T
HEY GLOWERED ACROSS THE ROOM
, each at the other, two men bound by a chain of loathing that ran the breadth of Imphallion—and through the wounded heart of a woman whom each, so far as he was capable, had loved. From the open doorway and between the slats of the floorboards drifted the scents of roasting bird and beast, the dull susurrus of half-drunk laughter. Hardly appropriate heralds of the violence to come.
Corvis felt Sunder quiver in his grasp, like a charger straining at the reins, and only then did he truly register the massive sword upon which the man in the doorway so casually leaned. It had been a dagger when Corvis saw it last, but he knew it instantly for what it was. He could feel the bloodlust, smelted into the steel and only tentatively leashed, as clearly as he could sense the smoldering rage, repressed just as feebly, emanating from its wielder.
He wondered, briefly, how the baron had gotten hold of the vile weapon, but he’d not provide the satisfaction of asking.
It was Jassion, instead, who broke the brittle silence. “It was a pathetic attempt at misdirection, Rebaine,” he said. “Did you really think that just entering town separately, or checking into different rooms, would be enough to keep us from spotting your accomplice?”
“Frankly,” Corvis said with a shrug, “we were more concerned about any Cephiran operatives looking for the pair of us traveling together. I wasn’t even thinking of you.”
It was a petty sting to the baron’s pride, but Corvis could tell from the twitch of the other man’s jaw that it landed. “Be that as it may,”
Jassion growled, “in a village this size,
any
newcomer draws attention. We identified her easily enough.” He offered a dismissive wave, and Corvis found his eyes drawn to the green glint on Jassion’s finger.
“I’m surprised you’re still wearing that ring, Jassion. As I recall, it got you in a bit of hot water during the Serpent’s War.”
But if he’d hoped to rile the baron further, reminding him of the universal suspicion he’d brought upon himself with his behavior, he was doomed to disappointment. “It’s an heirloom, Rebaine. It
should
belong to Tyannon, really, but I understand you gave her another ring to replace it.” His lips curled in a vicious, mocking leer. “I also understand she’s not wearing it anymore. Maybe I
should
consider giving her mine, at that.”
Sunder’s blade slowly rotated as the haft twisted in Corvis’s trembling fist. “I’ll do it for you. Would you like her to have it with or without the finger?”
“Ah. Is that about enough, do you think, Rebaine?” Jassion asked, mockery squirming like weevils through his words. “Have we spent long enough nattering on like bickering fishwives?”
“I certainly hope so,” Corvis told him. “I’m looking forward to lancing you like a boil and watching you shrivel.” He shoved the room’s table aside with a juddering crash. The cramped room made for a poor arena—especially given the oversized weapons each man carried—but it was the best readily available. “What are you waiting for, Baron? Too cowardly to attack when Kaleb’s not around to hold your hand?”
Corvis’s mention of a name he should have had no way of knowing was apparently lost upon Jassion, washed away in a flood of fury along with whatever satisfaction the baron had hoped to obtain by prolonging the confrontation. He crossed the room in a handful of steps, Talon raised high and gouging a path of splinters from the ceiling above. Nothing but murder remained in his sweating, twisted face, and Corvis could not have said whether it was the pounding of his boots, or his inhuman cry, that made the flimsy chamber tremble.
And then he was upon Corvis, and
through
Corvis. Braced for an impact that never occurred, Jassion slammed hard against the windowsill, arms flailing awkwardly as he tried both to keep hold of Talon
with one hand and to keep himself from toppling headfirst through the open window.
Corvis—who had made swift use of Jassion’s grandstanding, sidling slowly from the window beneath a cloak of subtle illusion—stepped in from the side, looming behind his startled and unsteady foe. Sunder whirled once, twice, as he neared, then swept through an arc that would have left little but empty air between Jassion’s gut and his ribs.
But for all his maddened fury and shock, Jassion had clearly lost neither his speed nor his senses. The narrow window allowed no room to parry or to dodge, but that still left one avenue of escape. Even as Sunder blurred toward him, the baron shifted his weight, letting gravity have its way. He toppled from the window, the Kholben Shiar passing inches above his twisting body, and landed with a bone-jarring thump on the packed earth of the road below.
