The Hammer Unfalls

4.58 Branching In

⋅.˳˳.⋅ॱ˙ॱ⋅.˳˳.⋅ॱ˙ॱᐧ.˳˳.⋅

Ever since the confrontation in the mountains, Glim had been jittery. The meaningless lesson with the chickens hadn’t helped; a rare tone-deaf moment from Master Willow. As if butterflies and chickens were anything to fear in comparison to the hyaenas. And the hinterjack battle that Glim himself had asked for had been pointless as well. Nothing but the needless death of simple creatures defending their home. It sickened him to realize he’d learned nothing from it.

Glim didn’t need to be placated, coddled, or condescended to. He didn’t need baths and pointless lessons. He needed to learn how to kill, as efficiently as possible, so that something like Ryn’s death would never happen again. He’d tried to find answers in essentiæ, to no avail. That left the sword.

“Again!” Glim yelled to his father, and came out swinging. Steel met steel, echoing through the training room, which Glim hardly noticed. All he saw in his mind’s eye was the target of his father’s padded breastplate. And nothing would stop Glim from finding it with his sword.

As he thrust, driving with an urgency he’d never felt in his life, Glim tried to shut out the visions. Drooling maws of sharp fangs. The hair-raising sounds of manic war-howls. Jittery eyes and twitching claws.

The sensation of being hunted.

Glim gasped and dove at his father with a fury he didn’t control so much as attempt to contain. If only he could learn how to land the thrust, maybe he could save Ryn.

Ryn’s dead, you whit. She’s never coming back.

His father parried, sending Glim’s sword skittering to the side. Glim rolled with the momentum, rerouting his blade to come back at his father’s torso.

The next thing he saw was the ceiling as his father swept Glim’s feet aside. He hit the ground, hard, which knocked the breath from his lungs.

“Get a hold of yourself!” his father yelled, voice rising in uncharacteristic ire. He glared down at Glim, scowling, then offered a hand to pull his son up.

Glim shoved the proffered hand away, clamored to his feet, tossed his sword aside, and screamed.

“That’s enough!” his father shouted. “Cool down, son.”

“Why should I?” Glim shouted back. He heard the unhinged tone of his own voice. “I need to learn this!”

“You aren’t learning anything right now. You’re just swinging without any rhyme or reason.”

“I need to get faster!”

His father’s eyes softened. “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Glim shouted, and kicked his sword across the room. It skidded across the floor and crashed into a wall. Glim watched it, his lungs heaving.

“It will make sense,” his father said, once Glim had regained control of his own breath. “You’re confusing phyr with speed. Thrusting wildly might land a blow faster. But attacking at the right time will end a fight more quickly, and save your own skin in the process. You don’t need to learn phyr right now. You need to learn something else.”

“What?”

“The hierarchy of defense.”

“I don’t need defense! I need to learn how to kill!” Glim picked up his sword and rounded on his father, face flushed. “We’re wasting time!”

He’d gone too far. He could see it in his father’s eyes, which had the same look they did before the captain sentenced a guard to cliff patrol for some lapse in judgment. Or assigned one of the kids to scrape goat pens all summer for injuring a sparring partner. To his father’s credit, the man’s next words were kinder than they might have been. As if he understood the source of Glim’s ire.

“You are out of line,” he said, with a tone of intentional calm that Glim had come to dread. “I have been training guardsmen since before you were born.” His father’s voice started to rise in volume, and he leaned ever closer, until Glim could feel the mist of his father’s breath on his face. “When I tell you to learn the hierarchy of defense, what I mean is shut your pudding hole and PAY ME your FULL ATTENTION!”

Glim blanched. “I’m sorry, father.”

The man’s eyes softened immediately. “Cool off for a bit. Take a jog to the northern wall and fetch me a couple of juniper branches. About yay long. Breathe them in on your way back. It’ll help.”

His father’s words proved true. The jog and the scent of freshly cut juniper did Glim’s mood wonders. He returned and handed the purple branches to his father, who buckled a helmet into place and stood across from Glim holding a branch in each hand.

“Tell me son,” he said, his voice muffled by a steel faceplate, “which position do you begin every skirmish from?”

“Algidon.”

“That’s right. No matter what, you always begin in algidon. Even if you unsheath your sword and walk twenty paces to stab an unsuspecting foe in the back, you are still beginning from a position of defense and finding the right opportunity to attack. So the question you need to answer is, when do you transition from algidon? To what mode? And with the greatest chance of success?”

His father fell silent, and looked at Glim to check his understanding. Glim felt he should say something. “Er, I’m not sure.”

“That’s right. You don’t know. You must learn the Hierarchy of Defense. With this you can see how algidon and phyr come into play. Think back to your lessons in aeolia. Sensing the bind and moving into attack. What happens every single time you attack?”

“I make myself vulnerable.”

“Exactly. Deciding to attack is deciding to accept vulnerability. You are judging risk. You say you want to be fast, and you think attacking fast is going to make you fast. That is only true in the first of the six levels of this hierarchy. The fastest. The most aggressive. But also, the most vulnerable. I will show you.”

