VIII. Kung Fu, Part 1
I am splitting this update in two for the sake of clarity, seeing as there are two separate battles before the next vote. Part 2 in a few days hopefully.
Staff and claws clash against one another time and again.
Bone-like talons strike wood with a sound like rattling a cage, deflecting a dozen blows until the slender haft finds an opening between the mighty scaled limbs and thrusts at an exposed chest, sending the foe reeling. Long sickle-blades slam into the ground, keeping the beastman from being knocked further back; the staff aims for his head and he parries it with his forearm - then the seven linked sections that make up the weapon unlock and it whips around his arm, striking him in the head and dazing him for a second. The snake-like chain whips around, striking the knee, and comes back for another stroke - but one terrible feet erupts from the ground in a spray of dirt and the snake recoils.
Shay darts back, pirouetting on one hand, the other snapping the seven-section staff back together with a flick of his wrist. He lands on his feet, breathing calmly, uninjured. Six feet away, Marrow stands with an awkward guard, claws held out and back hunched; there is no trace of bruise or blood on his scales, but the way his left eye twitches speaks to the ringing of his skull.
Shay smiles darkly, shifting his handle on his staff - and his smile turns to a frown as he looks down. A dozen deep cuts score the wood. He looks up again.
"So, all this time, you were hiding your training from me - hiding that you were a practitioner as well. What is this, Tiger Style?"
Marrow shrugs, shaking his leg to shed the numbness in his knee. "I don't know. We don't call it anything."
"Who's 'we'?" Shay asks, narrowing his eyes, and the sickleman chuckles.
"My people," he says, "the sicklefolk of Heart-upon-Stone. Don't go getting the wrong idea, it's not like I belong to some secret sect of martial arts, or like I tried deliberately to hide my skills. I never set foot in a dojo except as a visitor, Shay. And I never thought about what I did the way you do about your school."
Shay tilts his head, one hand tapping the wood of his staff in an unconscious thinking gesture. Then understanding dawns on his face.
"You're no student," he says, "you're a soldier."
"Barely," Marrow says, shrugging again. "For two, maybe three years, I followed the Way of War. I was trained in the way all sicklefolk warriors are trained; every instructor is different, but everyone teaches his variant of the Way. I was not even aware there were other ways to fight before I first came to the Grave; certainly I never could fathom your hundreds of schools and styles."
"It's always like this," Shay says, tensing up a little, a darkness in his eyes. "Our schools cultivate self-perfection for a hundred years, passing down teachings from master to student, dedicating our lives to honing the art. Then our lessons are simplified, watered down, and spread to the rank and file, who only think of a move as a fist to the face, and not as a way of life."
"Not everybody has their life to spend learning how to make a kick a little more perfect, Shay," Marrow says, not unkindly. "I didn't."
"Clearly not. You're strong and fast, but clumsy. You have the basics down and little else."
"I was not meant for the Way of War," the sickleman responds.
"So what," Shay hisses, eyes shining, an edge of contempt in his voice. "You had the opportunity to dedicate yourself to the art, and you decided to be a merchant instead?"
"I dedicated my life to connecting these lonely places," Marrow answers, an edge creeping into his voice, "to walking these dirt roads between backwoods village where people always risk starving from a bad harvest. To bringing meat to Embercairn and rice to Holiness and arrowheads to Heart-upon-Stone. What have you done with your gifts, Shay?"
"I shed my scales unto perfection," Shay says, translucent eyelids covering his eyes for a second, steel-grey light pulsing, for a heartbeat, across the outlines of his veins.
He crosses the distance between them in one step, and the staff does the rest, lashing out with such speed it seems to ignite with sparks. Marrow lifts one hand, slamming his palm into the haft and ducking his head to the side, and still the tip of the staff strikes his cheek with a ripping sound.
Red drops fall in the dirt. First blood. It only seems to incite Shay further; with a sharp cry he pulls the staff back and brings it back in a swing to Marrow's ankle; the sickleman is fast enough to lift his foot of the ground, but before he can strike back Shay flicks his wrist and unlocks the staff's segment. In the next instant the weapon blurs into a flurry of whip-like blows, rapid curves to baffling for Marrow's orthodox parry to thwart; the weighted segment at the end of the staff strikes again and again against his scales, drawing a gasp from his throat. Marrow steps back once, twice, raising his arms around his head and leaving his chest exposed. With a shout of triumph, Shay slams the staff back into a solid length and thrusts for the heart. The sickleman responds with a high kick, slamming the weapon up into the air - leaving himself off-balance and unguarded; Shay smirks and tugs on the staff to bring it back for the last blow…
The staff does not come. Shay blinks, and looks up.
