by Paula Guran
Laren shrugged. “As I have often said, love, that was a very long time ago.”
They were back inside the castle before darkness, for a final meal, a final night, a final song. They got no sleep that night, and Laren sang to her again just before dawn. It was not a very good song, though; it was an aimless, rambling thing about a wandering minstrel on some nondescript world. Very little of interest ever happened to the minstrel; Sharra couldn’t quite get the point of the song, and Laren sang it listlessly. It seemed an odd farewell, but both of them were troubled.
He left her with the sunrise, promising to change clothes and meet her in the courtyard. And sure enough, he was waiting when she got there, smiling at her, calm and confident. He wore a suit of pure white; pants that clung, a shirt that puffed up at the sleeves, and a great heavy cape that snapped and billowed in the rising wind. But the purple sun stained him with its shadow rays.
Sharra walked out to him and took his hand. She wore tough leather, and there was a knife in her belt, for dealing with the guardian. Her hair, jet-black with light-born glints of red and purple, blew as freely as his cape, but the dark crown was in place. “Good-bye, Laren,” she said. “I wish I had given you more.”
“You have given me enough. In all the centuries that come, in all the sun-cycles that lie ahead, I will remember. I shall measure time by you, Sharra. When the sun rises one day and its color is blue fire, I will look at it and say, ‘Yes, this is the first blue sun after Sharra came to me.’ ”
She nodded. “And I have a new promise. I will find Kaydar, someday. And if I free him, we will come back to you, both of us together, and we will pit my crown and Kaydar’s fires against all the darkness of the Seven.”
Laren shrugged. “Good. If I’m not here, be sure to leave a message,” he said. And then he grinned.
“Now, the gate. You said you would show me the gate.”
Laren turned and gestured at the shortest tower, a sooty stone structure Sharra had never been inside. There was a wide wooden door in its base. Laren produced a key.
“Here?” she said, looking puzzled. “In the castle?”
“Here,” Laren said. They walked across the courtyard, to the door. Laren inserted the heavy metal key and began to fumble with the lock. While he worked, Sharra took one last look around, and felt the sadness heavy on her soul. The other towers looked bleak and dead, the courtyard was forlorn, and beyond the high icy mountains was only an empty horizon. There was no sound but Laren working at the lock, and no motion but the steady wind that kicked up the courtyard dust and flapped the seven gray pennants that hung along each wall. Sharra shivered with sudden loneliness.
Laren opened the door. No room inside; only a wall of moving fog, a fog without color or sound or light. “Your gate, my lady,” the singer said.
Sharra watched it, as she had watched it so many times before. What world was next? she wondered. She never knew. But maybe in the next one, she would find Kaydar.
She felt Laren’s hand on her shoulder. “You hesitate,” he said, his voice soft.
Sharra’s hand went to her knife. “The guardian,” she said suddenly. “There is always a guardian.” Her eyes darted quickly round the courtyard.
Laren sighed. “Yes. Always. There are some who try to claw you to pieces, and some who try to get you lost, and some who try to trick you into taking the wrong gate. There are some who hold you with weapons, some with chains, some with lies. And there is one, at least, who tried to stop you with love. Yet he was true for all that, and he never sang you false.”
And with a hopeless, loving shrug, Laren shoved her through the gate.
Did she find him, in the end, her lover with the eyes of fire? Or is she searching still? What guardian did she face next?
When she walks at night, a stranger in a lonely land, does the sky have stars?
I don’t know. He doesn’t. Maybe even the Seven do not know. They are powerful, yes, but all power is not theirs, and the number of worlds is greater than even they can count.
There is a girl who goes between the worlds, but her path is lost in legend by now. Maybe she is dead, and maybe not. Knowledge moves slowly from world to world, and not all of it is true.
But this we know: In an empty castle below a purple sun, a lonely minstrel waits, and sings of her.
