by Yoon Ha Lee
Her uncle patted her hand and smiled. “Remember the cycle of elements, little one.”
She thought about it: metal cut wood, wood split earth, earth drank water, water doused fire, and—“Fire melts metal,” she said.
“Indeed,” he said. “The ashworlds abound in metal, mined from the asteroid belts. Therefore their dragons are built of metal. We must use fire to defeat metal.”
“But wood burns,” Ling Yun said, wondering, despite all her lessons and the habits of obedience, if her uncle was right in the head. She turned the glider around in her hands, testing the paper wings. They flexed under her touch.
“So does the phoenix,” her uncle said.
Ling Yun squinted, trying to reconcile fire-defeats-metal with fire-burns-wood and fire-goes-down-in-flames.
Taking pity on her, her uncle added, “The phoenix is a symbol that came to us by conquest, from the southern spicelands.” He laughed at her wide eyes. “Oh, yes—do you think that for thousands and thousands of years, the empire has never been conquered? You’ll find all the old, ugly stories in the history books, of the Boar Banner and the Tiger Banner, the woman who brought down the wall, the Outsider Dynasty with its great fleets . . . ”
Ling Yun took note of the things that he had mentioned so she could look them up later.
“Come, Ling Yun,” her uncle said. “Why don’t we go outside and test the glider?”
She sensed that he was preventing her from asking further questions. But if he didn’t want her to know, why had he told her about the phoenix in the first place?
Still, she loved the way the glider felt in her hand, and her uncle didn’t visit very often. “All right,” she said.
They went into the courtyard with its broad flagstones and pond, and spoke no more of the elements.
Ling Yun started composing the suite on the wuxian qin, the five-stringed zither. She had brought her favorite one with her. The military was accustomed to transporting fragile instruments, thanks to the Phoenix Corps, whose gliders had to be attuned to the elements.
For suicidal, dark-haired Wu Wen Zhi, Ling Yun wrote a disjunct melody with tense articulations, reflecting the mixed power and turmoil she saw in the girl’s white dragon. White and red, bone and blood, death and fortune. The aide had said Wen Zhi had killed six people since landing in the empire. The dragon had nine markings. Ling Yun trusted the dragon. Wen Zhi did not strike her as the subtle type. The aide’s response to this observation was a pained laugh.
Ko’s drawing was more of a sketch, in a relaxed, spontaneous style that Ling Yun’s calligraphy tutor would have approved of. The colors worried her, however: black and grey, no sign of color, a sense of aching incompleteness. Yet the reports that came every morning noted Ko’s unshakable good cheer and cooperativeness. Ling Yun felt a strange affinity to what she knew of the boy. She had no illusions that she understood what it was like to be a killer, but she knew something about hiding part of yourself from the outside world. She gave Ko’s piece a roving melody with ever-shifting rhythms and playful sliding tones.
Mesketalioth’s blue dragon was the most militant-looking of the five, at least to Ling Yun’s untrained eye. Ko’s dragon, if you looked at it from a distance, might pass as a picture of a god out of legend, not a war automaton. Mesketalioth’s diagram included not only the dragon, but cross-sections and insets showing the mechanisms of the repeating crossbows and the way the joints were put together. The aide assured her that it was a known type of ashworlder dragon, and provided Ling Yun with explanations from the engineers. Ling Yun thought that the aide was trying to be reassuring for her benefit, and failing. For Mesketalioth, she wrote a military air in theme and variations, shadows falling in upon themselves, the last note an infinitely subtle vibrato informed by the pulse in the finger holding down the string.
Periet was the best painter of the five. She had drawn her dragon out of scale so it looked no larger than a large cat, its head tilted to watch two butterflies, one sky-blue and the other star-spotted black. It was surrounded by flowers and gears and neatly organized mechanics’ tools. Ling Yun thought of Shang Yuan, with its shattered lanterns and ashes, wind blowing through streets inhabited only by grasshoppers and mice. No one had attempted to rebuild the City of Lanterns. The song she wrote for Periet had an utterly conventional pentatonic melody. The countermelody, on the other hand, was sweet, logical, and in a foreign mode.
