The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [20]
Aral fought veiled and tightly swathed, like a ninja. She had a reputation as an elegant fighter who made a fetish of her technique. Nobody had been able to break her form, let alone touch her. Her sword was an oddity: it was curved slightly and then recurved, in the form of an elongated letter S. Pretty but a pain to carry around, Quentin thought. You couldn’t fit it in a scabbard.
Bingle was an olive-colored man with hooded eyes that gave him a permanently melancholy look. He wore what might once have been an officer’s uniform from which the bars and trim had been snipped, and he fought with a thin, flexible, whiplike blade with a complicated basket hilt that didn’t look Fillorian. Though he’d won all his matches, the buzz on him was that he’d managed it without doing a lot of actual fighting. One infamous duel started in the morning and ran almost till sundown while Bingle engaged in an endless series of feints and evasions. The whole tournament was held up while they waited for the bracket to be filled.
In another match Bingle’s opponent waited till the opening bell had rung and then calmly stepped over the chalk line out of bounds for an automatic forfeit. Apparently they’d met before, and once had been enough. Quentin was looking forward to watching somebody make Bingle actually stand and fight.
Quentin nodded to the Master of Sword to start the match. Aral began a sequence of highly stylized movements, drawing fluid shapes in the air with her recurved blade. She didn’t approach her opponent. She seemed to be lost in concentration, practicing some ritualized, almost abstract martial art. Bingle watched her for a little bit, flicking the tip of his sword around uneasily.
Then he joined the dance. He began performing the same movements as his opponent—they became mirror images of each other. Apparently they were adepts of the same style and had chosen to open with the same form. Laughter rippled through the crowd. And it was funny, like a mime copying a passerby. But neither of the fighters laughed.
Afterward Quentin wasn’t sure exactly when this preamble ended and the fighting began. The two combatants passed too near each other, and it was like a candle flame accidentally brushing a curtain. A spark jumped the gap, the symmetry was broken, the fissile material reached criticality, and suddenly the room was full of the rapid-fire clatter of steel colliding with steel.
At this level of mastery the action went too fast for Quentin to follow. The precise details of the moves and countermoves and negotiations were lost on everybody but the combatants. Their shared style was all arcs and spins and constant motion as each side looked for openings and found only dead ends. You got the impression they were reading each other down to an atomic level, logging tiny twitches and tells and shifts of weight. The passes would start beautifully, set sequences that sometimes even included a flip or a somersault, then the flow would break and everything would be chaos until the blades tangled up and locked, and they disengaged and started all over again.
Jesus, Quentin thought. And he was going to get on a boat with one of these people. It was a little too real. But it was electrifying too: these were people who knew exactly what they were meant to do and never hesitated to do it, whether they won or lost.
Then all at once it was over: Aral overextended herself with a huge overhand chop that Bingle just managed to roll out from under, and by blind chance her blade stuck fast in the floor, in a crack between two