Empire in Black and Gold (89 page)

He did not see the blows, just felt the impact. The shield, moved to his best guess, took two. One slammed him in the side, denting breast and back where they came together. A fourth struck the plates of his upper arm, barely hard enough to make a mark. The strikes told him where she was as well as eyes could have done. His sword was swifter than she thought, not quite as swift as she was. Dragonfly-kinden were fast like that. He felt the faintest scrape where he had nicked some part of her own mail and even as she fell back her blade scored a fifth strike on him, bounding back from one of his greaves. He stepped back again and let his eye-slit find her.

Her face was set firm. She had appreciated the rules of the game now.
Not first hit, Princess, not first blood even. You have to hit me until this skin of steel gives way.

Varmen was a strong man made stronger by the weight of metal he had lived with these ten years. He would only have to hit her once.

Her wings fluttered, shimmers of light and motion, there for a moment, now gone. She had not moved. She kept her sword between them but would not come to him.
Fair enough. My turn, I reckon.

He set himself to motion. There was an art to fighting in full mail that was every bit as hard-learned as all her duelling fancy. It was a study in momentum and inertia, and Varmen had spent years mastering it. He was slow when he started moving, and her wings fluttered again, sword held out towards him, but then he was hitting his speed, and she saw that he would slam straight through any parry she put up. He drove in with sword and shield, always leading with the blade, great cleaving strokes that never stopped, just curved on into more and more blows at her. Oh, it was no difficulty for her to step or fly out of the way, but he made her move. He drove her back and forth like a wind playing with a leaf. Each small move of his birthed a greater move of hers. He was a miracle of economy. She attacked back sometimes, saw where his strike was going and laid her sword on him, on the shoulder, on the side, on his shield as it met her ripostes even as she made them. He could see it in her face, though. He did not need to dance. She could not cut through his steel. He would run her, and run her, until she had no more run left in her. Already she was backing against the trees. He was driving her like an animal.

She shrieked at him and exploded in a blurred flurry of blows. He took a solid whack across the helm, three on the shield again, one into the mail where his neck met his shoulder. If that had been her strongest, she might have set him back with that, but her strength was leaching from her, step by step, as he forced her ahead of him. There would be a bruise, of course, but there and then he did not even slow for her.

She was over his head, wings a blue-and-green blur. He turned with her, felt his sword clip something. She was within the view of his eye-slit once more, sword drawn back.

She stabbed. With all that length of sword she stabbed for his eyes. It was a good move, but he tilted his head as the lunge came in and the blade grated along the side of his helm, accomplishing nothing. She was within his sword’s reach, was close enough almost to embrace. The edge of his shield smashed across her face, shattering part of her helm and dropping her to the floor.

Her sword had spun from her hands, she crouched before him, bloody mouthed and defiant, and he held his blade point-down over her.

There had been a sound, these last minutes, and only he had not noted it. Her head snapped up to look at something and he saw that she, too, had been so taken with the fight she had missed it.

The ugly box-shape of the imperial heliopter thundered overhead a moment later, impossible to ignore now. As it passed over the trees, he saw the glint of what they threw from its belly, and the fire a moment later, grenades shivering tree trunks and shrapnelling through the forest. Then there were men in the air, not the nimble Commonwealers but the good old familiar sight of the light airborne: Wasp-kinden men in their stripped-down armour, landing all around with sting-fire and the sword.

Felipe Daless was still crouching before him, her face a mask of battered bitterness. Varmen lowered his sword. She could not see his expression, but she saw his helm nod once. She took flight, not up but straight away, into the trees.
I am too soft
, he knew,
but it would not have sat well, silencing that voice.

He turned back to the crashed flying machine. There were already a couple of the airborne there, one of them with lieutenant’s insignia. Varmen trudged over, feeling abruptly exhausted, as he always did when the fighting spirit bled away from him.

He saw Tserro there, and Arken. They had sour looks on them, and he asked, ‘What’s the stone in your shoe? They came, didn’t they? We’re rescued.’

‘If you can call it that,’ Arken said sullenly, and then, when Varmen did not see, ‘It’s not our people, Sergeant, not the Sixth. These bastards are the Gears, the pissing
Second
.’

The main body of the Imperial Sixth had been caught unawares by the Grand Army of the Commonweal and almost completely wiped out, save for such detachments as had been sent away for other duties. It was the Commonweal’s only significant victory of the war, and the Sixth’s remnants, dug in and stubborn, held the Dragonflies long enough for imperial relief forces to put the Commonwealers to flight.

Pellrec survived his wound, and of matters such as a dead Rekef lieutenant and the perfidy of Fly-kinden scouts nothing was ever said. If the Rekef took any interest in the matter, Varmen never found out. He recommended Arken for sergeant, but nothing came of that either. His superiors knew too well how much his recommendations were worth.

Pellrec would die later, outside Mian Lae, in what would turn out to be practically the last major engagement of the Twelve Year War. Varmen would survive to march on the Lowlands with the newly reconstituted Sixth, under General Praetor. All that was to come though.

After the Second Army’s intervention, and after the subsequent brutal assault on every Commonweal village and position within ten miles of the heliopter crash, Varmen toured the slave markets. He had the time, while the Sixth was in shreds. He saw every female Dragonfly the Slave Corps had taken, every prisoner of war awaiting disposal or execution.

He never did find Felipe Daless.