Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  She stopped by the shelves that housed the Black College’s history and counted backwards by decades until she found the era during which magistrate Brien had held office. So few volumes to encompass the long dance of lives, all reprinted via silhouette. Originals that old were stored elsewhere, and here the usual must of aging paper was replaced by a cleaner smell.

  Kaela knew that she would find little on Brien here; she had already looked. Her roomsister, better trained in historical methodology, would have told her if anything useful appeared elsewhere. Who had Brien’s friend the traitor been, and what had he betrayed? She should have paid more attention, even if it seemed like gossip too ancient to have any relevance, especially to mathematics.

  “Brien,” she said into the rows of listening books, tasting the name. The ancient gossip had once been anything but ancient or irrelevant; had captured three people, at least, in its knots. She did not know what they had looked like or what their voices sounded like. She did not know the touches they exchanged or failed to exchange.

  The archivist on duty, bemused by Kaela’s interest, found no contemporary portraits of the three, but located a later woodprint of the execution, called Between Shadows. The first thing Kaela noticed was the utter absence of blades in the picture, although even today, full magistrates carried a ritual sword of office. “Who is who?” Kaela asked, captivated by the stark stiff lines and shadows, the contrasting fluidity of the falling leaves that framed the scene.

  “Rahen the Traitor,” said the archivist, pointing to the man who stared defiantly from the center of the picture, hands bound behind him. “Magistrate Kischa.” A woman with a river-fall of dark hair around her averted face, to Rahen’s left. “Magistrate Brien.” A thin man with no expression except in his hands, with his fingers laced together. In those tense hands, Kaela, who had learned to read stances as a sword-dancer, saw a cry too broken for other expression.

  And all around them, the falling leaves, each three-lobed. No, shreds of leaves. Even Kaela understood that symbolism, the implication of death and divided lives. She thanked the unknown artist for being straightforward.

  The archivist said, “Shall I make you a silhouette of this?”

  “Yes,” Kaela said. “Oh, yes.” Brien had a face now. She would settle for that.

  She made it back to her room with a half hour to spare before curfew, clutching the woodcut-silhouette all the way. She laid it atop her escritoire and studied it more closely. For all she knew, the artist had invented the faces. But those tense, anguished hands had a truth in them beyond fact or fancy.

  Next to the picture, she laid her silhouette of the shadow postulates in their earliest known formulation, although the archaic notation gave her headaches. Three postulates, braided around each other and into the entelechy framework. Three-lobed leaves. Three people, two lovers, one death.

  The bell tolled curfew. Kaela was nowhere near ready to sleep. She stretched, then segued into the Wolf Approaches, miming the blade. Her shadow partnered her, a solitary shape against the wall. She stopped. No. Without Teris, it wasn’t the same.

  “I am not afraid,” Kaela said to her shadow.

  Kaela repeated the stretches to keep her muscles from knotting up. Idly, letting her mind drift free of her body, she negated the third shadow postulate, then followed the strands of logic in search of the inevitable contradiction. She knew the extended framework as intimately as her hands knew the unruly cascades of her hair. With practiced discipline, she began working through the consequences of a system identical save for that one negated postulate.

  There was no contradiction.

  Kaela sat before the escritoire. She laid her hands on her notes, intending to make sure she was remembering the postulates correctly, then snatched them back before they clenched and crumpled the sum of her work. Her gaze fell again on the woodcut-silhouette with its border of falling leaves.

  No. She had not misremembered.

  It was as though, having lived all her life in the belief that roomsisters or roombrothers must come in threes, she discovered they could live in pairs, as with herself and Teris, or quartets. The Black College organized itself around a rule of three, but why not a rule of two, or four?

  A person cast one and only one shadow under most circumstances, but in the darkness, no shadows lived; in the light of several lanterns, shadows proliferated. Each scenario, for a given set of light sources, was equally valid. And so it was with the third shadow postulate.

