When Yên laid a hand against the paneling, the door lit up in a harsh green. A sound started, on the edge of hearing, one that turned her innards to jelly, making her shiver where she stood. Turn back, she had to turn back before it was too late. And then that too passed, leaving her struggling to stand.
The light died. The doors swung open toward her, ponderously and noiselessly. There was time to turn back, to the relative safety of known areas in the palace. But then she heard the thread of sound. Two voices, unmistakable. The twins, arguing. They were too far away for her to make out precise words.
Inside, darkness stretched, thin, faint filaments of light hung like spiders’ webs. Yên couldn’t see the walls or the room. A kindness, after everything else in the palace. But then her feet caught on a raised protuberance on the floor. For a moment she felt herself fall, desperately trying to catch herself, and then she was on the floor with a skinned knee and a burning sensation spreading to her entire leg. Amazing, wasn’t she. A clumsy peasant oaf. The twins would never waste a moment reminding her of this....
Light flooded the room. Yên looked up. She had to blink, lest she be blinded. Everything seemed to be unbearably sharp, outlined in ringing lines that contracted, hurting her eyes.
Close to her, close enough to touch, was a bed about her size: a contraption of polished metal and glass that held one sleeper, their skin faintly glowing from within, motes of light shifting on their arms and legs, faint traceries of letters in that same alphabet. And, to either side of it, the translucent shape of larger beds and larger sleepers. All the beds were identical, all the sleepers different though arrayed in the same pose, flaring out in size and receding, as if the bed Yên was looking at was only the part of a circle closest to her. And, in the distance, at what would have been the halfway point of the circle, the beds shifted, shrinking in size again, growing farther and farther away from her.
It should have sent Yên to her knees, struggling not to vomit, but it was all so huge and so faint that it didn’t seem real. The only thing at her scale was the bed in front of her, which held one sleeper. Human, or human-shaped.
Where were the twins? She could hear their voices, but they didn’t seem to be anywhere....
Then something caught her eye, to the left of the bed. In one of the infinitely receding series of beds, she saw two small shapes, arguing.
How—? She tried staring at them again. Nausea was rising, this time her brain trying to tell her that it was all real....
Yên gave up on subtlety. “Children!”
In the small scene to her left, the twins looked up, startled. She saw them make a gesture with their hands, caught something that might have been “Teacher,” or her full name.
The entire ring heaved. There was no other word for it. All the beds seemed to move like boats caught in a storm, bobbing up and down and sideways, receding and growing as they slid sideways—stretching and altering, so that the sleepers grew taller, their faces slightly melting, like sealing wax. Yên looked away, the nausea in her throat sharply climbing, trying to steady herself by staring at the steel floor.
She was still looking downward when something slid into place with an audible click. “Teacher! What are you doing here?”
Yên looked up. Liên and Thông were standing by the side of a bed, but the occupant of this one wasn’t sleeping. They were sitting up, their skin blackened by burns, on a pale skin the color of yellow apricot flowers. They smiled at her, in that uncertain way of people who weren’t certain what the proper behavior was.
“This is Gia Canh,” Thông said. “Yên is a...guest of Mother’s. Our teacher.”
“I see.” Gia Canh’s voice was rich and resonant. His eyes—he had used the masculine to refer to himself in Viêt—were black, with pearled blood at the edges of his eyelids. It had gone beyond faintly creepy, and into something else altogether. “A guest, too?”
Yên turned. Forced herself to, because the view was still dizzying and wrong. “You live here?” she said. She saw, suddenly, on one of the beds, a familiar sight. Even in the distance, the faces were unmistakable: the father and his child, the ones who had walked away into nothingness during Vu Côn’s audience, so long before. “No,” she said. “You asked her for a boon. The dragon.”
“You didn’t?” Gia Canh’s voice was mildly curious.
Of course she hadn’t. Of course. “What did you ask for?”
“What we all ask for.” Gia Canh’s voice was bitter. “To be healed and made whole.”
She stared at him, hard. Saw the slight trembling of his hands, the way the blood at the edges of his eyes had seeped into the whites of his eyes. His duong self was overlarge. When he moved, Yên could see, not the faint shadow she’d seen with the child, but a limning of fire around the planes of his face, an energy that pooled within him with no outlet to escape.
