My Soul to Take (20 page)

“So remote?” Dawit said. “Wendimu came to lay a trap for you, then.”

Mahmoud twirled his staff and pounded it on the floor with a
crack
. “I dearly hope so.”

Mahmoud yanked on his mask. He was ready to enter the Circle.

Talking to Mahmoud before the match had been a mistake. Mahmoud’s combat arts sharpened with strong emotions, and his claims of the defections might be a ruse. No weapon was illicit in Mahmoud’s mind. His strategies began well outside the Circle.

“How many have gone to Michel?” Dawait said again, to be certain.

YOU WILL BLEED, BROTHER
, Mahmoud’s thought came. Mahmoud bowed low, his chin to his knees. Dawit returned his bow, accepting his challenge.

Their staffs would speak for them.

Time passed slowly in the Circle. It might have been a mortal’s twenty minutes, it might have been an hour. Dawit and Mahmoud glistened with perspiration and blood, grunting beneath each teeth-jarring blow across his shoulders, knees, temples, and knuckles. Dawit’s arms were raw from the effort of absorbing the impacts of Mahmoud’s sure staff.

They blocked more blows than they landed. Mahmoud was Dawit’s mirror.

When Dawit swept left, Mahmoud’s staff was there to meet it. If Dawit ducked and thrust, Mahmoud parried. Neither of them was fluid enough in mind arts to trust mental cues as much as they trusted their eyes, or their years of history in the Circle. They leaped at each other from the large ascending blocks at the Circle’s rear, landing blows as they flew from the perches.

They had fought together too often, either as adversaries in the Circle or allies on the battlefield. At Adwa, the first time they had faced the Sanctus Cruor sect that had birthed Michel, they had used their emptied rifles like staffs, bedazzling mortals with their speed before they split their skulls. They had made a game of it, one hypnotizing an Italian soldier with theatrics while the other swung from behind. Italian Cricket, they had called it.

This match was less a game. Dawit’s hands sopped with perspiration as his staff rang against his palm with each
clack
. Dawit was attuned to Mahmoud’s darting and ducking, every successful strike a victory to race his heart. Blood ran into his eye from a cut above his forehead, but he barely felt the sting.

Spectators had arrived. Mahmoud was as popular a Circle warrior as Dawit had once been. Above them, hisses signaled displeasure when Dawit struck a blow, and cheerful clucks when Mahmoud bested him. At least a dozen of his Brothers must be in the upper circle.

For the first time since Michel had driven his family from Washington State, Dawit’s spirit sang.

He was home again.

Then, the instant of perfection was over. A gong sounded from the edge of the Circle.

“I call a draw!” a voice said. Hagos.

At first, in the fever of battle, Mahmoud didn’t hear the gong’s low call. Dawit ceremoniously dropped his staff, raising his hands, and Mahmoud’s staff stopped its swing only a centimeter from Dawit’s nose. Mahmoud’s control was impressive, as always.

There was loud hissing from above.

“Nonsense!” Mahmoud roared, breathless. He ripped off his mask and strode to Hagos, who stood a head taller. “You’ve no right! Why did you stop the match?”

Matches might last at least a mortal’s day before a restless spectator called a draw. Dawit had strained with every moment, but to his Brothers the match had just begun.

Their traditions were now ghosts, to be honored or ignored as they chose.

Hagos was masked and armed with gloves and slippers fitted with customary seven-inch blades on the backs of his palms and at each big toe. A Gloves and Slippers match meant lost digits, or limbs. Dawit knew that Hagos meant to punish him. Hagos had railed that Dawit’s family should be expelled from the colony.

Hagos’s bald head gleamed in the light from the Circle. When a Life Brother was beheaded, he lost his hair and memories when his head re-formed on the stump. Memories returned with coaxing, but not hair. Hagos had undergone the beheading ritual twice.

Hagos’s eyes smoldered as he stared. “Dawit.” He named his opponent.

“Dawit has no obligation to accept!” Mahmoud said.

“I accept.” Dawit squeezed Mahmoud’s shoulder. “Another day for us, Mahmoud.”

Mahmoud glanced at him with surprise and anger. But he understood. To refuse the match was cowardice, though it was a match Dawit would rather avoid. He and Mahmoud rarely sparred with Gloves and Slippers. But Hagos relished pain, and would relish inflicting it more.

