Wrath-Part 2

The man's left arm went grey first.

It started at the fingers. The two fingers and the thumb that were left ran together into one blunt lump, and then the whole forearm swelled, splitting the sleeve, until the thing hanging from his elbow was a stone club as long as Wrath's leg.

He came across the clearing.

He was not fast, not the way Wrath was fast. But every step pressed the snow flat and turned it grey, and Wrath could feel each one through the soles of his split trainers, a dull thud in the ground.

'Heavy. Big swings. Probably slow to turn.'

'Let's see what you do with one arm.'

The club came round at the height of his head.

Wrath dropped under it. The wind of it pulled at his hair. He stepped in, inside the swing, close enough to smell the man — wet wool, old sweat, and under it something like a quarry after rain — and cut once, upward, through the elbow.

The forearm went spinning away across the clearing.

It hit the snow and broke into three pieces. It was stone all the way through. There was no blood on the blade, and none on the snow.

The man did not look at the stump.

He knelt, unhurried, the way a person kneels to tie a shoe, and pressed the end of his arm into the snow.

Wrath let him. He wanted to see.

The sand came up. It climbed the stump in a thin, quick crust, and the crust grew and kept growing: a wrist, a palm, a thumb. Then the fingers came out of the stone one at a time, grey and rough and jointed, closed into a fist, and opened again.

'...He went to the ground first.'

There was something else, too.

The new hand had five fingers.

The man stood. This time Wrath was close enough to see his eyes properly.

People's eyes moved. Even in a fight, even in a panic, they flicked and blinked and searched, looking for the next thing. Wrath had looked into a great many eyes over a very long time. Some of them had been full of hate, and some of them had been mad. All of them had had somebody behind them.

These did not move at all.

Nobody looked back.

Wrath stepped to its right, where a man would have to turn to follow him.

It did not turn. Its right knee broke instead, with a sound like a green branch snapping, the lower leg folding out sideways, and the whole body swung around on the broken joint faster than any knee would have allowed. The new stone fist came at Wrath's face.

He leaned back. The fist went past his nose and hit the cedar behind him, and the cedar split down the middle with a long, tearing groan.

The broken leg touched the snow. Sand ran up it. The knee ground itself straight.

It had not flinched once.

Wrath stepped back out of reach, and for the first time in forty minutes, nothing funny came to mind.

A pact was a trade. That was the part people understood. The part they did not read closely enough was that a Chūkū could come back later and ask for more. Most people paid. Some could not. And sometimes, when the price came due and the person had nothing left to give, the Chūkū took the rest. All of it. The body kept walking. The person did not come back.

Two fingers had been the first payment.

Not the last.

Wrath did not turn the blade flat again.

So.

The sword could end this in one swing. Not through the wool. With a bare hand on the handle. Eden kept beings like him held down on this side, so that the world would not crack under them, but even held down, one full swing would take this clearing, the slope below it and the road at the bottom of the valley. And whoever was on the road.

No.

Wrapped, the sword would cut the thing as often as he liked. He could cut it into pieces small enough to fit in a bucket. And every piece that touched the ground would pull up sand and stone and put itself back together.

Also no.

Which meant the problem was not the body. It was what the body was standing on.

It had not healed in the air, when he sent it flying across the clearing. It had not healed lying in the broken stone, either, not until the sand came up out of the ground beneath it. It had knelt to grow the arm back. It went to the ground first, every time.

So: get it off the ground, and keep it off long enough.

Lift it? When the flat of the sword hit its ribs, he had felt the weight behind them, and it was the weight of a boulder, not a man. He could lift that. But it would grab the earth again the moment its feet came down, and Wrath's own body weighed what a boy's body weighed. Holding something like that in the air while it fought him was a good way to get dragged down with it.

He thought of the view from the ridge.

Below the clearing, the slope ran down through the cedars and stopped at the gorge. A cliff, eighty metres straight down to the river, with nothing between the top and the bottom but air.

'Throw it over, and it falls a long way with nothing to drink from.'

Long enough to finish it on the way down. Probably.

There was a catch, of course. The expressway crossed that gorge.

But the longer this went on, the further the fight would drift down the mountain anyway, toward the road and the people on it. Better to choose where it went than to let it choose.

He thought about the catch for half a second.

'It's March. It's early. There won't be many cars.'

He went forward.

The thing stamped its foot.

The ground answered. A ring of stone spikes burst up through the snow around Wrath, each one as tall as a man and as thick as a thigh, packed so close together that there was no gap to run through. The snow they threw up was still falling when the thing turned to the rock at the high side of the clearing and put its new hand flat against it.

It pulled. A boulder the size of a small car came away from the hillside, roots and soil hanging off it, and it threw it downhill, at him.

Wrath had a quarter of a second.

His back was to the slope. The boulder would go through him and through the ring behind him and on down the mountain, straight toward the gorge.

He cut it at an angle.

The blade went through the rock as if it were not there, from the top left corner to the bottom right. The two halves came apart in the air and went past him on either side, and both of them broke left, into the trees, not straight down.

They hit the slope hard. Cedars went over, one, two, three, their roots tearing up out of the snow. Under the snow the slope was loose rock, and it began to move: small slides at first, grey streams of stone running and spreading between the trunks.

Wrath looked at that for a moment.

'...Noted.'

The thing came down after the boulder, running at him, heavy and fast for its weight.

