Free The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel by Chris Willrich

lover or nemesis. Between baby-kicks and voices, however, the veil of sleep was ever pierced.
    “So,” Eshe said to Bone, “the Night’s Auditors pursue.”
    “So,” Bone said to Eshe, “you know of them.”
    “No need to be crafty. I would like to help you.”
    “I am coming to think that’s true, but I am also coming to think the Eshe we know is but the crown of an iceberg. I don’t trust icebergs.”
    “In that case you and Gaunt are in a cold sea without a boat.”
    Bone chuckled. “The Starborn Lands do seem a sea of sorts, in which we’re but droplets. A strange sea, with peculiar currents. So: you wonder whose hand dropped us here? Well then: the kleptomancers of Palmary. You have heard of them, too?”
    “The sorcerer-cabal empowered by theft? Who has not?”
    “You may also have heard that two of their number were slain, some few years back.”
    “I might have. That was you?” To Gaunt’s ears Eshe sounded a bit horrified, but more than a trifle impressed.
    “Gaunt is blameless,” Bone replied.
    Rarely have I heard myself described so , Gaunt thought.
    “It was I,” Bone said, “who facilitated their perusal of the damnable tome that claimed their lives. It was self-defense of a sort, but I do bear responsibility . . .”
    Gaunt heard him struggle between braggadocio and evasion. She might have kicked him a little, if she could.
    “So,” Eshe said, “you have been running from their colleagues ever since?”
    “Oddly, no,” Bone said. “We wandered the West for many moons without pursuit. We were somewhat preoccupied with this or that. It was not until we settled near Palmary, with an eye to raising a family, that the mark was placed.” A sour tone spilled over his words. “Foolish of me. I thought myself wise about the area, and about them. I’d assumed they’d shrugged off their loss.”
    Gaunt thought, So, behind your protectiveness lies guilt.
    Eshe was silent a moment. An owl hooted. She said, “Perhaps they had . . . for it seems to me there may be other reasons for this assassination, and these assassins in particular.”
    “You have my full attention.”
    “What if you are not simply a threat, but an opportunity?”
    An owl cried out again, closer. The other night-noises dimmed. Bone said, “I have a notion . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “That we are being ambushed.”
    Gaunt rose without preamble, nodded to the others, and prepared to fight. She again heard an owl, this time somewhere in the mists of the forest floor. She doubted this owl was winged, or that its prey were mice.

After she claimed her scroll, events at first proceeded auspiciously for Next-One-A-Boy. Flybait gave a good account of her (complete with interjected growling, clawing, and leaping) and Five Finger Chang was impressed by the array of ancient weapons they piled at his feet.
    “They are magical,” he murmured, rubbing his mustaches. “They must be. They will help the gallant fraternity rob from the filthy rich and give one percent to the noble poor.” His good hand rubbed his maimed hand, the one studded with bloodstained jade shards, and he bowed to the stone shoe in the alcove nearby, symbol of his patron immortal.
    Next-One-A-Boy disagreed with him, and almost dared say so aloud. Her status had already improved considerably among the Cloud and Soil Society. She would be allowed a bedroll away from the lower part of the bandits’ caves, where the spray from the underground waterfall chilled the river guards and the hangers-on, and where she’d stayed since the day she’d first arrived, bearing a rich scholar’s purse and a defiant grin.
    The caves’ higher sections lay beside the upper plunge of the waterfall, but it possessed overhead fissures admitting shafts of sunlight. There the bandits proper schemed the fleecing of towns and travelers. Five Finger Chang sat there upon a dragon-crossed carpet between spears of sun, surveying his new toys.
    “Um,” Flybait said. “I’m not