The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (13 page)

“How old
are
you again?” she asked.

“Everyone loves stories. It was only terror that made me reluctant at the Wall. I was raised on tales of derring-do and wonder, good morals and bloody blades, magic and practicality. My father himself was, in a sense, one rambling story of adventure and misadventure after another. And all I knew of him were his tales and the trinkets attached to them. My mother was also a tale, one that began with ‘It was different when I was a girl,’ and ended with ‘now all the world is evil,’ but with infinite variations between.”

Next One sighed. “The world has always been evil. Grownups think the world becomes evil because they mistake their growing wisdom for a change in the land itself.”

“You are a cheery one. How does this theory explain you?”

She strove for a blunt demeanor. “We who are tormented from birth gain the gift of understanding. We waste no time complaining.”

“Well, unless this tale is a torment, read it!”

She considered punishing his boyish impudence. But reading aloud from the scroll would help her concentrate on it. And when she was not annoyed, he was a trifle charming.

The Jailer’s Tale

Once when Qiangguo was young and the Walls as yet unmade, the First Emperor built his regime upon a foundation of bodies. So when he died, the pillars of the Empire slipped upon pools of blood. Warriors and princes vied for the realm’s remnants. Meanwhile the Emperor’s bureaucracy lumbered on like oxen, keeping their heads low, lest heads roll. 

One such bureaucrat was nicknamed Youngster, a back-country jailer in his forties. In one scroll he bore his Imperial mandate; in another, a sample of Living Calligraphy that manifested as a giant cobra when unrolled. He had never used the latter.

One morning while leading a chain-gang through the hills to the provincial capital, Youngster woke to discover half his prisoners gone.

The First Emperor’s rule was harsh, and the bureaucracy retained that cruelty’s shape, as a dead crab leaves behind armor and claws. Youngster knew that when he reported his failure, he would become a prisoner himself.

He chained the remaining thugs to a tree and went for a walk. It is said that he beheld a giant shoe standing alone in the forest. He pondered, and made choices.

When he returned, he told those who remained, “You are free—free in a land of fire and blood. If you would go, go now, and do not look back. But if you would be united, winning gold and glory with your own hands, I will lead you.”

Most of the prisoners fled back down the path, toward Youngster’s remote town. There they encountered the giant cobra Youngster had loosed from his Living Calligraphy.

They panicked and raced back to their jailer. Knowing the cobra’s weak points, Youngster crept up and slew it, never revealing its origin. The prisoners acclaimed him a natural leader.

The band went on to a genteel sort of banditry, and in time Youngster gained the patronage of local nobles, who knew a useful protector when they saw one. There were other warlords more terrifying, more brutal. One might have assumed they would win the throne. But the people of the Empire had already known rule by terror, and they saw in Youngster something else: a man who could replace fear and force with generosity and guile.

Province by province, Youngster’s realm became second-largest in the land, surpassed only by he who named himself Overlord of the Desert Margin. Youngster kept getting beaten by the Overlord, but more and more people flocked to his banner anyway. Some of those who defected were clever strategists. Youngster listened to their good advice and at last maneuvered the Overlord into an ambush.

As they advanced, Youngster bade his soldiers sing the folk songs of the Desert Margin. The Overlord heard these songs, and thought, “Surely those who sing are my own countrymen. If they now oppose me, what hope is left?” At last the Overlord flung himself personally at the entrapping forces. He cut down scores before he fell.

Youngster gave the Overlord a stately burial, and humbly became the Second Emperor. He is remembered as wise and compassionate, adding to the Empire’s strength a reverence for human life and a respect for cunning. As a result the Empire endures even now.

And it was he who, to protect his people, began a project to bind the dragons . . .

“What happens next?” Flybait demanded.

Next One frowned. “I don’t know. The scroll looks torn, incomplete. I don’t know what that last part about the dragons means.”

Flybait looked disappointed, but he shrugged and smiled. “It makes sense the Second Emperor was a bandit, you know. Outdoor air, good exercise, clean living—all produce a superior man. Not like the decadent rulers of today.”

“You sound like a wrinkled-up and toothless old man, pontificating between weiqi games at the tea house.”

Flybait put a creak in his voice. He tottered toward her, shaking his fist in a meandering way. “How dare you mock your elders! You lack proper deference! I will educate you! You will now recite the three hundred major rules of ritual!”

She laughed. But her laughter ceased when she heard footsteps in the snow.

“It may be the hermit,” she whispered to Flybait. “But I am not sure . . .”

“There’s no harm in hiding . . .”

They crept backward into the deepest shadows.

In the soft light they beheld the strange Imperial official they’d glimpsed earlier in moonlit woods.

“How?” Flybait hissed.

“Sh,” said Next One. Whatever his means of tracking them, he was here, and approaching. It seemed their choices were to fight, to surrender, or to explore the bottomless pit.

She rather admired that Flybait seemed to have reached the same conclusion. He was edging toward the abyss as well.

