Captain's Fury (68 page)

Tavi followed the captain, who had agreed to officiate under protest, down the length of the wall toward Navaris. At the same time, the cutter began walking toward them, slim and deadly.

In the ruins below, people had gathered—
legionares
, domestics, camp followers. Thousands of them. Several had climbed atop walls and dilapidated rooftops to get a better view of the top of the wall. He could only just see them in the darkness—but atop one of the nearest buildings, he could make out white hair, and Marat manes drifting on the gentle breeze—Kitai and her people. He nodded to them, and fists thumped simultaneously against leather-armored chests in response, the sound loud in the otherwise-silent night.

They reached the middle of the wall in time with Navaris. Tavi stopped far enough away from her to have time to avoid a sudden draw and lunge, while Captain Nalus stopped halfway between them.

Nalus glanced back and forth between them. "I remind you that this duel is to the death. I ask you both if you will concede the point of the duel and spare needless bloodshed."

Tavi did so, and offered the hilts of the weapons to Nalus. The captain inspected them both for poison, and handed them back to Tavi, then slung the empty weapon belts over one shoulder.

"Phrygiar Navaris, draw steel."

He went through the same process with Navaris, and took her weapon belts as well.

"Very well," he said. "Neither party may move until I have stepped from between you and counted to ten. Once that is done, both participants are free to act. Do you understand?"

Both replied in the affirmative. Nalus stepped out from between them and hurried down the wall to descend to the ground. It took approximately forever, and Tavi held his gaze against Navaris's for the entire while.

"I'm curious," Tavi said. "How did you survive the sinking of the
Mactis?

Tavi felt a surge of nausea at the description. Three days… Crows, that was a bad way to go. Though he supposed there weren't many good ones.

"Because you're the bait, boy." Her eyes left his for a moment, focusing down the length of the wall behind him. "Once you're dead, Valerian there will come for me." She shuddered. "And
that
will be a fight worth watching."

Navaris's breathing began to speed up. He watched her eyes dilate, and a series of eager little shivers ran through her body and down the length of both of her blades.

His mouth felt dry, but he focused on what Araris had told him. Patience. Control. He faced the cutter and touched lightly on the steel of his blade with his crafting, drawing his world into sharp, calm focus.

Kitai's voice rang out clear and vibrant in the silence between Nalus's counts, ringing from the stones so that every man, woman, and child looking on was sure to hear it. "Take her to the crows, Aleran!"

"Ten!"

The First Aleran spoke in a single, enormous, deafening voice that shook the stones as the Legion roared its encouragement for their commander.

Phrygiar Navaris's eyes glittered with sudden lust and fury, and her mouth opened in a wordless cry of something eerily like pleasure as she lifted her blades and darted at Tavi.

Chapter 55

Navaris was fast. She closed the distance in the blink of an eye, both weapons whirling out in front of her, weaving through a rapid series of slashes broken by the occasional lightning thrust. Before the First Aleran's roar had died down, she had sent half a hundred strokes toward Tavi, and he was certain that only steady retreat and his recent, intensive training with Araris enabled him to stop them.

Colored sparks showered out every time the blades met, and the cuts and parries came so swiftly that Tavi could hardly see through them. He felt as if they were fighting in a blizzard of miniature stars.

Her assault was unrelenting, aggressive, and precise. Her cuts and slashes slammed hard into his upraised weapons, so that he felt the shock all the way to his shoulder when they hit. They were, by far, the simplest attacks to defeat. Her thrusts slithered forward like double-bladed serpents, smooth, almost unpredictable, and impossibly fast. He caught each one as it came in, but only responded with the most conservative of counterattacks, more meant to force her to remain wary of a counterstrike than actually to draw blood.

He missed the next thrust and had to spin to the side, arching his back out. Navaris's sword struck a line of sparks along his belly, glancing off the lorica— and leaving a seared black crease on the Legion steel. If she could strike squarely against his armor, her sword would pierce it like cloth.

Twice, Tavi saw an obvious opening, but Araris had taught him better than that. It had been a deliberate act on Navaris's part, and had Tavi launched his own attack in unthinking response, he would have paid with his life.

And then Tavi felt it—a flicker of surprise and concern that flowed from Navaris, coloring the riot of emotions that spilled from her.

She stepped up the pace and power of her attacks, but not enough to allow Tavi his chance to strike. He was forced to backpedal more quickly, and his defense wavered for a moment before solidifying under the storm of steel and light that threatened to engulf him.

"Footwork!" Araris cried.

Tavi didn't dare glance down at his feet. The cutter would skewer him. But he felt his balance shift for a second and realized that Navaris had driven him back to the edge of the wall—his right heel was hanging over empty air.

Navaris surged forward again, and Tavi knew that if he didn't have room to retreat, he'd never hold off her furious assault.

He called upon the wind and turned the whole world into a hazy, languidly fluid portrait. His blades swept up, simultaneously sliding aside one thrust aimed at his throat, the other at his groin.

