Conservation of Shadows

ISEUL’S LEXICON

kandagghamel, noun: One of two names the Genial Ones used for their own language. The other, menjitthemel, was rarely written. Derived from kandak, the dawn flower of their mythology and a common heraldric device; agha, or “law”; and mel, “word” or “speech.” Note that mel is one of a small class of lexical elements that consistently violates vowel harmony in compounds. The Genial Ones ascribe considerable metaphysical importance to this irregularity.

She went by the name Jienem these days, a proper, demure Yegedin name that meant something between “young bud” and “undespoiled.” It was not her real name. She had been born Iseul of Chindalla, a peninsula whose southern half was now occupied by the Yegedin, and although she was only the bastard daughter of a nobleman and an entertainer, she never forgot the name her mother had given her.

The Empire of Yeged had occupied South Chindalla for the past thirteen years, and renamed it Territory 4. Yeged and free Chindalla had a truce, but no one believed it would last for long, and in the meantime Chindalla had no compunctions about sending agents into South Chindalla. People still spoke the Chindallan language here, but the Empire forbade them to write it, or to use Chindallan names, which was why Iseul used a Yegedin name while operating as a spy in the south for the Chindallan throne. Curiously, for people so bent on suppressing the Chindallan language, Yeged’s censors had a great interest in Chindallan books. Their fascination was enormous and indiscriminate: cookbooks rounded out with gossip, military manuals, catalogues of hairstyles, yearly rainfall tabulations, tales of doomed love affairs, court annals, ghost stories, adventures half written in cipher, everything you could imagine.

Iseul worked for Chindalla’s Ministry of Ornithology, which, despite its name, had had nothing to do with birds or auguries for generations. It ran the throne’s spies. The ministry had told her to figure out why the books were so important to the Yegedin. Iseul had a gift for languages, and in her former life she had been a poet, although she didn’t have much time for satiric verses these days. The ministry had recruited her because she was able to write Yeged-dai and speak it with any of three native accents. She also had a reasonable facility with the language of magic, a skill that never ceased to be useful.

In the town the Yegedin had renamed Mijege-in, the censor was a magician. Iseul was to start with him, especially since tonight he was obliged to attend a formal dinner welcoming an official visiting from Yeged proper. It would have been more entertaining to spy on the dinner—she would have had a chance of snacking on some of the delicacies—but someone else was doing that. Her handler, Shen Minsu, had assigned her to search the magician’s home because she had the best chance of being able to deal with magical defenses.

Getting into the house hadn’t been too difficult. The gates to the courtyard and all the doors were hung with folded-paper wards inscribed with barrier-words of apathy and dejection to discourage people like Iseul. She had come prepared with a charm of passage, however, and a belt hung with tiny locks worn around her waist under her sash. The charm of passage caused all the wards to unfold, and reciprocally, most of the locks had snapped closed. One time, early in her career as a spy, she had run out of locks while infiltrating a fort, and the thwarted charm had begun throwing up random obstacles as she attempted to flee: a burst pipe, crates almost falling on her, a furious cat. Now she erred on the side of more locks.

It was a small house, all things considered, but magicians were a quirky lot and maybe he didn’t want to deal with the servants necessary to keep a larger house clean. The courtyard was disproportionately large, and featured a tangle of roses that hadn’t been pruned aggressively enough and equally disheveled trees swaying in the evening wind. Some landscaper had attempted to introduce a Yegedin-style rock garden in the middle. The result wasn’t particularly harmonious.

She circled the house, but heard nothing and saw no people moving against the rice-paper doors. Then she went in the front door. She had two daggers in case she came across someone. After watching the house for a few days, she had concluded that the magician lived alone, but you never knew if someone had a secret lover stashed away. Or a very loud pet. That time with the peacock, for instance. Noisy birds, peacocks. Anyway, with luck, she wouldn’t have to kill anyone this time; she was just here for information.

Her first dagger was ordinary steel, the suicide-blade that honorable Yegedin women carried. It would be difficult to explain her possession of the blade if she was searched, but that wasn’t the one that would get her in trouble.

Her second dagger was the one that she couldn’t afford to be caught carrying. It looked more like a very long needle, wrapped around and around by tiny words in the Genial Ones’ language. It was the fifth one Iseul had constructed, although the Ministry of Ornithology had supplied the unmarked dagger for her to modify.

The dagger was inscribed with the word for human or animal blood, umul. The Genial Ones had had two more words for their own blood, one for what spilled out of them in ordinary circumstances, and another used in reference to ritual bloodletting. The dagger destroyed the person you stabbed it with if you drew blood, and distorted itself into a miniature, rusting figure of the victim: ghastly, but easy to dispose of. Useful for causing people to disappear.

The house’s passages had creaky wooden floors, but nobody called out or rushed out to attack her. Calligraphy scrolls decorated the walls. Yeged had a calligraphy tradition almost as old as Chindalla’s, and the scrolls displayed Yegedin proverbs and poetry in a variety of commendably rhythmic hands. She could name the styles they were scribed in, most of them well-regarded, if a little old-fashioned: River Rocks Tumbling, Butterfly’s Kiss, Anaiago’s Comb . . .

Iseul looked away from the scrolls. She shouldn’t get distracted, even though the scrolls might be a clue of some kind. There was always the chance that the magician would find some excuse to leave the dinner early and come home.

She found part of what she was looking for in the magician’s study, which was dismally untidy, with scraps of paper on every conceivable surface. There was still some light from outside, although she had a lantern charm just in case.

The magician had brought home two boxes of Chindallan books. One of them mostly contained supernatural stories involving nine-tailed foxes, a genre whose appeal had always eluded her, but which was enduringly popular. She had to concede the charm of some of the illustrations: fox eyes peering brightly from behind masks, fox tails curving slyly from beneath layers of elaborate robes, fox paws slipping out of long gloves.

