The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  If the magician thought that a childhood nightmare was going to get her to give up so easily, he was sorely mistaken. She could have punched through the window, which was only covered with paper, and gone on her way. But he already knew someone with knowledge of magic had broken into his home. She might as well have it out with him right now, even if she ordinarily preferred to avoid confrontations. Minsu was going to lecture her about taking risks, but the dreadful timing couldn’t be helped.

  Iseul’s pulse raced as she drew her second dagger and angled herself back behind the coat rack. For a moment she didn’t realize the magician had entered the room.

  Then a figure assembled itself out of shadows and dust motes and scraps of paper, right there in the room. Iseul was tall for a Chindallan woman, but the figure was taller, and its arms were disproportionately long. She thought it might be a man beneath the strange layers of robes, which weren’t in any fashion she’d seen before. She could see its eyes, dark in a pale, smudgy face, and that it was holding up a charm of a variety she didn’t recognize.

  Iseul had killed people before. She lunged with her dagger before the magician had a chance to finish activating the charm. He brought up his arm to protect his ribs. The dagger snagged on his layers of sleeves. She gave it a good hard yank and it came free, along with strands that unraveled in the air.

  She made one more attempt to stab him, but he twisted away, fiendishly fast, and she missed again. She bit back a curse. It was only with great effort that she kept herself from losing her balance.

  Iseul ran past the figure since momentum was taking her there anyway and out of the study. The dagger was needle-keen in her hand, with blood showing hectic red at its point. It should have shrank into a misshapen figure amid shivers of smoke and fractured light the moment she marked her target. She flung it aside in a fit of revulsion and heard it clattering against the wall. It made a bright, terrible sound, like glass bells and shattering hells and hounds unloosed, and she had never heard anything like it before.

  If the dagger hadn’t changed, then that meant the magician was still alive. She had to go back and finish the job. She swung around. The dagger was visible where she had cast it. The blood on the blade seemed even redder. Words writhed in the sheen of the metal’s surface. Probably no good to her if it hadn’t worked the first time. She plunged past it and into the study without hesitating at the threshold.

  The magician was waiting for her. The mixture of amusement, contempt, and rage in his eyes chilled Iseul more than anything else that had happened so far. He threw his charm at her as she cleared the doorway.

  The charm didn’t grow thorns or teeth or tendrils. Instead, it unfolded in a twisting ballet of planes and vertices. For a single clear second, Iseul could see words in the Genial Ones’ language pinned to the paper’s surface by the weight of the ink, by the will of the scribe. Then, with a thready whispering, the words flocked free of the paper and spread themselves in the air toward her, like a net.

  Iseul knew better than to be caught by that net. She twisted around it, thanking her mother for a childhood full of dance lessons, although some of the words brushed her sleeve before they dispersed. Her entire left forearm grew numb. No time to think about that. The magician was reaching for something in a pouch. She ignored that and went instead for his throat. People never expected a woman to have strong hands.

  The magician croaked out half a word. Iseul pressed harder with her thumbs, seeking his windpipe, and felt the magician struggle to breathe. His hands, oddly chilly, clawed at her hands.

  How could someone as skinny as the magician have such good lung capacity? Iseul hung on. The magician’s skin grew colder and colder, as though he had veins of ice creeping closer to his skin the longer she choked him. Her hands ached with the chill.

  Worse, she felt the scrabbling of her lantern charm in response to the magician’s proximity. Belatedly, she realized he was trying to scratch words into her skin with his fingernails. Her teeth closed on a yelp.

  Like all her charms, the lantern charm was made of paper lacquered to a certain degree of stiffness. It scratched her skin as though it were struggling to unfold itself just as the magician’s original charm had done. For the first time, she cared about the quality of the charm’s lacquer, hoping it would hold fast against another word-cloud.

  Iseul could barely feel her left hand. She kept pressing against the magician’s throat and staring at the ugly purple marks that mottled his skin. “Die,” she said hoarsely. The numb feeling was spreading up her forearm to her elbow, and at this rate, she was going to lose use of the arm, who knew for how long.

  The lantern charm was starting to unfurl. Iseul resisted the urge to close her eyes and give up. But the magician was done struggling. The cold hands dropped away, and he slumped.

  Iseul was trembling. But she held on for another count of hundred just to be certain. Then she let the figure drop to the ground and staggered sideways.

  The magician’s eyes slitted open. Careless of her. She should have realized his physiology might be different. She scrabbled for her ordinary dagger with her good hand and cut his throat. The blood was rich and red, and there was a lot of it.

  The magician wheezed something, a few words in a language she didn’t recognize. Her first instinct was to recoil, remembering the cloud of words. Her second and better instinct, which was to stab his torso repeatedly, won out. But nothing more emerged from those pale lips except a last cool thread of breath.

  She sat back and forced herself to breathe slowly, evenly, until her heart wasn’t knocking at the walls of her ribs anymore. Then she went back out into the hallway. The magical dagger showed no sign of shrinking. She brought it back with her into the study and its mangled corpse.

