The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (11 page)

“Oh . . .”

They sat that way until lunch call. Flybait seemed gratified to receive approval for doing not much of anything, and he did it with enthusiasm. Next-One-A-Boy thought about moments un-mired by the past and the future, but it was hard. She thought about the dream of just sitting and breathing beside a fire (or had it been more?) but angry thoughts fell upon the image like snow, masking the days behind and the days ahead.

That night there was action. “Just a small foray,” Five Finger Chang said to the gathered Society at sunset, leaping down from a cypress tree and patting his spyglass. “I see three travelers approaching the Ochre River and the Wall. They are trying to look like peasants, but I discern they are foreigners! Having come so far, so secretively, they must be carrying wealth. I will take a handful of helpers. This will be a good chance for Flybait and Next-One-A-Boy to learn.”

“They were absent their duties today,” Exceedingly Accurate Wu objected, her stare indicating she knew exactly why any adolescent boy and girl would go missing together. Next-One-A-Boy stared back, swearing silently to remember Wu’s false assumption the next time the older woman pretended to know everything. Wu said, “Should we reward them?”

Chang shared Wu’s assumptions but not her disapproval. He chuckled. “They are young and need their exercise . . . And a raid will toughen them up. Unless the Lord of Lost Causes drops his shoe on us, we can afford to indulge the kids. They can watch the horses.” He frowned at Next-One-A-Boy. “But girl, you need a new name. A bandit name.”

“I will think about it,” she said. She could tell Chang wished her well, and she felt guilty for not correcting him about the new swords, which he still believed to be magical, making him overconfident. Should she tell? But there were only three opponents . . .

Flybait was meanwhile entranced with the problem of her name, and as they tromped through the sunset forest, he said, “Your name could be Moon Spider, because you climbed the Wall. Or Firecracker because you know your way around firepowder. Or Auspicious Tiger because you’re so fierce. Or Shining Pearl because—”

“Why are you so interested in my name?” she snarled. “And why do you not change the name ‘Flybait’?”

“Flybait is a good name!” he said. “It is the kind of name that makes evil spirits pass over you. My family was most thoughtful to bestow it.”

“You are a boy.” She shook her head. “My family saw another girl as just another mouth. Or at best someone to haul coal and weave silk and watch babies. When Chang says the poor are noble it shows he does not tarry often among them. For the poor can be as cruel as the wealthy. They simply have the power to hurt few, while the rich can hurt many.”

“Surely then the cruel rich are worse than the cruel poor?”

“If you’re a victim, you’re a victim. You don’t need to see anyone’s purse to know it.”

“Well, as long as you rob from the wealthy,” Flybait said, “Chang won’t mind your attitude.”

She spat. “I hope these foreigners really are rich. We needn’t kill them, do we?”

“That is up to them,” Flybait said, but there was something uneasy beneath his pose of gruffness, like a puppy playing at hunting raptors.

In his long career, Imago Bone had often been chased by dogs. There had been herd dogs, war dogs, and astonishingly vicious perfumed lap dogs. While many of his canine acquaintances had roamed free, hunting him down cobblestones, piers, corridors, and sewers, many others had been roped or chained, growling their frustration at the intruder who balanced upon the fence, climbed the tree, hung from the rooftop, and dangled suspended from the mad inventor’s hot-air balloon. Lately Bone felt a kinship with them, for he too was tethered, unable to venture far from his pregnant lover no matter the danger.

Still, he thought, a pair of daggers in hand, the chain was not real, and would not prevent him from goring any single foe that appeared. He prepared to spring ahead.

Ten shapes emerged from the mists. Bone edged back.

There were six bearded cutthroats, smiling beneath wide-brimmed cone hats, clad in ragged coats with a haphazard assortment of armor pieces distributed among them, motley-looking silks and shifts and gowns shining underneath. They appeared to Bone like incognito clowns. Their swords and knives, however, seemed of decent quality, predictive more of screams than laughter.

There were also two youths trailing, a boy and a girl, leading horses. The boy, maybe fifteen, had a gangly look to him, and a glint of exaggerated bravado beneath his moss-like tangle of hair. The girl, a trifle older, looked to be the boy’s temperamental opposite, compact body proudly erect, hard brown eyes staring between locks of hair straight as a dagger and dark as the deepest sea.

The lead bandit, whose extravagant beard and mustaches seemed to dare Bone to tug them, raised a right hand completely devoid of fingers, stubs adorned with pieces of jade. It certainly had a dramatic effect, for all gazes were upon it. The leader barked a command at the youths, who held off, staying close beside each other. The girl patted something within her garment, a hidden weapon perhaps.

The commander sauntered up and conversationally drawled something at the foreigners.

Eshe made crisp reply, and the bandit shook his head. The six elder robbers advanced.

“What did you say to them?” Gaunt asked.

“Take it back,” Bone suggested.

Eshe said, “I gave the wrong reply to the question, ‘Where are you going?’ This must be a criminal pass-phrase hereabouts. For future reference, ‘north’ is incorrect.”

The lead bandit removed a sword from a sheath that seemed a trifle large for it. The weapon had an air of antiquity. He made a menacing statement, which Eshe translated as, “This is a sword of ancient rulers. Its magic is great. Surrender all your possessions and you may live.”

At once the fierce-eyed girl beside the horses began interjecting something. The bandit leader snarled her into silence.

“What was that about?” Bone asked.

“The girl warned her leader the sword might be mundane,” Eshe said. “She said she would know the difference.”

