Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Minsu stopped by the next day and was tactfully silent on Iseul’s harried appearance, although she looked like she wanted to reach out and tidy Iseul’s hair for her. “That looks like some kind of progress,” she remarked, looking around at the sorted stacks of paper, “but clearly I didn’t provide you with enough paper. Or assistants.”

  “I’m not sure assistants would help,” Iseul said. “The Genial Ones seem to communicate with each other on a regular basis. And there are a few hundred of them just based on the ones who are writing, let alone the ones who are lying low. How many people would you trust with this information?”

  She had worse news for Minsu, but it was hard to make herself say it.

  “Not a lot,” Minsu said. “There’s that old saying: only ashes keep secrets, and even they have been known to talk to the stones. What is it that the Genial Ones are so interested in talking about? I can’t imagine that they’re consulting each other on what shoes to wear to their next gathering.”

  “Shoes are important,” Iseul said, remembering how much her feet had hurt after running to the border-fort in the Yegedin soldier’s completely inadequate boots. “But yes. They’re talking about language. I’ve been puzzling through it. There are so many languages, and they work in such different ways. Did you know that there are whole families of languages with something called noun classes, where you inflect nouns differently based on the category they fall into? Except the categories don’t usually make any sense. There’s this language where nouns for female humans and animals and workers share a class, except tables, cities, and ships are also included.” She was aware as she spoke that she was going off on a tangent. She had to nerve herself up to tell Minsu what the Genial Ones were up to.

  “I’m sure Chindallan looks just as strange to foreigners,” Minsu said. Her voice was bemused, but her somber eyes told Iseul she knew something was wrong. “I once spoke to a Jaioi merchant who couldn’t get used to the fact that our third person pronouns don’t distinguish between males and females, which is apparently very important in his language. On the other hand, he couldn’t handle the formality inflections on our verbs at all. He’d hired an interpreter so he wouldn’t inadvertently offend people.”

  The “interpreter” would have been a spy; that went without saying. Iseul had worked such straightforward assignments herself, once upon a time.

  “You haven’t said how bad things are down south,” Iseul said. She couldn’t put this off forever, and yet.

  “Well, I’m tempted to have you relocate further north,” Minsu said, “but there’s only so far north to go. The Yegedin have taken the coastal fort of Suwen. We suspect they’re hoping to open up more logistical options from their homeland. I don’t, frustratingly, have a whole lot of information on what our navy is up to. They’re probably having trouble getting the Yegedin to engage them.” During the original invasion, only the rapacious successes of Chindalla’s navy—always stronger than its army—had forced the Yegedin to halt their advance.

  “I have to work faster,” Iseul said, squeezing her eyes shut. Time to stop delaying. Minsu was silent, and Iseul opened them again. “Of course, every time the safehouse keeper comes in, she looks at me like I’m crazed.” She eyed the mobiles. There was only room for eleven of them, but the way they spun and cavorted, like orreries about to come apart, was probably a good argument that their creator wasn’t in her right mind. “What I don’t understand . . . “ She ran her hand over one of the stacks of paper.

  When Iseul didn’t continue the thought, Minsu said, “Understand what?”

  “I’ve tested the letter-scrying spell,” Iseul said, “with languages that aren’t the Genial Ones’. I’m only fluent in five languages besides Chindallan, but I tried them all. And the spell won’t work on anything but the language of magic. The charms spin around but they can’t so much as get a fix on a letter that I’m writing in the same room.”

  “Did you try modifying the charm?” Minsu asked.

  “I thought of that, but magic doesn’t work that way. I mean, the death-touch daggers, for instance. If you had to craft them to a specific individual target, they’d be less useful. Well, in most circumstances.” They could both think of situations where a dagger that would only kill a certain person might be useful. “But I think that’s why the Genial Ones have been so quiet, and why they’ve been busy compiling the lexicons by hand for each human language. Because there’s no other way to do it. They know more magic than I do, that goes without saying. If there were some charm to do the job for them, they’d be using it.”

  “I have the feeling you’re going to lead up to something that requires the best of teas to face,” Minsu said, and stole a sip from Iseul’s cup before Iseul had the chance to warn her off. She was too well-bred to make remarks about people who put honey in even abysmal tea, but her eyebrows quirked a little.

  Iseul looked away. “I think I know why the Genial Ones are compiling lexicons,” she said, “and it isn’t because they really like writing miniature treatises on morphophonemics.”

  “How disappointing,” Minsu said, “you may have destroyed my affection for them forever.” But her bantering tone had worry beneath it.

  Iseul went to a particular stack of papers, which she had weighted down with a letter opener decorated with a twining flower motif. “They’ve been discussing an old charm,” she said. “They want to create a variation of the sculpture charm.”

  “That was one of the first to become defunct after their defeat,” Minsu observed. “Apparent defeat, I should say.”

  “That brings me to the other thing,” Iseul said. “I think I’ve figured out that word that the first Genial One said, the one that was unfamiliar. Because it keeps showing up in their conversations. I think it’s a word that didn’t exist before.”

