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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “We’re almost there,” Minsu said as they came to the coast. “Just another day’s ride.” The sun was low in the sky, but she had decided they should stop in the shelter of a hill rather than pressing on tonight. She had been quiet for most of the journey, preferring not to interrupt Iseul’s studies unless Iseul had a question for her.

  Iseul had been drowsing as she rode, a trick she had mastered out of necessity. She didn’t hear Minsu at first, lost in muddled dreams of a book. The book had pages of tawny paper, precisely the color of skin. It was urgent that she write a poem about rice-balls into the book. Everyone knew rice was the foundation of civilization and it deserved more satiric verses than it usually received, but every time she set her brush to the paper, the ink ran down the bristles and formed into cavorting figures that leapt off the pages. She became convinced that she was watching a great and terrible dance, and that the question was then whether she would run out of ink before the dance came to its fruition.

  “Iseul.” It was Minsu. She had tied her horse to a small tree and had caught Iseul’s reins. “I know you’re tired, but you look like you’re ready to fall off.”

  Iseul came alert all at once, the way she had trained herself to do on countless earlier missions. “I have to review my notes. I think I might have it this time.”

  “There’s hardly any light to read by.”

  “I’ll shield a candle.”

  “I’ll see to your horse, then,” Minsu said.

  Minsu set up camp while Iseul hunched over her notes. Properly it should have been the other way around, but Minsu never stood on formalities for their own sake. She was always happy to pour tea for others, for instance.

  “If they think to do scrying of their own once I get started,” Iseul said while Minsu was bringing her barley hardtack mashed into a crude cold porridge, “our lifespans are going to be measured in minutes.”

  “We don’t seem to have a choice if we want to survive,” Minsu said.

  “The ironic thing is that we’ll also be saving the Yegedin.”

  “We can fight the Yegedin the way we’d fight anyone else,” Minsu said. “The Genial Ones are another matter.”

  “If only we knew how General Anangan managed it the first time around,” Iseul said. But all that remained were contradictory legends. She wondered, now, if the Genial Ones themselves had obfuscated the facts.

  “If only.” Minsu sighed.

  Iseul ate the porridge without tasting it, which was just as well.

  A little while later, Minsu said quietly, “You haven’t even thought to be tempted, have you?”

  “Tempted how?” But as she spoke, Iseul knew what Minsu meant. “It would only be a temporary reprieve.”

  She knew exactly how the lexicon charm worked. She had the Yeged-dai lexicon with her, and she could use it to destroy the Yegedin language. The thirteen-year occupation would evaporate. Poets could write in their native language without fear of attracting reprisals. Southern Chindallans could use their own names again. No more rebels would have to burn to death. All compelling arguments. She could annihilate Yeged before she turned on the Genial Ones. People would consider it an act of patriotism.

  But as Minsu had said, the Yegedin could be fought by ordinary means, without resorting to the awful tools of humanity’s old masters.

  Iseul also knew that turning the lexicon charm against the Genial Ones’ own language would mean destroying magic forever. No more passage charms or lantern charms; no more convenient daggers that made people vanish.

  No more storm-horses, either, or towers built of people’s bones erupting from pyramids of corpses, as in the old stories. It wouldn’t be all bad. And what kind of spy would she be if she couldn’t improvise solutions?

  Besides, if she didn’t do something about the Genial Ones now, they would strike against all the human nations with the lexicons they had already compiled. Here, at least, the choice was clear and narrow.

  “I don’t want to be more like the Genial Ones than I have to,” Iseul said with a guilty twitch of regret. “But we do have to go through with this.”

  “Do you have ward spells prepared?” Minsu said.

  “Yes,” Iseul said. “A lot of them. Because once we’re discovered—and we have to assume we’ll be—they’re going to devote their attention to seeking out and destroying us. And we don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “Oh, that’s not true,” Minsu said. “We know exactly what they’re capable of. We’ve known for generations, even in the folktales.”

