The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (18 page)

“I don’t mind,” said the big man, “as long as you hold still.”

Bone drew and threw a dagger, hitting Feng in the eye. The axeman screamed.

“I didn’t do it!” Flybait yelled, flailing free of his startled guards. “I didn’t do it!”

“There!” called Exceedingly Accurate Wu, drawing a dagger of her own. “A Western ghost! I knew it!”

“Boo,” Bone said, and ducked just in time to avoid Wu’s dagger, which hit the nearby rocks sharply enough to draw sparks. Wu was accurate indeed.

He felt a degree of kinship for Flybait, who despite his posture of self-centeredness was obviously risking his neck to impress a woman. Bone bellowed, “I am no ordinary ghost! I am a servant of the War God Guanti, he of the great clomping foot!”

There were fresh cries of alarm—but through all cut the voice of Wu: “That is pronounced Kuan Ti.”

“That’s what I said! Do you think I would get the Dread One’s name wrong?”

“I think,” Wu said, “that you and Flybait are cut from the same cloth. Funeral cloth. Kill them both!”

Bone threw a dagger her way and dove out of the opening. He hoped to sufficiently distract the bandits that Flybait would find a way to escape.

In fact, the bandits were all looking up.

Someone was cackling on high—someone dressed in black and clinging to a stalactite. “Rejoice!” came the voice of Lightning Bug. “Your fate is sealed! The war god has chosen you to be his shield bearers. Rejoice, as death initiates you into an eternity of service!” She continued in much this vein, plundering phrasing from the
Classic of Cardinal Directions
, the
Nine-Times-Nine Ruses
, and the
Romance of the Outlaw Kingdoms
. Persimmon Gaunt had researched Lightning Bug’s speech well, drawing forth especially gruesome details as to the manner of this promotion—how the god’s foot would squeeze out spirits like the guts from stomped crabs.

The upper waterfall, too, ran red.

Bandits were exiting at high speed. But Exceedingly Accurate Wu took aim at the shadowy form and threw her dagger.

Even Lightning Bug was not invulnerable, and the blade caught her arm.

“Look!” crowed Wu. “There is blood! True blood! Let outlaws of courage rally around me!”

Wu’s confidence secured herself five champions even as their brethren hurried out of the cave. Fortunately Flybait’s immediate captors were among the departed, the half-blind Feng of the axe included. Bone and Flybait took cover behind a stalagmite. Wu called to her men, “Give me daggers! I’ll down this ill-omened bird.”

Bone eyed the gigantic axe abandoned by Feng. “Two of us could lift that,” he observed.

“You are crazy,” Flybait said.

“Want to try it?”

“Sure.”

Soon two screaming thieves were charging the bandits with an axe bigger than either of them. The weapon had not been designed as a pole arm, but it was in such a manner that Bone and Flybait rushed the knot of foes. Distracted by the wulin woman leaping from stalactite to stalactite, the outlaws were unprepared for an attack of such poetic stupidity. Two of them simply toppled as they leapt out of the way; a third managed to get himself impaled on a flange of the axe, more by his own misjudgment than any precision of the wielders.

At that moment Lightning Bug leapt. Wu threw a dagger with a victorious grin, but Lightning Bug plunged in a corkscrew spin and the dagger slashed her leg but did no worse. Wulin woman and bandit queen connected with a sprawl.

Bone saw that two bandits might readily pounce upon Lightning Bug, so he tackled one. Flybait tripped the other. While thus occupied, the man and the boy could not secure their advantage with the remaining three. Bone sensed their approach, and felt the scales tipping against him.

Now came a screech of fury and an ululating war cry. Next One and Eshe were here, and they carried a giant burning shoe between them. They toppled one bandit with the toe and brought another to heel. The remaining free bandit, clutching a gut wound from the huge axe, decided he hadn’t the stomach for this fight. He ran, and the newcomers screamed inventive invectives from Qiangguo and Kpalamaa as he went. They proceeded to stomp the fallen bandits, who scrambled toward the sunlight after their companion.

Bone had his foe in a chokehold. Flybait gripped his own opponent’s leg like an angry lap-dog.

“Get out of here, Muttering Chung!” Next One screamed in the man’s face. “Wu’s finished! It’s over!”

“. . .” said Muttering Chung, scrambling as fast as he could away from the crazy attackers.

“Ow-ow-ow-ow,” said Flybait, before at last letting go of the departing Chung.

Wu stood alone, with a single dagger, backed up against a stalagmite. Lightning Bug crouched nearby, hands extended, poised to leap.

“I may be finished,” Wu said, “but I will take one of you with me.”

“We don’t have to kill you,” Next One said.

“We don’t?” Flybait said, rising and checking himself for blood.

“She and I are alike in some ways,” Next One said.

“After how she treated you?”

“I want her to be sorry,” Next One said, “not dead.”

Lightning Bug said, “This one will never be sorry. For this one is always right.”

“Why, thank you,” said Wu.

“It was not a compliment,” said Lightning Bug.

“Can we let her go?” said Next One.

“What say you, Imago Bone?” said Lightning Bug, “Eshe?”

Bone studied Wu. He saw in her eyes the same gleam as certain operators and fanatics he had known, who regarded death and torment with much the same gaze they did the counting of coin. And yet, the paradox: the consideration of the monstrous in others stilled the beast in himself.

