Against the Empire: The Dominion and Michian (26 page)

Alec rose to his feet, took another stab at Scarle, pinking him in the right shoulder, then stepped back. The man dropped his sword in pain, then looked at Alec. He raised his hand in salute, and as he did, the Canare swordsman unexpectedly swung hard, aiming at the Scarle’s unprotected ribcage. Seeing the foul play, Alec dove forward, blocking Canare’s deadly thrust, but feeling his own sword shudder painfully as he did. Alec redirected the cheap thrust into the ground, but as he did so, his own sword snapped off just a foot above the hilt. Astonished, Alec stepped back and stared at the sword.

The Scarle swordsman took advantage of his rescue to concede and limp rapidly away from the battle ring, and Alec stood with his stump of a sword, facing the highly confident Canare champion. “You may actually be the best of the three of us, Indige, but without a weapon you’re doomed to lose. And it’s not going to be a ceremonial cut to the foot this time either,” the man said viciously, his blood full of battle rage.

Alec calmly stood still, realizing that he was going to have to take a chance and let the Canare swordsman very close to him in order to have a chance of defeating him. Alec stamped his foot hard and advanced a step, then stamped again, trying to rush the man to action. And without explanation, his warrior energies were restored and engaged.

His tactic worked, as Canare came at him with his blade extended, seeking to ram his blade into Alec’s ribs. Using his powers to accelerate his reactions, Alec let the tip of the blade reach within a foot of his chest, then swung his broken shaft of metal abruptly upward, knocking the blade away. He swiftly pulled his blade back down, letting the jagged edge of metal score across his opponent’s face and chest, and checked the swing back up to cut the tendons in his right wrist, so that Canare dropped his sword before he could even raise his hand to his injured face.

Alec stepped back three steps quickly, and his opponent fell to his knees, cradling his injured arm against his injured chest.

Those who were present in the stands were standing on their feet cheering Alec’s accomplishment. Alec slowly walked out of the ring, then waved a hand in acknowledgment of the cheers as he walked back to the opening. Just before he entered the door he stopped and turned. He saw Rief, standing and clapping for him, and she waved as she saw his glance in her direction. He waved back, then walked in.

“Tremendous display, young man! Terrific job. You were mislabeled a bit, weren’t you?” an official came up to him to say. “We’d schedule you as the winner in the next round, but without a weapon I don’t imagine you plan to go on.” Alec looked at him directly, and nodded his head. He held up his sword and shook it.

“You want to move on? You’ll be a marked man,” the official offered him another chance to decline.

Alec shrugged his shoulders.

“Very well,” the man said with a sigh of resignation. “You’ve got quite a while until we move to the next round. Be back here in two hours.” Alec shook his hand, and walked away. He started to walk towards a quiet corner to inspect his weapon, but a stream of well-wishes kept coming up to him to congratulate him and to commiserate on the broken weapon. Realizing that he would have no peace among so many who were aware of and interested in what he’d done, Alec left the gladiators’ chambers and went into the stands, thinking as he walked. His powers had disappeared, then re-emerged. The timing had worked well this time, but troubled him. If it happened while he was facing a swinging weapon, the results could be catastrophic. It reminded him of the sudden, temporary loss of healing power he had suffered while treating his shoulder. Could it be something about Michian that disrupted the power? Not able to reach a conclusion, he finally reached his objective and plopped down by the startled Rief.

“Healer! Healer!” she almost squealed with pleasure and pride. She started to expound on his battle, but he motioned to his mouth and his stomach.

“How can you even think about eating right now?” she demanded, but she stood up, and together they left the stadium to go to some food stands.

“What happened to your sword?” Rief asked as they walked away from a stand that sold skewers of chicken. Alec pulled the ugly stump of metal and showed it to Rief, looking closely at it as well. Along the broken edge he saw rasp marks and indentations that made him suspect the blade had been sabotaged. Someone had deliberately weakened the metal so that it would snap under pressure.

Rief did not understand what Alec saw, but only looked at the weapon as a diminished blade. “Everyone was so amazed when you stayed in the ring to fight with that. You should have heard what people were saying. And when you let the Canare fighter charge at you like that at the end, I was sure he was going to skewer you,” she recounted for Alec. “I covered my eyes, and then everyone cheered, and when I looked, you were standing there and the other fellow was down!

“Do you get to change weapons for the next fight?” she asked in a much lower tone as they walked along. Alec shook his head. “Should you drop out now?” He shook his head again. “You don’t have to take this type of chance just for the sake of the clan,” she told him, looking around to see if they would be overheard. “Do you think you can win even with just that?” she asked, and he nodded. She looked intently in his face. “I believe you can too, healer. Now, let’s get you back to the arena.”

Minutes later they were back at the gateway. “Good luck, healer. I’m sure it’s my kiss that gave you luck to win last time, so here’s another,” she said, then leaned up and kissed his cheek again. Alec grinned, and walked into the dark spaces where the swordsmen waited.

The crowd of prospects had dwindled tremendously as a result of the hours of early battles to cull out the weakest opponents. Alec found a seat on a bench that allowed him to watch the battles out on the sandy floor. Yet he hardly noticed how the fights progressed as he thought about his sword. Who would have tried to sabotage his chances of success? He’d had the weapon with him since he’d left the clan home. It must have been tampered with before he even took it from the armory. Could the armorer have done it to him? Alec couldn’t imagine why, but there were many things he did not know or understand about the people and the culture he was in. He had no idea how secure the blade had been, but he suspected it had been available for anyone to touch it since yesterday.

