Operation Arcana - eARC

by John Joseph Adams

  Pahlu got to his feet and aimed himself at the butcher. He pulled the pin.

  The deck was treacherous underfoot, slick with blood and littered with scraps of scuttler. He ran flat out, leaping human and sraa bodies. As he came up to the butcher, it swung a forelimb in his direction, a lazy cut that would have decapitated him if he hadn’t ducked. Popping up inside its reach, he pressed himself against the underside of its body, one arm extended. His right hand, holding the grenade, stretched up along the butcher’s carapace until it found the cracked lens. He slammed the grenade against it, feeling the glass give slightly, and held it there with all the strength he could muster.

  There was a long, strained moment of stillness. Pahlu, cheek pressed against the butcher, could hear the click and whirr of tiny clockwork through its metal skin.

  Then the world went white.

  Pahlu woke up feeling better than he’d ever felt in his life. He was floating on a golden cloud, staring up at the brilliant blue of the sky, his body a distant, numb anchor far below him.

  A shadow fell across him, and he blinked. A brown blob resolved into the features of Lieutenant Sark Elb.

  “Oh,” he said. His throat felt raspy, as though he’d been shouting. “Are we dead?”

  “Not yet,” Sark said.

  That’s good. Pahlu’s thoughts felt fuzzy. If he’d been dead, then this would have been Heaven, and that would have meant his father and Domus were right all along.

  He sat up, or tried to. His muscles didn’t seem to work the way they should. Sark reached out and put a hand on his chest, just a light touch. It stopped him as completely as if she’d lowered a thousand-pound weight.

  “Lie still,” she said. “Rev’s still tying you off, and we gave you a pretty big dose of juice.”

  “Juice?” Pahlu said.

  “A powerful opiod,” Rev said from his right. “Useful as a painkiller in limited doses.”

  “Oh.” He flopped his head to the right. She was on her knees, bending over him, working on a knotted bandage that swathed his right arm. There was something wrong there, too. He wasn’t sure if it was the drug, but he thought there ought to be more of his right arm. He tried to wiggle his fingers, and silver pain lanced up into his chest, even through the comforting haze. His throat went thick.

  “Oh,” he said again.

  “Good tactics,” Rev said, finishing the knot. “Using the body of the butcher to shield yourself from the shrapnel.”

  Pahlu struggled to remember if that had been his plan. As best he could recall, he’d gone underneath the sraa because it seemed like the best way to keep from getting skewered and dropping the grenade. He hadn’t really expected to survive.

  “Did I kill it?” he said.

  “Yup,” Sark said. “Blasted its eye right in and sent nasty metal chunks through all its tender spots.” She paused, with the hint of a smile. “I have to say: I’m impressed.”

  “Thanks.” Pahlu turned his head away from his maimed arm, feeling dizzy. “What happened to the rest of them?”

  “We got a little help.” Sark pointed, and Pahlu flopped his head the other way to follow her finger.

  He was on the deck of the Wrath, lying on a canvas stretcher near the rail. Beyond the deck, he could see the blasted ground of the Waste. And, a few hundred yards away, the looming shape of another landship.

  Serrianople towered as high above the light cruiser as Marilei’s Wrath herself did above a scuttler. The battleship looked like a mountain on the move, a solid wall of metal the height of church spire back home. Unlike Wrath and the cutter—unlike any other class of landship—it didn’t have long, curving struts leading down to wheels and engine pods. Where the light cruiser was designed to keep the sraa at arm’s length, the battleship was meant to confront them head-on; its hull was supported on enormous caterpillar treads, like Wrath’s rear pods, but they were concealed from view by a heavy skirt of interlocking steel plates that hung down from the hull and protected the engines from sraa. At the Academy, Pahlu had heard there was a whole twilight world under there, amidst the screaming, grinding steam pipes, and that each battleship had a corps of soldiers dedicated to hunting down any sraa that managed to sneak underneath.

  On the deck of the battleship, high above, three triple-gunned turrets aimed their long barrels over her starboard rail. Men swarmed over them, tiny as ants, revealing their true, massive scale.

