Chase the Morning

A classic forehand smash. It caught him right on the sleek crown of his head, knocked him flying, flat on his back on his own altar. The sword rang in my fingers as if I’d struck solid stone. He lay groaning, writhing, kicking feebly, fingers scrabbling at the dark trenched gash. A wound like that should be fatal – but this was no ordinary man. Panting, I staggered forward, bent over him, lifting the sword to strike again. His mouth opened –

I sprang back with a yell of disgust. Just in time to avoid the fountain of blackness he vomited out.

‘You filthy bastard –’ I gargled, about to hack wildly at him, I think. Somebody caught my arm, though, and I looked around, into Jyp’s face. It was only about then my memory really began to reassert itself.

‘No,’ said Jyp wearily. ‘Don’t go near him. That wasn’t any attack. He won’t attack again.’

‘But –’

‘No buts. You whipped him. You met him out here on the Spiral, where he gained all his power, and you beat the bejasus out of him. Fought him, spell for spell –’

I shook my head, confused. ‘Spell? It – it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t using any magic. Something was happening here, but I wasn’t … in control of that. He had me thinking we – were just talking business, till the end. In my office – just sparring over a deal –’

‘Your kind of knowledge. Your kind of magic. Oh, the power behind it, that was … someone else’s, sure. But the using of it, the will – that was all yours. You had to make the moves. Don Pedro, he must’ve seen what had happened, thought you were the weak link in the partnership, that he could beat you on that level. So that’s how you saw it; but you turned it against him. And what you did there you were doing here too, I guess. Didn’t matter how you beat him – you did, and that’s what counts. Smashed his power, broke his body. And now he’s tried to escape from you. To run.’

‘Running? But he’s –’

‘In time. Fled away out of this wider world, where he was beaten. Fled blindly! Panicked like a wounded animal. Remember how I said some folk just break and bolt when the Spiral gets too much for them – back to the moment they first entered it? And look where that’s taken him. Back to his sick-bed. He’s dying of vomito negro – Yellow Jack. Just like he should’ve done all along.’

And as I stared at the writhing form of my enemy I saw that there was some subtle change around him, that the white stones behind him did take on something of the look of high stucco’d walls, the fitful light of the dying flames flickering across them like a single guttering lamp – or a sick man’s image of the fever consuming him. The rich robes his hands clenched and tore in their delirious agony spread out like embroidered coverlets, the stained altar-stone the soiled sheets of a lordly sick-bed. Nausea welled up in me, and a terrible unexpected pity, and I could only stand there, without speaking.

‘You are wrong in one thing only, Master Pilot,’ said Mall softly. ‘Aye, he has the yellow fever. But ’tis not that which kills him. See, the blackened and bloated tongue that near chokes him! Too often I’ve seen men die thus. Helpless in his derangement he cannot look to himself, and he has none loves him enough to risk coming near. Sooner than court infection, they leave him to perish most miserably – of thirst.’

Another voice beside us broke the brief silence. ‘Well! Hope he enjoys it, the little bastard! I’d say that’s just about up to his own standards of amusement – wouldn’t you?’ Clare’s mouth set hard as she contemplated the writhing figure. ‘Oh, don’t look so shocked! When they chained me up in that dungeon of his, with the cage and the bones and everything – they were laughing, those Wolves. Then they took the light away. I’d a few hours to think about his kind of fun.’

‘I just bet you did,’ said Jyp sympathetically. ‘But that’s done with now. And by the look of it, so’s he.’

Once again, though, he was mistaken. Racked by the last throes of his delirium, Don Pedro shrieked and sat upright, clutching at the headwound, his fingers scrabbling in agony, tearing like claws, tearing away the very flesh. Until suddenly it ripped – and slid away and sank, the sallow face sagging like crumpled linen …

There was no blood. There was no white bone laid bare beneath. No skull. Nothing but a shape, a mould, a form of the same solid darkness that lay behind his eyes, shining in the firelight like the blackest of opal.