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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “You should be all right so long as you don’t fall out of any more trees.” But the melancholy in his eyes told Iseul that he knew what happened to children in wartime.

  The younger girl handed him the wildflowers. She didn’t speak in complete sentences yet, but both Iseul and the physician were given to understand that she had picked him the prettiest and best wildflowers as payment. The physician smiled and told her to go back to her parents with her sister.

  “You can come in while I get the medicine, if you like,” the magician said.

  Iseul looked at him with worry as he began to walk. Something about the way he carried himself even over such a short distance intimated a great and growing pain. “Are you well?” she asked.

  “It’s an old injury,” the physician said with a shrug, “and of little importance.”

  The hut had two rooms, and the outer room was sparsely furnished. There were no books in it, which disappointed Iseul obscurely. On a worn table was a small jar with a crack at the lip and a handful of wilting cosmos flowers in it. He added the newly plucked wildflowers to the jar.

  Iseul couldn’t help looking around for weapons, traps, stray charms. Nothing presented itself to her eye as unusually dangerous, but the habit was hard to lose.

  “Here it is,” the physician said after a moment’s rooting around in a chest. “Take it once a day when the pain sets in. Ideally you want to catch it before it gets bad. And try not to rely on it more than you have to. People who take this stuff every day over long periods of time sometimes get sick in other ways.”

  “That shouldn’t be an issue,” Iseul said, one way or another. She hesitated, then said, “You could do a lot of good to the military, you know. They’re sure to be looking for physicians, and they’d probably give you a temporary license.”

  The physician held out the packet of medicine. “I am a healer of small hurts,” he said, “nothing more. Everything I accomplish is with a few herbal remedies and common sense. A surprising number of maladies respond to time and rest and basic hygiene, things that soldiers don’t see a lot of when they go to war. And besides, the people here need someone too.”

  Iseul thought of the little girl picking flowers for him. “Then I will simply wish you well,” she said. “Thank you.” She counted out the payment. He refused her attempts to pay him what he ought to be charging her.

  She took a dose of the medicine, then headed back to the safehouse. She passed more people heading out of the town. Mothers with small, squalling children on their backs. Old men leaning on canes carved in the shape of animal heads, a specialty of the region. The occasional nervous couple, quarreling about things to bring with them and things to leave behind. One woman was crying over a large lacquered box with abalone inlay. The battered box was probably the closest thing to a treasure she owned. Her husband tried to tell her that something of its size wasn’t worth hauling north and that nobody would give them much money for it anyway, which led to her shouting at him that it wasn’t for money that she wanted to bring it.

  Merchants were selling food, clothes, and other necessaries for extortionate sums. People were buying anyway: not much choice. Iseul paused to glance over a display of protection charms that one woman was selling, flimsy folded-paper pendants painted with symbols and strung on knotted cords.

  The seller bowed deeply to Iseul. “They say the storms are coming north,” she said. “Why not protect yourself from the rains and the sharp-toothed horses?”

  “Thank you, but no,” Iseul said, having satisfied herself that the charms’ symbols were beautifully rendered, but empty of virtue. “I wish you the best, though.”

  The seller eyed her, but decided not to waste time trying to sway her. Shrugging, she turned away and called out to a passing man who was wearing a finer jacket than most of the people on the street.

  There was a noodle shop on the way back to the safehouse. The noodles were just as extortionately priced, but Iseul was tired of the safehouse’s food. She paid for cold noodles flavored with vinegar, hoping that the flavor would drive out the foul taste of the medicine. The sliced cucumbers were sadly limp, so she added extra vinegar in the hopes of salvaging the dish, without much luck. At least her headache seemed to have receded.

  Iseul sat down with her papers and began her work again. She had been keeping notes on all her experiments, some of which were barely legible. She hadn’t realized how much her handwriting deteriorated when she was in pain. This time she adjusted the mobile to include a paper sphere (well, an approximate sphere) to represent the world, written over with words of water and earth and cloudshadow.