Stuffed into the same box was a volume of poetry, which Iseul pulled out in a spirit of professional interest. With a sigh, she began flipping through the book, letting her eye alight on the occasional well-turned phrase. She kept track of syllable counts by reflex. Nothing special. She was tempted to smuggle it out on principle, but this collection had been popular sixteen years ago and there were still a lot of copies to be had in the north. Besides, the magician would surely notice if one of his spoils went missing.

The next book was different. It had a tasteful cover in dark red, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. She had seen books with covers in every conceivable color, some of them ill-advised; hadn’t everyone? No. It was the fact that the book shouldn’t have been in the box with the others. She went through a dozen pages just to be sure, but she had been right. Each page was printed in Yeged-dai, not Chindallan.

However, Iseul could see why whoever had packed the box had gotten confused. She recognized the names of most of the poets. More specifically, she recognized the Yegedin names that Chindallan poets had taken.

Iseul knew from experience that a poet’s existence was a precarious one if you didn’t come from a wealthy family or have a generous patron. Fashions in poetry came and went almost as quickly as fashions in hairstyles. Before the Ministry of Ornithology recruited her, she had written sarcastic verses for nobles to pass around at social functions, and the occasional parody. Slightly risky, but her father’s prominence as a court official had afforded her a certain degree of protection from offended writers.

The poets who survived in occupied Chindalla could no longer rely on their old patrons, or write as they had been accustomed to writing. But some of them had a knack for foreign languages, as Iseul did, or had perhaps learned Yeged-dai even before the invasion. Those poets had been able to adapt. She had known about such people before this. But it still hurt her to see their poems before her, printed in the curving Yeged-dai script, using Yegedin forms and the images so beloved of the Yegedin: the single pebble, the grasshopper at twilight, the song of a heartbroken lark sitting in a bent tree.

Iseul put the book back in its place, wishing for something to staunch the ache within her. It would have been easy to hate the southern poets for abandoning their own language, but she knew that resistance carried a considerable risk. Even in Mijege-in, which had fallen early and easily, and which the Yegedin considered well-tamed, the governor occasionally burned rebels alive. She had passed by the latest corpses on the walls when she entered the city. Mainly she remembered them as shadows attracting shadows, charred sticks held together by a conglomeration of ravens.

There were also those who had died in the initial doomed defense of the south. Sometimes she thought she would never forgive her father, whose martial skills were best not mentioned, for dying with the garrison at Hwagan Fort in an attempt to slow the Yegedin advance. There were poems about that battle, all red-stained banners and broken spears and unquiet pyres, all glory and honor, except there had been nothing glorious about the loss. She hated herself for reading the poems over and over whenever she encountered them.

Iseul went through the second box. More Chindallan books, the usual eclectic variety, and no clue as to what the Yegedin wanted with them. Maybe it was simple acquisitiveness. One of the Yegedin governors, knowing the beauty and value of Chindallan celadon, had taken the simple expedient of rounding up all the Chindallan potters in three provinces and sending them to his homeland as slaves along with their clay, as well as buying up everything from vases to good forgeries of antique jewelry boxes.

The rest of the box didn’t take her long to get through. It included a single treatise on magic. Those were getting harder and harder to find in the south, as the Yegedin quite reasonably didn’t trust magic in Chindallan hands. The treatise in question concerned locator charms. Like all magic, locators were based on the writings of the Genial Ones, who had once ruled over the human nations the way Yeged desired to rule over the known world. Humans had united under General Anangan to destroy the Genial Ones, but not long after that, a chieftain assassinated the general and the alliance dissolved.

People discovered that, over time, magic started to fail because its masters were no more. Locators had stopped being reliable about a century ago or Iseul would have had some uses for them herself. On the occasions that you could get one to activate at all, it tended to chew a map into your entrails. Some people would still have used them anyway, but the maps were also inevitably false.

The treatise’s author had included a number of gruesome illustrations to support her contention that the failed magic was affected by the position of the user’s spleen. The theory was preposterous, but all the same, Iseul wished she could liberate the treatise. She didn’t dare risk it, though. The magician would be even more sure to notice a missing book on magic.

Iseul froze. Had she just heard footsteps? How could the magician be back so early? Or had she spent more time looking through those damnable poems than she had realized? She ducked behind a coat rack. Under better circumstances, she would have critiqued the coats, although a quick glance suggested that they were in fact of high quality. That cuff, for instance; hard to find embroiderers these days who were willing to put up with the hassle of couching gold thread that had to be done in such short segments. Iseul’s mother had always impressed upon her the importance of appearances, something that Iseul had used against a great many people as a spy.

The footsteps were getting closer and their owner was walking briskly. A bad sign. Contrary to popular belief, magicians couldn’t detect each other; being a magician was merely a matter of study, applied linguistics, and a smattering of geometry. Magicians could, however, check the status of their charms by looking, just like anyone else with a working pair of eyes. Or by touch, if it came to that. The problem with the passage charm that Iseul used was that it made no attempt to hide its effects. The older version that disguised its own workings had stopped working about 350 years ago.

It might be time to flee. Iseul was willing to bet that she was more athletic than a magician who worked in an office all day. Her glimpses of him hadn’t suggested that he was particularly fit. The study’s window was covered in oiled paper, and was barely large enough for her to squeeze through.

More footsteps. Iseul headed for the window, but her sleeve snagged on a coat, and it rustled to the floor. Just her luck: the magician had left a coin purse in it, and the coins jangled as they landed. She cursed her clumsiness. Now he probably knew her location. Indeed, halfway on her way to the window, flowers with shadow-mouths and toothy leaves started growing in hectic tangles from the window, barring her passage.

