The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  KAMERON HURLEY

  The Mirror Empire

  BOOK I IN THE WORLDBREAKER SAGA

  “We take our shadows with us.”

  Dhai saying

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Kameron Hurley

  Praise for KAmeron Hurley

  PROLOGUE

  When Lilia was four years old, her mother filled a shallow dish with Lilia’s blood and fed it to the boars that patrolled the thorn fence.

  “Nothing can cross the thorn fence,” Lilia’s mother said as she poured the blood onto the hungry, gnarled fence. The boars on the other side licked up the blood. Lilia liked the boars’ yellow eyes and wrinkled, mucus-crusted snouts. They reminded her of hungry babies. The thorn fence kept out the semi-sentient walking trees and conscription gangs who sometimes climbed up from the churning bay that clung to the base of the cliffs. The cliffs and the fence should have protected them forever. Her mother was a blood witch, and never doubted her power. If you fed enough blood to a thing, her mother said, it would do all you asked.

  Lilia traced the scars on her mother’s arms, and her own, and she believed her.

  Until the day something crossed the fence.

  It was high autumn, and the leaves were falling. Lilia sat on a shallow, chalky outcrop overlooking the toxic mix of lavender poppies and bulrus ivy that cloaked the heath between her village and the thorn fence. A sea of colorful leaves swirled through the air. She had dressed herself in tattered white bone-tree leaves, pretending to be the Dhai hero Faith Ahya. She played alone, rubbing her face with dandelion heads and pretending she could fly. Her mother hated it when she played that game, because it meant climbing up onto the outcrop and launching herself off it, arms outspread, hoping with each leap that some great wind would launch her into the sky.

  The pale green light of the satellite Tira was high in the sky, bathing the world in a burnished emerald glow. The sky was a brilliant amber wash. It was the only color Lilia knew the sky to be. Tira, the life-giver, had been ascendant as long as she could remember.

  Lilia scrambled to the top of the outcrop once again and spread her arms. This time, surely, the wind would carry her. As she prepared to jump, she saw the trees on the other side of the heath tremble. She froze. The thorn fence stood between her and the trees. Whatever stirred there, she resolved to face it bravely.

  A wave of fuzzy gray treegliders leapt from the forest canopy. They spread their webbed limbs and glided down into the field of poppies - dozens and dozens of them. The big-eyed creatures bound toward her, hurling themselves onto the thorn fence. First one, then two, then six, eight, twelve. Impaled on the hungry thorns.

  Lilia shrieked and slid down from the outcrop. The barrier’s tendrils wound about the treegliders’ trembling bodies. She scrambled forward, desperate to free them.

  “Take me, take me!” she cried at the fence, holding out her scarred arms. “Let them go.” She tripped and fell in the field of poppies.

  A great snuffling, crackling sound came from the forest. She poked her head above the poppies. Immense white bears with jagged black manes broke through the trees. Forked tongues lolled from their massive, fanged mouths. Their riders wore chitinous red and amber armor and carried green-glowing everpine branches as weapons, the sort imbued with Tira’s power. Lilia knew those weapons well – her mother used them to kill wolverines and walking trees.

  Conscription gangs sent by the Dhai in the valley to gather people for their great war carried those weapons, too. Lilia had heard dark stories of children bundled away in the night. Fear of being hauled off to join a terrible army overwhelmed her compassion, and she choked on a sob. She clawed her way back into the shadow of the stone outcrop. I am a terrible coward, she thought. Now everyone will know.

  The riders barreled toward the thorn fence, trampling the dying treegliders. When they reached the fence they raised their weapons and cut it down, as easily as cutting a fresh tulip. Lilia willed herself to be still. If these people could cross the fence, they could do anything, and that scared her more than being thought a coward.

  They galloped past Lilia’s stone outcrop and away – toward the towering mass of webbing that cocooned the trees around her village, protecting it from the seething, semi-sentient plants that roamed the woodland.

  Lilia grabbed a loose stone at her feet and ran after them. Maybe she couldn’t face them directly, but they would not expect her to come up behind them.

  She wasn’t certain when she first noticed the smoke, but by the time she came to the creek that marked the boundary of the village, gasping for breath, the smoke choked her. Great gouts of flame ate the cocoon sheathing above her, exposing the village to the dangers of the woodland.

  She stumbled into the circle of the village. Found screaming chaos. The taste of smoke was bitter. She ran toward her mother’s holding, an immense banded cocoon that hung from the birch tree at the far end of the village.

  From the folds of the smoke, a bear emerged.

  Lilia shrieked and clutched the stone like a talisman against evil. The bear rider’s weapon was extended, glowing green and bloody; the hilt protruding from a dark seed implanted in her wrist. The rider wore no helm, so Lilia saw her face. She was indeed one of the Dhai from the valley, the ones her mother told her to stay far, far away from, even if times were lean.

  Lilia held her ground. Raised her stone. Her mother had taught her how to heal a hundred types of wounds and illnesses, and shake loose a bone-tree’s prey, but no one ever taught her how to fight. She did not want to join the army.

