone-grass to where the civil servants stood clustered about the equipment required by law for a duel palatine. Camera eyes orbited the cluster of men from the prefect’s office, prepared to record the duel. Even then one was recording video testimony of the legal witnesses, of whom Anaïs, Dorian, and Elomas were the principals. I had formalized my own charge days earlier, the evening of the Umandh’s abortive attempt on the count’s life. For dangerous slander against a personal acquaintance and to answer past charges of assault and insult against my exalted personage. The formal jargon chafed like a uniform collar. Maybe I had lost some of my Imperial polish.
I accepted my blade from the officiant after Gilliam took his, going briefly to one knee to receive the weapon. “You will fight until one party bleeds, at which point the unbloodied will be granted an opportunity to end the engagement, as has been the custom under the Index and the Great Charters of the Imperium since the Assumption of Earth.” The mere mention of the homeworld’s name prompted discreet sun disc signs from Gilliam and his Chantry associates while I, filthy apostate that I was, stood unmoved. The intus priest noticed my lapse and sneered, but he held his silence. The little man was not done speaking. “If the opportunity to abort the engagement is not taken, the engagement will continue until one party can no longer fight. Is this clear?”
Two yeses sounded in the still air. Two men paced away from each other in the shadow of three officiant prefects. Three Chantry icona watched from the artificial wall of the grotto shrine, stone faces unseeing as funeral masks. Thin mist rose from the bone-white grass, thickening the dense Emeshi air with moisture. It was like walking through a dream, all clouded. All quiet. I did not truly hear the officiant as he recited the formal charges. Instead I watched Gilliam, his blond hair oiled back from his high and misshapen forehead, watching me with those slitted, mismatched eyes.
I pushed my sword forward, blade held at a slight angle, upthrust as I pressed my left fist to my breast. It was a knight’s salute, a gesture I had little right to but one none would truly challenge. It kept the blade forward, ready.
“Have you confessed?” Gilliam asked, the ban on our silence lifted. “I’ll hear your sins before you die.”
I did not reply, did not move but to flex my toes in the damp grass. The day would be a hot one, the fat sun rising the color of blood. I might have been a statue, locked in that moment, every preceding second had carried to that grotto that damp and fog-bound morn. My previous decisions ensured that I could not but walk the path I was on. I had chosen.
Gilliam lunged, and I snapped the parry, retreating a step. The sound of naked steel, not the highmatter of true swords, was fine music in the stillness. My eyebrows shot up. He was fast, far faster than his uneven legs belied. And his form was good, surprisingly straight and even despite the crookedness of his frame. This would not be an easy contest, or at least not so easy as I’d believed. I allowed my earlier arrogance to fade away. Pride cometh before destruction. Gibson was never far, endlessly quoting in my ear. My own pride fell with my fortunes, retreating before the advance of the priest. Teeth bared, Gilliam swept low. I turned to parry, distracting him as I lashed out with my off hand to cuff the man across the face. He staggered back, gasping, a bruise already blossoming on his cheek.
With a snarl, he pressed a new offensive, and I circled left around him, unwilling to be driven toward the wall of the grotto where our witnesses watched. I heard a woman—Anaïs?—gasp as I battered Gilliam’s sword aside with a clangor. The whole situation wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Gilliam’s blade made a pass for one of my kidneys, but I turned it with an elbow snap, knocking his point aside before stepping into the range of his sword and pulling my own weapon up and around my head into a rolling cut, saber-fashion, that should have connected at the joint of his neck and shoulder.
But Gilliam vanished, dropping into a roll that carried him counterclockwise by nearly ninety degrees. So stunned was I at this that I almost failed to jump aside. I felt the point of his backsword scrape the brown leather of my jerkin. Had I grown so used to fighting with the heavy myrmidon’s round shield that I’d forgotten how to duel properly? I heard Switch hiss in unneeded sympathy.