Iseul knew better than to believe the illusion, no matter how much the heavy, heady scent of the blossoms threatened to clog her sinuses; no matter how much her hands wanted to twitch away from the jagged leaves and the glistening intimation of poison on the stems. She had seen these flowers in her dreams as a child, when she was afraid that she would fall asleep in the garden during hide-and-seek and be swallowed up by the spirits of thorn and malice. They were only as real as she allowed them to be.

Her father had once, uncharacteristically, given her a piece of military advice, probably quoted from some manual. They had been playing baduk, a board game involving capturing territory with stones. As usual, he refused to give her any handicap despite the disparity in age. She had been complaining about the fact that she was sure to lose. In her defense, she had only been ten. It doesn’t matter how good your position is, he had told her, if you’re already defeated in your head.

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 wasn’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 new 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.

It is likely that they did this more than once.

Many of Chindalla’s astronomers believe that, since this sun indisputably supports learned civilizations, other stars must do the same. Some astronomers have produced lengthy essays, complete with computations, to support this position.

Reckoning whether any such civilization would survive the extinction of its sun, on the other hand, requires no arduous calculation.

Iseul’s handler, Shen Minsu, was a tall, plain woman with a strong right arm. Before the invasion, she had been known for her skill at archery. Iseul had seen her split one arrow with another at 130 meters during a private display. “Useless skill,” Minsu had said afterwards, “people dead of arrows to the heart find it hard to confess what they’re up to. Much better to make use of the living.”

They met now in the upper storage room of a pharmacy in a small town. The Shen family had risen to prominence by running pharmacies. One of the earlier Shens had been elevated to a noble after one of his concoctions cured a beloved king-consort’s fever. Even in the south, the Shen family maintained good ties with medicine-sellers and herb-gatherers. Yegedin medicine was not terribly different in principle from Chindallan medicine, and the Yegedin prized Chindalla’s mountain ginseng, which was said to bestow longevity. Iseul had grown up drinking the bitter tea at her mother’s insistence, but from observation of her mother’s patrons, it didn’t do anything more for you than any other form of modest living.

Minsu didn’t care for ginseng tea, ironically, but she always insisted that they drink tea of some sort whenever they met. Iseul took a sip now. She was wearing clothes cut more conservatively, and she had switched her hairstyle to the drab sort of thing a widow might favor. Shen Minsu was wearing subdued brown and beige linen, which suited her surprisingly well, instead of the sumptuous embroidered robes she would have worn in northern Chindalla.

Minsu was going methodically through the incomplete Chindallan lexicon. She had already glanced through the Yeged-dai lexicon. “You’re certain,” Minsu said for the third time this meeting, which showed how unsettled she was.

“I killed a Yegedin guard on the way out, to be sure,” Iseul said bleakly. She had agonized over the decision, but it wouldn’t be the first time she had killed a Yegedin on Chindalla’s behalf. The dagger had performed flawlessly, which meant the issue wasn’t that the charm had stopped working; the issue was that the charm only triggered on human blood. “And the last thing the Genial One said—”

You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this—and then the unfamiliar term.

“My guess is that the Yegedin are as much in the dark as we are,” Minsu said. “I find it hard to believe that even they would knowingly ally with the Genial Ones.”

“I wish I believed that Yeged conquered Chindalla so handily by allying itself with monsters,” Iseul said bitterly.

Both of them knew that Yeged’s soldiers hadn’t needed supernatural help. In the previous century, Chindalla had turned inwards, its court factions squabbling over ministry appointments and obscure philosophical arguments. The Yegedin had also been a people divided, but that division that taken the form of vicious civil wars. As a result, when a warlord united Yeged and declared himself Emperor, he was sitting on a brutally effective army that had grown accustomed to the spoils of war. It had only been natural for the Emperor’s successor to send his soldiers overseas in search of more riches to keep them loyal.

“I feel as though we’ve walked into a children’s story,” Minsu said. “When I was a child, the servants would scare us out of trouble by telling us tales—you know the ones. Don’t pull the horses’ tails, or the Genial Ones’ falcons will come out of the shadows and eat your eyes. If you pinch snacks from the kitchens at night, the Genial Ones will turn your fingers into twigs and use them for kindling. Or if you tear your jacket climbing trees, the Genial Ones will sew you up with your little brother and use you as a ceremonial robe. That sort of thing.”

“Except they were real,” Iseul said. “All the histories in all the known nations agree on the basics. It’s difficult not to believe them.”

Minsu sighed. “The Yegedin haven’t mentioned anything in their official dispatches so far as we know, but one of my contacts in Mijege-in has remarked on how the censor has been terribly quiet. A very long-running hangover after entertaining the guest from Yeged. No doubt the Yegedin authorities are looking for the murderer as we speak.” She looked sideways at Iseul; her eyes were dark and very grave. “And that means the Genial Ones are looking for the murderer, too.

“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Minsu went on, “although if they’re researching the world’s languages it’s certain that they’re widely dispersed. You’re lucky to have survived, and you’re also lucky that he tried to take care of you himself instead of raising the alarm.”

“He probably didn’t want to risk anyone else finding out about his collection of lexicons,” Iseul said, “if he ran afoul of some Yegedin magician.”

“This is a complication that I didn’t need,” Minsu said, “but it can’t be helped. We’re going to have to pull out.”

“It’s hardly unexpected,” Iseul said. People were talking about it in the markets, not least because the prices for ordinary necessities had gone up again.

The Yegedin were preparing to break the thirteen-year truce and move on free Chindalla to the north. Reinforcements had been filtering into the territory, some crossing the ocean from Yeged itself.

“I assume you have dedicated assassins,” Iseul said, “but we need to find out if there are any Genial Ones associated with the Yegedin army. One of them might have been mediocre at hand-to-hand combat, but we don’t know how closely connected they are with Yeged’s plans. If they intervene as magicians, or trained the Yegedin magicians, the border defenses could be in a lot of trouble. At least we know that they can be killed.”

Humans had battled the Genial Ones as a matter of necessity, even if they hadn’t done as thorough a job of obliterating them as everyone had thought.

