The Silk Map (2 page)

“You will not get to do that to me,”
says the third, and Monkey feels claws digging into her neck.
“You are dream-stuff, not stone.”

Monkey falls down the wall, losing a branch. She hits ground hard but rises and grabs at the Charstalker.

“You can't get rid of me. I'll take too much of your flesh with me. If you die in dreams, you'll be an empty shell. To live, you must accept the poison and become like me.”

“Wondrous Lady Monkey is not like anyone!” she answers, and runs beside the Wall.

She came to this spot for a reason. It's the heart of the unease she's sensed in the Heavenwalls' chi. There is an old, great fissure here in the Red Heavenwall, beside a huge pond amid the junipers. Here an Emperor died alongside his daughter, she who founded the secret society of the Forest.

Monkey runs across the water and leaps inside.

“No—”

Entering the Wall is like stepping into a gale. Ordinary mortals would not notice a thing, except perhaps a sense of heightened anticipation as they stood among the terra cotta soldiers in this modest tomb for an emperor. But here the chi of the land courses, its path swirling and twisting in this wound.

Before its power, the Charstalker cannot maintain its dream-form. It comes apart, and shreds of it whip beyond the chamber, passing through the stones. Monkey can't know what will become of it, but it's too weak to poison the mighty chi of Qiangguo.

The chi of Qiangguo . . . now Monkey, rubbing her neck in its midst, feels all around her the unease that she scented before. She scowls a dream-scowl. It is as if she's forgotten something, having slept so long . . .

“You're up to something,” she addresses the life-force of the land. “What is it? You can tell wise Monkey. When have I ever troubled you?”

It's as if a blast of air roars down from cold mountains. It knocks dream-Monkey off her feet. She collides with the toppled statue of an emperor, broken by tomb-robbers.

She lands on one hand and sneezes.

“
You're
looking for an Emperor again, aren't you? You still won't consider me?”

Again the wind howls; she somersaults out of the tomb, across the water, and onto a treetop, perched upon her staff.

She sniffs and smirks. “I scent it. An outlander? You're not trying
that
again? Your last three couldn't even figure out what was happening, let alone survive the trip. And of course, the Forest keeps hiding the home-grown candidates. No, you're just going to have to accept it. No chi-wielding Emperors for you.”

She flips, leaps off the waters of the pond, and arrives back in the shadow of the Wall. Dream-Monkey breathes deep, taking in the air from the fissure.

“No . . .” she says. “You picked
that
one . . . but as I scent him, I know him. The son of ne'er do wells. It's against his blood to rule anything. Perhaps not even himself. You can't be so crazy. Unless . . .” She sniffs, sensing a tendril of chi leaving this place for a remote land. “You're in cahoots with something . . .”

Dream-Monkey glances to her right, and sees Charstalkers swarming around her staff like nine scholars' scattered ink.

This won't do.

She sighs, turns to the fissure, and sucks in as much air and chi as a supernatural simian can. Turning, she
foofs
a blast of vital breath to the east.

Charstalkers scatter like spooked pigeons. They're all still present, however, and Monkey has just one chance. She leaps and rolls and snatches the staff. She is vulnerable for just one moment, as she gathers strength to cloud-leap once more. Claws slash, and dream-blood flies.

Screeching, she launches herself across the world. Just like in the old days.

Whenever her blood drops near a dreaming village, sleepers imagine they can fly.

 

Monkey passes over meandering rows of desert dunes, over the fires and lightning strokes of the Dragonstorm, over forests of endless shadow and snowy mountains that seem draped in light.

At last she descends to a gray ocean of the far West, a place where true dawn hasn't quite begun, where three immense, craggy islands spear through the gloom.

She lands upon a titanic promontory that resembles a dragon's head, petrified just before rending another stony dragon on the opposite side of a narrow, sheer-sided strait. An extension of the third island is also present, stretching like a draconic head lowered beneath the other two, its skull forming skerries breaking the white waves two thousand feet below Monkey.

Down there are men. They ride dragon-prowed longboats, warring amid the skerries with spear and axe. They are a peculiar lot, pale as though imbued with the elemental essence of snow, their hair and beards often an outlandish red or yellow. Their blood is as red as any mortal's, however.

But the warriors aren't what truly snatches Monkey's interest. What she perceives most is the chain.

A vast coil of steel wraps around the “neck” of the stone dragon she stands upon, stretching across the strait to loop the similar rock formation opposite. In between, it plunges into the waters, and she can perceive how it also snares the dragon-shape beneath the waves.

She can perceive it—because of the invisible chi crackling through the links.

Monkey is so overcome, she does a backflip.

“Oh! Oho! He's not really to be Emperor at all, is he? He's bait, for . . . oh, that's
crazy
. I like crazy.” Monkey frowns. “Though I do feel sorry for the kid, a little.”

A cold breeze cuts across dream-Monkey's nose, and she shakes her head. Somewhere down there a warlord raises the severed head of his adversary, becoming the “master” of the Great Chain. Until next time.

