I curled upon the ground and crossed my arms upon my chest.
He had never loved. But I had. I’d loved Anca and Ioana. Their little smiles and their games. Their sweetness and their cruelty, and the way their black eyes shone in the darkness, as if burnished. It was all gone and I couldn’t even muster the energy to crave revenge.
My fingers dug into the earth and I thought I might bury myself with my sisters. Rest my bones against their own. Cradle them once more. I would not be alone then, for their ghosts would keep me company.
I lay like this for a very long time and then, finally, I stood up and ripped my shift off. I fashioned a simple pouch out of it, scooping earth into it and tying it close. I thought of returning to the castle for some of the valuables there. Perhaps one of the maps. I discarded the idea.
Years later, I wonder if I shouldn’t have returned and scooped a trinket, a map, after all. My memories of those days have grown dimmer and dimmer. I sometimes wake up with a vision of two dark-haired women, but their names escape me. I wonder if a memento might help pin the thoughts in place. Or perhaps it would not make a difference. Perhaps we are all meant to wander with nothing but a handful of earth in our hands, never looking over our shoulders.
in winter
sonya taaffe
They call her the robber girl because she takes whatever she wants, and what she wants to take most are lives. She does it best with her Mosin-Nagant, iron-sighted like all sensible snipers; she has done it with flare matches and bottles of sticky petrol, with a borrowed rifle when her own jammed in a fog of snow and cordite and once, the time she remembers because she wore it back to camp like a uniform, with a knife and the freezing bark of pine branches, smashed like red windows in the snow. Glass is the enemy of secrecy: it glints, it clouds, it splinters. The robber girl’s breath dances reflections on her lashes and she blinks them clear, looking for Soviet coats and caps, summer-khaki against the winter’s white eye. There is snow in everyone’s hearts these days.
She sleeps with her arm around the neck of the boy called Reindeer, for his dark, delicate eyes and his long-legged stride over the wind-crusted drifts. He makes a poor soldier, but she swore to herself when she was eight that she would keep him safe and she has kept that promise through the Mannerheim Line and Taipale and Tolvajärvi, showing him how to stuff his boots and sling his rifle and stitch bedsheets into snow-smocks, the little blue-and-white badge he pinned to his student’s cap almost the same color as the forget-me-nots he picked once for her. She has never wanted to kiss him, with his face all wind-skinned angles and his soft lank hair as buttery as cloudberries; she never had a brother to love him like and when she dreams with her fellow-soldiers of clean deep-pillowed beds and warm stoves and nothing itching anywhere, it is not a body like his, broad-shouldered and bony, that entangles her. But she will set herself against all odds between him and the snow that wraps itself around the bodies of dying men, whispers itself into their mouths, leaves their eyes open so that they stare, dazzled, forever into its heart; he is the last companion of her childhood and so she understands the girl who comes from the south with not even a pistol in her hand, looking for a boy lost, like so many before him, to the winter and the war.
She brought her name with her, but the robber girl thinks of her as the rose girl—she looks like a schoolgirl with her long, fair plait and her blouse that comes untucked at the back when she bends, her cheeks as flushed as if they were newly scrubbed, but her nails are bitten short and broken, so that sometimes, passing a plate or a cartridge, she scratches, and the green of her eyes is pricked around the edges with something that will smart if touched; the robber girl is careful not to. Her pockets are full of bark bread and salmiakki, the dried skin of a stockfish like a letter from which the writing has been scraped clean; she came on foot over birch forests and spruce bogs, behind the lines of battle, asking at every camp she found. She was lucky, river-led, charmed as a mad thing. An officer by the sedge-lashed shores of Ladoga gave her a coat of furs sent by his fiancée, a scout with crow-black hair warned her away from the trails frozen hard enough for tanks not to mire down in. Her boots were stitched with red once, but the snow broke every thread until she turned north. Cross-legged by the stove at night as it spits over ice-grained knots of pine, she shows the robber girl her only token of a boy who loved mathematics and puzzles and strode off into the cold sunshine of a recruiting day as if he could see the snow calling, hollowing itself a place to fit his limbs when he threw his arms open for the bullet and fell: the burnt red petals of a rose, dried and crushed close as a heart. It fits in her palm, when she curls up to sleep. She smells like moss and the sweat of a long road, dusty crescents behind her ears like a child that needs washing. With one arm around her neck, one hand on her knife as she has slept since she left home to learn to kill, the robber girl does not sleep.
