Immortal at the Edge of the World (17 page)

I still appreciated watching her try.

The first thing that happened when she got into range was that the demon attempted to punch her in the head, which is what demons do. They’re really good at it, and they can be pretty fast despite their size. But she ducked below the attack and cut him in the side, then somersaulted far enough away to get her feet under her again safely. She adopted a defensive posture and waited for him to charge. As they also do.

I nearly forgot I had a goblin to deal with, but fortunately he was a very polite goblin, as it happens.

“Excuse me,” he said. He was standing next to a tree a few feet away, his own sword drawn. He was dressed in black clothing and his sword was matte black, and it felt an awful lot like I was facing a movie ninja. I was dressed in a sports coat and jeans, but nobody told me to dress for combat.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello.” He stepped closer and raised his sword in a formal fencing gesture indicating the combat was about to commence.

“Hey, hang on a sec,” I said. Sticking the tip of the sword in the ground next to me, I took off my jacket. “You don’t mind?”

“No, please. Prepare yourself.”

I took my time folding the jacket and trying to study my opponent, although the truth was I was more interested in how Mirella was doing. The demon had yet to touch her and had been sliced a half-dozen times. None of the cuts were in any way serious, but maybe he would die from infection in a week or two. There was no reason for her to look half as confident as she did.

The ninja goblin decided he was tired of waiting and charged while I was still putting down the jacket, which was downright unsportsmanlike. Goblins are in almost every way superior hand-to-hand fighters, but I’m not exactly bad at it either, and while I was enjoying the fight at the other end of the compound I had kept him in the corner of my eye, so he didn’t really take me by surprise. What
was
surprising was that he hadn’t stayed where he was and just buried knives in me from a safe distance until I stopped moving, since I’m not nearly good enough to knock a knife out of the air with a sword.

Anyway, he charged and I saw him coming and had the sword out of the ground and up to block a straightforward overhand attack. He was strong and had put a lot of weight into the blow, but he was also a little off-balance as a consequence. I deflected the attack and shunted him to one side, and he nearly fell over.

But only nearly. As he stumbled I tried to get in a shot at his side, but he regained his balance and caught my sword with his, and held it there.

“I commend your teachers,” he said with a slight smile. “Not her, surely. Your style is very different.”

“Not her, no. I’m used to a heavier sword.”

He stepped back and attacked again.

He wasn’t really trying to hit me, exactly. He
was
, in the sense that his blade was being swung at my body repeatedly and being met each time by the one in my hands. But he’d seen enough of my technique already to expect me to be capable of blocking these attacks. He was looking for a weakness in my defensive approach that he could exploit. I was doing the same thing, but since he was stronger I was looking for the times he overreached and left himself exposed. And I was wishing I had more than one short sword, because it was going to be difficult to exploit what I might find with just the one weapon. Surely he had more than one. I couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t tried using it.

After thirty or forty seconds of this—it felt like much longer—I had found only one weakness. He had probably found five. My technique was rusty and probably susceptible to anyone using a longer sword than I had in my hands, as he did. So I was probably in some trouble. But his one weakness was a good one. He didn’t know about Iza.

Mirella had been able to spot Iza the first time they met when in a well-lit hotel room while nobody was fighting anybody. But my goblin foe, while likely having the same heightened senses, was outdoors in semidarkness—there were street lamps—and moving about rapidly. I could hear Iza, and maybe he could, too, but he might not have known what he was hearing. Spotting her under these conditions, given she flew faster when she was nervous, was probably impossible.

He let up and stepped back and we both caught our breath. This gave me a chance to see how my bodyguard was doing. I glanced over just in time to see a particularly impressive maneuver. The demon, looking sort of exhausted and appearing covered in a hundred paper cuts, took a clumsy swing at Mirella. She avoided it cleanly as she had all of the others, but instead of slicing at his skin again—their skin is incredibly thick—she got underneath him and managed to bury one of the knives hilt-deep into the back of his knee.

He roared and rattled off an impressive string of expletives, and then fell down. She had damaged muscle, enough of it to render the leg useless. She also lost the knife, but that didn’t appear to matter, as by the time she got to her feet and he had gotten up on his one good leg there were two blades in her hands again.

“Let me ask you something, while we have a minute,” I said.

“Go on,” the goblin said.

“Why are you even here?”

“We’re here to kill you. I thought that was self-evident.”

“Fine, be difficult.” I went on the attack, and drove him back a little with a series of overhand and underhand cuts. I was as cautious as I could manage to be in case he decided to go on the attack again or saw an opening where I overextended. But he seemed happy to just counter and wait for me to exhaust myself. Every now and then I caught him watching Mirella and the demon. I nearly suggested we just stop fighting each other to watch them.

Instead, I backed off and waited for him to counter. He didn’t, or at least not right away. I caught him favoring his right shoulder a tiny bit. It was probably a little thing, a sore muscle or a recent bruise, but it was useful to know.

“Iza, be ready,” I said.

“What?” the goblin asked.

“I said I’m ready. Whenever you are, I mean.”

The demon on the other side of the field wasn’t doing well at all with only one good leg. The wounded one still held him up, sort of, in the sense that he wasn’t hopping about. But he was in a lot of pain, and his swings were less emphatic because the more force he applied the more off-balance he ended up being. It wasn’t a huge surprise when the arm he preferred to swing with was also taken away from him when Mirella buried another of her daggers into the beast’s elbow.

