The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (29 page)

Bone nodded. “Thank you. That is generous.” He kept the anger from his voice. Angry thieves were less likely to be indulged. And more, there was still in Eshe and her dark freckles something girlish and joyful, something he would like to believe still lit the woman’s life.

Even if it was merely a glint of sun upon the ice.

She sighed. “If you say so. At night we can smuggle you to the galleon. We can leave midmorning.”

He paced. “It should be dawn.”

“We can’t arouse too much suspicion, and there is always paperwork, and some bribery.”

“Very well.”

“But . . . forgive me, Bone. Even if the dragon is at Penglai, how can you hope to catch it, or its master? And will not Gaunt and your child be doomed by then? It is a very long journey.”

“I do not think either is a problem,” he lied, or hoped. “Hackwroth will want me. And my family will be the bait.”

Near the maw of the Forbidden City’s great Red Dragon lay a public park. This was not the precisely fashioned miniature world of the Windwater Garden, nor the immaculate visions of nature found in the other gardens of the high city. This was a place made for commoners and ordinary tradesmen, and while it aspired to the heights of those other locales, the trees ever needed pruning, the rock gardens demanded weeding, the ponds bordered on brackish, and litter needed removing. It was not an unkempt place, simply large and modestly budgeted. It had sounds never heard in the high gardens—barking dogs, crying children, chattering lovers.

Recently it had even had a swimming thief.

Lightning Bug thought it a controlled place, but tolerable for a city. Walking Stick found it an eyesore, but better than wandering in the wastes.

The two leaned on each other as they ascended the bridge, battered from their battle with vampires and ghosts. It seemed to Lightning Bug they passed ghosts once again, though of a very different kind. These specters were of the mind’s eye. There was a giggly young woman leaning on a dashing young man, both dressed in the plain grey robes of Garden acolytes. They were fresh from sparring and weeding, and while carnal pleasures were forbidden them, the air around them seemed to crackle with the tension of breath, sweat, contact, heartbeat. They stared at the pond and its carp, listened to the trees rustle and echo with birdsong, and stole glances at each other as though separated by the length of the park.

“Oh, kiss him, you fool,” murmured the Lightning Bug of now, as she passed the spot.

“Eh?” said the old Walking Stick beside her. He did not see her ghosts. She wondered if he saw anything but rules, precepts, strictures. But she remembered the fight at the necropolis, how her drunken fire complemented his icy calm, how he cleared the path for her with his flashing staff even as she watched for ambush from all sides, and she knew that young man was still within him, trembling with pride and desire. The young woman within her kicked and raged at being trapped inside this future moment, because all the might of her middle-aged body could not tear time asunder.

They reached the top of the bridge and sagged against its stone railing. “No birdsong,” he said.

“What?”

“No birds, no frogs. There are dogs, of course, but humans brought them. The wildlife of the Empire ebbs. Do you not remember, the day of our sparring, when we knew . . . ? It seemed a full opera of life attended us.”

“The Garden does not speak of this,” Lightning Bug said in wonder. “We have been warning . . .”

Walking Stick said, “Year by year, it was easy to discount the changes. And sadly, your warnings themselves discredited the idea. For it is human nature to mistrust a message when it is delivered by an opponent. But I have been away from the cities, searching for signs of a new Emperor. The feeling has grown in me, that the land is weakening. Yet only now, when I remember that day . . .”

“That day is with me too.”

Even in what now seemed a bleak silence, the park was beautiful. Clouds blew in from the sea. Kites bobbed. Children tackled their parents, all laughing. A fish surfaced, as if to say, “Here, here, still here.”

Lightning Bug said, “Is it true, then, that the Walls . . . ?”

“I will answer with a story.”

The Tale of Meteor-Plum

The Master Architect of the Second Emperor, the man charged with planning the Walls, was a careful planner in other ways as well.

In the proper time his son married into the extended Imperial family, reaching a station not too high, not too low. The Walls expanded, and in successive generations there was always one woman of the Master Architect’s line who in pregnancy bore the belly marks echoing the Walls’ ultimate shape.

The firstborn of such women proved to have a great communion with the chi of the land, as it billowed through the tracks of the Walls. Such children prospered, yet the family kept this power secret. Until the time of Meteor-Plum.

Meteor-Plum was born to one of the then-Emperor’s prized concubines, she who in time was elevated to Empress. As was sometimes the case, the eldest son of the favorite became crown prince.

Yet the boy’s father was remote. Concubine Long Ting, mindful of the family secret, was ambitious on her son’s behalf. Although she recognized that a future emperor of such promise should have a thorough education, she berated him for showing too much interest in art, literature, science, magic, and the welfare of peasants. Meanwhile she praised him for wearing proper clothes, showing proper decorum, and crushing his enemies.

