Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  In the town the Yegedin had renamed Mijege-in, the censor was a magician. Iseul was to start with him, especially since tonight he was obliged to attend a formal dinner welcoming an official visiting from Yeged proper. It would have been more entertaining to spy on the dinner—she would have had a chance of snacking on some of the delicacies—but someone else was doing that. Her handler, Shen Minsu, had assigned her to search the magician’s home because she had the best chance of being able to deal with magical defenses.

  Getting into the house hadn’t been too difficult. The gates to the courtyard and all the doors were hung with folded-paper wards inscribed with barrier-words of apathy and dejection to discourage people like Iseul. She had come prepared with a charm of passage, however, and a belt hung with tiny locks worn around her waist under her sash. The charm of passage caused all the wards to unfold, and reciprocally, most of the locks had snapped closed. One time, early in her career as a spy, she had run out of locks while infiltrating a fort, and the thwarted charm had begun throwing up random obstacles as she attempted to flee: a burst pipe, crates almost falling on her, a furious cat. Now she erred on the side of more locks.

  It was a small house, all things considered, but magicians were a quirky lot and maybe he didn’t want to deal with the servants necessary to keep a larger house clean. The courtyard was disproportionately large, and featured a tangle of roses that hadn’t been pruned aggressively enough and equally disheveled trees swaying in the evening wind. Some landscaper had attempted to introduce a Yegedin-style rock garden in the middle. The result wasn’t particularly harmonious.

  She circled the house, but heard nothing and saw no people moving against the rice-paper doors. Then she went in the front door. She had two daggers in case she came across someone. After watching the house for a few days, she had concluded that the magician lived alone, but you never knew if someone had a secret lover stashed away. Or a very loud pet. That time with the peacock, for instance. Noisy birds, peacocks. Anyway, with luck, she wouldn’t have to kill anyone this time; she was just here for information.

  Her first dagger was ordinary steel, the suicide-blade that honorable Yegedin women carried. It would be difficult to explain her possession of the blade if she was searched, but that wasn’t the one that would get her in trouble.

  Her second dagger was the one that she couldn’t afford to be caught carrying. It looked more like a very long needle, wrapped around and around by tiny words in the Genial Ones’ language. It was the fifth one Iseul had constructed, although the Ministry of Ornithology had supplied the unmarked dagger for her to modify.

  The dagger was inscribed with the word for human or animal blood, umul. The Genial Ones had had two more words for their own blood, one for what spilled out of them in ordinary circumstances, and another used in reference to ritual bloodletting. The dagger destroyed the person you stabbed it with if you drew blood, and distorted itself into a miniature, rusting figure of the victim: ghastly, but easy to dispose of. Useful for causing people to disappear.

  The house’s passages had creaky wooden floors, but nobody called out or rushed out to attack her. Calligraphy scrolls decorated the walls. Yeged had a calligraphy tradition almost as old as Chindalla’s, and the scrolls displayed Yegedin proverbs and poetry in a variety of commendably rhythmic hands. She could name the styles they were scribed in, most of them well-regarded, if a little old-fashioned: River Rocks Tumbling, Butterfly’s Kiss, Anaiago’s Comb . . .

  Iseul looked away from the scrolls. She shouldn’t get distracted, even though the scrolls might be a clue of some kind. There was always the chance that the magician would find some excuse to leave the dinner early and come home.

  She found part of what she was looking for in the magician’s study, which was dismally untidy, with scraps of paper on every conceivable surface. There was still some light from outside, although she had a lantern charm just in case.

  The magician had brought home two boxes of Chindallan books. One of them mostly contained supernatural stories involving nine-tailed foxes, a genre whose appeal had always eluded her, but which was enduringly popular. She had to concede the charm of some of the illustrations: fox eyes peering brightly from behind masks, fox tails curving slyly from beneath layers of elaborate robes, fox paws slipping out of long gloves.

