The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (6 page)

“The ur-glue?” Gaunt said, crouching beside him. He nodded, glaring at the oncoming rocks, applying some to the rope tip.

“Take the rope,” he said, before pouring three more drops of the alchemical substance into his empty bucket.

She complied, saying, “But why . . .”

The
Passport/Punishment
heaved again as it shot toward the rocks, and Gaunt had to stop speaking to avoid retching. She looked skyward so as not to watch the ship lurch, but this did not help much, as the dragon roared toward them. She flicked her gaze aft, and at that moment a man emerged from the gangway near the galley: a pocked, hulking fellow in black leather armor, bearing a lantern upon a thick chain.

The face of Lampblack (for by now she knew him by name) bore the red welts of scalding.

The lantern was empty of light, but the man bellowed, “Flick! Take the thief’s mind!” and swung the lantern in Imago Bone’s direction.

The blob of flame hissed toward him.

“Gaunt!” Bone cried, raising the bucket in defiance. “Go!”

Gaunt did not take orders from Bone, but she understood his plan. They had to proceed with thread and thimble and hope.

Hers was the thread. She staggered upon the bucking deck to the bow-rail, and waited for the moment to cast the rope.

A whoosh of air and a crack of wings aft, and now the dragon was there, flapping, hovering preternaturally, nearly as large as the junk. It seized a mast, flung it upon the waters like a child playing with a tree-branch.

Between pregnancy and imminent death, Gaunt felt ready to wet herself.

Bone dueled with the fire-blob with his bucket, making the conflict seem some peculiar new martial art. He danced closer and closer to the bow, the thing named Flick following like a mad dog.

A second man in black leapt off the dragon to stand beside the first. Hackwroth, the assassin with the jagged fragment of glass flaring from his skull, was here. (Gaunt saw with satisfaction what might be a dagger-scar on his neck.)

Hackwroth nodded to Lampblack and scowled at the group near the bow.

At once, one of the sailors beside Gaunt screamed and fell.

The sailor’s image appeared within Hackwroth’s glass fragment, silently wailing. The body still breathed, eyes staring skyward like those of a dead fish.

“Swan be with us,” Gaunt muttered.

“Agreed,” Eshe said.

The ship grounded. The deck pitched, and sailors tumbled.

Gaunt somehow kept her footing, and threw the rope tipped in enchanted glue.

It hit true, adhering to a rock face just off the port bow. Eshe immediately tied off the line, bellowing commands in the language of Qiangguo. If the ship only held this position, the survivors could escape . . .

Gaunt looked to Bone. He tumbled, seemingly unbalanced, unprepared for the impact. Flick blazed in triumph and hissed toward his head—

—and Bone, successful in his feint, leapt and clamped the bucket over the flame. He drop-kicked it overboard. Flick struggled to escape but was bound for now by the ur-glue. It hissed in evident rage before disappearing into the depths like a falling star.

Its master Lampblack collapsed in seizures into the arms of his snarling colleague Hackwroth.

Bone bowed to the Night’s Auditors, and fled.

Somehow in the scramble that ensued, Bone and Eshe were able to help Gaunt over the edge and the three of them alighted upon the tumble of boulders. The junk shifted and plunged further into the echoing, groaning rock tunnel, neatly trapped there. The easy escape was now gone, but more sailors were jumping into the sea. Gaunt hoped they would not be crushed.

She turned her attention to the cliff. Luckily this portion was not entirely sheer, but more a rugged slope where granite outcroppings alternated with inroads of soil and bushes and boulders. They began ascending the gentlest looking such track, but it was still rough going, with pebbles racing seaward at each step.

Hackwroth and Lampblack now rode the dragon, and it nosed toward the cliffs. There was something negligent in its wingbeats, as though mere muscles were but a perfunctory component to its magical flight. Gaunt’s bad habit of looking back plagued her anew. She imagined she saw rue in that vast onyx gaze coursing with internal fires. Perhaps gnats saw such weary disgust in human eyes in the moment before swatting.

“Climb!” Bone called. But his voice faded like a stone dropping into the well of that stare. She would never move fast enough. Perhaps when she was just Persimmon Gaunt, but not as almost-a-mother. The miracle of life ensured her death.

