The carriage groaned like something half alive, its ancient timbers protesting with every turn of iron rimmed wheels that bit and shuddered against the rutted stones of the northern road. Each jolt rose up through the floorboards, through the soles of my boots, and settled somewhere deep in my chest, where the last echoes of fever still lingered.
Through the small, dust hazed window, I watched the valley unfurl before me like a painting whose colors had only just dried. We had left Caerlog Castle behind, that grey sentinel nestled in the cradle between the rushing Akan River and the brooding shoulder of the Lonely Mountain, and now the land opened wide and unguarded beneath a sky the color of tempered steel. As we crested the final ridge, the world seemed to fall away on my left, and there stretching to the very edge of sight lay the Western Ocean.
I had never before set eyes upon a true ocean. Nothing in my life, no lake, no river, no flooded quarry had prepared me for the sheer, restless immensity of it: a vast and breathing plain of water, silver-blue and endless, each wave catching the pale morning sun and flinging it back in a thousand fractured points of light. I found I could not look away.
To the east, in gentle defiance of that wild water, rolled miles of lush golden farmland, the wheat stirring like a slow tide of its own. There the flora race bent to their labor, and their voices rose together in soft, harmonious song that drifted across the furrows and in through the carriage window a melody so free of malice, so achingly gentle, that for a moment it eased the tightness behind my ribs. Their smiles, warm and untroubled, seemed to belong to some gentler world than the one I was riding toward.
And then, at the road's end, where the land finally surrendered itself to the sea along the curve of the Bay of Heaven, the capital rose from the earth like a crown laid upon the coast: Heavenport.
Beside me, Nea rested her hand against my arm. I flexed my fingers slowly, testing the strength that had returned to them, feeling the faint, unfamiliar tension coiled in my chest. A full month of bitter herbal broths, of grueling conditioning, had dragged me back from the very lip of death. But time, that most merciless of creditors, had run out regardless; there would be no more mornings to sharpen my edge, no more hours to test the limits of my healing flesh before the fighting began. And yet my body was whole again. My strength had returned to me in full, and deep within, my dormant power lay coiled and waiting, settled like cold steel drawn taut along my veins.
I stared out at the looming ramparts and steadied my breath.
Heavenport lived by a decree older than most of its stones: once every ten years, the capital opened its gates for the Grand Trials, the sacred contest by which the next Lord Commander was chosen from among its knights. Yet the older law beneath it made no distinction of blood or birth any soul beneath the banner of the Holy Union might come forward, take up arms among Heavenport's knighthood, and, if deemed worthy, carve out a rank for themselves upon that bloodied sand.
"We are entering Heavenport, strategist," the driver called down from his bench, his voice nearly swallowed by the clamor rising ahead.
The capital rose before us like a titan wading ashore from the sea. Walls of white stone, vast and unbroken, encircled a sprawl of soaring spires and close-packed cobbled streets, its harbors crowded with masts swaying like a forest stripped of leaves. The carriage rattled to a halt outside the colossal amphitheater crouched at the city's heart, and the plaza surrounding it broke over us in a wave of noise and color and smell. Vendors cried out from their stalls, the smoke of skewered river-fish curling into the sky beside the sharp perfume of spiced meats and stranger delicacies, all of it offered up to the thousands of spectators who had come to watch blood spilled in the name of glory.
We stepped down onto the crowded stone, and the shadow of the Coliseum fell over us like the wing of some enormous, watching beast. Even here, outside its walls, the roar of fifty thousand voices rolled through the ground and up through the soles of my boots a sound less heard than felt, thrumming in my very bones.
Nea stepped close against my side, her pink hair brushing soft against my shoulder. Without a word she wrapped her arms around my torso and held me there, fierce and quiet, a small still point against the tide of noise and dread pressing in from every side. I lifted my hand and rested it gently against her head, offering her the only reassurance I had left to give a nod, wordless as her embrace before I made myself turn toward the registrar's tables gathered beneath the archway.
"Name?" the clerk barked, not troubling to lift his eyes from the parchment before him.
"Amaduce."
He pressed a seal of red wax against the page and slid a small bronze token across the counter to me, the metal still warm from his hand. With that quiet, unceremonious gesture, I was made a knight of Heavenport.
"Rule is simple, strategist." He said the word the way another man might spit. "Now that you're registered among Heavenport's knights, you fight through the brackets to establish your rank. Matches are strict one-on-one duels. Given the size of the Coliseum's sands, ten separate duels run at once, each in its own quarter of the floor. Survive your bracket, and you advance."
