In the Vanishers' Palace

by Aliette de Bodard

  His limbs hung crooked and out of shape. His skin had been marred by burns before. Now it seemed to be an ocean of suppurating sores, sheening a sickly yellow in the light below the spheres. His duong self pulsed, weakly, within him: he was almost all âm now, and in terrible pain.

  “You,” he said, to Yên. “Younger aunt. I hadn’t expected to meet you again.” His voice was no longer pleasant and low, but raucous. Damaged vocal cords. But no, that wasn’t just damage. That was someone peeled raw, whittled away until only pain and fear remained.

  Liên hung in Gia Canh’s grasp like a broken thing, arms and legs at impossible angles, skin darkening to the color of bruises. Gia Canh’s hands were wrapped around the curve of her jaw. Just one move downward, and he’d snap her neck. At his feet, shadows pooled, words drawn from the trees, moving and shifting, opening and closing like flowers in a frenzy to blossom and die. “Let go of her,” Yên said.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do,” Yên said, slowly, carefully. “You’re badly hurt. You’re angry. There’s no need to drag her into this.”

  “Drag her? They dragged me into this. They made this. They—” Gia Canh’s voice was shaking. “They broke me.”

  “You agreed to it!” Yên said, and then realized it was exactly the wrong thing to say. “Look,” she said, extending her arms. She wanted Thông to be here, or Vu Côn. Someone who’d know what they were doing. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, but do you think this is going to make anything better?”

  “Nothing is going to make me feel better.” Gia Canh’s voice was feverish. “You don’t understand, do you. They’ll put me back in the beds. They’ll stuff me back in with the sleepers. An eternity of being in stasis, and nothing to take away the pain. I can’t. I just—” He shook Liên as if she were a thing. She moved with him, limp and completely, jarringly relaxed. Yên fought the urge to run and snatch her from Gia Canh’s grasp. She wasn’t going to be fast enough. “You don’t understand. I want to go out. I want to see the outside. Trees and rivers and places that make sense, not this—this monstrosity of palace!”

  Yên spread her hands again. “I can’t open a gate. She can’t either. You know this.”

  Liên still wasn’t moving, but color was flowing back to her face. Yên saw her eyes open, for a fraction of a heartbeat only, before they closed again. But it was because she held them shut, not because she was unconscious again. Playing dead, and likely as drained as Yên felt.

  “I don’t care. Get me out of the palace,” Gia Canh said, and he sounded almost as though he were pleading now. Lips clenched, anger and fear and longing all tied together. “Away from the beds. Get me out, or I’ll kill her.”

  Yên didn’t have much. Magic, now almost spent. She was exhausted, body and mind, and none of the spells she’d read in the book would come into her thoughts, everything blurred and unattainable. No. She had nothing that could help.

  And yet. And yet, if she did nothing, Liên was going to die. She’d seen patients like Gia Canh often enough, and she knew that pain had taken him far enough that he’d do anything to make it cease. Do something, and do it now.

  But she had nothing, and no one....

  No.

  That wasn’t true.

  She had Liên.

  “Liên,” she said, slowly, softly, knowing that Liên could hear every word. She spread her hands, bracing herself to run. He could snap her neck so easily, but deep down, he had to know that it was irrevocable. Once it was done, he had no bargaining power left.

  “Stop,” Gia Canh said. “Move back.” His hands tightened. Liên convulsed, starting to choke.

  “Change!” Yên screamed at Liên, and ran.

  Everything seemed to happen at once. Gia Canh’s hands tightened further, pressing down so strongly, they went white. A scream, and Yên realized, halfway there, that it was hers, had always been hers. A snap of broken bones—no, there wasn’t. A clink of scales, and instead of Liên, Gia Canh was now holding a smooth, serpentine shape. Yên covered the rest of the distance while Gia Canh’s brief shock wore off. Liên was writhing in her other shape, trying to wriggle out of the hands that still kept her enclosed. Yên reached both of them, and flush with her momentum, bore them both to the ground. A confused scuffle, Yên’s hands finally closing around Gia Canh’s hands, tearing them away from Liên’s neck. Liên, slithering away, leaving Yên trying to fend off hands and feet that seemed to be everywhere.

