“Because you can’t tell what you get, when you ask for favors.”
Something small and hard was coalescing in Yên’s belly—a cold fury she’d sat on for too long, hearing Thông and Liên speaking about twisting and taking lives as though it meant nothing—not making excuses for Vu Côn, but treating it all as though it was perfectly natural. They were children, of course. They couldn’t know—
But within her were the old, old words, the merciless ones that had guided scholars since times immemorial, as sharp and as brilliant as naked blades.
The virtuous person examines their heart, that there may be nothing wrong there....
If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.
Liên and Thong were still talking, sounding distant and tinny. “They mostly beseech Mother for cures, in any case,” Liên was saying. “As if we could do these anymore...”
Thông’s gaze was stern. “We do what we can. And my earlier point remains. The risk of contagion...”
Mother had done what she could, too, which was, all too often, making patients comfortable while they died. Mother—
What kind of a filial daughter was Yên, to let herself be cowed into inactivity? “I want to see her,” Yên said.
Shocked silence. Then a scrabble, as Thông stumbled against the pillar they were leaning against. Their body was shifting, lengthening. Subtle traceries of light hung behind them, a wealth of words in that alphabet Yên couldn’t read. “Respectfully—”
“You said people came to see her. To beseech her. Anyone can do this?”
“Yes,” Thông said. They looked uncomfortable, trying to figure out how much they dared to reproach Yên. Courage won out. Yên felt for them, but she couldn’t allow that to sway her. “Respectfully, Teacher, that’s a bad idea.”
Worse than being stuck in the palace, coddled like a child? “I think not,” Yên said, as coldly as she could muster. Vu Côn may have owned her life, but that didn’t mean she got to dictate every waking hour of it.
FOUR
The Watcher in the Dark
When Yên came into the audience chamber, the first thing she saw was the body.
It was lying off to the side, by the walls—the part of them that didn’t stretch away to infinity—looking small and pathetic, its throat raggedly torn out. Blood, pooling out in odd, haphazard splashes, though there was very little of it. Old memories and instincts took over, from working with Mother’s patients. She knelt and touched the wrist, looking for the pulses of the heart threaded throughout the body. Nothing. They must have been dead before the throat-tearing. Not that it made it any better.
Thông whispered something under their breath. Minute, silver words left their mouth, clinging to Yên’s hands. Yên’s skin started to itch and burn. She snatched her hand back from the body, and the pressure eased.
“Teacher, please,” Thông said. “Do you remember what I said?”
Contagion. “They got their throat torn out,” Yên pointed out. There’d been no pulse.
“Too little blood. They didn’t die of the torn throat. And some viruses travel in the blood. Most of them very, very nasty.” At length, in a different voice: “I’m sorry for showing disrespect.”
“It’s all right.” Yên had played fast and loose with it herself.
“Audience” made the entire thing seem far larger than it was: there were only a handful of people ahead of Yên. They seemed infinitely far away, standing with a particular glaze in their eyes, as if they were dreaming awake. They weren’t talking to each other. One was coughing, a particularly nasty thing that racked their entire body, rising to a peculiar pitch, like the trill of a bird. After each coughing fit, they would fall down on one knee, and get back up. One had sores over their entire body, and the one closest to Yên was carrying a shivering, pale child in his arms. The child was perhaps nine, ten years old, barely older than Vinh.
When they moved, Yên saw, for a second, a translucent shape moving under the skin of their face, darker-skinned and thinner, like the shadow of a corpse’s skull. The âm self—the shadow-self, the moon self, except that it was completely shriveled away instead of being in balance with the duong self. Yên shivered. This far gone, there was no cure. m and duong—moon and sun, darkness and light, the fundamental duality that underpinned the universe—were meant to always be in perfect balance, always carrying the seed of each other within themselves. The child had perhaps two, three months left to live before they simply wasted away.
