Deathstalker (21 page)

But whatever the secret of his face, the crowds loved him, and they conspired with the Arena staff to keep his secret and preserve his identity, even from the Empress’ security people. Which was probably unique in the Empire. So far the Empress had declined to press the point, which had given rise to a whole new batch of rumors.

He fought always with the sword Morgana, disdaining monofilament edges or other energy weapons. He was a superb swordsman, with speed and skill and trained reflexes beyond anything outside the augmented men. There were still those who claimed he had to be a cyborg of some kind, or at the very least a product of the body shops, but the Arena staff said not, and they were best placed to know.

The Masked Gladiator took up his position in the center of the Arena and waited patiently for his opponent to come to him. The giant holoscreen showed a closeup of his featureless helm and ran columns of statistics from his previous fights on either side of it. The figures were impressive: never beaten in a hundred and thirty-seven combats. Only wounded seriously twice, in his early days. Present odds against his current challenger: one thousand to one, in his favor. The odds kept small fry from wasting his time, but there were always challengers.

The latest in a long line stepped out of a side gate and strode confidently toward the waiting champion. The crowd gave him a good-natured cheer. They admired courage, and fresh blood was always welcome. His name was Auric Skye, and he wanted to become a bodyguard for the Lord of Clan Chojiro. But since that was one of the top jobs in the bodyguard market, the only way to jump to the top of the queue was by committing some great act of courage and skill. Auric had chosen to challenge the Masked Gladiator. He didn’t necessarily expect to win, but if he put up a good enough fight, the crowd would very likely turn their thumbs up for him, and he would become one of the very few people who’d fought the Masked Gladiator and survived. Clan Chojiro would come looking for him, then.

And besides, he might win. He had an ace up his sleeve, and everywhere else, too.

Skye was young, extremely muscular, and almost offensively blond and handsome. Like the champion, he was armed only with a sword. Clan Chojiro were somewhat old-fashioned in that they didn’t approve of clones or espers or any other deviants from the human norm, but they had no objections to the gifts of technology. In this case, Skye was known to have had steel plates inserted under his skin to cover all his vulnerable areas and steel webbing everywhere else. A kind of internal armor, with no weak spots. The weight slowed him down, but he had ways of dealing with that. The Masked Gladiator had never fought such an opponent before. Even so, hardly anyone was betting against him.

Skye advanced on the champion, who bowed courteously to him. Skye broke into a lumbering run, his sword stretched out before him. His weight left deep footprints in the sand, but still his movements were eerily fluid, and he covered the intervening distance surprisingly quickly. The champion
smiled inside his helm. Whatever body shop had provided Skye with his exceptional muscles had done an excellent job. The Masked Gladiator stepped forward suddenly, catching Skye by surprise, and swung Morgana round in a whistling arc. Skye couldn’t get his sword up in time, and the double-handed blow slammed into the side of his neck. The blow would have decapitated anyone else, but Skye just stood there and took it.

He grunted softly at the impact and lurched one step to one side, but he had his balance back in a moment, and his free hand shot up to grab Morgana’s blade. His bare hand closed on the steel like a vice, and the Gladiator had to use all his strength to pull the blade free. It emerged jerkily from Skye’s fist, the sharp edges slicing through the skin only to grate against the steel webbing beneath it. Skye grinned quickly, ignoring the pain and the blood from his hand and neck, and brought his own sword up in a dazzlingly swift thrust at the Gladiator’s gut. The champion blocked the blow as though he’d known it was coming, but had to fall back a step to do so. Skye pressed forward, and the Gladiator backed away. The crowd couldn’t believe it.

The champion quickly turned the retreat into a circular motion, and the two men circled each other, looking for an opening. Skye charged forward, and the two swords rang loudly as they slammed together again and again. Skye had the advantage in weight and strength, but the champion had the edge in skill. Again and again he turned aside blows that seemed unstoppable, but try as he might, he was unable to mount a counterattack. Skye wouldn’t allow him the time or the space, pressing home his attacks with unflagging energy. The champion doubted Skye could maintain the attack for long, but then, he probably wouldn’t have to. The Gladiator only had to make one mistake, and the match would be over.