“It’s called the Sorrow of Monkey and Rooster,” Thông said, quietly. “A bloodborne disease that snuffs out the metal in a person’s khi-elements. There is no cure.”
The sleepers. The beds. “This is a hospital,” Yên said, flatly.
“A death-house,” Liên said. She sounded angry. “Most of those who beseech Mother...” She stopped, then started again. “Mother repurposed the Vanishers’ berths. They used them for genetic manipulation, but we can use them to induce stasis. To hold time and sickness at bay. That’s why we live here.”
“Cryogenics,” Gia Canh said. The word meant nothing to Yên. He sighed, again. “It’s like the worst sleep you’ve ever had. Like something sitting on your chest, gobbling up your lungs piece by piece. Slowly choking to death in the midst of nightmares. But you’re alive.” He didn’t sound in the least bit happy about it.
Liên was bent over the side of the bed. Yên realized that some kind of control panel was open, with commands displayed in glistening light. The alphabet was utterly unfamiliar. Vanisher words? “I think I’ve got it,” Liên said, to Canh. “This is going to drain the excess duong from your body. Ready?”
Gia Canh looked at Yên, and then back at Liên. His face was taut with fear. “I don’t think I can take much more of this,” he said.
“One more time,” Liên said. “Please. It should work.”
Gia Canh sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to be cured.” His voice was low, the amusement bitter and sharp. “One more time. But afterwards, you have to ask your mother.”
“You have my word,” Thông said.
“Ask what?” Yên asked, before she could think.
“To wake,” Gia Canh said. “To take what little time I have walking through gardens, listening to rivers and watching the fullness of the moon. To breathe in the flowers and the laughter of children. I can’t sleep anymore. Not like this.”
Letting himself die. Yên had seen it, numerous times, in Mother’s patients. Mother had argued, had tried to convince them to fight, but in the end, she had to admit what any healer did: that the patient’s wishes prevailed. Vu Côn was likely in that same denial.
A hospital. A healer. Yên hadn’t thought—no, she’d known, she guessed, because Vu Côn had healed Oanh, because she was treating Yên. She’d just never followed the thoughts to their logical conclusion.
Gia Canh lay down on the bed again. Liên touched the symbols, one by one. Something shimmered in the air above him. His face twisted in terrible pain. A scream formed on his lips. Yên moved to touch Liên, but Thông was already there, slamming their hand on the symbols.
Nothing happened.
Gia Canh’s scream tore through the air, a high-pitched, unbearable wail. Blood was spreading across his face. No, not blood, but something dark and sticky, a shimmering vermillion that turned his eyes the color of an imperial seal. Yên tried to reach him, but her hand hit an invisible barrier, again and again.
Liên’s face was white. “It shouldn’t be doing this!”
Thông spoke words in a language Yên couldn’t understand. It hung in the air: signs that grew larger and larger,
syllables that pressed against Yên’s ears and eyes and nostrils until all she could see and breathe was the echo of that word. Something wet was in her face: she wiped away drops of blood.
She couldn’t hear Gia Canh’s screaming, but his hands were moving, clawing at the glass, the same vermillion tinging his fingernails. His fingers warped. She couldn’t hear the snap because of the words Thông was speaking, but she saw them move into impossible, limp angles, even as his face twisted and twisted again.
Liên screamed. It was the same language as Thông. Yên’s left eardrum ruptured, fluid leaking into the hollow of her ear. The symbols on the panel shifted, for a fraction of a second, and then went dark. The barrier above the berth snuffed itself out. Gia Canh slumped back like a broken puppet, limbs askew. As the echo of the words died, and Yên’s world gave way to a piercing, unbearable pain, she heard his fast, labored breathing. But she was on her knees, trying not to scream herself.
Hands steadied her. Liên, kneeling by her side. “It’ll pass,” she said. “Breathe.”
Yên tried to, but it hurt too much. “What happened?”
“It didn’t work,” Liên said. “The berths are for gene-modding, same as the viruses. I thought we could rewire them with the right base pattern, and…” Her voice trailed off. “Mother is going to kill us.”
