Evensong

He dodged the katana and knife-blades and quarterstaff by hundredths of an inch, which his retinal headups could measure and display if he wanted while he was still in motion. He didn’t want; he’d assessed their weapons skills to his satisfaction. The other weapon, the flail, was hardly worth his attention: fearsome to look at and dangerous if it connected, but slow and clumsy and telegraphed.

His private nickname for such opponents was Meatslabs, and it was always like this when he fought them. He could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste their inadequacy. And their shock, when he decided to let the one with the flail land a blow.Theflailwasasix-footclusterofsegmentedblackmetal whips, glistening like a tangle of liquorice. He let it land without apparently noticing. A good tactic: it set them wondering what he must be made of, inside. But it wouldn’t have impressed Levin or the others.

He tried some cautious counterattacks. His hands and feet, fingertips and toes (he fought barefoot) flickered out at nerve clusters and pressure points. Not yet to touch, but to see how well they defended. Quietly, carefully, he was assembling a kinetic dossier on each of them.

But he still couldn’t take full advantage. Something went wrong. One of his opponents, the one with the quarterstaff, suffered a broken collarbone: Anwar had mistimed a fingertip touch to a nerve-centre, and had to turn it at the last moment into a shuto strike to avoid killing him. The other five were on Anwar immediately, fired up by what he had done, and he wasted seconds adjusting to the new dynamic—slowing down to assess it, rather than using it to his own advantage. Then his speed reasserted itself, and he did to them what he’d failed to do to their colleague with the quarterstaff: landed precise fingertip touches to nerve centres and pressure points, enough to disable and immobilise, but no more. He finished them in thirty-six seconds.

There were nineteen Consultants. Fourteen took part in this Tournament. The other five were on, or recovering from,active missions. Of the fourteen, only Anwar suffered the indignity of injuring rather than disabling an opponent. It was a notable Tournament. The previous record was twenty seconds, broken first by Miles Levin (nineteen seconds) and then by Chulo Asika (seventeen). Asika’s display even outshone Levin’s. Asika, in the real world, designed and built theatre sets.

Anwar’s time was tenth out of fourteen. Even without his mistake, it would probably have been no better than seventh. Levin came up to him afterwards and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m Miles ahead of you, Anwar,” he said, as usual.

Levin was full of such remarks. Anwar privately nicknamed them Levin’s Levities. He often thought of good rejoinders, but only when it was too late. At Fallingwater, for instance, he could have said, “Don’t look so preoccupied. You don’t have the attention span.” He thought, How can two people so dissimilar develop a friendship? He smiled, as he knew Levin would do every time he asked himself the same question. The question contained the answer.

But he couldn’t distance himself from the mistake. He’d been replaying it obsessively for days. It mortified him. 

3

The door opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. Levin walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside.

His shock was caused by the room: a replica of the reception at Fallingwater. They know what I am. He parked the thought, and concentrated on the eight men waiting in the reception. They hadn’t surprised him at all.

Their suits were immaculate, almost as expensive as his. He could tell, by the drape of the jackets and trousers, where guns and knives and other weapons were variously stowed in shoulder and ankle holsters, forearm and wrist implants. He could tell by details of stance and mannerism where they had served: SAS, Green Berets, Spetsnaz, and so on. At least three of them looked vaguely like Marek. Not their build, just their faces.

Eight. Normally this would not have been outside his competence—any one of The Dead would be certain of taking six such people, and almost certain of taking eight. But they had an ease about them. They knew, as well as he did, that he could defeat them. But their ease suggested they had something else.

Among his enhancements was a sensitivity to changes in ambient air pressure, replicating that of seabirds and spiders.

It worked, but it didn’t help him.