1633880583 (F) (74 page)

And the dead paused, hearing the music of the fossegrim in the hands of a poet who’d suffered. Northwing began drumming in accompaniment.

The dead stood transfixed, their attention momentarily frozen. She sang whatever doggerel came to mind:

Come my friends, let us go past.

Let us see, if luck can last.

Down they went.

In time the fog cleared. The slope became easy to walk. They moved through fissures in the bark as big as riverbeds. The roots of the great tree, like the crown, spread among the spinning stars. There was one of the titanic roots, however, which lay twisted awry, off in its own direction and far from its companions. That mammoth root seemed, at its distant tip, wreathed in fire.

Gaunt turned back, though the poetic precedent for that gesture was not so good. Many of their number had fallen, but Innocence, Haytham, Northwing, Katta, and Tlepolemus, and five more of their band remained.

“I regret our losses,” Gaunt said to Tlepolemus.

“They hearkened to old Kantening ways,” Tlepolemus said. “It suited them to battle the dead at the end of the world.”

Haytham stared back at the mists where the shade of Corinna lay. “Onward then,” he sighed. “Onward to destiny.”

They walked on, and time seemed a distorted, dreamlike thing. The fire-wreathed root loomed big as a ridge of hills, and now they had to ascend. As the fiery nimbus glowed over a ridge, the dead returned. These were a handful of figures only, but they seemed ravaged, twisted, bloody.

“No,” Gaunt said. “Not them.”

Her grandparents, along with her younger brothers and baby sisters. They had been ripped to pieces in Gaunt’s girlhood by a wizard’s beasts.

“Persimmon!” they wailed. “Persimmon!”

She hadn’t been known as
Gaunt
until later, in the distant city of Palmary, when she’d styled herself “Persimmon of County Gaunt,” and eventually just “Persimmon Gaunt.” When these siblings were alive, she’d been named for the family holding, the Sorrowdowns.

Katta asked, “Who are these shades?”

“They are members of my family, slain by creatures of Spawnsworth, a wizard who was a bane to Swanisle for many years. They died when I was young.”

“Why didn’t you help us?” the dead ones said. “Why weren’t you there?”

“I was with the bards,” she found herself saying. “I was learning music and poetry. . . .”

Now, “Selfish! Selfish!” came the voice of her mother. Olivia of the Sorrowdowns followed the rent ones. She was in one piece but emaciated and old.

“Mother? You are dead?”

“When your bastard son slew summer in the Bladed Isles,” Olivia said, “it chilled Swanisle as well. We were starving. Then he loosed the dragons, and the sun was blotted out. I could not survive. Maybe your older sisters did; I can’t say.”

“Oh, Mother . . .”

“What do you care? You were off on your adventures . . . just as when these little ones died, you were off with your music! Family was never enough for you!”

Gaunt reeled, dropped to her knees. Katta took her arm, and Haytham too. Northwing stood beside her. And Innocence too came between Gaunt and the shade.

Gaunt rose.

“Weren’t we rich enough for you, spoiled girl?” the shade said. “Did you abandon us because we found hard times?”

“I didn’t care about your wealth! That was your obsession, Mother! It’s a lie that I was greedy. I sought a life of harder toil than you could imagine. You, clutching at coins and jewels, pomp and show! I saw it all, Mother. Not just the hollowness of our lives but where it ended, in the grave. Everything ends eventually. I made peace with that, built my poetry around it. But you—you hide from it. Cowards! As if shoving your head under fancy pillows will distract the reaper. Well, that was your business, Mother, but mine was living.”

The image of Olivia of the Sorrowdowns screamed, “I have had enough! I will give you something to cry about!”

“I’m not crying.” Gaunt took up her instrument. “I’m fiddling.”

And she played.

It seemed as though pain was a string on a Vestvinden fiddle. The specters hesitated, as though no longer able to perceive Gaunt. The warband passed them by.

As they came over the next ridge, the journeyers saw the way ahead barred by a curtain of fire. They stepped forward and peered into it.

Within the fire wavered the image of a small island wrapped in a titanic chain, links stretching at either hand toward cliffs flanking a white-waved strait.

“This is it,” Gaunt said. “But we are barred.”

“So you are, Gaunt,” Imago Bone said, stepping from the flames. He was a charred travesty of himself. Beside him walked two angels of death, one shadowed, one fiery. She knew their names, for they’d accompanied Bone of old: Severstrand and Joyblood.