In Yoon Ha Lee’s story, the High Fleet of the Knifebird is still fighting the war that strategist Niristez promised to win. She has lost a match, but there is still a game—perhaps more than one—to play.
The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars
Yoon Ha Lee
The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. Light the color of fossils burns from the ships, and at certain hours, the sun casts shadows that mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations. It is said that when the tower’s sun finally darkens, the universe’s clocks will stop.
But the sun, however strange, is not why people make the labyrinthine journey to the tower. The tower guards the world’s hollow depths, in which may be found the universe’s games. Every game played among the universe’s peoples was once trapped in the world’s terrible underground passages, and every one was mined and bargained for by some traveler. It is for such a game that the exile Niristez comes here now, in a ship of ice and iron and armageddon engines.
This is the hand Niristez played long ago: The Ten of Theorems; the Knight of Hounds; the Nine of Chains, the bad-luck symbol she uses as a calling card; and she kept two cards hidden, but lost the round anyway.
Niristez carries the last two cards with her. They come from a deck made of coalescent paper, which will reveal the cards drawn when she chooses and not before. Today, the backs show the tower in abbreviated brushstrokes, like a needle of dark iron plunging into an eye. Coalescent cards are not known for their subtlety.
She may have lost that match, but it’s not the only game she’s playing, and this time she means to win.
The tower has a warden, or perhaps the warden has a tower. The warden’s name is Daechong. He is usually polite. It was one of the first lessons he learned.
Most people don’t first notice the warden when they meet him, or the rooms crowded with agate-eyed figurines, flowers of glass, cryptochips sliced into mosaics. They first notice the warden’s gun. It is made of living bone and barbed wire and smoke-silver axioms. It would have a stock of mother-of-pearl, if pearls were born from gangrenous stars. It has a long, lustrous barrel forged in a bomb’s hellheart. And along the barrel is an inscription in whatever language your heart answers to: I never miss.
When he is human-shaped, Daechong is modestly tall, with a narrow face and dark hair cut short. His hands move too quickly to be reassuring, even if he always keeps them in sight. He wears gray, although sometimes his definition of “gray” has more in common with the black static that you find on the other side of your eyelids.
Daechong has been chained to the tower since the tower came into existence. He remembers his first visitors. It took him very little time to understand that he couldn’t leave, and so he murdered them. After that, for a long time, he was alone. When more visitors started to arrive, he was very careful with them, having learned that silence is wearisome company.
Anyone who desires to descend into the world with its unmined games must persuade him to let them pass. Daechong is not recalcitrant, precisely, but he likes to challenge his visitors to games himself. It is possible, although not easy, to defeat him. Sometimes defeat carries a small penalty, sometimes a great one, according to his mood.
It is inadvisable to threaten him, and especially inadvisable to attempt to separate him from his gun. The gun admits no bullets and speaks no words of fire or fission. It gives forth no smoke, no sparks, no suppurating oil.
Yet the gun always hits what Daechong intends to shoot. Killing is one of the few pleasures available to him, and he indulges either as part of a wager or in self-defense. It doesn’t mat
ter whether the target is in front of him, or behind him, or in another galaxy, behind the ash-shroud of stars that failed to be born. Sometimes, when he fires, a quantum sentience shudders apart into spin-states pinned to forever zeros. Sometimes a city inverts itself, plunging its arches and cobweb skyroads into the earth, leaving its citizens to suffocate. The story goes that the sun-of-starships was Daechong’s response to some reckless admiral bent on conquering the tower, although Daechong refuses to say anything definite on the matter.
It has been a long time since Daechong feared anyone. When he learns that Niristez of the Nine of Chains has asked for an audience, fear is not what he feels. But after all this time, he is still capable of curiosity; he will not turn her away.
There is an old story you already know, and a variant on it that you have already guessed.
Take a chessboard, eight squares by eight squares, sixty-four in total. Play begins with the first square being paid for with a single death. On the second day, fill in the next square with two deaths. On the third day, four; on the fourth day, eight. The sequence continues in this manner. The question is when both parties will find the toll of deaths such that they can no longer stomach the price of play.
