The Silk Map

by Chris Willrich

  I look forward to our dealings tomorrow.

  “Charstalker,” Gaunt said.

  “That is one name. It will do.”

  The thing advanced. It grabbed Gaunt’s ball and chain; Gaunt kicked and struggled to draw Crypttongue, which lay sheathed and concealed under her robe. Am I to be laid low by clothing? she thought. This is one irony I do not mind missing.

  As if summoned, Bone jumped past her, kicked at the possessed corpse, and sent it plunging through the grave-pit. His momentum nearly sent him after it, but he righted himself, standing on the edge. He wore a smirk she almost wanted to slice off with a nick of the sword she’d just freed.

  “I did promise not to die that way,” he said.

  “You’re late,” she said and turned to the others.

  There were two more corpses stalking Zheng, who was running toward the Tower of the Beak as fast as an iron ball rolling downhill.

  There were also two Karvak balloons approaching. From the doorway to the Palace of Larks ran perhaps twenty of Qushkent’s guardsmen, lightly armored and clad in cloth of brown and white, with helmets suggesting the beaks of raptors.

  Under these circumstances, Gaunt felt no compunction at unsheathing Crypttongue and chopping off her ball and chain. She did likewise for Bone.

  “We’d best help Zheng—” Bone began and suddenly stiffened.

  A nimbus of red had risen from the grave and flowed into his ears. His eyes burned red.

  “No,” he continued, his voice gravelly and mocking. “Nothing can help the meat.”

  A second red glow rose up behind Bone. Three burning eyes appeared within its form. As Gaunt watched, hand gripping Crypttongue until it ached, the eyes traced the characters in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, which indicated the idiom “An unskilled cobbler.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?” Gaunt sneered, though sweat dripped down her face. “Calling me a mediocrity? You’re going to have to dig up better chengyu. Too bad for you most of them have four characters.”

  “You are about to eat the bread a devil baked,” Bone’s mouth said. “That is a saying from your husband’s country.”

  “Eat this!” called a voice, and a sweetcake flew through the air and connected with Bone’s face.

  Gaunt leapt onto the edge of the grave and grabbed Bone, forcing crumbs into his mouth, even as Mad Katta swooped by, riding Deadfall and laughing, flames from the second Charstalker chasing them.

  The first Charstalker flowed out of Bone’s body, fixing the lovers with a triple glare.

  “He didn’t quite,” Bone coughed, “get the saying right . . .”

  “Shut up, Bone. Hey, Charstalker! Meet Crypttongue!”

  It was mostly bravado, for she could not know what would happen when the enchanted blade stabbed the hateful nimbus that had just fled Bone.

  Luck was with her. A shriek entered her mind as the Charstalker twisted and shrank and flowed into the gem that had once borne Luckfire. That stone blazed brighter than the others, like the eye of sunset seen through a socket of mountains.

  They were alone, then, as much as two people in a battleground can be alone. The second Charstalker was in flight, pursuing Katta and Deadfall.

  “This is cozy,” Bone said.

  “We need to help Zheng.”

  Bone eyed the swirling white beneath the fissure at their feet. “It would be ironic if we accidentally plunged to our deaths right now.”

  “On a count of three . . .”

  They escaped the grave and ran after Zheng. Bellows from the guardsmen echoed among the slabs, but Gaunt did not know the words. The shadows of balloons crossed them, but they did not halt.

  By unspoken accord Bone raced ahead to tackle the undead foe nearest to Zheng, while Gaunt attacked the one trailing.

  “Hey!” she called. “You! Dead person! A word!”

  The dead man spun. Between the nine-year limit and the high altitude, the corpses here were well preserved, making this a perfect playground for possessing spirits. This shambling fellow was clad in princely robes, making Gaunt hope she wasn’t about to mutilate a royal body. Ah, well, they can only execute me once.

  She swung, jabbed, blocked, swung again. The corpse kept coming at her, and the Charstalker refused to give up the body. Of course—all the gems were full. It quickly proved evident that Crypttongue’s great power was snatching spirits, not severing heads or limbs.

  “Can we not come to some accommodation?” Gaunt asked, backing away.