I guess
, Corvis reflected as he leaned outward to study his groaning foe,
that it was too much to hope he’d fall on Talon or break his neck
.
‘
You want
everything
just handed to you the easy way, don’t you? No wonder I had to do all the hard work myself.
’
Corvis vaulted the sill and dropped, twin clouds of dust puffing outward as his boot heels struck the earth. Jassion scrabbled madly backward like a drunken spider and lurched to his feet. The little finger on his left hand protruded at a curious angle, and he winced visibly with every step, but neither the demon-forged sword nor his hate-tempered gaze ever wavered.
They came together, Jassion unslowed by his injuries, and the crash of the Kholben Shiar was the shriek of a thousand tortured angels. Talon’s edge pressed hard on Sunder’s haft as the warlord and the baron leaned into each other, feet shifting as they circled. Around them, the already sparsely populated street rapidly emptied, men and women fleeing from the gale of violence blowing through their midst. By fits and starts, the din from the restaurant faded as the folk within recognized that something was amiss.
Jassion brought a knee up viciously, driving for his opponent’s groin, but Corvis twisted to take the blow on his thigh instead. He staggered, limping for only a step or two, and swept Sunder in a fearsome parry.
Again the demon-forged weapons slammed together, and again after that. Feet sidestepped and bodies twisted with a dancer’s skill, even as heavy blades chopped and slashed with a force and a fury more brutish than elegant.
Corvis ducked under a high, arcing swipe, and knew only too late that he’d walked into a trap. Jassion continued his spin, carried by the momentum of his swing, coiling his body low and lashing out in a sweeping kick. Corvis felt his ankles shoot out from under him and toppled like a felled oak. The air escaped his lungs as though fleeing for its life, and the world grew fuzzy as he struggled to breathe.
The moon disappeared from the nighttime clouds as Jassion loomed above, Talon clasped underhanded. The Kholben Shiar plunged earthward as though eager to return to hell, and Corvis could not possibly lift Sunder in time to parry.
Acting on nothing but primal instinct, he slapped desperately at the flat of the blade with a bare hand. And as Talon jerked aside, sinking deep into the dirt mere inches from his ribs, Corvis knew that he owed a dozen prayers to Panaré Luck-Bringer.
Startled and off-balance, his sword sticking more than a foot into the earth, Jassion could not twist aside as Corvis kicked out with both legs. The baron bent double around the impact, hurtling backward to slam against the restaurant’s outer wall. Corvis scrambled to his feet, breath coming a little easier, whispering through a hoarse and ragged throat.
The tiny sprouts and sprigs protruding from the soil began to wiggle, desperate to escape the confines of their earthen prison. With a speed seemingly impossible for one so badly beaten, Jassion had risen and crossed half the distance between himself and his foe when the first of the tendrils wrapped around his ankle, yanking him to a halt. A second strand, and then a third—roots and stems, blades of grass and winding weeds—wove themselves over his feet, binding him to the spot until he might as well have been one of those plants himself.
Corvis lunged, but Jassion was already gone. Talon swept downward, severing the plants that held him, and he was twisting aside, all so swiftly that he appeared little more than a blot upon the scenery, a blurred silhouette glimpsed through a thick fog or a filthy pane of glass.
And Corvis, no matter how he hated the thought, knew that he must do the same.
As Jassion had clearly already done—as he himself had dared a few days before—he drank once more from the well of power bubbling in the depths of the Kholben Shiar. And again he recoiled, fighting to keep tight rein on his own emotions lest they be swept aside and lost amid the exultation and bloodlust within the demon-forged blade.
The bulk of the village disappeared, his vision closing in on the street immediately before him. The clouds of dust resolved themselves into individual specks and particles; the stars in the firmament ceased to twinkle. He heard the shouts of distant citizens, too terrified to draw near; the sharp breaths of patrons watching through the restaurant’s windows; even the beating of his own heart, and Jassion’s as well, now slowed to a casual cadence.
