Madeleine scored first blood.
“On the flute,” the singer announced in her perfectly pure voice, accented only by the slightest touch of a Harlem accent, “we have our boy’s memory of the greatest woodwind partnership he ever heard. Give it up for the Man and the Woman with the Golden Flutes, the flickering shadows cast by the flames whose names are Sir and Lady Galway!”
The instruments skirled and Nathan redoubled his attacks in response. She’d landed a hit, not a scratch but far from disabling, on his leading shoulder. He noticed it, cataloged it, and set it aside, except for his knowledge that it put him on the back foot for a battle of endurance or attrition.
She parried, parried again, and went for a riposte—but she was slow, having to deflect his sword more firmly than he had to deflect her needle. She had no equivalent to the guard or knuckle bow that protected his hands, and it cost her when he cut across the back of her knuckles.
“It was in Lincoln Center that young Nathan developed a taste for jazz,” the singer informed the room. “And what trumpet player could possibly have led the Orchestra? Why, it could have been none other than Wynton Marsalis! He’s not with us here, because we’re all a work of fiction created to be a thresher for Nathan himself—but his story lives in us, so show him some love by proxy!”
He cut her again down the length of her thumb as the crowd cheered for the virtuoso whose brassy tones filled the warehouse.
The blood slicking her hand seemed to have no effect on her grip, and she shifted her stance slightly as the knitting needle in her other hand grew to just shy of twenty inches. She caught a slash from Nathan on it as he tried to score on her hand again, pinning his sword at the intersection of her own blades, and with a twist she was in too close for him to parry as she struck with the new dagger.
He parried anyway, Saucer shifting form fluidly to allow it. Parried again as her other hand came in with a needle newly shrunk to that same dagger length, and this time he was the one to trap it and viciously twist as he stepped to the side.
Half a needle fell to the floor as she flicked the other half at him, embedding it in the palm of his non-dominant hand as it crumbled to dust.
“And just who is this man on the drums? He was dead right around the time of the birth of this young man fighting for the right to have someone else be his death. The tremendous, the influential, please make some noise for the notional Buddy Rich!”
Nathan cut his own hand off without losing a beat, not looking down as it shriveled and curled into itself even before it hit the ground. The needle-dart had stolen its vitality, but Saucer’s own theft had broken its connection to Maddie; she would see no gain from his loss. Her own hand was no more functional than his, though she hadn’t been subjected to the cascading, self-propagating attack she’d attempted on him; and they fought on.
It was… wrong. That much seeped through the haze of his apathetic hatred of the scenario he’d wound up in. He could tell she wasn’t toying with him, that she was pushing herself to the limit, but equally he wasn’t doing anything but trying to kill her. It simply wasn’t possible that they were not only perfectly matched but that the randomness, the vagaries of combat, hadn’t resulted in a winner. And Saucer had only shifted to break the needle once, when she came in for the secondary strike—ah, he thought to himself with a realization. Now I understand.
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“Not a lot of blind musicians out there, but this one has style for the ages, and I know you all see it. He can’t see you, so please, let the beaming doppelganger in the stylish opaque glasses HEAR how much we all love him. Let him hear you scream the name of the pianist he represents: Ray Charles!”
Just as the Antagonist had in the tournament scrum which had preceded his first death, Saucer was training him. It was shifting its weight to cue his motions and prepare him in his parries, and it was doing the same to make those parries work. That explained why, despite his opponent’s higher degree of skill, she was only able to outpace and outplay him on the defensive; she struck again and again, and he deflected and parried by the barest margins.
There was a lesson that Saucer was trying to teach him. There was one thing that Saucer wanted him to learn.
And as Nathan fought, he began to grasp it. It was…
Ah.
Rapier buried deep in Maddy’s heart, Nathan felt relaxed muscles trying to tense up once more. He studied the balance of his body, the places where his feet were relative to his hips and shoulders, the way that he’d held his wrist and shifted his arm just so. He studied how very little he had moved for such lethal effect, how liquid the motion had felt.
How explosive the acceleration.
“We have been the Lovers of the Eternal Dungeon Jazz Band,” the woman at the microphone crooned as the warehouse began to fade, wisping away like a dream or like the morning mist over a pond as the sun and wind cleared it away. “And I have had the pleasure to be… the representative and voice of jazz in a new world… the stand-in for the First Lady of Song, the monster manifested only to take the form of the memory of the Queen of Jazz. Siblings, cousins, and strangers,” she continued as the doppelgangers in the ground faded into nothingness one by one, “I have had the honor of wearing the mask of Lady Ella Fitzgerald. And we have been so very glad to have this chance to entertain you all. Take us out, boys!”
With one last exchange of skirling, whirling notes and runs, pouring a career’s worth of soul into eight short measures, the band brought the song to a close.
They were gone by the time the final chord faded.
Nathan staggered in that absence, finally waking from his reflective fugue back into the emotionless, over-extended cold of his being utterly and absolutely done with all this shit. He flexed his fingers, Saucer sliding back up to encase his wrist and forearm in the shape of a wristguard, and adjusted his balance again.
The fleeting moment of inspiration was fading, its clarity lost, but there was something left in its place. A moment of transcendent learning which settled into him in the evanescent wake of that sublime state’s passage.
“Fuck this place,” he said flatly, and walked onwards through the mist towards the center of the town.