The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  She had kept the Yegedin boots on because she hadn’t brought spare shoes—they would have been a nuisance to carry around—but she discovered that the boots were even worse than she knew from days of marching around in them. Every step jolted the soles of her feet, and the toes were starting to pinch. The scout she had killed hadn’t had notably small feet, so she was guessing the boots had caused him even more discomfort than they were causing her. Ill-fitting shoes were apparently a military universal: she knew Chindallan soldiers complained about it, too.

  The sky to the north was yet clear, but every time she glanced over her shoulder she saw the stormclouds.

  The gate guards to the border-fort must have been bemused to see a small, disheveled woman huffing as she came up the road. Iseul was gratified to see the wall sentries training their bows on her: at least they were prepared for the enemy. “I work for the Ministry of Ornithology,” she called out. Iseul trusted that the purity of her Chindallan accent, high court from the north, would convince them that she was no Yegedin. “That’s an army a few hours south, as you’ve guessed, but it has magicians.”

  The guards conferred, and after a few moments escorted her in to see the guard captain. “You must have made a narrow escape, sister,” he said. He was a stocky man, much scarred, with kind eyes, and he spoke Chindallan with the unhurried rhythms of the hill people. Iseul had never been so grateful to hear her people’s language. “The outriders had thought as much. Follow me. We can at least give you something to eat.”

  The guards let Iseul in, and a young soldier led her to the kitchens, where the cook gave her some rice and chicken broth. Iseul was glad of the opportunity to sit and rest her aching feet.

  The captain came in with her and asked her questions about the disposition of the enemy. Iseul reported everything she had observed about the rival generals and their temperaments, the disarray of their army as it marched, and the estimated numbers of cavalry and infantry. “But it’s the magicians you must worry about, Captain,” she said, determined to impress this point upon him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the captain said quietly. “We’re the first thing that stands in their way, and stand we must, however terrible the thunder that comes for us.”

  He didn’t have to mention the fact that two of the three first land battles in the original Yegedin invasion had involved Chindallan commanders abandoning their forts, destroying all the supplies, and fleeing north. It was a shame that no Chindallan would soon forget.

  “You won’t stand for long unless you have magical defenses of your own,” Iseul said.

  The captain was already shaking his head. “The Yegedin will next have to pass Fort Kamang on the River Hwan,” he said. “They have two magicians there. That will have to do.” He eyed Iseul’s soup bowl, already empty, with affectionate amusement. “We’ve sent word north, but it won’t hurt to give them more recent intelligence. You undoubtedly have business of your own in that direction. Could I trouble you to—?”

  “Of course, Captain,” Iseul said.

  The captain insisted on making her eat more soup, and she was given rice and barley hardtack and clear, sweet water for the journey. They let her rest for half an hour. The captain asked if she could ride, and she replied that she could, as her mother had taught her. They mounted her on a steady mare, a plain bay without markings, but one who responded calmly and quickly to each of Iseul’s aids.

  She set out on the bay mare. She had pulled her coat tightly about her in response to the air, which tasted increasingly of ice even though winter was months away. Then, looking back only once, she rode north, knowing as the distance unribboned behind her that she had failed her people.

  The terrible thing about the Genial Ones was not that they held nations as their slaves, or that they destroyed cities with firefall and stormlash, or that they concocted their poisons from corpses. After all, human empires have done similar things.

  It was not even that they were fond of sculpture. The Genial Ones regarded it as one of the highest arts. A favorite variant was to attune a slab of marble or a mossy boulder to a particular individual. As the days passed, the victim’s skin would crack and turn gray, and their movements would slow. When the process was complete, only a dying, formless lump would remain of the victim, and the statue would be complete.

  As much as people dreaded this art, however, the Genial Ones could only kill one person at a time with it.

  Two hours before the siege of the border-fort, six arrows flew.

  The senior general wore a back banner in livid red and a great helmet that resembled the head of a beetle. Only a small part of his face was exposed.

  The first arrow took him through the side of the face, beneath the left eye, and even so he didn’t die of it.

  At the time he was consulting with the two magicians. In the gray light and the fine haze of rain, it was difficult to discern their otherwise distinctive blue robes. Three arrows took one of the magicians in the chest. She wore no armor and the arrowheads’ barbs caught in her heart.

  Two more arrows killed one of the general’s servants, who happened to wear clothing that you might mistake for a magician’s robes from a great distance on a day where the visibility was terrible to begin with.

  This left the Yegedin army in disarray: someone notified the junior general, who wished to take command, while the senior general was shouting orders even as his servants tried to call for a physician. Both generals were keen on capturing the assassin, but by the time the two of them had organized search parties—since both groups of soldiers were confused as to whose orders should take precedence—the assassin had gotten away.

  All that the Yegedin searchers found, at a distance sufficiently far from the command tent that everyone agreed the archer had taken the shots from some other, closer location, were goose feathers dyed red, damp from the rain, stuck into a hill at the base of a tree in the shape of an azalea.

