Conservation of Shadows (13 page)

After a silence, Dragon said, “What did you intend, then, Swan?”

The question brought her up short. She had been so absorbed in attempting to convey the swanships’ grandeur that she had forgotten that real people passed into the fermata to send their souls to the end of time. “I’ll change my music,” she said. “I’ll delete it all if I have to.”

“Please don’t,” Dragon said. “I would miss it greatly.” A faint swelling of melody: his ship was playing back one of her first, stumbling efforts.

“You’ll miss it forever if you keep going.”

“A bargain, then,” Dragon said. “I was never an artist, only a soldier, but a hundred years here have taught me the value of art. Don’t destroy your music, and I’ll come back.”

Swan’s eyes prickled. “All right.”

Tiger and Swan watched as Dragon’s ship decelerated, then reversed its course, returning to the station.

“You’ve sacrificed your freedom to bring him back, you know,” Tiger said. “If you finish your symphony now, it will lack conviction. Anyone with half an ear will be able to tell.”

“I would rather have Dragon’s life than write a masterpiece,” Swan said.

“You’re a fool, cygnet.”

Only then did Swan realize that, in her alarm over the situation, she had completely forgotten the theme she had meant to record.

Dragon helped Swan move the keyboard out of the observation room and into the rock garden. “I’m glad you’re not giving up your music,” he remarked.

She looked at him, really looked at him, thinking of how she had almost lost a friend. “I’m not writing the symphony,” she said.

He blinked.

“I’m still writing music,” Swan assured him. “Just not the captain’s symphony. Because you were right: it’s impossible. At least, what I envisioned is impossible. If I dwell upon the impossible, I achieve nothing. But if I do what I can, where I can—I might get somewhere.”

She wasn’t referring to freedom from the swanwatch.

Dragon nodded. “I think I see. And Swan—” He hesitated. “Thank you.”

“It’s been a long day,” she said. “You should rest.”

“Like Tortoise?” He chuckled. “Perhaps I will.” He ran one hand along the keyboard in a flurry of notes. Then he sat on one of the garden’s benches and closed his eyes, humming idly.

Swan studied Dragon’s calm face. Then she stood at the keyboard and played several tentative notes, a song for Dragon and Phoenix and Tiger—a song for the living.

They are connoisseurs of writing in Imulai Mokarengen, the city whose name means inkblot of the gods.

The city lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.

Imulai Mokarengen has been unmolested for over a hundred years. People come to listen to the minstrels and drink tea-of-moments-unraveling, to admire the statues of shapeshifting tigers and their pliant lovers, to look for small maps to great fortunes at the intersections of curving roads. Even the duelists confront each other in fights knotted by ceremony and the exchange of poetry.

But now the starships that hunt each other in the night of nights have set their dragon eyes upon Imulai Mokarengen, desiring to possess its arts, and the city is unmolested no more.

The soldiers came from the sky in a glory of thunder, a cascade of fire. Blood like roses, bullets like thorns, everything to ashes. Imulai Mokarengen’s defenses were few, and easily overwhelmed. Most of them would have been museum pieces anywhere else.

The city’s wardens gathered to offer the invading general payment in any coin she might desire, so long as she left the city in peace. Accustomed to their decadent visitors, they offered these: Wine pressed from rare books of stratagems and aged in barrels set in orbit around a certain red star. Crystals extracted from the nervous systems of philosopher-beasts that live in colonies upon hollow asteroids. Perfume symphonies infused into exquisite fractal tapestries.

The general was Jaian of the Burning Orb, and she scorned all these things. She was a tall woman clad in armor the color of dead metal. For each world she had scoured, she wore a jewel of black-red facets upon her breastplate. She said to the wardens: What use did she have for wine except to drink to her enemies’ defeat? What use was metal except to build engines of war? And as for the perfume, she didn’t dignify that with a response.

