Wrath-Part 1

Wrath cleared the ridge in one jump, and somewhere at the top of it, his stomach growled.

He came down in snow up to his knees, rolled once, and was running again before the snow he had kicked up had finished falling.

'Should've eaten first.'

He had been chasing the man for forty minutes. In that time they had crossed four ridges and two frozen streams, and passed a troop of monkeys sitting in the snow, who watched them go by without much interest. The man had not slowed down once.

The tracks were easy to follow. Bare feet, a long stride, and at the bottom of every print the snow had gone grey and hard, as if someone had poured cement into it.

Every so often there was something else.

A crow on a low branch, which did not fly off when Wrath went past. It was grey all the way through, down to its claws.

Further on, a fox, stopped mid-step in a drift with one front paw lifted. Stone.

Wrath had stopped looking at them after the fox.

He went up the next slope in three long strides, caught a cedar trunk to swing himself around a drop, and the trees opened in front of him.

The mountains were all there at once.

To the east, the Hida Mountains stood in rows, one behind the other, white to the shoulders, each row paler than the one in front until the farthest peaks could hardly be told apart from the sky. They ran north and south farther than he could see. They had stood there long before anyone came to name them. In winter they buried roads. In spring they let go of their snow all at once, in slides that took the roads with them.

Below, the land fell away into a long, narrow valley. A river ran along the bottom, grey-green and shallow, running north between its stones. Across it, the expressway came out of a tunnel in one mountain, crossed the valley on tall concrete legs, and went straight into the next. Nothing moved on it that he could see.

Far to the north, where the valley widened, a village of steep thatched roofs sat among brown fields. From up here, he could have covered it with his thumb.

And on a ridge above all of it, a thin boy with a sword stood in the snow and thought about breakfast.

'...Focus.'

He looked about fourteen. He was not.

He wore a grey hoodie with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow, track pants, and a pair of trainers that had split across the left toe at some point in the last forty minutes. No coat. No gloves. The cold was on his bare arms and he did not mind it. Cold had never done much to him.

The sword was in his right hand. It was long and straight and plain, the blade a dull grey-black with no shine to it at all. Its handle was wrapped in a long wool scarf, wound around and around and knotted at the end, the loose ends flapping behind him when he ran.

The scarf was not for warmth.

Bare skin on that handle, and the sword woke up all the way. Through the wool, it was only a blade that could cut through anything solid. He preferred it like that. Most days, that was already more than he needed.

There were seven of them. Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth, and him. They hated each other and agreed on almost nothing, except this: this world was the last mortal realm, keeping it standing was their job, and the job went better when nobody knew they were there.

Wrath had come down two years ago, on the night the Eye opened over the world. Before that he had been asleep for a long time. He had woken up falling.

Since then, things had been finding their way through. Into this world, and into the people in it.

The tracks led down the far side of the ridge and into the trees. Wrath followed them at a run, ducking branches, knocking snow off the lower boughs in soft, heavy falls.

Then the trees stopped.

It was a clearing, flat and white, with tall cedars all around it. The snow was smooth and untouched except for one line of grey footprints running straight to the middle.

The man was standing there.

He was in his forties, maybe. He wore what had once been a dark office suit. The jacket had split along both shoulders, as if he had grown too big for it, and he had lost his tie and his shoes somewhere along the way. His feet were bare in the snow. They were grey to the ankle.

He was not breathing hard.

'Forty minutes uphill in a suit, and he's not even out of breath.'

'...To be fair, neither am I.'

The man turned his head and looked at Wrath. His eyes were grey, a flat, even grey, like wet slate.

Then, without hurrying, he reached out and laid his palm against the nearest cedar.

The grey went into the bark.

It spread out from his hand in a ring, quick and quiet, up the trunk and down into the roots. The needles stopped moving in the wind. A branch creaked once under its load of snow, and then made no sound at all. In a few seconds the whole tree, thirty metres of it, stood grey from root to tip.

