Kino didn’t allow herself to be impressed. She pulled the Woodsman from her back holster, flicked the safety off, and aimed it at the trombonist's head. He had just enough time to blink before she shifted her aim slightly and pulled the trigger.
There was a sharp report, and a bullet whizzed past the man's face, missing him by less than an inch. He smiled and aimed his instrument at Kino again.
Suddenly, a purple geyser erupted from his right shoulder.
He halted in mid-puff and stared at the leak. The contents of his "hump" were escaping through the neat little hole Kino had drilled in the hose that carried the incendiary fluid to the trombone. The liquid rained down onto the surprised combatant and the surrounding ground.
Kino stood calmly, a gun in each hand, and said, "That's not a big hole, so I'm going to guess that there's a lot of pressure building behind it, which means that if you don’t close the valve, it will rupture. Will you surrender now?"
The man glanced from his saturated clothing to Kino's face. "I refuse."
"You can’t win," said Kino, aiming the Woodsman.
The man did not budge. He just glared at her. "Kill me."
“Why?"
"Kill me."
Someone in the stands yelled, "Finish him! Kill him!"
And that brought the entire audience to their feet and set off a rhythmic chant, "Kill! Kill! Kill him now! Kill! Kill! Kill him now! Kill! Kill! Kill him now!"
Kino turned very slowly, looking at the audience as they screamed happily, crazily, for this man's blood. Then she raised the Cannon over her head and fired it once into the air. The audience fell silent, savoring the drama.
Kino turned to the king.
Resplendent in his finery, he grinned down at her from the safety of his box. Their eyes met, and Kino forced a polite smile.
Behind her, the mendicant musician said, "What are you waiting for? His permission? You have it. And you have mine. We bet our lives on this fight. The winner survives; the loser dies. That's the law. I've lost today. So I die, and you, girlie, get to live. Shoot... me... now."
Kino grimaced, glancing back over her shoulder. "'Girlie?' Don't make me gag. I'm Kino."
"Kino? Good name. I'll remember it in Hell."
"Thanks..." She turned on her heel, strode up to the man, and paused just in front of him.
The crowd clamored again, demanding his death.
She placed the Cannon against his forehead, and cocked the hammer. "Surrender."
"No."
"Then I have no choice."
Kino lowered the hammer slowly back into place.
"What game are you playing?" he whispered savagely. "They'll kill you if you fail to satisfy them."
Kino spun the Cannon in her hand, shifted her grip to the barrel, and dealt her opponent a glancing blow to the temple with the butt of the gun.
The mendicant musician toppled over into the sand, unconscious.
"A cutie pie like you this late in the game? What on Earth were your opponents thinking?"
Kino's second adversary of the day accompanied her words with a look of pure scorn. She was a young woman with long, blonde hair pulled back severely into a ponytail. Tall, with sharp, fox-like features, she wore cargo pants and a camp shirt, both of which looked like some sort of uniform. Over her shirt was a vest covered in little pouches. The thigh pockets of her pants were unusual, divided into long, narrow pleats, as if to hold short arrows or darts.
She hefted her gun with its wooden stock braced against one hip and its slender muzzle aimed at the sky. It was a bolt-action rifle that ejected the spent cartridge and loaded a new bullet after each shot. Not very efficient for this type of contest.
"They must have underestimated me," Kino told her blandly.
The other woman nodded. "Yeah... I use that trick all the time. Works like a charm, huh?"
Kino asked, "Do you really wish to become a citizen?"
"Me? I certainly do. Wanna know why?"
Kino didn't answer, but blondie told her anyway, her mouth twisting in a strange half-smile. "When I came through the woods just outside of town, I met a beautiful little boy playing in a brook. A darling child. A precious child, but he told me he had no mother or father. If I gain citizenship, they'll let me adopt him."
She seemed to read Kino's amazement and added, "You don't understand, do you, little girl? It's just a woman's nature, I suppose."
A woman's nature. Perhaps she should understand. Perhaps she merely wanted to understand. She thought of her own mother and shrugged.
"I suppose you'll refuse, but would you surrender?"
"Hey, that's my line," the blonde snapped.
"I was afraid you'd say that," whispered Kino, her right hand brushing the Cannon's hammer.
Blondie cocked the rifle as the fans began chanting; Kino dove for cover as her adversary fired from behind the base of a broken statue, narrowly missing her. The bullet pierced the thick metal above Kino's head as if it were made of air.
Armor-piercing bullets?
Kino waited a beat, then moved again, diving from behind the scrap iron to roll toward the cover of a masonry block.
"You're pretty good," her opponent shouted. "But not good enough." With blinding speed, she spun the rifle bolt; the spent cartridge leapt from the breech and the next bullet chambered.
Kino rolled to her left, drawing the Woodsman as she went, and flicking off the safety. She came to a stop beneath a slab of iron plating and peeked out, catching the glint of the woman's golden hair as she moved behind her cover. Kino took the opportunity to dive from the plating into a shelter of piled rubble.
She had just rolled onto her belly when a bullet burrowed into the stone. Blondie must have incredible peripheral vision.
That volley was followed by three more in rapid succession, as if the woman were trying to chip through Kino's concealing wall. The stones rattled with each impact. Kino kept her head down.
The silence was quickly broken by the delicate rip of a Velcro pocket. The fox was reloading.
Kino's eyes seized on a fist-sized rock near her right elbow. She picked it up and hefted it, noting that many more lay close by. She holstered the Woodsman, popped to her feet, and threw the rock as hard as she could. It connected, sickeningly, with something softer and more yielding than masonry. The other woman cried out in pain and outrage. Something metallic bounced and scraped over the stone.
Blondie had dropped her clip.
Kino snatched up two rocks in each hand and zigzagged from one scrapheap to another, heading toward her opponent. Just before she reached cover, Kino heard the sound of a clip being loaded. A second later, the other woman poked her head out of concealment, saw Kino coming toward her with her arm cocked, and jerked backward. But she was too late – the stones had already left Kino's hands.
Kino slid to her knees behind a pile of desks and chairs, but not before she'd heard the impact, and seen the sudden splash of blood on the blonde's face. At least one stone had caught her in the head.
Kino pressed her back against a twisted metal desk and shouted, "Can you hear me?"
"Yeah, I can hear you."
"Are you sure you won't surrender?"
"Are you kidding? I have my pride, little girl."
"That gun puts you at a big disadvantage this close..."
Silence.
Heaving a sigh, Kino drew the Woodsman again, vaguely aware of the crowd's murmured approval. Sweat beaded on her forehead and trickled down her cheeks. She listened then, trying to determine what blondie was doing behind her chunk of fortress. Metal scraped against metal and then clanked against wood.
Was she dismantling her gun?
Again, the sound of Velcro parting. Kino wished desperately that she could see what was going on. Did she dare take a chance that the fox was disarmed, at least for the moment?
Kino rolled to her left, trying not to upset so much as a grain of sand. She peered around her pile of junk from the bottom left, eyes on the heap of scrap metal that hid her adversary. There was a twisted lump of steel about the size of a serving platter balanced precariously at the top. Kino fired the Woodsman at it. The bullet ricocheted, and the scrap toppled over, taking several other pieces of metal with it.
"Crap!" Blondie broke from cover, racing not toward Kino, but away. She fired the rifle once and dove.
Kino rolled away from the edge of her rock pile. An uninterrupted stream of bullets ripped at the dirt where she had lain seconds before, spraying sand into the air. Somehow, blondie had altered her gun, transforming it from a single-shot weapon into a machine gun. Kino's plan to use her opponent's reload time to get close enough to force surrender was literally shot.