Mara, despite every training of the mind garnered in the Temple of Lashima, was left without such solace. This time her mind found ease in ritual; if she was not feeling regret for loved ones who had been lost, she felt rage against an intolerant fate that condemned her to failure in protecting those still alive. Try as she might, her thoughts could not be forced to subside toward anything approaching tranquillity.
The ignominy of imprisonment without any way to contact her captors left her galled. The magical chamber effectively sealed the condemned away from all other living beings. Sourly, Mara wondered whether even gods could hear prayer in such a place. And with no windows, nor even the sounds of outside activity, the minutes dragged. Darkness itself would have carried a blessing of change, but the cho-ja globe drifted always, its light stark and constant.
The dawn would come, inevitably.
And yet for all the creeping agony of waiting, daybreak caught Mara unprepared. Her racing, trapped thoughts still circled, repeatedly reviewing events and questioning whether this action, or that word, or that decision differently handled might have won them alliance and freedom. Her futile pondering left her with a crushing headache. With the flashing magical whirl of light that signaled the dissolution of their prison, Mara felt tired, and depressed.
A double-file guard of cho-ja marched forward to take custody of the condemned. Mara retained enough presence of mind to rise and cross to where Lujan waited, awake and already on his feet.
She took his dry hands into her own clammy ones. Then she regarded his expressionless face and intoned the ritual words, 'Warrior, you have served in highest honor. You have leave from your mistress to claim what death you choose. Fight well. Fight bravely. Go singing to the halls of Turakamu.'
Lujan sank into a bow. His return courtesy seemed to exhaust the patience of their captors, for cho-ja guards advanced and hauled him to his feet. Mara also was grasped and tugged away as a herder might drive a needra calf to slaughter. She lost sight of Lujan as the bodies of cho-ja warriors closed around her. They allowed her no chance for protest, but set her on the march through the maze of hallways that riddled the city of Chakaha.
She raised her chin high, though pride seemed meaningless. The cho-ja of these lands were not impressed by honor, or courage, nor did they have any care for human dignity. She presumed that very soon she would be greeting the spirits of her ancestors; but not as she had always expected. Here, now, the most glowing of her Tsurani attainments and even her illustrious title of Servant of the Empire seemed empty. Now she would have traded all for a last glimpse of her children, or one tender embrace from her husband.
Kevin had been more right than ever she knew. Honor was only a glorified word for emptiness, and no sane replacement for the promise of continued life. Why had it taken until now for her to fully understand what prompted the opposition of the Assembly? And if help to break their stagnating hold upon Tsuranuanni could not be found here, and these Thuril cho-ja would make no alliance, where would Hokanu seek for resources to end the tyranny the magicians so jealously guarded? If there were answers, they must remain a mystery.
The cho-ja guard were indifferent as beings of stone. They moved briskly through the corridors, and across two catwalks that sparkled like glass. Mara regarded the clear sky, never so green and fresh before now. She smelled the fragrance of rich earth and jungle greenery, threaded through with the perfumes of tropical flowers; and on the breeze she drew in the scent of ice carried on the winds from the mountain peaks. She drank in these pleasures of life, and also the beauty of Chakaha's tracery of towers. She walked, bathed in colored arrows of light caused by sunbeams that shone through the towers, and her spirit shrank from the senseless end to come, the giving up of all hope, and the end of all dreams.
Too soon, the cho-ja guard escorted her into the translucent purple dome where the tribunal had judged her the day before. Now there were no officials present, not even scribes. The chamber was occupied by the spindly presence of a single cho-ja mage. It stood in a domed alcove. Upon the marble floor at its feet was a scarlet line that described a perfect circle.
Mara recognised the figure's significance. Set to a diameter of twelve paces, with a simple symbol scribed at east and west, where two warriors would stand confronting each other, she beheld the Circle of Death, traditionally drawn within the Empire for time out of mind. Here would two warriors battle until one lost his life in the ancient rite of challenge that Lujan had chosen in place of honorless execution.
