The surroundings did indeed resemble cream. Shivering, they crept onto a series of rocky slabs that a kindly or imaginative observer might have considered steps. Stone rose on either side, dark suggestions of form. In such an environment it was easier to credit the teachings of the Undetermined, that all observed reality was emptiness decked out for the ball, and all willful creatures the dancers. He might have asked Katta about that, and it occurred to Bone that Katta also would have made a good guide in a situation where sight was untrustworthy. He hoped Katta would escape Deadfall—and that Deadfall would escape whatever madness had possessed it.
Widow Zheng interrupted his thoughts. “Swarnatep . . . how long ago did you know—me?”
“I do not know how much time has passed,” said the dead voice. “A short while from the Leviathans’ perspective. A long while from ours. The Heavenwalls were still being built.”
“Did I hurt you in some way?”
Silence.
“Speak, if you would. I’ve loved many men. I’ve even tumbled with Art Quilldrake once or twice. A woman once too, if truth be told. I’ve also loved with no hope of response. I can sense such a thing in others. Did I hurt you?”
“You did not mean any harm. If a man is blinded by the sun, is the sun at fault? Can the sun choose not to dazzle? No one who inspires love from afar can be said to cause hurt.”
“Some, upon knowing they are admired, use the admiration cruelly. Some who are beautiful privately see themselves as wretches and admirers as fools worthy of contempt. I may have behaved in this way, in my youth.”
“We can guess at karma, but we can glimpse it only as shadows in the mist. Whatever the errors of this life, you were blameless in that one. And perhaps the youth of Widow Zheng was less cruel than you believe.”
“You cannot judge that, Swarnatep. But I thank you.”
“Zheng, Swarnatep,” Gaunt said in her most gentle voice. “I don’t wish to silence you, but I must. Foes may be pursuing us even now, and our voices may lead them to us.”
“Of course,” Zheng said, and Swarnatep said, “Yes.”
Bone listened, thinking he should have thought of this matter before Gaunt. Yet, although he’d trained himself to consider carefully every dispatch from his ears, he heard nothing but a sigh of winds and the crunch and scuffle of their footsteps upon the rocks.
Down they went, into perceived emptiness. Into Xembala.
It was a difficult passage for Imago Bone. There was a daydreamy quality to his mind, which returned to reality only in the presence of danger. There was the risk of a plunge into some abyss, perhaps inches distant, but the setting was so peaceful and featureless, Bone’s mind began winging away, unable to convince itself to focus. His will had to drag his fancy back to his side, like a messenger bird eager to be gone. He had to struggle not to think, not to plan, not to muse, not to imagine how it would be to fly a Karvak balloon to steal fire from the sun. He had to be entirely open to the sensation of descending the fog-shrouded mountain path. The difficulty of it made him feel like a rat gnawing at the mesh of a cage. It would be absurd to slip now, to perish after all that came before, simply because he could not calm his mind. He tried to accept the absurdity, perceive it as he might perceive a peculiarly gnarled lump of rock, hanging over the void. In a similar way he perceived his own imagination, and his weariness, and his bruises, and the motion. He heard his heartbeat and his breath, and the breathing of his companions, or two of them at least.
This way of thinking, this acceptance of his own mind, remained difficult. Yet it was no longer excruciating.
Without warning they broke into sunlight.
The living stopped and stared. Their companion sat its desiccated body upon a boulder and looked with dead eyes upon a paradise.
Down below the endless mists, the cloud cover had a look of liquid gold, sunlight fashioned into a river in the sky. Below lay sheer variegated granite walls many thousands of feet tall. Veins of red crystal twisted here and there within the cliffs, catching the sunlight with ruby reflections recalling blood upon sand. Elsewhere, waterfalls streamed in white threads down the gray, visible for miles in either direction, dozens upon dozens, until the great canyon twisted out of sight to west and east. There were many more waterfalls upon the south cliffs, but the north had a large share. Here and there extensions of the canyon walls jutted out like fortresses, green valley-floor forests like besieging armies. A blue river, like a mirror of the cloudy one in the sky, wound through the woods.
