Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 16 of 42

Kevintor woke on the floor of the back room with the scroll still in his hand. The drum below had stopped hours ago. He sat up and listened. The walls were paper and thin pine. He could hear a cook scraping a pan two rooms over. He could hear a man cough on the stair. The Threnody's first lesson called for him to break his boxing stance inside himself, alone, with no eye on him. This room could not hold that. One wrong sound through the wall would tell the wrong ear he was here and what he was doing. He unwrapped the rice sack and took out the gold arm bands he had carried since his first title. He set one against the wall behind the lamp and tapped it with his knuckle. The ring carried. He moved to the other wall and tapped again. The note was clean and long. Sound passed through this place like water through a sieve. He put the bands back in the sack. He needed stone, or earth, or distance. Scarlet Violet slid the door open without knocking. She set a tray of rice and tea on the table and knelt. "Two men came in at first light," she said. "They asked the door woman which room held the man with the tube. She told them no such man. They paid her anyway and sat by the front window." She did not look at the scroll. "A third is on the roof across the lane. I saw the shadow when I opened the shutter." Outside, a small orange serpent dragon banked once over the eaves and settled on a tile, its wings folded flat. A watcher's signal beast. Kevintor had seen the kind before. "Is there a back way that does not cross the lane," he said. "Through the kitchen," she said. "Past the well. Then a wall you can climb if your arms still work." He pulled a folded paper from the sack and spread it on the table. It was the old man's map, the one he had carried since the burial, a dragon mountain at its center with a thin path winding to a cave on the north face. He had not meant to use it yet. "How long on foot," he said. She looked, then away. "Two days if you do not stop. The road is empty past the second ridge." He rolled the map and the scroll together and tied them. He counted out coin and set it on the tray. "Hold the room a week. Let them watch an empty door." Scarlet Violet took the coin without counting. "I keep what I see," she said. Kevintor went down the back stair, through the kitchen, past the well, and over the wall before the sun cleared the eaves. By midday he was on the north road with the mountain ahead and the bar behind him, the first unmaking still waiting for stone walls thick enough to hold it.