Mara bit her lip to hide an unseemly apprehension. She had once stood to witness a husband's ritual suicide with less trepidation in her heart. For then she had regretted the waste of a young man whose own family's neglect had left him open for her exploitation. That indeed had been the first moment when the Game of the Council had shown itself to be less than a rigid code of honor and more a license to indulge any excuse to exploit another human's faults. Now honor itself seemed empty.
Mara beheld Lujan, standing between the cho-ja guards on the opposite side of the room. She knew him well enough to read his stance, and she saw, with a terrible pang, that the human warrior who would take up his weapons to die no longer subscribed to the beliefs he had been raised in. He valued the esteem he might gain in the Red God's halls far less than the lost chance to marry and rear children.
To Mara, Lujan's challenge to combat was a tragic and meaningless gesture. The honor he might win for his shade was like the fool's gold that Midkemian swindlers foisted upon the unsuspecting merchant. And yet the charade would be played through to its senseless conclusion.
Lujan was both more and less than the grey warrior she had rescued from masterless oblivion in the mountains. Guilt for her own responsibility in that change closed her throat. She had difficulty breathing, far less holding herself expressionless and erect as a noble Tsurani Lady must in public.
The cho-ja mage waved a forelimb, and an attendant scurried into view, bearing Lujan's confiscated weapons and the plain, unmarked armor he had worn into Thuril. Not without disrespect, it crouched and deposited the gear at the warrior's feet.
'Our hive has no knowledge of the manner of usage of these protections,' intoned the cho-ja mage, which Mara interpreted as an apology that the worker could not offer Lujan the courtesy of helping him arm.
On impulse, she stepped forward. 'I will assist my Force Commander.'
Her words echoed across the dome. But unlike in a gathering of humans, no cho-ja present turned its head. Only the mage twitched a forelimb to permit Mara to cross to Lujan's side. She bent and selected one of his greaves from the floor, then flashed a glance at his face. By the slight arch to his brows, she saw he was surprised at her gesture, but also secretly pleased. She gave him a surreptitious half-smile, then bent to lace on the first of his accoutrements. She did not speak. He would understand by her unprecedented behavior how highly he was regarded by her.
And in truth, the handling of armor was not unknown to her. She had girded on Hokanu's sword many times, and before him, her first Lord Buntokapi's; and as a child, she had played at adult behavior with her brother, Lanokota, when he had carried his wooden practice sword to workouts with Keyoke.
Lujan gave her a nod to indicate that she had the lacings right — tight enough to bind, but not so much that they would restrict his movement. She finished with the heavy, laminate sword that had more than once stopped enemies at her door. When the last buckle of the sword belt was clasped, she arose and touched Lujan's hand in farewell. 'May the gods ride your blade,' she murmured, which was the ritual phrase one warrior might say to another who sallied forth, expecting to die.
Lujan touched her hair, and tucked a drifting strand back behind her ear. The familiarity might have been an impertinence, had Lujan not come to hold the place of her dead brother in her heart. 'Lady, feel no sorrow. Had I the -choices of my youth to make over, I would live them all again.' His mouth quirked with a ghost of his old insolence. 'Well, maybe not quite all. There were
the instances of an unwise wager or two, and then the fat madam of that brothel whom I once insulted . . .'
The cho-ja mage rapped a hind limb upon the paving with a sound like the crack of a mallet. 'The time appointed for the combat is at hand!' it intoned, and at no other discernible signal, one of the cho-ja guard advanced to the edge of the circle.
It waited there, its bladed forelimbs shining in the soft light under the dome.
Lujan flashed Mara his most insouciant grin, then sobered, his mien as taut as any time he had waited poised for battle. Without a look back, or any sign of regret, he walked to the circle and took his place on the side opposite his cho-ja opponent.
Mara felt alone and vulnerable. Uneasily she noticed that her cho-ja guard had closed the space she had crossed; they now stood arrayed at her back, as if prepared to block her retreat, or any other desperate move she might attempt.
Her knees shook. It embarrassed her that even that small weakness showed.
