In the Vanishers' Palace

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Well, well,” the dragon said. She put a hand under Yên’s chin. Her touch was wet and slimy, but the mist tendrils held Yên, as she’d have jerked away. “What do we have here?” The dragon lifted Yên’s face, held it for a while. “My payment for a healing?”

  Her eyes were the color of a storm, never quite holding a shade or nuance, blue and green and grey in a dizzying dance, and the pupils were the dragon’s, dark and bottomless. Even if Yên had been free, even if she could have moved, she’d have remained there, staring into them until she was lost.

  “You’re not the human I healed,” the dragon said. She still held Yên’s face, with both hands on either side of her cheeks now, lightly pressing down, as if debating whether to crush it between their palms. “You’re the summoner’s daughter.”

  “Honored lady,” Elder Tho said. She’d risen from her own bow. She held herself tightly, the shaking of her hands and chest barely noticeable, though the dragon knew. Had to know. “She offered herself to replace Oanh, the child you healed.”

  The dragon let go of Yên but didn’t stop looking at her. Weighing her. Wondering what she was worth, what her life or death would be worth? “She offered herself. Did she, now.” She nodded toward Yên, and the tendrils around Yên snapped out of existence. “Well?”

  Yên swallowed, her breath burning in her throat, and saw Elder Tho’s steely gaze. A bargain, to keep Mother safe. She had to. “Oanh is a friend,” she said. A friend who slept, exhausted and changed, and would never notice Yên was gone until it was too late. Every word felt like a red-hot pebble in Yên’s throat. Mother. She had to think of Mother. Better her life than Mother’s. “She’s got a bright future ahead of her, and I”—she breathed in, slowly, carefully—“I don’t.”

  “Indeed not.” The dragon seemed amused: a thin parting of the lips to reveal teeth too sharp to be human, a smile that went nowhere near her eyes. She turned to Elder Tho. “You offer her to me as a replacement for Oanh? Did you not think of getting the summoner here?”

  “I—I don’t—” Elder Tho started, flustered.

  “Don’t take me for a fool.” The dragon’s voice was low, pleasant. “I can feel this one’s heartbeat in my hands. She’s not the one who chose to come here.”

  Elder Giang spoke up. “Yên’s mother is old and infirm. Surely, her life is of no value—”

  “You offer me youth and beauty instead of knowledge?” The dragon laughed, a thunderous sound that turned Yên’s legs to jelly. She fought not to fall to her knees. “Do you think I need a child”—she spat out the word—“to warm my bed?”

  Yên heard the words from far away; she felt the blood leave her face, leaving her shaking and weak. She hadn’t thought—she’d thought she might suffer and die, but not that. Never that.

  The dragon moved away from her, toward the elders and Elder Tho, who now stood rooted to the ground, held by the same threads of mist that had held Yên. She paused, the folds of her silk tunic billowing in a rising wind. In the distance, a construct howled. “You aren’t worthy of this village,” she said, in that same pleasant tone, which suggested she’d be equally happy slaughtering them where they stood. “You”—she laid a hand against Elder Tho’s chest, pushed until Elder Tho turned as pale as rice paper, the shaking of her hands visible, her knees sinking from under her—“pleading and promising and threatening, to save your own above all others. “And you”—to the other elders, as she passed them one by one, laying one hand on on each of their foreheads in turn, where a word glimmered the color of the river, shimmering with the reflections of spilled oil—“cowards letting this happen rather than holding her in check.”

  She walked back to Yên calmly, while behind her the elders sank to their knees, as if they’d cut the strings holding them. Elder Tho remained standing, but growing paler and paler, her eyes the only things alive in the whole of her face. Elder Giang was struggling to pull themself to their knees, though in their eyes Yên saw nothing of fear or pleading, but merely acceptance of something they’d known was coming.

  “Please,” Yên said. She could have asked for Giang’s life, but what would that make of her, if she played the same game of favorites as Elder Tho?

  The dragon watched her, for a while, eyes like holes in the oval of her face. “What’s your name?”

  “Yên. Hai Yên.”

  “Sea swallow.” The dragon sounded amused. “I won’t kill them,” she said, mildly. “Come.”

  “Where?”

