A small unmetal circle, set into the sand, marked the exact center of the dueling ground. Maya took her place on one side of it, and Tanax walked to the other side, turning to face her. For the moment, he kept his hand away from his haken, and she did likewise. She searched his face—dark-skinned, features hawk-like and aristocratic, lips pressed together and tight with suppressed anger.
She wished she’d insisted on sparring with him, sometime during the mission. She’d seen his power at work, the strange twisting of space that rent matter apart, but that wasn’t the same as going up against it. At a deep level, the power all centarchs wielded was the same, and duels were trials of deiat against deiat, blade to blade and mind to mind, regardless of how that power manifested. At the same time, though, each centarch materialized that power in a different form, and that inclined their fighting style in certain directions. Jaedia, for example, had always been far more mobile than Maya, her body as slippery and nimble as one of her breezes, preferring to evade an attack rather than meet it head-on.
Maya guessed that this would not be Tanax’s technique. What she’d seen of his power was brutally straightforward, though his sheer strength was impressive. We’ll see.
“Agathios-Challenger Maya.” Prodominus’ voice echoed down to them, boosted by some arcana device until it rang through the arena. “Centarch Tanax Brokenedge. The Council has voted me authority to oversee this duel. Raise your arm if you have any objections.”
Maya didn’t move. Neither did Tanax.
“On my command ‘draw,’ you will draw and ignite your weapons,” the old Kyriliarch went on. “On my command ‘fight,’ the duel will commence. It will continue until one of you surrenders or is unable to continue. On my command ‘stop,’ you will cease fighting immediately.”
Sweat prickled across Maya’s forehead. Tanax’s hand clenched into a fist, then loosened.
“Very well,” Prodominus boomed. “Draw.”
Maya took hold of her haken, opening herself to deiat. The power ran through her, first in pinpricks of energy throughout her body, then as a steady flow. It felt like a mug of water after a week of thirst. In the years since Jaedia had given her her haken, Maya had never gone without touching its power for this long, and as it flooded into her she realized how hollow she’d felt without it.
She pushed a thread of the burgeoning energy into her panoply belt and felt its field activate, tinting her vision with the usual hint of blue. Raising her haken, she let deiat flow into it, and its flaming blade materialized with a whoomph. Across the circle, Tanax lifted his own blade, and a narrow line of space twisted and writhed, distorting everything behind it. It emitted a faint drone, like a swarm of bees.
“Fight!” Prodominus shouted.
Maya flung out her free hand before the Kyriliarch’s voice had faded, and a burst of fire slammed across the space between them. It hit Tanax hard enough to knock him off his feet, sending him sliding across the sand, and she saw the sparking blue aura of his panoply flare.
But her opponent recovered impressively quickly. He rolled onto his knees, throwing up a shield of warped space around himself that deflected the flames like a breakwater. Maya closed her hand, and the stream of fire vanished. Tanax got to his feet behind his aura of paradoxical geometry, breathing hard.
“Feel free to yield,” Maya said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
He growled a curse, and the real battle began.
Tendrils of deiat reached out, slicing through the space all around her like a blooming flower with Tanax at the center. She could see them as shimmers in the air, bits of twisted space like the ripples rising from a hot stone, but it was easier to feel them resonating with her connection to deiat. She channeled power through her haken and slammed her own energy against them. Fire bloomed all around her, motes of energy devouring one another and being devoured in turn.
Bit by bit, Maya’s grin faded. He’s plaguing good. Not as good as Jaedia, who made the whole affair look effortless, but he wove deiat with speed and efficiency, sending little dust devils of twisted space spinning across the floor, then sweeping a broad wave of distortion that forced her to block in a wide arc. When she struck back, he withdrew, leaving her wasting her energy against emptiness while he attacked elsewhere. Within a few moments, she was focused entirely on defense, and she could tell it wasn’t going to work for long. Waves of ripping, twisting space came closer and closer.
The next time he lashed out, Maya dodged instead of blocking, letting the energy slash past. That bought her a second to launch an assault of her own, throwing curving lines of flame in his direction. He deflected them, but she sprinted forward as he moved, coming at him with haken swinging.
He parried, and flame spat and crackled against the weird buzzing of his twisted blade. Maya disengaged, slipping around his guard and pressing in, and Tanax had to give ground. His power curved in against her from all sides, but Maya wove a nimble shield of flame to block. He was slower, off-balance, splitting his attention between trying to slip past her defenses and keeping her blazing haken away. She hammered him relentlessly, and he backed up another step, then another.
Stay close. Her swordwork was better than his; she could feel it, feel the desperation behind his parries. Let him get clear and he can wear me down. Keep it close and I can win.
Tanax apparently had come to the same conclusion. He hopped backward, momentarily out of range, and reached out with his free hand. Maya readied a block, but his wave of energy slashed out sideways, into one of the stone pillars. A chunk of granite broke free, falling toward her, and Tanax’s power lashed out and shattered it into a hundred razor shards plummeting toward her.
Stopping them with deiat would only mean spattering herself with molten rock, so Maya bulled forward, trusting to her panoply. Blue energy flared around her, and she felt a wave of cold, but it passed in moments. She caught sight of Tanax slipping around the pillar and hurried after him, incinerating a distortion wave he left in his wake. Her own power lashed out, touching the ground behind him and raising a wall of flame. He danced away from it and pressed his attack against her, blade swinging. Maya parried and took a step back, their crossed haken crackling and sparking.
Tanax’s eyes went suddenly wide. He stepped back from the clinch, mouthing something Maya couldn’t hear. His free hand went to his face, and Maya automatically followed suit, feeling something hot and wet on her skin.
Blood. There was a long cut running along her cheek. One of the rocks must have gotten me. It wasn’t deep, and she’d barely felt a sting, but—
The panoply. It had flared, she was certain. She ran her mind along the stream of deiat she was feeding it. But if it was working, it wouldn’t have let anything cut me—
Which meant that it wasn’t working.
Which meant that if he caught her with that haken, it wouldn’t be a rush of cold and a brief spell of unconsciousness. She would end up like Yora and the other rebels, carved into fragments by a blade of twisted space, bleeding from wounds still ragged with distorted echoes.
Fuck. Maya was suddenly aware of her heart racing, the sweat pouring down her cheeks, soaking her shirt, trickling past the Thing between her breasts. Fuck fuck plaguing fuck.
Tanax’s voice was still inaudible over the roar of her own flames, but she caught the word he mouthed at her. “Yield.”