Pain seared her skin. Brilliant light surged across her vision. The image of the trefoil burst in her mind. A whump of air knocked her back. She landed hard on her tailbone. The man screeched.
Gian ran forward. Lilia’s head ached; she began to tremble violently, uncontrollable spasms that shook her whole body. Her jaw clenched. Gian killed me, she thought.
The man was screaming. Screaming. The way they had screamed in the village.
“It’s all right,” Gian said. She made little shushing sounds. “It’s all right.”
Lilia thought Gian was talking to the man, but as her vision cleared, she saw Gian crouching next to her, one hand on her forehead, the other on her sternum, holding her down as she jerked and flailed on the forest floor.
The fit lasted several minutes. When it was over, Lilia was exhausted, spent.
Gian asked to take Lilia into her arms and carried her back down the hill to the clearing near the rocky outcrop. Lilia had not realized how strong she was. Lilia buried her face in Gian’s hair and wept.
Gian held her while she cried.
“It’s all right,” Gian said. Her voice sounded distant. She was staring off into the woods. “I drew too much. I hurt you, too. I’m sorry. I won’t let that happen again.”
“You can’t do that,” Lilia said. “You can’t hurt the ungifted like that.”
“I used up a great deal of power,” Gian said. “It was my fault. Sometimes, I panic and pull too much. Kalinda says it’ll burn me out someday.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I flayed him,” Gian said. “Don’t go back there. I’ll get his heart and his liver. We’ll eat well tonight.”
“The sanisi will find us.”
“He’s close, no doubt,” Gian said. “But we’ll keep moving. My people aren’t far from here. It’s why I agreed to take you. Just another day to the northeast, and you’ll have your answers.”
Lilia saw the bloody body of the man crumpled on the hill. Gian could do anything she wanted with her. She wasn’t bound by temple rules. Why had she taken Lilia’s bargain, then?
“Kalinda wanted you kept safe from the Kai,” Gian said. “My friends can protect you better than I can.”
“Kalinda brought me to the Kai. I live at the Temple of Oma where the Kai lives. Kalinda never saved me from anything. She delivered me to her door!”
Gian stood. “I need to prepare his heart and liver,” she said. “Do you like dandelion greens?”
Lilia pressed her fists against her eyes. “Why won’t you tell me anything?”
“You’ll understand when you meet the others,” Gian said. “I did what you asked and brought you here. Now you fulfill your end. You join me.”
Lilia watched the hourglass of the suns begin to set in the blue-lavender sky above her. Lavender, not amber. The leaves here were just beginning to turn, far up in the forest canopy.
Lilia struggled to her feet. The sky. The leaves. The village.
“What is it?” Gian asked.
Lilia walked back down to the stone outcrop. She gazed toward the clearing where the thorn fence had been, and stared at the sky. The blue-lavender sky. She covered her mouth.
“Lilia?” Gian asked.
“Oma,” Lilia said. “The sky. It’s the wrong color.”
Gian’s expression was unreadable.
Lilia persisted. “I thought it was because Tira’s descendent now. But the sky here, right here, wasn’t this color when I lived here. When the village was here. It was amber, and it caught fire at sunset, like a crimson cloak. Oh, no; oh, no…”
“Lilia, I’m sorry,” Gian said. “I can explain–”
Lilia’s legs gave out. She leaned against the rock outcrop. Terror squeezed her insides. “That’s why everything is different here,” Lilia said. “Dhai has no conscripted army here. The Kai wears no armor. This isn’t where my village was at all, is it?”
Gian shook her head.
Lilia burst into tears at the sad expression on Gian’s face. It was pity. Pity for a foolish child piece on a kindar board who suddenly understood the whole world was make-believe.
“I’m not from this world, am I?” Lilia said. “And neither are you and Kalinda. That’s why you put me with the Kai in Oma’s Temple. It’s not this Kai you’re fighting.”
“No,” Gian said.
“You’re fighting a Kai somewhere else,” Lilia said. “You’re fighting a woman who looks just like her, from a world with an amber sky.”