Because she had to, Yên looked up; and down again, quickly, before she could be overwhelmed. The room stretched and twisted. Rivulets of water ran down on either side of the path leading to the throne where Vu Côn sat, gradually gathering to become a huge river that climbed over the throne and then fell back behind it, a soundless, impossible waterfall. But the rivulets went on and on, receding into the distance and forming another, farther-away waterfall falling on an empty throne, and on and on, repeating without any sign that this pattern ever ended. The air was saturated with a clean, sharp, and unfamiliar smell, almost like the smell of the monsoon, but strangely characterless: it didn’t leave an oily aftertaste in the mouth, or bring tears to Yên’s eyes with its sharpness. Clean, she thought, and the word itself felt alien to her.
“This is a bad idea,” Liên said.
“You don’t have to come,” Yên said.
Thông snorted. “As if.”
Yên looked up again, tried to focus on Vu Côn. The dragon wore her hair in an ornate topknot, with jeweled pins that glinted in the semi-darkness of the room. Her tunic was layer after layer of purple clothes of slightly different hues, sheening to silver when she moved. None of the layers hid the shape of her strong, lithe body, or the presence Yên could feel, pressing against her even from the back of the room. Yên’s heart was beating faster, a symphony of panic and desire conjoined in her throat.
The person with the child in their arms had reached Vu Côn when she looked up and saw Yên, who was still carrying the book from the library, clutching it to her chest, a pathetic, ineffectual shield.
Vu Côn’s face went still, as if time had stopped. Her eyes were two pools of darkness in the brown oval of her face, depths into which burnt the cold, cold ice of the sea’s depths—catching Yên’s gaze and drowning her, over and over. “You,” she said. Her voice carried perfectly to the end of the room.
Yên knelt, the full obedience reserved for an empress in a distant city she would likely never see: forehead on the floor, feeling the coolness of water on her brow. “I beseech you,” she said, in the growing silence.
Nothing, for a while. Whispers she couldn’t make out. Thông and Liên walking out from behind her, their feet getting closer to the throne. An animated conversation that Yên caught only fragments of, Vu Côn’s voice the thunder of killing water.
At length, after what felt like an eternity: “Come here,” Vu Côn said.
The child and their parent were standing beside the throne: outlined for a bare moment in a radiance made of thousands of words before they faded away, an afterimage swiftly banished. As if they’d never been there at all. Had they come back to the outside world? Had they—
Enough. She couldn’t afford to think of any of this.
There were two other bodies at Vu Côn’s feet, with no visible wounds: only a thin, watered-down dot of blood on their rough-spun tunics.
Yên stood at the foot of the steps, not meeting Vu Côn’s eyes for fear of disrespect. “Up here,” Vu Côn said. Her voice was still mild. Thông and Liên had fanned out on either side of her. They were both silent, looking distinctly chastened, and fully human. Maintaining that shape was obviously taking a toll on Liên, who kept shivering, staring at the door out of the room with longing.
Yên was going to get killed. Or punished in some other way. She never should have—
Up close, Vu Côn’s presence was even more unbearable. She stood a handspan away from Yên. Close enough to touch, clo
se enough to kiss. “Well?” she asked.
Yên swallowed, forced herself to speak. No choice, not anymore. “You go out into the world.”
“Of course.”
“Will you consider taking a message to my mother?”
A silence. Yên didn’t mistake it for acquiescence. “Please. She’s all I have, and she thinks I’m dead. If I could let her know—”
“That you’re not dead?” Yên kept expecting Vu Côn to touch her. She’d been steeling herself against it, reproaching herself for wanting it. But the dragon hadn’t moved. “I told you. You might as well be.”
“But I’m not!” Yên let anger out, briefly. It was the only way she’d ever feel brave enough to argue with a spirit who held her life in their hands. “I understand you don’t want me to see her. That”—she swallowed—“the village would not take me back in.” That it was true didn’t make it any less hurtful. “But surely—”
“Surely, she should know that you’re in a spirit world, unable to ever come back? You think that would be some comfort?”
“Yes,” Yên said. “Because I’m alive. Because there’s hope.”
A hope that, if she listened to the twins, Vu Côn had lost a long time before. Another silence. At length, Vu Côn said, “You dare much.” Too much, her voice said.
