Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 21 of 42

The instructor brought a small iron tool to the table where Kevintor sat with the scroll. He turned the dragon-head plate, broke the seal, and slid the silk free. The paper inside was thin and covered in a hand Kevintor had seen once before on the slip in a dead man's pocket. The instructor read the first line and pushed the scroll back across the table. "Six men live in your bones," he said. "You will need walls thick enough to hold what comes out when you pull them apart. Not this dojo. I have students here." Kevintor walked the grounds until he found a flat stone yard behind the main hall. Wide steps climbed to a low platform where a stone figure sat in meditation. Carved beasts flanked the arches. No one trained here. The instructor said the place was used for prayer once a year and stood empty the rest. Kevintor asked if he could borrow it. The instructor nodded once and left him a broom. He swept the platform clean and laid the scroll on the top step. The first lesson named the six arts inside him and told him to take them apart one at a time. He was to throw a punch and feel which art moved his shoulder. Then he was to throw it again and refuse that art. Then again. Until the punch belonged to none of them. The scroll warned that a half-undone art would lash out without aim. It said to test only against stone. At the far end of the yard stood a cast dragon the height of a man, gold paint chipped at the claws. Kevintor set it in front of the platform and bowed to it the way he bowed before a bout. He drew a clenched fist on a sheet of rice paper and pinned the page to a post beside the dragon. Six small circles ran down the margin, one for each art. He would scratch a circle out when an art no longer answered his arm. That was his ledger. He had no other way to measure what he was losing. He started with boxing. He threw the jab. The shoulder turned the way it had turned for ten years. He threw it again and held the turn back. The third jab landed against the dragon's chest with no snap in it at all, and his wrist bent wrong. Pain ran up to his elbow. He sat down on the steps and breathed through it. Then he stood and threw the jab a fourth time. By the hundredth he could not have named what muscle moved first. He scratched out the first circle on the page. Karate fought him harder. The roundhouse cracked one of the dragon's wings and rang the yard like a bell. By dusk his shin was split and the second circle was crossed through. He rolled the scroll, tucked the page inside, and walked back to the hut. He had a place now. He had a method. He had four arts left to kill.