  When the scrying charm did begin to work, hours later, Iseul almost didn’t realize it. She was staring off into space, resigned to yet another failure. It was a bad sign that the tea was starting to taste good, although that might possibly be related to the desperation measure of adulterating it with increasing quantities of honey. Not very good honey, at that.

  The safehouse’s keeper had come in with another pot of tea and was staring at the mobile. “My lady,” she said, “is it supposed to be doing that?”

  Iseul stifled a yawn. She didn’t bother correcting the keeper, although a mere spy didn’t rate “lady.” “Supposed to be doing—oh.”

  The sphere was spinning at a steady rate, and black words were boiling from its surface in angry-looking tendrils. Iseul stood and squinted at them. Experimentally, she touched one of the tendrils. Her fingertip felt slightly numb, so she snatched it back. The safehouse’s keeper excused herself and left hastily, but Iseul didn’t notice.

  Iseul had a supply of sheets of paper and books of execrable poetry. She opened one of the poetry books, then positioned one of the sheets beneath the sphere’s shadow. Sure enough, words began to condense from the shadow onto the paper, and lines of poetry began to fade from the books. The lines were distorted, probably because they were traveling from a curved surface to a flat one, but the writing was readable enough, and it was in the Genial Ones’ language, as she had expected it would be.

  Not far into this endeavor, Iseul realized she was going to need a better strategy. There was only one of her, and only one of the scrying charms. Based on the sphere locations, there looked to be at least a hundred Genial Ones communicating with each other. She could make more scrying charms, but she couldn’t recruit more people to read and analyze the letters.

  Minsu stopped by the next day and was tactfully silent on Iseul’s harried appearance, although she looked like she wanted to reach out and tidy Iseul’s hair for her. “That looks like some kind of progress,” she remarked, looking around at the sorted stacks of paper, “but clearly I didn’t provide you with enough paper. Or assistants.”

  “I’m not sure assistants would help,” Iseul said. “The Genial Ones seem to communicate with each other on a regular basis. And there are a few hundred of them just based on the ones who are writing, let alone the ones who are lying low. How many people would you trust with this information?”

  She had worse news for Minsu, but it was hard to make herself say it.

  “Not a lot,” Minsu said. “There’s that old saying: only ashes keep secrets, and even they have been known to talk to the stones. What is it that the Genial Ones are so interested in talking about? I can’t imagine that they’re consulting each other on what shoes to wear to their next gathering.”

  “Shoes are important,” Iseul said, remembering how much her feet had hurt after running to the border-fort in the Yegedin soldier’s completely inadequate boots. “But yes. They’re talking about language. I’ve been puzzling through it. There are so many languages, and they work in such different ways. Did you know that there are whole families of languages with something called noun classes, where you inflect nouns differently based on the category they fall into? Except the categories don’t usually make any sense. There’s this language where nouns for female humans and animals and workers share a class, except tables, cities, and ships are also included.”
She was aware as she spoke that she was going off on a tangent. She had to nerve herself up to tell Minsu what the Genial Ones were up to.

  “I’m sure Chindallan looks just as strange to foreigners,” Minsu said. Her voice was bemused, but her somber eyes told Iseul she knew something was wrong. “I once spoke to a Jaioi merchant who couldn’t get used to the fact that our third person pronouns don’t distinguish between males and females, which is apparently very important in his language. On the other hand, he couldn’t handle the formality inflections on our verbs at all. He’d hired an interpreter so he wouldn’t inadvertently offend people.”

  The “interpreter” would have been a spy; that went without saying. Iseul had worked such straightforward assignments herself, once upon a time.

  “You haven’t said how bad things are down south,” Iseul said. She couldn’t put this off forever, and yet.