  “I should start tonight,” Iseul said. “I’m only going to be more tired tomorrow.”

  Minsu looked as though she wanted to argue, but instead she nodded.

  Iseul sat in the lee of the hill and began the painstaking work of copying out all the necessary charms, from the wards—every form of ward she knew of, including some cribbed from the Genial Ones’ own discussions—to the one that would compile the lexicon of the language of magic for her by transcribing those same discussions. That final charm was bound to fail at some point when its world of words was confined to the sheets of blank paper she had prepared for it, but—if she had done this correctly—she had constructed it so that it would target its own structural words last.

  The winds were strong tonight, and they raked Iseul with cold. The horses were unsettled, whinnying to each other and pulling at their ropes. Iseul glanced up from time to time to look at the sky, bleak and smothered over with clouds. The hills might as well have been the dented helmets of giant warriors, abandoned after an unwinnable fight.

  “All right,” Iseul said at last, hating how gray her voice sounded. She felt the first twinge of a headache and remembered to take the medicine the physician had given her. “Come into the circle of protection, Minsu. There’s no reason to delay getting started.”

  Obligingly, Minsu joined her, and Iseul activated each warding charm one by one. It was hard not to feel as though she was playing with a child’s toys, flimsy folded shapes, except she knew exactly what each of those charms was intended to do.

  At the center of the circle of protection were four books as empty as mirrors in the darkness, which Iseul had bound during her time in the safehouse. She hoped four books would be enough to cripple the Genial Ones, even if they couldn’t contain the entirety of their language. Iseul began folding pages of the empty books, dog-earing corners and folding them into skewed geometries. When she wasn’t watching closely, she had the impression that the corners were unfolding and stretching out tendrils of nascent words, nonsense syllables, to spy on her. She didn’t mention this to Minsu, but the other woman’s face was strained. There was a stinging tension in the air; her skin prickled.

  Lightning flickered in the distance as she worked. It cut from one side of the sky to the other in a way that natural lightning never did, like the sweep of a sword.

  “Hurry if you can,” Minsu said, head raised to watch the approach of the storm.

  “I’m hurrying,” Iseul said.

  The winds were whipping fiercely around them now. One of Minsu’s braids had come unpinned and was flapping like a lonely pennant.

  The candle flickered out. Minsu brought out a lantern charm.

  “I’m all for ordinary fire if you can get it to work for you,” Minsu said at Iseul’s dubious look, “but you need light and this will give you light for a time.”

  Iseul continued with the lexicon charm, double-checking every fold, every black and twining word, every diagram of spindled lines. The sense of tension sharpened. If she dared to look away from the books’ pages and at the suffocating sky, she imagined that she would see words forming amid the clouds, sky-words and wind-words and water-words, words of torrential despair and words of drowning terror, words that had existed in some form since the first people learned to speak.

  She slammed each book shut counterclockwise, shuddering, suddenly hoping the whole affair was an extension of the dream she had had and that she would wake to sunli
ght and flowers and a warm spot by some fire, but no. With a dry creaking voice—with a chorus of voices that rose and rose to a roar—the books wrenched themselves open in unison.

  For a second the pages fluttered wildly, like birds newly freed. Then they darkened as words inundated them. Slowly at first, then in a steady pouring of black writhing shapes. Postpositions. Conjunctions. Nouns that violated vowel harmony and nouns that didn’t. Verbs in different conjugations, tenses, aspects. A stray aorist. Scraps of syntax and subclause generators. Interjections snatched from between clenched teeth. Sacred names rarely spoken and never before written.

  One of the horses was thrashing about, but Iseul was only peripherally aware of it, or of Minsu swearing under her breath. A dark shape plunged up before Iseul, but she was intent upon the books, the books, the terrible books. Who knew there were so many crawling words in a language? Years ago, when reviewing a cryptology text, she had seen an estimate of the number of words a literate Chindallan needed to be able to read. She had thought the number large then. Now she knew the estimate must be low. It wasn’t possible for more words to flood the four books’ pages, but here they came, again and again and again, growing smaller and smaller as they crushed each other in the confines on the pages.

