Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 34 of 42

Kevintor slept on the boards until the tide turned. When he woke the sixth circle was gone and the camp was empty. Roxy had left at dusk as promised. Five arts loose in the world. None in him. He sat up and felt the hollow under his ribs where the trained shapes had stacked for ten years. The scroll lay in his pack. He pulled it out and read the last page again. It said the seventh art drew on the remnants of the six. It did not say how. The page ended there. The instructor on the mountain had read this same scroll and warned him only about the dismantling. No one had told him the rest. He walked up the beach to the inn at first light. Scarlet Violet was on the porch braiding her hair. She watched him climb the steps and set the scroll on the rail between them. "You held the pads," he said. "I owe you a clean answer too. Did the old man ever talk to you about what comes after the six?" She shook her head. "He came once. He drank tea and left. He did not teach." She tied off the braid. "The woman who gave you the scroll knew him forty years. Ask her." He rode two days inland and reached Ronda Nayoodle's shop by dusk. She was wiping the counter when he came through the curtain. She looked at him once and put down the rag. "You're thinner," she said. "Sit." She set a bowl of spicy pork in front of him without asking. He ate. The heat moved through him and found nothing to wake. The arts were not there to answer it. She watched him finish. "You came for the back room or for the road past it," she said. He said, "The road." She nodded and wrote an address on the back of a receipt. "She moved her quarters last month. The gate guard knows my hand." He reached Lady Astella Combonia's training lands at the third watch. She met him in the courtyard in a loose kimono with the pipe in her hand. She looked at his face and at the empty way he stood. "All six," she said. "Yes." She drew on the pipe. "And the seventh page told you nothing." "It told me it uses what is left," he said. "It did not tell me how to call it." She was quiet a long moment. Then she said, "He never wrote that part down. He said any man who needed it written would die using it." She tapped the pipe out on the stone. "There is one person alive who heard him say it aloud. Not me." She met his eyes. "Her name is on a list you already carry. The one from the basin." Kevintor went to his pack and took out the list of names.