“You can call me Cairn,” she said. “I am risking a great deal speaking with you now.”
It was the Chooser of the Slain.
“Am I a warrior, then?” I had to laugh. “You would want me in the golden hall of battle?”
She laughed back. “You would steal the golden goblets. You would run across the green pastures, and the chosen warriors would catch you and chop you to pieces. The next day you would reassemble and steal the golden platters. It might be amusing. But it is not to be.”
She said it wasn’t my time.
“I fully agree,” I said. “I will always agree. This is a dream, eh?”
“Yes,” she said. “And you may not always agree.”
“As regards the dream or my time?”
“I cannot be with you for long, in this place. Listen.”
She said I can’t die till my daughter is born.
“I don’t have a daughter.”
“Then live, Imago Bone, and listen. This conflict is not just about nations. If it were, this would be but a minor skirmish on the grand scale. But this time it’s different.”
She told me, time itself is being rent.
“Great powers are involved. It is not just that the isles are formed of arkendrakes, whose thoughts spawn trolls and whose power raises such distortions of reality as the Draugmaw and the straits. The Heavenwalls of Qiangguo are involved too. So much concentrated power can shatter everything. Along one path lies the end of the human world. Along the other lies much conflict still, but a chance for better days.”
“I will have no better days unless I can find my wife and son. Where are they?”
She told me to come to the Straits of Tid.
“You want what?” Captain Nonyemeko said.
“Anansi to go to the edge of the Draugmaw.” Bone pointed to a map. “Here.”
After exchanging further words with Eshe, the captain asked, “Why?”
“I will dream my way into the Straits of Tid. I think at this particular node of power, I can find help.”
Eshe said, “In your condition, Bone, even a bad dream could kill you.”
“I have to try.”
Eshe and Nonyemeko consulted. Eshe said, “For this service, we will need to ask you a thing in return.”
He laughed. “I find that reassuring, Eshe. All this help with no price attached . . . it was unnerving.”
“Your worries are at an end. In a month, regardless of what transpires, I want you to serve Kpalamaa.”
“You spoke of employment to me before, a long time ago.”
“You could be a useful agent. Gaunt too, if we can find her.”
“I can’t make promises for her.” But if she and Innocence were lost, a grim part of him thought, then he would need something to occupy him. Something that would keep him from destroying himself. “I can only speak for me.” He hesitated. “And I won’t ever kill for you. I’ve had enough of that.”
“Noted.”
“I will spy. I will steal. For you. Now do this thing for me.”
He dreamed he floated above Anansi and the endless whirling storm, but that the surrounding realm had changed. Stars wheeled visibly, nebulae stretched across much of the blackness, a blue moon joined the silver. A blue-white ocean washed ghostly all around him, and Bone bobbed within it. He did not believe he could drown, but he sensed that enough damage to his dream body might cause him to awaken and forget anything he’d seen.
Cairn and her narwhal leapt out of the spectral waters, splashing beside him.
“You are here.” She reached out and hauled him up, demonstrating unexpected strength. But perhaps strength of mind was all that mattered here.
“What do you wish of me?” Bone asked. Though the air was cool, he already felt dry.
“The currents of Tid are flowing to two destinations, Thief with Two Deaths. You must help make them one.”
Now that he’d a better view, he beheld a fiery shore in the distance, dotted with volcanoes. There was also a shore with dark forests, cheerful firelights, and snow-capped mountains. Nearer at hand was a coast with castles and villages, piers and knarrs. Though he saw no people, now and again he heard the whinnying of thousands of horses.
“It’s been a while,” Bone said, “since anyone called me that. And despite my many talents, I don’t see how I’m qualified to shift the currents of time.”
“No one is skilled at first; nothing can replace experience. But you are already involved. Your family is already buffeted by the flow.”
“I can’t argue the point. So is this a strait? It looks like a river.”