She gives the rose girl a knife, because she cannot fight Russians with salt candy and summer flowers; she gives her a kiss on the mouth, because she cannot fight snow with steel. When their hair curls together, she cuts the bright and dark strands and twines them like a compass, though she knows it will not lead the rose girl back to her. The robber girl has deaths to steal and Reindeer to look after, the war to fight until she falls like a broken window in the snow or walks home to a quiet house she can hardly remember, with forget-me-nots in the meadow and rye bread rising on the stove; the rose girl has a boy in steel-rimmed spectacles to find, if they have not shattered like cat-ice, blinded him, deceived him, given him away. He wore a soldier’s new boots and loved the taste of licorice, black as biting frost. It burned the robber girl’s lips, strong as tears in a kiss. When he asks, she gives her Reindeer, just as far as the forest’s edge, his light-footed swiftness to lead her over the treacherous rime, the branch-tangles that lie under the breaking crusts of snow, and she lies with her arm around no one’s neck that night. She dreams of running with them, over endless snowfields without ski-tracks or the treads of stopped tanks; she dreams of summer, as distant and strange as home. She dreams of her finger on the trigger, the sun on the shine of glass. She dreams of blood, blooming like roses in the snow.
ghostweight
yoon ha lee
It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.
What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.
Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.
“There’s time for one more hand,” Lisse’s ghost said. It was composed of cinders of color, a cipher of blurred features, and it had a voice like entropy and smoke and sudden death. Quite possibly it was the last ghost on all of ruined Rhaion, conquered Rhaion, Rhaion with its devastated, shadowless cities and dead moons and dimming sun. Sometimes Lisse wondered if the ghost had a scar to match her own, a long, livid line down her arm. But she felt it was impolite to ask.
Around them, in a command spindle sized for fifty, the walls of the war-kite were hung with tatters of black and faded green, even now in the process of reknitting themselves into tapestry displays. Tangled reeds changed into ravens. One perched on a lightning-cloven tree. Another, taking shape amid twisted threads, peered out from a skull’s eye socket.
Lisse didn’t need any deep familiarity with mercenary symbology to understand the warning. Lisse’s people had adopted a saying from the Imperium’s mercenaries: In raven arithmetic, no death is enough.
Lisse had expected pursuit. She had deserted from Base 87 soon after hearing that scouts had found a mercenary war-kite in the ruins of a sacred maze, six years after all the mercenaries vanished: suspicious timing on her part, but she would have no better opportunity for revenge. The ghost had not tried too hard to dissuade her. It had always understood her ambitions
.
For a hundred years, despite being frequently outnumbered, the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities, destroyed flights of rebel starflyers, shattered stations in the void’s hungry depths. What better weapon than one of their own kites?
What troubled her was how lightly the war-kite had been defended. It had made a strange, thorny silhouette against the lavender sky even from a long way off, like briars gone wild, and with the ghost as scout she had slipped past the few mechanized sentries. The kite’s shadow had been human. She was not sure what to make of that.
The kite had opened to her like a flower. The card game had been the ghost’s idea, a way to reassure the kite that she was its ally: Scorch had been invented by the mercenaries.
Lisse leaned forward and started to scoop the nearest column, the Candle Column, from the black-and-green gameplay rug. The ghost forestalled her with a hand that felt like the dregs of autumn, decay from the inside out. In spite of herself, she flinched from the ghostweight, which had troubled her all her life. Her hand jerked sideways; her fingers spasmed.
