Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [251]
‘How can you even—’ Che started, but Tynisa just said, ‘Che.’ Not spoken loudly, but the word brought silence in its wake.
‘It’s a good idea,’ she continued. ‘I’ll do it.’ And when Che started protesting again, ‘I’ve seen the man fight, so who knows how matters might fall out? And, besides, I’d rather die at the hands of another Weaponsmaster I can respect, than fall to some chance spear or arrow.’
And in her head she heard the echo of the words, With me, you can win any battle, and they were followed by hollow, bitter laughter.
I could ask him back, even now, and he would come, but she knew bleakly that she would not. I will live or die according to my own merits, in the final analysis. The real man that my father was would appreciate that.
Forty-Four
After that it had simply remained for them to choose who should deliver the challenge.
In the grey light of a mist-laden dawn, Thalric emerged from the tumbled tower, passing Dal Arche, who had watched out the last hours of the night.
‘Good luck,’ the Dragonfly wished him.
Thalric gave the man a sour look. This was, he was fully aware, a stupid idea, and he had no faith in it, whatever the late Varmen might have said. Still, it was marginally less stupid than sitting in the tower until the Salmae finally cracked their defences.
All I need to do is get Che out, he decided. Win or lose, he would manufacture the opportunity somehow.
And they take this seriously? This clash of champions? Now that it had been mentioned, he did find an old memory surfacing from the earliest years of the war. Imperial generals being called out, gorgeously armoured Dragonfly-kinden Weaponsmasters standing before the automotives and the massed infantry, and then pointing a levelled sword, trying to face down the future.
He frowned. There was a great deal of idealism in the Commonweal back in those days – amongst the nobility, at least, who didn’t need to worry about where their next meal was coming from. Storybook lives, princes and castles, dances and hunts and mock tourneys. Then the Empire had come and burned away centuries of accumulated romance inside the engines of its war machine. So where did that leave Salme Elass? Was she still the honour-bound idealist?
Emperor’s balls she is, Thalric decided. He would rely on two things: that there would be empty-headed idle nobles among her retinue by whom this nonsense would be taken seriously and that Salme Elass knew what she herself wanted.
He spotted their picket line even as he entered the trees, mostly because it recoiled from him at a distance of twenty feet, the scouts flitting back towards the safety of the camp. He guessed that they had spread themselves thin, a cordon about the tower with plenty of airborne keeping watch for attempts at an escape to the sky. But, then, they know Tynisa, therefore they know she cannot fly.
‘I am an emissary with a message for your princess,’ he called out. ‘You will take me to her.’
After a pause, a handful of them approached him, clustered together for shared courage, as though they were stepping between the jaws of a beast. Thalric regarded them coldly, facing down the spearheads trained on him. They were a handful of peasant levy, he realized, and terrified of him. Varmen did some good work, then.
‘I come under truce,’ he informed them, raising one hand. A red flag was