“I get it,” Monkey says. “It can't work unless we get him out of the trap he's in . . . and the best tools for that are his very own parents. It's time for Monkey to earn again her reputation.”

She prepares to cloud-leap, but the nine Charstalkers have found her.

Monkey plunges off the promontory just in time, splashing among the dream-warriors. She doesn't know how conscious they are of the dream-state, but they do notice her, babbling in some barbarian tongue Monkey can't bother to take the minutes to learn. They jab spears and hurl axes, so Monkey doesn't feel too sorry for them when she plucks nine dry hairs from the top of her head and blows them hither and yon with the last Heavenwall chi in her lungs.

Each hair lands upon a pale warrior, and each warrior's appearance blurs and becomes the spitting image of Monkey.

When the Charstalkers land, it isn't pretty. They rend and bite and poison, and mortals can't shrug such things off. Here in this cold land, nine brutal men will awaken with darkness in their hearts.

But this is not Monkey's problem. Bracing herself against a rocky underwater shelf, she cloud-leaps again.

The world rushes past her in a white-green-blue-gray-brown blur, until the great mountains of her continent stab the sky below her feet.

“You have no idea,” she whispers to the unhearing tiny figures of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone. “You have no idea he'd be far safer where he is. But I can see it now . . . it's him or the whole world, kids. Even Wondrous Lady Monkey has to fall in line on this one. But she's going to turn it to her advantage; she always does.”

As the world rushes toward her and her dreams turn dark, she murmurs, “Forgive me.”

 

There's no trace of people but this mountain road

Like a stone offering to granite gods

And no voice but the wind through the ridges

And rocky rivers roaring with thaws

And no one dwelling with nature

In farms or cabins or tents

And no time when you can nurture

Self-importance

It's too cold for that

And the mountains too many and wide

And the clouds no longer seem separate

Vast as the blue they disguise

Till moonlight shears weird and wondrous

Flaring the early rain

Striking your skin in the windfall

Of an awe that is cousin to pain.

—Gaunt, untitled,
composed in the Worldheart Mountains

In hindsight, it was perhaps foolish to awaken the sleeping demigod.

Gaunt, Bone, and Snow Pine might have turned back after the third warning, but there was something about the trio of skull-adorned markers, embellished with old bloodstains and croaking unkindnesses of ravens that had aroused their professional ire. The road to Five-Toe Peak had been a route to inspire either despair or stubbornness. The three rogues were constitutionally inclined toward the latter. Of the former they had a sufficiency.

Thus they'd taken in stride the forest of the poisonous Zheng-bird, and the crags of the one-footed booming Kui-monsters, and the wasteland of elephant bones sliced with the tracks of giant Bashe-snakes who consumed elephant flesh.

Now, although Snow Pine was a child of the East, she'd long since stepped beyond the realms of her personal knowledge, and likewise passed the perimeters of scholarship and hearsay and drunken ranting. For they now skirted those mountains that defined the southern boundary of the Braid of Spice, which led to the dubious Western lands. Gaunt and Bone themselves hailed from the exotic empires of the sunset, where pale-skinned folk like themselves were the norm. But they'd taken the sea-route to the East, and knew even less than Snow Pine of this frontier.

Thus none of them knew what to make of the first marker, rising from its skulls.

It was a large boulder chiseled with the characters of the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, the language of Qiangguo. The inscriptions were darkened with a suspicious-looking substance. By now, after a long sojourn in the Country of Walls, Gaunt and Bone could read them along with Snow Pine. This didn't put any of them at ease.

THE GREAT SAGE IS BUSY. COME BACK IN TEN THOUSAND GENERATIONS.

Around the stone, arranged rather like bulbs in a flower garden, lay the craniums of monkeys.

“At any rate I assume they're monkeys,” said Persimmon Gaunt, considering the one in her palm. Her sun-bronzed skin and tattooed face (portraying a web-shrouded rose upon her right cheek) might lead a quick observer to judge her some barbaric marauder. In fact she was a poet and a scholar and—as circumstances warranted—wily tomb-plunderer and thief.

Her husband Imago Bone scrambled onto a neighboring boulder and perched there, scanning the land. “Do you think, as we are not monkeys, the message doesn't apply?” He was a lean fellow, veteran of many a mansion-theft and crypt-crawl, with scars upon either cheek, one from blade, one from flame. There was something jovial about even his fiercest scowl, something sinister about even his warmest smile.

Gaunt snorted. “You look rather like a monkey to me, up there.” Her tone was not entirely warm.

Ravens squawked at them. Snow Pine shook her head at her friends. She was a wiry bean-pole of a woman, with short, straight black hair, wearing a gray tunic that seemed to defy any attempt to scrutinize her, as a nondescript boulder might shelter a glittering chameleon. Her eyes regarded all the wild nature about her coolly, trying to peer beyond surfaces into the interplay of contrasts that gave birth to the physical world. Such meditations helped soothe her in the midst of trouble.