The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (3 page)

The day of the assassins dawned with a hint of rain amid the coiling clouds threading the gold-and-turquoise sky. The poet Persimmon Gaunt emerged from a cave, stretched, noted the blazing beauty of the morning, and threw up over the cliff.

That business done, she arranged a set of buckets and pots and bowls here and there on the canyon terrace. Rainwater wasn’t to be wasted, especially when one battled nausea every morning. She knew there was some risk of discovery (she could imagine Bone chiding her), for a bucket open to the rain was also open to sight. But an enemy would have to hunt deep within this rocky maze to glimpse the containers. And for Gaunt to trek down to the stream bore its own risks.

For all that she was not yet showing, her body reminded her of its condition every day, and she had to be more careful in everything now. Her mother and sisters in distant, misty Swanisle would be aghast to see her facing pregnancy in her desert, in the company of her thief. With an unexpected pang she imagined the care they would now be giving her, and the ample amounts of water on hand, and the eggs and milk and pork, and the green expanse of County Gaunt all around.

Then she imagined the chiding, the nagging, the scorn.

There were ballads about women like her, women who ran off into the wide world, sometimes hooking up with similarly rootless men. Indeed, she’d written a few. Audiences liked it if the protagonists perished weeping, pining for small farms and cramped rooms and respectability. She’d given them what they wanted, for the coin that had bought her—so far—her real ending, of freedom and marvels beheld.

And one more marvel still to come.

She patted her still-flat belly and returned to her empire, a collection of cool caves set halfway up the wall of a side gorge of the great canyon, filled with simple furniture and mementos, and festooned with ropes to trigger traps. For a time she’d feared this outlaw haven would seem an imprisonment after adventures down many roads, among mountains and forests and seas and tundra.

In fact, staying in one spot had opened a door for her, of sorts.

One of her “rooms,” well-lit by the rising sun, was her treasure house. While Bone’s own dark vault contained a clutch of jewels, coins, and three magical prizes, her bright domain was piled with books, and paper, and quills, and ink. When her various tasks were done, she could contemplate the intricate rockscape and the wide clear sky, or delve into the realms of history and fancy; and when her mind was filled, she could record her own impressions until evening. It was in this place that she’d already completed her
Greylight Idylls
, a feat impossible under the hardships of the road.

And now that her characters were reconciled to the death of the sun and the doom of everything, Gaunt had to accept that destroying the world twice would be repetitive. Memories swirled around her like dust devils. She wondered if the stuff of her recent life could inspire her.

Gaunt snapped a stick from a nearby bush. She did not want to waste paper and ink. Her wax tablet was at the far end of the cave, and in any event she associated it with travel. She swished one title after another into the sand, the thin shadows raised by the furrows offering a kind of insubstantial ink. One by one she swept all away. As time passed, clouds greyed the sky and raindrops fell, plinking inside the buckets and spattering the sand. Still she scribbled. Her eyes lingered on the words
The Book of Tattered Days
.

The sun tore briefly through the gloom.

The thin shadow of the tracing was consumed by the thick shadow of a man.

A man who had just now managed to silently scale the cliff.

Persimmon Gaunt did not think—not until she did three things. She sprang to her feet, threw her dagger, and sprinted into the caves. As she departed her treasure house for the deeper chambers, she paused only to snatch up her wax tablet and to yank upon the cord that collapsed her bookshelves over the opening. The same trigger toppled kitchenware to block the main cave.

An image of the intruder only now entered her mind: a man in black leather who could not possibly be Imago Bone.

Indeed, he could not possibly be alive, for he had a vast, jagged shard of mirrored glass embedded in his skull.

But perhaps worse, within that glass she thought she’d glimpsed herself, and not as a reflection. She had been standing at a barred tower window, alone.

“You cannot escape.”

The man’s curiously gentle voice followed her like the pattering of the rain into the sitting room. It was punctuated with the sounds of shattering wood and crumbling stone.

“The climb may have wearied me, Persimmon of County Gaunt. But as my strength returns, the shard’s futures grow clearer.”