As for the last of them, Li Cheng Guo had drawn a flamboyant red dragon with golden eyes. Ling Yun wondered if he meant some mockery of the Phoenix General by this. On the other hand, red did indicate good fortune. The gliders were always painted in fire-colors, while the dragons came in every color imaginable. Obligingly, Ling Yun wrote a rapid, skirling piece for Cheng Guo, martial in its motifs, but hostile where Mesketalioth’s was subtle.
Ling Yun slept surrounded by the five assassins’ pictures. She was disturbed to realize that, no matter where she rearranged them on the walls, she always woke up facing Periet’s butterfly dragon.
Careful inquiry revealed the assassins’ sleeping arrangements: in separate cells, although they were permitted in a room together for the purposes of lessons—probably a euphemism for interrogation sessions—and the general’s game. Ling Yun asked how they kept the assassins from killing their guards or tutors.
“After the first few incidents, they swore to the Phoenix General that they would abide by the terms of the game,” the aide said.
“And you trust them?” Ling Yun said.
“They’ve sworn,” the aide said emphatically. “And if they break oath, he’ll have them executed.”
Sooner or later, she was going to have to speak with the Phoenix General, if he didn’t demand a report from her first. She presumed that Phoenix Command had other precautions in place.
Two weeks into the assignment, Ling Yun said to the aide, “I’d like to speak with the assassins.”
“If you draw up a list of questions,” she said, “our interrogators can obtain the answers you want.”
“In person,” Ling Yun said.
“That’s unwise for a whole list of reasons I’m sure you’ve already thought of.”
“Surely one musician more or less is expendable in the general’s game,” Ling Yun said, keeping all traces of irony from her voice. She doubted the aide was fooled.
Sure enough, the aide said, with exasperation, “Do you know why we requested you, Musician Xiao? When we could have asked for the empress’s personal troupe and had them do the general’s bidding?”
“I had wondered, yes.”
“Most musicians at your level of mastery have, shall we say, a philosophical bent of mind.”
Ling Yun could think of a number of less flattering expressions. “I’ve heard that criticism,” she said noncommittally.
The aide snorted. “Of course you have. We wanted you because you have a reputation for pragmatism. Or did you think it would go unnoticed? The psychological profiles for the empire’s musicians aren’t completely worthless.”
“Will you trust that I have a pragmatic reason for wanting to talk to the assassins, then?” Ling Yun said. “Tell them it’s part of the game. Surely that isn’t far from the truth. It’s one thing for me to study your game transcripts, but I want to know what the assassins are like as people. I’m no interrogator, but I am accustomed to listening to the hidden timbres of the human voice. I might hear something useful.”
“We will consider it,” the aide said.
“Thank you,” Ling Yun said, certain she had won.
The first time Ling Yun tuned a glider to the elements with her music, she was shaking so badly that her fingers jerked on her zither’s peg and she broke a string.
Ling Yun’s tutor looked down at her with imperturbable eyes. “Perhaps the flute—” he suggested. Many of the Phoenix Corps’ musicians preferred the bamboo flute for its association with birdsong, and therefore the heavens.
Ling Yun had come prepared with an extra se
t of strings. “I will try again,” she said. Instead of trying to block the presence of the pilot and engineers from her mind, she raised her head and studied them. The pilot was a woman scarcely older than Ling Yun herself, who met Ling Yun’s gaze with a quirk to her mouth, as if in challenge. The engineers had an expression of studied politeness; they had been through this before.
Carefully, mindful of the others’ time but also mindful of the necessity of precision, Ling Yun replaced the broken string. The new one was going to be temperamental. She would have to play to compensate.
After tuning the zither to her satisfaction, she breathed in and breathed out several times. Then she began “The Crane Flies Home,” the traditional blessing-piece. At first, the simple task of getting her fingers through the piece occupied her.
Then, Ling Yun became aware of the glider responding. It was a small, scarred creature, with gouges in the wood from past battles, and it thrummed almost imperceptibly whenever she played the strings that corresponded to wood and fire. Remembering her tutor’s advice not to neglect the other strings, she coaxed the glider with delicate harmonics, reminding it that it would have to face water, fight metal, return to earth.
