This Bloody Game

by Dan Schiro

  Orion started to push between them to the frosted-glass doors, but Bully whimpered and head-butted him back. “Don’t you worry, Bully boy,” Orion whispered as he stooped. “I’ll be right back. It’s payback time for the lady who made you ride the lightning back on Corvis Stoat.” Embracing pure wrath for the strength he needed to leave his friends behind, Orion went through the doors and didn’t look back.

  He took the executive tube up to the 199th floor and skirted the entrance to the Orbit Lounge, sneaking down a staff-only hallway. After smashing in a latticed gate with a hammer blow from his spellblade, he bolted up a short, steep staircase and picked the lock on a maintenance hatch. Hoisting himself onto the roof, Orion stared up at the towering spire that led to the 200th floor of Echohax Tower and steeled himself. Then he extended silver claws from the fingertips of his spellblade gauntlet and started his long climb.

  The vast solar panel floated in over the Hub, and the lights of the sprawling metropolis cast a gentle pink glow up at him as he scaled the spire. Gusts of wind snapped Orion’s cloak this way and that, but he climbed on with his gauntlet claws deep in the soft metal. Finally he reached the flat-topped cupola at the apex. Measuring little more than 100 feet across, the orbital observation post was strictly off limits to the public. Orion had to drive his manacite claws into the diamond-glass windows that ringed the station, but he managed to drag himself to the flat rooftop.

  Clambering over the edge and quickly springing to his feet, Orion saw what he had feared — and expected — on the opposite side of the roof. LaVal LaVoy struck a defiant pose in her yellow-striped, black-leather bodysuit, her mirrored helmet hiding her face. Katherine Vanlith knelt at her side wearing a classic Earth-style black party dress, her straight, fine hair a dark nimbus in the blustery wind. She had her hands restrained behind her back, and a silver chain around her neck ran back to LaVal’s spellblade gauntlet. Vanlith’s scowling face wore bright bruises about her high cheekbones and bow-shaped lips, and a series of bleeding red cuts lined one arm from shoulder to elbow.

  “Orion,” said Vanlith, her shout ragged and woozy. “Whatever happens—”

  “Shut up,” LaVal screamed at her with a snap of the chain.

  “I was going to let you walk away, LaVal, if you let Kat go.” Orion smirked cruelly, his mismatched eyes sharp as a hunting beast’s. “But now that I see you’ve hurt her, I think this might be an eye-for-an-eye situation. Maybe literally.”

  LaVal laughed, a grinding sound through her helmet’s digitized filter. “She is one tough bitch,” she said, jerking the chain again. “I actually couldn’t make her cry.”

  “You get her, Orion,” Vanlith growled, her icy eyes finding focus. “You make sure…”

  Orion’s spellblade filled with thirsty yearning in the presence of Vanlith’s fresh blood, and the long red cuts on her arm made Orion think of his mother. “Let her go, LaVal,” he bellowed, shouting away the memory. “This is about me, I get it. I bet your oracle says it’s my turn to die, right?”

  “Oh, this isn’t a Guild assignment anymore.” LaVal shook her head, her iridescent faceplate capturing the pink miasma of the Hub’s ambient light. “The Guild doesn’t even want Zovaco Ralli dead now. The Oracle said it had to be done before he made Parliament or not at all.” She shrugged. “This is about me killing you — in single combat — to prove that I can. This is about me hurting you because I want to.” She yanked her chain to draw a wince from Vanlith. “Do you know how you’ve disgraced me, you pawn? I was on track to be the youngest Master in Guild history.”

  “You make sure you get this bitch, Orion,” Vanlith spat as she struggled against the thin fibers binding her wrists. “You make sure you kill her, you do it for me!”

  “I told you to shut up!” LaVal jerked the chain so hard that Vanlith’s head whiplashed. “What, do you think you’re going to inspire this clown to actually beat me? He’s only had bits and pieces of the training I’ve had since childhood, and from a deserter like Crag Dur Rokis Crag at that.”

  “Just let her go,” Orion yelled over the wind. “After that, you kill me, I kill you, whatever, fine! Just let her go.”

