The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  “But I saw you with a sword.”

  “I’m sorry, child, I’ve never picked up a weapon in my life.” She hesitated, then, “It must be very confusing, to lose your family. Don’t fear. We’re your family now. Everything may seem very different, for a time. But we’ll help you get through it.”

  Lilia thought to ask her about the sky, too, but the Kai was already moving on to the next child.

  The Dhai people in the valley were not at all what she thought they were. In truth, she wondered if these were really the same people who burned her village, or if she’d dreamed the whole thing after all.

  For many years after, Lilia dreamed of treegliders. Some years, she even forgot about her promise to her mother. But when she was fifteen, well after Tira’s descent, when Para, the Breathmaker, bathed the world in blue light, she sketched out the trefoil with the tail her mother had pressed into her flesh on the back of a book in the temple library, and handed it over to her best friend Roh - a novice learning to draw the breath of Para - in the hopes he’d find some record of it in the temple libraries she didn’t have access to. She wanted to know how much of her memory of her former life was the terrified fantasy of a young girl, or if there was some truth to it now that she was grown.

  “What’s this for?” Roh asked as he pondered the paper, bouncing back on his heels.

  “I’ve been a coward too long,” she said. “It’s time to be brave.”

  He laughed. She didn’t.

  That night, for the first time in over a decade, Lilia did not dream of a bloody Dhai army.

  1.

  Because ruin so often came from the sky, borne by fickle satellites on erratic orbits, Shao Maralah Daonia did not think to look to the sea until it was too late. She expected the next wave of invaders to come in overland, after falling from a tear in the sky, the way they had the last six years.

  Instead, the invaders came in on the morning tide. They drove before them a seething swarm of vegetal-flesh - a massive black surge of death that slithered up the coast like ravenous snakes of acidic kelp, devouring all it touched. Six cities had fallen to the same onslaught in six weeks, driving Maralah and her army further south. Now they came for the seaside city of Aaraduan, last stronghold in Saiduan’s northernmost province.

  Maralah expected they would take Araduan just as easily as the other cities, but not before she evacuated her Patron, burned the archives, and took a legion of them with her unto death. She did not mind dying here. Her brother’s army was only half a day away, slowed by spongy tundra and permafrost made unpredictable by the summer’s heat. When he did finally sweep into the city, after it was taken, she relied on him to murder any stragglers she could not finish herself.

  Maralah summoned an air-twisting parajista at the height of his power to secure Aaraduan’s inner and outer gates with shimmering skeins of air and soil. She gazed at the cracked face of the ascendant star, Para, glowing milky blue in the lavender sky. She cursed the invaders for not coming ashore fifteen years earlier, when her star, Sina, was ascendant, and she was the most deadly power in Saiduan. She felt only the most tenuous connection to her violet-burning satellite, now, and could do little more to aid in the shoring up of the gates than give orders. Her days of calling lightning and fire from a clear sky were long behind her. Sina was two or three years from ascendance. If all here went as she foresaw, she would die before seeing it again.

  Maralah marched into the hold to watch the burning of the archives. A half dozen sanisi – Saiduanese assassins blessed to call on the stars, as she did - tossed ancient records of bamboo, human skin, carnivorous plant exoskeletons, finger bones, and the pounded carcasses of winged insects – most of them long since extinct - into the roaring hearth. On some other day, one not so mad, Maralah imagined the Patron of Saiduan himself sitting beside the hearth with a book of poetry, tracing the columns of text with his worn fingers as a sinajista conjured a flame for him to read by. But the Patron would never sit here again. The room itself would be eaten soon, and the sanisi with it.

  What records they could not save, they destroyed. Maralah had heard the same reports from every city – the invaders went first to the libraries and archives, drawn there like spotted beetles to the nectar of claw-lilies. Whatever knowledge they searched for, she would rather see it burned than give them the satisfaction of having it.