  Stuffed into the same box was a volume of poetry, which Iseul pulled out in a spirit of professional interest. With a sigh, she began flipping through the book, letting her eye alight on the occasional well-turned phrase. She kept track of syllable counts by reflex. Nothing special. She was tempted to smuggle it out on principle, but this collection had been popular sixteen years ago and there were still a lot of copies to be had in the north. Besides, the magician would surely notice if one of his spoils went missing.

  The next book was different. It had a tasteful cover in dark red, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. She had seen books with covers in every conceivable color, some of them ill-advised; hadn’t everyone? No. It was the fact that the book shouldn’t have been in the box with the others. She went through a dozen pages just to be sure, but she had been right. Each page was printed in Yeged-dai, not Chindallan.

  However, Iseul could see why whoever had packed the box had gotten confused. She recognized the names of most of the poets. More specifically, she recognized the Yegedin names that Chindallan poets had taken.

  Iseul knew from experience that a poet’s existence was a precarious one if you didn’t come from a wealthy family or have a generous patron. Fashions in poetry came and went almost as quickly as fashions in hairstyles. Before the Ministry of Ornithology recruited her, she had written sarcastic verses for nobles to pass around at social functions, and the occasional parody. Slightly risky, but her father’s prominence as a court official had afforded her a certain degree of protection from offended writers.

  The poets who survived in occupied Chindalla could no longer rely on their old patrons, or write as they had been accustomed to writing. But some of them had a knack for foreign languages, as Iseul did, or had perhaps learned Yeged-dai even before the invasion. Those poets had been able to adapt. She had known about such people before this. But it still hurt her to see their poems before her, printed in the curving Yeged-dai script, using Yegedin forms and the images so beloved of the Yegedin: the single pebble, the grasshopper at twilight, the song of a heartbroken lark sitting in a bent tree.

  Iseul put the book back in its place, wishing for something to staunch the ache within her. It would have been easy to hate the southern poets for abandoning their own language, but she knew that resistance carried a considerable risk. Even in Mijege-in, which had fallen early and easily, and which the Yegedin considered well-tamed, the governor occasionally burned rebels alive. She had passed by the latest corpses on the walls when she entered the city. Mainly she remembered them as shadows attracting shadows, charred sticks held together by a conglomeration of ravens.

  There were also those who had died in the initial doomed defense of the south. Sometimes she thought she would never forgive her father, whose martial skills were best not mentioned, for dying with the garrison at Hwagan Fort in an attempt to slow the Yegedin advance. There were poems about that battle, all red-stained banners and broken spears and unquiet pyres, all glory and honor, except there had been nothing glorious about the loss. She hated herself for reading the poems over and over whenever she encountered them.

  Iseul went through the second box. More Chindallan books, the usual eclectic variety, and no clue as to what the Yegedin wanted with them. Maybe it was simple acquisitiveness. One of the Yegedin governors, knowing the beauty and value of Chindallan celadon, had taken the simple expedient of rounding up all the Chindallan potters in three provinces and sending them to his homeland as slaves along with their clay, as well as buying up everything from vases to good forgeries of antique jewelry boxes.

  The rest of the box didn’t take her long to get through. It included a single treatise on m
agic. Those were getting harder and harder to find in the south, as the Yegedin quite reasonably didn’t trust magic in Chindallan hands. The treatise in question concerned locator charms. Like all magic, locators were based on the writings of the Genial Ones, who had once ruled over the human nations the way Yeged desired to rule over the known world. Humans had united under General Anangan to destroy the Genial Ones, but not long after that, a chieftain assassinated the general and the alliance dissolved.

  People discovered that, over time, magic started to fail because its masters were no more. Locators had stopped being reliable about a century ago or Iseul would have had some uses for them herself. On the occasions that you could get one to activate at all, it tended to chew a map into your entrails. Some people would still have used them anyway, but the maps were also inevitably false.

  The treatise’s author had included a number of gruesome illustrations to support her contention that the failed magic was affected by the position of the user’s spleen. The theory was preposterous, but all the same, Iseul wished she could liberate the treatise. She didn’t dare risk it, though. The magician would be even more sure to notice a missing book on magic.

