Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Hwado, noun. The way of fire. At one point the Chindallan bow and arrow were believed to be sacred to the spirits of sun and moon. A number of religious ceremonies involve shooting fire-arrows. Such arrows are often fletched with feathers dyed red. There is a saying in Chindalla that “even the wind bleeds,” and most archers propitiate the spirits of the air after they practice their art.

  Minsu was late for the rendezvous. Iseul had taken advantage of one of the safehouses in the town of Suwen, which was some distance to the north and out of the likely path of the Yegedin advance. She took advantage of the lull to experiment with making her own charms, even though she knew Minsu would have preferred her not to risk working with magic. Still, Iseul had a notion that she might be able work out something to spy on the Genial Ones’ communications if she could only exploit certain of the charms’ geometries.

  After her latest failure, which resulted in words of lenses and distance charring off the attempted charm, Iseul sought comfort in an old pleasure: poetry. She could barely remember what it was like when her greatest problem had been coming up with a sufficiently witty pun with which to puncture some pretentious noblewoman’s taste in hairpins. After a couple hours failing to write anything entertainingly caustic, she ventured to one of the town’s bookstores to buy a couple volumes of recent poetry so she could pick them apart instead.

  Iseul had once wondered what the Yegedin were getting out of piles of Chindallan books when the majority of them were simply not very good. Especially when the Yegedin were famed for their exquisite sense of aesthetics. It was almost difficult, at times, to hate people who understood beauty so thoroughly, and who even recognized beauty when it was to be had in a conquered people’s arts.

  She returned to the safehouse with her spoils. One of the books was an anthology by highborn poets. All of the poems were written in the high script, which Iseul had learned as a child at her mother’s insistence. She had hated it then. The high script was based on the language of the great Qieng Empire to the north and east, but the Qieng language had little resemblance to Chindallan, necessitating a whole system of contrivances to make their writing work for Chindallan at all. Complicating the matter was the fact that the high script had come into use in Chindalla’s earlier days, when Chindallan itself had been different, so you had to compensate both for the Qieng language and for the language shifts within Chindallan.

  The other volume was a collection by an entertainer who had made a specialty of patriotic poems. He wrote in the petal script, which had been invented by a female entertainer, Jebi the Clever, to fit Chindallan itself. The shapes of the letters even corresponded to the positions of the tongue as it made Chindallan’s speech sounds. Sadly, while the collection was beautifully illustrated—the artist had a real eye for the dramatic use of silhouettes—the poetry itself was trite and overwritten. How many times could you use the phrase “hearts of stout fire” in the space of twenty pages without being embarrassed for yourself, anyway?

  Minsu met her at the safehouse two days later. She was wearing modestly splendid robes of silk embroidered with cavorting quails. “I am tired of hearing about battles with no survivors,” she said. She was referring to the border-fort.

  “I heard about the supernatural archer who came back from the dead to defend the fort,” Iseul said, raising her eyebrows. “A rain of arrows to blacken the sky, people falling over pierced through the eye, that sort of thing. I didn’t even know you had that many arrows.”

  “You should know better than to listen to hearsay,” Minsu said. “Besides, I’m sure I got one magician, but I missed the other. Damnable light, couldn’t tell who was who and couldn’t risk getting closer, either. And it made no difference in the end.”

  Iseul nodded somberly. People in the town spoke of nothing else. The storm clouds, the white hands of lightning, the tumbling stones. Skeletons charred to ash, marrow set alight from within. The kindly guard captain at the border-fort was almost certainly dead.

  Despite the city magistrate’s attempts to keep order, the townsfolk had been gathering their belongings to flee northward. One of them had insisted on explaining to Iseul the best things to take during an evacuation. “Don’t take rice,” the old woman had said. “Only fools weigh themselves down with rice.” She had shown Iseul her tidy bundles of medicines, small and light and pungent. “Someone always gets sick, stomach trouble or foot pains, or some woman has a hard childbirth, if you’re unlucky enough to bring a child into the world in these times. You trade the medicine for the food someone else has had to carry, and you fill your belly without having to break your back.” Bemused, Iseul had thanked the old woman for her advice.