  “I remember that time that satirist coined a new word for hairpins that look like they ought to be good for assassinations but are completely inadequate for the job,” Minsu said. “Of course, based on Chindalla’s plays and novels, I have to concede that we needed the word.”

  Minsu’s attempts to get her to relax weren’t helping, but Iseul appreciated the effort. You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this—“ ‘Defeat,’ ” Iseul said softly. “The word means ‘defeat.’ ”

  “Surely they can’t have gone all this time without—” Minsu’s mouth pressed into a flat line.

  “Yes,” Iseul said. “These are people who had separate words for their blood and our blood. Because we weren’t their equals. Until General Anangan overcame them, they had no word for their own defeat. Not at the hands of humans, anyway, as opposed to the intrigues and backstabbing that apparently went on among their clans.”

  “All right,” Minsu said, “but that can’t be what’s shadowing your eyes.”

  “They want to defeat us the way we almost defeated them,” Iseul said. “They’re obsessed with it. They’ve figured out how to scale the sculpture charm up. Except they’re not going to steal our shapes. They’re going to steal our words and add them to their own language. And Chindalla’s language is the last to be compiled for the purpose.”

  In the old days, the forgotten days, the human nations feared the Genial Ones’ sculptors, and their surgeons, and their soldiers. They knew, however, that the greatest threat was none of these, but the Genial Ones’ lexicographers, whose thoroughness was legendary. The languages that they collected for their own pleasure vanished, and the civilizations that spoke those languages invariably followed soon afterwards.

  Iseul was in the middle of explaining her plan to thwart the Genial Ones to Minsu, which involved charms to destroy the language of magic itself, when the courier arrived. The safehouse’s keeper interrupted them. Iseul thought it was to bring them tea, but she was accompanied by a young man, much disheveled and breathing hard. He was obviously trying not to stare at the room’s profusion of charms, or at Iseul herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she had given her ha
ir a good thorough combing, and she probably looked like a ghost. (For some reason ghosts never combed their hair.) Her mother would have despaired of her.

  “I trust you have a good reason for this,” Minsu said wearily.

  “You need to hear this, my lady,” the keeper said.

  The young man presented his papers to Minsu. They declared him to be a government courier, although the official seal, stamped in red ink that Iseul happened to know never washed out of fabric no matter what you tried, was smeared at the lower right corner. Minsu looked over the papers, frowning, then nodded. “Speak,” Minsu said.

  “A Yegedin detachment of two thousand has been spotted heading this way,” the courier said. “It’s probably best if you evacuate.”

  Iseul closed her eyes and drew a shuddering breath in spite of herself.

  “All this work,” Minsu said, gesturing at the mobiles.

  “It’s not worth defending this town,” Iseul said bleakly, “am I right?”

  “The throne wishes its generals to focus on protecting more important cities,” the courier said. “I’m sorry, my lady.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Iseul said to Minsu. “I can work as easily from another safehouse.”

  “You’ll have to set up the charms all over again,” Minsu said.

  “It can’t be helped. Besides, if we stay here, even if the Yegedin don’t get us, the looters will.”

  The courier’s expression said that he was realizing that Iseul might have more common sense than her current appearance suggested. Still, he addressed Minsu. “The detachment will probably be here within the next five days, my lady. Best to leave before the news becomes general knowledge.”

  “Not as if there are a whole lot of people left here anyway,” Minsu said. “All right. Thank you for the warning.”

  Iseul was used to being able to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, but she hadn’t reckoned on dealing with the charms and the quantities of text that they had generated. There wasn’t time to burn everything, which made her twitch. They settled for shuffling the rest into boxes and abandoning them with the heaps of garbage that could be found around the town. Her hands acquired blisters, but she didn’t even notice how much they hurt.

  Iseul and Minsu joined the long, winding trail of refugees heading north. The safehouse keeper insisted on parting ways from them because she had family in the area. Minsu’s efforts to talk her out of this met with failure. She pressed a purse of coins into the keeper’s hands; that was all the farewell they could manage.

  Minsu bought horses from a trader at the first opportunity, the best he had, which wasn’t saying much. The price was less extravagant than Iseul might have guessed. Horses were very unpopular at the moment because everyone had the Yegedin storm-horses on their mind, and people had taken to stealing and killing them for the stewpot instead. Minsu insisted on giving Iseul the calmer gelding and taking the cantankerous mare for herself. “No offense,” she said, “but I have more experience wrangling very annoying horses than you do.”

  “I wasn’t complaining,” Iseul said. She was credible enough on horseback, but it really didn’t matter.

  Most of the refugees headed for the road to the capital, where they felt the most safety was to be had. Once the two of them were mounted, however, Minsu led them northeast, toward the coast.

  In the evenings Iseul would rather have dropped asleep immediately, but constructing her counterstroke against the Genial Ones was an urgent problem, and it required all her attention. Not only did she have to construct a charm to capture the Genial Ones’ words, she had to find a way to destroy those words so they could never be used again. Sometimes she caught herself nodding off, and she pinched her palm to prick herself awake again. They weren’t just threatened by armies; they were threatened by the people who had once ruled all the known nations.