His father turned his back to Glim and dropped the branches to touch the ground. “How much risk are you taking if you attack me now?”

“None.”

“Almost none.” His father turned around, keeping the branches touching the ground. “How about now?”

“Low risk.”

The branches came up to his father’s helmet, as if he was protecting his own head. “Now?”

“Still low risk.”

His father snapped his hands forward, as if clapping. The branches swapped Glim on both sides of his face in a stinging slap.

“Ow!”

His father held the branches pressed against Glim’s cheeks. “How ‘bout now?”

“’Lia’s taint! I don’t know!”

“You’re already dead, son. So somewhere between here —” the branches returned to his father’s helmet “—and here—” he swapped Glim in the face again, “—you need to make some decisions.”

“Ow! Would you cut that out?”

“Hyaenas won’t. If they’re anything like you describe, which I’m certain they are, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Glim shuddered, picturing the deceptively dopey appearance of the hyaenas. Their goofy ears and googly eyes, masking an intelligence and madness he’d never before witnessed. “They are. And… I am.”

“Then you must decide whether to use the first level of the hierarchy: Attack before it does. Either during the preparation of its attack, like so.” His father pulled the branches back, as if preparing to swap Glim once more. “Or by breaking its guard.” The branches went up, hovering somewhere between Glim and his father’s breastplate. “These are both good situations to take the offensive. When you can strike, and be reasonably sure you won’t get mauled in the exchange. Try it now.”

Glim studied the position of the branches and made several practice thrusts.

“Remember to keep your back straight and your head out of the way. Tuck your tailbone in. Now let’s talk about the second level, which is to void the opponent’s attack and counter attack in time.”

“In time for what?”

“In time. Maintaining your own flow. Attacking in time means you’re setting the pace, and not adapting to its pace.”

“And how do I avoid its attack?”

“Void. Not avoid. You want to make its attack useless at the same time as your own attack. How would you do that?”

Glim watched his father move one of the the branches forward in slow motion. “By attacking its claw while I thrust.”

“Exactly. You have to be sure of hitting it. Otherwise—”

“—I’m vulnerable.”

“Just so. Show me.”

Glim practiced thrusting through the branch, keeping his head back and his own hands out of the way.

“Very good son! But what if I were to do this?” He moved both branches forward in slow motion.

“I’d… er, attack the closest branch?”

“And get mauled. What else? Remember the eight-in-eight. You just gonna stab me from the 1-1 like that?”

“Oh!” Glim said, comprehension dawning. He stepped to the side, negating one of the claws, and speared through the other in one fluid motion.

“You’re getting it now. But let’s say you aren’t absolutely confident you’ll be able to score the two hits, voiding my attack and striking in the same motion. That leaves you level three: defeat the attack and counter attack in single tempo time.”

“Single tempo?’

“A fight is all about tempo. Rhythm. You want to be in your own tempo, dictating the flow. But sometimes you have to forget about a void-attack. Block, while making a counter attack dictated by your opponent’s tempo. Block and counterattack at their pace. Versus void-attack in your own tempo. Let’s try it out. Be sure of the combo and use level two, or else opt for level three.”

His father unleashed a flurry of purple-needled swats at Glim, resetting each time. Sometimes Glim hit the branch along the route of his thrust. Sometimes he batted it aside then attacked.

And sometimes, he attempted to void, missed, and wound up with a faceful of juniper needles.

“That’s okay, son. It comes with practice. This brings us to level four. The slowest and clunkiest of the attack-based defensive maneuvers: static parry and immediately counter attack.”

“How is that different than what we just did?”

“A counter is considered an attack. A parry is completely defensive. Parrying, by definition, is not attacking.”

“I don’t understand the difference between that and block-counter.”

“It’s all about tempo and mentality. When you’re parrying, you’re committed only to defense. The move has no other purpose. So your brain has to get right back into the decision of whether to attack as a separate motion, or to fall into either level five or six.”

“Which are?”

“Void the attack without counter attack. Or parry without counter attack.”

Glim sighed. It was all starting to sound like nonsense. Like when Master Willow told him stuff like: both opposing truths are true at the same time. “What’s the difference between those last two?” he asked.

“Voiding the attack can take many forms. Stepping out of the way. Stabbing its claw. Parrying is deciding to swap the claw out of the way with your sword but remaining in algidon.”

His father let the branches fall and unbuckled his helmet. His hair had plastered itself to his face under a sheen of sweat. “I can see you’ve reached your limit. We’re going to practice this over the next week or so until you get it.”

A younger Glim would have groaned. Whined, and made some melodramatic flounce or another.

Things had changed in the last week.

“Don’t blame past Glim for what he didn’t know,” Ryn had said. “Or future Glim for what he does know. Only… you Glim. Here and now.”

Here-and-now Glim felt a fire inside he feared would never quench. Not until he did what some shadowy part of his mind was already planning to do: head north, track the hyenas down, and eliminate their threat once and for all. Ryn had been right about that part for sure. He’d make sure her sacrifice was honored.