Sir Tanis made the formal speech; he cited all the hallowed customs that surrounded the curious custom that allowed an irate Lord of the House to take a cleaver to anyone who annoyed him sufficiently, and then in a less pompous tone explained the rules to me. They weren’t much: we’d hack at each other until Sir Revenat was satisfied or dead.
“Man to man,” Sir Tanis finished his spiel. “The House of Ancinet-Chanore defends its honor with the ancient right of its strong arm! Let her detractors beware!”
Then the crowd backed off and the servants formed up a loose ring, fifty feet across. Huvile brandished his sword and his eyes ate me alive. Fsha-fsha took my jacket and leaned close to give me a last word of advice.
“Remember your Sorting training, Billy Danger! Key-in your response patterns to his attack modes! Play him until you read him like a glorm-bulb line! Then strike!”
“If I don’t make it,” I said, “find a way to tell them.”
“You’ll make it,” he said. “But—yeah—I’ll do my best.”
He withdrew at a curt command from Tanis, and Huvile moved out to meet me. He held the sword lightly, as if his wrist was used to handling it. I had an idea the upstart sir had spent a lot of hours practicing the elevating art of throwing his weight around. He moved in with the blade held low, pointed straight at me. I imitated his stance. He made a small feint and I slapped his blade with mine and moved back as he dropped his point and lunged and missed my thigh by an inch. I tried to blank my mind, key in his approach-feint-attack gambit to a side-jump-and-counter cut syndrome. It was hard to bring the pattern I wanted into clear focus without running through it, physically. I backed, made Huvile blink by doing the jump and cut in pantomime, two sword-lengths from contact distance. A nervous titter ran through the audience, but that was all right. I was pretty sure I’d set the response pattern I wanted to at least one of his approaches. But he had others.
He came after me, cautious now, checking me out. He tried a high thrust, a low cut, a one-two lunge past my guard. I backed shamelessly, for each attack tried to key-in an appropriate response—
I felt myself whip to one side, slash in an automatic reaction to a repetition of his opening gambit. My point caught his sleeve and ripped through the wine-red cloth. So far so good. Huvile back-pedaled, then tried a furious frontal attack; I gave ground, my arm countering him with no conscious thought on my part. He realized the tactic was getting him nowhere and dropped his point, whipped it up suddenly as he dived forward. I caught it barely in time, deflected the blade over my right shoulder, and was chest to chest with him, our hilts locked together.
“It’s necessary for me to kill you,” he whispered. “You understand that it’s impossible for me to let you live.” His eyes looked mad; his free hand still gripped the controller. “If I die—she dies. And if I suspect you may be gaining—I plunge the lever home. Your only choice is to sacrifice yourself.” He pushed me away and jabbed a vicious cut at me and then we were circling again. My brain seemed to be set in concrete. Huvile was nuts—no doubt about that. He had brazened his way into the midst of the House of Ancinet-Chanore on the strength of the invisible knife he held at Milady’s heart; and if he saw the game was up—the fragile game he’d nursed along for months now—he’d kill her with utter finality and in the most incredible agony, as the magnesium flare set in her heart burned its way through her ribs.
There was just one possibility. The Drathians had gone to a lot of trouble to link the life of the slave to the well-being of the master; but there was one inevitable weak spot. Even the most sophisticated circuitry couldn’t do its job after it was destroyed. I’d proven that; I had crushed Huvile’s controller under my foot—and he was still alive.
But on the other hand, maybe that had been a freak, a defective controller. Huvile had been two miles away at the time. And it was no special trick to rig an electronic device so that the cut-off of a carrier signal actuated a response in a receiver. . . .
There was sweat on my face, not all of it from the exercise. My only chance was to smash the controller and kill Huvile with the same stroke—and hope for the best. Because, win or lose, the Lady Raire was better dead than slave to this madman.
While these merry thoughts were racing through my mind, I was backing, feinting and parrying automatically. And suddenly Huvile’s blade dropped, flickered in at me and out again and I felt my right leg sag and go out from under me. I caught myself in time to counter an over-eager swing and strike back from one knee, but it was only a moment’s delay of the inevitable. I saw his arm swing back for the finishing stroke—
There was swirl of silver, and the Lady Raire was at his side, clutching his sword arm—and then she crumpled, white-faced, as the controller’s automatic angina circuit clamped iron fingers on her heart. But it was enough. While Huvile staggered, off-balance, his free hand groping, I came up in a one-legged lunge. He saw me, brought his sword up and back, at the same time snatched for the controller. He was a fraction of a second late. My point struck it, burst it into chips, slammed on through bone and muscle and lodged in his spine. He fell slowly, with an amazed look on his face. I saw him hit; then I went over sideways and grabbed for the gaping wound in my thigh and felt darkness close in.
2
The House of Ancinet-Chanore was very manly about acknowledging its mistake. I sat across from old Lord Pastaine under the canopy on his favorite sun terrace, telling him for the sixth or seventh time how it had happened that I had bought freedom for two slaves and then sent them off together in my boat while I went to the rafts. He wagged his Mosaic head and looked grave.
“A serious misjudgment of character on your part,” he said. “Yet were we not all guilty of misjudgment? When the Lady Raire returned, so unexpectedly, I wished to open my heart to her—supposed—savior. I granted the interloper—Huvile, you say his name was?” He shook his head. “An upstart, of no family—I granted him, I say, every freedom, every honor in the gift of Ancinet-Chanore. As for Milady—if she chose to closet herself in solitary withdrawal from the comfort of her family—could I say nay? And then I saw the beginnings of the wretched maneuverings that would make this stranger Head after my death. I called for Milady Raire to attend me—and she refused! Me! It was unheard of! Can you blame me for striking her from my memory, as one dead? And as for the others—venal, grasping, foolish—to what depths has the House not fallen since the days of my youth, a thousand years agone. . . .”
I listened to him ramble on. I had been hearing the same story from a variety of directions during the past three days, while my leg healed under the miracle-medicines of old Zeridajh. If any one of the Lady Raire’s doting relations had cared enough about her to take just one, good, searching look into her eyes, they’d have seen that something was seriously amiss. But all they saw was a pawn on the board of House politics, and her silent appeals had gone unanswered. As for why she hadn’t defied Huvile, faced death before submitting to enslavement to his ambitions—I could guess that half an hour of sub-fatal angina might be a persuasion that would convince a victim who could laugh at the threat of mere death.
“If you’d arrange for me to see the Lady Raire for a few minutes,” I butted in Milord’s rumbling assessment of the former Sir Revenat’s character, “I’d be most appreciative.”
He looked grave. “I believe we all agree that it would be best not to reawaken the unhappy emotions of these past months by any references thereto,” he said. “We are grateful to you, Captain Danger—the House will be forever in your debt. I’m sure Milady will understand if you slip quietly away, leaving her to the ministrations of her family, those who know where her interests lie.”
I got the idea. It had been explained to me in slightly varying terms by no less than twelve solemn pillars of the House of Ancinet-Chanore. The Lady Raire, having had one close brush with an interloper, would not be exposed to the questionable influences of another. They were glad I’d happened along in time to break the spell—but now the lady would return to her own kind, her own life.