Unfortunately for Skye, the Gladiator didn’t believe in making mistakes. Choosing his moment carefully, he stepped inside Skye’s blows and launched a blistering attack. Morgana seemed to fly at Skye from every direction at once. He blocked most of the blows, but some got through. Morgana cut him again and again, but to the crowd’s loud astonishment, he didn’t go down. Wherever Morgana pierced flesh, it found only steel plates or webbing. Hardly any blood flowed, and Skye’s face never flinched once. He and pain had become old friends in the process that had given
him his internal armor. And then the Gladiator was just a little too slow in pulling back from a lunge, and Skye’s spare hand shot out inhumanly quickly and closed on the champion’s arm. Muscles bulged, and Skye threw the Masked Gladiator thirty feet across the Arena.

He landed hard and rolled quite a way, but was back on his feet in a moment. Behind the featureless steel helm he could have been panting or scowling or grimacing with pain, but his stance was firm and his sword arm was steady. Skye lurched into a run again, building momentum like a runaway truck. The Gladiator shook himself once, as though to settle himself, and then lifted Morgana and waited for his opponent to come to him. The crowd were going wild at the prospect of finally seeing their champion beaten, humbled, perhaps even killed. They screamed warnings and advice and encouragement to both fighters, standing on their seats for a better view, and there was a flurry of last-minute betting as people changed their minds.

The Gladiator stood his ground. He could run, but that wasn’t his style. He could surrender and beg for mercy, but he didn’t do that, either. He hefted Morgana angrily: a good sword, the best he’d ever known, but helpless against implanted steel armor. And then a thought came to him, and he smiled inside his featureless steel helm. Skye was almost upon him, sword pulling back for the killing thrust. The Masked Gladiator stepped forward in a perfect lunge, and the tip of his sword leapt out and plunged through Skye’s left eyeball and on into his brain: the only part of him that hadn’t been protected.

For a long moment Auric Skye just stood there, transfixed on the champion’s sword, and then the Masked Gladiator pulled Morgana free, and Skye collapsed as though that was all that had been holding him up. He fell heavily and lay still, and the Gladiator saluted him once with Morgana before turning away. The crowd was beside itself, cheering till their throats were raw, pounding their hands together till they ached, even those who’d been foolish enough to bet on Skye. The Masked Gladiator walked back to the main gates, one hand raised to acknowledge the crowd. And Auric Skye, who’d given up part of his humanity in his quest to become a bodyguard for Clan Chojiro, lay broken and forgotten on the bloody sands.

In the Wolfe private box, Jacob turned triumphantly to his
Family. “Now that is a real fighter. Strong, smart, committed. Find a weakness and exploit it. You could all learn a lesson from a man like that.”

His Family murmured politely in reply, but kept their thoughts to themselves. Everyone in Clan Wolfe knew all about finding and taking advantage of other people’s weaknesses while guarding their own. It was what kept them alive from day to day. Daniel pictured himself in the featureless steel helm, standing haughtily over a number of dying bodies, not least Valentine and his father. Stephanie considered a rumor that was never more than a whisper: that underneath the steel helm lay the face of a woman, not a man. She smiled at the thought, and many were the faces of those who lay broken at her feet. Jacob tried for the hundredth time to come up with some plan, legal or illegal, that would win the Masked Gladiator’s allegiance. Constance hugged the Wolfe’s arm tightly and plotted marriages for her stepchildren, so that they would leave and allow her uninterrupted access to the Wolfe. And Valentine considered the many deaths he’d caused that day, and smiled and smiled and smiled.

