In the Vanishers' Palace Page 5

  She’d tried to go out, several times. To find a way back out of the river or wherever Vu Côn really lived, but there was nothing. Corridors twisting and stretching, windows opening onto impossible landscapes, towers upside down, fountains and basins that fed back into themselves. The palace might not have been designed as a prison, but there was no way out. And, every time she opened a door, she thought of Vu Côn’s warnings. Viruses. Diseases. How would she know, if she was contaminated? Was there even any truth in that, or was it a way for Vu Côn to keep her penned in the palace?

  Every night, the same prayers to her ancestors, asking them to watch over Mother, asking Elder Giang to watch over Mother, because she was desperate and could think of no one else she could beseech.

  Vu Côn left her alone, which was equal parts good and frustrating. In some ways, Yên didn’t want to think about her, about that strange, unhealthy thrill of looking into the dragon’s eyes, the rush of desire that had made the world contract when Vu Côn had touched her. But in others...she wanted to argue with Vu Côn. To tell her she wasn’t getting used to being there, that she missed Mother and Oanh and the village—that she even missed Elder Giang, which was something.

  One morning, Yên made her way to the vast, deserted rooms of the kitchen to find the twins there. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence: the palace seemed to have no inhabitants other than the twins and Vu Côn, but every morning Yên would find steaming hot breakfast on a table, a bewildering array of odd-tasting foods, of soups that were too sharp, noodles that were too soft, buns too white and too smooth to seem real. The flour of legends, without blackness or insects or grit.

  The uncommon thing was that neither Thông nor Liên appeared to be eating. They were simply waiting for her: Liên in a simple set of fluid robes that moved like water, and Thông wearing the robes of an official, not the embroidered wealth Yên had seen on traveling scholar-magicians from the cities, but a simple, deceptively deep scarlet that never quite remained the same color, shifting as the light caught it.

  Yên could have asked if she was late, but she’d never get an answer: neither of the twins would ever accuse their own respected teacher. Besides, she was famished, and food, no matter how odd-tasting, shouldn’t be wasted. She headed to the metal table, thanking the ancestors and all the spirits that the kitchen was one of the only rooms where geometry seemed to behave normally, with only a few engravings of dragons growing larger and larger on the ceiling—the endmost scales on the larger dragons turning out to be the seed of small dragons going into the other direction. Bewildering, but not dizzying.

  “Grab some food,” Thông said. “We’re going to the library today.”

  Yên paused, halfway to an oddly puffed-up fritter. She couldn’t help it. It was like holding rice to a famished man, or sleep to an exhausted one. “There’s a library here?”

  “Of course!” Liên said. She smiled, a toothy, white smile that Yên suddenly saw as dazzling instead of frightening.

  “She’s been worrying at Mother for days, trying to get permission,” Thông said. They hid an obvious smile of fondness.

  “Like you haven’t been doing the same thing.” Liên crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I don’t boast,” Thông said, almost gently.

  “I don’t understand,” Yên said. “Your mother—Vu Côn gave me permission to go wherever I want in the palace.”

  Liên nodded. “The library is hidden,” she said. “And locked.”

  Like the doors to the outside world Yên couldn’t find in the labyrinth of corridors and upside-down gardens? “Why?”

  “Because it’s dangerous. The words in the books are magic,” Liên started, but Thông held up a hand.

  “That’s not what she’s asking,” they said. And, with a sigh: “Because you’re unhappy.”

  Yên stared at them. Wherever she’d thought mercy and compassion would come from, she hadn’t thought it’d be her students. Her unruly, rowdy students who seemed to be sitting down with her out of boredom and duty to their mother, rather than interest—always chafing, in a hurry to leave and do something that didn’t involve discussing the First Teacher’s maxims. “I’m—” She opened her mouth to say that she was not, and then closed it.

  She could have asked how they knew, but she was sure she wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Fine.” Yên went back to the table and picked up a bowl of noodle soup, breathing the familiar smell of star anise. She wasn’t sure by what miracle it remained hot. When asked, Thông would raise their eyebrows and say, “Things working as they should,” and Liên wasn’t much more helpful. “Is it far away?”