She put one hand over her stomach, lifted her eyes to her doom. She would defy the dragon that much.

The dragon had not previously singled her out (reviewing rather the ascending sailors like a cat contemplating a line of ants) but now it fixed its vision upon her. She felt exposed by its regard, as though the furnace of the dragon’s sight burned away cover, clothes, skin, dignity, grace, illusion.

It sized her up in a moment, and its expression twisted with the last emotion Gaunt expected.

Fear.

At that moment Hackwroth and Lampblack too stared at the cliff-face. “The child . . .” Hackwroth said, a cascade of images forming in the shard of glass embedded in his skull. The scenes possessed an unnatural clarity, like mountains observed through the thin air of high altitudes, and even across the gulf Gaunt was entranced. This time there was no image of Gaunt trapped alone in a tower in Palmary. She saw herself, Bone, Eshe, people of Qiangguo she did not recognize. She saw battles upon rooftops and inside caves. She saw a mighty Eastern palace and a pagoda upon a mountain. She saw a baby—wrinkled, red, and bawling its health to the world. And she saw, too, eagerness upon the face of Hackwroth, but fear as well.

The assassin was about to speak again, but the dragon prevented him. Snarling like a thunderclap, it whirled and shot out to sea.

Gaunt glimpsed its riders struggling to maintain their grip, before the dragon became a dark spot on the horizon, receding like a thrown stone.

“You . . . brandish an intimidating cleaver, Eshe,” Bone remarked.

“I’ll take credit in all future tellings,” Eshe said.

“Enough,” Gaunt said, freed of dragon-gaze and vertigo, but not of the vision of the baby. “Climb!”

The rocky, pebbly ascent gave way to a crumbly, bush-studded ascent— not as perilous, but arduous, and deadly enough if Gaunt’s concentration slipped and her with it. Thus she resolutely ignored the wind-whispering trees and shrubs that dazzled in the midmorning light, and which shivered their leaves like an orchestra of tiny tambourines. She disregarded the groan of the junk settling into its rocky prison, and the stinging hint of saltwater in her eyes. Eshe led on, and Bone followed just below Gaunt’s shadow, as if he considered all his remaining fortune bounded by a Gaunt-sized package.

“We will be on safe ground shortly, if we’re lucky,” Bone called.

Gaunt, breathing hard, could only nod.

“I do not believe in luck,” Eshe said. “But because we are in Qiangguo, I’ll whisper praise to my ancestors, a custom these people and mine share.”

“It’s said the East retains its many gods,” Bone said, “while the West’s are dead. I’d implore them if I could, but I don’t know their names.” He chuckled. “Fortunately, I do believe in luck.”

“Those gods are not all dead,” Eshe said, a bit archly. “Some will remember us, if we remember them.”

“Perhaps!” Gaunt broke in, between hard breaths. “But while we Westerners are trapped in the East perhaps we should stick together.”

“I am not exactly a Westerner,” the dark Kpalamaa woman said, with a trace of amusement.

“We barbarians then! We will need a translator, Eshe. If you are seeking new employment.”

Eshe narrowed her gaze, as though hearing a threat in those words. Intimations of the future seemed to swirl around Gaunt, like images in a broken mirror, like autumn leaves, like whispers.

“I could hear an offer,” Eshe said. 

They reached the top, and safety, and a green expanse with spindly hills peeking above a distant and enormous rosy barrier. Gaunt’s small human worries seemed lost in this land, like tiny black birds against a stormy sky.

The Empire of Walls was at hand.

Deeper into the Empire, at the farthest point of the Red Heavenwall that the travelers could possibly have seen, a grimy girl crept toward the place where the New Year slept.

The girl, a compact sixteen-year-old with an inkspill of dark hair and a stare that made bandits blink, was named Next-One-A-Boy. She did not really believe the Nian, the monster of the New Year, dwelled in the great shadowy crack in the Heavenwall that loomed ahead, wide as a manor door at the bottom and slicing up till its narrowest crack was high as the junipers. Nor did she believe in flying-carpet fairies, goldfish people, love and justice, and other stories for babies.

