The Blade

It came off the throne without hurrying.

That was the first thing and it was wrong in a way he could not immediately place.

He had been in perhaps forty fights by then. Everything he had ever faced had started a fight the same way, which was suddenly. A thing decided, and then the thing was moving, and the deciding and the moving were one event.

This got up.

It came down off the throne at the pace of somebody who has finished sitting, and it had something in its right hand that it had been holding low beside the chair, and at no point in the descent was it hurrying.

He looked at what was in its hand and then made himself stop looking, because it was hard to look at.

By the time he understood that the fight had started, it was inside ten feet.

* * * *

He opened well.

He would hold onto that afterward for a while, until he understood what it was worth.

He gave half a pace to make it come to him, which he had learned in a cellar in the third month. He kept the throne on his weak side so its height could not be used against him. He put his weight where it belonged, which under that room's weight was harder than it had ever been, and he held it there.

Then he cut at the shoulder, high, on the side away from its lead foot. It was the best opening available and he had seen it and taken it inside a second and a half.

He landed nothing.

* * * *

Nothing at all in the first minute.

A dozen attempts. Four of them good by any standard he had. Two of them the kind that Maren would have said nothing about, which was her highest praise.

Every angle he found was already closed.

That was the specific and horrible quality of it. He would see a way in and commit, and the way in would not be there, and it would not be there because it had stopped being there a quarter of a second before he arrived. The closing had started before he finished deciding.

He was not being blocked. Blocking is a response.

He was arriving at places that had already been made safe.

And the thing in its right hand never came up. It held it low, point down, the way a man holds a walking stick he has forgotten he is carrying. Whatever it answered him with came from its left hand, or its shoulder, or the flat of a bare foot. The blade stayed where it was.

* * * *

In the second minute he understood that he was not being beaten.

He was being measured.

Every opening he had taken had been offered. The shoulder. The low line at the third exchange, which had looked enormous at the time. The gap on the left when it turned toward the lake as though something there needed watching.

A thing that offers you four openings that do not work is not defending itself.

It was finding out what he did.

* * * *

The dais was not solid either.

He found that out at the end of the second minute, when he set his back foot for a drive and the dais under the heel was not there to push against. Not gone. Smooth, suddenly, the way the stone on the lake had gone smooth, and his foot slid a hand's width and his drive went nowhere.

He corrected. The dais gripped again. He did not trust it again for the rest of the fight, and every step he took after that he took as though the floor might change its mind, which cost him and which he could not afford not to pay.

The crystals on the walls had turned to face the dais. They did not fire. He kept waiting for them to fire and they went on facing him, and the waiting was its own weight on top of the other one.

* * * *

The armour saved him twice.

The first time was the pauldron. Something came across the top of the shoulder that should have taken the shoulder, and the steel rang so hard his left ear stopped working for a while.

The second time was the breastplate, and he did not see what caused it, and he was two paces further back with no memory of travelling there and the heat of the lake close behind his heels.

Both times he was aware that the plate had done a thing his body could not have done. It had been made for somebody. It had been kept for somebody. A panel had issued it to him on a wet morning at a breakfast table, and it had twice been the only reason he was still standing on the dais.

* * * *

The finger of play in the shoulder saved him once more.

That was the third one and it was the strangest.

Something came in high and the plate was a fraction too big for him, and the fraction was the whole difference. The blow landed on steel that was not quite against his body, and the steel moved before the body did, and the force went sideways instead of through.

If the plate had fitted him, it would have gone through.

He had the rest of his life because a woman in a room over a stable had found half a hole's worth of leather, and had then said out loud, in eight words, that the shoulders were still a finger loose.

He did not have time to think about that. He thought about it anyway, at speed, while other things were happening, and then it was gone.

* * * *

He heard himself counting.

One count. Two count.

It was under his breath and it had presumably been running since the corridor.

He did not stop it. The count cut the fight into pieces the size of one exchange, and a piece that size was survivable, and if every piece was survivable then the fight could look after itself.

It did not help, in the sense that he was not winning.

It helped in the other sense, which was that he was still on the dais.

And somewhere in the fourth minute he heard that he was not the only one making a sound.

The goblin was humming.

Low, barely above its breathing, under the ring of steel and the slow crack of the lake. Four notes, and then the same four again. He did not know the tune. He had never heard it. It went on the whole time the thing was taking him apart, at the unhurried pace of somebody working at a bench, and he realised after a while that his count and its four notes had fallen into step with each other, and he could not have said which of them had moved to meet the other.

* * * *

It was not angry.

He understood that in the fifth minute and it was worse than if it had been.

He knew what angry looked like. A great many things had been angry at him, and every one had been legible: they came harder, or faster, or with less care for themselves, and the anger made them worse at what they did.

This had none of that in it. Its breathing had not changed. He was close enough to hear it, under the humming, and it was the breathing of a creature standing still.

