In the Vanishers' Palace

by Aliette de Bodard

  Warmth on her fingers. She was holding a cup of tea, which she didn’t remember taking: a soft celadon eggshell one, the cracks an intricate design, a labyrinth in some unknown language. She took a sip. The tea was odd, not the comforting bitter aftertaste she’d been used to in the kitchens. It was soft, almost tasteless.

  Vu Côn was leaning against one of the bedposts, watching her. “Better?” she asked. Her dressing gown was parted, showing her chest, her dark skin rippling with each breath. Yên closed her eyes.

  Definitely not better.

  She opened her eyes again, focused her gaze on the floor: shining, polished metal, with carved grooves. She said, again, “There was someone in my room.”

  “I heard it the first time.” Vu Côn sounded distantly amused.

  Yên’s cheeks flamed again. “I wasn’t thinking,” she said, finally. She hadn’t repeated it for Vu Côn, but for herself, because the words helped steady her.

  Vu Côn flowed from bed to door. She traced, carefully, words on the panels. Yên could almost read them, something about palaces and safety. They glowed a liquid blue against the paler metal of the door. “Wait here,” she said. The scales on her cheeks were thicker, her body lengthening under the robes.

  “But—” She was going to leave Yên alone while she went out to have a look. She couldn’t. That room was just the same as Yên’s room, just as susceptible to Vanisher interference.

  Vu Côn paused. She turned. She was a dragon now, fangs protruding through her snout, eyes the color of storm clouds, and flew to Yên. Her hands—claws, skin as rough as sandpaper, cold and slimy and yet not altogether unpleasant—closed over Yên’s own hands and the cup. “I have to check, before whatever you saw leaves,” she said. “You’ve seen the signs on the door. This is the heart of my power. There is nothing, not even Vanishers at the height of their powers, that could breach these doors.”

  “The walls,” Yên said, struggling to speak. The steam from the tea was trapped in their embrace, gently warming them up. Her fingers felt soft, impossibly relaxed. “It came through the walls.”

  Vu Côn’s face didn’t change. “Nothing could breach the walls of this bedroom, either.” A pause, then: “I’m not sending the twins into danger, but I can wake them up, if it would help.”

  The words on the door glowed. They cast a shadow, a darkness shot through with their interlaced letters: the same shadows Yên had seen before in Oanh’s home, trailing in Vu Côn’s wake. Yên felt the coldness of Vu Côn’s flesh on her hand. She’d been half-repulsed, half-attracted before. Now she hungered for that moment to never end. She couldn’t bear the thought of the twins piling into the bedroom, making small chatter and dissecting everything and anything. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  Vu Côn gave her a sharp look. She looked as though she might argue, and really, there was no way Yên could argue back. But at least Vu Côn moved away. “As you wish.”

  Yên stopped herself from reaching toward her, as Vu Côn leapt into the air and flew through the doorway. The panels slammed shut behind her: the words glimmered, once, twice. Darkness and silence spread absolute across the room. She’d barely looked at it. She’d gotten a confused image of a vast space with furniture scattered across a polished metal floor. There was a large table and a few chairs, and the dark, squat shape of bookshelves; and a mirror that glinted in the darkness. All of it felt...off, the wrong shape, the wrong proportions. Not quite the furniture in her room: not Vanishers, but perhaps Vu Côn’s personal preferences?

  Yên sat on the bed, sipping at a tea that had gone cold, trying not to think about where she was or why. In the shadows on the floor, the words spooled and unspooled, endlessly morphing into one another, a slow, inexorable pattern like a lullaby that whispered that she was safe. It would be so easy to listen to it, to believe.

  She hadn’t got a good look at the person—if they were indeed a person—by her bed. Perhaps it was just her fevered imagination? But she’d seen them. She’d felt their gaze on her. She hadn’t imagined this. She’d been tired and in the grip of her nightmare, but she hadn’t run away for nothing.

  The words blinked, slowly, steadily.

  When she looked up again, Vu Côn was standing by the bed.

  Yên hadn’t heard her enter, or the doors open. Vu Côn wasn’t in dragon shape anymore. She was wearing her dressing gown again, and a single jade disk hung at her throat, glistening in the darkness. She smelled of musky wetness, with a faint hint of lotus flowers.

