Chapter 31 Dahvid Tin’vori

Darling was no longer playing games.

His fourth champion walked out through the gates. The man did not smile. He did not wave to the crowd. Dahvid knew him on sight. He had seen the man at Darling's parties, even watched him fight in some of the marquee showdowns. Everyone in Ravinia knew the Whisperman.

The man's name was born from his habit of leaning down and speaking with the dead after killing them in the arena. They said corpses from his fights would mutter aloud in the morgue, supposedly repeating his final words in a garbled tongue.

Dahvid didn't care about any of that shit.

His mind trimmed away the rumors and focused on facts. All the notes Nevelyn had made. Her research on the Whisperman had been thorough, because she'd imagined him as Darling's most obvious choice against Dahvid. They used to make bets on who the fifth gladiator would be in his imagined gauntlet. She'd been off by one. He'd have to remember to make Nevelyn pay up the next time he saw her. Just the thought of that had him smiling.

Across the sand, the Whisperman settled into his stance. Dahvid could not help admiring the sword he unsheathed. He was a fine duelist who'd been made into something more by an absolutely legendary blade. One that had been crafted by Maxim himself. It was a manipulation sword. Dahvid had witnessed its effect on a number of gladiators. The way they'd stumble the wrong way or swing at nothing but air—all because their opponent's blade was casting an illusion. That was the trick of it. Sometimes, the real Whisperman was rushing forward to cut them in two. Other times, it was an illusion of him that veiled the real attack. No one could truly know the difference.

Unless their sister had studied the patterns. Learned every possible combination. It helped, too, if the opponent had magic that matched the Whisperman's skills. As Dahvid did.

The warlord gave his signal. Dahvid reached for his twins tattoo. The two imps that Cath had etched on his body. This was still his favorite spell. Cold air gasped out from him. A great exhalation. He always imagined it sounded like a first breath.

Dahvid stepped to his left. A mirrored version of him matched that movement, stepping out to the right. His twin hefted the same sword, took up the same stance. They both smiled at their opponent. A perfect replica. Dahvid knew no one in that arena could tell them apart.

The Whisperman hesitated for only a moment, assessing them both, and then he began striding purposefully forward. His first attack was for the real Dahvid. A lunging strike that would have caught his upper chest. Dahvid battered the sword aside with a quick parry.

The first one is always real.

Whisperman spun away from him, preparing to swing at the conjured twin. But Dahvid knew the pattern. Real, fake, fake, real. Sure enough, the actual Whisperman blinked back to life in front of him, his swing already halfway to Dahvid's neck. Any other person would have been cut in two. It was impossible to match that speed—unless you knew it was coming.

Dahvid turned the blow away and then parried a second. He was pressed just enough that he had to backpedal a few steps. The Whisperman used his retreat to swing his attention back to Dahvid's twin. Or at least it appeared that way.

But that's fake too.

Dahvid made a gut call. He swung his sword where the Whisperman had been a moment before. And he very nearly took off the man's head. His opponent ducked at the last second, forced into a backpedal by the unexpected strike. Dahvid took advantage, pressing him in return, aiming blow after blow after blow. The shock on his opponent's face was utterly satisfying.

I know you, friend. I know every combination you will try. All thanks to Nev.

His twin joined the fray from behind. Together they forced the Whisperman into a frantic retreat. His illusions would not serve him now. The fight was coming too fast and from both angles. He was lucky to avoid their blades as he danced and backpedaled, danced and backpedaled.

Nevelyn's notes continued to guide his attack: Agatha Marchment disarmed him, because she kept him on his heels the entire time. His sword works best when he's on the offensive, so remember to keep pushing him.

Dahvid and his twin had never trained together—but they didn't need to. The twin was Dahvid. They fought the same, thought the same, killed the same. His twin scored the first blow. A slit on the Whisperman's upper bicep. Dahvid landed the second, a gash that bit through the armor on their opponent's upper leg. A sequence of combinations drove the man back, step after step, toward the puzzle section of the arena. By now most of the stones had fallen away, leaving only a few platforms on which to stand. It had created several pits at the edge of the central circle. With each swing, they backed him closer and closer to those waiting, shadowed jaws.