It was not enjoying itself either. He checked, because he had met two things that had enjoyed it and knew the difference at once.

There was nothing on its face at all. Only attention.

* * * *

Then he understood the rest of it.

It was not trying to win.

A thing that is trying to win is in some danger of losing. That is what trying means. Every fight he had ever been in had contained, on both sides, the possibility of going the other way, and everything either side did was shaped by it.

This had never at any moment been in danger. It was not managing a risk. There was no risk. There was a small thin creature on an island in a lake of fire, performing a sequence of movements correctly at a pace it had chosen, against a man in issued plate who could not touch it.

He did not know what it was finding out. He only knew it was not finished.

* * * *

He kept going. There was nothing else to do.

He got worse in the sixth minute and knew it. His left arm had stopped being useful somewhere in the fifth and he had adjusted, which cost him reach. The plate that had saved him three times was now, in that doubled weight, the reason he was late to places, and his legs had begun to shake in the way legs shake at the top of a long climb.

He landed one hit in the seventh minute.

It was a real one. It went in above the hip on the right side, a clean cut on a committed line, and for a second and a half something enormous went through him.

The blade did not go in.

It arrived and stopped, the way his axe had stopped the first time he swung it wrong at Ashfield and the shock had come back up the handle into his elbow. There was no cut. There was no mark. There was silver skin, and his edge resting against it, and nothing had happened to either.

The goblin shifted its stance by about four inches and carried on.

That was all. No stagger, no sound, no change in the humming. He had struck it as hard as he had ever struck anything, and it had adjusted its feet.

He would remember that longer than any of the rest of it.

* * * *

He went down at eleven minutes.

Something came across the shoulder. Not the pauldron this time. He never worked out how. Afterward he suspected the pauldron had been moved out of the way earlier, by something in an exchange that had looked like a miss.

A hand. Not the blade. It had still not lifted the blade once. A small hand, with claws on it, went into the joint of his shoulder and opened him.

The pain was enormous and it was the wet field again, and he knew this one, and knew what it meant, which was that he had perhaps a few seconds of use left in that side.

His sword went. It did not break. It came out of a hand that had stopped being able to close, and it skidded across the dais to the edge and over, and he heard it go into the lake with a sound like a stone into mud.

His knees stopped taking instruction.

The dais came up hot against his cheek.

* * * *

He was on his side.

He could see, from there, the lake beyond the dais edge, moving slowly under its skin, and the stones standing out of it, and the path he had come by.

He could see the goblin's feet, a few paces away, not hurrying.

He was not frightened.

He examined that afterward and could never account for it. He had been frightened at the eighth minute in a pit a month ago. He had been frightened at a mile and a half in a valley by a shape on a slope.

Here, on hot stone, with his shoulder opened and his sword gone into fire, there was nothing. There was a great deal of pain and a considerable amount of arithmetic and no fear at all.

The count was still running.

One count. Two count.

The humming had stopped.

* * * *

The blade rose.

He watched it come up in the small thin hand, and for the first time in eleven minutes he let himself look at it properly, because there was nothing else left to look at.

It was not metal.

It was the shape of a blade, and the shape was all it had agreed to. Its surface was squares, purple and black, small and even, set against each other like a board for a game nobody had taught him. Parts of it were not there. Not broken off: absent, gaps in the shape of the blade with the light of the lake coming straight through them. Its edges did not keep still. They slipped a little against the air, and the air near them had gone to small squares too, as though the blade were spoiling everything close to it.

He had seen that once before. On a pane, on his first morning, at the edge of a map that knew only where he had been.

It was the grey. It was the part nobody had drawn.

There was a moment at the top of the arc, and the moment was not hesitation. It was simply the top of an arc.

Three count.

He would have said, afterward, that he did not think about the disc.

He would have been right. He went over it in the following days and could find no decision anywhere in it. There had been no moment in which the disc occurred to him. No weighing, no choosing, no instant of I have a way out of this.

Four count.

His hand went to his collar.

* * * *

It went the way it had been drilled.

Not to the belt. Not to the right side, forward of the hip, where the other two were and where a hand takes a third of a second to travel.

To the cord under his shirt, flat against his chest, where he had put one of them on the fourth day after dying, because a third of a second was not a number he had been prepared to accept any more.

His hand did not have to travel.

It had no distance to cover and no decision to make, because a man sitting on a fountain edge four months into his life had spent an afternoon making certain that this exact motion would happen without anybody being consulted.

The disc was warm.

* * * *

He never saw the blade come down.

That was the thing he wanted, afterward, and did not get. He had a great many questions about that room: about the town, and the loaves that were all one loaf, and the flame that did the same three things forever, and the small curled thing in the corridor, and the four notes. The answers to some of them might have been in the last half second.

There was the top of an arc.

There was a hand at a collar that had not been sent there.

And then there was no room.