Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 6 of 42

Kevintor stood in the passage with Lina and the list between them. The katana hung at his side. He kept feeling its weight wrong. The hilt matched every broken grip in the basin behind the iron door. He had carried it out like a trophy and now he saw he had carried out a leash. He passed the list to Lina and told her to hold it. Then he walked back through the iron door alone. The room was as he had left it. The cleaner lay bound by the small door, breathing into the cloth. Kevintor crossed to the wall opposite the basin and stopped. He had not looked at this wall before. A wooden rack stood against the stone, tall as a man, dark with old polish. Five swords waited in its slots. Each one had a gold pommel. Each one had a red-wrapped grip. The blade in his hand was the sixth, the one a fighter was meant to find on the floor and lift like luck. He set the katana into the empty slot. It fit. The rack had been built for it. He crouched by the cleaner and pulled the cloth from the mouth. Beside the man lay a bucket and the tool he had carried in earlier, a mop with a head the size of a sheep, the cords stained dark at the tips. Kevintor pushed it aside. "The sword," he said. "Who sets it on the floor." The cleaner did not want to speak. Kevintor waited. The cleaner said the swords came from above. He said the fighters always picked them up. He said the fighters always swung at the hands and the hands always won, because the blade was made soft at the tang and broke on the third strike. Kevintor thought of his fight. He had used the katana twice and then his hands. He had been two swings from the basin and had not known it. He stood. He went to the rack and broke each remaining sword across his knee. The metal gave like green wood. He left the pieces on the floor where the next fighter would see them before reaching for anything. He took the cleaner's whetstone and the rag and nothing else. He did not take a sword. At the iron door Lina was already reading the list again under the lantern. He told her what the blades were. He told her he had walked out of the hall the first time carrying the trap. Her mouth tightened. She held up the list and pointed at a name three above his own. "This one came back," she said. "I saw him last winter. Fat man. Keeps scrolls." Kevintor knew the description before she finished. Rocky Bookster. The old man's threnody. The name on the paper in his pocket. He took the list from her hand. "Then he knows what the seventh art actually is," he said. "And he knows who is sending men down here to die for it."