Three quarters of an hour, five rounds, five touches to him. His old lined face was glowing with perspiration, but he was five times the winner I was.
'Enough for today, sir?' he asked.
'You're going easy on me, Jubal.'
'Beating you five love straight is going easy?'
I hung my scorae over my belt and adjusted the straps of my sleeve-shield. 'If I was one of your security detail in training, I'd have five bruises now to go with my five losses.'
Kircher smiled and nodded. 'You would. But an ex-Guard bravo or a slumboy trying to make my grade needs the bruises to remind him that work here isn't some well-paid retirement. I don't believe you need to learn that sort of lesson.'
'None of us are too wise to learn.' We both looked and saw Medea entering the pugnaseum. She wandered around the edge of the mat, one moment in the shadows of the wall panels, the next in the glaring yellow oblongs cast by the skylights. She looked at me.
'Just repeating one of your many aphorisms.'
I could tell something was up with her. Kircher shifted uncomfortably.
'Let me spar with him,' she said. I nodded to Jubal, who saluted, Carthaen style, with his scora and left the circular room.
Medea took off her father's cerise jacket and hung it on a window knob.
'What'll it be?' I asked, taking a sip of water from a beaker on the decanter stand.
She walked over to the armoury terminal and keyed on the screen, jump-cutting rapidly through the graphic templates the monitor displayed. She was dressed in a tight, semi-armoured bodyglove and her feet were clad in training slippers. She had prepared for this, I realised.
'Blades and power-bucklers,' she announced, stopping the menu and keying the authority stud.
There was a distant rattle and whirr as automated systems in the armoury under the floor processed the selected weapons from their racks and elevated them up into the ready rack in the wall next to the terminal. Two buckler modules. Two swords, matching, each the length of an adult human femur, single-edged and slightly curved with a knuckle-bar around the grip. She tossed one to me and I caught it neatly.
I walked over to join her, placing my scorae in the rack that would return it to storage. Then I took my buckler. It strapped around the left forearm, supporting a round, machined emitter the size of a pocket watch. Engaged, it projected a disc of shield energy the size of a banquet plate above the back of my hand and forearm.
'Attention, you have selected weapons of lethal force. Attention, you have selected weapons of lethal force…' The terminal issued the notice in soft but urgent repeats.