Conservation of Shadows (34 page)

The question was moot, as she doubted the aide would stand for any such endeavor.

On a whim, Ling Yun had brought her uncle’s toy glider with her. Keeping her motions slow, she drew it from her jacket.

“Pretty,” Periet said. “Does it fly?” She was smiling.

Mesketalioth opened his hands toward Ling Yun. She gave the toy glider to him. He studied its proportions, and she was suddenly chilled. Could he draw diagrams of gliders, too?

“Yes, it flies,” Mesketalioth said. “It’s never been tuned, has it?”

“No,” Ling Yun said. “It’s just a toy.” Surely the adolescents had had toys in childhood. What kinds of lives had they led in the ashworlds, constantly under assault from glider bombing runs?

“Even a toy can be a weapon,” Cheng Guo said with a sneer. “I would have had it tuned. Especially if you’re already a musician.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Cheng Guo,” Ko said, “what’s it going to do? Drop little origami bombs?” He made flicking motions with his fingers. Cheng Guo glowered at him, and Ko only grinned back.

They sounded like the students she had attended classes with, as an adolescent herself, fractious and earnest. However, unlike those fellow students, they carried themselves alertly. She noticed that, despite standing around her, they deliberately left her path to the exit unblocked.

“I have permission to ask you some questions,” Ling Yun said. She wanted them to be clear on her place in the hierarchy, which was to say, low.

“Are you part of the game?” Wen Zhi asked.

Ling Yun wondered if the girl ever smiled, and was struck by a sudden urge to ruffle that short hair. The thought of the nine red marks on Wen Zhi’s dragon made the urge entirely resistible. “No,” she said, afraid that they would refuse to talk to her further.

“Good,” Cheng Guo said shortly. “You’re not prepared.” He trained his glower on Ling Yun, as though it would cause her to go away. It seemed to her that ignoring her would be much more effective.

“What does it feel like to kill?” Ling Yun said.

Ko had sauntered over to the wall across from Cheng Guo and was leaning against it, worrying at the fraying end of his braid. They hadn’t given him a clip for his hair, and the aide had said that he refused to get it cut. Ko gave Ling Yun a shrewd look and said, “You could ask that of your own soldiers, couldn’t you?”

“I’d know how they felt, but I’m interested in you,” she said.

“Ask what you mean,” Periet said. Her tone had shifted, just below the surface. Ling Yun wondered if the others could hear that undercurrent of ferocity. “You’re interested in how we’re different.”

“All right,” Ling Yun said. “Yes.” It cost her nothing to be agreeable, a lesson she had applied all her life.

“Don’t listen to her,” Wen Zhi said to the others. “She’s trying to get inside our heads.”

“Well, yes,” Ling Yun said mildly. “But the longer you talk to me, the longer you draw out the game, the longer you live.”

Mesketalioth raised his chin. His scars went livid. “Living isn’t the point.”

“Then what is?” she asked.

With no warning—at least, not to Ling Yun’s slow senses—Mesketalioth snapped the glider between his hands.

Ling Yun stared at him, fists pressed to her sides. Her eyes stung. She had known, theoretically, that she might lose the glider. What had she been thinking, bringing it into a room full of assassins? Assassins who knew the importance of symbols and would think of a glider as a hostile one, at that. She just hadn’t expected them to break this reminder of her childhood.

It’s a toy,
she reminded herself. She could make another herself if she had to.

How much had these children lost, before coming here?

Periet’s blue eyes met Ling Yun’s gaze. The girl made a tiny nod.

“ ‘Even a toy can be a weapon,’ ” Mesketalioth said, without inflection. “There are many kinds of weapons.”

“Hey,” Ko said to Ling Yun. He sounded genuinely concerned. “We can fix it. They’ll let us have some glue, won’t they? Besides, your general likes you. He’d have our heads if we didn’t.”

I’ve never even met the Phoenix General,
Ling Yun thought, chewing her lip before she caught herself. “How many people did
you
take down?” she asked, trying to remind herself that these children were assassins and killers.

Ko rebraided the ends of his hair. “I keep a tally in my head,” he said.

“He’s killed sixteen gliders in the game,” Wen Zhi said contemptuously. “That’s information that you should have gotten from studying the game.”