She was Acoma! She would not flee her fate, nor would she demean Lujan by shirking her place at the circle's edge. Still, when the cho-ja mage intoned the procedure, that at its signal both Lujan and the cho-ja warrior appointed to face him should cross within the line and commence the contest, the Lady fought back an overpowering wish to close her eyes, to shut from view the petty striving that was all Lujan might claim for his epitaph.
Lujan gripped his sword. His hand was firm, and his sinews did not quiver from apprehension. Nervousness seemed to have fled him, and indeed, to Mara's eyes he seemed more assured than before other forays in the past. This battle was to be his last, and that knowledge eased him. Here, on the edge of the circle of challenge, there were no unknowns to worry over: the outcome of this fight would be the same whether he fought well or not, whether he won or he lost. He would not leave the circle alive. To wish events had been otherwise was a waste of his strength, and a lessening of the courage he had been born and raised to exhibit. According to the creed of the Tsurani warrior, he had let no one down. He had served his mistress well and fully; he had never turned his back on any foe. By all that he had been taught to believe, his death by the blade here was a fitting thing, the culmination of honor that was more sacred to the gods than life itself.
Quiet in his readiness, Lujan inspected his sword edge one last time for flaws. There were none. He had drawn it for nothing but sharpening since departure from Tsuranuanni.
Then all considerations were ended as the cho-ja mage spoke out. 'Hear me, combatants. Once the line of the circle is crossed, the ward of its making will activate. To step over the line again, either from within, or if another should try to intervene from without, will bring death. The terms of battle shall be according to Tsurani tradition: either the condemned shall die in combat inside the circle, or if he proves the victor, he shall be permitted to choose the hand of his executioner. I, mage of the city-state of Chakaha, stand as the witness that these proceedings require.'
Lujan gave the cho-ja mage a crisp salute. The cho-ja warrior he was to fight gave no acquiescence at all beyond a change in stance, from a position of rest to the angled crouch that signaled its readiness to charge. Beads of reflected light glanced off the knife-sharp edges of its forelimbs, and its eyes sparkled inhumanly. If pity and regret were part of the hive mind, such emotion was not reserved for the fighting arm of its society. The cho-ja warrior held but one directive: to do battle and to kill. In Tsurani conflicts, Lujan had seen companies of the creatures turn a battlefield into a butchery, for unless the weather was cold, the speed and reflexes of a human warrior were inferior. At best, he judged by the humid air that wafted through this chamber, he might get in a few parries before his body was diced up. His passage to Turakamu would be quick and almost painless.
His mouth tipped into a ghost of a crooked grin. If he was lucky, he would be drinking hwaet beer with his old friend Papewaio in Turakamu's halls before sundown.
'Cross the line and commence on my signal,' intoned the cho-ja mage; and it stamped its hind limb against the floor with a sound like the chime of a gong.
Lujan's levity faded. He sprang into the circle, barely aware of the red flare of heat at his back that spelled the activation of the death ward. The cho-ja warrior came on with all of the speed he had anticipated, and he barely completed three steps before his guarding blade clashed into chitin. Against this foe his peril was doubled, for cho-ja possessed two forearms with which to sally and chop at him. He, with his longer blade, had the better reach; and that humans were more naturally inclined to two-legged stance meant he could sometimes snatch the advantage of height as well.
But the cho-ja was superbly armored. Only a lunge with the point or the most hefty of two-handed chops could wreak any damage through chitin. Their joints were their sole point of vulnerability, yet too often their speed precluded tactics. Lujan parried and parried again. His footwork stayed light to deflect the cho-ja's double-sided attack. He squinted, circled, and spun his blade in the tight-knit forms proven over time to best defend against a cho-ja opponent. Blade clashed with chitin as he tested: the creatures usually had preferred sides. The right limb might tend more to guard, while the left was cultivated for attack. Sword and bladed forelimbs whirled in deadly dance. Lujan became aware of a stickiness to his grip; exertion had set him sweating. Inwardly he cursed. Once the leather wrappings of his sword hilt became saturated, they would loosen. His hold might slip, making his bladework sloppy. And against a cho-ja adversary, even the slightest change of angle must be fatal. The strength behind their blows was such that a direct hit on the outer curve of a laminate Tsurani sword could shatter its cutting edge.