  “Let her go?” Slowly, LaVal LaVoy curled her fingers under the edge of her reflective helmet. She pulled it off and revealed a human face, younger than Orion’s own and dusky instead of pale. She had a short mop of tight black dreadlocks that danced in the wind like Medusa’s snakes. “I can’t let her go, she belongs here with us. The first human Union starship commander, the first human baptized into the Assassins Guild, and the first human to be… whatever you are. Formidable, even if you never quite know what the hell you’re doing.” She smiled, her teeth bright in the ambient light. “We’re three of a kind, Orion!”

  Orion shook his head, horror knotting his stomach. “LaVal, you don’t have to—”

  “Do you know how the ancient Engineers used to duel, Orion?” LaVal smirked.

  “Orion,” said Vanlith, her voice a thin rasp above the wind, “promise me you’ll finish her…”

  “They had an interesting ritual,” LaVal continued.

  “Don’t,” Orion cried, raising his hands. “You can strike me down, just let her go!” He was too many steps away, and he knew it.

  “Before a duel,” said LaVal, “they’d power their spellblades with the purest fuel there is…”

  “For me, Orion…” Vanlith pled.

  “…the sacrifice of the innocent,” said LaVal.

  “No!” Orion cried, hand outstretched.

  The chain holding Vanlith swirled back to LaVal’s gauntlet and became a simple, thin knife. A blazing-quick stroke caught the pink lights of the Hub as it flashed across Vanlith’s neck and loosed a torrent of blood. Her icy eyes went wide and rolled back in her head.

  “Kat!” Orion howled with a bottomless scream.

  With a flick of her spellblade-bonded arm, LaVal tossed Katherine Vanlith’s warm corpse from the top of Echohax Tower. Orion felt Vanlith’s life force flow out and split, quickly consumed by the two hungry spellblades. The red veins snaking through Orion’s silver gauntlet blazed bright with fresh blood magic, and the yellow veins in LaVal’s gauntlet did the same. They both raised their arms to cast, but Orion’s word of power came faster than LaVal could summon a bolt of lightning. “Hellfire!”

  A river of brimstone-flecked flames blazed forth from his gauntlet, sweeping across the rooftop like the devil’s tongue. The heat of Orion’s onslaught could have melted a dropship to slag, but he had been too brash, too obvious in his attack. LaVal had cued her jetpack just in time, and she hovered high above him with nothing more than singed boots. Orion’s fiery spell quickly wore itself out, and LaVal LaVoy floated back down to the red-hot rooftop.

  “That was reckless,” she said, shaking her head at Orion. “Didn’t your master teach you to save that sweet blood magic for when you really need it?” She drew a thin tai chi sword, just as her avatar had in the manufactured reality of the Engineers’ Temple, and beckoned him. “Come on. Let’s see if old Crag was better at teaching swordsmanship than he was spell-casting.”

  Orion matched her nimble sword and dropped into the White Room. Muscles tingling, he dashed across the sizzling roof to meet LaVal LaVoy in the middle. Their manacite blades rang out with the silvery song of an ancient people as they hummed through the air and met, sharp and strong and hungry for more blood. Their savage dance moved faster than should have been possible for two humans as they cycled through Blades of a Wheel, Skywalk Strike, Bull Thrust, Furious Wind and other attack styles in a matter of seconds. Then, with a kick to LaVal’s shin to distract her, Orion braced his sword against hers and delivered a head-butt that broke her nose. She fell back squirting blood, and Orion spun his sword to deliver the killing blow, but LaVal never gave him the chance. An electric kiss arced off the tip of her narrow sword and hit Orion in the chest, blasting him across the griddle-hot
rooftop.

  Orion rolled to a stop inches from the long drop to the pink-glowing Hub thousands of feet below. For a moment he thought his heart had stopped, and he could hear nothing more than the wind howling over the spire of Echohax Tower. Then he felt it beat again, a pained drum that reverberated through his body as he gasped for air. Though it felt like every muscle burned with acid, he struggled to his feet and tried to focus on the blurry figure across from him.

  “Damn, getting up for more, huh?” LaVal spat out a bloody wad that sizzled on the rooftop. “Look, just get on your knees, and I’ll do it clean.”

