So, a duel. I’d fought them before of course, more or less. A duel was just a tourney match except with no other combatants, and this one wasn’t even going to be to the death. Except we would be using edged steel, that was the big thing.

  Bigger for me than my opponent, too. Because I was now occupying the very problematic situation of having to choose between cutting the skin of an aristocrat and letting him stab me to death. I wasn’t worried about losing, not really, but I stood to have a lot more trouble than a few scars whether this went my way or not.

  Stabbing a noble, even gently and non-lethally was a very good way to make enemies in high places. Particularly the apparent heir to the Leibricht Dukedom. And so the morning after that party, I spent about an hour straight just rolling around in my bed groaning from a mix of hangover and regret.

  In the end, it took Vara knocking on my door to draw me out of the slump. Well, that and a bit more pressing.

  “Are you decent?” she asked.

  “Why?” I groaned.

  “Because I’m coming in.”

  I swore at her and covered myself with the sheets, then she was stalking into the room with an odd sort of expression.

  “You’re in trouble,” she said.

  “I fucking know!” I snapped back. “Are you just here to rub it in?”

  “I’m here to try and help you think of a way out of it,” Vara hissed, surprising me with a sudden fury.

  “Why?”

  She stared at me in disbelief for a second.

  “Because you’re in trouble after stopping that drunk pig from leering at me, you stupid bastard.”

  I stared at her, she stared at me. Both of us became embarrassed at about the same time and neither of us wanted to be the first one to speak. In the end Vara caved first, though I suspect that was just to give me a sense of victory and mollify me.

  ++”It was, but I suspected that he suspected that so I still win.”++

  “Thank you,” she said at last. “Now how do we stop you from getting stabbed to death?”

  That was one question I had no ready answer for, thus all the moping about and dread. But Vara worked wonders there. It wasn’t that she was so very clever, though of course she was, but that just having another person to bounce thoughts off had a way of calming me, making my mind coherent and sharp where it’d been a foggy mess just before.

  “I could leg it,” I suggested, putting my new clarity of thought to good use as I’m sure you’ll agree. Vara regarded that idea with about as much seriousness as it warranted. After she was done snorting in the most un-ladylike laughter I’ve ever heard, she finally managed to reply.

  “You think you’d make it a mile? The King wants you in this duel, all running does is add defying him openly to the list of reasons you’re in deep shit. Also, it’d kill your reputation.”

  “Well, my reputation is trying to kill me, so that sounds about fair,” I grumbled. She was right of course, and I’d known what she said was right even as I made the suggestion.

  “The trouble is,” I murmured, “that I don’t really have a good option here, do I? If I win but mark the little shit up, then I’ve pissed off his dad and I’m on his shitlist forever. But if I lose…well, I’m getting slashed to death by some moron who I am quite sure isn’t skilled enough to win without permanently wounding me, and completely sure isn’t nice enough to try.”

  Vara’s eyes lit up at that. “Are you…skilled enough to try?”

  I sat back at that. Was I?

  “To try…I mean, against some opponents, I could definitely go for a disarming…” I thought it through, at that, considered all the angles. It’s hard to work out a fight before it happens—impossible to do so with a fight against opponents you’re unfamiliar with—but I’d had a lot of practice in duelling by then.

  “You have to,” Vara pressed, “I mean how hard can it really be?”

  Now it was my turn to laugh, except it was my skin on the line so instead I just glared at her until her face burned up in a crimson blush and her eyes fell away from mine like dead leaves.

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  “Fucking very,” I informed her through gritted teeth, “but…I have to.”

  And I did.

  My body was still a little bit achy from the siege, and I wasn’t left to rest in bed for long before my least-favourite Thaumaturge in the whole world came to see me.

  Morlo was not happy. If I were to construct a scale of happiness, I would place a starving man who just found an endless stash of food on one end. I would then construct a new point past the opposite side of the spectrum to accommodate the level of unhappiness Morlo was pioneering as he entered.

  “Ah good, he’s awake,” the Thaumaturge sneered, “now I can kill him.”

  I spoke fast, not really believing he’d do it but also not knowing the miserable old man nearly well enough to stake my life on that confidence.

  “We have a plan,” I vomited. Had I not set a new record for speaking speed, he might’ve already reached me before I finished.

  “That might just work,” Morlo mused, “do you reckon you’re good enough to pull it off?”

  “How the fuck should I know!?” I snapped, “I have no clue about this little shit. How good is he for a start?”

  “Oh, not very,” Morlo waved a dismissive hand, “probably about your equal.”

  “Fuck you!” He cackled at that, clearly enjoying himself.

  “Relax,” the Thaumaturge grinned, “you have better odds than you think.”