  “Did you—”

  “There was no one,” Vu Côn said. She frowned.

  Yên’s cheeks flamed. “You mean I must have dreamt it.”

  When she dared to look up, Vu Côn was looking at her, thoughtfully. “No,” she said. “I wasn’t saying that.” She fingered the pendant at her neck. As she did so, its light shone on the walls of the room: an endless series of mazes within mazes, not expanding outward like in Yên’s room but into smaller and smaller dimensions, every detail becoming the seed of another, more compact maze. The pendant’s radiance expanded: a warm and soft light, almost like daylight but with a deeper, yellower undertone. Yên’s head ached.

  “I saw the book on your bedside table,” Vu Côn said.

  Yên snorted. “You’re going to say something about my being a scholar, always.”

  “No.” Vu Côn’s voice was serious. “You summoned magic in that room.”

  Yên stared at her. “I can’t do magic.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because it’s never worked for me, that’s why! Mother can write down words in circles and heal people. I—” She took a deep, shaking breath. “I know how the words work. I know how they’re put together. But it’s all theory.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with theory,” Vu Côn said. “My husband—” She stared at the darkness for a while, a pause that Yên didn’t dare break through word or breath. “—my husband was a good theoretician. The best.”

  “I’m sorry,” Yên said, before she could think. Vu Côn wouldn’t want her sympathy. But the words were out of her mouth before she could clamp her lips on them.

  Vu Côn shook her head, as if to clear a persistent thought. “There was magic in that room.”

  “The Vanishers—”

  “—don’t do that sort of magic.” Something was obviously worrying her. She walked to the table. In the light, Yên saw that it was polished metal, engraved with a delicate, curving pattern of tree branches laden with peaches and kumquats. She dipped her hand into the bowl, and letters flowed from the tip of her hand to the hollow, sinking into the metal until they seemed to have always been part of it. Vu Côn retrieved a glass from the bowl and brought it back to Yên.

  “Here, drink this. It’ll help.”

  It tasted bitter and sharp, faintly familiar, like one of Mother’s medicines. Something for shock? Yên drained it, feeling it settle in the pit of her stomach. She still felt faintly nauseous.

  “You’re homesick,” Vu Côn said. “Very badly homesick.”

  Because Vu Côn had taken her from her village. Because—Yên thought of Elder Tho again, and of all of them, marching her to the Plague Grove to barter her like cattle—nothing more useful than a life to be given into servitude. Their fault. Vu Côn’s fault. She wasn’t sure anymore, just angry. “It’s not my fault.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Vu Côn said. “I just mean that...” She paused, and cocked her head again. Her snout glistened in the light, droplets of water catching the yellow and refracting it in a harsh rainbow of colors. “Desire bends the world,” she said. “And you’re reading a book about changing the rules by which things work. A...syllabary of power.”

  “That I can’t use.” The words tasted like ashes on Yên’s mouth.

  Vu Côn went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “You want to go home. Badly enough to open a gate. Except...” She hesitated. “Except that not all gates lead where you’d expect.”

  A gate. Yên thought, again, of the walls op
ening. Of the figure standing on the threshold, waiting for her. She’d wanted to escape the palace so badly. She’d wanted to go home and find Mother and tell her that everything was all right, to find her old life and her students, Mother’s querulous patients, even Elder Giang’s cold and cryptic sympathy. Except that the gate she’d seen—the shining, wavering threshold beyond which all geometry seemed to become the bewildering infinite—wasn’t anything she’d ever want to go through.

  “Vanishers,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” Vu Côn said. “The Vanishers are gone so far away that they’re beyond our recall.” She sounded relieved, and who wouldn’t be? “But they’ve left other, no-more-palatable creatures behind them. Their guards, their enforcers. The people they took and twisted into their powers.”

  Yên was going to feel sick again. “I don’t—”

  “You were studying the book,” Vu Côn said. “It has effects. May I?” She gestured toward Yên’s hand.

  “Yes,” Yên said, not knowing what she meant.

