Iseul was lucky he hadn’t been Emperor during the war, or during my time fighting in it, anyway. That Emperor had a lot to answer for, and, with a sword in my hand, I might’ve been tempted to make him answer for it right then and there, and peace treaty be damned.
The first meaningful thing I learned about Emperor Iseul was that he was fast.
He came at me like a poisonous snake lashes out to bite, whip-quick and light. He looked more at home in plain clothes than he did all trussed up in emperor garb, and he looked pretty regal then.
And it wasn’t anything at all like fighting Lord Temur, partly because they were two very different men and partly because having a real sword in your hand changes everything. I was more than just plain grateful that I’d had the practice fighting Lord Temur to learn a little more about swordplay in the Ke-Han style. In fact, I didn’t have any proper words for just how grateful I was.
Knowing what the Emperor was aiming for helped me to parry the first ten or so attacks, but not knowing what direction he was coming from wasn’t doing me any good. I couldn’t read anything in his face beyond the glint in his eyes. He’d wanted to strike out at us for a long time, ever since we’d arrived and probably before then, too. I just happened to be the poor bastard standing in front of him, holding a sword.
I thought about Volstov. I thought about how many years I’d fought, and how many friends I’d lost, and the battles I’d been in with that man on the other side.
It was hard to get past the defensive, but there was something as angry as fire in the air and it was coming over me now, same as it’d come over the Emperor himself. I didn’t even know what we were fighting for anymore, but we were fighting honestly, like two starved lions in the ring.
I brought my sword down, hard, aiming for his shoulder, and he parried, throwing all his weight against the attack. I could feel the clash in my jaw, it was so sudden and so hard, and then he was on the offensive again, while I had to keep blocking his attacks at lightning speed, or else. He was moving fast enough that I didn’t know if his swings were the sort of thing he could stop in time—that is, if he did break through my defense—before he sliced my arm off, or worse.
Head, belly, hand, head, hand, belly. He fell into a pattern that was deceptively easy to follow, striking out with rhythmic diligence. It wasn’t anything like fighting an ordinary soldier. I wasn’t good enough, and we both knew it. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to make him sweat—and fighting, I knew intimately, wasn’t always about who was good and who was better. It was about luck, too, and tenacity, and about reading a person.
Only it was impossible to read the Emperor. The more I fought him, the more I realized he was fucking insane.
There was sweat in my eyes, pouring down the back of my neck and staining my shirt and my chest, my shoulders, my underarms. I wished to bastion I had my own sword—a mean, heavy Volstovic number that could’ve broken his blade in half with the right swing—and then we’d’ve seen how good he was, with two pieces of a sword and me bearing down on him.
I could hear my breath turn ragged, was starting to recognize the pattern of the Emperor’s breaths, too—how he breathed in when he attacked, breathed out when he parried. Our swords met, over and over, me fighting like a Volstovic soldier, him like the Emperor of the damn Ke-Han.
Then I slipped on the gravel. It was the only opening Emperor Iseul needed—the opening, maybe, he’d been waiting for this whole time. It was my boots, or the fact that I wasn’t used to fighting like that on the gravel, or how out of practice I was. Any number of things could’ve caused the slip, but they were all worthless excuses. It was a mistake, pure and simple, and I was going to pay for it. It was only a matter of how.
My thoughts came pretty quickly in that instant, right before the Emperor’s sword came down.
I managed to stop the blade from slicing me open, cracking my collarbone and heading toward the lungs or