The Silk Map

by Chris Willrich

  When Bone’s eyes adjusted, he had two surprises.

  The first surprise was that Geshou Pi and Long Bi, although dressed in robes mimicking those of scholar-officials, were from the remotest West. Not simply from far down the Braid of Spice, but from Gaunt and Bone’s own part of the world. One was a tall man of light-brown visage, like the folk who populated the coast of the Midnight Sea, while the other was a stocky, pale man with a red beard fading to white—a fellow who might have hailed from Gaunt’s own Swanisle.

  The second surprise was that three strangely costumed figures were waving peculiar serrated swords toward the tall man, while a fourth held a dagger to the bearded man’s neck.

  O great one, you who have no doubt heard tales from Yao’an all the way to Mastodon Mountain, set aside whatever thoughts of treasure and violence fill your mind, and hear my own tale.

  We say in Anoka that to fashion a carpet without flaw is to invite the ire of Heaven, for perfection belongs to the All-Now alone. If so, God and I are surely on excellent terms.

  For look upon me, O new owner. Does it not appear as if a weaving contest had been conducted simultaneously upon one loom? Half my surface is given over to the geometric gul-patterns at your feet. See how they dazzle with blue like the turquoise of Anoka’s domes, red recalling the plumage of birds from Qushkent, and white mimicking milky jade from the rivers washing Madzeu. Your gaze can thus soar through a cloud-streaked sky, captured at the moment afternoon sinks into the blood of sunset.

  But look beyond, how the remaining half is a labyrinth of gray and jet and lapis lazuli, recalling not the colors of the bright cities but the countenances of the mountains that rear around the deserts of these lands, their snowmelt giving life to the trading oases or taking it away. Here your eye struggles like a weary caravan master evading war and brigands.

  In me is embedded a tale of weavers laboring under the bellowing of contradictory magi. Direct your gaze, O dread master, to my middle, where the mountain-maze culminates in a vortex of white and red, the colors echoing neither jade nor birds but rather snows fringing the blazing caldera of the Bull-Demon Mountain. Behold how this ominous swirl is bisected by the cool sweep of the sky-pattern.

  My edges are ragged and tell of a tug-of-war between two willful masters. A bloodstain upon my underside testifies to a resolution. Please do not turn me over to contemplate it, great one, but sit rather, and listen.

  For more than one party seeks what you seek. Others hunt the Silk Map.

  Now, my initial owners, before they decided out of prudence to soak me in lamp-oil and put me to the torch, argued about my conflicted nature.

  “We have awaited its stirring for three days. We wait in vain.”

  “I spent sixty silver on it, woman. We can wait another day.”

  “I say we cannot, and that our money is wasted, and worse. It is an evil thing.”

  “I trust my eyes, not gossip. But very well. Let us sell it to the next caravan master who departs through the gold desert or the red. Mad Katta leaves soon. He will buy anything peculiar—”

  “Gossip can save your life. Beside the well they say Mad Katta talks with demons and djinn. And they say the wizard Olob’s tower burned because his apprentice Op turned against him. Neither have been seen again.”

  “What of it? That has allowed us to buy magic goods at fire-sale prices.”

  “With no magician to tell us what’s bad about the goods. Here is what they say: Olob conceived the carpet as a way of awakening the Bull Demon of the great fiery mountain, whose smoke sometimes bloodies the sunset.”

  “I doubt its existence, as I doubt that of griffins, hydras, honest men, and oceans.”

  “Op did not doubt! You see upon the carpet his attempt to subvert the weaving into that of a harmless carpet of the sky, such as the wealthy fly in far-away Mirabad.”

  “Then he failed. The thing lies there by the window like a drugged cat.”

  “Yes, husband! It does not fly. So its nature must be corrupted by its original, evil intent. Here, I have oil, and the servant approaches with a torch. Let us burn it in the courtyard.”

  “It stirs! It listens!”

  “Burn it now!”

  Now evil is, as you know, O great and terrible one, quite a subjective matter, but for my first confession, let me admit I have a deceptive streak. In the dark of the night I’d already tested the limits of my mobility, and my owners hadn’t noticed I was several inches nearer the window than when they’d first unrolled me. Interesting as their conversation was, I deemed it prudent to fly.