“You’re still losing territory,” Ling Yun said, remembering the latest report. “How do you expect to win?”

Cheng Guo laughed from his corner. “As if we’d tell you? Please.”

General,
Ling Yun thought,
how in the empress’s name is this a good idea?
She hoped she wasn’t the only musician they had working on the problem. The whole conversation was giving her a jittery sense of urgency.

“Indeed,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Leave the glider,” Ko said. “We’ll fix it. You’ll see.”

“If you like,” Ling Yun said, wondering what her uncle would say if he knew. Well, she didn’t have to tell him. “Perhaps I’ll see you another time, if they permit it.”

Periet touched Ling Yun’s hand lightly. Ling Yun half-turned. “Yes?”

Periet said, “There should be six, not five. But you’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

The hairs on the back of Ling Yun’s neck prickled.

Periet smiled again.

Ling Yun thought of the two butterflies in Periet’s dragon-portrait, and wondered if dragons ate butterflies. Or musicians, for that matter. “It was pleasant meeting you all,” she said, because her parents had raised her to be polite.

Wu Wen Zhi and Li Cheng Guo ignored her, but the others murmured their goodbyes.

Shaking her head, Ling Yun made the signal that the guards had taught her, and the door opened. None of the assassins made an attempt to escape. It scared her.

Ling Yun was in the midst of revising Mesketalioth’s piece in tablature when the summons came. She knew it had to be the Phoenix General, because the soldiers would not disrupt her concentration for anything else. But Ling Yun used to practice composing in adverse circumstances: sitting in a clattering train; at a street puppet theatre while children shouted out their favorite characters’ names; during tedious parties when she had had too much rice wine. She didn’t compose courtly lays or ballads, but cheerful ditties that she could hum in the bath where no one else had to know. But the aides had certain ideas about how musicians worked, and it was hardly for her to overturn those ideas.

The aide asked, “Will you need your zither?”

“That depends,” Ling Yun said. “Will he want me to play what I have so far?”

“No,” the aide said, a little hesitantly. “He’ll make arrangements when he wants to hear a performance, I’m sure.”

Surreptitiously, Ling Yun curled and uncurled her fingers to limber them up, just in case.

The aide escorted her to a briefing room painted with Phoenix Command’s flame-and-spear on the door. She slid the door open with a surprising lack of ceremony. “General,” she called out, “Musician Xiao is here.” She patted Ling Yun’s shoulder. “Go on. You’ll be fine.”

Ling Yun stepped through the minimum distance possible and knelt in full obeisance, catching a glimpse of the Phoenix General on the way down. He had grey-streaked hair and a strong-jawed profile.

“Enough,” the general said. “Let’s not waste time on ceremony.”

Slowly, she rose, trying to interpret his expression.
He hasn’t heard your work yet,
she reminded herself,
so he can’t hate it already.

“Sir,” she said, dipping in a bow despite herself.

“You’ve been too well trained, I see,” the general said wryly. “I swear, it’s true of every musician I meet. Sit down.”

Ling Yun had no idea what to say to this, so she sat cross-legged at the table and settled for looking helpful.

“What dreams do you dream?” the general said. His fingers tapped the wall. Indeed, he seemed unable to stop them.

“My last dream was about the fish I had for dinner,” Ling Yun said, taken aback. “It swam up out of my mouth and chastised me for using too much salt. When I woke up, I was facing the butterfly dragon.”

“Ah, yes,” the general said. “Periet, destroyer of Shang Yuan. I lost an entire glider squadron when she flew in. Dragon pilots are unstable too, as you might guess, so we thought she was a rogue. We’d seen her take down a couple of her own comrades on the way in. Then her dragon roared, and the concussive storm shattered everything in its path, and the City of Lanterns exploded in fire.”

“You were there, General?”

He didn’t answer her. “How is the dragon suite progressing?”

“I have revisions to make based on this morning’s results in the game, sir,” Ling Yun said.

“Do you play
wei qi,
Musician?” he asked.

“Only poorly,” Ling Yun said. “My mother taught me the rules, but it’s been years. It concerns territory and influence and patterns, doesn’t it? It’s strange—musical patterns are so easy for me to perceive, but the visual ones are more difficult.”

The general sat across from her. “If musicians were automatically as skilled at
wei qi
as they were at music,” he said, “they would be unbeatable.”

