Nature's Servant (62 page)

“WINNER, KUSAR!” the mayor announced, and the crowd cheered with unbridled excitement, calling out the victor’s names. Kusar took a bow and the braided warrior thrust his staff in the air, whipping the crowd up to even greater exuberance.

The healers came shuffling across the sand, bending down to examine
the prostrate losers. After a brief inspection, they levitated the bodies into the air, as if they were being carried by invisible stretchers, and bore them away.

“Blooming heck!” Gaspi said
once the cheering had died down, looking at Taurnil with wide eyes. What in the world had they signed themselves up for?

“Pretty full on eh?” Taurnil responded.

“Do you think we can handle it?” Gaspi asked. The fluttering nerves in his belly were more making him feel physically sick.

“Yep,” Taurnil answered, as determined as ever. “You’ll see when we’re out there.”

Gaspi swallowed noisily and nodded. He’d find out how well prepared they were when their first match was called. He just had to hold himself together until then. “Do you think they’re badly hurt?” he asked, changing the subject. “They didn’t heal them in the arena.”

“Nah,” Taurnil answered. “The fight’s over and there are a lot of matches left to go. They’ll just patch them up out of sight.”

“Guess so,” Gaspi said, watching Kusar and his staff-wielding warrior sit back down in their seats, the first victors of the tournament. By the end of the day, would he and Taurnil be retaking their seats as victors, or would they be out in the first round?

“What are we gonna do if we end up fighting someone who uses illusions?” Taurnil asked.

“Dunno,” Gaspi said. “I was thinking about that during the match.” But they didn’t get the chance to strategise, as they were interrupted by the mayor. It was time for the second match. He called for the crowd’s attention, and once the noise level had dropped right down, he raised his staff. It began to glow as before, and the cloud of dazzling lights burst from its tip. Gaspi was on tenterhooks, every nerve jangling as he waited for his name to be spelled out, but the first name was Brukasi and the second, Stemet, and he slumped back in his seat with a huge sigh of relief.

“BRUKASI AND STEMET!” the mayor called, and two teams headed out across the sand. Brukasi was the tiny magician Gaspi had observed while waiting for the first round to begin. He walked side by side with the striking warrior woman, taking two steps for every one of hers. It was hard not to look at the sinuous curves of her body, or the exaggerated sway of her hips as she moved. Gaspi flushed and looked away, but Taurnil shamelessly tracked her all the way to the centre of the arena. Stemet was tall and pale, and dressed in long, icy blue robes. His warrior was even taller, and fully kitted out in polished plate mail that reflected the morning sunlight. The warrior looked extremely put out and was talking to the mayor in tones of repressed outrage, gesturing at his female counterpart as he did so. She on the other hand, looked on with a small smile playing on her face, her posture completely relaxed.

“He’s pretty annoyed,” Gaspi said.

“I bet he doesn’t like fighting a woman,” Taurnil responded.

“Would you?” Gaspi asked.

Taurnil wrinkled his brow in thought. “Maybe not, but I wouldn’t be an ass about it. She’s chosen a life as a warrior and I don’t think she’d like
being treated differently.”

The tall warrior walked away from the mayor and re
-joined Stemet, muttering in the magician’s ear all the while.

“Good point,” Gaspi said, watching as the mayor lifted his staff of office and the teams entered the circles of light.

“BEGIN!”

Brukasi and Stemet both summoned fistfuls of swirling power but neither of them cast it, holding back while their warriors engaged. The heavily armoured warrior drew his two-handed sword and advanced, swinging it half-heartedly in broad arcs. The warrior woman said something that made him stiffen in anger. She taunted him again and began to circle, which forced him to do the same. It was harder to circle in plate armour, but he kept up with the pace, keeping her at bay with low sweeps of his sword. The woman’s long sword was light enough to use one-handed, and she kept her shield arm extended, placing the small buckler strapped to her forearm between her and the other warrior.