Both the goblin and I witnessed this, and I think it was the first time either of us thought Mirella could possibly emerge alive from the fight. For the goblin this meant he was going to have to figure out how to deal with both of us soon, so he had less time to toy with me than he thought. His renewed assault was thus less playful and much more difficult to defend.

The maneuver that nearly ended my life was one that I didn’t see coming at all, which is how these things usually work. He had been right-handed all the way down to his footwork for the entire fight. And usually you can tell when someone is either fully ambidextrous or left-handed and pretending not to be. There are indications, and I know what they are, so I’m customarily prepared when someone shows a sudden talent for opposite handedness. But he didn’t have a single tell. So when he switched his sword to his left hand, changed his stance, and went on a mirror image attack, I nearly fell to him.

And then I did fall, because after all of that toying around he decided to use more than one blade. While I was busy trying to regain command of my defenses against a suddenly left-handed attacker, a knife appeared in his right hand.

It slashed across my stomach before I had a chance to get entirely out of the way of it. The wound wasn’t mortally deep, but it wasn’t exactly shallow either. It was the kind of wound that came just ahead of a killing blow, mainly because the victim has a tendency to stop paying attention to the person who inflicted it and more attention to the cut itself.

I did not make this mistake, but only because I backpedaled so quickly that I actually tripped and landed on my back. There was no immediate follow-up blow from the goblin, because then he was in no hurry.

I stole a glance across the compound to see if I could expect any help, but Mirella was still busy bullfighting the demon to a slow ending. He was waving his one good arm at her, staggering around and being a handful. And she was starting to look tired.

The goblin stood over me with his sword and prepared to lower it in a swing meant to remove my head.

And then he hesitated.

I didn’t know why. There was no reason for it, but it was there and it was enough for me.

“Now, Iza.”

Iza and I have a long history together. Sure, we don’t talk a lot, and sometimes she can be a pain, and every now and then something would happen like her not bothering to mention that we were running in the direction of the demon she warned us about. These things happen. But she was very good to have around in a fight, especially if you needed someone blinded temporarily.

That was what happened to the goblin when she flew as fast as she could into his right eyeball. He screamed and clutched his head and didn’t finish his swing, and a second later he was out of luck entirely because I had shoved my short sword up through his belly, under his ribcage, and into his heart.

He stopped screaming about the pain in his eye after that. Then he fell over onto his back and had the courtesy to only get a little blood on me before dying.

I rolled over onto my side and felt my stomach. My hand came away wet, and I didn’t think it was goblin blood.

Fortunately, Mirella was nearly finished doing something I would have said only an hour earlier was impossible: She was killing a demon with knives.

The monster was almost entirely incapacitated, as she’d taken out his second leg, which left him only his left arm. It was an incredibly powerful arm, though, so whenever she got near she risked getting crushed. I was about ready to suggest loudly that we just leave since he was unlikely to be following, but then she finished him in a move that was frankly breathtaking to watch.

At first it looked like he’d finally caught her, because his huge hand had managed to get a hold of her left arm, but before he could do anything with it—a tight squeeze and a twist and he could have snapped the bone—she was turning until her back was to him and using the force from this spin move to help propel her right arm around until the knife in her hand met the demon’s eye. Then it was obvious she’d allowed her arm to be grabbed because it was the only way she’d ever get close enough to finish him off.

The knife went in deep. I was never entirely positive demons
had
brains, or if they did that they were located in the head, but she certainly acted like someone who knew the answer to that question. She held the blade there while the beast underneath her bucked and contorted, and then she twisted and dug it deeper and higher up into the skull until the demon let go of her arm and stopped moving.

She pulled the knife out and ran over to me.

“I see you
can
fight,” she said, pulling her sword from the goblin’s chest.

“No, but I know a pixie who can.”

She used the goblin’s clothing to clean off the sword and slid it back into the sheath. “Good. Now let’s get out of here before . . . you’re hurt.”

It wasn’t easy to tell I had been wounded with all the blood everywhere, not until I tried to stand up and found out that caused more blood to show up.

“He got me pretty good, yeah,” I admitted.

“Lie down,” she ordered. I was only up on one knee so this was really no problem. She raised my shirt and got a good look, and then I got to hear the name of the god she usually prayed to. I heard some cloth being torn—pieces of ninja pajamas. Then she was wrapping me up, which hurt enormously.

“We need to get you sewn up,” she said.

“Hospitals are inconvenient. Let’s get back to the airplane.”

“Do you have a doctor on the airplane?”

“I have a needle and thread on the airplane. I’m sure you can do stitches.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I’m being practical. The only anesthetic that will work on me is bourbon, and most doctors don’t prescribe that, so just get me back to the airport and we can worry about it then.”

She growled. “You are impossible. I’m going to ask for five million.”

“Fine. But only after we get to the plane.”

Chapter Eleven

When I first met Hsu he made it clear that he’d sought me out mainly for my experience and knowledge. While this was undoubtedly true, there were times when it was clear he took my godhood seriously, even though I just as obviously did not.

We sparred often, to keep our battle skills sharp. One time he nicked me with one of his blades. It was on the arm, and it wasn’t deep, just enough to draw blood. I only thought about it as long as it took to bandage up, but he looked legitimately confused by the whole thing.

“I forgot,” he said afterward, “that you can be harmed.”

“I’ve told you as much, many times over,” I said.

“I know. But . . . never mind. For the great Li-Yuan, for Bres, it doesn’t correspond.”

“Who is Bres?”