Their blades connected in the first few testing swipes. Dorja got a feel for him. Lullock’s blade tried again and again to parry her blade tip down, tried stomping on it, to capture it between his foot and the ground. He advanced, she shuffle-stepped backwards, remembering what Master Korvix had told her about the weaknesses in Lullock’s style. He feinted left, drew out a response from her, parried her blade down and once again stepped on its tip, and this time he kept it there while he slashed out at her. Dorja ducked the first slash, and used both weeping-hands to catch the next one on the inside, pulled her glaive free, and spun around to strike him in the solar plexus with her elbow.

The Hekkite leader grunted, chuckled, and rushed her again. Dorja push-stepped backwards, then ducked and C-stepped around him, sweeping low at his feet like Korvix had instructed—

But Lullock was fast and skilled. He leapt over the attacks, landing several feet out of her range and raising his guard. He held his sword in an icepick grip, tip facing down, and aimed the pommel of his silvery hilt at her. Advanced with a push-step. Swiped at her blade. Dorja angled out to the left. Lullock came forward with quick, questing attacks, trying to find a gap.

Dorja’s movements were a microsecond too slow—her injured leg was cramping, her body was exhausted from the day’s sustained attacks. She looked into her opponent’s eyes. His energy told of a man that was only patient to a point, he liked to seize what he wanted when it was within his grasp. No toying with his food. Inspired by this insight, she resorted to Form Nine, the attack-by-drawing approach, and allowed her guard to slip—

Lullock seized on this at once, thinking he’d found the gap. He connected his blade to hers in the bind, wiped her blade to his right, and thrusted. Dorja was ready. Holding her glaive in only one hand, she freed up all three of the others to pat the flat of his blade as it came in, and battered his thrusting arm, using trapping hands until she was inside, grabbing the wrist of his free hand and yanking him to one side, twisting it into a joint lock and delivering a J’ing strike to the side of his head.

Lullock grunted in pain and frustration. With a will, he wrenched his wrist free, then spun and slashed at her head. Still holding the blade one-handed, Dorja barely brought the heavy weapon around in time to block. Lullock thrust again, his blade tip bouncing off of Dorja’s breastplate, exactly where she’d deflected it because she knew she had coverage there.

But Lullock’s free hand reached around to the back of his waist, and drew a short, shimmering blade and threw it at her. Dorja gasped, spinning away just in time before the blade could find her neck.

She moved in, trying a foot sweep, and when he danced away, Dorja was only too glad to let him. She spun around and swiped low at his lead foot. It worked! Her blade struck his left ankle and he screamed as he went down. But he rolled away, performed a kip-up, and whipped back onto his feet, staggering a bit before he thrust low and slashed up, right across the elbow of her left weeping-hand—

Dorja snarled in pain. Tried push-stepping back go gain range once again—

Then Lullock did something Dorja did not suspect. He held the sword one-handed, and dived to the ground, running around like a three-legged dog, swiping at Dorja’s feet. She leapt out of the way, swiping at him with a quesh’tha series, but Lullock blocked each of them with his compristeel bracers, all the while allowing his blade to attack her centerline. He got in close, head-butted her, spat in her eyes.

Dorja spun away, swung wildly, seeing through blurred vision—

The holopanes along the wall flashed. The cam drones hovering around her were broadcasting this fight live. Once or twice they came so close they got in her face and she swatted them away—

But Lullock’s tricks knew no end. He grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on the edge of a check-in desk, threw it in her face, and advanced with a flurry of low attacks.

Their blades locked. Half blinded, Dorja shoved him backward as his blade met the shaft of her glaive. She spin-kicked him in the chest, he laughed as he went down, rolled onto his feet, one hand planted on the ground, and ran at her in his three-legged dog fashion, and then launched himself at her. He grabbed a foldout chair on the way up, flung it at her, then round-kicked her rear leg, taking it out from underneath her. Dorja fell, rolled out of the way of his downward thrust, but when she tried to stand, Lullock once again stomped her blade, pinning the entire weapon down.

