Bone held up his hands and began to speak reassuring blather, such as he’d uttered to hundreds of surprised householders.
But Lampblack spat and waved his lantern, and the fiery apparition of Flick dashed out and burned through the ears of all four people, not unlike a knitter threading a diamond pattern. It returned, a notch brighter, to its master’s lantern.
Bone’s fevered excuses became as ashes on his tongue. The family shuddered as one, before becoming as still as the doomed crewmen of the
Passport/Punishment
.
“Accompany us,” the auditor told them. “Throw yourselves upon all who threaten us.”
They nodded with gaping mouths, and lurched toward Lampblack.
Bone lowered his hands. “There is a hell reserved for you,” he said to Lampblack. “I say this not from my brain but from my sinew, which knows it must be so.”
“You speak as a primitive,” Lampblack said. “There are no ultimate punishments or rewards. Only processes, which the skilled can exploit.”
Bone shuddered, feeling then that Lampblack had had a point about the struggle among bloodlines. For despite the fate of this family, he would not risk killing them and ending their enslavement, knowing their thralldom temporarily served his goals.
He imagined Brother Clement’s gaze upon him. He felt more self-disgust than at any robbery.
“I will lead,” Bone managed to say, gesturing toward the Necropolis Wall. “Rude streets and tunnels are, after all, my element.”
Lampblack agreed. “This allows me to watch you.”
Watchfires flared around the Shadow Ward. The Necropolis Wall, a four-story affair slumped between the titanic Heavenwalls, was roused to action. Soldiers in cheap armor rushed along it, bearing spears. Ambling and creeping as instinct bade him, Bone reached a muddy track that ran before the wall. From a crumbling temple nearby he hefted a chunk of masonry and hurled it far; it clattered and distracted the soldiers even as he skipped in a peculiar dancing motion through the shadows toward the wall, pausing just once, to scratch twin converging lines in the mud. For this was the one moment in which Lampblack could not fully see him.
Even as Bone reached the wall, Lampblack crouched and hurried afterward. At the same time the auditor pointed his mindless thralls toward the stone Bone had thrown.
Soon the doomed family caught the eyes of the nervous guards upon the wall. They were promptly gutted by thrown spears.
Bone shuddered as he found what he believed the gang’s tunnel: a fissure in the wall, covered by thick netting painted stone-grey. He pushed the camouflage aside and slipped within, taking little stock of Lampblack or of the sounds of the better-armed Imperial troops converging on the wall.
Bone found himself within a hot, dusty and winding little passage, cramped even for a youth. The confinement strained his composure as he slithered along. The words of Lampblack at his heels made it worse: “You interest me, Imago Bone. You obviously suffer at the hurts of children. You felt lost as a child yourself.” A light flared behind Bone, and the burning blob of Flick rushed past Bone’s ear to light the tunnel before him. Bone forced himself to breathe evenly. Lampblack continued, “You felt bereft of the love of your parents, perhaps? Many thieves substitute shiny trinkets for paternal affection.”
Bone willed himself to press on, Flick bobbing before his eyes. “You will not steal the minds of these children,” Bone said. “There is no need. I will convince them or overcome them.”
“Your solicitude amuses me,” Lampblack said. “Succeed, and their minds will remain intact.”
The passage continued for what seemed half an hour’s crawl, with frequent descents. Bone suspected the Necropolis Wall lay well behind.
His suspicions were confirmed when the path ascended. Flick burned past his nose on its return to its master, and Bone emerged within the shattered frame of a mausoleum.
Whomever the tomb once sheltered had been of some importance. It had the dimensions of a small manor, hewn from cracked grey stone, threaded with green vines and worn calligraphy. Faded murals depicted men in dark robes and women in colorful gowns. Bas-reliefs of dragons amid trees and mountains glowered dustily, with chipped tails and noses. The ceiling was mostly gone, and blocks of masonry testified to its undignified fall. Above glowed the morning sky; all around lay shadows and whispers. He crept forward, keeping his movements to two mouses on his personal scale of sound.
The crack Bone ascended from lay partly under a vast block of stone swarming with characters in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, and judging by the whispers, the block’s far side was swarming with characters of a different sort.
“It was Goatbreath’s dog who snatched it, Flybait!”