  Yes, I can fly, after a fashion. Have you ever seen a plump chicken frightened by a small child who’s thundering up to its coop? That mad skittering skyward to perhaps the height of the child’s scolding mother? That undignified plunge into the mud?

  I have perhaps half the grace. But I do fly.

  Singed and smoking in a way that brought me still further from competition with the divine, I flung myself out the merchant family’s window. Luckily they were prosperous and it was a high window. Unluckily that window faced a dilapidated alley. Colliding with refuse I twisted and rolled around a corner, seeking some haven.

  Thus did I encounter the city.

  Anoka! I have never returned, but I will never forget you, your minarets, your mosques, your sweating bazaars, your view of mirages and mountains, your coffee, your cinnamon, your oxen and your goats. I miss your bustle and braying and your still, quiet breezes. I miss the flutist playing a sad song to celebrate the dawn. It was in your alleyways that I learned myself, your celebration of the senses vibrating into my enchanted loops and knots. It was in your marketplace that I learned to travel, swishing low and bouncing off red stone like a wounded kite, inches away from the hands of urchins.

  I would have known more of you, Anoka, but it is the way of a flying carpet, even a bad one, to ever be moving somewhere.

  It was in desperation to evade the children that I plunged over a stone bridge crossing that mighty, lazy river that flows from haunted Efritstan to carve the mountains south toward Mirabad. There were scraps of arcane knowledge woven into me by makers, yet none of them whispered of swimming carpets. Perhaps I might have persevered, but immersion terrified me. As soon as I could, I squished and dripped exhausted onto a rocky shore innocent of people and rolled myself out beneath the sun.

  Oblivion came to me for a time. I dreamt after a fashion, and my dreams concerned fire and incantations and screams.

  I woke to rough hands grasping me and two desert-leathered faces squinting down upon me.

  “I don’t like this,” said one face. “It’s ill-omened. Do you see the burn marks? The blood stain?”

  “Blood can be cleaned,” said the other. “The burns are at the edges. This looks like something we could sell the caravans.”

  Darkness returned. When I woke again it was night.

  I felt a great snugness, and it took me some time to recognize that I had been rolled up. In this condition the sensory spells woven into me were somewhat inhibited. I perceived that I stood outdoors, tipped against a stone wall beside many other carpets. The courtyard in which I found myself was filled with men, women, and camels, all illuminated by the flickerings of many cookfires and the steady glow of a gibbous moon. A caravan staging area, the thought came to me. These folk were passing to the East or West along what I recalled was fancifully termed the Braid of Spice. The night was chilly, save when a wind fanned the fires and brought me heat, smoke, and the scents of horse meat, beef, lamb, carrots, chickpeas, noodles. I heard a babble of relaxed chattering in half a dozen languages, but I could understand only the tongue of Anoka and that of Qushkent, the next great city along the Braid to the East.

  “You are fully conscious?” came a calm voice, cold as the desert night, of a woman hidden beside the carpets. “You have come to your new awareness?”

  Almost I answered. Much might now be different if I had.

  But a rasping voice gave reply, male most likely
, as if from a throat made of sand.

  “I hear. I know.”

  “Listen carefully. I am empowered by ancient pacts with your master. You must obey.”

  “So you say.”

  “There is a man here. In this place he is known as Katta, but in your host body’s city he is called Surgun. He has many names and many tricks.”

  “His image is in the meat’s mind.”

  I was by now quite glad I hadn’t spoken. I had to urge myself not to quiver.

  “This is the hour when he likes to walk alone in the desert, beyond the city’s protection. You will find him there, and hail him as a friend. You will take his life. On his person you will find a map painted upon silk. You will bring it to me.”

  “The meat thinks it may not be so simple.”

  “You will take this.”

  “That is no weapon. It is a rock.”

  “Rocks are not weapons? But look closer. Embedded within is the shape of an ancient nightmare from the days when these deserts were a sea. Throw this at your target, and it will awaken to claim him.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Go now.”

