The Unstrung Zither

  by Yoon Ha Lee

  Yoon Ha Lee published her first story ten years ago, when she was still an undergraduate at Cornell University. She subsequently went on to Stanford University's teacher education program in math and a stint in teaching. These days she lives in Pasadena, California, with her husband and their daughter. Her Web site (egasus.cityofveils.co) lists Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card as two of her influences; perhaps you'll see their imprint on this story, but we think you'll find it pretty distinctive on its own.

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  "They don't look very dangerous," Xiao Ling Yun said to the aide. Ling Yun wished she understood what Phoenix Command wanted from her. Not that she minded the excuse to take a break from the composition for two flutes and hammered dulcimer that had been stymieing her for the past two weeks.

  Through a one-way window in the observation chamber, Xiao Ling Yun saw five adolescents sitting cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle. Before them was a tablet and two brushes. No ink; these were not calligraphy brushes. One of the adolescents, a girl with short, dark hair, leaned over and drew two characters with quick strokes. All five studied the map that appeared on the tablet.

  "Nevertheless," the aide said. "They attempted to assassinate the Phoenix General. We are fortunate to have captured them."

  The aide wrote something on her own tablet, and a map appeared. She circled a region of the map. The tablet enlarged it until it filled the screen. "Circles represent gliders," the aide said. "Triangles represent dragons."

  Ling Yun peered at the formations. "Who's winning?"

  At the aide's instigation, the tablet replayed the last move. A squadron of dragons engaged a squadron of gliders. One dragon turned white—white for death—and vanished from the map. The aide smiled. "The assassins are starting to slip."

  Ling Yun had thought that the Phoenix General desired the services of a musician to restore order to the fractious ashworlds. She was not the best person for such a purpose, nor the worst: a master musician, yes, but without a sage's philosophical bent of mind. Perhaps they had chosen her on account of her uncle's position as a logistician. She was pragmatic enough not to be offended by the possibility.

  "I had not expected prisoners to be offered entertainment," Ling Yun said, a little dubious. She was surprised that they hadn't been executed, in fact.

  "It is not entertainment," the aide said reprovingly. "Every citizen has a right to education."

  Of course. The government's stance was that the ashworlds already belonged to the empire, whatever the physical reality might be. "Including the classical arts, I presume," she said. "But I am a musician, not a painter." Did they want her to tutor the assassins? And if so, why?

  "Music is the queen of the arts, is it not?" the aide said.

  She had not expected to be discussing the philosophy of music with a soldier. "According to tradition, yes," Ling Yun said carefully. Her career had been spent writing music that never strayed too much from the boundaries of tradition.

  The most important music lesson she had had came not from her tutor, but from a servant in her parents' house. The servant, whose name Ling Yun had deliberately forgotten, liked to sing as he stirred the soup or pounded the day's bread. He didn't have a particularly notable voice. It wavered in the upper register and his vowels drifted when he wasn't paying attention. (She didn't tell him any of this. She didn't talk to him at all. Her parents would have disapproved.) But the servant had two small children who helped him with his tasks, and they chanted the songs, boisterously out of tune.

  From watching that servant and his children, Ling Yun learned that the importance of music came not from its ability to move the five elements, but from its ability to affect the heart. She wanted to write music that anyone could hum, music that anyone could enjoy. It was the opposite of the haughty ideal that her tutor taught her to strive toward. Naturally, Ling Yun kept this thought to herself.

  The aide scribbled some more on the tablet. In response, an image of a mechanical dragon drew itself across the tablet. It had been painted white, with jagged red markings on its jointed wings.

  "Is this a captured dragon?" Ling Yun asked.

  "Unfortunately, no," the aide said. "We caught glimpses of two of the assassins as they came down on dragons, but the dragons disappeared as though they'd been erased. We want to know where they're hiding, and how they're being hidden."

  Ling Yun stared at the dragon. Whoever had drawn it did not have an artist's fluency of line. But everything was precise and carefully proportioned. She could see where the wings connected to the body and the articulations that made motion possible, even, if she squinted, some of the controls by the pilot's seat.

