The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (27 page)

Such was the last conversation of Lampblack.

Now the little flame bore into Bone’s ear, and he felt a burning and something worse than a burning, an immolation of his thoughts, a conversion of his mind to a fine haze, the easier for extraction. Striving and rage, love and adventure were soon to be equalized, mere fuel for the thing of the lamp.

And then the thing itself buzzed and burned its way back the way it came, for its master was dead. It skittered like a firework across the stone squares of the tomb and descended through a crack into the mysteries of the deep Earthe, from whence it had been summoned years gone.

Bone reeled beneath the scream of “Father!” and the weapon-cracks above, the shadow of the wings and snout and tail of the great beast and the flicker of battle above it. He could not recall his own name, nor the names of the combatants; he only recalled he should flee with his prize. Taking the scroll he escaped the tomb and ran through the necropolis, past fallen pagodas and fractured arches and cracked stone soldiers and the vestiges of a sacred gate, all the way to the place where the city wall met the Red Heavenwall, and a tunnel a few feet overhead that led through the Necropolis Wall to Riverclaw.

He was climbing into the tunnel when a blow like a boulder sprawled him upon the stony ground.

The shock freed him of the effects of Flick. He recovered his wits, taking stock of a battered body full of complaining cuts and bruises, and saw a trio of silvery claws snatch up the scroll with great care.

Bone looked up to behold Kindlekarn, riderless, glaring down at him. The reptilian snout, gleaming with rubies, filled the sky.

Bone snarled and leapt for the scroll. Kindlekarn swatted at him, but he leapt upon the other leg. The dragon rose into the air, flapping its wings.

“Dragon!” Bone screamed. “Master of sky and fire! Why do you serve human scum?”

There was a vast shaking of a head. Kindlekarn rushed into the air over the city of Riverclaw. Behind, in the necropolis, Bone glimpsed Walking Stick and Hackwroth atop the mausoleum’s central slab, still fighting.

The dragon tried to scrape Bone off with its claws, but the thief scrambled further up the leg, finding ample handholds in the encrustations of jewels that marked Kindlekarn’s body. Also, the need to preserve the scroll kept Kindlekarn from scratching with the other foreclaws, and the rear claws were difficult to bring to bear.

“Dragon! I remember now, where I heard your name! A wizard of the West once told me you’d come East to mate! What has happened, that you enslave yourself to men?”

The dragon roared and shot back over the Shadow Ward, over hovels and streets and taverns and guardhouses and then the flared dragon-heads where the Red and Blue Heavenwalls met, where the Forbidden City lofted from the interface of the draconic flanges like a fanciful hat shared by both creatures, gardens and pagodas and palaces gleaming in the sun. Shouts of alarm and weary men with crossbows greeted Kindlekarn’s passing, but the dragon was now diving toward the cavernous maw of the Red dragon, who loomed over the Foreign District and its warehouses thick with merchants from many lands.

Bone was even then managing to crawl, inch by terrifying inch, across the chest of Kindlekarn. Here he gripped a wartish diamond, there a lump of silver, and afterward a wrinkle of iron. Wealth to astonish came and went beneath his fingers (or above and sideways of his fingers, if one considered the actual pull of gravity at any given moment). He focused only on movement, straining closer and closer to the painting of Meteor-Plum.

Kindlekarn dropped low, just over the foreign warehouses, swinging back around toward the lower fangs of the vast stone dragon.

Bone looked up in time to roll a little with the blow as the five-story stone tooth knocked him off Kindlekarn’s hide.

The tooth was smoothly sloped, and Bone spun, tumbling instinctively with the blow, to spill through the air and splash into a garden pool. Breaking the surface he gasped and screamed, “No!”

FOOL, boomed the voice of the dragon, in Roil. I WOULD PRESERVE YOU. The echoes of the words reverberated in ripples across the water. Kindlekarn spun in the air and began flying toward the Shadow Ward, the scroll still in its claw.

“Not without her!” Bone shouted, coughing water. “Not without her!”

But the dragon was gone, returning to its master.

Almost, Bone stopped moving, let the waters close overhead. From the harbor to the tomb to here, he had never, in a long and bloodcurdling career, fought so hard and so well. He’d felt dim amazement at his own passion and skill. And all for nothing. Innocents were dead. Gaunt was captive. Bone was alone.

He saw a squad of Forbidden City soldiers, a dragon-banner writhing before them, emerge from a gateway between the tonsils of the stone dragon’s mouth. Bone considered bobbing and waving, allowing them to kill him.

But no, there was still a thin chance to preserve Gaunt and their son. And if that failed there was vengeance. He knew also that revenge would be on Hackwroth’s mind as the auditor considered Gaunt’s fate.

Anger rose within him like bubbles from the bottom of the pond, and with them came the memory of Eshe, she of Kpalamaa and Swanisle, and a notion entered his mind, red-fringed. With battered body, he swam from the pool and fled through ornate rocks and bushes toward the foreign district and the dubious sanctuary Kindlekarn, in his perverse mercy, had offered.

Just as Kindlekarn disappeared from Imago Bone’s sight, Persimmon Gaunt manifested from the painting.

She discovered herself perched upon the claw of a dragon, winging above the Purple Forbidden City. She gasped, clutched at a section of gem-studded hide, and vomited all over a glorious brass talon.

SPARE SOME PUKE FOR THE HUMANS BELOW, DOOMBEARER, rumbled a voice, in Roil.

