He had never once, in his short life, pushed hard enough to find out what happened after that.
Simika's first strike came in low, aimed at his lead leg, and he caught it on the flat of his blade a half-second later than he expected to, close enough that he felt the wind of it against his shin. He'd read her stance as an old woman's stance (wide, unbalanced, betraying her hip the way she'd joked about herself not five minutes earlier), and it was, technically, exactly that. It was also, he realised half a beat too late, bait.
She came again before he'd fully recovered his footing, a spinning cut aimed at his exposed side, and this time he didn't quite make it in time. The edge of her blade opened a thin line along his forearm, shallow but bright with blood, and the pain of it landed a half-second after the surprise did.
She's blind, he thought, retreating a step, resetting. She has been blind for years. She should not be able to do that.
She wasn't reading him with her eyes. He understood that now, too late to have used it. She was reading the scrape of his sandal against stone, the change in the air pressure his own body pushed ahead of itself when it moved, the faint, particular heat that came off a young man's skin when his heart rate climbed. She had been fighting entirely by ear and by air and by decades of practice long before he had learned to walk, and she had just proven, in under ten seconds, that none of that made her any less dangerous than a woman with two working eyes. If anything, it made her worse, because there was no telegraph to read, no gaze to track, nothing for him to out-guess.
He reached for the current under his sternum without fully deciding to, the way a man reaches for a rail when he feels his footing go, and felt it answer: a rush of borrowed strength up through his legs, his sword arm, the numbness spreading fast now from his fingertips toward his elbow, the first grey threads creeping in at the edges of his vision.
It bought him speed. It did not buy him enough.
Simika's ears (or whatever it was in her that served the function of ears now) caught the hitch in his breathing the instant he drew on the current, the almost imperceptible catch a body makes when it starts spending more than it easily has. She used the half-second that cost him. A bronze bowl, snatched off the edge of the council table, came spinning at his flank exactly as she somersaulted low and fast toward his other side, splitting his attention in two directions at once.
He got the bowl. He did not fully get her. Her blade caught him hard along the ribs, not deep, but enough to drive the breath out of him in a single ragged grunt and send him stumbling back into an empty chair, which went over with a crash loud enough to bring two of Redan's people to the doorway before Taisen waved them off without looking.
This is not the fight I thought I was walking into.
He circled the table instead of standing his ground, buying himself a few seconds to think instead of react, sweat stinging in the new cut along his forearm, the taste of copper thick at the back of his throat. He tried to call his second blade (the finishing move he'd used against every opponent since Lukan, twin blades closing from two directions at once), and for one horrible, silent half-second, nothing answered him at all. The shape of it flickered into being at his open palm like a candle flame caught in a draft, and simply went out again before it had fully formed, the well under his sternum suddenly, alarmingly empty in a way it had never been before in his short life. He had spent more than he had, and his body was telling him so in the only language it had left.
He had one working blade, a bleeding arm, bruised ribs, and an opponent who could apparently hunt him by the sound of his own pulse. He aborted the strike he'd already committed his weight toward and threw himself sideways instead, into a clumsy, undignified roll that saved his skull and cost him what remained of his dignity, coming up in a crouch with his back against the wall and his lungs burning.
Simika didn't press the advantage. She stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard herself now, head tilted at an angle that suggested she was listening rather than looking, waiting to see what he'd do with the opening she'd just handed him for free.
She's not chasing. She's letting me come to her, because she can hear exactly where I am the second I move.
So stop giving her anything to hear.
He stripped his sandals off where he crouched, silent, and set his breathing to the long, even count his old training-master, back in somewhere, some other life he couldn't quite place the memory of, only feel the shape of, had once drilled into him for hours at a stretch. Bare feet on stone made almost nothing. Slowed breath made almost nothing. He let two full seconds pass in total stillness, felt her head track, once, toward the spot where he'd been a moment before and wasn't any longer, and understood, all at once and completely, that he had just found the only advantage this fight had left him.
He circled her along the outer wall instead of across open floor, timing each step to fall exactly when she exhaled, masking his footfalls inside the sound of her own breath, until he was behind her rather than in front of her, and for the first time since the fight began, she didn't know precisely where he was.