I led Nea through the cool stone tunnels beneath the stands, our footsteps echoing until, at last, we emerged into the blinding heat and light of the arena floor. The air struck me like a physical blow thick with the copper tang of old blood, alive with the deafening cheers of a crowd hungry for more.
The day wore on in a blur of steel and sand. Across the ten divided sectors, duels rose and fell in quick, brutal succession. When my section was called, I gave myself over to what I knew best, not raw strength, but precision, the patient geometry of dead-angle footwork. I disarmed heavy spear-bearers before they understood they had already lost. I swept the legs from beneath swordsmen too eager to spend themselves in the first exchange. I forced yield after yield without wasting a single unnecessary motion. Match by match, the field of eager recruits thinned around me, and somewhere in the stands my name began to travel from mouth to mouth as the sun dragged itself slowly toward the horizon.
By late afternoon the great barriers that had divided the sand into ten sectors were drawn back into the walls, one by one, until the whole vast floor of the amphitheater lay open and empty save for two. Out of every recruit who had entered the Grand Trials that day, only two remained standing. The entire arena had been cleared for us alone, and across the open sand stood my final opponent: the ultimate warrior of the Holy Land, waiting in silence for me to close the distance between us.
"Your name," I said, and my voice carried further than I expected across the sudden, breathless hush that had fallen over fifty thousand watching souls.
She tilted her head, her expression as flat and unreadable as ice locked beneath a winter lake. "Volger Cathie," she answered, and her voice was as cold as the name itself.
Up close, she seemed almost too young to be the Holy Land's finest. Fine, brilliant blonde hair framed a delicate face marred by swollen, raw-red eyelids, by bloodshot golden eyes, by cheeks blotched as though she had wept until there was nothing left to weep. Something in the sight of her struck me like a fist to the ribs she wore, unmistakably, the same wounded look I had seen on Nea's face the very first time I found her in the black horror of the mines. She might have been mistaken for an angel fallen to earth, lacking only a pair of white wings to complete the illusion.
She carried no heavy plate. Instead she wore high-necked vestments of immaculate white, woven from some thick, unyielding cloth that caught the dying sunlight and held it, the fabric fitted close to her frame, its seams traced in reinforced silver embroidery a holy purity that felt like a blasphemy against the blood-soaked sand beneath her feet.
The horn sounded. Before its echo had even begun to fade, she was gone.
A white blur crossed the space between us in the space of a single blink, the air keening around the terrible speed of her blade. I barely caught the first blow on my own steel in time, the shock of it slamming up through my arms and into my shoulders hard enough to rattle my teeth. From that first exchange I was driven onto the defensive and kept there, forced back step after step beneath an assault that gave me no room to breathe, no half-second to set my feet thrust, slash, high guard, low parry, her wide, red-rimmed eyes tracking my every twitch as though she could read my next move before I had chosen it myself.
For long minutes I did nothing but endure, pouring every scrap of my tactical mind into simple survival. But speed, however blinding, leaves patterns behind it. With every blow I turned aside, I began to see them: the subtle roll of her shoulder before a strike, the faint hesitation in her left ankle a heartbeat before she lunged, the rhythm hidden inside her breathing like a melody I had only to learn.
Slowly, the storm around me began to resolve itself into something I could read. I calculated her angles before her feet ever left the sand, until the moment came when she committed to a sharp overhead strike and I did not block it. I shifted half a step to the right, let her blade carve nothing but empty air beside my ear, and drove my guard hard into her exposed wrist.
Steel found flesh. A thin crimson line opened along her forearm. I pressed into the dead angle she had left me, my blade already moving a cut across her shoulder, a slice through the white cloth at her waist until the exchange belonged entirely to me.
I stepped in for the strike that should have ended it.
Before my edge could reach her throat, Volger hurled herself backward in one impossible, fluid leap, landing yards away at the center of the ring. Her white garments were already darkening with blood, yet her swollen, tear-worn face remained entirely motionless, her bloodshot eyes fixed on me through the deepening dusk.
"Not bad," she murmured, and the words carried with unnerving clarity across the hushed ring. "Not bad at all. I did not expect to use this so soon."
She raised her sword toward the darkening sky and let her voice ring out in a chant that seemed older than the stones around us:
"Shining light, purge the night! Darkness falls before our light!"
