In the Vanishers' Palace Read online

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” the dragon said. “What is past is past.” But she sounded as though she would gladly have bitten Yên’s head off, or that of any Vanishers fool enough to venture back into their deserted palace. “Now we look towards the future.” She gestured toward the bed, where Thông and Liên were busy arguing with each other, long sleeves streaming in an invisible wind. “Teach them, Yên. Teach them how to survive.”

  Yên’s face burnt. “I will.”

  “Good.” A silence. Then, as Yên turned, to walk back to her new charges: “Yên?”

  She turned, found the dragon staring at her in the doorframe of a corridor framed by stars. “There’s no point in empty formalities. Let’s address each other less ceremoniously, shall we?” She’d shifted pronouns, to something that was just—barely—suitable for master and servant. “My name is Vu Côn.”

  “Mistress,” Yên started, and an invisible wind brushed her lips, silencing her and sending a shiver up her spine.

  “Vu Côn,” the dragon said. “Remember.”

  As if she would ever forget.

  THREE

  The Dragon’s Children

  Vu Côn drew the scraping coin along the kidney meridian, all the way from the nape of Diêm Châu’s neck to the arch of her foot. It left a reddened trail on the oiled skin: blood, stimulated to flow on the line she’d drawn.

  “There,” she said. “You can sit up.” She dropped the coin in the foundry bowl, where it was taken apart for components. “Let me have a look at your healing spells.”

  Diêm Châu, wordlessly, held out her arms. The words Vu Côn had written along the biceps’ outer edge had faded. She traced them again, carefully. Flow. Breath. The Sea King’s Gift. They glowed silver for the briefest of moments, before fading to a more tanned color on Diêm Châu’s skin.

  Diêm Châu said nothing. She was a quiet child: ten years old but behaving herself with the preternatural poise of someone much, much older. Her father had brought her to the palace a moon earlier, but the sickness they’d both contracted had progressed much faster in him, and Vu Côn had had to put him into permanent sleep, desperately hoping she’d be able to find a spell to cure him. Yên, no doubt, would have expected Vu Côn to kill him, but contrary to legend, she killed the infected only in the outside world—because she had to, because otherwise the world would be overrun by Vanishers’ viruses. Diêm Châu, either younger or with a slightly different mutation of the virus, had reacted much better to treatment.

  “I’ll take you back to your berth,” Vu Côn said.

  They walked in the corridor, back to the sleepers’ room, in silence. “Grandmother...” Diêm Châu said, finally, as they reached the door.

  “Yes?” Vu Côn said.

  “Do you think I’ll ever be ready?”

  Vu Côn’s heart contracted in her chest. She knelt, her face level with Diêm Châu’s own, antlers rubbing against Diêm Châu’s forehead. For a moment, words failed her. Then she said, “I can’t take the sickness out of you right now. But you’re getting better. Soon, child. Very soon.”

  “How soon?”

  Vu Côn hated making promises she couldn’t keep. But Diêm Châu’s face was drawn and tight, and she looked so heartbroken; and who wouldn’t, when all her life was stretched, endless time? “One or two sessions.”

  “Really? And then I’ll be healed?”

  “Of course,” Vu Côn said.

  The virus Diêm Châu and her father had contracted was one Vu Côn had seldom seen. She didn’t know what its original purpose had been, but it was catalogued as the Occlusion of the Entryways: something that disturbed the skin’s balance and threw up rashes faster than she could heal them. Diêm Châu was always flushed, always burning to the touch, and without Vu Côn’s regular infusion of healing spells, she’d slip into unconsciousness. Everyone was a balance of âm—the moon part, the quiet, waiting self in the darkness—and duong—the sun part, the forceful light. Diêm Châu’s duong was so strong, her âm was barely visible. Vu Côn was trying to rebalance both before she could intervene more durably. Her few patients who’d had it had made a full recovery, but only if she’d properly rebalanced their âm and duong before intervening.

  Diêm Châu was silent for a while. “I hate the sleep,” she said.