It all looked a bit static. The magicians still hadn’t cast a single strike, and the warriors were just circling, swinging and jabbing their weapons without making a serious attempt to attack each other. Stemet’s warrior still seemed reluctant to strike out in earnest, but Gaspi couldn’t understand what the warrior woman was waiting for.

The stasis extended for long moments, but then Brukasi broke ranks and launched a force strike at Stemet. Gaspi could tell it only took a fraction of the power he was holding, and had to consider it a test of the other magician’s ability. Stemet deflected it easily enough, but in the moment that he was distracted the warrior woman leapt in to attack, swinging her sword in a vicious arc at the armoured warrior’s head.

Gaspi figured she must have been waiting for such a moment, when Stemet would be too busy to defend his warrior with magic. The warrior blocked her attack with his broadsword, using the heavy weapon’s momentum to drive the tip of her sword down against the ground. She let go it and slammed her buckler into his face, sending him stumbling backwards as she picked her blade up and started to circle him again.

Stemet summoned power to attack her, but Brukasi ripped up a curtain of sand from the floor and cast it over him. The diminutive magician followed up with an earth strike that rippled under Stemet just as the sand cleared. He kept his feet and launched a counter strike that Gaspi didn’t recognise, a red bolt of light that flew through the air, sizzling with unknown power. Brukasi deflected it with a hastily summoned shield, the impact sounding with a deep, reverberating detonation, like a gong being sounded in the distance. Whatever that spell had been, it had been powerful, and Gaspi suspected that Brukasi had done well to deflect it.

As the match unfolded, it became clear that the magicians were evenly matched, and they were so busy trying to overcome each other with a myriad of strikes that they didn’t have the chance to help out their warriors. In one sense it was disappointing that the fight had split into magician against magician, and melee against melee, but on the other hand it was a fairer test of their individual skills. Taurnil was leaning forwards, watching the warriors intently as if the magicians didn’t even exist.

“Who’s gonna win the combat?” Gaspi asked.

“Leather against plate mail?” Taurnil asked rhetorically. “It should be a foregone conclusion.” The blow to his face seemed to have exorcised the remainder of the heavily-armoured warrior’s reluctance to attack a woman. He was trading blows with her in earnest now, forcing her to retreat from the powerful strokes of his broadsword.

“That little buckler can’t take those kind of hits for long,” Taurnil said. Gaspi grunted in agreement. The warrior woman was catching many of the double-handed blows on the small shield she wore on her forearm, but every time she did so it looked like it hurt her pretty badly.

The heavily-armoured warrior didn’t let up for a moment, keeping his opponent on the defensive with his superior strength and heavier weaponry. The warrior woman looked under pressure, but she still managed to maintain a defence, holding off a long string of attacks until the moment came that decided the bout. Stemet’s warrior delivered three brutal strokes in a row, the first of which she caught on her buckler, the second she parried, and the third she knocked aside. Taking advantage of the other warrior’s deflected blade, she spun around and elbowed him sharply on the temple. His head was more lightly armoured than the rest of his body, protected only by a leather cap sewn with chain mail for ease of movement, which did little to protect against the force of the blow.

He staggered to the side with his arms over his head and she was on him in a heartbeat, raining blows against his armour, trying to slide her blade between one of its many joints. The interlocking plates guarding his chest and abdomen were soon dislodged, exposing his undershirt, and as he tried to defend against this new vulnerability she slammed her buckler once more into his face. Blood spurted from his smashed nose as he stumbled backwards, hands lifted in a paltry defence. He tripped and fell to the ground, raising his hands in surrender just as the warrior woman levelled her sword to slash at his exposed torso.

She withheld the strike that would have disembowelled him and spun on her remaining opponent. The magicians were still locked in a ferocious battle of equals. Brukasi dripped sweat as he deflected another of Stemet’s red, sizzling bolts. He sent a mad flurry of strikes in response, mingling earth, air and force with other offensive spells that Gaspi couldn’t identify, including one that made the air ripple unpleasantly, leaving him feeling queasy after looking at it. Stemet stumbled as it landed, staggering drunkenly for a moment, but he recovered quickly enough to defend against Brukasi’s next strike.

