Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 39 of 42

The blade did not fall. Kevintor opened his eyes. The killer stood over him with the dagger pressed to his throat, a slender thing with a yellow stone set in the crossguard. The man's hand was steady. He was waiting for something. Kevintor saw it then. The killer's eyes were on the carved panel behind Kevintor's head, not on Kevintor at all. He was reading the gold script. He was reading the name of whoever had hired him off the stone. Kevintor moved while the man's eyes were elsewhere. He drove his bleeding shoulder up into the killer's wrist and turned the blade past his neck. The edge opened his jaw instead of his throat. He caught the killer's sleeve with his other hand and pulled. The man came down across the altar's base. Kevintor had no art in his body to finish him. He had weight and the stone. He drove the killer's head against the carved panel once. The dagger fell. He drove it again. The man went slack. Kevintor sat against the altar with the dagger in his lap and bled. His forearm was open to the bone in one place. His shoulder would not lift. He had won nothing. Two more killers were out there somewhere, and his hands shook so hard he could not have held the dagger if a third came up the rise. He looked past the body to the tree line and saw what he had missed in the dark. A small canvas tent stood between two pines, the flap tied back, a cold fire pit in front. They had watched him from there. They had eaten and slept and waited while he knelt on the stone. He crawled to the tent. Inside he found a water skin, a folded cloth, and a strip of dried meat. He wrapped his forearm tight and drank. He found a second thing under the bedroll. A small leather book with a list of names in the same careful hand he had seen in the basin. His name was on it. Three names above his were crossed through. One name above those was circled. He did not know it. The name on the altar's panel, the one the killer had been reading, was the same name. He took the book and the dagger and the water skin and went back to the altar. He set his hand on the panel again. The pressure under his ribs answered, then sat. The seventh art would not open here. Not for the words, not for blood, not for a body at the stone. It wanted something he did not yet have. He understood that much now. The altar was not the lock. The name in the book was. He stood. His legs held. He walked past the carved stone dragon at the clearing's edge and did not climb the stair to the dragon hall. He went down the road instead. He had a name to carry to Lady Astella, and a wound that would not wait, and one weapon in his hand that was not his.