  Vu Côn took her hand. Her touch was cool: something from the depths, rising to hug Yên, to keep her forever safe. Letters flowed again, from her onto Yên’s skin. Something about banyan trees and citadels, and other words she couldn’t read. She reached out before she could think, and one of the words shimmered and died under her touch.

  “No,” Vu Côn said, gently. She took Yên’s hand and set it aside. The words flowed again. Yên felt something shift and compress within her, as if she was being held underwater, her lungs burning. “There,” Vu Côn said.

  “I don’t understand,” Yên said.

  “It’s protection,” Vu Côn said. The words still shone on Yên’s hand, in the web between the thumb and index finger, a distant illumination like a tattoo made in silver dust instead of light. “A ward, if you wish. Something to contain the magic within you until you master it enough.” Keeping Yên locked into the palace. Yên wanted to say something sharp about the convenience of it all, but the memory of that shape bending over her bed killed all sarcasm. The sheer malice she’d felt then, that distant amusement that drew its source from tearing the wings off birds and watching fish choke on land...

  Yên breathed out, again. She felt odd. Tight, as if she couldn’t quite breathe or move right. “I’m not a magician.” But. But, if she was one, if she could somehow use this, if she could come back to the elders and show them this, or even go to another village... She’d have a use. She’d be valued.

  “Perhaps.” Vu Côn’s voice was amused. “Perhaps not.”

  “The thing.” Yên said. She breathed slowly, evenly. “The creature that came through that door.”

  “It’s gone.” Vu Côn’s hands still held hers, stubbornly refusing to move. Yên found she didn’t mind. “It hadn’t materialized far enough.”

  “I saw it.” She swallowed. “It bent over my bed.”

  “A shadow of a shadow.” Vu Côn’s eyes were hard. “There was nothing that had any physical presence in your room.”

  Yên said, finally, “It’s safe?” She couldn’t quite believe it.

  “I can come and sleep in your room if you’d like,” Vu Côn said. And, with a raised eyebrow: “On the floor, obviously. I’m not that kind of person.”

  “I know you’re not.” Ought she be reassured, or disappointed? She couldn’t tell anymore. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “There’s no shortage of rooms,” Vu Côn said. She shrugged. “Have one next door if that makes you feel better.” And, carelessly, almost absentmindedly: “You don’t have to decide now.”

  Which was good, because she didn’t know what she wanted, right now.

  “Thank you.”

  When Yên looked up again, Vu Côn was standing, watching her. She was mostly human again, with only the darkness in her too-wide eyes reminding Yên that she was a dragon. “I owe you an apology,” she said.

  That wasn’t what Yên had expected to hear. “I don’t understand.”

  “I made light of your homesickness. I shouldn’t have. It’s no easy thing, to see your entire world overturned.”

  “It’s nothing.” Yên searched for words in the scorched desert of her mind, and found only the truth. Vu Côn was going to make some flippant remark about genuine gratitude, show that same distant amusement she’d always shown to Yên. But she didn’t.

  “You said it was nothing. You’re wrong. It was needlessly hurtful from me,” Vu Côn said. She turned again to the bowl. Yên couldn’t hear the words she was saying, but when Vu Côn turned around, she held out a basket of odd fruit. They were unbearably bright and colored, clashing with each other and glistening with light. They looked...fake, like cardboard decorations for wedding banquets.

  “Here. You need some comfort.” Vu Côn must have seen Yên’s face. “This is what they were, before the Vanishers poisoned the world. Mangosteen. Rambutan. Carambola. Dragon fruit. Breast-milk fruit. Mango. No fungus. No rot.” She sat down again, the basket in her lap. She picked out a tight, almost perfectly round shape, red as a bleeding heart and with rough, gritty skin. Her hands shifted shape, easily slicing through the thick skin and scooping out the seed. She held it out balanced on a claw. “Try it.”

  It tasted sweet. Too sweet, an almost-sickening explosion of juice and soft flesh in Yên’s mouth. No grit, no soothing harshness. She made a face. “Elder aunt—”

  Vu Côn was already holding out another fruit. “This one is sweeter.”

