Colder than Ice, Hotter than Flame, part 3
Part 3.
The cuts on Kit’s face healed slowly as such things go for him, but they were mostly gone by the end of the day. That evening we made it as far as the first of the lodges built along the pass to shelter traders after each stage of the week-long journey. It was shut for the winter, but easy enough to break into. There was no fuel, but neither of us had any qualms about breaking up the furniture and we soon had a blaze roaring in the common room fireplace.
Kit cooked up a decent meal from our rations, so the first part of the night was fairly pleasant. It was marred only by his silence. He had hardly spoken two words since the tollhouse. He responded with warmth to any affectionate gesture on my part and would answer briefly if I spoke to him, but was otherwise withdrawn.
Snow fell very heavily that night. A strong wind came with it, blowing the draft back down the chimney and filling the room with smoke, forcing us to douse the fire. The night became much colder for us then, and we huddled together beneath our coats and blankets.
Even in that chilly common room Kit attempted his morning exercise, but it didn’t go well. Instead of his usual impassive expression a look of frustration crossed his face more than once. There’s a move about a quarter of the way through it where he brings his hands together up the center of his body, turns and shifts his weight to to one leg, then makes a slow lunge pushing his opposite hand forward. Halfway through the motion he stopped. He re-centered his weight and tried again, and then a third time. There was nothing different from how he always did it that I could see, but he shook his head and gave up the whole thing.
The storm had piled snow above the ground floor windows and the front door was blocked, so we put on our snowshoes and exited from an upstairs window. Our progress was much slower that day, and as night fell it was clear we had no hope of gaining the next lodge. Travel after sunset was not an option. The sky had remained cloudy all day, and at night with the moon hidden it was almost pitch black. It would be all too easy to miss places where one side of the gorge fell away, and the drop over the edge was hundreds of feet. There wasn’t even any sheltered ground we could reach. We ended up scooping out a small pit in the snow to block out the wind and using our blankets for a roof to hold in what little warmth there was.
At first I was far from comfortable. Even a week in the mountains hadn’t prepared me for spending the night in these conditions, and I couldn’t stop shivering until Kit curled up against me. He felt warm, very warm. If I didn’t know better―he was never ill―I’d have thought he was feverish. But I wrapped myself around him, and his heat made the cold bearable.
There was no snow that night so we didn’t end up buried, but in the morning Kit wolfed down a double ration for breakfast as if he were starving. He looked it too. He never carried any spare flesh in the fattest of times, but that morning I thought his cheeks had sunk a bit and he looked paler than usual. I wondered if it had been a fever, but when I asked him about it he waved me off.
We made the next lodge by early afternoon, and decided it would be best to stop then rather than spend another night outdoors. Or rather, I decided and Kit didn’t object. It was just as well. Once we settled in, he slumped into a chair looking positively haggard, and his skin was almost paper-white.
“Kit, are you sick?” He shook his head. “Then what is it? If there’s something seriously wrong then the twelfth hell can take this job; we have to get you taken care of.”
He waved a hand. “There’s nothing to be done anyway.”
Coming from him, this despondency was so unusual as to be alarming. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Are you trying to kill yourself? I know you’re upset about the other day, but it’s not worth that!”
He sighed. “No, of course not. The problem is― Well, it’s complicated.”
“So what? We have to take care of it before you fall apart.”
“There is no taking care of it that I can see.” He gave in before the exasperated look I gave him. “All right. But it’s one of those philosophical things you don’t like to hear about.”
“So make it simple. Unless you mean you’re finally sick of philosophy.”
He gave a weak smile. “The martial art Wei-fu taught me has two parts, each with its own discipline and each supporting the other. There’s the outside, which is all about fighting and physical conditioning and all that. Then there’s the inside. That’s harder to manage.
“You’ve heard me talk about qi, right? It’s not so easy to describe it without a lot of other things, but you can think of it as a kind of energy that gives life and movement to living, moving things. When you master your own qi, you find you’re much stronger than you could be otherwise.”
