by Joe Jackson
“Like what, recruitment?”
“Of a sort.”
“You know I can’t serve you without telling everyone I work with – not to mention my deity – all about you, right? It’s been hard enough keeping a shadow over that until the right time to let everyone know,” Kari said, pacing.
“All the more reason for you to make sure you do not lose. Unless you would like to raise the stakes further…?”
“Isn’t this going to be a bit unfair with the differences in our armor? You’re not exactly protected for a full-on, stand-up fight, are you?”
“Come find out.”
“If you insist,” Kari said.
She approached cautiously, her legs tensed and ready to lunge or dodge at a moment’s notice. The Wraith brought his blades up to a ready position and set his feet, but made no move to initiate their battle. He was going to force Kari to come to him, fighting where he was strong and she was weakest. She started to curse the tactics, but then she thought better of it.
I’ve been using this fighting style for the better part of two lifetimes, she thought. She knew its ins and outs. She knew the prescribed movement, parry, dodge, or riposte for just about every angle and depth of attack. There was no reason she couldn’t simply invert her knowledge, using his own style against him. After all, it was how she’d deconstructed and defeated many a fighter over the course of her life. Learn their style, mimic and anticipate it, and then turn that to her advantage.
She inched toward him, keeping her head moving side to side, twitching her shoulders, her neck, and feinting ever so slightly to draw a reaction. He was like a furry statue, those orange eyes never deviating from her own, and he never reacted to one of her movements. Once she was in proper range, she jabbed at him in a lightning-quick motion, but lunged sideways and spun, keeping her wings tucked tight as her blades came around.
He wasn’t there. The Wraith paced to the side out of her range, and she recalled the words of her lover and master, Suler Tumureldi. Avoid fatigue; dodge when you can. Let them strike wind.
Too obvious, she thought. She moved in on him again, pacing back and forth in semi-circles to close the gap between them. When Kari was back in range, she simplified things, coming straight at him and trying to drive him to one side or another. He gave ground; he had that luxury here in the fields with only knee-length grass and soft soil beneath them. Still he refused to counterstrike, but she could hardly fault him: she had yet to come anywhere near landing a blow on him.
Kari double-stepped to close the gap faster, but hopped back in anticipation of the long-awaited counterattack. When one of his blades came up to stave off her advance, she struck at it, instinctually trying to knock it from his hand. The clash of their weapons produced a loud clang that drew the attention of some nearby farmers, but Kari ignored them. She had his weapon out of position, and she danced to the side, ready to capitalize on his coming correction, when she realized her mistake. She paused mid-stride and spun the other way, ducking low and trying to strike on the other side, where he wouldn’t be expecting her to attack.
His right blade swept out as she had expected, but his left came in her direction at the same time. He blocked her swing, turning with her and forcing her to give ground as she straightened out again. His blades were longer, allowing him to pressure her more easily, and she finally found herself under assault. This was her comfort zone, though, and she fell into her routine, keeping him moving forward but fruitlessly.
She set up a riposte and baited him into it, a little too easily. She abandoned her planned counterattack, expecting a reversal, and instead she stepped in and kicked straight into his gut. He turned to take the blow on the hip, and she had to parry a sudden backhanded swing. Instinct took over and she readied herself to catch the spinning slash that would almost surely follow.
Stars exploded behind her eyes as instead of a spinning slash, he brought up the foot that had deflected her kick and unleashed one of his own. His build may have looked lean and even a bit scrawny, but his foot struck her like a lance held by a knight at full gallop. Kari staggered back but kept her instincts about her; she wove a defensive pattern with her blades while she got her wits back, and she marked his circling as she finally shook the stars away. She could taste a bit of blood in her mouth, but the damage was superficial.
“It never ceases to amaze me how fast you and Seanada are,” Kari said, cautiously moving to meet him again.
“I may be old, but I have been at this a long time,” he said. He feinted toward Kari and she tensed, but didn’t give ground. “Come now. You have only minutes to defeat me and save your friends. Stop delaying and bring the fight to me.”
Kari quick-stepped straight forward several times, closing inside his range. Her best option was to force him to strike at her, but if he refused to, then she needed to take him down by her own skills. He moved defensively, setting up a barrier of shadowy blades and potential kicks between them, but still only held Kari at bay without attacking. If his scenario was truth, then all he would have to do is stall her until all hope was lost and he received reinforcements or her friends were dead. In a contest where she didn’t have the luxury of time, she had to be able to punch through his defenses and be a better-balanced fighter.
She moved to attack, projecting her own defensive tactics onto him. She met each of his parries with a taunting strike, moved in tandem with each dodge, brushed aside each riposte in a dazzling display that would have terrified her had she been on the receiving end of it. Armed with the knowledge of his defensive style, she broke through his defenses. She turned so that a thrusting kick merely glanced off of her, and aimed for one of the deadlier weak points in his armor between groin and thigh-guard.