Only when she had finished did she realized that her fingers were bleeding, despite her calluses. That hadn’t happened in years. She blotted the blood against the hem of her jacket. Water feeds wood, she thought.
The engineers, who had their own training in music, checked the glider over. They consulted with her tutor, using terminology she didn’t understand. The tutor turned to her and nodded once, smiling.
“You haven’t even flown it,” Ling Yun said, bewildered. The winch was all the way down the airfield. “How do you know I tuned it properly?”
“I listened,” he said simply. “It must fly in spirit before it can fly in truth. You have achieved this.”
All her dreams that night were of gliders arcing into the air, launched by winch and changing into birds at the moment of release: herons and cranes and sparrows, hawks and geese and swallows, but not a single red-and-gold phoenix.
The five pilots—Ling Yun wasn’t sure when she had started thinking of them as dragon pilots rather than assassins, a shift she hoped to keep from Phoenix Command—wore clothes that fit them indifferently. Dark-haired Wu Wen Zhi stood stiffly, her arms crossed. Ko, the boy with the braid, was smiling. Mesketalioth, whose face was calmly expressionless, had his hands clasped behind his back. The scars at his temple were startlingly white. Periet’s blue eyes were downcast, although Ling Yun knew better than to mistake the girl’s demeanor for submissiveness. Li Cheng Guo, the tallest, stood farthest from the others and scowled openly.
“I’m—”
“Another interrogator,” Wen Zhi said. The girl’s voice was high, precise, and rapid. It put Ling Yun in mind of stone chimes.
“Yes and no,” Ling Yun said. “I have questions, but I’m not a soldier; do you see me wearing a uniform?” She had worn a respectable grey dress, the kind she would have worn to speak with a client.
Wen Zhi grabbed Ling Yun’s wrist and twisted. Ling Yun bit back a cry. “It’s all right!” she said quickly, knowing that the guards were monitoring the situation.
The girl ran her hand over Ling Yun’s fingertips, lingering over the calluses. “You’re an engineer.”
“Also yes and no,” Ling Yun said. “I’m a musician.” Wen Zhi must not play the zither, or she would have noticed immediately that Ling Yun’s fingernails were slightly long to facilitate plucking the strings. Ling Yun could practically hear the aide’s reproof, but what was she supposed to do? Deny the obvious?
Ko tossed his head. “The correct response, Wen Zhi,” he said, “is to say, ‘Hello, I am honored to meet you.’ Then to give your name, although I’m sure you already know ours, madam.” His Imperial was startlingly good, despite the broadened vowels. “I’m Ko.”
“I’m Xiao Ling Yun,” she said gravely. Did they not use surnames on Arani? Or Straken Okh or Kiris, for that matter?
The others gave their names. Mesketalioth had a quiet, clipped voice, distantly polite. Periet called herself by that name. She had a pleasant alto and spoke with a heavier accent than the others. Li Cheng Guo’s Imperial was completely idiomatic; he addressed Ling Yun with a directness that was just short of insulting.
Ling Yun wondered if any of them had vocal training, then felt silly. Of course they did. Not in the populist styles of their homes, surely, but in the way that all glider pilots did, the ability to hold a tune and the more important ability to listen for a glider’s minute reverberations. What would it be like to write for their voices?
The question was moot, as she doubted the aide would stand for any such endeavor.
On a whim, Ling Yun had brought her uncle’s toy glider with her. Keeping her motions slow, she drew it from her jacket.
“Pretty,” Periet said. “Does it fly?” She was smiling.
Mesketalioth opened his hands toward Ling Yun. She gave the toy glider to him. He studied its proportions, and she was suddenly chilled. Could he draw diagrams of gliders, too?
“Yes, it flies,” Mesketalioth said. “It’s never been tuned, has it?”
“No,” Ling Yun said. “It’s just a toy.” Surely the adolescents had had toys in childhood. What kinds of lives had they led in the ashworlds, constantly under assault from glider bombing runs?
