The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (38 page)

Wu screamed and dropped Lightning Bug.

Hackwroth had leapt up and stabbed his mirror-shard into the back of Wu’s neck, embracing her like a lover.

“No . . .” he gasped. “Even if all is chaos, you will not escape me. I will know satisfaction before the bright ending promised me . . .”

“Go!” Wu snarled, blood filling her mouth. “I, an evil, will prevent a greater evil. I will keep the barbarian here. Go!”

She drove herself backward into the shallow waters of the cavern, where the pair sprawled and splashed, Hackwroth raging, Wu screaming and laughing.

Gaunt helped Lightning Bug to her feet, looked at the struggling pair, and turned her eyes to where Next One cradled the unmoving Flybait. “So young,” she whispered, feeling so old. She felt no hate for Wu for endangering her child, nor anything for Hackwroth at all. She took Next One’s hand, and tugged the bereaved girl gently up.

“Live,” Gaunt told her.

Next One stared as though from ten thousand leagues away. She nodded, a movement like a settling stone.

Gaunt heard a gasp far below, thought it contained the word Gaunt.

“Bone?”

“You must find him,” Next One said.

“I will take you to him,” Lightning Bug said. She took Gaunt and Next One’s hands, and together they leapt.

Bone fought the current, but battered and dragged in the dark, he knew soon enough that he could either let go the scroll, or drown. He could choose to enter the scroll, and perhaps enchanted as it was it would endure, for it did not lose its resilience in the water. But he would be lost to Gaunt.

There came a great booming, as of rock shattering. The waters rushed with renewed force. He clutched at the scroll and went under. He was a feather tossed on the waters, and the scroll was not the anchor he needed. But his child was there. His son. He did not remember anything about the boy, but he projected his words into the world of the scroll.

I am sorry. I am so sorry. But I cannot go with you. I must be with your mother. It is who I am. But never forget that I am also your father.

He thought he heard an answer:
Help mama.
A blessing? Or a call for help? He could not know.

He let go the scroll.

He struggled to the surface, a surface filled with sounds like concussions and roars. He gasped out, “Gaunt!”

Then he toppled back into the water, was dragged along into the dark. Somewhere in that endless time he thought he felt hands upon him, but that seemed a warm and distant dream.

He felt like a horse was kicking him, and a water snake strangling him. He coughed up water onto a wooden deck.

Eshe of the Fallen Swan was staring down at him, spitting out a little water of her own. “There, it’s done,” she said, regarding him a moment longer. “He’ll live.”

“Gaunt . . . Persimmon . . .”

“She will live too, you great fool, as will Next One. Thanks to Lightning Bug. Chi power or no chi power, I cannot imagine the strength it took to get the three of you away from
that
.”

Bone looked up and saw smoke rising from the sea in a vast cloud. It billowed westward like a grey pillar toppling under the weight of fuming fungus.

He lay there a long time, aching and breathing, watching the smoke carry away the dreams of dragons and outlaws.
So I did betray you, Kindlekarn
, he thought.
As I’ve betrayed so much else.

He crawled toward Gaunt. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide. She sat next to Lightning Bug, who moved little, her complexion pale, her midsection covered with bandages that seeped blood.

“Lightning Bug,” he said.

“I am glad . . . you are alive . . . I go to rejoin the world’s breath.”

“Lightning Bug,” he said again. “I can’t . . . how can I . . .”

“Bone,” Gaunt said. “Innocence. Our son.”

Bone felt as though all his long life until this point was one chapter. The next would not be happy. The page must be turned.

“He is back inside the scroll,” Bone said. “And Walking Stick went with him, to guard him. And the scroll is . . .” He looked up at the smoke plume, back at his knees.

“No,” Gaunt said. “No.”

“Do not despair . . .” Lightning Bug said, and Bone could see much how the effort cost her. “The scroll is not so easily destroyed. It was Meteor-Plum’s last work, you see . . . And Walking Stick is not quite the man he was. He showed me I was right to marry my husband. And yet he showed me he still had a good heart, deep under that fine robe. All may yet be well. Who can tell what is good or bad. Who . . .”

She fell silent, as if marshaling her strength. If so, in the next moment she spent it, or it deserted her. Bone had been staring for minutes at the wulin woman, Gaunt silent beside him, before Eshe appeared to close Lightning Bug’s eyes.

“Wherever you would go,” Eshe said at last, “I can promise you we will take you there, if it be a sane destination.”

“I have no sane destinations,” Bone muttered.

Gaunt studied him a long time. “To Qiangguo, and the coast. In Abundant Bamboo there are children who need to know their mother is not coming home.”

Eshe nodded, lingered, then departed.

“Persimmon . . .” Bone said.

Gaunt said nothing. She stood and strode toward the ship’s bow.

Bone stayed with Lightning Bug. What else was there to do? He would guard her body before the sailors committed her to the churn of the sea. Perhaps he would come along.