He held his sword high, and was about to bring it down in a skewering motion—

When Dorja threw her whole body into his midsection, tackling him and sending them both to the ground. They scrambled on the ground, both fighting for control over the hilt of Lullock’s sword. Disarmed as she was, it was Dorja’s only hope. She plunged an elbow into her enemy’s face, and he took it, smiling through yellow teeth coated in blood, and threw her over and rolled on top of her, raining fists down on her—

Dorja covered her head with her reaching-arms, and fought back with her left weeping-hand, while her right weeping-hand held on to his sword hilt for dear life, preventing it from thrusting into her. One of Lullock’s fists got through, and bounced her head off the floor so hard she heard a loud ringing. He straddled her, hammering her with his right fist again and again. Dorja brought her heels in close to her butt, bridged her hips as high as she could go, throwing him off of her.

Lullock sprang to his feet. Dorja spun on her back, whipping her feet around until she came up in a crouch. Lullock had already walked over to her glaive and now stood on it, both feet planted, denying her a weapon.

“Your voice,” he panted. “It’s very—very unusual.” He snorted out a gob of blood from his nose, and smiled those yellow teeth. “It grates—on the ears. Like someone singing—but singing badly. You’re an aberration, Dorja. You belong—in a grotesquery.”

“Dorja is Dorja.”

“You certainly are.” He lunged at her and Dorja shuffle-stepped back several times, triangle-stepped away from his next attack, then went into low horse stance and rooted herself as he came forward once again. She performed a trapping series—sacrificing her left weeping-hand, she parried the incoming blade, taking a huge gash across the palm, slapped the wrist out of the way with her two weeping-hands and delivering a J’ing-style strike to his jaw. It rocked him. Lullock spun and nearly fell down, but recovered enough to slash out wildly, preventing her from following him.

But that was all right, because Dorja sprang to the right, dived at the ground, rolled, clutched her glaive, and came up onto her feet just as the Hekkite leader was rushing her. She advanced with two quick strikes, bringing up his high guard before shuffling back, keeping him at range, maintaining high attacks to keep Lullock committed to his high guard—

And then she summoned chi into her weeping-hands, flashed her faery lights into his face. It wasn’t nearly enough to blind him the way Master Korvix’s trick had done, but it surprised him nonetheless, opening his guard a micrometer more.

She spun completely around, sweeping low as before, and her blade completely severed his ankle this time. Lullock went down laughing, rolling away from her, and standing up on his bloody stump. He staggered, using his tip-down blade as a balancing cane. “You’re not getting—out of here, Dorja-chan,” Lullock laughed, still panting. “You’re not capable of—”

She rushed him, batted his blade out of the way with one hard swipe of her shaft, and cracked his skull with the blunt end. He fell over, still laughing, head bleeding. Dorja put her blade to his neck. “This is Dorja’s blade. Do you see it?” He kept laughing. “Do you see it?!”

“Yeah, Dorja-chan,” he laughed, sputtering his own blood. “I see, pez’a. You bested me by luck. But my real power doesn’t come from the blade, you stupid ut’rek kah!” He spat on her boot, which was pressed against his chest. “My power comes from Inzytt. The Mother of Void protects me. Protects all of Wyrmdov, her-her.” Lullock spoke strangely. Where before his voice had been relatively crisp and clear, he now used the accent of the four men that had jumped her in the alley. “We are Wyrmdov, us-us! We are all of us Wyrmdov!”

“Well, then,” she grunted, realizing in the moment what he was doing. He was playing to his audience. Dorja turned and saw the drone still watching her, saw the live vidfeed on the holopanes up and down the corridors of the empty spaceport. She wiped the sweat from her brow. “Well. Wyrmdov just met Dorja the Di’goji. Doyen-Adherent to the blade. But now you’ve all just witnessed something else.” She lifted the blade from his neck. “You’ve witnessed her mercy. And I know that is something far, far worse for men like you. To be mercifully spared, to live in the humiliation of the defeat.”