“Some say the straits resemble a river, and others have visualized it as a great tree. Some say its branches lead to three worlds, or nine, or more. Many say the world of humans, the Middle World, is but the easiest branch to reach, the main one. But it is simply that humans occupy the present. The past speaks to them but cannot be spoken back to. The future beckons to them but cannot speak for itself.”
“Are you trying to befuddle me? Because it is working.”
“I am explaining too much! Your own path is simple in idea, difficult in attainment. Find a way to make the Middle World, the main branch of time, flow to a place where life endures.”
“I am just a thief.”
“There is a story that the All-Father was a thief. He stole the very mead that gives visions and poetry.”
“Say, would that mean my wife owes her art to the work of a thief? That amuses me.”
“I’m not sure it would amuse her. But listen. Now I must leave you; for reasons I cannot explain, your presence is disruptive to me. You may ride this narwhal, however. His name is Drømlanse. He is gentle, unless you are evil.”
“I have had varying luck with riding, and being good.”
“I know. Not-evil is good enough for Drømlanse. He will take you where you need to go.”
“Where is that?”
“Your intuition must guide you, Imago Bone.”
“Gaunt is the one with intuition—”
Cairn leapt from the narwhal, and Bone carefully hauled himself onto Drømlanse. He raised his hand in a tentative farewell to the girl, but she was gone.
“Drømlanse,” he sighed. “If I’m to divert the flow of time, I suppose I should have begun yesterday. Swim against this flow that leads to what-do-you-call-it. Ragnarok. We’ll figure out the rest as we go. It’s what I usually do.”
The narwhal rushed ahead. They raced alongside the spectral shore.
A vessel crossed their path. It seemed bigger this time.
“Naglfar,” he said aloud.
“True, nithing,” came a voice from the ship. “And this time you are alone.” It was the voice of Skalagrim. He recognized others on deck. Crowbeard. Nine Smilodons. Erik Glint. And many others whom he’d met in his travels.
“Persimmon Gaunt is not among you,” he observed. “She lives.”
“Not for long,” Skalagrim said. “The end comes, sweeping us all toward it.”
“I’ve been outmaneuvering the end a long time. Ha!”
He gently kicked the narwhal’s flanks, in the same way he’d tried and failed to control horses before. The narwhal was more cooperative. They charged Naglfar, attempting the same strike Cairn had once made against it—or its previous avatar.
But there sprang up from the water his two brothers who’d drowned long ago. They clutched at him, barnacle-faced, seaweed-draped, pearls in clammy eye sockets.
“Be at peace, brothers,” he rasped. “I love you. Dive, Drømlanse.”
They ceased their clutching and stared. The real Bone brothers had never heard him speak thus.
Down Drømlanse went, through what seemed more fog than water. The world became blurred light.
They drifted in the midst of a sunken citadel, one filled with books. Sunlight streamed through windows, and an eel-like thing twisted from floor to floor, seeking something.
No, not an eel. A flying carpet.
“Deadfall?” Bone said aloud.
He realized three things. First, speaking beneath the time-flow was like breathing mist. Second, the tower was not truly drowned but a place under the desert sun. Third, the carpet almost seemed able to hear him, for it twitched a little in response.
Was this the past, when Deadfall had dwelled in the great desert? Or some future in which Deadfall had returned?
The carpet ascended to a set of books arrayed in a pattern of black, with one white-colored book in the middle. Bone recognized it.
Deadfall hovered there, contemplating.
“The Chart!” Bone tried to call, sudden instinct taking him like a wave. “Psst! The Chart of Tomorrows! Take it! Give it to Gaunt and Bone!”
The carpet twitched. At last it extricated the book from its place and carried it downward.
“What have I done?” Bone said to himself. “Or had I already done it?”
Drømlanse swam them through a window into bright sunlight. It seemed he was a sort of ghost while he wandered the Straits of Tid. Even in this brightness he was wrapped in a nimbus of blue-green, a pocket of the waters of time. He didn’t know how to navigate. Yet a way of influencing the past seemed open: to speak and plant ideas into minds.