Bone glimpsed upon one of the outcroppings, far to the east, a palace seemingly formed of chalcedony and beryl and jade—a kingly treasure in a glance. He saw no balloon.
“Do you see the palace?” he said, pointing.
“I cannot make it out,” Gaunt said after a time. “But do you glimpse the pagoda across the canyon, on the rocky hill? It looks perfect for writing poetry.”
“Hm. Can’t see it.”
“It’s somewhat obscured by the trees.”
“Hey,” Zheng said, “I see something. It’s a cottage, maybe a hermit’s house. Little bit of chimney smoke. Over in that arm of the valley there.”
Squinting, Bone said, “I don’t see it.” Gaunt shook her head.
“What about you, Swarnatep?” Zheng said, turning. Then: “Swarnatep!”
The body had slumped, unable to maintain its posture.
“It seems . . .” Swarnatep gasped, “the danger past, I cannot compel my spirit to remain any longer.” The body fell to the ground. “Farewell, Xia.”
It said no more.
Bone thought he heard shouts far above in the mist. He could have been mistaken, but the sight of death renewed, revived his worries. “Not so certain it’s over.”
“It seems wrong to leave this body here,” Gaunt said. “But the lady of Qushkent had always expected to arrive down here. Just not so gently.”
Zheng looked distant, staring at the bright river of clouds. “Vultures, earth, fire—it is all one. We come, and we return. What did he say . . . she say?”
Bone helped her up. “Come.”
The descent through the light was more obviously terrifying than the descent through the clouds, and with precipitous and obvious death looming at either hand, Bone returned to himself.
Thus his mind churned as his feet sought the treacherous stones. Xia, Swarnatep had said. The implications of the name swirled around his brains like clouds around the promontory, and with as little clarity. But if Zheng had somehow once been Xia . . .
Like a storm upon a mountain a thought returned to him. The message from the falcon still remained within his pocket. What he read was a series of characters in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell.
When the wolf prowls
The haven of silkworms
Trust a fox.
Gaunt descended past alpine flowers and pines, which gave way to cypress and willow and at last to palm and eucalyptus. Where once she’d felt chilly, by the time their path became horizontal, a stretch of red earth meandering through emerald grass into forest shadows, she was covered in sweat.
She’d had some small hope of finding Crypttongue in the valley, but these hopes had drowned as the sweat pooled. There was simply too much green, too much territory. Crypttongue might have impaled a tree trunk and remained there for a generation. And why should that worry her? Surely it was a wicked thing, slaying lives and capturing souls.
“Are you all right?” Bone asked her.
“I’ve slain others,” Gaunt said. “It weighs on me.”
“I’m not sure dispatching possessed corpses counts as slaying.”
“Before that. The Karvaks in the city.” She recalled Crypttongue in her hands, the power it lent her. “A man at the Cave of a Thousand Illuminations. Even in our line of work, it should not feel good to kill.”
“I am not certain I know, anymore, what our line of work is.”
“You are evading the point.”
“Evasion used to be our line of work.
Or at least the part that followed the claiming of objects.”
“Then we really are in a new realm. I have lost an object and long for it.”
“We will find Innocence again, Persimmon.”
“Yes. Of course.”
She made a point of stepping toward the trees and studying their foliage. Bright-plumed birds squawked to announce their presence. Gaunt wondered if these woods were the source of some of Qushkent’s colorful avians.
“We’d best keep moving,” said Widow Zheng.
“Zheng,” Gaunt said. “What Swarnatep said—”
“I know what Swarnatep said. I also know Karvaks are after us. We must move.”
“Where are we even going?” Gaunt asked. “We lack time to consult our pieces of the map.”
“Into the woods!” Bone yelled and pushed them along the path to make the point. “I will explain later!”
Beneath twisting branches and the wingbeats of startled avians, they saw another winged form far above.
“A falcon,” Bone said. “I think it’s Steelfox’s. It gave me this.” He showed them a note.