“Well,” Minsu said, “it’s clear you can’t rely on the charms anymore since they’ll be suspicious of anyone using magic. You’re in a lot of danger.”

Iseul looked at her bleakly. Like everyone in Chindalla, she had grown up with stories of the Genial Ones’ terrible horses, whose hooves opened cracks in the earth with bleak black eyes staring out until they boiled poisonously away; the Genial Ones’ banquets, served in the skulls of children; the Genial Ones’ adulthood ceremonies, where music of drum and horn caused towers of glistening cartilage to grow out of mounds of corpses. Even in the days of their dominion, the histories said, there had been humans who objected not to the Genial Ones’ methods, but to the fact that they didn’t have mastery of those terrible arts for themselves. After the Genial Ones’ downfall, they had lost no time in learning. The wars in the wake of General Anangan’s assassination had been wide-reaching and bloody.

“Everything has been dangerous,” Iseul said. “We just didn’t realize it until now. And who knows—maybe if I can lure them out, we can get them to reveal more about whatever it is they’re up to.”

They discussed possible options for a while. “Your tea’s getting cold,” Minsu said eventually. “Drink up. You never know when you’ll next taste Three Pale Blossoms tea harvested before the Yegedin took over the plantation.” Her smile was bitter. “I keep track, you know. Not many people care, especially when the stuff is a luxury to begin with, but it matters.”

“I know,” Iseul said. “You don’t have to remind me.” She drank the rest of the cup with slow sips. She didn’t like the tea, but that wasn’t the point.

himmadaebi, noun: More literally, “great white horse rains.” A Chindallan term used of the worst storms. Originally reserved for the storms that the Genial Ones used to call down on cities that defied them. Usage shifted after the Genial Ones’ defeat by General Anangan, although attempts to date the change have been hampered by the fact that literacy rates in Chindalla at the time were much lower than they are now, and only a few reliable sources are extant.

Not long after Iseul’s run-in with the magician, the second Yegedin invasion began with a storm, and with horses.

The horses were the color of foam-rush and freezing ice. They had wide, mad eyes and hooves that struck the earth as though it were a breaking drum. Their shadows broke off behind them every fourth stride and unfurled into tatters that sliced off tree branches and left boulders in crumbled ruins.

Iseul had been traveling with the soldiers ever since they decamped from the city that the Yegedin had renamed Mijege-in, heading north toward the border of free Chindalla. The infantry soldiers had wan, anxious expressions, and the highborn cavalrymen didn’t look much better. Their horses were blinkered, and the blinkers were made of paper covered with cryptic words: charms. She had checked one night. Too bad she couldn’t cause a little confusion by making off with all the blinkers, but it wasn’t feasible and she had a more important task.

She had been tempted to report to Minsu for further instructions the moment she saw the horses. The storm-spell had been defunct for over two centuries. There were accounts of it in the old histories. One of the northwestern Chindallan forts had been thundered down by such a storm generations past. To this day the grasses and trees grew sickly and stunted where the stones had once stood. It wasn’t surprising that the Yegedin had more magicians in their employ, but the fact that an old charm had been resuscitated suggested that at least one of the magicians was a Genial One, or had been trained by one. Perhaps a Genial One could pass the charm off as a brilliant research discovery, even though the problem of magic that didn’t work anymore had vexed the human nations ever since the phenomenon was noted.

But Iseul needed better information. It had taken an alliance of all the human nations to defeat the Genial Ones the last time, and some of them had survived anyway. There were probably much fewer of them now, but she was under no illusions that the human nations of the present time were likely to unite even for this, especially if they had a chance of claiming the Genial Ones’ magics for themselves.

She had spent cold hours thinking about the fact that at least one of the old spells worked again, which meant others might, too. And which meant that human magicians and their masters would seek those spells for their own ends, no matter how horrible the cost.

Tonight Iseul was dripping wet and huddled in a coat that wasn’t doing nearly enough to keep out the chill. She had killed a scout early on and was wearing his clothes. Her hair was piled up underneath his cap and she had bound her chest tight. It wouldn’t pass a close inspection, but no one was looking closely at anyone in such miserable weather.

Iseul was helped by the Yegedin themselves. Not that the Chindallans were known for tight military discipline either, but the Yegedin force was doing unusually poorly in this regard. Part of the problem was that no one felt comfortable near the storm-horses. The other part was that orders from Yeged had apparently assigned the initial attack to not one but two rival generals. No doubt the theory was that the two would spur each other on to ever greater feats in battle, but in practice this meant the two generals’ soldiers squabbled over everything from watch assignments to access to the best forage. Iseul had situated herself at the hazy boundary between the two armies so she could claim to be on either side as necessary.

Tonight she had decided that she would try approaching the magicians’ tent again. The Yegedin were sheltering in hills perhaps two days’ march from the nearest Chindallan border-fort. The Chindallan sentries would have seen the storm, although the knowledge wouldn’t save them. They almost certainly wouldn’t realize what it signified.

She was tempted to assassinate the Yegedin magicians. But she would undoubtedly die in the attempt. Besides, as terrible as it would be to lose the fort, it was more important to determine how the Genial Ones meant to threaten all of Chindalla.

Iseul eased her way toward the magicians’ tent a little at a time. She had learned that there were two of them and that they kept to themselves, although not much else. Even the officers didn’t like speaking of them too loudly. When they did mention the magicians, it was with careful distaste. Iseul was only a little reassured to find out that Yegedin attitudes toward magicians weren’t far different from Chindallan attitudes, considering that she knew how to use charms herself.

Most of the soldiers who weren’t on watch were, sensibly, sleeping. But a few exchanged ribald jokes about shapeshifting badgers, or spoke of how much they missed proper plum pickles from home, or mentioned pilgrimages they had made to Yeged’s holy mountains in the past. Some of them looked quite young.

