Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 14 of 42

They rode back hard and made the wall by late afternoon. Kevintor did not stable the horse. He walked it through the outer yard and up the stone steps to the high gate, the one carved with a long sky dragon coiled along the lintel, its snout pointed at every visitor who passed beneath. Lina stopped at the threshold. "This part is yours," she said. He gave her the reins and the scroll case, and kept only the folded paper from the shrine and a small iron key he had taken from a hook inside the shrine box. The key fit nothing he had seen yet. It would fit something inside. The hall opened onto the empress's seat, a high carved chair under blue drapery and gold posts. Astella stood beside it, not in it. She wore a red kimono and held a short hash pipe between two fingers. Smoke moved past her ear. The blade under her sash sat flat against her hip. She did not look surprised to see him back a day early. "You knew," Kevintor said. He set the folded paper on the arm of her chair. He set the key beside it. Then he walked to the corner where the old man's armor stood inside a tall glass case, the long sword laid across the greaves. He pointed at the empty hook at the hip of the case, where a scroll tube had once hung and now did not. "You knew where it was. You sent me to a road you picked. You marked the stone. You left a sister page in a box for me to find. The key on your shrine fits this case." Astella drew on the pipe. She let the smoke out slow. "Yes." "Why." "He made me promise." She tapped the pipe against her palm. "He said if you came asking, send you the long way. Make you earn the page before the scroll. He thought the road would turn you back." She looked at the case, then at him. "It did not." She crossed to the case, fit the key, and opened the door. She lifted a lacquered tube from a shelf below the armor and held it out. "The Threnody of Kalos. His copy. He kept it for forty years and would not burn it." Kevintor took the tube. It was lighter than he expected. "What does it teach." "How to kill the other six in a man." She closed the case. "He warned you because he learned it. He died because he could not unlearn it." She sat then, finally, in the high chair, the pipe across her knee. "Read it tonight. I will not stop you. When you finish, come back and tell me if you still want the seat I offered. The man who reads that scroll is not the same man who refused me." He held the tube against his chest and walked out without an answer.