  “I know. But without it, you’ll die, sweetheart.”

  Diêm Châu made a face. “Next time. I’ll be ready.”

  “Of course.” Vu Côn forced herself to smile at her. “Come on, sweetheart. Time to sleep, now.”

  After Diêm Châu was back in her stasis berth, among the other sleepers—held in suspended animation so that her symptoms only marginally progressed—Vu Côn walked to her room.

  It had been a long, exhausting day. Alone in front of her mirror, Vu Côn undressed, slowly. She was winding down, no longer bothering to maintain one shape. Her hands shifted to claws and back again, half-tearing clothes that the palace would repair in the night, and her skin was becoming dotted, here and there, with iridescent scales. She stared, for a while, at the shadow of antlers at her temples. Hoang would have hated it. He’d always been so prim and proper, as if rules and etiquette, enclosing all they could and could not do, could keep them forever safe.

  Of course they couldn’t. The Vanishers had made their own rules, and even after they were gone, their palace hadn’t meekly bent down to their will—as Hoang had found out, all too late—that even being careful and respectful was no shield against disaster.

  A knock at the door tore her from her gloomy thoughts. Thông. They were the only one who knocked that way and waited: Liên just knocked and came in as if expecting everything to be ready for her. “Come in,” Vu Côn said.

  Thông was worried. It was hard to tell, but Vu Côn had had years to watch them grow up, from a child whose wishes were transparent on their face to this composed young person on the edge of adulthood.

  “Liên is in bed,” Thông said. “Reading those books again.”

  Liên had found a treasure trove of mystery books in the library, about a magistrate investigating increasingly bizarre crimes in the provinces of a fictional country that had broken free of Vanisher rule. They dated from the breaking of the world, and were infused with an odd, drunken enthusiasm, the writer heady on the promise of freedom from Vanishers: odd, disjointed readings about a future that hadn’t come to pass.

  “You’re too serious,” Vu Côn said, fondly. They had their heart set on following in her footsteps and running the palace.

  “You think I’m a child.” Thông’s voice was mildly frustrated. They were growing up too fast, too uncontrollably. And so was Liên. Vu Côn thought of Hoang again, and wondered how things would have gone, had he been alive.

  “I don’t,” Vu Côn said. “But there are some things you’re not ready for.” The vast, dangerous world, the one that would dazzle and cut them at the same time.

  Thông said, finally, “You gave her the run of the palace. You’ve not done that for any of the others.”

  “The other patients?” Vu Côn asked, finally. The hundred, the thousands in the cradle-rooms, who had come beseeching her and who now awaited healing or death or both. “She’s not infected. Or dangerous.” But, as she said that, she remembered Yên, coming to stand in her path as she left with the healer in her arms—facing her, shaking with fear—remembered that odd thrill going through her, almost a mirror of the fear in Yên’s face. It was nonsense. She was a dragon. Even had Yên been the most skilled of scholar-magicians, Vu Côn’s powers would have dwarfed hers. But, in that moment, Vu Côn had had the feeling of facing an unbreakable wall, that not even grievous wounds or death would stop Yên from barring her way.

  “Filial piety,” Vu Côn said, slowly, carefully. She’d almost forgotten what the word actually meant. “I suppose she’s here because she impressed me.”

  Thông laughed. They were still tense, but it had abated.

  “What?” Vu Côn asked.
<
br />   “You’ve been alone for too long, Mother.” They shook their head. “A mortal, of all things.”

  Vu Côn bristled. “We’re not sleeping together.”

  “Because she’d say no? You know she wouldn’t. I’ve seen her making puppy eyes at you.”

  Because she’d seen the horror in Yên’s eyes when she’d made an angry, ill-timed jab about warm bodies in her bed. Vu Côn breathed out. “We’ve discussed this before. Not just other people saying yes, but whether they mean it, or whether they’re just doing it because they’re afraid.” They didn’t quite get that, she knew: neither them nor Liên. Was it genetic, something even years and years of nurturing hadn’t managed to eradicate?