The Hekkite leader’s smile turned into a glower. He had to keep his cool. People were watching. Perhaps all of Wyrmdov was watching.

Dorja glanced down at the bleeding stump of his ankle, then turned to the drone. “Someone needs to send for a medical bot. Dorja is only so good at emergency aid.” She suddenly knelt on his thigh, and Lullock grunted and growled through gritted teeth. Dorja undid Lullock’s belt and stripped him of it. While her reaching-hands wrapped the leg tightly with the belt, her weeping-hands held the glaive, with the blade vaguely pointed at his face. He didn’t move while she made a quick tourniquet.

Dorja was about to stand up, and suddenly felt very lightheaded. She couldn’t show weakness, not right now, not with everyone watching. Because if this disgusting man was any indication, then the only thing some of these Wyrmdovians respected was strength. She ground her teeth but kept a composed face as she stood. “Dorja has proven this: you are not invincible. But you did fight well, Lullock. You are an above average practitioner of the Seven Vile Blades—”

“Above…average!” he growled, forcing a savage, bloody grin. “You were lucky! That’s all you were! Lucky!”

“Dorja is Dorja. And your men could not stop her. Your witching priestess could not stop her. And your blade could not quiet hers. Dorja asked for peace. She asked only for Senjelica, but you chose the hard way. Dorja pleaded with you. She begged you to let this go. But you had to do it the hard way. People like you always do—”

“You little—” He reached for her leg. Dorja thumped him hard on the head with her shaft.

“Keep your filthy hands off Dorja! She has beaten you. Take it like an adult would, and stop being so childish. You—” She stopped, listening. Distant shouting, and blades clanging. It suddenly struck her right out of the blue: Kirek!

She had completely forgotten that he’d lured the hunchbacked woman away. Dorja now forgot all about Lullock, and ran in the direction of the fighting.

* * *

Dorja found the hunchback lying on the floor, bleeding, trying to crawl away, her left arm in tattered pieces next to her, her right arm spasming. Kirek had collapsed onto a stack of shimmering metal chairs in the spaceport’s reception area, bloodied, lacerations up and down his arms but he was currently wrapping those with strips of his shirt that he tore away. He looked over at Dorja as she entered, and smiled a beleaguered smile. “Lady Dorja,” he huffed. “Looks like you made it.”

“Are you all right?” she said, crossing over to him in a hurry. She pointed the business end of her glaive at the woman slowly crawling away. “Gods below, you look like you need—”

Kirek took his omni-pad from his front pocket. “Pill bot.”

“What?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Pill bot. Already called it in. Had a subscription left over from my last visit.”

Dorja was about to ask what he meant, for she’d never heard of a pill bot, but then she heard raised voices, heavy booted footsteps. “They’re coming. The Keepers are coming—”

A door shunted open behind her, and she rounded on it, thinking it a threat. It looked like a floating coffin, or perhaps some ancient sarcophagus with its weird runes etched across its black metal and plastoid surface. It was oval, shaped like a giant pill, and as it hovered in quickly and quietly on repulsors, its side panel opened and out came half a dozen segmented metal tentacles, some of them with syringes extended, others with scanning equipment that looked like instruments from Veringulf’s auto-doc.

The pill bot gently shoved Dorja out of the way as it scanned Kirek. Dorja stood aside and watched it work. She heard scuttling, and turned to find the hunchback grabbing up pieces of her cyberware and retreating. From other corridors, red-uniformed Keepers came rushing in, electro-batons in hand, the visors on their faceless helmets scanning around. Some of them moved towards her like they meant to detain her, while others were clearly more interested in Lullock’s condition and ran to find him. Private security teams, most likely working independently for the spaceport, also entered, and while all of them saw her, they all steered clear.