Marrow's outstretched leg holds the staff in the closed talons of his foot, tighter a grip than any human foot. Shay realizes, too late, that he did not even realize sicklefolk toes were prehensile. With a grunt, the raptor slams his foot down, planting the head of the staff in the ground, and rotates his ankle while keeping his grip - seven linked segments of wood are torn apart, flying apart, two of them bouncing off Marrow's scale, one hitting Shay in the forehead and slicing the skin. The sickleman slumps forward, bringing a sweeping right hook at his once-lover, claws held out.
"Do you think I am less dangerous unarmed?!" Shay shouts, anger running through his veins like icewater. Closer and closer to his totem. He leans down and the claws sweep above his head, barely grazing his curly hair; one step takes him into his much larger opponent's guard, and he holds out the index and middle finger of his right hand out while closing the others. Channeling power feels like frostbite in his hand, but he sees the chest of his opponent, knows the heart and ribcage and patterns of muscles and the pathways of nerves underlying it all. One stroke. Shay's fingers hit the nerve cluster that connects the arm to the pectoral muscles, a perfect hit, the Essence ebbing away into his foe's body.
Marrow gasps, taking one step back, his right arm jittering. Shay grins, stepping up to him for a follow-up - and is too stunned to see Marrow's right hand tense up and strike at his open face to dodge. A last-second instinct allows him to catch his breath and tense his whole body, hardening his skin to iron-like strength. The claw hits him like what it is, a punch from a man twice his body weight, and he rolls away into the dirt - but at least the blow drew no more than a trickle of blood.
Shay stumbles back up hastily, gasping, eyes wide, staring at Marrow. The sickleman looks back, a dimness in his eyes, his breath halting, his chest heaving. But his guard is still strong, when his right arm should be limp and useless.
"...how?" Shay asks baffled.
"Do you really have to ask?" Marrow says, rolling his shoulders with a fanged grimace.
"...your scales," Shay mutters after a moment. "I hit the right spot but couldn't hit the nerve through that layer."
Marrow nods - and then, his back relaxing a little, looks up at the night sky. The sun is entirely gone now, and the stars peek through faint, ribbon-like clouds. He lets out a sigh.
"I like you, Shay," he says longingly. "But I don't just like you. I like your people - graveborn and riverborn alike, and those beyond these lands. You are all so… soft, and light, and yet so resilient to time and hardship. There is such strength in your fragility, and such fragility in your strength. It fascinates me."
"Ah," Shay says, looking bemused. "And here I thought you liked me for my strength."
"I do," Marrow answers. "But not in the way you think. Your people, you are like… spirits everywhere, dancing, dizzying. You wear a thousand different garments when only a skirt, a vest, and perhaps a coat will fit my body." He brushes his feather-crests as he says this, blues and red all muddied by the darkness of night, a wide leather skirt ending above the knees his only garments. "You stumble in the dark yet move silent at night. You can go days without eating but you'll complain after a single missed meal. The best among you can run from sunrise to sunset - do you know what I would give for that kind of endurance?"
"The best among us," Shay answers, "are those who spend their lives in the pursuit of one skill. I am no ordinary man - and neither is your Golden Road. Your idea of the non-sicklefolk is… twisted."
"You don't understand what I am getting at," Marrow sighs, looking down again. "I told you, didn't I, that among my people blue feathers are considered a sign of softness of character, of a nurturing but weak temperament? I wanted to prove them wrong, so I tried to follow the Way of War, and I couldn't. I couldn't stand the blood and the pain. So I left, and became a merchant. I chose to spend more time in your world than mine. I failed the path of the warrior and yet..." He opens his arms wide, talons shining in the starlight. "Here I am."
He takes one step, something burning now in his eyes and voice, claws sweeping at the air with each sentence.
