The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (33 page)

“Your conversion was a sincere one?”

“Indeed. And ever since I have had the privilege of being regarded as a freak by both my own people and by the Swan Church hierarchy, neither of which quite knew what to do with me. Thus I wander the Earthe. Few can tolerate me for long.”

“That surprises me.”

She studied him. He kept himself studying the cliffs. “No irony? Imago Bone, are you distracted by my wiles?”

“I am as loyal to Gaunt as moss to a rock,” Bone said with a smile, “though I occasionally notice others, not being dead.” The smile faded. “I intend to marry her yet.”

“I am yet a priestess. I’d be honored to perform the deed.”

“I’ll give you your chance.”

One island loomed taller than the rest, poised like the neck of a colossal decapitated mantis, rearing up defiantly. Rugged cliffs surrounded the island, rising perhaps six hundred feet before the jungle began.

“The dragon will be there,” Bone mused, “and Hackwroth with him, I feel sure. I wonder how Kindlekarn feels, surrounded by elder females of his kind?”

“He will notice,” Eshe said, “not being dead.”

“Hm. This place has a liveliness to the land, that I did not see in Qiangguo.”

“Yes,” Eshe said. “Interesting, that a realm that so honors dragons has so few of them.”

“Perhaps I will ask Kindlekarn about that, when I meet him. Could your crew take me alongside?”

In the end, the Kpalamaa crew let Bone approach by gig. Eshe accompanied him, as he strapped on climbing gear purchased in haste at the foreign district of Riverclaw. The sunrise cast a trembling golden path upon the rippling sea, but at least this spot was sheltered. Bone need only concern himself with rock and gravity, not wind.

The Kpalamaa crew called out something in their own tongue. Bone had learned enough of their speech to understand they were saying
ship!
or something of the sort. Eshe pointed at a fleck of white on the horizon, and bade Bone use her cheetah-marked spyglass.

As their own small boat surged up and down, Bone struggled to pin the distant sail in his sight. At last he caught a view of a small brown-and-black junk, two-masted, bobbing with the blue swell, bow aimed toward Penglai. He noted two figures scrambling about but could not glean any details.

“Qiangguo pursues,” Bone said. “Though with a rather small force.”

“If it is Walking Stick,” Eshe said, “he does not need a large force.”

“It is time,” Bone said.

“I would accompany you,” Eshe said, “but . . .”

“But you are not insane.”

“Good luck.”

Bone nodded, leapt, and grabbed an outcropping largely free of barnacles. From there he caught the bundles of gear Eshe threw at him. He had no intention of dying on this climb. At the very least, Hackwroth or Kindlekarn would have to do the honors.

Looking up, he saw a variegated, mist-threaded mass of rock that seemed to beg for climbing. It would be tempting never to secure a rope, but if time were of the essence then Gaunt and his son were already doomed. Likewise, if Hackwroth knew of his presence he was as good as audited.

To be of any use, he had to take care.

He waved to the Kpalamaa crew in a wan attempt at cockiness, and ascended.

The handholds proved more generous than he’d hoped, though he stopped at times to thread his rope into cracks or hammer in a piton. He did acquire a number of nasty cuts, however, for the rock edges were sharp, and at times would fracture in unpredictable ways. When he rested on ledges, he found it necessary to bandage his hands, arms, and legs. By the time he cleared the top, his hands carried a ghastly looking assemblage of chalk, bandages, and blood. Yet he grinned, for despite everything the technical challenge had been bracing, and for all that he worried pursuit would follow, he took pride in the trail of pitons he left behind. Imago Bone was here.

Seabirds screeched, and insects chittered, as the sun set with a momentary green flash over the turquoise horizon. Bone could see no ships, either from Kpalamaa or Qiangguo. He might as well be alone upon the Earthe. He looked to the forest.

Bone perched at one edge of a shallow bowl of rock a quarter-mile across, filled with a jungly canopy. At the far side, the summit reared, and within the rock bulged the mouth of a limestone cavern. Kindlekarn could fit inside with ease. As the dragon failed to soar and rage and burn anywhere else in his view, Bone began hiking.

