Operation Arcana - eARC

by John Joseph Adams

  Most magicians would have left it at that, but Kodai wasn’t just a magician. She had been one of the best magicians of her class. And her mastery of graphological principles had only improved in her years of field practice.

  So Kodai put together the puzzle pieces: the telltale leftward drift of the columns of text, the elongated water-radical and its association with strategic thinking, the slight tendency to roll the brush at the end of horizontal strokes (unattractive, but no one was perfect), even the preference for brushes too large for the size of the handwriting. The finicky attention to detail, with no smears or smudges or thumbprints. Kodai reflected that her instructors would have liked her to be this good with ink. Not that trying harder would have saved her from exile.

  Captain Arvash-mroi’s letter mentioned a gift of a fine bolt of cloth and (in surprisingly mawkish terms) anticipated embraces. It then launched into a tirade about how his boots pinched his toes. Interesting. Kodai would have expected him to be able to afford better than army issue.

  More interestingly, the graphological signs in Arvash’s letter spoke of conquests. Not just in bed, although Kodai saw that, too, especially in the vigorous club-ended downstrokes. But there was more, pointed at by forked marks and tapering lines and narrow diagonals: villages encircled and eaten by fire. Torched women. The lamentations of the drowned. The ugly seesaw balance of fire and water dominated his writing, as sharp as swordfall.

  Kodai kept track of these traits, using them to focus her hatred of Arvash and writing them down in a notebook with dog-eared pages. Whenever she grew weary of her mission, she returned to the notebook and reread her notes, and went to the next page to write the name of her dead classmate over and over again in stab-shaped columns.

  Nawong remembered the first time he had met Kodai. She had been sitting in a precarious folding chair, lips moving slightly as she read a book and, occasionally, nibbled green tea cookies. He had been prepared to dislike her; he couldn’t imagine that a daughter of the Tepwe family wouldn’t be spoiled rotten. But instead, when he saluted, she waved him down and said, “Lieutenant, I trust you will consider it your duty to help me finish this box of cookies?” She added, “I used to love green tea cookies, but there’s love and then there’s being inundated with the things.”

  He was dying to find out what a Tepwe daughter had done to get herself exiled to the military, when she could instead be languishing amid silk cushions and (presumably) a greater variety of cookies. But it wasn’t for him to ask. As much as she confided in him about everything from cookies to insect bites, she rarely dropped any hints about that part of her past.

  So Nawong contented himself by making up stories, none of which he expected to have any relationship to the truth: Kodai was the reincarnation of a general who had died without winning their last battle (not that most people in the Empire believed in reincarnation). Kodai had followed a lover into the army—except she showed no signs of being lovesick. Kodai had fled an unhappy engagement—but would her family have permitted such a thing? All in all, he liked the reincarnation story best. If nothing else, it gave him an excuse to speculate about the legendary generals she could be.

  He should have remembered that legendary generals rarely enjoyed happy endings.

  Kodai collected books. One of them was a collection of military aphorisms, which she treasured. It wasn’t the only such collection she owned, but it came from a country called Maeng-of-the-Bridges, which no longer existed. Maeng was conquered by the Empire half a generation ago and razed the way all things beautiful and defiant were razed. Kodai knew a little about Maeng, about its dueling aristocrats and its high gardens with the prized sullen orchids and the fabled crown of its king, set with seventy-six sapphire and aquamarine cabochons. (The rumor that nine of the aquamarines were in fact heat-treated topazes of much lower value was surely invention.)

  She had carried it for the length of the Spider campaign, even when she was footsore and sleep-deprived and any modest decrease in the weight she was carrying would have brought her ease. Although no one had been able to teach her to read the dead Maeng language, she could still say a little about the calligraphic style. That was what mattered, not the book’s fragile but exotic stab binding, in contrast to the link stitches favored in the Empire, or the book’s cover, in fibrous dark red paper that was worn at three edges.

  The book’s aphorisms weren’t organized in any useful manner, as though the unattributed author simply sat down to dinner and spilled out whatever came to mind. They were written untidily. Kodai got headaches when she examined the characters too closely. Both the Maeng and the Empire wrote with the brush, and in times past Kodai pored over the calligraphy style used in the book, which bore a distant resemblance to the Imperial one called The Stars Fall Slowly. Kodai’s least favorite instructor in academy had used The Stars Fall Slowly, yet she couldn’t deny the beauty of the script, with its deceptively relaxed spacing and dramatic, almost blot-like serifs.

  Lately Kodai hadn’t opened the book at all. In the evenings leading up to the ritual against the Spiders, Nawong had watched her sitting with her head bent, book cradled in her tense hands. Open it, he had wished her, but she refused herself that small comfort, as though she didn’t think she deserved it.

  When spoken indistinctly (and face it, drunken soldiers were a universal), the name of the nation of Pekti-pehaktuch sounded similar to the Imperial word for “spider.” Thus the Imperials called the Pektis Spiders.

