The spotlights didn't seem to bother them. They turned toward the ship and performed elaborate salutes with their weapons. Jang stood beside me, his face paler then usual and tinged with an expression I could not decipher. It was clear that the salutes were for him.
For a long moment the two figures were absolutely still; then they sprang at each other, a whirl of glitter, their skelts moving with such speed that the human eye saw only the visual trails of the movements, a gossamer blossom of light around the combatants, delicate and shifting. Jang touched a button and a faint metallic singing came through the speakers, the sound of the blades sliding against each other. It seemed like faraway music, and in the rhythmic sound I could almost recognize a melody.
«They're very convincing,» Jang said. A splash of hot sparks burst from the right shoulder of the male; evidently his opponent had penetrated his guard. He faltered, and the blossom of light changed, became thinner and smaller on his right side.
«He's lost,» Jang said, and turned away, but I watched. A moment later he staggered as her skelt sank deeply into his armor at the base of his neck. The other blade drove into the other side of his neck and as she jerked her weapons free, his head toppled from his shoulders.
He remained on his feet for a moment, his own weapons dropping until their tips touched the ground. The headless body knelt, almost gracefully, then fell forward and shattered into a thousand wriggling fragments.
Later Jang told me about the ritual on his home world, using terms like honor and courage and principle... terms that I suspected meant entirely different things to him than they did to me. His face was unreadable but I saw a slight tremor in his hands as he spoke. «The skelt was our religion, Leeson.» He shook his sleek head. «Steel made us holy and steel brought us low. The skelt decided our great questions for us, and there was always wisdom in the steel, or so it seemed. But over the centuries we changed, and the skelt became our politics as well as our religion and oracle.»
«It doesn't sound so bad,» I said. «If I understand you rightly, a politician on your world sometimes had to fight for his life. The process must have weeded out some of the sociopaths that infest the governments of other worlds.»
«I suppose so. But it was corrupted, and became a bludgeon for enforcing class and status. The skelts are expensive to own and expensive to train with. What peasant or small merchant could ever challenge a lord, when that lord had been trained since early childhood in the use of the weapons? So we became a society of low-born assassins who struck from concealment, and bloodthirsty courtiers who accumulated power by collecting the heads of their enemies.» He shook his head. «It became very bad.» And then he told me about his world, the academies of war, the festive holidays marked by contests between great champions, the joyful years he had spent in the service of various masters. A kind of reverence suffused his hard features while he spoke, but the light eventually dimmed and he fell silent.
I was quiet for a while too, until my curiosity overcame caution. «I've never heard the story of why you left your home world,» I said.
Jang smiled, his usual subtle twitch of the lips. «It's an old story, like yours. But different. I was challenged in an unavoidable way by a man whose death at my hands would have been a terrible disgrace. I could have killed him without effort but then I would have been destroyed as a man of my world.»
«So you left?»
«Yes. It was the somewhat less dishonorable action. I traveled to Dilvermoon, I offered my skills to a mercenary recruiter there, and here I am, some years later, and I no longer recognize myself.»
I tried to hear bitterness in his words, but it didn't seem to be there.
Jang looked out at the ruins and shut off the lights. «The show appears to be over for tonight,» he said.
«I guess,» I said. It occurred to me with sudden force that Jang admired the skelt fighters with an intensity that a man like me could not possibly understand. «Jang,» I said cautiously. «Do you still own a set of skelts?»
«Oh, yes,» he said. «They hang in my pod, oiled and sharpened, next to my armor.»
He took a generous pinch of cannabis from a pouch and poked it into the pipe, which seemed to look up at him with avid stone eyes. He lit the pipe with a fingertip torch and drew in the smoke.
«Leeson, do you know why I like this stuff so much?» he asked.
«No,» I answered. I'd never felt any great affinity for the drug, which had seemed old-fashioned, even quaint, compared with all the ferociously distracting and gloriously bizarre pleasure drugs available to a moneyed citizen of Dilvermoon.
«It's a memory drug, you know.» Jang gestured with the pipe. «But not old memory. It thins out the new memories crowding into your head from every sense, every thought, every impulse. It lets you see what you want to see with unclouded clarity, without distraction, if that's your choice. Useful in my profession.»
«I suppose so,» I said dubiously. «What if you concentrate on the wrong thoughts?» I thought about Flash and Irvane and their monsters.
Jang nodded. «Always a possibility,» he said. «An overactive imagination might be a liability to a man in my business.» He shook his head. «On the other hand, my business, in brief, is killing. I don't mean to speak in cliches, but isn't it true that death is the last mystery? Trillions have died; none have sent back reports. We still wonder what death might be, even now, when dying is a final choice and not a grim necessity, for most pangalac citizens. Surprising, isn't it... even when death has become a remote abstraction for most of us, religions promising life after death continue to bloom and spread and metastasize into newer and gaudier and ever more irrational forms.» He laughed, a brief reluctant sound I'd never heard from him before.
«In any case, we who are close to death, who touch it with our hands... we often find ourselves distracted by poetry and mysticism. Thus the killer monk, the meditative slayer, the grandly mad murderer of fiction and history.
«But usually my imagination is limited to a kind of... theatrical paranoia. I feel armies coming for me, gorgeously cruel warriors hungry for my blood.» He shook his sleek head. «Tonight I saw them rising from the stones, like soldiers born of dragon teeth.»
«Cadmus,» I muttered. «Sowed the teeth himself.»
«You're well educated,» said Jang.
He tapped the ashes from his pipe and went away, leaving me to envy his imagination, despite its limitations.
THE FEMALE WARRIOR in the obsidian armor came to the ruins every night for a week, each time defeating a different opponent, until she was finally destroyed by a warrior in glossy crimson armor. His helmet depicted some insectile god with large compound eyes and sawtoothed mouth parts. After his victory he raised his head and bellowed his triumph to the moons, a shout with a buzzing inhuman undertone.
On the next night Jang went out to meet the crimson warrior, without a word to any of us, but for some reason he turned on the ship's alarms before he left.
The sound brought the survivors to the viewports in the ship's lounge, and we saw the whole thing.
Jang wore a suit of armor in an antique style, brown iron plate with dull blue lapis inlaid into the iron in jagged patterns.
He whirled his blades with what appeared to be great skill but he lived for only a few moments. The crimson warrior brushed aside his guard, almost casually, and an instant later, Jang's head fell backward from his shoulders. As I watched, I felt a surprisingly strong sense of loss, mixed with fear. Who would protect us now?
Hu Moon, who watched the brief combat from the port beside me, beat her fists against the thick crystal. «What a fool,» she said.
In the morning we buried him well away from the site, so as not to contaminate the dig. Hu Moon at first talked about continuing the excavation, but several days passed and she stayed in her quarters with Dueine.