They hovered now over the cliffside city of Qushkent. “Drømlanse, can you take me back to the Bladed Isles?”
The narwhal rushed west, and reality blurred around them. For a moment he thought they’d gone east; the place they encountered seemed a part of Qiangguo. Then he recognized the mountain of the Scroll of Years and saw how Princess Corinna called upon warriors to accept A-Girl-Is-A-Joy as her champion. It seemed there was one there who’d been especially recalcitrant. Bone shouted in his ear, “Joy! Joy is wonderful! You like Joy!”
“Hail, Joy Snøsdatter!” the man yelled, raising his axe.
“That’s the spirit,” Bone said. “This is fun. But Drømlanse, perhaps I need to be more direct. Take me to . . . Ragnarok.”
Again, the blurring. Now all was fire and ocean and ice. They hovered high above the sea. He thought he recognized the islands of the Splintrevej below him and Oxiland in the distance ahead. But that meant Spydbanen and Svardmark should be to his right and left.
Instead there was only a series of new volcanic islands belching fire and smoke into the atmosphere. Oxiland seemed intact, but its own volcano was doing its best to keep up. The sky was dark, and snow was falling everywhere.
They drifted down to a little island bearing remnants of a vast metal chain.
“This was it,” Bone said, sliding off Drømlanse. “The heart of the Chain. The dragons woke up. What made it happen?”
“I did,” came an ancient voice.
Bone spun and saw a tall, thin, white-bearded man, the white flecked with red. Blood-gold runes covered his black robes.
“Winterjarl,” Bone said.
“I have used that name, traveler. Do you come from the past or the future?”
“The past, or so I believe. I have made use of the book you made.”
The Winterjarl looked confused. “I made a book? You must be from the future then.”
“I am growing less certain. What has happened in this place?”
“The battle of the dragons was renewed. The ash blotted out the sun. The final frost is upon the world.”
“Cheery.”
“I’ve changed my mind. You must be from the past. Even your dream-form is making me feel more tenuous.” The Winterjarl turned transparent as he said this.
“Don’t go! I must change all this! Where do I start?”
“It’s surely futile! The only path I see is to change the hearts of those who struggle. Make them see peace as a victory, not a defeat.”
“Who? Who must I change?”
“Alas, I do not know. I have forgotten so much. You seem so familiar. . . .”
The Winterjarl faded from sight.
Bone sat beside ash-colored waters.
“Drømlanse,” he said in time. “Will you take me to me? Somewhere in the past. Sometime between sleeping and wakefulness.”
He rode the narwhal through dark seas and shifting stars. Now they were above a desert rooftop before dawn, in the thousand-towered city of Palmary. There a younger Bone stirred in his sleep.
As the future Bone descended from the narwhal and stepped forward, two figures rippled and shimmered out of the gray. To the left stood a thing of dust and spiderwebs resembling a tall, hooded figure, one of whose hands was a pair of sharp pincers, the other a dark scythe. To his right was a being of fire and smoke, its eyes and mouth like rubies glowing in the sunset, and it clutched what resembled at times coiling flame, and other times a burning cat-o’-nine-tails.
“Of course,” said the future Bone. “I must be challenged by the powers who accompanied me in the old days. Angels of death, hear me. I am but a shade of a reflection of a dream. I will change nothing of substance.”
“We know not what you are, spirit,” said the dark one, “but you cannot take his life. That is given to me.”
“He means, to me,” said the fiery one. “But I sense you mean no harm.”
“I assure you,” Bone of the future said, “I would never harm him. Would you leave us?”
“Since I concede you intend no harm,” the grim death said, “very well.”
“I will kill him later,” said the bright death, and faded along with his counterpart.
Bone shook his head and knelt beside Bone.
“Thief. Wake up.”
Without warning the younger Bone somersaulted to a crouching defensive position, knife drawn. The older Bone envied the younger man’s reflexes. It hadn’t been so many years, had it? He was road-worn. His younger self had paler, smoother skin and darker hair. No moustache either; he’d forgotten that.
