'I did not know who I was; only that I might be able to help. I was born in the clan vault of the family Velteseri. They brought me here at my request. I was taken by —'
'Did not know, Asura?' he asked gently.
'— by people who wish to hold me and so try to stop me from doing what I am supposed to do.'
'Asura,' he asked, 'do you know who you really are now?'
She looked down at him, eyes glittering. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes I do, Quolier.' She showed her teeth and took one gliding step forward, so that she was between the open end of the A-shaped ice-craft.
Quolier? he thought.
'Oncaterius,' the girl said, and there was something new and un-girl-like in her voice that set his heart racing. 'You slug; is this really the best you can do, impersonating an old lady scientist?'
He grabbed the right claw-oar and swung it at her.
She doubled up, dodging beneath the blow. He leapt from the ice-scull. The girl swung at him with one leg, but he cancelled the skates; this arena was within his control, and he had only ever allowed her to specify those rather than boots. The slicing kick brushed past his face and he felt the wind of it on his cheek. The girl staggered as the blade beneath her foot disappeared, but she did not fall.
The ice-scull trundled off a little way behind him; he lunged at the girl to force her back, then retreated two steps to the scull; he grasped the remaining oar and threw it away behind him, skittering and whirling across the ice.
The girl grinned at him, throwing away the hand muff with a similar gesture.
'Ah,' she said, glancing in the direction of the oar. 'It's to be a fair fight, then.'
He jabbed forward and swung the oar. The seven claw blades were needle-tipped and razor sharp; they hissed through the air in front of her face as she jinked back and side-stepped.
'Well, you still have the advantage of me in terms of names,' he told her, keeping himself between the girl and the other claw-oar, still sliding away across the ice.
'As in so much else, Oncaterius,' she laughed, dodging one way, then the other, as if trying to get past him. He was ready for the bluff, but not the double-bluff; the claw-oar slammed into the ice where the girl would have been as she slipped and skidded past behind him. He twisted, levering himself on the embedded oar to perform a sort of stunted vault and landing kneeling with the oar held out in front of him.
She had not attacked, and she had not attempted to run for the other oar, fifty metres or more away across the ice; instead she'd picked up the ice-scull, brandishing its thin A-frame in front of her now like a shield, and advancing.
'We have met before, haven't we?' Oncaterius said, rising and hefting the claw-oar as he moved forward too.
'Once or twice,' she agreed.
'Thought so,' he said, thinking furiously, certain he knew this person in some other guise. He cancelled the image he'd taken on, removing any trace of Gadfium from his appearance. There was just a hint of a delay as this took effect, almost as though the alteration had had to be approved, which ought not to be the case.
He watched the girl's tensed, intense face, framed by the ice-scull, edge closer to him.
He'd had enough of this. He attempted to cut out, back to base-reality, but the command failed. He was stuck here.
Now that was interesting, he thought. He tried thinking the girl unconscious, then imagined that the claw-oar was a gun, but neither worked. He attempted to summon help; that oaf Lunce was supposed to be waiting in the wings… No reply. The Serotin, then:… again, nothing.
Alone, then, as well as trapped.
'Problems, Quolier?' the girl asked, still advancing warily towards him. One of the ice-scull's rear blades caught the light and glinted, and for the first time Oncaterius realised that the spindly craft might be pressed into use as a weapon as well as a defence, and that he was just a little afraid. So this was how it felt.
He laughed. 'No, not really,' he said, then swung furiously at the girl. She fended the blow with the ice-scull; he was already swinging back, but that slice too was parried. He anticipated a counter attack and saw her moving as though to comply; he used his own momentum to whirl round and then brought the claw-oar up and then down where he expected her to move.
The claws ripped through the left arm of her coat, encountering some resistance, then slammed into the ice. He hauled the claws back out as fast as he could and ducked and twisted, but the A-frame of the little ice-craft came whistling through the air and a blade bit into his shoulder.
They separated a few metres, each carried across the ice by their own momentum. She bled from the left arm, tattered fur hanging dripping red onto the ice, her face still set in a strange, eager grin. His own shoulder felt numb and suddenly stiff. There was blood on the ice at his feet.
He advanced again, feinted and swung; the claw locked into the ice-scull's frame; she twisted it and the oar was almost torn from his grasp. He pulled, skidded on both feet, and suddenly they were face-to-face through the A-frame of the craft, him pulling one way on the locked blades, her hauling in the other direction on the warping frame of the little ice-boat. Their breaths met in a single cloud amongst the carbon tubing.
Oncaterius tugged, feeling his feet start to slip, and planted them further apart. At least the shaft of the claw-oar was between them, preventing her kicking him in the balls. She was sweating. Blood was dripping from the elbow of her left arm. He felt the A-frame and the oar start to tremble as the girl's strength began to give out. She grunted, her mouth set in a compressed line. He was sweating too and his shoulder hurt abominably, but he could feel her gradually yielding to him.
Her breathing was laboured now; their faces were less than half a metre apart and he felt her breath on his face, smelling of nothing. He wondered — with a sort of furious idleness that allowed his real concentration to focus on the physical struggle — how far down the reality-base the parameters here extended. They were each modelled for muscles, skeleton, cardiovascular system and appearance, but was there some sub-routine running which impersonated their intestinal flora? He really ought to look into these things more closely. Meanwhile, all that mattered was that he was physically stronger than this girl, and the trembling he was feeling through the ice-craft's A-frame and the claw shaft was increasing as he forced the oar round.
He laughed, conscious of his breath clouding around her, enveloping her face. She frowned, and he knew he had won. He glanced, grinning, round the A-frame as he twisted it slowly round. 'Use my own scull against me, eh?"
Her eyes flashed. Her head came thudding forward and her forehead smacked into his nose. He heard a crunch and his face went numb. He dropped back and heard a great bell tolling inside him, as though his bones were metal and hollow and just struck. Something whacked into the back of his head, sounding another toll within his reverberating bones.
He lay, spread upon the ice. He tried to draw breath through the warm liquid bubbling up in his mouth and nose.
Then she was on top of him, her knees on either side of his chest, the front blade of the ice-scull cutting into the skin over his Adam's apple.
'All right, all right,' he said, spitting and spluttering through the blood. 'Tell you what; we'll call it a draw.'