One insult too many. I never learn.
Murillio felt his heart pounding. The scar of his last, near-fatal wounding seemed to be throbbing as if eager to reopen. He could feel blood pulsing down from his pierced shoulder muscle, could feel warm trickles running down the length of his upper arm to soak the cloth at his elbow.
‘Blood drawn,’ he repeated. ‘As you guessed, I am in no shape to duel beyond that, Gorlas. We were agreed, before a witness.’
Gorlas glanced over at his foreman. ‘Do you recall, precisely, what you heard?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Thought there was something about wounding…’
Gorlas frowned.
The foreman cleared his throat.’… but that’s all. A discussion, I think. I heard nothing, er, firmed up between you.’
Gorlas nodded. ‘Our witness speaks.’
A few hundred onlookers in the pit below were making restless sounds. Murillio wondered if Harllo was among them.
‘Ready yourself,’ Gorlas said. So, it was to be this way. A decade past Murillio would have been standing over this man’s corpse, regretful, of course, wishing it all could have been handled peacefully. And that was the luxury of days gone past, that cleaner world, while everything here, now, ever proved so… messy.
/ didn’t come here to die this day. I’d better do something about that. I need to survive this. For Harllo. He resumed his stance. Well, he was debilitated, enough to pretty much ensure that he would fight defensively, seeking only ripostes and perhaps a counterattack-taking a wound to deliver a death. All of that would be in Gorlas’s mind, would shape his tactics. Time, then, to surprise the bastard.
His step and lunge was elegant, a fluid forward motion rather quick for a man his age. Gorlas, caught on the forward tilt of his rocking, was forced to jump a half-step back, parrying hard and without precision. His riposte was wild and in-accurate, and Murillio caught it with a high parry of his own, following through with a second attack-the one he had wanted to count from the very first-a fully extended lunge straight for his opponent’s chest-heart or lungs, it didn’t matter which-
But somehow, impossibly, Gorlas had stepped close, inside and to one side of that lunge-his half-step back had not been accompanied by any shift in weight, simply a repositioning of his upper body, and this time his thrust was not at all wild.
Murillio caught a flash along the length of Daru steel, and then he could not breathe. Something was pouring down the front of his chest, and spurting up into his mouth.