In the Vanishers' Palace

by Aliette de Bodard

  She could have stopped, she supposed. She could have turned away from whatever strange abilities she had, and turned back to the familiar, to a world where everything was under control.

  Yên was a scholar and a healer’s daughter, and nothing—whether it be knowledge of history or the best way to effect a cure—had ever been gained by turning away from the truth.

  And she could use it. If she could master magic, if she could do, effortlessly, more than the few spells Mother had mastered, then she could come back to the village as a magician. As a useful, valued person, one that no one would dare throw into the wilderness: a protection she could extend to Mother. When she came back, when she left the palace, when she escaped. All unattainable dreams, but it kept her awake. It kept her focused, and it gave her hope.

  At night she’d read, obsessively, the book on her bedside table: ancient maxims and proverbs, the slow, painful rules of building incantations; which word combinations worked, which ones would have no effect no matter how many times she wrote them. She’d sketch calligraphy letters in the air and on the floor, and watch the letters turn from golden to ash-silver. It was draining. She had a headache that didn’t seem to go away, and she woke up in the morning never feeling rested. But it was also exhilarating. Not the magic itself, but how spells were put together. How the Broken-World Teacher referenced poems and songs, how every spell called on myths and stories and sayings. How it all came together to form things that weren’t just magic.

  Every part of a spell has meaning, like a rite that must be followed. Words are actions and actions are words: when all is aligned, then the world will react in answer.

  The spells were beautiful in their own right, like a finely written essay, singing on Yên’s tongue like new year’s delicacies.

  Sorrow. Sweetness. Forgiveness. The taste of love.

  Marriage. Promise. Red thread. A hundred knots.

  One morning, someone knocked on Yên’s door.

  She opened it, and found Vu Côn.

  The dragon was wearing a five-paneled tunic, on which her jade disk shone like the sun. She stared at Yên for a while. Her gaze was a grey, closed-off wall. She was aloof, unattainable, once more the spirit who had healed Oanh, who would have taken Mother away. Words pooled, in the darkness of her robes. Sword. Frozen. Separation. An almost-physical wall that Yên could feel. When she reached out, her hands pushed through thickened air.

  “Here,” Vu Côn said, thrusting two pieces of paper at Yên. Her fingers rested for a bare moment on Yên’s wrist, as lukewarm and as inert as stone. And, before Yên could even so much as say a word, she was gone.

  “Vu Côn!”

  The first paper merely said: I gave you my word. I’ve kept it. And the second one...

  It was a smooth, grey piece of paper. The handwriting, crabbed and cramped, was Mother’s, and the smell that rose from it, a mixture of sandalwood and camphor, was so familiar, Yên saw the world wobble and contract as tears came to her eyes.

  Child, I thought you dead. Thank the ancestors for miracles. Here, life continues much as before. I know you worry for me, but I’m well-provided for....

  Vinh has learnt her letters, and is making her way through the Tale of Kiêu with alarming speed. Khiêm is as rowdy as ever. Oanh... Oanh will never be the same, but she’s alive. She’s walking again.

  My patients are well....

  Little of substance there, and yet... Words unsaid, words unwritten. Life was going on without her. Mother was alive, and not starving or thrown out of the village.

  Yên closed her eyes, trying to compose herself, and failed. She was crying, and the world was blurred and painful and raw, but it was all for the best. “Thank you,” she said, aloud, and she wasn’t sure if it was to Vu Côn—who couldn’t possibly hear it from that deserted room—or to her ancestors, or to whatever spirits remained in the Heavens.

  She tried to find Vu Côn, to thank her properly. But when they did meet—in passing, at one of the twins’ lessons—the dragon was aloof, unattainable, exactly as she’d been on the doorstep. They’d broken something, when they’d kissed. And the only things Yên felt was sorrow that it hadn’t lasted longer, and anger that Vu Côn was letting it all die out. Pathetic.

  And yet...