One of the younger ones mentioned a pretty Chindallan woman who was waiting for him in a southern town. Iseul kept her face blank at the coarse remarks that followed. She had long practice controlling her expression, and it wasn’t news that a number of the Yegedin had taken lovers among the Chindallans. South Chindalla had been occupied for thirteen years, after all. There were Chindallans who had grown up thinking of the Yegedin as their natural rulers, and whose only memories of freedom were a child’s memories of stubbed toes and overripe persimmons and picking cosmos flowers in the fall.

Iseul clutched the satchel of the unfortunate scout and continued to the magicians’ tent, which stood by itself with two reluctant sentries at the tent flap. A pale, unsettling light burned from the tent. She wound her way to the back. The sentries were exchanging riddles. She wished she could stay and listen; the Yegedin, for all their faults, knew the value of a good riddle.

She was going to have a hard time getting past the sentries into the tent, and from the sounds of it the magicians were having a discussion. The fact that there were always sentries was bad enough. She might have dealt with them, but usually at this hour the magicians were speaking to one or the other of the generals in the command tent. Rotten luck.

Of course, all the rotten luck in the world didn’t make a difference when the magicians’ defensive charms were certain still to be in place. She had glimpsed some the first time she approached the tent nights ago. While some of them were unfamiliar, she recognized the ones that would have detected the use of concealment magic. Another was a boundary-warden, which would have caught her if she had attempted to cut her way into the tent.

This was no doubt just punishment for developing a dependence on the Genial Ones’ tools all these years, but Iseul couldn’t help but grit her teeth. She wondered if a passage charm would work, but the Genial Ones might have a countermeasure for that, too. Keeping her expression placid, she strolled on by.

The magicians’ voices carried remarkably well in the chilly damp. They spoke the language of magic with an accent similar to that of the Genial One Iseul had killed. She had difficulty understanding their pronunciation, as before, but her mother had taught her how to sing in foreign languages by concentrating first on the sounds without worrying about the meaning. As she traced a meandering path, she committed the conversation, which had the rhythms of an argument, to memory.

Iseul slouched her way to a less conspicuous location, avoiding contact with Yegedin soldiers as much as possible. She had only two days to figure out a better approach. If she had Minsu’s astonishing skill with a bow—but going around with a Chindallan weapon, especially one so difficult to conceal as a bow, would be a sure way of getting herself killed for no gain.

The storms grew worse in the next two days. Iseul drifted to the rear with other laggards. The generals had people whipped for it, but nothing could change people’s opinion of the storm-horses.

She tried again the next night. The guards were clearly bored. One of them kept peeling back the tent flap to look in and make snide comments about the magicians’ furnishings. Time to risk a more direct approach if it would get her a glimpse of the tent’s contents. She made sure to spill some of the scout’s rice wine on her coat and take a long sip before she strolled on by just as one of the guards was finishing up a joke about an abbot and an albino bear.

“Hey, you’d better move on,” the other guard said, noticing Iseul. “The only things that go on in there are related to spiders.” He shuddered.

The guard was probably referring to the moving shadows. Iseul staggered a little as she approached him. Inside, there was a charm on the small table right next to a telltale sheaf of papers, but it was hard to see—ah, there it was. Two quills, curving in opposite directions. She guessed that they complemented each other, one to send letters and one to receive.

“If he’s drunk, maybe he’s drinking something better than we are,” the first guard said. “Want to share what you have, friend?”

“It’s no good if they catch us drinking on duty,” the second guard said.

“Like they pay attention to people like us.”

“Ah, what’s the harm,” Iseul said in her gruffest voice, which wasn’t very, and handed over her flask. It was terrible wine, but maybe terrible wine was better than no wine. She didn’t hang around to find out what the guards decided to do with the flask.

The information about the quills was all she had gotten out of the miserable journey, but it might allow her to figure out a charm to spy on the Genial Ones’ future communications. She worked her way to the rear again, and left six hours before dawn the day the siege began. Without an army’s impedimenta to trouble her, she could make better time. Not that the storm wasn’t obvious, but it wasn’t clear to her the Chindallan watchers would realize just what it signified.

She shed the Yegedin clothing while hiding behind some shrubs, exchanging it for the plain brown dress—now quite rumpled—she had been carrying with her, although she resented even the moments that this took. Then she ran for the border-fort, pacing herself. It was hard to make herself concentrate on the dubious paths, but she would be no use if she sprained an ankle on the loose rocks. She had not eaten well while she traveled with the Yegedin army, and it took its toll now. Her breath came hard, and she could feel the storm-winds drawing ever closer behind her.

She had kept the Yegedin boots on because she hadn’t brought spare shoes—they would have been a nuisance to carry around—but she discovered that the boots were even worse than she knew from days of marching around in them. Every step jolted the soles of her feet, and the toes were starting to pinch. The scout she had killed hadn’t had notably small feet, so she was guessing the boots had caused him even more discomfort than they were causing her. Ill-fitting shoes were apparently a military universal: she knew Chindallan soldiers complained about it, too.

The sky to the north was yet clear, but every time she glanced over her shoulder she saw the stormclouds.

The gate guards to the border-fort must have been bemused to see a small, disheveled woman huffing as she came up the road. Iseul was gratified to see the wall sentries training their bows on her: at least they were prepared for the enemy. “I work for the Ministry of Ornithology,” she called out. Iseul trusted that the purity of her Chindallan accent, high court from the north, would convince them that she was no Yegedin. “That’s an army a few hours south, as you’ve guessed, but it has magicians.”

The guards conferred, and after a few moments escorted her in to see the guard captain. “You must have made a narrow escape, sister,” he said. He was a stocky man, much scarred, with kind eyes, and he spoke Chindallan with the unhurried rhythms of the hill people. Iseul had never been so grateful to hear her people’s language. “The outriders had thought as much. Follow me. We can at least give you something to eat.”