  "Who produced this?"

  The aide turned her head toward the window. "The dark-haired girl did. Her name is Wu Wen Zhi."

  It was a masculine name, but they probably did things differently in the ashworlds. Ling Yun felt a rebellious twinge of approval.

  Ling Yun said, "Wen Zhi draws you a picture, and you expect it to yield the ashworlders' secrets. Surely she's not as incompetent an assassin as all that. Or did you torture this out of her?"

  "No, it's part of the game they're playing with the general," the aide said.

  "I don't see the connection," she said. And why was the general playing a game with them in the first place? Wei qi involved no such thing, nor had the tablet games she had played as a student.

  The aide smiled as though she had heard the thought. "It personalizes the experience. When the game calculates the results of combat, it refers to the pilot's emblem to determine her strengths and weaknesses. Take Wen Zhi's dragon, for instance. First of all, the dragon's design indicates that it specializes in close combat, as opposed to Mesketalioth's—" she switched briefly to another dragon painting "—which has repeating crossbows mounted on its shoulders." She returned to Wen Zhi's white dragon. "However, notice the stiffness of the lines. The pilot is always alert, but in a way that makes her tense. This can be exploited."

  "The general has an emblem in the game, too, I presume," Ling Yun said.

  "Of course," the aide said, but she didn't volunteer to show it to Ling Yun. "Let me tell you about our five assassins.

  "Wu Wen Zhi comes from Colony One." The empire's two original colonies had been given numbers rather than names. "Wen Zhi has tried to kill herself three times already. She doesn't sleep well at night, but she refuses to meditate, and she won't take medications."

  I wouldn't either, Ling Yun thought.

  "The young man with the long braid is Ko. He's lived on several of the ashworlds and speaks multiple languages, but his accent suggests that he comes from Arani. Interestingly enough, Ko alerted us to the third of Wen Zhi's suicide attempts. Wen Zhi didn't take this well.

  "The scarred one sitting next to Ko is Mesketalioth. He's from Straken Okh. We suspect that he worked for Straken's intelligence division before he was recruited by the Dragon Corps.

  "The girl with the light hair is Periet, although the others call her Perias. We haven't figured out why, and they look at us as though we're crazy when we ask them about it, although she'll answer to either name. Our linguists tell us that Perias is the masculine form of her name; our doctors confirm that she is indeed a girl. She comes from Kiris. Don't be fooled by her sweet manners. She's the one who destroyed Shang Yuan."

  Ling Yun opened her mouth, then found her voice. " Her ?" Shang Yuan had been a city of several million people. It had been obliterated during the Festival of Lanterns, for which it had been famous. "I thought that the concussive storm was a natural disaster."

  The aide gave Ling Yun a singularly cynical look. "Natural disasters don't flatten every building in the city and cause all the lanterns to explode. It was an elemental attack."

  "I suppose this is classified information."

  "It is, technically, not that many people haven't guessed."

  "How much help did she have?"

  The aide's mouth twisted. "Ashworld Kiris didn't authorize the attack. As near as we can determine, Periet did it all by herself."

  "All right," Ling Yun said. She paced to the one-way window and watched Periet-Perias, trying to map the massacre onto the girl's open, cheerful expression. "Who's the fifth one now skulking in a corner?"

  "That's Li Cheng Guo, from Colony Two," the aide said. "He killed two of our guards on the first day. Actually, they all did their share of killing on the way in, although Periet takes the prize."

  "That's terrible," Ling Yun said. But what she was thinking was, The ashworlds must be terribly desperate, to send children. The Phoenix General had had the ashworlds' leader assassinated two years ago; this must be their counterstroke. "So," she said, "one assassin from each ashworld." Colony One and Colony Two; Arani, Straken Okh, and Kiris. The latter three had been founded by nations that had since been conquered by the empire.

  "Correct." The aide rolled the brush around in her hand. "The Phoenix General wants you to discover the assassins' secret."

