Rehger’s face had acquired a shadow. The prefiguration of the bones within. After all, he had been marked—“You watched the last combat, Katemval?”
“I can always watch now, when you fight.”
“Did I kill the Corhlan?”
“You killed him. And half the city says she brought him back. But who’s seen the boy? It’s an ugly nonsense, but it’s compatible with what she is. Oh, they can work magic. Sham or genuine, it’s nothing to want to be near.”
Rehger came to his feet. He gazed at Katemval, a long, open look, and the shadow was in his eyes now.
“Katemval, I have to be going. I must be in the practice court by midmorning, or put out the fighting-squares.”
“Yes,” said Katemval. “Go carefully.”
He felt old, and sat down as Rehger turned to leave. But then, getting up again, Katemval walked upstairs to the roof and watched the Lydian riding away along the avenue on the coal-black thoroughbred. Katemval watched as far as the fountain, where the road angled. For the snake witch lived on this very street. In the dilapidated tiled mansion. Rehger had gone by it without a glance. But neither had he looked back once, toward Katemval’s house.
He might have excluded himself from the practice court, this one day; the squares would not have been out, despite what he had said to Katemval, who knew as much. Champions made their own laws for such things.
But he had required the fight, the hard exercise. Sex had not purged him. The sea and the night, disturbed by red glimmerings, the water plucked away. It was Zastis. He was of the bloodline of a dead king. And in his mind, he could recall a white girl lying on a palace floor, a white girl with her hands locked upon a grill of iron.
Eight squares, each composed of four men, spaced two by two, back to back.
The sun streamed down and broiled them, and the blades, sword and dagger, made lightnings, slammed together, slithered, grated, shot away.
And the Corhlan. He lived. Did he? Where? Where would a man go to, who had been slain and restored inside a day? To the brothels? The temples?
“You’re slow, Lydian,” the Ylan, facing him from the next square, rhythmically lunged. “Too many times, Rehger, with the one you had, Rehger. Last night. Was it six times? Or seven? Did she go pale, then?”
You did not converse while fighting. Except now and then in the practice court.
“Last night I was praying,” said Rehger, feinted almost idly, and thumped the Ylan across his helm with the sword-flat. The Ylan went down, and the man back-to-back with him stumbled and cursed.
Rehger thought: That was word-play, too. Pale. He meant the Amanackire.
The trainer ambled up the block of squares. Now he frowned, now called on Daigoth.
Rehger waited for the Ylan.
“Take off your pathetic rags,” he said to the frightened girl, in snow-lapped Xarabiss.
The Ylan was on his feet, shaking his head like a bemused lion.
Amrek. Rehger. A dream, memories carried in his blood—
The Swordsman beside him, a young sturdy Ommos who would be worth watching in a year, if he lived so long, landed a blow upon the Ylan’s side-mate. The man swerved, missing the worst of it, and came back to ram the Ommos under the ribs with a dagger hilt. “That’s what you like, boy-stitcher.” The Ommos sprawled toward Rehger’s piece of ground. Rehger sprang away. The Ylan, favoring his dagger now, tried to score under the Lydian’s sword. Rehger moved effortlessly beyond the stroke. Bringing up his left hand he took the sword neatly from his right, snatched the dagger right-handed. The showy gambit now brought the sword left-handedly down on the Ylan’s blade, and scythed it to the court. The Ylan snarled, his anger was real. Generally they fought in the practice court with blunted iron. Not today. It was Zastis. Tempers and blades were sharp—
The Lydian’s sword and dagger re-passed each other, the showy gambit performed twice without a flaw. “Only able three times, then,” growled the Ylan. “You saved it for me?”
The Ommos, still rolling on the ground, sank his teeth suddenly in the foot of the man who had felled him.
A howl of laughter and abuse went up.
The trainer groused stamping forward. Dirty fights earned docked privileges. No boys for the Ommos tonight—
What did it matter if you were a king’s making? That blood must run thin by now. And he was a slave in Saardsinmey—Careful with the sword. Swords might be snakes in disguise. “I fear you. Oh, Rehger—warn this city—”
Something was screaming, miles below, loud and sonorous, a mighty creature in the gut of the planet—
Rehger lifted his head—the sun canceled vision. His left arm flew outward for no reason, and he looked and saw the Ylan standing in astonishment there. “You let me cut you.”
The blood of a king, it was leaving him now.
The trainer was at the Lydian’s elbow, holding the left arm, examining it. The Lydian allowed this. The arm, opened lengthways a hand’s breath below the elbow to the wrist, did not belong to him. It belonged to the city.
The other squares fought raggedly on.
“That’s deep enough. This old wrist scar here blocked off the stroke. Lucky. Off, out of it. Gods blind me, Lydian, I never saw you take a dolt’s bite like that since you were eleven years of age.”
He walked away from the court. He held the blood of Amrek inside his arm as best he could, but it spilled between his fingers, to the ground.
The surgeon pointed to the cup of wine.
“Eh-ink that. Keep still.”
Unkinder echo of Katemval, this morning.
Rehger did as he was instructed. The surgeon drove his silver needle six times through the skin, tied off the gut-thread and severed it. The wound was bound by an apprentice.
“You won’t compete for our city for ten days. You were due two events, they’ll pine. I will inform you presently which exercises you may or may not indulge.”
When the lecture was done, Rehger said, “Do you know anything about the Corhlan who fought here?”
“I wasn’t in attendance yesterday. But I’ll tell you, Lydian, I don’t know of a single man among all the stadium surgeons who was.”
In the under-passages, a pretty harlot, one of scores kept to content the younger Swords, came by the Lydian, slipping her dress from her shoulders and smiling slyly. “They say the Ylan got you—well, and so he did. Well, I know. You let him do it, so you can be with that woman, didn’t you? To have your Zastis days and nights alone with her.”
On foot, cloaked and hooded, he went there. He even stooped a little; some might know him by his height.
But three torch-lighters, who always greeted him, paid him no attention as they made their way through the main boulevards of Saardsinmey, touching the stalks of light-poles to yellow flower. And the girls did not come up to him, or the shopkeepers and princes who had won.
A couple of riotous dinners were in progress on Gem-Jewel Street, and there was also dancing in the road about the fountain, young women swirling their beads and skirts. Two officers of the Guardian’s cohorts, standing to watch, were complaining that word had it the Lydian had been sliced through the arm at practice, and would not fight or race for thirty days, or maybe never again, and how would the bets go now, Daigoth-eat-and-spit-it-forth.
Her house was in darkness.
Even in the garden, no lit window was visible.
He came to the upper entrance, and the lamp there, too, was out. He left the bell and crashed his fist several times on the timbers.
When the mix girl opened the door, he was sorry.
“It’s all right, sweetness. I only wanted to be heard.”
She said nothing, nor did she try to stay him. She darted away and he was left to enter as he would, closing the door himself.
Everything was shadows, the salon empty. Yet he could smell the perfume of her, faint as fine pollen, everywhere.
He went to the grill, where she had clung lamenting. The garden lay beneath, quite silent. The moon was rising, the Vis moon of Zastis, red as the hair of a red-haired woman—white, in the cold months, as the Amanackire. His arm gnawed and burned. His fingers had stiffened. The surgeon had not told him, since he knew, that even with the utmost care, some malady might set in. The wound could fester. The arm ... be lost to him. Some chose to sweep the courts then, to clean the privies, to put oil in the bath-house jars. To run errands for the Swords. Some went back into the stadium and soon died there, jeered and pitied, and praised in death. It was the mercy of Daigoth, to kill a crippled man swiftly.