Yên breathed again. The world refused to steady itself. “Rewire,” she said. It was the only word in her mind.
“We’ve been doing that since we were kids,” Liên said. In the distance, Thông was speaking in a low, urgent voice to Gia Canh.
In, out. In, out again. Memories bubbled up, from another lifetime, from Mother’s manual and the faraway village. She’d have given anything to be back there. Things were bad, then, if she was nostalgic for the elders’ enmity. “My eardrum. It’s ruptured, but it’ll heal itself, won’t it? Unless it becomes infected.”
“May I?”
Yên nodded. Liên’s hand brushed her hair. More words, this time ones that Yên could barely recognize. Farsight. Ant. White-throated rooster. Rot beneath walls.
A tingling of warmth. “It should be fine.” Liên breathed out. “How is he?”
Thông had stopped speaking to Gia Canh. “Come and see,” they said. And, to Yên: “Don’t touch him.”
Gia Canh’s body was now so pale, it was almost translucent: not pale skin, but a uniform, waxy color with no distinctive features that was profoundly unnatural. His eyes were closed, his breathing labored. The vermillion hue was almost gone. Only on his eyelids and on his fingernails was it visible at all, a network of thin lines like blood vessels, or cracks in a celadon dish. It shone, faintly. A single, luminous word hung on his chest, the one that both meant strength and fullness of health. His duong self was dull; his face had the darkness and translucency of dominant âm.
“How is he still breathing? The berth?”
Thông shook their head. “The spell.” They laid a hand on the glass lid of the berth, tracing the contour of the word. Faint lines went from it to the duong organs: the large and small intestine, bladder, stomach and gallbladder, and a larger, fatter bundle of lines to the middle burner organ. “It’s regenerating his duong, but it’s very slow. He needs to pull through the night.” They didn’t sound happy. Or optimistic.
Liên’s face was taut. “It’s our fault. We never should—”
Thông’s voice was gentle. “He knew the risks, and he agreed.”
“You mean we’re not guilty?”
“Of course not. We totally are. I mean we take our responsibilities, but we don’t let it eat at us. We can’t afford to, lil’ sis.”
Liên took a deep, shaking breath. “All right.”
Yên said, in the awkward silence, “When you say ‘don’t touch him’...”
“I don’t think he’s contagious,” Thông said. “But I’m not keen on having one extra patient.”
Yên started to say she didn’t know the twins were healers too, and then she remembered what Liên had said, about Mother having their hide. “Gia Canh agreed to being healed by you, but you’re not allowed to do this, are you?”
They looked, not at Gia Canh, but at each other. At length Liên said, “Please don’t tell Mother.”
She was supposed to. She couldn’t afford not to. “Just so you can avoid punishment? I’m your teacher. I’m not exactly supposed to help you bend the rules.”
A silence, again. Thông said, “We’ll tell her. Tomorrow. We just need a chance to make things right.”
And then Liên, whose hand was trailing, lightly, on Gia Canh’s burnt face: “Tomorrow, we’ll know whether he has a chance. I want to know what we’re apologizing for.”
Yên thought for a while. They were her students. Her responsibility. But, looking at their crestfallen faces that barely masked shock and grief, they were punishing themselves enough. And the prospect of going to see Vu Côn—of talking to her, as if the kiss had never happened—twisted her stomach in knots.
“Fine,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
* * *
When Yên came back to her room, she found Vu Côn waiting for her.
So much for avoidance. The dragon wore not her five-paneled dress but a large tunic split over silken trousers. The tunic itself was the dark brown of the earth, long enough to trail on the floor, pooling around Vu Côn like fallen maple tree leaves. Words glittered in its folds, changing too fast and too abruptly for Yên to follow. The air was thick and cloggy, as if before a storm.
The word “master” rose and died on Yên’s lips. Instead, she bowed, falling to her knees on the floor, head touching the floor: the full obeisance, as she’d once done before Vu Côn’s throne. “Was there anything?” she asked.