  Thông shrugged. “Not much.”

  “There’s a tricky corridor, though,” Liên said. “We got stuck there once.”

  “Younger sis!” Thông frowned, again. “Don’t scare her.”

  “We were much younger,” Liên said. She spoke a word in an alien language, and luminous words hung in the air for a bare moment. Was it the language of the spirits? Yên hadn’t dared ask, though it wasn’t the first time the twins had spoken it. “Now we’ve got the palace sorted out.” Liên looked as though she was going to say more, but Thông cut her off.

  “Are you ready?”

  Yên finished chewing her fritter, and followed them. The greasy dough sat uncomfortably in her stomach as they walked through the palace corridors, going past vertiginous room after room. She got, once more, the impression that she was going to throw up.

  They didn’t go to the courtyard where she usually taught the twins: instead, Thông took a corridor that flared out, becoming windows on either side of them, with a distant, hazy landscape Yên couldn’t quite make out.

  “Don’t look down,” Thông said, casually, as they rounded a corner and the windows became more ornate: sculpted, filigreed metals with cascades of light giving the frames different colors. In each was the same landscape, over and over—not just the same place, but the same features: a set of rocky spurs with a temple clinging to their summit, a dozen scattered buildings with corroded metal roofs, shining in the light of a sun and an overlarge moon. No, not quite the same: in each window, the sun and moon were in slightly different configurations, from dawn to noon to dusk, the moon hanging from low to high over the horizon.

  Yên tried to keep her eyes on the windows. But the corridor flared out and stopped twisting and turning, and she lost the fight. The floor she was on... There was no floor, merely more windows, except with two suns instead of a sun and a moon—and the very slight yield she’d felt, which she’d taken as her walking on different tiles of a floor, was in fact the windows, flexing slightly as she stepped on them—not like glass but like a pane of water stretched so taut it wouldn’t break....

  Thông’s arm on her steadied her. “I told you not to look down.”

  “We’re almost there,” Liên said. “Hang on.”

  “Here.” Between two of the windows—if one could keep their gaze on the windows without nausea—was a slight space, just large enough for one person to squeeze in. It barely merited the name of door. Liên laid her hand on the panel, unperturbed by the window on her left, where the sky above the building was ablaze with glowing lava, the moon and the sun themselves falling to ashes in large blackened chunks. Words lit up slowly and lazily: they were the same script as Vu Côn’s robe. Something clicked. Liên pushed, and the wall disappeared, as if the floor had swallowed it up. A thin sliver of light replaced it.

  Thông stopped Yên as she was about to go in. “Us first,” they said.

  “I thought it was safe.”

  Thông snorted. “The Vanishers broke the world and left. Do you expect their dwellings to be safe?

  Liên slid in. As she did so, her arms turned into scaled claws for a fraction of a second, leaving gouges in the door frame. After a moment, her voice came floating out of the darkness: “All good,” she said.

  Yên squeezed in. It was a tight fit, and she understood now why Liên had struggled. Yên
was thinner: turning sideways, she could just fit into the door. She could feel Thông’s breath, slow and even, at her back, and then she was through, and blinded with light.

  “Oh.”

  The library stretched over and around her: a sphere of light and steel, a sweeping, shimmering room like the sky at dawn, when everything was still grey but a faint reddish tinge colored the thick layer of pollution clouds. It didn’t have shelves, but rather row after row of pillars, labelled with that same alphabet she couldn’t read, going on and on and up, clinging to the walls as though gravity didn’t matter. Each of them was faceted and a different color, like huge jewels scattered inside a sphere so big, Yên could barely comprehend its dimensions.

