“As soon as I find my sword I’ll repair that oversight,” the Dead Man said. He held out the amethyst. Blood streaked down his cheek, dripped hot from his ear.
“Keep it.” The Gage looked down at his naked armature. “I seem to have left my pockets on the floor.”
While the Dead Man found his blade, the Gage picked his way around the borders of the broken floor. He moved from shelf to shelf, lifting up sculptures, books of poetry, pottery vases—and reverentially, one at a time, crushing them with his dented hands.
Wiping blood from his sword, the Dead Man watched him work. “You want some help with that?”
The Gage shook his head.
“That’s how you knew he didn’t live downstairs.”
“Hmm?”
“No art.”
The Gage shrugged.
“You looking for something in particular?”
“Yes.” The Gage’s big hand enfolded a small object. He held it for a moment, cradled to his breast, and bowed his scratched mirror over it. Then he pressed his hands together and twisted, and when he pulled them apart, a scatter of wood shreds sprinkled the floor. “Go free, love.”
When he looked up again, the Dead Man was still staring out the window. “Help me break the rest of these? So the artists can rest?”
“Also so our friend here doesn’t grow his head back? Soul or no soul?”
“Yeah,” the Gage answered. “That too.”
Outside, the Dead Man fixed his veil and pushed his dangling sleeve up his arm, examining the strained threads and tears.
“Come on,” the Gage said. “I’ll buy you a new coat.”
“But I like this one.”
“Then let’s go to a bar.”
This one had better wine and cleaner clientele. As a result, they and the servers both gave the Dead Man and the Gage a wider berth, and the Dead Man kept having to go up to the bar.
“Well,” said the Dead Man. “Another mystery solved. By a clever man among clever men.”
“And you are no doubt the cleverest.”
The Dead Man shrugged. “I had help. I don’t suppose you’d consider a partnership?”
The Gage interlaced his hands around the foot of his cup. After a while, he said, “Serhan.”
“Yes, Gage?”
“My name was Khatijah.”
Over his veil, the Dead Man’s eyes did not widen. Instead he nodded with satisfaction, as if he had won some bet with himself. “You’re a woman.”
“I was,” said the Gage. “Now I’m a Gage.”
“It’s supposed to be a selling point, isn’t it? Become a faceless man and never be uncertain, abandoned, forsaken again.”
“You sound like you’ve given it some thought.”
The Dead Man regarded the Gage. The Gage tilted his featureless head down, giving the impression that he regarded the stem of his cup and the tops of his metal hands.
“And yet here you are,” the Dead Man said.
“And yet here I am.” The Gage shrugged.
“Stop that constant shrugging,” the Dead Man said.
“When you do,” said the Gage.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-five novels (The most recent is Steles of the Sky, from Tor) and almost a hundred short stories. Her Promethean Age novel, One-Eyed Jack, will be published by Prime Books in August 2014. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.
The ministry had recruited Iseul because she was able to write
Yeged-dai and speak it with any of three native accents. She
also had a reasonable facility with the language of magic,
a skill that never ceased to be useful.
ISEUL’S LEXICON
Yoon Ha Lee
kandagghamel, noun: One of two names the Genial Ones used for their own language. The other, menjitthemel, was rarely written. Derived from kandak, the dawn flower of their mythology and a common heraldric device; agha, or “law”; and mel, “word” or “speech.” Note that mel is one of a small class of lexical elements that consistently violates vowel harmony in compounds. The Genial Ones ascribe considerable metaphysical importance to this irregularity.
She went by the name Jienem these days, a proper, demure Yegedin name that meant something between “young bud” and “undespoiled.” It was not her real name. She had been born Iseul of Chindalla, a peninsula whose southern half was now occupied by the Yegedin, and although she was only the bastard daughter of a nobleman and an entertainer, she never forgot the name her mother had given her.
The Empire of Yeged had occupied South Chindalla for the past thirteen years, and renamed it Territory 4. Yeged and free Chindalla had a truce, but no one believed it would last for long, and in the meantime Chindalla had no compunctions about sending agents into South Chindalla. People still spoke the Chindallan language here, but the Empire forbade them to write it, or to use Chindallan names, which was why Iseul used a Yegedin name while operating as a spy in the south for the Chindallan throne. Curiously, for people so bent on suppressing the Chindallan language, Yeged’s censors had a great interest in Chindallan books. Their fascination was enormous and indiscriminate: cookbooks rounded out with gossip, military manuals, catalogues of hairstyles, yearly rainfall tabulations, tales of doomed love affairs, court annals, ghost stories, adventures half written in cipher, everything you could imagine.
Iseul worked for Chindalla’s Ministry of Ornithology, which, despite its name, had had nothing to do with birds or auguries for generations. It ran the throne’s spies. The ministry had told her to figure out why the books were so important to the Yegedin. Iseul had a gift for languages, and in her former life she had been a poet, although she didn’t have much time for satiric verses these days. The ministry had recruited her because she was able to write Yeged-dai and speak it with any of three native accents. She also had a reasonable facility with the language of magic, a skill that never ceased to be useful.