Meteor-Plum Long was a kindly man by nature, and thus was torn in two. His virtuous impulses brought him shame.

Yet to be his own man, he must at times defy his mother, and the nature of his rebellion took the forms of poetry, painting, philosophical inquiry, magical experimentation, and charitable works. He proved cunning at all these tasks.

The more the common people praised him, the sharper his mother’s words.

“You let them control you like a puppet,” she sneered once. “I see I have erred by allowing you too much leisure. Starting tomorrow your days will be meticulously planned, your current laziness supplanted by readings of the military classics, tutoring in etiquette, swordplay, and supervision of punishment.”

“Supervision of punishment?” Meteor-Plum asked.

“You possess too much compassion. You are out of balance. I would have you preside over a spate of state executions. This will serve two ends: to sharpen the blade of your heart, and to temper the people’s love of you with fear.”

Meteor-Plum wrote a poem the next day that alluded artfully to a desire to kill himself.

The date coincided with one of Long Ting’s routine searches of his rooms. Long Ting found the poem and mentioned casually over tea, “Should any child of mine be so weak as to desire suicide, I will personally hand him the knife.”

Meteor-Plum would have appealed to his father, but the Emperor was far away in the Ruby Waste, supervising aspects of the Walls’ construction and the monitoring of the cat-eyed denizens of that land.

Meteor-Plum needed to escape. He bent all his knowledge and skill toward an exit that would occur under the court’s nose. Thus he created his scrolls of transspatial dislocation.

In other realities, bereft of human beings, Meteor-Plum found the freedom he needed. Arranging the flow of time to suit himself, at first he simply caught up on lost sleep. Back in the court he displayed a new calm, born of a rested body. He marveled at how much of his despair was founded in fatigue.

Once recovered, he set about exploring his worlds in earnest. Having great skill in landscape painting, his scrolls reached worlds with a rich range of natural forms. He hiked, climbed, and sketched. He learned to swim unharmed in the torrent of a waterfall, making his body flow with the chi of the water. At other times he got drunk and composed poetry. He painted upon the edges of cliffs.

Undistracted by the bafflement of human speech, Meteor-Plum considered the Way that lies beyond all words, the word
Way
included. When he painted, or wrote, or swam, or climbed, in a manner unencumbered by words or formal thought, his skills soared. More, he learned to sense that flow of chi within him which was his birthright. And he came to understand something about his homeland.

The Walls of Qiangguo were not merely channeling chi from the people and land in order to trap the mating dragons. The Walls funneled chi from the dragons’ very death-throes back to the Forbidden City, and most especially to
him
. The process was young yet, but it would intensify over the generations until the Emperors would be like unto gods.

Meteor-Plum believed (humbly) he might absorb such power without becoming mad. But what of men like his father? Worse, what of men like those his mother wanted him to be?

Meteor-Plum resolved that future emperors be bound with legalism and tradition, so that they would not treat the people as a child treats his playthings. Scouring the records of the ancients, he extracted what he considered the best of their wisdom, and founded a tradition of scholars to study these teachings. He called his school the Garden.

Affected by the scrolls’ strange time-flow, Meteor-Plum seemed to have grown up overnight. Because he had not wasted his time, he conveyed the aspect of a sage who followed the Way. People heeded his teachings, and the Garden’s.

Order based on punishment produces scoundrels who obey its letter, not its spirit. Order based not only on punishment, but on excellence through example and imitation of excellence through ritual, will produce people of good character.

Show respect for the magical world, then stay as far away from it as you can.

Harmony depends upon good relations throughout the hierarchy. If there is discord in the family, there will be discord in the Empire.

To rule others, one must first rule one’s self.

What few but Meteor-Plum understood was that his primary hope was to bind the powerful, not the weak. Meteor-Plum now returned his mother’s scorn with impeccable courtesy, though minimal obedience. Consort Ting did not understand this combination, and baffled by it she at last withdrew to her narrow circle.

When his father perished in battle with the grass-sailors of the Argosy Steppes, Meteor-Plum ascended to the throne. He oversaw the completion of Riverclaw and spread the Garden’s influence throughout Qiangguo. The land prospered. All seemed well, and his number three wife in time bore the stretch marks proclaiming the approach of the next chosen one. She was elevated to empress, and the child was born.

The child was a girl. And Meteor-Plum was dismayed.

“Ah,” Lightning Bug said. “Here we come to the part that I know.”

“Tell it to me, then. It is well, I think, that at this moment Forest and Garden tell each other their stories. We have been too long silent.”

“Our superiors might not agree.”

“We are off dry land at this point, don’t you think?”

“That is for you, me, and the fish to know.”