Conservation of Shadows (22 page)

“That was one of the first to become defunct after their defeat,” Minsu observed. “Apparent defeat, I should say.”

“That brings me to the other thing,” Iseul said. “I think I’ve figured out that word that the first Genial One said, the one that was unfamiliar. Because it keeps showing up in their conversations. I think it’s a word that didn’t exist before.”

“I remember that time that satirist coined a new word for hairpins that look like they ought to be good for assassinations but are completely inadequate for the job,” Minsu said. “Of course, based on Chindalla’s plays and novels, I have to concede that we needed the word.”

Minsu’s attempts to get her to relax weren’t helping, but Iseul appreciated the effort.
You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this—
“ ‘Defeat,’ ” Iseul said softly. “The word means ‘defeat.’ ”

“Surely they can’t have gone all this time without—” Minsu’s mouth pressed into a flat line.

“Yes,” Iseul said. “These are people who had separate words for their blood and our blood. Because we weren’t their equals. Until General Anangan overcame them, they had no word for
their own defeat.
Not at the hands of humans, anyway, as opposed to the intrigues and backstabbing that apparently went on among their clans.”

“All right,” Minsu said, “but that can’t be what’s shadowing your eyes.”

“They want to defeat us the way we almost defeated them,” Iseul said. “They’re obsessed with it. They’ve figured out how to scale the sculpture charm up. Except they’re not going to steal our shapes. They’re going to steal our words and add them to their own language. And Chindalla’s language is the last to be compiled for the purpose.”

In the old days, the forgotten days, the human nations feared the Genial Ones’ sculptors, and their surgeons, and their soldiers. They knew, however, that the greatest threat was none of these, but the Genial Ones’ lexicographers, whose thoroughness was legendary. The languages that they collected for their own pleasure vanished, and the civilizations that spoke those languages invariably followed soon afterwards.

Iseul was in the middle of explaining her plan to thwart the Genial Ones to Minsu, which involved charms to destroy the language of magic itself, when the courier arrived. The safehouse’s keeper interrupted them. Iseul thought it was to bring them tea, but she was accompanied by a young man, much disheveled and breathing hard. He was obviously trying not to stare at the room’s profusion of charms, or at Iseul herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she had given her hair a good thorough combing, and she probably looked like a ghost. (For some reason ghosts never combed their hair.) Her mother would have despaired of her.

“I trust you have a good reason for this,” Minsu said wearily.

“You need to hear this, my lady,” the keeper said.

The young man presented his papers to Minsu. They declared him to be a government courier, although the official seal, stamped in red ink that Iseul happened to know never washed out of fabric no matter what you tried, was smeared at the lower right corner. Minsu looked over the papers, frowning, then nodded. “Speak,” Minsu said.

“A Yegedin detachment of two thousand has been spotted heading this way,” the courier said. “It’s probably best if you evacuate.”

Iseul closed her eyes and drew a shuddering breath in spite of herself.

“All this work,” Minsu said, gesturing at the mobiles.

“It’s not worth defending this town,” Iseul said bleakly, “am I right?”

“The throne wishes its generals to focus on protecting more important cities,” the courier said. “I’m sorry, my lady.”

“It’ll be all right,” Iseul said to Minsu. “I can work as easily from another safehouse.”

“You’ll have to set up the charms all over again,” Minsu said.

“It can’t be helped. Besides, if we stay here, even if the Yegedin don’t get us, the looters will.”

The courier’s expression said that he was realizing that Iseul might have more common sense than her current appearance suggested. Still, he addressed Minsu. “The detachment will probably be here within the next five days, my lady. Best to leave before the news becomes general knowledge.”

“Not as if there are a whole lot of people left here anyway,” Minsu said. “All right. Thank you for the warning.”

Iseul was used to being able to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, but she hadn’t reckoned on dealing with the charms and the quantities of text that they had generated. There wasn’t time to burn everything, which made her twitch. They settled for shuffling the rest into boxes and abandoning them with the heaps of garbage that could be found around the town. Her hands acquired blisters, but she didn’t even notice how much they hurt.

