The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (21 page)

“Take me to her,” snapped Gaunt. “Please,” she added more gently.

“That is unnecessary,” said a woman’s brisk slap of a voice. A powerful-looking figure, not old, not young, stepped into view.

Even in a green robe, even with hair cropped even shorter than before, her presence commanded all attention. “I am willing to help, in return for news of the outside world. For I burn to know the fates of those who wronged me. You may call me Exceedingly Vengeful Wu.”

In the moonlight, the woman Lightning Bug fluttered like a ghost at her own window. There was no point hiding now, and no time. She rapped upon it, and presently her husband answered.

Tror’s beloved features revealed shock, and worry, and anger. He took her hand and brought her inside.

“You’re hurt—” His fingers brushed blood from her lip.

“It is nothing, husband. I gave as good as I got.”

“I have been worried. I returned to find the children hiding, and signs of battle. The magistrate’s guards are searching. Did bandits—”

She shook her head. “Walking Stick.”

“He dares!”

“Husband. Save your anger, for it helps no one.”

“For years I have tolerated him, invited him into my home, not out of fear or respect for his station, but out of pure courtesy, such as Qiangguo believes barbarians incapable—”

“Peace, Tror.”

“Peace! When he assaults my wife!”

“I assaulted him, Tror. Yes. He acts with official blessing, and it is in this capacity that he pursues Gaunt and Bone, and their child. When I lift a hand against him, I rebel against my emperor. Such is the spirit of the Forest, but—”

“Not only the Forest. The Swan is a fierce bird when its family is threatened.”

“Yes! Family, Tror. I will not have the stain of my resistance spread to you or my children.”

“I am your husband! Shall I not have satisfaction against your foe?”

“You are father of my children! Shall they be orphaned? For this is what we discuss, Tror. Forest and Garden may oppose each other, but there are customs to observe. Walking Stick and I are both of the wulin. Neither he nor I will make the conflict lethal if other means are available. But if you, an ordinary man—a foreigner!—raise your fist to an envoy of the government, your life is forfeit, and yes, those of our children. To make this point the emperor’s men would slaughter a family even out to the tenth generation.”

“So I must pace and fume. And you . . . you will be off again, into the world of the Rivers-and-Lakes?”

“The Rivers-and-Lakes is in my blood, Tror. I am sorry for the sorrow to you. But I must help Gaunt and Bone, and oppose Walking Stick. He must be checked. I will return when I can.”

“It is exciting to you, isn’t it? To battle him again?”

Lightning Bug looked away.

“You do not have to hide it, wife. He is your peer, as I am not. Even were there not old desire, there is the need to measure yourself.”

“There is no desire.”

“You need not say it.”

“You accuse me of falsehood?”

“No. Only humanity.”

“I must be away, before the children awaken. Tell them . . .”

“I will tell them their mother is brave.”

Bone was preparing what he considered a most cunning device—a small hollow log in which he meant to conceal the scroll, plugging it at either end with fire-hardened clay—when Gaunt’s voice came to him, a hushed sound emanating from the scroll beside his foot.

“Gaunt! Say again?”

“Imago. Listen. The baby’s time is coming.”

Bone stared. He had a mental image of a tiny scroll sliding out of the big one. “Is that possible? When you are transmogrified into silk and ink?”

“I feel all too much like flesh and blood. I’m persuaded you hold merely a gateway, not a whole world.”

“Even so . . . I fret at the consequences. However, I fret more at Walking Stick and Night’s Auditors.”

“Yes. Otherwise I would flee this place. Bone, Wu is here.”

“Wu! I thought she was beyond the Wall.”

“Evidently Lightning Bug had other ideas. Yet . . . I feel safe enough for now. Wu has never seen me before, or heard my name. If she guesses my involvement in your attack she hasn’t shown it. And the monks who dwell in this world are kind, if prone to lecture. I think they will protect me.”

“I do not like this.”

“Nor I. But we can do no better.”

“Then I will bear the scroll downriver until we reach Riverclaw. Or . . .”

“Yes. You have some time, Bone. But one point of the monks’ lecturing I must convey—although we can speak normally now, for me time is passing faster than for you. Two days have elapsed here.”

“Two days! And the baby—”

“It could be today. It could be several days. Do not tarry, Imago. And protect the painting.”

“At this moment, Persimmon, no one appreciates art more than I.”