  The dragon raised a thin, dark eyebrow. Dull scales moved across her left cheek, slowly spreading to armor her neck. Yên fought an impulsive, foolish urge to touch them. “I claimed your life. And, in any case, would you stay in your village, after what’s happened here? There would be...repercussions. Unpleasant ones.”

  Yên forced herself to move. Her legs wouldn’t obey her. After what felt like an eternity, she finally managed to unglue one foot from the muddy earth, under the dragon’s visibly growing impatience. “I have family...” She’d have said friends, but the only name that came to her mouth was Oanh’s.

  “Yes,” the dragon said. “In a foreign, faraway land you can’t come back to.” She walked toward the river, growing as she did so, lengthening until she was once more the serpentine, elegant shape that had burst out of the water. Her tail wrapped around Yên’s waist, loosely—that same wet and slimy feeling, except this time Yên managed to hold herself still as it seeped through her clothes.

  In the river, the words appeared again, danced and coalesced until everything seemed awash with a radiance stronger than the moon’s.

  The dragon dived into the center of the river, taking Yên with her.

  * * *

  Yên woke up with a headache. She sat up slowly, and realized something was wrong. She should have seen the ceiling of the sleeping alcove: instead, there was a wall, somewhere farther in the distance. That wasn’t an exaggeration, because the room she was in was huge. The same kind of odd letters she’d seen glowing in the water ran down the side of the bed she was lying in. As they went farther, they altered and shifted orientation, and the walls of the room turned with them and expanded, the unknown words multiplying, turning and growing until they blurred somewhere in an infinite distance, a vertiginous effect that made Yên clutch the sides of the bed for reassurance—look away, she had to look away lest she be drawn into a chasm that had no end.

  “Hey, she’s awake!”

  “Will you look at that!”

  A patter of feet on tiles, and then someone jumped at Yên. The bed bounced and creaked under their weight, and before she could even so much as react, she went down in a flurry of limbs and clothes, flailing to recover her balance.

  “So much fun!”

  Two voices, both too young and lacking the poise of the dragon’s. Yên grabbed one arm at random, feeling scales shift under her fingers, and pushed. “Will you let me breathe.” She used her teacher’s voice, the one for unruly children who refused to learn their alphabet. “Now.”

  A snort and a grunt. Her assailants quieted down and moved away, and Yên sat up again—do not look at the walls do not look at the walls.

  There were two of them, sitting on the edge of her bed, lazily dangling legs over the smooth sheets, dressed in flamboyant embroidered silk that shimmered with the light from the room. They looked identical. No, they weren’t. Subtle shifts of face and hands—harder to work out, because when they both moved, their faces changed by fragments—revealing antlers in their hair, thin and curled moustaches, a lion’s snout instead of a nose. Changing shapes between human and spirit in the blink of an eye. “You’re dragons,” Yên said, flatly.

  Their smiles were dazzling and innocent. “I’m Dan Thông,” the one on the left said.

  “And I’m Dan Liên,” her sibling said. “I’m the younger one.” And, in the face of Yên’s obvious confusion: “We’re your new students!”

  The dragon. Yên struggled to remember what had happened after the river. Her
mind threw up nothing except darkness, gradually closing in. “I’m going to need some time—”

  A door opened. Yên made the mistake of looking up, and saw it lying at a right angle from her current position; and, through the doorframe, a corridor where every wall had windows opening on the vastness of stars. Oh, ancestors, she was going to be sick....

  “Are you all right? Hey, big sib, did they eat anything today?” Liên asked.

  “She,” Thông said, sternly. “Remember? Mother told us so. And you’re not leaving her space to breathe.” Thông used gender-neutral pronouns. Liên had an ambiguous appearance and used female ones.

  “Children.” That was the dragon’s voice, sharp and pointed. “Behave. Respect is due to teachers, no matter how mortal they might be.” A pause, as her footsteps grew closer, and then, “Especially if they’re mortal. They’re more easily harmed.”

  Yên’s stomach churned. She gave up on dignity and decorum, and bent over the edge of the bed, throwing up the meager contents of her stomach. The dragon. Ancestors, the dragon was going to kill her—

  But she hadn’t, had she. What was she waiting for?

