13. The Ice Spirit and the Wire Master #3
“We’ll get someone to properly clean it.
” Rerdas extricated a hand enough to wave at the servants, trying to mime fetching a basin, but his frantic motions caught the wrong attention.
Imalroc prowled in front of the chaise, eyeing him and paying Siglor no mind.
He’d insisted on this damn fight, and now he seemed to have forgotten he was in the middle of it.
Imalroc had lost all sense. Umber wasn’t a man who could be challenged and openly insulted, certainly not by a battleboxer. Rerdas was going to have to apologize for this half a dozen times, and not only with words.
He turned his attention fully to the duke, ignoring Imalroc’s half-hearted tracking of Siglor. “Your Grace, I can’t imagine what possessed him to—”
“Can’t you?” Umber asked. His eyes glittered with a cruel sort of interest. But then an amazed grin spread across his face. “Rerdas,” he said. “He desires you. Do you realize that? And he can’t have you.” Umber’s hand curled around Rerdas’s knee and wandered up a little. Rerdas turned to stone.
“He can’t have you,” Umber repeated, “because I have you. It’s a bit delicious, isn’t it?”
Rerdas couldn’t think of what else might be permissible to say.
It wasn’t delicious at all to be dangled in front of someone like a toy.
And that was only the beginning of the things Umber would not want to hear.
They were in public, but after Imalroc’s little display, he didn’t dare fold himself away from the touch climbing his leg.
A loud thud reverberated, and the audience groaned and yelped.
Siglor evaded a swipe from the Draalish sword, but Imalroc’s attention flickered between the opponent scuttling away on his hands and heels, and the possessive caress of Umber’s palm slipping up the inside of Rerdas’s thigh.
Rerdas had worried that a brief fight might displease Widran’s patrons, and now all he wanted was for it to be over.
Almost as soon as Siglor regained his feet, Imalroc kneed him in the stomach. And pulled up short, shaking out his leg as though something had stung it.
Siglor, backed into one of the pillars, smiled, and the noise in the battlebox built. Rerdas recognized that hungry anticipation.
The white fabric over Imalroc’s kneecap rapidly turned red.
Thin scarlet branches wound down his shin.
Perhaps one of Siglor’s daggers had not been sheathed, although Rerdas hadn’t seen a blade.
Just the shine of the metal whorls of the costume.
He sat up sharply, heedless of Umber’s tugging hold.
Imalroc had driven his knee into some scrap of metal, and it had sliced him.
It didn’t seem to hinder him, judging by the way he tested his weight. Only a shallow cut. But the Kiboan’s deranged leer and the audience’s enthusiasm… Something else was wrong.
Siglor straightened slowly and shivered as though trying to shake off water. The silvery coil at his shoulder slid down his bicep and over his forearm, stopping at the metal spur.
Gods. In the story, Nolbrathe had called him the wire master.
“Razor-saws,” Etiana breathed. She crouched at the end of her seat and shouted, “Those are razor-saws!”
Siglor hurled the wire from his wrist, and Imalroc ducked to avoid taking a line of razor saw across the face. He swung the sword, but the metal moved like a whip, coiling around the sword hilt in a blur too fast for the eye to follow.
With a backward leap that almost put him into the shrieking audience, Siglor yanked the wire tight.
The coil sank into the unprotected skin of Imalroc’s hands. Imalroc flailed the sword to shake it free, but the wire bent around the blade’s edge. Blood trickled across Imalroc’s straining tendons.
Retreating would only put more tension in the wire. Imalroc needed to—
The battleboxer charged his black-clad opponent, barreled into him and tackled him to the ground. Slack in the wire let him get his hands and sword free, but Siglor drove him back with another vicious crack of metal spiraling off his other forearm.
Imalroc reeled away. A long, shallow line opened across the side of his head, streaming down to the edge of one eyebrow. Rerdas’s breath came in stabs.
Now it was Imalroc trying to put distance between them, dodging away, his full attention finally on his opponent.
The wires hummed as Siglor worked them to a blinding speed, three strands uncoiled now, striking at all angles.
Even as he managed to block the worst of it, Imalroc bled in a hundred places.
Rerdas clenched his hands on his own knees.
Siglor whirled a new wire, landing it again around Imalroc’s sword hand.
Imalroc threw his sword in the air and yanked his wire-bound wrist down.
Siglor toppled off balance, and Imalroc caught his blade in his free hand.
He drove it up the outside of the enemy’s nearest leg.
Siglor screamed as the sword tore through a long strip of leather, skin, and blood.
He staggered away, and Imalroc let him go, knocking free the ensnaring wire.
The fighters circled each other. Rerdas grimaced as he spotted hands reaching to touch Imalroc as he padded by. Both of them left trails of blood on the smooth floor. Siglor had fewer marks on him, but the Draalish sword cut much deeper than the razor-saws.
The Kiboan limped at the edge of the open space, a long line of saws unspooling from one arm. He bent to unwind the thicker wires from around his legs.