The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (39 page)

Innocence left off his studies for a time, and gazed out at the window. Soon he would return to painting intertwined dragons, but for now he was hoping against hope to see the sad-eyed and wise and beautiful A-Girl-Is-A-Joy, the orphan who was his best friend, and yet whom Walking Stick increasingly tried to keep him away from, muttering things about “distraction” and “vital energy” and “youth.” Sometimes he had a dim memory, of his mother telling him a story of a boy in a similar predicament. He could not quite remember. Something about a fox.

I am your son
, he sent his thoughts toward the grey sky.
I will know the storied seas and lands of your world, where the stars rise and more. I swear this.

Though almost every day the rain fell, the boy did not stop wishing, or laughing. His work was too serious for that.

Here is the first Gaunt and Bone adventure, reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, June 2000, in which the poet and the thief clash with the kleptomancers of Palmary, and in so doing find their fates entangled forever.

The Thief With Two Deaths

Once in the ramshackle avenues where Palmary meets the sea, a poet loved a thief with two deaths. It might have been the May-December match of a hundred poor songs and a thousand worse jokes, save for two points which balanced the scales: owing to his odd condition the old thief more resembled a man of nineteen than of ninety-nine; and the young poet had a taste for graveyards.

It was in a graveyard that they sealed their fates.

Fanned by moonlit palm trees, chaperoned by star-aimed white obelisks slicing the surf’s roar into baffled echoes, Persimmon Gaunt stroked the thief’s dark hair and smiled. “Now I will ask the third time, and you will answer. How did you earn your name?” Her face betrayed her origin on a farm upon distant Swanisle: sturdy shoulders caught her merry cascade of red hair. Yet her cheeks were pale, and one bore the tattoo of a black spider tickling a web-snagged rose.

Imago Bone smiled back. A short burn scarred his left cheek, and a long cut spanned the neck to below the right eye. “I do not properly remember.”

“You are not senile, Bone. You may forget which palmgreaser’s house you looted last, but surely you recall your fame.”

As befitted his profession Imago Bone’s frame was slight, though it captured all the coiled energy of a hungry ferret. He uncoiled to draw Persimmon Gaunt to the hallowed earth.

Smiling, she pushed him away. “That’s a better ploy, but it too will fail.”

“A better way to while one’s time,” he said, “than unearthing what’s buried.”

“What better ground to unearth it from? Where better to explain these ‘Two Deaths?’ Have you died twice, Bone, and returned?”

He smirked. “Nothing so familiar.”

“Or are you a sorcerer, with two night angels bound in your service?”

He snorted. “Service? Now that’s amusing.”

“You laugh at ‘service,’ not ‘sorcerer’? Why?”

Bone rolled and leapt, attaining an obelisk’s highest seam (an action as natural to him as stretching the quill-arm was to Gaunt). He surveyed the shore. Owing to ancient regulations the desert city kept the shape of a human hand, and only the coastal Sleeve spilled away in the random manner common to living, growing towns, dangling warehouses and tenements and commoners’ graveyards like loose threads. This tryst was far up the northern strand and hidden from living eyes.

Moonlight sketched his sigh. “I’m no sorcerer, thank the night. Now, then: I’ve already pledged to recover your manuscript from whomever stole it; surely I owe you no more.”

She rose, shivering with pleasure at the wind. “‘Owe’? You believe I sold my charms?”

“I did not say that. But I am not a curiosity for your morbid lyrics, Persimmon Gaunt.”

“Nor did I say that.”

“At ninety-nine I am entitled to privacy.” Though Bone strutted overhead, his voice checked her laughter. He said, “Now then, from whom must I pluck your
Alley Flowers
?”

Now Gaunt sighed. “To business? Very well, if you cannot trust me with your story. It was the goblins of Hangnail Tower.”

Persimmon Gaunt studied his reaction. It was as she feared.

Imago Bone stared at her, then the stars, scratching his chin so his hand cradled the two wounds of his face. Few in Palmary knew why Imago Bone was called the Thief With Two Deaths; but all understood the Goblin Library of Hangnail Tower was no place for borrowing books.

First she feared he would refuse. Then the crimson light surrounded her, and her fears became altogether different.

Bone was lost in a time eighty years gone, a journey that lasted one long heartbeat. Then his heart skipped into the present, and his skin thrilled at the nearness of doom. It was too familiar a doom, after so long, to surprise him. Indeed, he could almost welcome it as a friend. Nonetheless, he had to challenge it.

Bone leapt to earth, tumbled to his jerkin, rose with a knife.

“Release the woman, Joyblood, or I will strike.”

He pricked his own chest.

“Ah, Bone.” The lips were Persimmon Gaunt’s, but the voice was not.

It more resembled a choir of perfectly tuned, cackling madchildren. This was not so distracting as Gaunt’s stance, for she levitated a foot above ground, cloaked in a ruby glow like sunset glinting off scarlet pools at a battlefield. She twitched like a marionette, and mocking fires danced in her eyes. “Do not struggle. Your end has come. The seeds of love have rooted in two stony hearts.”

“Seeds?” Bone chuckled. “Harbinger of death at a lover’s hands! And you are satisfied with
seeds
?”

Gaunt’s eyebrows drooped in vexation. “What else have I to work with? Eh? Anonymous tavern wenches wooed in disguise? Bored palmgreasers’ wives who wouldn’t know love from caviar indigestion?”

“Concede,” Bone demanded, twisting the dagger and wincing. “This poet is a devotee of nightmares, a student of decadence, and would no sooner
love
me than write poems about pretty ponies.”