  “Well, I’m tempted to have you relocate further north,” Minsu said, “but there’s only so far north to go. The Yegedin have taken the coastal fort of Suwen. We suspect they’re hoping to open up more logistical options from their homeland. I don’t, frustratingly, have a whole lot of information on what our navy is up to. They’re probably having trouble getting the Yegedin to engage them.” During the original invasion, only the rapacious successes of Chindalla’s navy—always stronger than its army—had forced the Yegedin to halt their advance.

  “I have to work faster,” Iseul said, squeezing her eyes shut. Time to stop delaying. Minsu was silent, and Iseul opened them again. “Of course, every time the safehouse keeper comes in, she looks at me like I’m crazed.” She eyed the mobiles. There was only room for eleven of them, but the way they spun and cavorted, like orreries about to come apart, was probably a good argument that their creator wasn’t in her right mind. “What I don’t understand . . . “ She ran her hand over one of the stacks of paper.

  When Iseul didn’t continue the thought, Minsu said, “Understand what?”

  “I’ve tested the letter-scrying spell,” Iseul said, “with languages that aren’t the Genial Ones’. I’m only fluent in five languages besides Chindallan, but I tried them all. And the spell won’t work on anything but the language of magic. The charms spin around but they can’t so much as get a fix on a letter that I’m writing in the same room.”

  “Did you try modifying the charm?” Minsu asked.

  “I thought of that, but magic doesn’t work that way. I mean, the death-touch daggers, for instance. If you had to craft them to a specific individual target, they’d be less useful. Well, in most circumstances.” They could both think of situations where a dagger that would only kill a certain person might be useful. “But I think that’s why the Genial Ones have been so quiet, and why they’ve been busy compiling the lexicons by hand for each human language. Because there’s no other way to do it. They know more magic than I do, that goes without saying. If there were some charm to do the job for them, they’d be using it.”

  “I have the feeling you’re going to lead up to something that requires the best of teas to face,” Minsu said, and stole a sip from Iseul’s cup before Iseul had the chance to warn her off. She was too well-bred to make remarks about people who put honey in even abysmal tea, but her eyebrows quirked a little.

  Iseul looked away. “I think I know why the Genial Ones are compiling lexicons,” she said, “and it isn’t because they really like writing miniature treatises on morphophonemics.”

  “How disappointing,” Minsu said, “you may have destroyed my affection for them forever.” But her bantering tone had worry beneath it.

  Iseul went to a particular stack of papers, which she had weighted down with a letter opener decorated with a twining flower motif. “They’ve been discussing an old charm,” she said. “They want to create a variation of the sculpture charm.”

  “That was one of the first to become defunct after their defeat,” Minsu observed. “Apparent defeat, I should say.”

  “That brings me to the other thing,” Iseul said. “I think I’ve figured out that word that the first Genial One said, the one that was unfamiliar. Because it keeps showing up in their conversations. I think it’s a word that didn’t exist before.”

  “I remember that time that satirist coined a new word for hairpins that look like they ought to be good for assassinations but are completely inadequate for the job,” Minsu said. “Of course, based on Chindalla’s plays and novels, I have to concede that we needed the word.”

  Minsu’s attempts to get her to relax weren’t helping, but Iseul appreciated the effort. You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this— “ ‘Defeat,’ ” Iseul said softly. “The word means ‘defeat.’ ”

  “Surely they can’t have gone all this time without—” Minsu’s mouth pressed into a flat line.

  “Yes,” Iseul said. “These are people who had separate words for their blood and our blood. Because we weren’t their equals. Until General Anangan overcame them, they had no word for their own defeat. Not at the hands of humans, anyway, as opposed to the intrigues and backstabbing that apparently went on among their clans.”

  “All right,” Minsu said, “but that can’t be what’s shadowing your eyes.”

  “They want to defeat us the way we almost defeated them,” Iseul said. “They’re obsessed with it. They’ve figured out how to scale the sculpture charm up. Except they’re not going to steal our shapes. They’re going to steal our words and add them to their own language. And Chindalla’s language is the last to be compiled for the purpose.”