  “Teacher!” Liên’s voice. Yên batted away a hand that tried to gouge out her eye, and tried to find a purchase. Something. Anything. Gia Canh kept slipping away from her. Whenever Yên managed to find a purchase, Gia Canh would slip or tear out of it.

  And then the ground shook, beneath her. “Let go of her,” Thông’s voice said, far away.

  Something grabbed Yên and pushed her upward, away from Gia Canh. His hands slid away, grabbed her wrists, and wouldn’t let go.

  “I said, ‘Let go’.’ The anger in Thông’s voice was unmistakable, but it felt wrong, too, as if something were pushing nails into Yên’s ears. “Leave us alone.”

  Yên and Gia Canh held each other. He was on his knees, struggling to push himself up. The words from the trees pooled under his feet, shifting and changing, growing darker and darker, and the pressure on Yên’s wrists stronger and stronger—until something snapped, and Gia Canh let go of her, tumbling toward the ground, breathing heavily. Under him, the earth was dark. No. It wasn’t darkness, but his blood, his fluids. It was clinging to him, drinking him dry: all that remained of his duong first, and then the âm, turning his skin from the grey color of the rotten moon to a featureless translucency, like the wings of a butterfly’s corpse. His face turned upward, but he wasn’t staring at Yên, but at something beyond her. “You,” he whispered, and the pronoun he used was archaic, one Yên had read in books but never heard. “The masters...” His voice dipped and sank, and became inaudible as he pitched facedown on the ground, and didn’t rise again, his body shriveled and dried, like the husk of a man.

  The masters.

  No no no no.

  Yên rose, shaking, to face Thông.

  They didn’t look like a dragon at all. Why had Yên ever believed they were one? Their hair streamed around them like the mane of a lion, with the polished shine of lacquer. Their face, elongated and stretched, closed on a fanged snout, but the eyes were too high and too close, stretched into oval shapes rather than almonds. The scales were the color of rusted buildings, except that they could be seen faintly behind the translucence of the sclera. The body was serpentine, but it had too many arms and legs, all sharp claws and disjointed fingers; and all of it kept shimmering, as though not quite in focus, changing shapes, sprouting more scales, more legs and more arms. And the antlers...the antlers were the branches of the trees around her, sharp and frightening, as if someone had distilled the essence of knives and razors into thin lines.

  “You’re—” She wanted to say they were another spirit, something in Mother’s storybook, a ky lân or one of the myriad spirits that must still be walking the earth. The words remained stuck in her throat. Because she knew in her bones, in her lungs, in her guts—knew, just as her ancestors had once known—she knew what she was facing.

  Vanisher. They were a Vanisher.

  Liên. Liên was behind them, except she wasn’t the woman Yên had taught, but a sharp monstrosity: a smaller, more compact shape with scales shining oily and wrong in the gardens’ light, antlers like knives’ blades, rusted with dried and blackened blood, shimmering and changing and alternating between dizzying shapes, each of them as twisted and wrong as the previous one.

  She stood next to Vu Côn. The dragon was in human shape, watching Thông with that same dawning horror in her eyes. No, that wasn’t it. There was wariness in her eyes, but no surprise.

  “You killed him,” Vu Côn said.

  “The palace did.” Thông’s voice was still too resonant and deep, that same sense of wrongn
ess that shook Yên to the core, and now she knew why.

  “Child...” Vu Côn was weeping now.

  Thông seemed to shiver and shrink, and the towering shape that held Yên pinned in place became that of a person again: the same genderless face with the flowing robes of a scholar, and the long, disheveled hair. “Lil’ sis...”

  Liên had shrunk too, back to her human shape, though the shadow of antlers remained behind her head, flickering in and out of existence with a faint hiss, as if they were puncturing the dome’s air over and over. “I’m all right,” Liên said. She didn’t sound like she was.

  Vanisher.

  They were both Vanishers.

  And Vu Côn stared at Thông with only worried affection, and held Liên against her like a mother would hold a child, with no hint of rejection. “You knew,” Yên said, shaking.

  Vu Côn stared at her, and said nothing.

