The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel, page 1
Published 2013 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Scroll of Years. Copyright © 2013 by Chris Willrich. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
“The Thief with Two Deaths” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2000.
Cover illustration © Kerem Beyit
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
Inquiries should be addressed to
Pyr
59 John Glenn Drive
Amherst, New York 14228–2119
VOICE: 716–691–0133
FAX: 716–691–0137
WWW.PYRSF.COM
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Willrich, Chris, 1967–
The scroll of years : a gaunt and bone novel / by Chris Willrich.
pages cm
ISBN 978–1–61614–813–3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–1–61614–814–0 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3623.I57775S37 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013022378
Printed in the United States of America
For Becky
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One. Flybait and Next-One-A-Boy
Part Two. Lightning Bug and Walking Stick
Part Three. Gaunt and Bone
The Thief with Two Deaths
About the Author
Gaunt and Bone would not exist at all without Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Some supporting characters in their adventures were suggested by Andrew McCool, Becky Willrich, and Mike Wolfson. I’m grateful to many others who’ve helped keep the rogues on the road with advice, encouragement, or support, including John Joseph Adams, Scott H. Andrews, Carla Campbell, Crystalwizard, Jim Frenkel, Phoebe Harris, Matthew Hughes, Nik Hawkins, Howard Andrew Jones, Jade Lee, Susan McAlexander, John Morressy, John O’Neill, Bev Olson, Robert Rhodes, Anne Rohweder, Scott Stanton, Scott Taylor, and Carl and Mavis Willrich.
In making the patchwork quilt called “Qiangguo” I am indebted to many people. My late mother-in-law Jane Eades would sometimes tell stories she heard as a girl in China, and a couple of those tales are in this book. Ann Hsu, Larry Hsu, Paul T. S. Lee, and Shu-Hua Liu helped with language questions. Paul also contributed the name Meteor-Plum. The poems of the “sage painter” are variations on the Cold Mountain poems of Hanshan, which I am fortunate to have encountered in translations by Red Pine and Gary Snyder. Several nonfiction works served as inspiration, particularly God’s Chinese Son and The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence, The Arts of China by Michael Sullivan, and the James Legge translation of the Tao Te Ching. However, any foolishness in how I have used this material is wholly my own.
I am particularly grateful to my agent, Joe Monti, to my editor at Pyr, Lou Anders, and to my sharp-eyed copyeditor Gabrielle Harbowy. And most especially to my wife Becky, whose reaction to my writing ambitions was never “Are you kidding?” but always “Go for it.”
The howls of trained springfangs fluted through the gorge. Someone in the temple had seen him, or they’d been loosed for someone else. Imago Bone froze. Springfangs could hear a rabbit scratch itself a mile off.
But the Door of Penitence was not going to come to him.
He shifted until he sat, there on the track he’d just stumbled upon amid the boulders flanking this desert ravine, and with the silence due him from long years of thieving, Bone removed his boots. His bare feet greeted the cooling desert air. He’d never walked this particular track, but he knew the Brothers and Sisters of the Swan, surely with love and mercy in their hearts, had set pit traps here. Nevertheless, it was his best chance. In the ebbing sunset, casting jagged red-edged shadows everywhere like a promise of future blood, he had to trust to his feet.
For speed Bone had buried his pack half a day back, and thus as he stood he laced the boots together and tied them to his belt, so that their jostling could deliver a metaphorical kick in the behind. He could use all the motivation he could get.
He picked his way along the path, his progress slowing as the sun departed. Overhead the Sanctuary glowed pink, a granite promontory painted and sculpted to resemble a titanic, ravaged white feather that had crashed to earth. By now there should be a light high in the upper sanctum, but that window was dark. Below too, shadows pooled everywhere. Lighting like a grasshopper from rock to rock, Bone squinted for thief-worthy landing spots. Increasingly he relied on the skin of his feet to test those stones, and soon he less resembled a locust than a water-strider as he stretched out one leg, then the other.
More howls, closer now. With the gorge’s echoes he could not determine the direction. Time for the boots? No.
Nothing we do is direct. The words of Master Sidewinder came to Bone, borne on memory’s winds from Bone’s first night amid the thousand towers of Palmary. Our work is too delicate for that. We do not fight, save by ambush. We pass the paucity of doors, where a wealth of windows awaits. Why stalk an Everlux amid its score of guards, when a gawking noblewoman’s necklace will do as nicely?
Why run races with springfangs? Imago Bone wished he could answer his long-dead teacher. Success would have to do for his reply.
If he could continue slow and silent, he might have a chance. Already he could discern a white wall beyond the oranges, browns, and shrub-covered greens of the narrow path, with an iron door set into it. Peace and security, that contrast promised, though not for him. He thought of his lover awaiting him, days away in the desert. It was hard to maintain this deliberate pace. He wanted to demolish the distance between himself and his answers.
But even penitents on their way to and from ordeals in the Sandboil took this path slowly, avoiding the sharpest rocks. And the pits.
