Silk & Steel

by Ellen Kushner

  Nhân.

  Humaneness. Altruism. A fundamental virtue of the scholar. Liên would have laughed, if she felt in the mood to laugh.

  As they walked, Mei laid a hand on Liên’s chest, and this time there was no splitting of the world, no difficulty to breathe—and Liên was still walking but she was also holding her own flute. “Why is it so easy?”

  Mei smiled, and it was a shadow of the expression that had endeared Liên to her. “You’re so close to ascension. Didn’t you realize? You barely need me anymore. You could manifest this with just a thought.”

  Liên didn’t feel close. She felt small and scared and powerless. How old was the thing she’d stepped into, and how presumptuous was she for thinking she could change even a fraction of it?

  The arena was dark, but someone was sitting at the center. “Child,” Sinh said, and as he rose, the banyan lit up, and she saw that he’d brought the chessboard, the one with the painting of Scholar Vương summoning the dragon—except that he’d laid the pieces on the painting’s side as though for the beginning of a game.

  Sinh had changed his clothes, too. He wore long, loose azure robes and a large sash adorned with peach-tree branches; his hair was tied in an elaborate topknot, held in place by silver pins. In fact—

  Liên looked to the board for confirmation. He was dressed exactly as Scholar Vương in the painting. “Modeling what you’re trying to steal?” She hadn’t meant to be wounding, but she was acutely aware of Mei at her side.

  Sinh raised an eyebrow. “I see you are not ignorant. You are wrong, however.”

  Liên raised her flute, an inadequate shield. By her side, Mei had fallen to her knees, and this time the swords going through her weren’t ghostly. They were real, and Mei was bleeding on the floor, curled and gasping and struggling to breathe.

  Mei. No no no no.

  Mei!!!

  “Wrong?” Liên knelt by Mei’s side, trying to grab a sword, any sword—to pull it out of the mass of sharpness and blood, but Mei kept writhing, and the swords moved with her, dragging across the floor, their hilts and blades clinking against the stones, the entire mass opening up with Mei’s ragged breathing and convulsions, like an obscene flower. Mei. No. No no no. “You’ve used her. You’ve used all of us to steal power. How wrong am I?”

  An amused laugh. Sinh knelt on the other side of Mei, making no move to help her. “Almost. I’m not stealing. I made this power: I’m only taking back what is owed to me.”

  Owed to him? “I don’t understand—” Liên said, and then she looked at him—really looked. Mei’s swords were now real, but so was another thing: the hole in Sinh’s chest, through which jutted a tip of a broken flute of deep, gleaming jade.

  I made this power.

  Sinh laughed. “Yes. I’m not a thief, child.”

  “You’re Vương. Scholar Vương. You—”

  “What became of him. What’s left of him.”

  And Mei—Mei who was contorting and bleeding on the floor of the arena—Mei, who wore the dress of a princess of the imperial court....

  “The Dragon Princess,” Liên said. The words didn’t feel real. They couldn’t be. “You. You cannot be alive.”

  “Hunger will do odd things to time,” Sinh said. “Stretch and thin it, so that nothing is quite right—tea with dregs of ashes, a lover’s touch dragging bone fingers across my skin, the river shimmering with corpses. She was right: I only feel alive when I play.”

  Her flute. Liên’s hands tightened on it. “And you broke your flute.”

  A shrug. “Power can be used for many things, but I used mine wrongly. Too many worldly things: a palace and serving girls, and jade and silver, and the kingdoms of the world at my feet. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  No, now he just enjoyed having one person utterly devoted to him. Liên had to stop herself looking at Mei. “So just the music, then.”

  “You’ve felt it,” Sinh said. “You know.”

  A heady rush of pleasure unlike anything she’d ever felt, the sensation that she could be anything and do anything, the wonders of the birds and the dragon in the river.... “Yes,” Liên said, because she wasn’t him and didn’t lie.

  “This is why I need your flute.”

  “Are you asking?”

  Sinh shrugged. “Usually, I’m the Revered Teacher, and the students will do what I ask because they trust me. But you—” He frowned, staring at her as if he didn’t quite know what to make of her.