  “We’re almost there,” Minsu said as they came to the coast. “Just another day’s ride.” The sun was low in the sky, but she had decided they should stop in the shelter of a hill rather than pressing on tonight. She had been quiet for most of the journey, preferring not to interrupt Iseul’s studies unless Iseul had a question for her.

  Iseul had been drowsing as she rode, a trick she had mastered out of necessity. She didn’t hear Minsu at first, lost in muddled dreams of a book. The book had pages of tawny paper, precisely the color of skin. It was urgent that she write a poem about rice-balls into the book. Everyone knew rice was the foundation of civilization and it deserved more satiric verses than it usually received, but every time she set her brush to the paper, the ink ran down the bristles and formed into cavorting figures that leapt off the pages. She became convinced that she was watching a great and terrible dance, and that the question was then whether she would run out of ink before the dance came to its fruition.

  “Iseul.” It was Minsu. She had tied her horse to a small tree and had caught Iseul’s reins. “I know you’re tired, but you look like you’re ready to fall off.”

  Iseul came alert all at once, the way she had trained herself to do on countless earlier missions. “I have to review my notes. I think I might have it this time.”

  “There’s hardly any light to read by.”

  “I’ll shield a candle.”

  “I’ll see to your horse, then,” Minsu said.

  Minsu set up camp while Iseul hunched over her notes. Properly it should have been the other way around, but Minsu never stood on formalities for their own sake. She was always happy to pour tea for others, for instance.

  “If they think to do scrying of their own once I get started,” Iseul said while Minsu was bringing her barley hardtack mashed into a crude cold porridge, “our lifespans are going to be measured in minutes.”

  “We don’t seem to have a choice if we want to survive,” Minsu said.

  “The ironic thing is that we’ll also be saving the Yegedin.”

  “We can fight the Yegedin the way we’d fight anyone else,” Minsu said. “The Genial Ones are another matter.”

  “If only we knew how General Anangan managed it the first time around,” Iseul said. But all that remained were contradictory legends. She wondered, now, if the Genial Ones themselves had obfuscated the facts.

  “If only.” Minsu sighed.

  Iseul ate the porridge without tasting it, which was just as well.

  A little while later, Minsu said quietly, “You haven’t even thought to be tempted, have you?”

  “Tempted how?” But as she spoke, Iseul knew what Minsu meant. “It would only be a temporary reprieve.”

  She knew exactly how the lexicon charm worked. She had the Yeged-dai lexicon with her, and she could use it to destroy the Yegedin language. The thirteen-year occupation would evaporate. Poets could write in their native language without fear of attracting reprisals. Southern Chindallans could use their own names again. No more rebels would have to burn to death. All compelling arguments. She could annihilate Yeged before she turned on the Genial Ones. People would consider it an act of patriotism.

  But as Minsu had said, the Yegedin could be fought by ordinary means, without resorting to the awful tools of humanity’s old masters.

  Iseul also knew that turning the lexicon charm against the Genial Ones’ own language would mean destroying magic forever. No more passage charms or lantern charms; no more convenient daggers that made people vanish.

  No more storm-horses, either, or towers built of people’s bones erupting from pyramids of corpses, as in the old stories. It wouldn’t be all bad. And what kind of spy would she be if she couldn’t improvise solutions?

  Besides, if she didn’t do something about the Genial Ones now, they would strike against all the human nations with the lexicons they had already compiled. Here, at least, the choice was clear and narrow.

  “I don’t want to be more like the Genial Ones than I have to,” Iseul said with a guilty twitch of regret. “But we do have to go through with this.”

  “Do you have ward spe
lls prepared?” Minsu said.

  “Yes,” Iseul said. “A lot of them. Because once we’re discovered—and we have to assume we’ll be—they’re going to devote their attention to seeking out and destroying us. And we don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “Oh, that’s not true,” Minsu said. “We know exactly what they’re capable of. We’ve known for generations, even in the folktales.”

  “I should start tonight,” Iseul said. “I’m only going to be more tired tomorrow.”

  Minsu looked as though she wanted to argue, but instead she nodded.

  Iseul sat in the lee of the hill and began the painstaking work of copying out all the necessary charms, from the wards—every form of ward she knew of, including some cribbed from the Genial Ones’ own discussions—to the one that would compile the lexicon of the language of magic for her by transcribing those same discussions. That final charm was bound to fail at some point when its world of words was confined to the sheets of blank paper she had prepared for it, but—if she had done this correctly—she had constructed it so that it would target its own structural words last.

  The winds were strong tonight, and they raked Iseul with cold. The horses were unsettled, whinnying to each other and pulling at their ropes. Iseul glanced up from time to time to look at the sky, bleak and smothered over with clouds. The hills might as well have been the dented helmets of giant warriors, abandoned after an unwinnable fight.

  “All right,” Iseul said at last, hating how gray her voice sounded. She felt the first twinge of a headache and remembered to take the medicine the physician had given her. “Come into the circle of protection, Minsu. There’s no reason to delay getting started.”

  Obligingly, Minsu joined her, and Iseul activated each warding charm one by one. It was hard not to feel as though she was playing with a child’s toys, flimsy folded shapes, except she knew exactly what each of those charms was intended to do.