Even as he felt the contact, he drew power up through the heavy stone of the wall, pivoted, and flung himself into empty air.

The fury-borne strength of his legs sent him sailing across a twenty-foot volume of open space to land on the rooftop of the nearest building. He landed heavily—there was generally no other way to land when one wore heavy armor—and rolled as the overstrained stonework of the roof gave way in his wake, falling straight down into the dilapidated building beneath him. He gained his feet as the watching crowd erupted into cheers.

Navaris stared coldly at Tavi for a moment, and then down at the wall. With a quick, practical motion, she reversed her grip on her
gladius
, knelt, and with a single thrust drove it several inches into the stone of the vertical surface of the wall's interior.

Then she backed away, long blade in her right hand, took two bounding steps forward, and leapt. Her heels came down upon the quillions of the blade embedded in the wall. The
gladius
bent, then flexed back with unnatural strength, flinging the cutter into the air. She turned a complete flip as she sailed toward Tavi, and landed in a roll on the building's roof, exactly as he had.

Except, he realized with a sinking feeling, that the roof hadn't collapsed under the slender, lightly armored woman's weight. His situation had not improved. At least on the wall he had known where the drop
was
. If he spent much time shuffling around up here, he was sure to find a weak spot and fall right through the roof, and almost certainly through the rotted wooden floors of the building's interior.

Navaris drew a dagger from her belt and stalked forward. She smirked, and Tavi felt certain that she had come to the same conclusions he had about the roof.

They engaged again, and storms of blazing motes shattered from every touch of blade on blade. Though Navaris's offensive potential had been reduced by the loss of her
gladius
, Tavi, forced to keep track of his footing, could not take advantage of it. Bits of rubble threatened to turn beneath his feet, and the furylamps on the wall were just far enough away to offer deep shadows that concealed the sections of rooftop that had already fallen.

Tavi's instincts screamed at him to take the offensive and drive the fight off the rooftop, but he knew it would be a deadly mistake. Patience, Araris had said. Wait for the opening.

But Navaris hadn't given him one.

Tavi barely avoided a neatly executed maneuver that would have disarmed him, and whipped his shorter blade at Navaris's dagger arm.

The blade struck.

Navaris's attack stopped at once, and the two stood poised, barely out of one another's reach, weapons raised. The stillness was eerie, broken only by Tavi's steady, heavy breaths and those of his opponent.

A tiny trickle of blood wound its way down Navaris's hand.

"You pinked me," she said, her head tilted, her eyes narrowed with what felt to Tavi like a sudden and somewhat alarming interest. "That hasn't happened in years."

Tavi didn't move, holding his
gladius
at arm's length in his left hand, in a low guard, his long blade in his right, slightly forward, pommel close to his body, tip aimed at Navaris's throat. Any shifting of his weight or stance would give her an opening for a blow he might not be able to repel. But by the same token, she couldn't move without facing a similar risk.

The hit had been the result of luck as much as skill, but it had certainly caught Navaris's attention. She would be more wary now, harder to strike, and there would be no repetition of his riposte's success. Tavi gritted his teeth. He had to push her, somehow, get her to take more chances, come at him even harder. Otherwise, he would wind up one more name on the list of people killed by Phrygiar Navaris.

But how? There was nothing for him to work with. The woman was apparently driven solely by a desire to inflict pain on others, coupled with an obsessive need to prove her skill. If he used his earthcraft to increase his strength, he was likely to leave her an opening while he demonstrated the danger to her. If he windcrafted greater alacrity into his attacks, it was entirely possible that she'd skewer him before he had the chance to frighten her. Speed alone was no guarantor of success.

But how else to force her into a more aggressive attack without getting himself killed in the process?

Outthink her. Create the opening. Blades and furies aren't dangerous. Minds and wills are dangerous.

There was another way to overcome her skill and metalcraft—by overturning the mind and will that sustained the cautious discipline that could prove lethal to Tavi. In the face of that discipline and skill, he would never be able to take her down blade to blade. Not all weapons were made of steel.

His mother had shown him that.

Tavi suppressed a surge of excitement and focused on his watercraft. The emotions of the mad cutter—and he had no doubt at all, now, that she was completely insane—washed over him in a fluttering tangle of sensation. It blended weirdly with his sense of the weapons in her hands.

"Phrygiar Navaris," Tavi said quietly, keeping his eyes on the center of her mass. Arm and hand motions could deceive, but real movement would always show in her center of balance.

She stared at him.

Any number of things could have caused the woman's madness and obsession, but some were still more likely than others: The deepest joys and most terrible wounds were both to be had from family.

The name Phrygiar, like every other metronym in the Realm, was an indicator of illegitimacy. Children who were not recognized by their fathers and admitted into their Houses legally became members of the "city-house" of whichever High Lord held authority over their birthplace.