The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (15 page)

Bone launched himself at the one at the desk, tackling him—no, her.

She squirmed and pounded and scratched and bit, and Bone found himself getting angry at her unwillingness to succumb to his superior thiefcraft. She grabbed at something on the desk and tried to club him with it. Luckily it was just a scroll. He shifted his weight and she fell. By this time Lightning Bug was there, and the second intruder already lay still.

Lightning Bug reached out and performed a rapid series of jabs upon the foe’s head and chest.

The young woman stiffened and ceased to do anything but breathe.

“That,” gasped Bone, “is quite a trick.”

“Knowledge of the pressure points is very old,” Lightning Bug said, “but the more exotic techniques are hard to master.”

Bone nodded as if he understood.

Lightning Bug said, “Help me make them comfortable,” and together they dragged the intruders to a couch and Bone stood over them, feeling superfluous, while Lightning Bug fetched a lamp.

Oil hissed and flame weaved, and the room awakened with flickering light. This was the scholarly nook of the house, draped with hanging scrolls of tumultuous mountains and serene lakes, banners of calligraphy like traces of dancing ink, and a hanging carpet dizzying in its unity of reds and yellows, squares and circles. A gnarled tree root in one corner served as the stand for peculiar artifacts of ceramic and wood and bronze, and a desk stood opposite with a pen and an ink block impressed with a tangle of dragons.

Previously Bone had only glanced at this room. He’d been distracted by Gaunt’s needs, and the chamber’s alienness baffled his appraiser’s eye. Now he responded to the weight of knowledge and tradition as if he stood in the workshop of a Western wizard. The presence of arts unguessed stirred his sense of wonder and his caution. He stood light on his feet.

Lightning Bug’s voice pierced his mood, made the study seem less a somber encoding of culture, and more a record of a mind’s pleasures. “I recognize them!” she said. “The girl has been my student, of sorts. A runaway; I taught her in return for labor. A project, really. The boy I have seen here and there. He is a bandit, or likes to think he is.”

Bone realized he recognized them, too. “The ambush at the stone! These two were the wisest of the bandits, never having actually attacked us. How did they end up here?”

“A question to be asked over rice wine,” said Lightning Bug.

Noises filled the upper stories, and as Lightning Bug filled in her husband and stilled the excited children in rapid-fire speech, the Western thieves checked on Eshe, who had not awakened despite all.

“She’s just sleeping deeply,” Gaunt said, after studying the enigmatic Kpalamaa woman, she who was sailor, cook, and Swan priestess. “As I wish I was.”

“You could certainly return to bed.”

“And miss how the local thieves surprised Imago Bone? I think not!”

He helped her downstairs and into a chair, which he crouched beside. Lightning Bug handed him a porcelain cup with a clear, warm liquor that burned in an unfamiliar but not altogether unpleasant way. “Not for you,” Lightning Bug snapped at Gaunt’s outstretched hand, in such a matter-of-fact way that Gaunt took no offense. “Tea is coming.
Tror
!”

With wine and tea, they contemplated the paralyzed prisoners.

“They will snap out of it soon,” Lightning Bug said. “The technique is essentially harmless. They may feel a little drunk.”

Bone felt a little drunk. It had hit him at last. Here he was, on the eastern fringe of the known world! He, a mere second-story man! And it was here Gaunt would bear their child. He took another sip.

The young man and woman on the couch stirred.
I was never such a pup
, Bone thought of the boy, and,
Odd, I feel protective of the girl. And a little afraid of her, too.

The young bandits woke up, and were immediately caught in the volley of Lightning Bug’s angry speech. Their eyes widened in shock—and in the girl’s case, recognition. They lifted their hands and just as quickly made innocent-sounding objections. To a screech of a question, the girl knelt before Lightning Bug.

“This is,” Tror whispered, “that girl. The one my wife takes in now and then. She has come on bad times.”

“She has talent,” Bone said.

“Oh?” Tror said.

“A quick mind,” Gaunt put in. “The boy too.”

“Hm,” Tror said.

The interview was proceeding. The girl and boy were miming many strange things as they talked—a horse, falling leaves or snow, tumbling into a pit or off a cliff, dragons. And they pointed at the scroll upon the floor.

“I believe,” Lightning Bug said in Roil, raising the scroll, “these particular trespassers can be released.”

“What they have done is very serious,” Tror said. “They are old enough to suffer consequences for their actions.”

“I say the consequences should be these: they will do hard labor for this family, for a month. If they demur, we will call the authorities down upon them. For they were pursued by Walking Stick himself, and they will not want his wrath.”

“Hm,” Tror said. “So many guests . . .”

“These two, Flybait and Next-One-A-Boy, will sleep outside. They may come upstairs if the river floods. And Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone? I would like you to instruct them in your language, and for them to teach you ours.”

And so it was that Next One found herself instructing not just a smelly bandit but two pale barbarians (for she taught them reading and writing all at once, and Flybait needed at least half of that). From the moment she’d tumbled out of the scroll-world and recognized Lightning Bug’s home, Next One had concluded that the workings of the Way were somehow guiding her like the Ochre River’s currents might sweep a carp. She decided she’d best not swim against them. And when Lightning Bug herself stood revealed as the Woman in Black, she could only kneel.