  The bear snarled at her. The rider laughed.

  “Li!” Her mother’s voice.

  Lilia threw the stone, and missed. The air felt heavy. She tasted copper on her tongue. She glanced back. Her mother stood behind her, arms raised.

  A great blinding-tree burst from the bare ground between Lilia and the rider, taking Lilia again off her feet. The blinding-tree sprouted brambled arms and sprayed a great rain of acid, a dew that ate at skin, hair and armor alike. It coated the rider and her mount – and splashed across Lilia’s right foot.

  Lilia screamed and tried to wipe it away as the rider squealed and thrashed.

  Her mother caught her hands. “Don’t touch it!”

  The flesh sloughed off Lilia�
�s foot, revealing bloody tendons and bubbling, melting bone. The acid numbed her flesh as effectively as it disfigured it. The hem of bone tree leaves on her makeshift dress hissed and smoked.

  As Lilia wailed, her mother ripped the dress from her body, leaving her in a thin slip of linen. Lilia thrashed. Her vision swam. She was suddenly lightheaded. I’m going to die, she thought. We are going to waste so much blood.

  Her mother dragged her along, swift and silent as the world burned around them. Lilia was struck dumb, too horrified to speak. Within the sticky drapes of the trees, the immense cocoons where her people lived were burning. Great charred hunks of the cocoons fell, a rain of fire and flesh so mortifying that it took on the surreal aura of a dream. Women fled through the undergrowth, dressed in their twisted green regalia for the Festival of Tira’s Descent. There was to be feasting tonight. Blood soup. Stuffed moths. Dancing. But it was all gone, now, all in ruin.

  When they came to the other side of the blazing village, her mother kicked open a discarded immature cocoon.

  “Hide here,” her mother said. “Like a snapping violet.”

  Lilia climbed inside. Her mother’s skin was slick with sweat and blood, though Lilia did not know where the blood had come from. When Lilia looked back from inside the cocoon, her mother pressed something into the soft flesh of Lilia’s wrist, and murmured a prayer to Tira. Lilia saw a red tendril marked into her own flesh; a trefoil with a curled tail.

  “It will bring you back to me,” her mother said. “Come back to me.”

  “I’ll come back,” Lilia wailed. “I promise I’ll come back. Please don’t leave!”

  “You’ll find me,” her mother said, and clapped her hands. The broken flesh of the cocoon reknit itself.

  “I promise, Mam. Don’t leave me.”

  Lilia pressed her face against the edge of the cocoon, where some insect had worried open a hole. She saw her mother standing before a dozen riders wearing chitinous crimson armor. They sat rigid on their massive bears. The bears’ yellow eyes glinted. The lead rider menaced forward, a severe looking woman with a tawny face and broad jaw. Lilia went still, like a snake. She put her hands to her mouth again, fearful she would cry out and give her mother away.

  “Where is she?” the rider asked.

  “Gone, Kai,” Lilia’s mother said.

  “You’re a liar.” The Kai’s weapon snarled out from her wrist, a lashing length of everpine that hummed with a pale green light. “You don’t have enough blood to kindle a gate.”

  “I do now,” Lilia’s mother said.

  Lilia felt the air condense, as if the weight of the world pressed down on her. She closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears. Heavy air meant someone was drawing on the power of Tira to reshape things. But covering her ears did not cut out the screaming.

  The ground trembled. When Lilia opened her eyes, her mother stood above her, covered from head to toe in blood. She ripped open the cocoon and pulled Lilia into her arms.

  “I knew you wouldn’t leave me,” Lilia said.

  But Lilia could see something over her mother’s shoulder. Four paces behind her, a dark, tattered shadow rippled across the fabric of the woodland, as if some great beast had rent a hole in the stuff that made up the sky. Between the black tatters Lilia saw hints of another woodland, a field of black poppies, and some hulking structure in the distance. The double hourglass of the suns’ light was reflected from a massive glass dome there. The light hurt Lilia’s eyes. Beyond it, Lilia saw the faint red blot of the third sun in a lavender-tinged blue sky, suffused with the green light of Tira in the distance.

  Lilia blinked and gazed up into the sky above her, on her side of the rift. She saw the same hourglass suns, and the third red sun. But the sky on her side was amber, not lavender-blue. And as the suns sank in her sky, the horizon was a brilliant, blazing crimson, as if the suns bled. Why was the sky different on the other side?

  “It’s time to be brave,” her mother said. “You remember what I said about being brave?” She set Lilia her down and pushed her toward the tear in the world. “I’ve opened a gate. Hurry now. I’ll bring the other children and follow after.”

  “But Mam –”

  “No questions. Be brave. You remember what I said about the Dhai from the valley, and what would happen if they came here among the woodland Dhai? Go now, Li, before it’s too late and this was all for nothing.”

  “I’m not a coward,” Lilia said. Her eyes filled. She wanted to throw herself at her mother’s feet. Instead, she rubbed the tears from her eyes, and stumbled forward.

