He rolls his wings right to crush me, but I twist to cement my feet, mustering Second-Stratum, ninth stance, which steadies my body in the wide staggered position. I twist and flip along the scales even when he lifts his wings.Second stance,fourth stanceandfifth stance, before I run to the top and leap, twisting, my feet hammering on to his fiery head.
My skin burns and we go rolling in a tangle of talons and limbs. His knee snaps my jaw and blood leaks into my eyes. But my arms blindly catch his talons. Through strained, bloodied teeth, I pull backwards. His quqnoos form shrinks and he slips from my grasp.
Cursing, I pivot with my right heel, crunching my hands into dense balls of Heavenly light. Compressing them, I launch the spheres in quick succession. A blast hits him in the chest. At the next projection, his fiery wings bracket his body, fire absorbing the nur in a crackle and ejecting it.
The explosion knocks me on to my stomach into a bundle of date palms. Blearily, I pick myself back up, glancing at the trees. Yabghu’s advice returns: use my environment. What if I create my own?
I crunch my hands again; instead of aiming for Fayez, I gamble on the Heavenly Energy reserves I have left and sprout dense walls of nur around the amphitheatre, using the structure’s pillars to form them. My form trembles when I manifest eight different walls of nur like a forest of cosmic light. I leap over them, on to the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, the sandstone fissuring from the force of my Heavenly Energy–imbued body.
On either side of me, officers lurch back a bit, though the Veil separates us. I stalk around the ledge, stepping over them, my bare feet leaving bloody footprints on the sandstone. Shoving the hilt of another khanjar between my teeth, I pass Adviser Arash and the Sepahbad, wholeans back with crossed arms, watching me form barrier after barrier above their seats.
Fayez turns in a slow circle. My breath labours from maintaining so many walls, but I start to leap from one to the other, my movements growing too fast for his perception, behind him –beside him– over him. He turns at each brush of wind created by my passing, whipping his blades, but he is half a breath delayed, unable to pinpoint my location. Instead, his knives shatter the maze of barricades. I forcibly erect a new wall each time.
I squat over the barricade behind him, my hands curling on the top. He whirls around, sensing me. But that one second is enough to target him. I clasp my hands and fall back from the barrier.
‘Dragon scales,’I order through the khanjar. My finger bonds burst wiry tendrils of nur into the wall, merging them together with my leg and back bonds to form a net formation of amber whipping upwards, right into his face. The density skewers his jaw.
I hit the ground and do not wait. I pounce, as he howls from my needles of nur.This is it.
When I am a breath away from his hunched form, time slows. Something is wrong. His lips move as if he is channelling breaths. His fingers curl inwards. My heart stutters and the air crackles around us.
The tip of the khanjar in my mouth kisses his neck. Fayez’s eyes rise slowly – patiently – as time slows.
‘Maximum iron-fist.’The words are uttered calmly.
I do not see what happens next.
One second I am there and the next, I see a flash of glowing eyes, a white spark, and then I am in the air, sailing back across trees -no,through trees. My back smacks against the bedrock, but I splinter through it, landing in a crater of dirt, sand and debris.
The sky shakes above me like Judgement Day, and I realise it’s my tilting vision. Blood seeps through my clothes. I cannot sense my right hand, two fingers crushed. My left leg is unrecognisable.
I cannot feel anything – cannot hear anything. My mind disappears from the material realm, and horrifyingly... my seventy-seven bonds connected to Heaven flash and stutter. To my disbelief, four bonds snap and wilt to the ground of the psychospiritual world. Those were my feet bonds.
A laugh pulls me back to the present.
Fayez stumbles forward, clutching his bloodied face, laughing and laughing. Dread spears through me.
‘Enlightenment,’the crowd murmurs in a sardonic swell. The scholars exchange long, impressed glances. Older clanhouse generals look on with cocked heads from the top of the amphitheatre, and some nod, content that one of their own has reached the maxim of the spiritual arts. Only Yabghu is on his feet pushing against the Veil, fear naked on his face, with the look of a teacher about to watch his student die again.
My overseer warned me.Enlightenment: the martial phenomenon where the Heavenly bonds are heightened; where one’s senses are all-seeing; where eyes flash white as their spiritual energy encompasses everything. One blow cansevera Heavenly bond.
I’ve caused a man to evolve into a monster.
Even Fayez did not expect this. He shudders. ‘I have never been able to master a maximum iron-fist,’ he says, as if the awakening of Heavenly Energy has him baffled.
But this warrior is powerful. This warrior is Za’skar. From the lessons of Sister Umairah, the maximum iron-fist is the densest punch of iron-bone that martial masters can use; it snaps the connection of several Heavenly bonds. In my case, my foot bonds. It will take me weeks to recover, after a spiritual cleanse, from such a brutal attack.
My nails dig into the sand, scooping pebbles and dirt. My eyes search the uneasy crowd, moving up to the advisers. I cannot give them the satisfaction of watching me concede.
With a prayer, I use a tree to pull myself out of the debris, leaning on my right leg.
Fayez’s smile ceases. ‘How are you still moving? You should be done for; your crucial Heavenly bonds have snapped.’
My legs tremble, but I grit my teeth, imagining a string pulling me up forcibly.
Fayez rolls his shoulders, then lunges so quickly in his state of enlightenment that I cannot see or predict his movements; they no longer form a pattern.Use your environment.
I hardly blink before pain explodes in my torso, then jaw, then throat with bone-crushing force. One after the other, his scaled half-quqnoos fists pummel me in an iron-fist barrage, obliterating more bonds.
