The Silk Map (49 page)

Gaunt ran forward, waving her dagger.

“You're not intersecting them, Gaunt! They seem to notice you but disregard you.”

“Let them disregard this!”

She grabbed Crypttongue, pulled it from the rocky ground.

It appeared to her that something knocked Bone's dagger from his hand, and another something pummeled his face, both somethings invisible. She ran forward and jabbed at the air in front of him. Bone ceased flinching.

“You have hit one!” he said. “Now, to the right!”

She lunged right.

“No, sorry, I mean your left!”

She thrust left. “Keep your wits about you, man!”

“A hit! But they are attempting to surround you and kick your legs out from under you.”

She swung Crypttongue in wide arcs.

Bone said, “You are driving them off! They cannot lay a hand on you; you're like a ghost to them. Yet they are substantial to the sword! An impressive advantage—ow!”

Bone, surprised, found his arms pinned behind him. If he were not insane, of course, if this weren't a perverse delirium wrought of poisonous fruit. Perhaps Bone was crazy, and Zheng had scampered into the woods . . .

“Can you hear them, Gaunt?” Bone asked, perspiration showing on his face. “A couple of them know the dialect of southern Qiangguo. They order you to stand down, or they may inflict injury.”

“Oh?” Gaunt said, stepping forward with the blade raised. In the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell she said, “Do you follow the Undetermined and his Thresholders? Then how can you employ violence?”

“They hear you,” Bone said, cocking his head. “One, their leader, I think, says, ‘The great work of life is to combat suffering with understanding. But it is sometimes correct to employ lesser means of combating suffering.' I may be getting the sense of it wrong, Gaunt, but I think she's sincere. She says, ‘You have harmed some of us already—is this truly what you wish?'”

Gaunt shouted, “How can I be responsible for hurting people I can neither see nor hear?”

Bone said, “She says, ‘We can never fully end the suffering we cause, but we can be mindful of it. In a similar way we regret any insect we may have crushed, unknowing, as we walk. And we step lightly when we can.'”

Gaunt hesitated. She did not necessarily agree. She did not necessarily disagree. But somehow considering such matters quenched her fury. She lowered her sword.

Her sword, she realized. That was how she thought of it. She was not about to set Crypttongue down.

Bone's arms appeared to become free. He sighed and stretched, wheeling them in circles. “They've stopped, Gaunt. They are looking at you. With sad eyes, I'd say. They are tending to their wounds.” Bone slowly retrieved his weapon and sheathed it. Raising his arms, he said in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, “I mean no harm. We wish to reclaim this sword . . . Zheng! I see Zheng, coming up the path! And that man must be Jamyang.”

“I do not see anyone.”

“She says she's been pulled into the grasp of the goddess of the valley. As I will be.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“I concede this is a great deal of excitement for one mango. The leader says, ‘If you are owner of the blade, we do not contest it. But it is a wicked thing to enslave the mind it contains. We have offered it sanctuary.'”

“In what way can it be offered sanctuary?”

“‘Here in Xembala, the land can offer a dwelling place for the wayward spirit. If released, it may pass on to new incarnations, or other realms, or oblivion. But it may also linger, and live among us as an inhabitant of the valley.'”

“There is much here I do not understand,” Gaunt said. “But know this: We are on a quest that may rescue more than one lost child. I am willing to keep the entity in this sword chained for as long as that takes. For I suspect such captives empower the weapon.”

Bone looked uneasy. “She says, ‘I urge you to consider the karmic burden you take upon yourself, compounding your suffering on behalf of these children with the suffering of those you bind. Together they form a weight upon you. Release them.'”

“And give up my son?”

“‘You need not give up your quest. A quest can be a good thing. Love of a child can be a good thing. But your choices speak of desperation, of craving. An unhealthy frame of mind.'”

“And does this wise woman know what it is like to be a mother?”

“She concedes she does not.”

“Let her walk in my shoes, before she speaks! Let her nurse, and clean, and sing to sleep an infant before she judges my loss! Let her kiss scraped knees and hug away nightmares before she talks about my
craving
, as if I were some disciple of opium! I will not be some good little wife who can just serenely make another baby, and let it all flow by me like a river.”

“Gaunt . . .” Bone said. “I do not know what she really thinks. But I never . . . I never . . .”

“Don't talk now,” she said, shaking her head, as her body shook as well. “Just interpret.”

Bone lowered his head. After a time he said, “Ah. Zheng's friend proposes we journey to the palace—the seat of Maldar Khan! The closest thing this strange land has to a ruler. Let Maldar Khan decide, Jamyang says.”

“That is acceptable to me, Bone,” Gaunt said, her fury spent. If nothing else, the journey would delay the reckoning.

“And to me,” said Bone. “Jamyang is considering . . . oh, no.”

“What?”

“Zheng's spotted something. Turn around.”

She did. At first Gaunt could not understand what she was seeing. Just over the edge, a vast shape curved into view. Some deep part of her brain feared a monster. But it was no beast.

A Karvak balloon, the same that Gaunt had punctured earlier, rose above the cliff.

The gash in the gasbag had been patched by sections of an ironsilk dress, painted with cartographic symbols.

“Gaunt!” Bone was shouting. “Run!”

She ran. They descended the path, for there was only one safe route of descent.

Yet it was not safe at all, for soon they saw Karvaks in armor advancing up the switchbacks. The warriors halted and unsheathed bows. Gaunt and Bone flattened themselves against the rocky wall as arrows careened off the stone. They were momentarily safe, but the balloonist Karvaks would soon descend the path.

“Just like old times,” said Bone. “Why, I remember—”

“Focus, Bone,” said Gaunt. “I have a strategy.”