Wrath went through the ring the quick way. Two cuts, and the tops of three spikes slid off and fell. He stepped out through the gap, let the thing come, turned aside at the last moment, and as it went past him, kicked it in the back with everything he had.

It went over the lip of the clearing and onto the slope.

It landed. Its feet sank and gripped. The grey began to climb its legs.

Wrath was already there.

He took its left leg off below the knee. It dropped. Before the stump could reach the ground, he kicked it again, and it went tumbling down between the cedars. Ten metres. Fifteen.

He followed.

Cut, then kick. Every time it landed, it reached for the earth, and every time it reached, he moved it again before the sand could finish its work. A leg. A hand. Half its jaw, which grew back crooked.

Thirty metres. Fifty.

The cedars thinned. Through them he could see the far wall of the gorge now, grey rock streaked with snow, and the light ahead was opening out over the drop.

Ten metres to the edge.

Then the ground under his left foot stopped being ground.

It turned to mud all at once, wet and cold and bottomless, and he went in to the knee. As soon as he was in, it set again, hard, locked around his shin.

Wrath tore his leg free. The stone around it cracked and burst apart.

It took him one second.

In that second, the thing climbed two metres back up the slope and knelt with both hands buried in the snow, its jaw straightening with a grinding sound.

'Fine. Two metres.'

He went again.

Eight metres. Five. Three.

Then the thing stopped fighting the push.

Wrath felt it, the way you feel a door give when you have been leaning on it. One kick, and it went back without grabbing at anything. Another, and it went back again. Its heels were at the cliff edge now. Behind it there was nothing but air and the far side of the gorge.

It was letting him.

'Why is it—'

It looked at him with its empty grey eyes. Then it dropped to its knees and drove both hands into the rock at the very edge of the cliff, wrist-deep, as if the rock were water.

The mountain groaned.

The sound came up through Wrath's feet and into his teeth. A crack opened in the snow beside him and ran away uphill, wider than a road and getting wider, all the way back toward the clearing. The cedars on either side of it leaned. And then the whole slope, from the clearing to the cliff, trees and rock and snow and the two of them standing on it, let go of the mountain and began to slide.

It went over the edge in one piece, and then it was not one piece anymore.

Wrath was in the air among falling rock. Snow, stones, whole trees turning end over end, all of it roaring, the air thick with the smell of wet earth and crushed cedar. He stepped down onto a boulder as it fell, and off it onto the next, and the next, staying on top of the slide, keeping his feet.

The thing was below him.

It was not falling. It was riding. It lay in the sliding earth the way a swimmer lies in water, half sunk in it, gravel and rock pouring over its arms and back, and with every metre it fell, it grew more whole.

He had wanted it off the ground.

It had brought the ground along.

'...Damn it.'

He dropped onto it anyway, from above, and cut down through its shoulder to its hip. The slide poured into the cut and closed it before the two halves could even come apart.

Then the gorge opened beneath them.

It was deep and narrow and very old, two walls of grey rock that the river had been cutting into for longer than anyone had been there to watch it. The river lay at the bottom, green and white over its stones, eighty metres down. Across the gorge, the far wall rose straight up into forest and snow. And to the right, spanning the gorge from one tunnel to the other, the expressway stood on six concrete pillars, each one as tall as a twenty-storey building, so that the road ran across the empty air sixty metres above the water like a ruler laid across a bowl.

There were cars on it.

A white truck. A red car. A blue one. A tour bus painted with cherry blossoms. Another truck. A whole line of them, strung out across the bridge from the south tunnel, bright and small in the morning sun.

He counted without meaning to.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

'Not many cars, I said.'

The slide hit the hillside above the north tunnel.

It hit hard enough that Wrath felt the shock in his chest through the air. Rock burst out across the mouth of the north tunnel. Boulders bounced off the hillside and onto the north end of the viaduct, one, two, and a third the size of a fridge that skipped once on the road, went straight through the steel barrier and dropped into the gorge.

The thing came down on the deck in a spray of stone. Wrath came down ten metres away, on his feet.

Tyres screamed. Somewhere a horn started and did not stop.

Then the dust arrived.

It came rolling down off the hillside, grey and thick as smoke. It poured over the tunnel mouth and spread out along the bridge toward the cars, until the nearest of them were only shapes, and the shapes were only headlights. Around Wrath it was thinner, drifting past in slow grey sheets.

'Good. Nobody sees much in dust.'

He was not supposed to be seen. That was the first rule, and for the last minute he had been breaking it in front of sixteen cars and a tour bus.

He looked at the thing.

The fall had broken it. Its left side was caved in from shoulder to hip. One leg was gone at the thigh. Most of the lower jaw had gone again. It lay on the road for a moment, the way the man had lain in the clearing.

Then it pressed both hands flat against the road.

Wrath watched the cracks in the surface around its palms.

At first nothing happened. Then grey grains began to seep out of them, a few at a time, creeping across the road toward its hands. Over the barrier, on the nearest pillar, a thin grey line was climbing the concrete from far below.

Concrete had been sand and stone once. It could still drink from it.

Just slowly.

The leg began to grow back. It took its time.

'A window. Not a win.'

He shifted his grip on the scarf.

Behind him, out of the dust and the dark mouth of the north tunnel, came a long black car with tinted windows, its headlights still on from the tunnel, its brakes already screaming.