We’ll see how long that lasts.
Dido stands and raises her hand for silence. Her allies quiet respectfully, but as insult, her husband’s allies speak on with one another and turn their backs to express their antipathy. It infuriates Dido. “You know the face…” Her words are drowned out. “You know the face of…” Romulus’s men speak even louder. At her side, Seraphina watches with faint amusement. Diomedes does not help his mother. Nor does the ArchKnight Helios. Bellerephon looks to Dido for instruction. She flicks her hand for him to begin and sits down with her jaw set in anger.
The knight slams his razor on the ground. Once, twice, till the room is silent.
“Cassius au Bellona, I see you.” Bellerephon stalks around the ring, his razor trailing behind. “You wretched buzzard. You spineless cur. You conspired to kill my grandfather and liege. You sought to kill my cousin in the flower of her life. You betrayed the Compact of Society and aided the Slave King of Mars. You came here in disguise, intent on mischief.” He smiles. “For these insults you shall whimper and bleed.”
Even Romulus’s men are silent and stare down at Cassius. All know how he betrayed the Sovereign, even if they did not claim her as their own. Coincidence bringing Cassius into the Rim beggars belief. So they require little to convince them that Darrow sent him here for some nefarious purpose. Cassius knows this. And so does Dido. Absent her evidence, she uses this to quell the dissent over her coup.
“I came of my own accord,” Cassius says to deaf ears. “I have no affiliation with the Republic.”
Bellerephon laughs. “Liar.”
“Bring evidence if you think me a liar and try me. No? Then you have no evidence, and you resort to bloodfeuds for justice. An absurdity in itself. But what can one expect from Rim rustics? No one ever taught you manners.” He chuckles. “As for the bloodfeud: it I do not dispute.” The Peerless meet the concession with hungry silence. “The blood of children and many more is on my hands. I expect no mercy. I ask only that if I fall, honor my bones and send them to the sun.”
Bellerephon spits boorishly on the ground. “You will have no honor. Your corpse I will feed to my hounds so they might shit Bellona. But your eyes I will put in a jar so they might watch as I feed your brother to the dust.”
Seraphina makes a disgusted sound. Amongst the Olympic Knights and much of the room, the proclamation is met with sharp disapproval. Helios makes a motion to Diomedes, who booms out an affirmation. “You will be so honored in your way, Bellona.” This maddens his cousin and Bellerephon almost flies into the crowd to strike at Diomedes to finish their earlier affair.
I feel Dido’s eyes on me, and I know Cassius was right. Again.
Of course this is all for me. They think I am the weak link. That, to spare Cassius’s life, I will give them what Cassius will not. Fools. They see my slender hands and naked face and believe me weak. Dangerous game, judging a blade by its scabbard. I stay seated, silent, watching as Bellerephon shouts at Chance and gestures to the bit of elm she holds in her hand. “Break the damn stick, girl, before I do it for you.”
Startled, Chance bends the elm, and as it snaps, the duel begins.
The men do not lash into one another, but pace in a circle, measuring. Seldom have the forms of the Core and the Rim met in duels, at least after Revus forbade any Ionians from dueling on Luna. Most of the Rim houses followed his lead.
As is old custom, neither duelist wears armor, though Cassius is allowed an aegis: a small shield generator embedded in a metal vambrace on the back of his left forearm. In his right hand, he carries a coiled razor. They could have given him their unfamiliar, longer hasta, but instead gave him a razor of the Interior.
Bellerephon’s hasta slithers on the ground behind him like an oiled snake, nearly three meters long in whip and two meters in lance. In a scabbard on his left hip he carries the short kitari thrusting sword.
Hardening his razor into its lance form, Bellerephon raises the wicked black blade. Hands above his head, the weapon pointed toward Cassius so that Bellerephon looks like some strange, pale scorpion with its long stinger wagging in the air.
It is the Shadowfall stance of the Rim’s razormasters.
“He’s a shade?” I ask Seraphina. She does not answer. Her eyes devour the scene with excitement.
Cassius observes the alien stance warily. He holds his blade rigid and at his side with one hand in the summer hold of the Willow Way. His aegis he holds tight to his chest, ready to activate the shield. I blink. And by the time my lid pulls back from my pupil, Bellerephon’s blade has spun in his hands, changed to whip form, and now slashes at Cassius’s face.