  Iseul wanted to drop both daggers and huddle under the coats for the rest of the night. Instead, she wiped off both daggers on the magician’s clothes and tucked them back into their sheaths. She took off her jacket. There was a small basin of water, and she washed her hands and face. It wasn’t much, but it made her feel better and right now she would take what she could get. She hunted through the magician’s collection of coats for something that wouldn’t fit her too poorly and put it on.

  Since she had killed the magician, she might as well complete her search of the house. She wouldn’t get another opportunity once they found out about the murder.

  Yes. Think about logistical details. Don’t think about the corpse.

  Except she had to think about the corpse. It would be remiss of her not to search it to see if the magician had been carrying any other surprises.

  She couldn’t think about the fact that the dagger would have disintegrated a human. It might simply be that the charm no longer worked, the way any number of charms had stopped working. There was an easy way to test that, but she wasn’t about to kill some random victim just to test whether her dagger really had lost its virtue.

  Iseul thought about the fact that its blade repeated, over and over in a winding trail, the word for human blood. Umul.

  About the fact that she might have killed a Genial One, and the Genial Ones were supposed to be over a thousand years extinct.

  Someone would find the corpse. But first, the search. See what the corpse wanted to say to her in the language of violence and clandestine corners.

  Iseul went through the magician’s robes, all of them, layers upon layers that clung clammily to her fingers. Next time she did this she was going to bring gloves. All the while she puzzled over the magician’s last words. She had believed that she was fluent in the language of magic. The longer she thought about it, the more she became convinced that the magician had said, You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this—and then there was one more word that she couldn’t get to slot into place no matter how much she shifted the vowels or roughened the fricatives.

  The most unhelpful thing she found in the magician’s pockets was the candy. It smelled like ordinary barley candy, but she was
n’t about to put it in her mouth to check.

  The one useful thing was a charm. Iseul recognized it because it was folded very similarly to her own charm of passage, except it had a map-word inscribed on some of its corners, which meant that it was meant to interact with a specific lock rather than being intended for general use. The magician had worn it on a bracelet. Iseul cut it away, then set about stuffing the magician’s corpse into a closet and wiping down the room. It wouldn’t pass a good inspection, but she would be long gone by the time anyone came searching.

  It was hard not to flinch every time a branch knocked against the walls of the house as the wind outside grew stronger, but eventually she found the secret passage by paying attention to the way the charm quivered in her hand. The door was in the basement, which had a collection of geometrically sorted blocks of bean curd, bags of rice, and other humble staples. Curious thought: had the magician cooked his own food? She wasn’t sure she liked the thought of a Genial One enjoying Chindallan food.

  The secret room was situated so it was under a good portion of the oversized garden. Brandishing the magician’s charm opened the door. Lantern charms filled the space with a pale blue light. It was hard not to imagine that she walked underwater.

  Iseul checked the shadows for signs of movement, but if an ambush awaited her, she would have to deal with it when it came. She stepped sideways into the room.

  A book lay open on a cluttered escritoire. Next to it was a desk set containing a half-used, sumptuously carved and gilded block of ink. The carving had probably once been a dragon, judging by the lower half: conventional, but well-executed. A charm that had been folded to resemble a quill rested against the book. The folds had been made very precisely.

  Iseul’s gaze went to a small stack of paper next to the book. The top sheet was covered with writing. Her hackles rose as she realized that that wasn’t precisely true. It sounded like someone was writing on the paper, and the stack made a rustling sound as of furtive animals, but there was no brush or graphite stick, and the ink looked obdurately dry.

  Against her better judgment, she approached the desk. She looked first at the charm, which was covered with words of transference and staining, then at the papers. Black wisps were curling free from the book, leaving the page barren, and traveling through the air to the paper, where they formed new words. She flipped back in the book. The first thirty or so pages were blank, as faceless as a mask turned inside-out. Iseul flipped forward. As before, the words on the next page, which were in somewhat archaic Chindallan, continued sizzling away in ashy curls and wisps.

  Iseul reminded herself to breathe, then picked up the top of the pile and began paging through. All of the words were in the Genial Ones’ language. It appeared to be some sort of diatribe about the writer’s hosts and their taste in after-dinner entertainment. She squinted at the pages: only three of them so far. She pulled out the page currently being written on.

  More words formed on the new sheet. Iseul had expected a precise insectine march, but that wasn’t the case. There seemed to be someone on the other end; it wasn’t just a transfer of marks. Sometimes the unseen writer hesitated over a word choice, or crossed something out. At one point a doodle formed in the margin, either a very fat cow or a very large hog, hard to tell. The writer, a middling artist at best, had more unflattering comments about the people they were staying with.

  Would she alert the person on the other end if she made off with the letter, which was becoming increasingly and entertainingly vituperative? She didn’t know how close by they were. How much time did she have? Her left arm felt less numb than before, which was reassuring, but that didn’t mean she should let down her guard. Time to read the letter and see if there was anything she should commit to memory. Sadly, the writer was cagey about revealing their location, although she learned some creative insults.