Lujan beat back another attack, snapped straight as the guard limb of the cho-ja effected a stroke that would have severed him at the knees. His leap back saved him from harm, but a burning sensation in his heel as he landed warned how near to the edge of the ward circle his evasive maneuver had carried him. He feinted, used a disengage that Kevin the barbarian had taught him, and was nearly fatally surprised when his stroke rasped across chitin and snicked the edge of a leg joint.
The cho-ja warrior hissed and clattered back, its claws stiffened with alarm.
And Lujan was nearly taken in the neck by its return stroke, so unprepared for his small success that he had dangerously overextended. He half turned on reflex and caught a glancing slice in the shoulder that peeled through armor and grazed enough flesh to sting cruelly. The parry he barely brought up to deflect the guard limb jarred him down to his sandals.
It took the spinning leap of an acrobat to escape from being cornered. He ducked away from the milling whirl of the cho-ja's attack, desperately aware of his peril. He needed to catch his breath. The fight would give him no chance. As his toughened hide blade crashed together with chitin again, he used his bracer to deflect the guard blade, while the attack blade whistled for his throat. He lunged, trusting impetus to carry him inside the arc of the cho-ja's main thrust. He hit its jointed forelimb on the unbladed inside of the elbow and it folded, its sharpened side deflected harmlessly against the back plate of his armor.
The blow still had force enough to wind him. Lujan danced back a half-step, to bring his blade back in play, while the cho-ja warrior huffed in astonishment. Lujan followed with the classic riposte, and his curved sword stabbed in at the juncture where a mid-limb joined its thorax. The cho-ja scrabbled back, wounded. Its mid-leg was no longer neatly folded, but dragged, limp at its side. Caught in wonderment that his attack had gone through, Lujan felt the dawn of revelation: these cho-ja were unexperienced at fighting humans! They were well enough schooled to combat the ancient forms of Tsurani swordsmanship that they had faced in ages past. But the shutdown of information across the borders must have prohibited any experience with the innovations that had followed the Tsurani treaty. The newest refinements of bladework introduced by the wars with Midkemia, and styled on their barbarian way of fencing, had never been encountered by the hives outside the Empire. Chakaha's warr
iors held to the old ways, and despite their superior speed, despite their double-bladed style, a Tsurani human held an advantage: his newer techniques were not predictable, and Lujan had drilled against cho-ja warriors in the past.
Thought during battle slowed the warrior; Lujan took a cut to his calf and another to his forearm behind his left-hand bracer. Despite his wounds, he realised that the cho-ja was holding back. Perhaps it was the tiniest bit hesitant because of Lujan's unorthodox attack patterns, because either one of its blows could as easily have lopped off a limb. Something had caused it not to follow through with its full strength and capability.
Lujan paid special heed to his footwork, which was paramount to the Midkemian style. He slapped the cho-ja's next stroke aside as he might have dispatched a practice stick, then tried another disengage. To his gratification, the cho-ja retreated, proving his theory that it did not understand Midkemian fencing tactics.
Lujan grinned in a wild, adrenaline-sharpened exultation. He had crossed practice sticks with Kevin the barbarian many times and, better than most of his peers, had mastered the foreign technique. More suited though it was to a straight sword than to the broader blade his own culture favored, there were forms a Tsurani swordsman could execute with good effect. The cho-ja was now disadvantaged and uncertain, and for the first instant since Lujan had claimed his right to challenge, he entertained the hope of victory.
He feinted, lunged, and felt his next stroke connect. Grinning wider, he saw a spurt of the milky liquid that served the cho-ja as bodily fluid. His opponent dropped briefly to its unwounded mid-limb as it counterattacked; but four-legged posture was sure sign of a cho-ja prepared to retreat. Lujan lunged for his opening, a clear stroke to his foe's neck segment. Never mind that its dying follow-through would take him in the heart. His would be the victory, his the first lethal strike. He would gain the time-honored Tsurani reward of death in battle by an enemy's blade.
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