But other than the armorer, only Cander and Rief had been present when he had selected the blade. Alec realized he had narrowed down the list of possible traitors to Cander, the son of the clan leader. Why would Cander have tried to do this? Alec remembered Cander’s interest in Rief; was the man jealous of Alec’s relationship with his personal extension?

Alec sat slumped against the wall, puzzling away at his problem, until a man he didn’t recognize, wearing the Indige colors, tapped him on the shoulder. “You did well for us,” he said. “Your next match is almost up. You better check in and get in your pen,” he advised.

Alec nodded his thanks, and did as directed, winding up in a pen with just one other man. His opponent wore only a plain white, short robe, without house colors. They stood in the pen without speaking, and soon were ushered out to the roped circle in the sand. Alec re-engaged his ingenaire powers at a low level, and in only a matter of minutes had used his metal stub to knock his opponent’s blade from his hand and out of the ring. The result was a disqualification, and the first bloodless match Alec had seen.

He walked back to the official who was recording results. “Don’t go far, half-blade. Your next match is only half an hour away. You’ll be in pen 7,” he told Alec, then turned to speak to another fighter.

Alec spent a few moments splashing water on his face, then went to his pen, and waited alone for fifteen minutes. As the time for his match approached, no opponent appeared, and Alec wondered what would happen next. He was called to the doorway, and as he stood there, a very large man in brown strolled up, and brushed against Alec as he walked by, knocking him back a step. The obvious effort to intimidate him annoyed Alec, and he took a deep breath to calm himself.

The match in front of them came to an abrupt end, with the loser receiving a severe wound to his stomach. Alec watched a stretcher bear the man out, and as it passed him he dropped his warrior powers, then used his healing powers as he reached out and touched him, giving him a small jolt of energy to reduce the internal damage. Satisfied that he had done something positive, he dropped his healing power, and re-engaged his warrior power as he passed into the rope ring.

His opponent approached slowly, and before they got within blade distance of each other, the man threw a handful of sand at Alec’s eyes. Alec saw the motion, and with his enhanced abilities, he threw his body to the side, avoiding not only the effort to blind him, but the bull-like rush that followed as the brown clad swordsman tried to take advantage of the inability he had anticipated for Alec. Seeing the charge, Alec flicked the edge of his sword at the back of his opponent’s knee. He missed the crucial muscles he had wanted to sever, but did slice open a vein from which blood began to flow freely.

Standing up, Alec watched the man stagger, then look around behind him. Seeing the blood infuriated him, and he stood up too, facing Alec with an intense scowl on his face. “You’ll need to keep running and dodging with that stump in your hand. But there’s not far to run, is there?” He grimly strode forward, keeping his blade low, then swinging as soon as he had Alec within his reach. Alec kept his blade remnant before him, blocking and playing defense, trying to figure out how to penetrate the man’s defenses so that he could inflict a wound that would knock him out.

The man’s blows began to grow slightly wilder, just a little more careless, as he began to grow both frustrated and tired, and Alec at last saw a chance to flick his sword up and nick his opponent’s wrist, opening another vein. Blood began to run into the man’s palm, and his grip began to slip.

Slowly, step-by-step, Alec inched away from him, and the man began to lunge to reach him, the strain making his right arm less able to control the heavy blade that was now far extended from his body. At last Alec felt he had the advantage he needed, and instead of blocking a thrust, he inclined his body away, letting the sword carry past him, then bringing the hilt of his sword down hard. The brown-clad man dropped his sword, and Alec brought his hilt and fist upward, catching the man on the bridge of his nose. Alec hit the man hard, very hard. He could tell that he had broken some small bones in his own hand from the force of the contact.

Alec stepped back and prepared to hit the man again, but before he could do so the man’s eye’s rolled back into his head, and he fell backwards, laying out flat on the ground. Alec was relieved, for he had begun to feel a strain from his use of his ingenaire powers. Though the day’s work would have seemed simple back when he was freshly trained in Oyster Bay, after his long period without powers it was like trying to use a forgotten skill.

The crowd, which was much larger now than it had been in the early afternoon, began to cheer for Alec, and as he looked around he saw that Waines was now in the imperial box, clapping lustily for him. Alec waved in her direction, then waved at Rief, and trotted off the sand and into the fighters’ space.

“Son, you shouldn’t have been able to beat him, but you shouldn’t have won any of your other matches either,” the scoring official said. “You’re the first to qualify for the final match tonight. Be back here just past sundown, and there will be four of you all at once fighting to see who can survive.”

Alec bowed his head in acknowledgement one more time to the man, then walked out of the warriors’ space. As soon as he left the doorway, Rief was waiting for him. “You make it look so easy! You look like you’re dancing while the others are trying to walk in mud, healer!” she told him proudly. He hooked his arm in hers and they strolled away from the arena.

“You’re doing it all with just half a blade,” Rief started again, but Alec placed a finger against her lips. He noted how soft they felt. “You don’t want to talk about it for now?” she asked, and he nodded. “Shall we go see the archery? It must be in the finals almost,” Rief judged, looking at the sun that was moving towards a distant horizon, one that Alec realized for the first time had mountain peaks.

The archery contests were held in an open field, before long sets of benches that lined a distance of fifty meters from the targets to the archers. There were no seats left available on the benches, and Rief couldn’t see over the taller men in front of her, though Alec could. Alec crouched down, pointed at her, then patted his back. “You want me to ride you pig-a-back?” Rief laughed, and Alec nodded as he grinned. She stepped around and mounted, so that when Alec raised up she told him, “I can see now!”