Iseul and Minsu joined the long, winding trail of refugees heading north. The safehouse keeper insisted on parting ways from them because she had family in the area. Minsu’s efforts to talk her out of this met with failure. She pressed a purse of coins into the keeper’s hands; that was all the farewell they could manage.

Minsu bought horses from a trader at the first opportunity, the best he had, which wasn’t saying much. The price was less extravagant than Iseul might have guessed. Horses were very unpopular at the moment because everyone had the Yegedin storm-horses on their mind, and people had taken to stealing and killing them for the stewpot instead. Minsu insisted on giving Iseul the calmer gelding and taking the cantankerous mare for herself. “No offense,” she said, “but I have more experience wrangling very annoying horses than you do.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” Iseul said. She was credible enough on horseback, but it really didn’t matter.

Most of the refugees headed for the road to the capital, where they felt the most safety was to be had. Once the two of them were mounted, however, Minsu led them northeast, toward the coast.

In the evenings Iseul would rather have dropped asleep immediately, but constructing her counterstroke against the Genial Ones was an urgent problem, and it required all her attention. Not only did she have to construct a charm to capture the Genial Ones’ words, she had to find a way to destroy those words so they could never be used again. Sometimes she caught herself nodding off, and she pinched her palm to prick herself awake again. They weren’t just threatened by armies; they were threatened by the people who had once ruled all the known nations.

“We’re almost there,” Minsu said as they came to the coast. “Just another day’s ride.” The sun was low in the sky, but she had decided they should stop in the shelter of a hill rather than pressing on tonight. She had been quiet for most of the journey, preferring not to interrupt Iseul’s studies unless Iseul had a question for her.

Iseul had been drowsing as she rode, a trick she had mastered out of necessity. She didn’t hear Minsu at first, lost in muddled dreams of a book. The book had pages of tawny paper, precisely the color of skin. It was urgent that she write a poem about rice-balls into the book. Everyone knew rice was the foundation of civilization and it deserved more satiric verses than it usually received, but every time she set her brush to the paper, the ink ran down the bristles and formed into cavorting figures that leapt off the pages. She became convinced that she was watching a great and terrible dance, and that the question was then whether she would run out of ink before the dance came to its fruition.

“Iseul.” It was Minsu. She had tied her horse to a small tree and had caught Iseul’s reins. “I know you’re tired, but you look like you’re ready to fall off.”

Iseul came alert all at once, the way she had trained herself to do on countless earlier missions. “I have to review my notes. I think I might have it this time.”

“There’s hardly any light to read by.”

“I’ll shield a candle.”

“I’ll see to your horse, then,” Minsu said.

Minsu set up camp while Iseul hunched over her notes. Properly it should have been the other way around, but Minsu never stood on formalities for their own sake. She was always happy to pour tea for others, for instance.

“If they think to do scrying of their own once I get started,” Iseul said while Minsu was bringing her barley hardtack mashed into a crude cold porridge, “our lifespans are going to be measured in minutes.”

“We don’t seem to have a choice if we want to survive,” Minsu said.

“The ironic thing is that we’ll also be saving the Yegedin.”

“We can fight the Yegedin the way we’d fight anyone else,” Minsu said. “The Genial Ones are another matter.”

“If only we knew how General Anangan managed it the first time around,” Iseul said. But all that remained were contradictory legends. She wondered, now, if the Genial Ones themselves had obfuscated the facts.

“If only.” Minsu sighed.

Iseul ate the porridge without tasting it, which was just as well.

A little while later, Minsu said quietly, “You haven’t even thought to be tempted, have you?”

“Tempted how?” But as she spoke, Iseul knew what Minsu meant. “It would only be a temporary reprieve.”

She knew exactly how the lexicon charm worked. She had the Yeged-dai lexicon with her, and she could use it to destroy the Yegedin language. The thirteen-year occupation would evaporate. Poets could write in their native language without fear of attracting reprisals. Southern Chindallans could use their own names again. No more rebels would have to burn to death. All compelling arguments. She could annihilate Yeged before she turned on the Genial Ones. People would consider it an act of patriotism.

