Skrill gave a hiss of annoyance and placed her bow on the ground, replacing the arrow in her quiver.
‘What in blazes have we here?’ the Ant officer asked, aloud for their benefit. ‘A bag of halfbreeds, it would seem.’
Salma could only guess at the silent thoughts going meanwhile between him and his men.
‘We’re not with that army out there,’ he said hastily. ‘In fact, we’re from Collegium.’
‘I can’t see a crew like yours fitting in anywhere outside a freakshow,’ the Ant officer replied levelly. ‘But what you are right now, lad, is prisoners. You come along with me, and anyone who does any tricks gets a bolt up the arse, and no mistake. There’re folk in the city just waiting to speak to folk like you.’
‘We’re not your enemies,’ Salma tried again. He tried a smile, but the officer was having none of it.
‘You might be all sorts, lad, but I think you’re spies looking to get inside the city. Looks like you got your wish too, doesn’t it, although not in the way you might prefer.’
Three
The Prowess Forum had never seen the like. This was no formal event, no meeting of teams from the duelling league, and yet the backsides of the onlookers were packed all the way up the stone steps that rose in tiers at every wall. The aficionados of the duel were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, from College masters through the ranks of students and professional bladesmen to the children who followed their favourites with the fanatical loyalty of Ants to their city.
The fighters stood ready in the circle, which had been scuffed by a hundred hundred feet in the past. Neither participant was new to it. They had faced each other before, and there was nothing the crowd liked better than a rematch of champions. The Master of Ceremonies, the old Ant-kinden Kymon of Kes, had tried to start the duel three times, but the crowd was refusing to quieten down for him.
To one side stood the acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood: it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically, one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize, and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however, preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium kept duelling teams to further their prestige.
But the crowd were here to see more than a haughty Mantis-kinden win yet another bout. Enough of them had gathered there to see his opponent. The less charitable said that they wanted to see her before some stroke dealt by Piraeus ruined her, for he was a misogynist at the best of times, and this match. The Mantis-kinden saved their utmost barbs of loathing for one target. Why they hated the Spider-kinden quite so much was lost in time, but they did, and they never forgot a grievance.
Like most Spider-kinden, she was beautiful. She was also unusual in that she was a daughter of Collegium, not some arrogant foreigner. The name on the lips of the crowd as she entered was ‘Tynisa’. Properly she was Tynisa Maker, but she was so obviously none of the old man’s blood that just the one name sufficed.
Piraeus was tall and lean, his face chiselled with distaste. The bruises he had given Tynisa when they had last met had healed, and it was obvious he was ready to gift her with another set. She was shorter than he and slighter, an eyecatching young woman with her fair hair bound into a looped braid and her green eyes dancing.
There was something in the way she stood that told the best of them this was going to be a new kind of contest. She did not stand like a Prowess duellist or like a Spider-kinden. In her time away from the city she had learned something new.
She had learned who she was and what blood ran in her veins, but only Tynisa and two spectators there knew it.
Kymon called for silence once more, striking the two practice swords together in a dull clatter of bronze-covered wood.
‘I shall not ask again!’ he bellowed. ‘Silence now, or this match shall not take place!’
At long last the crowd quieted, under threat of its entertainment being removed. Kymon nodded heavily and passed the swords out. They were, in the hands of these fighters, graceless things. Those two were meant for swords more slender and crafted of true steel.
‘Salute the book!’ Kymon directed, and they turned to the great icon carved at one wall of the forum and raised their blades.
‘Clock!’ barked the Master of Ceremonies and stepped back hurriedly. Neither of them moved even as the ponderous hands of the mechanical timepiece ground into motion. For a long moment, to the hushed anticipation of the crowd, they merely faced each other. Tynisa studied Piraeus’s face and knew that, while she was seeing just what she had seen before, he could tell how she had changed.
But he was proud, and he was a blur of motion as he now came for her, his ersatz blade swinging in tight arcs to trap her.
She gave before him, barely parrying, making the fighting-circle her world, backing around it so the darts and sweeps of his sword clove empty air. She thought he might get angry, since she had seen him provoked before, but he retained his icy calm and his moves became tighter and tighter, and she was going to have to do something soon.
In a sudden flurry she had taken his sword aside and in that instant she was on the offensive. She did not keep it long, but after that it was anybody’s. She and Piraeus circled, stopped, circled back. The air between them rattled with the clash of their blades. The audience were on the edge of their seats but the two combatants had forgotten them. Their world had contracted to that duelling ring. The Prowess Forum with its clock and book had ceased altogether to exist for them.
He never gave up pressing his attack, for he knew the natural order of things was for him to advance, his foe to give way before him. He tried and he tried to turn the fight back to that familiar territory. He had done it before when, not so very long ago, he had beaten her two strikes to none. Now she was holding him off, constantly turning his attacks into her own. Her guard was iron. He could not breach it, no more than she could break his.
And the thought came to Tynisa, If these were live blades, I’d have killed him by now. Her own Mantis blood was rising in her and she saw Piraeus then as his own kind would. Look at this coward playing with children. He was all skill and poise, but the pride of his heritage had died within him.
So let’s call it real. And she gave her blood full rein. The orderly, calculated exchange of the Prowess Forum fell in pieces around them. She cut straight through, his blade passing inches from her face, and the point of hers rammed into his stomach.
He doubled over, hit the ground shoulder-first, and it took all of her will’s work to hold back a second strike that would have broken his neck in lieu of opening his throat. She stepped back carefully with the slight, sad thought that she could not return to this place. Her skills, once made here, had been reforged in blood, in the outside world. The reflexes and instincts honed between life and death were not tame beasts for her to teach tricks to.
Piraeus was slowly getting up, trying to catch his breath. She waited for him, motionless, and amongst the crowd not a word, not a fidget.
He lunged at her, as swift a move as they had yet seen, and it would have caught her if she had been a mere duellist. She had moved before her eyes had registered his strike, the point of his sword missing by inches. She struck him a numbing rap to the elbow that sent the blade tumbling from his hand.