Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Like a pendulum, her thoughts swung between her son and Paienne, her son and Lord Mière. Late at night, when she walked the battlements listening vainly for the footfalls of marching soldiers, feeling betrayal’s cold hand in every tremor of the wind, she remembered tales of the Nightbreak War. Biantha had never put much faith in the minstrels’ embellished ballads, but the poetry preyed upon her fears.

  Working with fragments of history and the military reports that came in daily, she attempted to map past onto future, battle onto battle . . . betrayal onto betrayal. And failed, over and over. And cursed the Prophecy, staring at the worn and inscrutable pages, alone in her room. It was during one of those bouts that a familiar knocking startled her from her work.

  Marten? thought Biantha involuntarily. But she had learned the rhythm of Vathré’s tread, and when she opened the door she knew who waited behind it. The twin edges of relief and disappointment cut her heart.

  The gray-haired man looked her up and down, and scowled. “I thought you might be overworking yourself again.”

  She essayed a smile, stepping aside so he could enter. “Overwork, my lord? Tell that to the soldiers who train, and fight, and die for it, or see their friends die for it. Tell that to the cook or the servants in the keep.”

  “There are ways and ways of work, my dear.” He paced around the chamber, casting a curious eye over her bookcase and her cluttered desk, then rested a hand on her shoulder. “Perhaps I should come back later, when you’ve rested—and I do mean rest, not sitting in bed to read your books rather than sitting at your desk.”

  Biantha craned her head back to glance at him. “At least tell me why you came.”

  “Marten,” he said bluntly, releasing her shoulder.

  She flinched.

  “You’re hurting the boy,” Vathré said. “He’s been here quite a while and you haven’t said a word to him.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “He’s not the boy I left behind, my lord.” Her voice nearly broke.

  “I’m old enough to call you a girl, Lady Biantha. Don’t quibble. Even I can’t find cause to mistrust him, and the years have made me paranoid.”

  “Oh?” She ran her fingers over her copy of the Prophecy, worn smooth by years of on-and-off study. By all accounts, Marten’s advice was sound—but the demons kept coming.

  “I’m sending him to command at Silverbridge.” Vathré shook his head. “We’ve held out as long as we can, but it looks like our efforts have been no more than a delaying action. I haven’t told the council yet, but we’re going to have to withdraw to Aultgard.” He exhaled softly. “Marten will keep the demons occupied while the bulk of the army retreats.”

  Biantha stared at him.

  “The soldiers are coming to trust him, you know,” he remarked. “He’s perhaps the best tactician Evergard has seen in the past couple generations, and I want to see if that trust is justified.”

  She closed her eyes and said, “A gamble, my lord. Wouldn’t you do better to put someone else in charge?”

  Vathré ignored her question. “I thought you should know before I announce it.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” Biantha paused, then added, “Do you know where Marten might be at the moment?”

  He smiled sadly. “Haunting the battlements, hoping you will stop by.”

  She bowed her head and, after he had left, went to search for her son. Biantha found him by the southern tower, a sword sheathed at his back. Even now it disconcerted her to see him in the dress of Evergard’s soldiers, as if her mind refused to surrender that first image of Marten standing before the court in red and black and gold.

  “Mother,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.

  Slowly, reluctantly, she faced him. “I’m here.”

  Moonlight pooled in his eyes and glittered in the tears that streaked his face. “I remember,” he said without accusation. “I was seven years old and you told me to pack. You were arguing with Father.”

  Biantha nodded. Marten had nearly reached the age where he would have to begin training as either a magician or a soldier, or forfeit what little protection his parents’ status gave him. Over the years, as their son grew older, she spoke to her husband of leaving the demons’ empire to seek refuge in the Watchlands or the realms further east. He always treated her kindly, without ever turning an eye to the courtesans—demon and human both—who served those the emperor favored.