“Desperate and dangerous, I suppose?”

Gaunt set Crypttongue against the rocks and pulled out her saved mango. She cut it with the tip of the blade.

“I suppose,” Bone said, “desperate plans work best on a full stomach . . .”

“Shut up, Bone.” Gaunt stuffed as much mango as she could into her mouth and gulped it down. She threw the rest over the edge. “Now I will eventually become attuned to Xembala or whatever the hell is happening. But you are farther along, Bone. You must run.”

“Run where?”

“Over the edge. I've learned much from you, Imago, but you are still the one with a lifetime of acrobatic thieving behind you. Use it all.” She lifted Crypttongue.

“Not without you.”

“Stupid man, don't be noble.” She smiled, for she could feel strength enter her sword-arm from the blade. “There's too much at stake. Innocence and A-Girl-Is-A-Joy. We've tangled with Karvaks. They're not your common warrior. We won't win, but I can hold them off while you escape.”

“I—I was offered this choice before. Stay with the boy, or . . .”

“I've tried to forgive your choice.” Her voice grew hard. “But I won't forgive you this time. If this is the end, we have had our adventure, Imago, my husband. I cherish it. Now listen to your wife. Save our son.
Go
!”

She ran, howling, up the path.

She did not pause to see which path he took to escape. That was his business. But somehow she sensed he'd gone.

A group of Karvaks ran up to her. Armored as they were, these men did not seem quite human, and her mind painted shadows over them, these sons of unknown women, made them symbols of everything that stood between her and her boy.

Crypttongue empowering her blows, she felled five before the arrow struck her in the leg.

She tumbled, and the sword fell from her hand.

Someone kicked Crypttongue away; the foot's next target was Gaunt's face.

It seemed she dwelled with the aurora for a moment before the world returned to her and she stared up into a female Karvak face. The woman who knelt beside Gaunt was like and yet unlike Lady Steelfox, only a little younger and yet somehow with a gaze like that of a greedy child.

“You fought well,” the Karvak said in the language of the Eldshore, “and I respect that. You've earned your life. Your companion's death is inevitable, of course. He has chosen to run like an animal, and we know what to do with prey. Be assured the kill will be swift and clean.”

“So generous.”

“I know enough about your lands to know you are raised in corrupt ways. Nevertheless, you are a poet as well as a brigand, and you can give my husband, the new Grand Khan, helpful intelligence. Serve me well now, and you will have a place in our empire, yes, you, and even your sons and daughters.”

Gaunt considered spitting in the Karvak's face, but with Crypttongue gone the battle-fury had withdrawn. Words were what she needed now.

“You are the wolf,” Gaunt guessed.

“You are correct.”

Bone fled.

He slid down a nearly sheer slope of scree, earning cuts and raising clouds of dust. He shifted himself down a chimney of rock, descended a cliff until it was just safe to jump, ran down a mossy slope where a twitch of imbalance might send him careening into fissures at either hand.

For a while he had the feeling the apparitional Xembalans, Zheng among them, were calling to him, but he had no ears for them, only for Gaunt.

I won't forgive you this time.

In his gut he wasn't really fleeing a rocky hill that held his wife but was desperately swimming in a collapsing underground island, the Scroll of Years leaving his hands and carrying his son with it. The green canopy under golden clouds was, in his mind's eye, the fragmenting substance of the Eastern dragon who had encompassed that island. His son was trapped in another world, and now his wife was captured—not dead, don't think dead—in a strange, otherworldly place.

He had no notion of direction, only a vague sense of where the palace had gleamed beneath the clouds. From time to time he thought he might have glimpsed a balloon drifting above the branches. He kept running. The undergrowth was not so thick on this side of the river, and Bone was able to make progress, until at last he collapsed.

He must have passed out for a time. The light was as diffuse as always but more concentrated now to the west. He felt a chill. Golden mists writhed around the trees, perhaps an aspect of Xembala he was now permitted to see. From time to time he saw shadowy shapes walking in the same direction, with his gait. Something told him not to hail them, but he could not resist looking.

There stood other versions of himself—haggard-looking in a gray traveling cloak, sans mustache, as he'd appeared in the danker parts of the West; brash and barbaric in a jerkin meant for hot weather, his pale, exposed limbs earning sunburns now that they'd left the shadows of Palmary of the Towers. It was hard to say how accurate these visions were, as he'd only glimpsed himself behind his own eyes. Younger versions of Gaunt walked beside him, laughing, chiding, grasping his hand, pointing ahead. Sun to his moon. She saw herself as grim and gravestuck and he as full of life, but it was he whose heart was shadowed, and hers who blazed.

He had to look away, though he knew the mists shadowed him.

The mists were not the only surprise. When he reached the edge of this forest, he looked out upon cultivated fields.

He saw rectangular stone houses amid terraces of green. Strewn between houses and boulders were ropes bearing hundreds of colorful square flags. He saw goats and cows and yaks. There were no people, however.

The ground was rugged enough that he could run from boulder to terrace to isolated tree, keeping himself mostly hidden. At last he reached a house, its flags rustling upon the ropes leading to its neighbor.

“Good evening!” he called in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, for day was fading. “You good?” He tried again in his best rendition of a northern dialect. “Peace be upon you,” he tried in the language of Mirabad, and “Hello!” in his own. There was no response. He leaned through an open window and saw no inhabitants, though there was a table set with flatbread, vegetables, and noodles, with a few oranges shining in his sight. His mouth watered.

He'd done much worse than steal food from invisible people, but he restrained himself. He suspected he was not alone. He crept around the house and observed the flags upon the ropes. Many were unmarked, but some bore a vertical script that was somehow familiar. Upon one he saw an illustration of a horse racing through clouds.