In the Lion’s Mouth

Ravn leans forward, arms on her knees. “They needed a Padaborn; I gave them one.”

“You gave them a false one.”

The Shadow flashes her teeth, leans back on the sofa, and spreads her arms along the backrest. “Did I?”

“No,” says Bridget ban. “She gave them the true quill. He was impervious to every persuasion but the last. Revenge, glory, or the liberation of Terra—these three things could not sway him. But that you had been felled acting in his place brought him forth at last.”

Ravn dipps her head. “Such was the plan.”

“Your plan!” says Graceful Bintsaif. “You might have been killed. Had Donovan held back, you would have been.”

Teeth flash. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Tell me, Ravn…” Bridget ban straightens, “who gave you the scars? Ekadrina? Did she vanquish the old man as she vanquished you; then hold you afterward for kaowèn? Or did Oschous lash you, for losing him the Padaborn card in his play for power?”

“No one gave me the scars, Red Hound. I earned them. They are most seemly wounds, and well acquired beside; for principle might merit lash, and wear such welts with pride.”

IX. Yuts’ga: The Main Argument

What words may capture combat grim
Whose course evades narration’s ken?
Surprise holds hesitant bold Ekadrina;
The scarred man’s passion recks no such pause
Nor ’tis shackled by single thought. First shot is his!
And Ekadrina falls! But falling, rolls; and so evades
The fatal blow, and vanishes misdt swaying grass.
The parking lot becomes a hiding place. She finds
Still forms there who once had followed her,
Gazeless eyes on golden sky affixed, weapons all a-scatter.
Those hands that lately clutched them clutch at naught,
As if they seize at things unseen. Or else were seizèd by them.
Shadows never more, they are become but shades,
To plow a vague existence shorn of fleshly joys.
They fade as holograms from aging substrate plucked.
“How sweeter than the king of all the dead,”
Achilles once proclaimed, “it is to slop my father’s swine alive.”
But who can fight when fueled by thoughts like these?
And failing fight, could hope the gods to please?

Ah, what blows were struck, what feats performed! Only a portion of the combat passed before the receptacles of Olafsdottr’s shenmat, to be recorded, pondered, honored in later leisure. Despite the shock of Padaborn’s unexpected advent, Ekadrina survived his first onslaught, and from stealthy and ever-shifting positions took potshots at her foe.

But Padaborn’s psyche had been split for just such affairs as this. He could consider options with half a mind while the remainder focused on the task at hand. No such fool as to trust his first shot fatal, he had winkled straightaway to a new position, one concealed, from which he might take his second.

Had he been in more constant practice, he would have prevailed. And had she been uninjured, she would have prevailed. As it was, the fell combat joined an equity of impairments, so that while victory might elude them both, defeat could fall to either. Around them, as companion stars do orbit a bright primary, the remnants of the taiji, the trident, and the black horse battled in contests lesser to any but those whose lives depended on them. The flames of the warehouse had already spread to the underbrush, sought out nearby dwellings, overleapt the Endicott River at the Narrows, and even then stalked the skirts of Cambertown herself. Several magpies struggling in the nearby woods must have found their deadliest enemy not in one another, but in the encroaching flames.

But much of this befell beyond the Ravn’s ken. Prone as she was, her shenmat’s view was limited and from an odd perspective. Padaborn showed himself briefly to draw fire and performed the Play of the Bundled Sticks. Ekadrina, from some location unseen, wafted a glider grenade, a spinning saucer that sailed across the grass tops before exploding. Only such fragments as these were recorded of this most celebrated struggle.

But the Long Tall One was badly wounded. Earlier, she had battled Big Jacques to a draw—no mean feat in itself—and the brief, but intense combat with the masquerading Ravn and the encloaked Domino Tight, though it had ended improbably in her victory, had not been exactly a restful entr’acte. The passages had taken their toll, and when at one point she limped directly by Ravn’s unconscious form, the seeping blood on her left side glistened against the flat black of her garment.

But Padaborn was little better off. Some of Ekadrina’s shots had told. The glider grenade had perforated his right leg and only the shenmat’s self-knitting powers had firmed up and staunched the wounds. And he had not fought a man à outrance since he had retired Billy Chins from the service nearly two years since.

In the end, the Play of the Spider was his winning play, or should have been. Fortuitously near Olafsdottr’s body ran a depression in the ground, and into this depression Padaborn insinuated himself by inches, bringing himself to lie as one dead in its concealing embrace. He scattered crispies not about his own position but farther off, to his left. Then he waited, as still and patient as Death. The wind, excited by the growing fire, whispered through the grasses and weeds and through the more distant trees and carried with it the occasional snap of weapons.

Betimes, the best stalk is to remain still and wait for the prey to come. It is a play oft used in extremity by those whose woundings hobble them. Stillness vanishes into the backdrop of the world. It is motion that catches the eye.

And soon enough came Ekadrina creeping. Soundless, rustling not the grasses, she seemed to flow through the landscape, embracing it, making it her own. Not for her the snap of the crispies. She spied them sparkling in the even-grown sun and, smiling just a little, sidled to her left to avoid them.

Padaborn erupted from the ground, seizing her by the ankles and toppling her like a caber. Her pistol went a-fling and she fell upon her back with a great whoof of breath, momentarily stunned.

Padaborn—or perhaps one should say the Brute—seized hold of her ankles and dragged her, intending perhaps to swing her by the heels against the broken wall of the old guardhouse. But at that juncture a spaceship’s lander screeched across the skies above, and distracted even the multifaceted Padaborn, if only for an instant. But in that instant Ekadrina Sèanmazy hurled a chance-snatched stone at Donovan’s head while she scrabbled for her dropped gun.

The Brute rolled, the stone missed, and the scarred man came to his feet with his own gun once more in hand, and …

… And there they stood, panting, gun arms extended, at point-blank range, both of them dead but for a moment of mutual hesitation.

Into the hiatus, Ekadrina inserted a grin. “You look like shit.”

“You, too. You’ve never been prettier.”

The lander canted and circled above them. Neither combatant spared it so much as a second glance; nor did they speculate on the allegiance of its owner. It fired impartially on all sides, but only to encourage evacuation of the battle space, and the remaining magpies melted away. Neither Donovan’s weapon nor his enemy’s wavered in the slightest. Each waited for the moment when a flicker of inattention would allow murder without effecting suicide.

“Why not shoot?” the loyalist asked, perhaps from genuine curiosity. “When will you ever in your soon-to-be-foreshortened life have a bedder chance?”