Maybe Valka was right. Maybe we were barbarians. What need had I for this? If I hadn’t gotten my blood up, hot off the Umandh’s attack on the count, if I hadn’t let my heart and my pointless feelings for Valka rule my head, none of this would have happened. But we all make mistakes and must stand by them. I cannot say if Gilliam’s competence, his skill, made the whole ordeal more a farce or less of one. He beat my weapon aside, made to lunge. I outdistanced him, able to retreat on my long, straight legs more easily than he could advance on his twisted ones.
It is the mistake of poets, of librettists like my mother, to believe that fighting is ever only one thing. They believe the work of the soldier, the game of the gladiator, the art of the duelist are all the same and that those are the same as the chaos of fighting on the streets and in the country villages of a thousand worlds. But there is fighting and there is fighting. I remembered the time I’d toppled Ghen in the training yard to get everyone behind me—to save Switch, in point of fact. Where was that Hadrian right now?
I kicked the back of Gilliam’s knee, staggering him in advance of a descending overhead blow. Once. Twice. The third cut I brought in from the side, but the little goblin of a priest parried each with a strength that astonished me. He was on the retreat now, and briefly I saw the waxen expressions on the faces of the two Mataro children. What would they think if their new friend killed their priest on this sanguinary field that bleak morning? I needed first blood, needed to call off this farce I’d written for myself, needed to apologize in action as well as word. Needed to redeem myself to Valka.
Valka.
I never saw the strike that cut me, only felt the raw, rusted pain of it lance up my arm. Red blood wept into the cream of my torn sleeve, faintly brown in the fabric. How had I missed it? I hissed, staggered back, swearing under my breath in Mandar of all things, groaning as my promises ran out with my blood. Medically the wound was minor, a clean slash across the top of my forearm. In a way that transcended the facts of our dispute, the wound was mortal.
“Halt!” The officiant’s nasal voice was deep now; the man was affecting a sergeant’s tone of command. “First blood to the defendant!” He focused his square face on Gilliam, green eyes wide beneath furrowed brows. “Is the gentleman satisfied?” he asked in deadly earnest.
There was no blood on Gilliam’s blade, none at all; he’d moved so quickly. I resisted the urge to clutch my arm and backpedaled, holding my sword at the ready in a haggard echo of my earlier salute. Only then did I realize my chest was heaving, that I was tired. Earth and Emperor, I should have kept up my regimen after coming to the palace. Ye Gods, the last few months had softened me. I set my jaw. The wound ached, but that was not the worst of it.
&nb
sp; I had no power in that moment, waiting for Gilliam to answer. My word hung on that answer, my promise to Valka. I had failed. I had been so sure that I would get first blood, that I could end everything at that critical juncture and bow out with some grace and dignity. I had been so sure. Now all that was taken from me and left in the hands of the asymmetrical creature holding the twin of my sword. I held my breath and felt the world suspended in that breath.
“No!” Gilliam sneered, and he lunged.
Damn my talent for making enemies!
I turned the first new attack, batting the blade down past my sinking heart. Time narrowed before me, the futures ahead of me thinning, reducing from the vague quantum smear of potential to a single pair of doors. Through one I stood above the mute’s body, a bloodied sword in hand. Through the other our positions were reversed. I slammed my sword up, stepping in and to the right to block a charge and angle out of the way as Gilliam redoubled his attack.
“Surprised, boy?” he asked through gritted teeth. “Expected it would be easy? Brave of you . . .” He blocked a thrust with a neat slipping motion of his sword, stepped in with a low jab that ought to have skewered me in the thigh. I danced back, threw a retreating cut at the intus’s shoulder. Strange, I reflected, that the man’s mother was not here. “Brave of you to challenge a cripple.”
I slashed the chanter across the front of his left thigh. The black leather sighed open, and Gilliam winced. “You should have taken the blood. I won’t make the same mistake again,” I said, redoubling my attack, driving the intus backward across the white grass toward the wall of pulsing flowers, steel ringing in the thick air. My left arm smarted, weeping blood as I advanced, but I ground my teeth and pressed ahead, cutting at the priest’s head and shoulders. The truth of what I’d tried to tell Valka rang in my ears: I was not a killer, had never been one.
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