The guards let Iseul in, and a young soldier led her to the kitchens, where the cook gave her some rice and chicken broth. Iseul was glad of the opportunity to sit and rest her aching feet.

The captain came in with her and asked her questions about the disposition of the enemy. Iseul reported everything she had observed about the rival generals and their temperaments, the disarray of their army as it marched, and the estimated numbers of cavalry and infantry. “But it’s the magicians you must worry about, Captain,” she said, determined to impress this point upon him.

“It doesn’t matter,” the captain said quietly. “We’re the first thing that stands in their way, and stand we must, however terrible the thunder that comes for us.”

He didn’t have to mention the fact that two of the three first land battles in the original Yegedin invasion had involved Chindallan commanders abandoning their forts, destroying all the supplies, and fleeing north. It was a shame that no Chindallan would soon forget.

“You won’t stand for long unless you have magical defenses of your own,” Iseul said.

The captain was already shaking his head. “The Yegedin will next have to pass Fort Kamang on the River Hwan,” he said. “They have two magicians there. That will have to do.” He eyed Iseul’s soup bowl, already empty, with affectionate amusement. “We’ve sent word north, but it won’t hurt to give them more recent intelligence. You undoubtedly have business of your own in that direction. Could I trouble you to—?”

“Of course, Captain,” Iseul said.

The captain insisted on making her eat more soup, and she was given rice and barley hardtack and clear, sweet water for the journey. They let her rest for half an hour. The captain asked if she could ride, and she replied that she could, as her mother had taught her. They mounted her on a steady mare, a plain bay without markings, but one who responded calmly and quickly to each of Iseul’s aids.

She set out on the bay mare. She had pulled her coat tightly about her in response to the air, which tasted increasingly of ice even though winter was months away. Then, looking back only once, she rode north, knowing as the distance unribboned behind her that she had failed her people.

The terrible thing about the Genial Ones was not that they held nations as their slaves, or that they destroyed cities with firefall and stormlash, or that they concocted their poisons from corpses. After all, human empires have done similar things.

It was not even that they were fond of sculpture. The Genial Ones regarded it as one of the highest arts. A favorite variant was to attune a slab of marble or a mossy boulder to a particular individual. As the days passed, the victim’s skin would crack and turn gray, and their movements would slow. When the process was complete, only a dying, formless lump would remain of the victim, and the statue would be complete.

As much as people dreaded this art, however, the Genial Ones could only kill one person at a time with it.

Two hours before the siege of the border-fort, six arrows flew.

The senior general wore a back banner in livid red and a great helmet that resembled the head of a beetle. Only a small part of his face was exposed.

The first arrow took him through the side of the face, beneath the left eye, and even so he didn’t die of it.

At the time he was consulting with the two magicians. In the gray light and the fine haze of rain, it was difficult to discern their otherwise distinctive blue robes. Three arrows took one of the magicians in the chest. She wore no armor and the arrowheads’ barbs caught in her heart.

Two more arrows killed one of the general’s servants, who happened to wear clothing that you might mistake for a magician’s robes from a great distance on a day where the visibility was terrible to begin with.

This left the Yegedin army in disarray: someone notified the junior general, who wished to take command, while the senior general was shouting orders even as his servants tried to call for a physician. Both generals were keen on capturing the assassin, but by the time the two of them had organized search parties—since both groups of soldiers were confused as to whose orders should take precedence—the assassin had gotten away.

All that the Yegedin searchers found, at a distance sufficiently far from the command tent that everyone agreed the archer had taken the shots from some other, closer location, were goose feathers dyed red, damp from the rain, stuck into a hill at the base of a tree in the shape of an azalea.

Hwado, noun. The way of fire. At one point the Chindallan bow and arrow were believed to be sacred to the spirits of sun and moon. A number of religious ceremonies involve shooting fire-arrows. Such arrows are often fletched with feathers dyed red. There is a saying in Chindalla that “even the wind bleeds,” and most archers propitiate the spirits of the air after they practice their art.

Minsu was late for the rendezvous. Iseul had taken advantage of one of the safehouses in the town of Suwen, which was some distance to the north and out of the likely path of the Yegedin advance. She took advantage of the lull to experiment with making her own charms, even though she knew Minsu would have preferred her not to risk working with magic. Still, Iseul had a notion that she might be able work out something to spy on the Genial Ones’ communications if she could only exploit certain of the charms’ geometries.

After her latest failure, which resulted in words of lenses and distance charring off the attempted charm, Iseul sought comfort in an old pleasure: poetry. She could barely remember what it was like when her greatest problem had been coming up with a sufficiently witty pun with which to puncture some pretentious noblewoman’s taste in hairpins. After a couple hours failing to write anything entertainingly caustic, she ventured to one of the town’s bookstores to buy a couple volumes of recent poetry so she could pick them apart instead.

Iseul had once wondered what the Yegedin were getting out of piles of Chindallan books when the majority of them were simply not very good. Especially when the Yegedin were famed for their exquisite sense of aesthetics. It was almost difficult, at times, to hate people who understood beauty so thoroughly, and who even recognized beauty when it was to be had in a conquered people’s arts.

She returned to the safehouse with her spoils. One of the books was an anthology by highborn poets. All of the poems were written in the high script, which Iseul had learned as a child at her mother’s insistence. She had hated it then. The high script was based on the language of the great Qieng Empire to the north and east, but the Qieng language had little resemblance to Chindallan, necessitating a whole system of contrivances to make their writing work for Chindallan at all. Complicating the matter was the fact that the high script had come into use in Chindalla’s earlier days, when Chindallan itself had been different, so you had to compensate both for the Qieng language and for the language shifts within Chindallan.

