Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 9 of 42

Kevintor made the fat man start again, slower. Rocky Bookster gave him the two names a second time and stopped at the third. He shook his head. He said he did not know the man above. He said he only got notes and coin. Kevintor watched his eyes and saw he was lying about part of it. He set the burlap sack on the desk between them. The gold winked at the mouth. The folded slip with the careful list stayed pinned to the cord. Kevintor walked Bookster back through the shelves to the cellar door. Lina kept the front. The cellar was small and low. A stack of empty wine bottles stood in the far corner, slender necks crowded together, glass catching the lamplight in green and amber. Behind the bottles was a wall. No hatch. No drain. No second stair. Kevintor pointed at the corner so Bookster would see it too. There was nowhere to run from this room. Bookster sat on a crate. He folded his hands on his belly. He said he boxed to keep his nerves quiet before hard reading, and his nerves were not quiet now. He said he gathered lost philosophies. He said the man above gave him pages he could not get anywhere else. He would not give up the name. He said a name spoken once was gone like a scroll burned. Kevintor took a pair of old binoculars from his coat and set them on the crate beside Bookster. The metal was worn soft. The lenses still held a faint steam-polish. He said he had pulled them off a watcher two streets from the shop this morning. He said the watcher had been counting who came and went. He said the man above already knew Bookster had been taken. He said silence would not save him. It would only decide who reached him first. Bookster looked at the binoculars a long time. He picked them up and put them down. He asked if Kevintor would carry one thing out for him in trade. A scroll, he said. The Threnody of Kalos. Last held by an old man who died last winter. He did not know where the old man's things had gone. Kevintor felt the room tilt. He kept his face flat. He said he would look. Bookster gave him the name. He said it twice so Kevintor would not mishear, and he gave the street. Kevintor took the sack of coins and the pinned list and climbed the stair. Lina met him at the front. He told her the name. She did not know it either. He stepped into the lane and felt the weight of the old man's scrap in his pocket beside the new name. The trail did not die in the cellar. It bent upward. And somewhere ahead, a dead man's scroll was waiting on him to ask the next question.