“Look,” the ghost said.
Few cadets had played Scorch with Lisse even in the barracks. The ghost left its combinatorial fingerprints in the cards. People drew the unlucky Fallen General’s Hand over and over again, or doubled on nothing but negative values, or inverted the Crown Flower at odds of thousands to one. So Lisse had learned to play the solitaire variant, with jerengjen as counters. You must learn your enemy’s weapons, the ghost had told her, and so, even as a child in the reeducation facility, she had saved her chits for paper to practice folding into cranes, lilies, leaf-shaped boats.
Next to the Candle Column she had folded stormbird, greatfrog, lantern, drake. Where the ghost had interrupted her attempt to clear the pieces, they had landed amid the Sojourner and Mirror Columns, forming a skewed late-game configuration: a minor variant of the Needle Stratagem, missing only its pivot.
“Consider it an omen,” the ghost said. “Even the smallest sliver can kill, as they say.”
There were six ravens on the tapestries now. The latest one had outspread wings, as though it planned to blot out the shrouded sun. She wondered what it said about the mercenaries, that they couched their warnings in pictures rather than drums or gongs.
Lisse rose from her couch. “So they’re coming for us. Where are they?”
She had spoken in the Imperium’s administrative tongue, not one of the mercenaries’ own languages. Nevertheless, a raven flew from one tapestry to join its fellows in the next. The vacant tapestry grayed, then displayed a new scene: a squad of six tanks caparisoned in Imperial blue and bronze, paced by two personnel carriers sheathed in metal mined from withered stars. They advanced upslope, pebbles skittering in their wake.
In the old days, the ghost had told her, no one would have advanced through a sacred maze by straight lines. But the ancient walls, curved and interlocking, were gone now. The ghost had drawn the old designs on her palm with its insubstantial fingers, and she had learned not to shudder at the untouch, had learned to thread the maze in her mind’s eye: one more map to the things she must not forget.
“I’d rather avoid fighting them,” Lisse said. She was looking at the command spindle’s controls. Standard Imperial layout, all of them—it did not occur to her to wonder why the kite had configured itself thus—but she found nothing for the weapons.
“People don’t bring tanks when they want to negotiate,” the ghost said dryly. “And they’ll have alerted their flyers for intercept. You have something they want badly.”
“Then why didn’t they guard it better?” she demanded.
Despite the tanks’ approach, the ghost fell silent. After a while, it said, “Perhaps they didn’t think anyone but a mercenary could fly a kite.”
“They might be right,” Lisse said darkly. She strapped herself into the commander’s seat, then pressed three fingers against the controls and traced the commands she had been taught as a cadet. The kite shuddered, as though caught in a hell-wind from the sky’s fissures. But it did not unfurl itself to fly.
She tried the command gestures again, forcing herself to slow down. A cold keening vibrated through the walls. The kite remained stubbornly landfast.
The squad rounded the bend in the road. All the ravens had gathered in a single tapestry, decorating a half-leafed tree like dire jewels. The rest of the tapestries displayed the squad from different angles: two aerial views and four from the ground.
Lisse studied one of the aerial views and caught sight of two scuttling figures, lean angles and glittering eyes and a balancing tail in black metal. She stiffened. They had the shadows of hounds, all graceful hunting curves. Two jerengjen, true ones, unlike the lifeless shapes that she folded out of paper. The kite must have deployed them when it sensed the tanks’ approach.
Sweating now, despite the autumn temperature inside, she methodically tried every command she had ever learned. The kite remained obdurate. The tapestries’ green threads faded until the ravens and their tree were bleak black splashes against a background of wintry gray.
It was a message. Perhaps a demand. But she did not understand.
The first two tanks slowed into view. Roses, blue with bronze hearts, were engraved to either side of the main guns. The lead tank’s roses flared briefly.