  Yet Biantha had never forgotten her husband’s puzzlement, molting slowly into anger, that she should wish to leave a court that sheltered them, though it did nothing to shelter others. She could not reconcile herself to the demons’ casual cruelty: one of the emperor’s nieces sent, after an ill-advised duel, to redeem her honor by riding a horse to the mines of Sarmont and back, five days and back forcing a terrified beast to carry her. The pale-eyed assassin who had fallen from favor after killing the rebellious lady of Reis Keep, solely because he had left evidence of his work. Children drowned after a plague blinded them and clouded their wits. If anything, the demons were as cruel to each other as to the humans who lived among and below them, but Biantha had found less and less comfort in that knowledge.

  “I stood in the doorway,” Marten went on, “trying to understand. Then Father was weeping—”

  She had said to her husband, If you will not come, then I must go without you.

  “—and he drew his sword against you.”

  “And I killed him,” Biantha said, dry-mouthed. “I tried to get you to come with me, but you wouldn’t leave him. You started to cry. I had little time, and there were ever guards nearby, listening for anything amiss. So I went alone. It would have been my death to stay after murdering one of the emperor’s officers. In the end, the emperor’s trust meant more to him than you or I.”

  “Please don’t leave me again,” Marten whispered. He stood straight-backed in the darkness, the hilt of the sword at his back peering over his shoulder like a sleepy eye, but his face was taut. “I am leaving for Silverbridge tomorrow.”

  “Will you be at the forefront?”

  “It would be unwise.” His mouth tightened for a moment. “I will be giving orders.”

  “To kill.” And, perhaps, be killed, she wanted to say, but the words fluttered in her throat.

  Marten met her gaze calmly. “It is war, Mother.”

  “It is now,” she agreed, “but it wasn’t before. I know what it is to be the emperor’s champion. ‘The sword at the emperor’s side,’ you said. The others heard the words only; they have never lain awake and sleepless for memory of bloodstains on a pale rug, or because of the sudden, silenced cries at night. How many fell to your blade, Marten?”

  “I came to follow you when I started losing count.” His eyes were dry, now, though Biantha saw the shapes of pain stirring behind them. “When the numbers started slipping out of my grasp.”

  Biantha held silence before her like a skein of threads that wanted words to untangle it.

  He lifted a hand, hesitated, let it drop. “I wanted to talk to you once, if never again. Before I go to Silverbridge where the demons await.”

  She smiled at him, then. But always the suspicion remained that he had some way of breaking his oath to Vathré, that the demon emperor had sent him to ensure the Watchlands’ downfall through some subtle plan—or, more simply, that he had come to betray the mother he had abandoned, who had abandoned him; she no longer knew which.

  “Go, then,” said Biantha, neither promise nor peril in her voice, and left him to await dawn alone.

  Four days later, Biantha stood before her bookcase, eyes roaming aimlessly over her collection of mathemagical works, some in the tight, angular script of the demon empire, others in the ornate writing common to the Watchlands’ scholars. There has to be something useful, she told herself, even after having scoured everything that looked remotely relevant. Now, more than ever, she wished she had talent for another of the magical disciplines, which did not rely on memorized proofs or the vagaries of inspi
ration, though none of them had ever seemed to get far with the Prophecy.

  Would that it were a straightforward problem—

  Biantha froze. The Prophecy did not describe the idealized spaces with which she had grown accustomed to dealing, but the tangles of truth, the interactions of demons and humans, the snarls of cause and effect and relation. Even the astrologer admitted privately that his predictions, on occasion, failed spectacularly where people were involved. She had been trying to linearize the cantos: the wrong approach.

  Evergard’s treasurer had once teased her about the cost of paper, though she took care to waste as little as possible. She located a pile of empty sheets in a drawer and set them on her desk, opening her copy of the Prophecy to the first page. After a moment, Biantha also retrieved Sarielle’s Speculations, Spells and Stranger Sets, sparing a glance for the 400-line poem in the back; Sarielle of Rix had fancied herself a poet. She had passed evenings lingering over the book’s carefully engraved figures and diagrams, curves that Sarielle had labeled “pathological” for their peculiarities.

