The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (35 page)

Birds nest in my trees, ants crowd my roots, salamanders swim my streams. What is it to me if you leave your scroll?

“But will you protect it?”

A man pursues you, man. Your business with him is your own.

“My . . . mate, and my child, are in this scroll. I know that might be hard to believe . . .”

A triviality. I understand your scroll, man.

“It is not trivial to me.”

The frenzy of mating and birthing is of great importance to little things. I have larger concerns.

Bone slumped. He was exhausted, hounded by forces far greater than he. It would be better to flee, scramble, climb. The animal in him understood that. He had to think instead.

Animal. The tone of the dragon’s conversation reminded him of his talks with Lightning Bug. It occurred to him that some of the East’s philosophy might have its origins in the female dragons. He tried to recall those conversations.

“A mouse sees grass, roots, and seeds,” Bone ventured. “A bird sees a green expanse, a canopy of leaves, and bright dots of flowers. Neither sees quite what the other sees. Yet each sees truly.”

The rippling had the quality of laughter.
You may be a mouse, but to you I am no bird. Think of clouds, rather, or the sky.

“Fine,” Bone said. “This mouse would ask a boon of the sky. You were not always in this form. Once you darted hither and yon like us smaller creatures. Once you were an egg, then a juvenile, then an arkendrake like the one who nestles in a cave far above here.”

Not like him. I was like clouds then, truly.
A wistfulness, perhaps, to the ripples.

“Male and female are different,” Bone said, speaking from intuition, imagining he were Lightning Bug. “Mountain and valley are different. Being and non-being are different. They are unlike—yet kin. From their interaction arises the world, ungoverned yet organized.”

You speak of the Way, human?
Anger, now.
The Way that can be spoken of is not the true way. Human speech is unequal to it. Human schemes can only impede it, like your Walls.

“Why do you speak of the Walls?”

They bind us, requiring us to mate only in the Ruby Waste. By this strategy they confine the energies of mating to one place, so as to preserve their cities and farms.

“Is that wrong?”

The presence of so many dragons in one place is confusing, and breeds conflict among us. And the eggs that result from such matings follow narrower paths than once they did. They are more likely to collide and be destroyed. They fall in a narrower range of places. Dragons suffer, but so too does the world. Over time, the eggs fall in fewer places, and the structure of the world becomes deficient.

Bone made himself shrug. “Who can say what is good or bad?”

I can!

“Then perhaps we have something in common. For I can say that the loss of my family is bad as well.”

There was silence, then a trill of laughter sketched in wind and water.

There is another reason, little one, I do not wish to guard your scroll. I sense within it the next Emperor, he who would command the energies of the Walls.

“If you keep it,” Bone said, “someone will come looking for it.”

Yes.

“It is my desire to escape with my mate and child, and run far from this place. But if I cannot do that, I would hide within the scroll, if it is well-protected.”

The arkendrake could bear you away. Yet I cannot coerce him. Were I to stir, I would rouse his lust, and he mine . . .

“Then help me against the one who pursues.”

Fight him here, then, little one.

“He can anticipate . . .”

“Indeed I can,” came the voice of Hackwroth. The auditor stood at the edge of the path of stones leading to the altar. He was removing a peculiar vessel from the pack at his foot. “You, Bone, are about to slip the scroll into a nook within that altar, hoping the she-dragon will guard it. Go on. It’s probably a good idea.”

Bone could see no better option, and he did so. He stuffed the scroll into a pocket that seemed made for it, and extricated his hand from the glove that still held it, twisting a bit like a peculiar flower on a wide stem.

Did the altar stone constrict a little at that moment? He hoped so.

“Have you seen your own death?” Bone asked conversationally, stepping backward along the further path, coming close to the plunge.

“Many times,” Hackwroth said, raising a peculiar bottle whose top coiled and merged with its base. “All different. But each instance seems like a story that happened to someone else.”

“Have you seen mine?”

Hackwroth smiled. “That would be telling.” Light began swirling like a dust devil within the bottle. “But I am more interested in the other end of your life.” A boy appeared within the bottle, bent over a toy sailing ship handmade from driftwood twigs. As Bone watched, transfixed, a foot appeared and crushed it. The boy sobbed and thrashed.

“I had forgotten . . .” Bone said.

“What we forget still may whip us on. You are still that boy, hounded by powers greater than you, grasping at fetishes of freedom.”

Bone took a hesitant step toward the bottle, despite himself. The image of the boy blurred like a ship in the rain. “You could use your gifts to heal, Hackwroth. How many of us are a little mad, raging against weathered old hurts?”

“Healing doesn’t pay,” Hackwroth said. “But I will heal you, Imago Bone. Step closer, and you will have peace.”

Bone wavered. More images formed: stick-fights with his brothers, which degenerated into stick-ball with little Imago as the ball; his mother slapping him for using good wool for his sea-explorer’s hat; hiding on the roof from a father angry that Imago had painted classical-style eyes on the front of the fishing boat. He found himself stumbling toward Hackwroth like a moth flitting toward a cruel torch-waving boy.

He passed beside the dragon-altar and chanced to look within.

Images shifted in the waters. They were cool drops upon hot wounds. His brothers declared him King of the Seas and let him command them as they rowed and sang shanties hither and yon across the bay, blue moonlight in the sky. His mother introduced him, a giggling toddler, to the tickling surf. His father and he stick-fought like duelists of Aquitania, and somehow Imago got to win two times out of three.

