Free Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee

rimlands, away from the sections that the sorcerer had reclaimed for human use.
    Sakera, who was crouching next to him with her coat hitched up over her knees in an unsuccessful attempt to keep it from getting soiled, sighed. “There’s more than one alphabet in the world. There are even things more complicated than alphabets.”
    Tamim tried to look receptive to the idea of learning something more complicated than an alphabet.
    Sakera burst out laughing at his expression. “You’re quick-witted. A little practice is all it would take.”
    “Thank you,” he said dourly.
    “As to why this alphabet and not another: it’s the oldest one in the rimlands. It was used by priests to gods now unnamed.”
    He leaned back and scowled. “How is it that you say the most preposterous things as if you knew them absolutely?”
    “Because I do, of course.” She grinned at him. “Really, Tamim, what kind of necromancer would I be if I didn’t gather knowledge?”
    “If my mother had spent more time gathering knowledge,” Tamim said thoughtfully, “maybe she would have been better prepared when she tried to assassinate the sorcerer.”
    “Come on,” Sakera said, clearly deeming it better to skirt the subject, “alphabet. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have it memorized.”
    Tamim drew an awkward copy of the first one.
    “No, no, no, ” Sakera said, laughing again. He didn’t mind it as much as he thought he would. “There’s an order to these things.”
    “I can’t see why it makes any difference, so long as you get the shape right.”
    “Hit me,” she said.
    “What?” Sometimes he wondered about her sanity.
    “It won’t land,” she said, “if that’s what you’re worried about. Come on, hit me.”
    He got up, settling his balance solidly over each foot, then threw a punch. He kept his fist several inches away from her even at full extension.
    “Oh, Tamim,” she sighed, “you don’t have to be so careful. But you see? Notice how all the parts of your body moved in a particular order, the way you twisted your fist at the end and not the beginning? There is a logic to these things.”
    Tamim should have known that complaining about it would elicit one of Sakera’s incomprehensible explanations. “Just tell me how to get it right.”
    “If you’d rather,” she said. She drew the letter again, slowly, imitating his strokes. “You went from left to right, and it’s right to left. That’s the first thing to remember.” And again, except this time from right to left, as she had said. “Do you see how it’s shaped, how the strokes flow into each other?”
    He tried a few more times until he could feel the flow that she spoke of: not so different from the alphabet he knew, even if the direction was different. “Shouldn’t it have a name?” he said. The letters of that other alphabet had names.
    “This one is tilat. If we spelled out your name, it would be the first letter.”
    “ Tilat, ” he repeated. “What’s the other one?”
    Sakera showed him how to write it correctly. Dirt collected under her fingernail. “ Meneth, ” she said. “ Tilat-meneth-meneth spells your name.”
    Tamim frowned. “Aren’t there letters missing, the breath-sounds?”
    “Vowels, you mean? You don’t write them in this alphabet.”
    “That sounds terribly confusing.”
    “There is power in empty spaces,” Sakera said. “Call it another part of the lesson.”
    Tilat-meneth-meneth. Tamim wrote it three times so the letters aligned, forming a three-by-three figure. “Show me—show me how to write your name.” He had a good memory. He would prove it to her.
    She showed him senu, and kor, and ras. If he looked at all the letters sideways, he could see a faint resemblance to the ones of his childhood alphabet. Were they related somehow?
    Tamim didn’t write the name he had given his skeleton, Ifayad, for he had a premonition that it would alter some necessary relationship. Power in empty spaces,