The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (4 page)

“Bone,” Gaunt said quickly, “it is worse than that. I have set off the rockslide mechanism.” She nodded at the dangling rope.

He stared at her. “The intended result was to seal away our treasures if we needed to abandon them. I did not think you would be trapped in the treasure room.”

“Am I not your greatest treasure?”

“That was not funny,” he said.

She nodded. “Then get the axe.”

“We chose this wood precisely for its great density—”

“Get the axe,” she repeated, and there was no arguing with her voice.

He departed, swiftly returning with their heaviest weapon, thus far used exclusively against firewood. It cut into the portcullis, but with great diffidence. Bone’s efforts were accompanied first by grunts and then snarls. The rain fell ever more heavily. The lights within the horomire flickered more rapidly, as if mocking Bone’s work.

On Bone’s next swing, the axe-head came loose from the handle. It flew into the upper reaches of the horomire and stuck there, suspended over the assassins’ heads.

“Try it,” Bone said.

Together they shook the portcullis. It splintered some more, but did not break.

“I do not think there is time,” Gaunt conceded.

“The luckdraught,” Bone said. “Drink it.”

“Already done. Well, I am not drinking the ur-glue . . . Wait! Perhaps by tugging—”

“They had horses! Wait here!”

“That was not the brightest thing you have ever said, Bone,” she teased, but he was already gone. Gaunt clutched the ur-glue, as this was all she could do. No, not all. She pocketed several large gems and a thick assortment of coins. She made sure her wax tablet was in easy reach.

One had to plan for survival, even if one was anticipating instead the arrival of a diverted flash flood.

Or the awakening of assassins. Already she thought she perceived a twitch of a finger, a wrinkle of an eyebrow, a drop in the level of the axe-head. Alas, it looked as though it would fall between them.

Bone returned with a rope. Together they wove it into the damaged bars of the portcullis, Gaunt dabbing the connections with the alchemical goop. The substance shimmered in an oily way, telling her she was using too much. But Bone would be needing her more than the ur-glue. Ur-glue could not watch his back or hold his hand. Ur-glue could not sing him to sleep or kindle his body to passion. Ur-glue could not bind anything as tightly as she was bound to him.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, looking at her face.

“The baby-to-be,” she said, not exactly truthful, not entirely false.

“You will be leaving here. I’ll pack your tablet. I go to the horses now.”

And he was gone again.

Persimmon Gaunt prided herself on her equanimity in the face of inevitable death. Even as a child she’d perceived how her elders were terrified of the thing, and how that terror robbed them of so much living. And so she had danced in graveyards, and sketched skeletons, and composed morbid poetry, earning early the label fey.

She whispered one of her first. Not her best. But it had stayed with her.

Laugh in rain

As water soaks

Your every pore.

Scoff at pain

And smiling note

Your every sore.

Life is brief—

The light will fade,

The bell will ring.

Grin at grief.

In death’s own shade

The birds will sing.

Yet the girl Persimmon had not understood everything, the woman Gaunt reflected. This instance was different. This was not mere death. This was loss.

Fool
. Her thoughts echoed the word of the assassin.
Even if your hopes are slim, fight for them!

She gathered the three remaining daggers hidden in the treasure cave, realizing here was an exceptional chance for target practice. She threw one at each assassin, and as they stuck suspended within the horomire, she reckoned that in any fair fight they would strike true. She held the last blade and hesitated. She did not know why, but she intuited that Bone’s unspoken promise was to slay the springfang. Something about its eyes . . .

She might try, in this manner, to honor his pledge. But that might remove one more factor in favor of her survival.

Her family’s survival.

She kept that last blade and commenced slicing at the kingwood. It was slow work. But it was work.

The springfang’s tail coiled a bit, the daggers advanced, and the assassins’ feet shifted by quarter-inches, when the rope stretched taut and the portcullis groaned. A distant whinny could be heard over the pounding rain.

The rope itself began to fray.

She thought of hiding at the farthest reach of the cave with her dagger ready. Instead she cut at the wood once more.

The wood gave.

A gap tore free, and the rope whipped out of sight, dragging splintered spears behind. The opening was rough and narrow and full of sharp points, but it was an opening. She wormed her way through, willing herself to move slowly enough to stay unperforated, even though she saw the man with the glass in his skull begin to smile.

She was free. She ran.

Behind her a growl erupted through the caves, an axe-blade clattered, and two men groaned in pain.

She reached the terrace and scrambled down toward the canyon floor in a fashion that under other circumstances would have been madness. At the bottom Bone waited. He waved her toward a pair of black horses snorting beside a dropped rope. One was covered in sweat. Bone pointed her toward the other, fresher-looking steed, and she did not argue.

As they mounted, behind them and high overhead two men in black stepped onto the terrace. Both were covered in blood. Gaunt saw no springfang.

“Ride!” Bone said, spurring his horse with his open-toed boot. “Do not look back!”

She rode. But look back she did, even knowing several legends citing the foolishness of such an act.

As such she was rewarded by the anticipated flash flood’s arrival, bursting forth from its diversion through the ceiling-fissures of Gaunt and Bone’s lower caves, filling their former home with debris and slapping the invaders aside like a giant, frothy fist.