17
The churning mud sucked at Zezili’s boots as she slogged across the remains of the camp. Her legionnaires milled about the field, gutting corpses from navel to neck to check if the dajians had swallowed any valuables before the raid. Zezili couldn’t imagine dajians having anything worth stealing in a camp like this, but some had been known to flee their owners after stealing from them. She heard the grumbling of her women as she went; easy slaughter was appreciated, but not cheap slaughter. Fighting that paid in nothing but blood would sour them quickly. She made a note to have a hundred kegs of cheap wine hauled in after the next raid. Mounts – a skinny dog or pox-ridden bear – were good prizes, too, for the most exuberant killers.
Monshara waited at the center of the field. She sat astride her great black-and-white bear. Zezili had left Dakar behind; she had no interest in tacking him up just to watch some petty bit of magic.
Four riders came through the camp, riding great bears like Monshara’s. They didn’t look like Monshara, though. They looked the same way Hofsha had – like Dhai. Zezili’s skin crawled. Were they opening a door of some kind to Dhai? Why would the Dhai want to kill dajians? They were petty pacifists. They’d vomit at the sight of blood.
“So what exactly are you going to do now?” Zezili called.
“My sovereign wishes to meet you,” Monshara said. “These agents of mine will open the way. I’ll keep them with the legion from here on out. We may need them.”
“Opening the way… to where you’re from?”
“Yes.”
“Are they some kind of mutant jista?”
“Nothing so grand. These are friends of mine. Omajistas.”
“Omajistas?” Zezili laughed. “There aren’t…” She caught herself. What had Anavha said? “I opened a door.”
“We put these omajistas in place many years ago,” Monshara said.
“Years ago? Oma’s a myth.”
“Like Rhea?” Monshara said. Zezili rankled. “Oma appears from between spaces. One cannot track it like a comet. Even Para, Tira, Sina are irregular bodies. We can make estimates, but their appearances can sometimes be erratic like their powers. Oma was not close enough to open a gate in those days, when my omajistas came here. We had to force it. As we will do today. Many died.”
“How many?”
“A small country,” Monshara said, “called Saloria.”
“The whole country?”
“Yes.”
“What’s worth killing a country over?”
“We knew what was coming,” Monshara said. “The sky has darkened on our world for decades. Bloody sunsets, first, as whatever poisons the satellites emitted as they decayed rained down on us. Then amber skies, and now… Well. We knew we didn’t have much time. When Para rose, it brought the full brunt of the decay it gathered from the spaces between things. It’s diseased. Now we are, too.”
“Wait,” Zezili said. “Your world? You mean your country. Your country’s dying?”
Monshara raised her hand in greeting to the riders. The riders made a similar salute. Best Zezili could tell, the riders were three women and one man. The man trailed after the women, as was proper in Dorinah.
The riders arrived and exchanged a few words with Monshara in a language that sounded a lot like Dhai. Was it some dialect?
“Should I step back or something?” Zezili asked.
“That won’t be necessary,” Monshara said.
The four riders formed a broad circle. They raised thei
r arms.
The air thickened. A massive boom rocked the field. Zezili’s legionnaires cried out. Raised their hands to their ears. Zezili wondered, then, if this was all some fun ruse – have the legionnaires slaughter the camp, then slaughter the legionnaires in turn with some great trick. But that thought was short-lived, because it was at that moment that the ground around Zezili’s feet began to harden.
Bloody mist roiled up from the soil and filled the sky. Zezili took a breath and gagged on coppery, blood-soaked air. Beneath her, the ground cracked and heaved. Zezili stumbled forward and caught herself on a fresh body. Blood burst from the corpse. She rolled to the side. Gazed across the field. One by one, the corpses burst and split apart, sending great gouts of blood into the already-saturated air.
She gagged on another breath.
The air began to clear as the blood coalesced into a single shimmering sphere at the center of the riders.
Zezili dry-heaved at the churned-up ground.
Above her, the flat sphere expanded into a thin-skinned bubble. Violet light burst from its center. Zezili turned away, blinded.
