The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (24 page)

There seemed little choice. A few more minutes of life might provide a few more opportunities. Bone raised his hands. “I can surrender myself only.”

“So we see,” said Hackwroth, as Lampblack leapt off the dragon to secure the thief. Bone was transfixed by the livid bright scarring of the auditor’s face, the dull hatred of the auditor’s stare.

Bone complied, and at Lampblack’s direction grabbed the lacing of ropes that wrapped around the dragon’s upper neck. Up he went, considering the merits of simply scrambling down the far side. The odds of stabbing or immolation seemed unacceptably high. Wait, he told himself. The dragon rose, and the staring, shouting citizens became the apparent size of cats, then squirrels, then ants. Buildings and ships whirled below.

“A long chase you gave us,” Lampblack said, “from the Sanctuary of the Fallen Feather to this land of strange minds.”

“I’ve surrendered myself to you,” Bone said, “because of your reputation as honest workmen.”

“We have earned that reputation,” Hackwroth said, and Lampblack added, “Sometimes to our cost.”

“Then hear me out. I assume your task is to audit myself and Persimmon Gaunt.”

“Indeed,” Hackwroth said. “Your minds will be pulped, the juice of knowledge extracted.”

“Which the kleptomancers of Palmary will sip,” said Lampblack.

Riverclaw spun below like the appendage it was named for, following the delta of the Ochre. From here Bone could clearly see the Red and Blue Heavenwalls merging at their heads like mating dragons, their nuzzling resulting in the Forbidden City. Their claws made divisions of the wards facing the river and the sea, while their gigantic backs framed a shadowy district inland. Seeing their stone embrace, Bone ached for his lover. “Is this,” he said, “what I have bought with my surrender?”

“For your wisdom,” Lampblack said, “we will make your auditing more graceful. There may be enough of you left to perform simple repetitive tasks. You might be a farm hand, a stone-hauler, a gravedigger. The opportunities are endless.”

“So is my gratitude.”

“You killed two kleptomancers, Imago Bone. Persimmon Gaunt was an accessory. You were both unwise to return to their realm.”

Bone nodded. “I had assumed they would let sleeping bygones lie.”

“They are patient, and forget little.”

As Lampblack spoke, Hackwroth guided the dragon into the clouds. Bone shivered in the misty chill, though he could sense the supernatural fire coursing within the creature beneath. A hush came upon the world, and Bone felt light-headed. He gripped the ropes tighter, though he suspected falling was an easy death he’d not be allowed. He recalled Eshe’s words the night of the bandits:
What if you are not simply a threat, but an opportunity?

“So be it,” Bone said. “And no others are included in the contract?”

“You refer, I assume, to your unborn child,” Hackwroth said, “whom I have glimpsed in the shard.” (Here the auditor’s eyes crossed and consulted the fragment of magic mirror.) “Of course he will need to be cared for. The kleptomancers will claim him.”

“Him?” Bone said. “You know the gender?”

“Indeed. As I know his three most probable names. It is a burden, my knowledge.”

Bone could not resist. “What are the names?”

Hackwroth studied him. “Do you not understand your position, thief?”

“Please. The names.”

“
Innocence
, if his parents name him.
Kuang Nu You
, if named by the folk of Qiangguo.
Lamprey
, if named by the kleptomancers.”

“Innocence,” Bone said. Then, “I’m surprised we’d name him that.”

“You haven’t,” Hackwroth snapped, images swirling in the mirror in his head. “All is in flux. Now is the time of decision.”

“I’d prefer Imago Junior.”

“Enough,” Lampblack said. “You would bargain? Bargain. Else we’ll disassemble you here and now.”

“A guaranteed catch of me, if you recover Gaunt from her current fate, and let her go.”

“You hope by this to save mother and child,” Hackwroth said. “But the cost is too high. It is the child the kleptomancers want most.”

“You have revealed something, then. You would doom an innocent?”

Lampblack said, “No one is innocent.”

Bone laughed bitterly. “That’s a lie I’m familiar with, having used it in my own profession.”

Hackwroth said, “You think us unacquainted with familial love? It is my own father here, whom you doused in boiling water.”

Lampblack said, “And it is my own son, who suffered from my experiment that shattered a scrying mirror. It is greater comfort than I deserve, that he chose to stay with me, and learn my work.”

“I saw the futures where I turned to bitterness,” Hackwroth said. “And saw that staying with my father would bring me to a glorious bright fate, though the details escape me.”

“Yet knowing love of family,” Bone said, “you’d destroy mine.”

“Come now,” Lampblack said. “Hypocrites speak of ‘love of family’ as if that were all one thing, and all families united. You and we know, however, that all clans compete. It is biological necessity. We wish our own spawn to cover the earth, and tolerate other bloodlines only to the degree that they serve or strengthen our own.”

“Not so!” Bone said, thinking of many strangers who’d become friends on the road. “Not so.”

“The vehemence of your denial suggests my father may have struck a nerve,” Hackwroth said. “How often have you stolen from others, for the benefit of yourself and Gaunt?”

“Those others could well afford it,” Bone said. “I steal, with rare exceptions, from the wealthiest, such as those who employ you.”

“Irrelevant,” Lampblack said. “You select rich targets with whom you lack affinity. That is strategy, not idealism.”

“It is natural you defend those whom you serve,” Bone said. “Those who keep you comfortable in your assassin’s trade. The best defenders of the rich are always those beholden to the rich.”

Hackwroth laughed. “He taunts you, father! You call him ignorant of biology; he calls you ignorant of poverty. And meanwhile Persimmon Gaunt gets further away.”