He picked his way among twisty trees, spindly trees, trees arcing and flaring with fan-like leaves, trees so bristling with branches as to appear like monstrous skeletons picked clean. Little brown lizards studied him, big rainbow birds squawked at him, still bigger snakes flicked tongues in stately acknowledgment. Mist obscured his path, and leaves dripped a delicate chorus all around. He saw a white, five-petaled flower drift by on a stream, almost regal, like a beheaded monarch.

He knew he was not alone.

He crouched, searching with eyes and ears for a glimpse of movement or a telltale rustle, but nothing stirred but trees and beasts. Then he realized this was the very source of his unease: an expectancy had come to the forest, formed of the regard of animals and a stillness in the plants. Madness to think of it, but the forest kept him company.

Or not madness? Eshe had spoken of the rain-aspected dragons of the East, the females of their kind, who if eschewing mating settled down to become mist-swept forests, even as the males of the West became mountains.

Was this wood the resting place of a dragon? Was she aware of him?

“Dragon,” he whispered, and he bowed. “If my guess is correct, there is a male of your kind nearby. You may sense him. You may also sense the power of his companion, and the power of the paper relic they carry.”

The sky overhead had darkened to the cobalt hues in blue-and-white porcelain, with dark clouds drifting by like stains.

Bone sat cross-legged on the ground.

“In the past few months I have already prayed more,” he said, “and to more gods, than in my whole adult life. It is not in me to pray again to you, dragon. It is not in me to beg. But, oddly, it is in me to give.”

Time was passing in the world, and more of it in the land of the scroll. Bone’s being tugged at him to move. He stayed, however, and sought for the art of description Gaunt had coaxed.

“I give you the Shimmerwork Range . . . threading from Eldshore’s north down to its capital, their snowy sides glinting in the sun, rock-pierced, dappled grey and white like . . . vast palominos. I give you the Sunderlights that dominate the southwest . . . sharp sentinels slicing the day. I give you the Homonculous Mountains that divide Eldshore from the Wheelgreen . . . grey cliffs forever casting suggestive shadowy shapes. I give you the Heavenwalks . . . that seem like hallucinations of mountains as seen from the desert near Palmary . . .

“I give you all the mountains that I have known and loved, and even scaled for a time. I give you these because I know that some must be your kin, and many more must be places your kin have loved. And I give you words in honor of she who taught me better to use them . . .

“I give you these images, I who have nothing else to give, because I must find her, and win her back . . . and our child. And there is no possibility of help in this place, save from you . . .

“Yet if you cannot help, know that I speak also for her, Persimmon Gaunt, and say . . . I am honored to walk your quiet and gentle shadows, and if that is all the boon you may grant, I welcome it.”

It seemed to him he heard creaking here and there. As he rose, butterflies flittered past his nose.

Bone rose, bowed to the four directions.

“That was lovely.”

Bone spun, and confronted Lightning Bug, whom he’d last encountered in Abundant Bamboo, when she harangued him to rise and run. She was a shadowy figure sitting on a tree branch, the dimming sky beyond. She wore a subdued grey traveling robe, her hair bound back tight in a bun, and looked almost sane up there. Bone had seen her in battle, however, and knew the lunatic that lay behind that calm stare. Not that he minded.

“That was you,” Bone said. “On the junk following us.”

She nodded. “You were difficult to catch, but a deep knowledge of the Way, and the manipulation of chi, made it possible for us to coax the winds.”

“Us?”

“That is why I am in haste to speak to you, Imago Bone. I am traveling with Walking Stick.”

Bone looked around, spying nothing but deepening shadows. “Your enemy?”

She smiled, though Bone saw sadness in her gaze. “He is no one’s enemy . . . and no one’s friend. But once he was much more to me than either, and I flatter myself that I was more to him. That was before Tror, of course, long before . . .”

Bone nodded. “But there is something, in a lover who shares danger with you.”

“We are both of the wulin, those who master fighting skills to protect others. Alas, in our youth it was easier to agree upon a shared Way. For me the Way is a dance of life and love, of change and acceptance. For him the Way is a straight road from the Imperial Palace into the future. Let none object to the paving, and all will be well.”

“My family will not be paved.”

“No. I would have your child, who may yet become our Emperor, be as free, and as wild, as you and Gaunt. That would be a good thing for Qiangguo, the cracking of our control. It is not good for the land to have its chi so tightly channeled.” She looked up toward the first star of evening. “But that is a matter for later. Walking Stick and I have agreed that whether Garden or Forest prevails, it is better that than have your family destroyed by this mind-assassin.”