But as Minsu had said, the Yegedin could be fought by ordinary means, without resorting to the awful tools of humanity’s old masters.

Iseul also knew that turning the lexicon charm against the Genial Ones’ own language would mean destroying magic forever. No more passage charms or lantern charms; no more convenient daggers that made people vanish.

No more storm-horses, either, or towers built of people’s bones erupting from pyramids of corpses, as in the old stories. It wouldn’t be all bad. And what kind of spy would she be if she couldn’t improvise solutions?

Besides, if she didn’t do something about the Genial Ones now, they would strike against all the human nations with the lexicons they had already compiled. Here, at least, the choice was clear and narrow.

“I don’t want to be more like the Genial Ones than I have to,” Iseul said with a guilty twitch of regret. “But we do have to go through with this.”

“Do you have ward spells prepared?” Minsu said.

“Yes,” Iseul said. “A lot of them. Because once we’re discovered—and we have to assume we’ll be—they’re going to devote their attention to seeking out and destroying us. And we don’t know what they’re capable of.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Minsu said. “We know exactly what they’re capable of. We’ve known for generations, even in the folktales.”

“I should start tonight,” Iseul said. “I’m only going to be more tired tomorrow.”

Minsu looked as though she wanted to argue, but instead she nodded.

Iseul sat in the lee of the hill and began the painstaking work of copying out all the necessary charms, from the wards—every form of ward she knew of, including some cribbed from the Genial Ones’ own discussions—to the one that would compile the lexicon of the language of magic for her by transcribing those same discussions. That final charm was bound to fail at some point when its world of words was confined to the sheets of blank paper she had prepared for it, but—if she had done this correctly—she had constructed it so that it would target its own structural words last.

The winds were strong tonight, and they raked Iseul with cold. The horses were unsettled, whinnying to each other and pulling at their ropes. Iseul glanced up from time to time to look at the sky, bleak and smothered over with clouds. The hills might as well have been the dented helmets of giant warriors, abandoned after an unwinnable fight.

“All right,” Iseul said at last, hating how gray her voice sounded. She felt the first twinge of a headache and remembered to take the medicine the physician had given her. “Come into the circle of protection, Minsu. There’s no reason to delay getting started.”

Obligingly, Minsu joined her, and Iseul activated each warding charm one by one. It was hard not to feel as though she was playing with a child’s toys, flimsy folded shapes, except she knew exactly what each of those charms was intended to do.

At the center of the circle of protection were four books as empty as mirrors in the darkness, which Iseul had bound during her time in the safehouse. She hoped four books would be enough to cripple the Genial Ones, even if they couldn’t contain the entirety of their language. Iseul began folding pages of the empty books, dog-earing corners and folding them into skewed geometries. When she wasn’t watching closely, she had the impression that the corners were unfolding and stretching out tendrils of nascent words, nonsense syllables, to spy on her. She didn’t mention this to Minsu, but the other woman’s face was strained. There was a stinging tension in the air; her skin prickled.

Lightning flickered in the distance as she worked. It cut from one side of the sky to the other in a way that natural lightning never did, like the sweep of a sword.

“Hurry if you can,” Minsu said, head raised to watch the approach of the storm.

“I’m hurrying,” Iseul said.

The winds were whipping fiercely around them now. One of Minsu’s braids had come unpinned and was flapping like a lonely pennant.

The candle flickered out. Minsu brought out a lantern charm.

“I’m all for ordinary fire if you can get it to work for you,” Minsu said at Iseul’s dubious look, “but you need light and this will give you light for a time.”

Iseul continued with the lexicon charm, double-checking every fold, every black and twining word, every diagram of spindled lines. The sense of tension sharpened. If she dared to look away from the books’ pages and at the suffocating sky, she imagined that she would see words forming amid the clouds, sky-words and wind-words and water-words, words of torrential despair and words of drowning terror, words that had existed in some form since the first people learned to speak.