Kari had him dead to rights, she was sure of it, and she pulled up on her attack before she ran the risk of groining him or slicing the tendons of his upper thigh. She was proud of herself, but his fist came across her snout with dizzying force, causing her to see stars again. He pulled back on her hair, punched her throat, and then pulled her face down into his rising knee. Kari was hardly cognizant of what happened after that, but came to, at least partially, when she felt her left elbow being hyperextended in preparation of breaking.
“Stop, stop!” she cried.
“No,” he said, continuing to put pressure on it. “You nearly cut my leg off; why did you stop? Do you think the princes or kings are going to bow to you if you threaten to kill them but pull back at the last moment? This is not a sport, Kari. You are not playing football. We do not reset the players when you score a goal. When you strike, you strike to kill, and you do not ever hesitate, because no prince or king will give you a second chance. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she moaned through gritted teeth, waiting for him to release her.
He didn’t. Kari’s arm snapped in half at the elbow, and it was all she could do not to vomit as the shock of the wound stabbed into her mind. He slammed her face-first into the dirt and put his knee between her wings. Kari groaned in pain, trying to pull free to tend to her now defunct arm, but he had all his weight on her and didn’t seem intent on letting her go.
“I know, such a display with Tumureldi would have doubtless led to the two of you making love under the twilight. That is not going to happen between us, Kari. When you fail me, I am going to make you suffer for it. Force you to redouble your efforts and seek to never make the same mistake twice. You must trust that if I want you to try killing me, then it is not as easy as you assume. If I was fearful of the damage you could do to me, we would be wielding sticks. Do not ever hold back on me again, do you understand?”
“Yes,” she managed through the pain.
He tugged on the broken arm slightly, just enough to make Kari retch. “I do not believe I heard you correctly.”
“Yes, Master,” she whimpered.
The Wraith took his knee off of her spine and turned her over. She lost her breakfast in the grass as he straightened her arm out and set it.
He was looking at it through his goggles, and he wrapped it up in a bandage when he was satisfied. “This should heal by tomorrow if I know your regenerative properties as well as I suspect. Your lesson is done for the day. Go eat and rest, and tomorrow, we begin in earnest.”
“My re…regenerative properties?” she huffed, trying to get her breathing steady again.
“Surely by now you realize you heal much more quickly than is typical even for one of your half-guardians, no? I suspect it has something to do with your relationship with Sakkrass, but that is merely a hypothesis. The lizardfolk are the only ones I have ever heard of possessing such regenerative abilities.”
Kari sat up, the pain sharp and throbbing but not vomit-inducing anymore. “You’ve spent time among the czarikk?” she asked.
“No. The lizardfolk have been gone from Mehr’Durillia since long before I was born. There are tales, but they are sparse and incomplete. But I remember a figure of speech from my childhood that referred to cutting off a czarikk tail to watch it grow back. I cannot think of any other reason why you might heal the way you do.”
Kari touched her chin where Turillia had nearly split her jaw in two, then her side where Annabelle had stabbed her hard with a longsword. She had traces of stretch marks on her belly from carrying two children, but they weren’t pronounced, and she had no scars from the other wounds she’d suffered in recent years. She thought of how quickly she recovered from the births of her children compared to the priests’ expectations, and how soon after those births she had her body back in fighting form.
Is this a blessing from Sakkrass? she wondered. She looked at her bandaged arm and flexed her bicep, curling it a little at the elbow. Pain shot through the joint, but it was working again, however agonizingly. She looked up at the Wraith, now on his feet and watching her through those emotion-hiding goggles.
“I still can’t believe you broke my arm,” she said, gripping the wound as the pain calmed. “Did you ever do that to Seanada?”
“Not that specifically, no. She does not possess the healing abilities you do. But rest assured, she was punished when she failed. Both of them were,” he answered, and he waved off her follow-up question before she could ask it. “I would rather not speak of such things. Should Seanada like to tell you of her training, or impart some of it to you, she is free to do so.”
Kari nodded but then looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Next time, I’m going to take your privates off,” she said, half-joking.
“Good. I expect nothing less. You let me worry about how to explain it to my wife.” He smiled ever so slightly, and Kari laughed. He held his hand out to her, and she put her good one in it and got to her feet. “Come, let us go get something to eat. Your breakfast does you no good spread out here on the field.”
*****
The following days progressed much like the first – only without broken arms. After their initial sparring, wherein he was gauging her abilities, the Wraith began to teach Kari in earnest. She began to see things from the opposite point of view, a bit like she’d glimpsed in their first contest. As opposed to her more defensive style, the Wraith showed her how to accomplish the same things in a more offensive routine, and how to switch between them.
In Tumureldi’s style, each defensive motion was designed not just to protect, but to also move one’s opponent toward a specific goal. Each dodge was intended not just to avoid a blow, but to get the enemy where you wanted them, expose a hole in their defenses, or frustrate them into abandoning all semblance of control. Parries were not just blocks, but setups to disarm, to instill fatigue, and to taunt and humiliate. Suler’s devastating ripostes were the lifeblood of the style, capitalizing on any mistake to disarm, to disable, or to kill.