  Like the other sanisi, Maralah dressed in a long black coat of firegrass and fibrous bark that touched the heels of her boots. She wore a knee-length padded tunic and long trousers. The hilt of her infused sword stuck up through her coat, a twisted branch of willowthorn that glowed faintly violet. The weapon marked her as one of Sina’s soul stealers. Even in Sina’s decline, the weapon retained its power. She could still kiss a conjurer to death with it.

  The youngest of the sanisi, Kadaan, looked up from the stacks. His dark hands were smeared darker with soot. As a boy, it was Maralah who put his own Para-infused bonsa weapon in his hand, a snarled yellow branch that burned blue when he drew it. She ensured he was apprenticed to the best parajista she knew, a man who taught him to channel Para’s breath to unmake the weather and push down walls of solid stone with a strong breeze. It was she who took responsibility for his fate now.

  “We’re nearly done here,” Kadaan said. “Let me die on the wall with the others. I won’t become their slave.” Maralah saw the fire reflected in his bright eyes. Oh, to be twenty-odd years old again. And foolish.

  The archivist who oversaw the purging of the archives, Bael, was already well gone with what he chose to save. Maralah wished she could have sent her youngest sanisi with him.

  “The ones at the wall will be dead in an hour,” Maralah said. “Killing a single biting tendril achieves nothing. You must burn out the weed’s nest. Keep burning.”

  Maralah stepped into the corridor outside the archive room, seeking relief from the oppressive heat. She heard a great yawning sigh move through the hold. Maralah let her fingers linger on one of her shorter blades and walked into the long mirrored hall that faced the coast. She gazed across the jagged black city, still bundled in a husk of late summer snow, to the harbor where the invaders anchored their fantastic bone and sinew boats. She’d had to sneak the Patron, his broodguard, and the archivist out across the mosquito-filled tundra in the other direction, hoping her brother’s army found them before some group of foreign scouts.

  She looked for the source of the sigh, but saw no evidence of it. From this vantage, the sound of the slithering plant life devouring the walls was indistinguishable from the thrashing of the sea; they drown out all else.

  She rested her hands on the warm railing. The holds this far north were ancient things, grown and manipulated by long-dead tirajistas, back when they had been called something else, something far more fearsome. Those sorcerers had since become priests, torturers and engineers, because their work still breathed and grew; it lasted. But something that was grown could be eaten. And the invaders knew it.

  Maralah heard the low, keening sigh again. She pulled at the collar of her coat. Some may have thought it was just the wind blowing through empty corridors, creeping through wounds in ancient living walls, stirring paper lanterns whose flame flies had long since died. But she knew better.

  Maralah drew the short blade at her hip, pivoted left, and thrust deep into the shadows of the curtained balcony behind her. The blade met resistance. Slid through flesh.

  A man hissed, and yanked his body from her blade.

  “Taigan,” she said as he pulled out of the shadows, clutching at his bleeding side. She sheathed her blade. “You have gotten soft… and noisy.”

  “Release your ward on me,” he said, “and you’ll see just how soft I am.” He took his bloody fingers. The blood around the wound began to bubble and hiss as he repaired himself. She smelled burnt meat.

  Taigan dressed in oiled leather and a padded brown dog hair coat. He carried no visible weapon. Tall and dark, his hair was shorn short, and he stooped awkwar
dly; wreckage from a wound she had inflicted on him, one he could not repair himself, not unless he persuaded another sanisi with her talents to assist him, and only when Sina was again ascendant. When the Patron stripped Taigan of his title four years before for betraying him, Maralah removed the ward that bound Taigan to the Patron. Maralah suspected the Patron would have killed him, if killing Taigan was possible, but instead, the Patron allowed her to bind Taigan to her. His talents were too useful to see him waste away in exile in some fishing village.

  “Was she the one?” Maralah asked.

  Taigan shifted his weight as another cold wind curled in through the windows, bringing with it the smell of the sea, and the acrid stink of the plants. “She died in the ruin of a tattered gate,” he said, “so let’s hope not. Perhaps all of those who can open gates are dead, and you can let me go in peace.”

