Both Brock and Zelnikov turned to their supporters, and waved them to silence. Nobody wanted a fool for a Kazarkhan, and who else would defy the wishes of the petrus?
“I see two men, two Kazarkhans. Are there any more amongst us who would serve?” he asked.
There were some catcalls, a jeer, and an outburst of laughter, but no more volunteers.
“Then we have two,” the elder said, nodding as if he had expected nothing else, “but, as Kazarkhan, two men cannot take the place of one. Shall we vote, my family, like the peasants, or shall we leave the decision to the hidden hands of our ancestors, and the invisible and indivisible favour of Ushoran?”
“Ushoran,” the crowd roared. Their enthusiasm was so great that it hid the unease that lay behind most of their eyes. The Striganies’ god was, after all, not a god to be summoned lightly.
The elder allowed himself a small, cynical smile, and then stepped back. The two would-be Kazarkhans turned to look at each other, their shared predicament making them brothers in this moment, just as it would make them murderous foes in the next.
“Then, my family, we shall allow those who walk silently among us to decide,” the elder said, and the voice of the crowd died. “As you know, there are many who follow our caravans, many who would protect us for as long as we honour our customs. Sharp of tooth, some are, or twisted limbed, or terrible in ways that you cannot imagine.”
The elder’s voice dropped as he spoke, but, in the breathless hush of the amphitheatre, that hardly mattered. The terror of their lore had always been a match for the terrors of the Empire, and, of all the petrus, the elder was the most adept at playing upon it, like a musician on some terrible harp.
“Not a pin drops,” he continued, “without those who follow us hearing it, not a word spoken or a deed done. Ushoran’s legions are all seeing and everywhere: in the shadows of your wagons, in the secrecy of your thoughts, and, here, among us, waiting to judge.”
The silence of the amphitheatre was as complete as that of the void between the stars that glittered above. The only sounds came from the camp beyond: the sobbing of children, the hushed voices of their mothers, and the whinnying of horses. Those who were already asleep murmured, as shade passed through their dreams, and, somewhere, a man screamed.
“So, I ask you again,” the elder asked, the whiplash of his voice hardly rising above a whisper, “in the contest for Kazarkhan, will you accept the judgement of unseen Ushoran?”
There was no reply. Then, a man stood, his hair a white flash in the gloom. He raised his hand in salute, and shouted the single word, “Ushoran!”
The amphitheatre exploded as, wild with an enthusiasm that bordered on hysteria, every man repeated the name of their terrible god. The elder let them continue, until he realised how loose the joints of the amphitheatre were becoming under the stamping of their feet.
“Then so be it,” he bellowed, waving them to silence. “We have cast our die. Now, let us see,” he said, grinning with a bloodthirsty enthusiasm, “how they fall for our two Kazarkhans. Strip, my brothers,” he commanded them, and they did.
Brock, lost in the world of the ordeal ahead, unbuckled his belt and pulled off his tunic.
“Here, I’ll take it.”
Brock turned to find Mihai standing beside him. He hid his surprise at seeing that his son had braved the wrath of the petrus to step into the ring.
“Thanks,” he said, grateful for the sight of Mihai’s face before the contest began.
He carried on undressing, slipping off his boots, until all he wore was a loincloth. He had had it bleached white this morning, in case this moment came, but, now that it had, he realised that it made absolutely no difference anymore.
What did make a difference was the sight of Mihai.
Brock shifted awkwardly.
“Mihai…” he began, and then trailed off. “I want you to know…”
He struggled to find the words, any words. Why couldn’t he tell his son that he was proud of him? That he loved him?
Mihai saw the helplessness in his father’s eyes, and understood, and with the understanding came a sudden fear. It had never occurred to him that his father could lose, until now.
“Win for us, domnu,” he said.
Brock suddenly found himself unable to speak. Instead, he gripped his son by the shoulder, his fingers squeezing hard enough to bruise the flesh, and nodded.
