The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (9 page)

The third night, with the Wall looming a mile away, they might have welcomed such an escape. At first all was calm. They made camp upon a wooded hilltop, beside an open shrine to a large, porous, irregularly shaped boulder, where a chill breeze ruffled bushes made silvery by the full moon. After convincing herself the sacred stone was not in fact some mineral monster, Gaunt told ghost stories that made their hearts pump warm blood. She told them of the phantom wheelbarrow that chased terrified children to offer them rides, and of the spectral courier who conveyed neatly sealed, beautifully scribed, indecipherable messages from the dead. After, she spoke of the haunted rocking chair, and how Doctor Karnak saw no spirit through his enchanted helmet’s eyes and knelt in defeat, only then to spy the spectral baby pumping the runner, awaiting a last goodnight kiss—after that, the life inside her kicked, and despite the cold she insisted Bone and Eshe feel her belly until they divined kicks of their own.

Afterward Eshe’s gaze lingered, and it seemed to Gaunt a look of cool appraisal passed over her face. Gaunt could not discern the meaning of it, but elected to cover herself.

“Pardon me,” Eshe said, the warmth in her voice belying what Gaunt had glimpsed in her eyes. “The lines on your belly, they . . . it is foolish.”

“What is it?”

Bone said, “They do resemble dragons, don’t they? I had noticed that myself, but thought myself silly.”

Eshe nodded.

Gaunt looked down, seeing the swirl of tan discolorations that had emerged as her middle expanded, and noted what she had not quite allowed herself to perceive. Yes, she thought, you might interpret the swirls as two coiling, willowy dragons, meeting at tail and snout. Odd.

“If you two are quite finished studying my stretch marks,” Gaunt said, “the expectant woman is tired.”

“Of course,” Bone said.

“If you are willing to stay awake a time, Bone,” Eshe said, the wondering tone still hovering in the air, “I would welcome talk.”

Gaunt found it advisable to sleep, desirable to sleep, but impossible to sleep. Bone had surrendered his cloak to her, claiming to be warm enough, and she tried to sleep sidelong, clutching the cloth like lover or nemesis. Between baby-kicks and voices, however, the veil of sleep was ever pierced.

“So,” Eshe said to Bone, “the Night’s Auditors pursue.”

“So,” Bone said to Eshe, “you know of them.”

“No need to be crafty. I would like to help you.”

“I am coming to think that’s true, but I am also coming to think the Eshe we know is but the crown of an iceberg. I don’t trust icebergs.”

“In that case you and Gaunt are in a cold sea without a boat.”

Bone chuckled. “The Starborn Lands do seem a sea of sorts, in which we’re but droplets. A strange sea, with peculiar currents. So: you wonder whose hand dropped us here? Well then: the kleptomancers of Palmary. You have heard of them, too?”

“The sorcerer-cabal empowered by theft? Who has not?”

“You may also have heard that two of their number were slain, some few years back.”

“I might have. That was you?” To Gaunt’s ears Eshe sounded a bit horrified, but more than a trifle impressed.

“Gaunt is blameless,” Bone replied.

Rarely have I heard myself described so
, Gaunt thought.

“It was I,” Bone said, “who facilitated their perusal of the damnable tome that claimed their lives. It was self-defense of a sort, but I do bear responsibility . . .”

Gaunt heard him struggle between braggadocio and evasion. She might have kicked him a little, if she could.

“So,” Eshe said, “you have been running from their colleagues ever since?”

“Oddly, no,” Bone said. “We wandered the West for many moons without pursuit. We were somewhat preoccupied with this or that. It was not until we settled near Palmary, with an eye to raising a family, that the mark was placed.” A sour tone spilled over his words. “Foolish of me. I thought myself wise about the area, and about them. I’d assumed they’d shrugged off their loss.”

Gaunt thought,
So, behind your protectiveness lies guilt.

Eshe was silent a moment. An owl hooted. She said, “Perhaps they had . . . for it seems to me there may be other reasons for this assassination, and these assassins in particular.”

“You have my full attention.”

“What if you are not simply a threat, but an opportunity?”

An owl cried out again, closer. The other night-noises dimmed. Bone said, “I have a notion . . .”

“Yes?”

“That we are being ambushed.”

Gaunt rose without preamble, nodded to the others, and prepared to fight. She again heard an owl, this time somewhere in the mists of the forest floor. She doubted this owl was winged, or that its prey were mice.

After she claimed her scroll, events at first proceeded auspiciously for Next-One-A-Boy. Flybait gave a good account of her (complete with interjected growling, clawing, and leaping) and Five Finger Chang was impressed by the array of ancient weapons they piled at his feet.

“They are magical,” he murmured, rubbing his mustaches. “They must be. They will help the gallant fraternity rob from the filthy rich and give one percent to the noble poor.” His good hand rubbed his maimed hand, the one studded with bloodstained jade shards, and he bowed to the stone shoe in the alcove nearby, symbol of his patron immortal.

Next-One-A-Boy disagreed with him, and almost dared say so aloud. Her status had already improved considerably among the Cloud and Soil Society. She would be allowed a bedroll away from the lower part of the bandits’ caves, where the spray from the underground waterfall chilled the river guards and the hangers-on, and where she’d stayed since the day she’d first arrived, bearing a rich scholar’s purse and a defiant grin.

The caves’ higher sections lay beside the upper plunge of the waterfall, but it possessed overhead fissures admitting shafts of sunlight. There the bandits proper schemed the fleecing of towns and travelers. Five Finger Chang sat there upon a dragon-crossed carpet between spears of sun, surveying his new toys.

