The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  Some days he thought the only place in Saiduan the invaders hadn’t touched was that village he grew up in. He still looked for it, on the lists of scoured cities and towns that Maralah kept in her study, compiled by sanisi posted across the Empire. She inquired often which city he looked for, but he dared not say it aloud. Some part of him hoped that if he never heard of it, it would remain untouched. He hated the heat here, and the cloying jungle. He wished he could bury the girl and her friends in the heat and forget them.

  Taigan followed the smell of the sea, trying to pick up signs of the girl and her companions again. He marked several great insects with little tendrils of twisted air and fragrance, hoping they would stutter something useful back to him.

  Three hours later, one of the insects returned. He followed it to a mossy trail. When he looked up, he saw the scullery girl clinging to the tangled branches of a tree just across a clearing on the other side of the trail. Taigan did not look directly at her at first, wondering if she thought she was spying on him. If so, she was doing a terrible job of it.

  But the girl did not move.

  He met her look.

  She scrambled down the tree, much more quickly than he expected.

  Taigan moved across the clearing after her.

  A cold dagger of pain plunged into his chest. He threw out his right arm, too late. The grim, bone-strung branches of the tree that dominated the clearing closed around him like a vise. Throwing out his arm had been a mistake; the bone tree snapped his bone clean through, torqueing it backward and shoving it against his body.

  He grunted. Tried to find leverage by kicking away with the heels of his boots. But the tree lifted him cleanly from the ground. Its bony fingers drove into his flesh like knobby needles.

  His skin burned. Punctured flesh and organs tried to knit themselves back together. It was like boiling from the inside out.

  As he struggled to center his mind, he saw the girl creeping toward him, skirting the edge of the clearing.

  Taigan showed his teeth. “You’re less stupid,” he said. He tried to rip his arm free. The bones of the tree dug deeper. His flesh bubbled. The air was filled with the smell of burnt meat.

  “I have a proposal for you,” Lilia said.

  He wanted to mash her face in, Maralah be cast to Sina’s maw.

  His songs for concentrating Oma were elusive, broken to pieces like the bones of his arm. He found his focus, briefly, and sliced his good arm free. He reached for the girl.

  She darted back.

  Another bony branch curled up from the ground, pulling his arm back. He hissed.

  “We both need things,” Lilia said.

  “You’ll need a fine surgeon,” Taigan said, “when I have done with you.”

  “I know the Woodland,” Lilia said. “I don’t think you do, though.”

  “If you think this tree can kill me, you know very little.”

  “You won’t be conscious much longer, no matter how strong you are. That’s a bone tree. It’s poisonous. Like most things here.”

  “Where’s your little friend?” Taigan asked. “You think a parajista can hold me, when I burst free of this?”

  “I think we can help each other,” Lilia said. She spoke loudly, but stayed at the edge of the clearing. He had seen enough young people bluster to recognize it. She was alone, then. He wondered how such a slip of a girl had freed herself of a parajista, and then considered his own predicament. Well.

  Taigan felt the poison. It was a subtle thing, twisting through his body like a cold, snaking elixir. He had been poisoned before by any number of things, and though it would not likely kill him, it would dull his access to Oma, a connection that was tenuous at the best of times.

  “Talk fast,” Taigan said.

  She puffed her chest out. Cheeky little child. “You need people who can channel Oma,” she said. “That’s why you’re after me. I want to help you. I do. I know what’s happening now.”

  “Do you?” Taigan grimaced. “Then you are well ahead of me.”

  “Help me find my mother, in Dorinah, and I’ll go with you willingly.”

  “Haven’t we already made this bargain, girl? I gave you that boy’s life, and you betrayed your promise to me.”

  “Only because there’s another promise that’s more important. This is important. My mother is a blood… she’s… well, you know already. She can channel Oma.”

  “You have a very strange way of asking favors,” Taigan said. His voice was slurred. He tried to move his fingers.

  “You wouldn’t help me otherwise,” Lilia said. “Not even if I asked nicely.”

