Restoration (69 page)

Madonai though I was, the bones of my right arm came near shattering at the meeting of our blades, and I dropped backward off the auction block to give myself a moment to recover. But I had scarce swiveled into position and yanked my dagger from its sheath to join my sword, when he leaped across the wooden platform and unleashed his steel on me again. One blow and then another and another, not a heart's pulse between them. Around the wooden block, up and over, from wall to wall we fought-or rather he attacked and I defended—until I was backed against the rusty iron gate. To my salvation, the gate swung open, and our battle moved into the cobbled slave market, surrounded by cheerless walls, low roofs, and guard towers that mimicked those of the Derzhi mountain city in all save living inhabitants. The afternoon was gray, the heavy clouds pregnant with winter. A dirty blanket of melting snow lay over the deserted stocks and pillories, and long icicles hung like frozen daggers on the ragged awnings and stone facades.

The Prince drew me into a high counter, then spun about and aimed to take vicious advantage of my vulnerability, but I retreated once again, saving myself from a blow that could have sliced through my rib cage. I stumbled backward through a blacksmith's shed, tripping over a pile of leg irons and chain. Reluctance and curiosity fell victim to necessity as I countered Aleksander's ferocious assault again and again.

Through the slave market gates and into the city streets we circled and scrambled, and only when we reached a wide bridge over a half-frozen river did I have an instant to consider strategy. The Prince's thickly padded vest was restricting his movements, a flaw that I had already exploited. A scratch on his neck was bleeding, and another on his forearm. And so he yielded the advantage of his relentless fury by pausing at the bridge gate to remove the vest. He should never have done it. When he came after me again, I was ready.

Aleksander was strong, and his skill, speed, and endurance were legendary among his warrior people. Our fighting skills were well matched; either one of us could prevail. But my Madonai body would not tire, nor would minor woundings deter me. Aleksander was young and fit, but he was human. And so I would let him continue to attack for as long as he could stand up, but I would lead him and tease him and bleed him, and when he was half dead from it, I would kill him.

I turned and ran across the bridge, taunting him, shouting to be heard over the ice-clogged torrent of the river. “Come, human, take me if you can!”

He gave chase, splashing through the ankle-deep slush of ice and filth in the narrow streets of the poor quarter. Every few hundred steps, I would halt and allow him to engage me, not too close, but yielding him five hits for every scratch I put on him. Then I would duck and dodge his next blow and run away, up and down the refuse-strewn alleyways. By the time I stopped again, my nicks and scrapes had faded, while the Prince looked as though he'd run through steel brambles. I laughed and let him come at me again.

At one stop, as we circled like two dogs eyeing the same piece of meat, he started talking. “Elinor says you answer to the name of your god Valdis. Is it so?”

I spun to meet his lunging step, left a dainty blood streak on his cheek, then stepped back. “I am everything that remains of Valdis and his memories, and I possess the power that has been waiting for him since his birth. If humans view Madonai power as the sign of a god, then that is their own limited vision.”

Circling. “And this prisoner you've feared ... this sorcerer ... you call him father ... the Nameless God...” He feinted left, then swept another powerful blow to my right.

My counter drove him backward. His back slammed into a tenement wall, loosing a small avalanche of ash-grayed snow upon his head. “My father was once the greatest of the Madonai,” I said. “He has made me Madonai, too, gifted me with his power—”

“—and his hatred of humans. You told me of that.” He brushed his face with his sleeve and spit the snow from his mouth, never lowering his guard.

“I do not hate humans. Neither do I care for them. I have been freed of such weaknesses so I can make reasoned judgments.” I lunged forward and pressed him with a series of intricate moves that left him bleeding in ten places.

But he did not lose focus. He beat off my attack until we both stepped back. “Yet your care, your compassion ... was always more effective than your sword. Don't you see that? Fiona could tell you. Blaise, too.” He waved his sword to the scene around us. “Here in this very place you once stopped me from razing the poor quarter of Capharna. You were always watching me, and on that day I began to see things through your slave's eyes. I hated you for forcing me to see.”

I glanced at the ramshackle warehouses and mean dwellings on every side of us. Indeed I recognized the place. A Derzhi heged had wanted to burn out the quarter and all its poor inhabitants to build a palace. Aleksander had refused them. On that same day in this street, the Prince had commanded a servant to give me a cloak and shoes against the freezing wind.

For one brief moment, I thought I had missed a move, and his dagger had caught me behind the eye. But I had no wounding. Why did my head keep hurting so these past few days? Was some spell carried by the woman and the Prince?
Nonsense. They have no power.
I tried to concentrate. “Do you think to distract me with sentiment, Prince? Remember, I have none.”

Dismissing the piercing discomfort, I lunged, staved off his dagger with my right foot, and ripped my knifepoint across his chest. His quickly muted oath punctuated our conversation, and blood stained the ragged tear in his shirt. I smiled and danced away. He resumed his attack. I dodged a ferocious strike and took off running. We had been fighting for two hours, but I felt as fresh as if I had just stepped onto the field.

Through the streets and back across the great bridge I led him, up the causeway toward the palace where I had been his slave, and then back toward the city marketplace. Our clashing steel and grunting efforts were the only sounds in the ghost city save the river and the wind gusting weakly from the heavy clouds. I began to question his tactics. He would feint a blow at my legs, his favorite target when dueling, but strike at my neck and shoulders— a reasonable ploy, but becoming predictable. He was tiring, perhaps not thinking clearly. I led him and teased another bloody hole in his sleeve. He looked like a juggler in his tattered garments, striped with red. Blood flowed freely from the shallow chest wound, a deep cut in one leg, and another gash in his left forearm.

A flurry of blows and another chase through the gloomy afternoon. The Prince drove me backward into Capharna's vast central marketplace, through abandoned stalls and into a potter's booth, knocking over tables stacked with bowls and cups and painted jars that shattered on the ice-slicked paving. I backed away into the center of the square, beckoning him as a drover calls his mule, only to be brought up short by some obstacle, a pedestal of stone. I tried to slip left around the shoulder-high block of marble, but a wood-vendor's wagon was in the way, piled high with sticks and logs and staves. Before I could go the other way around, Aleksander attacked again.

“Why do you bring me to this place of all of them?” he said, panting with his efforts. Yes, he was tiring at last. But still foolishly confident. He closed the gap between us, sweeping my sword aside, closing in and aiming his dagger at my heart. For one moment we grappled, a knot of straining muscle and damp skin and edged steel. Even tired and bleeding, he was as strong as a Makhara bear. “Oh, gods, where are you, Seyonne? I don't want this.”

He was too close; his left hand was pressing my right arm up over my head, exposing my side. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, I gathered my strength and shoved him away. I was Madonai. No human could best me. As he stumbled backward, crashing into the wood wagon, I kicked his sword out of his hand. It skittered under the wagon. I dodged about the pedestal and backed away yet again, taunting him to charge me, daring him to turn his back on me and crawl under the wagon to pick up his sword. He held back for one moment, bent over, his fists on his knees, and breathing harshly. My shirt and hands were sticky with his blood. Soon I would take him. Soon.

I gave him a moment to recover. No need to run too far ahead now. No need to rush. While he caught his breath, I glanced up to the bronze statue that topped the pedestal—a dying Derzhi warrior, slumped beside the corpse of a mythical creature called a gyrbeast. In the counterpart of this very statue, back in true Capharna, had my people hidden an enchantment that had led the two of us to their place of exile. At the feet of this dying warrior, Aleksander and I had begun a journey ...

My eyes fell to his blood on my hands. Like the glowing iron that had seared the slave mark on my face, so came the white-hot pain behind my eyes once more. The wounds of my flesh were already closing, but this one ... oh, gods of night ... this one ...

Like the gasping Prince, I could not breathe, could not speak. What weakness had been left beneath my skin? For that moment I felt powerless, and I staggered backward, trying to focus my vision through the glaring ferocity of pain. Powerless when I needed strength ...
Powerless.
As if one ray of dying sunlight pierced the lowering clouds, as if the knife blade behind my eyes ripped open a pall of darkness to reveal one spark of life, so came a shattering truth.
Tell me who you are,
the Prince had said, and for that single moment, I knew the answer.

“I am my father”—the cry burst from me as the Prince snatched a thick branch from the wood wagon, heaved a ragged, sobbing breath, and charged—“and his father before him.” My sword was high, ready to slash through the human warrior that rushed toward me, bearing death in his hand. But my weapon did not fall ... not for the moment's breath that made it too late, when the wooden club smashed into the scar on my right side, and I could no longer move.

Nerveless cold radiated from the fiery explosion in my side until half of my body was numb. My arm fell limp; my sword clattered to the paving. My right leg folded underneath me, and, even had I the strength to do it, there was nothing to catch hold of. When my left elbow struck the ground, my knife went flying, and then my executioner was kneeling at my side. Through the haze of shock and pain and flying snow, I could see his dagger poised above me and the white blur of his face, anguished, as if he were preparing to cut off his own flesh ...

“No!” The mountain's root beneath us shook with Nyel's wrath. If I could have sharpened my blurring eyesight, I would not have been surprised to see the earth crack and molten rock spew forth in that moment. But as it was, I saw only the nauseating result as the stones and structures of Capharna sagged, shifted, and reshaped themselves into the stone floor and columned vault of Kasparian's torchlit arena. Three forms took uncertain shape a few tens of paces away—Nyel, Kasparian, and the woman. Only Aleksander was held motionless, a solid center to the blurring universe, as unmoving as the bronze statue, though his eyes were living, and tears rolled down his blood-smeared cheeks. I lay crumpled in the dirt below his abruptly halted knife, fighting for breath, not sure my heart was still beating.

“No human will touch this misbegotten weakling, this sniveling creature I have called my son.” Nyel's face appeared in the spinning maelstrom, his skin flushed, his mouth contorted, and his eyes ... the gods save us all ... his eyes wearing the hard glitter of madness. “What are you?” He was near spitting with disgust and loathing as he stood leaning on Kasparian's arm looking down at me. “You—a Madonai-have allowed a human to defeat you. Whether from intent or your own incapability, it is all the same ... this shame ... all my hopes ... our history. I gave you everything. You were to bear the glory of the Madonai upon your shoulders, and now you lie here groveling before this human worm. You have ever been his slave, groveler, and only an old man's foolish desire saw you else.”

The clouds had gathered again. The pall had sealed itself. I could not say what I had done or why, but I tried to assert control of my body, so that perhaps I could still determine my own fate. “Wait, Fyothe ... Father ...”

But one half of me was dead, the other lost to weakness for the moment. I could not yet move, and Nyel would not listen. “You are unworthy of my gifts. Vile, human-tainted flesh ...”

I knew what was coming. Nyel had only one answer to raging disappointment, and it had ever been death. Fear had no power over me, and so it did not much matter which of them, human or Madonai, did the deed. Regrets without shape flitted through my head as Nyel's quivering hand snatched Aleksander's knife. I closed my eyes, reached for clarity, and awaited the cold steel ...

But the harsh cry that echoed from the vaulted ceiling, that pierced the shadows behind the ranked columns to either side of us, that shook the foundations of the world, was not mine. I blinked open my eyes to discover a stone-faced Kasparian lowering Nyel gently to the earth.

“What have you done,
attellé?”
whispered Nyel.

“You were going to kill your son in anger, Master. The deed would have destroyed you.”

Necessity overcoming incapacity, I struggled to my knees and saw the knife hilt protruding from Nyel's chest, and Kasparian rising to his feet.

“Kill Valdis? Never ... never could I do such a thing.” Nyel's voice was weak, but did not quaver. “How could you think it? I gave everything to spare him—my freedom, my life, all the others-every Madonai dead. I have made him a god.”