  Kodai was familiar with the official Imperial maps of the region. The old surveys weren’t as useful as she had hoped, given the cartographers’ tendency to stylize topographical features and the fact that local roads were easily damaged. For military applications, she relied heavily on the scouts’ investigations and on local informants.

  Still, the official maps did hold some interest for Kodai, and this was in the realm of (what else?) calligraphy. Imperial cartographers were a conservative lot, and they wrote in what was called, unimaginatively, Cartographers’ Hand. The characteristics of Cartographers’ Hand had proved stable despite the ebb and flow of calligraphic fashion in the Imperial court and among the government’s ministries.

  Cartographers’ Hand (according to Kodai’s notes, terse but readable, and the few remarks she made to Nawong on the subject) had the following traits: extreme vertical alignment, as though the calligrapher labeled everything while being hounded with a knife-edged ruler. This signified rigidity, conformity, reverence for tradition. Minimal variation from the beginning and end of a brushstroke, in contrast, for instance, to the dramatic flourishes favored in Evening Flight of Swans. In fact, the permitted variation was so minimal that it made reading the script at small sizes difficult. The implication was of narrow vision and institutional incestuousness.

  One final quirk of the cartographers’ art was that borders were not drawn with simple lines (if any line, following the twist-weave of political entanglements, river boundaries, and the habitations of different ethnic groups, was ever simple). They were inked, carefully, with the same character repeated over and over, like textual bricks: lio, for Imperial jade. In other words, the Empire was being carved out of the substance of other nations, which existed for this purpose.

  Kodai had her favorites in the collection of letters. Her interest should have been strictly military, focused on the task of reducing the Spiders to a name spoken only by the wind. But she was human, and anyway it was impossible not to take interest in the Spider soldier Gevoh-an’s recipes when she spent so many days eating cold rice and longing for jellied anchovies, pickled lotus root, or beef braised in summer wine—any smidgen of flavor. She liked to talk about food with Nawong: specifically, she talked about food, and he made fun of her nostalgia for anchovies. They both took a certain consolation from this conversation.

  Her favorite recipe was the one for shadow soup. Gevoh’s instructions neatly paralleled those for some of the fish soups that they’d eaten in the past. Kodai hated fish, but not more tha
n she hated starving. In any case, the concept was to catch a shadow in a pot with green onions, ginger, winter melon, and whatever other vegetables you could steal from stores or bully from the local peasants. If you boiled the shadow for long enough, it might become palatable. Or nourishing. Or something.

  Gevoh’s recipes had inconsistent letterforms, although in this case this indicated a partial education—he might even have been self-taught—rather than mental instability. His columns drifted right and left in the minor way that indicated humor rather than the major way that suggested a dangerous temper.

  Kodai showed some of the recipes to Nawong from time to time, and they shared a chuckle over their fancifulness. But when she came to the one for shadow soup, her eyes darkened, and she murmured, “It may be a fake soup, but that’s real hunger talking.”

  Kodai first explained the solution to the Spiders to Nawong on a cold, sleety night while the ruddy light of a full moon filtered through the clouds. They had been talking about something else entirely—the way local berries were mouth-puckeringly unappetizing, which guaranteed that the cook would incorporate them in desserts—when Kodai said abruptly, “If you think about it, graphology is stratificational.” Her voice was soft but not drowsy in the slightest, above the soprano cry of the frogs. “We’ve been focusing all this time on characteristics, as though people and their cultures could be factored into motes. But a person is more than the sum of their traits, just as a grapheme is more than the sum of its strokes. A person is a character, just as a word is represented by a character. If you can specify people entire, not just the traits, you can narrow the focus of the spell. You can direct it against Spiders rather than against Imperials. The Spiders won’t know what hit them.”

  Nawong wasn’t a graphological theorist. But he wasn’t stupid, either, and he didn’t like where this was going. “You can’t say that,” he said more familiarity than their relative stations would ordinarily permit. Except it was a cold, sleety night, and they had come to know each other well. “‘Character,’ like a person in a book.”

  “Oh, but everyone’s in a book,” Kodai said, suddenly fierce, “if the whole damn Empire and its ever-growing pile of decrees and statutes and declarations is a book.”

  Now, several years after that discussion, Kodai and Nawong were on the hillside, hoping it would and wouldn’t rain. No frogs this time. Kodai was gnawing her lip, not realizing it, as she wrote more and more exactingly, approaching the knot of characters that would complete and activate the spell.

  She paused, withdrew her brush so it wouldn’t drip over the paper, grimaced. Nawong, recognizing the signal, bent to massage her shoulders. She let him do this for a while, then straightened. He backed off, resolved to watch. For a moment, he thought she was about to say something. Then she lifted the brush and wrote the final few strokes with a sure hand.

  Here’s the final piece, the key, the piece you must have discerned from the beginning: 's own hand, distinct from the style she would rather have used, itself distinct from the style she was originally taught by tutors in her parents’ house.