  Liên said, “Free her. And I’ll give you the flute.” She kept her voice low and emotionless, but it was hard, because Mei was screaming.

  “Her?” He looked at her, and at Mei. He laughed, softly. “I’m not holding her prisoner.”

  But some cages didn’t have overt jailers. Liên’s mouth clamped on pointless words. “Walk away.”

  Again, laughter. “Give me the flute, and I won’t interfere.”

  Of course, because he didn’t need her. His face said it all. He thought Liên was throwing herself headlong at useless hopes. Liên... didn’t know if she disagreed, but she had to do something. “Deal,” she said. “Now go.”

  When she passed the flute to Sinh, she felt as if she was handing him the heart in her chest.

  “Finally.” He laughed softly, gently, and seemed to grow taller—and as his hair came loose and fluttered in the rising wind, and as his skin glowed alabaster, she finally saw what Mei had: the young scholar flush with dreams and glory, the man whose music transcended this world, strong enough to summon from the heavens and the river’s depths.

  “Mei. Mei.” Liên tried to grab the swords, but she couldn’t. They kept flickering out of reach, and the hilt was oddly shaped and always shifting out of her reach. “Mei, please.”

  Sinh walked to the river, stood in the banyan’s shadow. When his fingers slid into the hollows she felt them, one by one, as if they were resting on her skin, above the collarbone—and a sibilant whisper rose from the tree.

  Trespasser thief taker of songs.

  A note like a plucked string, and there was a sword, hanging in the air—the same swords sticking from Mei’s chest, the ones Liên was desperately trying to pull out. Its voice echoed like thunder across the arena.

  The will of heaven cannot be flouted punishment must be meted out the order of things cannot be violated.

  Sinh barely glanced at the sword. He gestured, fluidly and carelessly, towards Mei. “Take her.”

  The sword shifted towards Mei, the strength of its presence—sharp and slick and hating—sending Liên to her knees.

  Do you consent?

  Mei’s gaze rested, for a brief moment, on Liên. She smiled, with tears in her eyes. “You’re so young,” she whispered. “Playing with objects of power as if they were toys. There is no respite.”

  “Big’sis, no!”

  But Mei’s lips had already parted again. “I consent.”

  The sword dove for her, just as Sinh started playing. “No!!!”

  Each note felt drawn from the veins in her chest, and it was discordant and tentative—and Liên was on her knees, struggling to breathe, struggling to see anything through the tears in her eyes—her hands bloodied and cramped from trying to hold swords. The new sword joined the others, one more addition to a tangled mass—one sword for each stolen flute, one more nail in a coffin of everlasting pain. The banyan’s lights were flickering, and she couldn’t think anymore, she couldn’t—

  Mei’s voice, a memory of that time they’d fought over the dumpling soup.

  He held my hand and saw me. Truly saw me, just the way I was.

  He’d seen her. What had he seen?

  Sinh was still playing, and the lights were slowly filling the tree and the river. The huge and dark being in the river finally broke free—and it was the wizened and algae-encrusted shadow of a dragon, emaciated and infested with crawling, dark shapes like insect parasites, antlers broken and oozing dark liquid.

  Seen.

  How dare he? A wave o
f nausea and anger wracked Liên.

  Seen.

  “Princess,” Liên whispered. She pulled herself up, crawled to Mei, each gesture sending a fresh wave of pain down her chest. “Dragon Princess.” Her voice stumbled—she couldn’t remember the archaic words anymore. “Dragon.” She lifted a hand—drew, slowly and haltingly, the old characters. “I see you.”

  Dragon.

  Princess.

  Mei.

  The characters hung in the air for a brief moment, shifting to seal script, the same cursive shape on the seal around Liên’s neck. Mei’s face, drawn in pain, turned towards her, and Liên saw scales scattered across her cheek, iridescent patches that shone with a breathtaking light. “Mei,” Liên whispered, and Mei’s lips thinned on her name, and in her eyes shone the same slow wonder she’d shown before, and a shadow of her desire as she’d kissed Liên.

  And abruptly Liên could breathe again—could, for a moment only, see Mei, curled around the shape of the swords transfixing her. One of them was less fuzzy and less shadowy than the rest. The last one, the one that had come from Liên’s flute: its hilt was the same color and opacity as the fourth hole in the flute had been.

