Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  When he died, would she raise his bones and—

  “No,” Sakera said. “I wouldn’t do that. I am a necromancer, yes, but I made a promise. I told you, the death you desire.” Her tone was almost cheerful. “Come on, give it a try.”

  Tamim looked at the giant with spurs. Ifayad, he thought, which meant bird of prey. He could see the letters in his head: iro-fel-alim-yod-alim-dirat. Then he made the gesture Sakera had shown him.

  The giant knelt. He climbed up and up, into the skull, along the ridge of an abraded tooth in the open mouth. He wondered what it smelled like: earth, probably, and crushed flowers, and the tang of minerals newly exposed to air. His sense of smell was deadened from so many years among ghouls, and his adolescent years among the few remaining resistance fighters had not restored it.

  If something went wrong and the great jaws closed, he would be crushed. It comforted him. “Now what?” His voice echoed oddly in the space of the skull.

  “How are you supposed to see anything from in there?” Sakera said. He couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or exasperated. “Come down again and we’ll learn to ride the giants properly. Then, when we have paper, I can show you how to scribe your own patterns.”

  Tamim lingered a moment longer, drawn to Ifayad in spite of himself. Despite the restricted field of vision, he appreciated that the skull would provide protection against enemy fire.

  Tamim climbed down, bemused at himself for having any sort of faith in the necromancer. She would betray him in the end, and surrender to the sorcerer, and he would have to kill her. Until then, he would learn what he could.

  Tamim had always been quick with his hands, quick of reflexes, even as a child. It had taken him a while to appreciate this. He had thought it was something ordinarily true of people, as opposed to ghouls. Ghouls were unrelenting once they had a goal, but dexterity was not one of their virtues.

  Sakera was methodical in her lessons. They started with stances and moved on to simple motions—an arm lifting, a hand opening, a foot shifting—then compound motions. Familiar with the precepts of arms training, Tamim accepted this as necessary. They did everything slowly: gesture followed by the giants’ motion. Tamim’s hands became callused from clutching Ifayad’s ridged teeth to keep from rattling around inside the skull.

  He and Sakera went hunting together. Sakera was good at tracking animals, even the tricky, shadow-colored animals that lived in the rimlands. “Every life is a potential death,” she said when he asked her about it, since she didn’t seem to pay much attention to the usual cues, such as tufts of fur snagged in the rimlands’ scraggly foliage, or scat, or scuffed tracks in the dirt. Tamim was good at making snares, although a certain percentage of the animals that he caught that way were half-ghoul themselves, and had to be released. The problem had only grown worse over time.

  Between the two of them, they often had a full stew-pot. Sakera tended to pick at her food; sometimes he wasn’t sure she ate at all. When he pressed her on the topic, she ate the better portion of a rabbit, just to show him she could.

  “I’ve been thinking about our rides,” Tamim said to her over this night’s stew. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

  Sakera shook her head. “No,” she said. “Hasn’t it been a long time since the rimlands saw anything but ghoul-steeds?”

  “Probably,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the horses themselves, but of harnesses. Do you think we could create some kind of harness for riding the giants? That way, if something goes wrong”—he couldn’t help but think of Sakera’s unsteady hands—“you won’t be thrown.”

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “Something with buckles, maybe?”

  “We’d have to find a smith,” Sakera said drily. They had approached a settlement last week, leaving the giants behind, crouched behind some hills. The settlement’s buildings had been intact, but corpse-colored fungus grew from all the doors, releasing pale spores. They had retreated in haste. Sakera had been withdrawn for the rest of the day. “I don’t have any power over metal. Maybe we’re better off with some carefully chosen knots.”

  “With your hands?” Something else occurred to him: he had once seen a trader trapped under a fallen horse, back in the days when horses were to be found in the rimlands. “You’d want to be able to get out in a hurry, in case something went wrong.”

  “A slip knot of some sort?”

  He considered it. “It might work.”

