Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(209)

“You’re f*cked, you know,” he said, jerking his head over his shoulder toward the flares. “Your Wing’s dead. The Aedolians are dead. Even if you kill me, you’re f*cked.”

A grimace twisted Yurl’s face. “Then I’ll have to settle for the joy of gutting you,” he said, sliding into a folding fan attack, the feint blade slicing up and across while the true thrust came from beneath. Valyn battered it aside, but Yurl moved into the space, pressing forward, forward, raining down blows from above, from the side, twisting through obscure Manjari forms Valyn scarcely recognized and could barely block. The assault seemed to last hours, and when it was finished, Valyn could feel his breath tight in his chest. Another wound seeped blood down his shoulder.

“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.