  Orion plunged deeper into the White Room, far below rage and sorrow and incredible pain. Layer by layer, he quieted his screaming muscles, stilled his jangling nervous system and slowed his rapid heartbeat. “I’m going to feed you to my dog for what you did to her,” Orion said calmly as his thin blade transformed into a jagged barbarian sword.

  They charged at each other again, and this time their dance took them back and forth across the steaming roof as they rapidly switched between weapons. From axes to maces to spiked hammers and through a half-dozen different swords, their liquid metal weapons swirled and solidified, swirled and solidified. Neither landed an attack for a long minute, and then they both gambled at the same time. Orion slashed open LaVal’s side with a quick pull-cut of his longsword, and the tip of LaVal’s spear stabbed into Orion’s gut. They leaped away from each other with a pair of pained yelps, and as Orion fell on his backside, LaVal activated her jetpack.

  “To hell with this,” she spat as she blasted off into the sky, a blood-soaked hand holding her side together.

  Orion tasted his own blood as she soared off, but he refused to quit, even if it killed him. With a ragged voice, he called on the freshly infused blood magic coursing through his gauntlet, his own life force mingling with LaVal’s. “Wings,” he rasped.

  Great manacite feathers as thin and sharp as razors bloomed forth from Orion’s back, shredding his smartcloak to a fine rain of expensive confetti. Then, with a few mighty flaps, he plunged off the top of the tower and surged after LaVal LaVoy. The wounded, leather-clad assassin flew slowly as she dipped toward the rosy glow of the Hub, and Orion caught up with her just as they entered the lanes of air traffic that crisscrossed the skyline. He tackled her and wrapped his arms around her, and they careened sideways for a narrow miss with a swerving aircab.

  “What the hell?” cried LaVal as they hurtled between brightly lit skyscrapers and streams of vehicles, the wings and jetpack fighting for control of their course.

  “Not ready to die after all, LaVal?” Orion snarled as they wrestled. “You wanted this, LaVal, you wanted this!”

  For a few seconds they veered and curved wildly, their spellblade gauntlets intertwined like warring snakes while the two humans bit and clawed and punched each other. Then, after a long dive, they reached a busy traffic stream and smashed headlong through the window of an airbus. They blasted straight through the other side, leaving the passengers screaming and the smoking vessel spinning through the night sky. Tangled and battered, they plummeted toward the city’s neon-infused ground floor until an airtruck hauling a long string of freight boxes broke their fall. Orion and LaVal bounced apart, each desperately scrabbling for a handhold to stop them from rolling over the side.

  Slowly Orion got to his feet, his wings folded back like a cape of thin daggers. He wiped blood and glass shards from his face to see LaVal doing the same atop the next freight car down. Both of them wore plenty of blood, and Orion felt aching fissures in his kneecap, ribs and left elbow. From the awkward movements of LaVal’s joints, she couldn’t have felt much better.

  “This is what you wanted, right?” Orion yelled as the wind roared over them. “You wanted to make me kill you, right? Why? Because I’m better than you at… this bloody game?!”

  LaVal shook her head, a crazed smile baring her teeth. “Maybe it’s just inevitable, Orion,” she snarled back. “You and me, the first spellblade-bonded humans, facing off to be the alpha predator of the whole race. Maybe it’s meant to be!”

  Orion managed a dark laugh. “This isn’t destiny, LaVoy. You just picked a fight with someone harder than you.” He drew the thin tai chi sword again as the whipping wind distorted droplets of blood on his face. “Now you’re going to pay for that mistake.”

  “Back where we started?” LaVal conjured a matching sword, thin and straight. “Fine!”

  They staggered toward each other, Orion vaulting the gap between the two freight boxes, and they clashed. Their blades rang out again and again as wind howled all around them, and once more they seemed evenly matched. After a flurry of attacks and counters, their blades slid together and locked at their hilts. Orion and LaVal’s strained faces leaned close as each struggled to overwhelm the other, blood and growls bubbling from their lips.

  Through some hallucinatory combination of battle-trance and blood loss, Orion heard his old mentor’s voice. You cannot fight an enemy while you fight gravity, air, the universe, said Crag Dur Rokis Crag. You must flow through these things, by letting them flow through you. Closing his eyes, Orion let his body bend with LaVal LaVoy’s weight and rolled her over his hip. As she sprawled forward, Orion dipped his shoulder toward her. The razor-sharp feathers of his manacite wing unfolded and sliced off her head in a single clean stroke.

