The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  “It’s just upstairs,” he said, pointing.

  Lilia saw no Ora watching them from the great spiraling bloom of the stairs. Above, the hourglass of the twin suns blinked at her through the giant dome that capped the temple’s foyer, twelve floors above her. She squinted. The afternoon meal had already been prepared and washed up. They wouldn’t be looking for her for some time. Even though she was just a drudge, she often took part in strategy games with the novices, and even some Oras, but her next game wasn’t until the early evening.

  “Alright,” she said, and set the laundry out of the way, just outside the entrance to the scullery stair that ran behind the banquet hall. She made to go back to the main stair, but Roh gestured for her to go up through the scullery stair instead.

  She limped along behind him, dragging her mangled foot. Kalinda had ensured she didn’t lose her whole leg, but she was missing two of her toes and much of the ball of her foot, and the melted flesh and scar tissue left behind wasn’t pretty. Roh once asked her if it hurt. Only when she looked at it, she told him. When he laughed at that, she knew they would be friends.

  They went up four sets of stairs, and passed two other curious drudges. Kinless and ungifted, just like Lilia.

  “How far are we going up?” Lilia asked. “I’m not allowed above the sixth floor.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  Her foot was already throbbing. Her breathing was labored. She felt the tightness in her chest that often signaled a seizing of her lungs. She firmed her jaw and leaned her weight on the rail and kept going. Even among the drudges chosen to serve in Oma’s Temple, she was the weakest. What she lacked in physical power she had to make up for in endurance and patience.

  When they passed the eleventh floor, Lilia’s chest hurt. She hated that Tira had crippled her in so many ways. She tugged at Roh’s tunic. “We can’t go up there. That’s the Kai’s quarters, and the Ora libraries. Drudges aren’t allowed.” She took a moment to catch her breath.

  “Do you want to see it or not?” Roh said. “The Kai’s sick, so they’ve moved her a couple floors down. There’s nobody up there. Do you want to know what that mark means, or not?”

  “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “Because you have to see it.”

  Roh came to the top of the steps. They were in the corridor outside the Assembly Chamber, where the Kai often met with the elder Oras and clan leaders. Lilia had never seen it, but she knew it by the markings on the door.

  Roh pushed open the door, an ancient construction of amberwood banded in iron and marked with the Dhai characters for “come together.” Lilia crept after him.

  Inside the chamber, a massive round table of black walnut dominated the room. As they were at the top of the temple, the ceiling here was a tapestry of colored glass. The hourglass of the twin suns made up its center, directly above the table, illuminating it like some divine shrine to Oma. Lilia moved further into the room, and saw the whole sky represented in the glass; the double-suns, sometimes called Shar, the little red sun, Mora, and all three of the satellites – blue Para, green Tira, purple Sina. At the very edge of the patterned glass, closest to a second archway leading to a sitting room, was a fourth star, nearly black. The elusive Oma. Lilia did not see it represented often. Fingers of blackness followed it, like a great, spiny growth had crawled into the glass. On the other half of the ceiling were the moons – little Zini, irregular Mur, and great white Ahmur and its hazy tiara of satellites.

  “Li,” Roh said.

  Lilia pulled her gaze from the ceiling. Roh stood next to the great wooden table, pointing at the middle of it.

  She saw a mosaic of patterned stones at the center of the table. It was a map of Dhai.

  Roh tapped a section of the map at the edge of the woodlands, all the way on the other side of the country, past Mount Ahya, along the Hahko Sea. A jagged dart of green stones there made up a finger-length peninsula there. Set just to the left of the peninsula was a piece of jade carved into the precise shape of the figure that Lilia’s mother had pressed into her flesh.

  It was shocking to see it, after all this time. She’d half thought she made it up, along with everything else that happened that day in the woods.

  “You going to tell me what it means now?” Roh said.

  “It means I’m not crazy,” Lilia said.

  “Well, that’s debatable.”