Gaunt trembled and played her fiddle.

“Alas, it won’t work on me,” Bone said, “or these night angels.”

“You’re not the real thing, any of you,” Gaunt said. “You could not be.”

“You are correct. But the tree is raising whatever defense it can.”

Northwing said, “The tree is dying!”

Bone shrugged. “It does not realize that. It is not truly a thinking entity. It only tries to protect its integrity. Beyond here is the key moment that can be changed, to restore what was lost. But I cannot let you pass.”

“You are not my husband,” Gaunt said, playing her tune.

“No,” he said, and his voice was sad. “But I am enough like him that you cannot resist. Your own tune coils back upon itself.”

It was true. She could not defy him in that way.

She dropped the fiddle and drew and threw a dagger. It caught him in the shoulder.

“Well done!” Bone smiled. He and the night angels advanced.

Northwing said, “You men! These are Gaunt’s shades, and maybe we have a better chance of defying them than she. Are you with me?”

Katta, Haytham, Tlepolemus, the crew of
Little Dragon
, and even Innocence roared their assent. They met the attack of the thief and his two deaths. Katta flung the last of his enchanted cakes, and Severstrand hissed where they connected. Haytham and Tlepolemus faced Joyblood, saber and sword flashing as the cat-o’-nine-tails lashed. Innocence leaped and kicked at Bone, and Gaunt joined them with daggers drawn. Northwing chanted and slapped a Vuos drum, and Bone became slightly transparent as the shaman did so. The five remaining men of
Little Dragon
guarded Gaunt or looked for places to surprise the enemy.

At first it seemed strength was on their side, but then Severstrand and Joyblood both vanished and appeared beside the men of
Little Dragon
. Scythe and lash cut the air, and two men fell dead. Katta raced to continue his attack on Severstrand; Haytham did the same with Joyblood, though Tlepolemus turned to Bone. Northwing continued the chant.

Bone regarded the shaman with an insolent smirk and threw a dagger. It missed Northwing and slashed the drum. Eyes narrowed, Northwing hissed her response. A cold wind rippled the curtain of flame, and Bone briefly faded from existence.

It seemed to Gaunt that Joyblood and Severstrand flickered out of sight at the same moment.

Before Gaunt could voice her insight, Severstrand’s pincers closed around Katta’s staff arm and severed his hand. The wanderer’s scream echoed around the Axial Tree. “No!” Gaunt cried, as Severstrand’s scythe finished off a warrior from the ship.

Gaunt slashed at the doppelganger of her husband, and Innocence whirled and kicked, distracting Bone. Gaunt shouted, “Kill Bone! The deaths are linked to him!”

Out the corner of her eye she saw Haytham try to obey, though Joyblood’s lash cracked the air. Another sailor lay dead beside the fiery angel. Tlepolemus’s sword cut at Bone; the thief’s shade was hard put to escape it. But Bone’s concerns were elsewhere. He threw a fresh dagger at Northwing, and this time he caught the shaman in the throat. The chant turned to a bloody gasp, and Northwing slumped down, head bleeding onto the drum, covering the pictograms there.

At once Bone became more solid, more agile. He slashed and drew blood from Gaunt; but it was a feint that allowed him to impale Tlepolemus in the eye.

For a moment it was mother and son battling the father. Then Bone jabbed a dagger deep into Innocence’s gut.

“Father,” the boy said weakly, slumping onto the ground.

“No!” Gaunt drove Bone back from Innocence, seeking vital points. Now Katta was there, somehow fighting despite the blood spurting from his stump; and Haytham was there, saber flashing. She heard a scream and knew the last survivor from
Little Dragon
was trying to hold the night angels off. The scream ended.

They had to finish Bone now. She feinted, blocked, lunged. . . .

Severstrand removed Haytham’s head. Joyblood’s lash turned Katta’s face into a mass of fire.

In the last moment, Gaunt thought of Innocence lying injured behind her. She remembered the real Bone’s words:
Tell him you love him
.

I love you both
, she thought, and stabbed Bone through the heart.

He dropped to his knees and turned to mist, blew away into the stars.

Beside him the two angels of death faded from view.

Innocence moaned and breathed. No one else lived.

She grabbed him. “I have you, son. I will bandage you. We will make it somehow.”

“You are bleeding too. . . .”

“The wounds of my spirit are far worse.”