  The dark shape was one of the horses, which had pulled free of the rope in its panic. Minsu had her riding crop out and struck the horse. Iseul had a vague idea of how desperate she must be. The other woman had always been softhearted about the animals. But the horse wheeled and ran toward the hills, neighing wildly.

  Iseul’s attention was abruptly drawn to the horse when, having passed the circle of protection, lightning scythed through the horse. Except it wasn’t lightning, precisely: pale light with eyes in it, and black waving feelers sprouting from each pupil, and the feelers ate holes into the unfortunate animal’s spine. The horse screamed for a long time.

  More lightning zigzagged down from the sky, crackling around the circle. Rain was pelting down all around them, and muddy water sluiced down the hillside. Voices whispered out of the darkness, murmuring liplessly of entrails and needlepoints and vengeance. The light from the lantern charm glittered in the raindrops and the sheets of water like an unwanted promise. The lantern, although flimsy in construction, seemed to be in no danger of being toppled by the rising winds.

  One of the protective wards began to unfold itself.

  Minsu said a word that Iseul hadn’t even realized she knew.

  “We can’t let them win this,” Iseul said breathlessly. Stupid to just stand here watching, as if the Genial Ones would simply submit to the destruction of their magic. She began constructing an additional ward to reinforce the one that was disintegrating.

  Chasms of fire opened in the air, then closed, like terrible fierce smiles. The rain hissed where it met the fire, and Iseul flinched when tendrils of steam were repelled by the circle of protection. Leaves spun free of the hillside wildflowers and the nearby copses of trees, formed into great screaming birds, battered themselves fruitlessly against the wards before dissipating into shreds and slivers of green and yellow.

  Iseul spared a glance for the books. Was it possible for them to hold any more words? She set the current ward in place, then flipped through the pages of the fourth book in spite of herself, in spite of the conviction that the paper would hold her hands fast and drag her in. And then the teeth began.

  The teeth grew from the corners of the pages. They distended into predatory curves, yellow-white and gleaming. Iseul flinched violently.

  The teeth took no notice of her, but the books fanned themselves out like a hundred hundred mouths. Then, with a papery crumpling sound, they began to eat the words.

  Minsu was holding Iseul’s shoulder. “This is not,” she said thinly, “at all what I thought it would be.”

  The storm crackled and roared above them. The two women clung to each other as rain and lightning crashed inland. If the winds grew any stronger, Iseul felt she would fall over sideways and not stop falling until she had gone through the world and out the other side. But she didn’t dare rest, and she didn’t dare contemplate leaving the circle of protection

  More of the wards were unfolding. Despite her shaking hands, Iseul bent to the task of making more charms, except now the charms were fighting her. Of course, she thought, cursing herself for her carelessness. She had thought to specify that the lexicon charm would spare itself as long as possible, but she had done no such thing for the wards. She would have to try synonyms, circumlocutions, alternate geometries; she would have to hope that the Genial Ones were having as much difficulty sustaining their attacks as she was her defenses.

  The lantern charm abruptly guttered out. Iseul couldn’t see, through the water in her eyes, whether the words upon it had been devoured, or whether the Genial Ones had discovered them and snuffed it themselves.

  Faces of fire scattered downward and struck a hilltop perhaps thirty meters from them. All the faces were howling, and their eyes were hollow sooty pits. For a moment everything was crowned in sanguinary light, from the silhouetted grasses swept nearly flat to the hunched rocks.

  “We’re done for,” Iseul whispered. Was it her imagination, or did she hear horses in the distance, sharp-toothed horses with hooves that struck savage rhythms into the earth’s bones?

  More charms uncurled, crumpled, made the kinds of sounds you might imagine of lost love letters and discarded prayers.

  “Hold fast,” Minsu said, although she had to repeat herself over the drumming storm so that Iseul could hear her. Her expression was obscure in the darkness.