  Lilia leaned across the table to get a better look. She traced the shape of the jade; a perfect trefoil with a long, curled tail. Pain radiated up her bad leg, but she hardly noticed it. She saw other symbols, too, which she didn’t recognize. A triangle with two circles where the Temple of Para should be; a circle with two lines through it in the woodland around Tira’s temple; a coiled curl with a circle at the center near Sira’s Temple, and a square with a double circle inside over the Temple of Oma. There was one more near the Liona Stronghold that marked the mountain pass that separated them from Dorinah – a trefoil with four tails, one at each compass point.

  “What do these all mean?” Lilia asked. “There’s no temple or stronghold here. I know. I’ve been there. But it’s marked like the others.”

  “You should find out,” Roh said.

  She pulled her hand away. “That’s the other side of the country. Through the woodlands.” She wasn’t gifted. How was she going to get all the way out there by herself?

  “So what are you going to do, clean up after gifted novices your whole life?” Roh crossed his arms. He was almost as tall as her, and more than a year younger, but leaner and stronger. For a moment she wished she could have his perfect legs and powerful confidence.

  “I’m glad you found this,” she said. She got down from the chair and made her way back to the scullery stair.

  “Listen,” Roh said. “I can’t leave the temple without permission, but you can. You’re just a drudge.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I?”

  He sighed. “My mother once asked another seer about my fate,” Roh said, “because as much as she tried, she couldn’t see it. The seer told my mother I’d die an old man in an orchard. I’d be a farmer, with six spouses and dozens of children.”

  “A parajista farmer? I can’t imagine that.”

  “Me either,” Roh said, “but Para’s going to be descendent in another few years. What if it never comes back?”

  “It always comes back.”

  “Well, the seer saw something different,” he said.

  Lilia gazed at the dark shape on the ceiling that followed Oma. “They always come back,” she repeated.

  “Maybe,” Roh said, “maybe not.”

  “You were passed some good pieces in life,” she said.

  “Is everything some strategy game to you?”

  “Well, yes,” she said, as she’d been thinking of kindar, a cooperative board game played with wooden pieces meant to represent family members. Roh had a large family, multiple mothers and fathers and siblings and other relations. She had no one. “Be happy with how things turned out. You have a family that loves you.”

  “You don’t love me,” Roh said.

  That startled her. “What are you talking about?”

  His color darkened, which surprised her even more. Parajistas from powerful Clan Garika did not make eyes at kinless drudges.

  “We’re good friends,” she said. “Is that not enough?”

  Lovely, arrogant boys like him only loved a person until they loved them back.

  She turned and stumbled down the steps, gripping the rail hand over hand to keep from falling headlong back down all twelve flights. Her breathing was better, but she would need to see the temple doctor. Spending time with Roh had gotten more and more confusing of late. He left her more frustrated than anything. Her focus was the promise she made her mother. That’s all.

  She made it down almost a floor before she heard voices coming from below.

 
Lilia tried to step back, and fell. Roh grabbed her arm to steady her. He released her almost immediately, and apologized for touching her without asking.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Someone’s coming.” Lilia tried to get past him up the stairs, but there wasn’t any room.

  “You can kiss me,” he said, staring over her shoulder as the voices grew closer.

  “What?” she said.

  “What other reason do we have for being up here?”

  “Para, Roh, stop ironing my head.”

  “I’m not trying to annoy you,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  “Can I kiss you?” he whispered. “Should we tell them we’re doing laundry, maybe?”

  It was a rude and sometimes dangerous thing, to touch without consent. No one had dared do more than grab at her sleeve since she was twelve. People in the temple might play strategy games with her, but no one cared to court her. She wasn’t entirely sure she was ready.

  “No,” she said.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  Lilia jumped. Roh let out a squeak. Lilia covered her mouth to keep from laughing at him.

  Ora Almeysia, Mistress of Novices, rounded the stair ahead of them. Almeysia was tall and wiry, like a bird, with a nest of tangled white hair knotted in pale ribbons.