  Thông sighed. Words hung in the air for a moment as they did so: the blurred, silver traceries of a language that could change the world. “Duty is easier than grief.”

  “I said that,” Vu Côn said. She didn’t smile, because the memories that came with that were painful. Tuyêt, who’d always smiled even under Vanisher rule, still with that same smile as they buried the wives they’d lost in the breaking of the world—their mane of hair streaming in the wind, their fangs glinting in the darkness. Hanh Vang, with the turtles’ scales on her eyes and wrists and fingernails, standing very straight, dripping the sheening, oily water of polluted lakes and repeating that it would all be fine. Du Khach, halfway between rooster and woman, clinging to her maps as if they could make sense of the world—the vast spreads of emptiness on them with only the occasional city dotted across the forbidding landscape.

  After a while, all they’d seen when looking at each other was unbearable loss. It’d been easier, then, to just—not go, but drift apart. To retreat: all the spirits that had once protected the land, shutting themselves in their own fortresses. Vu Côn hadn’t. She’d remained in the world to answer prayers, to answer wishes, to safeguard what she could.

  “All grief ends,” Thông said, finally.

  “You still want me to sleep with her.”

  Thông shrugged. “I’m supposed to want what’s best for you. It doesn’t mean you get a say in it.”

  “I think you’ll find it will. If you read the First Teacher properly.”

  “Hmf,” Thông said. “She could be a friend, then, Mother. You don’t have to be so lonely.”

  Unlikely. No friendship under unequal terms, but she was used to solitude. “I can handle a lone mortal.” And, after a pause: “Let’s talk less about Yên and more about you.”

  Thông said, finally, “I don’t want to worry you.” They exhaled. Blurred silver words hung in the air in front of their snout.

  As if that made her worry less. “I’m your mother,’ Vu Côn said. “I’ll always worry. Is there anything in particular I need to be more worried about?”

  Another sigh. The words from this one hung in the air longer, no longer out of focus or illegible. These were sharp. These were words the palace would respond to. Vu Côn knew, then, with absolute certainty, what Thông was going to say. Fear took hold of her heart and squeezed. She forced herself to remain calm, to say nothing, because they needed to be the one saying it.

  “I’ve woken up,” Thông said. “Nightmares, except that my bed’s been dismantled when I wake up. As if I’d been giving orders to the palace. Liên says”—they took a deep, shaking breath—“Liên says I talk in my sleep.”

  “It’s nightmares,” Vu Côn said, finally. “It doesn’t mean you’re losing control.”

  “Genetics,” Thông said. “Some of your lessons did stick. I do know some things are hereditary.”

  “Like cruelty and thirst for power?” Vu Côn said. “That’s rather a stretch.”

  “You don’t understand,” Thông said, low and intense. “They broke the world.”

  “Your genitors?” Vu Côn had taught herself, a long time ago, never to say “parent”. Neither Thông nor Liên were hers by blood, but that wasn’t what mattered. It shouldn’t have. Except...except that, as Thông said, genetics were funny things. “They’re gone now. Into their gates and ships and away from the world. They won’t be coming back.” They’d scorched and poisoned the earth, enslaved spirits and men, and finally moved on. And if it meant abandoning two of their own children... Obviously they hadn’t cared, and wouldn’t care enough to return.

  Thông lifted a hand, stared at it. Scales flickered into existence on their skin, opalescent and fugitive, changing shapes as Vu Côn watched. “Won’t they?” they asked. “You always say parents live on in their children.”

  “Parents,” Vu Côn said, more forcefully than she meant to. Hearing them saying it had removed her fear. It wasn’t real. It was more of children’s nightmares and fancies, something it was her job to dispel. She’d sat with Thông and Liên when they were still very little—when they didn’t know when to control their form and would become miniature versions of the beings who’d once been her masters, going through shape after shape in an effort to outrace the dark. It had been impossible, even with the physical resemblance, to see the small, shivering children on the bed as a threat. “Not genitors. The people who raise you. There is a difference.”

  “We killed Father,” Thông said, finally.

