The Corhlan was smiling, his eyes burning on Rehger. So the hunter might dwell on his prey, so a woman might ponder a man she hoped would possess her.
The tiers had laughed at the boy’s headlong stampede, his need to meet the Lydian, and now they were saluting him, his valor and his idiocy. At least, probably, if he fought well, they would not regret watching him spared.
Rehger moved, slowly enough that the boy could see he was accepted and that it had begun.
The Corhlan made one beautiful answer, skimming with the sword—but, instantly checked by Rehger’s nearly gentle counterstroke, reacted with a clottish swing. From that, Rehger merely stepped away, as if ignoring a piece of pointless bad manners.
This was how the Corhlan would fight, then. Artist and dolt by turns. Katemval would have said, if he had been child-sold to a stadium something might have been made of him. But he was free, and it was too late now.
And then—chaos claimed the world.
It was so ridiculous, so incompatible, that for a moment Rehger paid no heed to it, only readjusting his reflexes and his touch as if in response to some natural happenstance.
It took him a few seconds more to realize that, although this had taken place, and continued to do so, it was impossible, and therefore he had no jurisdiction over it.
He had lost control of the sword in his hand. Lost it completely. The sword was alive. It tugged and pulled against him, it twisted against his palm. As he raised it, it resisted, and the length of it thrummed. Cold as ice, charged with an energy, a strength that wrestled with his own—
Before his mind had even laid hold of the facts, his entire body broke into a freezing scalding sweat—not of fear—of pure horror.
Witchcraft. A spell. Yes, Rehger could credit these. But whose work? The Corhlan’s? The power did not seem to come from him—
Struggling, a live enemy for a weapon, his actions suddenly labored and arbitrary, the Lydian strove to contain the boy’s gadfly attack.
(The tiers, supposing their champion taunted the swingeing young Corhl by mimicry, lovingly chided and clapped him.)
But the Corhlan was falling back, retreating. Under the dark Vis tan, his face had paled below the pallor of excitement. His eyes were on the bewitched sword.
So Rehger had an inch to spare, to glance, to see for himself.
They called it Shansarian magic. A trick of the Ashara temples. Katemval, who had beheld it done often in Sh’alis, had ascribed it to drugged incense and hallucination, or some odder ability to flex metal. Snakes became swords, swords were changed to snakes.
In his hand, the grip to the hilt remained, though it rippled with convulsive life. The hilt had shrunk to a kind of spine, quivering with the movement of the rest.
Under what was left of the hilt, the full length the sword had been, a serpent. Stiffly stretched, it was writhing to rid itself, even as he grasped it, of the final vestiges of the steel. It was the color of milk, the hard clinkered scales gleaming like platinum. The eyes stared from its flat head, soulless white—He knew then whose power had formed the spell.
The impulse was to fling it from him. There was an inherent loathing in the Vis, of snakes, which the people of the snake goddess had fed on and fostered. Real or illusion, to clutch this thing now, as it strove to full animation, turned the stomach, destroyed the will.
It must be she meant him to die. To die in shame, before his hour. He felt her cold eyes on him now.
And then, as if by that recognition of her, as of his fear and anger, he had satisfied the Amanackire sorceress, the sword returned to him. The snake disappeared. There was the flash of metal. Slim and balanced, it filled his hand, his servant, his. For how long? Now he could not rely upon the blade. The steel was a white snake, inside. He had seen it loosed. It might, having learned the truth of its nature, at any moment aspire to it again—
All this had taken only seconds. The crowd had noted nothing, only the Lydian’s joke of hamfistedness, the retreat of the Corhlan, the tiny pause that sometimes came in combat before some decisive blow.
Rehger’s skull sang. His vision was blurred, and his body too light. Such sensations followed great exertion and bloodloss. They were the prelude to death-danger. You could not stay long on the sand then, you must complete the task.
His hand on the sword felt numb now. The leaden beats of his heart tolled through him. He was past fear and shame, numbed like the sword hand. So it would be, on his death day.
The Corhlan was fighting him, his face full of the terror and fury Rehger had lost. The Corhlan did not understand, but the sorcery had him yet, its teeth in his throat.
Somewhere, the abacus in the Lydian’s brain had kept score, by the noises of the crowd, how many Saardsins had fallen or triumphed, and their popular status, how many men had been discommoded and hacked. Three or four fights still went on and were the last, this being one of them. Then it would be done.
Rehger moved suddenly. As the weakness dragged from him like a cloak, every failure and shadow of his life swept up on him. They were strangers, these emotions, yet they knew him.
He clipped leftward with the serpent sword, and doubled the blow, and the Corhlan’s shield clanged down at their feet.
It was not a matter of art any more. A howling mob ran on Rehger’s heels.
He saw the young man’s eyes, beautiful as a girl’s, widen with shock and dismay. Then Rehger brought the sword downward, gods’ fire from the sky, and cleaved through him, from the left side of the neck to the breastbone.
The stroke required colossal strength (the clavicle had been shattered), perfect judgment. It was, nonetheless, a butcher’s.
The tiers, amazed by rapidity, one falling figure, the abrupt climax, its glamorous awfulness, erupted. Women shrieked. Well, one had known they liked the Corhl.
Rehger did not acknowledge them. He stood, the sword ripped from his hand, looking at the unconscious youth dying in front of him.
When the paean of the trumpets rang out, with those who had survived and could, Rehger raised his arm to acknowledge a teem of praise and veils.
He neither searched for the Amanackire among the boxes, nor gazed after the surgeons’ carts which were coming up to tidy the corpses and the maimed.
He walked from the stadium, and passing into the rooms below, allowed himself to be stripped of armor and leather. Then, going to the bath, was cleansed in turn of dust and sweat and the blood of others.
A group of noblemen who had come down to laud him, found him stretched along a pallet of the empty upper dormitory, his head on his arms, as if for sleep. “Forgive me,” he said. Swordsmen might wax moody after their prettiest battles, it was well-known, nor was the lion-orchid of Ly Dis any exception. They spoke awhile of poets and women, to him, and awarded him their presents, and tossed a garland of golden poppies over his head, before leaving him. Then, only then, he wept.
The man stood immovably in the entrance of hell.
“I beg your pardon, lady,” he said. “You can’t come in here.”
The torchlit corridor beneath the stadium was very dark, the cavern which opened beyond the man, evilly-lit by braziers, had its own darkness. The woman gleamed between, too white, too ghostly, omen of all things bad.
And now she said, looking in his eyes with her own that were like sightless mirrors, “You see who I am. Stand aside.”
“Yes, I see. I’m very respectful, I’m sure. But no woman gets in here. Not even the whores, to say good-bye.”
Behind him, emphasizing everything, a man shrieked out in agony. That would be the one the Iron Ox had taken last. It was, altogether, the surgeons’ room, no place for the curious, whatever bribe or threat they offered.
“The Corhl,” the woman said.
“Oh, yes.”
“He’s alive,” said the woman.
“Somehow. His own gods know how. When they haul the steel out of him he’ll hemorrhage and die, anyway.”