Then, not trusting the stinging in his eyes, he turned back to face his opponent. The bald man looked equally subdued by the moment. Brock noted that, although he carried a lot of weight, it was muscle more than fat, and, despite his bulk, the man moved with the easy grace of a swordsman.
Brock, his own form as scarred and sinewy as a vipers, stepped forwards to slap his hand against his opponent’s.
The elder looked on with approval. Then, he bid them step back to opposite ends of the amphitheatre. When they had taken their places, he raised his staff and said simply, “One man leaves here as Kazarkhan.”
He paused, enjoying the hush.
“The other leaves as a corpse.”
The crowd sighed with what could almost have been pleasure.
“Begin!”
So saying, the elder slipped away from the two men, as they closed in on each other.
* * *
Brock and Zelnikov approached each other with a painful slowness. The seconds stretched out into minutes, as Brock, shoulders low and fingers outstretched, drew closer to his opponent. He could see the fear in his eyes, and it would have given him some comfort if he hadn’t known that the same emotion was reflected in his own.
Death in combat was seldom easy, He knew, from long, hard, bloody experience that death in combat was seldom easy, but death in unarmed combat…
Zelnikov made his move.
The big man screamed as he charged, a curiously falsetto sound for somebody so large. There was fear in the sound, and rage. Mostly, though, it was the desperation of a man whose existence has been reduced to the stark monochrome choice of kill or be killed.
Brock, his single eye widening, and his yellow teeth bared, leapt forward to meet his opponent. He slapped aside the punch that would have broken his jaw, and sprang to one side, spinning to punch the hard blade of his curled fingers into the man’s kidneys.
Zelnikov was an old enough brawler to have learned the painful lessons of an exposed back before. As soon as he realised that Brock was behind him, he fell, rolled, and bounced back to his feet.
The crowd roared their approval.
The sound goaded Brock, as he made his attack. He kept himself small and compact, hands held loosely to his chest, as he closed in on the big man, who jabbed at him with a punch.
This time, the blow caught Brock on the side of the head. The skin was torn open, and, as the first blood of the contest spattered across the ground, the crowd leapt to its feet, their voices merging into a wall of sound.
Brock ignored the sound, just as he ignored the pain, and the bright lights that flew through his field of vision like sparks. Zelnikov jabbed another fist up towards his chin, in what could have been a paralysing blow, but Brock was close enough to grab his opponent’s throat.
He felt the tickle of the man’s beard as he squeezed, snarling like a wolf, as his eye glittered with the savage joy of victory.
Zelnikov fell back, an expression of surprise on his mottling face. He punched Brock in the side, twice with each fist, and hard enough to snap one of his ribs.
Brock ignored the blows. His grip grew tighter.
Zelnikov, the first flash of panic shining in his bulging eyes, dug his fingers into the bundles of nerves hidden in his opponent’s armpits. Pain flared through Brock’s body, and his bared teeth opened as he screamed with agony.
Not that it did Zelnikov any good. Even as he adjusted his grip to twist a fresh symphony of pain from the one-eyed man who was strangling him, his strength was fading. His knees suddenly gave, and he fell backwards, twisting, so that B
rock was beneath him.
They lay together in the dirt, as close as lovers, as Brock choked the last few inches of Zelnikov’s life from him. The bigger man’s eyes rolled up, as white as Mannslieb above the forest of his beard.
Brock bit down the pity that twisted so treacherously within him. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t killed before. The bones of his victims lay scattered all over the battlegrounds of his younger days. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t killed this close before, either, or this slowly, brutally, or painfully.
When it came right down to it, Brock thought, killing your enemy, before he killed you, was every Strigany’s duty.
Even so, the joy of victory curdled into grim determination as his victim’s struggles became as weak as the fluttering of a bird. Brock shifted his weight, and prepared to put him out of both of their misery.
That was when he collapsed.
Brock had never felt the like of it before. It was as if every bone in his body had been dissolved, every muscle flensed. He couldn’t even draw breath to scream, and even the endless rhythm of his pulse paused.
His fingers slipped from Zelnikov’s grizzled throat, and he rolled away from his enemy’s body onto the flattened ground below.
