Duel by Dennis L. McKiernan: Sword Fighting, Scheming, and a Tiger from Another World
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points edited by Lynn Abbey (Tor Books, 2002)
Previous: Ritual Evolution | Next: Ring of Sea and Fire
Dennis L. McKiernan’s “Duel” is the longest and most ambitious story in the collection so far. It’s got a sword tournament, political scheming, interdimensional travel, a necromancer with his eyelids sewn shut, and a misshapen little sidekick who is way too proud of his anatomical tattoo. It’s a lot. And somehow it all works.
Three Stories Braided Together
McKiernan structures this one as three parallel threads that weave in and out of each other. You’ve got:
Thread One: Naimun and Soldt. Naimun is one of Arizak’s sons. He’s ambitious, resentful of his half-brother the Dragon, and desperate to get a gemstone prize from a sword tournament to gift to his father. He hires Soldt, the best duelist in Sanctuary, to win it for him.
Thread Two: Halott and Rogi. Halott is the necromancer we caught glimpses of in the previous story. He’s basically a walking corpse with fake eyes painted on his sewn-shut lids. His servant Rogi is a misshapen hunchback with hair on only one side of his body, a lisp, and a dragon tattoo in a very personal location. They’re summoning champions from another world.
Thread Three: Ariko and Durel. A warrior couple from a completely different world called Arith. They were sailing to the city of Ibarr when Halott’s magic dragged them through dimensions to Sanctuary during a blood-red lunar eclipse. They have no idea where they are. And the only way home is to do what the creepy dead-looking mage tells them.
The Tournament Setup
The whole story builds toward a sword tournament that’s happening in Sanctuary. The official reason is a Rankan festival celebrating one of their gods. The real reason is political cover. The Rankan Emperor has sent an emissary to convince Arizak to ally with Ranke against the kingdom of Ilsig. Ilsig sends their own emissary to counter. Arizak, being Arizak, plays both sides against each other.
Meanwhile, Naimun wants the tournament prize. It’s a black onyx gemstone striped with slightly lighter darkness. It represents Irrunega’s tiger, the Irrune god’s totem. Gift this to daddy, gain favor, get one step closer to power.
But Naimun doesn’t want to fight for it himself. He’s honest enough to admit he’s not good enough. So he pays Soldt, who teaches swordsmanship for a living and is widely considered the best blade in the city.
Soldt’s terms are simple. Pay him per match, win or lose. Get him the best healer if he’s wounded. No mages, no priests, no witches. And pay him a fair price for the gemstone itself, appraised by a trusted jeweler. Naimun agrees to everything.
Enter the Tiger
But Halott has his own plan. Using the eclipse of the moon, he pulls Ariko and Durel from their world through a ring of magical fog. Ariko is small, five foot two, with black eyes, saffron skin, and two swords. Durel is huge, six foot four, with a greatsword across his back. They’re warriors from another reality and they are not happy about being kidnapped.
Halott tells them: fight in the tournament, win me the gemstone, and in fourteen days when the sun eclipses, I’ll send you home. Otherwise, you’re stuck here forever.
Ariko enters under the name “Tiger.” Durel acts as her second.
And here’s the thing. Nobody in Sanctuary has ever seen anyone like Ariko. Her appearance alone causes a stir. But when she starts fighting? It’s a different conversation entirely.
The Fights
Ariko’s first match is against Enril the Rankan. He’s tall, cocky, fighting with a rapier in one hand and a sword-breaker in the other. He whispers to her before the signal: “I shall try not to wound you too deeply.”
Seven strokes later, he’s bleeding from his cheek and doesn’t even know how it happened. “First blood,” Ariko says calmly. The crowd goes wild.
Match after match, she tears through the competition. Flipping swords out of hands. Pinning wrists with precision cuts. The Irrune tribesmen in the stands start chanting her name. Tiger, Tiger, Tiger. Their god’s totem is a black tiger. How can they not love her?
Meanwhile, Soldt is watching. He’s the favorite. He’s winning his own matches. But he studies Ariko’s movements and realizes this is going to be the real deal.