Cassius bends back. Too slow. The whip slices a chunk of scalp off the front of his forehead. Blood sheets down his face. Bellerephon uses his momentum to spin with his whip forward, lashing it into another strike toward Cassius’s leg. His attack relies on the length of the hasta and his height to send the black blade falling down in a frenzy of incredibly swift blows. It reminds me more of Darrow than Aja or Cassius.
Blinking the blood out of his eyes, Cassius falls back under the onslaught, bending and circling and deflecting as the ground sparks from the metal whip. His own whip is useless against the longer reach of Bellerephon’s, so he uses it in rigid form for defense and relies on his aegis to turn away most blows. Time and again he tries to close the distance, but while Cassius is stronger, Bellerephon is the quicker of the two, more accustomed to the gravity here. He shuffles his feet instead of lifting them. Each time Cassius attempts to close, Bellerephon slides back, calls his razor to rigid form, and nearly spears him through the stomach.
The two men part, their world tiny and furious. Their bodies tell them to flee the metal and break out of the horrible confines of the circle, but their minds tether them together and again they lash out. It has been years since Cassius has faced a man like this. I’m not sure he has ever faced Shadowfall in an actual duel.
Each is a master of their craft, using their litany of tricks hard learned over the years. Each probing, testing, then locking into a furious spate of exchanges, arms a blinding flurry, the whips nothing but blurred movement. Blood sprays across the white marble and into the stands, where it spatters the face of a young child three rows back. I can’t even tell which man is wounded until Cassius stumbles away, a flap of skin and muscle folding over a long laceration all the way to the bone of his left shoulder. Blood pours out. Bellerephon seizes the moment and presses his attack.
“You can stop this,” Dido says past Seraphina. “Give me the code and he lives.”
“He doesn’t need my help.”
Despite my words, I watch in fear as Cassius falls back before Bellerephon and the momentum tips in the Rim knight’s favor. I thought Cassius invincible. Part of a story that could never exist without him in it. They can’t see the grandness of him. They can’t see the warmth, the pain, the regret, the love. All they see is a vessel for their hate. They stare down at him pitilessly, thinking his death their right, even those adversaries who despise Dido’s coup.
In the circle, Cassius can barely see for the blood in his eyes. He has no time to wipe them clean. He’s losing too much from his shoulder and now is pressed against the edge of the circle. His heels scrape the sand. Bellerephon lashes at him, maintaining his distance, but Cassius continues to turn away the whip with his aegis. The metal cracks into the small energy shield and bounces back, sending blue sparks hissing through the air as Cassius activates it milliseconds before each blow lands to prevent the shield from overheating. Smoke already rises from the battery pack.
Bellerephon batters Cassius down, blow after blow, till Cassius is on a knee, the whip raining down on his smoking shield. Bellerephon’s whip arcs in a high overhead strike. Cassius raises his arm yet again to deflect. But then his aegis winks out. The whip slashes down onto Cassius’s raised left arm and coils tight around it. Bellerephon could rip off Cassius’s arm from the elbow down, but he’s caught in the middle of his acrobatics, ex
pecting to meet the aegis again and for the whip to bounce back. He loses half a second.
Now, Cassius attacks. He uses the Snapping Branch gambit.
Springing forward with his thick legs just as he jerks on the whip with his arm, he pulls Bellerephon off balance toward him. With his left hand, Bellerephon desperately brings his kitari up to block Cassius. But Cassius bats the small blade to the side with his razor, and then cuts diagonally at Bellerephon’s right arm, which holds the hasta. His diamond-hard blade cleaves through the bone of the man’s arm like it’s pudding. An open artery sprays a single spurt of blood two meters long. Cassius spins with his momentum, and cuts in the other direction. The metal severs Bellerephon’s remaining arm at the forearm.
Both limbs spin to the floor. Bellerephon totters, looking at the weeping red stumps and the pale bone poking out from the meat, mouth opening and closing like a stunned dog’s.