  She’d known they were Vanishers. She’d known Yên was sick. She—she hadn’t said anything. She—

  “Come,” Vu Côn said. “Please, lil’ sis.”

  It should have made her happy, that form of address. From lover to lover, from friend to friend, from equal to equal.

  She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. Everything was folding and tightening around her, and darkness was stealing in, as inexorably as Gia Canh’s am and duong had been drained out of him. How could she trust Vu Côn to examine her? How could she trust her with anything?

  “No,” Yên said. “Stay away from me. Stop hiding things. Stop making the decisions for me. Just stop.” And, before she could think, she started to run. Stumbling at first, and then gaining speed, weaving her way between saplings and trees, not daring to look back. It was stupid and pathetic. They might be exhausted, but all they had to do was shift to their other shapes, to flow, liquid and elegant and graceful, between those sharp, unnatural trees. Or just to run. Every breath in her lungs felt like fire, and any moment now she was going to cough again, and have to stop lest she choke...

  She couldn’t possibly hope to escape.

  On her wrist, the words Vu Côn had drawn blazed, sharp enough to burn. Constricting her. Imprisoning her. Making decisions for her.

  Ahead, the trees tinkled: those impossible fruit floating below sharp, unforgiving branches, and the surface of the spheres, overhead. A wave of homesickness rose in her like knives, tearing her apart. She wanted to be home. To be in the small streets of the village, where she knew the shapes of all the houses, the bends of the river, the gates of the gardens and mansions. To her and Mother’s small, crooked house, away from the village’s life. To the smell of garlic and jasmine rice, not the odd, strong smells in the kitchens, everything familiar honed and concentrated into sickening.

  Behind her, the wind rising, and Vu Côn’s voice, getting closer, “There’s nowhere you can run. Lil’ sis.” Broken and pleading.

  The pain on her wrist was getting unbearable now. Shaking it hadn’t changed anything, and she was now biting her lip not to cry out. Blood flooded her mouth. Yên lifted her hand with the word, rubbed it against her lip, again and again. Pain crested, ebbed away again. She drew a deep, trembling breath. Her throat hurt, and the air didn’t ease the pain in any way. She coughed, again and again—slowing down to an agonizing crawl, as the world folded itself again and again around her, everything blurring—the trees and the spheres and the grass that shone like bladed metal—raised her hand, again, to her mouth, as if she could rub away the constriction in her throat and lungs.

  Ancestors, please. I just want to go home. Please.

  “Lil’ sis.” Do not look back, do not look back.

  Please.

  Blood smeared the words on her wrist. She felt it like a red-hot brand on her skin, a jolt that sent a scream tumbling out of her lungs. She pulled it away from her lips, staring dazedly at the throbbing surface. The words, blurred almost beyond recognition, winked, as words in the book had once winked at her.

  Scholar. Return. Threads. Fated to meet again.

  Her hands moved, tracing them in a daze. Something tore, within her, like the tug she’d once felt when looking for the twins, except a hundred, a thousand times as strong, as if her guts were suddenly pulled through her piece by piece.

  And the world tore in answer.

  Scholar. Return. Threads. Fated to meet again.

  Ahead, a dark slit appeared between two of the trees, widened to become a door. And, waiting on the threshold, the dark presence she’d felt twice before, a twisted mass of claws and teeth waiting to claim her. To tear her apart and rend her.

  It looked like Liên, like Thông, like a smaller and pathetic version of what she’d seen in the gardens. There was no intelligence or sentience in its gaze: merely hate and malice and hunger. Its hair was short and almost shorn, its face so thin there was only one eye, and a mouth full of entirely too many fangs. The body stretched like a snake’s, like a dragon’s, dozens of legs sprouting out of it.

  A construct. A gatekeeper. A chimera the Vanishers had made to guard their doors, to frighten humans and spirits long after they’d left the earth. A being of sheer spite that lived to kill and maim and shed blood.

  It didn’t frighten her, not anymore. Everything she feared was at her back now. Bleeding, her breath burning, Yên ran toward the door she’d just opened, weaving her agonizingly slow way toward the waiting shape.

