The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (8 page)

The beast was still searching the Wall for its prize. It turned toward Flybait, but hesitated. Next-One-A-Boy could not let the brave fool perish for her sake. She ran toward Flybait shouting, “Yummy rice! It will be so warm in your stomach!”

Astonished, Flybait saw her and grinned with all the joy of a boy blessed with both a girl’s company and an excuse to destroy things.

The beast charged them. Flybait threw.

It gulped the rice ball mid-flight, chewed, gagged, and let out a belch of lightning punctuated with firecracker farts. Colorful flashes burst inside its head. It ran this way and that as though chasing its tail. It covered its ears.

Next-One-A-Boy and Flybait had not so long ago been small children. They knew the procedure for frightening away the New Year. They stomped and clapped and whooped and screeched and bellowed
Out with the old, in with the new! Gimme red envelopes! Happy Year of the Dragon! See ya next time!

And the Nian-thing acted as a Nian-thing should, and raced into the hills and the night, dispersing into fog as it went.

The girl and boy laughed and slapped each other on the back and hugged. “It is like they say,” said Flybait. “A few smelly tanners can beat a champion.”

“You may be smelly,” said Next-One-A-Boy, disentangling herself. “I am not.”

“You smell good,” Flybait murmured.

“What?”

“I thought you were dead,” he said quickly. “How did you get away?”

“I—the woman! Where is she?”

“What woman?”

“The woman in black! She helped me.” Next-One-A-Boy looked back and forth, up and down, but could not spy her rescuer.

“I see no woman in black. I also see no man in black, no ox in black, no bear on stilts in black. Actually, I don’t see much at all right now. Those fireworks were bright.” He rubbed his eyes. “Those aren’t easy to get. Where did you find them?”

“A friend.” She grunted. “The soldiers may not be able to ignore the explosion,” she said, and indeed there was a doubling of lights in the nearest of the Wall’s watchtowers. It would take time for them to lower ladders and investigate, however.

“We’d better get going.”

“You are right.” She pointed at the crack in the Wall. “This is our only chance to investigate.”

“What? Your parents should have named you Crazy Girl!”

“If there is any treasure to be had this night, it is through the crack.”

“Huh. Lead on, Crazy Girl.”

They walked along the edge of the Wall, where a sure-footed person might reach the crack and stay dry. They only slipped into the pool once. With cold ankles, Next-One-A-Boy led Flybait into the strange cave in the Wall.

The moonlight revealed hulking humanoid shadows.

“We need a torch—” she said.

“We need to run!”

“No, they’re not moving. Get your fire-starter.”

The absence of a rampaging monster improved Flybait’s concentration, and soon his bamboo stick shone with the light of its ignited roll of paper.

“They’re statues,” Flybait said in awe.

The figures were of eight soldiers, standing at attention with swords drawn. They had lifelike color to their skin, hair, and gear. “That’s lamellar lacquer armor,” Flybait said. “These figures are old.”

“Lamellar?”

“That’s armor made of plates laced together. They still use it now, but the plates are metal or leather. The lacquer kind hasn’t been used for centuries.”

She looked at him with a bit of respect. “How do you know so much?”

“Oh, I love weapons and armor! They show up in all the best stories. These swords are dual-edged bronze, ancient style.” He looked at the base of a blade. “Yes! The mark of the Bellows Falls workshop. You know, these would be valuable to collectors . . .”

She had no qualms stealing works of art, but for a moment she wondered about stealing
from
works of art. Yet deeper in she saw another, solitary statue sculpted so as to show billowing robes upon a thick, powerful-seeming bearded man, with a wide, sad face. In his hand he held not a bronze sword, but a tattered scroll.

“I think this is the Emperor who died,” she whispered. She tugged on the scroll and was surprised to find that it was not only quite real, it slid easily from the hollow grasp. She pulled it out and concealed it under her tunic.

“Does he have treasure?” Flybait tore himself away from the swords and strolled over to kick the statue. He jumped on it. It did not break. He continued trying.

“That’s not respectful.”

“It’s not a real Emperor. And he’s dead. And we’re bandits.”

“Well, I think the statues are the treasure,” she said. “I have heard that the first Emperor had an army of statues such as these, buried somewhere, lost to time. Now this later Emperor must have been honored with something similar, but on a smaller scale. The chi-beast made sure no one came here.”

And that no one read the scroll
, she thought, heart pounding anew.

A change in the wind brought the sounds of soldiers lowering ladders, far down the Wall. “Let’s get out of here. Take as many weapons as you can, Flybait. Five Finger Chang and Exceedingly Accurate Wu will be pleased.”

“You sound so confident.”

It was not confidence, she thought, as they left the old Emperor face down in the hollow. It was that, scroll hidden against her chest, she now possessed the first treasure, beyond her own body’s breath, that was hers alone.

As they slipped beyond the pond into the moonlight, she felt the scroll rustle a bit, as though buffeted by an unseen breeze, but that was surely her imagination.

Autumn fogs concealed the foreigners. While the weary crew of the
Passport/Punishment
had staggered up the serrated coast toward the capital of Riverclaw, Gaunt, Bone, and Eshe struck north into rugged misty hills, toward the inland villages of the Ochre River.

“Better the crew not have you to blame,” Eshe had told them. “I have a contact north, another Westerner, who came to preach the glories of the Swan Goddess and ended up admiring the glories of the local women. One in particular.”