Dorja stood ready to fight and defend Kirek in his wounded state, but everyone walked around her like she had the plague or like she was radioactive.

However, one of them walked by quickly, tipped his head in what Dorja could only describe as a deferential gesture, and murmured, “Maluri’tuhk.” Dorja did not know what to say to that. Then another uniformed sec agent came jogging inside, and said, “Maluri’tuhk,” as he went to check on Kirek’s condition.

Dorja swayed on her feet. Now realizing just how spent she was, she thought to have a seat. But then she remembered Turtle was probably still inside the scooper pod. She started towards the main hangar, but when she swayed on her feet, the pill box’s soft female voice said, “You are not well. You have multiple lacerations, and I am detecting signs of dehydration and severe fatigue. Do I have your permission to give you a fluid injection?”

“No, Dorja needs only to—”

“The injection includes a nutrient soup, as well as bio-friendly nanites that will help your wounds heal more quickly—”

“No, just help my friend there.”

“Dorja,” Kirek said. “Hold tight. Take the injection.”

“No. They could be sending someone after Turtle right now—”

“They won’t dare do that.”

“You do not know that!”

“Yes, I do. In fact, even if they do find her, they won’t harm a hair on her head. In fact, they’ll treat her with deference.”

“Foolish man! You don’t know this place half as well—“”

“I know it better than you.”

“How do you know they won’t go after Turtle?”

“Because you are Maluri’tuhk.”

“What does that even mean?”

Before Kirek could answer, six heavily armored KOPs came moving down the corridor, accompanied by a pill bot of their own. One of the Keepers of the Peace pointed directly at Dorja and murmured a command to the other officers. Three of them peeled off from the main group and ran over to her, electro-batons out. “You! Drop your weapon! On the ground—”

“Dorja will not be doing that,” she said, and started to walk past them.

“Stop!” a KOP shouted, standing in her way. “I said stop—”

“Ler her pass!” said another uniformed official, this one in a purple uniform and with tall, black boots, and some sort of golden bird for an insignia on his left arm. “Let her pass, the people have declared her Maluri’tuhk.”

“I don’t care!” said the KOP. “I don’t recognize her as—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kirek butted in. “Dorja, you can just sit tight. No need to worry about Turtle, she will be—”

“I said stop!” the KOP said.

Dorja often felt the best way to win an argument was simply not to have it. So, she held the glaive in a not-so-casual grip and limped around the KOPs, none of whom moved to stop her. But as she crossed the main concourse to the hangar bay, Dorja saw something strange on the holopanes along every wall. Her face was still there, though it was no longer a live feed, and it was frozen on a single frame of her gritting her teeth. It looked like a shot taken from her battle with Lullock just moments ago. It was sort of glowing, with strange characters written all around it, a script she did not recognize.

As she crossed an empty corridor to enter the hangar bay, Dorja saw more of these holopanes with her frozen image. And she felt an odd silence. Paranoia crept over her. Something wasn’t making sense. No one was arresting her. No one was stalking her. The KOPs had heeded their superior’s warning and left her along, because she was Maluri’tuhk or whatever. Surely Lullock’s other thugs must know where she was at, they’d presumably been watching the live feed, and yet no one was assailing her.

She focused on nothing else besides reaching Turtle. She left the KOPs and Kirek and Lullock and everyone else to argue whatever it was they were arguing.

Suddenly, the floor itself lit up with her face. Turned out, the floor had built-in holopanes, and they now showed her face, enlarged, to the point she was walking over her own cheekbones and looking up her own nostrils. She froze, looking down at her image on the floor, mouth slightly agape. The same strange script was there, but now there were other screens popping up, superimposed over her battle-hardened face. These screens showed people walking the streets of Wyrmdov, some of them chanting, “Maluri’tuhk! Maluri-tuhk!” while kneeling and pouring what appeared to be red wine down into the gutters.

Dorja thought this was the strangest world she had ever visited. By far. No contest.

