Conservation of Shadows (18 page)

Iseul checked the shadows for signs of movement, but if an ambush awaited her, she would have to deal with it when it came. She stepped sideways into the room.

A book lay open on a cluttered escritoire. Next to it was a desk set containing a half-used, sumptuously carved and gilded block of ink. The carving had probably once been a dragon, judging by the lower half: conventional, but well-executed. A charm that had been folded to resemble a quill rested against the book. The folds had been made very precisely.

Iseul’s gaze went to a small stack of paper next to the book. The top sheet was covered with writing. Her hackles rose as she realized that that wasn’t precisely true. It sounded like someone was writing on the paper, and the stack made a rustling sound as of furtive animals, but there was no brush or graphite stick, and the ink looked obdurately dry.

Against her better judgment, she approached the desk. She looked first at the charm, which was covered with words of transference and staining, then at the papers. Black wisps were curling free from the book, leaving the page barren, and traveling through the air to the paper, where they formed new words. She flipped back in the book. The first thirty or so pages were blank, as faceless as a mask turned inside-out. Iseul flipped forward. As before, the words on the next page, which were in somewhat archaic Chindallan, continued sizzling away in ashy curls and wisps.

Iseul reminded herself to breathe, then picked up the top of the pile and began paging through. All of the words were in the Genial Ones’ language. It appeared to be some sort of diatribe about the writer’s hosts and their taste in after-dinner entertainment. She squinted at the pages: only three of them so far. She pulled out the page currently being written on.

More words formed on the new sheet. Iseul had expected a precise insectine march, but that wasn’t the case. There seemed to be someone on the other end; it wasn’t just a transfer of marks. Sometimes the unseen writer hesitated over a word choice, or crossed something out. At one point a doodle formed in the margin, either a very fat cow or a very large hog, hard to tell. The writer, a middling artist at best, had more unflattering comments about the people they were staying with.

Would she alert the person on the other end if she made off with the letter, which was becoming increasingly and entertainingly vituperative? She didn’t know how close by they were. How much time did she have? Her left arm felt less numb than before, which was reassuring, but that didn’t mean she should let down her guard. Time to read the letter and see if there was anything she should commit to memory. Sadly, the writer was cagey about revealing their location, although she learned some creative insults.

It was tempting to linger and find out if the writer was going to regale the dead magician with more misshapen farm animals, maybe a rooster or a goose, but Iseul made herself turn away from the escritoire and examine the rest of the hideout. There were more books with the writing worn away, and a number of what she recognized as ragged volumes of a torrid adventure series involving an alchemist and her two animal-headed assistants, popular about five years back. Since she preferred not to believe that one of the Genial Ones had such execrable taste in popular fiction, it seemed likely that the books were convenient fodder for this unusual method of exchanging letters.

Still, it paid to be thorough. Iseul didn’t like turning her back on the escritoire, but she still needed to search the rest of the secret room, which was well-supplied with books.

She was starting to think that most of the books would fall into the two previous categories—blank and about to be blank—when she found what the magician had been so keen on hiding. These books, unlike the others, were only labeled by number. Each was impressively thick. An amateur, albeit a moderately accomplished one, had stitched the binding. The binder—probably the magician—had a fondness for dark blue linen thread.

Iseul picked up the first book and flipped rapidly through the pages. Thin paper, but high quality, with just a hint of tooth. The left-hand pages were in a writing system unfamiliar to her. Unlike Chindallan, the letterforms consisted of a profusion of curves and loops. She wondered if it, like the language of the realm of Moi-quan to the south, had originally been incised into large leaves that would split if you used straight strokes.

The right-hand pages were in the Genial Ones’ writing, in script so small that it hurt her eyes, and it was immediately obvious that they were compiling a lexicon. Definitions, from denotations to connotations; usage notes, including one on a substitute word to be used only in the presence of a certain satrap; dialectal variations; folk etymologies, some amusingly similar to stories in Chindalla, like the one about a fish whose name changed twice in one year thanks to a princess discovering that something that tasted delicious when you were starving in exile didn’t necessarily remain so after you had returned to eating courtly delicacies. And look, there was a doodle of a sadly generic-looking fish in the margin, although it was in a different style than the earlier pig-cow. (Like many Chindallans, Iseul knew her fish very well.) How long had it taken the magician to put this together?