Dahvid could feel the end coming. Sweat ran down the Whisperman's normally blank face. This was a man who knew he was about to die. In a final desperate move, he battered both their swords aside. It gave him just enough room to turn, building a few steps of momentum. He shocked Dahvid by leaping through empty air. The gaping hole was the length of a man. A difficult jump. Dahvid got caught watching the impossible attempt. How he glided through the air. The way the Whisperman's feet scraped that distant edge. His arms pinwheeling to keep him from falling back into the pit…

… and then there was a blade in his gut.

The real Whisperman was beside him. He'd never jumped at all. That had been the illusion. Thin fingers tightened their grip on Dahvid's shoulder. His voice was as quiet as a dream.

"Found the real one, didn't I?"

He'd never been in so much pain. Nothing so awful in all his life. The Whisperman held him tight to the sword, and he could feel the world starting to slip through his fingers. Until his twin beheaded the man.

It happened faster than an indrawn breath. Dahvid saw a final flash of surprise, and then he was gone. A soul leaving a body. Dahvid thought it was a fair mistake to make. The Whisperman had assumed that his twin would vanish if he killed the real Dahvid. The way his own illusion disappeared. He'd turned his back on the danger, because he thought there was no more danger left. But Dahvid's magic was stronger than that. He let the Whisperman's body collapse into the sand.

The victory was a hollow one. As he stumbled to the center of the arena, he nearly collapsed. His current spell felt like it was draining him. He banished the twin, who faded like smoke in the air. Dahvid reached down and carefully removed the sword from his own gut. A scream clawed up his throat. It felt nearly as bad coming out as it had going in. He tossed the blade aside and sank to his knees in the sand. It felt better to lie down, so he did, stretching out on his back as the crowd watched.

One more fight.

He still had one more person to beat, and he would have to do it like this. He knew the grains were already slipping through the hourglass. Five minutes to rest. It felt like nothing at all now. Dahvid ripped fabric away from his undershirt. He balled the material up and stuffed it into the gaping, bloody hole in his armor. Anything to staunch the bleeding. Even that slight movement had him hissing with pain. For a time, he simply lay there, staring up at the dizzying lights above. If he could just sleep for a moment, just close his eyes, maybe he could stand back up.…

"Bring out the last!" Darling's voice cut through the air. "Bring out the fifth!"

Dahvid grunted with pain. He pushed back to his feet. His sword was waiting nearby. He stumbled over, blood still flowing from the wound, and lifted his weapon from the sand. The passing seconds only sharpened the pain. His eyes flicked up to Cath, and he could not help the pleading look he gave her.

Save me. Stop all of this. Please. I don't want to die.

And then his eyes drifted over to Darling. The gates were still closed. Dahvid saw who his final opponent would be just before the guards could shove them open. The seat beside the warlord was empty. Dahvid could not help laughing. As the gates groaned wide, Agatha was there, wearing her battle leathers. He wondered when she'd gone back to change. He had been too busy almost dying to pay attention. His end had finally come. He could not beat her. Not like this.

He let loose a scream. The collective frustrations of a decade came rolling up his throat and off his tongue. He could not put into words how terrible it all felt. Not that he might die. He'd accepted the possibility of his own death a hundred times over.

It was that he would die without burying Thugar Brood in the ground first. Ren Monroe had been right. She'd said that sometimes it was hard to breathe, because there was so much hatred in her chest. He felt the same way—and would go on feeling that way until the end.

Dahvid shook himself. He adjusted his feet and quieted his mind. Darling still hadn't given the signal. He was baiting the fans. Giving them a few more moments to enjoy the hero who'd made it through four rounds of a gauntlet. He would stretch it out until the old hero who'd won all five rounds put an end to the fairy tale. It was very nearly poetic.

Dahvid had three tattoos left. The null zone. Useless against Agatha. There was Ware's final tattoo. Unused all these years. An exchange of some kind. The optimist in him wanted to believe he would trade his condition for hers. Maybe the magic would hand Agatha Marchment a gut wound and leave him whole. Maybe that would be enough to sway the odds between them. He couldn't be sure.

