Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,19

be here?”

“I may not be a vulture,” Sakera said, “but I can smell death on the wind.”

“I could have used your help when I was fighting the vultures,” he said. The company of ghouls had taught him how to fight—his mother, a pragmatist in her way, had sought out the corpses of veteran soldiers—but it had still been one against several.

Sakera grimaced. “If only. A necromancer is only as useful as the bones she can call to her service. I promised myself I would only touch giants, who are long gone from the world, and whose families will not miss them.”

“That’s an inconvenient promise,” Tamim said, without approbation.

“I came here for the bones. I’m glad you came, too. Most people are afraid.” She waved down at him. “Over here.”

Tamim craned his head and regarded her skeptically.

“Oh, that’s right.” She made another gesture. The giant began lowering her to the ground, but her hand spasmed. The giant lurched. She somersaulted clear and rolled to safety, swearing in a language he didn’t recognize.

Tamim helped her get up, more out of curiosity than politeness. Both her hands were shaking. “How long has that been going on?” he asked.

“Long enough,” she said, embarrassed. “That’s the other reason I need an ally. I can’t draw the patterns by myself anymore.”

Patterns? “You’d better show me how to work the—” What should he call it? “—the giant.” As though it were a set of tools. “Why do you need patterns?” He didn’t recall that his mother had ever drawn anything.

“Do you know how the sorcerer came to power?” Sakera asked.

Tamim shook his head. His mother had told him gilded tales of the sorcerer’s court as though it had always existed, a place where enemies’ skulls were made into banquet cups and musicians played upon lyres of bone or tortoiseshell.

“In the old queen’s court, he was her most trusted general and a master calligrapher. First he conquered the Pit, which is death. Perhaps he made some terrible bargain there. Then, in the palace archives, he discovered some scrolls on ancient fighting forms, and applied those to the corpses he raised. Thus even ghouls who were once farmers and potters and prostitutes can fight, because they are aligned with the necromancer’s patterns.

“As for the sorcerer, he had become smitten with his queen. When she refused to marry him—well. You can guess the end of that story.”

Tamim was thinking of the patterns. “This implies that if you draw other fighting forms, you could apply those to the ghouls as well. Am I correct?”

Sakera nodded. “But you have to have an accurate hand and a knowledge of inner anatomies. Writing is troublesome for me, and drawing is impossible.”

It didn’t surprise him that a necromancer would be literate. Tamim had learned the alphabet from his mother, and could read and write, if shakily. He hadn’t had much opportunity to practice. “Teach me,” he said.

Her face lit. He had never seen anything like it, on the dead or the living. Carefully, she repeated the motion that had caused the giant to kneel. Although her hands shook a little, Tamim could tell what the gesture was supposed to look like. He did it several times until Sakera nodded her satisfaction.

“How do I get the giant to respond to me?” Tamim said. “Surely it doesn’t move every time you twitch your hands. The ghouls I knew just followed orders. They didn’t require constant guidance.”

“Give the giant a name,” Sakera said, “and use the name to address it in your mind. As for guidance, it’s a thing of memory. The recent dead remember who they were, after a fashion. They remember how to do the things they did in life, for a time. Or they’re instructed by patterns. The giants have been dead so long that they do require constant guidance.”

When he died, would she raise his bones and—

“No,” Sakera said. “I wouldn’t do that. I am a necromancer, yes, but I made a promise. I told you, the death you desire.” Her tone was almost cheerful. “Come on, give it a try.”

Tamim looked at the giant with spurs. Ifayad, he thought, which meant bird of prey. He could see the letters in his head: iro-fel-alim-yod-alim-dirat. Then he made the gesture Sakera had shown him.

The giant knelt. He climbed up and up, into the skull, along the ridge of an abraded tooth in the open mouth. He wondered what it smelled like: earth, probably, and crushed flowers, and the tang of minerals newly exposed to air.