His right foot was just brushing upon an unusually large and inviting flat slab of a stone, when he had a vision of this bend in the path as seen from above, on the day when Brother Clement had, perhaps unwisely, shown Bone the bell loft. Looking down, Bone had observed this track snaking amid the rugged scree on the north side of the gorge, and a line of little figures just reaching this bend. Not for the first time, the city thief had wondered at the religious fervor that brought this order out into the desert, twenty miles from the shady spires of Palmary. The believers of the Swan (his lover included, depending upon her mood) even admitted their goddess was dead. Yet as if by some principle of sympathy, they displayed great talent for ushering others to the same state. Bone had noted then, how the penitents’ leader had them detour well around the flat stone. He’d thought it peculiar at the time . . .
He paused, precarious, foot extended.
It was at that moment that the springfangs growled.
Bone looked up and saw that the beasts had not caught up with him after all.
They had instead been waiting for him, hiding behind the rocks on either side of the path.
The two lithe creatures scrambled atop boulders, regarding their prey. Heart hammering, he regarded them back. They had the bulk of bears and the grace of leopards. Their coats were a swirl of oranges, reds, yellows, and browns, and by day they were well camouflaged for the desert. In the moonless dusk they appeared scabrous, save for the slitted eyes that glimmered in the last rays of the sun, and the long, tapered ears that jabbed backward like daggers poised to throw.
Bone wanted to throw one of his own daggers, but at best that would slow one of the twain. The springfangs made rattling sounds in their throats and bared their teeth.
It was the teeth of springfangs that made them the stuff of scholarly feuds and campfire legends. Each boasted an asymmetrical set, so that one of the pair bore an oversized saber-like canine upon the left side, and the other brandished a matching tooth upon the right. The skin on the opposing side of the mouth was thin and readily pulled back to reveal a phalanx of grinders. Some scholars and campfire wags had it that ancient wizards bred matched pairs to drag their chariots and rend their enemies. Whatever their origins, today a mated duo would hunt side-by-side, their synchronized attacks simulating one voracious maw.
Bone wished for his own mate about now. In his mind’s eye he saw Persimmon Gaunt beside him, her red tresses an answer to the sunset, the rose-and-spiderweb tattoo upon her cheek a symbol of her passion and intellect, the daggers in her hands twin promises that someone watched his back.
But it was Persimmon, pregnant in their hideaway, who was depending upon him.
He edged backward . . . backward . . . wanting every bit of running start he could manage, keeping his eyes on the springfangs, hoping their instincts would overcome any training regarding this path, avoiding their predators’ gazes and watching their haunches, awaiting the telltale quiver that presaged their leaps—
Now. He took a running jump, aiming well beyond the wide, flat stone.
The springfangs leapt half a heartbeat later, converging upon the dust he’d left behind. But one took a wild swipe mid-air and buffeted Bone.
He stumbled hard onto the path, the wind knocked from him. He scrambled to his feet, gett
Their charge led them over the area he’d found suspicious.
With a crack of wicker, a clatter of sand and stones, and twin yowls of outrage, the springfangs fell into the trap. A scream confirmed there was something pointy down below.
But Bone was barely conscious of this, for he was lurching down the path as fast as he could manage. No time for finesse. With feet bleeding, but no worse, he fairly collided with the iron door.
We do not celebrate our victories, came Master Sidewinder’s voice, until we are safely in our dens. Bone was a long way from celebrating. Panting, he eyed the lock. He was familiar with the work of all Palmary’s locksmiths and many in Amberhorn to the north. Breaking into their workshops was once a favorite pastime of his. He carried a dozen customized picks.
But to identify the maker, and choose the right pick, in this light . . . The lock appeared to be a Hookworm Special. No, a Dodder Number Nine. . . . The half-diamond pick was called for . . . But the Xenocrates Conundrum greatly resembled the mid-series Dodders and required the snake-rake . . .
With a screech one of the springfangs clawed its way out of the pit. It lost no time sighting Bone and seeking vengeance for its howling mate.
Bone snatched the half-diamond pick, rattled the lock, and swung the iron door open. He barely registered his triumph and the alcove beyond as he slipped inside and flung the door shut.
As he clutched the bolt the springfang slammed the door back open, hurling Bone against the wall.
Luck was with Bone in two respects. First, the alcove was small and opened directly onto a wide stairway heading down; the springfang’s momentum carried it into a tumbling plummet. Second, there were also two narrow stairways up, and one was close beside him.
He scrambled upward without another thought. Growls (and perhaps human screams) echoed through the Sanctuary of the Fallen Feather, but he had no time for them. His objective was in the tower in any case. That he might reach it rather more noisily than planned could not be helped.
The room he reached held desert survival gear—robes, dried meat and fruit, packs, tents and the like—and as there were many wicker boxes, Bone shoved several of them into the stairway, plugging that access point. Angry growls confirmed he was followed. He ducked through a beaded curtain, recalling with annoyance that the Sanctuary interior contained few actual doors.
He entered a hallway and realized at once something was wrong here. Something other than the bloody-footed thief and the bloody-minded springfang, that is.