“I appreciate the point. Are you asking for my consent?”

“That, and one other thing. If you see things my way, then allow the boy to dwell in Qiangguo. The Forest will hide him. Let him know this land, that he may in time assist it.”

Bone thought of the long roads he’d walked, the gold of the tundra, the opal swell of the Western sea, the emerald hills of Swanisle. Qiangguo was wide, yes, but . . . “Why must this be his fate? Why does the Empire call to him?”

“For better or worse the chi of the Heavenwalls seeks a master. It may be that it conceives Qiangguo as too isolated, and so seeks an Emperor farther afield. This has happened now and then. We cannot fully know its motives. But the boy has been chosen.”

“Indeed,” came the voice of Walking Stick. “And that is why, despite this treacherous attempt to manipulate the father, the boy must be raised properly.”

Bone looked up at a tree opposite Lightning Bug’s. There stood Walking Stick, a stiff shadow in the dusk, clutching his wooden namesake upon a thin branch that surely could not support him.

Bone muttered, “There is perfectly good ground down here, you know.”

Lightning Bug did not seem to hear. “You would stuff the child into a starchy robe and have him reading the classics dawn to dusk!”

Walking Stick said, “I’m glad you acknowledge my superior pedagogy.”

“Insufferable. Let him contemplate the carp and dream of the butterflies! Let him swim beside waterfalls and compose drunken poetry in the mountains! That is education for an Emperor!”

“I will consider that. When I am ready for the barbarian hordes to trample the frontier and drink wine from our skulls.”

Lightning Bug laughed. “Aha! The usual refrain. Let one child’s calligraphy be off by a stroke, the whole Empire goes down in flames. Honestly, the sheer constipation of it should have ruptured your bowels by now.”

Walking Stick, who had shown such composure fighting Hackwroth on a dragon’s back, now bellowed, “It is well, woman, that we never had children!”

“Ha! As if you’d stay undignified long enough to sire one!”

“Um,” Bone said, “if I may . . .”

“Enough!” snapped Walking Stick. “It is clear you cannot be trusted. We settle this now.”

“Gladly.”

There was a vast gulf, Bone observed, between the mundane spark of the spat and the heavenly conflagration of its execution. The wulin leapt off their branches and fell sideways, careening into each other with soft, quick snaps of fist, foot, and staff. They separated like dancers seeking new partners, each tumbling into treetops with a crackling rustle, spinning into new positions like fish, kicking off into the air again as though a mere leaf was sufficient brace.

This time they met with more force. Walking Stick shoved his weapon horizontally toward Lightning Bug’s head, but she ducked and gripped the staff, swinging herself into a kick directed at the man’s face. He rolled backward in the air, swung his staff one-handed, catching the tumbling Lightning Bug at the ankle. She grunted and shoved into the sky by way of a kick to Walking Stick’s nose. Blood seeped down his face, but this seemed only to annoy him. He fell toward the ground but one tap of his staff served to reverse the plunge, send him shooting after Lightning Bug.

Bone beheld the once-lovers intersecting like dark birds in the sky. He, for all his many years of tumbling, climbing, sneaking, and filching, felt in comparison like an oafish dolt.

The sort of dolt who might keep his head low. And slip through the underbrush toward his objective while his betters fought. Yes. Quite.

Whether his plea to the spirit of this place had succeeded, or whether his senses had been invigorated by the aerial battle, Bone found his way largely free of stumbling and entanglement, and although the spare sunlight vanished and stars and moon ruled the sky, he kept his orientation. At times he thought he heard a distant cry, whether of beast or wulin he could not say.

At last beneath a descending moon he found the entrance to the cavern. He crouched beside it until his eyes adjusted, and beheld glistening in the moonlight an eerie mass of toadstool-like, upward-thrusting stalagmites, and tapering sharp descending stalactites, and terraced columns like broken and crudely set bones, and an undulating stone surface shaped across many years by mineral-rich water. The bandit caves had been bland hovels by comparison. The whole mass put him in mind of maws and stomachs and fungi and parasites and other things disconcertingly organic, for all that the mineral cavescape betrayed no actual sign of life.