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Mara jabbed. The Master parried, stepped to the side, and took Mara by the shoulder. Mara drove the blade through the top of the Master’s hand, feeling it scrape against the bone inside his shoulder. He let go of the blade and spun to grab fistfuls of the Master’s shirt.
The Master was strong, and with the unpinned hand, pounded on Mara’s head, blurring his vision. Mara bit at anything he could, the Master shrieking as teeth sunk into flesh. A thumb searched for Mara’s eye, but Mara pulled the hand down and bit into it, then felt the blade slide out of his shoulder. A hard knee to Mara’s stomach lifted his feet from the floor, then a roundhouse kick sent him skidding along the stone.
Breathing heavily, Mara watched the Master pull the blade out of his hand and throw it into the stone benches. “If you wish to kill me, Mara, you’ll have to do a better job than that.”
“Beast,” Mara shouted.
The Beast appeared behind the Master, both of its huge hands on his shoulders.
“I feel the presence of your familiar. It is strong, no doubt capable of infiltrating the minds of even the hardest willed.” The Master stepped out of the Beast’s grasp. “Yet today, you have a far more complex challenge in front of you. I assume you imagined an easy victory. Kill me, Mara, and everything will change. It is only with my assistance that we may govern balance in this world. Left to your own devices, it seems chaos will ensue.”
Mara smiled. “Chaos.”
The whispers wailed, and a fire-like heat spread across his body as he leapt up and ran at the Master.
Silas watched Mara grapple with a Shadow in front of The Wings of Darkness. There couldn’t have been a more fitting place. Demon-like black figures danced across the walls in the candlelight.
Mara and the Shadow moved in strange jolted movements, changing positions without transition between one move and another. Mara kicked at the Shadow’s shins in one movement, but before the blow landed, the pair had moved a couple of feet sideways.
Silas shook his head. What the fuck is happening? The strange movements continued, and Silas moved low and tight along the wall. If I can get close, I may get the ch
ance to kill after all.
Mara and the Shadow zipped from the high stone at breakneck speed toward the benches. Silas hit the floor and crawled between the rows closest to him. There had to be at least six rows between him and them. Chest to the floor, he slid along the ends of the benches.
Several rows down, Mara lay backwards over a bench, the Shadow on top of him. Mara clawed at the Shadow’s pale, bloody hands around his neck, randomly swiping at its mask. A Vespen blade lay only a few feet away.
Silas moved along one more row and slid toward the fighter’s flailing legs. He couldn’t focus on their movements, the sounds of contact not marrying up with what he was seeing. Looking at the floor, he breathed deeply. Concentrate, you have a job to do, just like any other.
A couple of feet from Mara and the Shadow, he gripped his blade tight and started a countdown. Three, two, one.
Exploding up, he plunged the knife into the Shadow’s back. A hard hit came to his chin, and he fell backwards, squeezing the Shadow tight with his free arm. The Shadow writhed, butting Silas’s face with the back of its head. Silas held on, vision blurring, and jerked the blade from side to side.
The arm he held the Shadow with burned, his face stung, he tasted blood. A high-pitched shriek came that had Silas let up his hold of the Shadow and cover one ear. Unable to pull his hand from the blade, his other ear rung, a pain accompanying it like no other.
Silas choked as a gush of blood filled his mouth and nose, the warmth of it covering his entire face as he tried to cough it away. He pushed as hard as he could to get the Shadow off. He couldn’t breathe. He thrashed, butted, kicked. Nothing – only gargled screams.
The weight slid from his chest, and he rolled sideways, coughing out blood and sucking in rasping breaths. A great pressure from a bare foot pushed his head to the floor.
“I told you not to follow,” Mara said.
Silas reached to wipe the blood from his eyes. “Please, stop.” He found himself pushed onto his back.
A bloodied Mara smiled down at him, the majority of one ear missing.
Silas arched his back as a boiling hot pain seared through his body. Hideous images flashed through his mind. A child on fire screamed, a woman swung by the neck from a rope, a man being chopped up with an axe. Strange black shapes floated across all of them. Then as quick as it had come, the pain disappeared. Silas could see Mara again.
Mara stared at a Vespen blade as he twisted it in the light. In his other hand, he held the head of the Shadow. He tapped the mask with the blade. “Have you seen underneath one of these?”
“Yes.”
Mara pushed the blade into the dripping red stump and pulled the mask off with his other hand. He looked proud of himself, like a magician revealing a bird. “They are disgusting.” Mara smiled, then flicked the head from the blade, so it thudded next to Silas’s.
He’s crazy. There’s no helping him, not anymore. “Was that the Master?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s over?”
