Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 4 of 42

The door swung wide and Kevintor stepped through. The room beyond was not a room. It was the floor of a vast stone hall whose ceiling climbed out of the lantern's reach. Carved hands covered every surface. Hands lay flat against the walls, palms out. Hands curled from the pillars. Hands held up the arches. Thousands of them. At the center of the floor, where he had seen the drain, sat a wide basin cut from a single slab of pale stone. It was full to the rim with dark liquid, and bones floated in it like sticks on a pond. He walked to the basin and looked in. A finger bone bumped against the stone lip. Beside the basin, something glinted. A katana lay on the floor where its owner had dropped it. The hilt was gold and wrapped in cord, the blade still bright. Kevintor crouched and lifted it. The weight was good. He stood with it in his hand and listened. A sound began in the high dark above him. Not breathing. A dry rasp, like palms rubbed slowly together. Many palms. He looked up. The carved hands on the nearest pillar were moving. They flexed and turned on the stone as if testing themselves. Higher up, a shape detached from the ceiling and lowered itself on a column of arms. It had no face he could find. It was hands all the way down, knit into a body that walked on its knuckles and reached with the rest. It came across the floor without hurry. He remembered what he had told Armstrong about the Gladiator Beast. It does not lunge. It walks you down and folds you. Kevintor set his feet. He did not know the sword. He knew his body. When the first hand shot at his throat he cut it off at the wrist and stepped inside the next two. He used the blade like a short stick, close, and his elbows and knees for the rest. A palm closed on his shoulder and he broke the thumb against the joint and drove the point up under the mass where a head should have been. The katana went in to the guard. The creature shuddered. More hands grew toward him from its sides. He sawed the blade free and cut down through the wrist column it stood on. It came apart in pieces. The pieces kept crawling for a moment, then stopped. He stood over it, breathing hard, bleeding from three places. The hall was quiet. The carved hands on the walls were still again. He wiped the blade on his sleeve and looked at the far end of the hall, where another door waited, smaller than the first, with no chain on it. Behind him, past the open iron door, Lina's lantern moved once. He kept the katana. He walked toward the next door.