  It was tempting to linger and find out if the writer was going to regale the dead magician with more misshapen farm animals, maybe a rooster or a goose, but Iseul made herself turn away from the escritoire and examine the rest of the hideout. There were more books with the writing worn away, and a number of what she recognized as ragged volumes of a torrid adventure series involving an alchemist and her two animal-headed assistants, popular about five years back. Since she preferred not to believe that one of the Genial Ones had such execrable taste in popular fiction, it seemed likely that the books were convenient fodder for this unusual method of exchanging letters.

  Still, it paid to be thorough. Iseul didn’t like turning her back on the escritoire, but she still needed to search the rest of the secret room, which was well-supplied with books.

  She was starting to think that most of the books would fall into the two previous categories—blank and about to be blank—when she found what the magician had been so keen on hiding. These books, unlike the others, were only labeled by number. Each was impressively thick. An amateur, albeit a moderately accomplished one, had stitched the binding. The binder—probably the magician—had a fondness for dark blue linen thread.

  Iseul picked up the first book and flipped rapidly through the pages. Thin paper, but high quality, with just a hint of tooth. The left-hand pages were in a writing system unfamiliar to her. Unlike Chindallan, the letterforms consisted of a profusion of curves and loops. She wondered if it, like the language of the realm of Moi-quan to the south, had originally been incised into large leaves that would split if you used straight strokes.

  The right-hand pages were in the Genial Ones’ writing, in script so small that it hurt her eyes, and it was immediately obvious that they were compiling a lexicon. Definitions, from denotations to connotations; usage notes, including one on a substitute word to be used only in the presence of a certain satrap; dialectal variations; folk etymologies, some amusingly similar to stories in Chindalla, like the one about a fish whose name changed twice in one year thanks to a princess discovering that something that tasted delicious when you were starving in exile didn’t necessarily remain so after you had returned to eating courtly delicacies. And look, there was a doodle of a sadly generic-looking fish in the margin, although it was in a different style than the earlier pig-cow. (Like many Chindallans, Iseul knew her fish very well.) How long had it taken the magician to put this together?

  The unfamiliar writing system was summarized in five volumes. Iseul went on to the next language. Four volumes, but the notes in the Genial Ones’ language were much more terse and had probably been compiled by a different researcher or group of researchers. She estimated the number of books, then considered the number of languages. Impressive, although she had no way of knowing how many languages there were in the world, and what fraction of them this collection of lexicons represented.

  She sampled a few more languages at random. One of the sets was, interestingly, for Yeged-dai. Judging by its position in the pile, it had been completed a while ago. She was tempted to quibble with some of the preferred spellings, but she had to concede that the language as used in occupied territories probably diverged from the purer forms spoken in Yeged proper.

  Then she came to the last set. Only one volume. The left-hand pages were written in Chindallan.

  It turned out that the second volume hadn’t yet been bound, and was scattered in untidy piles in drawers of the study. The words were sorted into broad groups more or less by Chindallan alphabetical order, although it looked like they were added as they were collected. For instance:

  Cheon-ma, the cloud-horses that carry the moon over the sea. Thankfully, the magician hadn’t attempted to sketch one. It probably would have ended up looking like an ox. The cheon-ma were favorite subjects of Chindalla’s court artists. There was a famous carving of one on a memorial from the previous dynasty, which Iseul had had the privilege of viewing once.

  Chindal-kot, the royal azalea, emblem of the queen’s house. This included a long and surprisingly accurate digression on the evolution of the house colors over the lifetime of the current dynasty as ne
w dyes were discovered. Iseul bristled at the magician’s condescending tone, although she didn’t know why she expected any better from a Genial One.

  Chaebi, the swallow, said to be a bearer of good luck. Beneath its entry was a notation on the Festival of the Swallows’ Return in the spring. And, inevitably, a sketch of a swallow, although she would have mistaken it for a goose if not for the characteristic forked tail.

  Iseul put the papers back. Her throat felt raw. The magician couldn’t be up to anything good with this, but what did it mean?

  Especially puzzling: what did it mean that all the lexicons were copied out by hand? The rough texture of ink on paper had been unmistakable. She had already witnessed a magician sending a letter by manipulating the substance of text from a book already in existence. Surely magicians could use this process to halve the work? Or did it only work on the language of magic itself?

  She had spent too long here already. It was time to get out and report this to her handler, who might have some better idea of what was going on.

  Iseul hesitated, then gathered up the Chindallan lexicon and the four volumes of the Yeged-dai lexicon. For all she knew there were duplicates elsewhere, but she would take what she could get. If she had more time to inspect the lexicons once she was far from here, there might be valuable clues. She was going to look odd hauling books around at this hour, but perhaps she could pretend to be running an errand for some Yegedin official.

  Cold inside, she headed back up the stairs, and out of the house with its secrets wrapped in words.

  The Genial Ones believed in the sovereignty of conservation laws. This may be illustrated by a tale that begins in the usual way by naming the Genial Ones as the terrible first children of the world’s dawning. In due course (so the story goes), the sun grew red and dim and large, threatening to swallow the world. Determined to preserve their spiraling towers and their symphonies and their many-bannered armies, the Genial Ones unlanterned a younger star in order to rejuvenate their own.