  * * *

  Vu Côn stood, uncertainly, at the door. The curtain whistled in the breeze, grey and tattered and eaten through by moths. She stared at it. Time to turn back, to begin the slow trudge back to the palace, back to her patients. Back to Diêm Châu, who was progressing so well: when Vu Côn had told her the next time she’d be ready for the full healing, the little girl’s smile had been wide, like a rising sun, an odd, twisting feeling in Vu Côn’s chest. Most of the people she saw couldn’t be cured, or not durably. Most of the healings that succeeded left people scarred and changed, hollow ghosts of themselves. A drop of water in the ocean of trying to undo what the Vanishers had done. And yet she had to try. As Hoang had said: if they didn’t, if they just let the world die from roiling poisons and sicknesses, then what made them any better than the Vanishers?

  Diseases. Poisons. Gene-modding viruses.

  Vu Côn thought of Yên, standing outside her room. Their hands, touching. Warm, pliant skin, sending a shiver up her spine. And that brief moment of lingering on Yên’s wrist, which burnt her desire to bitter ashes in a fraction of a breath. Yên had been pale and thin, but that could have been worry. The pulse, though—small, and pathetic, so thready and weak Vu Côn could have crushed it with her bare hands—the pulse didn’t lie. And neither did her spell. On Yên’s wrists, the letters shone so strongly, they’d lost all color and depth, fighting endlessly against what was burning within Yên. Against what was destroying her.

  Any illusion she’d had that Yên’s disease was going to burn itself out had died then.

  Noises came from inside the house. Bangings of pots and porcelain, and another voice cursing. Not the right time. Vu Côn turned away to leave, the village’s prayers a distant irritation on her skin.

  “Elder aunt?”

  Kim Ngoc stood on the threshold, uncertainly. “I wasn’t expecting—”

  Vu Côn shook her head. She wasn’t sure why she was back, what kind of thread had drawn her, as surely as a fated bond, back to Yên’s village.

  “I don’t want to bother you,” Vu Côn said.

  Kim Ngoc snorted. “Never.”

  Inside, two people were busy. One of them was an elderly person, wearing the faded robes of a scholar and with greying hair tied in a topknot. The cut of their clothes marked no gender. They were watching a pot of stock on the stove. The other was wearing a traditional woman’s ensemble: a white tunic split at the sides of the waist, and black silk trousers. She was busy taking down shirts from a clothesline. Oanh, the girl whose healing had given Yên to Vu Côn. She looked better than she had on that night, though she still moved as though carved from glass, as if her skin were merely the thinnest of cloaks on muscle and bones. Vu Côn’s words of healing still clung to her wrists, almost faded now, absorbed by the body.

  Neither of them showed any sign of recognizing her. Good. She didn’t need any more trouble, not when everything in her was screaming at her to get out. From the scholar came a prayer, a stronger, sharper one that she’d heard before: a desire for justice and a complex acknowledgement and acceptance that they would be judged for their part in things too, something too elaborate for Vu Côn to grant, a perpetual itch at the back of her mind.

  Kim Ngoc introduced Vu Côn as a traveling merchant, and the elder as Giang. There was the usual chatter about the land, the capital, the court of the Empress, the distant hierarchy of temporal power Vu Côn cared little about but which Giang clearly hungered for. Oanh contributed little.

  Finally, Elder Giang withdrew their pot from the stove, and laid it on the table. “Supper is ready,” they said. They pointed to another, covered pot. “That’s the rice. And the vegetables are in that one. Come on, child,” they said to Oanh.

/>   Oanh looked as though she might protest.

  “Grandmother Ngoc has a patient,” Elder Giang said, with a sharp look at Vu Côn.

  Vu Côn opened her mouth to say she wasn’t sick, and then closed it.

  After they’d left, Kim Ngoc spread two bowls and chopsticks on the table, and opened the pots. The smell that wafted up was familiar, and yet so completely off-kilter, tinged with the earthy notes of mold.

  Vu Côn ate in silence. When she was done, she carefully balanced her chopsticks on the rim of the bowl, and said, “Yên said it was just the two of you.”

  “Before Oanh’s healing? It was.” Kim Ngoc sounded amused. “Guilt is a powerful motivator, isn’t it.”

  “How are you?” Vu Côn asked. She gestured, with her hand, toward Kim Ngoc’s wrist. Kim Ngoc nodded.