“Let us follow her, then,” Lampblack said. “Very well, Bone, you have bought Gaunt’s eventual freedom. We will let her bear the child, then take it and its drooling father back to our masters.”

“Your generosity overwhelms me,” Bone said.

“Descend, Kindlekarn,” Hackwroth snapped.

Bone was surprised to recognize the dragon’s name, though from where he did not know. But he had no time to consider the question as the creature plunged and Bone gripped the ropes, perhaps as surrounded by enemies as he’d ever been in his life, studying the intricacies of Riverclaw for any sign of the miscreants who held his hopes.

Time within
A Tumult of Trees on Peculiar Peaks
moved differently than time in the world that spawned it, and this relationship was a fluid, twisting thing; and so Gaunt and Bone never knew that the moment the dog snatched the painting from the waters was also the moment of their son’s birth.

There was a time during the delivery when Gaunt hated Imago for leaving her, while simultaneously clinging to his words:
You will get through
. The idiotic monks and the daft self-portrait of the Sage Painter said foolish things about how well it was all going, when she knew perfectly well the baby’s passage through her loins was going to snap her pelvis like a wishbone.

Wu at least understood. “I have heard it said,” the outlaw confided, “that outside of a mortal wound, this pain is the greatest that one may experience.”

“Thanks so much,” Gaunt snapped.

“It is also said that a blessed veil falls over the memory afterward, so that the thought of agony torments you no more. Otherwise no woman would ever have a second child.”

“No chance of that,” Gaunt moaned.

“Indeed,” said Wu, leaning close and whispering, “for I know now who you are, consort of Imago Bone. I knew you were no innocent. Do not fear. I will be an honest midwife. But you will lead me to him one day.”

Gaunt could not even focus on this new peril. At last she gave herself over to life as a cripple and bore down. Leaftooth babbled something about the baby crowning and the self-portrait was beaming (and writing a poem about it, for Swan’s sake!) and then she found energy from some unknown source, prayer or love or raw spite, and the baby was out. The blades had only been needed for one thing, the cutting of the umbilical. Wu placed the little one upon her chest. The wrinkled-red-damp-perfect boy cried in a resigned, irritable sort of way, like a mad genius surrounded by fools, quieting as he shared her skin-warmth. He did not suckle at first, nor look at her. He just breathed in, out, in, out, staring at the light beyond the window. She admired her son’s priorities, and imitated him. Wu had the gall to ask for more pushing, and she wanted to kick the bandit in the face, but she obeyed and got the placenta out, too. Meanwhile the baby snuffled around for her breast, and after some fumbling Gaunt fed him, an act somehow both painful and satisfying. In time the latter would eclipse the former.

She was not crippled. She ached as though she’d been folded inside out and back again and wondered why, if this process were necessary to procreation, humanity was not extinct. But she was not crippled. She found the strength to stroke the baby’s little cap of tiny brown hairs. “Then this was all worth it,” she whispered. “In a sense.” She looked again at the diffuse grey light gently filling the Peculiar Peaks, and despite everything she smiled. “In a sense. Innocence.”

In Swanisle unmarried women gave their names to their children, whether the father was scoundrel or king. So began the life of Innocence Gaunt.

The name was duly recorded in the annals of the Peculiar Peaks, transcripted into the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell. Thus the baby gained a second name, via the meaning of characters vaguely echoing his name in Roil: “Nu You Kuang,” or in the Qiangguo manner with surname first, “Kuang Nu You.” Gaunt gathered “Nu” meant something along the lines of “skilled striving,” and “You” meant “friendship.” “Kuang” had no particular meaning, sounding reminiscent of “Gaunt.”

“You are an innocent striver for friendship,” Gaunt told the baby, aware how peculiar cooing sounded, coming from her. “Yes, you are.” 

Gaunt was never ignorant of the dangers around her, or the implications of Bone’s silence in the following days. It rained and thundered for a time. The air cleared later in the week, but the wind mimicked the distant barking of dogs and the laughter of naughty children. The monks readied themselves for another communication with the outside world, preparing a mysterious tea from purple leaves of the misty slopes. Meanwhile, however, Gaunt felt an unaccountable joy grow upon her. The feeling was highly suspect, as Gaunt’s days were filled with rocking, nursing, patting, burping—and cleaning waste with a bizarre resemblance to mustard—and her nights were as bereft of sleep as any time she’d spent on the run from guardsmen or monsters.

No doubt her body had ambushed her, demanding she perform the animal duty of motherhood, and repaying her with mere bliss. Torn from Bone, her future unknown, she did not argue. Innocence grew.

“He is smiling!” she announced to her companions.

“The facial muscles assume many random positions at this time,” Wu said, “including that of mirth. The time will come when he smiles in truth, and knows you as more than a cloud of color and comfort. Until that time—”

“He is
smiling
,” Gaunt repeated, less amicably.

“As you wish.”

Without a break in her nursing, or a hint of modesty, Gaunt added, “You still have no sense of what is happening out there?”

Leaftooth sighed. “I fear
Tumult
has changed hands. Soon the tea will be ready, we will be able to communicate with the outside again, and we will see. Your Imago Bone sounds like a resourceful one, however. So perhaps this situation will change.”

“If our enemies found the scroll,” Gaunt said, “would they be able to force entry?”

The image of the Sage Painter said, “I am afraid my prototype meant the painting for the enjoyment of all. I can keep an individual in the Peaks . . .” —Wu scowled as he spoke— “. . . but I can only protest, not prevent, an arrival. I can, however, deflect an approach, so that newcomers will have a considerably longer journey to the mountain crest.”