  Liên was standing at the nearest one, which was the green of jade and freshly cut grass, faintly opalescent and shimmering with an inner light that showed up the veins and imperfections in sharp contrast. “Long Châu’s The Moon’s Path.” The words flowed out of her mouth, transfigured into letters. She hadn’t had to write them, as a scholar-magician would have done. They simply appeared, clinging to the air like a flock of butterflies. The pillar shivered and contracted, the letters within flowing faster for a fraction of a second. Then a book appeared from a slot halfway up the pillar. Flecks of light clung to it like dust. Liên waved it at Yên. “Want to try?”

  Yên let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. The Vanishers had broken and poisoned the world; she’d had no idea that they could create such breathtaking beauty. “Yes,” she said.

  Up close, the pillar was nothing like stone, more like polished metal given a slightly different sheen. Odd rectangular patterns were carved within it, parallel lines splitting around darker islands of pooled silver, converging toward squat nexuses in haphazard fashion. It looked like a child’s drawing, random lines and circles, but nevertheless it didn’t feel random, more like something that had its own logic. Yên laid a hand on the pillar. Something gripped her, a fist of ice closing around her wrist. Her hand up to her wrist was now the blue of the stone. Liên laughed. “It’s normal. Go on, ask.”

  “I don’t know any of the books there.”

  “Then just ask a normal question. It doesn’t need to be a title.”

  Yên said, before she could think, “I want to know about magic.”

  The pillar went deathly still, the hand that was holding her as cold as a corpse. A faint, faint heartbeat, a memory of something living, slowly rose, reverberating through the pillar. Words floated on its surface: a single one detached itself and hovered at her height, steadily blinking. It wasn’t a word Yên knew, but as she watched it shifted to something else, an older, distorted version of “speech”.

  “Magic is speech?” she asked.

  Liên shrugged. “Everything answers to speech here.”

  “I was hoping—” Yên stopped because she didn’t know what she was hoping for. She’d tried studying magic, the words Mother painstakingly calligraphied around her patients’ beds to cast the healing spell, but to her they were nothing but abstract terms. She could guess where they’d come from and where they’d slot into a dissertation, but they never came alive for her as they did for Mother, never healed someone or moved things or started fires. She’d thought she’d made her peace with not knowing them—not every scholar needed to be a scholar-magician—but being in the palace and unable to make things work had sharpened her hunger for understanding.

  She reached with her free hand, touched the single word. The pillar shook again and spat out a book, just as the hold on her hand vanished.

  The text on it was the same archaic language as Vu Côn’s dress. When she opened it, she saw words in the same alphabet, except that the alignment seemed all wrong. The words felt too clumped together, too dense, compared to the ones she’d already seen.

  “That’s a primer on Vanisher magic,” Thông said, behind her. “Small, petty spells: it was for their servants’ use.”

  Vanisher magic? The book tumbled out of Yên’s hands before she could think.

  Liên laughed. “It’s not contagious!”

  The Vanishers had broken the world. They had taken and enslaved as they’d wished, leaving constructs and plagues as their legacies. Their magic was all chains and knives and diseases, everything that bound and broke and devastated. Even their rare healings had been double-edged, leaving people riddled with tumors and shriveled elements.

  “I—” Yên swallowed. “Maybe something else.”

  Liên shrugged. She touched the pillar again, said something in dragon language. A book coalesced into the slot. “Here,” she said.

  It looked old. It couldn’t be old, because surely the library—the pillar—had made it at Liên’s request. But the pages were crinkled and yellow, the binding repaired in several places. The title, even in distorted archaic, was intimately familiar. “Commentary on the Fourth Teaching.” She breathed slowly, evenly. She’d known there was an original to this book, that it hadn’t been written in Viêt but transcribed afterward. She’d known that everything they had was bad, distorted copies.

  She had no idea that she’d one day be holding a perfect one.

  The Broken-World Teacher’s words: everything their disciples had collected after the Vanishers tore them to pieces for their presumption, all the maxims and the proverbs and the poems, the painstaking work that had eventually led to all the scholar-magicians, their own defense against the darkness.

  She breathed out, again. The book still hadn’t vanished. “I can keep it?” she asked.

