Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  The book sounded impatient this time, which was at least a welcome change from its customary smugness. It pointed out, very painstakingly, that Vayag had never matched the count of the dead against the book’s own pages.

  “I never needed to,” Vayag retorted, surprised into speaking aloud, but now she wondered. The Meroi government had never released an official list of casualties, and even the reported deaths were probably well shy of the actual figure.

  For that matter, Vayag had been there herself, but in the mist and chaos and the hectic gunfire, she had had no good way to tell how many people had failed to survive.

  Then why, the book said relentlessly, did it surprise her that someone else had compiled their own book out of the massacre?

  Or indeed, of the other massacres, great and small, that had happened in the past years?

  Vayag was sweating now. The thought that the shadow government had manipulated its own people in this fashion was intolerable.

  The book informed her that it had welcomed death; welcomed the reduction of blood and sinew into curving letters, words of entwined red and black.

  Vayag didn’t address the book by name. She never did. It hurt too much to think of Kereyag’s easy smile, Kereyag’s laugh, Kereyag’s footsteps next to her own. “I have a new target,” Vayag whispered. “Stand with me or against me.”

  The book had always been her ally, even as she refused to make use of its capabilities.

  All right. The next step, then, was to seek out her handler and pry information out of him. This meant going out into the feather-storm, but there was no help for it. She could only hope that, if the Cloud Fortress were indeed about to fall, that it didn’t land on top of her.

  Vayag left by the door and took the stairs down to the ground floor. She made sure to lock the door behind her, out of an obscure sense of courtesy toward the individual whose home she had entered. A cat watched her, slit-eyed and unconcerned, as she emerged.

  The air had grown cold and restless. She could almost feel the wind’s fingers creeping through her hair, along her face, up into her sleeves. There was the sound of fire, roaring and directionless, but no sign of heat or light.

  Her handler wouldn’t be expecting her to check in. Indeed, their next contact was to be in nine days, which would work in her favor. It probably wouldn’t surprise him that she knew his usual hangouts, the clerk’s job that he had assumed, the tisanes he liked to order from the tea-shops.

  A sudden motion on the ground caught her attention. The pavement had cracked in the shape of a perfect keyhole, one large enough to swallow her foot if she placed it wrong. The inner section slowly crumbled into particles of shadow. It was followed by another keyhole, and another. The particles swirled, gathering themselves into the shapes of vertebrae and tibias and mazed circuit boards.

  She had to get out of here. Now.

  On foot, taking adequate precautions under these conditions, it would take her the better part of three hours to reach her handler’s neighborhood. There was no help for it but to start walking. The book reminded her of page 62’s runner, as she had known it would. It was less easy than usual to ignore its suggestion.

  Vayag kept to small, shadowed streets and away from major intersections, sprinting whenever she thought she could get away with it. Thankfully, she had always had good direction sense, and as she neared the city’s northwest-central district, the streets became familiar. About a third of the way there, she emerged from under the rain of shadow feathers, although she could still feel the dread wind and a more worrying, almost concussive force that transmitted itself in brief pulses, just below the threshold of human hearing.

  She passed an eclectic variety of people. Children who were gawking at the spectacle, despite the best efforts of their parents and aunts and uncles. Looters who were taking advantage of the confusion to slip into undefended stores; she gave those a wide berth, not because she feared them, but she couldn’t waste the time to deal with them. On one street corner she spotted a circle of older women and men with their arms linked and raised toward the treacherous sky, singing the old hymn of the three goddesses dancing the dawn of the world. The occasional Meroi, brandishing guns and sticks to get people under cover. A beggar sifting patiently through one of the keyholes in search of stray change. Her arms were covered with skull-shaped soot-marks all the way up to the elbows.

  She found herself wishing that the resistance’s gambit would succeed, given that they had tried it at all. The fact that the goddess was having difficulty with a Meroi Cloud Fortress was itself worthy of note. But then, she supposed, the problem was not the people but the technology. The Bird of Night was most concerned with people, and not at all with flying machines, and the Meroi were great believers in automated failsafes.

  Vayag, the book said. It rarely addressed her by name. It told her to run. There was no playfulness in its tone at all.

  People were watching. She shouted a warning, but couldn’t find the words. And then she ran as fast as she could. Not as fast as page 62 would have run—under other circumstances she would have been ashamed that the name had escaped her—but fast enough.

  For a while there was nothing but the jolt of her feet against uneven pavement, watering eyes, the thumping of her heart. And then she heard the Bird of Night’s scream. It scratched every cloud out of the sky. Even the feathers stopped falling.

  The book told her she could stop now.

  It took her several moments to convince herself that this was the case.

  She backtracked because the people who had been standing were standing no more. She had been perilously close to the boundary line, and she had to wonder if the book had protected her in some fashion.

  Vayag only checked six corpses, but six was enough. Each one had a bloody gaping wound in the shape of a keyhole where its heart should have been.

  Bile rose in her throat. Had the resistance’s plan failed? How could they have allowed it to go so wrong?

