The Silk Map (21 page)

“Perhaps it's time to speak, Quilldrake,” Zheng prompted after they'd traveled several li.

“Not yet,” Quilldrake said, looking around carefully at the various travelers within a stone's throw.

Several farms, a few villages, and a pair of wayside shrines lay within a day's travel of Yao'an, and as the hours passed, most of the walkers peeled off toward one destination or another. As the day waned, there remained only their own caravan and a more ambitious train of thirty camels, both nominally bound for Madzeu. Quilldrake kept casting anxious looks backward at the larger caravan, though Bone could see nothing worrisome about it.

As the sun reddened, Quilldrake groaned and called for a halt. “Bad melons!” he kept repeating as he lay upon the ground, but he waved off the other caravan's offer of aid as they passed. Once their last camel had disappeared around a bend of the southward hills and the last bell's tinkle had vanished into the whispers of the wind, Quilldrake had an immediate recovery.

He led them at a crawl until they'd passed around the bend and encountered a dome-shaped roadside shrine. Here Quilldrake halted again, made a perfunctory bow before a stone image of the Undetermined, and unsecured the corpse-pallet.

“Um,” Gaunt said, “what are you doing?”

“An important observance.” Grunting, he dragged the pallet into the shrine.

“I had not heard,” Widow Zheng called from her camel, “that the Karvaks had converted to the ways of the Undetermined.”

“Truly?” the unseen Quilldrake called. “I could have sworn I heard differently. At any rate, I'm hot and tired enough to convert to anything . . .”

Feeling an inconvenient responsibility to Nine Thunderbolts, Bone followed, but Gaunt was faster.

The structure was cramped but cool. Quilldrake and the pallet were on the other side of a pillar inscribed in languages Bone could not read.

“Quilldrake—” Gaunt began, and then gasped.

The shroud was moving.

It never ceased to astonish Persimmon Gaunt how monster-prone she and her husband's lives had become. “Bone?” she called, her voice giddy. “Everyone?
Walking dead!
” She drew a dagger and prepared to throw. Behind her, unable to see clearly, Bone cursed and found his own weapons.

The body was moving more emphatically now, as if enraged at being found out. Well, good. Gaunt threw. The dagger connected with a
thunk
at a part of the shroud nearest the floor, yet the thing only moved more swiftly.

“Swan's Blood,” she said, finding a second dagger, “Quilldrake, you should take burial customs more seriously—”

“My dear—!” Quilldrake began.

But all were silenced by the corpse's next action.

A sword blade transfixed the shroud, and with a sound of rending cloth a figure burst forth, armed with a saber whose metal shone like moonlight.

She heard one of Bone's daggers clatter to the stone floor, but she could not spare time for that. She made to throw.

A hand gripped her wrist. “Gaunt,” Bone said, “it's not the Karvak.”

“I've been mistaken for many things,” gasped the man with the saber, “but never that.”

She blinked. It was the second Westerner from Quilldrake's office.

Gaunt relaxed, lowering her dagger and breathing hard. “I do apologize, sir. Mister Flint, I presume.”

“Indeed,” said Flint, setting his weapon on the stone floor. The saber ceased to glow as it left his trembling grip, though the intricate gem-laden metalwork of the pommel glinted still. Something about its appearance tickled her memory, but there was no time to wonder about that now. “You'll pardon me if I do not immediately shake hands, Persimmon Gaunt, Imago Bone. But I've had a long and bumpy day.”

“You are unhurt?” Gaunt asked.

“Yes. Heat and bruises are my trouble. I'm glad it's not yet summer. I fear your dagger hit my companion the dead man.”

“Oh.” Gaunt retrieved it, whispering fresh apologies to the fallen Karvak. By now Snow Pine and Widow Zheng had entered as well.

“We were traveling with a live corpse the entire time?” Snow Pine exclaimed.

“And a dead corpse,” Quilldrake said. “I guessed as much when I saw how big the shroud was. We have contacts in many temples. I'm not sure the priest knew, but others did.”

“Indeed,” Flint said, snatching a waterskin from Quilldrake and greedily quaffing. He was a head taller than Bone, and even in his disheveled state he had the manner of an immortal looking down upon the world with rue. “I was obliged to collapse our escape route in a way that forced me back into the city, to our access under the House of Tender Breezes. I wished for tenderness indeed but could waste no time. I lurked here and there until overhearing the priest's plan to foist this body upon you, and my path was clear.”

“Clear to a madman!” Widow Zheng scoffed.

Flint bowed.

“Well, I do regret assaulting you,” Gaunt said.

Flint shrugged. “I prefer to forget what vexed me in the past, that I might focus on what vexes me in the present.”

“That's not exactly a path to bliss,” Snow Pine said.

“We don't all seek bliss in this life.”

“I admire your approach,” Bone said. “Do you feel pursuit is close at hand?”

“I don't know. I think we're safe enough from ordinary observers at this moment, but I gather Charstalkers are involved.”