“Do you think the flood will kill them?” she shouted over the sound of galloping hooves and the roar of waters.

“I don’t think that’s the key question here!”

Together they fled up a steep-sloping side canyon as they’d long-ago agreed should such a contingency arise. And just in time, for the water surged down the main path and lapped hungrily at the edges of their own. With luck they and their stolen mounts would live. But they would have to abandon the horses soon, as they had abandoned treasure, and books, and security. Perhaps there was no constancy anywhere in this world, only the road, and saying goodbye.

Goodbye to everything but each other.

As their pace slowed with the higher, rougher ground, Bone said something she could not make out. “What?”

“I promised you I would give you a home!” he shouted this time. “I am a breaker of promises!”

Lightning flashed. She thought of the springfang. She thought of the wax writing tablet he had thought to bring along, even now.

“I will go anywhere with you,” she said, “through all my tattered days and as far away as the land of the stars’ rising.” And at first she feared he could not hear her with the rush of rock walls and the rumble of hooves and water and the roar of the sky in answer to its jagged lights.

“Good,” came his reply. “Because that is where I think we must go.”

The six-masted junk that lurched and heaved in the spray of the Starborn Sea was called
Passport to Heaven
, or something like that. Gaunt’s language skills had failed her many months ago and many ports westward, and she now relied on the translations of a well-traveled ship’s cook from jungle-shrouded Kpalamaa. “Or perhaps the name translates best to
Capital Punishment,
” the cook added cheerfully, leaning on the bow-rail as she waited for her assistants to heat her oven amidships. “For all their legalism, the people of Qiangguo love ambiguities.”

Gaunt grunted. Her calligraphic skills were unimpaired, at least, and when she and Imago Bone had boarded this dubious vessel in Serendip she’d noted the somewhat hasty manner in which the wavy logograms had been painted upon the stern. She suspected at some point the ship had swiftly changed hands. A criminal herself, she spoke nothing of it. They could not be choosy.

By now Eshe of Kpalamaa had learned to expect a certain volubility from Gaunt and Bone. So she cocked an eyebrow at the other woman’s grunt, her black hair twisting and coiling in the wind, dark freckles covering Eshe’s face like strange shadows of stars. The tall cook, muscled like a fighter, given to grins, seemed at once serious and girlish, like one who has given and taken much hurt, yet refuses to surrender anything, even laughter. It was perhaps for that reason that Gaunt tolerated her company—that, and the experience the older woman had with Gaunt’s condition.

“Is the baby tiring you?” Eshe asked.

“Is there tea in Qiangguo?” Gaunt snapped.

Now at eight months’ pregnant, Gaunt was grateful for her rugged farm girl’s body, honed by years of travel. While the bump of her belly was pronounced, and she grew weary quickly, for short stretches she was almost as sturdy as she’d been before her sojourn in the desert. She refused to stay confined to her cabin. She could imagine running the length of this ship (as she did regularly in search of a place to pee) or swimming off it and scaling the cliffs of this coast.

Well, perhaps she wouldn’t go that far. Best to conserve energy. Even standing still, her body was busy. She felt the wriggling life within her kick in response to the lurch and heave of the 
Passport/Punishment
, and felt pride in her unsprung offspring’s vitality.

She watched the wind spill droplets from the waves’ foamy peaks into the waves’ dark troughs—like little cheese shavings tumbling into a baker’s bowl. Her stomach groaned. (Hunger was an ongoing annoyance of pregnancy.) But Gaunt smiled a trifle, thinking of the little ocean inside her, the little one bobbing within it.

Someday I will show this to you
, she promised
, or something like it. This Starborn Sea, or the Sandkiss Sea of our journey, or the Spiral Sea of home. I will teach you to love the roiling jewelscape of the water, the blinding fishnet of the light upon it, the sting of salt in the eyes, the coarse delight of brine on the tongue.

Someday, when we are sure we’re safe.
 

It was as if her lover detected her worries from his perch upon the mainmast, for Eshe reported, “Bone is coming.”

Gaunt turned to see him scrambling down the flag-tipped bamboo pinnacle at the heart of the vast junk. In the process Bone clipped his nose upon one of the horizontal battens supporting the thin bamboo sails, slid to a hard landing upon the dark teakwood deck, where he rallied and rolled and danced his way through the crew, hard-looking men who were mostly of Qiangguo origin, though some hailed from spired Mirabad, torrid Serendip, or the mighty city-state of Harimaupura. (All of little relevance now, for their true nationality was the sea, and they now gave Bone looks suggesting he might become an honorary citizen at its bottom.) Bearded sailors, smooth-faced sailors with their hair in ponytails, bald sailors, sailors with peaked hats, sailors with eyepatches and one with a bronze nose, sailors of yellow hue, brown, or black, sailors wearing head scarves and sashed robes, sailors bearing armor and capes, sailors clad only in trousers, with rain-dragons tattooed upon their backs—all glared at the prancing Western rogue who threaded between them as nonchalantly as a sea-wind.