In the town the Yegedin had renamed Mijege-in, the censor was a magician. Iseul was to start with him, especially since tonight he was obliged to attend a formal dinner welcoming an official visiting from Yeged proper. It would have been more entertaining to spy on the dinner—she would have had a chance of snacking on some of the delicacies—but someone else was doing that. Her handler, Shen Minsu, had assigned her to search the magician’s home because she had the best chance of being able to deal with magical defenses.
Getting into the house hadn’t been too difficult. The gates to the courtyard and all the doors were hung with folded-paper wards inscribed with barrier-words of apathy and dejection to discourage people like Iseul. She had come prepared with a charm of passage, however, and a belt hung with tiny locks worn around her waist under her sash. The charm of passage caused all the wards to unfold, and reciprocally, most of the locks had snapped closed. One time, early in her career as a spy, she had run out of locks while infiltrating a fort, and the thwarted charm had begun throwing up random obstacles as she attempted to flee: a burst pipe, crates almost falling on her, a furious cat. Now she erred on the side of more locks.
It was a small house, all things considered, but magicians were a quirky lot and maybe he didn’t want to deal with the servants necessary to keep a larger house clean. The courtyard was disproportionately large, and featured a tangle of roses that hadn’t been pruned aggressively enough and equally disheveled trees swaying in the evening wind. Some landscaper had attempted to introduce a Yegedin-style rock garden in the middle. The result wasn’t particularly harmonious.
She circled the house, but heard nothing and saw no people moving against the rice-paper doors. Then she went in the front door. She had tw
o daggers in case she came across someone. After watching the house for a few days, she had concluded that the magician lived alone, but you never knew if someone had a secret lover stashed away. Or a very loud pet. That time with the peacock, for instance. Noisy birds, peacocks. Anyway, with luck, she wouldn’t have to kill anyone this time; she was just here for information.
Her first dagger was ordinary steel, the suicide-blade that honorable Yegedin women carried. It would be difficult to explain her possession of the blade if she was searched, but that wasn’t the one that would get her in trouble.
Her second dagger was the one that she couldn’t afford to be caught carrying. It looked more like a very long needle, wrapped around and around by tiny words in the Genial Ones’ language. It was the fifth one Iseul had constructed, although the Ministry of Ornithology had supplied the unmarked dagger for her to modify.
The dagger was inscribed with the word for human or animal blood, umul. The Genial Ones had had two more words for their own blood, one for what spilled out of them in ordinary circumstances, and another used in reference to ritual bloodletting. The dagger destroyed the person you stabbed it with if you drew blood, and distorted itself into a miniature, rusting figure of the victim: ghastly, but easy to dispose of. Useful for causing people to disappear.
The house’s passages had creaky wooden floors, but nobody called out or rushed out to attack her. Calligraphy scrolls decorated the walls. Yeged had a calligraphy tradition almost as old as Chindalla’s, and the scrolls displayed Yegedin proverbs and poetry in a variety of commendably rhythmic hands. She could name the styles they were scribed in, most of them well-regarded, if a little old-fashioned: River Rocks Tumbling, Butterfly’s Kiss, Anaiago’s Comb . . .
Iseul looked away from the scrolls. She shouldn’t get distracted, even though the scrolls might be a clue of some kind. There was always the chance that the magician would find some excuse to leave the dinner early and come home.
She found part of what she was looking for in the magician’s study, which was dismally untidy, with scraps of paper on every conceivable surface. There was still some light from outside, although she had a lantern charm just in case.
The magician had brought home two boxes of Chindallan books. One of them mostly contained supernatural stories involving nine-tailed foxes, a genre whose appeal had always eluded her, but which was enduringly popular. She had to concede the charm of some of the illustrations: fox eyes peering brightly from behind masks, fox tails curving slyly from beneath layers of elaborate robes, fox paws slipping out of long gloves.
Stuffed into the same box was a volume of poetry, which Iseul pulled out in a spirit of professional interest. With a sigh, she began flipping through the book, letting her eye alight on the occasional well-turned phrase. She kept track of syllable counts by reflex. Nothing special. She was tempted to smuggle it out on principle, but this collection had been popular sixteen years ago and there were still a lot of copies to be had in the north. Besides, the magician would surely notice if one of his spoils went missing.
The next book was different. It had a tasteful cover in dark red, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. She had seen books with covers in every conceivable color, some of them ill-advised; hadn’t everyone? No. It was the fact that the book shouldn’t have been in the box with the others. She went through a dozen pages just to be sure, but she had been right. Each page was printed in Yeged-dai, not Chindallan.
However, Iseul could see why whoever had packed the box had gotten confused. She recognized the names of most of the poets. More specifically, she recognized the Yegedin names that Chindallan poets had taken.
Iseul knew from experience that a poet’s existence was a precarious one if you didn’t come from a wealthy family or have a generous patron. Fashions in poetry came and went almost as quickly as fashions in hairstyles. Before the Ministry of Ornithology recruited her, she had written sarcastic verses for nobles to pass around at social functions, and the occasional parody. Slightly risky, but her father’s prominence as a court official had afforded her a certain degree of protection from offended writers.