  “Yes,” the dead noble said. “I will agree to eat your heart. You will agree to die.”

  “Your evil reputation is entirely your own fault!” Gaunt declared. “I just want you to know that!” Silently she asked the spirits in the gems, Please, please, give me a name. Again a babble ensued, with the laughter of the trapped Charstalker howling above it all.

  A whistling creased the air, and suddenly an arrow pierced the dead man’s eye. Another took him in the heart, and a third in the throat. The damage to his vitals was irrelevant, but the impacts themselves staggered him backward.

  Gaunt looked up to see Karvak archers leaning from one of the balloons, Lady Steelfox among them.

  She dared not question this help. Seizing the opportunity she tripped the foe, raised Crypttongue in two hands, and decapitated him.

  This did not finish him, for the body tried to rise, and the head mocked, “Nothing can truly kill us, Persimmon Gaunt! Accept your destiny as meat—” until she kicked it across the necropolis.

  The head kept babbling from where it lay, but the body sagged, evidently too far away from its puppetmaster. Gaunt ran toward Bone, who struggled with his own foe, no magic weapon to aid him.

  A name, a name—

  “Persimmon Gaunt!” called Lady Steelfox from above. “You have my respect! And these demons have my spite! We would make good allies!”

  “Don’t listen to her!” came Snow Pine’s voice from somewhere within the flying ger. “She wants the ironsilk for conquest!” There came the sounds of a scuffle within.

  “And why not?” answered Steelfox. “We bring peace to lands that have never known it! Trade! Freedom to worship as you wish! The Karvak yoke is light!”

  Gaunt reached Bone, raised her blade, looked for an opening. To the balloon she yelled, “Let her go if you want to talk!” This said, she continued asking her captured entities for their names. I can’t free you if I can’t name you.

  A distant voice, young and male, whispered in her mind, My name was—

  An arrow hit the stone beside Bone and the undead woman he wrestled. Sparks flew. Gaunt lost the voice.

  “Stop!” Gaunt told the Karvaks.

  “Gaunt!” called Zheng, who stood beside the black door of the tower. “The keys!”

  Gaunt hurled the keys toward Zheng, who began trying one after the other.

  They had little time. The Karvaks might hold off, but the soldiers of Qushkent were almost here. Even now they battled the Charstalker who’d inhabited the decapitated corpse. Please, she thought, your name . . .

  Swarnatep, came the voice. When the fields were green around the shore, before the lake dried up and the sands consumed my home, my name was Swarnatep.

  “Swarnatep, I release you!”

  Green light, like sunlight upon grass, blazed from Crypttongue.

  Gaunt imagined that the spirit of Swarnatep would depart as had Luckfire’s. Instead, the green radiance flowed into the corpse battling Bone, writhing and twisting together with the red behind the dead woman’s eyes. For a moment it was as though the eye sockets were filled with red-and-green braids. Then the green dominated, red specks swirling angrily within like flies trapped in honey.

  Bone stepped back. “Are we . . . done?”

  With a cackle, Zheng got the tower door open. “Hurry!” she called.

  The corpse spoke again, this time in no language Gaunt knew. Perhaps only by means of the sword could she understand Swarnatep’s speech.

  Yet at the so
und of it, Zheng gasped. “What? What did she say? It sounds . . .”

  Gaunt took Bone’s shoulder. “Come!”

  Bone followed. So did the corpse.

  “That language,” Zheng said as they reached the threshold. “From the lost village. It sounds so familiar.”

  An arrow sang, punctuating its music by sinking into the corpse’s back. The dead woman spun and hissed, the red flecks growing brighter in its eyes.

  “Do not go any further!” called Lady Steelfox, leaning from her balloon with bow at the ready.

  In the silence that followed, Mad Katta and Deadfall returned.

  They swooped out around the tower and buffeted Steelfox, who dropped her bow. Other archers fired. Arrows pierced Deadfall, who laughed. Katta did not share the mirth, but he was unharmed.

  “Lady Steelfox!” Deadfall boomed. “Let them go! Your sister commands it!”

  “What?” Steelfox said.

