The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (28 page)

The foreign district was like a separate city, or several separate cities, compressed into a small space. Here the Empire tolerated the presence of foreign merchants, each delegation housed somewhere within thirteen vast converted brick warehouses, baking in the sun. Bone knew to expect some of the far-traveled traders of Mirabad and the other minaret-studded cities near the Sandkiss Sea, devout men in turbans and robes, honorable and urbane, who followed the Testifier and his revelation of the Law of the All. He also noted without surprise a few tunica-clad Amberhornish, still imperious despite ruling a remnant realm smaller than any province of Qiangguo. His eyes widened at the tall black mariners of mysterious Kpalamaa of the jungle and savanna, whose technical skill and sleek galleons surpassed that of every land Bone knew, including this.

But here at Riverclaw were also peoples unguessed-at. He saw men clad in beautiful white robes seemingly made for leisure, but bearing also elegant curved blades and gazes stern as stone or ice. He saw men and women with tangles of tropical bird feathers in their hair, the women wearing garlands of flowers, the men sporting intricate maze-like tattoos on their faces, and the delegation otherwise naked but for skirts of tightly woven beige reeds. He saw another group still more lightly garbed, wearing only grass loincloths and white face-paint, yet bearing themselves with an alert sophistication to rival the Kpalamaa delegation.

Some groups Bone could scarcely believe: long-eared, leaping, furred beings wearing Imperial silks and carrying their wide-eyed young in natural stomach-pouches; dapper looking black-and-white bird-creatures draped in water-skins and bearing umbrellas; huge crabs the color of sunset with pastel-painted barnacles on their shells and pouches with quill and ink hanging from their fore-shells.

Bone blundered into a line of those crabs. Silently, but for a troubling clicking and a gasp from nearby humans, they encircled him, dipped their brushes and painted black calligraphy upon their red shells. OFFENSE, Bone read in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, repeated eightfold.

He bowed to the crab-folk and leapt back into the crowd, but now the foreign district constabulary supplemented the Imperial troops . . .

Bone scaled a warehouse and ran among the crenellations and sculpted beasts as though intending to leap to the west. Dropping low, he crawled north instead.

Reaching the edge he slid down into an alley, grabbed a Mirabad gurkha from a clothesline and threw the robe around himself, rushing quickly west, as far from the Mirabad habitation as he could get.

He needed sanctuary. Unfortunately, those most likely to feel kinship with him might know his reputation. That left his options meager: beg for help among people (or non-people!) he understood less than the folk of Qiangguo, or dash into the armada of merchant craft circulating through the nearby waterways and seek safety elsewhere.

Or find sanctuary with his quarry. Eshe.

As he thought this, he glimpsed beyond the warehouses and the little shops—crowded with locals offering foreigners food or handiwork or medicine or palanquin travel or puppet shows—a little white shrine capped with a silver swan.

Bone hustled as fast as he dared through the throng, barely more than a persistent shuffle. Finally he made it to the temple doorway and scurried inside.

Two Amberhornish acolytes gasped at this son of Mirabad, but Eshe, looming in flowing white robes, drifted across the little temple as smoothly as a ghost, her eyes suggesting she beheld one.

“You are most welcome, brother. The Swan’s love is for everyone.”

“The Testifier,” Bone said, aiming for a Mirabad accent, but only hitting a bad one, “bade us respect the creeds that came before ours, O priestess.”

He earned stares, however, for his strained, overwrought impression. And Eshe cocked her head. Coming closer, she murmured, “Are you in haste for consultation, brother?”

Bone whispered, “A full conversion might be in order.”

“I am good at my work.” She led him toward the back and said loudly, “It might be best if you return for the sunset service. Let me show you a pamphlet and the back door.” They stepped among the pews and past the Swan altar to a vestry filled with robes, candlesticks, censers, and other accouterments of the faith. Bone was looking with interest at a golden swan figurehead upon a stave when Eshe opened an adjoining back door, loudly. Suddenly she pulled Bone through another passage, into a tiny office no bigger than a closet, and gently shut the door.

She pried up a floorboard. “This hiding place has never been tested.”

“That may change,” Bone said, descending a narrow ladder.

“This service will come at a fee.”

He searched her eyes, and imagined icebergs. “The fee will be paid.”