The man took his hand away and looked at Wrath again.

It was not a threat, exactly. It was more like he was showing him what happened to the things he touched.

Wrath tilted his head.

It was not an Echo. He had met enough of those in two years to know. An Echo grew out of the person who had it, out of some feeling that had broken in them and stayed broken. It felt like them.

This felt like a mountain.

'Shinketsu, then.'

The Chūkū lived in the Ku, a layer of the world that sat just under this one, close to it but not part of it. They were old, and each of them was built around one idea. Fire. War. Hunger. Earth. They did not give anything away, but they would trade. A person could make a pact with one and get a piece of it in return: a real piece, a splinter of the Chūkū itself, living inside them. That piece was Shinketsu.

The price was whatever the Chūkū asked for. Years of service. A memory. A hand.

Wrath looked at the man's left hand. The little finger and the ring finger were gone, the skin over the knuckles healed smooth and old.

'Two fingers for a piece of a mountain.'

'...That's cheap.'

He did not like cheap.

Still, he sized the man up the way he sized up everything: quickly, and without much worry. A grown man. Stronger now than any human had a right to be, and able to turn whatever he touched into stone. For most people, that was a problem.

Wrath was not most people.

Ten minutes, he decided. Fifteen, if the man was stubborn.

"Okay," he said. His voice came out loud in the quiet. "Here's a deal."

The man watched him.

"You let it go. The pact, the — whatever you've got in there. You let go of it, you sit down in the snow, and I don't cut anything off you." Wrath shrugged. "It'll hurt. Breaking a pact always does. But you'll probably live, and I'll carry you down to the road myself. Someone down there will have a phone."

He waited.

"That's a good deal," he added. "I don't usually do deals."

The man's mouth opened.

The voice that came out of it was not a man's voice. It was too low and too slow, and it did not seem to come from his throat so much as from somewhere under him: a long, grinding sound, like loose stones sliding down a slope. The snow at the edges of the clearing shivered with it.

"We are not finished."

Wrath looked at him for a moment.

'...We.'

Then he moved.

He crossed the clearing faster than a blink. The snow behind him did not even have time to rise. At the last moment he turned the blade flat, because there was still a person in there somewhere, and you did not cut a person in half while you were still offering him a deal.

The flat of the sword hit the man in the ribs.

He left the ground. He flew backward across the clearing and hit the stone cedar at the height of a man's head.

He went through it.

The trunk burst apart. The sound came a moment later, a crack like a rifle shot that ran away down the valley and came back twice. The top half of the tree tipped, slowly at first and then all at once, and came down across the clearing in a long grey crash that threw snow higher than the other trees.

Then it was quiet.

The man lay on his back among the broken stone, a few metres past the stump.

Wrath walked over to him. He did not hurry.

The man's shirt had torn open along one side. The skin under it was grey, and it had split. A crack ran from his hip up to his armpit, wide enough to fit a finger into, dry and jagged at the edges. There was no blood in it. There was nothing in it at all.

'Okay. That's not great.'

Something moved in the snow under him.

At first Wrath thought it was meltwater. It was darker than the snow, and it was spreading. Then it came up through the white in fine grains, brown and grey, and he saw that it was sand. It rose out of the ground, climbed over the man's back and along his side, and ran into the crack.

The crack filled.

Then it closed, the two edges sliding together until there was only a seam, and then not even that. The grey faded out of the skin. It looked like skin again.

The man had not moved once while it happened.

Wrath looked at the place where the crack had been, then at the last of the sand sinking back into the snow, then at the man's face.

'...Huh.'

The man got up.

He did not push himself up with his hands, or roll onto his side, or bend his knees. He rose from the hips, straight up, all at once, as if someone standing over him had taken hold of the back of his collar and lifted. His bare feet found the snow. His head came up last.

He looked at Wrath with those flat grey eyes.

And smiled.

It was a wide, easy smile, and nothing else in his face moved with it.