“Is that how you got so fast?”
“Partly. That’s what your fire is too. You keep this huge pool of qi inside that just has to come out sometimes. It feels like fire to you, so it works well for you think about it that way. In my art, we think about it as wind, which is close to what the word for it means.
“You won’t want the details, but qi takes many forms. It enters you through air, the sun, food, and other things; it flows and circulates, and changes from one kind to another. You can improve its flow and strengthen it by certain motions of the body and mind, like the forms I do in the morning. Someone who knows what he’s doing with it can― well, can arrange himself on the inside so that the different kinds of qi feed each other. They become self-generating. So you end up being able to do a lot more with it. That can only happen when you are in a kind of balance. To get that balance, you put opposites against each other and hold them in tension so that neither side is more dominant than it should be. You place heat against cold, dry against damp, left against right, up against down, light against dark; things like that. That’s never been a problem for me. Thanks to you, it’s not even very hard for me to balance male against female.”
I hadn’t expected that, and coughing fit seized me. When I got over it he went on, “But at the tollhouse― I didn’t do what I intended, but to stop myself I had to...” He groped for words. “There was a lot of darkness there. I’ve carried it a long time, ever since Dak was killed, but I always kept it buried so I could act like it wasn’t there. It’s not buried anymore. It all came out. To stop myself, I had to swallow it. As soon as I did, I knew I was in trouble.
“I might have been able to sort it out if I got to it right away, but we couldn’t hang around the tollhouse, could we? By the time we got to the lodge it was too late, and the only thing I could do was try to hold myself together as best I could. But nothing was working right. Usually I pull in qi just by breathing, but not even the forms helped. And then... Last night you were shivering so much. I couldn’t stand seeing you like that.”
“That wasn’t a fever? You made yourself that warm on purpose?”
He nodded. “But I blew through a lot more qi doing it. More than I should have as it turned out, because I fell apart after that. Inside... Some of it is turning the wrong way around and not working with the rest like it should. I had it blocked off, but I’m not strong enough to do that anymore and now it’s messing everything up. Instead of feeding each other, the different kinds are feeding on each other, wasting instead of growing. The qi I have left is draining away, and I can’t stop it.”
I was starting to catch on, but I didn’t want to think it. “What’s happening to you, Kit?”
“There’s no life or movement without qi. I can’t let it run out. So I’m drawing on my body to replace what I’m losing. But it’s going very quickly, and it won’t take long for me to devour myself, so to speak.” He hung his head. “This is all very instructive, but I have no idea what to do now.”
I couldn’t let this happen. My mind spun through possibilities. “Suppose we stay here for a while. Give you time to get back to how you should be.”
He shook his head. “I really messed myself up. It’ll take at least a week, probably longer. In the meantime I’ll need food, lots of it to keep my body from running out. We don’t have enough rations, not if we delay that long and not if I eat like I need to. So I won’t. I’m not going to starve you just to keep myself going, especially when it’ll do no good in the end anyway.”
“We’ll get you back to Wei-fu. He can fix you up, right?”
“Even if this was the kind of thing one person could fix for another, I won’t last long enough to make it there.”
A chill sank into my belly that had nothing to do with the winter. “How long?”
“If I stay here and do nothing, and eat every ration in our packs? Maybe four days. Hiking in this weather? A day and a half at most. I’m sorry, Tam.”
I got up and paced. This was wrong. I wouldn’t accept that he might just up and die of some weird breakdown in the very thing that made him so strong. There had to be an answer. But if Kit didn’t know what to do, how could I? My pacing led me to the window. I stopped and leaned against the sill.
Did I do the right thing when I stopped Kit from killing Tristan? I’d never seen him like that, never even knew he had it in him. Of course he’d killed before, many times. We both had. But it was never like that before, never from pure anger without need. It was like he was gone and an entirely different person took his place, all his happiness and sparkle and love turned to hatred and rage. The cloud of it that surrounded him felt almost demonic. It was frightening. Not on my own account―I hadn’t time to fear for myself―but that he was so changed. I might say I did it because of what Kit had told me the night before, but to be honest I had acted without thinking. I wanted my Kitaro back. Now he’s wasting away because of it.