Silence. A rustle of silk. And hands, wrapping around hers. Looking up, she found Vu Côn, kneeling by her side, her robes spread around her in a glory of star-studded darkness. Her eyes were the depths of the sea, the depths of the sky, the hungry maw that always sought sustenance, and Yên was as nothing before that. She was drawn, inexorably, stripped bare of everything. Of duty, of filial piety, of knowledge, of words.
“Lil’ sis,” Vu Côn whispered, the single word echoing under the vast ceiling. It tightened in Yên’s chest like an unbearable noose, a weight suddenly shifting and reconfiguring the entire universe. Lil’ sis. A familiar pronoun used only between intimates. “You’re no longer my servant.”
“I don’t understand,” Yên said, and the words died as Vu Côn’s hands tightened around hers.
“I’m sorry. It should never have happened in the first place. You’re free.” Vu Côn rose and drew Yên up, effortlessly, as the words on the floor, in the cloth, shone like wildfire. On Yên’s wrist, an answering light, that of the spell Vu Côn had laid on her.
Yên looked for words. There were none. “The twins. You need someone to teach them—”
“They’ll survive.” Vu Côn’s face was grave. “You can stay here and study books of magic. Or teach the twins, if that’s what you want. Or go home, though I’m not sure it’s best for you.”
A chasm yawned beneath Yên. For a moment, the future was so many things, so many flowers she could pick. It should have been exhilarating, but it wasn’t. It was just bone-deep fear, a loss of certainty, of the walls that had not only bounded her but defined her existence. I don’t know, she wanted to say, but the words remained stuck in her throat.
Vu Côn let go of her hands and withdrew, the coils of her tail sliding across the polished floor. “You can’t be leaving,” Yên said. So many things she wanted to say. To yell at Vu Côn, to tell her she couldn’t just treat Yên as a plaything, and in the end the only one that came through was how much Yên just wanted the dragon.
Vu Côn didn’t move, though Yên now saw that the dragon held herself still only through a great effort of will. “We need to talk,” she said. “And sleeping with me out of gratitude isn’t—”
Yên covered the distance that separated them in a single, agonizing hea
rtbeat, one that felt as though it were tearing apart her ribcage, resonating until her entire body ached with need. “Don’t,” she said. “Do you want this?”
“Yes,” Vu Côn said. “But—”
Before anything could change, Yên grabbed Vu Côn and kissed her.
She tasted like the sea, like the storm: tangy and bitter, the coldness on her lips like a jolt that spread from Yên’s mouth to her lungs. Yên’s breathing was slow and painful, and then lost altogether as she breathed Vu Côn in. Her hands, fumbling, found the fastening of the tunic and slipped it from Vu Côn’s shoulders, revealing golden-dark skin, just as Vu Côn’s own hands undid the clasps on Yên’s shirt. Vu Côn took off the slender sleeveless undershirt, slipping it over Yên’s head in one fluid movement. Wind whistled on Yên’s bare, exposed skin: wet cold creeping up her skin like fingers, gently stroking the hollow between her legs, her hips, her chest, circling her breasts until she shivered and gasped.
Vu Côn’s face lengthened and changed, the antlers sprouting from her head, her mouth now filled with glistening fangs, but the bulk of her scaled body remained human in shape. Her snout brushed Yên’s lips, again and again; it nipped at the nape, at the top of the neck until Yên’s entire being seemed to be inarticulate moans. The cold was rising to drown her: the sea and the storm encasing her, not numbing her limbs or fingers, but making everything sharp and sensitive, on the quivering edge of painful desire. She stroked Vu Côn’s antlers: a soft, silky touch, Vu Côn shuddering every time Yên’s fingers trailed upward.
She was on the bed with no memory of getting there, looking up as Vu Côn unfolded. The huge coils of Vu Côn’s tail held her legs, slimy and wet and oh ancestors she’d never hungered for anything so much as that touch, pinning her in place. Above her was the dragon, mane glistening against the infinitely receding ceiling; droplets of water were floating down to Yên’s bare chest like finger-strokes, a slow, agonizingly slow trail of icy fire from her navel to her breasts while within her desire crested, vast and terrible and utterly unbearable.
In the Vanishers' Palace Page 10