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the children who followed their
favourites with the fanatical loyalty of Ants to their city.
    The fighters stood ready
in the circle, which had been scuffed by a hundred hundred feet in the past.
Neither participant was new to it. They had faced each other before, and there
was nothing the crowd liked better than a rematch of champions. The Master of
Ceremonies, the old Ant-kinden Kymon of Kes, had tried to start the duel three
times, but the crowd was refusing to quieten down for him.
    To one side stood the
acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very
best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood:
it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically,
one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize,
and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however,
preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might
offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any
duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a
champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had
ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium
kept duelling teams to further their prestige.
    But the crowd were here
to see more than a haughty Mantis-kinden win yet another bout. Enough of them
had gathered there to see his opponent. The less charitable said that they
wanted to see her before some stroke dealt by Piraeus ruined her, for he was a
misogynist at the best of times, and this match . . . The Mantis-kinden saved
their utmost barbs of loathing for one target. Why they hated the Spider-kinden
quite so much was lost in time, but they did, and they never forgot a
grievance.
    Like most Spider-kinden,
she was beautiful. She was also unusual in that she was a daughter of
Collegium, not some arrogant foreigner. The name on the lips of the crowd as she
entered was ‘Tynisa’. Properly she was Tynisa Maker, but she was so obviously
none of the old man’s blood that just the one name sufficed.
    Piraeus was tall and
lean, his face chiselled with distaste. The bruises he had given Tynisa when
they had last met had healed, and it was obvious he was ready to gift her with
another set. She was shorter than he and slighter, an eyecatching young woman
with her fair hair bound into a looped braid and her green eyes dancing.
    There was something in
the way she stood that told the best of them this was going to be a new kind of
contest. She did not stand like a Prowess duellist or like a Spider-kinden. In
her time away from the city she had learned something new.
    She had learned who she
was and what blood ran in her veins, but only Tynisa and two spectators there
knew it.
    Kymon called for silence
once more, striking the two practice swords together in a dull clatter of
bronze-covered wood.
    ‘I shall not ask again!’
he bellowed. ‘Silence now, or this match shall not take place!’
    At long last the crowd
quieted, under threat of its entertainment being removed. Kymon nodded heavily
and passed the swords out. They were, in the hands of these fighters, graceless
things. Those two were meant for swords more slender and crafted of true steel.
    ‘Salute the book!’ Kymon
directed, and they turned to the great icon carved at one wall of the forum and
raised their blades.
    ‘Clock!’ barked the
Master of Ceremonies and stepped back hurriedly. Neither of them moved even as
the ponderous hands of the mechanical timepiece ground into motion. For a long
moment, to the hushed anticipation of the crowd, they merely faced each other.
Tynisa studied Piraeus’s face and knew that, while she was seeing just what she
had seen before, he could tell how she had changed.
    But he was proud, and he
was a blur of motion as he now came for her, his ersatz blade swinging in tight
arcs to trap her.
    She gave before him,
barely