by Yoon Ha Lee
The hairs on the back of Ling Yun’s neck prickled.
Periet smiled again.
Ling Yun thought of the two butterflies in Periet’s dragon-portrait, and wondered if dragons ate butterflies. Or musicians, for that matter. “It was pleasant meeting you all,” she said, because her parents had raised her to be polite.
Wu Wen Zhi and Li Cheng Guo ignored her, but the others murmured their goodbyes.
Shaking her head, Ling Yun made the signal that the guards had taught her, and the door opened. None of the assassins made an attempt to escape. It scared her.
Ling Yun was in the midst of revising Mesketalioth’s piece in tablature when the summons came. She knew it had to be the Phoenix General, because the soldiers would not disrupt her concentration for anything else. But Ling Yun used to practice composing in adverse circumstances: sitting in a clattering train; at a street puppet theatre while children shouted out their favorite characters’ names; during tedious parties when she had had too much rice wine. She didn’t compose courtly lays or ballads, but cheerful ditties that she could hum in the bath where no one else had to know. But the aides had certain ideas about how musicians worked, and it was hardly for her to overturn those ideas.
The aide asked, “Will you need your zither?”
“That depends,” Ling Yun said. “Will he want me to play what I have so far?”
“No,” the aide said, a little hesitantly. “He’ll make arrangements when he wants to hear a performance, I’m sure.”
Surreptitiously, Ling Yun curled and uncurled her fingers to limber them up, just in case.
The aide escorted her to a briefing room painted with Phoenix Command’s flame-and-spear on the door. She slid the door open with a surprising lack of ceremony. “General,” she called out, “Musician Xiao is here.” She patted Ling Yun’s shoulder. “Go on. You’ll be fine.”
Ling Yun stepped through the minimum distance possible and knelt in full obeisance, catching a glimpse of the Phoenix General on the way down. He had grey-streaked hair and a strong-jawed profile.
“Enough,” the general said. “Let’s not waste time on ceremony.”
Slowly, she rose, trying to interpret his expression. He hasn’t heard your work yet, she reminded herself, so he can’t hate it already.
“Sir,” she said, dipping in a bow despite herself.
“You’ve been too well trained, I see,” the general said wryly. “I swear, it’s true of every musician I meet. Sit down.”
Ling Yun had no idea what to say to this, so she sat cross-legged at the table and settled for looking helpful.
“What dreams do you dream?” the general said. His fingers tapped the wall. Indeed, he seemed unable to stop them.
“My last dream was about the fish I had for dinner,” Ling Yun said, taken aback. “It swam up out of my mouth and chastised me for using too much salt. When I woke up, I was facing the butterfly dragon.”
“Ah, yes,” the general said. “Periet, destroyer of Shang Yuan. I lost an entire glider squadron when she flew in. Dragon pilots are unstable too, as you might guess, so we thought she was a rogue. We’d seen her take down a couple of her own comrades on the way in. Then her dragon roared, and the concussive storm shattered everything in its path, and the City of Lanterns exploded in fire.”
“You were there, General?”
He didn’t answer her. “How is the dragon suite progressing?”
“I have revisions to make based on this morning’s results in the game, sir,” Ling Yun said.
“Do you play wei qi, Musician?” he asked.
“Only poorly,” Ling Yun said. “My mother taught me the rules, but it’s been years. It concerns territory and influence and patterns, doesn’t it? It’s strange—musical patterns are so easy for me to perceive, but the visual ones are more difficult.”
The general sat across from her. “If musicians were automatically as skilled at wei qi as they were at music,” he said, “they would be unbeatable.”
A tablet rested on the table. He picked up the larger of two brushes and wrote game, then several other characters. There were no triangles—no dragons—to be seen anywhere. “I didn’t know they could do that,” the general mused. “This is what happens when you allow the game to modify its own rules.” He met Ling Yun’s inquisitive gaze. “Somehow I don’t think they’ve conceded.”