  It was by no means certain that her handler would have answers, but she had nothing else left to try. She continued heading northwest. The sun was so bright that it was giving her a headache, but it was better than the rain of shadows.

  She made sure to mop the sweat off her face with a handkerchief before she approached her handler’s favorite place for afternoon tea. It was a small tea-shop with a wooden unsign, well-weathered and unpainted.

  A glance through the door told her he wasn’t there. Well, it was too much to expect to get lucky so early. The book was curiously silent about her options, although she knew perfectly well that page 98 contained someone with a tracking ability. Since the sun was in the sky it would even work right now.

  Vayag had no luck with the next three places she tried, and she was considering risking his workplace when she thought of going back to the tea-shop and asking if they’d seen the man. She pretended, not very gracefully, to be a worried lover, but the woman at the tea-shop was too distracted by the news on the television of this latest massacre—in her home city, at that—to need much convincing. It turned out he had not shown up today, so chances was that he was either sick or pretending to be.

  Her handler was not only at home, he was cooking a late lunch: fried rice with shrimp and strips of pork. She came directly through the door—picking the lock was absurdly easy, but then he wouldn’t want to arouse suspicion with unusually high security—and wavered for a moment out of sheer hunger.

  “I take it they stopped all the trains,” was the first thing he said to her. “But you’re days early, you know. Do you want something to eat? There were going to be leftovers anyway.”

  Vayag didn’t know his real name, the way he didn’t know hers. Probably. “We have to talk,” she said shortly. She supposed this meant sharing a meal with him, and she really didn’t want to be burdened by thoughts of hospitality customs.

  He turned off the stove and dumped the pan’s contents onto two plates, divided evenly. “Sit, then.” He gestured vaguely towa
rd a table and two plain oak chairs.

  She sat, but didn’t touch the food. She did pick up the chopsticks he had provided, though.

  Her handler eyed her, then shrugged and began eating. After a while, he said, “You really know all you need to know. If you’re going to ask for operation details—”

  “It’s already out on the television,” Vayag said pointedly. “What’s there to hide?”

  He wasn’t looking her in the eye, although that could have been because he was very interested in his lunch.

  “What was the objective?” she said. She wasn’t shouting yet. “A lot of people died because we fucked this up.”

  Still no answer. Now she was certain that he was avoiding eye contact. She reached across the table and shoved the plate violently. It spun off the table, scattering fried rice everywhere, and shattered against the floor.

  “That was uncalled for, agent,” the man said in a dead, even tone. Still, he made no move to defend himself when she abruptly got up and leaned forward to grab him by the throat.

  Vayag still had a chopstick in one hand. She set its point against his lower eyelid. “I need to know,” she said, “why those people had to die. The people whose freedom we are supposed to be fighting for.”

  “An agent who can’t follow orders isn’t of much use to us,” he said.

  She increased the pressure of the point, angled the chopstick up toward his eye. He only flinched a little, to his credit.

  “I have killed people for you,” she said. “I have risked death for you. I need to know that you’re doing it right.”

  “All right,” he said slowly. “But I’m going to have to remand you to a higher authority, and they could just as well decide to have you killed for being a security risk.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” Vayag said.

  “What did you think the objective was?”

  “To damage the Cloud Fortress, I suppose,” she said. She hadn’t thought very hard about it.

  “You know what the Meroi industrial capacity is like,” he said. “I won’t say that it’s trivial for them to manufacture and maintain Cloud Fortresses, but they have them over all their occupied territories so it’s clearly doable. No; the objective was the expertise that goes into a Cloud Fortress. Its operation, its design, everything.”

  “You’d have to get that from the Meroi themselves,” Vayag said slowly.

  He smiled; it barely lit his eyes. “And that’s what we just did. The other deaths in the city were an unfortunate side-effect. You gave us the idea, really.”

  “I what?”

  “Your book is no secret,” he said. “I don’t know how you persuaded a temple scribe to make it for you, or how often you use it, but the concept was sound: a Meroi ‘sacrifice’ would enable us to scribe their spirits for future use.”

  There was no point in denying it, even if her handler didn’t seem to be aware that the temple scribe in question had been her sister. “That’s not right,” Vayag said blankly. “I’ve never used the book. If it isn’t right to use our own spirits for gain, how can it be right to use Meroi spirits taken unwillingly?”

  “I don’t believe the Meroi ever gave us a choice worth speaking of,” he said.

  “No,” Vayag said. “I suppose not.” She dropped the chopstick.

  And then, when her handler relaxed, she grabbed a blade out of her sleeve and cut his throat with it.

  She felt like a hole had been carved out of her heart.

  The dead, reduced to words chained to a page, could not consent to be used in this fashion. All her life she had heard, from Kereyag even, that the scribe’s art was to be used only to present an accurate picture of the dead. Siphoning their aptitudes and abilities out of them afterwards was disrespectful to their rest, and scribes caught abusing their ability in this fashion could expect to be tortured to death.

  Kereyag had thought it no longer mattered, that last cold morning. Dying, she had recorded all the dead that Vayag could find for her, and then scribed herself into the book with its rough pages.