The younger Bone also seemed more focused, and desperate. Perhaps, under all the swagger, even sad. Curious. He hadn’t remembered it that way.
As he assessed his younger self, his younger self likewise assessed him. At last the younger Bone sheathed his dagger and crossed his arms.
“Bloody hell!” said the younger man. “Time travel!”
“Yes,” said his elder, nearly laughing. “Sorry.”
“I’ve heard of it but never experienced it.”
“I have,” said the older one. “You’re right to want to run.”
It didn’t seem possible that the younger Bone’s eyes could widen more, but it happened. “So you remember this meeting?”
The older Bone shivered. Did he? The memory was tentative, dreamlike. Perhaps it was something the mind-assassin Hackwroth had taken from him in Qiangguo, only now coming back to life? Or was history subtly changing around them?
“Perhaps I do.”
The younger man scratched his chin. “Then you’re genuinely me, and history is inviolate.”
“I hope not. A terrible event is coming I’m trying to prevent. It will destroy quite a lot of things. Possibly everything.”
“Bloody hell! I’m listening.”
“Good. But you may forget. This whole experience is dreamlike. In fact I’m counting on that.”
“How so?”
“I think you will lose the memory of this,” the older Bone said. “Because I feel certain now I did. But I’m hoping the sense of it will return when you need it. Listen. Your son may appear to you one day. Perhaps aboard a flying machine . . .”
The younger Bone shook his head. “Son? I was not sufficiently careful, was I?”
“He does not exist yet, for you. He . . . he needs your love. And his mother’s.”
“Such cryptic instructions. And yet somehow so alarming.”
“Deep down, Bone, you need to understand . . . even if a day comes when the boy seems dangerous, you are his father, and he needs love. He will need your mercy and your help, even if he seems to be sliding into evil. Promise me you will help him.”
“Love. Mercy. Evil. I change considerably in the future, don’t I?”
“I had not considered it before now. But you may be right.”
“If it were anyone else, self, I would reject what you say. But very well. I promise. Whether or not I remember, the promise has been spoken.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s a small enough gesture, I suppose, phantasm of the future. Safe journey to you . . . unless you care to tell me the trap details and guard rotations of the Tower of the Four Faces, or the secret call signs of the Lords of Cups, Wands, Coins, and Pentacles . . . ?”
“I recall planning that caper, but none of the details. Frustrating, no?” Indeed, as he spoke, Bone felt his senses blurring.
“Alas!” The younger man laughed, his voice dimmer. “But at least you haven’t materialized just to toss me a dagger, a parcel, and a mission, monstrous enemies at your heels.”
“Give me time.”
“Heh. Well, if we are done, specter of tomorrow . . . are you all right? You seem to be turning transparent.”
“More experienced time travelers than I,” Bone said, the words sounding distant to his own ears, “have said that speaking to people in the past can be disruptive to one’s substance. Farewell.”
“Farewell then! I need my sleep to be ready for the job and for an assignation with a lovely poet tonight, which the job will fund.”
“It is that night?”
The younger Bone’s eyes widened. “My son . . . is she . . . ?”
He shouldn’t have said it, but the older Bone said, “She is a good one, thief. Better than we will ever deserve. Farewell.”
He ran to the narwhal and climbed, feeling that he was becoming threadbare as he moved. Reaching Drømlanse solidified him, and the past blurred around him.
Now he should find Gaunt. Give her the same message and hope it did some good.
They seemed to be swimming above the Straits of Tid again, and still the fiery conflagration appeared on the horizon. “Can you find my wife, mighty one?”
Again a blurring, nights and days flickering past.
Now they were in a cold sea not at all unreasonable for narwhals. Icebergs drifted about them, and an icepack lay ahead.
“She is there?” Bone asked.
The narwhal did not answer, but another voice did. “It doesn’t matter, son,” said a rasping voice.
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