“So the dragons haven’t been captured,” she said, slipping back into the terminology of wei qi. “What else mediates this game, General?”
“It’s tuned the way a glider might be tuned by a musician, the way a tablet is calibrated by a calligrapher. It’s tuned by developments in the living war.”
“I had understood,” Ling Yun said, “that the suite was to reflect the pilots, not to influence them. I must confess that so far I haven’t seen anything that would explain the vanishing dragons.”
The general said, “In music, the ideal is a silent song upon an unstrung zither. Is this not so?”
Ling Yun drew the characters in her mind: wuxian meant “five,” qin meant “zither.” But the wu of “five,” in the third tone, brought to mind the wu of “nothing” or “emptiness,” which was in the first tone. The unstrung zither, favored instrument of the sages. The ancients had preferred subtlety and restraint in all things; the unstrung zither took this to the natural conclusion. Ling Yun had applied herself to her lessons with the same patient dedication that she did all things musical, but the unstrung zither had vexed her. “That was the view of the traditional theorists,” she said neutrally, “although modern musicians don’t necessarily agree.”
The Phoenix General’s smile only widened, as though he saw right through her temporizing. “Music is the highest expression of the world’s patterns. The sages have told us so, time and again. The music in the empress’s court provides order to her subjects. We must apply the same principles in war.”
She already knew what he was going to say.
“Thus, in war, the ideal must be a bloodless engagement upon an empty battlefield.”
“Are you sure it is wise to keep the ashworlder children alive, then?” Ling Yun said. It made her uneasy to ask, for she didn’t want to change the general’s mind. Perhaps the thought was traitorous.
“They’ll die when they’re no longer useful,” the general said frankly.
Traitorous or not, there was something wrong with a war that involved killing children. Even deadly children. Even Periet, with her eyes that hid such lethality.
Wei qi was a game of territory, of colonialism. Ling Yun thought of all the things she owed to her parents, who had made sure she had the best tutors; to her uncle, who had brought her the glider and other treats over the years. But she no longer lived in her parents’ house. And three of the colonies, Arani and Straken Okh and Kiris, had not been founded by the empire at all. What did they owe the Phoenix Banner?
In her history lessons, she had learned that the phoenix and dragon were wedding symbols, and that this was a sign that the ashworlds, with their dragons, needed to be joined to the empire. But surely there were ways to cooperate—in trade, say—without conquering the ashworlds outright.
The general closed his eyes for a second and sighed. “If we could win the war without expending lives, it would be a marvel indeed. Imagine gliders that fly themselves, set against the ashworlds’ dragons.”
“The ashworlders are hardly stupid, sir,” Ling Yun said. “They’ll send pilotless dragons of their own.” Or, she thought suddenly, dragonless pilots.
Maybe the ashworlds were ahead of the Phoenix General. From Ling Yun’s vantage point, it was impossible to tell.
“Then there’s no point sending army against army, is there?” the general said, amused. “But people are people. I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to disarm entirely, and commit a war solely on paper, as a game.”
Ling Yun bowed, even knowing it would annoy him, to give herself time to think.
“Enough,” the general said. �
��It is through music we will win the game, and through the game we will win the war. I commend your work, Musician. Take the time you need, but no longer.”
“As you will, sir,” Ling Yun said.
The population of the empire on the planet proper, at the last census, was 110 million people.
The population of the five ashworlds was estimated at 70 million people, although this number was much less certain, due to the transients who lived in the asteroid belts.
The number of gliders in the Phoenix Corps was classified. The number of dragons in the Dragon Corps was likewise classified.
Ling Yun stayed up late into the night reviewing the game’s statistics. Visual patterns were not her forte, but she remembered the general’s words. She had heard the eagerness in his voice, the way she heard echoes of the massacre of Shang Yuan in Periet’s. Even now, there had to be pilotless gliders speeding toward the colonies.