  Iseul froze. Had she just heard footsteps? How could the magician be back so early? Or had she spent more time looking through those damnable poems than she had realized? She ducked behind a coat rack. Under better circumstances, she would have critiqued the coats, although a quick glance suggested that they were in fact of high quality. That cuff, for instance; hard to find embroiderers these days who were willing to put up with the hassle of couching gold thread that had to be done in such short segments. Iseul’s mother had always impressed upon her the importance of appearances, something that Iseul had used against a great many people as a spy.

  The footsteps were getting closer and their owner was walking briskly. A bad sign. Contrary to popular belief, magicians couldn’t detect each other; being a magician was merely a matter of study, applied linguistics, and a smattering of geometry. Magicians could, however, check the status of their charms by looking, just like anyone else with a working pair of eyes. Or by touch, if it came to that. The problem with the passage charm that Iseul used was that it made no attempt to hide its effects. The older version that disguised its own workings had stopped working about 350 years ago.

  It might be time to flee. Iseul was willing to bet that she was more athletic than a magician who worked in an office all day. Her glimpses of him hadn’t suggested that he was particularly fit. The study’s window was covered in oiled paper, and was barely large enough for her to squeeze through.

  More footsteps. Iseul headed for the window, but her sleeve snagged on a coat, and it rustled to the floor. Just her luck: the magician had left a coin purse in it, and the coins jangled as they landed. She cursed her clumsiness. Now he probably knew her location. Indeed, halfway on her way to the window, flowers with shadow-mouths and toothy leaves started growing in hectic tangles from the window, barring her passage.

  Iseul knew better than to believe the illusion, no matter how much the heavy, heady scent of the blossoms threatened to clog her sinuses; no matter how much her hands wanted to twitch away from the jagged leaves and the glistening intimation of poison on the stems. She had seen these flowers in her dreams as a child, when she was afraid that she would fall asleep in the garden during hide-and-seek and be swallowed up by the spirits of thorn and malice. They were only as real as she allowed them to be.

  Her father had once, uncharacteristically, given her a piece of military advice, probably quoted from some manual. They had been playing baduk, a board game involving capturing territory with stones. As usual, he refused to give her any handicap despite the disparity in age. She had been complaining about the fact that she was sure to lose. In her defense, she had only been ten. It doesn’t matter how good your position is, he had told her, if you’re already defeated in your head.

  If the magician thought that a childhood nightmare was going to get her to give up so easily, he was sorely mistaken. She could have punched through the window, which was only covered with paper, and gone on her way. But he already knew someone with knowledge of magic had broken into his home. She might as well have it out with him right now, even if she ordinarily preferred to avoid confrontations. Minsu was going to lecture her about taking risks, but the dreadful timing couldn’t be helped.

  Iseul’s pulse raced as she drew her second dagger and angled herself back behind the coat rack. For a moment she didn’t realize the magician had entered the room.

  Then a figure assembled itself out of shadows and dust motes and scraps of paper, right there in the room. Iseul was tall for a Chindallan woman, but the figure was taller, and its arms were disproportionately long. She thought it might be a man beneath the strange layers of robes, which weren’t in any fashion she’d seen before. She could see its eyes, dark in a pale, smudgy face, and that it was holding up a charm of a variety she didn’t recognize.

  Iseul had killed people before. She lunged with her dagger before the magician had a chance to finish activating the charm. He brought up his arm to protect his ribs. The dagger snagged on his layers of sleeves. She gave it a good hard yank and it came free, along with strands that unraveled in the air.

  She made one more attempt to stab him, but he twisted away, fiendishly fast, and she missed again. She bit back a curse. It was only with great effort that she kept herself from losing her balance.