  Maralah went back to the rail and watched the invaders disembark from their bloated boats. The men’s chitinous armored forms rippled up the beach. All men. She had yet to see a woman among them. They rode no dogs or bears, brought with them no pack animals or siege engines, only the burbling plants and fungi and red algae tides, and those they tugged with them from coast to coast, like fish dragged along in great nets.

  As she watched, a bit of the sky tore above the ships, like something from a fantastic nightmare. She had a glimpse of some… other place where the sky was a murky amber-orange, as if on fire. A rippling shadow crossed the sky there; a black mass that made her skin crawl and her breath catch. The sky shimmered again, and the seams between her world and… the other closed. She let out her breath. She pointed at the sky. “The world is ready to come apart on its own. Somewhere there’s an omajista more skilled than you who can control it.”

  They had started seeing those mad tears in the sky eight years before, in the far, far north. She had not believed the sightings at first; thought it was just some drunk tuber farmer enchanted by especially brilliant northern lights. But no. Oma, the dark star, was creeping back into orbit. The worlds were coming together again far sooner than anyone anticipated.

  “There is an omajista among the Dhai people who can open the way between the worlds,” she said. “There always is, when Oma rises. You don’t have that many Dhai to pick through. We only need one.”

  “They’re weak-minded cannibals. Let them take that maggoty country, and their omajistas with it.”

  Maralah had fought the invaders on every coast, in every province, at the height of every snowy peak. When she sought out her father’s house in Albaaric, after the fighting, she found only a weeping ruin and the slimy remnants of red algae smearing the walls at knee height, where the highest tide had reached. She and her brother had not spoken to her father or sisters in twenty years, but she went to the house in search of living kin – a near-cousin, a second-mother, even a village brother – despite the silence. She found nothing but the taste of smoke. They never left the bodies, these invaders. What they did with them… Maralah did not care to guess. But rumor had it they had a taste for blood.

  “The city is done, Taigan,” Maralah said. “Now you must decide if you’ll perish with it.”

  “May your roads run long, then,” Taigan said, grimacing.

  “And yours,” Maralah said. “Don’t come back without an omajista. A real one. You understand?”

  “They’ve reached the walls,” he said.

  Maralah looked. Brown, slithering plant flesh swarmed the shimmering blue walls, even as the structure spat and hissed at them. The sanisi standing at the top of the walls raised their hands to call on the ascendant star Para, Lord of the Air, for protection.

  When she looked back, Taigan had gone.

  Maralah took the worn hilt of her weapon, and pulled it from the sheath at her back. The room cooled. A soft violet light emanated from the length of the willowthorn branch. In response to her touch, the branch awakened; the hilt elongated and snapped around her wrist twice, binding her fate to the weapon’s. She watched blood weep from the branch, gather at its end, and fall to the stones. The weapon sang to her, the voices of hungry ghosts, all Saiduan, all collected in the living weapon when Sina was at its height. The invaders did not have ghosts, because their souls were not of this world. A pity, that. Her weapon was always so hungry.

  Maralah swept the sword over her head and slammed it into the living flesh of the hold. Violet light burst across her vision. The weapon keened. The hold wailed as a massive wound appeared on its face. Thick, viscous green fluid gushed from the hold, pouring across her forearms, her boots. Her weapon licked greedily at the soul of the hold.

  She prayed to Sina it would be enough to survive the night.

  2.

  High summer, the festival season, when the Temple of Oma played host to dozens of traders and craftspeople, all of them eating and sweating and drinking in the temple’s great banquet hall. During her decade in Oma’s temple, Lilia had learned how to navigate through its mass of humanity like a skilled sea captain.

  She spent her time in the temple scullery cleaning sinks with morvern’s drake and bottling honey from the giant spotted bee hives in the back garden. In the afternoons she hobbled up the long tongue of the grand stairway, favoring her mangled right foot – which had never healed properly - and changed the bed linens for the temple’s novice Oras - the parajistas, tirajistas, and sinajistas who would claim the title of Ora on passing their initiation. The other temples – those dedicated to Para, Sina, and Tira – only trained one type of jista, but Oma’s temple claimed the very best of them all; bringing them together into one very powerful – and, in Lilia’s opinion - very arrogant, bunch.

