He broke into a charge as he ran straight at me with weapons raised. I brought up Flame Shield, large enough to catch both swords as they came down, though the force of their hits knocked me back a couple of steps and threw off my planned counter-attack.
Still as agile as he had been in a body of flesh, Hamon whirled around my shield and swung one sword high, the other low. I parried one and jumped over the other, then battered him with my shield. It caught him in the face, and he staggered back but laughed as he did so.
“You think you can beat me with such cheap tricks?” he asked. “There are no fragile bones to break here, foreigner. No weak flesh for you to stab with your hidden blades. I am the fire, and you are the fuel. You cannot stop me.”
More ash fell from him as he spoke, like a drift of black snow across the ground.
Perhaps I couldn’t beat him the way I had before, but I had other options.
I took a step back as he advanced and let him take the offensive. He came at me with reckless abandon as he struck to left and right, high and low, stabbing at my center and slashing at my sides. With every blow that came in, I took a step back and remained on the defensive. It went against every instinct, against everything I had learned about how best to fight, but this wasn’t a normal fight. I ignored the urge to attack and kept moving.
As he followed me around the arena, Hamon left a trail of ash in his wake. The more furiously he attacked, the faster it fell, as his body of fuel and flames consumed itself. The fire grew dimmer as the flames drew back from his blades, but if he noticed, he didn’t care. He just kept coming while he lashed out at me with all his strength.
My confidence grew. If he kept this up, he would burn down to nothing. I didn’t need to beat him; he would beat himself.
I retreated faster, and he was forced to take more steps to keep up. I goaded him into increasingly frantic attacks as more ash fell away. The flames of his left arm flickered and died before his sword fell to the ground.
“I’ll kill you,” he said, ignoring the clang of metal on close-packed dirt.
“I doubt it.” I backed up another step. “But keep trying.”
Another chunk of ash fell away, and he sank to his knees, then forced himself back up on slimmer, trembling legs.
“You,” he muttered as one side of his face fell away. “I’ll kill you.”
“Of course,” I grinned as I stepped back again.
He dropped onto a single knee, and I drove my sword into his chest. The blade plunged out of his back, and his torso started to disassemble as though it was the remnants of a charred log.
Suddenly, there was a humming in the air. My head throbbed, and my stomach churned.
“What now?” I asked, the words barely more than a groan. I was battered and exhausted, my thoughts were a swirling mess, and now, some fresh threat had arrived. I didn’t know how much more I could take.
The air between me and Hamon shimmered. He froze.
The sight was uncanny. It wasn’t only that he stopped walking and talking. It was as if he was frozen in time. The fires that made up his body no longer flickered or flared. His torso no longer crumbled into ash. The embers drifting from him were now as still as a photo.
Confused, I looked around.
Xilarion stood behind me, his hands raised.
“An elemental prison,” he said. “It will hold young initiate Wysaro as he is, stopping him from doing any harm. It will also stop him from disintegrating completely while I decide how to deal with him.”
He moved his hands around each other as if tying off a knot. The shimmering in front of Hamon solidified and became bars of something crystalline, a cage all around him.
“Did you kill Lord Wysaro?” I asked.
“I dealt with him,” Xilarion said. “That is enough, for the time being.”
“And what happens now?”
“Now?” Xilarion looked at the wounded warriors and ruined seating. “The fighting is over. Now, the real work begins.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
By evening, most of the guild’s members had returned from pursuing the Wysaro retreat. The clan members had taken refuge inside Jiven’s fortress, and their numbers had dwindled to the point that they were no longer a threat for retaliation. As each guild member returned, they were checked over by Faryn and a group of servants. Their wounds were bandaged and they were given herbs to help them recover, along with food and water. Fighting was thirsty work.
Some returned bone weary, exhausted from the first real fight of their lives. These stumbled into bed as soon as their wounds had been tended. For once, it didn’t matter who snored or how loudly. The inhabitants of the dormitories were too exhausted to be kept awake by such small things.
Those of us who still had some energy went to work setting the guild house straight. First, we handled the wounded and took them to Faryn’s team for triage. Then came the grisly business of clearing up the dead.
There was a graveyard outside the south walls of the guild and we took the bodies of our own side there. Master Kyu set out offerings of incense and gave prayers to the gods while we lowered our companions, one by one, into their graves. Some of them I had talked to around the guild, others I had barely seen before that day, but as each one was covered with dirt, I felt my sadness swell. By the end, we were all weeping. I felt stronger for it, the sorrow no longer tearing at me from the inside. The grief and I became