The other volume was a collection by an entertainer who had made a specialty of patriotic poems. He wrote in the petal script, which had been invented by a female entertainer, Jebi the Clever, to fit Chindallan itself. The shapes of the letters even corresponded to the positions of the tongue as it made Chindallan’s speech sounds. Sadly, while the collection was beautifully illustrated—the artist had a real eye for the dramatic use of silhouettes—the poetry itself was trite and overwritten. How many times could you use the phrase “hearts of stout fire” in the space of twenty pages without being embarrassed for yourself, anyway?

Minsu met her at the safehouse two days later. She was wearing modestly splendid robes of silk embroidered with cavorting quails. “I am tired of hearing about battles with no survivors,” she said. She was referring to the border-fort.

“I heard about the supernatural archer who came back from the dead to defend the fort,” Iseul said, raising her eyebrows. “A rain of arrows to blacken the sky, people falling over pierced through the eye, that sort of thing. I didn’t even know you had that many arrows.”

“You should know better than to listen to hearsay,” Minsu said. “Besides, I’m sure I got one magician, but I missed the other. Damnable light, couldn’t tell who was who and couldn’t risk getting closer, either. And it made no difference in the end.”

Iseul nodded somberly. People in the town spoke of nothing else. The storm clouds, the white hands of lightning, the tumbling stones. Skeletons charred to ash, marrow set alight from within. The kindly guard captain at the border-fort was almost certainly dead.

Despite the city magistrate’s attempts to keep order, the townsfolk had been gathering their belongings to flee northward. One of them had insisted on explaining to Iseul the best things to take during an evacuation. “Don’t take rice,” the old woman had said. “Only fools weigh themselves down with rice.” She had shown Iseul her tidy bundles of medicines, small and light and pungent. “Someone always gets sick, stomach trouble or foot pains, or some woman has a hard childbirth, if you’re unlucky enough to bring a child into the world in these times. You trade the medicine for the food someone else has had to carry, and you fill your belly without having to break your back.” Bemused, Iseul had thanked the old woman for her advice.

“I couldn’t get into the magicians’ tent,” Iseul said, “and I still haven’t figured out if there’s a way to spy on their letters. The trip was for nothing.”

“Overhear anything useful?” Minsu said, looking at her with such an expression of calm trust that Iseul felt even more wretched.

Iseul thought over the magicians’ exchange while she waited for Minsu. “They were arguing about how destructive to make the storm, I think. That was all. But there was something—” She frowned. Something about their words had just reminded her of the poetry, but what could Chindallan poetry possibly have to do with the Genial Ones?

“Have some tea,” Minsu said, her solution to everything, “and maybe it will come to you.”

Iseul gave a tiny sigh. The safehouse’s tea might as well have been mud steeped in rainwater, but Minsu gave no sign that she noticed its inferior quality. Iseul recounted the rest of her meeting with the border-fort’s captain, although there wasn’t much to tell.

“I don’t think the magicians at Fort Kamang will do us much good,” Iseul said. “How are mere human magicians going to stand up to the Genial Ones themselves? Magic clearly prefers to serve its original masters if the Genial Ones can so casually invoke spells we all thought had decayed to uselessness.”

“I’d send you to kidnap one of the Genial Ones,” Minsu said, “but I don’t think we have a safe way of holding one for questioning.”

Over and over Iseul heard the two magicians arguing in her head. “Their accent,” she said slowly. The threads were in her hands. She only had to figure out how to weave them together. “Their accents, and the accent of the one I killed. The fact that I didn’t recognize the language at first.”

Minsu eyed her but knew better than to interrupt. Instead, she poured more tea.

“Minsu,” Iseul said, going pale. “I was wrong just now. We’ve all been wrong. Magic didn’t die because the Genial Ones were wiped out. Because we know now that they were never wiped out. Magic stopped working for the humans piece by piece because it’s their language, and their language changed over time just as Chindallan has changed, which everyone who has studied the high script knows. Their language became different. We’ve been trying to use the wrong words for magic.”

“You could make more powerful charms, then,” Minsu said. “Using the proper words now that you know them.”

“Now that I know some of them, you mean. It would take trial and error to figure out all the necessary changes, and magical experimentation can get messy if you do it wrong.”

“So much for that,” Minsu said. “What about the lexicons? What do they signify?”

“I still don’t know what they’re doing, but I will find out,” Iseul said.

“We have some time,” Minsu said, “but that doesn’t mean we can afford to relax. The fact that Yegedin have learned from their mistakes in the first invasion may, in some sense, work in our favor.” Originally the Yegedin armies had raced north, far ahead of their supply lines, and eventually had to retreat to the current border. “This time they’re making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation. Still, tell me what you need and I will make sure you are well-supplied.”

“More paper, for a start,” Iseul said. “A lot of paper. I will have to hope that the Genial Ones don’t track me down here.”

“Indeed.” Minsu’s eyes were unexpectedly grim. “I would get you the assistance of a Chindallan magician, but you do realize that there’s every possibility that the Genial Ones have been hiding among our people, too.”

“It had occurred to me, yes.” Iseul was starting to get a headache, although in all fairness, she should have had one ages ago. “I don’t suppose you have any of that headache medicine?”

“I have a little left from my last detour to a pharmacy,” Minsu said, and handed it over. “I’ll get you more. I have other business to attend to, but I will check back with you from time to time. The safehouse’s keeper will have instructions to assist you in any way she can.”

“Thank you,” Iseul said. She didn’t look up as Minsu slipped out.

The first Chindallan dynasty after the fall of the Genial Ones only lasted four abbreviated generations. Its queens and kings were buried in tombs of cold stone beneath mounded earth. Certain Chindallan scholars, coming to the tombs long after they had been plundered, noted that many of the tombs, when viewed from above, seemed to form words in the high script: wall, for instance, or eye, or vigilant. The scholars believed that this practice, like that of burying terracotta soldiers with the dead monarchs and their households, arose from a desire to protect the tombs from grave robbers. Like the terracotta soldiers, the tombs’ construction was singularly inadequate for this purpose.

