Honor - Kevin Killiany [36]
“Now.”
“Now,” the K’k’tict around her murmured and pulled back.
Lefty, Copper, and two of her recent guards delayed for a moment, standing up stripped saplings and jamming them firmly into the loamy earth. Then they withdrew without haste.
Corsi uncoiled, coming to her full height in the center of the challenge square.
The Smaunif froze. Some with their swords half drawn, some stooped to drag bodies from the way, one with his hand halfway to his crossbow. For a long moment there was no sound.
She knew she was a sight, bruised and wounded in her hand-tied uniform. But she was a humanoid, the first non-Smaunif humanoid the invaders had ever seen. And where she stood right now spoke to their very core.
“Sonandal!”
The Smaunif leader snapped from his daze at the sound of his name.
“Your lack of honor and failure to take responsibility for your mistakes has cost innocent lives.” Corsi based her challenge on forms Pattie—and someone named Solal—had explained, trusting the language file transferred from Pattie’s combadge to choose the most stinging phrases. “The lives of my friends require recompense. I challenge you, now, here, to defend what honor you hope to possess.”
Sonandal looked at his troops. The troops looked at Sonandal. If he hoped to ever lead again, he had no choice.
He gestured to a young male close to him. The trooper pulled his sword from its sheath.
Clean, Corsi saw. Perhaps the slaughter had not been going on as long as she’d imagined. The K’k’tict bodies stacked like cordwood said otherwise.
She had hoped Sonandal, seeing her unarmed, would choose to fight hand to hand. It would be harder to keep her promise to the K’k’tict with swords.
Holding it by the blade, Sonandal tossed the clean sword to Corsi as he stepped into the ring.
She caught the hilt, twirling quickly to parry his charging lunge. When he spun back around, she was ready, guiding his scything blade up and over with the broad of her sword.
The Smaunif sword was more a cutlass that anything else. Nowhere near as subtle and balanced as the saber she had trained on at the Academy. Almost a chopping tool.
In fact, she realized as she wove it in front of her, parrying Sonandal’s attacks, it probably was just that, more machete than sword. These blades had probably traveled to Zhatyra II as part of a wing assembly or a bulkhead.
And Sonandal was not a swordsman. With each flurry of chops and thrusts he came at her as though she were a tangle of vines.
Which was a very good thing, Corsi realized as she almost missed a step. She was not fully recovered from her fall; her left side was beginning to betray her. Against a master swordsman she’d have been hard pressed to keep her feet, much less keep her opponent at bay.
She had to end this before her body gave out. But not with swords.
Ignoring the tremor in her left thigh, she lunged forward, slapping at Sonandal’s blade with the flat of her own sword. Startled, he staggered back, barely able to keep his blade up as she drove him across the square with rapid fire slaps; loud, frightening, and harmless if he’d had his wits about him enough to realize what she was doing.
Corsi stopped abruptly, letting the Smaunif stumble a few steps clear of her. She fought to breathe steadily, not let her chest heave. The stamina wasn’t there. Flourishing her sword, she leaned right and drove its point into the ground just outside the square.
Hoping she wasn’t making a mistake, she held both hands toward him, palm up, then beckoned with her fingers. Come get me.
Sonandal reversed his own sword, thrusting it into the ground. Technically it was still inside the ring, but Corsi suspected stopping proceedings now on a point of order would be counterproductive.
The Smaunif surprised her.
Leaping forward like a frog, he planted his hands on the ground two meters in front of her and spun. It was an awkward-looking round-off, but before she realized his target he drove his heels into her left thigh.
Pain spiked from her knee to her scalp. She