Her ears popped. The pressure eased.
She wiped at her eyes. Black spots juddered across her vision. Where the bloody bubble had been, a perfect disk of amber sky bled through from… some other place.
Zezili’s stomach heaved again. She vomited. She heard someone laughing and looked up. It was Monshara. She was looking through the hole in the sky.
Zezili didn’t know what she expected. The sky on the other side was a burnished amber, not blue-lavender. The hourglass suns were brilliant crimson, not yellow. The whole horizon glowed red, as if the ground itself emitted some wavering heat. She could not see Para, only a black mass in the sky where Para should have been, and long tails of misty black particles trailing it: the tail of an ebony comet.
The landscape it rained upon was a sea of charred hills. Zezili thought at first it was barren, but then she saw a squat, round tower in the distance, pulsing with a faint blue light.
“Are you coming?” Monshara asked.
Zezili started. “What?”
“Your second can clean things up here,” Monshara said. “My sovereign wishes to meet you, as I’ve said.”
“I can go through?”
“Yes. We’ve ensured that.”
“Ensured it? How?”
“That’s not important. Come through. You’ll need a mount.” She called to one of the omajistas – well, there had to be such a thing, didn’t there, if they could do this? – who slid off her bear and handed the reins to Zezili.
Zezili grimaced. She hated the smell of bears. She mounted anyhow. She didn’t want to make a habit of arguing with women who used blood magic to open doors between spaces. She remembered Anavha crouched on the floor of his room again, and her heart clenched. She broke out in a cold sweat. It was someone else, she reminded herself. He didn’t do anything at all. Maybe it was one of these people, opening spaces to nowhere on accident. Maybe… Zezili sat straight and tall atop the bear. She needed to ask Tulana about omajistas. If the Empress had known people all along who could do something like this, she would have hidden them away with Tulana. Zezili understood now why her local priest had wanted to take Anavha away immediately.
Monshara began to move through the gate.
“Will it stay open behind us?” Zezili asked.
“Eight hundred dead should keep it open at least two hours,” Monshara said. “We have time.”
“And if it closes?”
“We’ll be done by then,” Monshara said. “We’re going to the tower.”
Zezili firmed her jaw. She thought of her fine estate, and Dakar, her dajians, and Anavha. If these people wanted her dead, there were far easier ways to do it.
She hissed at the bear beneath her and followed Monshara into the other side.
Dirty bones littered the field around the glowing blue tower. The air here was dry and smelled strangely of sulfur. Zezili put a kerchief over her nose, but it did nothing to keep the strange air from her lungs. She gave up and tucked the kerchief back inside her cuff.
“Who were these people?” Zezili asked.
“We had to remove a good many people,” Monshara said, “to gather enough blood to open the way between the worlds. Blood witches have known how to intensify the power of the satellites through the power of blood for centuries. It was only natural we apply those same strategies to intensify the tenuous power of Oma.”
“Blood witches? Worlds? Are we on the moons or something? Because you’re talking nonsense to me.”
“Not the moons, no,” Monshara said. “It’s… like looking at a series of reflections, you understand?”
“No.”
Monshara sighed. She looked around the charred, shattered ground and pointed to a fetid pool of standing water in a ditch along the beaten track they followed. “When you see the sky reflected in that pool, is it the sky you know, truly? Or some blacker version, some mirror version? Pretend that beneath every reflecting pool is some other version of that sky, layer upon layer of them, with slight differences in each. The deeper you go, the more different things are.”
Zezili wasn’t too keen on that analogy but understood something of what she was getting at. “So, let’s say you peel up enough layers, and in some reflection, the Dhai aren’t slaves anymore?”
“To put it mildly, no. The Dhai are not slaves here.”
“There’s something I’ve been trying to figure out,” Zezili said. “Why kill a bunch of slaves on another world, especially if they look like you? I mean, you’re working for Dhai who are killing their… what, reflections? Isn’t that like killing yourself?”
“You’ll have to ask the Kai,” Monshara said.
