The Clarity of Cold Steel

“DON’T BLINK, KID,” I quip to Brooklyn, and there’s no reason on earth I need say it, but I do anyways. Bravado. Hubris. It’s both, maybe, certainly, but it’s for my brother and not me and in any case, I ain’t wrong.

Brooklyn’s by my side, eyes saucer wide as he gawks around, his hands clenching, unclenching, clenching again. He’s never seen Nikunj fight.

The rusted walls are sweating with condensation. The air’s thick. Bodies press in tight to all sides and the machinery above’s covered in a riot of bodies. A great chain crosses the room from above, each link longer than I am tall, each thicker than my waist. Arms and legs and bodies dangle from it, clambering rapscallions all, watching wide-eyed from above. Their voices rain down upon us, none of them encouraging. Best seats in the house.

Skinner’s poised across the squared circle, stripped to the waist, a massive chap looking more bear than man. A thick matt of hair covers his massive shoulders and chest and back, everywhere but the top of his shiny head. He’s pacing back and forth, his eyes focused, glaring bold, brazen, and unrelenting and they never leave Nikunj. Back and forth he stomps, his thick hobnail boots pounding out across the iron deck. The trench knife in his hand’s nearly a foot long, a brass knuckleduster for the hilt. A mean piece of mechanical advantage.

Casually, Nikunj finishes rolling up his sleeves. “See him?” he asks off-handed.

“He’s a big fucker…” Brooklyn bobs his head, rubs his palms, licks his lips. He’s jacked to the gills, no mistaking it.

“Not him,” Nikunj waves a hand, “the dok. Arboghast.”

“No,” I say, scanning the crowd for the grafter nonpareil, “but they say he always shows. His joint was empty. So he’s here.” I give the crowd another once over. “Somewhere.”

Nikunj shrugs. “Suppose it doesn’t matter, providing only that it’s true.”

“Have I ever steered you wrong, brother?” I slather a hand across my poetic heart.

Nikunj’s glare slides my way, deliberately murdering my smirk.

My finger’s in his face. “This is your plan, by the way.”

“I tried retiring.” He raises an eyebrow. “Remember how that went?”

“Yeah, well, I’ll stop sending knife fighters to your doorstep from now on, cross my heart, hope to—” I stop midway. “Forget it.”

Nikunj frowns, points with his chin to Skinner. “Got a line on him?”

“Yeah. He’s big, he’s bad, he’s dumber than a box of rocks, but he can fight. Uses that trench knife righty, but watch out for the left, too. The man likes a good slobber-knocker.”

Brooklyn raises an eyebrow.

“The man’s a bare-knuckle boxer, too,” I add for clarification, “a good one. King of the Gypsies, they call him round these parts.”

Brooklyn nods, snake eyes watching on all ravenous.

“Ten to one he comes charging in as soon as it starts,” I say, leaning in, seeing it in my mind’s eye. “No mucking about. No playing with the edge. No knick knack patty wack give the crowd a show. He’s all about murder and business. He’ll come at you with a quick stab below, try to latch a mitt on you and stab you til the Maharaja comes calling.”

Nikunj just nods.

“Which blade you using?” I ask, just to say something.

“The black glass.”

I raise an eyebrow. The obsidian composite blade’s sharper than my ex-mother in law’s tongue, but it has its shortcomings, too. “It’s too brittle,” I say. “Use the bundi. Or hell, the kukri.”

Nikunj shakes his head ever so slightly.

“It’ll shatter if you come to a bind.”

Nikunj raises an eyebrow, chuffs a scoff, shakes his head.

I don’t argue. If anyone knows this business, it’s my brother.

“Crowd’s getting restless,” Brooklyn says over the rising din.

Skinner’s pumping his fists up and down, and the crowd’s chanting his name, five hundred people crammed sardine-tight into a tin can coffin, a modified machine vault, a sweat locker, voices shattering flat into metal wall and reverberating off in caustic shard. My ears’re bleeding. Head’s pounding. Men and children cling to massive gears, watching from on high, a drool of expectational precipitation raining down which is an awful shame cause I forgot me lacy parasol.

Skinner turns and points a finger at me. “YOU!” Murder lies within those eyes. The crowd nearly explodes.

“I believe you mean him.” I step aside from the path of madness, keen as a chicken-shit matador, revealing my brother.

Nikunj merely nods, taking the gaze, holding onto it. He won’t break away from it from now on, not until one of the two of them is slithering cruciform in a puddle of their own guts.

I raise an eyebrow to Skinner’s second, a mustachioed chap named Dom Pedro Grink. Grink nods succinctly. He’s nervous, too. We seconds are always nervous around duels cause we’re the only ones with enough sense to be. And we have to do the worrying for two people. A shit job, but better the second than the first, if you catch my drift.

“He’s ready,” I deadpan to Nikunj. “You?”