  “You did not,” Vu Côn said. It was reflex. “It was his choice.” Hoang had been the one who’d heard the cries, years before. He’d ventured into a ruined Vanisher hatchery, and found two screaming children in their cribs, still dripping from the fluids that had held them in stasis. He’d been herding them back to Vu Côn, back to safety, and less careful than he should have been against the palace defenses. The hatchery had seen only a servant trying to steal away babies, and sheared him in two as he reached the door, long before Vu Côn could find the control panel to stop it. She saw it, sometimes, in her nightmares; she heard the lament of his ghost, even though it was fanciful, self-indulgent imaginings.

  Even dying, he hadn’t regretted saving the twins, and neither had Vu Côn. She’d raised them as her own, and as they reached adolescence and adulthood, she was only starting to measure the magnitude of what she’d done.

  They were children, her children, but the world hadn’t changed that much since the breaking, and so many things in it remembered the Vanishers. She couldn’t keep them safe forever, and she wasn’t even sure she could keep them safe from themselves. But she had to try.

  “Puberty is...fraught,” Vu Côn said. She didn’t know enough about the Vanisher equivalent. She could see it happening in Thông, in the way they’d shot up, their face losing the baby fat, their reptilian shape sprouting spikes and harder scales. She had no idea how much of this was normal. But it didn’t matter. “Most species have hormones flooding their bodies. It makes for vivid dreams. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It can’t be that,” Thông said.

  Vu Côn smiled in a way she hoped was reassuring and firm. “Because you’d want to lose control?”

  “No!”

  “Look. It’s normal to worry. I’d be more concerned if you didn’t. There’s...baggage,” she said, carefully. “Medical history.”

  “Medical.” Thông’s voice was neutral, carefully so.

  “You know as well as I do that some patients have more to overcome. It doesn’t make it more or less likely to happen.” Vu Côn said.

  Thông’s expression was distant: the healer’s, again, dissecting probabilities and evidence. Liên was all emotions, but they were different. They said, finally, “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. And maybe...” They were too well bred to contradict her openly.

  “If I’m wrong,” Vu Côn said, “we’ll deal with those consequences, too. People don’t suddenly snap. There’s warning signs, and I’m not seeing them.” Not beyond one over-worried, overwrought child with too much on their mind. “Why don’t you just find something to read? Or some lessons to review?”

  Thông snorted. “I’m not Liên.”

  “You asked about Yên,” Vu Côn said, finally. “She’s here to teach you. Duty. Behavior. Pro
per etiquette.”

  “You could have done that,” Thông said.

  “Yes,” Vu Côn said. “I have.” But in that, she knew she’d failed. The rules of the First Teacher didn’t matter to her as much as they mattered to a scholar, and the twins had picked up on that from an early age. “You need to hear it from someone else.” Yên was all fire and belief. She thought, again, of her standing to prevent Vu Côn from leaving the house. All passion, and hopefully the twins would respond to some of that. “Do you think I never lose control? All those rules, all those maxims: they’re how we remember. How we put on the mask of civilization over our baser instincts.”

  Thông watched her, for a while. Then they snorted again. “It’s a good excuse,” they said. “For having her around.”

  Vu Côn shook her head. “Do stop,” she said, keeping her voice low and pleasant. She was not attracted to Yên. Or, more accurately: she was attracted, but she knew the cost of giving in.

  She had it all under control.

  * * *

  Days passed, and it became hard to remember the village. Shrieking, dusty children in a small and cramped classroom, and Mother’s voice, and the smell of fish sauce and garlic on hands, all of it faded to dusty nothingness. All of it felt like a dream, every morning when Yên woke up inside the room with the walls stretching away from her into vertiginous infinity. At night, she dreamt that she hadn’t been saved: that everything led, as she’d always known it would, to the purifying circle—to its cold, merciless light, that single suspended moment before it flayed her, skin and muscle and bone... And then she’d wake up, gasping, trying to breathe, raising her hands to her face, remembering Vu Côn’s touch on her skin, as wet and as cold as the oily river.