Probably giving myself tetanus.
I reached inside, tried to find something, and came up with a handful of bent, rusty nails, rocks and splinters.
I kicked it over.
I made my way over the stuff I’d scattered along the floor, checking each thing I was stepping over while making sure I didn’t step onto a nail or a piece of metal that might pierce my boot. I kicked some stuff out into the hall. Two gross-looking pipes of different lengths, a pile of rust-caked nails, bits of crushed concrete and a shaft of rotted wood.
Hatchet in hand, I stepped into the hallway. The Other had stopped at the sound of the impact. A short distance up the hallway.
“Found you,” the Faerie said. She held her sword so it dragged behind her. “Slippery prey. Hiding from prying eyes.”
Ms. Lewis stepped into the hallway as well. She stepped around me, stopping just behind my shoulder.
“Three to kill,” the Faerie said. She smiled, and the smile touched her pale eyes.
She still didn’t look real. There were less wrinkles than I’d expect to see on a child.
“We challenge you to a duel,” Rose called out.
The Faerie stopped. “I would sully my blade.”
I held out the hatchet, ready to use.
Her expression didn’t change in the least. Did she not know how ineffective the hatchet would be against her, or did she know and was she exceptional at hiding her tells?
If she had spent centuries in some court of lies and illusion, I could buy that she was a good liar.
But she was impatient, proud…
“Are you reluctant because you’re scared of me?” I asked. Direct attacks, I thought. “I think you’re a coward.”
“Never,” the Faerie said. There was a flair of the dramatic to the word. As if she’d timed the statement to play off mine, that her earlier reluctance was solely to enable this interplay. “I’ll see you pay for that insult.”
A small oath. I felt my heart skip a beat, hearing that.
But I was dead if I failed, whatever happened. What did it matter if I raised the stakes?
Okay, dumb question. There were plenty of things worse than death. But everything had a price, didn’t it? You couldn’t win something if you didn’t stake something.
“Then,” I said. “How about a wager?”
“A prize to the winner?” she asked, in that strange accent of hers. She smiled. “I don’t think you know how good a swordsman I am.”
“You say that, but aren’t all Faerie liars?” I asked. “I mean, lying is at the core of your being. You’re just really good fakers.”
“I was going to humiliate you, mortal, but now I’m going to make it bad. And believe me, I can make it bad. I was the consort and protector to the High Queen’s Torturer. The woman taught me a great deal.”
“So sayeth the liar,” I said. I slapped the upper half of the hatchet’s handle into my other palm. My heart was pounding, but that hardly mattered. “I think you’re all just a bunch of idiot practitioners who started deluding yourselves so you could lie despite the rules.”
“Changing how you look at the world so the subjective changes?” Rose asked. “It makes an awful lot of sense.”
“And it would make just as much sense if you made the fucking stupid mistake of using that glamour trick of yours to convince reality you can’t die. Look young, be young. Look like you can’t get sick, you can’t get sick.”
Look like no weapon forged by man can kill you, no weapon forged by man can kill you.
“You insult me, you insult my people. Shall I take you to my Queen and tell her what you said, so she can devise an appropriate punishment?”
“I think you should take the offer for a duel,” I said. “Or you might just be a sad, pathetic little excuse for an Other who’s more bluff than anything else, you’re hiding behind that ridiculous, flimsy looking sword, and the only way you can prove you aren’t is by accepting the duel and winning.”
If they thrive on belief and perception, can I attack her on that front?
She cocked her head a little, a birdlike gesture. I saw her glance momentarily over one shoulder.
“I’m not trying to distract you from something else or throw some big plot at you,” I said, “As hard as that is to believe. What I’m saying is what I mean. I want a duel because I think I could win.”
“Enough. What are the terms?” she asked.
“We duel you,” Rose said. “Winner gets to claim a prize.”
“Careful,” Ms. Lewis murmured.
“Too late. I accept. For my prize, I will have your obedience, for one year, one month, one week and one day,” the Faerie said. She smiled. “I am sworn to Mademoiselle Duchamp, but I would still like to keep you in a place just outside this world, and with my spare moments, I could amuse myself with you. Perhaps I could make the first day you spend with me worse than any day you’ve experienced. I could challenge myself to see if I could do the same each day thereafter.”
“I think,” I said, “I might take some of your power.”
“Good,” she said. She leaped back a solid fifteen feet, her feet skidding on the floor. “Let us begin.”
“Ms. Lewis,” I said. “Would you happen to know the name of that something nasty that might come if I called it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Ornias. He once placed stars in the firmament, but he now calls them down to earth. Say his name seven times.”
“Perfect. Ornias,” I said.
“Jesus penis fuck, Blake, no,” Rose said.
I saw the Faerie’s eyes go wide.
When a fucking Other who had lived and breathed deception for thousands of years was still provoked into giving away a tell, I knew I’d struck home.
“Ornias,” I said again.
She dashed towards me.
Trying to stop me before I finished.
I clenched my fist. I still held the nails, rocks and splinters I’d grabbed from the barrel.
Words and gestures had power, right?
“Take this!” I shouted, hurling the fistful at her as if I were throwing a baseball. A left-handed throw, but still.
The sharp, heavy, coarse bits of debris were coated in my blood, from the wound I’d made with my knife. Was there maybe a bit of extra power in there? Was that expenditure of power why I staggered a little, as I released them from my hand?
I didn’t even get to see if it inflicted any damage or if it simply bounced off of her. When I stood straight again, she had stopped.
Raising my hatchet, gripping it in both hands, I met her eyes. It was too much to hope that I could see a glimmer of fear, a hint that my instincts were right. Her face was unreadable. She used one hand to brush gingerly at the tops of her breasts.
“Ornias,” I said.
She went on the offensive. Sword still behind her, narrow space, she still brought it forward, letting it gouge and scrape the wall, bending like it had when she’d pulled it from the scabbard.
I could envision it springing free, flexing back to its normal straight length, simultaneously piercing me. Every bit of her body language pointed to that same conclusion.
Glamour would help things to that conclusion.
I hurled the hatchet at her, overhead, two handed.
She wasn’t in a position to hit it with her blade. She was in a position to strike it out of the air with the butt-end of her sword.