The wounds were still there. But they were never the whole. He stopped.

Something groaned under Hackwroth’s weight. The auditor leapt as a stone slipped from its socket and rolled across his path, smashing his vessel before rolling into the pit.

“Dragon!” Hackwroth called. “Immense though you are, you’re a creature within time, and I can anticipate you!”

The ceiling groaned.

“A bluff,” Hackwroth said.

Flakes of stone fell.

“I would not mock a dragon,” Bone observed. “Especially from inside one.”

“I have no quarrel with you, old one!” Hackwroth boomed. “I mean to take the child you fear far away from here!”

The groaning subsided.

Bone’s dim hopes faded further. Or was the dragon’s change of heart another bluff?

Gaunt’s words returned to him.
Even childless in the heart of Archaeopolis we would sometimes depend on others.

He turned and raced along the path, reached the far side of the cavern, and climbed, trusting the walls not to betray him.

“Such a coward!” Hackwroth called.

I’ve never claimed courage
, Bone replied silently.
Stubbornness, rather . . .

He ascended as quickly as he could, grasping rocks and roots. For a long interval he was simply a thing that climbed, until he hung from a bundle of roots beside a shaft of light.

Hackwroth stood below, beside the dragon’s altar. “Bone,” he called, “I believe there is nothing preventing me from grasping this scroll and shifting to the world inside. You will have to follow.”

“Are you certain? You just called me a coward.”

“A coward,” Hackwroth said, “not an abandoner of family.”

“But you cannot be sure, Hackwroth,” Bone called from a hundred feet above. “I believe I’m far enough away that you cannot be sure.”

Hackwroth grunted, hesitated, then reached for the scroll. He found that it had slipped deeper into the altar. He stretched his fingers . . .

Bone took the opportunity to remove his vial of ur-glue, and empty it on the end of a rope. That was the last of the valuable stuff. He dropped the vial into the pool atop the white altar.

Hackwroth heard the sound, and gazed into the pool. As the ripples steadied, he stared at whatever scenes of Hackwroth’s life the dragon’s perspective revealed.
Your foresight can’t protect you
, Bone thought,
if you are fixed upon the past
.

He threw the glue-stained rope. It hit the edge of Hackwroth’s shard of magic mirror. Bone waited a moment for the ur-glue to settle.

He yanked.

Hackwroth’s head snapped to the side. He snarled. Blood seeped from the edges of the mirror. Bone glimpsed baleful red light within the shard, as though the future held a lifetime of crimson.

“You . . .”

“I will protect my family.”

Hackwroth screamed, “
Kindlekarn!
Aid me! Kindlekarn!”

Hackwroth stepped directly under Bone, creating slack. Bone kept pulling. “Kindlekarn!” he shouted too. “I have a gift . . .”

Bone yanked again. Blood seeped, but the shard remained in place.

Then the crimson within the shard flared bright with reflected flame.

Dragon-fire belched down from overhead, through one of the shafts of light.

Flame roared across Bone’s arm, down his hand, onto the rope. He struggled to keep his grip, but his agonized nerves had already betrayed him. The rope fell. Bone nearly fell as well. He gripped the hanging roots.

“
Now
I perceive your fate!” Hackwroth snarled, hand upon the shard of magic mirror. He used the mirror’s edge to sever the end of the now slackened rope. “Limited man! All of you time-blind creatures are as worms to me. Burn him, Kindlekarn!”

More flame cut the cavern air. The chamber trembled as the arkendrake’s weight settled upon it, rocks and clods of earth flicking into the pond. Or was there more to the disturbance?

Hackwroth said, “
You
are worms as well, agents of the Garden and the Forest.”

What?
Bone thought.

Bone looked down and beheld Lightning Bug and Walking Stick, advancing together along the stones toward Hackwroth. He saw them pause and turn to each other.

“We are agreed, then?” Walking Stick said.

“Yes,” said Lightning Bug. 

“You two are enemies,” Hackwroth objected.

“We are citizens of the Empire,” Walking Stick said.

“You would destroy what should be preserved,” Lightning Bug said.

The two wulin flanked the Western assassin.

“You are my superiors in every respect,” Hackwroth said. “Save that I know all you will do.”

Bone shouted, “Listen! In the interplay between two beings lies uncertainty. You fight in different styles . . . play off each other. Let the other choose your moves.”

Lightning Bug grinned. “The Way is larger than each of us, my old love,” she told Walking Stick.

Walking Stick smiled thinly, and tossed her his staff. “When we seek to embody the whole Way, we merely become more useful pieces of it. Our love has served its purpose.”

Lightning Bug laughed. “Perhaps its destiny was this.”

“Fight me!” Hackwroth snarled.

And so they did. But Imago Bone did not linger to see Lightning Bug’s elegant staff-play or Walking Stick’s erratic leaps and lunges, nor Hackwroth’s ducking, rolling, and savage head butts with the serrated shard. Rather, he grasped roots and shifted painfully across the roof. From time to time rocks fell and flame gouted, but he kept moving and reached his goal, a spot precisely above the altar of the Eastern dragon. He tied a rope around a massive root and descended.

He crouched by the altar and wiggled his fingers into crevices beneath his abandoned glove. At last he touched paper. “Gaunt . . . Gaunt . . . hear me.”

After a moment, “Father,” came a voice.