The Silk Map

by Chris Willrich

  Several of the Xembalans had bows as well, and although they lacked the skill of the Grand Khan’s daughters, they too forced a flying lizard to move aside. Widow Zheng’s shots, accompanied by curses, failed to hit their targets. Bone sympathized. He’d never been much with a bow.

  Nonetheless it was a promising start—but meanwhile the party was still most of two hundred feet above the ground, and three more beasts were coming. The rope would be worse than useless if several people fell at once.

  “Sever the line!” the fighting-monk Rabten called out, echoing Bone’s thoughts.

  As Bone and Gaunt obeyed him, Bone watched the eyes of the beast coming nearest. It would be a tricky throw, but oh so effective . . .

  He took a chance and left off cutting his rope free, flung a dagger through the void.

  The angle and spin were wrong. The blade bounced off the hide near the eye. The beast blinked, whirled, and came directly at Bone.

  Now he had another shot, but he was still linked to Gaunt by a shred of rope. No time to both cut and throw.

  There was time to cut and duck. He slashed at the rope while Gaunt furiously readied her bow. He leapt up the stairway, fell flat.

  I am thin, I am an empty robe, I am a reed mat, I am a stain upon the rock—well, maybe not that last . . .

  The creature’s snout smashed against stone, and its mouth revealed a reek of fresh meat upon ancient dust.

  Bone acted without quite thinking. He scrambled up and leapt onto the thing’s neck. He drove his dagger deep into the skin, found a third dagger and did likewise.

  As the flying beast winged into the air, Bone held on like a climber clinging to pitons.

  “Take the shot!” he screamed to Gaunt but was unsure she heard him. (She might have been swearing at him.) There came a shudder from the reborn animal, so something had afflicted it. Good. At some point the creature would perish and fall. That would not be so good.

  Bone glanced at the careening landscape, knowing his only hope was to leap off when the jump wasn’t fatal. But there were so many ill fates short of fatal. . . . The beast flew again toward the line of people on the stairway, and Bone shoved his weight against the daggers. The thing veered off, and Bone eased up on the weapons. Perhaps he could make the thing associate the stairway with pain.

  The other two had no such troubles. Snow Pine was busy whacking one with Monkey’s staff. Every one of her blows sent the thing whirling off-balance, but it kept coming back. Meanwhile a knot of fighting nuns and monks confronted the second. Among them was Haytham ibn Zakwan, demonstrating that the art of the scimitar was not lost to the gentlemen of Mirabad.

  Another reeling of the world, another plunge at the stair, and Bone again leaned upon the blades. Gaunt shot again and hit the eye. Bone was delighted until the anguished beast made a surge toward the sky. He gripped the daggers, but they began to come loose.

  Far below he saw Quilldrake and Flint, swinging swords with gusto. The cumulative blows had an effect, and though the thing they faced snapped at a Xembalan and forced her to fall, the subsequent rain of blows caused it to tumble to the ground with a snapping thud.

  Again a whirling, and one of Bone’s daggers fell free. Bone clung to a single dagger, flopping against the neck’s thick hide. Gaunt fired into the eye of one of the other beasts, as Bone’s was circling too wildly. He glimpsed Widow Zheng still shooting; once in a while an arrow connected, only to bounce off the lizards’ thick hides. This was not something she was used to, of course, and Bone appreciated the effort.

  The shaman Northwing was not so evidently useful. She was sitting, eyes closed. It annoyed Bone. Here he was about to plunge to his death, and she was meditating. Even the Xembalans were not doing that!

  His mount ceased flailing and began circling high above the battle.

  It groaned deep in its gullet.

  “Goooooommm.”

  Bone managed to return to his perch on the neck.

  “Gooooohhhhn.”

  Was it talking to him?

  “Boooooohhhhhhn.”

  “Northwing,” he said.

  “Aaaaaannnnng Onnnnnnnnn.”

  “Ang On?”

  The flying lizard dove.

  His beast plowed into the other two, scattering all. In the midst of the collision his animal became unconscious, and Bone had a single moment before it truly began to fall. In that moment he abandoned the remaining dagger and leaped to the stairway.