But, she said, smiling, there was one thing they could offer her, and then she would leave with her soldiers and guns and ships. They could give her all the writings they treasured so much: all the binary crystals gleaming bright-dark, all the books with the bookmarks still in them, all the tilted street signs, all the graffiti chewed by drunken nanomachines into the shining walls, all the tattoos obscene and tender, all the ancestral tablets left at the shrines with their walls of gold and chitin.

The wardens knew then that she was mocking them, and that as long as any of the general’s soldiers breathed, they would know no peace. One warden, however, considered Jaian’s words of scorn, and thought that, unwitting, Jaian herself had given them the key to her defeat.

Seran did not remember a time when his othersight of the city did not show it burning, no matter what his ordinary senses told him, or what the dry pages of his history said. In his dreams the smoke made the sky a funeral shroud. In waking, the wind smelled of ash, the buildings of angry flames. Everything in the othersight was wreathed in orange and amber, flickering, shadows cinder-edged.

He carried that pall of phantom flame with him even now, into the warden’s secret library, and it made him nervous although the books had nothing to fear from the phantoms. The warden, a woman in dust-colored robes, was escorting him through the maze-of-mists and down the stairs to the library’s lowest level. The air was cool and dry, and to either side he could see the candle-sprites watching him hungrily.

“Here we are,” the warden said as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

Seran looked around at the parchment and papers and scrolls of silk, then stepped into the room. The tools he carried, bonesaws and forceps and fine curved needles, scalpels that sharpened themselves if fed the oil of certain olives, did not belong in this place. But the warden had insisted that she required a surgeon’s expertise.

He risked being tortured or killed by the general’s occupation force for cooperating with a warden. In fact, he could have earned himself a tidy sum for turning her in. But Imulai Mokarengen was his home, for all that he had not been born here. He owed it a certain loyalty.

“Why did you bring me here, madam warden?” Seran said.

The warden gestured around the room, then unrolled one of the great charts across the table at the center of the room. It was a stardrive schematic, all angles and curves and careful coils.

Then Seran saw the shape flickering across the schematic, darkening some of the precise lines while others flowed or dimmed. The warden said nothing, leaving him to observe as though she felt he was making a difficult diagnosis. After a while he identified the elusive shape as that of a girl, slight of figure or perhaps merely young, if such a creature counted years in human terms. The shape twisted this way and that, but there were no adjacent maps or diagrams for her to jump to. She left a disordered trail of numbers like bullets in her wake.

“I see her,” Seran said dryly. “What do you need me to do about her?”

“Free her,” the warden said. “I’m pretty sure this is all of her, although she left a trail while we were perfecting the procedure—”

She unrolled another chart, careful to keep it from touching the first. It appeared to be a treatise on musicology, except parts of it had been replaced by a detritus of clefs and twisted staves and demiquavers coalescing into a diagram of a pistol.

“Is this your plan for resistance against the invaders?” Seran said. “Awakening soldiers from scraps of text, then cutting them out? You should have a lot more surgeons. Or perhaps children with scissors.”

The warden shrugged. “Imulai Mokarengen is a city of stories. It’s not hard to persuade one to come to life in her defense, even though I wouldn’t call her
tame.
She is the Saint of Guns summoned from a book of legends. Now you see why I need a surgeon. I am given to believe that your skills are not entirely natural.”

This was true enough. He had once been a surgeon-priest of the Order of the Chalice. “If you know that much about me,” he said, “then you know that I was cast out of the order. Why haven’t you scared up the real thing?”

“Your order is a small one,” she said. “I looked, but with the blockade, there’s no way to get someone else. It has to be you.” When he didn’t speak, she went on, “We are outnumbered. The general can send for more soldiers from the worlds of her realm, and they are armed with the latest weaponry. We are a single city known for artistic endeavors, not martial ones. Something has to be done.”

Seran said, “You’re going to lose your schematic.”

“I’m not concerned about its fate.”