  Symmetry. That which remained changeless. Red pieces upon black and black upon black at the start of a draughts match. A ballad that began and ended with the same sequence of measures; and now that Biantha turned her thoughts in this direction, she remembered a song that traveling minstrels had performed before the court, voice after voice braiding into a whole that imitated each part. Her image in the mirror. And now, Sarielle’s pathological curves, where a segment of the proper proportion spawned yet more such segments.

  Methodically, she went through the Prophecy, searching for these other symmetries, for the solution that had eluded her for so long. Late into the night, throat parched because she had drained her pitcher and dared not break her concentration by fetching another or calling a servant, Biantha placed Speculations, Spells and Stranger Sets to one side and thumbed through the appendix to Athique’s Infinities. Athique and Sarielle, contemporaries, had been opposites as far as titles went. She reached the approximations of various shapes, sieves and flowers, ferns and laces, that no mortal hand could craft.

  One page in particular struck her: shapes built from varying polygons with various “pathologies,” as Athique dubbed them in what Biantha suspected had been a jab at Sarielle’s would-be wordsmithing, repeating a procedure to the borders of infinity. The Prophecy harbored greater complexities, but she wondered if her solution might be one of many algorithms, many possibilities. Her eyes flooded: a lifetime’s work that she had uncovered, explored briefly by mathemagicians before her, and she had little time in which to seek a solution that helped the Watchlands.

  Even after she had snuffled the lamp and curled into bed, a headache devouring her brain, words still burned before her eyes: Symmetry. Pathologies. Infinity.

  Only a few weeks later, Biantha found herself walking aimlessly down a corridor, freeing her mind from the Prophecy’s tyrannous grip, when Lady Iastre shook her shoulder. “They’re back, Biantha,” she said hurriedly. “I thought you’d like to be there to greet them.”

  “Who’s back?”

  “Your son. And those who survived Silverbridge.”

  Those who survived. Biantha closed her eyes, shaking. “If only the demons would leave us alone—”

  The other woman nodded sadly. “But it’s not happening. The emperor will soon be at Evergard itself, is the news I’ve been hearing. Come on.”

  “I can’t,” she said, and felt as though the keep were spinning around her while pitiless eyes peered through the walls. “Tell him—tell Marten—I’m glad he’s back.” It was all she could think to say, a message for her son—a message that she would not deliver in person, because the urgency of the situation had jarred her thoughts back to the Prophecy.

  “Biantha!” Iastre cried, too late to stop her.

  In bits and pieces she learned the rest of the story, by eavesdropping benignly on dinner conversations and the servants’ gossip. The emperor had indeed forsaken his court for the battlefield, perhaps because of Evergard’s stubborn resistance. None of this surprised her, except when a curly-haired herald mentioned the serpent-eyed scepter. To her knowledge that scepter had never left the empire—unless, and the thought sickened her, the demons had begun to consider Evergard part of their empire. It had turned Silverbridge, the shining bridge of ballad, into rust and tarnish, and even now the demons advanced.

  Vathré gave a few permission to flee further east with their families, those whose presence mattered little to the coming siege. Others prepared to fight, or die, or both; the mock-battles that Biantha sometimes watched between the guards grew more grim, more intent. She and Iastre agreed that the time for draughts and rithmomachia had passed, as much as she would have welcomed the distraction.

  As for Marten—she saw almost nothing of him except the terrible weariness that had taken up residence in his face, as though he had survived a torture past bearing. Biantha grieved for him as a mother; as a mathemagician, she had no comfort to offer, for her own helplessness threatened to overwhelm her. Perhaps he in his turn sensed this, and left her alone.

  Day by day the demons came closer, to the point where she could stand on the battlements and see the baleful lights in the distance: the orange of campfires, the gold and silver of magefires. Day by day the discussions grew more frantic, more resigned.