“Let her go,” he said. “But since you’re such a good leaper, Lightning Bug . . . drop her off on the far side of the Heavenwall. Give her an opportunity for fresh air, exercise, and a chance to reflect on her misdeeds before she can contrive to return to Abundant Bamboo.”

“That is unwise,” Eshe said. “She has killed and will kill again. Let the record show she has ended just one more life by her actions—her own.”

Bone studied Eshe. “Since when does a house thief argue mercy, and a Swan priestess death?”

“It is a strange world,” Eshe said. “And a dangerous one. I, who hear confessions, know this better than most.”

“You want me dead on instinct, priestess,” Exceedingly Accurate Wu taunted. “I am what you cannot tolerate. For I never lie, yet you are all about lies, are you not?”

“I urge you to finish her,” Eshe said.

“Then what about you, Flybait?” Lightning Bug said.

Flybait looked from one grownup to another, seeking a better game than the one he was now forced to play. “I hate killing. I just want to get rich. If you can take Wu beyond the Wall, that works for me.”

Wu laughed. “You just want to impress the girl. And she likes it, though she won’t admit it.”

“Do you want to die, bandit?” Bone said in wonder.

“I want to live,” Wu said, “but only on my terms, barbarian. I have no patience for anything else. I like this offer. I will start again with nothing. I will again have my own kingdom in the wilds. I will not skulk in the alleys, or accept the limits placed on women, or indeed on any person of quality. In victory or defeat, I will never beg.”

“Don’t beg,” Next One said. “I’d sooner hear a tiger weep. Please take her away, Lightning Bug.”

“So I shall,” Lightning Bug said. And she gestured most pointedly, and Wu let the daggers drop. The woman in black led the woman in grey to the cave entrance and they leapt like bats into the night.

Bone lost sight of their shadows beneath the stars, thinking of evils he’d known, evils he’d been. For a moment he thought he saw vast dark wings brush the River of Stars, but for most of the long walk back to Abundant Bamboo he convinced himself it had been his imagination.

Eshe took her leave the next day, claiming to seek employment downriver in the foreign settlement within the great city of Riverclaw. “I have decided to act on behalf of the Church of the Swan and take up Tror’s mission,” she said, “though perhaps my approach will be more subtle.”

“Bellowing atop a crate was not subtle?” Gaunt said. Tror too had told stories. Eshe smiled.

Bone paid Eshe generously for her services as translator, enjoying the illusion that he was becoming some variety of honest man. The woman continued to puzzle him, however. “You spoke in a most grim manner, in the caves. And before, the night of the ambush . . . you had thoughts regarding the assassins who pursued us. In my preoccupation with bandits and babies I had forgotten.”

“Idle thoughts only, Bone. I simply thought you might fetch a high bounty, as an example never to cross the kleptomancers of Palmary. But such speculation is beyond the experience of a mere priestess and cook.”

“I am not so sure about that. It occurs to me that in Swanisle, Church serves Crown.”

Eshe said, “Closer to the truth that Church and Crown are the left and right hand of Swanisle. What is your point?”

Bone shrugged. “My point is that you are an iceberg, Eshe of Kpalamaa.”

“After all this time, you call me cold?”

“Not at all. Icebergs are beautiful things.”

Eshe smiled, revealing bright white teeth. “Seek me in Riverclaw, Gaunt and Bone, if you wish mild free assistance, or serious expensive assistance. And blessings upon your offspring. I suspect it will be a lucky child. We will meet again.”

Next One and Flybait surprised Bone by choosing to go with Eshe.

“We go to the big city,” Next One said in careful Roil. “We will find a way to live.”

“We will get rich,” Flybait said, more directly.

“You will not stay here?” Gaunt said. “You are safe here.”

“In some ways I am like Wu,” Next One said in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, her fierce eyes steady. “I must be free. Here I would always be serving. Even if Lightning Bug is a kind teacher, I must be elsewhere.”

“I am no teacher,” Eshe said. “I will not direct them. I will merely preach at them.”

“Take care of them, Eshe,” Gaunt said, “whatever you call it.”

Part of Bone wanted to go too, to see this metropolis and explore its rooftops . . . and to show these kids the best methods of access to a rich house. Ah, he was no longer young.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Be careful,” said Gaunt.

Bone rubbed Gaunt’s shoulders as she sat beside the house-stilts, and they watched Eshe, Flybait, and Next One hire a riverboat and push off amid the fishermen and merchants drifting, rowing, and sailing down the wide, golden-brown river.

“I hope they will be all right,” he said.

Gaunt said, “You still do not trust Eshe.”

“Oh, I like her.”

“That is not what I said.”

“She is at home nowhere in the world.”

“That describes someone else I know.”

“I would not trust him either.”

For a moment Bone saw Next One raise a bamboo cane she’d claimed from the cave as if stabbing at the sun, and in that moment of girlishness bursting like blue through stormclouds he finally saw her as a child, and wondered how many such unburdened moments under the sky she’d be allowed in the meander of time—she, and the new life within Gaunt too. But Gaunt shifted, and his hands moved to her face, and the thought, and the moment, and the girl, took a turn downriver and were gone.