Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  At the center of the circle of protection were four books as empty as mirrors in the darkness, which Iseul had bound during her time in the safehouse. She hoped four books would be enough to cripple the Genial Ones, even if they couldn’t contain the entirety of their language. Iseul began folding pages of the empty books, dog-earing corners and folding them into skewed geometries. When she wasn’t watching closely, she had the impression that the corners were unfolding and stretching out tendrils of nascent words, nonsense syllables, to spy on her. She didn’t mention this to Minsu, but the other woman’s face was strained. There was a stinging tension in the air; her skin prickled.

  Lightning flickered in the distance as she worked. It cut from one side of the sky to the other in a way that natural lightning never did, like the sweep of a sword.

  “Hurry if you can,” Minsu said, head raised to watch the approach of the storm.

  “I’m hurrying,” Iseul said.

  The winds were whipping fiercely around them now. One of Minsu’s braids had come unpinned and was flapping like a lonely pennant.

  The candle flickered out. Minsu brought out a lantern charm.

  “I’m all for ordinary fire if you can get it to work for you,” Minsu said at Iseul’s dubious look, “but you need light and this will give you light for a time.”

  Iseul continued with the lexicon charm, double-checking every fold, every black and twining word, every diagram of spindled lines. The sense of tension sharpened. If she dared to look away from the books’ pages and at the suffocating sky, she imagined that she would see words forming amid the clouds, sky-words and wind-words and water-words, words of torrential despair and words of drowning terror, words that had existed in some form since the first people learned to speak.

  She slammed each book shut counterclockwise, shuddering, suddenly hoping the whole affair was an extension of the dream she had had and that she would wake to sunlight and flowers and a warm spot by some fire, but no. With a dry creaking voice—with a chorus of voices that rose and rose to a roar—the books wrenched themselves open in unison.

  For a second the pages fluttered wildly, like birds newly freed. Then they darkened as words inundated them. Slowly at first, then in a steady pouring of black writhing shapes. Postpositions. Conjunctions. Nouns that violated vowel harmony and nouns that didn’t. Verbs in different conjugations, tenses, aspects. A stray aorist. Scraps of syntax and subclause generators. Interjections snatched from between clenched teeth. Sacred names rarely spoken and never before written.

  One of the horses was thrashing about, but Iseul was only peripherally aware of it, or of Minsu swearing under her breath. A dark shape plunged up before Iseul, but she was intent upon the books, the books, the terrible books. Who knew there were so many crawling words in a language? Years ago, when reviewing a cryptology text, she had seen an estimate of the number of words a literate Chindallan needed to be able to read. She had thought the number large then. Now she knew the estimate must be low. It wasn’t possible for more words to flood the four books’ pages, but here they came, again and again and again, growing smaller and smaller as they crushed each other in the confines on the pages.

  The dark shape was one of the horses, which had pulled free of the rope in its panic. Minsu had her riding crop out and struck the horse. Iseul had a vague idea of how desperate she must be. The other woman had always been softhearted about the animals. But the horse wheeled and ran toward the hills, neighing wildly.

  Iseul’s attention was abruptly drawn to the horse when, having passed the circle of protection, lightning scythed through the horse. Except it wasn’t lightning, precisely: pale light with eyes in it, and black waving feelers sprouting from each pupil, and the feelers ate holes into the unfortunate animal’s spine. The horse screamed for a long time.

  More lightning zigzagged down from the sky, crackling around the circle. Rain was pelting down all around them, and muddy water sluiced down the hillside. Voices whispered out of the darkness, murmuring liplessly of entrails and needlepoints and vengeance. The light from the lantern charm glittered in the raindrops and the sheets of water like an unwanted promise. The lantern, although flimsy in construction, seemed to be in no danger of being toppled by the rising winds.

  One of the protective wards began to unfold itself.

  Minsu said a word that Iseul hadn’t even realized she knew.

  “We can’t let them win this,” Iseul said breathlessly. Stupid to just stand here watching, as if the Genial Ones would simply submit to the destruction of their magic. She began constructing an additional ward to reinforce the one that was disintegrating.