  Iseul ran past the figure since momentum was taking her there anyway and out of the study. The dagger was needle-keen in her hand, with blood showing hectic red at its point. It should have shrank into a misshapen figure amid shivers of smoke and fractured light the moment she marked her target. She flung it aside in a fit of revulsion and heard it clattering against the wall. It made a bright, terrible sound, like glass bells and shattering hells and hounds unloosed, and she had never heard anything like it before.

  If the dagger hadn’t changed, then that meant the magician was still alive. She had to go back and finish the job. She swung around. The dagger was visible where she had cast it. The blood on the blade seemed even redder. Words writhed in the sheen of the metal’s surface. Probably no good to her if it hadn’t worked the first time. She plunged past it and into the study without hesitating at the threshold.

  The magician was waiting for her. The mixture of amusement, contempt, and rage in his eyes chilled Iseul more than anything else that had happened so far. He threw his charm at her as she cleared the doorway.

  The charm didn’t grow thorns or teeth or tendrils. Instead, it unfolded in a twisting ballet of planes and vertices. For a single clear second, Iseul could see words in the Genial Ones’ language pinned to the paper’s surface by the weight of the ink, by the will of the scribe. Then, with a thready whispering, the words flocked free of the paper and spread themselves in the air toward her, like a net.

  Iseul knew better than to be caught by that net. She twisted around it, thanking her mother for a childhood full of dance lessons, although some of the words brushed her sleeve before they dispersed. Her entire left forearm grew numb. No time to think about that. The magician was reaching for something in a pouch. She ignored that and went instead for his throat. People never expected a woman to have strong hands.

  The magician croaked out half a word. Iseul pressed harder with her thumbs, seeking his windpipe, and felt the magician struggle to breathe. His hands, oddly chilly, clawed at her hands.

  How could someone as skinny as the magician have such good lung capacity? Iseul hung on. The magician’s skin grew colder and colder, as though he had veins of ice creeping closer to his skin the longer she choked him. Her hands ached with the chill.

  Worse, she felt the scrabbling of her lantern charm in response to the magician’s proximity. Belatedly, she realized he was trying to scratch words into her skin with his fingernails. Her teeth closed on a yelp.

  Like all her charms, the lantern charm was made of paper lacquered to a
certain degree of stiffness. It scratched her skin as though it were struggling to unfold itself just as the magician’s original charm had done. For the first time, she cared about the quality of the charm’s lacquer, hoping it would hold fast against another word-cloud.

  Iseul could barely feel her left hand. She kept pressing against the magician’s throat and staring at the ugly purple marks that mottled his skin. “Die,” she said hoarsely. The numb feeling was spreading up her forearm to her elbow, and at this rate, she was going to lose use of the arm, who knew for how long.

  The lantern charm was starting to unfurl. Iseul resisted the urge to close her eyes and give up. But the magician was done struggling. The cold hands dropped away, and he slumped.

  Iseul was trembling. But she held on for another count of hundred just to be certain. Then she let the figure drop to the ground and staggered sideways.

  The magician’s eyes slitted open. Careless of her. She should have realized his physiology might be different. She scrabbled for her ordinary dagger with her good hand and cut his throat. The blood was rich and red, and there was a lot of it.

  The magician wheezed something, a few words in a language she didn’t recognize. Her first instinct was to recoil, remembering the cloud of words. Her second and better instinct, which was to stab his torso repeatedly, won out. But nothing more emerged from those pale lips except a last cool thread of breath.

  She sat back and forced herself to breathe slowly, evenly, until her heart wasn’t knocking at the walls of her ribs anymore. Then she went back out into the hallway. The magical dagger showed no sign of shrinking. She brought it back with her into the study and its mangled corpse.

  Iseul wanted to drop both daggers and huddle under the coats for the rest of the night. Instead, she wiped off both daggers on the magician’s clothes and tucked them back into their sheaths. She took off her jacket. There was a small basin of water, and she washed her hands and face. It wasn’t much, but it made her feel better and right now she would take what she could get. She hunted through the magician’s collection of coats for something that wouldn’t fit her too poorly and put it on.