The Silk Map (57 page)

“Perhaps thieving has rubbed off on you, if now you're planning to steal children.”

“Don't be absurd. You and I could make a child—the right way, this time, with a true community to support us, and it.”

“That is it? You wish to abandon Innocence?”

“You have the gall to accuse me of that? It's not I who left him there.”

He looked away. “I know you've been angry. I confess I've sometimes wondered if we shouldn't simply start anew. I ask, who would blame us? But I've seen him now, heard him speak. He is haunted, Persimmon. He has friends, I believe. But he could use family. We are the only ones who can give him that.”

“What about what I need, Bone? I want what was taken from me—the chance to know a child, through all his growing years.”

“I see. And if I go without you?”

“I will mourn you. But I will carry on. There are men here. I've seen them out this window. Men who work an honest living. Men who are dependable. Men who have genuine lives.”

“You say these things to torment me.”

“I say them because they are true. We've had too little truth, Imago Bone. Only dreams and fancies that turn to nightmares. If you can finally be a man, my love, you can be my man. But I have no more time for the boy who never grew up.”

She turned her back on him and commenced a song with the children.

Before he knew it, a dagger trembled in his hand.

Gaunt lunged—and at the last moment stayed her hand.

Bone's dagger was out now, and he snarled at her, “Do it, weakling! Do it!”

But she could not. Something was wrong here. Perhaps at his worst Bone might act in this way, but he was growing more and more like a mask, not a man.

There were shadowy shapes in the red room, barely glimpsed. They had proportions of two adults and several children. The adults had a familiar look to them.

She stepped closer to the woman.

Bone raised the dagger. For a moment he thought his impulse was just to startle Gaunt, to shock her out of her cruelty. But as he drew his hand back, an old tickling sensation prowled the skin of his neck. Perhaps Gaunt would truly change in this way, but would she say these words so perfectly calculated to wound him? As though she were a weapon, not a woman?

And why was he aiming directly at her? What could possibly goad him into becoming such a monster?

He was being manipulated. He looked around for the manipulator.

Elsewhere in the yellow room stood two shadowy figures. His suspicions aroused and his anger already alight, he edged toward the taller.

Gaunt peered into the shadow's face and saw herself. She saw her own mouth moving. She leaned closer and heard the specter say, “A real man would fight to keep me.”

Bone stepped beside the shadow and squinted close.

It was he. A shadow-Bone.

And he could hear the shadow-Bone saying, “You are a weak woman. Fight me!”

Gaunt could not put into words what she suspected, but her feet took her at once to the shadow of the man—

Bone saw the woman's shadow coming, and now, perhaps he understood. He hastened to her side—

“Ignore him! He's a daydream, poet, a shadow you invented!”

“You've decided not to grow up, thief! Touch that phantasm and you've lost!”

“Gaunt.”

“Bone.”

Just as they'd done when roped together in the graveyard of Qushkent, they took each other's hands.

Hands reached to faces, lips to lips.

White light burst all around them, until all shadows dispersed.

Snow Pine awakened in a chamber overlooking the River Aleph's rush to the plateau. Even before she took full notice of her still-sleeping companions, or the intricate colors of the tessellated floor and the painted walls aswirl with mandalas and resplendent Thresholders, she climbed three stone steps to a great open window bordered by a red frame and blue curtains. Tugging the azure cloth aside she was dazzled by sunlight blazing in the cloudswirl above the valley and by the golden flashes of the river surging down its natural ramp.

Or was it natural? That great escarpment, which carried the river from its source in a waterfall of the southern cliffs until it flowed onto this plateau, certainly seemed rugged enough to be natural. It had vast gray serrations and piles of tumbled rock and dust and trees poking up seemingly at random and even a small tribe of mountain goats. Yet Snow Pine had spent years within a seemingly natural landscape that was, in some way she still couldn't quite grasp, the work of a master painter.