In the Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard

Author:Aliette de Bodard [Bodard, Aliette de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-625673-74-9
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2018-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

Sleepers

Yên was late, and angry, and lost.

She’d gone to the small, twisting garden where she usually taught the twins. The day’s lesson plans had not been thrilling: reading The Pearl and the Scholar together, an elaborate moral tale about a scholar falling in love with a fisherman—and the fisherman’s quest into a Vanisher’s holdings when, years later, the scholar contracted a virus that split his soul—so that the âm part of him wandered the world, gathering knowledge, while the duong self endlessly, forlornly wandered the Vanisher’s palace, looking for his missing love.

It wasn’t subtle and it wasn’t fascinating, but the verses were beautiful, and the myriad word choices and allusions were a great opportunity to explain, at length, what friendship and duty and love meant. And, in the end, after many travails, the lovers reunited—and, in the long summer evenings when the fisherman was out working, the scholar’s âm self would sleep in their bed, while the duong self would wander once more, watching his love bring up nets of shrimp and fish from the river’s oily waters.

Yên expected Liên to protest at the unfairness of the lovers’ years of separation, trying to find a solution, and Thông to thoughtfully consider the matter, dissecting what both the scholar and the fisherman had done wrong and how they’d brought this hardship on themselves.

Except that the twins hadn’t been in the garden at all.

She’d gotten the day wrong again. Not an uncommon occurrence in a palace where not much deviated from routine. But she’d tried the other teaching places. The courtyard, the corridor with the infinitely receding windows of skyscapes, even the library, where she found the door tightly locked, and no noise or light within. The twins were nowhere to be found.

Off again on their adventures, maybe? But they’d never missed a lesson. Vu Côn had made the consequences of that clear. And even clearer to Yên what the consequences of non-attendance would be.

Vu Côn would have her head. The panic was old and reflexive now, almost written over by the memory of cold seizing her lips, running like a shiver up her spine and stretching her entire being with unattainable, unreasonable desire.

She needed to keep her wits and find them. Fast.

Unbidden, words rose to her lips: a spell she’d seen in the book, one to find lost relatives. And didn’t the First Teacher say that teachers and students might as well be parent and child?

Her hands moved before she could think, tracing the letters in the air.

Blood. Bone. Threads. Fated to meet again.

The letters on her hands burned, silver turning to a crisp white. The sharp, merciless radiance of the unbroken moon: the one under which the Vanishers had once hunted, whipping their servants ever onward, driving their prey to blood-streaked exhaustion and death. The floor under her, a single window into an impossible world, shifted, the words she’d spoken replacing the blasted and pockmarked surface. They twisted, then became the spirits’ language, and then fragmented, abstract signs, as if the palace itself was digesting what she’d spoken into a more palatable state.

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