  Two shadows crossing and uncrossing while she watched, breathless, from the doorway of the Spinning Rose.

  “Teris,” Kaela breathed, eyes widening. She was in love with Teris Tascha, despite the sister-taboo.

  Falling leaves, three-lobed leaves. Brien must have loved his friend’s lover, the woman with the long, dark hair, although it had gone unwritten and Kaela, in the absence of textual evidence, would never be able to prove it.

  Kaela began writing, scarcely conscious of her pen’s outpouring. She knew the shape of the entelechy framework and the alternate structures that would result from the variations on that third, mutable postulate, from its possible negations. She knew, too, that she could not articulate the key insight, the silent cry that Brien had left within the single language abstract enough to trust with his anguish at standing outside his friends’ romance.

  Perhaps Brien had executed the traitor, friend and rival both, with a traitorously glad heart himself. Perhaps he had wished to discard himself in the traitor’s place, after seeing what the execution did to that dark-haired woman. The artist, in drawing Brien’s fingers as a cage of tension, convinced Kaela that the latter was closer to the truth.

  Kaela remembered the name of Teris’s lover, but it didn’t matter. She put down her pen. Now that she understood what she had overlooked, she had time to formulate a coherent thesis. Roz Roven, her sponsor, would be pleased.

  She also understood that she could never mention her insight to Teris in a language that the other woman could fathom. Kaela had no desire to break the paired beauty of hand meeting hand, blade meeting blade, to step between two sword-dancers’ shadows intersecting beneath the eyes of light. But she could find her own dance.

  I have loved you in your own language, Kaela thought as she picked up her blades, so softly that we never knew it. Let your language be mine; let me cast my own shadows.

  No shadows interrupted her all the way through curfew hour that night as she walked to the Spinning Rose, or any night thereafter.

  The Bones of Giants

  Whatever else might be said of the sorcerer who ruled the rim of the Pit, he had never been able to raise the bones of giants. The bones lay scattered in the rimlands, green-grey with moss and crusted with crystals, whorled with the fingerprints of desperate travelers. The bones did not easily surrender fingerprints. The locals considered it bad luck to leave their marks on the giants’ bones.

  Tamim was sitting in the lee of a rock and had raised his gun to his head when the giants’ bones embedded in the hill shook themselves free of earth. He knew that the gun wasn’t going to be of any use against the bones. He knew of only two ways to destroy ghouls: lure them past the rimlands’ borders so they would crumble into dust, or pierce them through the heart with jade.

  The border was days away. Tamim had used the last of his jade bullets escaping a vulture patrol.

  His finger hesitated on the trigger.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” a girl’s voice, or a young woman’s, called from the other side of the rock.

  He shouldn’t have let his guard down, even for a suicide attempt. Maybe especially for a suicide attempt. The sorcerer’s Vulture Corps was always happy to collect corpses.

  Tamim edged around the rock. He didn’t like leaving bones at his back, but they were taking their time assembling themselves, as though unseen ligaments were growing at each joint. Their clattering made him jumpy. Assess the threat, he reminded himself, then decide.

  The girl was in plain sigh
t. She had brown skin like Tamim’s own and long black hair in tangles down to her waist, too long to be practical, the kind an aristocrat might have. No aristocrat, however, would have been caught in that high-collared black coat.

  Tamim knew the rimlands’ sumptuary laws, knew what the black coat meant: vulture, and necromancer besides. He aimed and fired.

  He must have made some noise to alert her. She ran toward him, ducking at the right moment. The bullet missed her by inches; a lock of hair drifted free. “I’m not what you think, boy,” she said breathlessly. She barely came up to his shoulder. Her hand, surprisingly strong, caught his and twisted the gun to point at the ground between them.

  Five bullets left, but he wanted to save one for himself. Admittedly, at this range he was more likely to shoot himself if he tried again. That wasn’t even taking into account the girl’s reflexes. “What are you, then?”