“Through honest means.”

Bone composed a face of shock, and Eshe dropped the trapdoor nearly on his head.

The space was a narrow one, wood-walled, with only the ladder for company.

If his suspicions about Eshe were correct, this might be a poor place to have delivered himself.

He set about establishing if all the walls were simply that.

Judicious tapping and listening revealed that one wall could slide to reveal an earthen passage. It led beneath the thick of the foreign district.

As one could hardly expect a thief to ignore a hidden passage, Bone slipped inside, closed the panel, and began crawling. He proceeded through the darkness for many minutes. It was a cramped excursion, but far more pleasant, he reflected, than his trip beneath the Necropolis Wall.

The recollection froze him there, and the cold wind of his recent memories bore down upon him. Unseen by any eyes, even his own, he shuddered, curled upon himself, and wept.

Not far ahead, voices sliced the silence.

Bone went silent himself, and dared to creep forward, probing the darkness with his fingertips. Not more than two feet away there was another wooden panel. Beyond it lay the voices.

Bone could not understand the language, but he believed he recognized it, for he had heard Eshe sing in the tongue of Kpalamaa. More, he heard the words “Eshe,” and “Qiangguo,” and “Kindlekarn.”

He backed up slowly. There was a fury in him, which he envisioned dropping deep into the soil and stone below, where he might find it again at need. He could no more afford rage now than tears. He returned to the space beneath the Swan church, slid back the panel and waited.

Feet filed in, above. The chants of a Swan service hummed through the floorboards. Bone found it beautiful and unintelligible. But some of the hymns had a sound he recalled from the Sanctuary of the Fallen Feather. The litany of the Swan’s sacrifice by quenching the Sun, much brighter in the mythical days of the story, was identifiable though he could make out no words. He knew also when prayers were said.

He made a few of his own.

Old remnant gods of the West, dead or sleeping—Swan Goddess beneath your Isle, Walrus God of the Contrariwise Coast, Arthane Stormeye, Rakwhille Dreamer of Lightnings, even you, bloody-minded Nettilleer Kinbinder . . .

He heard the ritual drinking of rainwater and eating of fish, but his own prayers continued.

Gods remote—Painter of Clouds, and the All-Now, and Eye of the Mosaic . . .

The benediction came, the farewells, the filing out.

Gods of the East—the Million Deities or One, the Oddsgod, the Lord of All Kitchens, the Dust on the Mirror . . .

And the last of the regulars, talking with Eshe overhead, easy and pleasant banter, but in its own way yet another ritual.

I am a lover of heights and I am walled all around. You gods, you who knock aside all human things, help me now. Break the walls that trap my family. Shed light.

The trapdoor opened.

Eshe descended with dry fish and water. Bone ate like a savage.

When he could think again, Eshe said, “You cannot stay.”

“How long until you turn me out?”

“It seems you found your own way out.” She paused. “That did make it easier to hide you from the Imperial guards. They were thorough. I will have to lodge a complaint.”

Bone smiled. Smiling thieves were less likely to be killed as inconvenient. He hoped. “How long have you served the Ghana of Kpalamaa, Eshe? Or did you never stop?”

“Ah.” Eshe sat cross-legged and leaned back against the wall. “Who says I do? A traveling priestess might like to visit her countrymen every so often . . .”

“A traveling priestess, speaker of many languages, friends in many lands, skilled combatant . . .”

Eshe smiled. “You and Gaunt wander. There is nothing peculiar about that.”

“Indeed?”

The smile left. “Where is she, Bone?”

He needed Eshe. He forced himself to chew through the truth.

“She is lost to you then,” Eshe said when she’d heard enough.

Bone shook his head. “Lost to the world perhaps. Not to me. She is trapped in an item of art, and I am a thief. I will find it.”

Eshe shook her head. “You are an item of art yourself, Imago Bone. But Walking Stick, or Hackwroth . . . one or the other will have prevailed to claim it.”

“If it is Walking Stick, he wants it for the Forbidden City. If it is the other, Kindlekarn will bear it. Palaces and dragons are difficult to hide. I will find her.”

“You cannot even leave this district.”

“Is that a threat?”

She frowned, waved a hand theatrically. “A fact. The danger is quite high. Consider an alternative. Gainful employment.”