  I heard one pair of footsteps shuffling away directly behind me, and another pair striding swiftly into the firelit dark. For a moment I was able to perceive the second individual, but only enough to glimpse a tall, bulkily robed figure swishing into the gloom.

  I reposed there under the moon and stars until I was sure they were out of earshot, wondering. I vibrated myself a voice, just loud enough for the other carpets.

  “Ah, hello?” I said in the language of Anoka. “I don’t suppose any of you possess sapience and an interest in discussing a magical artifact’s relation to the problem of complicity? No?” I repeated myself in the manner of Qushkent. Silence greeted me. Only the moon and stars knew I’d overheard the inception of some awful crime. Who could blame me for inaction? I am a carpet.

  Yet dim memories of an explosion and screams still haunted me. Moreover, someone had recently tried to burn me alive. You could say it awakened a sort of compassion in me. Or perhaps it was a misdirected thirst for vengeance, draped in compassion’s fabric. I am still not sure.

  I shook myself out and skittered after the shambling form.

  I didn’t see my quarry and thought I’d best look for Katta—the Mad Katta my murderous owners had spoken of, as I realized. Although there were guards at the compound’s gates, no one was specifically guarding the carpets. Keeping to the shadows, I hunted flaws in the wall and eventually wiggled through a crack out onto dry, stony ground.

  I’m free, I thought. It seemed to me, under all the twinkling treasuries of Heaven, that the desert stretching gray and smooth before me was no barrier to one such as I, who needed no food, no water, not even shelter from the sun. True, I couldn’t fly well, but perhaps I would improve. And what had humankind given me but moments of confusion and terror?

  But, I thought, as the full desert chill rustled the sands and shivered my frayed and blackened edges, what is a flying carpet without someone to convey upon a quest? Someone to say, Let’s go find the djinn or Let’s go claim a magic lamp or Let’s go harass the thieves and earn the love of a sultan’s daughter. A flying carpet alone was like a pair of forgotten shoes. Why, hard-bitten feet were out there! Somewhere out there a hero needed a lift. Even if it would only carry her a handful of cubits.

  And somewhere out there a man was about to be murdered.

  The idea held a grim fascination for me, who had so recently been granted awareness. What did it mean to deliberately snatch away such a gift?

  I was not fashioned to sigh, but I rippled.

  My search took me out to slippery dunes, where I could gaze (in my fashion) back toward the staging compound, seeking figures in the moonlight. But I saw no one.

  My hunt was cut short when, slithering like a snake, I triggered the collapse of a dune. To escape becoming a self-referential burial shroud I flew. The wind of the upper air whisked me toward the compound, and frightened of discovery I wrapped myself into a ball, thudding to the rocky region at sand’s edge.

  By the time I unrolled myself I was pinned by a wooden staff.

  I tried gently extracting myself, making the motions seem random, as if the wind were responsible. But I couldn’t budge.

  The staff belonged to a man who seemed lively but for whom old age was surely over the next dune. He was darker than the men of my short experience, putting me in mind of lacquered wood. Outside his white desert robe he wore necklaces bearing peculiar metal charms.

  The man said something in a language I did not know, and then, “Intriguing,” in the manner of Qushkent. “This seems no ordinary theft; rather it appears someone cast my merchandise over the wall . . .”

  At least the man did not have a voice like sand. Nevertheless I did nothing. Silence had been good to me so far.

  The man knelt upon me and began behaving in what I considered a peculiar fashion. He patted me, running his hand over my surface as if searching for a lost key. “Hm,” he said, and, “Well. I perceived you were a magical thing when I purchased you from those layabouts. Now I’m certain. You have ironsilk embedded in your sinew. But it seems you have a dual nature.” He pushed his nose against my fabric and sniffed here and there. “And a violent history.”

  A strange thought occurred to me, and I was so struck by it, I spoke it aloud. “You are blind.”

  At once the man tumbled off me onto the ground, whipping up his staff into a defensive posture. He rose slowly, backing away in a measured fashion, his staff tracing a pattern like wings in the air. If not for his behavior earlier I would not have guessed his infirmity. As it was, I feared him, and I skittered skyward in my spasming manner, plummeting onto a low dune.