“Even a toy can be a weapon,” Cheng Guo said with a sneer. “I would have had it tuned. Especially if you’re already a musician.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Cheng Guo,” Ko said, “what’s it going to do? Drop little origami bombs?” He made flicking motions with his fingers. Cheng Guo glowered at him, and Ko only grinned back.
They sounded like the students she had attended classes with, as an adolescent herself, fractious and earnest. However, unlike those fellow students, they carried themselves alertly. She noticed that, despite standing around her, they deliberately left her path to the exit unblocked.
“I have permission to ask you some questions,” Ling Yun said. She wanted them to be clear on her place in the hierarchy, which was to say, low.
“Are you part of the game?” Wen Zhi asked.
Ling Yun wondered if the girl ever smiled, and was struck by a sudden urge to ruffle that short hair. The thought of the nine red marks on Wen Zhi’s dragon made the urge entirely resistible. “No,” she said, afraid that they would refuse to talk to her further.
“Good,” Cheng Guo said shortly. “You’re not prepared.” He trained his glower on Ling Yun, as though it would cause her to go away. It seemed to her that ignoring her would be much more effective.
“What does it feel like to kill?” Ling Yun said.
Ko had sauntered over to the wall across from Cheng Guo and was leaning against it, worrying at the fraying end of his braid. They hadn’t given him a clip for his hair, and the aide had said that he refused to get it cut. Ko gave Ling Yun a shrewd look and said, “You could ask that of your own soldiers, couldn’t you?”
“I’d know how they felt, but I’m interested in you,” she said.
“Ask what you mean,” Periet said. Her tone had shifted, just below the surface. Ling Yun wondered if the others could hear that undercurrent of ferocity. “You’re interested in how we’re different.”
“All right,” Ling Yun said. “Yes.” It cost her nothing to be agreeable, a lesson she had applied all her life.
“Don’t listen to her,” Wen Zhi said to the others. “She’s trying to get inside our heads.”
“Well, yes,” Ling Yun said mildly. “But the longer you talk to me, the longer you draw out the game, the longer you live.”
Mesketalioth raised his chin. His scars went livid. “Living isn’t the point.”
“Then what is?” she asked.
With no warning—at least, not to Ling Yun’s slow senses—Mesketalioth snapped the glider between his hands.
Ling Yun stared at him, fists pressed to her sides. Her eyes stun
g. She had known, theoretically, that she might lose the glider. What had she been thinking, bringing it into a room full of assassins? Assassins who knew the importance of symbols and would think of a glider as a hostile one, at that. She just hadn’t expected them to break this reminder of her childhood.
It’s a toy, she reminded herself. She could make another herself if she had to.
How much had these children lost, before coming here?
Periet’s blue eyes met Ling Yun’s gaze. The girl made a tiny nod.
“ ‘Even a toy can be a weapon,’ ” Mesketalioth said, without inflection. “There are many kinds of weapons.”
“Hey,” Ko said to Ling Yun. He sounded genuinely concerned. “We can fix it. They’ll let us have some glue, won’t they? Besides, your general likes you. He’d have our heads if we didn’t.”
I’ve never even met the Phoenix General, Ling Yun thought, chewing her lip before she caught herself. “How many people did you take down?” she asked, trying to remind herself that these children were assassins and killers.
Ko rebraided the ends of his hair. “I keep a tally in my head,” he said.
“He’s killed sixteen gliders in the game,” Wen Zhi said contemptuously. “That’s information that you should have gotten from studying the game.”
“You’re still losing territory,” Ling Yun said, remembering the latest report. “How do you expect to win?”
Cheng Guo laughed from his corner. “As if we’d tell you? Please.”
General, Ling Yun thought, how in the empress’s name is this a good idea? She hoped she wasn’t the only musician they had working on the problem. The whole conversation was giving her a jittery sense of urgency.
“Indeed,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Leave the glider,” Ko said. “We’ll fix it. You’ll see.”
“If you like,” Ling Yun said, wondering what her uncle would say if he knew. Well, she didn’t have to tell him. “Perhaps I’ll see you another time, if they permit it.”
Periet touched Ling Yun’s hand lightly. Ling Yun half-turned. “Yes?”
Periet said, “There should be six, not five. But you’ve always known that, haven’t you?”