“You are a decadent nightmare in your own fashion,” the death persisted. “Ah, be reasonable, Bone! The future romance of Bone and Gaunt is flickering in your eyes. Accept your destiny. Do not wriggle with technicalities.”

“
I
wriggle?”

Then a cold wind arose seaward, stirring pebbles and earth. A vortex of dust and spiderwebs swirled and compressed, making the sketch of a tall, hooded figure. One hand terminated in cruel pincers, the other in a sweeping scythe.

“You are late,” said Bone.

“Late?” The word was like a dry breeze rustling a heap of old leaves and bones. “Three lives still twitched in the balance from your last barfight. After eighty years my fate still astounds. I am a death, yet I spend my nights protecting life. To wit—”

And here the death sighed its way between obelisks, scythe cutting air.

“Curse you, Severstrand,” said one death.

“Redundant, Joyblood,” said the other.

“Be mindful of Gaunt,” cried Imago Bone, and the dark angels shot him such a glance as mortals send slow-witted children.

Joyblood waved a hand; flame licked the air like burning cat-o-nine tails. Severstrand dodged waist-deep into the ground. The scythe shimmered upward into Persimmon Gaunt’s belly, but Severstrand checked his blow at the last. Joyblood’s essence billowed forth from the poet with a screech, like a smoke-cloud cradling its own fire-source. Gaunt slumped to the earth.

Bone crouched beside her. She still breathed. Her fingernails curved out an inch from her hands, her hair spilled to her waist, but she breathed. “You’re precise as ever, Severstrand. Thank you.”

“I do not want your thanks. I want your end. I want you to perish, friendless, loveless, in cold despair.”

“I do not take it personally, Severstrand.”

“I am glad, for I do respect you, Bone. Though you must die.”

The scythe twitched a little; but Joyblood shimmered into new solidity, all smoke and flame, eyes and mouth shining like rubies beside a prince’s fireplace. “He is not for you, decrepit one. That woman will love him.”

Severstrand proffered a thin, spiderwebbed smile. “Indeed? As he’s loved by the courtesans of the Pinky Palisade? The whores of Thumbbottom?”

“Those are sparks beside the bonfire. Ah, why do you never relent, Severstrand? I offer Bone a death of wild romance!”

Severstrand shrugged. “I offer an end. Nasty, brutish, short. Anything else is sugarcoating.”

Bone coughed. “Let me register again my desire to expire peacefully in bed, surrounded by adoring women and an ill-gotten hoard.”

Both deaths turned in scorn.

“But if the matter is buried for now,” Bone said, “I would like my privacy.”

Joyblood bowed. “Ah, very well. Passion will out. Shall we adjourn to a mortuary, decrepit foe, and debate over games of chance?”

Severstrand nodded. “Very well, mad opponent, if the odds are long. Enjoy your dalliance, Bone. I will destroy you later.”

“Happy dicing.” The two deaths faded from the air like morning mist.

Bone reviewed Gaunt’s sleeping form, and uncharacteristically he did not linger upon her physicality but tried to divine something of her heart. Here was a pale woman who idolized the grave; yet a brush with death gave flush to her cheeks, left her chest pulsing steadily with the ancient greed for air. And here was Imago Bone, dancing between two headstones marked with his name, as though the liveliness of his feet defied the narrowness of the ground. Gaunt thought she understood death, but truly, it was life she embraced.

Bone caressed the spiderweb tattoo of her cheek, and her eyelids fluttered.

“That was . . .” she said, “that was . . .”

“That was,” Bone said with a smirk, “you might say, my family. And the reason I will take your commission, and storm the Goblin Library. As I should have done eighty years gone.”

At sunset next day, poet and thief crossed from the Sleeve through the Bracelet Wall and onto Via Viva toward the Fingers, threading the shadows of the towers.

All the Spiral Sea knew the towers of Palmary, nine, ten, eleven story monstrosities of brick, adobe, granite. They were monuments to the hubris of rich palmgreasers, but more to the point, they were an outgrowth of zoning laws. To secure certain magical advantages, Palmary proper took the form of a human hand. Roads mirrored lifelines; hills mimicked the mounds of the palm; canals irrigated digit-like boulevards, with the spaces between surrendered to the sands. Violators lost fingers, so the city clawed enthusiastically skyward, and it was said that birds scorned the palm branches for belfries, and that bats and squirrels outnumbered their cousins the rats, and that true cat burglars the world over died and went to Palmary.

But there was one tower unstained, untouched by burglar or squirrel. Certain bats flew there only, a rare breed that alighted in silence.

The Hangnail Tower was hardly Palmary’s tallest, but it stood alone. It rose nine stories in the sharp lines of a graveyard obelisk, and all its stone was tarnished gray. Near the top, scores of severed fingers dangled from their tips upon irregularly spaced iron spikes. Rearing in the sunset where the desert lapped the end of Index Road, the tower attained a hue of scabrous blood.

From their vantage in a narrow lane between manor houses, Gaunt said, “I’ve never been so close to the home of the kleptomancers.”

“And you’ll get no closer,” Bone said. He wore a signature costume of black leather studded with various tools and weapons. Fully half of these were balsa wood fakes, to intimidate anyone he came across. He would never carry so much real weight. “You’ll await me at the assigned place, until I return with my prizes.”

“Prizes? There is something beside my manuscript?”

Bone laughed. “There are many things beside your manuscript. But there is one thing in particular that I will need for my salvation, and yours. The most terrible of tomes. Nothing else will do.”

Gaunt looked doubtful. “Bone, I wonder now if it was right to steer you this way. The tower will be riddled with traps, and now this book . . .”