  Chasms of fire opened in the air, then closed, like terrible fierce smiles. The rain hissed where it met the fire, and Iseul flinched when tendrils of steam were repelled by the circle of protection. Leaves spun free of the hillside wildflowers and the nearby copses of trees, formed into great screaming birds, battered themselves fruitlessly against the wards before dissipating into shreds and slivers of green and yellow.

  Iseul spared a glance for the books. Was it possible for them to hold any more words? She set the current ward in place, then flipped through the pages of the fourth book in spite of herself, in spite of the conviction that the paper would hold her hands fast and drag her in. And then the teeth began.

  The teeth grew from the corners of the pages. They distended into predatory curves, yellow-white and gleaming. Iseul flinched violently.

  The teeth took no notice of her, but the books fanned themselves out like a hundred hundred mouths. Then, with a papery crumpling sound, they began to eat the words.

  Minsu was holding Iseul’s shoulder. “This is not,” she said thinly, “at all what I thought it would be.”

  The storm crackled and roared above them. The two women clung to each other as rain and lightning crashed inland. If the winds grew any stronger, Iseul felt she would fall over sideways and not stop falling until she had gone through the world and out the other side. But she didn’t dare rest, and she didn’t dare contemplate leaving the circle of protection.

  More of the wards were unfolding. Despite her shaking hands, Iseul bent to the task of making more charms, except now the charms were fighting her. Of course, she thought, cursing herself for her carelessness. She had thought to specify that the lexicon charm would spare itself as long as possible, but she had done no such thing for the wards. She would have to try synonyms, circumlocutions, alternate geometries; she would have to hope that the Genial Ones were having as much difficulty sustaining their attacks as she was her defenses.

  The lantern charm abruptly guttered out. Iseul couldn’t see, through the water in her eyes, whether the words upon it had been devoured, or whether the Genial Ones had discovered them and snuffed it themselves.

  Faces of fire scattered downward and struck a hilltop perhaps thirty meters from them. All the faces were howling, and their eyes were hollow sooty pits. For a moment everything was crowned in sanguinary light, from the silhouetted grasses swept nearly flat to the hunched rocks.

  “We’re done for,” Iseul whispered. Was it her imagination, or did she hear horses in the distance, sharp-toothed horses with hooves that struck savage rhythms into the earth’s bones?

  More charms uncurled, crumpled, made the kinds of sounds you might imagine of lost love letters and discarded prayers.

  “Hold fast,” Minsu said, although she had to repeat herself over the drumming storm so that Iseul could hear her. Her expression was obscure in the darkness.

  Iseul was holding down the covers of one of the books, small futile gesture. The whole thing should have been drenched. Ordinarily she would have been appalled at herself for leaving a book out in the rain, but the teeth seemed just as happy to devour water as words.

  A swirl of flame made it past the circle of protection. Minsu’s hair caught on fire. She beat at the flames with her hands. For a bad moment, Iseul thought that the fires had spread to her eyes, her ears, the marrow of her hands. Bu
t after one horrifying white-red flare, the fire shook itself apart in an incoherent dazzle of sparks, then sizzled into silence.

  “I’m fine,” Minsu shouted, although her voice shook. She went to retrieve the lantern charm. “No words,” she said, squinting at it during the next lightning-flash. The charm had unfolded completely. There were only faint rust-colored marks where the words had been, like splotches of blood.

  Hurry, Iseul bid the books with their gnashing teeth. Hurry.

  There was no way to guide the books’ hunger now, no way to tell them to eat words of storm and fire above all others. They were indiscriminate in their voracity. More and more of the pages were spotted rust-red, like the former lantern charm.

  Then the storm broke. There was no other word for it. It came apart into smaller storms, and the smaller storms into eddies of wind, the rain into a fine wandering mist. In the distance they heard the tolling of dark bells and the screams of sharp-toothed horses.

