Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (31 page)

I pivoted on the point of rapture that was my right foot,
bringing my left leg up and around in a fan kick that followed the original path of
my higher sword. In turn, I dropped that sword to follow the still-rotating Kitsune
as I brought the other up, forcing her into a second, slightly less graceful, cartwheel.
I ended my motion sideways to the Kitsune in a stance like a horseman in his saddle,
my left blade held vertically between us. I shifted my right into a high diagonal
then, slanting it down over my head to point at her heart.

“Better and better,” Nuriko said with a laugh. “Now, try again.” She still hadn’t
drawn her sword or even a knife—that slighting of my skills was beginning to grate
on me.

I took a deep breath and recentered myself. Both feet were squarely on the Kitsune’s
shadow now, and I had to keep about half of my attention focused through Triss’s senses
on Thiussus. So far, she hadn’t decided to do anything more than laugh silently and
send wild shocks of sensation rolling up my body from the place where my feet met
her substance. Coping with that flow
was
growing easier with each breath as I learned to accept it and let it pass through
me, but that could change in an instant if Thiussus switched tactics.

I snapped my left wrist forward, flicking my sword at Nuriko’s shoulder like a whip.
She didn’t seem to move, but when my point passed through the place her shoulder should
have been, it touched nothing but air. I continued the motion of my sword as I rotated
forward around the ball of my forward foot. Twisting down and to the side I brought
my left sword into a cross guard while I swung the other in a whistling cut at her
face.

She bent backward like a dancer sliding under a pole, moving impossibly fast. An instant
later, she took a short, shuffling step that put her between my right-hand sword and
my shoulder and stood up, gently touching a finger to my neck as though she were checking
my pulse.

“Point?” she asked as though we were practicing on the field.

I growled, but nodded as she leaped back and away from me.

“That was an excellent combination,” she said. “Master Eskilon created the form it’s
based on, and he was the best of my teachers at the temple. Once more.”

I could feel anger boiling away under my heart at being treated so lightly, but I
knew I mustn’t let emotion rule me. Instead, I tried to do almost what Triss had done,
letting go of the consciousness of the mind in favor of a sort of bodythought.

Shift the swords. Reflect and distract. Lean back. Stomp a kick at the Kitsune’s ankle.
Miss. Deepen the knee. Turn a front flip, lashing blades at chest and thighs. Kick.
Thrust. Twist. Slice. Spin. Stab. Slice again.

Each time I attacked, the Kitsune shifted out of the way, never avoiding any attack
by more than the smallest fraction of an inch, but never seeming to be in any real
danger either. Twice more she pressed a finger to my body, once over the heart, once
sliding across the inside of my thigh over the big artery there. Both times she asked,
“Point?” Both times I nodded.

I was sure she could have scored more often if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t seem
interested in anything but the most perfect and deadly of mock attacks. I backed her
most of the length of the barracks but couldn’t lay steel on her. It was maddening.
When we had almost reached the edge of the building, she held up a hand and I stopped
for a moment.

“You are a credit to your teachers, Aral. Every motion is perfect, every thrust and
kick and spin the purest expression of the forms upon which they were built. Your
mastery of the arts of the Blade is a great strength, but also a great weakness. For
generations your predecessors tried to kill me, but each time they met with failure.
Let me show you why.”

She produced a pair of long, lightly curved knives from the sheaths at her waist,
like miniature versions of my own swords. “Oh, and don’t worry, no poison this time.”

She came at me and I lost all sense of the moment or anything but avoiding the steel
that sought my blood. I
parried and dodged and spun, and never once had a chance to strike back. Twice she
cut me lightly, a shallow slice on my chest over the heart, and a crease along the
back of my neck that sent a trickle of blood running down my spine. Add the three
times I only barely dodged or parried a blow that would have ended me, and that was
five times I would have died in half as many minutes had she been using full-length
swords. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the stunning series of attacks ended. She
had backed me almost to the place where we started.

“Do you know what you’re doing wrong?” she asked, returning her knives to their sheaths.

I shook my head mutely, too winded for words.

“Would you like me to tell you?”

“Yes,” I managed to gasp.

“Nothing.”

“Huh?”

“You’re doing nothing wrong. As with your attacks, every block and parry and spin
is perfect…and predictable. At least for me. You have learned to fight in the best
tradition of the Blade. But you have never learned how to fight against that tradition.
Your submission to the authority of your teachers will destroy you, just as authority
is destroying this world. A master of another school would find you a very hard nut
to crack, but for one who helped design and refine those forms, you are an open book.
Do you understand?”

“I do.” Both what she had said, and what it meant.

“You can’t hope to beat me, child, and I am loath to kill you. Won’t you step aside
and let me do what I must without destroying you?”

“No. I can’t, and I won’t.”

“I’m sorry it had to end this way, Aral. You were the best to come against me in all
the long years, save only Kelos.”

T
he
most finely crafted tool is nothing more than a dead weight if you can’t let it go
when it becomes a burden, and even a master has things to learn. Kelos had told me
that many years ago, and I had pretended to understand what he meant. Only, I hadn’t.
Not until now, when I faced the Kitsune and, very probably, my death.

“I’m sorry, too, Nuriko,” I said, “but I thank you for the lesson.”

Then I lunged, delivering a demonstration-perfect thrust of the burning water form,
which I subverted at the last possible instant by throwing in a twist I’d perfected
with the Zhani dueling swords that had been my primary weapons for seven years. It
was ugly and a bit clumsy, as my Varyan-style blade with its curve and single edge
had never been designed for such a maneuver, but it did something I had not managed
to do previously that night. It connected. The blunt back of the blade caught the
Kitsune high on the cheekbone. Not hard enough to split that metallic golden skin,
but hard enough that I felt the shock in my wrist. It also forced her to make an ungainly
leap to get back out of
range before I could follow up—the first ungraceful move she’d made.

