The Silk Map (37 page)

Katta heard her. “The fastest beasts on land, Snow Pine. Each one is worth a fortune. I tried to find a herd of them.”

“How did you manage to sense them?” Bone asked.

“All senses are enhanced when steering this vessel, including ones that are damaged.” Katta closed his eyes for a moment. “It is a disorienting pleasure, like strong drink.”

“By the way, the herd's not the only thing I see bearing the word ‘Dragon,'” Gaunt said. “Look there.”

Snow Pine followed Gaunt's gesture and looked into the west. Far away there swirled a fiery conflagration, rising far into the sky, red lightning flashing in its midst.

“The Dragonheat,” Bone said. “Where the dragons go to mate, bound in some fashion by the influence of the Heavenwalls.”

Snow Pine found the meteoritic staff had grown hotter in her grasp.

“Then Qushkent's a whole desert away,” Zheng said. “We're on the north side, not the south. How—”

Something new erupted from the sands.

Vast pale tentacles whipped around the crystal ship. They possessed suckers and smaller, branching tentillia. Both tentacles and tentillia were covered in arcane inscriptions that Snow Pine had seen before.

Mad Katta released the wheel and leapt, just as a tentacle tried to squash him. “Depart the craft!” he yelled.

“I believe the phrase is ‘abandon ship,'” Gaunt said, following his order regardless.

“I have never even been on an ocean!” Katta said.

“Deadfall!” Bone said. “Help Zheng get down!”

“Are you quite sure . . .” said Zheng.

“Better that than leaping the rail, Grandmother.”

The carpet skittered up to Zheng, saying, “You do not command me, O thief, but I will help her nonetheless.”

“Thank you,” Bone said.

“Well, let's be on with it,” Zheng said. “Gahhhh—”

As Zheng and Deadfall fled the ship, Gaunt look Snow Pine's arm, and they joined Bone and Katta at the railing. The starboard side was now leaning toward the sand. It was a long drop but a survivable one. Not for the first time, Snow Pine wished she had learned the esoteric secrets of her mentor Lightning Bug, who could make her body so light as to nearly fly.
Once a sturdy peasant
, she thought,
always a sturdy peasant, I suppose
.

She jumped.

As she lay face-down in the sand, she felt someone trying to lift her up.

“I'm okay,” she said, a trifle annoyed at her companion's pushiness.

She felt a sucker attach itself to her back.

“Shit!” she yelled and tried to roll away. A tentacle loomed over her, its arcane markings twisting as its muscles flexed, its suckers puckering like pale, squinting eyes.

Snow Pine whacked her staff against the tentacle, and it severed with an immense sound like tearing paper. Dry innards spilled onto Snow Pine's face like hay after a heat wave. She spat the stuff away and swung again. The tentacle released her, and she scrambled away. The rod was hot now. There was a sound of distant thunder.

Terrified, she ran for the rocky region between the sands and the horses, and did not stop until she'd climbed to the highest spot. Only then did she see that Katta had made it here too, while a little ways below Gaunt and Bone were assisting Zheng onto the rocks. She searched for Deadfall and was startled to find it curled up like a dog near her feet.

The tentacles dragged the crystal ship beneath the sands. Snow Pine could see no body to the Leviathan Mind, no eyes, no proof that the tentacles had any central connection at all. It was as if the desert itself had reached out its hand.

Yet she heard a voice, and she could not be certain if it came to her upon the wind, or through the pathways of her mind, or if she was dreaming while awake.

Your kind transgresses
, said the voice, a dry thing suggesting experience beyond all hope or bitterness. If a sand hourglass had a voice, it would be like this.
You play with relics that are not yours to toy with. You imitate our great works, with your Heavenwalls, and your Chain of Unbeing, and your city shaped like a hand. But you lack the wisdom to know when to stop. Slowly but inexorably you ruin the Earthe, as we nearly did.

Mad Katta heard the voice too. “Yet you are not done with the world, either, eh? You watch and wait, and you are not indifferent to the Silk Map.”

There is a great evil that dwells in the hidden valley. Greater than we. It has long hungered for our relics. You know this, wanderer. If you allow outsiders in, what will get out?

“No one can foresee all events. What I do know is that the people I travel with have good motivations. I believe I can help them without causing larger harm.”

Let it be on your cranium then. The Dragonheat will finish you in any event.

Ship and tentacles vanished into a pit in the sands, and the pit filled itself in, leaving only a cloud of dust to mark its passage.

“Well,” Bone said, stretching and cracking his knuckles. “That was terrifying.”

“I'm not certain the terror is over,” Gaunt said, studying the fire and lightning that curdled on the horizon. “What did it mean about the Dragonheat?”

“I do not know,” Katta said. “There are times when the storm moves away from its usual location, with predictably disastrous effect. Yet I know of no reason why it would threaten us.”

“I do,” Snow Pine said, staring at her glowing staff. “Monkey told me the needle—this staff—was a gift from a dragon queen. It must have a connection to them.”

Zheng said, “The dragons may be responding. Or the Dragonheat, the storm itself.”

“Either way,” Gaunt said, “we may be in danger.”

“Without wishing to panic anybody,” Bone said, “I must weigh in with my opinion that the storm is getting closer.”

“We could be lucky,” Gaunt said. “Perhaps the dragons mean to help us.”

Snow Pine studied the storm. “I do not feel particularly lucky.”

“I will be ready to panic,” Zheng said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact, “when the storm is twice its apparent size.”

They all watched the storm swell. To Snow Pine's eyes it was already an eighth or so larger.

“So!” Bone said brightly. “Horses, you say!”

“Allow me!” said Katta. “I have had dealings with dragon horses before. Deadfall, I would be most grateful if you would guide me.”