The Wraith’s offensive counterpart served much the same purpose from an opposite view. Each strike was not intended solely to kill, but to evoke a response. Just as Kari usually drew her opponents into her defensive web, the Wraith taught her to drive opponents into one, albeit an ineffective one, by turning their own defenses against them. Throughout the lessons, Kari couldn’t help but recall Koursturaux’ words about chess, and foreseeing an enemy’s moves.
The Wraith was highly effective, especially when he wasn’t stalling to take Kari out of her comfortable routines. Engaged in full-on offense, he drove her to her limits, and Kari was forced to call upon every technique, ruse, feint, and countermeasure she had ever learned or adapted. Each of his attacks brought a reaction from her, and she found quite often that she played right into his hands. But, as he’d suggested, it took her only days for the lessons to truly sink in.
It was the same exact style.
Whereas the more defense-oriented lessons of Suler assumed enemies would attack and play right into Kari’s hands, the Wraith’s style required no such aggression. He turned the style around, using aggression to force enemies to either meet it with aggression of their own – which played right into the defensive side – or else be buried under a flurry they couldn’t likely survive. Offense flowed into defense, and defense flowed into offense. It was a perfectly reciprocal style, one Kari had been learning to adapt to over the years, even having only learned one side.
She recalled her fight with Ressallk and realized she had done this before to some extent. She had pressed him to the point of frustration and panic, and his reactions had put him squarely where Kari wanted him: in the depths of her defensive web. So many applications came to mind: she thought of Koursturaux’ chess-playing; of her battle with Ressallk; even of the Rulaj Reds playing football. There was no offense and defense; they were two parts of the same whole, and one flowed into the other, like the ancient yin-yang symbol that hung in the dojo where she and her brother-in-law Aeligos trained.
“You will have one other distinct advantage over your enemies,” the Wraith said as their lessons came to a close on the final day.
Though she’d come close, Kari had never managed to wound him – not seriously, anyway. She nicked him now and then, and he bruised her through the paluric armor, but even after nearly two weeks, neither was that much worse for the wear. But she had upheld her part of the bargain, and ceased holding back. She was fearful she might gravely wound or even kill him, but trusted him to know her abilities as well as his own. And know her he had, as evidenced by her inability to maim or kill him, even when sparring at full force.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Your reputation,” he answered. Kari shook her head, confused, so he elaborated, “You are known on both our worlds as a defensive master. Your enemies know what to expect, little good though it does them. Now, however, you are better prepared to fight them where they think they are stronger than you, and that is going to be a major advantage for you.”
“So, am I perfect now?”
He shrugged, apparently taking her question seriously. “None of us ever reach that; there is always someone out there stronger, faster, better-trained in some area. Or perhaps just luckier on any given day. Remember that all it takes is a loose stone, a slick patch of mud, a sudden cramp in your gut – any number of things outside of your control can go wrong in a fight. The best we do is make certain that our martial prowess is never the unknown variable. But none of us is ever truly perfect.”
Kari nodded. “How long do I owe you my services for?”
He met her stare with those orange eyes, his goggles resting on his forehead. “You owe me nothing. I made the false wager simply to give you incentive to fight with all of your heart and mind. Had you not held back, you may well have set me on a cot beside Seanada at the very least. I have no need of making you a servant; we have many common goals, and I am satisfied having you as an ally, not a servant.”
“Just let me know what you need, and I’ll do what I can.”
The Wraith made a strange gesture. “For the time being, I need tell you something and ask you a favor. This form is unknown to my people, as I said the first night I trained you.”
“Is Shadak
your real name, though?” Kari asked, referring to the moniker he had given the innkeeper and the people around town.
“It is not. But it is the name I go by when I must show others my true form. You will learn my true name in time, when it is safe for me to reveal such. But for now, this form you know as Shadak, and the dark mass you know as the Wraith. You are the only person that knows they are the same. Seanada does not know that the Wraith and Shadak are the same person. She has only ever seen the black mass, as is the case with all of my people. This is a secret I must implore you to keep.”
“Why reveal yourself to me, though?”
“Mainly for the sake of your child,” he said, and Kari bobbed her head. “However, you are Salvation’s Dawn, and represent a great hope that I, even as an elestram, am willing to wager my future upon.”
“What do you know about Salvation’s Dawn?” Kari asked, intrigued.
“Little but that the kings are extremely interested in you. I think where they anticipate an opportunity for greater power, there lies instead an opportunity for their destruction.” He turned toward her and gestured back and forth between their heads. “You and I see things differently than most. Just as the styles you’ve learned reciprocate offense and defense, so too does most anything in life. Where there is opportunity for great gain, there is likewise opportunity for great loss. Consider for just a moment the involvement of King Morduri. He is an elestram; if he has chosen you as his proxy or even champion, then he knows the odds of success are in his favor, or at least close enough to risk everything.”
Kari hadn’t considered that. She had joked with Morduri about the odds of her success, but he declined to give her any. Had he been nervous that telling her she was likely to succeed might make her too confident or arrogant? Was the mathematical mind behind those purple eyes calculating the odds of Kari succeeding in her plans, in deposing the Overking, and perhaps even in freeing Mehr’Durillia from the kings as a whole?