  His landing was not as graceful as he’d have liked; he scrambled and fell and teetered back. But it was more so than the creatures’. They fell to Xembala’s green earth and slowly turned to dust.

  Snow Pine was now closest to him. “How do we fare?” he asked her.

  “Two lost, one monk, one nun.” She was panting as she gripped her staff, but there was a fierce grin upon her face. She hid it as she realized she was grinning in the aftermaths of deaths. But he’d seen it.

  “Bone!” Gaunt called from the back of the line. “Are you quite done cavorting with monsters? We’ve a volcano to visit.”

  “Agreed!”

  They reached the valley floor and walked among desiccated bones.

  “They see us,” Quilldrake said. “They surely see us coming and they’ll loose yet more creatures upon us.”

  Widow Zheng stared at the ash cloud above the mountain.

  “Zheng,” Bone said. “Do you remember? If you are Xia, you will know how to get to the Iron Moths.”

  “I . . .”

  “Out with it,” said Jewelwolf, striding forward. “In my Il-Khanate, to withhold tactical information is a crime.”

  Steelfox intercepted her. “We are not in your Il-Khanate, sister.”

  “All in good time.”

  “Even if your husband is the new Grand Khan, sister, our father’s rules of conduct—”

  “I think . . .” began Zheng

  “Father is dead,” said Jewelwolf.

  “You can bring that argument to the Supreme Judge—” said Steelfox.

  “Enough!” Gaunt said, raising her arm. “Let Zheng speak.”

  “I think I do remember,” Zheng said. “There was a path within the southern cliffs.” She closed her eyes and turned. She pointed. “There.”

  A waterfall surged down in the spot she noted, its spray giving birth to a tributary of the great river.

  “We should go,” Bone said.

  “There are rites for our dead,” Rabten said.

  “We have little time,” Gaunt said.

  “It is true that cremation is impractical now, but we can offer alms for the birds. We will carry our brother and sister to the cliffs, there to leave them for winged scavengers.”

  “May I assist?” Bone said.

  And so Gaunt and Bone helped carry the bodies of two who had fought valiantly for the safety of their land. Bone thought, I am no hero. Yet it is pleasing sometimes to smooth the path of one.

  At the waterfall they found a fissure in the cliffs in which they left the fallen. When the briefest of rites was concluded, and Bone and Gaunt and the other bearers scrambled back down, Zheng was pointing to the cliff face behind the falls. The surging water was a disorienting thing. Bone found himself gazing upon one burst of spray, tracking it as it fell to the river below. It was strange to realize it fell no more quickly or slowly than a falling man. Then his perception returned to the whole and the feeling of continuous roaring power. It was hard to believe anyone could get behind these falls.

  “It is there,” Zheng reassured. “There is a moment when you must accept that your senses are befuddled by the noise and the motion and the wet, when you must release your fear of losing this existence.”

  Zheng walked toward the waters.

  Bone put himself behind her, promising himself that if the waters washed Zheng away he would grab her. Gaunt and the others came behind.

  Spray engulfed them, and mist, and at last a pummeling of icy liquid. Bone couldn’t see to help himself, let alone Zheng. Was i
t like this for Mad Katta? He did not think he would last a day in that dark. He was a bundle of worries and impulses, tied together by a thin twine of ego. The string was fraying. He clattered on.

  And then they were through. The hidden cave was illuminated by the fading light of day, as veiled by the waterfall. A rough-hewn passageway led east and north. The threshold was, aptly enough, guarded by worn stone statues of Thresholders.

  “Are we all here?”

  “Yes,” called out Rabten, who added, “I have no knowledge of this place. We have long been discouraged from coming this far east.”

  “By your high lama?” Flint asked.

  “And by her predecessor, and by his predecessor.”

  “Makes sense,” Quilldrake said. “This probably is a secret way to the Iron Moths.”

  “Our goal is the survival of this valley,” Flint told him.

  “Of course!”

  Zheng said, “Quit talking. We must continue.” She hesitated, as though hearing far-off music, then proceeded. They followed into darkness. A pair of monks lit torches.