  “I’m no vulture,” she said. “I’m alone out here. I need help, and I’ll take what I can find, whether it comes in the shape of a giant or a boy who looks half-ghoul himself.” She stared directly into his eyes as she released her grip on the gun.

  Tamim made a frustrated noise and holstered the gun. A soldier wasn’t supposed to feel curiosity, but today he had forfeited any claim to being a soldier. “You’re the one raising the bones,” he pointed out.

  He had been wrong about the skeleton. There were two of them, not one, entangled oddly from aeons in the earth’s embrace.

  The girl took her attention off Tamim for a moment. She laced her fingers together, then pulled them apart. In a rush, the bones separated into two skeletons. Loam, uprooted grass, and glittering gravel showered both Tamim and the girl. Dust swirled in the shape of grinning skulls, then settled. The girl paid it no heed. Apparently she was as accustomed to the rimlands’ behavior as he was.

  “There,” she said with evident satisfaction. “What do you think? One’s yours, of course.”

  He stared at her stonily.

  “It’s not like I can ride two of them at once,” she said, as if she made perfect sense and he was the slow one. “You haven’t run screaming yet. That’s always useful.”

  Clearly the world had plans for him other than suicide today. “I was reared by the undead,” Tamim said. His mother, a woman with a brilliant smile and an aristocrat’s long, slender hands, had given him into the care of a company of ghouls, reasoning that it would prepare him to survive in the rimlands and eventually take up her cause. But one by one his caretakers had fallen apart, rotting teeth and decaying eyes, a toe here and a loop of shriveled intestine there.

  His mother had died attempting to assassinate the sorcerer when Tamim was a child. The undead did not fall apart immediately upon their creator’s death, but lingered for a span of years proportionate to the creator’s skill. Tamim’s mother, for all her ambitions, had not been a particularly skilled necromancer. He had a dim memory of crying when the last of his caretakers ceased to move, even the mindless, instinctive creeping of a rotted finger toward the hand. It had been the last time he cried.

  The girl nodded as though his childhood was unremarkable. Perhaps it was, from a necromancer’s point of view. “Right or left?” she said.

  Involuntarily, Tamim looked up at the giants. The one on the left had a long, narrow skull and cracked teeth. Curiously, spurs extended from the back, as though wings had been broken off. The one on the right had a broader visage and no spurs, and its left arm was longer than the right.

  “I don’t know your name,” Tamim said. “Why should I take up with a necromancer?” He hadn’t known that any necromancers remained in the rimlands who did not serve the sorcerer. The Pit was death, and the sorcerer controlled the Pit: ergo necromancers served he who ruled death. The rest had fled to the lands beyond the Pit, or died in a hundred small rebellions. The sorcerer was not notable for his sense of mercy.

  “I’m Sakera,” she said. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. I’ll make you a bargain, O soldier”—her eyes alighted briefly on the gun—“who wishes to die. Help me bring down the sorcerer, and at the journey’s end I will give you the death you desire.”

  The gun was an unbalancing weight at his hip. He had lived with such things all his life. “How long a journey?” Then, realizing that he was actually considering it, he added, “I don’t need your help to kill myself.”

  “Months,” Sakera said. “But I’ve seen what happens when you miss with a gun. You might live out the rest of your days as a mangled thing with less mind than a ghoul. With a necromancer, death can be certain. It can even be swift.”

  “I’m not that incompetent.” He had long years of practice killing.

  “No, I imagine not.” Her voice was brisk. “Let’s put it another way, then. There can’t be many necromancers left in the rimlands. If you’re no vulture-friend, I may be your best chance of getting rid of the sorcerer.”

  “I don’t trust you,” Tamim said. Tact had never been one of his strengths. Among other things, it was wasted on ghouls.

  “You don’t need to trust me,” Sakera said. “You just need to believe me.”

  It disappointed him that she wanted to kill the sorcerer. Tamim had no fondness for the man’s reign, but he suspected that Sakera meant to replace the sorcerer. Some traitorously sentimental part of Tamim had expected better from this girl, for all that he had met her only minutes ago.