The warrior woman approached slowly, clearly unwilling to interrupt the complex magical interplay in case it hindered rather than helped her partner. She stood for a moment, watching the timing of Stemet’s attacks intently, and then, fast as lightning, one of her knives was out of its sheath and flipping end over end towards him. He saw the attack coming and threw out a hand to summon a shield. The knife bounced off his shield, but the defence had distracted him and Brukasi’s next strike hit him right in the chest and sent him tumbling to the floor. The warrior was on him in a moment, her foot pressed heavily against his windpipe, and Stemet held up his hands in surrender.

The crowd cheered wildly at the dramatic conclusion to what had been a well-fought bout. It had lasted much longer than the previous bouts, and had shown what happens when you pit magicians of equal strength and skill against each other.

“That was amazing!” Gaspi said.

“You’re telling me!” Taurnil responded.

“Wish I knew what the red strike was, and that weird one that made me dizzy.”

“We’ll have to ask Voltan when we break for lunch,” Taurnil said.

“
If
we’re still in it by then!” There was so much he didn’t understand, and it wasn’t just the nature of strikes he couldn’t identify. He wanted to know why the warrior’s heavy armour had come apart on his opponent’s sword. Surely Stemet would have placed an unbreakable enchantment on it! He hoped that his ignorance of such things wouldn’t be his undoing if he was called to fight before he could speak to Voltan.

The healers came on and restored the health of all combatants, spending extra time on Stemet’s warrior, whose face was a shattered mess. The warrior woman was untouched and stalked around the sand with the grace and patience of a predator.

“That is some woman!” Taurnil said admiringly, his eyes never leaving her as she paced around the fighting floor.

“Don’t let Lydia hear you say that,” Gaspi said, and Taurnil looked away from her, flushing.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, embarrassed. “I just never saw a woman who can fight before.”

“I know mate, just kidding,” Gaspi said, but Taurnil didn’t watch her nearly so closely after that.

When the second bout began there was little hesitance on the part of either team. As soon as the enchanted circles of light disappeared, the warrior woman drew a strange device from one of the scabbards at her waist. Gaspi had assumed it was a knife, but it clearly wasn’t; it looked like a pommel with no blade attached. Brukasi flicked a thread of power at the curious object, and as magic flowed through it, a long, thin column of red light extended from the upper end. It lengthened to about eight feet in a matter of moments, and with one flick of the warrior woman’s wrist it became flexible, snapping to the ground with the unmistakable crack of a whip.

“Sheesh,” Taurnil breathed next to him. Gaspi could sense that there was a draw connecting the whip to Brukasi, sustaining its magical form. That would tire him if the fight went on too long, but a whip of pure magical force would be a devastating weapon, and he doubted they intended to let the fight last very long. Stemet drew power immediately, and Gaspi was pretty sure he was going to attack the warrior woman, but Brukasi flung a heavy strike his way, forcing the magician to defend himself instead.

Stemet’s warrior rushed his opponent with a yell, hefting his heavy sword into position for a devastating blow. Gaspi figured he knew he couldn’t stand against the force-whip unless he could get inside its reach, but the warrior woman brandished her whip expertly, snapping its deadly length at the charging warrior. It curled around his extended blade, and with a heave of her arms she wrenched it from his hands, sending it spinning away through the air. Weaponless, he continued his rush. He was inside the whip’s range now and still had a chance of knocking her out. He tried to use the weight of his armour to barrel right over her, but she threw herself to the side, tripping him as he rushed past. She was up on her feet instantly, flicking the long, sizzling length of her whip at him. It cracked against the plate armour covering his back, cleaving right through it, leaving it burnt and blackened around the edges of the jagged split. The warrior twitched violently as pure magical force sent a jolt through his bruised and battered body.

She lifted the whip again, but he flopped to his back and lifted his hands in surrender. Gaspi realised he’d been holding his breath and let out a sigh of relief. Another blow might have finished him off! She turned around to help her partner, but Stemet had already surrendered, knowing he couldn’t face the force-whip and Brukasi at the same time.