The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (34 page)

If the dragon was here, he was further within.

The auditor, however, could be anywhere.

Bone slid into the cavern and maneuvered around the perimeter as well as he could. He slithered through narrow crevices and clefts. The temperature dropped within the cave. Damp as he was from sweat and sea spray and jungle mist, he shivered. Already he feared growing disoriented within the intricate pitches of the stone floor. But he was Imago Bone, greatest second-story man of the Spiral Sea, and his sense of direction was strong. He could retrace his steps blindfolded.

Indeed, so attuned was he to the way out, that he nearly stumbled into Kindlekarn’s teeth.

His warning was a sudden wave of heat.

Bone jumped back a good five feet, and promptly stumbled, shuffling and shifting to a degree he measured at four mouses, in his personal scale of sound. To his mind this was like hauling out pot and spoon and sounding a march.

The dragon seemed to agree.

FOOL, hissed a voice through rows of shut teeth, rubies tall as lances, wide as corpses. YOU SEEK DEATH.

“I seek Gaunt,” he whispered.

SHE ABANDONED HER CHANCE AT FREEDOM. YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ONE. HE WILL AWAKEN.

“Hackwroth? He sleeps, then.”

BUT LIGHTLY. HE AWAITS YOU, NESTLED WITHIN THE COIL OF MY TAIL. IN HIS GRASP IS WHAT YOU SEEK. I INFLUENCE HIM NOW, SUBTLY, TO KEEP HIM SLEEPING. WE MAY SPEAK.

“Good! Keep him that way. I will be swift.”

NO.

“You cannot want to serve him.”

HE IS LIFE TO ME.

“Explain.”

I WISH SURVIVAL. BUT I CANNOT OVERCOME THE DUAL DRIVES OF SEX AND TRANSMOGRIFICATION.

“Explain in human terms?”

IF I MATE, I WILL PERISH IN FIRE. IF I DO NOT MATE, I WILL BECOME INANIMATE. SUCH IS THE LOT OF DRAGONS. HACKWROTH WILL SELECTIVELY AUDIT MY MIND, MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO EVADE BOTH DRIVES.

Bone considered. “I sympathize with your goal,” he admitted. “Mortality may be inevitable, but for that very reason, why rush? Yet it is possible to give up too much in the quest for longevity. You serve a murderer, dragon.”

HAVE YOU NOT MURDERED, THIEF?

“I dislike killing,” Bone conceded, recalling the bandits in the woods. “But I’ve killed to survive. At times I may have killed when I did not need to. At other times, people have died because of me.” The faces of the gang at the mausoleum returned to him. Then there returned to him what remained of their faces after Kindlekarn’s flame. “It is tempting to say that anyone who enters the game of aggressive self-advancement deserves their fate. It is also tempting to say that no one is innocent.” He thought of Lampblack’s cut throat. “I think both statements are convenient lies, however—means of evading guilt. So I’d say that I am guilty of much, and possibly murder besides.” He sighed. “I deserve little consideration, Kindlekarn. Persimmon Gaunt deserves more, however. And our child deserves most of all.”

I SEEK NOT YOUR FAMILY’S DOOM. BUT MY LIFE CLAIMS PRECEDENCE.

Bone considered. “It is the shard of magic mirror in Hackwroth’s brain, that gives him the confidence of knowing minds, and altering them.”

IT SEEMS LIKELY.

“This implies a way, gruesome as it seems, to impart that knowledge to you directly.”

AH, I FOLLOW YOU. IF YOU CAN ARRANGE THIS, YOU WILL HAVE MY AID.

“I need your aid to arrange this.”

TO THIS DEGREE ONLY. I WILL NOT INTERFERE, UNTIL COMMANDED.

“Generous.”

DO NOT MOCK ME, LITTLE THING.

“Oh, I speak gently to dragons.”

Bone crept past the vast beast, scrambling over the mineral-laden hide in places, for Kindlekarn had neatly slithered into the depths of the cave. Bone approached the sleeping form of Hackwroth—nestled around a heavy pack and encircled by a coiling tail gleaming with tempting gems—steadily fixing his gaze on the assassin’s head and its jagged shard of glass. 

The shard flared with light. Images danced within. One image was of Bone attaching a rope to the shard with three drops of ur-glue.

Hackwroth opened his eyes.

At once the auditor leapt to his feet, raising a hand.