  Sakera made a fist, rotated it, then opened her fingers. The lopsided skeleton knelt before her. She clambered up the bones and sat on one of the kneecaps, legs dangling. “Or I could leave you to die in the giants’ shadow, before I take this one away,” she said. “Your choice. But I hope you come with me. It will be a lonely journey to the sorcerer’s palace otherwise.”

  “What is your grievance with him?” Tamim said, on the grounds that he might as well be certain.

  “He raised my family as ghouls,” she said. “They’re still not at rest.”

  It sounded plausible. Maybe she was a good liar. “You came here for the giants’ skeletons.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “I may not be a vulture,” Sakera said, “but I can smell death on the wind.”

  “I could have used your help when I was fighting the vultures,” he said. The company of ghouls had taught him how to fight—his mother, a pragmatist in her way, had sought out the corpses of veteran soldiers—but it had still been one against several.

  Sakera grimaced. “If only. A necromancer is only as useful as the bones she can call to her service. I promised myself I would only touch giants, who are long gone from the world, and whose families will not miss them.”

  “That’s an inconvenient promise,” Tamim said, without approbation.

  “I came here for the bones. I’m glad you came, too. Most people are afraid.” She waved down at him. “Over here.”

  Tamim craned his head and regarded her skeptically.

  “Oh, that’s right.” She made another gesture. The giant began lowering her to the ground, but her hand spasmed. The giant lurched. She somersaulted clear and rolled to safety, swearing in a language he didn’t recognize.

  Tamim helped her get up, more out of curiosity than politeness. Both her hands were shaking. “How long has that been going on?” he asked.

  “Long enough,” she said, embarrassed. “That’s the other reason I need an ally. I can’t draw the patterns by myself anymore.”

  Patterns? “You’d better show me how to work the—” What should he call it? “—the giant.” As though it were a set of tools. “Why do you need patterns?” He didn’t recall that his mother had ever drawn anything.

  “Do you know how the sorcerer came to power?” Sakera asked.

  Tamim shook his head. His mother had told him gilded tales of the sorcerer’s court as though it had always existed, a place where enemies’ skulls were made into banquet cups and musicians played upon lyres of bone or tortoiseshell.

  “In the old queen
’s court, he was her most trusted general and a master calligrapher. First he conquered the Pit, which is death. Perhaps he made some terrible bargain there. Then, in the palace archives, he discovered some scrolls on ancient fighting forms, and applied those to the corpses he raised. Thus even ghouls who were once farmers and potters and prostitutes can fight, because they are aligned with the necromancer’s patterns.

  “As for the sorcerer, he had become smitten with his queen. When she refused to marry him—well. You can guess the end of that story.”

  Tamim was thinking of the patterns. “This implies that if you draw other fighting forms, you could apply those to the ghouls as well. Am I correct?”

  Sakera nodded. “But you have to have an accurate hand and a knowledge of inner anatomies. Writing is troublesome for me, and drawing is impossible.”

  It didn’t surprise him that a necromancer would be literate. Tamim had learned the alphabet from his mother, and could read and write, if shakily. He hadn’t had much opportunity to practice. “Teach me,” he said.

  Her face lit. He had never seen anything like it, on the dead or the living. Carefully, she repeated the motion that had caused the giant to kneel. Although her hands shook a little, Tamim could tell what the gesture was supposed to look like. He did it several times until Sakera nodded her satisfaction.

  “How do I get the giant to respond to me?” Tamim said. “Surely it doesn’t move every time you twitch your hands. The ghouls I knew just followed orders. They didn’t require constant guidance.”

  “Give the giant a name,” Sakera said, “and use the name to address it in your mind. As for guidance, it’s a thing of memory. The recent dead remember who they were, after a fashion. They remember how to do the things they did in life, for a time. Or they’re instructed by patterns. The giants have been dead so long that they do require constant guidance.”