City in the Sky by Glynn Stewart Page B

Letir. He made a gesture with his hand and Letir drew the rapier and extended it, hilt first to him.
    He took the sword and looked at the sister of the man he was about to fight. “I'll try not to kill him if I can,” he said softly.
    “Thank you,” Deria replied quietly. “He's been a stranger to us for forever it seems, and no matter what happens today my father will disown him. He'll be dead to us in law, but it would pain us – even my father, who refuses to show it – if he was dead in truth.”
    Erik turned to the sands, but stopped as Deria's hand settled onto his shoulder. “All that said,” she continued softly, “you're worth more to us now than him. Try all you want, but come back to us alive.”
    He nodded choppily, and then stepped through the fence onto the sands of the dueling ground.
     
     
     
    The Aeradi dueling code allowed neither armor nor shields, limiting the combatants to light clothing and their swords. The nature of the sword was left to the combatants' discretion, but it was the only thing a combatant could carry onto the dueling grounds.
    Of course, the code also enshrined the concept of duel to first blood, but Erik doubted that Kels would accept defeat after a single cut. He was probably going to have to seriously injure the Aeraid to force him to admit defeat.
    He shook his head, ridding his head of thought and raised his sword. Kels met him at the center of the grounds, wielding the traditional ancient Aeradi weapon: the tachi; a long, slightly curved sword only sharpened on the outer edge. Like Erik, his blade was forged of sky steel.
    At a signal from the judge, Erik and Kels crossed blades in the formal gesture of readiness. The judge eyed them both and raised a red cloth.
    “Begin,” he ordered, dropping the cloth and stepping back.
    Kels attacked even before the cloth hit the ground, yanking his sword away from the crossed blades and launching a spinning slash at Erik's neck. Erik ducked the strike and stepped back out of the smaller man's reach.
    A second slash came in almost before Erik adjusted, but a flick of his rapier sent it careening off into the air. The defensive flick easily turned into a riposte as Erik lunged toward Kels.
    The Aeraid blocked the blow with the back of his free forearm, smacking it against the edgeless length of the smallsword and knocking it aside. Jarred, perhaps, by the opening he'd left, his next attack was a perfectly controlled lunge at Erik.
    Erik hit it with the base of his smallsword, knocking the heavier sword aside. Before he could make a move of his own, Kels demonstrated just why he was feared as a swordsman. Using a strength of wrist that Erik knew he just barely possessed, but that few humans , let alone Aeradi, could even dream of, Kels turned the deflected lunge into a deadly slash at Erik's midsection.
    Erik barely managed to interpose the smallsword against the slash, hammering the blades together in a hilt on hilt crash of metal. For a moment, the hilts of the two weapons locked, but Kels' weapon's heavier blade-weight told. The smallsword’s blade slowly bent away from the contact point.
    The heavier tachi slid down the smallsword’s flexible blade, and Erik had to dodge back to avoid its deadly sharp edge. The tachi kept going and slid off the smallsword onto the ground, unbalancing its wielder. For a moment, Kels was unguarded and Erik slipped in.
    The smallsword had no edge, but that didn't mean it couldn't cut. The deadly sharp tip sliced a line across Kels' cheek, leaving blood to leak out onto the other man's face.
    “First blood,” Erik told Kels. “Yield. I don't want to have to hurt you.”
    “Go fuck a dragon,” Kels told him flatly, and attacked. He sent a flurry of blows at Erik's chest and head, forcing Erik back as he couldn't meet those blows with the flimsy blade of the smallsword.
    “I need a heavier sword,” he muttered, as Kels brought his tachi whistling around in an unstoppable blow at would have