Many of the reports compared the pilots’ strategy in the game to actual engagements. Ling Yun had skimmed these earlier, because of all the unfamiliar names and places—the Serpent’s Corridor, the Siege of Uln Okh, the Greater Vortex—but now she added up the ashworlders’ estimated casualties and felt ill. They had lost their own Shang Yuans. She doubted that the general would stop until they lost many more.
Ling Yun had been right. The ashworlders were desperate, to send children.
Something else that interested her was the rate of replenishment. In the game, you could build new units to replace the ones you had lost. The five pilots kept losing dragons. Over the course of the game, the rate at which the game permitted them to build new dragons dropped slowly but significantly. Based on the general’s remarks, Ling Yun was willing to bet that this was based on actual intelligence about the Dragon Corps’ attrition rate.
It was too bad she couldn’t ask her uncle, who had probably helped plan the general’s grand attack. Her uncle had once told her that, so far, the ashworlds had held their own because they had a relatively large number of dragon pilots. Metal was not nearly as unstable an element as fire; people who worked almost exclusively with metal did not self-destruct quite as regularly.
It was no coincidence that each colony sent an assassin, and also no coincidence that the Phoenix General had kept all of them captive. Five was an important number, one that Ling Yun had taken for granted until Periet told her that the key was six.
The empire, with its emphasis on tradition, had accepted the sages’ cycle of five elements since antiquity, even after it founded Colony One and Colony Two in the vast reaches of space. But what of space itself?
Numbers were Ling Yun’s domain as much as they were any musician’s. Now she knew what to do.
Ling Yun’s head hurt, and even the tea wasn’t going to keep her awake much longer. Still, she felt a quiet glow of triumph. She had finished the suite, including the sixth piece. The sixth piece wasn’t for the wuxian qin at all. It was meant to be hummed, or whistled, like a folk melody or a child’s song, like the music she had wanted to write all her life.
There was no place in the empire for such music, but she didn’t have to accept that anymore.
If the toy glider had a song, it would be this one, even if the glider was broken. It was whole in her mind. That was what mattered.
Five strings braided together were coiled in her jacket sleeve, an uncomfortable reminder of what she was about to do.
Ling Yun wrote a letter on the tablet and marked it urgent, for the general’s eyes only: I must speak to you concerning the five assassins. Her hand shook and her calligraphy looked unsteady. Let the general interpret that however he pleased.
A handful of moments passed. The character for message drew itself in the upper right corner. Ling Yun touched the tip of her brush to it.
The general’s response was, simply: Come.
Shaking slightly, Ling Yun waited until her escort arrived. Under her breath, she hummed one of the variations from Mesketalioth’s piece. In composing the suite, she had attuned herself to the pilots and their cause, but she did this by choice.
Be awake, she urged him, urged all the young pilots. Be prepared. Would the music pluck at the inner movements of their souls, the way it happened in the stories of old?
The escort arrived. “You are dedicated to work so long into the night,” the taller of the two soldiers said, with every appearance of sincerity.
“We do what we can,” Ling Yun said, thinking, You have no idea. People thought musicians were crazy, too. Perhaps everybody looked crazy to someone.
After tonight, she was going to look crazy to everyone, assuming Phoenix Command allowed the story to escape.
The Phoenix General met her in a different room this time. It had silk scrolls on the walls. “They’re pretty, aren’t they?” he said. Ling Yun was eerily reminded of Periet looking at her glider. “Some of them are generations old.”
One of the scrolls had crisp, dark lines. Ling Yun’s eyes were drawn to it: a phoenix hatching from a wei qi stone. “You painted that,” she said.
“I was younger,” the general said, “and never subtle. Please, there’s tea. Your profile said you preferred citron, so I had them brew some for us.”
The citron smelled sweet and sharp. Ling Yun knew that if she tasted it, she would lose her nerve. But courtesy was courtesy. “Thank you, sir,” she said.
She held the first five movements of the dragon suite in her head, to give her Wu Wen Zhi’s fixity of purpose and Ko’s relaxed mien, Mesketalioth’s reflexes and Periet’s hidden ferocity, and Li Cheng Guo’s quick wits.