  The journey was long and unnerving, for the mountain continued now and then to shake, and the thought of being buried alive was increasingly hard to dismiss. At last they emerged into a place of red illumination and great heat.

  The cavern was vast as the great coliseum in the Eldshore’s capital. Although it had the roughness of a place formed by natural processes, the result was surely the work of magic. A lake of bubbling magma surrounded an island of rock perforated with many caves. Strange lights of many colors glowed within those openings.

  Bone noticed other passageways leading out of the cavern. He also noticed that the opening they’d just exited was guarded by statues of ferocious three-eyed fanged monstrosities. Once he’d assured himself they would not animate, he noted that the statues glared toward the passageway, not the island.

  “Rabten,” Bone asked, “what are those statues?”

  “Wrathful guardians,” the monk answered. “Their fury is in the service of compassion, meant to protect seekers of enlightenment from various obstacles. If they are here, it means this place is hazardous.”

  Quilldrake said, “Is that the refuge of the Iron Moths?”

  “Yes,” Zheng said. “Long ago Xia had a hovel by the waterfall, and daily she came to assist the Moths. Until one day she longed to dance with the high lama, and they wove for her a dress that was also a map of her lands, of her life.”

  “This happened in the days of the third high lama,” Rabten said, “who, it is said, somewhat lost his way for a time, becoming enamored of transitory things.” The monk looked embarrassed for a moment. “We have long been warned away from this place, and I have never been certain where it lies.”

  “I don’t see the Moths,” Quilldrake said.

  “But I sense them,” Snow Pine answered. “The metal of this staff seems attracted by whatever lies upon the island.”

  “Perhaps it can take us there!” said Quilldrake.

  “Quilldrake, I understand,” Bone said. “No one wants to meet the Iron Moths more than I do. But I suspect none of us escapes Xembala alive unless we recover the high lama. Focus, good sir.”

  “Ah, blazes. You’re right of course.”

  They proceeded around the drop beside the magma lake.

  “Where do we proceed?” Flint asked.

  “I suspect,” Gaunt said, “we go through that passage guarded by six guardians of wrath.”

  For there, indeed, stood many glowering statues, warning the travelers away from a dark passage sloping upward.

  Rabten and his Xembalan companions knelt as he intoned a prayer. Rising, he said, “Let us go.”

  Eighteen strong, the expedition entered the realm of the Bull Demon.

  Gaunt immediately felt a queasiness in her stomach, reminiscent of riding a plunging balloon.

  “Are you all right?” Bone asked her, touching her shoulder. He looked a little ill himself.

  “More or less. This is nothing compared to pregnancy.”

  “That’s a fair point,” said Snow Pine, also looking pained.

  “You of course would not know about that, sister,” Jewelwolf said. “You who never had the chance to bear your man sons.”

  Steelfox did not reply, so Gaunt answered for her. “Women’s roads can be so rocky, Jewelwolf. Why do we throw stones in each other’s paths?”

  “Stay out of this, foreigner,” said Jewelwolf.

  “We are all foreigners here,” Widow Zheng said, “except these nuns and monks. Even I . . .”

  “Yet motherhood is not foreign to you, I think,” Jewelwolf said with an airy laugh, and Zheng responded with a clipped nod. “We are all mothers here, are we not . . . except Steelfox and her pet shaman. All true women.”

  “Irrelevant, Jewelwolf,” snapped Northwing. “I’m not a woman.”

  “You dare to talk this way?” Jewelwolf answered. “And yet I am curious. You dress as a man, by the standards of your people. Do you believe you are one?”

  “I don’t consider myself either male or female,” Northwing said. “I’m a shaman. Among our people that means I walk between all categories. Light and darkness. Giving and claiming. Life and—”

  “Yes, yes, I have heard all this before,” Jewelwolf snapped, “though I did not realize the depth of the perversion.”

  Steelfox, who had not spoken before, said in a voice low and sharp, “You will not speak to my servant in that manner.”

  “Oh! You care about your pets! Your twisted shaman and your deranged inventor.”

  “I rather like ‘deranged,’” Haytham put in.