She groped her way down the spiraling stair around the pit, Flybait creeping behind her. The steps led deeper into gloom. Light disappeared altogether, but she kept moving by touch and the smooth shuffle of their bodies against stone.

Yet, minutes later, an unnatural hush fell upon the pit. So complete was the silence, not even Next One’s own breathing reached her ears.

Now, only the sensation of movement and the cold touch of rock remained to guide her. She felt a warm hand upon her shoulder and she clutched it, grateful for the contact in this enchanted place. Warmth, comradeship, and shared fear—all were conveyed by Flybait’s grip.

And all at once it vanished. She heard and felt nothing.

Now she was afraid. She sniffed, and found her nose still worked, bringing her the stink of her own sweat, the reek of fear within it. Flybait’s own odor reached her too, and it reassured her that she was not alone, and even (
admit it, girl
) beside a man, of sorts . . .

But now all scents, too, were stolen away.

She had never taken much notice of the taste of her own mouth, but now she had this sense and no others. Because she expected this to leave her as well, she bit hard and tasted the blood of her lip, and sucked at this last evidence of life.

It faded.

It was intolerable to be thus senseless, here beside a bottomless pit.

Desperately she tried to shift her body, in hopes of sparking some response from the smothering dark. After an endless moment a surprising circle of light appeared—the top of the pit, its dim illumination now seemingly a blazing beacon.

A shadow appeared within that light, the blot of a man looking down. She tried to raise a hand in defiance—or surrender—but saw nothing. Could it be she was not so much insensible as nearly
nonexistent
, down here in the pit? A mote of consciousness, losing its connection to the world? For sound, too, drifted down to her, even though she could hear nothing of her surroundings.

“Welcome, young ones, to dissolution. You have reached the edges of the painting, and thus, I suspect, of existence. Your crimes are repaid. I must now attend to more urgent things, foreigners who could shake the Empire. I leave you with oblivion.” The light faded. The voice was gone.

In the absence of everything but consciousness, what could she choose?

She recalled the words of a poem written in ash and rubbed out by a careless foot.

She tried to throw herself into the abyss. But she could not know if she had succeeded or not.

Morning came and made the mists appear blurred, like golden serpents coiling among the trees. Gaunt, Bone, Eshe, and the mysterious Walking Stick passed beyond the forest into a craggy region of jutting hills too rocky to admit cultivation. Here and there a shrine or temple teased free the light dwelling far above and between the clouds.

At last they descended to the steep valley of the Ochre River. There, in the shadow of the red-tinted Heavenwall, lay the village of Abundant Bamboo.

Bamboo was indeed abundant. Living bamboo fringed the town on the rocky far side of the river, and cut bamboo supported the multi-story buildings clustering there in a continuous maze. Some seemed to hug the Red Heavenwall itself. The ground levels were open-air gardens or tea houses or workshops or market stalls, surrounded by the stilts.

“If the Ochre River floods,” Eshe said as Bone and Walking Stick helped Gaunt from the boat that brought them across, “the villagers lose these temporary constructions but not their homes.”

“Do not the soldiers in the Wall offer sanctuary?” Bone asked.

“Not in living memory . . . Ah! There is my friend.”

Eshe’s friend was a sturdy Archaeopolitan named Tror, who dominated an open-air printing and calligraphy shop (it was a measure of Gaunt’s exhaustion, Bone thought, that she barely noticed the scrolls, the ink, the marvelous machinery). Tror welcomed the travelers with big hands and a big voice. He wore a simple grey robe, but a swan medallion gleamed around his neck. His gaze was welcoming, but he narrowed his eyes upon seeing the Imperial official, and his bow was curt.

His wife Lightning Bug was a small, slender woman with strong arms and bright eyes. She was a striking beauty, and also a well-muscled one; Bone felt if she struck him in earnest, he would feel it for days. She moved quickly and deftly within a simple grey robe with a single yellow firefly embroidered at one shoulder, and soon she had the travelers safely settled and equipped with seats and tea (they declined the rice wine, which she swigged herself) watching the river boats bob past.

Bone noted that while Tror was abrupt with Walking Stick, Lightning Bug never even acknowledged him. Stranger still, the official seemed not to notice. Perhaps it was a distinction of gender?

Lightning Bug did acknowledge Bone, and immediately fussed at Gaunt. “You should not be traveling,” she told the poet in Roil, the language of Swanisle and the Eldshore, touching her hand to Gaunt’s middle.

Bone expected Gaunt to bristle, but his lover remained calm, even appreciative. For Lightning Bug conveyed nothing cloying nor predatory, as if born of a people too busy and practical for foolish privacy. “No, I should not,” Gaunt agreed.

“Then stay,” Lightning Bug said. “You too, Eshe.”

“You honor me,” the Swan priestess said.

Abruptly Lightning Bug fixed her attention on Walking Stick. “You may stay too, of course, man of the Garden.”