  Her pulse was strong, with just a tiny hint of the clogging building up again. Vu Côn shook her head. “You’re better than I expected.”

  Kim Ngoc shrugged. “I’m not a spirit, but I do know a few tricks.”

  The small, ineffective remedies the village folks had passed on to each other. “I see,” Vu Côn said. She kept her face neutral, because to speak up would be needlessly hurtful. “Well, ask me again in a few months’ time. It’s too early to clear it again. It would damage the artery for very little gain.”

  Kim Ngoc sighed. She poured tea for both of them, a black one, redolent with a different smell of mold. Deliberate this time, the leaves carefully tended to cultivate the flavor. Such things had existed before the breaking, though Vu Côn preferred her tea grassy and green, with subtle flavor. It probably wouldn’t have survived the water if said water was drawn from the river.

  “I’m well,” she said. “It’s odd, to not feel out of breath anymore. Or to wake up, and there’s no pain in my chest.”

  “You were lucky,” Vu Côn said.

  “That you happened by?” Kim Ngoc smiled. “Is that really luck?”

  Vu Côn didn’t know, not anymore. How much of it was fate, and how much their own actions and choices, and if there were any difference. “You should leave,” she said.

  “There’s nowhere to go.” Kim Ngoc gestured toward her leg, the one that kept slightly dragging on the floor. “Do you truly think I’d run fast enough to avoid the constructs?”

  “No one does,” Vu Côn said. “A traveling merchant could take you to a bigger city....”

  Kim Ngoc sighed again. “You’re a healer, aren’t you? Would you leave your patients?”

  “Of course not,” Vu Côn said. It was gut reflex, as unthinkable as the sun rising in the west.

  “Exactly.” Kim Ngoc sipped at her tea. “It’s not so bad. The children come too. Yên’s students. They bring little things. Leaves. Paper. Books. And as long as I’m useful...”

  More useful than her daughter, the life they’d offered up, as thoughtlessly as they’d discard dust. The life Vu Côn was still holding. In more ways than one, because she hadn’t yet told Yên how bad it was. Because she didn’t know how bad it was, and wouldn’t know until she’d examined Yên more thoroughly.

  “You’re just playing into their hands.”

  Kim Ngoc raised an eyebrow. “No. I refuse to play by their rules. I refuse to decide who is valued, who is not. To trade favors. Isn’t this what healers should do?”

  Of course. Vu Côn didn’t favor one person over another. She didn’t treat anyone differently. Though some of the children, feverish and still struggling to smile, would break her heart into so many ugly, jagged pieces.

  Vu Côn said, slowly, carefully, “They’ll kill you.”

  “Yes,” Kim Ngoc said. “One day. But that’s the way things go, isn’t it? In a world where we’re all weighed on how much value we bring, and seen as burdens when we’re no longer of use.”

  Usefulness.

  You’re smart and handsome, and I hate waste.

  A life, held because the twins needed it. Not because they’d die, but because of what they’d do, if left unchecked. Teaching them passion and the love of decorum, because she needed it. For the sake of the world—of her children—dismissing what it cost Yên of little importance in the grand scheme of things.

  Usefulness. Burdens.

  “Not everyone is like that,” Vu Côn said, with a sinking, leaden feeling in her throat.

  “It’s the worst part of ourselves.” Kim Ngoc set her cup on the table. Only a scattering of droplets lay at the bottom, like a string of darkened, shriveled pearls. “It’s always with us. Always whispering. Always calling. And sometimes, we answer.

  “Why are you here, elder aunt?”

  Vu Côn opened her mouth to say she didn’t know, and found no true words in the emptiness of her mind. Because she knew why she’d come. Because of Yên, in a way. Because the last time she’d been there, Kim Ngoc had assuaged her guilt. Had told her that Yên was better off in the palace than in the village. Had given tacit approval to her indenture of Yên. She’d come back for that. For ways to rationalize what she was doing, all of it from the lies to Yên’s servitude.

  She rose, draining the last of her cup. “I’m here because I shouldn’t be thinking like that.”

  SIX

  Sleepers

  Yên was late, and angry, and lost.

