Not since she felled Raymel Tacsis had Nona been up close with someone as massive as Denam. The apprentice seemed to fill half the ring and she had to crane her neck to look up at his face.
‘I’m going to snap you in two, little girl.’ Denam curled his lip. He had the arms to do it too, without effort. He’d grown, if anything, less handsome, over the two years, and he hadn’t been pleasing to look on in the first place. His face, reddened in anger, sported a nasty collection of pustules, and the beginnings of a sparse ginger beard. More spots had broken out along his arms and his back was thick with them.
‘You shouldn’t oil your muscles.’ Clera from just behind Nona’s corner. ‘It’s bad for your skin!’ Nona had to put a hand to her mouth to hide a grin as Denam’s face contorted in rage.
Raymel Tacsis had moved closer to the ring, towering above the merchants and lords he now stood among. In all the crowd only one man seemed prepared to stand beside Raymel and an empty area had opened around the pair of them despite the press of people. The other man stood skeletally thin in a robe of sky-blue silk, his head small upon the long column of his neck, eyes pale, dark hair scraped across his head in long thinning locks. He seemed more interested in Raymel than in the fight, constantly glancing at the giant to his left.
For his part, Raymel kept his gaze on Nona. His left eye had no white or iris, just a black pupil surrounded by scarlet. Nona could almost imagine something inhuman watched her through it. The right eye was all Raymel though, blue and full of malice.
‘Fight!’
At the fight-master’s shout Nona rushed forward. Denam moved like a stone sinking in thickest honey, barely flinching before Nona delivered her kick to his belly. She might as well have kicked a wall. She spun beneath a huge and questing hand to land a series of punches to the nerve centres of the major muscles in his right thigh, following with a vicious kick to the back of his knee. The gerant reacted with such sloth that Nona stayed to drive three more punches into the most vulnerable areas of his left leg, blows that should leave the big muscle of the thigh dead and useless for the best part of an hour. Finally she skipped away from a lumbering swing of his arm.
‘Even Regol can hit harder than that.’ Nona had expected Denam to collapse but he came on unhindered and she had to dive aside to avoid the wide spread of his arms.
Spinning beneath his guard again, she focused an attack on his right leg, hitting hard enough to hurt her hands, but the thick slabs of muscle seemed impervious. She kicked at his kneecap with all her strength and leapt away from another attempt to seize her.
Nona stood back, catching her breath. Denam weighed at least four times what she did and she lacked the physical strength to hurt him. Punches that would floor another novice he hardly noticed.
‘You’re not the first hunska I’ve fought, holy girl.’
Nona pursed her lips and came forward again, weaving around the hands grasping for her. Denam kept his legs tight, wise to the groin strike from her previous fights. Even so, Nona hammered a trio of punches into the fullest-looking part of Denam’s loincloth then rolled away. The gerant’s roar joined, and temporarily drowned out that of the crowd, his face shaded more deeply crimson than seemed possible without actually bleeding … but he came on undeterred.
Nona kept at it, dancing around Denam’s clumsy lunges, peppering the lower part of his body with her best punches and kicks. But it gained her no advantage and she felt the slow but inexorable rise of exhaustion. No hunska can dance between the moments for too long before their body fails, and Nona had already had a trying day.
Even as she ducked and wove Raymel Tacsis occupied the corner of her eye. At each break when she won clear and waited for Denam to catch up she risked glances towards her enemy. He wore an ugly smile now, anticipating the moment when her resources would be so drained as to allow Denam to snag her. The Noi-Guin assassins and corrupting the Ancestor’s high priest must have lightened even the Tacsis purse, but how much had it cost to have Denam swear to break her back when he caught her, or put out her eyes with his thick fingers? A sovereign? Nona wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was pennies, or perhaps just the cost of a polite request.
Another round of bouncing from the ropes, from one corner to the next. Nona felt herself slowing. Even Denam, crimson and sweat-soaked, seemed to be running out of rage-fuelled energy. Still, in the tight confines of the ring she had little doubt that the gerant would eventually catch her – unless his heart exploded.
The general roar of a hundred voices converged now on a singular cycle of oooohs and aaaaahs, like the watchers of a ball game, as Nona escaped Denam’s outstretched fingers by ever narrower margins.
‘Enjoy your running!’ Raymel’s shout reached her through a lull in the crowd’s voice. He’d moved closer, only a few yards from the ropes now. ‘You won’t be doing any more after today.’
The taunt stopped Nona dead, right in Denam’s path. Her eyes flickered from Denam to Raymel. The man had killed Saida as surely as if he had throttled her himself. And here he stood in his riches, waiting for his hireling to maim her. Common sense told Nona to slip from the ring, retreat to the convent’s safety. But a red anger rose in her, drowning out the voice of reason.
The ginger gerant howled his bloodlust and thrust a hand towards her.
Nona sank into the moment and timed her jump. She landed with legs bent, one foot against the back of Denam’s hand, letting his momentum carry them both forward. As he whipped his hand up, trying both to dislodge and catch her, Nona straightened her legs, driving off the broad back of Denam’s hand. To the onlooker it would look as if he literally batted her into the air with a fumbled attempt to seize her.
Airborne, Nona sailed across the upper rope, staring at her target. Raymel had time to lift his head and start to move his arms but caught by surprise he had no chance of stopping her. Twisting in the air, Nona brought her feet to the fore and hammered both into Raymel’s chest. She caught him around the back of the head to keep her place. Immediately, long before his hands could reach her, something else took hold, as if some unseen and clawed hand had sunk its talons into her mind, cutting through memories, letting emotion bleed out. She felt them. She felt whatever it was that now shared Raymel’s skull, the passengers that had ridden him back from his long stay trapped on the border between life and death. They lurked under his skin, watched her from his crimson eye.
Nona and Raymel remained in contact for only a split second, but some instinct told her that, although both eyes lighted on her, only the red eye truly saw her, and more, it recognized her. Something woke inside Nona as her gaze locked with whatever lay hidden inside the ring-fighter’s skull. Their communion lasted only an instant, but her speed drew it out into an age. A deep and twisting sensation enveloped her, half-pain, half-sickness.
A dozen different thoughts crowded through the small fragment of time that Nona had left for thinking. She should spring away. She should kill him. She should mark him.