The unfamiliar writing system was summarized in five volumes. Iseul went on to the next language. Four volumes, but the notes in the Genial Ones’ language were much more terse and had probably been compiled by a different researcher or group of researchers. She estimated the number of books, then considered the number of languages. Impressive, although she had no way of knowing how many languages there were in the world, and what fraction of them this collection of lexicons represented.

She sampled a few more languages at random. One of the sets was, interestingly, for Yeged-dai. Judging by its position in the pile, it had been completed a while ago. She was tempted to quibble with some of the preferred spellings, but she had to concede that the language as used in occupied territories probably diverged from the purer forms spoken in Yeged proper.

Then she came to the last set. Only one volume. The left-hand pages were written in Chindallan.

It turned out that the second volume hadn’t yet been bound, and was scattered in untidy piles in drawers of the study. The words were sorted into broad groups more or less by Chindallan alphabetical order, although it looked like they were added as they were collected. For instance:

Cheon-ma,
the cloud-horses that carry the moon over the sea. Thankfully, the magician hadn’t attempted to sketch one. It probably would have ended up looking like an ox. The
cheon-ma
were favorite subjects of Chindalla’s court artists. There was a famous carving of one on a memorial from the previous dynasty, which Iseul had had the privilege of viewing once.

Chindal-kot,
the royal azalea, emblem of the queen’s house. This included a long and surprisingly accurate digression on the evolution of the house colors over the lifetime of the current dynasty as new dyes were discovered. Iseul bristled at the magician’s condescending tone, although she didn’t know why she expected any better from a Genial One.

Chaebi,
the swallow, said to be a bearer of good luck. Beneath its entry was a notation on the Festival of the Swallows’ Return in the spring. And, inevitably, a sketch of a swallow, although she would have mistaken it for a goose if not for the characteristic forked tail.

Iseul put the papers back. Her throat felt raw. The magician couldn’t be up to anything good with this, but what did it mean?

Especially puzzling: what did it mean that all the lexicons were copied out by hand? The rough texture of ink on paper had been unmistakable. She had already witnessed a magician sending a letter by manipulating the substance of text from a book already in existence. Surely magicians could use this process to halve the work? Or did it only work on the language of magic itself?

She had spent too long here already. It was time to get out and report this to her handler, who might have some better idea of what was going on.

Iseul hesitated, then gathered up the Chindallan lexicon and the four volumes of the Yeged-dai lexicon. For all she knew there were duplicates elsewhere, but she would take what she could get. If she had more time to inspect the lexicons once she was far from here, there might be valuable clues. She was going to look odd hauling books around at this hour, but perhaps she could pretend to be running an errand for some Yegedin official.

Cold inside, she headed back up the stairs, and out of the house with its secrets wrapped in words.

The Genial Ones believed in the sovereignty of conservation laws. This may be illustrated by a tale that begins in the usual way by naming the Genial Ones as the terrible first children of the world’s dawning. In due course (so the story goes), the sun grew red and dim and large, threatening to swallow the world. Determined to preserve their spiraling towers and their symphonies and their many-bannered armies, the Genial Ones unlanterned a younger star in order to rejuvenate their own.

It is likely that they did this more than once.

Many of Chindalla’s astronomers believe that, since this sun indisputably supports learned civilizations, other stars must do the same. Some astronomers have produced lengthy essays, complete with computations, to support this position.

Reckoning whether any such civilization would survive the extinction of its sun, on the other hand, requires no arduous calculation.