She limped past Veringulf, made her way over to the old Colony-class ship, and shouted, “Turtle! Turtle, are you here? Answer Dorja!”

One of the cam drones was following her. Dorja looked around at the quietly floating machine, wondering where it had come from.

“Turtle?” Dorja’s voice caught in her throat. Fear was choking her. She had reached the scooper where she left Turtle. It was empty. “Turtle!” Tears began to well up. She ran about the hangar bay, shouting Turtle’s name at the top of her lungs, till her voice started to give out and her throat felt like it would bleed. “Turtle!” She ran past ever starship parked in the hangar, checked the maintenance corridor where all the bots were parked, ran up the steps to the higher scaffolding.

She ran until her legs began to fail, until at last Turtle’s silence did what her enemies’ blades could not, and defeated her. She fell to one knee and could not climb back up. Dorja tried to use her glaive to stand, but her energy was depleted. “No,” she wept. “No, no, no.” There was nothing left in her reserves, nothing left except—

“Dorja?” a small voice said.

Dorja gasped and spun around, daring to hope. When she saw the small girl climbing out of the landing gear of a Vo’genta-class shuttle, Dorja was afraid it was a ghost playing tricks on her, or fatigue-induced delusion. Turtle was so tiny she was able to fold herself most unnaturally into the framework. Dorja surged, throwing herself to her feet and dropping her glaive and lunging for Turtle. When she took the girl in her arms, Dorja realized at once she had been wearing her heart outside her chest these last months—the girl was a vulnerability, a chink in her armor, a definite and exploitable weakness to her enemies.

And she would not surrender her for all the power or freedom in the universe.

* * *

You almost lost, Dorja, she thought to herself. You very nearly lost everything. Turtle, Kirek, even your battle against the Seven Vile Blades. You are too impetuous; Master Jerrod was right about that. You cannot fight your way out of everything. You were lucky this time. And you are not nearly the bladeswoman you believed you were. Master Korvix was right about that.

Dorja was seated inside Veringulf, moments from leaving. She wanted to check the local hospitals to find out what had become of Kirek. And after that, she meant to go and see, finally and at last, just what had become of the girl Senjelica, the person she had come all this way for. Lullock had been right about this much: Dorja would never have been able to leave the girl alone on such a wicked place as this place. Wyrmdov was a cesspool of too many defilements to count.

You have a seed, Dorja, she told herself, lightly stroking Turtle’s hair. You need to water this seed, not put it in so much danger. You must leave Wyrmdov at once…and yet…Kirek is now potentially in danger.

Presently, Dorja sat in Veringulf’s auto-doc, allowing the machine to seal her wounds—the stab wounds to her leg, the gash across her left weeping-hand, the cut across her neck, which she wasn’t even sure how she’d gotten. Once that was done, she stepped outside of the ship to make sure it had not been tampered with. She didn’t want to take off only to find out later that the Hekkites had placed a bomb or something on her ship.

But she got no further than the cargo ramp, because a group of emissaries was waiting for her.

The hangar was still mostly empty, and the low horn had finally stopped blowing, but a dozen assorted men and women, mostly humans, stood at the foot of the ramp. One of them stepped forward, dressed in yellow robes and multicolored sashes that crisscrossed her chest. Jewelry clattered from multiple piercings that looked painful to Dorja. She was a crone, gray-haired and one-eyed, and she wore the glowing fungus on the left side of her face, cultivated in a particular red-and-gold pattern that reminded Dorja of a sunrise. From her neck hung a glistening white crystal; it looked like quartz.

“Blade-Swan,” said the old crone. The fungus pulsed with bioluminescent light. “Matty the Utmost, am I.”

“Dorja is Dorja,” she said, guardedly. Glaive in both her reaching-hands, she pushed Turtle behind her with her weeping-hands.

“Then Maluri’tuhk, you be. Yes, you-you.”

“Dorja knows this word not. So you can keep it.”