“All right,” he said. “But if you know anything about me, you know that your paper soldiers won’t last. I stick to ordinary surgery because the prayers of healing don’t work for me anymore; they’re cursed by fire.” And, because he knew she was thinking it: “The curse touches anyone I teach.”

“I’m aware of the limitations,” the warden said. “Now, do you require additional tools?”

He considered it. Ordinary scissors might be better suited to paper than the curved ones he carried, but he trusted his own instruments. A scalpel would have to do. But the difficult part would be getting the girl-shape to hold still. “I need water,” he said. He had brought a sedative, but he was going to have to sponge the entire schematic, since an injection was unlikely to do the trick.

The warden didn’t blink. “Wait here.”

As though he had somewhere else to wait. He spent the time attempting to map the girl’s oddly flattened anatomy. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to intrude on her internal structures. Her joints showed the normal range of articulation. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said she was dancing in the disarrayed ink, or perhaps looking for a fight.

Footsteps sounded in the stairwell. The woman set a large pitcher of water down on the table. “Will this be enough?” she asked.

Seran nodded and took out a vial from his satchel. The dose was pure guesswork, unfortunately. He dumped half the vial’s contents into the pitcher, then stirred the water with a glass rod. After putting on gloves, he soaked one of his sponges, then wrung it out.

Working with steady strokes, he soaked the schematic. The paper absorbed the water readily. The warden winced in spite of herself. The girl didn’t seem capable of facial expressions, but she dashed to one side of the schematic, then the other, seeking escape. Finally she slumped, her long hair trailing off in disordered tangles of artillery tables.

The warden’s silence pricked at Seran’s awareness. She’s
studying how I do this,
he thought. He selected his most delicate scalpel and began cutting the girl-shape out of the paper. The medium felt alien, without the resistances characteristic of flesh, although water oozed away from the cuts.

He hesitated over the final incision, then completed it, hand absolutely steady.

Amid all the maps and books and scrolls, they heard a girl’s slow, drowsy breathing. In place of the paper cutout, the girl curled on the table, clad in black velvet and gunmetal lace. She had paper-pale skin and inkstain hair, and a gun made of shadows rested in her hand.

It was impossible to escape the problem: smoke curled from the girl’s other hand, and her nails were blackened.

“I warned you of this,” Seran said. Cursed by fire. “She’ll burn up, slowly at first, and then all at once. I suspect she’ll last a week at most.”

“You listen to the news, surely,” the warden said. “Do you know how many of our people the invaders shot the first week of the occupation?”

He knew the number. It was not small. “Anything else?” he said.

“I may have need of you later,” the warden said. “If I summon you, will you come? I will pay you the same fee.”

“Yes, of course,” Seran said. He had noticed her deft hands, however; he imagined she would make use of them soon.

Not long after Seran’s task for the warden, the effigy nights began.

He was out after curfew when he saw the Saint of Guns. Imulai Mokarengen’s people were bad at curfews. People still broke the general’s curfew regularly, although many of them were also caught at it. At every intersection, along every street, you could see people hung up as corpse-lanterns, burning with plague-colored light, as warnings to the populace. Still, the city’s people were accustomed to their parties and trysts and sly confrontations. For his part, he was on his way home after an emergency call, and looking forward to a quiet bath.

It didn’t surprise him that he should encounter the Saint of Guns, although he wished he hadn’t. After all, he had freed her from the boundary of paper and legend to walk in the world. The connection was real, for all that she hadn’t been conscious for its forging. Still, the sight of her made him freeze up.

Jaian’s soldiers were rounding up a group of merry-goers and poets whose rebellious recitations had been loud enough to be heard from outside. The poets, in particular, were not becoming any less loud, especially when one of them was shot in the head.

The night became the color of gunsmoke little by little, darkness unfolding to make way for the lithe girl-figure. She had a straight-hipped stride, and her eyes were spark-bright, her mouth furiously unsmiling. Her hair was braided and pinned this time. Seran had half-expected her to have a pistol in each hand, but no, there was only the one. He wondered if that had to do with the charred hand.