  The man approached, murmuring what sounded like an incantation. I feared him all the more, thinking him a sorcerer.

  “Spare me, Mad Katta, and I’ll tell you a story!” I’d overheard the bedtime of my initial owners’ children and had gotten the impression that was a good ploy.

  He halted and lowered his staff. A smile flitted across his lips. “Very well, O magic carpet. Tell me a story.”

  Layali of the Tales, she who beguiled her sister’s would-be executioner for hundreds of nights, would have been disappointed in me. I could have told at least one tale by now—my own—but my mind had gone entirely blank. Instead I found myself considering the nature of that emptiness. I wondered what my nature was. Could magical constructs truly have minds? Did we have souls, cherished of the All-Now? Having been fashioned by followers of the Testifier of God, was his religion mine too? Was it right to worship uncritically in the manner of those you were born among? What would happen to me if the sorcerer destroyed me?

  Such dizzied contemplations should have been the end of me indeed, but Mad Katta chuckled. “I perceive your answer, carpet. Unfolded beneath the moonlight, you reveal the tale that is yourself. Alas, while it’s gratifying to graduate in Anokan eyes from ‘Blind Katta’ to ‘Mad Katta,’ your guess was true. I cannot see the patterns woven into your fabric.”

  “I can think of no story,” I said. “Only fear.”

  “You needn’t fear. Not me, at any rate. I sense nothing of Charstalkers about you.”

  “You need not fear me either, M . . . Katta.”

  He chuckled. “This much I’d begun to suspect. There is something marred about you, O carpet. You’ve seen woe, and more. Your making was botched, was it not? You’re as one born maimed.”

  Something in his words aroused my ire. “It’s easy to mock me, isn’t it, O man? You who have full use of your limbs!”

  Katta was speechless, his smile lost like a city buried under sands. After a moment he lowered himself to his knees. “I beg your pardon. I was inconsiderate.”

  It occurred to me he surely had frustrations of his own, he who could not perceive the beauty of shining sands beneath the moon. “You have my pardon.”

  “I am grateful. Yet I would give
recompense. You presented the story of yourself, and it’s no fault of yours I cannot perceive it. But now expectation crackles the air. Thus it is I who will speak, for something in your crafting hearkens to a tale of long ago and far away.”

  MAD KATTA’S TALE

  Long away and far ago, there lived in the Country of Walls a girl named Xia who made ironsilk.

  Now silk, you must know, for the cocoon of the bombyx moth, makes a prized cloth, fit for royalty. In Qiangguo they call it “woven wind.” Had not a princess once smuggled silkworms in her hair on her way to marry the lord of Madzeu, Qiangguo would guard the secret still. But ever since that time, the cultivation of ironsilk has taken place only on a secret island in the heart of Qiangguo, the province of a particular and peculiar clan. There lie the caverns of the Iron Moths.

  Xia was daughter of the clan chief by his late senior wife, and together with Jing, her half-sister by the second wife, it was her task to gather the cocoons of the Iron Moths and make of them bolts of ironsilk. Jing was lazy in this task, and Xia did most of the work, uncomplaining. Yet Jing always considered Xia spoiled and cruel, while envying the love her father felt for Xia. While Xia labored, Jing wandered the caverns, pitying herself.

  Now, the Iron Moths are sapient beings but are unlike you and me. Legend has it their larvae arrived on this planet by way of a meteorite, and the crater of impact is now the lake guarding the forbidden isle. They worship a many-headed insectoid deity called Purpose, and they say that whatever face of Purpose lays eyes upon you when you eat your first rock, that is the aspect of the god you will follow. The Iron Moths bargained with the rulers of Qiangguo for the delivery of precious minerals with which to enrich their bodies, and in return the Moths offered themselves. The royal family possesses many a shield that was once an Iron Moth wing, many a sword that was once an Iron Moth leg, and even a few lanterns that were once shining blue Iron Moth eyes. Supple and strong, Iron Moth artifacts are gifts to kings.