  Extremely crisp brushwork, as though chiseled. A broadening of the spacing of the characters as the text marched across the page. Vertical strokes like perfect spear hafts. Most of all, if you looked sideways at the page, diagonal spaces falling through the columns like rain.

  couldn’t read any of this anymore. , as she had known, and had explained to her aide, was gone. The side-effect of writing the Spiders into the narrative of their own destruction, even if she spared the Imperials, was that the author, too, was an implicit character in that selfsame narrative.

  She had been obliterated along with them.

  Everywhere the Spiders bled from punctures like crescent moons, in the villages, in the towns, upon the battlements of castles. Their bones burned up from the inside and candled the night. Their outposts ran red like hemorrhage and black like rot.

  On the hillside, Lieutenant Nawong lingered beside the crumpled mass of charred meat that had once been , knowing that he would never remember her name, and trying to anyway. After all, there was no hurry now. Then he gathered up the spell-pages, even if couldn’t read any of them anymore.

  Like the Spiders she had destroyed, she was no longer part of the story.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed. Lee’s short story collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. Her stories have also appeared in the anthologies The Year’s Best SF 18, ed. David Hartwell; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012, ed. Rich Horton; and The Year’s Best Science Fiction 29, ed. Gardner Dozois. She lives in Louisiana with her family. Learn more at yoonhalee.com.

  AMERICAN GOLEM

  Weston Ochse

  On Tuesday I stalked the old section of Kabul where the minarets stand impervious to the constant bombings. Men halted their chatter and peered at me as if they knew what I was about. Women sheathed in powder blue burqas hurried away. Even children scattered as I limped through their gaggles, worried at what seemed to be a white man trolling through their midst, his face wrapped in a black and white shemagh, body clothed in Pashtun long shirt and pants, but unmistakably American to those who would know the difference.

  I ignored them. Purpose-made, I was on mission to kill the man who’d killed my brother. Not my real brother, of course, but the one from whom my existence derived. He, the child of Shira and Emil Drachman, me the man raised from the mud and sand of New Mexico—land of his birth, land of my birth, and the land where he was buried on the same day I was born.

  My not-real-brother, Isaac, died three years ago while driving Massud Circle. One second he was in a vehicle bound for the airport for mid-tour R&R, the next he was eaten by the rage of a roadside bomb as it chewed through him, the three other American soldiers in his Hummer, and seven Afghan civilians, including a doctor, a student studying social work, and a child in the city for the first time for an operation on her lungs.

  On Wednesday the military police chased me. I was AWOL from the Army. If they caught me, they were going to send me home. It was too hard to find my target behind concrete T-walls and armed sentries anyway. This way I was closer to the people, which also meant I was closer to him, wherever he was in this city of three million people.

  On Thursday I witnessed a man on a bicycle ride into a crowd and detonate. He rained like hateful confetti at a nonexistent parade, the sound of his death ringing through the streets and on up into the Hindu Kush.

  On Friday I met the woman from the embassy. It was an odd thing, her being there teaching a group of children to skateboard. I remember my maker whispering to me about Isaac and his love of Tony Hawk and his years living aboard a skateboard before he grew up to be a soldier. It was the skateboards that made me stop and watch. It was her eyes that made me stay. And it was her voice that captured my clay-made heart.

  I wonder even now if it is my idea of what Isaac would have loved or if this love I felt was an invention of myself. Can a thing such as me have these emotions? I’ve felt anger. I’ve felt fear for others. So why not love?

  “You’re not from around here,” she’d said, delivering the ultimate cliché once she noticed me sitting in the shade of a fig tree, only my eyes visible through the break in my shemagh.

  I didn’t answer her.

  A moment later she asked, “Are you from one of the other embassies? It’s probably not safe to have you out here.”

  “It’s not safe for you, either,” I said.

  She grinned. “I have guards.” She pointed to the six men deployed around the park, each wearing heavy body armor and Kevlar helmets and carrying HK 416s. “You sound American. If so, then you definitely shouldn’t be outside the walls. What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for someone.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “I’d rather
not say.”

  Her smile fell. “Why not?”

  “I’d rather not say.” I got up. One of her soldier guards was staring at me and seemed to be about ready to come over to investigate. I turned to go.

  I’d gotten perhaps a dozen feet when she said, “I hope you find who you are looking for.”

  Me too. I thought. Then I said it aloud, but I was too far away for her to hear.

  I have no memory of before. My first recollection was awaking fully formed in a Navajo mud hut that crouched in the shadow of the Chuska Mountains in New Mexico. My maker stood next to an ancient Navajo woman. She shook a bunch of burnt sage as she sang in a paper-dry voice. My maker drew the forefinger of his right hand across my forehead and traced on it the Hebrew word nqm, which I knew meant vengeance. But the American English was truly inadequate to fully translate nqm. I felt it mark me—the idea of a community having been damaged because of an offense, something which could only be restored by a deed I was destined to commit.