  Oh no, Ling Yun thought. For all the honors that the empress had lavished on the Phoenix General, he was still known as the Mad General. He had started out as a glider pilot, and everyone knew that glider pilots were crazy. Their extreme affinity for fire and wood unbalanced their minds.

  On the other hand, Ling Yun had a lifetime's practice of bowing before those of greater standing, however much it chafed, and the man had produced undeniable results. She could respect that.

  "I'm no soldier," Lin g Yun said, "and no interrogator. What would you like me to do?"

  The aide smiled. "Each assassin has an emblem in the game."

  Ling Yun had a sudden memory of a self-portrait she had drawn when she was a child. It was still in the hallway of her parents' house, to her embarrassment: lopsided face with tiny eyes and a dot for a nose, scribbly hair, arms spread wide. "Why did they agree to this game?" she asked.

  "They are playing because it was that or die. But they have some hidden purpose of their own, and time may be running out. You must study the game—we'll provide analyses for you, as we hardly expect you to become a tactician—and study the dragons. Compose a suite of five pieces, one for each dragon—for each pilot."

  "Pilot?"

  "They're pilots in their minds, although we're only certain that Periet and

  Mesketalioth have the training. Maybe the secret is just that they found blockade runners to drop them off." The aide didn't sound convinced.

  "One piece for each dragon. You think that by translating their self-representations into music, the supreme art, you will learn their secret, and how to defeat them."

  "Precisely."

  "I will do what I can," Xiao Ling Yun said.

  "I'm sure you will," the aide said.

  * * *

  Xiao Ling Yun's ancestors had worshipped dragons. At the harvest festival, they poured libations of rice wine to the twin dragons of the greatmoon and the smallmoon. When the empire's skies were afire with the summer's meteor showers, people would burn incense for the souls of the falling stars.

  You could still see fire in the sky, most nights, festive and beautiful, but no one brought out incense. The light came from battles high in the atmosphere, battles between the ashworlders' metal dragons and the empire's Phoenix Corps.

  When she was a child, Ling Yun's uncle had made her a toy glider, a flimsy-looking thing of bamboo and paper, with tiny slivers to represent the wing-mounted flamethrowers. He had painted the red-and-gold emblem of the Phoenix Corps on each wing. "Uncle," she asked, "why do we fight with fire when the gliders are made of wood? Isn't it dangerous?"

  Her uncle patted her hand and smiled. "Remember the cycle of elements, little one."

  She thought about it: metal cut wood, wood split earth, earth drank water, water doused fire, and—"Fire melts metal," she said.

  "Indeed," he said. "The ashworlds abound in metal, mined from the asteroid belts. Therefore their dragons are built of metal. We must use fire to defeat metal."

  "But wood burns," Ling Yun said, wondering, despite all her lessons and the habits of obedience, if her uncle were right in the head. She turned the glider

  around in her hands, testing the paper wings. They flexed under her touch.

  "So does the phoenix," her uncle said.

  Ling Yun squinted, trying to reconcile fire-defeats-metal with fire-burns-wood and fire-goes-down-in-flames.

  Taking pity on her, her uncle added, "The phoenix is a symbol that came to us by conquest, from the southern spicelands." He laughed at her wide eyes. "Oh, yes—do you think that for thousands and thousands of years, the empire has never been conquered? You'll find all the old, ugly stories in the history books, of the Boar Banner and the Tiger Banner, the woman who brought down the wall, the Outsider Dynasty with its great fleets...."

  Ling Yun took note of the things that he had mentioned so she could look them up later.

  "Come, Ling Yun," her uncle said. "Why don't we go outside and test the glider?"

  She sensed that he was preventing her from asking further questions. But if he didn't want her to know, why had he told her about the phoenix in the first place?

  Still, she loved the way the glider felt in her hand, and her uncle didn't visit very often. "All right," she said.

  They went into the courtyard with its broad flagstones and pond, and spoke no more of the elements.

  * * *

  Ling Yun started composing the suite on the wuxian qin, the five-stringed zither. She had brought her favorite one with her. The military was accustomed to transporting fragile instruments, thanks to the Phoenix Corps, whose gliders had to be attuned to the elements.

