The Silk Map
Authors: Chris Willrich
Published 2014 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Silk Map
. Copyright © 2014 by Chris Willrich. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover illustration © Kerem Beyit
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
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Inquiries should be addressed to
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Pyr
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Amherst, New York 14228
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
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Willrich, Chris, 1967â
The silk map : a Gaunt and Bone novel / by Chris Willrich.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61614-899-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-61614-900-0 (ebook)
1. Missing personâFiction. 2. Fantasy fiction. 3. MapsâFiction. I. Title.
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PS3623.I57775S54 2014
813'.6âdc23
2013047298
Printed in the United States of America
The Scroll of Years
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For my parents, who've always been ready to walk a thousand miles for us.
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Chapter 1: Fools of Five-Toe Peak
Chapter 2: The Secret History of the Sky Khanate
Chapter 3: In the Alley of the Scholars of Life
Chapter 4: Interlude: Confessions of a Magic Carpet
Chapter 6: Flint and Quilldrake, Limited
Chapter 7: Beyond the Jade Gate
Chapter 8: The Desert of Hungry Shadows
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Chapter 10: Interlude: Testimony of a Traveler's Robe
Chapter 11: Cave of a Thousand Illuminations
Chapter 12: Daughter of the Sky
Chapter 13: The Question of Flight
Chapter 14: The Gift of the Great Sage
Chapter 15: The Gash in the Earthe
Chapter 16: Interlude: Observations of an Overcoat
Chapter 17: The Necropolis of Nine Years
Chapter 18: Interlude: Suspicions of a Strangling Cloth
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Chapter 27: Bull-Demon Mountain
Chapter 28: Interlude: Epiphanies of an Emperor's Robe
Chapter 29: The Man Who Would be Sericulturalist
Chapter 32: Steel of the Steppe
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For simplicity the distance unit
li
is assumed to be roughly three miles.
Spinning in a twilight world between darkness and light, earth and sky, Being and The Other Thing, Monkey flees.
In her dreams she's flying again over Qiangguo and the lands that encircle it, bright emeralds of the Mangrove Coast, green sprawl of the Argosy Steppes, browns, reds, and grays of the deserts where the great trade road meanders like a thread woven by a trembling hand. Monkey would tremble too, if it were all real. Once she truly leapt across clouds and made Heaven shake; now she can't even scratch her nose.
Yet in her mind she's free. And she sees things, and she hears.
Things that certain parties wish she hadn't.
She winks over her shoulder at the dozen dark shapes that dog her, careening through the sky like black meteors. Although meteors really shouldn't have arms, claws, and three blazing red eyes.
They are intimidating, these dream-monsters, but she is Lady Monkey and she's not about to hide at home, not when her curiosity's aroused.
As she descends from her cloud-leap, she hears the whispering of the Heavenwalls, those twin fortifications that cross the land like coiling dragons, meeting at Qiangguo's capital in the east and in the heart of the desert in the west. There an eternal firestorm swirls in the sands where true dragons go to mate.
And Monkey, because she is Monkey, hears the hiss of their power, their breath, as it is siphoned into the Red Wall and the Blue, and drawn across the land, absorbing still more vitality from the land itself as it goes. At last this accumulated
chi
converges at Qiangguo's capital and whorls through the Purple Forbidden City, unheeded by the inhabitants save as a gust of wind here, a rumble of stone there. Having swirled and mixed, the chi flows back to the Heavenwalls' tails, and the cycle continues. Back and forth the power travels, unguided, for it is as yet unmastered, waiting for someone to give it shape.
There is something uneasy about its whisperings today.
Monkey's dream-form descends near the earth, where three of the clawed shadow-shapes catch up with her.
One slashes, and Monkey's blood falls upon the nearest Wall, the red. A second does likewise, and blood falls upon the water of a nearby lake. The third's three eyes flash in expectation.
“You will perish here,”
it says, voice deep and urgent as an avalanche,
“and be poisoned in the waking world.”
Its words are full of refined loathing, the kind ordinary mortals only aspire to. Anybody can hate, but it takes multiple lifetimes of caustic living to become a Charstalker.
Monkey, she has to admit to herself, might be in a bit of trouble. Still, she is the dream-image of a power that shook Heaven.
As she falls past a juniper tree, she stretches her sky-metal staff to catch a branch, thinking thoughts of lightness. The branch groans and swishes back into place, throwing Monkey in a new direction. She somersaults as she moves, surprising one Charstalker with a bash to the shadow-cranium.
The creature becomes a billow of black smoke, snaking its way west and south toward its master. There are sounds of alarm from a nearby village, as dreaming people sense the battle.
A second Charstalker veers in for a slash, but Monkey's free hand shoots out and grabs the thing in what passes for the neck. It rakes at Monkey like a housecat being given a bath. This might not have been a good idea. The third Charstalker spoke true; these wounds might poison Monkey's own chi.
However, at that point they collide with the bricks of the Red Heavenwall.
The Charstalker, triple-eyes flashing with rage, becomes a smoke-trail, following its companion. There are shouts from a guard post atop the Wall, as dream-soldiers sense the conflict.