WEAR A COLLAR
, Mahmoud whispered to Dawit, his head close to pass the thought.

Dawit left the Circle to suit up in the rows of weapons in a compartment beyond the Circle.

The collection held most handheld weapons except firearms: spears of all lengths, Zulu assegai knives, and dozens of variations of rods, blades, and batons.

The blades in Gloves and Slippers were an alloy created in the House of Science, three times sharper and stronger than carbon steel. Double-edged and serrated. A wondrous weapon. Dawit considered a small shield and iron wrist guards, but decided not to carry the extra weight. He would risk Hagos’s blows. He did not glance
toward the cumbersome metal neck guard Mahmoud called a collar. He would not give Hagos the satisfaction.

Hagos stood close behind him, breathing hot breath as Dawit fitted on his pointed slippers. His rudeness made Dawit want to kick back and stab him in the gut. In time.

“Will you call your girl-child to protect you?” Hagos taunted.

“Ease your nerves, Brother. We will be alone in the Circle.”

He saw the strong image in Hagos’s mind: crimson oozing from Brother Kaleb’s eyes, nose, and mouth as he lay dead in the pool of blood Fana had drained from him. Fana had acted reflexively; she’d only been three, after all. Kaleb had provoked Fana by attacking Jessica with a sword while a horrified Fana stood witness.

Dawit couldn’t help his glow of pride in the power Fana wielded.

Aside from Khaldun’s Ritual of Death—a mental practice he claimed to have used only twice in a thousand years—Kaleb had been the first with their Blood to die. His Brothers were still smarting from their newfound vulnerability in Fana. But most feared Michel more.

“You have too much hair, Dawit,” Hagos said. “I will see you bald.”

Dawit ignored the taunting as he walked back to the Circle, instead sifting through his memories of Hagos’s past matches so vividly that he could see them. Hagos had great agility and speed, but he was not as ambidextrous as Dawit, or as fast. He favored blows and kicks from his right side. And Hagos was lazy in his mind arts.

Dawit would have to trust his mental skill as much as his eyes, or he might lose his head today. He had no time for a long debilitation. Fana needed him.

At the edge of the Circle, Dawit bowed low to Hagos.

Hagos pushed past his bow, slicing Dawit’s upper right arm on his way, drawing a bright string of blood. Dawit had not been cut so deeply by a knife in years, and the pain startled him, flaring when he flexed his arm.

The spectators hissed at Hagos. Some rituals still mattered, apparently. Without his meditations with Fana, Dawit might have been angry at such an insult. But, unlike Mahmoud, anger was not his friend in a battle; he had suffered his worst heartaches and
defeats when his emotions roiled most. Dawit smiled instead.
I am the better fighter
, he told himself, holding the thought close.

He hoped so, anyway.

Dawit met Hagos in the Circle’s bright light.

Facing Hagos, Dawit remembered Khaldun’s first lesson when he and his Brothers had awakened with the new Blood in their veins:
Your Blood makes you longer-lived than ordinary men, but you are still men. You are not stronger than ordinary men. You will hurt and bleed like ordinary men. You will heal, but healing takes time. Do not expect to be gods
.

He wished he had not fought with Mahmoud first, or with such vigor. Dawit was alarmed at his own sluggishness. At first, he seemed to be only watching Hagos spring around him as he tested for weaknesses, his gloves’ blades pinwheeling close to Dawit’s face and belly. Hagos’s sweeping kick toward his groin came within two inches of slicing Dawit’s most tender region, an indignity he had avoided in five centuries of life. Dawit’s legs and arms were leaden, and Hagos was fresh. Even the wound on his arm throbbed enough to distract him.

His mind arts were a disappointment, too. Most of Hagos’s thoughts were incoherent, and the signals often came too late. Hagos fought by instinct, not strategy.

NECK
, a thought came through, and Dawit ducked in time to avoid an assured swipe with Hagos’s right hand that might have been strong enough to behead him. The spectators clucked, excited, another distraction. Their thoughts would attract others, and Dawit was already struggling to stay focused on Hagos. How did Fana tolerate her heightened sensitivity?

Dawit’s mental clumsiness cost him. While he fumbled with Hagos’s thoughts, a blade suddenly pierced him to the bone just above his knee, unheralded. The pain was so dazzling that his leg nearly buckled.