Jassion came at him, falcon-swift and tortoise-slow at once, and Corvis was already parrying before he’d consciously decided to move. Once more the weapons clashed, but they sounded now like slow, ponderous thunder. The baron again kicked one of Corvis’s legs from under him, but Sunder swept down and out before he’d toppled more than a dagger’s length, propping him upright long enough to catch his balance. Straightening, Corvis drove an uppercut into his enemy’s chin, and he saw the tips of each individual hair splaying upward as Jassion’s head snapped back. He lashed out with the axe, missing as Jassion ducked with equally inhuman speed. The Kholben Shiar tore instead completely through the nearest wall. The combatants had already exchanged a dozen more blows, moved yards down the street, before the splinters fell to earth.
Jassion’s shoulders tensed and Corvis was already dodging away from the expected swing, but the baron jabbed instead, wielding Talon like an awkward spear. Corvis hurled himself aside, heard more than felt the thud as he slammed back-first into another neighboring shop, knew instantly that Jassion would follow with a wide slash that the wall would prevent him from dodging. Hoping the wood was as thin as it had felt, he drove an elbow back with inhuman strength even as his other hand raised Sunder in an awkward one-handed block.
The wall splintered, giving way beneath the impact as the meeting of the blades drove Corvis through the wood. Both men crashed to the floor amid broken shelves and shards of pottery. Clay dust matted itself across Corvis’s cheeks and forehead, transformed into paste by rivulets of acrid sweat.
Both hands now locked on Sunder’s haft, he strained with all the mundane and mystical might at his command, and it wasn’t enough. Jassion crouched atop him, pressing down on Talon with the strength not just of another Kholben Shiar, but of a younger body and a maddened rage Corvis couldn’t comprehend, let alone match. Elbows pressed to the floor, arms quivering with strain, he held the axe crosswise, inches above his chest, and with every breath it—and the sword pressed against it—crept nearer. He had no leverage to throw the baron off him, no angle from which to kick, not even sufficient room to bend his neck back for an awkward headbutt.
So Corvis, instead, craned his neck
upward
and bit down with all his strength on Jassion’s nose.
He felt cartilage give under the pressure; heard it snap even over the baron’s agonized cry; gagged as he tasted blood and mucus sluicing between his teeth. Jassion jerked away, leaving shreds of skin and flesh behind, and Corvis gasped in relief as the pressure against his arms and chest eased. Daring to take one hand from Sunder, he drove the heel of his palm into Jassion’s chin, and then, as the baron fell back farther, planted both feet in his chest and shoved. The younger warrior hurtled back through the hole in the wall to sprawl in the street. Corvis spit the vile gobbet from his mouth before rising and following his enemy.
Jassion, with a determination that Corvis could not help but envy, was already standing. Blood formed a mask across his features, dripped down the sides of his neck, and his heaving breaths whistled obscenely through the wreck of his face.
Yet Corvis, though lacking in any such fearsome wound, was gasping no less harshly. His entire body felt bruised and battered, his ribs as though they’d been hammered flat upon Verelian’s anvil, his ankles stuffed with ground glass. He had many years on his opponent, and they clung to him now, a weighty chain about his waist.
Both men slowed, now drawing upon the magics of the demon-forged blades just to keep themselves steady.
And Jassion
smiled
, a stomach-churning sight. “You cannot hurt me, Rebaine, not any more than you did when I was a child. And I can keep this up longer than you.”
“You probably can,” Corvis admitted between gulps of air, allowing Sunder to sink just a bit. “But Jassion? I cheat.”
At his best, Jassion would have sensed her coming, been able to dodge or at least lessen the blow. As it was, when Irrial’s sword slammed into his hauberk, severing links and splitting skin, it was all he could do to scream and twist aside, preventing her from delivering an immediate second thrust through the rent in the armor.
Rather than follow and risk stepping into range of that monstrous flamberge, the baroness dropped into a defensive stance, the tip of her blade leveled, waiting for him to come to her—and to present his back to Corvis. Jassion, Talon drifting back and forth before him, declined. He stepped slowly backward, trying to gain enough distance to focus on both.
“What took you so long?” Corvis asked breathlessly.
Behind Jassion, the roots and stalks he’d earlier escaped reared like striking serpents, grown to a dozen times their former size. Several whipped outward, drawing bloody welts across his exposed skin, while others curled tight around arms and legs, lifting him bodily from the earth.
From around the restaurant’s shattered corner, a mangy hound slunk into the street, crouching at Irrial’s feet and scratching idly behind one ear with a back foot.