In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (26 page)

The Martian beside him swung up the visor of his helmet. That was a shock as well, because of how closely he resembled Teyud, down to the yellow eyes and hair the color of raw bronze. His face showed a great scabbed-over graze on one side, too, and slightly puffed lips. The sort of injuries you’d get if you survived the crash of a landship at speed.

She looked at him sharply, then unfastened and shook back the sleeves of her robe, holding up her arms so that the long swirling red-and-black patterns that ran from the inner side of her wrists to the elbow joints were visible. The man did the same, and the marks were identical—even a little more vivid.

“Faran sa-Yaji, Independent Contractor of Coercive Violence in Wai-Zang-Ekk,” the man said. “I require your life in fulfillment of my contractual obligations, and for reasons of personal satisfaction.”

Teyud looked at him with one thin brow arched. “For
money
, Faran sa-Yaji? The Thoughtful Grace do not sell themselves for a bowl of
to’a. Sh’u Maz
forbids.”

The man smiled slowly; when he spoke his Demotic had the same crisp, staccato accent as hers.

“
Sh’u Maz
has become no more than a metaphor, while a bowl of
to’a
is life to hungry offspring. And you are more than even the
whole pot. Also, my pair-bonded partner and four of my immediate Lineage were killed when your technically brilliant counterstroke destroyed our landships.”

“We were bred as the sword of the Tollamune emperors. I unite their Lineage with that of the Thoughtful Grace.”

“It is debatable how much my immediate Lineage owes the Kings Beneath the Mountain—they who dismissed my ancestors for lack of resources to feed them. In any case you are the product of genomic theft, rather than a purebred or authorized cross, as has become commonly known recently. You would be flattered at the resources on offer for your person—or, alternatively, simply for your head, Deyak sa-Vowin.”

That’s right, Teyud’s an assumed name
, he thought; it was oddly disconcerting.
I’ll keep thinking of her as Teyud. That’s the person I got to know
.

“Ah. Alternative open contracts, then?”

“Several, from several parties. The offer for your living presence or your ova is the larger, but I foresee unpredictable complications even if you were safely delivered captive.”

“You flatter me once more,” Teyud replied.

Jeremy pushed aside bafflement.
Someone wants her alive to use as a figurehead. And this jerk is saying he doesn’t think that would work
.

The mercenary shrugged. “Even a puppet Tollamune would have influence . . . and might someday cease to become a puppet. I had some acquaintance with your mother, and if you resemble her in character as you do in form, you will pursue the perception of injuries with malignantly unreasonable persistence. You see the implications from my perspective.”

“Logical,” Teyud conceded. “But your analysis neglects an important input, Faran sa-Yaji.”

He assumed the position of polite-interrogative, leaning forward slightly with both hands turned upward and fingers crooked; his ears signaled ironic doubt. Teyud went on calmly:

“I am also Deyak sa-Sajir-dassa-Tomond, and I am the closest in genetic consanguinity to the Ruby Throne. Hence, if you were to
assist
me . . .”

“But you are not acknowledged with a Vermillion Rescript,
swaying the Real World. Preventing this is the primary motivation for those whose contractor I am.”

Teyud’s tone was ironic. “Yet there is acknowledgment, and acknowledgment. There is acknowledgment by a sheet of writing material, and there is—”

She put her hands to the sides of her head. Her eyes closed; her features didn’t grimace, but they went wooden as the strain showed, and after thirty seconds there were even a few beads of sweat on her forehead.

Suddenly cold white light flashed, but he could tell that it was somehow
inside
his head, as if ice water had been injected into the fibers of his nervous system, an echo of that moment of shuddering blankness when Teyud had first put on the Invisible Crown. For the briefest instant it
wasn’t
invisible, and then it was again and that glimpse of silvery mesh and bloodred jewel was fading, like the memory of a dream on waking.

The nomad chief yelled in fear and flung a gloved hand up before his eyes; both
rakza
screeched like an predatory orchestra’s woodwinds, showing thick purple tongues vibrating within their beaks, and reared back with their crests flaring in a threat display. From behind his back the crew of the
Traveler
raised a brief harsh shout:

“Tollamune! Tollamune!”

