Blood Engines(37)
“My name is Ch’ang Hao. What is your name?”
“Your master didn’t tell you that?”
“I prefer introductions to be made personally,” he said, bowing slightly.
“Call me Marla.”
“And your associate?”
“We’re not at a cocktail party, Ch’ang Hao,” she said. “State your business, throw a punch, or piss off, okay?”
He spoke past her, to Rondeau. “I regret the necessity of committing an act of violence against someone to whom I have not been introduced,” he said, voice heavy with genuine regret. “It smacks of mere thuggery, a condition to which I never wish to sink. But, alas, circumstances are what they are. I—”
Marla threw a punch at his throat.
He blocked, knocking her hand aside, without even pausing in his speech. “—will do as I must.” Bowing again, he slid his right foot back and brought up his hands, assuming a defensive stance.
“Get back, Rondeau,” she said, and slid into a stance of her own. It had been a while since she’d used martial arts for real, and she hoped she hadn’t lost the knack. Actually fighting someone was quite different from practicing at the gym or her friend Master Ward’s dojo.
Ch’ang Hao moved sinuously—he was a snake stylist, or at least he was starting out in snake style. Of all the forms of five animals kung fu, snake was the most reactive, the most dependent on moving around your opponent. Fighting a snake stylist could be like fighting a pool of water, though there were plenty of whip-fast strikes for offense, and if you let a snake grapple with you, you’d quickly find yourself entangled. Not to mention the rumors about secret poisoning techniques if you got too close to a real snake master, which Marla suspected Ch’ang Hao probably was.
Marla’s approach to martial arts was syncretic, like her approach to magic—she put together anything that seemed useful, and her own preferred style was hard to name precisely. If pressed, an educated observer would say she fought mainly with Jeet Kun Do, the style created by Bruce Lee—itself a combination of boxing and foil fencing with a core of wing chun. Jeet Kun Do was a style of brutal lunges, bone-snapping low kicks, and crippling grapples. Marla’s sinewy strength was well suited to the style. The thing she liked about Jeet Kun Do was the fact that every attack was meant to be a fight-stopper. Long, drawn-out fights between martial arts masters were a cinematic invention, because a real fight didn’t work well on a movie screen—a brief blur of action, too fast to follow with the eye, and it was over, usually in ten or fifteen seconds at the outside, excluding feints and moves meant to test your opponent’s reactions. But Jeet Kun Do took that to its logical extreme. A Jeet Kun Do stylist meant every strike to be the last one.
Ch’ang Hao’s hands rippled forward.
Marla struck back, intercepting his blows and trying to land her own at the same time. She liked Jeet Kun Do because there were no blocks, just counter-strikes that served as blocks. Ch’ang Hao hit hard, and he was fast, but Marla didn’t have any trouble knocking his strikes aside. She knew he was just testing her at this point, seeing what she could do. She, in turn, winced when he hit, to make him think the blows hurt more than they had.
They could go on sparring like this, but she didn’t care for games—she got enough of those with Master Ward at the dojo. She’d make Ch’ang Hao fight her fight. She went for his knees with a low kick, and when he stepped aside to avoid it, she got into grappling distance, grabbed him, twisted him against her hip, and bounced him onto the ground. Ch’ang Hao sprang up, lashing out at her—and snakes came out of his sleeves, little hissing asps, fangs bared, leaping straight for her face. Marla shouted a bug-in-amber spell, and the asps hung in the air, still hissing, as Marla stepped away from them.
Fucking snakes! First frogs, then hummingbirds, then Finch’s bear trick, and now snakes?
“I’ve got it,” Rondeau said, flipping out his butterfly knife and slicing the asps in two with a casual twist of his wrist. The severed snake-halves fell to the pavement.
Ch’ang Hao took advantage of Marla’s distraction, striking at her head. Marla blocked with her arm—the blow numbed her from the wrist to the elbow—and jabbed her other fist into his throat. He dropped to one knee, then struggled to his feet, hissing inhumanly—and began to grow. Marla thought it was simply an illusion meant to intimidate her, at first, but no—he was actually gaining mass, getting taller, his shoulders broadening, the muscles in his arms and calves bulging. His clothes split at the seams and fell away, revealing a complex harness of brown leather straps with copper-colored studs he wore underneath. The straps cut visibly into his expanding flesh, and when a strange, yellowish blood began to run down his arms, legs, and chest, Marla realized the copper studs were actually the heads of nails—the harness was nailed to him, and as he expanded against the bonds, the nails dug in and wounded him. He gasped, standing eight feet tall now, but hunched over in the constricting harness. Marla didn’t relax, but it was clear Ch’ang Hao wasn’t about to attack anyone.