A mocking voice spoke from the shadow beneath my feet, “The kitten that fights and
bites may scratch and claw, but there’s very little blood he’ll draw.”

I ignored Thiussus’s words, listening only for action, straining for any hint of threat
with my borrowed senses.

Meanwhile, Nuriko reached up and touched her cheekbone. “I do believe you’ve bruised
me, child. That’s very well done, indeed. Your death will be the most honorable I
can deliver.”

Nuriko’s left hand went to the hilt sticking up over her left shoulder. With a lift
and flick she drew her greatsword, bringing it down and around into a guard position
in front of her while placing her right hand on the hilt below her left. Like the
Varyan-style swords I carried, it had a single edge. But it was straight as a Zhani
dueling sword, and well over a yard in length—a warrior’s weapon, a good foot and
a half longer than my own shorter assassin’s blades.

Without Triss’s senses augmenting my own, the blade would have been all but invisible
to me. The smoky blue gray tint of the goddess-forged steel drank the light with a
special kind of magic. The oris juice I’d used to treat my own swords was a sad echo
of the effect inherent to Namara’s. The guard, like my own, was a simple oval. But
where mine were of bronze, worked with bas-relief dragons chasing their tails eternally
around the base of the blade, Nuriko’s was set with a simple piece of lapis as magically
unbreakable as the rest of the sword.

The misty blue stone looked down the length of the sword at me as it was supposed
to—the Unblinking Eye of Justice. Only, the true eye of Justice had closed forever.
Having the order’s greatest renegade pointing it at me now felt like blasphemy. Anger
surged through me in a great wave. Were it not for a lifetime of training, it might
have sucked me under completely, dragging me down into the madness of the berserker.
Instead, I took my rage and rode it—setting the whole of my being to the task of destroying
the Kitsune.

I leaped forward before Nuriko could act, and once again I lost track of the details
of the thing. Giving myself over wholly to the play of steel against steel, I focused
only as much attention on any given move as I needed to keep myself from falling into
the patterns of my temple training. I drove her back and back again, though she gave
ground more slowly than she had before and not every blow was simply avoided. Three
times she had to interpose her own sword between one of mine and a vital point. But
I still couldn’t touch her, and she had yet to strike back.

When she finally made a move, she nearly ended me. It was a simple double-handed cut
swung down and around from a high guard and aimed at cutting me in half. From the
expression on her face to the loose relaxed set of her arms and shoulders the blow
looked slow, almost lazy. It was anything but, coming in harder and faster than anyone
but Kelos had ever struck at me.

Instinct told me to set my feet and take the blow with a hard block. Instinct would
have killed me. Instinct wanted my swords to be those Namara had made for me. They
were not and they would have shattered had I followed my instincts. Instead, I interposed
my left sword at an angle to deflect the blow up and out while simultaneously jumping
backward.

Sparks danced in my vision as my parrying sword was driven into my forehead, side
on, and my wrist burned where it had been wrenched out of line. If Nuriko had followed
up then, she could easily have killed me, but she didn’t, waiting for me to reset
myself.

“I really am sorry that this has to end with your life,” she said, and there was genuine
pain in her voice. “Kelos was better when I first faced him, but you adapt faster.
Given time I think you might surpass your teacher. Killing you is going to be as much
a tragedy as the destruction of a Chang Un master sculpture.”

“It’s not over yet,” I replied, though that was pure bravado.

In addition to the minor injuries she’d inflicted on my
wrist and forehead, Nuriko’s blow had shaved a hair-thin strip of steel off the side
of my left sword. The peeled away piece was a foot long and half an inch across. I
revised my earlier thought about her shattering my swords. A direct hit wouldn’t break
them, it would cut them in half.

“Keep telling yourself you have a chance, child, right up until the end,” said Nuriko.
“Maybe it will allow you to die happy. Now, come at me again. You’re getting better
with every exchange, and I want you to end on the highest note you can reach in the
time that you have.”

Her words should have sounded condescending. They didn’t. They sounded true.

I lunged for her heart, then spiraled my point off to the side to aim for a wrist
while dropping my second sword into a cut at her forward foot. She moved. I missed.
She drove a skull splitting slice down toward my head. I got out of the way somehow,
but now my sword had matching stripes of raw steel on both sides.

The part of me that was coming to really fear the Kitsune made the stripes symmetric
and intentional—markers set down by a master. The remaining rational bits recognized
that was bullshit and me mind-gaming myself, but that helped less than I would have
liked.

She attacked again as soon as I’d set myself, following up immediately with a cut
that sliced off the top of my cowl and some of my hair. And once more—driving me back
to our starting point with her third blow. There, she put up her sword to let me breathe.
I took her charity, realizing suddenly and against all odds that I
wanted
to live in a way that I had not in many years.

I was just resetting myself for what I knew would be our final pass when a voice whispered
in my ear. “She honors you, and that is the only reason I haven’t closed my jaws around
your spine.” It was the nine-tailed fox speaking in something other than riddles for
a change.

It was only in the instant that he spoke that I realized I had lost track of Triss’s
senses and Thiussus both in my focus on Nuriko. The fox had put herself behind me
without
my even noticing her movement, though, of course, a tail of shadow still connected
her to Nuriko. The line of it passed directly between my legs, and I had no doubt
of the message. Thiussus wanted me to know that even if I somehow managed to defeat
Nuriko, I still couldn’t win because she outmatched Triss in a way that left me fighting
all but alone.