I thought again about Vahauka. Maybe a killing can be cathartic sometimes. Yeah, fratricide was supposed to bring a curse, but it’s not as if Kit didn’t have good reason. They caused the death of the boy he loved and then tried to kill him. Maybe if he’d gone through with it his darkness would have been spent, and he wouldn’t have been forced to take it in.
And then I went and gave away how cold I was last night. Of course he’d want to do something about it if he could, but it damaged him even more. Now he’s declining and there’s no way to stop it.
That meant I was responsible. I had to fix it somehow. But what to do? I shifted my attention to the view outside the window.
The windward side of the lodge was buried, but the lee side where the window looked out faced a narrow valley that branched off the gorge and was relatively clear of snow. It was dense with tall firs, which I had seen nowhere else in the pass, and they marched down almost to the grounds of the lodge. I scanned the wood for signs of animal life. If I could do some hunting we might be able to stretch out our rations indefinitely and give Kit the time he needed.
I spotted movement. I was expecting deer or squirrel or rabbit or something else familiar, but this was nothing of the kind. A bear? Couldn’t be, not built like that. It was―
“Kit! Look at this!”
He came over to the window and sighted along my pointing finger. When he spotted the creature he gasped. “Gods above! It’s real!”
“I can see that. But what is it?”
“A legend. The Wild Men of the High Pass―there are stories, the kind you tell children at bedtime or around a fire. No one’s ever seen them, not for centuries if you believe the tales.”
“I guess you have to believe them now.”
“Yeah. Wow.” We watched it in silence for a time before Kit spoke up again. “It must be the trade. It hides in valleys like that one while the traffic is going through, but then in the winter it comes out. No one’s ever here in the winter-”
”-so no one’s seen it since the trade started,” I finished. “Makes sense.” We watched it a while longer as the shadows began to lengthen. “Looks like it’s searching for something,” I said. “I wonder what.”
“Let’s find out.”
“Huh?”
“It must need something, and badly if it’s this close to the lodge. Maybe we can help.”
I looked him over. He had not improved. Dark circles had grown under his eyes and his lips had thinned. “Help? Kit, you’re the one who needs help right now.”
“Please, Tam. I don’t have any hope for myself, but I don’t want to sit here and waste away doing nothing either.”
I didn’t want to risk him, but I couldn’t bring to mind any arguments that made sense. “All right. Let’s do it.”
We put on our gear and stepped out. We hadn’t gone more than a few paces toward the wood when the creature spotted us. It bellowed and made for us in a rush.
Kit laid a hand on my wrist before I could draw my sword and began to radiate... something. It was like when he stopped Tristan’s advance by projecting fear, but turned inside out. That was the ice in the belly and the growling of an unseen predator on a dark, moonless night, but this was like the campfire, inviting you into its circle of light and warmth that kept all the monsters at bay. It didn’t repel but invited, welcomed.
The creature slowed to a walk as it relaxed. It looked both of us up and down in turn, and then bared its teeth. At first I took it for a bad sign and was about to go for my sword again when it occurred to me it was smiling.
As for the creature itself―or I should say himself, since he was obviously male―he was more than eight feet tall and covered from head to ankle in long, coarse hair that varied from light gray to black with streaks of pale yellow and chestnut. The hair on the backs of his hands and tops of his feet was shorter and more tightly curled. The face was a little apelike with its protruding brow, but the high forehead and strong chin were more like a man’s. Other details were hidden behind the hair. His feet were large, even larger than you’d expect for his size. His nose was naked, and the eyes that regarded us from beneath his brows were bright but grave.
Abruptly he turned and headed into the valley. When we didn’t move, he looked back toward us and beckoned. At that we followed.
