Maya bounced back to her feet, breathing hard, bolts of flame lashing toward him. Tanax blocked and kept running, and Maya pounded after. Space boiled in his wake, ripples and twists of impossible geometry floating around her like dandelion seeds, then falling inward. Intercepting them took more and more of her attention, and Tanax got farther and farther ahead, darting through the maze of pillars.

He knows I can take him blade to blade. She wanted to scream with frustration. This isn’t going to work. Her legs already felt leaden, and she wasn’t going to be able to run him down, not with his power lashing at her from every direction. Sooner or later, he’ll get through, and—

She cut off that thought, abruptly, and came to a halt in the shadow of a pillar. Tanax paused as well, keeping a safe distance and concentrating on the threads of deiat that boiled all around him. Maya’s defenses retreated closer and closer, a shell of flame that contracted by the moment.

She raised her free hand and drew hard on her connection to deiat. Diverting power meant her defense weakened even faster, but she persisted, gathering energy for a single, colossal blow. She saw Tanax frown, and his attack slowed as he gathered power to counter. She imagined his confusion—an attack like this was wasteful, easy to see coming, trivial to deflect. She raised her hand, and a shield already shimmered in front of him.

Grinning savagely, Maya turned, shifting her aim. The energy she’d gathered lanced out as a single coherent beam of light, the backwash strong enough to kick the sand at her feet into a raging cyclone. It blasted across the arena, missed Tanax by a meter, and impacted on the stone pillar behind him. As the light faded, a thunderclap rolled out in its wake.

Tanax raised his haken, hesitated. Looked up.

The lance of pure energy had blown a hole in the stone pillar the size of a wagon wheel, sending the rock in molten spatters across the sand. Maya had judged her aim carefully, shearing away the stone on the side closer to Tanax. It started to tip, stone cracking with a sound like a blaster bolt, slowly at first but with unstoppable momentum.

It was falling behind him, blocking off his retreat, unless he wanted to test his panoply against a thousand tons of granite. Tanax turned back to Maya to find her charging straight at him, haken leveled like a spear.

Get close. A hundred wisps of twisted space raced toward her, threads of deiat blooming all around him. Maya focused her power in front of her, a wave of fire that cleared her path, and ignored the rest. Tanax adjusted, flinging waves and ripping tendrils of energy, too many and too fast, desperate to make her back off and resume the long-range battle he was sure to win.