“With you?”

She blinked. “Let us say my people value travelers’ tales. I am a storyteller, a
Jelimuso
. That is my first training and calling. The fact that I am voluntarily exiled from my homeland has not changed that. But the stories I tell are no longer those of Kpalamaa’s exploits and lineages. Now my stories come from all the Earthe.”

“Stories,” Bone said. “The kind of stories a ruler would want to hear? Especially late at night, in a secret room, with maps on hand?”

She nodded. “Understand, Bone. Ours is a world where peculiar portents and enchanted evils can arise from anywhere. Doppelvolk dragging people into mirrors. Scumbloods rising from the sewers. Necroconomists plotting financial doom. These ills can be challenged by random heroes. But they are best quelled by
directed
heroes—guided by those who keep our ears to the wall.”

Bone smirked. “You speak of ‘heroes.’ I don’t see what business that word is of mine.”

“It is everyone’s business. Bone, generations ago there were two moons in the sky. The Archmage Sarcopia Vorre dragged the Blue Moon underground, where she chains it and slowly devours its power. If nobody prevents her, will she one day claim the Silver Moon?”

“Darkness benefits thieves.”

“Thirty years ago, the Archon of Night arose in the taiga beyond the Argosy Steppes. He and his Man-Wolves sought to conquer the world. Countries convulsed to bring him down. Champions arose and died. Some claim it was the end of an Age.”

“I was strictly a local criminal at the time.”

“Five years ago the Dauphin General of Aquitania seized and excavated a pyramid in Northern Ma’at, setting his sorcerer-scribes to translating the inscriptions within. Within a month he had become a mummified sorcerer, his Dead Fleet terrorizing the Spiral Sea before an alliance of nations and pirates brought him down.”

“I do recall much activity in the harbor. Much loot, too.”

“Last year the mercenary Lord Runestock located Fangthrone, seat of dread powers of prior Ages. He meant only to loot the fortress, but he learned to his cost why so many grim lords set up shop in that location. For it was the literal Fangthrone itself, a toothsome iron chair, that was the evil mastermind of that place. It took the combined sacrifice of Eldshore’s Dusk Knights and Amberhorn’s Whisperguard to slay Runestock and melt down the throne. The world shook.”

“I recall some crockery falling, in our cave.”

“That you lost no more than pots is in part because I and others like me roam the Earthe, listening for prophecies and portents, omens and dooms, so that the proper forces can be in the right place at the right time. To shape events, for the world’s sake.”

“And you think I could be one of those listeners.”

“You have the skills. You could accomplish much good.”

Bone looked at the dirt below his feet. “I have never sought to do
good
. The prospect has little luster for me. But I have
known
good. What life I have now, I owe to Persimmon Gaunt. She has rescued me more than once. Sometimes from myself. At last it’s my turn. And her child . . . our son . . . that is my responsibility as well.”

“But if there is no hope, Bone?”

“If there is no hope, it is because too many people saw Gaunt’s pregnancy as a thing to control.” Bone rose. “You alluded to this before, Eshe. Palmary sent Night’s Auditors, not just to punish us, though that is a fringe benefit. They wanted our child, who is somehow touched by this land.”

“Bone—”

“But you did more than allude, didn’t you, storyteller? You speculated to Walking Stick about the nature of the child. You had glimpsed the suggestive stretch-marks on Gaunt’s belly, and knew what they implied. Perhaps in your own way you sought to help us. But it may be that, for all Kpalamaa’s good intentions, it has a stake in helping install a friendly Emperor of Qiangguo, and earning the gratitude of the Garden.”

Eshe looked to the floor. “Bone. You must understand . . .”

“I understand that empires, even empires devoted to good, have ways mere thieves cannot grasp. Oh, I do not condemn, storyteller, priestess, wanderer—agent. Only do not pretend to be like me, or like Gaunt. Do not pretend to be free. And do not presume to tell me when to surrender hope.”

Eshe was silent. Then: “A Western dragon was seen flying southeast, not so long ago. Boatmen more recently arrived report it was spotted winging toward the haunted tropical islands of Penglai, where none dare go.”

“Then I have my direction.”

“I will find a way, to let you leave. My kinsmen can help. We can disguise you, take you aboard a galleon, bear you southeast.”