The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,117

The weight of his blows jarred the bones of her wrists and grated on all the old wounds she bore in shoulder and collarbone. He struck at her again, his rushing drive slowed by the depth of the drifts. The snow creaked under Gil's boots as she sprang back, but it gave no more than an inch.

Her breath rasped in her throat like an icy saw. In and out, before he has time to touch you , Ingold had said. It was her only defense against the driving strength that smashed her sword aside and razored a gash several inches long in the flesh of her side. The blades sang against each other, moonlight searing down their stained edges, and Gil drove in, bringing blood from the big man's thigh.

Alwir cursed, lunging after her, hard specks of snow whirling about him as he surged free of the drifts and foundered again. He came after her nevertheless, slowed by the snow but never faltering in the treacherous footing, hacking at her with heavy cuts that crumpled her lighter attacks. She felt his blade rip her flesh like a talon of fire; as she twisted clear of him, she was struck by the sick weakness of blood loss and shock. She danced back, her feet slipping in the icy drifts, with darkness closing around her vision as she skidded and stumbled.

Wet cold bit her knees. Aching, she staggered to her feet, propelled by the memories of thousands of hours of Gnift the swordmaster's drills; her eyes cleared as she ducked and spun away from Alwir's floundering stroke. In spite of the intense cold, she saw how his face glittered with sweat in the moonlight, saw how the breath rolled from his mouth in great steaming clouds of white.

She thought. He's rusty. He's breathing like a bellows . She herself was exhausted by fighting for footing; Alwir must be half-dead with it.

As she backed, she saw the dark, splattering trail of her blood on the snow. Alwir was driving her, knowing her to be weakening; she saw his mouth twist with ugly fury and frustration as the ever-deepening snow underfoot slowed him down with his own weight. She sprang back before his cuts, then in, sweeping his blade aside, the metal whipping in a tight circle before he threw hers off and cut, floundering in a drift. She angled for position. He blocked her feint, surged up out of the drift in a flying storm of crystals, and slashed in great whirling strokes. Back again, then in, parrying and striking, faster and faster, their feet sliding on the hard crust. She retreated, cutting, her muscles burning with fatigue, watching for the one opening in his guard that she would buy at the cost of her own life.

Feint, parry, dodge! Her wrists were numb with the force of his blows. The roar of his breath and her own filled the night around her. Strike and counterstrike! The world narrowed to the dark bulk of his body. Flounder, slip, recover, and counterattack. Move back, drawing him toward the deeper drifts-dodge under the staggering force of his blows-back, then in! She was conscious of nothing but the burn of air in her lungs and the light, cold joy of battle.

He struck her blade aside, floundering clear of a drift, his sword cleaving the darkness as he fell upon her. She sprang back, then in-and kept on moving in.

His blood erupted out over her hands, unexpectedly hot in the freezing air of the night. For a moment, impaled on her blade, he simply stared at her, incredulous. Then the astonishment fixed on his face as his eyes turned back, and his body began to slump. She jerked the blade free and stepped back, crimson-handed, to let him fall at her feet, and he lay dead before her in the trampled drifts, a great black shadow of spread velvet and pooling blood.

The night silence seemed for a time to fill the earth. Gil stood above him, looking down at that still form and the black puddles that were already seeping into the snow, lost in a kind of detached wonderment. She had won a fight which she had not even expected to survive. She was avenged and alive. For a time it seemed to her that she felt nothing, neither joy nor gratification, only a deep, impossibly brilliant consciousness of how beautiful the night was, how the moon edged each footprint in the trampled snow with a transparent