Iseul slept little in the days that followed. She was making progress on the scrying charm, though, which was something. It required suspending the charm along with two of the quill-charms in a mobile. Sometimes, when her exhaustion overcame her, she found herself staring at the charms bobbing back and forth in the air.

She also developed a headache so ferocious that Minsu’s medicine, normally reliable, did her no good. Finally she ventured out in search of a pharmacist. It turned out that the pharmacist had fled town, to her vexation, but an old man told her that one of the physicians, a somewhat disreputable man who had evaded registration with the proper ministry for his entire life, was still around. Since she didn’t have much option, she went in search of him.

The physician lived in a small hut at the edge of town. He was sitting outside, and he had finished ministering to a pair of grubby children. One of the children was eating a candy with no sign that her splinted wrist bothered her. The other, an even younger girl, was picking wildflowers.

The physician himself was a tall man who would have been taller if not for his hunched shoulders, and he had a wry, gentle face. His clothes were very plain. No one would have looked at him twice in the market square. He stood at Iseul’s approach.

“This will be quick, I promise,” Iseul said. “I’ve been having headaches and I need medicine for it.”

The physician looked her up and down. “I should think that a few good nights’ sleep would serve you better than any medicine,” he said dryly.

“I don’t have time for a few good nights’ sleep,” Iseul said. “Please, don’t you have anything to take the edge off the pain? If it’s a matter of money—”

He named a sum that explained to Iseul what he was doing in such plain clothes. Any respectable licensed physician could have charged three times as much even for something this simple.

“I can pay that,” Iseul said.

The girl with the splint tugged at the physician’s sleeve, completely unconcerned with the transaction going on. “Do you have more candy?”

“For pity’s sake, you haven’t finished what’s in your mouth,” he said.

“But it tastes better when you have two flavors at once.”

He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Maybe later.”

“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 the 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.

“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 sunlight 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 direction. 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.

They were sitting in a rented room at the time, and Minsu had scared up a tea that even Iseul liked.

“I only wrote the account,” Iseul said, very clearly, “because none of the charms work anymore.” With the Genial Ones’ language extinguished, the magic it empowered was gone for good. She had attempted to create working charms, just to be sure, but all of them remained inert. “Imagine if Yeged’s Emperor had figured out how to use this on Chindallan or the language of any other nation he desired to conquer.”

“The way we could have?” Minsu said sardonically. “It’s done now. Finish your report, and we can get out of this town.”

There were still refugees on the road north. They might have deprived the Yegedin of magical assaults, but then, they had also deprived the Chindallans of magical defenses. Given that both sides had spent the uneasy peace preparing to go to war, it was anyone’s guess as to who would prevail.

At one point they ended up at a wretched camp for those who were too sick to continue fleeing, and the few people who were staying with them, mostly their families and a few monks who were acting as caretakers. Iseul remained prone to headaches and was running low on medicine. Minsu had insisted that they seek out a physician, even though Iseul tried to point out that the people at the camp probably needed the medicine more than she did.

As it turned out, they forgot all about the question of who deserved the medicine when Iseul saw a familiar little girl. She was picking flowers, weeds really, but in her hands they became jewels.

Iseul approached the girl and asked her if she knew where the physician was. The girl seemed confused by the question, but after a little while her older sister appeared from one of the tents and recognized Iseul. “I’ll take you to him,” the girl said, “but he’s very sick.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Iseul said. Despite the monks’ best efforts to enforce basic sanitary practices, the camp reeked of filth and sickness and curdled hopes, and she couldn’t help but imagine that the physician had taken sick while helping others.

She and Minsu followed the older girl to a tent at the edge of the camp. Flowers had been weighted down with a rock at the tent’s opening: the younger girl’s handiwork, surely. They could smell the bitter incense that was used to bring easeful dreams to the dying.

The tent was small, and there were more flowers next to the brazier. Their petals had fallen off and were scattered next to the pallet. The incense was almost all burned away. The physician slept on the pallet. Even at rest his lined face suggested a certain weary kindness. Someone had drawn a heavy quilted blanket over him, stained red-brown on one corner.

“What happened?” Minsu said. “Will he recover? I’m sure he could be a great help here.”

“He fell sick,” the girl said. “One of the monks said he had a stroke. He doesn’t talk anymore and he doesn’t seem to understand when people talk to him. They said he might like us to visit him, though, and our mother works with the monks to help the sick people, so we come by and bring flowers.”

He doesn’t talk anymore. Iseul went cold. He had spoken Chindallan; shouldn’t that have saved him? But she didn’t know how language worked in the brain.

Without asking, she lifted the corner of the blanket. The physician had longer arms than she remembered, like the Genial One she had killed at his house a lifetime ago. Who was to say they couldn’t change their shapes? Especially if they were living among humans? Tears pricking her eyes, she replaced the blanket.

“I’m very sorry,” Iseul said to the girl. “It’s probably not long before he dies.”

She couldn’t help but wonder how many Genial Ones had lingered into this age, taking no part in the conspiracy for vengeance, leading quiet lives as healers of small hurts to atone for their kindred who summoned storm-horses and faces of fire. There was no way to tell.

The Yegedin had tried to destroy Chindalla’s literature and names, but Iseul had destroyed the Genial Ones themselves. It hadn’t seemed real until now.

“Thank you,” she said to the dying Genial One, even though his mind was gone. She and Minsu sat by his side for a time, listening to him breathe. There was a war coming, and a storm entirely human, but in this small space they could mourn what they had done.

For a long time afterwards, Iseul tried to come up with a poem about the Genial Ones, encapsulating what they had meant to the world and why they had had to die and why she regretted the physician’s passing, but no words ever came to her.

—. A noun, probably, pertaining to regret or cinders or something of that nature, but this word can no longer be found in any lexicon, human or otherwise.