The poets who survived in occupied Chindalla could no longer rely on their old patrons, or write as they had been accustomed to writing. But some of them had a knack for foreign languages, as Iseul did, or had perhaps learned Yeged-dai even before the invasion. Those poets had been able to adapt. She had known about such people before this. But it still hurt her to see their poems before her, printed in the curving Yeged-dai script, using Yegedin forms and the images so beloved of the Yegedin: the single pebble, the grasshopper at twilight, the song of a heartbroken lark sitting in a bent tree.
Iseul put the book back in its place, wishing for something to staunch the ache within her. It would have been easy to hate the southern poets for abandoning their own language, but she knew that resistance carried a considerable risk. Even in Mijege-in, which had fallen early and easily, and which the Yegedin considered well-tamed, the governor occasionally burned rebels alive. She had passed by the latest corpses on the walls when she entered the city. Mainly she remembered them as shadows attracting shadows, charred sticks held together by a conglomeration of ravens.
There were also those who had died in the initial doomed defense of the south. Sometimes she thought she would never forgive her father, whose martial skills were best not mentioned, for dying with the garrison at Hwagan Fort in an attempt to slow the Yegedin advance. There were poems about that battle, all red-stained banners and broken spears and unquiet pyres, all glory and honor, except there had been nothing glorious about the loss. She hated herself for reading the poems over and over whenever she encountered them.
Iseul went through the second box. More Chindallan books, the usual eclectic variety, and no clue as to what the Yegedin wanted with them. Maybe it was simple acquisitiveness. One of the Yegedin governors, knowing the beauty and value of Chindallan celadon, had taken the simple expedient of rounding up all the Chindallan potters in three provinces and sending them to his homeland as slaves along with their clay, as well as buying up everything from vases to good forgeries of antique jewelry boxes.
The rest of the box didn’t take her long to get through. It included a single treatise on magic. Those were getting harder and harder to find in the south, as the Yegedin quite reasonably didn’t trust magic in Chindallan hands. The treatise in question concerned locator charms. Like all magic, locators were based on the writings of the Genial Ones, who had once ruled over the human nations the way Yeged desired to rule over the known world. Humans had united under General Anangan to destroy the Genial Ones, but not long after that, a chieftain assassinated the general and the alliance dissolved.
People discovered that, over time, magic started to fail because its masters were no more. Locators had stopped being reliable about a century ago or Iseul would have had some uses for them herself. On the occasions that you could get one to activate at all, it tended to chew a map into your entrails. Some people would still have used them anyway, but the maps were also inevitably false.
The treatise’s author had included a number of gruesome illustrations to support her contention that the failed magic was affected by the position of the user’s spleen. The theory was preposterous, but all the same, Iseul wished she could liberate the treatise. She didn’t dare risk it, though. The magician would be even more sure to notice a missing book on magic.
Iseul froze. Had she just heard footsteps? How could the magician be back so early? Or had she spent more time looking through those damnable poems than she had realized? She ducked behind a coat rack. Under better circumstances, she would have critiqued the coats, although a quick glance suggested that they were in fact of high quality. That cuff, for instance; hard to find embroiderers these days who were willing to put up with the hassle of couching gold thread that had to be done in such short segments. Iseul’s mother had always impressed upon her the importance of appearances, something that Iseul had used aga
inst a great many people as a spy.
The footsteps were getting closer and their owner was walking briskly. A bad sign. Contrary to popular belief, magicians couldn’t detect each other; being a magician was merely a matter of study, applied linguistics, and a smattering of geometry. Magicians could, however, check the status of their charms by looking, just like anyone else with a working pair of eyes. Or by touch, if it came to that. The problem with the passage charm that Iseul used was that it made no attempt to hide its effects. The older version that disguised its own workings had stopped working about 350 years ago.
It might be time to flee. Iseul was willing to bet that she was more athletic than a magician who worked in an office all day. Her glimpses of him hadn’t suggested that he was particularly fit. The study’s window was covered in oiled paper, and was barely large enough for her to squeeze through.
More footsteps. Iseul headed for the window, but her sleeve snagged on a coat, and it rustled to the floor. Just her luck: the magician had left a coin purse in it, and the coins jangled as they landed. She cursed her clumsiness. Now he probably knew her location. Indeed, halfway on her way to the window, flowers with shadow-mouths and toothy leaves started growing in hectic tangles from the window, barring her passage.
Iseul knew better than to believe the illusion, no matter how much the heavy, heady scent of the blossoms threatened to clog her sinuses; no matter how much her hands wanted to twitch away from the jagged leaves and the glistening intimation of poison on the stems. She had seen these flowers in her dreams as a child, when she was afraid that she would fall asleep in the garden during hide-and-seek and be swallowed up by the spirits of thorn and malice. They were only as real as she allowed them to be.
Her father had once, uncharacteristically, given her a piece of military advice, probably quoted from some manual. They had been playing baduk, a board game involving capturing territory with stones. As usual, he refused to give her any handicap despite the disparity in age. She had been complaining about the fact that she was sure to lose. In her defense, she had only been ten. It doesn’t matter how good your position is, he had told her, if you’re already defeated in your head.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 65