  “I’m sorry,” Lilia said. Her cheeks felt hot. She glanced at Roh. His color, too, had deepened, and that made her want to laugh even more. All this sneaking around for a mark on a map that she had no idea how to reach.

  “We’re going,” Roh said.

  “Rohinmey Tadisa Garika,” Almeysia said. “This is not the first time I’ve caught you where you shouldn’t be. I want you in my study at dusk. We’ll mete out your atonement for this indiscretion. And you… who are you?”

  “Just a drudge,” Lilia said.

  “Drudges have names. What are you called?”

  “Lilia Sona.”

  “No clan.”

  “I’m a woodland Dhai,” Lilia said.

  Almeysia snorted. “Woodland. Not surprising, then, to see this sort of behavior from you. I’ve told the Kai time and again not to permit you feral dissidents here. The scullery master will be informed of this trespass. Go, before I toss you to the pitcher plants.”

  Lilia squeezed past skinny Almeysia and limped down the steps as quickly as she could.

  They made it down four more flights before Roh said, “Why was Almeysia taking the scullery stair? She’s allowed to be up there. She could have taken the main stair.”

  “She was talking to someone,” Lilia said. “I heard voices.”

  “But she was alone.”

  “Should we start spying on her, since we’ve already broken a temple law?”

  “It wasn’t a very big temple law,” Roh said cheerfully.

  “I bet when you’re that old, you’ll talk to yourself, too.”

  “It’s a lot like talking to you,” he said, “only I get a lot more compliments.”

  They walked down the rest of the stairs in silence. Little lightning jabs of pain spread up Lilia’s leg, from ankle to knee. Every few breaths, she coughed. She focused on her breathing, and pushed out of the scullery stair and back into the banquet hall. A few Oras generally worked there between meals, sipping cinnamon tea or smoking Tordinian cigarettes, but she saw no one there now. She limped to where she had hidden the laundry, hoping Roh wouldn’t follow.

  That’s when she saw the stir of figures standing under the entrance to the foyer. At least a dozen novices and drudges fixed their attention on the giant amberwood door.

  Lilia came up behind them, dragging the laundry. A very tall, dark man stood in the foyer, speaking with four of the senior Oras. He wore a long black coat. She saw the hilt of a blade sticking up through the back of it. In Dhai, only trained members of the militia were allowed to carry weapons.

  “Who is he?” Roh asked as he came up behind her.

  One of the novices, a boy named Kihin, glanced back at them and said, “He’s a sanisi, all the way from Saiduan.”

  “I’ve seen sanisi in books,” Roh said. “He doesn’t look like a sanisi. Not a real one.”

  “Ora Ohanni found him trying to get through the webbing around the garden,” Kihin said. “I guess they don’t have web fences there. My father says –”

  But at that moment, the sanisi raised his voice, and turned toward them. “Bring me to your Kai or I will cut my way to her. I’m here to save your maggoty, cannibalistic little country. Against my better judgment.”

  The sanisi’s gaze met Lilia’s. He frowned. She stepped behind Kihin, trying to avoid the stranger’s look. Roh glanced back at her.

  “My name is Taigan. I need to speak with the Kai,” the sanisi repeated. As Lilia peered around Kihin, she saw the sanisi still looking at her. “If things are progressing here as they did in my country, it’s time you all stopped dancing around the olive trees and prepared for war.”

  3.

  Ahkio started awake in the arms of three strong women whose names he was pleased to remember. His cousin Liaro lay sprawled naked beside him; a long, lean man with a face that would inspire no poetry. The number of infused everpine swords and baldrics scattered across the floor reminded him that their bedmates were members of the Dhai militia posted at the Kuallina Stronghold.

  It was not an unpleasant way to start his morning.