“Perhaps, Faran sa-Yaji,” Teyud said, “
Sh’u Maz
shall become more than metaphorical once more.”

The Thoughtful Grace mercenary went as rigid as Teyud, his face as blank despite the automatic skill that gentled his bird back into quivering stillness; the nomad chief’s
rakza
continued to prance for several moments, and the dust drifted towards them along with the hot, dry stink of disturbed bird and the dusty white droppings it shed in its agitation.

“Ah,” Farad sa-Yaji said. “That is indeed remarkable.” A long pause. “It also increases the value of your head to a level metaphorically comparable to the top of the Mountain.”

Teyud’s slight smile was cruel; when she spoke, it was to the silent nomad.

“You saw, wasteland dweller.”

“I saw,” he grunted, red-brown eyes wide. “We remember from the very long. We fear. We fear very much always.”

“Then listen, and believe: If you attack me or mine here, your Lineage will die, to the seventh degree. So it is sworn by That Which Compels.”

Faran sa-Yajir shot the nomad a quick glance, and his hand brushed his dart pistol. The inhuman visage of the chieftain wasn’t designed for showing emotion; Jeremy couldn’t tell if the tooth-baring grimace was anger or frustration or fear or amusement. The only question it definitely settled was that the nomads were designed to be meat eaters.

“I hear,” he said, reaching out to touch the grounded lance. “We will attack neither you nor him who paid us. Not in this place, not this year.”

Farad almost snarled with frustration; then his face smoothed, and he adopted a posture of rueful acknowledgment.

“Atanj?”
Teyud asked.

“Excessively cerebral, in the present context,” Farad said. He gestured at the desolation that surrounded them. “I also confess to a degree of personal resentment.”

“I concede there is neither soothing music, nor good incense or stimulating chilled essence to maximize the satisfaction of the Game of Life,” Teyud said. “Furthermore, the professional and the personal can never be entirely disassociated.”

“Let death and the sword settle it, then.”

Uh-oh
, Jeremy thought, as Teyud slowly nodded.

The nomad war party and the crew of the
Traveler
each formed a half of the circle around the flat patch of desert that had been agreed upon as the field of death. The four standard Martians who’d accompanied Faran sa-Yajir stood in a group around him; they looked ordinary enough, if you were referencing by a group who looked as though they’d started playing with knives at an unpleasantly early age and had been beaten up recently. He was giving them final instructions, speaking too quietly for observers to do more than watch his lips move.

They don’t look happy. Well, if he loses, they’re alone with the nomads . . .
that wouldn’t make me happy, either. I bleed for the bastards; I won’t say from where
.

It was an hour past noon, and the temperature was up to about fifty. Both the duellists had shed their outer robes to reveal loose, soft trousers and jackets of cloth colored a light-absorbing matte black; the coats lapped over like a karate
gi
, and were held closed by a sash, Teyud’s crimson, Faran’s dark blue. Both of them tucked their daggers into the backs of the sashes and took their sheathed swords in their left hands.

“You’re going to beat this guy, correct?” Jeremy whispered, standing behind Teyud and to her right.

He offered the canteen, and she took a slight sip and returned it. Without looking around, she replied:

“That is, as you said, a
toss-up
. Faran sa-Yajir is slightly older than myself and probably equally skilled.”

Then she turned her head, and met his eyes; hers held an odd warmth. “If I lose, shoot him.”

“I would—but you’re not going to lose.”

“This is an irrational statement implying an unlikely ability to anticipate event and randomness, but still oddly comforting,” she said.

Then her head turned back, and he could see her body drop into complete focus; not tight or tense, but every nerve and tendon aware, the way a cat could see with its fur. She took three paces forward and went down on her right knee. Her hand went over and across, resting on the hilt of her sword beneath the elaborate guard. Faran sa-Yajir did the same, and his motions had an equal, daunting grace.

There was a moment of thick silence, broken only by the low ghosting of the wind and the wistfully hopeful
Eeeat? Killll? Eeeat?
from a couple of the nomads’ mounts. Half a mile away, a dust devil towered into the sky like a bloodred tornado faded to ghost-thinness. The sky above was absolutely blue, looking as if it would bleed if you cut it, and the small sun was alone in it save for a few distant dots that were flying creatures; there was no sign of the airship they’d seen earlier. Pink dust drifted across the circle for a moment, outlining the two motionless figures.