We use chess—with its pieces intimating knights and kings and castles, sword-crash wars of old—for convenience, although it could be anything else. And we restrict ourselves to powers of two for convenience as well, although the mathematics of escalation knows no such boundary.
Daechong waits for Niristez in one of the highest rooms of the tower. He doesn’t know what she looks like, and he declines to watch her enter by the door that will admit her but which will not allow him to leave. Besides, he can hear her footsteps wherever she is in the tower, or on the world. She has a militant reputation: he can tell that by the percussion of her boots.
This room contains musical instruments. He doesn’t know how to play any of them, but he can tune and maintain them. His current favorite is a flute made of pipe scavenged from some extinguished city’s scrap heap. There’s a great curving harp, a lithophone, two bells. On occasion, one of his visitors breaks an instrument, and then he burns up the fragments; that’s all.
The footsteps slow. She’s reached the room. The lights in the tower will have told her where to go. On occasion, some visitor strays, and then he has to fetch them out of the confusion of hallways and shadows. It is sometimes tempting to let them wander, but by now the habits of courtesy are strong.
Niristez knocks once, twice. Waits.
“The door is unlocked,” Daechong says.
He regards her thoughtfully as she enters the room. She is taller than he is, and her hair is like a banner. In the intolerable aeons of her exile, she has gone by many names, but Niristez is the one she prefers. It means I promise. The name is a lie, although most people know better than to mention it to her face. Once she had a reputation for always keeping her promises. Once she swore to win an unwinnable war. Then she fled her people, and the war has not, to this day, been won.
Her most notable feature, aside from her reputation, is not her height, or the gloves made from skinned fractals, or even the sword-of-treatises knotted at her side. It is her eyes, whose color cannot be discerned in any light but corpselight. In her eyes you can see a map forever drawing and redrawing itself, a map that knows where your flaws may be found, a map that knows how your desires may be drowned. Long ago, she was a strategist for the High Fleet of the Knifebird, and while no one now refers to her by her old rank, people remember what her eyes mean. Daechong isn’t concerned by them, terrible though they are. She will already have charted his greatest weakness, and she doesn’t need her unique form of vision to do so.
Niristez isn’t looking at his gun, which is easily within his reach. That isn’t saying much. No matter where it lies, the gun is always within his reach. But its presence is like a splinter of black dreaming, inescapable.
Niristez is, however, bearing a bottle of amber-green glass, with a cork whose eye stares unblinking at Daechong. “I thought,” she says dryly, “it would be ungracious if I didn’t bring a gift, considering that I am here to bargain for a favor.”
“It’s very considerate of you,” Daechong says. “Shall I open it here?”
Niristez shrugs. “It’s yours now, so you may as well suit yourself.”
He keeps glasses in a red-stained cabinet. She’s not the first person to bring him liquor. He picks out two spiraling flutes, with gold wire patterns reminiscent of inside-out automata and melting gears. It’s tempting to shoot the bottle open, but that would be showing off, so he picks the cork out with his fingers. He’s killed people by digging out their eyes; this isn’t so different.
The liquor effervesces and leaves querulous sparks in the air, spelling out hectic inequalities and the occasional exclamatory couplet. Daechong looks at it longingly. “Would you be offended if I burn it up?” he says. Anything for a taste of the world outside. “I can’t actually drink.”
“I can’t claim to be difficult to offend,” Niristez says, “but as I said, it’s yours now.” She takes a sip herself. The inequalities flare up and die down into first-order contradictions as they pass her lips.
Daechong taps the rim of the glass. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the entire glassful goes up in smoke the color of lamentations, sweet and thick, and he inhales deeply. “You must find my tastes predictable,” he says.
Niristez smiles, and shadows deepen in her eyes. “Let’s say it’s something we have in common.”