Iseul’s handler, Shen Minsu, was a tall, plain woman with a strong right arm. Before the invasion, she had been known for her skill at archery. Iseul had seen her split one arrow with another at 130 meters during a private display. “Useless skill,” Minsu had said afterwards, “people dead of arrows to the heart find it hard to confess what they’re up to. Much better to make use of the living.”

They met now in the upper storage room of a pharmacy in a small town. The Shen family had risen to prominence by running pharmacies. One of the earlier Shens had been elevated to a noble after one of his concoctions cured a beloved king-consort’s fever. Even in the south, the Shen family maintained good ties with medicine-sellers and herb-gatherers. Yegedin medicine was not terribly different in principle from Chindallan medicine, and the Yegedin prized Chindalla’s mountain ginseng, which was said to bestow longevity. Iseul had grown up drinking the bitter tea at her mother’s insistence, but from observation of her mother’s patrons, it didn’t do anything more for you than any other form of modest living.

Minsu didn’t care for ginseng tea, ironically, but she always insisted that they drink tea of some sort whenever they met. Iseul took a sip now. She was wearing clothes cut more conservatively, and she had switched her hairstyle to the drab sort of thing a widow might favor. Shen Minsu was wearing subdued brown and beige linen, which suited her surprisingly well, instead of the sumptuous embroidered robes she would have worn in northern Chindalla.

Minsu was going methodically through the incomplete Chindallan lexicon. She had already glanced through the Yeged-dai lexicon. “You’re certain,” Minsu said for the third time this meeting, which showed how unsettled she was.

“I killed a Yegedin guard on the way out, to be sure,” Iseul said bleakly. She had agonized over the decision, but it wouldn’t be the first time she had killed a Yegedin on Chindalla’s behalf. The dagger had performed flawlessly, which meant the issue wasn’t that the charm had stopped working; the issue was that the charm only triggered on human blood. “And the last thing the Genial One said—”

You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this—
and then the unfamiliar term.

“My guess is that the Yegedin are as much in the dark as we are,” Minsu said. “I find it hard to believe that even they would knowingly ally with the Genial Ones.”

“I wish I believed that Yeged conquered Chindalla so handily by allying itself with monsters,” Iseul said bitterly.

Both of them knew that Yeged’s soldiers hadn’t needed supernatural help. In the previous century, Chindalla had turned inwards, its court factions squabbling over ministry appointments and obscure philosophical arguments. The Yegedin had also been a people divided, but that division that taken the form of vicious civil wars. As a result, when a warlord united Yeged and declared himself Emperor, he was sitting on a brutally effective army that had grown accustomed to the spoils of war. It had only been natural for the Emperor’s successor to send his soldiers overseas in search of more riches to keep them loyal.

“I feel as though we’ve walked into a children’s story,” Minsu said. “When I was a child, the servants would scare us out of trouble by telling us tales—you know the ones. Don’t pull the horses’ tails, or the Genial Ones’ falcons will come out of the shadows and eat your eyes. If you pinch snacks from the kitchens at night, the Genial Ones will turn your fingers into twigs and use them for kindling. Or if you tear your jacket climbing trees, the Genial Ones will sew you up with your little brother and use you as a ceremonial robe. That sort of thing.”

“Except they were real,” Iseul said. “All the histories in all the known nations agree on the basics. It’s difficult not to believe them.”

Minsu sighed. “The Yegedin haven’t mentioned anything in their official dispatches so far as we know, but one of my contacts in Mijege-in has remarked on how the censor has been terribly quiet. A very long-running hangover after entertaining the guest from Yeged. No doubt the Yegedin authorities are looking for the murderer as we speak.” She looked sideways at Iseul; her eyes were dark and very grave. “And that means the Genial Ones are looking for the murderer, too.

“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Minsu went on, “although if they’re researching the world’s languages it’s certain that they’re widely dispersed. You’re lucky to have survived, and you’re also lucky that he tried to take care of you himself instead of raising the alarm.”

“He probably didn’t want to risk anyone else finding out about his collection of lexicons,” Iseul said, “if he ran afoul of some Yegedin magician.”