“‘Trust a fox’?” Zheng said once they’d read it. “To the chickens, the fox and the wolf are interchangeable.”
“I am not claiming we should trust Steelfox,” Bone said. “But her falcon might have killed me up there, instead of telling me this.”
“What, then, is the wolf?” Gaunt asked.
“Too many questions,” Zheng said. “Not enough li between us and trouble.”
They proceeded into the woods with the vague notion of finding the river. What had seemed a simple matter upon the heights now appeared a ferocious trial. The path faded into the undergrowth, and the three had to contend with vines, bramble, ditches, and a sky full of green. This was the mirror image of desert travel—life all around, but the horizon impossible to see. The green-tinged cloud-light began to ebb, with as yet no sign of the river. Gaunt began considering dubious campsites when Zheng called out, “I see the hermit’s hut!”
A vine-shrouded gray ruin rose here, a half-crumbled stone dome reminiscent of the wayside stupas of the Braid of Spice. It was no haven, but it was shelter.
“I could have sworn . . .” Zheng began, before shaking her head. She sat and stared overhead at the green canopy, leaves whispering in the breeze.
“We might as well stop here,” Bone said. “I advise every caution, however. Let’s search the area, keep to our own food and water, and set no fire.”
“We won’t last long on our own provisions, Bone,” Gaunt said.
“You two do as you wish,” Zheng said, rising. “I know mangoes when I see them.”
Bone proceeded to search the clearing, while Gaunt investigated the stupa’s interior. There was no evidence of hermits. She cut away vines and leveled the earth to make it a more pleasant shelter. She discovered a fallen statue—of the Undetermined, perhaps? The posture was seated, but the face was worn away. It was like the shadow of a man or a woman, turned to stone.
Zheng offered them mangoes, but Gaunt and Bone regretfully declined, even though the orange fruit looked delicious. Soon the pulp spattered Zheng’s eager face. For all that the widow was Gaunt’s elder, she seemed in that moment like a mischievous little girl. It was hard not to follow suit. But something in Persimmon Gaunt did not trust paradises. Give me an honest graveyard every time.
“I’ll take first watch,” Bone said. “Rest.”
Gaunt felt a swelling of gratitude at her husband as she curled up within the stupa. Then, mercifully, she felt nothing for a time.
In the shadowed dawn, heralded by a chorus of squawks and cheeps, Gaunt discovered that Bone had fallen asleep on watch. Fortunately nothing had found them.
“I am chagrined,” Bone said when she roused him. “I must be getting old.”
“You had a long day yesterday. Zheng?”
She prodded the widow.
“Eh? Is that you, old Bison. Or no, you must be young Aurochs . . .”
Gaunt felt Zheng’s forehead. “She is feverish, Bone.”
“The mangoes?”
“Impossible to say. She had a long day too.”
“The hermit,” Zheng said, sitting up. “The hermit has returned.”
Gaunt and Bone looked at the forest, at each other, and at Zheng. One thing they did not look at was any hermit.
“Don’t be rude, kids,” Zheng said, offering her unseen friend a bow.
Gaunt and Bone also bowed, in the apparent direction of the unseen apparition. Zheng snorted at their clumsiness and spoke rapidly. The language was the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, but Gaunt did not understand it. She suspected it was a northern dialect; she and Bone had learned the Imperial version, a southern dialect, used in the capital, along the Walls and down the Braid.
After her exchange with the “hermit,” Zheng said, “His name is Jamyang. He was once a man of Daojing, the emperor’s seat of power in the north. He had another name then, of which he does not speak. His new name is in the language of the Plateau of Geam, because Xembala takes many of its beliefs from there.”
She sounded lucid, which worried Gaunt more than mad rambling would have. Gaunt asked, “Does he have advice for us?”
“He says this valley is the metaphysical body of the Mother Goddess of the world, whose head is a great volcano to the east, and whose feet break into an underworld to the west. In between lie seven vortices of power, corresponding to seven similar vortices in the human body. Each lies along the river. Once in a lifetime, inhabitants of the valley travel the vortices, seeking harmony within themselves, and perhaps true enlightenment. He has made the journey and can take us to the river.”