I almost surge to my feet in a joyful shout as Cassius sets his hand on Bellerephon’s shoulder and guides him gently to his knees. He looks up at Dido. Prime show, my friend. Damn prime show.
“Do not waste a man like this,” Cassius says. “He bled for you. He doesn’t have to die. Release me and mine. Agree to our terms, and his life will be spared.”
Dido glowers down at him. Not for a moment does she entertain the idea of sparing her nephew. A cold heart beats in that chest. “Bellerephon?” she asks. “Your fate is yours.”
“Pulvis et umbra sumus.” He shivers. “Akari, bear witness.”
Honor calls him to the dark. What a waste of a man.
But there is something beautiful in it all the same.
His body shakes and I marvel at the life’s worth of discipline that goes to keeping himself erect on his knees. The pale Raa knight looks to his family, his slender Norvo wife, and up to the dragons of his ancestors on the ceiling.
Cassius hacks his head off at the spine.
Beside me, anger roils from Seraphina as her cousin dies.
“This is your fault, my son,” Dido says to Diomedes. Amidst his knights, watching his cousin die in his stead, he looks stunned and stricken with guilt almost as immense as my relief. Bleeding from his forehead and shoulder, drenched in sweat, Cassius manages to smile at me, knowing that I could have given in to Dido but did not. He raises chin and lifts his voice for all to hear. “I am Cassius au Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”
It is over.
He has won. The matter is settled, though I don’t know what shape the next moments will take. And then I look over at Seraphina, readying to console her on the loss of her cousin, only to see implacable Dido’s face unchanged, her hand in the air, her fingers snapping together.
“Fabera,” she calls.
My hope sinks and Cassius’s face falls as a young hawkish woman with a bald pate hefts her razor and jumps from the second row over the heads of those sitting on the benches beneath. She lands on the edge of the white marble and paces toward Cassius, her long razor rigid. She spits on the floor and enters the circle, where she crows her challenge to Cassius, her name and her right as cousin to open his veins.
“It’s over!” I say in protest to Dido. “The feud was settled with Bellerephon!”
“His feud is with House Raa,” she replies.
There is a part of me that wants to rail against her and decry her hypocrisy, but the look she gives me is so reptilian that it activates the colder part of my own blood. The shock disappears and I work to understand. “Do you support this?” I ask Seraphina.
Though surprised at her mother’s action, Seraphina says nothing. “Don’t look to her,” Dido snarls. “I preside here. That creature murdered my daughter. He killed Revus!” The room cries for blood. Then, very softly, Dido leans toward me. “But I can forget. I can forgive. And you can end this. Open the safe.”
Dangerous woman.
I look down at Cassius and let my silence answer. Dido sighs. “A pity. Fabera, honor House Raa.”
She is not a shade, but she is fast and knows this gravity. She lunges at him with her razor, roving and probing like she’s hunting boar. Knowing he’s losing too much blood, she tries to draw out the duel, but Cassius continues to charge and close. She’s more agile than Bellerephon, but not so powerful. Cassius manages to pin her against the rim of the circle, where they exchange a dangerous series of slashing parries. She scores two cuts on his right leg, but has no time to savor the moment. I see her die two seconds before it happens. Cassius flows into the Autumn Wind movement as easily as if we were sparring together with blunted weapons on the Archi. He strikes three times at head level, locks blades, pushes against her so she counters his force, then he pivots right and slides his blade overtop hers in a leverage position so the tip enters her forehead and pushes through her brain before coming out her throat and through her jaw. She dies before she hits the ground. He slides his blade from her skull, flicks off the gray gristle coating it, and limps to turn and face Dido.
“I am Cassius au Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”
Dido snaps her fingers. “Bellagra.”
Another knight jumps down.
“Seraphina, you’re going to lose another cousin,” I say, knowing that this execution wears on her.
Diomedes does not retain his composure. “Mother, enough.”
“Bellagra, honor House Raa.”
