“Is that it?” Vash ached from standing and wanted only to lower himself into a hot bath, to be tended by his young boy and girl servants. He wished he had not been too proud to accept the kiliarch’s offer of a chair. “Is it over? Can we finish with this?”

“There is one more challenger,” said Marukh, “a fellow named Daikonas Vo. I am told he is the best swordsman of the White Hounds.”

“But the autarch ordererd them to prove themselves in bare-handed combat!” Vash shook his head in irritation, surveying the dozens of assembled Perikalese soldiers, perhaps four or five dozen in all. None of them looked big enough to give Yaridoras a contest. “Which one is he?”

For answer, Marukh stood and shouted, “Now the last fighter—step forth, Vo.”

The man who rose was so unremarkable that, discounting his Perikalese heritage—the telltale fair hair and skin that marked him as a foreigner—any man of Xis might have passed him on the street without a second look. He was wiry but slightly built; his head barely reached Yaridoras’ brawny chest.

“That one?” Vash snorted. “The big yellow-hair will snap his back like a twig.’

“Likely.” Marukh turned and bellowed, “You two may bring no weapons into the sacred space. So has our master Sulepis, the god-on-earth, the Great Tent, the Golden One, declared. You will fight until one of you can get up no longer. Are you ready?”

“Yes—and thirsty!” bellowed Yaridoras, making his fellow mercenaries laugh. “Let’s get this over with so I can have my beer.” The thin soldier, Daikonas Vo, only nodded.

“Very well,” said the captain. “Begin.”

At first, the smaller man put up a surprisingly good defense, moving with serpentine fluidity to stay out of Yaridoras’ powerful grasp, once even hooking his foot behind the big man’s heel and throwing him backward to the tile floor, which earned a percussive shout of surprised laughter from the other White Hounds, but the giant was up quickly, smiling in a way that suggested he himself was not very amused. After that Yaridoras was more careful, angling in to cut off his opponent’s retreat, and Vo began to find it increasingly difficult to stay out of his hands. Vo did not give in easily, and several times he landed swift blows whose power was clearly greater than his size would have suggested, one of them opening a cut above Yaridoras’ eye so that blood ran down one side of his face and into his beard. However inevitable the outcome seemed, the bigger man was clearly not enjoying the delay, and in the course of trying to get a finishing hold on his opponent left several long, bleeding weals across the small man’s face and arms. The shouts and rowdy suggestions that had filled the room at the beginning of the bout began to die down, replaced by a murmuring of unease as the match slowly took on the look of something more desperate.

The big man lunged. Vo ducked under the groping arms and put a knee into his opponent’s belly, so that Yaridoras’ surprised gasp sent red froth flying, but the big man’s knob-knuckled hand lashed out and caught Vo retreating, smashing him to the floor with an impact like a slaughterer’s hammer. Yaridoras threw himself on top of his opponent before Vo had recovered his wits and for a moment it seemed as though the smaller soldier had been swallowed whole.