The boy beside the girl spoke now. There was another exchange, in much the tone of the first.

“The boy says the metallurgy of centuries past was inferior to that of today,” Eshe continued. “The value of the blade is in sale to collectors. The bandit leader replies children should be silent, and they should consider themselves lucky not to be expelled from the Cloud and Soil Society.”

“There is a reason,” Bone said, “I was never an organization man.”

Having settled their debate for now, the bandits began advancing, ancient blades drawn.

“I think the odds are poor,” Gaunt noted.

Bone nodded. “Set aside thinking for now.”

In one motion Bone threw two daggers. The lead bandit dropped, with a blade in his throat. A second snarled at the new wound in his arm.

Gaunt felled that one with a dagger to the eye. She passed her remaining blade to Bone, snatched up a fallen tree branch, and climbed the gnarled sacred boulder.

Eshe, her eyes wide, now raised a silver-fringed statuette representing the Swan Goddess. She pressed a switch upon it, and blades sprouted from wingtips and beak. She crouched, her knife shifting from target to target.

The surviving bandits shared a look of mixed fear, calculation, and anger that would make the coldest Western businessman pale. Their leader and one other had fallen. Their prey had proven most expensive.

The young accomplices had reached the same conclusion. With a flurry of hoofbeats, the pair disappeared with the bandits’ horses. Those who remained snarled in outrage. Bone smiled in respect.

His smirk soon faded. It seemed the remaining bandits’ cost/benefit/rage calculation went against the travelers, for the four rushed the three, swords in hand.

These were no amateurs, and in between dodging and lunging, Bone grew concerned. He and Eshe bloodied an attacker apiece, and Gaunt’s branch-swings kept the pair from being engulfed. But a single error would doom them all.

Then came two errors. Bone’s nearest opponent saw through his feint, and the Western thief was obliged to roll past the Eastern bandit. Meanwhile Eshe took a blow to the ribs and dropped.

Bone leapt up and tackled his own foe, knocking over Eshe’s as well. Bone pierced the throat of the first man and rose again, his foot stomping the windpipe of the second.

A distant, watchful part of his mind noted in amazement he’d never fought so well.

But it was not enough.

The last two bandits had slipped around the stone and were ascending to attack Gaunt. She waved her branch, but they approached with mirthless grins.

She must submit or else jump, risking harm to her child-to-be.

Bone threw the last dagger, cutting one bandit across the back of the neck. The man shrugged off the pain and continued climbing. His comrade turned away from Gaunt, leapt from the boulder, and ran for Bone.

Then a length of wood, seemingly out of nowhere, cracked against Gaunt’s opponent’s skull. The man toppled down the boulder and lay still.

Bone and the final bandit turned to see a white, four-hoofed blur pass by, with a staff-bearing black-and-red blur on top. Both returned their attention to each other, but Bone a fraction of a second sooner. Diving, he tripped his foe.

When Bone rolled to his feet, the enemy remained prone, his eyes rolled up into his head, the butt of a staff pressing disturbingly deep into his skull.

The staff belonged to a black-clothed man of Qiangguo with a thick mustache recalling that of the bandit chief (Bone would not dream of pulling it) and a red cap with a long tassel fluttering behind. His silk clothes were adorned with white images of a spindly insect, save for one tiny spot, over his heart, marked with a red firefly. His horse, snorting beneath him, was pale and possessed of more ribs than the norm. The nostrils steamed.

Bone locked gazes with the newcomer, decided he faced no immediate threat, and bowed. The staff-wielder nodded. Bone’s gaze met Gaunt’s, and she nodded yes to his unspoken
Are you all right?

Gaunt and Bone moved to Eshe’s side.

The Kpalamaa woman bled heavily, but was alive. Bone took a bandit’s bright cloak and tied strips of it around the wound. Before long, Gaunt and their mysterious savior were helping him.

Bone noted the fallen swan-dagger. “You fought well,” Bone said, “Swan priestess.”

She smiled weakly, many drops of blood and one secret lighter.

They propped Eshe up against the sacred stone, and she gasped her thanks.

Their rescuer now mounted his horse and galloped off in the direction the two youths had fled. Oddly, Bone hoped they would escape. He had, he thought, glimpsed something familiar about them.

He put his hand upon Gaunt’s shoulder, let out a long breath of relief. He hoped Gaunt would say he’d been magnificent.

“My back hurts,” she murmured.

He rubbed it. “You were magnificent,” he hinted.

“Lower,” she said.

His breathing eased, as normality of a sort returned. The reality of carnage touched his mind, his nose, his shaking hands. All at once Bone crouched, stomach nearly heaving.

And now it was Gaunt’s turn to caress him, stroking his neck, cradling his head. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

“Foolishness,” he croaked. “I’ve seen death before.”

“Rarely by your own hand, Bone. Ever you avoid battle, as you would a viper.”

After several minutes the horseman returned, reined up, and snapped a quick question, words stiff and blunt. Bone stirred himself to rise, but it was Eshe who answered, with words whispery and gentle. After a few more exchanges, she said, “The name he gives might be rendered as ‘Walking Stick.’ He is a government official from the very Purple Forbidden City in Riverclaw, on a mission of some urgency.” Eshe coughed, but held up a hand before Bone or Gaunt could interrupt. “As such, he will overlook the presence of mysterious foreigners who so enthusiastically dispose of bandits . . . so long as he accompanies us where you are going. I have told him.”

“This time ‘north’ was the correct answer?” Bone asked.