  When she looked up, the dragon was leaning against one of the bedposts, with that same distant amusement she’d had in the Plague Grove. She wore flowing silk: a stark, black cloth of a shade that Yên had only seen in Vanishers’ cloth, with not one clearer patch to mar the deep color. When she moved, it was as if the night sky shifted and spread around her. What would it be like, to have those sleeves enfold Yên—those long, thin fingers wrapped around Yên’s shoulders? Yên found her breath catching in her throat again.

  Beautiful. No. No. She couldn’t afford to think of the dragon that way. She was Yên’s master, Yên’s executioner. There was no future in desire or love. “You—” Yên swallowed, pulling herself upward, turning away from the vomit on the floor lest she be sick again. “You claimed my life.”

  The dragon raised an eyebrow.

  Yên forced herself to say the words, because she might as well burst the abscess. “Everyone knows dragons kill.”

  Something passed across the dragon’s face, too fast for Yên to see. Pride, anger? “Do they. I’d hate to disappoint them.” She raised Yên’s face to hers again. Her thin, pointed fingers were claws, though they only lightly rested on Yên’s skin, a clammy coldness that should have been trembling on the edge of uncomfortable, spreading to Yên’s cheeks and fingers until Yên wasn’t sure anymore if it was pain she was shivering with. “You’re smart and handsome, and I hate waste,” the dragon said, mildly. Yên tried to look away from her eyes, and couldn’t. Vertiginous darkness: a hole that swept her away, trembling and struggling to hold herself still and silent, for fear she’d reach out and lose herself in the dragon’s gaze.

  “Mother,” Thông said, their voice tinny, as from a great distance.

  The dragon released Yên. “You’re a scholar.” She turned away, slightly. Yên breathed out—in relief, in disappointment?

  “An indifferent one,” Yên said. She couldn’t help herself. She’d walk to her own death before she’d lie about her own literary achievements, apparently.

  The dragon snorted. Oily water hung in the air for a brief moment, sheening with the dimmed colors of diseased rainbows. “Wasted in a small village where literature isn’t valued? There’s no shame in that.” She shook her head. “The twins badly need an education, and you’ll provide it to them. I take it they’ve already introduced themselves to you.”

  “We can do that again,” Liên said, her face shaped in an almost comical frown. Her shape seemed to have stabilized, with only a hint of the dragon when she pulled herself up from the bed. Yên forced herself to stare at the floor rather than at Liên: it made her seem submissive and very un-teacher-like, but if she had to look at the walls, she was going to vomit again.

  “Behave,” Thông said, sharply.

  “Walk with me,” the dragon said to Yên, a polite request that was a command. They headed toward that impossible door, the one Yên tried, stubbornly, to look away from. Behind them came noises. It sounded as though Liên and Thông were bundling up Yên’s vomit, making quips at each other as they did so. “They’re children,” the dragon said. “They mean well, but they regularly try to commit suicide. Not a difficult thing to do, in this palace.”

  “I don’t understand,” Yên said.

  The dragon’s voice was mild again. “I didn’t build this place. The Vanishers did.”

  Yên had heard of ships, of gates, and of artefacts, but never of an entire building. “Why?”

  “Who knows why the Vanishers did what they did.” The dragon snorted again. “It’s far too big and far too drafty, but it serves.”

  If one didn’t mind nausea-inducing doors or rooms with improbable geometry. Yên looked up, cautiously. They were at the door, though they couldn’t have walked nearly far enough. It was open, the corridor twisting away from them. More letters, this time in shades of metallic red and brown, and open windows on every wall, opening out on a courtyard with caged birds in a small pavilion, against the background of stars. Except that every wall had the pavilion in a different orientation, upward or downward or tilted to the side, as if such things as mundane rules didn’t apply.

  Ancestors, she was going to be sick again. “You get used to it,” the dragon said. “Obviously, their idea of geometry wasn’t quite ours.”

  “You didn’t know the Vanishers.”

  “I’m older than you think,” the dragon said. Her voice was still mild, but it had edges now. “We served them, until we no longer had any use.”