So this was what the elder meant by the will of Ushoran, he thought, as he lay, pulseless and unbreathing in the circle of the amphitheatre.
Ushoran.
His heart started. He sucked in a great gasping breath, and his limbs thrashed as his muscles twitched back into life. His vision cleared, too, just in time to see the grubby heel that Zelnikov was smashing down onto his throat.
Brock moved, but not quickly enough. He saw the calluses and spiralled grooves of Zelnikov’s foot, and then nothing but a blinding flash of pain, as it crunched down onto his nose.
Zelnikov raised his foot to stamp down again. It was a mistake. Brock seized his ankle and twisted, throwing the big man off-balance, and using his staggering form to pull himself up off the floor.
Fingers flashed towards his throat, and he bit down. There was a crunch of gristle and a scream. A fist clipped against his head. He staggered back and raised his knee, the joint thudding into flesh.
Suddenly, the two men found themselves standing alone, lurching away from the ground they had bloodied.
Brock shook his head, ignoring the constellation of dancing lights and spattering blood drops. He ignored the pain, too, the broken-boned, shattered cartilage pain. The only thing that he couldn’t ignore was the knowledge that, at the moment of victory, Ushoran had spoken.
His head lowered like a bull’s, and he watched Zelnikov massaging his throat. The bruises were already dark enough to be seen in the lamp light. So, he thought, that is the man Ushoran wants to win.
Well, to hell with Ushoran.
I am Kazarkhan.
I will win.
With that thought, he flung himself into a fresh attack.
He had almost reached his target when, with a whoosh of air escaping from his collapsing chest, his strength vanished, and he tumbled forwards into Zelnikov’s fist.
Petru Engel hadn’t been concerned when Brock had met his challenger. He had known the domnu since he had been a child, and had no doubt that his ferocity would be enough to win the day.
It wasn’t until the petru felt the pricking in his thumbs that he realised that something was wrong. Of course, he had told himself, none of his fellows would use their craft to interfere in such a contest. In business, or war, or politics, then yes, perhaps, but not here. It would break every taboo, every principle of their lore.
Brock had collapsed at his moment of victory, and, as the hair had risen on the back of Engel’s neck, he had known it. Someone was willing to interfere with the contest.
As Brock had fallen, the petru had leapt to his feet to look around at his fellows. Most of them were straining forward, lost in the bloody struggle beneath them. A few, though, were glancing around, their expressions as shocked as Engel’s own.
He locked eyes with one of them, a hook-nosed man, who he had never seen before. The man nodded in understanding, and Engel knew that he had not been the only one to have felt the violation.
Together, the two of them returned to looking for the culprit.
Engel found that his gaze was skittering uselessly over the dozens of black-robed figures that surrounded him. He paused, closed his eyes and took a breath.
Then he looked again.
Brock and Zelnikov had rolled clear of each other to stand as patiently as animals in a slaughterhouse. Petru Engel searched the crowd, the faces that were twisted in fear, or horror, or good old-fashioned bloodlust.
Then Brock charged, and, as he collapsed once more, Engel saw his man.
He was thin-faced and grey-haired, and, although he was dressed in the leather tunic and sack cloth breeches of a butcher, he was like no butcher that Engel had ever seen. As the men around him roared and stamped their feet, and hurled abuse and advice at the two battling men below, this one sat as still as a doll, his dark eyes hooded, his fingers interlaced, and his features composed.
“You!” Engel yelled at him, but to no avail. As Brock had gone down, the crowd had leapt to its feet, wild with the anticipation of a kill.
Engel pushed his way through his fellows, tripping down towards the ring. When he got to the edge, he gathered up his robes, ready to leap over the edge, so as to race across the pit to stop this rogue petru.
Before he could jump, however, he saw the elder appear behind his foe. The men around him leapt out of his way without quite realising why, and he emerged from the crowd like a black granite rock from the waves.
The false butcher, all of his attention fixed on his work, had no idea of the doom that was upon him. The elder reached out, and, with a gentle caress, he gripped the back of the man’s neck.