The cuts on Kit’s face healed slowly as such things go for him, but they were mostly gone by the end of the day. That evening we made it as far as the first of the lodges built along the pass to shelter traders after each stage of the week-long journey. It was shut for the winter, but easy enough to break into. There was no fuel, but neither of us had any qualms about breaking up the furniture and we soon had a blaze roaring in the common room fireplace.
Kit cooked up a decent meal from our rations, so the first part of the night was fairly pleasant. It was marred only by his silence. He had hardly spoken two words since the tollhouse. He responded with warmth to any affectionate gesture on my part and would answer briefly if I spoke to him, but was otherwise withdrawn.
Snow fell very heavily that night. A strong wind came with it, blowing the draft back down the chimney and filling the room with smoke, forcing us to douse the fire. The night became much colder for us then, and we huddled together beneath our coats and blankets.
Even in that chilly common room Kit attempted his morning exercise, but it didn’t go well. Instead of his usual impassive expression a look of frustration crossed his face more than once. There’s a move about a quarter of the way through it where he brings his hands together up the center of his body, turns and shifts his weight to to one leg, then makes a slow lunge pushing his opposite hand forward. Halfway through the motion he stopped. He re-centered his weight and tried again, and then a third time. There was nothing different from how he always did it that I could see, but he shook his head and gave up the whole thing.
The storm had piled snow above the ground floor windows and the front door was blocked, so we put on our snowshoes and exited from an upstairs window. Our progress was much slower that day, and as night fell it was clear we had no hope of gaining the next lodge. Travel after sunset was not an option. The sky had remained cloudy all day, and at night with the moon hidden it was almost pitch black. It would be all too easy to miss places where one side of the gorge fell away, and the drop over the edge was hundreds of feet. There wasn’t even any sheltered ground we could reach. We ended up scooping out a small pit in the snow to block out the wind and using our blankets for a roof to hold in what little warmth there was.
At first I was far from comfortable. Even a week in the mountains hadn’t prepared me for spending the night in these conditions, and I couldn’t stop shivering until Kit curled up against me. He felt warm, very warm. If I didn’t know better―he was never ill―I’d have thought he was feverish. But I wrapped myself around him, and his heat made the cold bearable.
There was no snow that night so we didn’t end up buried, but in the morning Kit wolfed down a double ration for breakfast as if he were starving. He looked it too. He never carried any spare flesh in the fattest of times, but that morning I thought his cheeks had sunk a bit and he looked paler than usual. I wondered if it had been a fever, but when I asked him about it he waved me off.
We made the next lodge by early afternoon, and decided it would be best to stop then rather than spend another night outdoors. Or rather, I decided and Kit didn’t object. It was just as well. Once we settled in, he slumped into a chair looking positively haggard, and his skin was almost paper-white.
“Kit, are you sick?” He shook his head. “Then what is it? If there’s something seriously wrong then the twelfth hell can take this job; we have to get you taken care of.”
He waved a hand. “There’s nothing to be done anyway.”
Coming from him, this despondency was so unusual as to be alarming. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Are you trying to kill yourself? I know you’re upset about the other day, but it’s not worth that!”
He sighed. “No, of course not. The problem is― Well, it’s complicated.”
“So what? We have to take care of it before you fall apart.”
“There is no taking care of it that I can see.” He gave in before the exasperated look I gave him. “All right. But it’s one of those philosophical things you don’t like to hear about.”
“So make it simple. Unless you mean you’re finally sick of philosophy.”
He gave a weak smile. “The martial art Wei-fu taught me has two parts, each with its own discipline and each supporting the other. There’s the outside, which is all about fighting and physical conditioning and all that. Then there’s the inside. That’s harder to manage.
“You’ve heard me talk about qi, right? It’s not so easy to describe it without a lot of other things, but you can think of it as a kind of energy that gives life and movement to living, moving things. When you master your own qi, you find you’re much stronger than you could be otherwise.”