  Yên’s face burnt. “I’m sorry. I should have thought—”

  “They used everyone.” Her body under the dress was growing longer and more serpentine, though her face didn’t shift. “As I said, it’s an odd thing, to be inhabiting their houses.” A revenge, her tone clearly said, if not her words.

  Yên said, slowly, carefully, “You could have built another home.”

  “Yes. It would have been inadequate. I do have responsibilities,” the dragon said, and didn’t venture anything more. Clearly, she didn’t want Yên to ask, and Yên wasn’t brave enough to throw herself at a closed door. “There are places here where your presence isn’t appropriate,” the dragon went on, in a more relaxed tone.

  Yên wasn’t surprised. “And forbidden rooms?”

  The dragon snorted. “I know mortals. If I forbid you a place, you’ll just tear open the doors in your haste to find it. Anyway, you’ll find out soon enough, if a place isn’t for your use.”

  She wasn’t going to kill Yên. She wanted to use Yên as a teacher; and how hard was it, really, to teach two children? “Because I’ll be dead.”

  “Yes,” the dragon said.

  “Am I a prisoner, then?” Yên asked. Mother. The village. Giang. Oanh. Mother.

  “I did claim your life,” the dragon said. “And be fair. Your village elders would have sold you again to the highest bidder. Quite fast, possibly, to remove the memory of their shame from the village.”

  “They meant well—”

  “You know they didn’t. Your friend—”

  “Elder Giang? They’re not my friend,” Yên said, more forcefully than she’d meant. Would Elder Giang keep their promise to take care of Mother? Or was it so much empty air?

  The dragon shrugged. “All the same to me.”

  “You were the one who offered the elders the bargain.”

  “Because no one gets something for nothing,” the dragon said. “It sets a bad precedent.” She raised an eyebrow. “And, in the end, if you fall to temptation? You only have yourself to blame.” Her voice was harsh.

  “It’s my home!” A small, cramped room, a bed on the floor, the smell of rice over her sleeping mat—the sound of Mother’s loud snoring—what she wouldn’t have given for this, for any of this, now.

  “I told you. It was. In a distant, faraway country. Once touched by the spirits...” The dragon exhaled. Th
en, in a gentler, kinder tone: “You’ll get used to it.”

  “You don’t know that I will!”

  Again, that distant amusement. “Perhaps I do.” And, in a different tone: “Harm a hair on either of the twins, and I’ll tear you apart.”

  They were children. “I wouldn’t,” Yên said.

  “Wouldn’t you?” The dragon cocked her head, watching Yên. “Who knows what we’ll do, when faced with threats and death?” She sounded amused, ironic again. Her hand was far too close to Yên’s, her whole presence an almost-physical weight in the air. Yên braced herself, half-welcoming the touch of that tail again, wrapped around her legs and dragging her on. “Be careful,” the dragon said. “In the palace. Or you’ll die.”

  It made little sense to Yên. She latched on to the part that she had understood. “You don’t have to care about my well-being.”

  A pause, and a glance that went on for far too long, devouring her with eyes. “As I said: I hate waste. That doesn’t mean you’re safe.” The dragon gestured to the two small shapes clustered by Yên’s bed. “All yours now.”

  “And if I fail?”

  The dragon snorted. “You’ll be dead. But most probably because the palace will have killed you, long before I get around to it.”

  “Are there—” Yên hesitated, then plunged on, because she might as well commit herself. “Are there other people in the palace?”

  “Other servants?” The dragon cocked her head.

  That wasn’t what Yên had wanted to know. Were there other dragons? One or several spouses? “Other masters,” she said.

  “The Vanishers are gone,” the dragon said, sharply, with a hint of anger.

  “I didn’t mean to—” But she had, hadn’t she? She was such a fool.

  “No.” A deep breath, which was the roar of the storm. “They took much with them,” the dragon said, finally. Her voice was toneless. “But they left all their toys and pet projects behind. All their diseases, rewriting bodies and souls as they pleased. You’re lucky, out there in the world. You only see a fraction of them. Here... I’m not warning you about the palace as some empty threat. Spirits can’t fight diseases or gene-viruses. There were more of us, once. Wives. Parents.” The words echoed in the silence of the room, cheap and inadequate to cover what must have been an ocean of grief.