"I like your people, Shay, but I don't like your world. You eat roots and grain every day and meat once a week or a month, and I starve among you. I eat eggs every day and I am so, so tired of eggs, but without some meat I will starve. You write with quills and charcoal sticks that snap in my hands. You work day-long in the sun and I look in vain for the shade and public baths of my homeland. Every day is like a little pebble rolling down my back, and each pebble I can ignore, but a year among you is an endless roll of stone on my skin, scraping away my scales, itching where I cannot scratch. And when I seek a companion for a night, my smile looks like a snarl to you and you back off in fright. "
"Not me," Shay whispers. "Never me."
"And for this," Marrow responds, "I have grown so fond of you. Perhaps, where you not bound to this village and I to the road, I could love you. But look at yourself. Look at the path your mistress led you down. Snatching food from the hands of starving babes in the name of loyalty and honor - what kind of life is that?"
"If you are telling me that I should stand down, you know that it won't work."
"I do," Marrow says, shaking his head. "But it's not what I am trying to do. What I am trying to say is that… This is it. This moment. It is what my people were made for. The gift and curse laid upon us. Every day among your people a struggle - but this? The outburst, the exertion of speed and strength, the sudden thrill, for a few instants? You spent your entire life studying the martial arts, and I spent two years trying and failing to become a warrior…"
And Marrow straightens his back, raising his talons open wide, one hand guarding his face and another held forward, rooting his feet in the ground.
"But I was born with this body, and I will beat you."
"Then I suppose there is nothing more to say," Shay answers, clutching his hands into finger-claws.
Marrow nods, his eyes sharp and intent on his opponent.
Shay breathes out, a pulse of steel glowing beneath his skin.
"Ox-Slaying Bite, he speaks, the veins of his right forearm bulging, dim light crowning his fingers.
His lunge is as sharp and sudden as a snapping jaw, less a brawler's strike than a fencer's; one step and his body extends out into reach of Marrow, the glowing hand punching for the torso. Marrow meets him with a claw-strike to the side of his hand, deflecting the deadly attack before it reaches him, then jabs his left hand at Shay's face. The young man swats it aside with his free hand and hunches forward, glowing hand coiling up at his side - then lunges again.
The two extended knuckles hit Marrow's scale like a knife slicing through gauze, and blood sprays out. Mighty slabs of muscle fare no better, parting like water, and Shay strikes bone - a rib cracks.
Marrow's talons clasp shut on Shay's forearm, blocking him a fraction of a second before he reaches the heart. For a breathless second, the two men stand there, frozen in motion. Blood pours down one's chest; sweat trickles down the other's brow.
Then Shay lets out a cry of anger and frustration and his arm slips out of Marrow's unearthly grasp as if it wasn't there, the steel-grey light shining anew. and lunges again.
But now Marrow has seen the move, its incredible speed and its rigid pattern. He slumps forward, bringing up his hands in front of his face, then snaps out - hitting the deadly hand with his forearm to push it outwards from his body. The extended knuckles slice through the scales, scatter a handful of bright blue-red feathers, and rip against the bone, going wide. Shay's chest is unprotected. The sickleman flows into a deadly kick.
Talons the size of a man's fingers. One claw, on the middle toe, twice as long and shaped like a sickle - the reason for his people's name. An edge to gut a man of a grip to shatter his bones. In a suspended heartbeat, Shay's eyes widen as he sees it coming.
At the last second, Marrow grits his teeth and snaps his toe-claws shut. Instead of a blade it is a hammerhead that hits Shay in the chest, knocking the breath out of him, tearing a hundred small vessels, bruising the bone. The Adder goes flying backwards and hits the ground with his back, rolling once, limp.
Marrow lets his foot fall to the ground and gasps, his breath steam curls coming out from his fangs, his eyes closing and opening repeatedly. His chest heaves with heavy breathing. He touches his breast, where the blood still trickles, but he can't even feel the pain - all he feels is the pounding in his skull and the furnace in his lungs, his entire body burning.
Quietly, almost self-consciously, he mutters thanks to the stars under which he was born. He knows they do not listen, and do not care, for they are cold and distant gods; but the gods of his people, the living gods of fur and bark, are much too far to hear him. And, perhaps, he has spent too much time with Golden Road.
Then Marrow puts his skirt back on and walks out of the paddy, sitting heavily down on the ground next to Shay.
The young man's breath hisses, a little erratic, a sign of wakefulness. His fingers claw at the dirt once, as if to try and push himself up, then he gives up.
One eye - strangely now colored grey as steel - stares up at Marrow, unreadable. The sickleman smiles a little, then looks up at the stars.
"I think we should talk about our relationship," he says.