“And who leads the dog’s pack, Nightsoil? Even the mutt understands the ranking around here. Give me that scroll before I mark you with my scent!”
There were hoots and catcalls.
“But you are not the brains around here,” the boy called Nightsoil countered. “You’d be no one without Next One. She’s our expert appraiser!”
“The one who can read, you mean,” Next One replied. “I should refuse. We were supposed to watch for a barbarian, not run off with treasure.”
“There’s always an exemption for treasure,” Flybait protested. “Everyone knows that.”
“Give it here,” Next One snapped.
It sounded as though the scroll were passed over, for without further argument Bone heard it unrolled.
There was a gasp. “The seal of Meteor-Plum Long,” Next One said. “I know this scroll.”
Bone thought it would be a good time to step forward, but he could not resist eavesdropping.
“That thing!” Flybait said. “The one with the taotie and the bottomless pit!”
“Should that mean something to me?” Nightsoil said.
“This artist made paintings into which one might disappear,” Next One said wonderingly. “There’s a whole world inside here.”
“Like a trap?”
“Like a gift.” There was a wistful sound in Next One’s voice. “This will secure our fortunes, if we can sell it in the right place.”
There was a chorus of indrawn breaths, a medley of murmurs.
“Let me test it,” Flybait said, and by the sounds, took the scroll. “I want to make sure. I just concentrate . . .”
“He’s gone!” one urchin shouted.
Bone sensed the appearance of Lampblack in the crack near his feet. He was out of time. He stepped forward.
“Next One,” he said. “I—”
“A spy,” someone said, and “Get him!” said someone else.
His opponents numbered five: three boys, a girl, and a dog. Next One herself held back, the scroll at her feet, evidently shocked by the return of Bone.
The dog leaped. Bone had considerable experience with guard dogs, and did not expect to talk it down. He sprawled it with a savage kick.
“Next One!” Bone said, “Call them off!”
“No,” she said, raising the cane that once belonged to Exceedingly Accurate Wu. “I know you, Bone. You want this prize for yourself.”
“That’s true in a sense, but—”
He tried getting another word in, but the third boy, the smallest of the bunch, ran screaming at the thief. Bone elbowed the boy’s gut, grabbed him, and slammed him face-first into the stone block. The boy whimpered and did not rise.
Bone could not pause for breath or regret. Lampblack was peering around the corner.
Now he had to mangle the kids to save them.
He drew a dagger and advanced on the nearest opponent, this one a teenaged girl with clipped hair who bore a dagger of her own. She snarled and lunged. He saw it coming, and took advantage of his height by tripping her. Before she could rise he stomped upon her weapon arm. She screamed and dropped her dagger.
He rolled away from a simultaneous attack from the two older boys—the one he’d temporarily blinded and the one he’d kicked. He rose again in a corner, sizing things up at last. Three foes down for now. Two advancing with daggers. He estimated he could kill them, but as he wished to be less lethal, his odds were less sure.
Beyond them, Next One was opening the scroll of Meteor-Plum Long and calling out for Flybait.
“Listen!” Bone said to them all. “I can sell the thing for you. At the foreign district, where you needn’t fear the crime lords getting a cut.”
“Why should we trust you?” sneered a boy.
“Hear me out! I could have killed your friends but didn’t. I only want the scroll so I can free someone from it.”
“Wait . . .” Next One said, as though listening to faraway music. “Bone tells the truth . . . this foreign thief tells the truth. I’m sorry, Bone. Flybait is trying to leave, and he’s met Persimmon Gaunt.”
“How is she?” Bone could not help crying out.
“She’s well, he says. And she has a baby boy.”
There was a snarl from Lampblack then, and a sound of armored figures climbing into the tomb. Shadows sharpened as Flick blazed. There came the distinct sound of armored figures falling.
For better or worse, the Imperial troops had found Bone’s arrow in the mud.
“Kids,” Bone said, “you don’t have to like me, but listen. You’re in over your heads. I have no quarrel with you getting rich off the scroll. I salute you. But help me get my lover and my son out of there.”
“I can’t reach them directly,” Next One said. “Time passes differently there . . .”
“I know.” The clatter of battle continued. Bone took a chance, leaning closer and saying as quietly as he could, “Take the scroll with you. Keep them all inside. We’ll get out of here first.”