  It grabbed her as she passed, hissing like a maddened snake, their claws raking the side of her body. Nothing would go through.

  Yên punched it, again and again. Blood streamed down her hands, her fingers. Pain was an abstraction now, a thing that existed in some other world beyond the haze. “You’re. Not. Stopping. Me.” Again, and again, as it held fast. Its claws dug into her arms, sought her chest, her face, her neck. She punched it again, and it fell, crying out.

  Scholar. Return. Threads. Fated to meet again.

  Yên tore herself away from its flailing limbs, and walked, slowly and shakily, deeper into the gate. She should have run. She couldn’t hope for more than a few stolen moments. She should have run....

  She stumbled, and then there was nothing but an endless fall into darkness.

  EIGHT

  m and duong

  Vu Côn found Yên’s body in the gardens. Behind her, the gate she’d opened was slowly drawing closed again. The keeper on the threshold was gone, faded as soon as Thông and Liên had approached: not keen on facing its makers or what remained of them.

  Vanishers.

  If she closed her eyes, she’d still hear Thông’s voice, commanding the palace to obey them. She could still feel the words ringing within her, reminding her of times when these words had held her in place, when they’d lashed out like whips, drawing blood like red mist on the floor. She’d still see Liên, drawing herself up, the oily scales on her skin fading away, shivering and weeping and incoherent with fear.

  Not now. She couldn’t afford to break, not now.

  There were things to be done, first.

  Yên was pale, her skin almost translucent. She was cold to the touch, almost all duong and no âm, weighing next to nothing as Vu Côn lifted her. She hung, limp, in Vu Côn’s embrace. Vu Côn had briefly taken her pulse, and felt only the faintest trace of a rhythm: an odd, syncopated one she couldn’t quite place, but that was most definitely not a normal heartbeat.

  “Here,” Thông said.

  Vu Côn said nothing and walked on, her feet ringing on the polished metal of the floor.

  “We can help,” Liên said.

  Vu Côn shook her head. She didn’t speak again until Yên was lying on a steel table in her laboratory, wrapped in one of the blankets Liên had embroidered, back when she’d still been trying her hand at cloth. The lopsided birds glared at her as she sat down.

  “She should be in stasis,” Thông said. They’d used the laboratory’s foundry bowl to brew some tea. They handed a cup to Vu Côn, and another one to Liên, before they settled down with their own, crouching on t
heir haunches on the floor, watching her.

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Vu Côn said. She needed to do what she’d said she would. To examine Yên, properly, figure out what was wrong with her, how to fix her, if she could fix her at all. If she could fix the deeper wrongs: the merciless moment when Yên had turned away from her with a betrayed look on her face and run toward the open gate, fighting the gatekeeper she’d so feared rather than come back to Vu Côn.

  You knew.

  Stay away from me. Stop making the decisions for me.

  “You should be in your room,” Vu Côn said. Everyone was dancing around the subject: the unspoken words, the unvoiced fears.

  Liên’s laughter was bitter. “Locked doors? Do you think they’ll hold us anymore?”

  Thông was staring at their tea.

  Fine. If no one was talking about it... Vu Côn was feeling raw and exposed, but she’d never shirked from her duty. “You killed a patient,” she said to Thông.

  “Who was about to kill Liên. And Teacher Yên.” Thông’s voice was distant, toneless. Shock, or did they simply not care? Did the act of taking a life mean as little to them as it had meant to their genitors?

  How much had she failed, as a parent, as a protector of the world?

  Liên said, finally, “The Sorrow of Monkey and Rooster. He was contagious, Mother. You kill the infected.”

  “Yes.” Vu Côn forced herself to remain icy cold, because if she paused for even as much as a moment, she’d feel again the pain her masters had once inflicted on her. “Do you think this was the same?”

  Liên opened her mouth, closed it again.

  Thông drained their cup in a single gulp. “Of course not. This is the palace. You kill the infected in the outside world, to prevent further contagion, or those who can no longer bear the pain and ask to die. Here, there’s no one they can contaminate. We put the sick in stasis.” Their voice had the singsong accent of a lesson learned by heart.

  “He didn’t want to go into stasis,” Liên said.