  Unfortunately, Sakera was not any good at finding trees. It took them several days to track down a stand of widely separated willows by following one of the rimlands’ black rivers. Sakera drank the water fearlessly, although she grimaced at its taste.

  Tamim showed Sakera how to strip the bark and plait it into cords. Once they had enough rope, it took them more time to devise a system of knots that would work on the giants. Sakera knew an amazing number of knots. “They’re a kind of magic from the sea-folk,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the sea.”

  Supposedly there was a black sea on the other side of the Pit’s boundary, with ships of rotting timbers and ghost-fabric sails. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing magical about knots, either, no more than a gun is magical.” He still had five bullets, although they were of iron rather than jade. Death and undeath were the only magic he recognized.

  Sakera flexed her fingers, grimacing. Her skin was torn from working the bark. She washed her hands in the river, then dried her hands on her coat. “If only things were that simple,” she said.

  They made more rope, just in case, and took the opportunity to bathe and wash their clothes. Sakera’s coat was beginning to look more grey than black. Tamim suspected it was losing its dye. Sakera insisted on going around in a ragged blanket while the coat dried.

  “Do you really get that cold?” Tamim said.

  “Death is cold,” Sakera said. “It’s the absence of warmth and the absence of light.”

  All Tamim could think of was the grave he had dug for the last of his caretaker ghouls. All virtue had gone from their bones, and no necromancer would raise them again. But he had wanted to do them that honor anyway, to offer them the peace that his mother had denied them. He had wanted to lower himself into the grave, too, but then no one would have been left to cover them with earth.

  “These are not entirely bad things,” she said, more kindly. “What would day be without night, a candle without the shuttered room?”

  “It’s been years since I’ve seen a candle.”

  “There we go, missing the point,” she said, but she didn’t sound offended.

  It wasn’t until Sakera was satisfied with Tamim’s control over the giant that she began to teach him the alphabet. He had been looking forward to this until he realized that the shapes she was showing him didn’t resemble the ones he knew. “They’re wrong,” he said stubbornly as he stared at the two figures she had drawn in the dirt.

  Blood welled up in the letters, as though she had cut them into the flesh of some sleeping beast. It bubbled briefly, then soaked back into the dirt. It was not an uncommon phenomenon, this deep in the rimlands, away from the sections that the sorcerer had reclaimed for human use.

  Sakera, who was crouching next to him with her coat hitched up over her knees in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it from getting soiled, sighed. “There’s more than one alphabet in the world. There are even things more complicated than alphabets.”

  Tamim tried to look receptive to the idea of learning something more complicated than an alphabet.

  Sakera burst out laughing at his expression. “You’re quick-witted. A little practice is all it would take.”

  “Thank you,” he said dourly.

  “As to why this alphabet and not another: it’s the oldest one in the rimlands. It was used by priests to gods now unnamed.”

  He leaned back and scowled. “How is it that you say the most preposterous things as if you knew them absolutely?”

  “Because I do, of cou
rse.” She grinned at him. “Really, Tamim, what kind of necromancer would I be if I didn’t gather knowledge?”

  “If my mother had spent more time gathering knowledge,” Tamim said thoughtfully, “maybe she would have been better prepared when she tried to assassinate the sorcerer.”

  “Come on,” Sakera said, clearly deeming it better to skirt the subject, “alphabet. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have it memorized.”

  Tamim drew an awkward copy of the first one.

  “No, no, no,” Sakera said, laughing again. He didn’t mind it as much as he thought he would. “There’s an order to these things.”

  “I can’t see why it makes any difference, so long as you get the shape right.”

  “Hit me,” she said.

  “What?” Sometimes he wondered about her sanity.

  “It won’t land,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. Come on, hit me.”

  He got up, settling his balance solidly over each foot, then threw a punch. He kept his fist several inches away from her even at full extension.