“Um,” Flybait said. “I’m not sure . . .”

She elbowed him, and he went silent. He clearly needed someone to watch out for him. There was no point disagreeing with the chief, and they hadn’t actually misled. Well, Flybait hadn’t. Next-One-A-Boy felt the presence of the scroll beneath her tunic like the rustling of her own heart. Would Five Finger Chang discover her betrayal? Perhaps he’d throw her out. Perhaps he’d kill her. Perhaps he’d claim her for his bed.

But no—Chang was a smelly, ugly, cold-hearted extortionist and highway robber, but like the one-shoed Lord of Lost Causes, he treated his few female comrades with honor. Chang’s second in command, Exceedingly Accurate Wu, was even a woman. Albeit one who terrified her. “All men are brothers here in Shadow Margin,” Chang would say, “even the women.” Men who defied this rule, even those who mistreated the camp followers, were flogged. Next-One-A-Boy had chosen a good entry into the wild outlaw mirror of decent society, that outcast realm which folk called the Rivers-and-Lakes.

“We cannot tell if they are magical,” Exceedingly Accurate Wu said, “until they are tested in battle.” She studied Next-One-A-Boy and Flybait as though assessing grimy old coins.

That evening Next-One-A-Boy contrived to wash without revealing the scroll hidden in her pile of clothes. The cold touch of the waterfall made her feel born anew, like an immortal with an ethereal body rising through rainbow clouds, attended by a phoenix. She curled up with her bedroll and scroll (well away from Flybait, who should not get any ideas) and in the moonlight shafts of the caves she dared unroll the scroll a little.

The scroll was not a text but a painting, a monochrome landscape of dark ink upon white, formed of intricate brushwork testifying to endless hours of squinting labor. She caught a glimpse of mountains rising rugged and tree-crowned from a wash of clouds, the peaks growing more indistinct with distance. The one hint of color was a signature-chop hovering above all like a faded red sun. The scene blurred and swam as Next-One-A-Boy’s fatigue caught up with her, and she slid into a peculiar dream.

The Dream of the Cold Mountain

A dreamer once found herself drifting through the sky like a windblown leaf, looking down upon mountains rising like islands from fog. Although snow had not yet come to the waking world, here it lay thick upon the rocks. She meandered among the falling flakes and settled at last upon a winding path, as gently as a lighting songbird.

Solidity came to her, and she hugged herself for warmth, wreaths of breath rising from her pursed lips. How cold it was on the mountain! All around her rugged peaks lay engulfed in silent white, while dark forests rose thick within a breath of mist. Clouds swirled around a wind-tossed moon that ascended like a lonely white bird.

Fear closed its icicle fingers around her heart. She could not remember her name, nor where she belonged.

She ran upslope, seeking illumination. Chased by confusion, the traveler craned her head but caught only snatches of dark blue sky. Snowflakes made tiny cold kisses upon her face. Alpine mist soaked her clothes. She shivered.

“Hello?” she cried out. “Is anyone there? How did I get here?”

The words themselves seemed formless, like something spoken in a distant valley and carried here in an unpredictable flurry of winds, their meaning blurred, their context unknown. Who was the speaker, and who the listener?

No
, said something deep and stubborn within her.
No, I cannot lose myself in fog and snow and the dissolution of self. All things may seem unreal, but this fathomless cold will kill me sure as steel.
Although she could not recall her name, the girl’s hard thought steadied her. Yes, such bluntness was the natural tenor of her mind. She was returning to herself.

But how to find shelter? She was no hermit, for they had not yet taught her woodcraft. (They? She let the question drop like snow.) Her only clue as to destination was the path underfoot, well worn despite her solitude. Up or down?

She feared this single choice could save or doom her. Looking out at the bright abyss between the neighboring mountains she felt dizzy, and lost her sense of gravity, white clouds and pale sunlight twisting in their slow dance. She faced her mountainside. Something in her heart longed for the sunlit heights, where she might have a view of the other peaks and the void in which they appeared to drift. Yet the mysteries of the lower shadows beckoned also, with the promise of strange grottoes and glades.
I am a poor village girl
, she thought,
unsuited for such rambles
. She reached for a coin-string hanging low around her neck and removed one of the three coppers threaded there. Upon one side coiled twin dragons, on the other side the name of a previous emperor. “Dragons for up,” she called, and tossed the coin into the air.

It landed on its side and rolled down the path before disappearing into a tangle of snow and fallen leaves.

“Hey!” she called, for even in this mysterious place she was not about to lose good money. She chased the runaway coin. As she searched amid the detritus of the path, she glimpsed a firelight in the gloomy depths below. It occurred to her then that frozen corpses have little use for money. Her teeth chattered a similar message. She approached the fire.

Orange light seeped into tree-shroud and snow-veil, like a candle seen from behind a sheet, its fire-glow tickling its way into the shadows. Crackles and pops murmured across the snowy silence. Next-One-A-Boy saw a cave, the fire dancing near its mouth. A hulking shadow blotted one wall. As she crept closer the shadow moved, as if slowly breathing.

She approached warily, until she could see a large man sitting cross-legged beside the fire. He appeared to be staring directly at her.

“Uh, hello,” she said.

There was no reply but the fire’s chatter. Her teeth responded. They kept up this conversation for a time.

“I am cold,” she said. “This is a cold mountain. May I come to your fire?”

“Words,” said the man, in a deep voice like stones grumbling free of thick mud. “I have not heard words for a time.” He wore a hat made of bark. His clothes, once fine, bore tears and patches and stains. “I forget words, just as I forget my path hither.”