“You can pronounce my name properly but simple conjugation, articles, and pronouns are beyond you?” Iskondra said, holding her empty hands out in front of her.
“Father had saying. ‘Words’ like ’swords’ without ’s’ on front: useless,” the assassin replied.
“Clearly a philosopher,” Iskondra said.
“Though sword not very useful right now. This your problem,” the hunched figure said. He pointed a finger at her sword, bound to her belt and its sheath. “Need reach for sword, but Tauri Quick-Claw’s weapons ever at ready.”
He demonstrated by slashing the air in front of her with both hands. She had to suck in her already skinny gut to avoid the second pass, and it still scraped three shallow scratches in her leather vest.
“Ah. Yes. Quite,” Iskondra said. “But I feel obliged to point out that there are no less than three fairly important things that you are, in point of fact, overlooking. If I may be allowed to enumerate them?”
“Own last words,” Tauri said. “Spend ‘em as see fit.”
“In the first place, while having one’s weapon perpetually at the ready is indeed an advantage, it is hardly the only means by which a weapon’s usefulness can be judged, and must be weighed against other properties such as reach, deadliness, and bodily integrity,” she said. “The concept of the ‘primacy of the point’ is well established, for instance, meaning that even as my sharp-tipped sword takes longer to bring to bear, once it is in a ready position I can stab far faster than you can slash… and from a greater distance as well. Additionally, if I do choose to employ a slashing motion, not only is my reach greatly extended, but I can achieve a greater application of force due to the increased leverage this provides me. So, while in this one specific case the ready readiness, as it were, of your claws does seem to put me at a distinct disadvantage, there are numerous other circumstances in which my sword would clearly convey the advantage to me.”
“Too bad not in those circumstances,” Tauri said. He shrugged. “As last words go… heard better, heard worse.”
“Oh, I am far from finished. That was only one point of three,” the woman said. “The second thing that I feel obligated to point out to you is that you are laboring under the influence of a false dilemma. The choice you face is not between carrying a sword or using your claws… you could be doing both. In situations where you were caught flat-footed, you would still have your claws to rely on, giving you a significant advantage over most barehanded combatants and putting you on something like an equal footing with less-skilled armed opponents.”
“Will take under advisement,” Tauri growled.
“And third and finally… I am a blade-bonded magus of the Iskar, you disagreeable little man,” the woman said. “In point of fact, I do not need to reach for my weapon.”
Observing the subtle hand gesture she made with her left hand, Tauri made a quick determination to jump back and roll to the side instead of pressing forward to gut the woman. It was a good decision… a gleaming blade of silvered steel materialized in her right hand, in the space he had just been occupying.
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