  She’d gone to the small, twisting garden where she usually taught the twins. The day’s lesson plans had not been thrilling: reading The Pearl and the Scholar together, an elaborate moral tale about a scholar falling in love with a fisherman—and the fisherman’s quest into a Vanisher’s holdings when, years later, the scholar contracted a virus that split his soul—so that the âm part of him wandered the world, gathering knowledge, while the duong self endlessly, forlornly wandered the Vanisher’s palace, looking for his missing love.

  It wasn’t subtle and it wasn’t fascinating, but the verses were beautiful, and the myriad word choices and allusions were a great opportunity to explain, at length, what friendship and duty and love meant. And, in the end, after many travails, the lovers reunited—and, in the long summer evenings when the fisherman was out working, the scholar’s âm self would sleep in their bed, while the duong self would wander once more, watching his love bring up nets of shrimp and fish from the river’s oily waters.

  Yên expected Liên to protest at the unfairness of the lovers’ years of separation, trying to find a solution, and Thông to thoughtfully consider the matter, dissecting what both the scholar and the fisherman had done wrong and how they’d brought this hardship on themselves.

  Except that the twins hadn’t been in the garden at all.

  She’d gotten the day wrong again. Not an uncommon occurrence in a palace where not much deviated from routine. But she’d tried the other teaching places. The courtyard, the corridor with the infinitely receding windows of skyscapes, even the library, where she found the door tightly locked, and no noise or light within. The twins were nowhere to be found.

  Off again on their adventures, maybe? But they’d never missed a lesson. Vu Côn had made the consequences of that clear. And even clearer to Yên what the consequences of non-attendance would be.

  Vu Côn would have her head. The panic was old and reflexive now, almost written over by the memory of cold seizing her lips, running like a shiver up her spine and stretching her entire being with unattainable, unreasonable desire.

  She needed to keep her wits and find them. Fast.

  Unbidden, words rose to her lips: a spell she’d seen in the book, one to find lost relatives. And didn’t the First Teacher say that teachers and students might as well be parent and child?

  Her hands moved before she could think, tracing the letters in the air.

  Blood. Bone. Threads. Fated to meet again.

  The letters on her hands burned, silver turning to a crisp white. The sharp, merciless radiance of the unbroken moon: the one under which the Vanishers had once hunted, whipping their servants ever onward, driving their prey to blood-streaked exhaustion and death. The floor under he
r, a single window into an impossible world, shifted, the words she’d spoken replacing the blasted and pockmarked surface. They twisted, then became the spirits’ language, and then fragmented, abstract signs, as if the palace itself was digesting what she’d spoken into a more palatable state.

  Blood. Bone. Threads. Fated to meet again.

  Something tugged at Yên’s guts, like a fishhook digging into her innards. It traveled upward into her heart, pulling slowly but steadily. She was already walking. Running, because it kept mindlessly rising, dancing on the edge of pain.

  Blood. Bone. Threads. Fated to meet again.

  A large corridor, the wind rising and whistling through angled stairways that led nowhere. A garden that folded back onto itself: the path she traveled on got her back to the doorway she’d entered by, except that it now led to a different room. A scholar’s studio that kept climbing upward, the latticework windows twisting and turning until they were the floor on which she walked; and through them she could see another scholar’s studio with the same eight trigram windows, the same inkstone, brush and scroll pots, and cut-bamboo wrist rest....

  The pain in her chest was flaring up again. Not constant or fixed, but moving like a burning brush, sweeping across the space of her entire body. And then it flared so strongly, it almost sent Yên to her knees—and, just as abruptly, snuffed itself out like a spent lantern.

  Yên looked up, and there was a door, a handspan away from her face.

  It didn’t look like any of the doors she’d seen before in the palace. The other doors had been small and narrow. This one was huge, a layer of filigreed grey metal over a flat panel that must have been bronze or copper, a rich brown color that peeked through the filigree, shading into golden and red on the edges of the doors. Birds and trees and dragons, twined around abstract patterns. No, not abstract. They were words, written in the spirits’ alphabet, and not growing infinitely larger or smaller, but merely written in a tight, cramped hand, barely visible under the layers of ornamentation.