She passed many mementos, lit by shafts of light from fissures in the ceiling—a bit of sailcloth from a pirate ship, a river stone from Swanisle, a ptarmigan feather from the tundra, a seashell from the drowned mountains of the South, a chip of peculiarly hovering stone from a wizard’s tower—and ascended a rocky slope, ducking through the low entrance to Bone’s haven and tugging another cord.

A kingwood portcullis, hauled here with great difficulty weeks ago, whacked down in front of the treasure room.

She took back all the curses she’d flung at Bone for that particular plan. As she sought the three magical souvenirs from the wizard’s tower, she heard the man knocking aside her precious books from his path.

“You will compose no more poems, Persimmon. You shall have but one more journey. Be at peace! Life’s conundrums will be for others to fathom. Life’s wonders will be for other eyes. Accept this like a human being. Do not wriggle like a fish within a net.”

She opened a teak box and grabbed the vial of ur-glue, the flask of luckdraught, and the jar of horomire. These were alchemical treasures of a lifetime which she and Bone might never possess again.

She shoved the ur-glue into a pocket, chugged the luckdraught in one burning gulp, and raised the horomire to the light. The oozy substance was the color of yesterday’s sunset and it responded but sluggishly to her tipping and turning, as if it acknowledged gravity’s pleadings only after a contemplative sip of tea.

A new voice spoke, rasping as with a throat full of dust. “That will not save you, Persimmon of County Gaunt.” The second intruder had either bypassed the kitchen’s barrier, or had already slipped inside.

The man who now crouched before the portcullis also wore black, and he bore a family resemblance to the man with the shard in his brain. But this one was old, not young, pocked and hulking rather than smooth and slim. He bore an iron lantern upon a thick chain around one hand, and the hissing flame inside sometimes careened outside and skittered to catch up with the lantern’s movements, as though the connection of vessel and fire was more a partnership gone sour than a matter of cause and effect. Traceries of light, invisible to all but a close observer, coiled outward from the flame and snapped at the portcullis, like a clutch of incandescent baby snakes.

“It is simply ‘Persimmon Gaunt,’” she said, meeting the man’s bloodshot eyes. “I refused to be ‘Persimmon Oakdaughter.’ But a surname is useful now and then.” She backed away, found amid shadows the thick rope that dangled from a fissure in the ceiling. She looped it around her free hand.

“Persimmon Gaunt,” said the older man, “it is our business to understand potentialities. And we have perceived that nothing within your pile of treasures, or in your collection of meager skills, can defeat us.”

“Then you needn’t be worried.” She was getting a sense of the horomire’s weight. She pulled at the rope, throwing her full weight into it.

All the while the luckdraught flamed through her veins and pores. She felt alight with optimism. Even if she died she knew she would look astounding while doing so. She wanted to write an epic about a former farm girl who battled assassins. She wanted to live it.

New strength burst through her and she pulled, and pulled, and was rewarded with a distant sound of rumbling stones. The rope slackened.

“Whatever that may have accomplished,” the lantern bearer said, “it is too remote to affect us.”

She was ready to hurl the jar, but she waited, waited . . . “Truly? Then I am but a foolish woman.”

She remembered arguing with Bone.
What kind of home has a self-destruct mechanism?

It would not be the strangest thing I’ve seen in the houses of the rich,
he had replied.

We are not rich!

That depends greatly on perspective.

The assassin frowned at her from beyond the portcullis. “You cannot bait me in this fashion. And Imago Bone cannot help you either. We’ve foreseen that only if someone who despises Bone grants him a boon can he intervene. And even were he to appear, we would deal with him.”

“You have everything calculated.”

“That is our business,” said the younger man, who had finally broken her barricade. Gaunt winced to think of him stepping on her books.

Her first impression had been correct; he should not be alive. His face was nearly bisected by a ragged shard of magic mirror that protruded from the tip of his skull and sliced down to his nose. At times one eye or another looked askance at its shifting images. Gaunt again saw herself in the tower, which she recognized as the stronghold of the rulers of Palmary. She also perceived that within this vision she appeared slack-jawed and vacant of gaze. 