  “Oh, Tamim,” she sighed, “you don’t have to be so careful. But you see? Notice how all the parts of your body moved in a particular order, the way you twisted your fist at the end and not the beginning? There is a logic to these things.”

  Tamim should have known that complaining about it would elicit one of Sakera’s incomprehensible explanations. “Just tell me how to get it right.”

  “If you’d rather,” she said. She drew the letter again, slowly, imitating his strokes. “You went from left to right, and it’s right to left. That’s the first thing to remember.” And again, except this time from right to left, as she had said. “Do you see how it’s shaped, how the strokes flow into each other?”

  He tried a few more times until he could feel the flow that she spoke of: not so different from the alphabet he knew, even if the direction was different. “Shouldn’t it have a name?” he said. The letters of that other alphabet had names.

  “This one is tilat. If we spelled out your name, it would be the first letter.”

  “Tilat,” he repeated. “What’s the other one?”

  Sakera showed him how to write it correctly. Dirt collected under her fingernail. “Meneth,” she said. “Tilat-meneth-meneth spells your name.”

  Tamim frowned. “Aren’t there letters missing, the breath-sounds?”

  “Vowels, you mean? You don’t write them in this alphabet.”

  “That sounds terribly confusing.”

  “There is power in empty spaces,” Sakera said. “Call it another part of the lesson.”

  Tilat-meneth-meneth. Tamim wrote it three times so the letters aligned, forming a three-by-three figure. “Show me—show me how to write your name.” He had a good memory. He would prove it to her.

  She showed him senu, and kor, and ras. If he looked at all the letters sideways, he could see a faint resemblance to the ones of his childhood alphabet. Were they related somehow?

  Tamim didn’t write the name he had given his skeleton, Ifayad, for he had a premonition that it would alter some necessary relationship. Power in empty spaces, Sakera had said.

  Numbers came after letters. This time the numerals looked more similar to those he already knew, and the lessons went more quickly.

  Sakera was in the middle of teaching him yush, one hundred, when the ambush came. Their days of training in the hinterlands had made them careless. The rimlands had never been friendly to human existence. Under the sorcerer’s reign, they had become less so. The sorcerer might have built edifices of slate and dark marble and delicate bone, but each year fewer and fewer people were willing to dwell under the banner of the vulture. So it was that Tamim and Sakera had not run into travelers or traders. Thanks to the giants’ conspicuousness, they had also gotten into the habit of avoiding villages.

  Tamim was watching Sakera’s hand draw the numeral in the dirt when she made a fist. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Run!” she said in a low, fierce whisper. Her hands went through a sequence of motions punctuated by pauses, like a language in itself. The ground thundered as her giant hauled itself out of the nearby copse of trees and walked toward her. The trees’ limbs knotted themselves around the giant’s arm. It pulled free. Hand-shaped leaves flew everywhere, writhing and clutching at the air. The giant crouched down so Sakera could vault up to its rib cage. She climbed until she reached the safety of its skull, then guided it back toward Tamim.

  Tamim had Ifayad pick him up and place him in its eye socket. His stomach lurched as he climbed down, into the harness. He hated the moments of absolute helplessness as he secured himself. He could practically hear his heartbeat echoing in the skull.

  Through Ifayad’s open maw, he could see the vultures’ red banner. There were six vultures: two necromancers in their black robes and four grey-fleshed ghouls in dull armor. The necromancers gaped at the moving giants. Even with its massive limbs, Sakera’s was faster than the ghouls, although Tamim was far from reaching her level of control.

  Sakera’s giant loomed over the vultures and swept the banner to the ground, crushing it under one foot. Then it stopped. Tamim guessed that her hand tremor had started up again. The necromancers scrambled out of the way, out of his field of vision, shouting orders.