Bone felt a pain in his skull, as the shard showed tiny scenes of his life in Palmary, women loved, jewels taken, rivals outwitted, lawmen outrun. At first he felt a keen edge to the memories; then he felt nothing for them, for they stirred nothing in his mind, as though they happened to another man with his face.

At last the images faded, and he knew many days of his life were gone from his memory forever.

“Thief,” Bone said.

“I will take more,” Hackwroth answered. “Murderer.”

Bone threw a dagger, but not before the image of that act flashed within the mirror, and Hackwroth dodged aside. Bone rolled to trip the auditor, but again Hackwroth danced out of the way.

Bone made a crazy series of leaps, acting on intuition only, striving to think as an animal, but Hackwroth sensed him coming, and Bone thudded on his tailbone upon the rocky floor within the dragon’s tail.

Once again he had a profound sense of recollection—at loving a woman atop the citadel of the Black Thumb Banking Concern, scarlet sunset clouds threading the skies above the desert like the blood humming through their veins—then he wondered what the memory of waking up alone on a roof was all about.

“I will take it all,” Hackwroth said, “clipping the wings of your mind, until you are but a larva of immediate sensation. And then your only sensations will be pain.”

“Killing your father was regrettable,” Bone lied, more or less. “I only wanted to shake your pursuit.”

“It is too late to repent.”

It seemed too late for much of anything.
Nothing we do is direct
, old Master Sidewinder had taught, and yet for Hackwroth nothing was circumspect. The shard could anticipate even moves Bone was hardly conscious of. And yet—here on impulse Bone rose and scrambled upon the dragon’s back, shuffling out of eyeshot—while Hackwroth had displayed similar insight in their brief melee in the West, he had shown none such at the city of the dead, nor upon the
Passport/Punishment
. It might be the case that the fractured seeing-glass’s subjects had to be in close proximity.

Bone pulled forth a vial and placed three drops of ur-glue upon a glove. Replacing the vial, he donned the glove. He threw his hooked rope around a stalactite and it caught. From Kindlekarn’s shoulder he leapt.

“Kindlekarn!” he called. “Choose heads or tails!”

EH? HEADS—

Hackwroth had sprung into a defensive stance. But Bone’s final target had not been chosen until Kindlekarn spoke. An uncertainty had been introduced—and Bone glimpsed his form blurring within the magic mirror.

“Tails” had been the shard. Bone instead aimed for the thing he’d assigned to “Heads,” the scroll bearing
A Tumult of Trees on Peculiar Peaks
, leaning beside Hackwroth’s pack.

He grabbed it, rolled with it, leapt over the dragon’s tail, and fled deeper into the cave.

YOU BREAK YOUR TRUST, Kindlekarn boomed after him.

“No,” Bone muttered, “I improvise.”

The space around him narrowed. He slipped down a pitch, lost his footing, landed painfully on a sharp outcropping and rolled. He held fast to
Tumult
, slid into a deep passageway. Bone trusted his instincts for dark places to save him from cul-de-sacs.

Hackwroth would pursue, but here Kindlekarn could not follow. This compensated somewhat for darkness and confusion and pain. He knew his way around castle tunnels and secret passages in manors, trusted his footwork in sewers and web-strewn ruins. He’d never been a caver, however. The constant irregularity of the floor seemed at times a deliberate affront. Twice he simply plunged into shallow pits, lacerating himself on the rocks to the intensity of ten
mouses
. At least there were echoes to confuse Hackwroth. He did not dare spare a moment to attempt to contact the world beyond the scroll . . .

A plan then occurred to him—a plan madder than the one he currently pursued.

The trouble was implementation. Somehow, in the dark, he must evade Hackwroth long enough to find a very deep drop. And then jump into it.

Deep enough, and Bone might throw himself into the world of the painting before hitting bottom. Deep enough, and Hackwroth would never find the scroll. No one would.

If he did this thing, he’d indeed be breaking his word to Kindlekarn, just as he’d essentially broken his promise to Brother Clement. Justifiable, certainly. Still. It rankled. He was a thief, not a cheat.

So he searched for a drop, or a steep pitch, with intent to set ambush. His other plan would be there, waiting in the dark.

He groped carefully, listening for any clues in the reverberations around him, any variations of temperature or breeze. It was harder because the scroll was glued to his glove. Bone’s gait resembled more a centipede’s than a rabbit’s. Hours seemed to pass. He grunted over sharp little peaks and scooted through narrow shallows. Once he chanced nosing into a tunnel requiring a slow crawl toward a fresh breeze; he got blocked when the passage narrowed to the size of a melon, sucked in a deep breath of cool moist air and backed out, expecting Hackwroth at his feet at any moment.