“We are Night’s Auditors,” said the younger man. “We sift the stuff of human life, both within and without, both things dreamed and things made manifest, both past and future. It is our calling to reduce the irrational to dust, in honor of a future when all things are gridded, accounted, controlled.”

“Really?” Gaunt said, and though she should have been terrified, the luckdraught still burned and perhaps more.
Closer, closer . . .
 “I thought you murdered people’s minds.”

“That is another way we reduce the irrational.”

“For gold.”

“And amusement. One must earn a living. And your mind, poet, is surely a fascinating one.”

“Enough,” snapped the older man. “The lantern quivers with sudden new potentialities. Make this quick—”

He did not finish his command, for at that moment a mass of desert-colored fur and muscle slammed into him.

The old man was thrown across the sitting room and landed face-first upon an atlas open to a mostly hypothetical map, swirling with dragons, of the mysterious East.

The arrival of the springfang also toppled Imago Bone from its back. It seemed a wonder he had clung there at all. The face of Gaunt’s lover, even with all its old scars and new discomforts, was a welcome sight. That, along with the luckdraught, made Gaunt feel flushed with triumph.

“Fool,” said the young man with the shard in his head, and while his choices of fool seemed ample, Gaunt felt sure he addressed her. The springfang advanced upon him. But each nip and swipe it took, the man in black anticipated. Within the shard fluttered images of the springfang lunging and clawing—and missing.

Bone was already on his feet and giving Gaunt a tired wink. He had two daggers out and threw both in turn at the glass-maimed assassin.

Visions of blades flashed through the shard, as the man sidestepped one and ducked beneath the other.

“That’s hardly fair,” Bone said.

The old man had risen. An atlas burned on the floor beside him. “There is no ‘fair.’” He raised the lantern, and the blob of fiery light began to burst forth from its innards. “There is only skill.”

Enough
. Gaunt hurled the horomire through the kingwood bars.

The shard showed the vessel smashing against the stones. The younger assassin lunged to catch it—

Blazing tendrils whipped from the older assassin’s lantern to snare it—

Both were too late. The jar exploded in a burst of light that recalled the colors of dying fires, fading sunsets, scabbing blood, ancient amber. Night’s Auditors, and the springfang they battled, all froze in place. As the glow died they remained in a static tableau. Glass from the jar hung mid-air. Tongues of fire from the atlas stood like ruddy ice.

Persimmon Gaunt shuddered and flushed and was drenched in sweat, as the last of the luckdraught fled her system. She felt as though she’d won a footrace or wrestled a bear or passed a full night lovemaking.

“You were correct,” she told the assassins. “I could not
hurt
you . . .”

Imago Bone was not quite as lucky. He was not caught in the horomire but the tip of his boot just connected with the effect, and he could not shift his foot. “Hm. Well. Good morning, Mistress Gaunt! Well done! Care to bring me a dagger from the treasure room?”

The caves were full of such things, tucked here and there in the crevices. Gaunt found one and pulled on the portcullis’ rope.

It would not budge.

“My dear, I would love to oblige,” Gaunt said, “but the horomire effect appears to intersect the barrier.” She tossed Bone the dagger and he caught it in mid-air. He began slicing at the boot.

“Bless and curse the work of wizards,” he said. “This also suggests I will not be able to slit these fine gentlemen’s throats.” He rubbed his eyes, looked at her anew, expression shifting from murderous intent to almost motherly concern. “Are you well? Did they harm you?”

“Not at all, thanks to the portcullis. And the horomire. They are trapped in someone else’s web for a change.”

Bone paused to regard the springfang. “Good. Although that very ensnarement means I cannot honor a promise.”

“How so?”

Bone studied the cave shadows. “One more thing on my conscience. I will explain later. I am sorry, Persimmon, but we must be free of this place.”

She followed Bone’s glance to the blazing lantern and the shining shard. Both were in their own fashion glowing yet. Furthermore, these lights were flickering in defiance of the horomire.

This place
, she thought.
My home. Or so I imagined.

In the silence that followed, the sound of pounding rain filled the cave.