  Now Vayag had to find a way to stop her own people from conquering the Meroi by throwing away their own beliefs. It was too late for second thoughts. She had committed to this course the moment she threatened her handler.

  She washed up and went to find a change of clothes.

  Then she found an empty space at the kitchen counter and opened the book. The last page was blank. Trembling, she wrote, in unstable, spidery letters: Anything I can do with your help, I can do better by relying on my own heart and my own hopes.

  The book’s answer formed below Vayag’s sentence:

  This isn’t my book, sister sweetest. You are.

  Vayag slammed the book shut but couldn’t bring herself to leave it behind where someone would come across it. She left the dead man’s apartment, then, and walked out into a world of ashfall and crumbling keyholes.

  Conservation of Shadows

  There is no such thing as conservation of shadows. When light destroys shadows, darkness does not gain in density elsewhere. When shadows steal over earth and across the sky, darkness is not diluted.

  Hello, Inanna. You have seven inventory slots, all full. The seventh contains your heart, which cannot be removed. We will do our best to remedy this.

  A feast awaits you at the end, sister. I am keeping it warm for you. You will be cold by the time you reach my hall beneath the floors of the world. Meadow honey on barley cakes, cheese and the tender flesh of goats; plums and pears brighter than the jewels in your hair; wine less sweet than birdsong and more bitter than tears. Taken together they form a nutritionally complete diet.

  You think that all we eat in the underworld is dust and all we drink is the dregs of rain, but that is not the case. Come and share the feast.

  You hesitate over the shadow-gun at your waist. Notice the holster, leather stamped with a lioness on each side. The leather comes from a lioness’s hide. She is dead, sister. She cannot aid you here.

  I can’t tell you how to pass through the first gate. More accurately, I could, but I won’t. We live by different laws in the underworld, we who live at all. Now you must respect those laws as well.

  The gate lies there. Your fingers move toward it, then draw back. How wise of you. Gates are hungry. They demand propitiation. Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?

  No, what you feed the gate is other. It is easy for gates to be dark, maws opening to the earth’s own secrets. They wonder what light is like. So you tempt it with the jewels in your hair. Poor gate: it knows nothing about symbolism. It knows only that the tinted diamonds and emeralds and lapis lazuli glint with the evening star’s passion. Down you draw the golden pins from your dark hair and let that torrent free.

  Eagerly, the gate lips at the diamonds’ fire, the emeralds’ intimation of bounty, the lapis lazuli’s memory of the sky that cannot be seen. The color leaches from the diamonds, leaving them ashen. The other stones, less hardy, crumble into dust, their virtue vanished.

  Sated, the gate eats no more of you as you pass through, divested of glory yet more beautiful than ever.

  The fires won’t hurt you unless you let them, sister. Hungry already? You’ll be hungrier still. Don’t roast the flesh off your bones. It’s not time yet.

  Did you think the underworld moved in ignorance of summer? The season that scours the earth and fills the stomachs of those aboveground while leaving us below-ground with the rotting chaff? At least we know that we are the chaff of days, the dust of time.

  It is summer because you’ve scarcely left the world above. Just think, sister: the longer you linger here, the more the leaves shrivel gold and brown on the branches; the more the last grapes wither on the vines.

  Now you are hungry again, and thirsty as well. I know. I know you so well that you co
uld flense yourself bare of face and fingerprints and still I would recognize you. After all, I recognized you the first seventy-four times you came my way.

  Does it surprise you that your inventory comes up in the shape of an eight-pointed star? Blink once and it appears; twice, and it folds out of your field of vision. It reports nothing you can’t find upon you.

  One slot is empty now, black as a gate, as the absence of day; black as your hair. Pick up something else if you like. Yes, that pencil will do. The graphite’s luster is dark. It grows darker yet in your grasp.

  I don’t recognize the words you are writing on my walls, sister: graffiti, in scratchy bird-claw marks. Maybe you mean it to be illegible. That would be unkind.

  Consider this. The seventy-four earlier iterations of you left no guide-star tags upon the walls, no cheat sheets, no maps tattooed upon their skins. Underneath your armor there is skin, the organ on which your boundaries are written. You’ll know the instant it dissolves and opens your secrets to the air.

  Nothing’s left of your pencil but a stub. One point of the eight-pointed star flares diamond-bright as the inventory slot empties itself in response.

  Did I speak to you of skin? The walls are my skin, the gold-painted pillars my bones. Do what you will with them. You always did.

  You are silent. I don’t know whether this is an improvement or not. Do you think your words will inscribe themselves upon the air like the coming frost upon fallen leaves? Twenty degrees Celsius, room temperature. You are in a room.

  There is no way out of the room, except now there is. Like a hundred mutilated lips the letters—are they letters or logograms?—crack wide, wider. Gap to gap, they gape until they dissolve into a single opening.

  A wind rushes through the gate. The wind chill factor is 14 degrees Celsius. You may feel that is excessive. From that number you can calculate the speed of the wind. Unfortunately, your pencil’s stub will write no more for you. Perhaps you can do the figures in your head.