Dawit yanked his flesh free from the blade, slashing an X across Hagos’s bare chest before he leaped away with the strength of his uninjured leg. When he landed several meters away, the soles of
Dawit’s slippers whined against the blood spotting the Circle’s floor. His pierced leg was numb in places, afire in others.

Hagos charged.

Finish him
, Dawit thought. His mind went as placid as the waters of Miami’s Biscayne Bay, which he imagined during meditation.

The approving clicks and clucks from his Brothers vanished as the room went silent. Hagos’s chaotic thoughts, too, went silent. All Dawit heard was his own steady heartbeat, slowing even as it strengthened. His flesh vanished, too, taking his pain away.

Images appeared in sudden flashes of bright light: Hagos’s right arm hooking toward him. The flash of the sinister blade on Hagos’s right foot.

Dawit watched Hagos’s spectacular, spinning midair flip, as if he had taken flight. Saw the luminous tip of Hagos’s blade nearly rake his eyes.

Dawit rolled, springing and leaping as soon as his feet found the floor. Calmly, he noted that he was behind Hagos when he landed. His eyes fixed on the brown skin at the nape of his opponent’s neck. To Dawit’s perception, Hagos stood as still as a monument.

No one will harm my daughter
, Dawit thought.
No one will harm my family again
.

Dawit did not recognize the yell that spilled from his lips. He spun toward Hagos with both arms outstretched, his twin blades blurred as he snapped them like scissors.

A wet
thunk
at his feet, like a tumbled melon, told Dawit that the match was over. He saw Mahmoud’s delighted grin beyond the Circle, through the void between Hagos’s hulking shoulders. Then Hagos’s headless torso slumped to the floor.

This time, Dawit mused, his Brother might be luckier.

Perhaps he would wake up with a full head of hair.

T
he tires of Johnny Wright’s ATV whirred over a pile of gravel on the winding, polished-stone path, skidding, and the Lalibela Colony sprawled above and below him as he drifted toward the ravine. The vehicle righted itself with a tap from Johnny’s thumb on the handlebar controls, as sensitive as a nerve-controlled artificial limb.

The colony had three levels, each two or three stories high, and the oval courtyard below was at least the size of a football field. Like a giant beehive, or an ant colony, but without the activity, Johnny thought. It always looked deserted, most of the immortals out of sight.

The lighting was bright, like midday sunshine, so Johnny slipped on his shades. The colony never had night, and he had never missed the dark so much. Johnny’s watch was still set to Southern California, so it was the middle of the night for him.

Like an immortal, Johnny didn’t sleep much these days. He was bone tired, but the nightmares in his waking hours kept him from going to sleep.

Dawit had warned Johnny to stay away from the House of Science, but they needed news about a vaccine or an antidote. Then they needed to pray there was time to flush it into the Glow network. Suddenly, the Glow network seemed to exist for no other reason than to give people a chance to survive the Big One.

He and Caitlin didn’t rely on anyone else to make sure the House of Science was cooperating, and not in immortal time. Fana vanished into meditation for six hours straight, trying to be ready for Michel one day.

When Johnny rounded the bend, he saw two men approaching in animated conversation. Amharic? Arabic? Their voices were too soft to tell. Dawit had advised him to avoid direct contact with immortals he did not know.

These two men quieted as they neared him, but they didn’t slow their pace. Johnny coaxed his ATV to a careful stop on the narrow path, brushing his knee against the smooth, blood-colored stone wall to allow them to pass. His heart sped as he pasted a polite smile on his lips. If one of them decided to give him a friendly shove over the side, it was a long way down to the rock garden, where a clawlike stone spindle would skewer him.

Like all the immortals here, they walked nude. Johnny averted his eyes as the two men approached him in a cloud of thick cologne. Scented baths were a religion here.

One man seemed to return his smile when he glanced at them, so Johnny grinned more widely. Damn—a mistake. They stopped walking, towered above him; one in front of him, one behind. Their gazes were heavy enough to carry weight.

“Good morning,” Johnny said, a nervous reflex. Who knew if they spoke English? And that greeting was meaningless in a place with no day or night.

The man in front of him looked like a pro wrestler, squat and thick-muscled. Johnny gripped his handlebars. He kept his smile, but he would mow over this guy if he made a sudden move. On such a narrow path, he didn’t have room for diplomacy.

Just try it
, Johnny thought. Johnny hoped he was a HiTel, and he’d gotten the message.