Movement Four — The Man Who Kept Coming

There had been, across however many uncounted years accumulated before the fight this account is finally ready to tell, a great many challengers whose names and faces Torvin no longer bothered keeping track of individually — not out of disrespect for what each of them had risked simply by standing against him, but because a man who fights this many opponents, across this much unmeasured time, eventually learns to hold the fighting itself as the memory worth keeping, letting the specific faces blur together into something closer to weather than to individual history. A few stood out anyway, the way a few storms stand out among a lifetime of ordinary rain. There had been a woman, some indeterminate stretch of years back, who fought with a pair of curved blades in a style his world had never produced, moving with a fluid, almost dancing economy that had very nearly undone him before he adjusted his own footing to account for it. He had beaten her, in the end, though it had cost him three broken ribs and a wound along his forearm that took longer to close than any wound had taken in longer than he could remember — a detail he'd noted with some private unease at the time, though he never let himself examine the unease too closely. There had been a boy, barely old enough by his world's reckoning to call himself a man, who fought with nothing but his bare hands and an expression of total, uncomplicated terror the entire time, and who Torvin had ended quickly and gently, out of the same instinct that made him treat every genuinely outmatched opponent with more care than the fight itself strictly required. He remembered wondering, afterward, what kind of a life sent a boy that frightened into a fight that dangerous. He never got an answer. The boy, like all the others, simply vanished once it was over, the same quiet, unremarkable dissolution he had stopped questioning a very long time ago. There had been, more recently, a man built like a mountain who fought with nothing at all resembling technique, relying entirely on a raw and staggering strength that had nearly ended the match in the opening exchange, before Torvin remembered, mid-desperation, an old lesson his father had once beaten into him about using an opponent's momentum against the very mass that generated it. He had won that one too, though it had taken him longer, and hurt considerably more, than most of the challengers before him. He had begun to notice, in the stretch of matches immediately preceding the one this account is finally ready to describe, a particular quality creeping into his victories that he did not entirely like the shape of. He was still winning. He had not lost, not once, in all the uncounted years since the light. But the winning had started to cost him more, each time, than the time before it — not dramatically, not in any single obvious leap, but the way a slope grows steeper by degrees too small to notice individually, until you look back from far enough along it and realize how much ground you've actually climbed. He told himself this meant his opponents were simply improving — that whatever force kept sending new challengers his way had started sending him better ones, worthier ones, exactly the kind of escalating test a man who wanted to remain the strongest should be grateful to receive. He did not consider, because nothing in his understanding of the world had ever given him reason to consider it, that the truer explanation might be simpler and considerably less flattering: that he himself, whatever he had become since the light, was not quite what he used to be, and that the accumulated cost of an eternity of fighting was beginning, in ways too gradual to notice day by day, to wear down even a strength this considerable. He was thinking of none of this, on the particular morning the challenger this account has been building toward finally arrived. He was thinking, if he was thinking of anything beyond the plain immediate business of another day's training, of his father, and of a promise made in red dirt so long ago that the man who'd asked for it had faded, in Torvin's own memory, into something closer to myth than to the specific, scarred, limping figure he had actually been.

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