  The seeds, piled in Vu Côn’s lap, were large and plump and brown, not the shriveled ones Yên had found inside the lychees of the village orchards. She ate one, then another. The taste was settling down in her mouth: too sweet, too soft, but not wholly unpleasant. “I guess,” she said, slowly, reaching out for another fruit, ”I could get used to it.” Her hand closed over Vu Côn’s claw, held it for a moment. It took all her willpower to hold it there, unmoving, to not move upward, to touch shoulder and chest and lips.

  Vu Côn smiled, and it made her appear younger and less severe.

  For a moment—a bare, monumental moment of ignorance—Yên struggled with pronoun choice. She wanted to address Vu Côn not as “elder aunt” but as “elder sister.” It was sheer foolishness. It was the height of familiarity, intimacy above and beyond what Vu Côn would ever allow. Yên couldn’t. Instead she said, slowly, “The twins said...you had a duty.”

  Vu Côn’s face didn’t move. But neither did her hand. Yên felt heat rise into her heart, her face. “We’re not the Vanishers,” Vu Côn said. “They thought everything was playthings. That nature could be bent and rewritten to suit them. I”—her hand clenched, a fraction—“I am better than them.”

  And she’d lost everything to them, too, and to their legacy. But Yên couldn’t say those words.

  Vu Côn withdrew, effortlessly. “Here. You can have the last one.”

  Yên took the lychee, cradled it in her lap. Her hands were smeared in sticky juice. Everything seemed to cling to her skin, including stray strands of hair from her undone topknot. She must have looked ridiculous. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t thank me.” Vu Côn shrugged. And, as she moved away, Yên caught the slight swaying, saw how she held herself, trembling.

  Yên was a healer’s daughter, and no fool. “You’re exhausted.” Checking out Yên’s room, the basket of fruit? Both?

  A silence. Vu Côn had her back to her, but under her robes her body was lengthening again, turning serpentine, her arms shrinking, her hair subsumed into a streaming mane, scales peeking beneath her dark skin. Her hands, clenched, were now fully retracted, the thumbs indistinguishable from the other sharp, thin claws. “That will teach me to show off.” Her voice was sharp and cutting, resonating with the thunder of the sea, the roars of the storm.

  Yên remembered that she was talking to her jailer, to her executioner if she proved unsatisfactory. Yes, she’d been kind, she’d been considerate, but one fleeing moment of compassion didn’t change what had happened.
Couldn’t. Shouldn’t. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have said—”

  “You keep doing that,” Vu Côn said. She still hadn’t turned.

  “Doing what?”

  “Apologizing.”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong about that.”

  Vu Côn stretched, and turned. In a heartbeat, she was the dragon again, but instead of making straight for Yên, she remained where she was. When Vu Côn spoke again, it was with the dragon’s jaw. “I took you from your village. I hold your life.”

  All facts which Yên was all too keenly aware of. Something snapped inside her. “And you want me to yell at you? What do you expect me to do? Gainsay you in your own palace?”

  The dragon’s shape trembled. Yên could see the woman within it, like an insect trapped in amber. Vu Côn said, at last, “You don’t have to care.”

  “Of course I do.” Yên opened her mouth, shut it again. She couldn’t unsay the words. She could apologize. She—

  She wasn’t going to, and they both knew it.

  Vu Côn shifted. She leapt into the air, heading straight for Yên, flowing over the metal floor like water. Yên tensed, knowing there was nowhere she could possibly go; but Vu Côn inflected her trajectory at the last moment, coming to rest, half-folded, by Yên’s side, her maw a finger’s width from Yên’s mouth.

  Waiting. Trembling. A moment that could be so many things. A moment—

  There was no time.

  Yên gave in and, bending down, kissed Vu Côn.

  She tasted like the sea, salty and sharp, with a hint of earthy sand. Yên drank her in, feeling the cold spread from her lips to her face, all the way into her chest, where her heart was now a painful mass, each heartbeat magnified ten thousand times. Vu Côn’s body was wrapped around Yên’s chest and legs. That odd, tight wetness spreading through her clothes, through her skin until it seemed to fill her to bursting. Yên pulled away, struggling to breathe. “Vu Côn...”