But Nikunj is already striding past me, one of his long arms loping a hand to my shoulder as we head together toward the center of the room. A prickly steel cable ropes off the ring into a dented pentagon. Two parallel lines have been hacked into the ground in its middle. Amidst bloodstains eons old. Charming. Skinner stands with one booted toe to his line, huffing and growling like a bull ready to charge. Grink’s by his side. We mirror them.

“He ready?” I call across to Grink.

The crowd continues to hurl insults at Nikunj and myself, insults that can only be categorized as racially insensitive. Gads. I just might swoon. I glance at my brother, take in his mental status, see that he’s honed in. Sharp. He is. He’s hearing nothing of the crowd. Placid. The fucker looks placid while I’m here ready to shit a brick. Bad juju starts flowing through my brain. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe we’re overstepping, overstepping and off our turf and hell and away from anything approximating home. I don’t want to die here. And if Aashirya hears about this? Nikunj dying? Me dying? Shit. I start wondering that even if Nikunj’s plan does come to fruition, are we gonna get lynched as the grand finale?

Grink glances sidelong at Skinner then swallows. Nods. Skinner’s eyes are mad-wide now like he’s been injecting coke and snorting spike and downing yards of ultra-caffeinated whiskey. Veins stick out like worms crawling beneath the flesh of his wide neck. They might burst.

“I’ll call it.” Grink raises an eyebrow my way, daring me to defy.

He has the better mustache so I nod, slap Nikunj on the shoulder — “Remember the plan,” I whisper in his ear then back up next to Brooklyn. He’s bouncing like a BB in a boxcar. “Been sorta nice knowing ya, kid.”

“Huh?” Brooklyn yells.

“Forget it.”

“Ten seconds, gentlemen!” Grink announces, whipping a white handkerchief out of his pocket. Ostentatious bastard. He raises it above his head as he turns in a measured circle.

The crowd silences immediately under his quivering gaze.

“Ten!” Grink counts down and the silence that formed is now shattered piecemeal by rising din. “Nine!” They can’t hold back, and by, “Seven!” the whole crowd is roaring along to the count.

“Six!”

When Grink finally roars, “ONE!” at the top of his lungs, no one can hear it, but the handkerchief whips down and Skinner’s instantly on the move, no measuring, no feinting, no bullshiting, just a mad razorback charge, tusk leading, launching forward, going for the gore, going for the kill. He’s quick for a bloke his size, he’s determined, he’s mean.

But he misses.

Nikunj slide-steps in at an angle off Skinner’s line of attack, parrying with his empty left hand as he pivots just so, right-handing his blade, a neat little prick looking like nothing special but oh-so-obsidian sharp. Like getting cut with the edge of nothing. In the moment, an instant — only I can see it cause only I know what he’s gonna do — they’re shoulder to shoulder, and I see Nikunj’s knife plunge beneath Skinner’s sternum and rake across to his right flank, and then they’re separating as momentum carries them apart. But Skinner whirls — doesn’t know he’s dead yet — he can’t yet feel the echo of the blade’s bite — slashing out with that trench knife.

Nikunj ducks it by a hair and knicks out with his own. Nothing more than a flick, rapier quick, but he cuts Skinner’s patellar tendon then kicks out what leg’s left beneath it. Then he gets the hell out of range.

“Fuuuuuuck!” Skinner roars, down on one knee, slashing out backhanded.

Nikunj is still out of range, a lion that’s hamstrung a cape buffalo but knows those horns can still gore him guts to gizzard.

Skinner probably still can’t feel any of the cuts, jacked on adrenaline and whatever else he’s scoffed, but the damage to his knee’s made it unstable. You can fool yourself, but gravity? Well, ain’t she just a bloody bitch? Skinner tries to rise and to his credit does, somewhat, but he’s wobbling on jelly now and can feel something ain’t copacetic. He steps, hobbles, drops again, howls.

That moment’s all it takes, an instant of distraction, an opening in his guard, and Nikunj viper strikes in quicker than a blink and, with a knick, butterflies Skinner’s forehead wide. Blood pours in a sheet down his face and into his eyes as he casts about on all fours now, hacking and swearing and searching around like some mad blind man who’s lost his glasses.

The crowd goes silent.

Nikunj is behind him now, standing poised. I see Nikunj’s mouth move, can’t hear what he says. Skinner does, though, cause he stiffens to whirl and strike then thinks better of it. His entrails are pouring out in slick ropes all over the floor.

Skinner can’t see. He can’t stand. Maybe the pain’s starting to batter its way through his toppled fury? Maybe. At any rate, he wipes his eyes with his arm, which does nothing but stain his arm crimson as more and more blood pours out. “End it quickly,” Skinner says straight on, clutching at his right flank, trying to stuff his outards back into innards.

In the metal silence, a woman is crying out loud somewhere in the sordid dark, a sad lonely peal, a stuttering, choking, mourning gasp. Skinner’s blind eyes turn toward the unlovely sound, and though he cannot see, he says, despite every evidence to the contrary, “It’ll be alright, love.”