Outskills

'They tell me you’re good,’ said Lucius.

‘I am the best of my Legion.’

‘That’s not saying much.’ Lucius hooked the whip to his belt and entered the duelling circle. Sanakht drew his swords; one crystalline edged and glittering with witch-fire, the other a simple energy blade.

Lucius rolled his shoulders, and swung his blade to loosen his wrist. He had sparred with his own Legion, but had stopped short of killing anyone since Iydris. No such restraint was needed here.

He circled Sanakht, studying his movements, assaying his reach and footwork. He saw strength and speed. Confidence that crossed into arrogance. Sanakht was so like himself, it was almost funny.

‘I assure you that I will defeat–’ Sanakht began, but Lucius attacked before the Thousand Sons warrior could finish speaking.

All of his strikes were repulsed with casual ease. They broke apart and circled again, studying one another and using obvious cuts and feints to test the other’s mettle.

‘You have natural ability,’ said Sanakht, ‘but I have studied every school of the blade since the first swords were hacked from the Dobruja flintbeds of Old Earth.’

They came together again in a clash of blades. Sanakht was blindingly fast, his two weapons moving in perfect concert. Lucius could fight with two swords, but preferred the focus of a single blade. Sanakht’s blades cut high and low, forcing him to work twice as hard to keep them at bay.

‘Your thoughts betray you,’ said Sanakht, and Lucius heard the first trace of amusement in his voice. ‘You fight with passion, but I can feel every attack before you make it.’

‘Are you actually giving me tips on technique?’

Sanakht swayed aside from a throat-opening thrust. ‘I am a scholar of martial knowledge. It is my duty to pass on what I have learned to others, by example.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t need your help.’

‘You are manifestly incorrect,’ said Sanakht.

Anger touched Lucius, but instead of controlling it, he let it consume him. An angry swordsman made mistakes, but now he needed that anger. He threw himself at his opponent, discarding any notion of testing his defences, just going for the kill. He wanted to take this arrogant cur apart, to gut him without mercy and without finesse.

To give him an ugly death.

Sanakht turned aside the attacks with lightning-fast parries and ripostes, but Lucius kept up an unrelenting pressure. He forced him back to the edge of the circle, relishing the confusion he saw in Sanakht’s eyes.

No longer able to pick out Lucius’s emotions from the morass of anger, Sanakht was falling back on techniques learned by rote, and from ancient teachers.

And that just wasn’t good enough.

Lucius hooked his sword under the energy-wreathed blade and spun it from Sanakht’s grip. As the warrior’s arm went wide, Lucius kicked him in the groin and slammed the hilt of his sword into his face.

Sanakht fell back, rolling and bringing his second sword to bear. Lucius smashed it aside, and his return stroke swept down to open Sanakht’s throat.

But the silver blade stopped a hair’s breadth from Sanakht’s neck, as though striking stone. Resistance vibrated up Lucius’s arm, and he crashed his other fist into Sanakht’s jaw instead.

‘Sorcery?’ he spat. ‘You’d save your miserable skin with sorcery?’

‘He wouldn’t,’ said a voice behind Lucius. ‘But I would.’

***

Lucius the Eternal Blademaster