Yoon Ha Lee's Blog, page 11

The woman had not chosen to be in the tower. They had taken her sword away from her, and her bow, and even her boots. They hadn’t been very good boots, that was a given when you were a soldier, but they had been better than nothing at all. (She could have insisted on better boots, given who she was, but that would have been cheating.)

Her captors didn’t know what to do with a female soldier, that much was clear. She had seen her comrades taken away, the axes; she knew the reek of slaughter. After all, sometimes she had done the slaughtering. On the other hand, her captors were also people of poetry and strange prejudices, and they prided themselves on a chivalry bound up with roses and filigree chains. The tower had been their compromise. Her cell was so spacious that it wasn’t quite a cell, although you couldn’t call it the height of luxury either. She slept upon sheets of worn silk and a soft mat rather than one of rice straw, and while the window was narrow, it let in stripes of sunlight and moonlight and the occasional bird-shaped shadow.

In the early days she had hoped that her brother might ransom her, but the cost of her ransom would be dear, she knew; and war was expensive. He had always been the calculating sort, and she didn’t expect him to value one horse-archer, even a good one, even his sister, over a company of keen-eyed mercenaries. It was just the way he was, and besides, as her mother had always said dryly, a woman had to make her own luck in a world of men.

The woman had only two changes of clothing, but it was not, she reflected, as if she needed to fear battlefield mud and gore in here. Along with the weapons and boots, her captors had taken away all possessions that they deemed metaphysically dangerous, such as the whalebone charm to the dragon-of-the-sea, or the beads of alternating carnelian and alabaster she had worn about her neck for protection from gangrene spirits. But they had left her a single braided cord, which had been a gift from her great-aunt.

“It’s a ladder to escape,” her great-aunt had said one firelit evening, her fingers turning the worn red, white, and black cord around and around. The woman, then a girl, had only halfway paid attention, despite her interest in the cheerful orange-tinted red of the component cords. Her great-aunt, for all her lean beauty, her amber-brown eyes, was something of an eccentric. Even to her death she always went around in black gloves. But she was still talking: “Eight threads in the braid, do you see? One missing. It’s a one-way ladder. Still, best to have some way out than none.”

“Yes, Auntie,” the girl said, and reached for the cord to wrap around her wrist.

Now, the woman walked over to the window–too narrow to see much, too wide for any self-respecting architect to claim it as a loophole–and glanced at the distant mountains, the low-hanging clouds. And she heard in her head, It’s because you have to divide by four, something she’d overheard her great-aunt saying to her mother, whatever it meant.

No: she didn’t want to stay here any longer. Patience had gotten her this far; it would get her no further. She listened for the guards, but they were accustomed to her docility. So she took out the braid and began doing the only thing she could think of, unweaving its strands, red and white and black. As she did so, she felt a pleasant dizziness. She set her teeth and kept unweaving. She began to see why the braid’s construction required multiples of four.

When she was done, she lifted one paw, then another, then another, then another, looking at them in turn. Interesting. And she had a plume of handsome white-tipped tails, but there should have been nine and one was missing. Eight threads in the braid. Not that she knew anything about braiding, but even being an unwhole fox spirit was better than being a whole captive.

She slid through the window ghostlike–as if walls could hold a fox spirit–then ran down the side of the tower on black-stockinged fox feet, silken, fearless. When she reached the base of the tower, she looked up–the tower appeared much taller from a fox’s vantage point–and cocked her head. Then she shrugged a fox shrug and slipped from the tower’s shadow into the distance, contemplating foxish mathematics all the while.

Flashfic for telophase. Prompt: kumiho; kumihimo.

I may have a weakness for fox spirits.

Published in the anthology Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, edited by Paula Guran.

I wrote this story in exchange for a donation to benefit those hit by Hurricane Katrina.  At the time I was flat broke, but I could still barter my writing, although it took me some time to produce the story and even longer to find a home for it.  Right now (2014) I live in Baton Rouge.  The story draws from my childhood images of the Dragon King Under the Sea and his realm (Korean folklore) because at the time of writing I had never been to Louisiana, let alone New Orleans, so I thought I’d write of the sea the way I knew how.

A tactician with a promise to keep, a warden who guards the universe’s games, and a game of linguistics.

Inspired by a quote from Big Bang Theory S6 involving—what else—games. Thanks to Joseph Betzwieser, Peter Berman, Daedala, dormouse_in_tea, and Yune Kyung Lee.

The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. Light the color of fossils burns from the ships, and at certain hours, the sun casts shadows that mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations. It is said that when the tower’s sun finally darkens, the universe’s clocks will stop.

A tactician with a promise to keep, a warden who guards the universe’s games, and a game of linguistics. Published in Lightspeed August 2013.

Inspired by a quote from Big Bang Theory S6 involving—what else—games. Thanks to Joseph Betzwieser, Peter Berman, Daedala, dormouse_in_tea, and Yune Kyung Lee.

There is no such thing as conservation of shadows. When light destroys shadows, darkness does not gain in density elsewhere. When shadows steal over earth and across the sky, darkness is not diluted.—from “Conservation of Shadows”

A collection of sf/f short stories, including the original novella “Iseul’s Lexicon.” Introduction by Aliette de Bodard. Forthcoming from Prime Books.

They are connoisseurs of writing in Imulai Mokarengen, the city whose name means inkblot of the gods.

The city lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.

Thanks to Daedala and Yune Kyung Lee. Published in Clarkesworld Magazine.

General Shuos Jedao was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrate Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.

Next time, Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better, I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.

Thanks to Daedala and Yune Kyung Lee. Published in Clarkesworld Magazine.

There lived a man in the tower and he had no eyes. The birds of the sky came to him and he knew them by the beats of their wings. The sun in the sky traveled its white road and he knew it by the heat of its breath.

Fantasy with nods toward Mesopotamian mythology. Thanks to Margaret Ronald, Jacqueline A. Lott, Oyce, Elizabeth Burdick, and others for their encouragement. Forthcoming from Papaveria Press.

The book was bound in pale, crinkled leather and rough thread the color of massacres, and Suzuen Vayag carried it in an inner pocket of her coat as a matter of course. Her sister Kereyag had written it in gunfire and witchfire and hellpyre smoke, on the stray cold morning of her death. The least Vayag could do was keep it safe.

Science fantasy. Thanks to my sister for the beta. Published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Among the universe’s civilizations, some conceive of the journey between stars as the sailing of bright ships, and others as tunneling through the crevices of night. Some look upon their far-voyaging as a migratory imperative, and name their vessels after birds or butterflies.

Sf. For Sam Kabo Ashwell. Thanks to my betas: Daedala, Yune Kyung Lee, comrade_cat, and Marissa Lingen. Published in Tor.com Aug. 10, 2011. Reprinted in Year’s Best SF 17, ed. David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer.