I shift my left hand three inches. Her eyes never flicker. She didn’t pick up the motion. The heel of my left hand is now against the head of the spike through my right wrist.
Oh, my god, how I love this bitch.
Some ideas I save. Something special.
I love her so much, I’m going to fuck her.
Special just for little-
Right swinging backhand from my left armpit, left jamming like a short shovel-hook and I can’t get much on them but together I don’t need a whole hell of a lot. The spike through my right wrist spears deep into the side of her knee.
It grates on bone and I can’t tell if it’s mine or hers but I’m balls-up adrenoamped far beyond feeling any fucking pain.
She jerks like I clamped a high-tension line to her nipples and says-
“. . hurkk. .”
— and I give the head of the spike another good whack with the heel of my left hand, and this time the bone it grates on is the inside of her kneecap because when she yanks back her leg, the spike rips down and jams behind her patellar tendon, so her yank of the leg yanks me with it by the spike, which sits me up and plants her foot within the loop of my pinned-together legs and slams my battered nervous system hard enough to grey the world down by better than half-
But there is a fundamental difference between her and me. On the street, in the ring, on Adventure-so many times I’ve been half out or better, so greyed I didn’t know where my fucking legs were, hurt, cut, bleeding, having to use one hand to hang onto my guts while I try to cover my head with the other-
I can deal.
Crowmane, though-what is she? She’s no Marade, no Pretornio. She’s not even a Tizarre. When you carve all the way to nuts and guts, Crowmane’s just a bitch with a shitty attitude, playing games with somebody else’s power.
Which is why when some of the world is slipping back into focus she’s still screaming like a brain-damaged howler monkey and trying to shake me off her leg.
It’s only now that she remembers she’s got better than a hundred pounds on me and a razor-sharp fighting claw curving around the fist that is directly over my head.
All I can do is bring up my left as her right comes down and in the last infinitesimal fraction of a second I register the relationship between her fist and my forearm and an image blossoms and my forearm adjusts its angle without interference from my brain.
Her fist comes down. Her fighting claw spears into my trapezius and scrapes my collarbone but goes no deeper because my block braced my left forearm across my head which set the spike in that forearm against my skull like a spear grounded to receive a horseman’s charge.
The horseman, in this case, is Crowmane’s fist.
She takes the spike between the second and third knuckle and she jerks again, rearing up, yowling-
Which is when we both remember that the fist she just punched me with, the fist I just spiked, was her right.
The one holding that ball of Reality-
WHITEOUT
The world darkens back into existence. .
Still pinned together-my forearm to her knee-
Not pinned forearm to fist anymore. She doesn’t have a fist. Just a stump of charred bone.
A snap of my left arm whips the white-hot remnant of the spike out of my charring flesh, and there is a bleak red light shining up on her and from the smell and the pain I’m guessing that my hair’s on fire, and I don’t give half a mouthful of shit. That spike was grounded against my skull.
We’ve been joined by the Outside Power.
She’s looking down at me, and in those yellow eyes now is the greatest gift she will ever give me.
Fear.
Because we Know each other now. And the punkass bleeding heart who said “To understand all is to forgive all” wasn’t from my fucking neighborhood.
I grin up at her. “Shaikkak Nerutch’khaitan. .”
I roll her name around in my mouth.
“Skaikkak Nerutch’khaitan-” My left hand spasms with nerve shock from the burn through my forearm; I let the spasm beckon to her. “I believe this is my dance.”
Her stump and her left hand make an off-balance pinwheel when she tries to backstroke into the night sky. I throw my weight forward when her heel hits my nailed-together ankles, and my forearm spike comes free from behind her kneecap and I keep the momentum going forward so that I can roll up onto one shrieking foot and shove myself up her leg and hook my left arm behind her neck. My weight captures her balance, and she keeps on staggering backward.
Behind her is the perimeter wall and beyond that there is nothing but coils of black turd smoke spinning toward the sky.
Guess this is my star exit.
Finally.
Good-bye, fuckers. Good-bye all of you sacks of shit who’re watching at home with your dicks in your hand or a thumb up your snatch.
Hope you had a good time, and kiss my ass.
The perimeter wall hits her above the knees, crushing my nailed ankles into a snarling white flare inside my head, and the wall’s just barely high enough to hold her, so I crook my arm behind her neck and croon lovingly into her rumpled mass of ear-
“When you wake up in Hell, you festering slab of rat cunt, I’ll already be killing you again.”
— and I backhand the point of my forearm spike at her right eye.
Nothing wrong with her reflexes: she jerks her head back and away from the point-
— and so the spike-
— which I hadn’t really expected to get her eye with, y’know, anyway, so there’s no point in shitcanning my follow-through-
— takes her just under the cheekbone, above her upper jaw, into what on a human would be a savagely sensitive nerve cluster around the trigeminal-
— triggering a transcendently satisfying airhorn shriek and instant stiff hyperarch of her back-
Guess ogrilloi keep a nerve cluster there, too.
— and we topple over the wall.
With a kick that’s half convulsion I yank my ankles apart as we start our long slow tumble into the darkness.
Why not? Like our Garthan Hold personal combat Brother used to say-
Hurts now. Be over soon.
Gahh-
– ’d like to hear that fucker say it again with a fifty-penny nail behind his motherfucking Achilles tendon-
But I still swing my legs around and wrench her thrashing underneath me as we fall free, because I am for ass-raping sure gonna land on-
Wham.
— tumbling flailing clawing-
WHAMWHAMWHAM
. .
. .
.
.
stars in the dust
breathe
— whoop-
breathe goddammit breathe
— whoop-
stars
hrakchakh
stars come out like a window
dusty sand settles around me and
on me
into my eyes and up my nose and
fuck my bleeding ass I’m still
alive
One minor-
hrakchakh
— minor flaw. . in the whole sonofabitching plan. .
The vertical city isn’t exactly vertical, exactly.
More of a steep slope.
I’m in one of the houses. . still has walls. . hasn’t had a roof in a thousand years or so. .
With the kind of effort that would have gotten Sisyphus to the top of his motherfucking hill, I roll my head sideways.
The city above catches enough of the firelight from the camp that I can pick out Crowmane’s body crumpled on the rubble maybe ten feet away.
She looks worse than I feel.
That is to say: dead.
I figure that between my two half-working hands, I oughta be able to chopstick a big enough piece of rock to make sure. And I will.
I will.
Just-
Just as soon as I get my breath. .