The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel
Published 2013 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Scroll of Years
. Copyright © 2013 by Chris Willrich. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
“The Thief with Two Deaths” originally appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
June 2000.
Cover illustration © Kerem Beyit
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Willrich, Chris, 1967–
The scroll of years : a gaunt and bone novel / by Chris Willrich.
pages cm
ISBN 978–1–61614–813–3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–1–61614–814–0 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3623.I57775S37 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013022378
Printed in the United States of America
For Becky
Part One. Flybait and Next-One-A-Boy
Part Two. Lightning Bug and Walking Stick
Gaunt and Bone would not exist at all without Gordon Van Gelder, editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. Some supporting characters in their adventures were suggested by Andrew McCool, Becky Willrich, and Mike Wolfson. I’m grateful to many others who’ve helped keep the rogues on the road with advice, encouragement, or support, including John Joseph Adams, Scott H. Andrews, Carla Campbell, Crystalwizard, Jim Frenkel, Phoebe Harris, Matthew Hughes, Nik Hawkins, Howard Andrew Jones, Jade Lee, Susan McAlexander, John Morressy, John O’Neill, Bev Olson, Robert Rhodes, Anne Rohweder, Scott Stanton, Scott Taylor, and Carl and Mavis Willrich.
In making the patchwork quilt called “Qiangguo” I am indebted to many people. My late mother-in-law Jane Eades would sometimes tell stories she heard as a girl in China, and a couple of those tales are in this book. Ann Hsu, Larry Hsu, Paul T. S. Lee, and Shu-Hua Liu helped with language questions. Paul also contributed the name Meteor-Plum. The poems of the “sage painter” are variations on the Cold Mountain poems of Hanshan, which I am fortunate to have encountered in translations by Red Pine and Gary Snyder. Several nonfiction works served as inspiration, particularly
God’s Chinese Son
and
The Search for Modern China
by Jonathan Spence,
The Arts of China
by Michael Sullivan, and the James Legge translation of the
Tao Te Ching
. However, any foolishness in how I have used this material is wholly my own.
I am particularly grateful to my agent, Joe Monti, to my editor at Pyr, Lou Anders, and to my sharp-eyed copyeditor Gabrielle Harbowy. And most especially to my wife Becky, whose reaction to my writing ambitions was never “Are you kidding?” but always “Go for it.”
The howls of trained springfangs fluted through the gorge. Someone in the temple had seen him, or they’d been loosed for someone else. Imago Bone froze. Springfangs could hear a rabbit scratch itself a mile off.
But the Door of Penitence was not going to come to him.
He shifted until he sat, there on the track he’d just stumbled upon amid the boulders flanking this desert ravine, and with the silence due him from long years of thieving, Bone removed his boots. His bare feet greeted the cooling desert air. He’d never walked this particular track, but he knew the Brothers and Sisters of the Swan, surely with love and mercy in their hearts, had set pit traps here. Nevertheless, it was his best chance. In the ebbing sunset, casting jagged red-edged shadows everywhere like a promise of future blood, he had to trust to his feet.
For speed Bone had buried his pack half a day back, and thus as he stood he laced the boots together and tied them to his belt, so that their jostling could deliver a metaphorical kick in the behind. He could use all the motivation he could get.
He picked his way along the path, his progress slowing as the sun departed. Overhead the Sanctuary glowed pink, a granite promontory painted and sculpted to resemble a titanic, ravaged white feather that had crashed to earth. By now there should be a light high in the upper sanctum, but that window was dark. Below too, shadows pooled everywhere. Lighting like a grasshopper from rock to rock, Bone squinted for thief-worthy landing spots. Increasingly he relied on the skin of his feet to test those stones, and soon he less resembled a locust than a water-strider as he stretched out one leg, then the other.
More howls, closer now. With the gorge’s echoes he could not determine the direction. Time for the boots? No.
Nothing we do is direct.
The words of Master Sidewinder came to Bone, borne on memory’s winds from Bone’s first night amid the thousand towers of Palmary.
Our work is too delicate for that. We do not fight, save by ambush. We pass the paucity of doors, where a wealth of windows awaits. Why stalk an Everlux amid its score of guards, when a gawking noblewoman’s necklace will do as nicely?
Why run races with springfangs?
Imago Bone wished he could answer his long-dead teacher. Success would have to do for his reply.
If he could continue slow and silent, he might have a chance. Already he could discern a white wall beyond the oranges, browns, and shrub-covered greens of the narrow path, with an iron door set into it. Peace and security, that contrast promised, though not for him. He thought of his lover awaiting him, days away in the desert. It was hard to maintain this deliberate pace. He wanted to demolish the distance between himself and his answers.
But even penitents on their way to and from ordeals in the Sandboil took this path slowly, avoiding the sharpest rocks. And the pits.
His right foot was just brushing upon an unusually large and inviting flat slab of a stone, when he had a vision of this bend in the path as seen from above, on the day when Brother Clement had, perhaps unwisely, shown Bone the bell loft. Looking down, Bone had observed this track snaking amid the rugged scree on the north side of the gorge, and a line of little figures just reaching this bend. Not for the first time, the city thief had wondered at the religious fervor that brought this order out into the desert, twenty miles from the shady spires of Palmary. The believers of the Swan (his lover included, depending upon her mood) even admitted their goddess was dead. Yet as if by some principle of sympathy, they displayed great talent for ushering others to the same state. Bone had noted then, how the penitents’ leader had them detour well around the flat stone. He’d thought it peculiar at the time . . .
He paused, precarious, foot extended.
It was at that moment that the springfangs growled.
Bone looked up and saw that the beasts had not caught up with him after all.
They had instead been waiting for him, hiding behind the rocks on either side of the path.
The two lithe creatures scrambled atop boulders, regarding their prey. Heart hammering, he regarded them back. They had the bulk of bears and the grace of leopards. Their coats were a swirl of oranges, reds, yellows, and browns, and by day they were well camouflaged for the desert. In the moonless dusk they appeared scabrous, save for the slitted eyes that glimmered in the last rays of the sun, and the long, tapered ears that jabbed backward like daggers poised to throw.
Bone wanted to throw one of his own daggers, but at best that would slow one of the twain. The springfangs made rattling sounds in their throats and bared their teeth.
It was the teeth of springfangs that made them the stuff of scholarly feuds and campfire legends. Each boasted an asymmetrical set, so that one of the pair bore an oversized saber-like canine upon the left side, and the other brandished a matching tooth upon the right. The skin on the opposing side of the mouth was thin and readily pulled back to reveal a phalanx of grinders. Some scholars and campfire wags had it that ancient wizards bred matched pairs to drag their chariots and rend their enemies. Whatever their origins, today a mated duo would hunt side-by-side, their synchronized attacks simulating one voracious maw.