He looked toward the bow and saw Gaunt stand beside Next One. The two were talking, their arms jabbing, their backs stiff, their forms comprising some unknown character representing grief.

He saw Gaunt raise a coin, contemplate it, and flip it. She regarded the result, and tossed the coin into the waters. Back she came, down the deck, toward the fallen warrior and the kneeling thief. He waited.

“You let him take Innocence,” she said, and the lack of emotion in her voice cut deeper than any scream. “You let Walking Stick have our son.”

Bone could have protested. He had no heart to. The essence was true enough. “I had to do it. To stay with you.”

“I do not know if I would have made the same choice, Imago. I think I would have done the opposite. I am sorry.”

Bone nodded. “I also. It has been so long . . .”

“Imago Bone. I think I may hate you now. And yet the hate, too, is in the service of love.” She knelt and took his hand, stiffly, yet he, stupid animal that he was, thrilled at the touch of her. “I will not be parted again without calling you
husband
, for that is what you are, have long been, for better or for worse. For you came back to me when you could have had a clean escape beside your son. I hate you for that decision, yet the hate is a small, gridded part of the chaos we call love. Call for Eshe of the Fallen Swan, Imago. Do it now before I change my mind and hurl you into the sea.”

Bone obeyed, for all was as she said, and he experienced that strange, chill calm in the midst of wind, of a lover new-forgiven. He hoped it would last.

I am your father
, he thought to someone toward the smoke plume.
I swear I will find you again.

Winter had come to Abundant Bamboo. Snow fell from veiled skies like flecks of white silence and muffled the hubbub of all but the children and the river. Since the passing away of the bandits it had become a safer, steadier place, and the printer Tror felt a lightness in the steps of all feet but his own. Even his children, for all that they yearned for their mother, were engrossed in their snowball fight, and he repeatedly shooed them away from his machinery so no official proclamations would be spattered in the crossfire.

He needed his work. For all that Lightning Bug could be a mystery to him, he liked her as a close mystery. He missed her snores and her tendency to battle invisible monsters in her sleep, for all that this sometimes left him dizzied on the floor. For that matter, their lovemaking had at times the same effect. He missed planning his days and waiting to see exactly how she would upend those plans. Things were getting far too reasonable and predictable. She would say he was getting too fat, and then make a pot of fried rice far richer than anything he’d had in months. She would say he was letting the children run around like wild animals, before joining the snowball fight herself. He would sigh and bemoan his fate. All would be well.

He watched a few brave boats bobbing up and down the river. One sturdy travel barge was tying up even now. He wondered what places the travelers had come from. Wondering made him consider making something up. Even now at the teahouses they were telling stories of Devil Bone and the Dagger Poet, the students of the Woman in Black, and their endless battles against the Staff Sage and Exceedingly Sorcerous Wu. Tror figured he could do better than most in promoting that myth. And he had a printing press. Perhaps he could slip a little covert Swan scripture in, just around the edges . . .

A knot of four travelers was headed his way, and Tror’s daydreams ceased. Through the snow he could not make out the three cloaked travelers who paused on the street of cold, crunching mud, but he knew the girl who came forward and removed her hood—no, not a girl, not anymore. But he knew her.

“Next One,” Tror said. “What . . . ?”

“I have things to tell you,” she said, and in her voice he knew already what the first thing would be, and gripped a bamboo post for support. “And help to offer you and your children. But please . . . call me Snow Pine.”

The Tale of Innocence

In the temple in the Peculiar Peaks, Innocence Gaunt studied his classics and practiced calligraphy beneath the paintings that were the gifts of the self-portrait of Meteor-Plum—the landscapes of Swanisle and Palmary, Penultima Thule and the Contrariwise Coast, and many another land, as described to the artist by the woman in the portrait by the window. She was a thick-boned farmer-turned-poet-turned-thief, bearing a rose-and-spiderweb tattoo, and she seemed sad and kindly and motherly and mischievous, like one who has seen much but refuses to surrender anything, even laughter. She had also described the man in the portrait opposite, the thin rogue with a flame-scar on one side, the blade-scar on the other, bearing a look implying even the end of the world had its amusing aspects.

Outside coughed the stern man who paced beside the outbuilding so methodically, the grim-faced man with the staff, who said the boy had a destiny, out in his parents’ world.

Above the land, the sky had a thick, grey countenance, almost like paper that had sopped too much water. It rained often. Monks venturing from the temple down the mountain paths reported a great lake making islands of the peaks. Every year the level of the lake was a little higher.

“How then can I fulfill this destiny, O shade of the emperor?” Innocence asked once of the self-portrait. “How can I escape into my parents’ world? And even if I could, with the power you speak of, what ill deeds might I commit there? Would I enslave the world, be it in the manner of the East or West, garden or grid?”

“You cannot know these things,” said the image of Meteor-Plum. “You can lay plans, but you can never control the future. Only, learn from my maker’s folly, and seek not to command what you love.”