  Liên closed her eyes, and tried to remember what it had been like to play. All her poems and all her songs, and all of Mother’s old stories, and dragons in the river, and citadels brought down by theft, and people turning to stone by the seashore—and swords with jewel-encrusted hilts—and her finger, reaching out, slid and connected with hard metal and old, everlasting hunger.

  The will of heaven is punishments there should not be mercy she consented....

  “I do not,” Liên whispered, and felt the sword pause in its ceaseless litany. “It was my flute, and I do not consent!”

  The blade came free. The weight of it sent Liên to the floor, before she pulled herself up, gasping. She held nothing but smoke and shadows, the vague shape of a sword. She—she could kill Sinh while he was still engrossed in the music. An eye for an eye, blood for blood. She could feel the sword’s quiescent hunger, its anger, its rage at the way student after student had lost their hearts to Sinh. It was not right. It had to be made right. She wanted—

  She wanted to help Mei, not a bloodbath.

  Help me. Father, Mother, help me do the right thing. The needful thing.

  She drove the sword in the earth, feeling the shock of it in her bones; the shape of the hilt in her hand, what it had felt like when she’d connected, when she’d taken the weight of the blade in her hand.

  Then, slowly and grimly, she went for the rest of them.

  As when she’d played the flute, it was a matter of putting her fingers in the proper space—of reaching out across the length of metal or bamboo and finding a hole that shouldn’t have been there. She didn’t feel flush with words or poems, simply struggling to keep the emptiness in her chest from consuming her whole.

  The flute in Sinh’s hand was burning now—slowly starting to fade, a dull, distant pain compared with the effort of grabbing one sword after another—to hold hilt after hilt, planting blade after blade in the floor of the arena. Her hands were slick with blood and sweat, and her legs shook and locked into painful spasms.

  Sword after sword after sword, and there was no end to them, the countless students whose flutes Sinh had used up. It’s my fault, Mei had said, and yes, she had not stopped him, but an eternity of pain while he walked free... how was that fair punishment?

  Liên reached out, again and again, and finally her hand closed on empty air. Surely she’d missed one... But when she looked, she stood in a field of swords, and Mei lay beneath her, gasping.

  Traitor coward thief. The swords’ combined voices made the earth shake. Heedless, Liên knelt by Mei’s side. “Big’sis. Come on come on. It’s over.”

  Mei’s lips were blue. “Lil’sis.” Her smile was weak. “It’s... never... over.”

  A noise, behind her. It was Sinh. He held burnt bamboo fragments in his hands: the remnants of Liên’s flute. He looked, curiously, at the swords scattered around them. “A fine effort,” he said. “But in the end, it will avail you nothing.”

  “Shut up,” Liên said. And, to Mei, “Look. Look.” And, gently cradling Mei’s head, turned her towards the river, towards the skeletal and almost unrecognizable dragon, slowly sinking back beneath the waves. “That’s what he sees, big’sis. Do you truly think that’s who you are?”

  Mei’s face was drawn in pain. The swords were quivering, thirsting for blood. She’d earned nothing but a reprieve. “Lil’sis.”

  “Look,” Liên said, and then everything she’d done—the swords, the burning of her flute—hit her like a hammer, and she flopped downwards, as the swords rumbled and started tearing themselves away from the ground. “Look!”

  Mei was crying. It was slow and noisy and heart-wrenching.

  “Come, child,” Sinh said to Mei. He was halfway to the gates of the arena, one hand on the wrought iron. He tossed, carelessly, the fragments of Liên’s flute on the floor, and Liên felt as if she’d been stabbed as each one hit the stones. “Nothing ever changes. Come home.”

  “Big’sis. Walk away from him, please.”

  Mei didn’t say anything. Sinh waited, arrogant and sure of himself: for everything to start again, for the old games to resume. For other duels and other thefts.

  “Please...” Liên’s words tasted like blood. “There’s no time left. Please.”

  A final rumble, and the swords tore themselves free, and dove, again, towards Mei.

  Liên screamed before she could think. “Take me, not her. I consent!”