She did believe in magic, however, just as she believed in corruption and unfairness and all the other things that could have you eating mud or becoming it. That was why she was here.

“This is it,” said the idiot boy the Cloud and Soil Society had sent to test her. At least he was cute for a gangster. “They say an Emperor died here. He didn’t die like ordinary people would.” Here the boy Flybait mimed a man’s death-throes, shuddering and rolling his eyes back into his head. He claimed to be fifteen, but acted twelve. Or eight. “No, he exploded in a burst of chi.” To make sure she got the idea, he spread his hands while emitting a whooshing sound that delivered flecks of spittle to her face. Flybait resembled an explosion himself, a bamboo stick of a boy with tangly black hair shooting everywhere like spilled soup. Sometimes he amused her.

“I know that chi means ‘breath,’” Next-One-A-Boy said, waving the air. “No need to blow yours in my face. No need to wake the Nian either.”

“So you believe in it?” Flybait’s eyes widened. He had never attempted this challenge.

“I believe in what I can see . . . and hear and
smell
, dog-breath.” She crept forward and stared through the evening twilight at the great fissure in the wall. The moon rose, and permitted her to study the pond at the crack’s base. It was big enough for a few fishing boats to work without entanglement, should any fishermen have defied the local legends. But its silver-fringed waters were empty and still. Even the Imperial soldiers perched on the Wall’s nearby watchtower never ventured here, rushing past most efficiently when their business took them across the span overhead.

Her heart pounded, but she kept her voice steady. “Earthquakes happen. Emperors die. People confuse things tangled in time with things tangled in cause.”

“What about the monster stories?” Flybait said. “The great shadow-beast that rises at the start of spring, that eats cats, cattle, constables?” He made a fanged mouth of his hands, began chomping the air.

The hand-monster came too close to her face and she slapped it into two contritely folded halves. She could not help but smile. “You should have been a shadow puppeteer, not a gangster,” she said. “You would know, then, that shadows can trick people into seeing monsters.”

“I will be a great gangster,” he announced. “Five Finger Chang trusts me. I will be his right-hand man.”

“His right hand has no fingers.”

“I will finger many a treasure for him! So may you, if you survive your chosen initiation. No one has chosen such a feat before, not even Feng Axe-Big-As-Himself or Muttering Chung.”

“I don’t need your advice on crime,” Next-One-A-Boy scoffed.

“Are you sure?” Flybait said with a bow, before raising something to the moonlight. “Because I think I need this snack I just stole from your pack.” He started unwrapping something glistening from its lotus leaf garment.

“Give me that!” Next-One-A-Boy snatched at the rice ball, but Flybait wriggled backward like a snake.

“Sticky rice!” he said in glee. He nibbled and smiled. “Sugary sticky rice!”

“You idiot,” she said. “For all you knew it was poisoned.”

He stopped eating, but his voice was suspicious. “Explain what it’s for, or my stomach takes over.”

“It hasn’t already?” She considered the eleven other rice balls in her pack. While these might be enough for her purposes, she believed in precision of effort. Moreover, twelve was an apt number. “It is bait for the Nian,” she said.

“You don’t really believe in the Nian,” Flybait said, looking as though he did not really believe either, but did believe in food.

“I believe there’s a source to the stories. There are strange creatures in the world, monsters and spirits—but humans may overcome them with cleverness and a bit of luck from Heaven. Do you want me to return to Five Finger Chang and Exceedingly Accurate Wu and tell them you ruined my plan?”

He hesitated, before slowly stretching out his hand. She snatched back the rice ball. She’d bought it from a lady of means in one of the nearby villages, named Lightning Bug, who’d taken pity on a runaway over the last month. Next-One-A-Boy had become a ghost of a servant in Lightning Bug’s house, learning something of cookery (mostly how to make a meal from scraps) and even martial arts (mostly how to survive the other kind of scraps). But she could not bow and scrape and scrub forever; for all that Lightning Bug’s family was kindly, submission was still submission, and reminded her too much of home. Next-One-A-Boy had made contact with the bandits hereabouts and set out upon a new career. Fear was still with her, but what she feared most was being sucked back into servitude.