The three kids still standing met each other’s gazes and, after a moment, nodded. Bone helped the youngest boy to his feet, wiped his bloody face as he cried and sneered. The older girl nursed her arm and watched Bone with hate. The dog limped. But the gang followed him to the mausoleum doorway.
Though the sounds of battle were fading behind him, Bone paused to study the landscape. A series of crumbled ruins in this gloomy canyon formed by the great Walls, jabbing at the narrow sky like the fingers of skeletal hands, could offer some running cover. “We need a different path back to the city.”
Next One crept up beside him. “There, where the Necropolis Wall meets the Red Heavenwall, is a tunnel—”
A draconic snout, encrusted with jewels, filled the space ahead.
Heat like a king’s oven blazed into the mausoleum.
Bone slammed Next One and himself against the wall, out of the direct path of the blast of coiling flames that exploded through the entrance.
The fury seared Bone’s back even through his clothes. Then it was gone.
The smell of burned meat and new death hung thick about the tomb. Bone and Next One turned, and saw the charred remains of children and a dog.
“No,” the girl said. “No, no, no.”
Vast claws supported by monstrous arms tore at the doorway, and rubble fell all around. Bone shielded the girl and the scroll, battered by stones and clouds of dust. At last the sounds of collapse subsided and the air cleared. The ruin lay open to a sky choked with dust reddening the ascending sun.
And that sky was filled with the dragon Kindlekarn.
From this angle, at least, Bone reflected, Hackwroth would withhold a blast of fire, for fear of killing the nearby Lampblack, still engaged with Imperial troops. Probably.
“Girl,” Bone hissed. “Leave the scroll. Run far, far away from here.”
“No,” the girl repeated. “No, no, no.”
Bone snatched the scroll, unrolled it, and pushed it against her nose. “Then Flybait needs you,” he began, and before he finished she had turned transparent. When he drew breath again she was gone.
“You cannot escape, Bone!” Hackwroth called from Kindlekarn’s back. “Should you enter the scroll, who will defend it?”
Bone shifted toward Lampblack’s melee, and its dubious cover.
“The shard perceives no allies for you,” Hackwroth said, as images swirled within the glass in his head. “You have no hope.”
“Those statements aren’t equal,” Bone muttered.
Then he saw something resembling hope.
A shadowy shape leapt from the tallest remaining spur of the ruin, and onto Kindlekarn’s back. It was Walking Stick.
Hackwroth spun upon the dragon’s neck, clutching the tangle of ropes, but beside the Garden warrior the auditor’s movements were clumsy, oafish. Walking Stick seemed to dance to Hackwroth’s position, swinging his staff like a thunderbolt. Hackwroth dodged, his eyes less upon his foe than upon his embedded magic mirror.
As Bone watched his enemies battle, he heard them fence with words.
“Magic is an inefficient and corrupting use of chi! The superior man does not employ it save at great need!”
“One who names himself ‘superior’ must secretly believe himself deficient! Now that I see you clearly, I see old age and decay upon you and your Empire!”
“Age is honor! But indeed the West knows nothing of this!”
As they sized each other up, seeking weakness, the dragon Kindlekarn ceased his exertions, as though unwilling to rend and burn without specific instruction. Bone edged along the ruin’s walls, then glimpsed the lantern-flame of Flick shooting up to circle around Walking Stick’s head. Glancing toward Lampblack, Bone noted that no sounds of battle could now be heard, and many fallen soldiers covered Lampblack’s side of the tomb.
The words of old Master Sidewinder came unbidden to Bone,
The enemy of my enemy is a pain in the ass
, as he crept around a pillar encircled (appropriately enough) with a carved stone dragon. He saw Lampblack’s fingers perched like the legs of a spider upon the forehead of the last of Walking Stick’s entourage. The soldier’s eyes had rolled backward in his head and spittle twisted like a little egg sac at his mouth. Bone remembered Brother Tadros, and the lost family at the Necropolis Wall, and the roasted gang here in the tomb, and the voice of Gaunt.
He tumbled up behind the auditor, rose, grappled, and slashed the man’s throat.
“Murderer . . .” gasped the auditor as he fell, gurgling, and Bone found the little flame of Flick was now circling his own head. It flitted toward his right ear.
Bone dropped low and stuck the blade between the ribs, finding the heart. “Assassin,” he named the auditor.