“I—” Gaunt said. “I— I— I—” She looked down at peaked orange roofs embellished with mythical beasts, stone balconies guarded by grinning sculpted lions, swarms of elegant robed servants screaming at the flesh-and-blood monstrosity overhead. That unnerved her, so she looked up, into the sardonic vast gaze of the dragon who’d spared her life beside the sea. She had been prepared for Western assassins and Eastern martial artists, not this. “What?”

THEY BIND MY KIND, the dragon said. THE HEAVENWALLS CONSTRAIN OUR MATING. I PISS MOLTEN GOLD UPON THEM!

Gaunt heard a spattering, and distant screams.

“I did not know,” Gaunt whispered, thinking it was impossible for her to be heard. “Perhaps that was wrong of Qiangguo.”

I BLAME ALL HUMANITY, the dragon replied.

“Oh.”

BUT MY WRATH EBBS. FOR NOW. BEFORE THEY LOOSE GHOSTROCK WARRIORS AND LIVING CALLIGRAPHY, I WILL DEPOSIT YOU UPON A ROOF.

“You will?”

I WAS LAST COMMANDED TO ACQUIRE THIS TRIFLE, NOT YOU AND YOUR MATE. I CHOOSE TO BE LITERAL AND SPARE YOU, DOOMBEARER.

“My mate! Where is he?”

CLOSER TO THE SEA. BUT I WILL NOT RETURN THERE. I WILL SET YOU DOWN.

They hovered above a palatial purple roof, with a gentle slope.

“My baby! Let me go back for my baby!”

NO, YOU MAY NOT BRING THAT DOOM BACK INTO THE WORLD.

“Doom? He is an infant!”

I HAVE NO TIME FOR ARGUMENT. GO!

“Time flows faster there! I can be there and back in moments.”

I DO NOT HAVE MOMENTS. ALREADY AN ATTACKER COMES.

Gaunt looked, and was shocked to behold Lightning Bug, racing across the Forbidden City’s rooftops in her grey robe with the golden firefly woven at the shoulder, even now sprinting to begin a leap toward them, palace guards chasing her all the while.

“Gaunt!” called Lightning Bug. “At last I’ve found you!”

“She’s a friend!” Gaunt told the dragon.

SHE IS HUMAN.

Flame lit the sky above the Purple Forbidden City as it receded below them. Gaunt lost sight of Lightning Bug, and of freedom. But she had some of her wits back, and some of her physique; she could leap now, and perhaps live.

She clutched the end of the imprisoned scroll to her chest. “Take me back,” she whispered to it, and was gone.

The hungry ones smelled the fallen man’s chi, and one by one they shuffled, hopped, or glided to where he lay upon the old spirit way leading to long-unvisited royal tombs. Some were green corpses with long white hair, and they leapt upon the stone dogs and lions to better regard their unconscious prey. Some were contorted spirits writhing their way through the air, and they pointed and hissed like spittle upon a fire. Some were majestic even in death, and clad in fine billowing silks that might have blended with a noble’s wedding feast; these came along the spirit way as though they owned it.

The hungry ones rarely came out by day, but the shadows of the Walls were long, and the prize was rich. The hungry ones were discriminating. They had ignored the youths who frequented the mausoleum, for the living sometimes lost their senses when their children were taken, and a foray by the Emperor’s army would be disruptive of the dead community. Besides, children made small morsels. The strange dragon, too, they had avoided, for its power might unmake even them. Most found a vile existence better than no existence. Those who objected to devouring chi, or who were incautious in its pursuit, did not last.

But the man who had battled the wizard with the magic glass in his head—he was a rarity. Even senseless, his staff fallen from his limp fingers, he fairly crackled with chi.

The hungry ones began whispering to each other, a chorus of rustling and wheezing and hissing, every one of them uttering the same word.

“Mine.”

“Mine.”

“Mine.”

Their horde was hundreds strong now, yet they advanced in spurts. Each one feared the warrior would awaken and destroy the nearest. At the same time, each one feared to lose its chance for a morsel of delectable life-force. The struggle between fears was written in the mob’s trembling advance.

“Mine.”

“Mine.”

“Mine.”

All their eerie senses were focused upon the warrior, and thus they were entirely unprepared for the woman who leapt upon the nose of a lion statue, the head of a dog statue, and the shoulders of three hopping vampires to land beside the man. She snatched up his staff and swept it in a circle, staring down all the dead horde.

It paused in a complete silence unthinkable for a living mob.

“Mine,” she said.

She whacked the staff upon the road beside the man’s ears. The echo filled the necropolis.

Walking Stick was on his feet in one motion, his hand grasping the staff. Lightning Bug did not relinquish it.

Their eyes met.

“You came for me,” he said.

“I had questions for you,” she said.

“I am somewhat busy.”

“A shared task may go more quickly.”

“Indeed. It is . . . good to see you.”

“I confess I feel that as well.”

There was a quickening of their breath. A hungry sigh emerged from the ranks of the dead, for they sensed an enlivening of the matched warriors’ chi. The dead surged toward the pair, who shared a single look of guilty understanding.

The wulin could hide the strength of their feelings, from others, from themselves. But the dead did not lie.

Lightning Bug removed her hand from the staff.

The hungry ones surged forward with a howl of desire.

Lightning Bug and Walking Stick moved back to back. He flourished his staff. She downed a flask of wine.

A vampire hissed in her face and she kicked its head half off its body. Another leapt at Walking Stick and found itself whacked into the crowd. Maddened, the hungry ones tore their compatriots to pieces.

“There is no holding back,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not in this.” And she smiled.