“Is that how you got so fast?”
“Partly. That’s what your fire is too. You keep this huge pool of qi inside that just has to come out sometimes. It feels like fire to you, so it works well for you think about it that way. In my art, we think about it as wind, which is close to what the word for it means.
“You won’t want the details, but qi takes many forms. It enters you through air, the sun, food, and other things; it flows and circulates, and changes from one kind to another. You can improve its flow and strengthen it by certain motions of the body and mind, like the forms I do in the morning. Someone who knows what he’s doing with it can― well, can arrange himself on the inside so that the different kinds of qi feed each other. They become self-generating. So you end up being able to do a lot more with it. That can only happen when you are in a kind of balance. To get that balance, you put opposites against each other and hold them in tension so that neither side is more dominant than it should be. You place heat against cold, dry against damp, left against right, up against down, light against dark; things like that. That’s never been a problem for me. Thanks to you, it’s not even very hard for me to balance male against female.”
I hadn’t expected that, and coughing fit seized me. When I got over it he went on, “But at the tollhouse― I didn’t do what I intended, but to stop myself I had to...” He groped for words. “There was a lot of darkness there. I’ve carried it a long time, ever since Dak was killed, but I always kept it buried so I could act like it wasn’t there. It’s not buried anymore. It all came out. To stop myself, I had to swallow it. As soon as I did, I knew I was in trouble.
“I might have been able to sort it out if I got to it right away, but we couldn’t hang around the tollhouse, could we? By the time we got to the lodge it was too late, and the only thing I could do was try to hold myself together as best I could. But nothing was working right. Usually I pull in qi just by breathing, but not even the forms helped. And then... Last night you were shivering so much. I couldn’t stand seeing you like that.”
“That wasn’t a fever? You made yourself that warm on purpose?”
He nodded. “But I blew through a lot more qi doing it. More than I should have as it turned out, because I fell apart after that. Inside... Some of it is turning the wrong way around and not working with the rest like it should. I had it blocked off, but I’m not strong enough to do that anymore and now it’s messing everything up. Instead of feeding each other, the different kinds are feeding on each other, wasting instead of growing. The qi I have left is draining away, and I can’t stop it.”
I was starting to catch on, but I didn’t want to think it. “What’s happening to you, Kit?”
“There’s no life or movement without qi. I can’t let it run out. So I’m drawing on my body to replace what I’m losing. But it’s going very quickly, and it won’t take long for me to devour myself, so to speak.” He hung his head. “This is all very instructive, but I have no idea what to do now.”
I couldn’t let this happen. My mind spun through possibilities. “Suppose we stay here for a while. Give you time to get back to how you should be.”
He shook his head. “I really messed myself up. It’ll take at least a week, probably longer. In the meantime I’ll need food, lots of it to keep my body from running out. We don’t have enough rations, not if we delay that long and not if I eat like I need to. So I won’t. I’m not going to starve you just to keep myself going, especially when it’ll do no good in the end anyway.”
“We’ll get you back to Wei-fu. He can fix you up, right?”
“Even if this was the kind of thing one person could fix for another, I won’t last long enough to make it there.”
A chill sank into my belly that had nothing to do with the winter. “How long?”
“If I stay here and do nothing, and eat every ration in our packs? Maybe four days. Hiking in this weather? A day and a half at most. I’m sorry, Tam.”
I got up and paced. This was wrong. I wouldn’t accept that he might just up and die of some weird breakdown in the very thing that made him so strong. There had to be an answer. But if Kit didn’t know what to do, how could I? My pacing led me to the window. I stopped and leaned against the sill.
Did I do the right thing when I stopped Kit from killing Tristan? I’d never seen him like that, never even knew he had it in him. Of course he’d killed before, many times. We both had. But it was never like that before, never from pure anger without need. It was like he was gone and an entirely different person took his place, all his happiness and sparkle and love turned to hatred and rage. The cloud of it that surrounded him felt almost demonic. It was frightening. Not on my own account―I hadn’t time to fear for myself―but that he was so changed. I might say I did it because of what Kit had told me the night before, but to be honest I had acted without thinking. I wanted my Kitaro back. Now he’s wasting away because of it.