There were no Brothers or Sisters, and the tapestries depicting the Swan Goddess lofting an ocean in her feathers and quenching the scorching primeval sun lay torn and strewn. Here and there lay a bloodstain upon the wall or floor.
Bone had no time to wonder about it. He ripped strips from a holy tapestry to bind his oozing soles before, wincing, he reunited his boots with his feet. Even so, the blood he’d left already would lead the springfang here before long. He got his bearings and found a spiral stairway ascending toward the upper sanctum. He estimated his footpads at the level of two mouses in his personal scale of sound, but his taxed lungs were forcing his labored breaths toward three.
Alas, Master Sidewinder once said, we must keep breathing. Occupational hazard.
Bone gasped his way out into a window-lined hallway lit with the last rays of the sun and the dying flickers of neglected torches. There a young monk, draped in an oversized robe, stood regarding the desert.
“Brother Tadros,” Bone said, recognizing him, “you must run!”
The gangly youth, whose garments always either smothered him or revealed his ankles, simply kept gazing out at the dimming red-orange land. Tower-fires in Palmary glowed upon the horizon. Far to the east, Persimmon’s canyon home betrayed no light.
“Tadros, it’s Imago Bone. You remember. Gaunt and I came here a few months ago. No one trusted us, but we’re used to that. You were always kindly, at least . . .”
Brother Tadros slowly turned to stare at Bone. There was no hint of recognition. Bone, a lean-faced man with dark hair gone sandy-colored from long exposure to the sun, and bearing distinctive scars upon each cheek, one the gift of a blade, the other of a flame, was used to being remembered. Tadros’ lack of reaction was more unnerving than any scream.
“You thought we’d left,” Bone went on, searching for a glimmer of a response, “but your elders have been hiding us. I sneak in once a month to see Brother Clement for news and supplies. I usually take my time and climb the tower at night, but now . . . I thought something was amiss. Last night I saw the Sanctuary light swinging like a pendulum.”
“In fire and glass,” Brother Tadros murmured, as though from as far away as Qiangguo, “we are purged.”
“That doesn’t sound like Swan talk,” Bone muttered. “Come on.”
He got an arm around Tadros, and while the youth did not resist, it took some effort to steer him to the upper sanctum.
This was a small chapel reserved for the use of the Sanctuary’s elders, for those times when their administrative duties permitted only brief observances. The true glory of the Sanctuary of the Fallen Feather was in the public sanctum, which could hold scores of visitors. This one possessed but three pews, a modest stone altar in the likeness of a swan, an earthenware bowl for sacramental rainwater, and a candleholder of red glass hanging from a steel chain. Four open-air windows allowed the shining glass to be seen from miles off.
Pews were overturned, and there were red stains near the altar. The bowl was smashed and the Sanctuary light was dark. The wind from the windows raised a chill.
“Imago Bone,” rasped a voice from beneath a pew. “Such remarkable timing.”
An old monk, with tufts of white hair cut to resemble wings, stared out at Bone. Tonight his eyes even had the wide round look of a swan’s.
“Clement,” Bone began.
“You and your lover have ravaged this place,” Brother Clement said, crawling out from his hiding place with a bitter scowl, “as surely as if you had set fire to it. How fitting that you are here a day early, but still only just after your enemies have left.”
“Clement, later you can curse me from here to the Starborn Sea, but now we have to—”
The springfang leapt into the room.
It crashed into an overturned pew and smashed it away with the saber-toothed side of its mouth. Clement whirled with a speed that belied his age. “The sun is quenched!” he hissed. “Be at peace!”
At his ritualized words the springfang halted and lay down, though it kept its eyes focused upon Imago Bone.
Clement said, “I see the master thief was not so masterful on this occasion.”
Retrieving his breath from whatever distant star it had fled to, and shifting away from Tadros to where he’d have the best options for flight of his own, Bone managed to say, “What has happened?”
“As I said, you have happened.”
“We did not do this, Persimmon and I.” Bone nodded to Tadros. “What has been done to him?”
“Purged,” Tadros whispered.
Clement placed a shaking hand upon his own temple. “He has been robbed of mind. As were Sister Una and Brother Fion. Perhaps others, I do not know. All is chaos. Many were robbed of life, and perhaps they are better off. Your enemies departed only recently. We are fortunate most of our number were in Palmary to receive a ship from Mother Church in Swanisle, although perhaps it was our weakness that brought them upon us—”
“Who, Clement! Damn it, who did this?”
“The assassins of mind. They who are known as Night’s Auditors.”
Bone steadied himself with the altar. As he did so, the springfang looked as though it might relieve Bone of his throat, command or no command. “I have heard of them . . . They leave no mark . . . They hunt kings at the behest of kings . . .”
“They were hunting you. You and the mad poet you call your lover. You told us you were adventurers once, but no more. That you had decided to call it quits to savagery and sorcery and settle down. You hinted you had enemies, and of course we grant sanctuary to any who ask, with no questions. But you never said how powerful your enemies were!”