The man’s hooded eyes flickered open, and his mouth opened in a wide “O” of surprise. Then, with a sudden convulsion, he collapsed back onto his seat, as dead as a bag of meat.
The elder looked up, met Engel’s eyes, and smiled. Then, as the crowd roared at another twist in the vicious combat below, he melted back into their ranks, unseen and unheard.
The domnus, unaware of what had happened, closed back in after he had passed, and apart from the cooling corpse of the rogue petru, which lay, as yet unnoticed, at their feet, the elder might never have been there.
This time, when Brock recovered, he realised that it was too late. He was held face down on the floor, his arm twisted so far behind him that the gristle was being chewed up by the bones of his shoulder. Meanwhile, Zelnikov was searching for the arteries in his neck, eager to return the favour of his earlier strangulation.
Brock waited until he felt the big man’s fingertips, before he twisted away, throwing all of his weight into a manoeuvre that threw Zelnikov off him, even as it tore his arm from its socket.
The domnu howled with pain, and, his limb dangling uselessly beside him, he took his one chance to finish the fight: his only chance, his forlorn chance.
As Zelnikov rolled to his feet, Brock leapt forward, taking the blinding impact of his opponent’s open palm on his already smashed nose, and stamping down onto one of his knees.
The blow connected, tearing off a knee cap so that it slid down beneath the skin of Zelnikov’s shin. He fell, and Brock, stepping back, twisted a kick up under the black bushel of his beard.
Zelnikov’s head snapped back and he collapsed onto his back. His eyes fluttered shut. Before they could flutter open, Brock fell upon him.
Crippled by the loss of his arm, he had no choice in the manner of his opponent’s execution. This would be no soft strangulation, or swift snap of the spine.
This would be nothing so civilised.
Brock’s lips snarled back to reveal teeth that were as strong and as yellow as a wolfs. Half delirious with pain, blood on fire with adrenaline, it didn’t take much for him to bend over the grizzled hair of Zelnikov’s neck, ignore the taste of sweat, and bit
e down.
Brock found himself growling as his teeth ripped at his opponent’s flesh. Blood spurted, hot and sickening, and, as he swallowed it, he began to choke with vomit.
Still, even as he heaved, and the hot spray of vomit vented through the closed cage of his teeth and the ruined meat of his nose, Brock paused only to spit out the first gobbet of flesh, and fasten his teeth back into Zelnikov’s throat.
The big man regained consciousness, but it was already too late. His life was escaping through one torn artery, and Brock was busily chewing his way through the other.
All the big man could do was scream as he died, a terrible, gurgling sound that Brock would never forget, could never forget.
Later, Zelnikov lay still, his throat a red ruin all the way down to his pink vertebrae. Brock sat beside him, his one eye glassy, his features torn and bruised, his head and chest covered with Zelnikov’s blood and his own.
Then the chanting started.
It began from Zelnikov’s own ranks: a single word, a single throated roar that pounded through Brock’s shock like the waves of some terrible ocean pounding against a mysterious shore.
“Kazarkhan.”
Already, the chant had spread to the rest of the amphitheatre, and the assembled dignitaries were on their feet, stamping and pounding their fists into their palms to mark each syllable of the honorific.
“Kazarkhan.”
Brock didn’t want to get up. He didn’t want to move at all. He just wanted to lie next to the body of his opponent, and wait for the ravens.
Even through the fog of his shock, he knew that what he wanted didn’t come into it. He was Kazarkhan, he was his people’s war leader.
He got to his feet, and the chanting disintegrated into a roar of approval. Brock grinned, bearing his teeth in a pink crescent that belied the deadness of his eyes. Then he raised the limb that hadn’t been broken in a salute.
“For Ushoran,” he bellowed, pink flecks of spittle flying from his mouth, and his one eye glittering madly.
The crowd roared the name back at him, and Brock’s grin grew wider.
The elder had emerged from the shadows to stand beside Brock. He saw that the man was bloodied, battered, dazed with shock, and half dead with pain, yet, he was grinning.
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