Snow Pine saw the magic carpet flow over to Katta and offer one corner of itself to the wanderer. Staff in one hand, carpet in the other, Katta descended.

The horses turned their heads toward the travelers. Their eyes, so Snow Pine thought, were wary but not frightened. The animals continued to eat. From time to time they looked toward the oncoming storm with somewhat more attention.

Katta hummed a mantra to himself as he approached a stallion brown as a desert stream, mane and tail black as Zheng's ink. The horse's eyes seemed to Snow Pine to hold a vast patience that was also a grim imperiousness. There was within them a compassion humans could never comprehend, and a wrath unimaginable, should that compassion be mocked.

Katta released Deadfall (who coiled about in the sparse grass like a snake) and spread his hands. “Great one. That which has given rise to this form and this name pleads to that which gave rise to you. Something in the karma of both phenomena has brought us to this place. We are drawn together in this moment. Thus I ask to incur a debt that may endure a hundred lifetimes.”

The stallion snorted and swished his tail.

“Indeed, and yet you know me, and you know I keep my oaths.”

The stallion whinnied, and his hoof tore the earth.

“Yes, there are many disturbances, and I understand why you would come here to better sense them. I am fortunate that you did so.”

The stallion tugged its ears back and sneezed.

“Qushkent.”

The stallion nickered.

Katta turned to the others. “We are in great luck. Our friend here—his name is not truly repeatable without the equine vocal apparatus, but might be rendered as Firstsnorter Proudneck Earjab Hightail—our friend is willing to bear us to Qushkent, along with two others of his herd.”

Staring at the huge beasts, Bone said, “You know, historically horses and I have not gotten along well. I prefer friendlier beasts. Like camels. Or dragons—”

“Do you want to tell that to the Dragonheat?” Gaunt said. “I think it's just now reached the apparent size where Zheng said—”

“There is always time to start a new friendship!” Bone said.

“Agreed,” Zheng said.

At Katta's recommendation, Snow Pine and Zheng mounted Dawnracer Windneigh Maneshake Laughswish, a dappled roan female with a teasing manner, and Gaunt and Bone climbed onto Springjumper Wildgroan Headtoss Backkick, a gray male with a look of coiled energy ready to whip into motion. Deadfall consented to becoming a horse-blanket upon the stallion. Snow Pine got a sense of sullenness from the magic carpet.

The atmosphere had changed. There was a wind moving toward the storm, as though the Dragonheat was calling the air toward it. Now it filled half the sky. Flame and smoke, clouds and rain, lightning and lava tormented the air. Now and again Snow Pine thought she glimpsed a shadowy suggestion of sinewy winged shapes, tiny within the conflagration, but it might have been her imagination. The Dragonheat, created by the mating energies of the dragons, seemed a living thing of its own. A thing that sought their death.

Monkey's rod nearly burned her hand; on intuition she cleared her mind and pushed it from two directions.

It shrunk swiftly back into the form of a needle, still hot to the touch but manageable. She threaded it into her robe, hoping the fabric would not burn.

“Impressive trick,” said Zheng.

She nodded. “Time to go.”

“I agree,” said Katta, “but it is not our decision. The stallion and his herd communicate as to when and how they will meet again.”

“At this rate,” Bone muttered, “the answers will be never and by no means—”

His voice was cut off by the movement of horses scattering in all directions but west-southwest, whence the blue lightning danced amid a crimson veil.

When Bone first scrambled onto the dragon horse, he found his perch even higher off the ground than he'd believed. He wondered if perhaps Gaunt shouldn't be the one in front but was reluctant to admit it. He was comfortable with high rooftops, to be sure, but rooftops did not gallop, shake, or attempt to buck off their occupants. And just as he was making peace with his distance from the ground, the ground began to move. Swiftly, to a drumbeat of hoof-falls, the russet borderland became the rocky desert edge and then the expanse of sandy waste, the shadow of the dragon horse outlined in fiery red.

“Are you all right?” called Gaunt.

“Just getting used to the gallop!”

“This is a trot! Will you be all right?”

“I can hold on to the mane, yes—whoa!”

Whoa
did not seem to be an instruction that Springjumper Wildgroan Headtoss Backkick recognized. In fact, Bone decided—after the ground became an orange-red blur and his companions shadowy suggestions of motion, so that only the Dragonheat itself seemed a constant presence in an indistinct world of sand and sun—the dragon horse did not seem much aware of his or Gaunt's presence at all, let alone their words.

This at least allowed him to curse as colorfully as he wished.

From time to time he looked over his shoulder, and each time he wished he hadn't. He still saw no dragons, only the chaotic madness of the Dragonheat. He was sure now it had an independent life, quite apart from the wishes of the dragons who had given rise to it. How else to explain why a thing of blood-red fire, icy-blue lightning, and tomb-gray cloud, the confluence of these things filling two-thirds of the sky, would deign to pursue them.

But pursue it did.

At first it seemed the storm would catch them, for it approached sidelong, and twice the horses were slowed in leaping over two inexplicable fortifications the height of houses. (Only later did Bone realize these must be the far western extensions of the Heavenwalls.) Yet gradually the conflagration shifted until it was at their backs.

For hours it followed them past bizarre wind-sculpted rocks twisting like squids and staircases and crowned heads. It followed them over endless dunes, each trough a new gut-plunging sensation for Imago Bone. The sun set, and still the dragon horses galloped, and still the storm followed, bright enough that its illumination cast rushing horse-shadows upon the sands.

At one point the stallion came near to them, and Katta shouted to see if they were all right.

“Never better!” Gaunt said. “Alas! I think the storm is doing well too!”

“Is there no place to hide?” Bone called out.

“We may find a karez!” Katta said.

“The what?” Gaunt said.

“The irrigation system Qushkent spreads far into the desert! Its tunnels lie under the ground!”