“The Kai?” Zezili said. “You have got to be joking.”
Monshara did not answer. She slid off her mount and tied off the reins at a broad silver hitching post outside the tower. The tower itself was not as grand as it appeared from the other side. Just four stories tall, ringed in silver-rimmed windows that shimmered with little rainbows of light, as if inlaid with the wings of dragonflies.
Zezili followed Monshara up three broad flights of stairs. The tower was empty of possessions. Zezili saw a spot of blood near the door. The rest of the interior was scoured clean. Not even any dust.
As they came to the top of the tower, Zezili heard voices. Four figures dressed in chitinous red armor stood around an amberwood table. A large map lay at the center. Four red vases sat next to each leg of the table.
It took Zezili a moment to realize she actually understood what they were saying. They spoke Dhai.
The woman farthest from Zezili glanced up at their arrival. She was a dour, hard-faced woman a handful of years younger than Zezili, with a strong jaw and sloped nose. She looked vaguely familiar. Her companions turned. Two men, two women.
“Welcome back,” the hard-faced woman said to Zezili, in Dhai.
“Do I know you?” Zezili asked.
“I’m sure of it,” the woman said.
“You have me confused with someone else, then.”
“I think not,” the woman said.
Zezili tried to remember where she had seen this woman – the title, Kai, decided her. Zezili had killed any number of dajians over the years and interacted with hundreds more. But something about this one reminded her of burning flesh. And she remembered a man she murdered one day calling for his wife, calling for the Kai, the honorific for the Dhai leader.
“You’re the girl from that camp uprising I put down,” Zezili said. “That was… twelve, thirteen years ago? You pulled your brother out of that fire. He was lit like a torch. I remember.”
“Is that what happened?” the woman said. She looked amused. “Perhaps that’s what happened where you’re from. It was different here. We met very differently.”
Zezili glanced back at Monshara. “Is this a joke?”
Monshara shook her head.
“I’m the
Kai,” the woman said, “of the Tai Mora. You’ll know me as Kirana Javia Garika, if you remember my name at all. You were a rebellious little troublemaker here, rousing your people against mine about that time.”
Zezili had been a snot-nosed young recruit in the Empress’s legion back then. She had killed a good many Dhai during that year; there was an uprising in the camps caused by their itinerant Kai, a religious zealot who had decided to play prophet in the camps. Those never ended well.
“No, I was murdering your parents in the camps,” Zezili said, “as a member of the Dorinah legion.”
“Interesting,” Kirana said.
Zezili glanced over at Monshara. “What’s going on? Why’s the Kai in some other world?”
“There are two of us, of course,” Kirana said. “Two worlds. Mirrors of each other.”
Zezili started. “What?” She remembered Monshara’s talk about reflections. It hadn’t occurred to her she didn’t just mean countries and places that were the same, but actual individuals. Two of everything? Two of Zezili? That hurt her head.
Kirana grinned. “You were never one for philosophy or astronomical theory,” she said, “so I’ll use small words. You’re fighting Dhai here. The same Dhai you fight in your world, with some key differences.” She waved her hand at the window. “Such as the scenery. And, of course, the fact that we’re winning.”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“I wish it were,” Monshara said.
Zezili stared at the Dhai woman in armor. She had never seen a Dhai in armor, she realized. The dajians in the camps were soft things, even during the uprisings. At most, they wore heavy leather and maybe carried a staff or battered sword. She struggled with her slim knowledge of Oma – long referred to in scripture as Rhea’s Eye – and the people she saw before her. Rhea walked the world the last time Oma rose, bringing with her the Empress’s people and the Saiduan. Those invasions eventually led to the end of the Dhai empire. But fighting themselves? Fighting… reflections?
“There’s no logic to what you’re saying,” Zezili said. “My mother is a titled Dorinah. My father is a dajian – a Dhai slave. You’ve just said you’re the leader of the Tai Mora, whatever that is, not the Dhai, and I’ve seen no Dorinah here. So I couldn’t exist. I’d have no double.”
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