Light erupted around her left arm, so bright it left ghosts swimming across my vision. When it finally receded, a heavy shield and an armored gauntlet had taken shape over her hand and forearm the shield carved as if from living marble, veined through with deep cobalt filigree and rimmed in gold that caught what little light remained in the sky.
She came at me again, and everything about her had changed. Faster now, and heavier, each blow landing with a force that had nothing left of restraint in it. I lunged for an opening along her exposed waist, only for her to snap that shielded arm across her body in time my steel rang against stone with a dull, bone-deep shock that traveled the length of my spine, and left not so much as a scratch behind.
Worse followed. As I fell back to disengage, I saw the wounds I had opened along her forearm, shoulder, and waist begin to bead with small, clear spheres of water, blue as a mountain lake. Wherever that water touched her skin, the torn cloth stitched itself closed and the deep crimson slashes simply ceased to be, vanishing beneath flawless, unmarked skin. Within seconds she stood before me as though I had never landed a single blow.
Tactics alone would not be enough against a wound that refused to stay open. I had no choice left but to reach for what remained of my true strength.
I planted my back foot and let my dormant aura pour down through my arm and into the blade. The polished steel darkened to pitch black, an ink-like shadow curling and writhing along its edge as the air around me grew suddenly, unnaturally cold. I saw recognition flare in Cathie's bloodshot eyes she understood, even before I moved, what she now faced and she braced herself low behind the blue-and-gold shield, locking every inch of her defense into place.
I struck.
My blackened blade crashed into that white marble shield with a crack like breaking thunder. Dark energy rippled outward across the gold trim, spidering fine cracks through the stone, but Cathie held her ground, shifting her weight at the last possible instant to bleed the worst of the force harmlessly aside. The cracked stone wept thick, luminous blue water even as it knit itself whole again and with each fresh healing, her movements sharpened, quickened, until every wound I managed to carve into that shield only fed the speed with which she closed on me again.
I could not sustain this. My aura was burning away far faster than I could afford, and driving my sword again and again into a wound that healed itself was nothing but a slow, certain way to lose.
Then, without warning, Cathie broke away, retreating several long strides to put space between us. She held her shield high and ready, her gaze fixed with sharp suspicion on the black mist still curling from my blade.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice slicing clean through the wind between us. "And who sent you?"
Every instinct honed by years of careful strategy told me to hold my silence. But the raw adrenaline of the duel loosened my tongue before I could stop myself, and I answered a mistake I regretted before the last word had even left me.
"Yeh-KOON recognized me," I said. "Why shouldn't you?"
Cathie went utterly still. For a long moment the silence between us stretched taut across the blood-darkened sand, her eyes locked on mine, calculating. "How do you know Yeh-KOON?"
Me and my careless tongue.
"I know him," I said, "because I killed him."
Her eyes narrowed to thin slits, her jaw hardening like stone. "Yeh-KOON was killed by Hen. Which means you are one of their agents." Her voice dropped, cold and absolute as a closing tomb. "For the last time who are you, and who do you work for?"
"I am Amaduce," I told her, and lifted my black-bladed sword once more into guard.
"I know no one by that name." Her eyes burned now with a fervor closer to madness than to reason, her grip tightening on the shield. "It does not matter. You must die, for you are a sinner who has no place upon this land Her Majesty has purified!"
Time was slipping through my grasp like water through cupped hands. My muscles screamed with exhaustion, my lungs clawed for air that never seemed to be enough, and my aura drained away with every heartbeat I could not hope to win a war of attrition against an opponent whose every wound sealed itself shut before I could press my advantage. I had one chance left, and it would have to be enough.
I gathered the last dregs of my dormant power and poured every remaining scrap of it into my sword. The blade flared with a suffocating, ink-black light, and I struck three times in rapid succession, loosing three dense crescents of pure darkness that tore across the sand toward her.
The wave of dark energy slammed into Cathie's shield with a sound like the sky itself splitting open. The marble shattered into a thousand glowing fragments, the force of the blow lifting her clean off her feet and hurling her across the arena floor. She struck the thick outer wall of the Coliseum with a shudder that cracked stone, and a cloud of dust and rubble crashed down to bury her beneath it.
I let out a long, ragged breath and let the point of my blade drop toward the sand.
I won...
The thought had not even finished forming before my knees buckled beneath me. My vision swam, dark spots creeping in at the edges until the great arched ceiling of the arena spun loose from its moorings above me, and every last reserve of strength deserted my body all at once. I pitched forward into the cold sand and knew nothing more.