“You mentioned that you wished to bargain,” he says. “Might I ask what you’re looking for?” Ordinarily he would not be so direct, but Niristez has a reputation for impatience.
“I want what everyone wants who comes here,” Niristez says. “I want a game. But it’s not just a game.” It never is. “You know my reputation, I trust.”
“It would be hard to escape it, even living where I do,” Daechong says.
“On this world is the stratagem that will enable me to keep my promise.” Niristez’s eyes are very dark now, and her smile darker still. “I wish to buy the game that contains it from you. I’ve spent a great deal of time determining that this game must exist. It will win me the war of wars; it will let me redeem my name.”
Daechong taps the glass again. This time it chimes softly, like a bell of bullets. Some of the musical instruments reverberate in response. “I’m afraid that you are already losing my interest,” he says. “Games that admit an obvious dominant strategy tend not to be very interesting from the players’ point of view.” It’s difficult to be a warden of games and not feel responsible for the quality of the ones that he permits to escape into the outside world. “I could let you root around for it, but I assume you’re after a certain amount of guidance.”
Although he is not infallible, Daechong has an instinct for the passages. He knows where the richest strata are, where the games sought are likeliest to be found. When people bargain with him, it’s not simply access that they seek. Anyone can wander through the twisty passages, growing intoxicated by the combinatoric vapors. It’s another matter to have a decent chance of finding what they want.
“That’s correct,” Niristez says. “I have spent long enough gnawing at the universe’s laws and spitting out dead ends. I don’t intend to waste any more time now that I know what I’m after.” She leans forward. “I am sure that you will hear me out. Because what I offer you is your freedom.”
Daechong tilts his head. “It’s not the first time someone has made that claim, so forgive me for being skeptical.”
He cannot remember ever setting foot outside the tower; it has a number of windows almost beyond reckoning, which open and close at his desire, and which reveal visions terrible and troubling. Poetry-of-malice written into the accretion disks of black holes. Moons covered with sculptures of violet-green fungus grown in the hollowed-out bodies of prisoners of war. Planets with their seas boiled dry and the fossils bleached upon alkaline shores. These an
d other things he can see just by turning his head and wishing it so.
Yet he thinks, sometimes, of what it would be like to walk up stairs that lead to a plaza ringed by pillars of rough-hewn stone, or perhaps gnarled trees, and not the tower’s highest floor with its indiscriminate collection of paintings, tapestries, and curious statuettes that croak untrue prophecies. (More gifts. He wouldn’t dream of getting rid of them.) What it would be like to travel to a gas giant with its dustweave rings, or to a fortress of neutronium whispers, or to a spot far between stars that is empty except for the froth of quantum bubbling and the microwave hiss. What it would be like to walk outside and look up at the sky, any sky. There isn’t a sky in the universe whose winds would scour him, whose rains would poison him, whose stars would pierce his eyes. But his immunity does him no good here.
“Call my bluff, then,” she says, her smile growing knife-sweet. “You like a challenge, don’t you? You won’t see me here again if you turn me down. If nothing else, it’s a moment’s diversion. Let’s play a game, you and I. If I win, you will tell me where to find my stratagem. If I lose, I will tell you how you can unshackle yourself from this tower—and you can set me whatever penalty you see fit.”
“I don’t remember the very beginning of my existence,” Daechong says softly. “But I was made of pittances of mercy and atrocities sweeter than honey. I was made of carrion calculations and unpolished negations. They say your shadow is shaped like massacres, Niristez. You haven’t killed a fraction of the people that I have. Are you sure you want to offer this? I am not accustomed to losing, especially when the stakes matter to me.”
He doesn’t speak of the penalties he extracts when people lie to him. For all the dreadful things he’s done, he has always respected honesty.
“I am sure,” she says.
“The High Fleet of the Knifebird is still fighting the war you promised to win. It would not be difficult for me to shoot the key players into cinders.”