  “I couldn’t get into the magicians’ tent,” Iseul said, “and I still haven’t figured out if there’s a way to spy on their letters. The trip was for nothing.”

  “Overhear anything useful?” Minsu said, looking at her with such an expression of calm trust that Iseul felt even more wretched.

  Iseul thought over the magicians’ exchange while she waited for Minsu. “They were arguing about how destructive to make the storm, I think. That was all. But there was something—” She frowned. Something about their words had just reminded her of the poetry, but what could Chindallan poetry possibly have to do with the Genial Ones?

  “Have some tea,” Minsu said, her solution to everything, “and maybe it will come to you.”

  Iseul gave a tiny sigh. The safehouse’s tea might as well have been mud steeped in rainwater, but Minsu gave no sign that she noticed its inferior quality. Iseul recounted the rest of her meeting with the border-fort’s captain, although there wasn’t much to tell.

  “I don’t think the magicians at Fort Kamang will do us much good,” Iseul said. “How are mere human magicians going to stand up to the Genial Ones themselves? Magic clearly prefers to serve its original masters if the Genial Ones can so casually invoke spells we all thought had decayed to uselessness.”

  “I’d send you to kidnap one of the Genial Ones,” Minsu said, “but I don’t think we have a safe way of holding one for questioning.”

  Over and over Iseul heard the two magicians arguing in her head. “Their accent,” she said slowly. The threads were in her hands. She only had to figure out how to weave them together. “Their accents, and the accent of the one I killed. The fact that I didn’t recognize the language at first.”

  Minsu eyed her but knew better than to interrupt. Instead, she poured more tea.

  “Minsu,” Iseul said, going pale. “I was wrong just now. We’ve all been wrong. Magic didn’t die because the Genial Ones were wiped out. Because we know now that they were never wiped out. Magic stopped working for the humans piece by piece because it’s their language, and their language changed over time just as Chindallan has changed, which everyone who has studied the high script knows. Their language became different. We’ve been trying to use the wrong words for magic.”

  “You could make more powerful charms, then,” Minsu said. “Using the proper words now that you know them.”

  “Now that I know some of them, you mean. It would take trial and error to figure out all the necessary changes, and magical experimentation can get messy if you do it wrong.”

  “So much for that,” Minsu said. “What about the lexicons? What do they signify?”

  “I still don’t know what they’re doing, but I will find out,” Iseul said.

  “We have some time,” Minsu said, “but that doesn’t mean we can afford to relax. The fact that Yegedin have learned from their mistakes in the first invasion may, in some sense, work in our favor.” Originally the Yegedin armies had raced north, far ahead of their supply lines, and eventually had to retreat to the current border. “This time they’re making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation. Still, tell me what you need and I will make sure you are well-supplied.”

  “More paper, for a start,” Iseul said. “A lot of paper. I will have to hope that the Genial Ones don
’t track me down here.”

  “Indeed.” Minsu’s eyes were unexpectedly grim. “I would get you the assistance of a Chindallan magician, but you do realize that there’s every possibility that the Genial Ones have been hiding among our people, too.”

  “It had occurred to me, yes.” Iseul was starting to get a headache, although in all fairness, she should have had one ages ago. “I don’t suppose you have any of that headache medicine?”

  “I have a little left from my last detour to a pharmacy,” Minsu said, and handed it over. “I’ll get you more. I have other business to attend to, but I will check back with you from time to time. The safehouse’s keeper will have instructions to assist you in any way she can.”

  “Thank you,” Iseul said. She didn’t look up as Minsu slipped out.