  “They will find the treasure—and with my new powers, I can follow them anywhere! Together the daughters of the Grand Khan will seize the ironsilk!”

  “What?” Katta said.

  In the dead woman’s eyes, the red grew dominant again. “Carpet! You think you are free of your curse, thanks to your growing skill and Widow Zheng’s magic! But we guess now what you are, and your empowerment only makes this easier!”

  A red glow rose from the corpse, whose eyes now burned wholly green.

  The Charstalker rose and intercepted Deadfall.

  Then came a second, a third, and a fourth.

  Deadfall glowed red.

  “No,” came the carpet’s voice. “No! You cannot have me! I am mine. I AM MINE!”

  But the carpet shuddered, and it was all Mad Katta could do to hold on. The black cloth with which they’d disguised Deadfall’s appearance burned away. Katta screamed, though he held on still.

  The carpet’s patterns seemed to flow with eldritch flame. The image of the volcano that dominated the middle of one side now swirled with crimson energies.

  “I . . .” came Deadfall’s voice. “I know now. I see it all. Petty crimes. The theft of the book from the Tower of the Crake, to surprise and test you, Gaunt and Bone. But more, the murders I could not admit even to myself. The innocent Shahuang guardsman. The Protector-General’s assistant. The caravaner Kilik. Evil has been within me all along. It is what I was made for.”

  Deadfall swooped low and hovered just above the door. “I will not harm you now. But this is farewell. I go to meet my destiny. And Katta—you must come too. For the Bull Demon will want a gift.”

  There was perhaps one moment in which Katta might have saved himself, or another might have intervened. But Gaunt was too shocked to act, as it seemed were they all.

  Her inaction would haunt her.

  Deadfall shot off into the clouds east of Qushkent and was gone.

  Bone pulled Gaunt through the doorway, and after a moment’s hesitation he also let through the green-eyed undead whom he’d battled just moments before. As soon as it staggered through, Bone slammed shut the door and slapped in place its three locks.

  Not a moment too soon, for arrows hit the door, and soon afterward guards banged upon it.

  “Ours are surely not the only keys,” Bone said, “but hopefully they’ll have to send to the palace.”

  “Why did you let that thing in here?” Widow Zheng said.

  “It helped us,” Bone said. “I think. And you said you found its speech familiar.”

  “I did,” Zheng said wonderingly. “Yet I cannot tell you why.”

  “Because it was once yours,” said the dead woman.

  “Aiya!” Zheng said.

  “You have the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell now?” Gaunt asked. “Do we speak to Swarnatep?”

  “Yes, and yes,” said the corpse. “I know nothing of the woman I inhabit, and it grieves me to disturb her peace in this way, but things are as they are. I took this language from the thing called a Charstalker with whom I shared being, for a short and eternal while. Yet I am Swarnatep, long dead, who should have fled this world long ago.”

  “How,” Zheng said, “how could I have known your language? Is it not as dead as your people?”

  “There are those who die, and yet for whom the wheel of existence continues to turn. Your spirit has a familiar radiance. Once you dwelled among us. Of this I am sure.”

  “This is all fascinating,” Bone said, “but those of us currently in living bodies have much to lose, should those outside get inside this tower. Let’s find this hidden way to Xembala, if it exists.”

  “And if it does not?” Gaunt said.

  “Let’s hope the Karvaks are in a generous mood.”

  The tower was a small place, no bigger than a border watch-post, with one windowless chamber. Magical light gems glowed like stars upon the ceiling, illuminating a dusty cart roped to an iron post by means of an intricate knot. Bone, ever fond of traps and puzzles, could have stared at its ins and outs for hours.

  Beside the cart, post, and rope was a black slab, identical with the ones outside except for lacking a lever.

  “I suspect this is our way onward,” Gaunt said, echoing his own thoughts.

  “The lack of a lever is almost a provocation,” Bone muttered, looking around. The walls were filled with inscriptions, but there was no clue here for him. The script of Qushkent resembled the flowing calligraphy of Mirabad, but even if he knew that writing system, he lacked the language. “Gaunt, I don’t suppose . . . ?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t make sense of it.”

