He walked a circle, and the circle was an argument.
Left to right, eight meters out, unhurried — the pace of a man inspecting fencing — and Iskar of Zhammar turned to keep him, and the fire came, and the circle ate it. A lance of flame arrived where his walk had been; he was a stride along the arc, walking. A second burst led him properly, splashing the stone ahead — he had already shortened step, letting the future it was mailed to lapse unoccupied. He did not dodge. Dodging was expenditure. He curved, only and continuously curved, and the geometry did the spending for him: on a straight line a marksman corrects once and kills; on a circle the correction never ends, the answer is always changing, the address is always old.
The head had to turn. That was the bill the circle presented. To aim, Iskar had to look; to look, he had to track; to track a man orbiting him he had to keep the whole apparatus of skull and neck and burning eyes in constant rent-paying motion, and Shen Huang walked the rim of that motion and studied it like a clock's escapement. Turn — settle — blink — fire. Turn — settle — blink. The tell was compressing as irritation shortened it. The leads were getting greedier, hungrier, thrown further ahead of him, easier to lapse.
The crowd's weather shifted. Laughter first, at the slave who would not stand still; then less laughter, as some slow collective instinct began to grasp — before Iskar did; crowds read posture faster than principals — that this was not fleeing. Fleeing has panic in the shoulders. This had a metronome in it. High up in the western shade, cups had stopped moving, and the leaning silhouette had put a second hand on its rail.
Iskar stopped leading and started flooding the near arc — sheets of fire thrown across whole sectors of the circle, denial, herding — and it cost him. Shen Huang watched the cost with a moneylender's love. The dry-man shimmer at his boots was gone; the flood he stood in had climbed his hem, dark up the coal-red cloth. Steam-sweat sheeted his face. Between conjurings his chest heaved twice for every once at the fight's start, and the pillars themselves ran leaner, paler at the crown, their heat spending faster off thinner stock. Zhammar fire came out of a purse, and the purse had a bottom, and eight meters away the purse was being turned out sheet by sheet against a man who was buying every sheet with three steps of walking.
Now the mathematics are visible, Shen Huang thought, rounding the western quadrant with the sun swinging low and level into the far man's face — glare off the gold water, glare he had banked yesterday, the floor itself joining his side of the ledger. You are a cavalry purse fighting an infantry war. And your eyes are the only soldiers you have.
Iskar screamed something at him. The crowd took it up, jeering — at which of them, the crowd itself no longer seemed sure —
— and in the holding cage sunk into the eastern wall, a boy stood with both hands on the bars, not blinking, and made a small sound.
The ten had crowded to the iron to watch a slave die, and stayed to watch something they had no story for. Around Nuunah men were whispering odds and prayers in the same breath — but Nuunah had stopped hearing them somewhere in the walking, because he was watching the way he always watched, the only way he knew, the way that saw people under what they did — and what he saw out on the bright water was wrong in a way that stood his arms' hair on end.
The burned man was not escaping. The burned man was herding. Every circuit of that terrible patient circle wound the fire-lord a turn tighter — spent him, angered him, aged him — and the man in the slave-gray walked it with his ruined arm swinging loose and easy, and there was a thing in the set of him, in the pure economy of him, that Nuunah's eyes kept trying to name and kept failing, because the nearest word was joy and that could not be —
Iskar's head stopped turning.
Nuunah felt it before he could have said what it was: the fire-lord went still at the circle's hub, chest heaving, and stopped aiming — chin dropping, eyes leaving the walking man entirely, unfocusing, both fists coming up not toward his enemy but simply up, and the air over the whole Pit tightened like a held breath, every hair on every arm in the cage lifting together, the water at their ankles crawling with sudden ghost-current —
The old net-mender moaned and turned his face away.
"He's going to burn the floor," someone whispered, in the marsh-tongue, in the dark. "All of it. Sweet Hymn — he's going to burn the world—"
Out on the water, the walking man stopped walking.
And the Pit turned white.