He escaped the predicament and found an alternate route, picking his way among a rough patch with numerous stalagmites, drawn by moisture and the sound of dripping water. And now there was something else: a hallucination of light.

No, he decided . . . true light, but exceedingly dim, and in the direction of the water.

Nearer that light, and still uncertain as to its source, Bone beheld natural wonders fit for kingly hoards. He threaded a barricade of titanic crystals stabbing everywhere like the splintered teeth of giants. Further was an irregular archway of glittering stalactites resembling white feathers or snow-wrapped branches or the tendrils of medusae. Whatever the metaphor, Bone hesitated to touch them, ducking beneath these mineral formations seemingly so alive.

Beyond, his metaphors became shrines, temples, cathedrals.

This cavern was immense, more so even than Kindlekarn’s above. Bone knew this because shafts of light speared from roof to floor like ghostly, hundred-foot pillars. Water trickled from crowded stalactites, feeding a vast shallow pool. Further on, the pool dribbled rivulets down an immense pit yawning beneath the illumination, darkness slurping light.

Bone crept forward, skirting the great pool, feeling as though he intruded upon a ceremony as devout as the one in Eshe’s temple, though no one was about. When he reached the pit, more details glowed into view. Above, among the stalactites, massive roots crisscrossed like the work of a giant, drunken weaver. Wood merged with stone, such that there could be no untangling the two. At the apex, gaps in the ceiling admitted sunlight. The light was pale, and Bone judged it was now early dawn. If he could climb out of here, there was a chance of escape. Yet a mishap would plunge him down into the pit. Fifty feet wide, it filled half the cavern and the sunlight could not fathom its depths. Down there in the dark the trickling waters plunged, and he heard no stream announcing the bottom.

There was a place one might get a better view, however. An outcropping of rock split the curtain of gentle waterfalls, and upon it rose a most peculiar formation.

A white column the size of a temple altar stood there gleaming in the light, its smooth surface reminiscent of a turban or a cocoon. Rocks in the pool led irregularly, yet inexorably, to the outcropping.

“Did it form by accident,” Bone mused aloud, “or intent? But who would ever visit here?”

There was no answer but the dripping.

“It might be against my better judgment . . .” he murmured. He walked out across the stones.

Within the altar was a clear pool, nodules of white stone set within like a clutch of pearls. Bone looked into the water, perceiving his own face. He had a moment of disorientation.

Who is this?
he wondered.

Once upon a time an angry boy had fled home to seek his fortune.

He would not have recognized himself now, nor the fortune.

As he thought this, he saw his face give way to the boy’s. The lad leapt upon driftwood on the sands of the Contrariwise Coast. He saw his brothers, fishermen, laughing in those days before, one by one, they were claimed by the sea. He saw his scowling parents, determined to make him fish, when he longed to see the world. He saw the grim adolescent highwayman he became.

“Stop . . .” he whispered, but the images rippled on.

The highwayman wandered to Palmary of the Towers, where he learned the trade of a city-thief. All was well enough until he fell for a kleptomancer, Vine, and was entangled in the schemes of Vine and her lover Remora. That ended badly for them, and so they set upon him two angels of death.

“So long . . .” he gasped.

Yet the two deaths checked each other, paradoxically extending his life by decades, until the spell was broken by the words of Persimmon Gaunt, and what began with a foolish infatuation at last ended with a wise one.

“Gaunt . . .”

Together they wandered, doing deeds larcenous and heroic, crushing the stuff of life to their mouths like wet fruit. There was the sand castle of the mermaids and the misty citadel of Rainjoy. There rose the golden Vault of Heaven and the pustulous Tower of the Contemplators. There was warm rain on the southern ocean and pale snow upon the tundra. And through all of it they were together.

“Oh, my . . .”

Gaunt had said that the stare of a dragon tore away pretense, revealing a naked soul. Bone knew that in this pool, he saw himself as a dragon would. He saw that he was but a bright, irrelevant fluttering thing, a torn feather on the wind, lacking as he did the weight of Gaunt’s hand.

The images faded. He lowered his head. He raised the scroll, saw its reflection in the water. “Dragon,” he whispered.

Gusts swept into the cavern from the gaps above, rippling the pool upon the altar. And the gusts and ripples became words.

I know you, little thing who speaks of mountains.

Bone dropped to his knees. It couldn’t hurt. And he was tired. “All I love is in this thing. Might you guard it?”