The world, Mother said quietly in Yên’s mind, is unfair. A little fairer now, with the Vanishers gone. But also broken and twisted out of shape, struggling to recover from a hundred thousand strictures imposed on it.
Yên lifted her head, still not looking at Vu Côn. It’d be so easy for the dragon to kill her, arguing disrespect. Yên didn’t even understand half the rules, nor did she expect to. Who knew what laws bound spirits, especially in the world after the breaking? “Then just kill me. At least it’d be cleaner.”
To Yên’s surprise, Thông spoke up. “She’s been distracted. Weeping in her room, when she thinks we can’t see her.” And, to Yên: “I’m sorry, Teacher.”
“And you think this is going to make me be in a better mood?” Vu Côn sighed. “What did I tell you about respect for teachers?”
Thông’s voice was soft. “It’s what she wants. Against that—”
“The cost of revealing this matters little? That’s...some rather creative interpretation of filial respect.” Vu Côn didn’t sound altogether happy.
“You were the one who told me,” Thông said. “The old rules no longer apply. We need to change.”
Another silence, but the anger had receded a fraction. “All things do.” And, to Yên, more softly: “I’ll take your message, should my duties get me back to your province.”
Yên’s lips shaped around a “thank you,” but she was choking on it. Why should she thank Vu Côn for basic pity and courtesy? “It’s good of you,” she said, finally.
Vu Côn raised an eyebrow.
Thông looked as though they were going to kick Yên for failing to be properly respectful. Yên swallowed, tried again. What had happened to her scholar’s smooth, honeyed tongue? But she knew she’d never had one. “I appreciate it,” she said. “Very much.”
A silence. Then: “Honest, if nothing else.”
“You knew this,” Liên said.
“Sincerity being the mark of the gentleperson scholar? Very well.” Vu Côn shook her head. Her face shifted, became the dragon’s, with the shadow of antlers crowning her face, and a long, thin moustache falling on either side of a thin, curved mouth filled with fangs. “Was there anything else?” She gestured, with lengthening sleeves, to the people still waiting in the audience room. “I have work.”
Yên looked, again, at the bodies strewn at the foot of the dais. The one farther away in the audience room had started to fade away, like the parent and their child but slower, the outline becoming more and more indistinct as the words that surrounded it became more and more pronounced. Why had they died? She could ask, but she knew she’d reached the ends of Vu Côn’s patience. The dragon was not distantly amused as she’d been in the Plague Grove, but taut and angry. Was it because Yên had defied her? Or because she’d brought the children into it—not, of course, that the twins had done anything but bring themselves.
Liên tugged at her sleeve. She was shaking now, the outline of scales flashing under her skin, her face taut with effort. “Come on, Teacher. You can write your letter? While we read The Pale Turtle’s Sword.”
Yên went down the steps in silence. As she withdrew from the room, just a few steps from the pale imprint of the corpse, she turned, and met Vu Côn’s eyes. The dragon’s eyes were a light grey, the color of storm clouds gathering. She was looking straight at Yên with an expression that was half-irritation, half-hunger, as if she would gobble Yên whole, given half a chance.
And what scared Yên most? This might, in the end, be just what she longed for.
* * *
Yên woke up in a dark, silent room. Her belly was clenched with fear, her muscles all stiff, as if she’d run and run during her sleep. She could only remember vague strands of a nightmare: Mother dead, Vu Côn chasing her through a forest of trees crumbling into ashes, the scales of her draconic body shimmering through the holes left by the burnt tree, burning, burning so bright they drowned out everything....
A dream. It was just a dream. She’d go back to sleep and it would all be fine. It—
There was someone in the room, watching her.
She didn’t know how, or why. Just this cold, hard certainty, a fist of ice tightening around her guts. The impossible perspective was illuminated with a faint blue light, the same way it always was, but now it felt like instead of leading into some other, faraway world, it opened on somewhere very close—somewhere the Vanishers waited, watching, for anyone foolish enough to trespass on what was theirs.
Malice.
There was something, in the depths of the light. A blurred shape. A person. Not a human one: claws and too-long arms, and a crest rising from the back of their neck, climbing to where their hair should have been.