  Iseul was holding down the covers of one of the books, small futile gesture. The whole thing should have been drenched. Ordinarily she would have been appalled at herself for leaving a book out in the rain, but the teeth seemed just as happy to devour water as words.

  A swirl of flame made it past the circle of protection. Minsu’s hair caught on fire. She beat at the flames with her hands. For a bad moment, Iseul thought that the fires had spread to her eyes, her ears, the marrow of her hands. But after one horrifying white-red flare, the fire shook itself apart in an incoherent dazzle of sparks, then sizzled into silence.

  “I’m fine,” Minsu shouted, although her voice shook. She went to retrieve the lantern charm. “No words,” she said, squinting at it during the next lightning-flash. The charm had unfolded completely. There were only faint rust-colored marks where the words had been, like splotches of blood.

  Hurry, Iseul bid the books with their gnashing teeth. Hurry.

  There was no way to guide the books’ hunger now, no way to tell them to eat words of storm and fire above all others. They were indiscriminate in their voracity. More and more of the pages were spotted rust-red, like the former lantern charm.

  Then the storm broke. There was no other word for it. It came apart into smaller storms, and the smaller storms into eddies of wind, the rain into a fine wandering mist. In the distance they heard the tolling of dark bells and the screams of sharp-toothed horses.

  The teeth receded. The books’ pages twitched upward, yearning, then subsided. A sullen light rippled from their covers. Every single one of their pages was covered with splattered blood, a slaughterhouse of words. Fighting her revulsion, Iseul closed each one and put them away. The light sloughed away.

  Iseul and Minsu were drenched through. “We’ll catch our death of chill out here,” Iseul said. Her throat felt raw although she had hardly spoken. After what had just happened, a great lassitude threatened to drag her under, but she couldn’t afford to sleep, not yet.

  “We have to see what became of the coastal fort,” Minsu said. “If we walk through the night we might make it. Assuming the place hasn’t been overrun by the Yegedin navy.”

  The books felt like chains all the way through the night. They found a trail through the hills, difficult to see in the darkness and dangerously slippery at that, but Minsu had experience of this region and was able to lead them in the right directio
n. She insisted that Iseul ride the remaining horse while she led it. By that point, Iseul didn’t care where they were going or how they got there so long as she was allowed to collapse and sleep at the end of it. Any flat surface would do.

  “Oh no,” Minsu said at last.

  Iseul almost fell off the horse. She had slipped into a half-doze, except she kept seeing black spidering shapes behind her eyelids.

  They had stopped on the crest of a hill: risky to be silhouetted if there were enemies in the area, especially archers, but an excellent vantage point otherwise.

  The sea crashed against broken white-gray cliffs. The bones of ships could be seen floating in the newly formed harbor along with uprooted trees. “They destroyed the coast,” Minsu said, bringing out a spyglass and looking north and south. “Fort Jenal used to be out there—” She gestured toward the horizon, toward the frothing waves. “Now it’s all water and wreckage.”

  “Do you suppose there are any survivors?” Iseul said. But she knew the answer.

  Minsu shook her head.

  “If only I had figured it out sooner,” Iseul said, head bowed. If only she had been able to make the lexicon charm work faster.

  “We’ll have to notify the nearest garrison,” Minsu said, “so they can search for survivors, Chindallan or Yegedin. But for now, we must rest.”

  She said something else, but Iseul’s knees buckled and she didn’t hear any of it.

  The Genial Ones originally had no word for medicine that did not also mean poison. They ended up borrowing one from a human language spoken by people that they slaughtered the hard way for variety’s sake, person by person dragged from their villages and redoubts and killed, cautery by sword and spear.

  Minsu said very little to the garrisons they visited about the real reason the storm had broken, which was just as well. Iseul wasn’t sure what she would have said if asked about it. She did, at Minsu’s urging, write a ciphered account of the lexicon charm and the devouring books to send to the Ministry of Ornithology with a trusted courier.