  That set off alarm bells in my head. Pure paranoia, of course, I didn’t have any hard reason to be fearful of what was otherwise rather promising news. Except I was completely right to be, even if I wouldn’t know it for quite some time. And not just because it came from Morlo.

  “What do you want?” I ended up asking him, mouth faster than my brain as usual, “what are you working towards? Don’t say fighting the undead, don’t say turning me into a false Hero. What do you want long-term? Tell me.” I had no right to demand that of him, not one that Morlo would care about, nor did I have any way of compelling an answer.

  And yet I got one. Morlo would never stop surprising me, I thought then. And even now I must admit that he would continue to do it for a good while still.

  “Do you know what happened to the Heroes?”

  Well, a question as an answer was still an answer right? The older I get, the more I learn that they’re the best kind of answers, so very much to dissect about the person giving them to you that even they don’t intend. I was young, then, but though this lesson hadn’t fully sunk in just yet, I was still able to put the skeleton of it to use. I got thinking.

  “They…I don’t know, I’ve heard a lot of stories. They were killed?”

  “Care to be more specific?”

  “By us, by the humans. We got fed up of them being arseholes, mad tyrants and what not, and we killed them all.”

  Morlo eyed me. “Any more specifics than that?”

  “Are there more?”

  “This was recent, as far as history goes, less than a century gone now,” he explained, “and so it’s well known. Provided you have the right sources. The Heroes did walk this earth, and they were powerful. Now they don’t exist, or at least exist rarely enough that nobody is sure whether they still do. Makes you think what happened to force things so strong into either extinction, or near-extinction and an eternity spent scurrying in the dark for any survivors.”

  It didn’t make me think that, actually, but now that Morlo had broached the topic.

  “Something changed,” I frowned, “what though…” I saw I wouldn’t get any sort of answer about that. Fortunately, I didn’t need one. “Guns.”

  “Guns,” Morlo echoed, “not as deadly as Thaumaturgy, not yet, but far more common, more producible. Heroes took a lot of killing even from the early arquebuses that overthrew them, but humans outnumbered them a thousand to one or more. And humans have longer memories than our longer-lived cousins would care to bet. Glyca the Faceshifter had left a great many scars upon history, as had Emperor Noranus and his screaming human candles. They did a great many evil things. Sometimes they even had reasons for them. Now men with guns and the money to motivate guns rule this world, them and the Thaumaturges. They do evil things, too. Sometimes they even have reasons for them.”

  I chewed on that, then answered.

  “You haven’t explained anything to me, just given me a history dump. An opinionated one.”

  Morlo grinned at that.

  “So I have. Hope for you yet if you keep distrusting answers like that. Fine, how about a real one. Change happened to the Heroes. I plan for Change.”

  I thought about that, too. Looked down at my feet as if the weight of thinking had made my brain too heavy for its neck to hold up. “Plan for it as in…you plan for it happening, or plan to make it happen?” I looked up for my answer.

  But Morlo was already gone.

  That left me with a lot to think about, as you can probably imagine. Which isn’t to say that I actually ended up thinking about any of it of course, there are limits to what any teenaged boy can focus his mind on. Especially an idiot, and certainly an idiot who was now worried about getting stabbed to death in public.

  I spent my time training, then resting, then training some more. I was already starting to see what Morlo had described about the effects of mild Thaumaturgical influence on a trained body, because I healed faster than I’d have thought possible just a week before.

  There was no boost in confidence to be found from that fact, though. Every extra minute I spent, every second closer to the duel I came, my fears worsened. As usual, Gruin was a particularly intense aggravating factor on them.

  “Just kill him,” the Grynkori suggested, “I still don’t know why you haven’t done it already.”

  “Because I’ll have the second most powerful man in Anglyn trying to ruin my life if I do that!”

  Gruin shrugged. “So kill him too.” That was where I decided to start tuning the Grynkori out and focusing fully on my preparations for the duel, as limited as they were.

  This time, I was fighting in something that looked more like a coliseum than the duelling rings I was used to. A great cavity of layered seats and concave walls crowning the sandy floor at its heart. That floor was where I’d be taking my own life into my hands.

  And the young Lord Leibricth’s life, of course, but I didn’t give quite as much of a shit about that. He was standing there ahead of me playing with his sword in a mess of fidgety nervousness, twitching and glancing up and around me. I tried to ignore him, and probably failed.

  Some announcer screamed a few words of introduction for us both, I got more cheers than him. That wasn’t a good thing. If anything it’d piss him off. I could see his eyes steeling as he heard it, even, the brutality growing. That same idiotic violence that’d placed his hands on Vara now bubbling up with edged steel out.

  I planted my feet and started advancing to fight.

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