  At last, one morning, the horns blazed high and clear through the air, and the siege of Evergard began. Biantha took her place on the parapets without saying any farewells, though some had been said to her, and watched while archers fired into the demons’ massed ranks. Not long after, magefire rolled over their hastily raised shields, and she prepared her own spells. Only when the demons began to draw back and prepare a second attack did she call upon powers that required meticulous proofs, held in her mind like the memory of a favorite song—or a child in her arms.

  She gathered all the shapes of pain that afflicted the demons and twisted them into death. Red mists obscured her vision as the spell wrenched her own soul, sparing her the need to watch the enemy falling. Yet she would have to use the spell again and again before the demons’ mathemagicians shaped a ward against it. Those who shared her art rarely ventured into battle, for this reason: it often took too long to create attacks or adapt to them. A theorem needed for a spell might take years to discover, or turn out to be impossible; and inspiration, while swift, was sometimes unreliable. She had seen mathemagicians die from careless assumptions in spellcasting.

  By midday Biantha no longer noticed the newly fallen corpses. She leaned against the wall’s cold stone—and glimpsed black and red and gold in the distance: the demon emperor, carrying the serpent-eyed scepter that she remembered too clearly. For a moment she thought of the Blade Fidora and cursed the Prophecy’s inscrutable symmetry. “No,” she whispered. Only if the emperor were certain of victory would he risk himself in the front lines, and a cold conviction froze her thoughts.

  Marten. He’s counting on Marten to help him.

  She had to find Vathré and warn him. She knew where he would be and ran, despite the archers’ protests that she endangered herself. “My lord!” she cried, grieving already, because she saw her fair-haired son beside gray-haired Vathré, directing the defense. “My lord! The emperor—” Biantha nearly tripped, caught herself, continued running.

  Vathré turned, trusting her, and then it happened.

  The emperor raised his scepter, and darkness welled forth to batter Evergard’s walls. In the darkness, colors moved like the fire of dancing prisms; silence reigned for a second, strangely disturbing after the clamor of war. Then the emperor’s spell ended, leaving behind more dead than the eye could count at a glance. Broken shapes, blood, weapons twisted into deadly metal flowers, a wind like the breath of disease.

  Biantha stared disbelievingly over the destruction and saw that the demons who had stood in the spell’s path had died as well; saw that the emperor had come forward to spare his own soldiers, not—she hoped not
—because he knew he had a traitor in the Watchlanders’ ranks. So much death, and all they had been able to do, she and the other magicians, was watch.

  “Mercy,” Vathré breathed.

  “The scepter,” Marten said harshly. “Its unspoken name is Decay.”

  She looked across at the gates and sneezed, dust stinging her nostrils. Already those who had fallen were rotting, flesh blackening and curling to reveal bone; Evergard’s sturdy walls had become cracked and mottled.

  Marten was shouting orders for everyone to abandon that section of wall before it crumbled. Then he looked at her and said, “We have to get down. Before it spreads. You too, my lord.”

  Vathré nodded curtly and offered Biantha his arm; Marten led the way down, across footing made newly treacherous. The walls whispered dryly behind them; she flinched at the crash as a crenel broke off and plummeted.

  “—use that scepter again?” she heard the lord asking Marten as she concentrated on her footing.

  “No,” she and her son both said. Biantha continued, “Not so far from the seat of his power and without the blood sacrifices. Not against wood or stone. But a touch, against living flesh, is another matter.”

  They had reached safety of sorts with the others who had fled the crumbling section of wall. “What of the Prophecy?” Vathré asked her, grimacing as he cast his gaze over the morning’s carnage.

  “Prophecy?” Marten repeated, looking at them strangely.

  Perhaps he had not heard, or failed to understand what he heard, in the brief time he had been at Evergard. Biantha doubted he had spent much time with the minstrels. At least he was not—she prayed not—a traitor, as she had thought at first. Breath coming hard, she looked around, listened to the cries of the wounded, and then, all at once, the answer came to her, one solution of several.