Gaunt and Bone shared a look. Gaunt said, “Zheng . . . I must confess something. This man . . .”
“Jamyang.”
“We cannot see Jamyang at all, nor hear him.”
“Nor are there footprints,” Bone said, “or disturbed foliage.”
“I get the point,” Zheng said. She began using the northern dialect again. She stood still afterward, nodding. “Jamyang says the illusion of reality is thinner in the valley. People may see things that are unreal, or they themselves may be perceived by others as unreal.”
“In which category,” Gaunt asked, “would he place himself?”
After a pause: “He says he is perhaps not the best person to answer your question, for as a follower of the Undetermined, he is accustomed to seeing nothing as real. Indeed, he cannot perceive you and Bone, but he is willing to accept that you exist for me, as he does. He sees no reason to privilege his own reality above yours.”
Bone rubbed his forehead. “Maybe I should give up and eat a mango, no liquor being available.”
“You may be right,” Gaunt said. “Perhaps eating the food here brings us more in tune with the processes of the valley.”
“The way you said that, it’s almost as if you really understand what is happening.”
“I know! Isn’t language fun?”
“I’m glad he can’t hear you,” Zheng said. “You are being a little rude.”
“Zheng, you have a fever,” Gaunt said.
“I admit,” Zheng said, “I don’t feel all that well . . . but I do think we should follow Jamyang.”
“Where is the fabled practicality of Qiangguo?” Bone asked.
“It’s not gone, foreign devil,” Zheng snapped. “Let’s suppose I made Jamyang up. He’s just an aspect of my thoughts. We’re no worse off, then. We’re still stuck in the woods, trying to find a river. Maybe this is how my mind is trying to help itself. If Jamyang takes us anywhere crazy, you can say so. It’s not like I’m asking you to trust a Karvak.”
“Who said anything about trusting Karvaks?” Bone objected.
“You did!”
“Did not!”
“Enough, you two,” Gaunt said. “Zheng, would you kindly ask your provisionally real friend the way to the river?”
Soon they were following Zheng through unexpec
ted pathways, animal tracks with an occasional stone marker of great antiquity. At last they reached the shore of a wide blue river. The waters looked still and deep and hundreds of feet wide. On the far shore was a better-tended pathway, with a raft moored to a post beside it and a canoe sitting on the riverside mud. No one was visible.
“Could we swim this?” Gaunt said doubtfully.
“Jamyang does not advise it. The currents can destroy the unwary.”
“I don’t suppose you or he see anyone on the far side?”
After a time Zheng shook her head. “Jamyang says that while it’s possible to make one’s own versions of the larger or smaller craft, it’s best to rely on what the followers of the Undetermined have left us. But we have no guide.”
“We lack the equipment to make a worthy boat,” Bone said. “A simple raft, perhaps.”
Gaunt remembered the river crossing at Yao’an and the bargain-rate rafts of goat carcasses. “Perhaps all we need is something we can hold onto, something that will keep our heads above water.”
Bone rubbed his chin. “Steelfox wants ironsilk for her balloons, doesn’t she? Maybe we can make air sacs. Wrap the ironsilk into bladders, seal them with sap . . .”
“Yes,” Zheng said. “That is interesting . . .”
With great effort they spent the morning and afternoon building a bamboo frame and attaching their makeshift bladders to it. A test proved it sufficiently buoyant to support one swimmer. They decided Zheng must go first, and Jamyang, who believed himself a sufficiently good swimmer to tag along with occasional grabs of the frame, would come along.
Into the water Zheng went. Gaunt feared for her, and once or twice Zheng struggled with a current but spun right again. The widow was surprisingly spry in the water. Eventually she was nearly at the far shore, when the strongest current yet tugged her downstream.
“Zheng!” Gaunt yelled helplessly.
Zheng, appearing almost dragged, cast away the frame and the ironsilk dress with it. She kicked and stroked her way to shore, clutching reeds.
The Silk Map, all they had of it, drifted out of sight.
The Silk Map Page 32