  Hwado, noun. The way of fire. At one point the Chindallan bow and arrow were believed to be sacred to the spirits of sun and moon. A number of religious ceremonies involve shooting fire-arrows. Such arrows are often fletched with feathers dyed red. There is a saying in Chindalla that “even the wind bleeds,” and most archers propitiate the spirits of the air after they practice their art.

  Minsu was late for the rendezvous. Iseul had taken advantage of one of the safehouses in the town of Suwen, which was some distance to the north and out of the likely path of the Yegedin advance. She took advantage of the lull to experiment with making her own charms, even though she knew Minsu would have preferred her not to risk working with magic. Still, Iseul had a notion that she might be able work out something to spy on the Genial Ones’ communications if she could only exploit certain of the charms’ geometries.

  After her latest failure, which resulted in words of lenses and distance charring off the attempted charm, Iseul sought comfort in an old pleasure: poetry. She could barely remember what it was like when her greatest problem had been coming up with a sufficiently witty pun with which to puncture some pretentious noblewoman’s taste in hairpins. After a couple hours failing to write anything entertainingly caustic, she ventured to one of the town’s bookstores to buy a couple volumes of recent poetry so she could pick them apart instead.

  Iseul had once wondered what the Yegedin were getting out of piles of Chindallan books when the majority of them were simply not very good. Especially when the Yegedin were famed for their exquisite sense of aesthetics. It was almost difficult, at times, to hate people who understood beauty so thoroughly, and who even recognized beauty when it was to be had in a conquered people’s arts.

  She returned to the safehouse with her spoils. One of the books was an anthology by highborn poets. All of the poems were written in the high script, which Iseul had learned as a child at her mother’s insistence. She had hated it then. The high script was based on the language of the great Qieng Empire to the north and east, but the Qieng language had little resemblance
to Chindallan, necessitating a whole system of contrivances to make their writing work for Chindallan at all. Complicating the matter was the fact that the high script had come into use in Chindalla’s earlier days, when Chindallan itself had been different, so you had to compensate both for the Qieng language and for the language shifts within Chindallan.

  The other volume was a collection by an entertainer who had made a specialty of patriotic poems. He wrote in the petal script, which had been invented by a female entertainer, Jebi the Clever, to fit Chindallan itself. The shapes of the letters even corresponded to the positions of the tongue as it made Chindallan’s speech sounds. Sadly, while the collection was beautifully illustrated—the artist had a real eye for the dramatic use of silhouettes—the poetry itself was trite and overwritten. How many times could you use the phrase “hearts of stout fire” in the space of twenty pages without being embarrassed for yourself, anyway?

  Minsu met her at the safehouse two days later. She was wearing modestly splendid robes of silk embroidered with cavorting quails. “I am tired of hearing about battles with no survivors,” she said. She was referring to the border-fort.

  “I heard about the supernatural archer who came back from the dead to defend the fort,” Iseul said, raising her eyebrows. “A rain of arrows to blacken the sky, people falling over pierced through the eye, that sort of thing. I didn’t even know you had that many arrows.”

  “You should know better than to listen to hearsay,” Minsu said. “Besides, I’m sure I got one magician, but I missed the other. Damnable light, couldn’t tell who was who and couldn’t risk getting closer, either. And it made no difference in the end.”

  Iseul nodded somberly. People in the town spoke of nothing else. The storm clouds, the white hands of lightning, the tumbling stones. Skeletons charred to ash, marrow set alight from within. The kindly guard captain at the border-fort was almost certainly dead.

  Despite the city magistrate’s attempts to keep order, the townsfolk had been gathering their belongings to flee northward. One of them had insisted on explaining to Iseul the best things to take during an evacuation. “Don’t take rice,” the old woman had said. “Only fools weigh themselves down with rice.” She had shown Iseul her tidy bundles of medicines, small and light and pungent. “Someone always gets sick, stomach trouble or foot pains, or some woman has a hard childbirth, if you’re unlucky enough to bring a child into the world in these times. You trade the medicine for the food someone else has had to carry, and you fill your belly without having to break your back.” Bemused, Iseul had thanked the old woman for her advice.

  “I couldn’t get into the magicians’ tent,” Iseul said, “and I still haven’t figured out if there’s a way to spy on their letters. The trip was for nothing.”

  “Overhear anything useful?” Minsu said, looking at her with such an expression of calm trust that Iseul felt even more wretched.

  Iseul thought over the magicians’ exchange while she waited for Minsu. “They were arguing about how destructive to make the storm, I think. That was all. But there was something—” She frowned. Something about their words had just reminded her of the poetry, but what could Chindallan poetry possibly have to do with the Genial Ones?

  “Have some tea,” Minsu said, her solution to everything, “and maybe it will come to you.”

  Iseul gave a tiny sigh. The safehouse’s tea might as well have been mud steeped in rainwater, but Minsu gave no sign that she noticed its inferior quality. Iseul recounted the rest of her meeting with the border-fort’s captain, although there wasn’t much to tell.