Rogi: The Weirdest Character in the Book
I have to talk about Rogi because he’s unforgettable. He’s Halott’s servant. He lisps because his tongue is too long. He has a blowgun with sleeping darts that he uses to catch live rats for his master’s dark rituals. He’s completely bald on one side and extra hairy on the other, like his body couldn’t make up its mind. And he has this recurring bit where he wants to show women his dragon tattoo and gets thrown out of every bar in Sanctuary for it.
He sees Ariko and immediately falls in love. Then wisely decides that asking her to admire his tattoo would cost him the tattoo and everything it’s attached to.
Rogi is comic relief, but McKiernan also gives him a sad backstory. The witch who raised him wasn’t his real mother. She was killed by a potion that he may or may not have tampered with. He was thrown into the sea as a baby. Twice. He’s been kicked around his whole life and ended up serving a necromancer because what other options does someone like Rogi have?
The Final Duel
The final comes down to Soldt versus Tiger. The whole city is watching.
Soldt is dressed in gray leather, calm, a faint smile on his lips. He carries a long-knife in one hand and a dark, oil-coated sword in the other. That sword is an Enlibar blade, something special, though nobody in the stands knows it.
Ariko draws her two curved blades and they go at it.
McKiernan writes the fight scene with real energy. Steel on steel, back and forth across the arena. Ariko is faster. Soldt is more powerful. She loses one sword to his Enlibar blade’s special properties. Then she disarms his long-knife. Single blade against single blade now. And then, in a sliding move down his sword, a twist of the wrist, she gets past his guard and nicks his wrist.
First blood. Tiger wins.
The Irrune go absolutely wild. The crowd chants. Even Naimun just smiles, because he has a backup plan.
The Real Scheme
Here’s where it gets dark. After the fight, Soldt collapses. He’s not just tired. He’s been drugged or poisoned. Rogi carts him away to Halott’s tower.
See, Naimun and Halott had a deal all along. Naimun gets the gemstone either way, whether Soldt or Tiger wins. And Halott gets Soldt’s body.
Except Ariko is smarter than all of them.
The night before the final match, a shadowy two-headed tiger (yes, Irrunega’s totem animal) woke her. She watched Halott sneak into their room and coat her blades with something. Poison, almost certainly. If she nicked Soldt, he’d die.
But Ariko didn’t want to kill an innocent man. So she followed the tiger spirit down to Rogi’s room, found his collection of sleeping pastes, and replaced the poison on her blades with Rogi’s knockout mix. Same effect from the outside. Soldt looks dead. Halott is satisfied. Ariko and Durel sail through a ring of fire during the solar eclipse and get sent back to their own world.
And Soldt? He wakes up alone in Halott’s laboratory. Alive. Angry. With his special sword in hand.
Halott wanted Soldt’s Enlibar blade because it might be the one weapon that could truly kill an undead necromancer whose organs are hidden in magical jars. But now the blade is gone and Soldt has it. And someone is about to pay.
What Makes This Story Stand Out
McKiernan does a lot with this story. The political stuff between Naimun, his brothers, and the foreign emissaries gives Sanctuary some geopolitical texture. The tournament gives us genuine action. Ariko and Durel give us outsiders who see Sanctuary with fresh eyes.
But what I like most is how every character in this story thinks they’re the smartest person in the room. Naimun thinks he’s playing Soldt and Halott. Halott thinks he’s playing everyone. And Ariko, who was kidnapped from another dimension and forced into all of this against her will, outsmarts the necromancer with a hunchback’s rat paste.
The ending leaves threads dangling. Soldt is alive and hunting for answers. Halott has lost the blade he feared. Naimun has his gemstone but no idea what he’s really gotten into. And somewhere on another world entirely, Durel is laughing on a boat.
It’s the kind of ending that makes you want to keep reading. Which, in a shared-world anthology, is exactly the point.
This is part 8 of a 14-part series on Thieves’ World: Turning Points. The stories keep getting bigger and wilder from here.