  Thông laughed. It was a rare and precious sound, unburdened by their usual seriousness. “It’ll make other copies if anyone asks.”

  “There used to be limits on how much we could borrow at the same time,” Liên said. By her tone, it sounded like they’d thoroughly tested them. “But we fixed that.”

  “Excluding the brief interval where everything that came out of here crumbled as soon as you moved a finger.”

  Liên snorted. “Design flaw. We figured out the right words, didn’t we?”

  Yên sought words, carefully. “You’re very fluent with the technology.”

  Liên laughed. Thông’s laughter, this time, was barbed. “You have to be,” Thông said. “It’s that or go mad with boredom.”

  They sounded...angry, as if Yên had touched on a sore spot. And no wonder. Had the twins been prisoners there all their childhood?

  Thông must have seen Yên’s face.

  “We’re not prisoners.” They laughed, as if mildly annoyed with themself. “Would you trust Liên, out in the world? She’d get herself killed.”

  Liên made that frustrated snorting sound again. “Mother treats us like we’re celadon and might break at any moment.”

  Thông said nothing. Neither did Yên. She’d seen that odd mixture of maturity and childishness before, in teenagers forced to grow up too fast. “Your father—” she said, finally.

  “Dead,” Thông said. The word was final, like a grave snapping shut.

  “I’m sorry.” Yên said.

  “Don’t be.”

  Yên clutched the book, looked, again, at the library. How much knowledge was there in the scattered pillars? What were they used for; why were they all different? But instead, looking at Thông, at the way they held themself—marking time, Yên knew suddenly, with absolute certainty, because she’d seen it in dozens of her students back in the village—she found another question bubbling up. “Why are we here?” she asked. “Really.”

  “You’re unhappy,” Thông said, glibly and easily. Too distracted to put too much effort in their pretense.

  “No,” Yên said. “Not that. Did Vu Côn—” Why would Vu Côn ask anything of them? It made no sense.

  “We do have our own initiative,” Liên said, mildly.

  “You do,” Yên said. She pointed to Thông. “You’re counting. Marking the passage of time. Something is happening in the palace, isn’t it? Something I shouldn’t be seeing?” And what better distractio
n for a scholar than a library?

  At length Liên said, “It’s not safe to be in our classroom today, Teacher.”

  “Less safe than usual?” In ordinary times, Yên would have made a better effort, but she was tired.

  “You’ve noticed Mother is out most of the time,” Thông said.

  Which explained why Vu Côn hadn’t talked to her since the first day. “Answering summons?”

  “Traveling. Making sure the world doesn’t break further. It carries its own risks. Traveling isn’t exactly safe nowadays,” Thông said, curtly.

  “She’s busy,” Liên said. There was a hint of bitterness in her voice. “She’s thrown herself into her work since...” She paused, started again. “Duty comes before anything else, for her.”

  Yên said, “I’m not sure what that duty is.”

  “What the Vanishers bequeathed her.” Liên laughed but there was still no joy in her face. “All the mess of the broken world. And us, of course, on top of that.”

  The twins were a handful, to be sure, but no more and no less than other teenagers their age. “The joys of motherhood,” Yên said, keeping her face straight. “You’re not answering my question.”

  “It’s audience day.”

  Which meant nothing to Yên.

  “People come to see Mother and beseech her for favors. They’re not safe.”

  Yên struggled to reconcile this with the palace. “There is no one here.” There were no exits, no easy way of getting out.

  “You can get here from the outside world,” Thông said. “If you’re motivated enough.”

  “Heart’s desire,” Liên said. “Like your mother did, when she summoned Mother.”

  A reference to Mother on a dragon’s lips didn’t head the list of welcome subjects for Yên.

  “Getting out is another matter,” Thông said. They sounded darkly amused. Their hands played with something Yên couldn’t see, which emitted small, regular sparks of icy blue light.

  “Because your mother takes random prisoners?” It was cheap and easy. Yên knew Thông would likely let it pass, out of respect for their teacher.