The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (40 page)

“You are a wise woman,” Bone said, wrestling free a sewer grate from the cobblestones, “but still a young one, though you wish otherwise. You do not see that sometimes even we old folk must toss the dice. I may die, but it is a reasonable risk. Much more reasonable than another eighty years with my friends Joyblood and Severstrand.”

“I still do not understand about them . . .”

“Pray you never do. Now wait one hour, then make for the location I showed you.”

He slipped down into darkness.

Gaunt replaced the grate. She shivered as the sky purpled and blossomed with stars.

A whisper came to her. “I will teach you, Persimmon Gaunt, what you wish to know.”

Hangnail Tower was divided in three parts.

The lowest level (which Imago Bone trod, light as a famished ant) housed the bureaucrats who ran the city in the kleptomancers’ name. It also sheltered vaults bursting with coins, gems, tapestries—all the wealth the kleptomancers seized from the palmgreaser elite. The kleptomancers did not prize such things; but their vassals did, and that was all that mattered.

The topmost level formed the sanctum of these sorcerers of theft, from which they regarded their strange instrument, the city. For Palmary itself was like the hand of a thief, stealing the magical energies of the surrounding land and sea.

And all the space between held the Goblin Library, sheltering the only treasure the kleptomancers loved for itself.

At the Library doorstep Imago Bone drew a dagger he’d nicked from a kleptomancer eighty years ago, and which he had employed only once. It was slender and silver, its hilt took the shape of a slender tome, and the blade glinted with intricate notches as Bone waved it before the door.

The Library possessed but three portals. One led to the kleptomancers’ sanctum. Another opened from the Goblin Reading Room onto empty air. The door Bone pondered in flickering light was a huge brass panel proclaiming
Ex Nihilo
in the style of a bookplate. A sculpted goblin face, three-eyed, with bat ears and a single nostril, grinned a brassy grin. Its third eye cradled a torch.

Sweating, Bone slid the blade into the goblin-nostril. He twisted.

There was no reassuring click. Instead, there was a thin whistle.

His sweating redoubled, and he sheathed the dagger and covered his face with a mesh woven of sweetair leaves. With one hand he flicked open a metal case bearing six customized, notched daggers.

As he worked the lock, Bone’s neck tingled in the accustomed way. Was Joyblood nearby,
tsking
at the passionless nature of death by gas? Severstrand, displeased it might be painless?

The second dagger worked.

Bone advanced, welcoming cool, moldy air.

The Library filled seven stories. Or would have, had there been stories to speak of.

Instead it was one vast chamber, festooned with balconies which were linked by a mad arrangement of rising and falling staircases. The stairway railings shimmered with hundreds of glass spheres, each aglow from dozens of trapped, luminescent insects. But the balconies had no railings; that would have meant less room for the bookshelves.

The shelves’ hollows clutched motley volumes sheathed in cracked bindings and cobwebs; while their frames scowled with goblin calligraphy, proclaiming each balcony a branch of knowledge in the goblin bibliographic system.

Thus Imago Bone knew he crept through the Alcove of Martyrs (whose urns cradled the ashes of incinerated books) and thence to the Vault of the Vanished (whose squarish marble statues honored books lost to time). Beyond these he arrived at a major fork dividing the Library into halves: books written by the left-handed and the right-handed. Bone’s forehead wrinkled, and he jogged left.

The directions in the memoirs of Dolman the Charmed were tantalizing but unspecific; and Bone himself had been here but once. So he pattered cautiously through the balconies: Cynical Stories by Innocents; Innocent Stories by Cynics; Polite Arguments for Cracking Heads; Coming-of-Age-Tales-cum-Cruelty-Manuals; Vast Philosophical Systems Proving Why Mommy Was Wrong; Books Proudly Shocking the Sensibilities of a Generation Already Dead; Books with Excessive Use of Semicolons.

“You risk much, old companion,” came a disembodied whisper, and Bone knew it drifted to his ears alone.

“Really, Severstrand?”

“The librarians are admirably bloody-minded.”

Bone allowed a smile. “Would that satisfy you? Bloody or not, it wouldn’t be by your hand.”

He leapt silently past bookshelves contrived to sprout blades and sandwich idle browsers. The sepulchral voice followed him. “That is a point.” Severstrand sighed. “I have fallen somewhat, Bone. Once I would not have hounded my prey so.”

“Once it was merely a duty, killing people.”

“Quite. Personal attendance was unnecessary. A true night angel is an arranger. Somewhat like a mortal florist. I needed only a touch of fever, a few old worries, some slippery cobblestones, and a frightened horse team. I no more needed to manifest than the florist needs to kiss the young lady personally. Nevertheless . . .”

“Nevertheless, you and Joyblood have hounded me for eighty years. Is that not enough?” Here Bone avoided the attractive “fallen” book sculpted of everlasting glue.

“I confess I sometimes tire of the matter, Bone. And yet. If I quit the field, Joyblood triumphs. Death at the hands of a lover—utter melodrama! It dishonors you and the cold eye you’ve turned upon life.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Of course. However, death by the fury of goblin librarians—that might do. I regret the end of our conversations, Imago Bone.”