  The ghouls were armed with repeating crossbows. Tamim heard an initial burst of bolts clattering against Sakera’s giant, and cursed all the small gods of the rimlands. He got Ifayad moving. A sweep of its forearm knocked two ghouls to the ground. One ghoul leapt for Ifayad’s hand and clung to a finger. He heard it laughing creakily. Tamim pivoted Ifayad and smashed the ghoul against a tree. Its arm separated from its body and the ribcage collapsed.

  Tamim lifted Ifayad’s arm. It probably looked ridiculous from the outside, but he had to see—there it was: the ghoul’s severed arm was climbing toward Tamim. He didn’t fancy the thought of struggling with it while trying to control Ifayad.

  He tried for a tense minute to use the giant’s fingers to pry the severed hand off and fling it away before he realized he knew no commands that would accomplish that end.

  Cursing, he raised Ifayad’s arm to bring the target closer and put the giant in a stable stance. Then he unknotted himself from the harness and reached for his gun. Five bullets left.

  The ghoul’s hand continued its relentless climb.

  He crouched against the base of Ifayad’s jaw. It was lucky for him that the giant’s teeth, besides being chipped, had irregular alignment.

  He aimed through the gap between two teeth. Fired. The ghoul’s hand was blown backwards and landed on the ground, twitching, before righting itself.

  Four bullets.

  However feebly, the hand was scrabbling toward him. But at least it wasn’t on Ifayad.

  Sakera had gotten her giant to respond again. In a display of entirely characteristic ferocity, it intercepted one of the necromancers and stomped. The sound of crunching bone was palpable.

  The necromancers meant them no good; no one who served the sorcerer could. He retied the harness and set off after the second necromancer. Ifayad’s hand closed around her.

  “Kill her!” Sakera said.

  The necromancer wheezed out something.

  Tamim hesitated for a long moment.

  The necromancer said rapidly, “I can tell you of the death at your heels—”

  He had agreed to support Sakera, not to ask questions. He took a deep breath, then pinched his thumb and forefinger against each other.

  The giant’s fist squeezed tight. The necromancer screamed.

  Tamim didn’t stop until the screaming cut off. Then he dropped the body.

  Sakera had dismembered the rest of the ghouls. “That will hold them for a while,” she said. “We can travel faster than they can.”

  Tamim turned Ifayad to face Sakera’s giant. “That wasn’t so difficult,” he said.

  “Only two necromancers and their ghouls for now,” she said. “We
don’t know how long they were following us. We haven’t exactly been subtle. That’s my fault. I thought—” Her voice sounded hollow. “This place has been my home for so long. I thought it would protect me, somehow. But I should have known better. It’s not as if land has any loyalty.”

  Tamim focused on the part of her speech that had made sense. “So we should expect more pursuit. Let’s get our gear and run.”

  “We can only run so far,” Sakera said. “We’ll end up at the gates of the sorcerer’s palace with the undead nipping at our heels. There’s no help for it.”

  “We could head out of the rimlands instead,” Tamim said. He was accustomed to the idea of dying, but surely Sakera felt differently. The thought of her felled by the vultures made him ache in a way he had no name for.

  “No,” Sakera said firmly. “This has to be done.”

  Two villages later, Tamim discovered why Sakera was so desperate to take down the sorcerer.

  This far into the rimlands, they had expected the village to be abandoned. Tamim had suggested that they might be able to find cloth or soap or needles left behind, small necessities. “Unless it bothers you to scavenge,” he added.

  “Not at all,” Sakera said. “If they’ve left, they’ve left.”

  They paused at the crest of a hill to peer down at the village. There were no cook-fires burning, and the crops in the nearby fields had withered. Yet people walked around the village’s perimeter and through its streets.

  The pattern they traced was chakath, one of the letters of the alphabet, except with the beginning and ending points joined.

  “They’re ghouls,” Tamim said, looking at Sakera for an explanation. “But why—?”

  “The vultures didn’t raise them,” Sakera said. “They’re too practical to have ghouls spelling out alphabet lessons. No: something came to this village and killed its people, and the people simply failed to die.”