If Yên moved, if she breathed, they would see her. They would—she’d heard all the stories. They would take her apart, hurt and hunt her for fun. If—
Her breath burnt in her lungs. She couldn’t move. She didn’t dare move. But, if she didn’t, they’d catch her anyway.
She needed to do something.
The book she’d taken from the library glowed on the bedside table. Her hands, moving agonizingly slowly, moved through a familiar sequence: the Broken-World Teacher’s most basic mantra, the one for protection against evil spirits. Spiral. Turtle’s Claw. Crossbow. Fortress. Again and again, and nothing happening. No glowing signs, no sense of power. She wasn’t meant for magic: it was a talent, and she didn’t have it. She’d known this. She hadn’t taken the book hoping to wield its power, but simply to understand. To take it all apart as she took apart ancient texts in her classroom.
But, as her hands moved, again and again, shaping the old words of power, the knot of fear in her stomach eased, and her breath no longer burnt in her throat. Spiral. Turtle’s Claw. Crossbow. Fortress. She was in that timeless, fearless place where she didn’t have to think about anything making sense or frightening her. There were only the words, and the way they fitted together. The strokes on “spiral” that formed the first glimmers of the fortress’s wall, echoed by the sharp turn of “claw,” a reminder of weapons, of impregnability dearly bought.
Spiral. Turtle’s Claw. Crossbow. Fortress.
She rose, heedless of the dark shadow in the room, and ran toward the door. In her mind were only the words. The two turns in the writing for “crossbow,” the way the string was tightened, broken in the middle, along the frame of the crossbow; and the turtle, in the center of it all, the spirit that had always protected the land and its rivers and sea.
When she stopped on the threshold, pausing for breath, the shadow was standing by her bedside, reaching down.
She ran.
It was night in the palace, and nothing made
sense anymore: courtyards with towers that became underground silos, gardens with trees on every wall and roof, endless rooms where the windows opened on a hundred, a thousand different realities, where two suns became a sun eaten by a wolf became ten crows of fire spreading burning winds amidst a hail of arrows, where the moon was encircled by the roots of a banyan tree, its leaves falling pale and lifeless over the ruins of the earth....
“Yên?”
It was Vu Côn. The dragon was wearing a dressing gown with embroidered peaches, billowing in some unseen wind. She stood in the middle of a corridor, looking puzzled. “I was wondering what all the racket was.”
Yên stopped. The words in her mind stopped too, their shape lit for a few seconds more in her thoughts—spiral turtle’s claw crossbow fortress—and then slowly dying away, like embers deprived of air. As they did, she realized—another kind of cold, hard certainty clenching her chest—that she was wearing pyjamas, standing barefoot in a palace that wasn’t hers, facing the being who had claimed her life.
“I’m sorry,” she said, dully. “I’ll—” She started saying she’d go back to her room, and then she thought of the shadow by her bed. “I’ll not bother you anymore.” She’d find somewhere else to sleep. A garden, a courtyard. Somewhere, anywhere she didn’t have to face the walls in her room again.
Vu Côn looked at her, for a while. She cocked her head in a disturbingly lizard-like fashion. Scales glimmered on her cheeks. “You’re in shock.”
“It’s nothing,” Yên said.
Time froze, slowed down to a trickle. Vu Côn was pushing her, steering her through one more corridor that was all empty, vertiginous spaces. An open door, with letters in the spirits’ alphabet, glimmering on the panels, and only darkness inside. She was sitting on something soft, staring at a huge painting of the Four Immortals of the North: the Golden Princess stood over the corpses of animals who’d died in an epidemic, surrounded by a tangle of pink ribbons like writhing snakes.
Soft. A bed. She was sitting on Vu Côn’s bed.
If embarrassment had been bad before, it was now terminal. “There was someone in my room,” Yên said, her cheeks flaming. Shock was receding. She just wanted to dive under the bed and never emerge. Or to run away before Vu Côn saw her. All useless fancies, as she’d be caught before she even lifted a hand or foot.
In the Vanishers' Palace Page 6