  The first Chindallan dynasty after the fall of the Genial Ones only lasted four abbreviated generations. Its queens and kings were buried in tombs of cold stone beneath mounded earth. Certain Chindallan scholars, coming to the tombs long after they had been plundered, noted that many of the tombs, when viewed from above, seemed to form words in the high script: wall, for instance, or eye, or vigilant. The scholars believed that this practice, like that of burying terracotta soldiers with the dead monarchs and their households, arose from a desire to protect the tombs from grave robbers. Like the terracotta soldiers, the tombs’ construction was singularly inadequate for this purpose.

  Iseul slept little in the days that followed. She was making progress on the scrying charm, though, which was something. It required suspending the charm along with two of the quill-charms in a mobile. Sometimes, when her exhaustion overcame her, she found herself staring at the charms bobbing back and forth in the air.

  She also developed a headache so ferocious that Minsu’s medicine, normally reliable, did her no good. Finally she ventured out in search of a pharmacist. It turned out that the pharmacist had fled town, to her vexation, but an old man told her that one of the physicians, a somewhat disreputable man who had evaded registration with the proper ministry for his entire life, was still around. Since she didn’t have much option, she went in search of him.

  The physician lived in a small hut at the edge of town. He was sitting outside, and he had finished ministering to a pair of grubby children. One of the children was eating a candy with no sign that her splinted wrist bothered her. The other, an even younger girl, was picking wildflowers.

  The physician himself was a tall man who would have been taller if not for his hunched shoulders, and he had a wry, gentle face. His clothes were very plain. No one would have looked at him twice in the market square. He stood at Iseul’s approach.

  “This will be quick, I promise,” Iseul said. “I’ve been having headaches and I need medicine for it.”

  The physician looked her up and down. “I should think that a few good nights’ sleep would serve you better than any medicine,” he said dryly.

  “I don’t have time for a few good nights’ sleep,” Iseul said. “Please, don’t you have anything to take the edge off the pain? If it’s a matter of money—”

  He named a sum that explained to Iseul what he was doing in such plain clothes. Any respectable licensed physician could have charged three times as much even for something this simple.

  “I can pay that,” Iseul said.

  The girl with the splint tugged at the physician’s sleeve, completely unconcerned with the transaction going on. “Do you have more candy?”

  “For pity’s sake, you haven’t finished what’s in your mouth,” he said.

  “But it tastes better when you have two flavors at once.”

  He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Maybe later.”

  “You should be all right so long as you don’t fall out of any more trees.” But the melancholy in his eyes told Iseul that he knew what happened to children in wartime.

  The younger girl handed him the wildflowers. She didn’t speak in complete sentences yet, but both Iseul and the physician were given to understand that she had picked him the prettiest and best wildflowers as payment. The physician smiled and told her to go back to her parents with her sister.

  “You can come in while I get the medicine, if you like,” the magician said.

  Iseul looked at him with worry as he began to walk. Something about the way he carried himself even over such a short distance intimated a great and growing pain. “Are you well?” she asked.

  “It’s an old injury,” the physician said with a shrug, “and of little importance.”

  The hut had two rooms, and the outer room was sparsely furnished. There were no books in it, which disappointed Iseul obscurely. On a worn table was a small jar with a crack at the lip and a handful of wilting cosmos flowers in it. He added the newly plucked wildflowers to the jar.

  Iseul couldn’t help looking around for weapons, traps, stray charms. Nothing presented itself to her eye as unusually dangerous, but the habit was hard to lose.

  “Here it is,” the physician said after a moment’s rooting around in a chest. “Take it once a day when the pain sets in. Ideally you want to catch it before it gets bad. And try not to rely on it more than you have to. People who take this stuff every day over long periods of time sometimes get sick in other ways.”

  “That shouldn’t be an issue,” Iseul said, one way or another. She hesitated, then said, “You could do a lot of good to the military, you know. They’re sure to be looking for physicians, and they’d probably give you a temporary license.”