“You two owe us explanations,” Zheng said, “especially about them.”

“Agreed!” Quilldrake said. “But survival comes first. The immediate thing you must know about Charstalkers is that they can fly like smoke upon the breeze, or inhabit animal minds.”

“The human animal included,” Flint said. “Thus the desert is, ironically, a haven, as it is inimical to animal life. Our demonic foes must make themselves obvious if they're to hunt. Of course the sands present their own dangers, but there's no help for that. Death licks every heel.” He retrieved his sword. Gaunt noted that on this occasion it did not glow. “Sunset approaches. I'd prefer to travel by day, but we must get off this track. Let's leave signs that we've camped here, then make our exit.”

In that way a companion who'd been utterly silent all day now took the reins of the entire expedition. Though clearly much younger than Quilldrake, Flint gave orders. Gaunt was uncertain what to make of it all, but Flint seemed to know his business. As they returned to the camels, she shared a wary shrug with Bone. They had to follow through on their best guesses, and that meant following Flint into the desert.

They removed the camels' bells and stepped into sands seemingly turned bloody with the sunset. Gaunt reflected that those she trusted numbered three, and they might still overpower Flint and Quilldrake if need be (though that sword was worrisome).

I have become a cold thing
, Gaunt thought.

The desert became cold too.

After some ten li they reached a rocky rise jabbing at the stars like a giant's broken blade. There they camped against the northern face, for Flint and Quilldrake wished only to escape sight of the road. For the same reason they sparked no fire.

“I suggest we sleep,” Flint said. “Save talk for tomorrow. It will be a hard day.”

At dawn Bone and Quilldrake carried the body of Nine Thunderbolts high onto the rocks. “This method of corpse-disposal,” Quilldrake said, gasping, “is closer to that of Qushkent than to that of the steppe. But I doubt he'll object. We're close enough to the road to attract scavengers, I'd think.”

“He's heavier than I'd have credited,” Bone said. “As though he's wrapped with something weightier than this shroud . . .”

“It is not our business,” Quilldrake said, letting Nine Thunderbolts drop.

“Farewell, brave warrior,” Bone said, feeling that he should say something. “May you ride upon starlit grasslands, fight wondrous opponents, and bed miraculous women.”

“So let it be,” Quilldrake agreed.

The others were readying the caravan, bells and all. Flint had snapped a desiccated branch from a long-dead tree, and was using it to sketch a map of the known world, all the way from the littoral region of Qiangguo to Swanisle. Gaunt was studying it with great interest, and Bone joined her.

“I'm not going anywhere,” said Widow Zheng, hands on hips, “until I have the answers to two questions. Where exactly are we going? And where is the book I loaned you?”

Flint said nothing, as he added finishing touches.

“Xembala,” Quilldrake muttered, as he walked up.

“That sounds like a long way to take a book,” Snow Pine said.

“I see no Xembala on that map,” Bone noted.

“Indeed,” Flint said. “One day I hope to add that name.”

“You have a slight inaccuracy on the southern coast of Qiangguo,” Gaunt noted. “The coast bends inward more near Riverclaw.”

“That indentation is obscured by the name of the city,” Flint retorted.

“As you wish.”

“I think the book was taken by our friends in black,” Flint continued. “And as for Xembala? Well, perhaps we will see it. But first—” He jabbed his stick. “We are here, a little west of Yao'an. We go to Shahuang deep within the desert.” Another jab.

“You hardly moved the stick at all,” said Bone.

“And yet a flick of the stick, on this scale, means many days' travel. I want you all to understand what we undertake, and how much territory it may encompass. The first leg is comparatively easy. We must see the Cave of Ten Thousand Illuminations and consider for ourselves this record of the Silk Map. Then we can decide where we must go.”

They began the long journey into the desert.

“‘Comparatively easy,' he said,” Zheng groused after an hour, fanning herself atop her camel. “Can't we travel by night?”

“There are two bad ways to cross the desert,” said Flint over the tinkle of the camels' bells and the soft fall of feet and hooves upon the bright sand. “The first is to travel by day, under the unremitting heat and glare. The second is to travel by night and risk getting lost with no hope of recovery. We'll likely do some of both. The only truly good path, I'm afraid, would be to turn around.”

All around them lay mute supporting arguments—thousands of dunes, rocky outcroppings shaped into weird sculptures by the wind, trees dead for decades, the occasional bones of a horse. The mountains behind them had receded into a dark and wavy suggestion of mass, while the horizon ahead was a blur of merged sand and sky that was not so much like the world's edge as an absence of form altogether.

“I like this fellow,” Bone muttered to his mount, whom he'd privately named Scoff. (The camel-merchant had called her Fragrant Flower of the West, but he reasoned she deserved better than sarcasm.) “He sees a universe of disaster in a grain of sand.” He was grateful for his white robes and hood but still felt as if he were an ant traveling through a very large oven.

Gaunt, just ahead of him and behind Flint, pretended not to hear Bone. “Is there then no good way, Master Flint?”