  For suicidal, dark-haired Wu Wen Zhi, Ling Yun wrote a disjunct melody with tense articulations, reflecting the mixed power and turmoil she saw in the girl's white dragon. White and red, bone and blood, death and fortune. The aide said Wen Zhi had killed six people since landing in the empire. The dragon had nine markings. Ling Yun trusted the dragon. Wen Zhi did not strike her as the subtle type. The aide's response to this observation was a pained laugh.

  Ko's drawing was more of a sketch, in a relaxed, spontaneous style that Ling Yun's calligraphy tutor would have approved of. The colors worried her, however: black and gray, no sign of color, a sense of aching incompleteness. Yet the reports that came every morning noted Ko's unshakable good cheer and cooperativeness. Ling Yun felt a strange affinity to what she knew of the boy. She had no illusions that she understood what it was like to be a killer, but she knew something about hiding part of yourself from the outside world. She gave Ko's piece a roving melody with ever-shifting rhythms and playful sliding tones.

  Mesketalioth's blue dragon was the most militant-looking of the five, at least to Ling Yun's untrained eye. Ko's dragon, if you looked at it from a distance, might pass as a picture of a god out of legend, not a war automaton. Mesketalioth's diagram included not only the dragon, but cross-sections and insets showing the mechanisms of the repeating crossbows and the way the joints were put together. The aide assured her that it was a known type of ashworlder dragon, and provided Ling Yun with explanations from the engineers. Ling Yun thought that the aide was trying to be reassuring for her benefit, and failing. For Mesketalioth, she wrote a military air in theme and variations, shadows falling in upon themselves, the last note an infinitely subtle vibrato informed by the pulse in the finger holding down the string.

  Periet was the best painter of the five. She had drawn her dragon out of scale so it looked no larger than a large cat, its head tilted to watch two butterflies, one sky-blue and the other star-spotted black. It was surrounded by flowers and gears and neatly organized mechanics' tools. Ling Yun thought of Shang Yuan, with its shattered lanterns and ashes, wind blowing through streets inhabited only by grasshoppers and mice. No one had attempted to rebuild the City of Lanterns. The song she wrote for Periet had an utterly conventional pentatonic melody. The countermelody, on the other hand, was sweet, logical, and in a foreign mode.

  As for the last of them, Li Cheng Guo had drawn a flamboyant red dragon with golden eyes. Ling Yun wondered if he meant some mockery of the Phoenix General by this. On the other hand, red did indicate good fortune. The gliders were always painted in fire-colors, while the dragons came in every color imaginable. Obligingly, Ling Yun wrote a rapid, skirling piece for Cheng Guo, martial in its motifs, but hostile where Mesketalioth's was subtle.

  Ling Yun slept surrounded by the five assassins' pictures. She was disturbed to realize that, no matter where she rearranged them on the walls, she always woke up facing Periet's butterfly dragon.

  Careful inquiry revealed the assassins' sleeping arrangements: in separate cells, although they were permitted in a room together for the purposes of lessons—probably a euphemism for interrogation sessions—and the general's game. Ling Yun asked how they kept the assassins from killing their guards or tutors.

  "After the first few incidents, they swore to the Phoenix General that they would abide by the terms of the game," the aide said.

  "And you trust them?" Ling Yun said.

  "They've sworn," the aide said emphatically. "And if they break oath, he'll have them executed."

  Sooner or later, she was going to have to speak with the Phoenix General, if he didn't demand a report from her first. She presumed that Phoenix Command had other precautions in place.

  Two weeks into the assignment, Ling Yun said to the aide, "I'd like to speak with the assassins."

  "If you draw up a list of questions," she said, "our interrogators can obtain the answers you want."

  "In person," Ling Yun said.

  "That's unwise for a whole list of reasons I'm sure you've already thought of."

  "Surely one musician more or less is expendable in the general's game," Ling Yun said, keeping all traces of irony from her voice. She doubted the aide was fooled.

 

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