A tablet rested on the table. He picked up the larger of two brushes and wrote
game,
then several other characters. There were no triangles—no dragons—to be seen anywhere. “I didn’t know they could do that,” the general mused. “This is what happens when you allow the game to modify its own rules.” He met Ling Yun’s inquisitive gaze. “Somehow I don’t think they’ve conceded.”

“So the dragons haven’t been captured,” she said, slipping back into the terminology of
wei qi.
“What else mediates this game, General?”

“It’s tuned the way a glider might be tuned by a musician, the way a tablet is calibrated by a calligrapher. It’s tuned by developments in the living war.”

“I had understood,” Ling Yun said, “that the suite was to reflect the pilots, not to influence them. I must confess that so far I haven’t seen anything that would explain the vanishing dragons.”

The general said, “In music, the ideal is a silent song upon an unstrung zither. Is this not so?”

Ling Yun drew the characters in her mind:
wuxian
meant “five,”
qin
meant “zither.” But the
wu
of “five,” in the third tone, brought to mind the
wu
of “nothing” or “emptiness,” which was in the first tone. The unstrung zither, favored instrument of the sages. The ancients had preferred subtlety and restraint in all things; the unstrung zither took this to the natural conclusion. Ling Yun had applied herself to her lessons with the same patient dedication that she did all things musical, but the unstrung zither had vexed her. “That was the view of the traditional theorists,” she said neutrally, “although modern musicians don’t necessarily agree.”

The Phoenix General’s smile only widened, as though he saw right through her temporizing. “Music is the highest expression of the world’s patterns. The sages have told us so, time and again. The music in the empress’s court provides order to her subjects. We must apply the same principles in war.”

She already knew what he was going to say.

“Thus, in war, the ideal must be a bloodless engagement upon an empty battlefield.”

“Are you sure it is wise to keep the ashworlder children alive, then?” Ling Yun said. It made her uneasy to ask, for she didn’t want to change the general’s mind. Perhaps the thought was traitorous.

“They’ll die when they’re no longer useful,” the general said frankly.

Traitorous or not, there was something wrong with a war that involved killing children. Even deadly children. Even Periet, with her eyes that hid such lethality.

Wei qi
was a game of territory, of colonialism. Ling Yun thought of all the things she owed to her parents, who had made sure she had the best tutors; to her uncle, who had brought her the glider and other treats over the years. But she no longer lived in her parents’ house. And three of the colonies, Arani and Straken Okh and Kiris, had not been founded by the empire at all. What did they owe the Phoenix Banner?

In her history lessons, she had learned that the phoenix and dragon were wedding symbols, and that this was a sign that the ashworlds, with their dragons, needed to be joined to the empire. But surely there were ways to cooperate—in trade, say—without conquering the ashworlds outright.

The general closed his eyes for a second and sighed. “If we could win the war without expending lives, it would be a marvel indeed. Imagine gliders that fly themselves, set against the ashworlds’ dragons.”

“The ashworlders are hardly stupid, sir,” Ling Yun said. “They’ll send pilotless dragons of their own.”
Or,
she thought suddenly,
dragonless pilots.

Maybe the ashworlds were ahead of the Phoenix General. From Ling Yun’s vantage point, it was impossible to tell.

“Then there’s no point sending army against army, is there?” the general said, amused. “But people are people. I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to disarm entirely, and commit a war solely on paper, as a game.”

Ling Yun bowed, even knowing it would annoy him, to give herself time to think.

“Enough,” the general said. “It is through music we will win the game, and through the game we will win the war. I commend your work, Musician. Take the time you need, but no longer.”

“As you will, sir,” Ling Yun said.

The population of the empire on the planet proper, at the last census, was 110 million people.

The population of the five ashworlds was estimated at 70 million people, although this number was much less certain, due to the transients who lived in the asteroid belts.

The number of gliders in the Phoenix Corps was classified. The number of dragons in the Dragon Corps was likewise classified.

Ling Yun stayed up late into the night reviewing the game’s statistics. Visual patterns were not her forte, but she remembered the general’s words. She had heard the eagerness in his voice, the way she heard echoes of the massacre of Shang Yuan in Periet’s. Even now, there had to be pilotless gliders speeding toward the colonies.