She bound his midsection tight, and her arm, and they staggered forward to the flames.

“In a just world these would have faded,” Gaunt sighed.

“There are many cloaks here, and we can soak them with the water we’ve carried.”

“You think like your father. The real one. Just take care not to empty the flasks of alcohol.”

“I worked in a tavern. I know the difference.”

While he worked, she made one more hopeless check for life among her other companions. Hands shaking, she took the strange manuscript that Katta, Haytham, and Northwing had worked upon. It seemed wrong to leave it here, in limbo.

She kept one arm around it, one around Innocence, as they ran through the flames.

Coughing, smoking, they fell into cloudy daylight.

It was the same island they’d seen through the curtain of fire, but now it possessed only blackened, broken fragments of the Chain. And there stood the Winterjarl.

“Eh?” said the strange wizard, stepping toward them. “Are you with the thief?”

“Thief?” said Gaunt. “Was Bone here?”

“A familiar sound to that name . . . who are you?”

He was staring at Innocence as he said it.

Innocence dropped to his knees. It looked like supplication, but she knew it for pain and exhaustion.

“You,” said the Winterjarl.

Innocence gasped, “Do you remember this meeting?”

The old wizard blinked. “I do not.”

Innocence, tears streaking his face, began to smile.

The Winterjarl said, “But I . . . recognize you. Though I have never spoken to you. Except, perhaps, when muttering at a pool of water.”

“I’m you. And now I’m sure history can be changed.”

“We all have our fates.”

“But you don’t remember this conversation. There’s a chance. This is where we have to fix it, Winterjarl. We have to witness that day.”

“No!”

“Can you bring it to us? Bring us to it?”

“No!”

“I love you,” Gaunt said, putting her arms around the Winterjarl. The wizard gasped, stiffened. “You are my beloved son.”

“No . . .”

“Yes! Please. Let me help you by taking away the worst day of your life.”

“No,” he whispered. “It’s all coming back. . . .”

Now a great conflict came rippling into view. A storm shrouded the cliffs of Svardmark and Spydbanen. Balloons filled the air. Trolls rose from the water. Upon the part of the Great Chain linking the little island with Svardmark, Inga was carrying Steelfox down the Chain. Bone, the real Bone, lay beside Deadfall, near Jewelwolf. And Innocence, a third, ghostly Innocence, had his hands upon the Great Chain.

It seemed that time flowed slowly in the vision, perhaps ten seconds there for each experienced by Gaunt.

“There,” the Winterjarl said. “I have done it. But I cannot bear to look upon it. Let me leave. Your presences may destroy me.”

“All right,” the Innocence beside Gaunt said. “Thank you.”

“Wait,” said Gaunt, an intuition seizing her. “Take this.” She passed the Winterjarl the manuscript of Katta, Northwing, and Haytham. “This is a collection of writings that may shed light on many secrets of the Bladed Isles.”

The Winterjarl flipped through the pages. Considering the manuscript seemed to calm him. “It needs a cover. And maps to give context. And some commentary. Hm.”

He walked away, through a curtain of ghostly fire.

“Mother,” said the bleeding Innocence beside her. “I have little time, in either the mystical or physical sense.”

“Whatever messages we deliver, we must give them now. I’ll whisper in your younger self’s ear. My son, please give some encouraging word to your father.”

They stepped to their tasks, Innocence rising painfully. He chuckled. “Peace and love, is it?”

“Swan, Undetermined, All-One, spirits of the sky . . . isn’t love at the heart of all of it?”

“So easy to say,” Innocence said. “But it’s all confusion once we take one step beyond that.”

“Well. Half a step then?”

They advanced.

They whispered.

They vanished like water drops upon a sword pulled fresh from the forge.

CHAPTER 42

TODAY

Imago Bone felt cheated. For the second time he’d flown a significant distance on a flying carpet, but he couldn’t remember any of it. After he’d willingly left
Anansi
with Deadfall and Jewelwolf—wanting to see Innocence and not wanting to bring trouble to Eshe—his consciousness failed. His battered body remembered, however, with aches and chills. He woke on an island in the Chained Straits, upon a litter, covered in a blanket. He’d been placed where he would have a good view of the Great Chain of Unbeing, whose vast dark links covered the island in this spot. Thoughtful. The gray before dawn had only just started revealing the heights above. He’d awoken several times before, to see only darkness.