  The teeth receded. The books’ pages twitched upward, yearning, then subsided. A sullen light rippled from their covers. Every single one of their pages was covered with splattered blood, a slaughterhouse of words. Fighting her revulsion, Iseul closed each one and put them away. The light sloughed away.

  Iseul and Minsu were drenched through. “We’ll catch our death of chill out here,” Iseul said. Her throat felt raw although she had hardly spoken. After what had just happened, a great lassitude threatened to drag her under, but she couldn’t afford to sleep, not yet.

  “We have to see what became of the coastal fort,” Minsu said. “If we walk through the night we might make it. Assuming the place hasn’t been overrun by the Yegedin navy.”

  The books felt like chains all the way through the night. They found a trail through the hills, difficult to see in the darkness and dangerously slippery at that, but Minsu had experience of this region and was able to lead them in the right direction. She insisted that Iseul ride the remaining horse while she led it. By that point, Iseul didn’t care where they were going or how they got there so long as she was allowed to collapse and sleep at the end of it. Any flat surface would do.

  “Oh no,” Minsu said at last.

  Iseul almost fell off the horse. She had slipped into a half-doze, except she kept seeing black spidering shapes behind her eyelids.

  They had stopped on the crest of a hill: risky to be silhouetted if there were enemies in the area, especially archers, but an excellent vantage point otherwise.

  The sea crashed against broken white-gray cliffs. The bones of ships could be seen floating in the newly formed harbor along with uprooted trees. “They destroyed the coast,” Minsu said, bringing out a spyglass and looking north and south. “Fort Jenal used to be out there—” She gestured toward the horizon, toward the frothing waves. “Now it’s all water and wreckage.”

  “Do you suppose there are any survivors?” Iseul said. But she knew the answer.

  Minsu shook her head.

  “If only I had figured it out sooner,” Iseul said, head bowed. If only she had been able to make the lexicon charm work faster.

  “We’ll have to notify the nearest garrison,” Minsu said, “so they can search for survivors, Chindallan or Yegedin. But for now, we must rest.”

  She said something else, but Iseul’s knees buckled and she didn’t hear any of it.

  The Genial Ones originally had no word for medicine that did not also mean poison. They ended up borrowing one from a human language spoken by people that they slaughtered the hard way for variety’s sake, person by person dragged from their villages and redoubts and killed, cautery by sword and spear.

  Minsu said very little to the garrisons they visited about the real reason the storm had broken, which was just as well. Iseul wasn’t sure what she would have said if asked about it. She did, at Minsu’s urging, write a ciphered account of the lexicon charm and the devouring books to send to the Ministry of Ornithology with a trusted courier.

  They were sitting in a rented room at the time, and Minsu had scared up a tea that even Iseul liked.

  “I only wrote the account,” Iseul said, very clearly, “because none of the charms work anymore.” With the Genial Ones’ language extinguished, the magic it empowered was gone for good. She had attempted to create working charms, just to be sure, but all of them remained inert. “Imagine if Yeged’s Emperor had figured out how to use this on Chindallan or the language of any other nation he desired to conquer.”

  “The way we could have?” Minsu said sardonically. “It’s done now. Finish your report, and we can get out of this town.”

  There were still refugees on the road north. They might have deprived the Yegedin of magical assaults, but then, they had also deprived the Chindallans of magical defenses. Given that both sides had spent the uneasy peace preparing to go to war, it was anyone’s guess as to who would prevail.

  At one point they ended up at a wretched camp for those who were too sick to continue fleeing, and the few people who were staying with them, mostly their families and a few monks who were acting as caretakers. Iseul remained prone to headaches and was running low on medicine. Minsu had insisted that they seek out a physician, even though Iseul tried to point out that the people at the camp probably needed the medicine more than she did.

  As it turned out, they forgot all about the question of who deserved the medicine when Iseul saw a familiar little girl. She was picking flowers, weeds really, but in her hands they became jewels.