“They have been diverting,” Bone agreed, ducking under the invisible wire rigged to topple an upper stack brimming with bricks in leather covers. “But I am not finished yet.”

“Soon,” Severstrand said. “And then I may destroy my foe.”

Bone stopped. “You would attack Joyblood? Even with me gone?”

“Of course. Joyblood feels the same. Our feud has lingered too long, Bone. It demands satisfaction. But that—and all else—is beyond your concern. Farewell.”

There came a gentle
swoosh
from far overhead; and a few seconds later an oversized bat with human hands for claws tumbled dead at Bone’s feet.

As the bookbat’s
thud
echoed among the balconies, there rose an excited murmuring from all around, as the goblin librarians looked up from their shelving and straightening, cataloging and indexing, and scampered hissing toward the sound.

Persimmon Gaunt brandished a dagger, mainly to salve her pride before Joyblood possessed her anew. But the crimson apparition merely sighed. “Ah, have no fear, mortal! Although you would love Imago Bone in time, I concede you are unripe for my purposes.”

“I’m no romantic,” Gaunt said, lowering the blade. “In fact your little speech just slew any spark I might have felt.”

“Please tell yourself that; you will fall all the harder. Not that it matters, anymore.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“The wheel has turned. Imago Bone has gone home.”

“Home? The Hangnail Tower?”

“Where Bone, as he is now, was born. Where he has returned to die. And in a gruesome fashion that will no doubt please my rival.”

Persimmon Gaunt felt something graveyard poets are not supposed to feel. “Does he seek his own destruction there? And did I push him in?”

“I believe the answer to both is Yes—but do not blame yourself! The Tower has haunted him for eight decades. He had to return.”

“Tell me why.”

“As you wish.” The red miasma’s eyes flickered. “When Imago Bone was truly nineteen his heart was like a torch fanned by a gale, and the windstorm was a woman. She was a kleptomancer of Hangnail Tower, and he was a street thief, down from the Contrariwise Coast seeking fortune, beckoned by the hand of Palmary. The kleptomancer Vine stole the young man’s gaze, but she loved and abandoned him, as the kleptomancers are wont. Worse, she berated him for weakness, never elaborating on the theme.

“Like many men before, Bone was flogged to madness by this word ‘weak.’ He pursued her. He hunted all talk of her. Of late, he learned, she dallied with many men from the poorer creases of the great hand . . . but primarily she shared the bed of the kleptomancer Remora. Now, as this rival treated Vine with imperious contempt, Bone supposed there was a chance—nay, a duty—to replace him. And yet Vine spurned Bone’s advances and clung to Remora, for that alliance brought power to both.”

“A sad tale,” said Gaunt. “It seems to me Bone was better off without love.”

“Without love?” jeered the death. “It is the brightest light of existence.”

“But not the only. Can not the sun share sky with the stars, the moon?”

“The sun banishes the rest.”

“Perhaps because it is jealous, and craves all eyes. And does it not blind?”

“Feh . . . I will not argue with poets. Remember: the end of all arguments is silence.”

“Do not be silent yet. How does the story end?”

“With a beginning. For at last Bone’s passion whipped him toward the Hangnail Tower. He purchased—not stole—one perfect violet. No roses for him! So armed, Bone sought to fling himself at his lady’s feet. Luck and stealth, but mainly the first, bore him through the Goblin Library. At last he attained Vine’s chambers—but she was not alone.”

“Remora was there, taking his pleasure.”

“Not in the sense you mean,” said the death. “The two stood amidst a dozen bound and gagged citizens of Palmary, six women and six men. Gore streaked the room, as Remora and Vine fed, into a burning brazier, the first victim’s heart.”

“No,” Gaunt whispered. The grave, skeletons, decay—these things stirred Persimmon Gaunt’s soul; but cruelty was something else.

“It was then,” Joyblood said, “that Imago Bone understood why Vine the kleptomancer called him weak. She meant that he was weak in magic, and thus an undesirable sacrifice. That is the way of kleptomancy, for its power turns on theft. And to metaphorically
and
physically steal hearts, well, that is quite a path to power. Vine and Remora meant to become immortal.”

“Ah, Bone,” Gaunt said, and her heart contracted in sympathy.

And at that moment Joyblood the death looked into her soul and nodded with satisfaction. Then he was gone.

After Severstrand dropped his noisy parting gift, Bone flung a rope and ascended from Kitchen Sink Narratives to Thin Painful Volumes. From there he scampered this way and that, until he spotted the rumored blue volume that triggered a spinning shelf, leading to Non-Sentient Cookery. There he listened, cold sweat glistening in the dim, flickering light.

The goblin librarians were notorious lovers of tales and infamous collectors of tomes. Their bookbats scoured the city for both. But these obsessions were distinct.

Goblins believed a living tale was a spoken tale, and in the writing was slain, lying still and unchanging. Therefore the Library was a mausoleum, and the most a visitor might do was offer complimentary bookmarks of pressed flowers, which the librarians placed in the honored tome. Browsing was forbidden, borrowing unheard of—unless you were one of the goblins’ patrons, the kleptomancers. Such privileges were tolerated as sad necessity.