  “Nor I,” Zheng said, and turned her gaze to the green-eyed undead, who was silent.

  Bone searched the chamber and tugged at the slab. Nothing. He stepped onto the cart. He gestured dramatically. “Onward,” he said. Nothing happened. He kicked at the iron post with no result other than an aching foot. He sat dejectedly upon the slab. “Greatest second-story man of the Spiral Sea,” he sighed. “I am out of my depth on the Braid of Spice.”

  “The knot,” Zheng said. “Surely it has to do with the knot.”

  “I remember,” said Swarnatep, making the others jump. “I remember a story of a conqueror from the exotic West, red-haired like this woman here, who came to this city and found the knot.”

  “That sounds like Nayne of the Eldshore,” Gaunt said. “She is said to have invaded many lands unfamiliar to us, before her army perished in the desert.”

  “In the story, the conqueror tries but fails to unravel the knot. She raises her sword in frustration. Yet some glimmer of enlightenment comes to her, and she says, ‘To destroy is not to surpass. I want no victory that is unearned.’ And alone among cities, she declined to conquer Qushkent.”

  “I am not certain Nayne could have cut this cord,” Gaunt mused, studying it. “It looks to contain strands of ironsilk.”

  Bone scratched his chin. “This implies to me we are on the right track.” He turned around. “If only we could read that writing.”

  There came more pounding on the door.

  “We could ask them,” Zheng said.

  “No, thank you,” said Bone.

  “I will attempt something,” Gaunt said, closing her eyes and gripping her saber.

  Her saber. Strange that Bone thought of it that way, and not as Flint’s saber. Flint, who, it seemed, had betrayed them. He knew that greed tore apart alliances and knit new ones like a drunken seamstress, and this was one reason in his thieving career he’d worked alone. He did not trust the particular alliance of Gaunt and Crypttongue. It would bear watching.

  Meanwhile he crouched beside the knot. Any solution, his instincts told him, must involve this rope in some way. He ran his hands along it, seeking to divine its full shape.

  “Are you in love, Imago Bone?” Widow Zheng asked.

  “Hush, if you please. I am working.”

  The pounding resumed.

  “Is silence too much to ask of you people?” Bone exclaimed.

  “I have it,” Ga
unt said. “One of the spirits already in the sword was a mercenary of Qushkent. He will translate in return for release.” She began studying the walls afresh, murmuring to herself.

  One wonders at the ethics of making a trapped soul’s release conditional, Bone mused. Then he thought, I’m dwelling upon ethics? I’ve been in the East too long . . .

  Zheng and the dead woman had begun talking in low tones. Bone wanted to shush them, but that seemed unfair. He continued to explore the tangles of the knot.

  “If I dwelled in your town long ago,” Zheng said, “did you know me?”

  “I think perhaps I did. If you are who I believe you to be, then I knew you as a boy, and loved you from afar.”

  “I suppose it is strange for you, being a woman now.”

  “One dead body is much like another.”

  “Do you not wish to depart, to whatever paradise or reincarnation awaits you?”

  “That departure is inevitable enough. I find I want to linger near you. Is this acceptable?”

  “It is strange! Flattering, sure. But unsettling. If you knew me, why did your people attack me, beneath the sands?”

  “We have long been under the mental sway of the Leviathan Minds. They dislike surface dwellers digging too far beneath the sands. More, there was a relic that they preferred not come to light.”

  “The fragment of the map.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bone,” Gaunt said. “Zheng . . . Swarnatep. Listen.

  “‘Hear now the secret sayings of the Fire Saint, whose resting place is beneath the slab.

  “‘I have taught that Stargrace is in mortal danger from Lightrender, and needs human help to survive. This is not precisely true. But it is the way of humankind to be flattered by a plea for aid. What Stargrace desires, but does not require, is the joy of all beings who are willing to endure the joy of others. Do not sever or destroy that which can become your lifeline.

  “‘It is true that one day the wicked will face damnation, and the angels will ask for human help in throwing the evil ones into the fire. But those who volunteer to damn their fellows, they themselves shall be cast in. Do not fall.