  “The captain sent up a signal rocket as soon as we started our run,” Sark said, looking at the battleship with a satisfied expression. “Fortunately for us, Serrianople was on the southern edge of her patrol area. The sraa turned away as soon as she came over the horizon.”

  “The sraa ran?” Pahlu said. The warm, cottony feeling was rising all around him again. He suddenly felt very tired.

  “The sraa never go up against a battleship,” Sark said. “They’re smart enough to know when they haven’t got a chance.”

  “Until today,” Revya said softly, “the sraa had never ambushed a ship. They are smart enough to know better.” She was staring up at the mountainous steel war machine, too, but her expression was more like regret. “And they never, ever give up. Someday . . .”

  But Pahlu was no longer listening. He closed his eyes, and the black waters of blessed sleep closed over him.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. He is the author of the military fantasies The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne, and the middle-grade fantasy The Forbidden Library. His website is djangowexler.com.

  THE GRAPHOLOGY OF HEMORRHAGE

  Yoon Ha Lee

  Rao Nawong, aide to Magician Tepwe Kodai, had not been on the hillside for long with her. The sky threatened rain on and off, and the air smelled of river poetry, of lakes with their scarves of reeds. Water would make their mission here, in the distant shadow of the Spiders’ fortress, more difficult, if not outright impossible. The Empire’s defeat of the upstart Spiders, whose rebellion had sparked a general conflagration in the southwest provinces, depended on the mission’s success. At the moment, Nawong found it hard to care. His world had narrowed to Kodai’s immediate needs, politics be damned.

  Kodai was scowling at the sky as she drew a roll of silk out of a brass tube. She had clever hands, which he had always admired, precise in every motion, as good with a brush as she was with the pliers and hammers and snippers that she used for the gadgets that were her hobby. “I still think it’s going to rain,” she muttered. “But this has to be done.”

  Nawong hesitated for a long time before he said what he said next. “Does it?” he asked at last.

  She looked at him sidelong, no doubt guessing his intent. Waited.

  His hands tightened on the umbrella he had brought just in case. Stupid thing to carry in the field this close to the enemy, but the nature of graphological magic meant protecting Kodai’s ink while it dried. He had once asked, when they were both new to each other, why the hell couldn’t magicians use a pencil. She’d explained that the nature of the instrument changed the nature of the marks: you got different strokes and thicknesses and curves with a piece of graphite than you did with the traditional brush, and this in turn affected the spell framework in such a way that you’d have to discard centuries of research and start over with a completely new way of constructing spells. For the longest time he’d thought she was making this up to shut him up. Only gradually had he realized that this was not, in fact, the case.

  “The spell-plague,” Nawong said. “Don’t do it this way. Use one of the traditional spells.” One of the spells that wouldn’t kill her in the casting, he meant. But he didn’t say it outright.

  Kodai began unrolling the silk, then stopped. Waited a little more. When h
e thought he would have to make another plea, she surprised him by speaking, in a low, rueful voice. “You know, you’ve spent years dealing with the fact that I cart around so many books and documents. Yet I’ve never once heard you complain about making the arrangements. Why is that?”

  While it was true that he didn’t believe in talking just to hear himself talk, he couldn’t claim he never complained, either. “It’s the nature of your work,” he said.

  Her eyebrows raised. “Be honest,” she said, as though he was the one who needed sympathy.

  It was Nawong’s turn to be silent. He met her eyes, although he had a hard time doing so, trying to figure out what she wanted of him.

  The Empire had developed a class of spells linked by their destructiveness: storms of fire, sheets of blading ice, earth swallowing cities. Such spells were not without their limitations. The performing magician had to know the languages of the region so they could bind the magic to its target, and copy out the spell, adopting a handwriting with the particular characteristics dictated by the spell’s effects, whether this was the volatility of fast writing or the murderous intent of clubbed vertical segments or the fire nature of certain sweeping diagonal strokes.

