Winterglass

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, and year's best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

The season's last match brings with it a press of audience, the mass and noise of them audible even in the preparation vestibule where silence is meant to be the final word. There’s nothing for it, Nuawa supposes, as she tightens the seals on her armor and checks her gun one last time. Everything is oiled, ready.

The gladiator’s bell rings. The arena gate lifts slowly, a hum of blindfolds and lion helms, a susurrus of tiger tails and specters. She knows the mechanisms are lubricated well, the ghosts fed a rich diet of incense and candlewicks, but the tournament masters like their theatrics.

She steps into a dome of obsidian glass and agate tiles. It is opaque from inside, transparent from the outside. If she falls, they will hear every last noise: the rattle of her final breath and the wet slap of viscera meeting glass, while she will never see their faces. Their rapt faces, empty-eyed, mesmerized by spectacle. So it goes.

The opposite gate unfurls, dove wings and mandarin petals. For half a moment, she sees nothing at all, then discerns the solid outlines of the muzzles, the light-drinking coat, the sleek knotted limbs. They have sent her leopards to fight.

She hears the whirr of their articulated legs, the scrape of their curse-alloyed claws, and knows they are more than animal. Guided by a human mind, potent with thaumaturgy. She counts: four pairs of jade-dark eyes, four tails like whips.

An instant’s calculation for angle and trajectory, and she fires. The leopards are fast, upon her far quicker than any human or natural beast could be. Her bullet ricochet off the dome, piercing a leopard’s shadow; its flesh corresponds in a rip of meat, a spray of gore. Her second shot catches another in the haunch, interrupting it mid-pounce.

Her drop to the floor is a fraction too late. Claws screech across the metal of her armor, not penetrating but leaving a slick of concentrated grudges: pain flashes down her vertebrae, bright turquoise synesthetic across her vision. Her gauntleted arm is all that keeps her face from being shredded to cartilage and gore.

She pulls a polynomial from her belt, tearing off its safety with her teeth. An implosive flash, more light than heat, blinds the puppeteer behind those feline eyes. Nuawa uses the pause to gain distance, rolling away, drawing her blade. Her sword’s beaked shadows click and clatter, a spread of five today: thanks to the lighting, all far longer than the blade itself or her reach. More than sufficient.

Blade shadows roar as they meet the leopards’. Fur tears; arteries rupture and tendons snap.

Nuawa beheads the animals, for theater and for good measure. Even then she half-expects each to get up for a rematch, but apparently they haven’t been witched to work beyond stopped hearts and spilled brains. A ground fog of expended power rises, is quick to dissipate. She wonders what shape the puppeteer is in. Incapacitated, with luck. In agony, she hopes.

Her gate lifts. There is no announcement of her victory, no applause. The Marrow is too refined for that

"Courtship in the Country of Machine-Gods" - Issue 62 of Apex Magazine

"The Beast at the End of Time" - Issue 81 of Apex Magazine

"The Prince Who Gave Up Her Empire" - Issue 88 of Apex Magazine