  After untangling himself from bed, Ahkio snuck out the back of the house to avoid bumping into his housemate Meyna and her child. Her husbands were likely off working in the sheep fields, which made his exit that much easier. He walked down the ramp leading to the knotty exterior of their living house. Most homes in central Dhai were hollowed out of gonsa trees, their crowns so great they blotted out the sky. It took a good half hour of walking to clear the shadow of the gonsa trees and reach the Osono Clan square.

  The dozen students he taught religion and ethics were already assembled under the immature gonsa tree next to the square, the one that would be big enough to house a proper school in another eight years, when Tira became ascendant, and the tirajistas would use that power to sculpt it. In the distance, he saw the silky threads of the webbing that dissuaded the worst of the walking trees from inundating the square. Most homesteads beyond the webbing had only thorn fences and homegrown defenses like fox-snaps to protect their families and livestock from creeping vegetation with a taste for blood and bone.

  “Ahkio!” the students called when they saw him, and he waved, for a moment forgetting to be self-conscious of his hands. The children had stopped asking about his scars when he told them he once fought a fire-breathing bear. It was a prettier story than the one their parents might have told them.

  “Today we talk about Dhai government,” he said.

  “Does this mean you’ll tell us about your mother?” one of the girls asked, “and how she died so your sister could become Kai?”

  Ahkio winced. “Terrible things sometimes happen to Kais,” he said, “like what happened to my parents. We’ll discuss that when we speak of the line of the Kai, and I’ll also tell you about Faith Ahya, who birthed the first of us.”

  Ahkio tried to smile, but it took a great effort. His sister Kirana was Kai now at twenty-seven - eight years older than him - and talking about her supposed divinity always made him uncomfortable. His sister hadn’t blazed down from a satellite the way it sounded like Faith Ahya did in The Book of Oma, though there were days he wished she had. Mostly, she was just his sister – a warm, sometimes aggravating, and often wise woman who believed in him even when the rest of the country wanted to see him exiled for madness after the death of their parents.

  “Government is not determined by Oma,” Ahkio said. “If you learn nothing else in this class, remember that. It’s created by people like you. When we were slaves to those Dorinah witches across the mountains, five hundred years ago, a woman named Faith Ahya fell in love with a man named Hahko, and the Dhai people followed them and their kin out of bo
ndage in Dorinah, not because of their brute strength or cunning, but because of their faith in the vision Faith and Hahko spun for them. This was the refuge they created. Now each of you are a part of building its future.”

  Only one student rolled her eyes. Ahkio made a note to tell her some terrible story later about how people from Saiduan spirited away arrogant young students who didn’t listen to their teachers.

  “Oma,” he muttered aloud, because he realized he’d heard precisely that type of story from the Oras in the temple when he was younger. He was going to end up an old man teaching the children of shepherds to fear monsters in the woods.

  At midday, most of his students went home to help move their family’s thorn fences so they could rotate their sheep from one plot of community land to another. Ahkio napped and spent some time at the local tea house playing kindar with Saurika, the clan leader of Osono, a pleasantly plump, beady-eyed old man who kept claiming his leader piece long before he’d swept Ahkio’s family pieces off the board.

  “You’re a cheater,” Ahkio told him.

  “You’re one to talk,” Saurika said. “I taught your sister to play kindar. I know all the tricks.”

  Later in the afternoon, a few students returned for a lesson in arithmetic, something Ahkio was not nearly as qualified to teach as religion and ethics. When he tired of it, he invited everyone home to dinner with Meyna and her husbands.

  They arrived at Meyna’s house and sat at the big communal table out back - Ahkio, three of his students, his cousin Liaro, and Meyna’s husbands, who were also brothers - big Hadaoh and skinny little Rhin. The brothers shared a father, and one could see their kinship in their faces, their postures. Hadaoh stood at the outdoor stove, poking at the embers and drinking from a mug of wine. Rhin rubbed Meyna’s swollen feet and told her some bit of gossip from the square about a merchant’s new husband. Meyna was hugely pregnant with her second child. Her first, Mey-Mey, was two, and danced around the table with a large day lily stalk.