  “I don’t think the magicians at Fort Kamang will do us much good,” Iseul said. “How are mere human magicians going to stand up to the Genial Ones themselves? Magic clearly prefers to serve its original masters if the Genial Ones can so casually invoke spells we all thought had decayed to uselessness.”

  “I’d send you to kidnap one of the Genial Ones,” Minsu said, “but I don’t think we have a safe way of holding one for questioning.”

  Over and over Iseul heard the two magicians arguing in her head. “Their accent,” she said slowly. The threads were in her hands. She only had to figure out how to weave them together. “Their accents, and the accent of the one I killed. The fact that I didn’t recognize the language at first.”

  Minsu eyed her but knew better than to interrupt. Instead, she poured more tea.

  “Minsu,” Iseul said, going pale. “I was wrong just now. We’ve all been wrong. Magic didn’t die because the Genial Ones were wiped out. Because we know now that they were never wiped out. Magic stopped working for the humans piece by piece because it’s their language, and their language changed over time just as Chindallan has changed, which everyone who has studied the high script knows. Their language became different. We’ve been trying to use the wrong words for magic.”

  “You could make more powerful charms, then,” Minsu said. “Using the proper words now that you know them.”

  “Now that I know some of them, you mean. It would take trial and error to figure out all the necessary changes, and magical experimentation can get messy if you do it wrong.”

  “So much for that,” Minsu said. “What about the lexicons? What do they signify?”

  “I still don’t know what they’re doing, but I will find out,” Iseul said.

  “We have some time,” Minsu said, “but that doesn’t mean we can afford to relax. The fact that Yegedin have learned from their mistakes in the first invasion may, in some sense, work in our favor.” Originally the Yegedin armies had raced north, far ahead of their supply lines, and eventually had to retreat to the current border. “This time they’re making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation. Still, tell me what you need and I will make sure you are well-supplied.”

  “More paper, for a start,” Iseul said. “A lot of paper. I will have to hope that the Genial Ones don’t track me down here.”

  “Indeed.” Minsu’s eyes were unexpectedly grim. “I would get you the assistance of a Chindallan magician, but you do realize that there’s every possibility that the Genial Ones have been hiding among our people, too.”

  “It had occurred to me, yes.” Iseul was starting to get a headache, although in all fairness, she should have had one ages ago. “I don’t suppose you have any of that headache medicine?”

  “I have a little left from my last detour to a pharmacy,” Minsu said, and handed it over. “I’ll get you more. I have other business to attend to, but I will check back with you from time to time. The safehouse’s keeper will have instructions to assist you in any way she can.”

  “Thank you,” Iseul said. She didn’t look up as Minsu slipped out.

  The first Chindallan dynasty after the fall of the Genial Ones only lasted four abbreviated generations. Its queens and kings were buried in tombs of cold stone beneath mounded earth. Certain Chindallan scholars, coming to the tombs long after they had been plundered, noted that many of the tombs, when viewed from above, seemed to form words in the high script: wall, for instance, or eye, or vigilant. The scholars believed that this practice, like that of burying terracotta soldiers with the dead monarchs and their households, arose from a desire to protect the tombs from grave robbers. Like the terracotta soldiers, the tombs’ construction was singularly inadequate for this purpose.

  Iseul slept little in the days that followed. She was making progress on the scrying charm, though, which was something. It required suspending the charm along with two of the quill-charms in a mobile. Sometimes, when her exhaustion overcame her, she found herself staring at the charms bobbing back and forth in the air.

  She also developed a headache so ferocious that Minsu’s medicine, normally reliable, did her no good. Finally she ventured out in search of a pharmacist. It turned out that the pharmacist had fled town, to her vexation, but an old man told her that one of the physicians, a somewhat disreputable man who had evaded registration with the proper ministry for his enti
re life, was still around. Since she didn’t have much option, she went in search of him.

  The physician lived in a small hut at the edge of town. He was sitting outside, and he had finished ministering to a pair of grubby children. One of the children was eating a candy with no sign that her splinted wrist bothered her. The other, an even younger girl, was picking wildflowers.

  The physician himself was a tall man who would have been taller if not for his hunched shoulders, and he had a wry, gentle face. His clothes were very plain. No one would have looked at him twice in the market square. He stood at Iseul’s approach.

  “This will be quick, I promise,” Iseul said. “I’ve been having headaches and I need medicine for it.”

  The physician looked her up and down. “I should think that a few good nights’ sleep would serve you better than any medicine,” he said dryly.

  “I don’t have time for a few good nights’ sleep,” Iseul said. “Please, don’t you have anything to take the edge off the pain? If it’s a matter of money—”

  He named a sum that explained to Iseul what he was doing in such plain clothes. Any respectable licensed physician could have charged three times as much even for something this simple.

  “I can pay that,” Iseul said.

  The girl with the splint tugged at the physician’s sleeve, completely unconcerned with the transaction going on. “Do you have more candy?”

  “For pity’s sake, you haven’t finished what’s in your mouth,” he said.

  “But it tastes better when you have two flavors at once.”

  He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Maybe later.”