  “It is always thus with you,” Steelfox said. “Cutting at me, smiling all the time. Always reminding me I am not a baatar. Reminding me my realm is smaller and more desolate. Reminding me that my husband died before we had children.”

  Jewelwolf said, “It is not my fault that you haven’t remarried. You are a Karvak princess; you could have your pick of men.”

  “If I had no taste—”

  “Perhaps your taste runs more to your livestock—”

  “Enough!” Steelfox’s blade was unsheathed. “Do you seek combat? I will give it to you!”

  Jewelwolf responded in kind, though she still left her round, cloaked shield on her back. “You think you can—”

  “Princesses!” boomed a voice, though it struggled to be heard over the sudden rumbling of the mountain. When the sound subsided, it was Rabten who continued to speak. “Princesses, hatred is the great enemy of humankind. We are in the lair of one who feeds upon that very emotion. Do you not sense it? The disorientation we felt, it brought us deeper into the power of the Bull Demon. We are more easily gripped by hate.”

  Gaunt said, in as calm a voice as she could manage, “I suspected we’d pierced another veil of reality.”

  Bone put in, “You know, I am coming to prefer my own mundane reality, with its bandits and sandstorms and ornery camels.”

  “And its walking mummies,” Gaunt said, “and Leviathans and dragon horses?”

  “Exactly! The everyday world.”

  They chuckled together, and Gaunt studied the princesses. The mood had changed. They were backing away from each other.

  Rabten said, “Even here in a realm of evil, the greatest foe is the fury we bring with us. Only tolerance of and patience with one another can challenge this threat. Be true, Karvak warriors, my daughters. Defeat the enemy called hate!”

  Steelfox breathed in, breathed out, gaze focused not upon her sister but at some hidden horizon only she could see.

  She sheathed her blade.

  Jewelwolf said, “I am not your daughter. The man whose daughter I am would remove your head for speaking to me in this way.”

  That said, she sheathed her blade as well.

  Rabten bowed.

  They continued up the passage.

  Gaunt released a slow breath, took in air that tasted increasingly acrid. The hallway had the look of a natu
ral lava tube, but as with the tunnel in Five-Toe Peak, Gaunt did not believe it. The thought made her glance at Snow Pine, whose own gaze alternated between the tunnel and Monkey’s staff.

  “Are you all right?” Gaunt asked.

  “Yes . . . The staff seems skittish, excited by this place. And I’m seeing things . . . strands of chi flowing from place to place within this mountain. They’re concentrated somewhere not far ahead. The staff feels more powerful now . . . I’m not sure I can command it.”

  “You can,” said Flint. “I am regularly amazed by what you can accomplish, Snow Pine.”

  “I . . . thanks.”

  “We are here,” Rabten said.

  Up ahead the passage opened onto the volcano’s caldera, a space like a titanic, smoldering arena. Smoke rose up in scores of places from the rocks. There was lava here as well, bubbling up from a sort of natural cauldron on the left, flowing through the middle of the caldera and disappearing through a gash on the far right. Near the far wall were two deflated Karvak balloons.

  In between lay an island, like the island of the Iron Moths. But unlike that vast dome of twisted stone, this island was dominated by single ruddy boulder the size of a keep.

  Into it was carved the face of a ferocious bull.

  Eyes that resembled enormous rubies blazed within the red stone.

  “If I were not terrified,” Bone said to Gaunt, “I might imagine the two of us scrambling up the back of that thing, to creep over its head and claim the rubies.”

  With a rumble, the visage’s grin widened, revealing serrated ruby teeth the size of stalagmites. A deep tormented groan rose from the stone gullet.

  “Or perhaps not,” he added.

  “We can tell the story your way afterward,” she said.

  The Bull Demon was not moaning at them. There was an encampment of round tents before it, and a score of robed individuals knelt or sat cross-legged beside them, as though waiting. They looked to be the Fraternity of the Hare. Two others held a captive between them, standing as close as they dared to the Bull Demon.

  One of the captors was a member of the Fraternity.

  The second, Gaunt saw with the plunging-balloon feeling, was Mad Katta.

  Between them stood Chodak. It seemed to Gaunt the three were speaking to each other, but she could not make out the words.