Bone had the notion, gleaned from a childhood in a fishing village, that all watercraft deserved names. He called his salvaged sampan
Cradle
. As he poled out into the still, lapping river and rode current and wind, Bone improvised a silly song beneath the cloud-spattered stars.

Tumble out, baby,

In your treetops.

When the wind blows

Cradle
will rock.

When the bow breaks

The river’s rough foam

Out will come baby

And we’ll share a home.

He was, in a way, pleased Gaunt did not overhear his doggerel.

She checked in from time to time, using whatever mysterious power the scroll-monks possessed. She related days of fading energy and intensifying contractions. He related hours of whirling stars and gurgling waters. She did not seem as pleased with his descriptions as she had previously.

He did not relate how he had once glimpsed, far above the branches of an enormous dangling willow, a dark draconic silhouette.

Come morning, with dawn on the misting water like a volcanic slurry of gold slicing onyx shadows, pursuit had not materialized, nor had true labor commenced.

“This is taking some time,” he observed to the scroll within the hollow log.

“This is . . . not uncommon, Wu says,” Gaunt’s voice emerged. “I do not think she would lie . . .”

“That I believe. Kill. Steal. Whip. But not lie.”

“Imago, enough. I want you here.”

“Persimmon, we are not safe. Riverclaw is another half day, I believe, in my timeframe.”

“Forget Riverclaw, Imago . . . Conceal the painting in the wilderness. Come to me.”

This was a rare thing, this speaking so urgently with their given names. Usually,
Persimmon
and
Imago
were names for campfire or bedroom,
Gaunt
and
Bone
for dark alley or battleground. But now it was Persimmon and Imago who had the challenge to face; Gaunt and Bone were of little use.

“We might return to the world,” he said, “to find ourselves buried alive.”

“Hide it in the crook of a tree.”

“Might it not become firewood?”

“I need you.”

He studied the course of the Ochre. Ahead lay the dark curves and spikes of a pair of boats, like shadowy slices cut from the gleaming swirl of the morning river. At either hand the forest ebbed, and cultivated land stretched south, oxen-tilled fields and rice paddies nearly as wet and sparkling as the river.

The cover of the woodland was fading; the cover of the city was yet to come.

“Persimmon, I want to press on. I feel as I do when leaping widely separated rooftops. Sometimes I’m not sure I’ll make it. But I rarely fall.”

“Go. Do what you must . . . and don’t be wrong. This is hard, Imago. Harder than I . . .”

“Yes. I know.”

“You do not. Don’t be wrong.”

The murmur ended, and there was only the lap of water, the trill of distant voices and songs.

Bone passed beneath jutting karst ridges on the western shore, clouds wafting between as though a vast fanged maw sleepily blew smoke. Lanterns waved and blew out amongst the early laborers and the cormorant fishermen on their little plank boats. Bone watched a man release his noosed birds, and one of six returned with a fish wiggling in its bill. To the east the Red Heavenwall was a band of shadow with bloody highlights where the sun blazed jewel-like, a half-circle catching red flecks and veins within the stone.
I will be a father
, he thought.

It was not a notion attended by joy or fear, but a calm thing, certain as a plunging stone finding the river bottom. Everyday emotion was left behind like bubbles in its fall. Deep, hard-earned emotion would come later, like cloud of river mud rising on impact. Bone experienced then a love that seemed sharp and cold from the outside, because it kept its secrets. He knew then a deeper meaning to the phrase
heart of stone
.

The sun rose, and the towers of Riverclaw rose likewise in Bone’s sight, crowned by the convergence of the Red and Blue Heavenwalls into the titanic fortress of the Purple Forbidden City, masses of curved roofs defining its twin draconic heads, far above the boxlike fortifications it sprouted like talons.

His gaze wandering, he spotted behind him the two-sailed profile of a large, oared river-junk.

It could be nothing but a merchant
, thought his surface mind.

It is pursuit
, thought his stony heart.

He made a calm estimate (and another part of him was amazed at this calm) and steered toward a knot of boats bobbing near the harbor wall.

Cradle
must fall.

Through the first and second watches of the night, the man known as Walking Stick galloped upon his dragon-horse atop the Red Heavenwall, pausing only to wave an Imperial scroll in the face of any guard brash enough to question his presence there. His garments were tattered, for Lightning Bug had taken pains to tear off the embroidered firefly over his heart. So be it. She had long since chosen her destiny. He had his own.