The crone clutched the quartz in both fists, and said, “Maluri’tuhk—”

“Dorja said keep your word. Dorja is Dorja.”

“—the priestesses have been propitiated and they have answered,” the crone said, unabated. “You can speak on the Scales at next Sun Peek. You are allowed to make your Argument there. The task of telling you about it falls to me. You will be unmolested upon your approach to the Scales, and you will have an escort to the Raised Dais. You will be unmolested,” she repeated.

Dorja looked at the rest of the crone’s retinue. Men in women in formal robes, a couple of security agents, a uniformed KOP, a four-legged Gower hovering at the back, its insectile head bobbing up and down curiously. Some of them were gawking at her, and peering around at Turtle hiding behind Dorja. Some seemed overawed by her weeping-arms. All of this had the ad-hoc look of a quickly assembled welcoming party. It was almost comical. Their various conflicting faces and bearings made them look part law enforcement squad, part religious entourage, and part slack-jawed backwater hicks. Dorja realized she was looking at all three, an amalgam of whatever weird governmental system was at work on Wyrmdov.

She knew something else, too. She knew that she was not prepared to deal with this sort of challenge. This type of socializing and diplomacy was completely out of her range. Master Jerrod would had laughed at her awkwardness, for it had been his skill to speak to anyone from a castellan to a clerk to a crone. Dorja’s mother had also had the talent, but alas, neither had lived long enough to fully inculcate those things into her.

She only knew how to communicate her desired end goal.

“Dorja only wants the girl,” she said. “Dorja wants—”

“We have already heard what you did for the family of Kennisons,” the crone interrupted. “The father, Luke, has been speaking on the Forum.”

“Forum? What Forum?”

The crone tilted her head quizzically, trying to figure Dorja out. “The Forum, my dear. Where people commune, sharing messages and stories over the Weave.”

“The Weave?”

Turtle tugged at Dorja’s armor. “I think she means a computer network, Dorja,” she whispered. “The thing people talk on.”

Dorja made an “ah-ha” di’goji gesture. So, the Weave was a form of networked computer systems. She had heard that type of service called many different things, depending on where she was. The Kingdom had been shattered and so had its computerized social networks. She had never learned to be part of them, and living much of her life in space, alone aboard Veringulf, which kept her away from network buoys for long stretches. She shrugged and said, “The Kennisons needed help and so Dorja helped them.”

“Because of her Candle,” Turtle blurted out.

“Turtle! Hush now!” The girl quailed. Dorja was upset with her, but perhaps it was her own fault for not adequately explaining that the Candle was not to be shared with just anyone. It wasn’t necessarily meant to be a secret, but it should always be guarded, or else the cynicism of others could poison it, douse it.

“Dorja’s candle?” the crone said. “I would hear more. And we will, when Maluri’tuhk speaks at the Raised Dais.”

“Dorja will not be sharing her Candle with any of you,” she said. “She only wants Senjelica.”

“Ah, the girl you’re looking for. It is all over the Weave, Lullock’s people have mentioned it. Well, the priestesses have agreed with the people, you are Maluri’tuhk, and you will be heard. So if it is this girl, Senjelica, that you wish to find, you will see her there on the Raised Dais with you.”

Dorja’s ears perked up, part of her detecting a trap. “She will be there? Senjelica will be there, and Dorja can take her to someplace safe?”

The crone shrugged. “I suppose. If the girl feels safe with you, and if the priestesses are comfortable with your Argument—”

“What argument? And why wouldn’t the girl feel safer with Dorja than she would here?”

“The Argument is the cause you put forth for your actions. You are allowed to defend yourself in an open hearing against the Hekkites and the priestesses, to settle your Quarrel. And as for the girl’s safety, well…if the girl really is from the Doomed world of Herenov, I must ask: where exactly are you going to take her?” The crone splayed her hands out, offering the logic. “After all, Dorja Blade-Swan, where is safe, when all that exists outside of here is the Doom?”

image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]