“That idiot thought you were a great Swordsman. Look at you. Your knees are shaking. You’re bleeding like a gutted hog. I see terror in your eyes.”
“That’s not terror,” said Wichtig, batting aside another long-reaching attack. “That’s boredom.” He laughed at his opponent’s baffled look. The big fool was lost for words. But it was bravado. Wichtig had been tortured and maimed yesterday and hadn’t slept last night. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate. He tired quickly. His sword arm felt leaden. His heart pumped cold porridge through his veins.
You’re going to have to take a chance. Gamble you’re faster, better than this long-limbed freak.
A thousand sword fights and not once had he been so much as scratched. His shoulder pulsed pain, leaked blood down his chest. Prior to this one, he corrected. Why the hells did he get involved in this stupid fight? What was he thinking? Facing two Swordsmen in his condition was madness. He could barely breathe. It felt like the gathered crowd sucked up all the air and held it trapped in their lungs. Wichtig blinked as his vision shrank, a collapsing tunnel of red and black.
Again the long limbed bastard attacked. Again Wichtig stumbled away in retreat.
“Drop your sword,” said the towering Swordsman—Gods, has he grown even taller?—”And I’ll let you live.”
Let me— Stunned, Wichtig lowered his guard, mouth falling open. He wobbled unsteadily. Was that pity? Did this stupid slow-witted monster of a man pity Wichtig?
Wichtig screamed and hurled himself at the Swordsman. The giant bastard was as strong as he was tall, and knocked aside Wichtig’s frenzied attacks.
Wichtig didn’t give a shite. He pressed on, pushing forward, driving the Swordsman back. He spat and screamed incoherent rage, all thought of defence gone. He’d break this giant, crush him to the ground, chop him down like a gods-damned tree.
The towering Swordsman lifted his thousand strides of steel and Wichtig saw his opening. He ran his sword into the man’s guts as the giant brought his sword slashing across Wichtig’s face.
As if in a dream, Wichtig felt skin part like silk before razor sharp shears. The grating of steel on bone rang through his head and his lips fell open in a way they never should. Fragments of teeth were crushed from his mouth to spatter nearby onlookers.
The guard of his sword struck hard abdominal muscles and stopped. Wichtig leaned his forehead against the man’s chest, his grip on his sword all that kept him on his feet. The bastard was solid like stone. In what remained of his collapsing peripheral vision, Wichtig saw the gathered people staring, mouths and eyes open wide, breaths held in an expectant hush.
Did I miss?
Wichtig gave his sword an experimental twist, watching with detached interest as the Swordsman toppled backward and Wichtig’s sword slid free. He stared in dumb confusion at the length of blood and gore-smeared steel he held.
The hush of the crowd broke—exploded like an enraged hive—and people were congratulating him and cursing him and offering ale and sex.
This is it. This is where I belong.
He drank it in, swam in adulation, inhaled worship. Then he crawled around on his hands and knees in the spill of guts and searched the bodies of his defeated foes for coin. His face hung open and gaping, his sundered lips swinging like the tattered ends of old curtains.
When I meet that tall bastard in the Afterdeath, I’m going to kill him again.
The inside of his mouth didn’t feel any better. Top and bottom, teeth were missing or broken and jutting at odd angles. He leaked blood at a terrifying rate, his chest slick, the front of his bed sheet—how the hells did that stay in place?—more red now than yellow.
Once Wichtig gathered what coin he found, he took the shorter man’s sword, the giant’s far too long to be useful. He didn’t know why, he wanted two swords. Just needed something of his old perfect symmetry. Using a nearby man to pull himself to his feet, he stood weaving as if drunk.
“Get me into that tavern and I’ll buy you a drink,” he said. Or some wet and gushing flappy-lipped version of it. The man understood and helped him into the nearest building, propping him in a stool at the bar.
Wichtig slammed the sword and a coin on the bar, enough for several rounds, and then grabbed the man’s shirt. He pinned him with flat grey eyes, hiding his pain beneath layers of bravado and a fear of showing weakness. “Get me a surgeon and there’s more.”
The man nodded once and disappeared out the tavern’s front door.
Pushing himself straight, striking his best regal pose—the World’s Greatest Swordsman holding court—Wichtig tried to straighten his shirt and then remembered he wore only a gore-spattered bed sheet around his waist. Leaning heavily against the bar, he waved over the bartender.
“Ale,” he said.
“All we have is Kartoffel.”
“Cart offal?”