Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 24 of 42

Kevintor stood in the stone yard with the ledger page weighted fresh and the scroll open across his knee. He set his hand on his sternum where the third art lived and felt nothing he could grip. Boxing had been a fist. Karate had been a shape. Judo was a door inside him, and the door had no handle. His body had forgotten the edge. Three days in hot water had healed his ribs and dulled the thing he needed sharp. He could not cut what he could not find. He walked down the mountain before noon. The serpent bridge swayed under him and he kept his hands off the ropes. In the valley he turned away from the bath house and followed the path to a ramen shop with a red curtain and lantern light spilling over the step. Ronda Nayoodle looked up from the counter when he ducked inside. She did not smile. She said, "Spicy pork. Sit." He sat. She set the bowl in front of him a few minutes later, broth red, noodles glossy, an egg cut clean. He ate slowly. The heat opened his throat. The pepper pulled sweat from his scalp. By the third mouthful his pulse had climbed, and his shoulders remembered the weight of a man being thrown. "You came back thinner," she said. He nodded. She watched him finish. When he set the bowl down empty she said, "Whatever you are going to do, do it on a full stomach next time too." He paid and left. He carried the heat in him up the path. Past the bridge, above the instructor's hall, a crystal-mouthed cave opened into the rock. He had marked it on his first climb and not entered. He entered now. The walls held the cold the yard could not. Water ran somewhere deeper. He set the scroll on a flat stone, stripped to the waist, and read the third passage aloud the way the instructor had taught him. He named judo. He named every throw he had ever finished. He named the three times he had quit and come back. Then he set his palm flat against his chest and pushed. The edge came up under his hand like a blade rising through skin from inside. He found it. He worked it. He cut. His knees buckled and he went down on the cave floor and kept cutting until the door inside him stood open and empty. He heard himself shout once. He did not hear it twice. When he could see again the third circle on the ledger was a line in his head, crossed. He crawled out of the cave and down to a falling sheet of water that ran clean off the cliff into a shallow pool. A woman who tended the falls met him at the edge and helped him kneel in the cold. She checked his ribs, his wrist, the new tear along his collarbone. She said he would live to try the fourth. Three down. Three to go. Above them, on the road from the valley, a rider was asking after a man with a wrapped wrist again, and this time no one had sent the rider east.