  Iseul approached the girl and asked her if she knew where the physician was. The girl seemed confused by the question, but after a little while her older sister appeared from one of the tents and recognized Iseul. “I’ll take you to him,” the girl said, “but he’s very sick.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Iseul said. Despite the monks’ best efforts to enforce basic sanitary practices, the camp reeked of filth and sickness and curdled hopes, and she couldn’t help but imagine that the physician had taken sick while helping others.

  She and Minsu followed the older girl to a tent at the edge of the camp. Flowers had been weighted down with a rock at the tent’s opening: the younger girl’s handiwork, surely. They could smell the bitter incense that was used to bring easeful dreams to the dying.

  The tent was small, and there were more flowers next to the brazier. Their petals had fallen off and were scattered next to the pallet. The incense was almost all burned away. The physician slept on the pallet. Even at rest his lined face suggested a certain weary kindness. Someone had drawn a heavy quilted blanket over him, stained red-brown on one corner.

  “What happened?” Minsu said. “Will he recover? I’m sure he could be a great help here.”

  “He fell sick,” the girl said. “One of the monks said he had a stroke. He doesn’t talk anymore and he doesn’t seem to understand when people talk to him. They said he might like us to visit him, though, and our mother works with the monks to help the sick people, so we come by and bring flowers.”

  He doesn’t talk anymore. Iseul went cold. He had spoken Chindallan; shouldn’t that have saved him? But she didn’t know how language worked in the brain.

  Without asking, she lifted the corner of the blanket. The physician had longer arms than she remembered, like the Genial One she had killed at his house a lifetime ago. Who was to say they couldn’t change their shapes? Especially if they were living among humans? Tears pricking her eyes, she replaced the blanket.

  “I’m very sorry,” Iseul said to the girl. “It’s probably not long before he dies.”

  She couldn’t help but wonder how many Genial Ones had lingered into this age, taking no part in the conspiracy for vengeance, leading quiet lives as healers of small hurts to atone for their kindred who summoned storm-horses and faces of fire. There was no way to tell.

  The Yegedin had tried to destroy Chindalla’s literature and names, but Iseul had destroyed the Genial Ones themselves. It hadn’t seemed real until now.

  “Thank you,” she
said to the dying Genial One, even though his mind was gone. She and Minsu sat by his side for a time, listening to him breathe. There was a war coming, and a storm entirely human, but in this small space they could mourn what they had done.

  For a long time afterwards, Iseul tried to come up with a poem about the Genial Ones, encapsulating what they had meant to the world and why they had had to die and why she regretted the physician’s passing, but no words ever came to her.

  —. A noun, probably, pertaining to regret or cinders or something of that nature, but this word can no longer be found in any lexicon, human or otherwise.

  Counting the Shapes

  How many shapes of pain are there?

  Are any topologically equivalent?

  And is one of them death?

  Biantha woke to a heavy knocking on the door and found her face pressed against a book’s musty pages. She sat up and brushed her pale hair out of her face, trying to discern a pattern to the knocking and finding that the simplest one was impatience. Then she got to her feet and opened the door, since her warding spell had given her no warning of an unfriendly presence outside. Besides, it would be a little longer before the demons reached Evergard.

  “Took your time answering the door, didn’t you, Lady Biantha?” Evergard’s gray-haired lord, Vathré, scowled at her. Without asking for permission, which he never did anyway, he strode past her to sweep his eyes over the flurry of papers that covered her desk. “You’d think that, after years of glancing at your work, I’d understand it.”

  “Some of the conjectures are probably gibberish anyway.” She smiled at him, guessing that what frustrated him had little to do with her or the theorems that made her spells possible. Vathré visited her when he needed an ear detached from court intrigues. “What troubles you this time, my lord?”

  He appropriated her one extra chair and gestured for her to sit at the desk, which she did, letting her smile fade. “We haven’t much longer, Biantha. The demons have already overrun Rix Pass. No one agrees on when they’ll get here. The astrologer refused to consult the stars, which is a first—claimed he didn’t want to see even an iffy prediction—” Vathré looked away from her. “My best guess is that the demons will be here within a month. They still have to march, overwhelming army or no.”