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The third I take on the crossed blades and it drives me back four paces and puts my heel over the lip, and a moment of complete clarity arrives in which I understand that if I fight this the way I fight everything — by being unavailable until the other man is tired — I lose, because the footing is small and he has worked that out and he is simply going to keep pushing me toward the drop.

So I stop moving backward.

That's all of it. That is the entire tactical content of what people in Mountmend now insist on calling the duel, and I want this on paper, because the version Joren tells has a great many more somersaults in it.

I stop giving ground, and I catch the following three strikes on my body instead of my blades, and each one buys me a half-pace forward, and inside those three exchanges I'm near enough that a blade of that length can no longer be brought to bear.

He knows it immediately. He drops the blade and gets both hands on me instead, and then it's a grappling fight between a Kaleidian and a mercenary with cybernetic reinforcement along his jaw and shoulders, on a platform that will not hold still, above a drop.

That part lasts a while.

Twice he gets me onto my back. The next time he has my throat and a knee across the shoulder wound, and the drop is somewhere behind my head, and I am considering my options and finding them thin when the platform we are on tilts eleven degrees to the north.

Not the building. The building doesn't do things in eleven-degree increments.

Clara.

She has been up on that command stem watching a fight she can do nothing about, with a console in front of her that speaks three verbs and a scope, and she has worked out, somewhere in it, that the scope can be a place. Chamber nine. Chamber fourteen. The gallery on the eastern wall. This platform.

She cannot tell the building to attack. There is no verb for it and the building would not know what she meant.

But she can tell it, in a language that took her six weeks to learn a third of, where she would like the floor to be.

Rekk slides off me sideways. Not off the edge — he catches the lip one-armed, which is remarkable, and hangs there four seconds while the whole surface settles level again and I rise to my knees.

I could take him there. He'd not even see it.

I don't, and I've been asked about that a number of times since, usually by people who need it to be honour. It isn't. It's that Selka will have to file an account of this afternoon, and Vane's lawyers are going to read every line of it, and a Kaleidian who kills a hanging man is a Kaleidian whose testimony about a contract can be made to look like something else.

So I wait and let him climb back up, which he does, and then we do it properly for another two minutes, and at the finish of those two minutes I put him down on the platform and he stays down.

He's breathing. His right arm is broken in two places and he isn't getting up on that ankle for a season, and he lies on his back on white stone high above all those careful notes, and laughs at the ceiling.

“Go on then,” he says.

“No.”

“I'd have done you.”

“You'd have done me for money. You're not being paid past dark and it's past dark.” I take his blade and put it over the edge, and it takes an age to arrive anywhere below. “The authorities will be down that shaft in an hour. Tell them the job and the name behind it, and they'll shave the years off in fistfuls. Your daughters won't wait a decade for you.”

Rekk studies the ceiling a while.

“That's not a favour,” he says. “That's you making a witness.”

“It's both. Most useful things are.”

I climb back up the stem to the command floor by a route the building offers, and offer it it does, which I register without the leisure to dwell on.

Clara is on her feet before I'm fully up.

“Sit down.”

“The archive isn't secured.”

“Draeven. Sit down.”

“Vane is loose with a case of Precursor components and access to nineteen chambers, and there are Authority cutters forty minutes out who will arrive to find one man conscious and armed in a facility of this significance.” I stay standing, because if I sit I am not confident about the getting up. “I would like that man to be me.”