  She fell through the waving tatters between the reflected worlds, tumbling into the field of black poppies under the new sky. She looked behind her.

  Her mother had turned her back on the gate. The Kai stood before her, bloody everpine weapon in hand, a tangle of poisonous vines crawling up her opposite arm. Blood wet the vine. The Kai swung her sword.

  The weapon crushed Lilia’s mother’s collarbone. Her body crumpled; a mangled succulent.

  The Kai stepped over her mother’s body. Her shiny crimson armor was soaked in blood and tattered plant matter. The vine on her arm was shriveling now, turning to brown dust.

  The Kai reached for her –

  But her fist stopped short on the other side of the parting of the worlds, as if it met some invisible barrier. The Kai’s face twisted in anger.

  “Motherless woodland fool,” the Kai said. “I have other cats to whip. Oma is rising, and we will rise with it.”

  The air around Lilia contracted. The world pulled her down, as if she had gained three times her weight. She put her hands over her ears. Closed her eyes.

  When Lilia opened her eyes, she stood alone in the field of poppies in the middle of a deep, wooded glen. The tear in the world was gone. She saw the emerald light of Tira high in the lavender-blue sky, and the hourglass of the twin suns. Her foot ached badly; the numbness was wearing off. She saw the bloody, melted flesh of her ruined right foot covered in dirt and curious flies.

  Lilia retched.

  “Child?”

  A plump woman stood at the edge of the clearing. She had a kind face, and a thick mane of silver hair; swaths of it peeked out from beneath the broad hood of her coat. She held a large walking stick.

  “Where is Nava, child? Your mother? Where are the others?”

  Lilia held out her wrists. “Please cut me,” she said. “If you’re a blood witch too, you can bring her back.”

  The woman recoiled. “Child, drop your hands. Don’t speak that way here, no, no. Things are very different here. I’m Kalinda Lasa. You’re to come with me, you understand? And no more talk of blood witches. Witches, of all things? Tira’s tears.”

  Lilia kept her hands outstretched. “I made a promise.” Her voice caught. “I have to find my mother. I promised.”

  “We all want a good many things, child, but it doesn’t mean we get them,” Kalinda said. “I’m sorry. The world – all worlds - are bigger than the both of us, and your mother too.” She glanced at Lilia’s foot. “If you want to keep that limb we must go quickly.”

  “My mother,” Lilia said, and finally dropped her hands. It was like grasping at air. Already the horrifying morning felt like a terrible story that had happened to someone else.

  “Your mother is dead, likely,” Kalinda said. “You’ll meet her fate too unless you come with me.”

  “But I have to –”

  Kalinda gently took her arm. Lilia felt numb. Her attention grew hazy. The light here was so different, dazzling, as if she’d come from a place where she only saw things through a haze of smoke. It was the sky, she realized, staring up at the blue-lavender wash. The sky was so different.

  “You can keep your promise,” Kalinda said softly, “but do so when you’re a woman, not a little girl. Your mother will forgive you for waiting awhile longer.”

  Kalinda brought her to a small camp on the other side of the field and bound her foot. Then she loaded Lilia into the
back of a bear-pulled cart. They traveled some time before halting at the steps of a grand temple. Lilia recognized it as the structure she had seen when she first peered through the tear in the world.

  “A pity you have no magical talent yet,” Kalinda said, gazing up at Tira’s waning light. “But we all have our place. The Temple of Oma will look after you, child. Keep your head down. Don’t cause any trouble. And don’t tell any wild stories. You’ve been ill, and your mother is dead. That’s all they need to know. No blood witches. No armies. You understand?”

  Lilia nodded, even though she didn’t understand at all.

  “You’ll be safe here,” Kalinda said. “Until they come for you again. But we’ll be ready, then, won’t we?”

  It was only after Lilia woke the next morning in her simple bed in the Temple of Oma scullery, and saw that the red tendril her mother had pressed into her flesh was gone, the skin red and blistered as if she’d been washed in poison ivy, that she wondered if she herself was just some shadow, another person’s memory from some other life.

  It was in the Temple of Oma, many months later, that Lilia met the Kai a second time.

  “You’re welcome here,” the Kai said to Lilia and the twelve other girls and boys admitted to the temple that season as they lined up in the great foyer to meet her, safe behind the crown of webbing that kept out the worst of the toxic plant life that still crawled across the valley. This Kai had the same severe, unwelcoming face that Lilia remembered from their first meeting. But she wore no armor, and her wrist bore no seed of a retracting weapon. If she knew Lilia at all, she did not show it.

  “And what brings you here?” the Kai asked.

  “My mother,” Lilia said. “Some people say she’s dead, but I’m going to find her again.”

  The Kai smiled, but it was a sad smile. “You’re a woodland Dhai,” the Kai said. “I can tell from your accent.”

  “And you’re one of the Dhai from the valley,” Lilia said. “But where is your army?”

  The Kai laughed. “Army? I’m not sure what the woodland Dhai tell their children, but there is no army here. We are a peaceful people, just like you.”