The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (12 page)

Eshe said, “More or less. You go to the town of Abundant Bamboo.”

“You are most free with information,” Gaunt murmured.

Walking Stick stared at Gaunt, eyes taking in the shape of her middle. Bone wondered if he should pull that mustache after all.

Walking Stick exchanged more words with Eshe, who said, “I am free in no other sense. The rope is tangled, as we say in Kpalamaa. This man could kill us all. I speak not merely of his skill, but of his station. Let him reach any provincial garrison and he could set a small army upon us . . . He merely wishes to help us to the town—a small kindness for him, and a minor delay.”

Gaunt nodded. “So be it. He saved our lives.” Bone grunted acceptance.

Walking Stick bowed and remounted. With gestures he enlisted Bone’s aid in getting Eshe upon his horse, whom he led through the trees and moonlight, the Westerners trailing. From time to time the priestess and official exchanged murmurs in the tongue of Qiangguo.

“
He
does not seem so bothered by death,” Bone muttered. He was not sure he wanted to know the young bandits’ fate.

“Let us not forget that,” Gaunt replied.

Next-One-A-Boy and Flybait fled through the forest, casting looks backward through moon-spattered shadow and fear-scented sweat for bandits or foreign devils. They saw neither. They kept riding anyway.

“We can’t go back to the caves,” Next-One-A-Boy said when they’d gotten halfway to the river, dizzy and bruised from hard riding. “We’ve betrayed the gallant fraternity.”

“No!” said Flybait. “We saved our skins. It was not premeditated. It was a mishap.”

“We panicked. The foreign devils were monstrous in battle, and we panicked.”

“Yes, that’s it! We were out of our minds!”

“And yet,” Next-One-A-Boy noted, “we had the presence of mind to steal the horses.”

“Aiya! The Cloud and Soil Society will never forgive us. Where will we go, then? I, a child of peddlers who are surely halfway to the Argosy Steppes by now. And you, a hen who crows.”

Next-One-A-Boy folded her arms. “This hen who crows will give you good advice if you’ve the ears for it.”

He paused, patted his ears as if worried he’d left one behind. “Okay. What?”

“We let the horses go.”

“Oh! Yes, then the fraternity won’t think we took them.”

“No. Left to themselves they’ll go back to the caves.”

“Oh. Why, then?”

“
We
will be going somewhere else.” She pulled out the magic scroll.

“Is that a map? Let me see it!” He grabbed.

“Wait!” she said, but it was too late. Flybait’s expression changed from one of fear and greed to one of fear and wonder, as he turned transparent and vanished. His horse snorted, looked around, and whinnied.

“You idiot,” she said, dismounting and taking both horses’ reins. “Not you, horse. Well, at least now I’m sure it wasn’t just a dream.”

She heard a distant sound. It at first seemed an echo of her racing heart, but a dissonance revealed the sound of hoofbeats. She peered into the moonlit distance and glimpsed a white horse appearing and disappearing amid the shadows of tree trunks. It galloped as though the trees were giving way before an honored worthy.

Flybait re-emerged, toppling onto the ground. He was shivering, with a dusting of snow over him. “Hey! What was
that
?”

“Shh!” said Next-One-A-Boy. She shooed the horses into a run, and led Flybait in another direction. “We’re being chased. We have to vanish now.”

“I’m not going back in there! I was falling, and I didn’t know who I was. I just knew I had to escape.”

“You still have to escape. Someone’s chasing us.”

“Maybe they have a blanket?”

She dragged him low into the bushes. “Look,” she said.

Caught in the moonlight, an Imperial official charged past on a huge horse with one extra rib. He raced on, following the bandits’ horses.

“A dragon horse!” Flybait whispered, wonder shaking him out of his misery. “They are supposed to be the mightiest of steeds, from the lands where the Argosy Steppes meet the Ruby Waste. They can run tirelessly. Only a dozen exist in the Empire. Oh, to touch one!”

“You could touch one as it tramples you,” she answered him. “That official must be working with the foreigners. Maybe he’s bribed, or maybe they were Imperial agents all along. Either way, in a minute he’ll catch the horses and start looking for us. Our only hope is to get this scroll hidden somewhere and disappear into it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “The kind of official who’d have a dragon horse would be most formidable. But it’s cold in there . . .”

“I know where there’s shelter on the cold mountain. Hurry.”

They heard the hoofbeats and whinnying begin, as they worked the scroll deep amid the roots of a bush. Next-One-A-Boy reached as far in as she could, and grasping Flybait’s hand, she held the scroll and concentrated.

“He’s coming!” Flybait hissed.

“Don’t distract me . . .” she said. And the pair became like unto snowflakes, fluttering down to a white-dusted mountain.

Once again the experience was like a dream, or a tale. This time, however, they remembered their pasts. They settled down, hands linked, onto the white path. They stared at each other a moment, then let go.

“Where is this shelter of yours?” Flybait said, snow swirling about him. “I see nothing but wilderness.”

“It is this way,” Next-One-A-Boy said, gesturing downslope. “And you’re welcome.”

Snow crunched underfoot as they hastened down the path. From time to time neighboring mountain peaks loomed out of the mists like the fingers of giants. “Forgive me!” Flybait said. “I am a simple bandit with an eye for beautiful—valuables! I know nothing of strange magic. Where did you find this scroll?”