Mistworld was the rebel planet. The only rebel planet in the whole of the Empire. A world made by renegades and traitors, insurgents and troublemakers. When you’d been everywhere else and found no safe haven, there was always Mistworld. Outlaws, rogue espers, criminals, trash and scum all ended up on the planet of eternal winter. The world they’d built wasn’t particularly pretty or civilized, but it was free, and every man, woman and child on Mistworld would fight to the death to keep it that way. Schemes for rebellion against the Empire came and went without accomplishing much, because the rebels were only safe as long as they stayed on Mistworld, protected by a powerful psionic screen that was the equal of anything the Empire could send against it. The only city, Mistport, seethed with plots and plans and spies, not least from the Empire, who liked to know what was going on. And to this last refuge, this last chance, this last roll of the loaded dice came Hazel d’Ark and Owen Deathstalker, the ex-clonelegger and the outlawed Lord, to start a rebellion that would spread far beyond the world that birthed it.

The
Sunstrider
howled out of hyperspace like a bullet shot from a gun, and then slowed reluctantly into high orbit around Mistworld. Its shields snapped on again, and the sensor spikes shimmered, but there was no trace anywhere of the two starcruisers that had been attacking it. In the luxurious main cabin, Owen sank back in his chair with a sigh, and Hazel blinked respectfully.

“I’m impressed,” she said finally. “We made it all the way here, across half the damn Empire, in just one jump. It normally takes at least seven, and only then if you’ve got a shit hot navigator. How much power did we just burn up?”

“Hardly any,” said Owen smugly. “I told you, this is a whole new kind of stardrive. It’s going to make everything else obsolete.”

“How does it work?” said Hazel.

Owen shrugged. “I don’t know. I just bought the ship; I didn’t design it. I had my AI scan the manual so it could fly the thing, but I’ve only flipped through it. I’m not really very technically minded. I’ve always had people to do that sort of thing for me.”

Hazel sniffed. “That’s one attitude you’ll have to lose, aristo. An outlaw can’t afford to rely on anyone but themself.”

“You should know,” said Owen easily. “All right, what’s our next step?”

“We ask very politely for landing permission. Once we’re dirtside, we’re protected by the planet’s espers, but out here we’re a sitting duck for the first Imperial ship to come along. It won’t take them long to come here looking for us, and while this ship might be fast, it’s got no heavy-duty weapons systems at all.”

“Well, no,” said Owen. “It’s a pleasure yacht, not a warship.”

“Next time, look a little further in the catalogue. I’ll contact Mistport. It’s the only starport on Mistworld. In fact, it’s their only city. It’s not what you’d call a densely populated world, and once you’ve lived there for a while you’ll know why. Desolate bloody place, all snow and ice and fog. I just hope I can pull a few strings, call in some old favors. It’s been a while since I was last here, and I’m not sure if I’ve got any friends left in Mistport.”

She was silent for a long moment, frowning, and Owen studied her thoughtfully. She fascinated him, if only because he’d never met anyone like her before. He’d grown up believing the only good rebel was a dead rebel, and now he was one. His life had changed completely, and he was going to have to understand Hazel and her world if he was to survive in it.

“What brought you here before?” he said casually.

Hazel started, jerked out of her thoughts, then shrugged
self-consciously. “I spent some time here recovering after my stint as a mercenary on Loki, during the succession wars. As usual, with my native wit and massive experience, I had no trouble picking the losing side to sign on with. We got our ass kicked good, my side scattered to the winds, and I ended up here because it was the only place my enemies wouldn’t come looking for me. As it turned out, I was wrong about that, too, but that’s another story.”

“What are we going to do once we’ve landed?” said Owen. “A hell of a lot of people are going to be looking for me, and the price on my head would tempt a sainted nun.”

“What’s this
we
bit?” said Hazel. “I hauled your ass out of the line of fire because I couldn’t just stand by and watch you die, but I haven’t adopted you. In fact, if I’d known your were an aristo, I’d probably have joined in the shooting myself. As it is, once we are safely down, I am going my way and you can go yours. The last thing I need is a know-nothing tenderfoot like you slowing me down and attracting attention. I have my life to rebuild, and that’s going to be hard enough without carrying a passenger.”