I thought again about Vahauka. Maybe a killing can be cathartic sometimes. Yeah, fratricide was supposed to bring a curse, but it’s not as if Kit didn’t have good reason. They caused the death of the boy he loved and then tried to kill him. Maybe if he’d gone through with it his darkness would have been spent, and he wouldn’t have been forced to take it in.
And then I went and gave away how cold I was last night. Of course he’d want to do something about it if he could, but it damaged him even more. Now he’s declining and there’s no way to stop it.
That meant I was responsible. I had to fix it somehow. But what to do? I shifted my attention to the view outside the window.
The windward side of the lodge was buried, but the lee side where the window looked out faced a narrow valley that branched off the gorge and was relatively clear of snow. It was dense with tall firs, which I had seen nowhere else in the pass, and they marched down almost to the grounds of the lodge. I scanned the wood for signs of animal life. If I could do some hunting we might be able to stretch out our rations indefinitely and give Kit the time he needed.
I spotted movement. I was expecting deer or squirrel or rabbit or something else familiar, but this was nothing of the kind. A bear? Couldn’t be, not built like that. It was―
“Kit! Look at this!”
He came over to the window and sighted along my pointing finger. When he spotted the creature he gasped. “Gods above! It’s real!”
“I can see that. But what is it?”
“A legend. The Wild Men of the High Pass―there are stories, the kind you tell children at bedtime or around a fire. No one’s ever seen them, not for centuries if you believe the tales.”
“I guess you have to believe them now.”
“Yeah. Wow.” We watched it in silence for a time before Kit spoke up again. “It must be the trade. It hides in valleys like that one while the traffic is going through, but then in the winter it comes out. No one’s ever here in the winter-”
”-so no one’s seen it since the trade started,” I finished. “Makes sense.” We watched it a while longer as the shadows began to lengthen. “Looks like it’s searching for something,” I said. “I wonder what.”
“Let’s find out.”
“Huh?”
“It must need something, and badly if it’s this close to the lodge. Maybe we can help.”
I looked him over. He had not improved. Dark circles had grown under his eyes and his lips had thinned. “Help? Kit, you’re the one who needs help right now.”
“Please, Tam. I don’t have any hope for myself, but I don’t want to sit here and waste away doing nothing either.”
I didn’t want to risk him, but I couldn’t bring to mind any arguments that made sense. “All right. Let’s do it.”
We put on our gear and stepped out. We hadn’t gone more than a few paces toward the wood when the creature spotted us. It bellowed and made for us in a rush.
Kit laid a hand on my wrist before I could draw my sword and began to radiate... something. It was like when he stopped Tristan’s advance by projecting fear, but turned inside out. That was the ice in the belly and the growling of an unseen predator on a dark, moonless night, but this was like the campfire, inviting you into its circle of light and warmth that kept all the monsters at bay. It didn’t repel but invited, welcomed.
The creature slowed to a walk as it relaxed. It looked both of us up and down in turn, and then bared its teeth. At first I took it for a bad sign and was about to go for my sword again when it occurred to me it was smiling.
As for the creature itself―or I should say himself, since he was obviously male―he was more than eight feet tall and covered from head to ankle in long, coarse hair that varied from light gray to black with streaks of pale yellow and chestnut. The hair on the backs of his hands and tops of his feet was shorter and more tightly curled. The face was a little apelike with its protruding brow, but the high forehead and strong chin were more like a man’s. Other details were hidden behind the hair. His feet were large, even larger than you’d expect for his size. His nose was naked, and the eyes that regarded us from beneath his brows were bright but grave.
Abruptly he turned and headed into the valley. When we didn’t move, he looked back toward us and beckoned. At that we followed.