“The hollow in the Wall,” she said, “where we met the New Year.”

“You held out loot from me? Us? You cheated the gallant fraternity!”

“The same gallant fraternity we’ve betrayed together?”

“It’s the principle of the thing!” Flybait said.

“I look after myself. I am Next-One-A-Boy. My very name proves the truth of my life, that I can count on nobody but myself. This scroll we’re in represents power. Or wealth, if I can sell it. I might share such things with you, Flybait, if you prove yourself a considerate . . . business partner.”

“You know, it’s really time you stopped calling yourself Next-One-A-Boy,” Flybait said, frowning. Apparently the word “partner” had flown right through his head like a bird through an empty cavern. “Maybe This-One-A-Girl.”

“I don’t need my name to tell anybody that.”

“So true,” Flybait said. He paused, shut his mouth, and pointedly stared at the mountains. She strode ahead of him.

“You know,” Flybait said in a more sober tone, “in stories this is the sort of place to which holy men retire, to contemplate Emptiness and the flow of natural forces. Also, the sort of place to which bandits flee to contemplate empty purses and the flow of Imperial forces.”

“It’s also the sort of place where people freeze to death,” Next-One-A-Boy said. “Let’s hustle.”

They descended. Mountains reared out of mist; rock piles reared out of snow; ideas reared out of her mind. What should be her new name?

Once upon a time a runaway arrived hungry in the village of Abundant Bamboo and a matron named Lightning Bug had offered a tray of delights—fish dumplings, fluffy bao, pork buns, shrimp rolls, shu mai, chicken’s feet—and even though the girl’s mouth watered and her stomach groaned she was paralyzed with indecision. What if something was too rich? Too spicy? Too rare, and a mark of presumption if she took it first? Too paltry, and a sign of ingratitude if she claimed that? Lightning Bug had smiled and claimed a bao, implicitly giving permission for Next-One-A-Boy to take its counterpart.

Next-One-A-Boy felt much the same in the matter of names. It was in some ways easier to have no choices. You could hate your life in a pure, uncomplicated way. You could take your meager pleasures with no guilt attached, and cheerfully kick others in the teeth, knowing they were better off than you.

But escape that purity, by way of running away from home, by befriending storytellers and bandits, by encountering the supernatural and surviving? That began to muddle things. Now there was better and worse. There was judgment and guilt. It was as though freedom led, not to happiness, but to a wilderness where happiness was just one of the many bizarre wild animals one might find. Some of the other creatures might be far worse than the demons of her past. Others might be preferable even to happiness. The possibilities left her feet frozen. But she had to go somewhere.

“Where to, Next One?” Flybait was saying. “Have you forgotten where this shelter is?”

“What did you call me?”

“Um, ‘Next One?’” Flybait looked as if he expected to be punched in the face. She frowned. It insulted her to be treated like a maniac. At most she would have slapped him. He said, “I just was saving time talking because it’s so cold.” He shivered for emphasis. “And it’s nicer than always calling you ‘you.’”

“‘Next One.’” It would do, perhaps. Until she chose her own name. “All right.”

They found the hermit’s cave. There was no fire now, but in the ashes they discovered a short poem inscribed by a stick.

Kids, listen up!

Flee your burning house

The wild horses wait

To take you to a greater dwelling.

Kids, keep calm!

It’s all alike below the sky

Pick your trail it’s all fine

The abyss is as good as the peak.

If you get my meaning

You can go anywhere you want.

“Yep,” said Flybait, stirring the ashes with his foot. “Crazy hermit.”

“Hey!” said Next One. “You’ve destroyed the poem.”

“Well, if he wrote it in ashes, he can’t have expected it to stick around. Like I said, crazy.”

Next One scowled. “He didn’t seem crazy. He seemed like . . . the other side of crazy.”

Flybait laughed. “Have you ever been to the other side of crazy?”

“No,” she answered seriously. “I always swim back. And you?”

He smirked. “I stay on shore where the shiny things are.”

“They say there’s treasure in shipwrecks.”

“I like my treasures dry. Hey, where does this go?”

They followed the cave back into the depths of the mountain. It was not the vast, perforated sort of complex that provided homes for robbers, but rather a simple tunnel, its irregular floor swept, its indentations hung here and there with whittled wooden deities or painted mandalas or paper banners proclaiming such news as “This is a cave! How great is that?”

The snow-sheen behind them lit the way inside until in the dimness they found a bed of branches and an old blanket, baskets of dried berries and nuts, and a small collection of scrolls. Beyond lay an abyss leading into a vast darkness, steps spiraling narrowly around its perimeter. Next One nearly slipped into it.

Flybait helped her step back from the edge. “Why would anyone sleep beside a bottomless pit?” he said. “The answer is: because they’re crazy.”

Next One frowned into the abyss. “We don’t know it’s bottomless . . .”

Flybait walked back to the fire and returned with a short, char-edged stick. He dropped it into the darkness. They heard no impact.

“Bottomless enough for me,” Next One conceded. “If you go down there, use the steps.”

“After you,” Flybait said.

She snorted. She turned to the scrolls. Maybe Wu’s mockery still haunted her, because she opened one and read the title. “‘The Jailer’s Tale.’ It’s a story from long ago.”

“A story?” Flybait curled up in one corner of the hermitage, watching her expectantly.