Page 25 of Beds and Blades

I had never seen anyone fight before. Not really. I had read about it, studied it, analyzed it at the strategic and tactical level for years. The mechanics of actual violence—two people trying to hurt each other in a small space—were something I had processed entirely in the abstract until this moment.

Skip was not abstract.

He moved through the courtyard like someone who had been doing this long enough that the efficiency was not effort anymore; it was how he was built. Sword in his right hand, hook axe in his left, managing two separate problems simultaneously with calm, expert focus.

One of the vampires had a garrison soldier on the ground and was drawing a blade across its own wrist with the calm, practiced efficiency of something that had done this before. The blood welled up dark, the wrist lowering toward the soldier’s mouth with the patience of a process being executed rather than a fight being won.

Not a bite. A blood transfer.

The turning mechanism was clinical rather than dramatic, which, I noted, was more disturbing than the dramatic version would have been.

Skip covered the distance in four strides and brought the hook axe through in one committed arc, and the vampire’s head left its shoulders and hit the dirt.

The soldier on the ground was still breathing, and Skip did not stop moving.

The sword was for the other vampire.

Skip hit it with a single blow powerful enough to drive it to its knees. The wound was already beginning to close with the slow, visible determination of something that had no intention of staying open.

The vampire’s healing process bought Skip a moment.

Skip used it.

The hook axe followed in the same arc.

Suddenly, the vampire was no longer a problem because the vampire no longer had a head.

The third one was faster than the first two.

It came at Skip from the left with the speed of something that had been fed recently. This was the amplified speed Caen had described, the blood-fueled version that doubled everything. Skip moved with it rather than against it, using the vampire’s own momentum to redirect the hook axe, which swung in a low arc that caught the legs rather than the neck, breaking the sequence of motion and buying a half-second.

A half-second was enough.

One of his soldiers took the opening. The hook found the angle. The vampire went down in pieces, which was the only way vampires went down, and Skip was already past it, moving toward the fourth.

The fourth one had gotten hold of a garrison soldier and was not letting go. The soldier was upright, still fighting, still in the engagement. Holding. Controlling. Using the soldier as a variable that required managing, which meant the soldier was the thing Skip had to get to first and the vampire second.

Skip got to both simultaneously.

I watched him do it, and I did not have the vocabulary for it. Military history had given me the language of campaigns, tactics, and strategic objectives. It had not given me the language for this.

The economy of it. The absence of wasted motion. The way six years of repetition had fused thought and action into a single uninterrupted process.

Within seconds, the vampire’s head was gone and the soldier was free.

He did not look like a man fighting.

He looked like a man working.

This was nothing like reading about battles. This was loud and close enough to rattle bones. Steel clanged against steel. Men grunted and roared. Blades slid into flesh.

When it was over, the courtyard fell quiet. Four vampires were gone, and every one of Skip’s men was still drawing breath.

The courtyard smelled of blood.

I had read enough battlefield accounts to recognize the smell, even though I had never encountered it before. The reality was sharper than anything I had imagined, more precise and less forgiving.

The copper smell was overwhelming. I knew, in theory, that blood smells that way because of iron oxidizing in the air. Knowing it didn’t help. It didn’t prepare me for the heaviness of it, or how it crowded out everything else.