The knight surges toward Cassius. This one was not the same quality as the first two and dies quicker than Fabera. Cassius parries a weak blow and splits the man down the middle. His halves twitch on the floor and leak his life’s blood into the Gold Sigil. But something strange has happened. Despite the condemnation of the Olympic Knights, the room roils with volunteers. Each death decays their manners and resolve and reaches into the crowd with forked rootlike fingers to enrage and poison another soul—a lover there, a cousin, a friend, a drinking companion, a brother in arms. From Dido’s allies to Romulus’s, the anger boils. It dawns on me then the cruel stratagem the woman has devised. I don’t doubt that her hatred of Cassius is real. But they do not waste in the Rim. Each death is a down payment for her war. Absent her holodrop evidence, she uses my friend to boil the blood, to distract, to bind her allies and foes together in anger. And the more Raa that fall, the more her position solidifies, the more the blood of the Rim is raised against the Interior and not against her coup.
This is the depth of her conviction, a willing sacrifice of her own kin to reveal whatever truth hides within our safe.
I witness Dido at long last: the immensity of her resolve, the cruelness of her intellect, and I am terrified to think that I ever was so arrogant as to presume her Romulus’s inferior simply because I’d heard his legend more. She reminds me of the woman who taught me all I know—more passionate, less subtle. But a shade of my grandmother dwells in this woman. At her side, Seraphina sits with a weary expression that seems to say she understands all but will suffer it because she must.
But I cannot watch my brother suffer much longer.
There will be no end to it.
No mercy. Just death, and for what?
Cassius limps to his feet, again standing over the body of his foe. The floor is littered with them. “I am Cassius au Bellona.” He pants for breath, barely able to go on. “Son of Tiberius…son of Julia.” He squares his shoulders and summons his pride to lift his voice. “Morning Knight, and my honor remains.”
“Mother! Stop this madness!” Diomedes cries out. “He has won. How many of our blood will you throw away?”
“As many as honor demands,” she says. “Save your kin, Diomedes.”
He does not rise.
“A pity,” Dido replies. I feel the words coming before they leave her lips, because I saw Seraphina’s legs bouncing, her fingers tightening the laces on her boots, and I saw Dido notice the glances shared between us at dinner. Now the woman turns to me, only one card left to play and she plays it well. “Ser
aphina, honor House Raa.”
SERAPHINA BOLTS UPWARD LIKE A KUON released from its leash. She leaps, clearing the heads of those seated beneath us, and pulls free her razor before she lands on the killing floor. Diomedes watches in fear for his little sister. But the Golds clamoring for their chance to face Cassius now sit back down in disappointed silence. They think the matter settled. Seraphina is the executioner.
Cassius bleeds and sweats, his golden curls matted to his forehead. His knuckles sliced and savaged by metal. Blood soaks his shoes. His body is shaking from pain as steam trails off his flayed skin and open meat, but still he stands, using one of the discarded hasta for a crutch, watching neutrally as tall Seraphina lopes into the circle. This is his end. But there’s nothing glorious about it.
All I feel now is dread.
The same dread from that day when I watched my grandmother die and did nothing to stop it. Not even when I saw Cassius and the Reaper’s pack finish Aja. I cannot hate him for his part. It was I who did nothing to protect those I love. And I do love him. In this moment, he is true and pure and, in a way, everything I wanted to be as a child. Tears, unwelcome and unfamiliar, leak out my eyes as Cassius looks at me and shakes his head. Let me die, he is saying. That is all he wants. Absolution in death. But it is the wrong absolution.
The wrong death.
Seraphina steps past the corpses of her cousins and nods to Cassius. “Bellona, would that we had met as equals. You deserve better.”
“We all deserve the worms, Raa,” Cassius replies. He wipes blood from his paling face. “Shall we meet them together?”
In reply Seraphina draws up into the Shadowfall, a shade herself, and Cassius sinks into the Willow Way.
Hoping to surprise her, and knowing he can’t last for long, Cassius lunges forward with his remaining strength. It is not enough. She ripples into motion. Not as fast as Darrow, not as strong as Aja, but smoother than either could ever hope to be, sliding sideways easy as a bird’s shadow over the sea. She blocks his blade with her hasta and spins her kitari from her belt and hammers the blunted handle into his knuckles. Cassius’s razor slips out of his hand and skitters over the bloody marble. He hunches without a weapon, panting. Sluggishly, he lunges for another discarded razor, but Seraphina cracks her whip and sends the weapon Cassius seeks flying into one of the walls.