But Xylina did nothing either he or the Queen expected. Instead, she drew her hands through the air, where they filled swiftly with a kind of metal mesh. She cast this net of metallic fibers over him as he rushed her, stepping aside in the manner of a bull-dancer and throwing it at the last possible minute, as if wanting to be certain she hit her target.
She did indeed; as the audience of mixed warriors and their attendant slaves roared with either approval or disbelief, Faro was completely entangled in the netting, staggering away, unbalanced. Xylina dashed in to gather up the edges and jerk the net, throwing her own weight fearlessly backwards as Faro's feet flew out from underneath him. As he fell, she ran to the opposite side of the arena, as far away from him as she could get. And once again abolished her conjuration.
The audience screamed, as at least half of the watchers leapt to their feet. The Queen watched in complete bewilderment, clutching the arms of her chair. What was the girl up to? Was she suicidally soft-hearted? Surely she knew that the man would kill her in a heartbeat now that she had shamed him twice before others. No one could afford this kind of bravado in the arena, not even an experienced fighter!
For the second time, Faro rose, turned, and charged her.
Xylina held out her hands. A torrent of thick, opaque mist rose from the sand. He blundered into it-and she stepped in too. Both of them vanished in the expanding fog. The cloud of conjured smoke filled the center of the arena, too thick to see into.
The crowd fell silent, waiting.
The Queen held her breath. That must have been an act of desperation. Xylina's powers must have been running out. She could not hide in there forever. Sooner or later Faro would find her and-
Faro staggered out of the fog.
With Xylina on his back.
The crowd went insane.
There was something in Xylina's hands-something that kept the man from trying to claw her from his shoulders. After a moment, the Queen saw what it was-a loop of fine wire that Xylina had cast around his neck. If he made a single move that she did not like, Xylina could choke him to death in a breath, or even, if she got the right leverage, slice his throat. He was as helpless as if she had him bound hand and foot at her feet.
He staggered to the center of the arena, and stopped there. Once again, the crowd fell silent-so quiet that Adria clearly heard the cries of birds above the arena, the barking of dogs in the streets outside.
Then, slowly, Faro fell to his knees, bowed his head, and raised his arms in the posture of complete surrender.
Xylina had won. She had tamed the brute man. He had acknowledged her as his mistress.
But she was not yet finished. She dismounted carefully, abolished the wire, and faced the audience, her back to Faro.
Once more, hope surged into Adria’s heart. There was no honor in the arena; the arena-slaves were the dregs of society. Faro could still kill her and earn his freedom.
But he did nothing.
Now Xylina conjured a simple drape of bright fabric and wrapped it gracefully around her nude body. As the girl looked up at the Queen, Adria was startled by her expression-totally blank, as if she were as astonished by this victory as Adria herself was.
Then Xylina shook her hair forward to hide her face, and walked slowly to the victor's exit, ignoring the screams of the crowd, the cowed slave, the flowers and coins that showered down onto the sand. She walked past Faro, into the darkness of the doorway.
Faro swallowed experimentally, breathing heavily, and was a little surprised that there was so little soreness. Xylina had a delicate touch, it seemed. Her body had been marvelously light, almost childlike-no, light but definitely not childlike!-yet her touch on the wire about his neck had been persuasively sure. She certainly could have hurt him, had she chosen to.
When she dismounted as if he were some strange breed of horse, and turned away from him, he was well aware that he could still attack and kill her. Surrender was not an absolute, and there was nothing that would say he had violated any code of honor if he struck her down.
But he had his own honor, his own integrity-even if none of these women believed that a slave could have honor.
Besides, he thought with a touch of irony, there was no guarantee that Xylina could not counter a fourth attempt to kill her. Or a fifth, sixth, seventh. She had spared his life- and he was suddenly aware how much he wanted to live, a revelation that had come in the brief moment when she had cut off his breathing and before he had stopped struggling.
Yet she had not really hurt him in any way. She could readily have given him any number of injuries-nothing that would seriously impair his value, but which could have kept him in crippling pain for days or weeks. Just to make her point.
There could be worse mistresses. In fact, he'd had one. This one at least knew the meaning of mercy. That might seem like a weakness, but now he realized that he could live with it. That he wanted to live with it.
So when she passed him, silently, her face a blank mask, he acknowledged his indenture to her by rising and following her. He saw the arena keepers already coming out to clean up the ground for the next event. This particular show was over.
As a former arena-slave, he was well aware that he was in a very special case. He was not eligible for freedom within this society, except by special dispensation of the Queen, and his life was tied to Xylina's. If she died, he would be executed. If he wished to live, he must now defend her as savagely as he had fought her.
"Well." Xantippe leaned back in her seat, and gave Adria a long and significant look. "That was certainly-impressive."
"There is no question as to her ability or her nerve," the demon Ware observed, his heavy-lidded eyes betraying nothing. "I do not know when I last saw a more decisive woman-trial." He lounged indolently in his seat, long and elegant fingers toying with the stem of a glass goblet of conjured wine.
The Queen glanced sharply at him, but he did not seem to be exercising his formidable and sharp wit at her expense; he was simply making an observation. Without a doubt, he had seen any number of woman-trials during his life in the city.
She wondered what he was thinking. Demons were tolerated in the city, and in the Mazonite culture as a whole, provided they qualified. They qualified only if they took binding oaths to do no harm, to do nothing to change the existing order, and to serve the Queen personally, bowing to whatever her whim might be. Many demons seemed to find these oaths humiliating, and so shunned Mazonia as a whole. But not Ware.
The Queen found his wit and ironic sense of humor amusing, so long as they were not exercised against her, and he was often her guest. Some of her subjects found his presence unpleasant, even disturbing, but she was not one of them, and she had found his talents useful in the past. She was not certain how old he was-several hundred years, at least. And he was as ornamental as he was witty: graceful as a cat, pale-skinned, dark of hair, with a thin, sculptured face. Only his eyes gave him away for what he was; there was no mistaking the eyes of a demon for anything else. They were a peculiar color: an odd dark red, with golden flecks, like gold-dust floating in rich, unwatered wine-and the human looking into them suddenly felt the weight of every year of his many centuries.
In fact, a human looking into them too long stood a chance of becoming mesmerized by them. That was one of the many powers that demons possessed, powers they were sworn not to use against the women of Mazonia, although they were perfectly free to exercise them at the expense of the freedmen. The demons who swore their oaths to the Queen had a great deal of commerce among the freedmen. They often acted as the Queen's agents in trading outside the borders.
The demons were useful in other ways, such as supplying lifelike female surrogates: a kind of conjured, animated doll, as an outlet for men's primitive urges. Adria had a shrewd idea that a great many of these surrogates bore her face and the faces of other prominent Mazonites. It didn't matter. Whatever the freedmen got into within the walls of their private quarter made no difference to her rule. So long as no one actually dared bring such indiscretions to her attention, she could afford to ignore them. It made the freedmen content with the illusion that they were beyond her control.