  In the frozen instant before the swords dove for her, she saw Mei’s shocked face—the same shock on Sinh’s face—rising, shaking and heavily breathing, stretching and changing, and saying a single word ringing like a peal of thunder.

  “No.”

  “You can’t—” Sinh said.

  Mei’s voice was cold. “I do not consent.” The swarm of swords shivered and shook, turning from Liên to Mei and from Mei to Sinh. “She will not take my pain, and I will not take his anymore.”

  “Child, please,” Sinh said. And another, older word. “Beloved...”

  “No,” Mei said. She was long and halfway to serpentine, with the shadow of antlers around her snouted face, her hand gripping Liên’s shoulder like iron—and she was so beautiful, so heartbreakingly beautiful, brittle mane streaming in the wind, antlers shining with weak and flickering iridescence. “Find someone else to bear your guilt.”

  The swords shivered from Mei to Sinh to Liên—the weight of their presence oscillating as they shook and shook and shook—and then they finally dived for Sinh.

  His mouth moved. He tried to say something: words that were drowned by the rush of air, by the angry whispers of the swords as they came for him. They faded to a faint shadow, a shard of darkness lodging itself into his chest. He fell, gasping, to his knees, breathing hard—and finally got up, shaking. His face was slick with sweat, but his voice was assured and smooth.

  “Nothing has changed,” he said. “I’m still the chairman of the Academy.”

  He’d find someone else, wouldn’t he? He no longer had Mei, but it would just start all over again—the duels and the flutes and the abuse, sheltered by the Academy the way it had always been sheltered.

  Nothing had changed.

  “Come on,” Mei said. She pulled Liên up, slowly.

  “Big’sis.” Liên was a mass of sore and unhealed wounds and fatigue. She’d freed Mei. That mattered. It had to. One person at a time, and yet how much it had all cost.... “Big’sis...”

  “Ssh.” Mei laid a shaking hand on Liên’s lips—two fingers, pressing against her flesh, and then the rest of her face, bending towards Liên: a brief, exhausted kiss that resonated in Liên’s chest, setting her entire being alight. “Let’s go, my love.”

  “Where—”

  A short, exhausted laugh. “Out there. The world isn’t the Academy, and it holds more than hi
s games. Let’s go. Anywhere. Come.”

  They walked supporting each other. They didn’t spare a glance for Sinh, who still stood over the shards of Liên’s flute, whispering “nothing has changed” over and over.

  Slowly and carefully, they picked their way out of the arena, holding each other’s hands—walking measure by agonizing measure towards the iron-wrought gates—out of the arena, out of the Academy, and out into the world that awaited them both.

  With thanks to @mainvocaljiu for help with naming Sinh.

  About the Authors

  (alphabetical order by last name)

  Claire Bartlett

  Claire Bartlett is an author of YA and adult speculative fiction. Her critically acclaimed debut, We Rule the Night, was called one of the best books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly, and her novel The Winter Duke features more sapphic romance between soft scientists and cheerful warrior women. She grew up in Colorado, but studied history and archaeology around Europe before settling in Denmark for good. You can find her full bibliography at www.authorclaire.com.

  Elizabeth Davis

  Elizabeth Davis is a second-generation writer living in Dayton, Ohio. She lives there with her spouse and two cats—neither of which has been lost to ravenous corn mazes or sleeping serpent gods. She can be found at deadfishbooks.com when she isn’t busy creating beautiful nightmares and bizarre adventures. Her work can be found in Eerie River Publishing: Patreon July 2020; Eternal Haunted Summer: Summer Solstice 2020; and No Safe Distance: Stories from Quarantine.

  Aliette de Bodard

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won three Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, a British Fantasy Award, and four British Science Fiction Association Awards. She was a double Hugo finalist for 2019 (Best Series and Best Novella). Her most recent book is Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, a fantasy of manners and murders set in an alternate 19th Century Vietnamese court (released by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.). Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective (2018 Nebula Award winner, 2018 British Fantasy Award winner, 2019 Hugo Award finalist), and the upcoming Seven of Infinities, in which a poor principled scholar and a disillusioned sentient spaceship must solve a murder, but find themselves falling for each other. Her short-story collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is out from Subterranean Press.