The last option was the scarlet traveler. Thinking about it made him laugh. Was it too late to use it? He'd been saving it all this time for Thugar Brood. It was the only magic he possessed that would guarantee the death of his greatest enemy. What was the point of beating Agatha Marchment? If he went south to be buried next to Ware all these years later?

"They took him," Dahvid said to no one, to everyone. "They took him from us. They dragged him back behind their pretty walls, and they buried him in the ground. I never…" He trailed off, unsure what the point of all of this was. "I never got to say goodbye."

Darling gave the signal.

Agatha Marchment strode forward like an inevitability. He had no other choice.

"I'm sorry, Brother. I failed you."

He swiped his thumb across the scarlet traveler Ware had drawn. The flower rose from his skin, floated before him in the air, and he watched as a thousand petals unfurled in a dizzying pattern, far too fast for his eyes to follow. Time fractured. Bent and shaped into a thousand possibilities. He saw them all like little miniature worlds. As if he were a god, looking down on a universe full of half-glinting stars. In that endless cosmos, he began his hunt.

Every world he saw was different. He was being shown every possible combination, every possible outcome of the fight between himself and Agatha Marchment. What would happen if she struck first? What if Dahvid threw sand in her eyes? What if someone from the crowd leapt to their death and interrupted the fight? What if he parried first and dodged second? What if he swung a fraction of an inch lower in this one particular sequence? The scarlet traveler granted him access to every possibility that existed, across every timeline that existed.

Dahvid took his time searching. Time in this world and the real world were not the same. But the problem he faced was exactly what he'd guessed. As he picked up each potential world, examined its outcome, he kept finding Agatha Marchment standing over his corpse.

A gut wound here. Severed hands there. Sometimes he died of exhaustion or from losing too much blood. She was that good and he was that weak. World after world. Possibility after possibility. The results were all the same. He was meant to die in this place. His fate had already been decided.

"Not yet. Please. There has to be a way.…"

Another and another and another. If he surrendered, Agatha executed him. If he fought, Agatha beat him. If he ran, Agatha caught him. She killed him a thousand different ways in a thousand frightful sequences. Dahvid was starting to give up hope when he found it. In the darkest corner of his shadowy universe, a small star winked up at him. He knelt down in that imagined vastness and began to weep. Thousands of possibilities and just one way he could win.

Dahvid scooped the little world up with great care. He held it to his eye once more, watching for confirmation, and then he set the world between his teeth. He knew the consequences of this magic. He'd felt it happening for years. The way he drifted sometimes. How time bent and fractured around him. That subtle untethering of his mind. He'd not used the traveler much for that very reason, but now it was his last hope.

He bit down. Chewed and chewed. It was a thick possibility, though. A rubbery texture. He gagged a few times before swallowing the future whole. Dahvid braced himself for the pull. Out of this world of endless possibility and back to the limited one. It always felt like traveling through a too-narrow door. Time unwound.

He did not experience the sequence the way everyone else did. He did not see their exchange of blows or the stunning way Agatha disarmed him. He missed their dance through the spikes and the desperate finale that left him flat-backed on the ground. The crowd would witness every move.

Not Dahvid. The magic always took him straight to the end. Later, his memories of the fight would be gray and dull and incomplete. Dahvid regained consciousness at the moment that Agatha Marchment stumbled away from him, hands clutching at the knife buried in her chest. It was her own blade, the one she kept at her ankle. He slumped back in the sand, blood rushing out of his wounds.

When his opponent finally fell, he was left with a clear view of Darling. He would never know the sequence, never know how he beat her, but he didn't care. The gauntlet was finished. He'd won. The crowd stared down at them in stunned silence. Both Darlings had taken their feet. Even the real one, who'd come forward into the light, shock bright and visible on that hideous face.

Dahvid was finally bold enough to look that version of Darling in the eye.

"Bring me my army."

And with that, he left the waking world.