“Here is how it is,” her mentor told her then, in the tone of an outlaw of the Rivers-and-Lakes. “You and bandit-boy arrived via the magic painting. You know it and I know it. The painting is mine now. That’s half my price for not turning you in to the Empire. The other half is that you’re going to help me bring down your gallant fraternity. They are becoming a nuisance. Oh, and the third half is that you’re helping those ghost-faced lovebirds over there speak like civilized people.”

“It is not our fault!” said Flybait, and, “Ten thousand abject pardons! We were not even there!” and many other things to this effect.

“Everything is your fault,” Lightning Bug said. “Everything is my fault. Everything is everybody’s fault. Therefore, everything is nobody’s fault.”

“Huh?” said Flybait.

“Hush,” Next One hissed. “She’s being mystical.”

“Oh.”

“You will learn to work together,” Lightning Bug said, “like the opposites that bring forth the stuff of nature—light and darkness, rain and sun, man and woman.”

“Hm,” Flybait said. “Tea and beer?”

“It was an example of cosmic opposites!” Flybait protested after they were exiled to the stilts of the house, with naught but sleeping gear and a scroll of instructions. “Have you tried drinking one right after the other? It doesn’t work. You get industrious and maudlin at the same time. You weep, twitching.”

“I am going to weep twitching. Shut up and go to sleep.”

“We could just escape, you know.”

“From
her
? I now know her for the Woman in Black. We’re not going to escape from her. And even if we did, the Cloud and Soil Society will still think we betrayed them. Our best chance is to stay right here.”

“And
really
betray the Cloud and Soil Society? They weren’t so bad to us, Next One.”

“Chang wasn’t too bad. Exceedingly Accurate Wu, now . . .”

“Wu . . . so the Woman in Black is going up against Wu.”

“We’re going up against Wu,” Next One said.

“You have a grudge against her, huh?”

“We’ll see if she calls me a child this time.”

Sleeping outside wasn’t really so bad, as long as there was warmth and some cover for the rain; she’d done it before, when her parents punished her for yelling at the Little Emperor after he punched and bit her. The night was chilly, but Lightning Bug and Tror had provided good bedrolls. River ripples, cricket trills, owl hoots, and fish splashes made peculiar music beside bamboo stilts and stars. Even Flybait amused her, rolling back and forth, sometimes emitting a snore, sometimes a muttered, “Ha-ha,” or “Run away,” or “I didn’t do it.” At last sleep came, and whether she dreamed of cold mountains or cold families, she remembered nothing.

Next One had to wait to satisfy her grudge against Wu, for the next weeks were chores, and language lessons, and more chores, and all of it involved more barbarians than she’d ever known before.

She knew not what to make of them. The only foreign devils she’d heard much about were monkey people from the lands across the eastern sea, and considering these were supposed to possess stone skeletons, prodigious magics, supernatural fighting arts, and the wisdom of two-year-olds, Next One suspected the stories were a trifle exaggerated. Rather than foils for the heroes of legend, these real barbarians seemed perplexities for the sages.

Imago Bone was pale and thin enough to be a hungry ghost, those emaciated specters who longed for burnt offerings of food and money, if they weren’t after the very breath of the living. Certainly he gazed at potstickers and gold with enough longing to qualify. But in his leaping and climbing and skulking he might have been a monkey person indeed.

Persimmon Gaunt was even paler, but she was near to bursting with a barbarian baby-to-come. Her frame spoke of action and theft and generosity and narrow escapes. Her eyes spoke of tombs and flowers and elegies and inevitable decay. Her voice spoke of all these things and the glimmer of a silver thread that bound them.

Eshe of the Fallen Swan was dark like summer shadows in the mountains, and her smile was like the moon flung high in a winter sky. All seasons found their record on her face, which spun through springtime and autumn with the telling of one anecdote of Swanisle far away, or Kpalamaa, farther. If common wisdom was to know the dripping of years, then Eshe was wise with the torrent of moments.

“These are our companions,” Flybait scoffed, “for storming the gallant fraternity?”

“Two only,” Next One said, “for Gaunt will not join us. Rather she is writing a speech for what Bone calls our ‘caper.’”

“I know that barbarian word now! It means to tumble and prance like a fool.”

“I fear there may be some similarity,” Next One said.

It would be wrong to say that, for Gaunt and Bone, a month passed uneventfully. But in lives that had featured cruel sorcerers, murderous mermaids, and angels of death, the next weeks held a certain charm.

Gaunt swelled, and the life within her kicked and twisted. Bone made himself useful in lawful ways. He was clever at hunting and fearless in repairing roofs. He brought skins for the leatherworkers and closed leaks for the woodworkers. It was Lightning Bug who found him such clients, and Bone sensed there was a chain of favors being forged—but that was her own business.

He found able assistants in Flybait and Next One, and his language lessons often focused on such terms as
rope, handhold
,
balance
,
leap
, and
escape
. The town magistrate raised eyebrows at these nimble strangers, but Lightning Bug and Tror whispered to him about the fate of Five Finger Chang, about the involvement of certain barbarians in that event, and about the probability that the Cloud and Soil Society might have a second encounter.