The braided silk strings slipped down into Ling Yun’s palm. She whipped them around the Phoenix General’s neck. He was a large man, but she was fighting with the strength of six, not one. And she was fighting for five ashworlds rather than one empire.
As the Phoenix General struggled, Ling Yun tightened the strings. She fixed her gaze upon the painting of the hatching stone.
Ling Yun had been the Phoenix General’s creature. The phoenix destroyed itself; it was only fitting that she destroy him.
It would only occur to her later that it had begun with the general assassinating the ashworlders’ leader, that justice was circular.
Now I know what it is like to kill.
There was—not happiness, precisely, but a peculiar singing relief that the other was dead, and not she. She let go of the strings and listened to the thump as the general’s body hit the floor.
The door crashed open. Wen Zhi and Periet held pistols. Wen Zhi’s was pointed straight at Ling Yun.
Ling Yun looked up, heart thudding in her chest. She pulled her shoulders back and straightened. It turned out that she cared to die with some dignity, after all. “Make it quick,” she said. “You have to get out of here.”
Ko showed up behind the other two; he had apparently found a cord to tie his braid. “Come on, madam,” he said. “We haven’t any time to waste.”
“So you were right,” Wen Zhi said to him, sounding irritable. “The musician took care of the general, but that doesn’t guarantee that she’s an ally.”
“Is this really the best time to be arguing?” Periet asked, with an air of, Have you ever known me to be wrong?
The other girl lowered her pistol. “All right, Perias. Are you coming with us, Musician?”
It was unlikely that Ling Yun’s family would ever forgive her, even if she evaded capture by the imperial magistrates. She hurried after the pilots, who seemed to know exactly where they were going. “Perias?” she asked Periet, hoping that she might get an answer where Phoenix Command had not.
“Was the sixth one,” Mesketalioth said without slowing down.
“What exactly is your plan for getting out of here?” Ling Yun said diffidently, between breaths. “We’ll be hunted—”
“You of all people have no excuse to be so slow-witted,” Cheng Guo called back. He was at the head of the group. “How do you think we got here?”
“All we need is a p
iece of sky,” Periet said yearningly. She struck the wall with the heel of her hand.
I was right, Ling Yun thought. The edges of her vision went black; the reverberations sounded like a great gong.
Mesketalioth caught her. His arm was steady and warm. “Next time, a warning would be appreciated,” he said, deadpan as ever.
The wall split outwards. Metal cuts wood.
“Let’s fly,” Periet said. A great wind was blowing through the hallway. They stepped through the hole in the wall, avoiding the jagged, broken planks. Above them, stars glittered in the dark sky.
“The void is the sixth element,” Ling Yun said, looking up.
Five dragons manifested in a half circle, summoned through the void, white black blue yellow red. In the center, tethered to the red dragon by shimmering cables, was an unpainted glider. The sleek curves of its fuselage reminded Ling Yun of her zither.
“See?” Ko said. “I told you we’d fix it.”
“Thank you,” Ling Yun said, overwhelmed. They had written her into the game after all.
“It only works if there’s six of us,” Cheng Guo said. “You’re the sixth pilot.”
Mesketalioth helped Ling Yun into the glider’s cockpit. “When we release the cables,” he said, “follow Cheng Guo. He understands glider theory best, and he’ll safely keep you on the void’s thermal paths.” Despite the scars, his expression was almost kind.
“It’s time!” Wen Zhi shouted from her white dragon. There were now ten red marks on it. “We have to warn the seedworlds.”
Soldiers shouted from the courtyard. A bolt glanced from one dragon in a shower of sparks. Mesketalioth’s dragon reared up and laid down covering fire while Wen Zhi’s dragon raked the ground with its claws. The soldiers, overmatched, scattered.
Then they were aloft, all six of them, dragons returning to the sky where they had been born.
Ling Yun spared not a glance backwards, but sang a quiet little melody to herself as they headed for the stars.
The Black Abacus
War Season