The kite whispered to itself in a language that Lisse did not recognize. Then the largest tapestry cleared of trees and swirling leaves and rubble, and presented her with a commander’s emblem, a pale blue rose pierced by three claws. A man’s voice issued from the tapestry: “Cadet Fai Guen.” This was her registry name. They had not reckoned that she would keep her true name alive in her heart like an ember. “You are in violation of Imperial interdict. Surrender the kite at once.”
He did not offer mercy. The Imperium never did.
Lisse resisted the urge to pound her fists against the interface. She had not survived this long by being impatient. “That’s it, then,” she said to the ghost in defeat.
“Cadet Fai Guen,” the voice said again, after another burst of light, “you have one minute to surrender the kite before we open fire.”
“Lisse,” the ghost said, “the kite’s awake.”
She bit back a retort and looked down. Where the control panel had once been featureless gray, it was now crisp white interrupted by five glyphs, perfectly spaced for her outspread fingers. She resisted the urge to snatch her hand away. “Very well,” she said. “If we can’t fly, at least we can fight.”
She didn’t know the kite’s specific control codes. Triggering the wrong sequence might activate the kite’s internal defenses. But taking tank fire at point-blank range would get her killed, too. She couldn’t imagine that the kite’s armor had improved in the years of its neglect.
On the other hand, it had jerengjen scouts, and the jerengjen looked perfectly functional.
She pressed her thumb to the first glyph. A shadow unfurled briefly but was gone before she could identify it. The second attempt revealed a two-headed dragon’s twisting coils. Long-range missiles, then: thunder in the sky. Working quickly, she ran through the options. It would be ironic if she got the weapons systems to work only to incinerate herself.
“You have ten seconds, Cadet Fai Guen,” said the voice with no particular emotion.
“Lisse,” the ghost said, betraying impatience.
One of the glyphs had shown a wolf running. She remembered that at one point the wolf had been the mercenaries’ emblem. Nevertheless, she felt a dangerous affinity to it. As she hesitated over it, the kite said, in a parched voice, “Soul strike.”
She tapped the glyph, then pressed her palm flat to activate the weapon. The panel felt briefly hot, then cold.
For a second she thought that nothing had happened, that the kite had malfunctioned. The kite was eerily still.
The tanks and person
nel carriers were still visible as gray outlines against darker gray, as were the nearby trees and their stifled fruits. She wasn’t sure whether that was an effect of the unnamed weapons or a problem with the tapestries. Had ten seconds passed yet? She couldn’t tell, and the clock of her pulse was unreliable.
Desperate to escape before the tanks spat forth the killing rounds, Lisse raked her hand sideways to dismiss the glyphs. They dispersed in unsettling fragmented shapes resembling half-chewed leaves and corroded handprints. She repeated the gesture for fly.
Lisse choked back a cry as the kite lofted. The tapestry views changed to sky on all sides except the ravens on their tree—birds no longer, but skeletons, price paid in coin of bone.
Only once they had gained some altitude did she instruct the kite to show her what had befallen her hunters. It responded by continuing to accelerate.
The problem was not the tapestries. Rather, the kite’s wolf-strike had ripped all the shadows free of their owners, killing them. Below, across a great swathe of the continent once called Ishuel’s Bridge, was a devastation of light, a hard, glittering splash against the surrounding snow-capped mountains and forests and winding rivers.
Lisse had been an excellent student, not out of academic conscientiousness but because it gave her an opportunity to study her enemy. One of her best subjects had been geography. She and the ghost had spent hours drawing maps in the air or shaping topographies in her blankets; paper would betray them, it had said. As she memorized the streets of the City of Fountains, it had sung her the ballads of its founding. It had told her about the feuding poets and philosophers that the thoroughfares of the City of Prisms had been named after. She knew which mines supplied which bases and how the roads spidered across Ishuel’s Bridge. While the population figures of the bases and settlement camps weren’t exactly announced to cadets, especially those recruited from the reeducation facilities, it didn’t take much to make an educated guess.
The Humanity of Monsters Page 14