  As Lilia came downstairs, dragging a bag of dirty linens too massive to take through the scullery stair, she saw her friend Roh waiting for her next to the heavy carved talon of the banister.

  She hesitated on the stair. He saw her, and grinned. His grin could fill a room. It pierced her heart every time she saw it, because that grin made her want to trail after him like some love-struck fool, and she had seen enough novices and drudges acting just that way around him to realize how silly it would make her look.

  A plump novice named Saronia passed behind him. Seeing him grinning at Lilia, she frowned. “You should be pickier with your affections, Roh,” Saronia said. “You can afford to be.”

  Roh paid her no mind. He offered a hand to Lilia and said, “Leave the laundry. I want to show you something.”

  Saronia rolled her eyes. Two others had joined her; smooth-cheeked, well-fed novices from Clan Garika. They wore the blue tunic, trousers, and green apron of novices; their hair was shorn short and dark, like Roh’s – like Lilia’s. “All she’s good at is laundry,” Saronia said. “Didn’t your mothers ever tell you you should flirt with Garikas, not drudges? My mothers know yours, you know, and they wouldn’t approve.”

  Roh rounded on Saronia. “Go wrap your head in a litany,” he said. “Maybe next time you’ll remember it, then, instead of dropping Para in the middle of building a vortex.”

  “I’m more talented than –”

  “You’re talented at getting people to think you’re talented,” Roh said. “I could bury you chest deep in laundry and you wouldn’t be able to breathe your way out of it with Para.”

  “You’re an arrogant child.”

  “And you’re a terribly jealous woman,” Roh said, “because my mother could have been yours. Too bad you were barely gifted, and she gave you away.”

  There were five genders in Dhai — female assertive, female passive, male assertive, male passive, and ungendered. Saronia always used the female-assertive for herself, while Lilia thought of herself in the female-passive. But Roh happily used the ungendered pronoun in reference to Saronia. It was considered a rude thing, to use the wrong gender once you knew it, but it seemed to especially annoy Saronia.

  “I’m telling Ora Almeysia you said that,” Saronia said.

  “Go ahead. And I’ll tell her where you light off to after dark,�
�� Roh said.

  Saronia curled her lip and turned away.

  Lilia waited until they were in retreat, then started down the stairs again. Her clothes were the same as the novices’, only the simple gray of the temple’s drudges to their brilliant novice blue.

  Roh hopped up the steps to meet her. She had a desperate urge to put her hands in his silky hair and draw him closer. But she pulled away from him instead, and averted her gaze.

  “I found that symbol,” he said. “The trefoil with the tail that you drew.”

  He pulled the book she’d written in out of his tunic pocket. She also noticed the edge of one of Kalinda’s letter peeking out, which she was fairly certain she’d never given him. Had he stolen it?

  “Where?” Lilia said.

  “First tell me how it helps you find your mother,” he said. “I asked around, Li. You’re supposed to be an orphan.”

  “It’s my business, Roh.”

  “You asked me to help.”

  Lilia tried to snatch the book back, but Roh was too fast. Spry, light on his feet, it was always difficult to tell how much of that was his dance training and how much was him playing with the forces of Para. He fairly floated away from her, lighter than air.

  “How will you evade me when Para is descendent?” Lilia said. “Your tricks won’t work then.”

  “By then I’ll be a fine fighter,” he said, “married to a dozen powerful sinajistas who’ll protect me from you.”

  Roh was at least six years away from becoming a fully trained Ora – one of the jistas trained in theology and ethics across the Dhai valley – and Para would be descendent far sooner than that. Even with its erratic orbit, it wouldn’t dominant the sky more than another two or three years. Sina was coming around next. She wondered how Roh would get along then, because she couldn’t imagine him being happy without a satellite to call on.

  “So are you going to tell me what it means or not?” Lilia said. She had slept very well the last week after turning over the symbol; not one shrieking treeglider or bloody-eyed bear. It reinforced her convictions. She was old enough to make good on her promise. She wasn’t such a weak little girl anymore.