After a chilly night on the heights, the morning mist cleared from the valleys at either hand and they beheld downslope of their aching feet a green landscape of rivers and canals threading between the tall hills and bordered by forests. Over the land a pattern of cultivation lay like glistening lace, torn only by the higher hillcrests. Rice paddies glimmered under the sun, fringed by gardens, orchards of mulberry trees and tea bushes, and ponds adorned with fishermen in long boats. The frame of this setting was the nearer Heavenwall. It paralleled the travelers’ course on their right, then many miles ahead bent across their path, underlining the far horizon. A wide, yellow-brown river emerged from the western highlands, converged with the Wall to the north, and paralleled that faux dragon into the hazy east.

“Where the river first touches the Wall,” Eshe said, “there is the village of my friend.”

“How much should we fear the authorities?” Bone asked.

“In the cities and big towns—much. In the countryside—little, so long as you are nondescript. The Heavenwalls, with the aid of rivers and mountains, slice the Empire into administrative regions. But the provinces can be so large, they have wild stretches that can accommodate bandit hordes.”

“What, then, is the point of the Walls?” Gaunt asked, her gaze traveling to the blue-stoned Wall beyond the reddish one, meandering near and far like a basking snake. “If they do not defend the people?”

“Many reasons are given,” Eshe said, “which causes one to wonder if none are true. The Blue Heavenwall’s northern reaches do indeed guard against barbarians, and the Red Wall’s southwestern fringe does deter the kings of the Mangrove Coast. Likewise, both Walls’ inner twistings restrict the movements of bandits or rebels. They provide highways for those with the Imperial blessing. They also, to my mind, keep the provinces provincial.” Eshe spread her hands to take in the vastness of the Red Heavenwall. Gaunt thought the gesture a trifle theatrical, and wondered, not for the first time, if Eshe were a trained storyteller.

“Yet all this,” Eshe said, “could be accomplished with less grandiose means. And the Heavenwalls meander in ways that make little military or administrative sense. Why? Well, there are geomancers at work in the Empire, akin to those who fashioned the Western city of Palmary in the shape of a hand. Perhaps the Empire gains in some mystical fashion by marking itself with twin dragons.” Eshe shook her head, smiled. In her more typical voice she said, “You will need local clothing.”

“Show me a farmhouse,” Bone said, “and the deed is done.”

“Of course. You are a thief. This does not greatly bother me, but it might concern the authorities. I presume a thief might always carry a little gold? Then allow me to bargain with the locals.”

“We are greatly relying upon her,” Bone observed, lighter in pocket, when the Kpalamaa wanderer had left.

Gaunt shrugged. “There is much more to her than she claims. I suspect she does not want us to realize what a good heart she has. At any rate, we took our chances when we fled east.” She ran a hand across her belly. “We do have limits, Imago. Even childless in the heart of Archaeopolis we would sometimes depend on others.”

Bone silently watched Eshe’s receding back.

Her venture was successful and the trio became a huddle of shy peasants, hooded against the autumn chill. The journey proved unexpectedly pleasant, as they meandered their way through rice paddies on winding stone paths. Gaunt noted the Qiangguo farmers followed the natural contours of the land, where Westerners more often created grids. The trio took care to slip around villages, or pass them in interludes of fog or rain. Gaunt wished she could spy the settlements more closely—through mist or out the corner of her eye she spotted wooden buildings with peaked roofs, sometimes embellished by a pagoda or two, walled, gated, packed tight. Oddly, it was in the villages that a predilection for grids did appear; most Western towns she knew sprawled chaotically, as if the wind had scattered the seeds of houses. The well-ordered buildings hid their secrets, and she had better glimpses of the villagers themselves in the fields or rice paddies, where families bent at their labor.

Gaunt had traveled for years now (though never so far) and knew the peril of snap judgments. But what she recalled from the West were both happier peasants and more desperate peasants. She wondered if Qiangguo endeavored to avoid extremes in favor of serenity.

Footsore and pregnant, it was an attitude she could respect.

By nightfall they still had not reached the Wall. They slept against a rocky hillside, starting no fire for fear of bandits. But the moon rose wide and crickets trilled, and Bone told stories of his thieving days in Palmary, that city shaped like a hand, his own hands moving like bats. There was the haunted furniture store at the end of Lifeline Road, which echoed with family arguments in five languages, whose every nook seemed to open out on some different place and time. Down a long alley from there was the Medusa Gallery of Headline Street, its atrium stuffed with sculpture and with sculptors late with their payments, the realistic and fanciful intertwined. And across a fountain-tickled square hung Bone’s lodgings in the Webbing, strung between the towers of the Middle and Ring Districts, where tenements twitched upon ropes above an influx of desert sand dotted with the lairs of patient springfangs. Ears full of desert horrors, Gaunt slept soundly among the mists.

The next night the Wall was larger but still distant, and they found a wayside shrine, with benches for travelers and an idol of a plump god with a mock-fierce expression, wielding a ladle like a sword. At its feet Eshe told magical tales of Qiangguo, of Living Calligraphy that slithered off its rice paper to guard treasuries or mop floors . . . of the immortal warrior with one shoe who was patron of lost causes . . . of the Windwater Garden representing the Empire in miniature, where dropping a lit pipe on a bush could burn down a thousand-acre forest . . . and of Meteor-Plum Long, sage author of
Record of Brush Methods and Transspatial Dislocation
, into whose paintings an observer could literally lose oneself, becoming but a new paint-stroke upon a fir-clad mountain.