  LaVal’s thin sword disappeared in a swirl of liquid metal, and her lifeless body belly-flopped on the freight car. Her manacite gauntlet froze in a twisted claw, and her head bounced away to fall toward the vast cityscape of the Hub. Orion rose with a pained grunt and dragged a hand across the warm, sticky spray coating his face. He stumbled and fell on his knees, his breath coming in ragged, wet gasps as his bloody wounds and broken bones screamed at him. After a moment his spell faded, and his manacite wings disintegrated in a slow, shimmering river of silver flakes that streamed off the airtruck like the tail of a comet. Orion fell forward with a shuddering cough and lay flat, the freight car’s thrumming vibration soothing him as cold crept through his body.

  As his vision grew dark, Orion smirked. “I’m just glad… you weren’t… my mom…”

  Chapter 30

  His bloodshot green-and-blue eyes found focus slowly, and Orion saw Aurelia Deon and Kangor Kash. They sat at a table across his comfortably furnished, flower-bedecked hospital suite, the two of them playing a game of table tarzzak over a board that generated a contained anti-gravity field. He watched them swear at each other in hushed tones for a few seconds, and then he managed to choke out a single word. “Head…”

  “Goddess,” Aurelia said with a start. “He’s up.”

  “Little friend,” said Kangor, his orange-red eyes wide. He rose and was at Orion’s side with two quick strides. “Welcome back. I feared you might not return from the borderlands.”

  “Head,” Orion rasped again, struggling to gather his thoughts.

  Aurelia joined Kangor at Orion’s bedside. “Head? What are you trying to say, Orion?”

  “LaVal… LaVal LaVoy,” Orion said as the shards of memory drifted together. “Her head… rolled away. Coulda hurt someone…”

  Kangor laughed, a hearty vycart guffaw. “That’s right, little friend, the assassin’s head. It splashed down in a rooftop pool, gave a few of the pampered class a scare.”

  Aurelia filled a glass of water from a pitcher on his nightstand. “Don’t worry about that now. Don’t think.” She held the glass to his lips, careful to make sure he got no more than a small sip. “Just relax. You’ve been through a lot, for a lesser carbon.”

  Orion cleared his throat gently, his sides aching with every small cough. “How long?”

  “Were you out?” Aurelia set the glass of water aside. “Better part of five solar cycles. When we found you, you were… well…”

  Kangor finished for her, his thick brow knit. “All but dead.”

  “Tho
ught I told you… not to come after me,” Orion said, managing a shadow of a smile.

  “That you did.” Aurelia planted her hands on her hips. “And while you geared up, the minority partners of AlphaOmega voted to subvert your order.”

  Orion shook his head, a few pained snorts standing in for laughter. “It doesn’t work that way, you know. How did you find me?”

  “Reddpenning pulled the locator chip out of her datacube,” Aurelia said with a smile. “And Koreen planted it on your shoulder when she did her blessing-chant nonsense.”

  “My crew,” Orion sighed. “You are good at what you do.” He searched his foggy mind — why did it feel like he had a lump of cold metal chained around his heart? “What… else?”

  “Zovaco was elected to Parliament,” Kangor offered. “A crushing avalanche of votes. And he thanked AlphaOmega Security in his acceptance speech.”

  “And as for LaVal LaVoy’s spellblade,” added Aurelia, “that disappeared into the swamps of Union bureaucracy. Predictably.”

  “We probably should have kept it,” Kangor conceded with a shrug of his mighty shoulders. “But… I didn’t feel like ripping the spines out of a dozen city security officers.” A slow smile curled his wolfish lip. “I was too happy to see my comrade alive.”

  Aurelia chewed her lower lip, as if trying to think of something more to say. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of Mervyn to—”

  Suddenly Orion remembered, and he surged up in bed despite the webs of pain that flowed across his stiff torso. “Kat,” he cried before he crumpled back. He could see from the expressions of his friends that they had no miracles to reveal. After a few minutes of painful, stifled sobs, Orion wiped his eyes and took a deep breath to compose himself. Again he sat up, this time gingerly testing his muscles. “Did you… find her?”