“Kill!”
Baid tu-Or said.

Ting!

The swords touched, slithered, rasped apart before the flung scabbards struck the ground. Jeremy’s breath caught; Teyud was bleeding from a neat slice below one eye. The razor steel had kissed the skin just enough to part it, and a slow red trickle dripped down her cheek, like a tear. It stopped as they circled, eyes cool and intent.

Ting! Clang-tang!

Jeremy’s eyes went wide. Faran had tried envelopment in low line, usually suicide against a good opponent. He’d nearly brought it off, though; Teyud had saved herself only with a lightning whirl and disengage.

Damn, he’s good. They both are. She’s doing better now than she ever did when we fenced, and it’s just barely enough
.

Their feet scrunched on the sand, and steel rang on steel; the deadly fascination of it gripped him, almost as strong as his fear—swordplay on this level was impossible to follow unless you were an initiate yourself. Faran made a double attack—stepping in with a feint, and then disengaging for the lunge. Jeremy would have tried for a stop-hit on the sword arm there, but that was a fencer’s reflex, not a duellist’s; Teyud had been right to use a simple parry. It was one of those things that was possible to see only in retrospect; he briefly wondered how she’d known it was a trap.

He’d noticed how Teyud had an astonishing ability to sense where the points were by feel alone while they sparred. She did; unfortunately, it seemed that Faran did, too. Possibly it was a Thoughtful Grace thing.

They were motionless again, nothing but the controlled rise and fall of their chests showing they were alive. Then Faran was moving, a running attack
en flèche
. Teyud parried and riposted in the same motion, the speed so great it wasn’t even a blur, looking like a short smooth tap-and-strike instead.

Jeremy felt himself making a mooing sound of eagerness, willing the long blade into flesh, then groaned in disappointment as Faran parried in prime while still extended; almost impossible, but he did it, knocking her blade out of line, then lunged with a cutover.

He went rigid; that
was
impossible, but now it was impossible to dodge or block. Yet the blade only scored across Teyud’s left shoulder,
as she dove
under
the attack, throwing herself down and forward with one hand on the ground.

Passata sotto!
he thought exultantly.
I showed her that!

Faran’s sword froze. He looked down slowly, to where Teyud’s blade transfixed him from just above the navel to just below the ribs to the right of his spine. His face was gray with shock, but showed no pain as he crumpled back off the steel. The black jacket and the sash held back the gout of blood for an instant; then it came, and he crumpled, bleeding also from the corner of his mouth. The sword must have nicked his lung as well.

He sank backward slowly as Teyud came back to her feet, blood running down her left arm. Then he rallied for an instant, and sank down on one knee.

“Supremacy,” he gasped, bowing his head over a fist pressed into the sand. “Rule well. Give
Sh’u Maz
to the Real World once more.”

Then he collapsed; the crew of the
Traveler
set up a cry of
“Tollamune!”

The nomads raised an odd hissing clatter through their nasal slits that seemed to be their equivalent of applause, and waved their arms in the air with the hands flopping limply. Faran’s ex-employees simply looked at each other, shrugged, slung their dart rifles over their shoulders, and headed for the lines where the
rakza
were picketed.

Teyud swayed slightly; Jeremy started forward, as did Baid tu-Or with the medical kit.

It was the nomads’ mounts that gave warning. They all looked up at once, crouching backward and whipping their heads from side to side with their crests erect in a spray of red-bronze feathers. Their fluting screeches were machine-loud, terror and rage combined.

“Paiteng!”
one of the nomads shouted, and drew his bow to shoot an arrow upward.

A javelin punched into his chest and he flopped over backward, clawing at the ground and the shaft in his ribs. Teyud dove at Jeremy’s knees and he went over backward himself, landing on the sand with a thud that on Earth would have knocked him breathless;
here it was just emphatic, but he grimaced as some of her blood spattered into his face. His eyes were blurred with shock as something huge flashed over them.