  The physician held out the packet of medicine. “I am a healer of small hurts,” he said, “nothing more. Everything I accomplish is with a few herbal remedies and common sense. A surprising number of maladies respond to time and rest and basic hygiene, things that soldiers don’t see a lot of when they go to war. And besides, the people here need someone too.”

  Iseul thought of the little girl picking flowers for him. “Then I will simply wish you well,” she said. “Thank you.” She counted out the payment. He refused her attempts to pay him what he ought to be charging her.

  She took a dose of the medicine, then headed back to the safehouse. She passed more people heading out of the town. Mothers with small, squalling children on their backs. Old men leaning on canes carved in the shape of animal heads, a specialty of the region. The occasional nervous couple, quarreling about things to bring with them and things to leave behind. One woman was crying over a large lacquered box with abalone inlay. The battered box was probably the closest thing to a treasure she owned. Her husband tried to tell her that something of its size wasn’t worth hauling north and that nobody would give them much money for it anyway, which led to her shouting at him that it wasn’t for money that she wanted to bring it.

  Merchants were selling food, clothes, and other necessaries for extortionate sums. People were buying anyway: not much choice. Iseul paused to glance over a display of protection charms that one woman was selling, flimsy folded-paper pendants painted with symbols and strung on knotted cords.

  The seller bowed deeply to Iseul. “They say the storms are coming north,” she said. “Why not protect yourself from the rains and the sharp-toothed horses?”

  “Thank you, but no,” Iseul said, having satisfied herself that the charms’ symbols were beautifully rendered, but empty of virtue. “I wish you the best, though.”

  The seller eyed her, but decided not to waste time trying to sway her. Shrugging, she turned away and called out to a passing man who was wearing a finer jacket than most of the people on the street.

  There was a noodle shop on the way back to the safehouse. The noodles were just as extortionately priced, but Iseul was tired of the safehouse’s food. She paid for cold noodles flavored with vinegar, hoping that the flavor would drive out the foul taste of the medicine. The sliced cucumbers were sadly limp, so she added extra vinegar in the hopes of salvaging the dish, without much luck. At least her headache seemed to have receded.

  Iseul sat down with her papers
and began her work again. She had been keeping notes on all her experiments, some of which were barely legible. She hadn’t realized how much her handwriting deteriorated when she was in pain. This time she adjusted the mobile to include a paper sphere (well, an approximate sphere) to represent the world, written over with words of water and earth and cloudshadow.

  When the scrying charm did begin to work, hours later, Iseul almost didn’t realize it. She was staring off into space, resigned to yet another failure. It was a bad sign that the tea was starting to taste good, although that might possibly be related to the desperation measure of adulterating it with increasing quantities of honey. Not very good honey, at that.

  The safehouse’s keeper had come in with another pot of tea and was staring at the mobile. “My lady,” she said, “is it supposed to be doing that?”

  Iseul stifled a yawn. She didn’t bother correcting the keeper, although a mere spy didn’t rate “lady.” “Supposed to be doing—oh.”

  The sphere was spinning at a steady rate, and black words were boiling from its surface in angry-looking tendrils. Iseul stood and squinted at them. Experimentally, she touched one of the tendrils. Her fingertip felt slightly numb, so she snatched it back. The safehouse’s keeper excused herself and left hastily, but Iseul didn’t notice.

  Iseul had a supply of sheets of paper and books of execrable poetry. She opened one of the poetry books, then positioned one of the sheets beneath the sphere’s shadow. Sure enough, words began to condense from the shadow onto the paper, and lines of poetry began to fade from the books. The lines were distorted, probably because they were traveling from a curved surface to a flat one, but the writing was readable enough, and it was in the Genial Ones’ language, as she had expected it would be.

  Not far into this endeavor, Iseul realized she was going to need a better strategy. There was only one of her, and only one of the scrying charms. Based on the sphere locations, there looked to be at least a hundred Genial Ones communicating with each other. She could make more scrying charms, but she couldn’t recruit more people to read and analyze the letters.