  The few other military magicians Nawong had met had little interest in reading their victims’ writings after wielding fire or ice or earth to destroy their civilizations. Kodai was different, however. Kodai treasured her books and poems and crude posters, even if they belonged to the Empire’s enemies. She’d carried them around even after the ability to read them was burned out of her, never to return.

  This last mission, against the Spiders, was different. The Spiders’ writing system was based on the Imperial writing system, which made it impossible to focus a spell on them without losing literacy in Imperial. It was a terrible thing to ask of a magician, someone trained to the nuances of writing and literature. But then, beyond being exiled to the military in the first place, Kodai being sent to this particular assignment—putatively on account of her brilliance—was a punishment. More relevantly, from her superiors’ point of view, the entanglement of the two writing systems meant that anything that hit the Spiders would also hit the Imperials in the region, and a full evacuation would cede too much territory, enable too much mischief. They trusted that she would find a workaround.

  Kodai’s solution, if you could call it that, was to come up with a completely new class of spell. The difficulty, from Nawong’s point of view, was that it would require her to sacrifice her life.

  “Lieutenant,” Kodai said. She had averted her eyes and was tensed as though she expected rain to fall like blows. “I have to do this one way or another.”

  “We don’t,” he said, meaning that we. “We could desert. I don’t imagine you’re very good at hunting or foraging, but my mother used to take me into the woods to gather greens and mushrooms. We’d find a way to survive, far from here.”

  “Just what kind of livelihood do you think there would be?” Kodai said. “Do you think the Spider rebellion is going to stop if we don’t stop it?”

  And it was true. It would be enormously risky to look for a hiding place elsewhere in the Empire. The disorder in the southwest might make it harder to track them into the outlying lands, but was a threat in itself. The Empire was little liked by its neighbors after the past decades of expansion. They would have difficulties wherever they went.

  “It’s a terrible chance,” Nawong agreed. “But it’s better than no chance. Which is what you’re proposing.”

  “We are doing a terrible thing here,” Kodai said. He didn’t miss how she, too, said we: generous, considering the most he could contribute was to hold an umbrella for her, or carry her ink sticks. He wasn’t the one with the specialist knowledge. “Maybe, if I carry through with it, other magicians will see just how terrible it is.”

  He wanted to shout at her. “That’s a ridiculous reason.”

  “Someone has to fight,” she said. “Even fighting with ink and brush. And some of the Spiders are as ruthless as we are.” She was referring to the tactician who had taken out an entire division, which had included one of her old classmates. Nawong remembered how little she had eaten the entire month after that incident. “I will do this last thing, since it would disgrace my family for me to fail, and then I will be done.”

  Curiously, it was the mention of her family that stopped him from pressing the point. The Tepwe line was a proud one. She had spoken rarely of her family in all the time he had known her. The tremor of her voice when she mentioned them now did not escape him.

  “Then you may as well get started,” Nawong said, feeling each word like a knife.

  Kodai smiled at him without smiling—her eyes shadowed but alert—and spread the silk upon the grass. Nawong weighted the corners with the ritual stones, heavy at heart.

  Magicians in the Empire ranged from those who told auguries to the Empress’s court to those who copied out charms for millers and farmers. Kodai’s original trajectory should have been toward court. Magicianship was overwhelmingly the province of the nobility, and for all its importance, the military enjoyed much less prestige than the literati. So Kodai’s parents, who had anticipated benefiting from their daughter’s connections for years to come, reacted poorly when she enlisted.

  It wasn’t entirely their fault. Kodai’s father had never quite understood his daughter, consistently giving her gifts, like sentimental adventure novels, that his oldest son would have appreciated more. (And did, actually. Kodai and her brother swapped books regularly.) On the other hand, their relationship wasn’t so bad that he would have had reason to expect that she’d run off to the army.

  As for Kodai’s mother, she had romanticized visions of her daughter having erudite discussions on poetic forms in scented parlors while zithers played, or practicing calligraphy beneath gingko trees turning color. The fact that a number of court magicians led such existences didn’t help. It came as quite a shock to her when Kodai broke the news to her.