  In the old days, the forgotten days, the human nations feared the Genial Ones’ sculptors and their surgeons and their soldiers. They knew, however, that the greatest threat was none of these, but the Genial Ones’ lexicographers, whose thoroughness was legendary. The languages that they collected for their own pleasure vanished, and the civilizations that spoke those languages invariably followed soon afterwards.

  Iseul was in the middle of explaining her plan to thwart the Genial Ones to Minsu, which involved charms to destroy the language of magic itself, when the courier arrived. The safehouse’s keeper interrupted them. Iseul thought it was to bring them tea, but she was accompanied by a young man, much disheveled and breathing hard. He was obviously trying not to stare at the room’s profusion of charms, or at Iseul herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she had given her hair a good thorough combing, and she probably looked like a ghost. (For some reason ghosts never combed their hair.) Her mother would have despaired of her.

  “I trust you have a good reason for this,” Minsu said wearily.

  “You need to hear this, my lady,” the keeper said.

  The young man presented his papers to Minsu. They declared him to be a government courier, although the official seal, stamped in red ink that Iseul happened to know never washed out of fabric no matter what you tried, was smeared at the lower right corner. Minsu looked over the papers, frowning, then nodded. “Speak,” Minsu said.

  “A Yegedin detachment of two thousand has been spotted heading this way,” the courier said. “It’s probably best if you evacuate.”

  Iseul closed her eyes and drew a shuddering breath in spite of herself.

  “All this work,” Minsu said, gesturing at the mobiles.

  “It’s not worth defending this town,” Iseul said bleakly, “am I right?”

  “The throne wishes its generals to focus on protecting more important cities,” the courier said. “I’m sorry, my lady.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Iseul said to Minsu. “I can work as easily from another safehouse.”

  “You’ll have to set up the charms all over again,” Minsu said.

  “It can’t be helped. Besides, if we stay here, even if the Yegedin don’t get us, the looters will.”

  The courier’s expression said that he was realizing that Iseul might have more common sense than her current appearance suggested. Still, he addressed Minsu. “The detachment will probably be here within th
e next five days, my lady. Best to leave before the news becomes general knowledge.”

  “Not as if there are a whole lot of people left here anyway,” Minsu said. “All right. Thank you for the warning.”

  Iseul was used to being able to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, but she hadn’t reckoned on dealing with the charms and the quantities of text that they had generated. There wasn’t time to burn everything, which made her twitch. They settled for shuffling the rest into boxes and abandoning them with the heaps of garbage that could be found around the town. Her hands acquired blisters, but she didn’t even notice how much they hurt.

  Iseul and Minsu joined the long, winding trail of refugees heading north. The safehouse keeper insisted on parting ways from them because she had family in the area. Minsu’s efforts to talk her out of this met with failure. She pressed a purse of coins into the keeper’s hands; that was all the farewell they could manage.

  Minsu bought horses from a trader at the first opportunity, the best he had, which wasn’t saying much. The price was less extravagant than Iseul might have guessed. Horses were very unpopular at the moment because everyone had the Yegedin storm-horses on their mind, and people had taken to stealing and killing them for the stewpot instead. Minsu insisted on giving Iseul the calmer gelding and taking the cantankerous mare for herself. “No offense,” she said, “but I have more experience wrangling very annoying horses than you do.”

  “I wasn’t complaining,” Iseul said. She was credible enough on horseback, but it really didn’t matter.

  Most of the refugees headed for the road to the capital, where they felt the most safety was to be had. Once the two of them were mounted, however, Minsu led them northeast, toward the coast.

  In the evenings Iseul would rather have dropped asleep immediately, but constructing her counterstroke against the Genial Ones was an urgent problem, and it required all her attention. Not only did she have to construct a charm to capture the Genial Ones’ words, she had to find a way to destroy those words so they could never be used again. Sometimes she caught herself nodding off, and she pinched her palm to prick herself awake again. They weren’t just threatened by armies; they were threatened by the people who had once ruled all the known nations.