  What Kodai’s parents never knew, and were never going to find out, was that the choice to enter the military had never been a choice. Sleeping in a leaky tent, picking at moldy biscuits, having to wear a uniform whose dyes ran in the rain, to say nothing of the run-ins with dysentery . . . no one would have considered Kodai, with her love of rhyme schemes and assonance, to be the sort of person who’d sign on for that if she could sit in a pavilion sipping tea and reading fortunes in people’s pillow books.

  At academy, Kodai and three mechanically minded classmates came up with movable type. They weren’t the first in the Empire to do so, but the prior discoveries were classified, so they deserved credit for their ingenuity. Two of her classmates were also sent to the military as punishment. The third hanged herself.

  Movable type seemed like a good idea at first. It would eliminate all the troublesome irregularities of human handwriting; it would replace personal deficiencies with a machine’s impersonal perfection. Kodai and her friends worked out a simplified system for the Imperial script, reducing it to a much smaller set of standardized graphemes. It was moderately clever, and could, conceivably, be learned more quickly than the original script itself.

  The head of the academy disapproved for entirely orthodox reasons, as had others before him, because of the democratization of literary magic that movable type implied. (“Democratization” was anachronistic; “vulgarization” might have been truer to the Imperial term.) It was one thing for the Empire’s statutes to be enforced by the writings of ministers indoctrinated in the Empire’s philosophies. Think of the body of Imperial writings, as one of Kodai’s instructors often said, as the living map of the Empress’s will. It was another thing for this to become available to people whose training consisted merely of combinatorial arrangement, rather than dedicated calligraphic toil.

  On the other hand, the head of the academy was also a pragmatist. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust that the military sometimes accomplished useful things, but he recognized that Ko
dai was the most promising of the miscreants. Sending her to languish in a backwater unit would waste her skills. After her initial assignment, he had his agents keep an eye on her. When her initial performance in the military did, in fact, bear out her potential usefulness, he had a relative in the War Ministry pull strings to assign her to the problem of the Spiders.

  Kodai collected letters, especially Spider letters. A love letter from Captain Arvash-mroi, for instance. Arvash was the Spider tactician who had come suddenly and unhappily to the Imperials’ attention in general, and Kodai’s in particular, when he arranged to demolish a dam on top of an Imperial army that was fatally certain the Spiders couldn’t manage the trick so quickly. One of Kodai’s three classmates had been part of that army.

  She had obtained this love letter by bribing a Spider messenger. While all Spider captains used the same seal, Arvash consistently perfumed certain personal letters, which were delivered to a local town rather than his home city. The messenger endured hard days of riding and inadequate sleep in exchange for a salary that never went as far as it ought to. Kodai’s agent, for his part, persuaded the messenger that some coin in exchange for the loan of a piece of personal correspondence was harmless enough. After that, it didn’t take Kodai too long to copy out the letter—so close it could have been mistaken for the original—and substitute that to be given to Arvash’s lover; like most magicians, Kodai was excellent at forgery.

  Whether Arvash or his lover noticed the letter’s delay was an open question. If the Spiders’ official messenger service was anything like the Imperial one, message delivery time varied anyway.

  The fact of Arvash’s letter suggested that his lover was also literate, although the man might also have had someone to read the letter to him. (It was not entirely proper for Arvash to take a man as a lover, but as long as he kept the affair out of sight of his wife, it was not a terrible sin, either, since there could be no child. A female lover would have been another matter.) While it was the case that the Spiders used Imperial writing, some of their calligraphy forms had diverged from the Empire’s over time. Imperials argued over the interpretation of, say, the formation called the Swindler’s Hook. Most Imperials said it should retain its meaning of an untrustworthy or vacillating personality. The Contextualists, a graphological school that had become politically irrelevant twenty-nine years ago, insisted that the interpretation should instead be drawn from the Spiders’ conventions and community of use. Kodai had subterranean Contextualist leanings, but in this instance she was on the fence. The Spiders called the same formation the Widower’s Hook. Maybe it pointed to a lack of interest in his wife.