  He could not argue that. “You said your mother was dead.”

  “Do you always say things that are true?”

  “They’ll gut you open if you try and go to Dorinah alone. You’ll end up a slave.”

  “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

  “Why not your Dhai friends?”

  “You’re the only person I know who isn’t Dhai… and I know for sure you won’t kill me.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m important to you.”

  “Cut me loose then, or whatever it is you’re going to do,” Taigan said.

  “You’ll take me?”

  Taigan saw Maralah’s swirling note before him, and something older, darker – a searing brand, a ward Maralah burned into his spine, sealed with the power of Sina to ensure he did Maralah’s bidding. It was his punishment for betraying the Patron. He was almost impossible to kill, but like any other thing of flesh, he could be coerced with the right ward. It compelled him now; he could not destroy the girl, no matter how much he wished it. He fought the ward, the same way he fought the tree’s poison, and with the same results.

  “If I escort you,” he said, “you both come to Saiduan.”

  “All right,” Lilia said.

  He wondered at her lack of hesitation. She must believe her mother powerful, indeed, or believe him a great fool. She had run from him once, of course. In her arrogance, she might believe she could escape again. But he knew what she did not – there were children of Oma scattered all over the country, and the more he had of them, the better his chances for success. She herself was weak. If not in spirit, then body. She would flame out gloriously, if she ever learned to channel at all. He needed more than just one girl before he trekked home.

  She stepped forward. He waited for something fantastic. Perhaps the parajista had already taught her how to draw Oma’s breath. Instead, she stepped around to the back of the tree and kicked something at the base of it.

  The tree spasmed.

  Taigan dropped to the mossy ground. His body contorted; muscles tensed, flesh knit, organs regenerated. It was like some great rumbling storm churning through his torso. He hacked up a gob of blood. He wiped his mouth. From the corner of his vision, he saw the girl backing away, toward the edge of the circle.

  He snapped hold of the song in his mind, the one that called the great gout of fire that the gnarl-faced old woman had taught him three days before he killed her with it.

  But as he turned to focus it on the girl, the long length of the ward seared to his spine sent a wave of ragged fire deep into his bones. He hissed at her instead. He could not kill her. He had to deliver her.

  She moved back another step. Stupid girl. He knew the moment he saw her what she was. It was a simple test. Call on Oma to murder every child or farmer or soldier from Saiduan to the southern ice flow, and discover which his body would allow him to burn, and which it would not.

  The ones Maralah had compelled him not to destroy with her ward, he was compelled to collect. Even the troublesome ones.

  “Lead on, little scullery maid,” Taigan said. “I do hope you know what you’re doing.”

  20.

  Ghrasia Madah said prayers to Sina over the now deceased kin she had brought with her to Oma’s Temple, and the smooth-cheeked young people she had thought of as kin. So many dead in that bloody hall four day
s ago, and for what? Petty politics. Power. Their names would fade from history, or be erased from it because of their crimes. No one worshipped a kin-killer.

  She had trained and cared for these youth at the Liona Stronghold for over a decade, only to see their blood spilled by their own people. Anger coursed through her, so high and hot that she took a long plunge in the cold pools beneath the temple. She swam through the marbled tiers of the pools, thinking of the future she was promised so long ago as a girl. Her mother was so angry when she joined the militia that they didn’t speak for three years. Her mother called her a warmonger, and worse. Ghrasia had spent her life trying to prove her wrong, but when she closed her eyes, all she saw were all the people who died at her hand.

  Some days she wept to think her mother may have been right.

  When Ghrasia emerged from the baths, the blood-red spite of anger was gone. She was spent. Empty. The same way she had felt when she killed her first Dorinah during the Pass War. It was always the same. The blood tore her apart. Killing was like cutting off one of her own limbs. Every time she killed, she felt like she was bleeding out with them. Losing some part of herself.

  After bathing and dressing in the red tunic and skirt the drudges had cleaned for her, she walked up into the sky of the temple to meet with the Kai. The Liona Stronghold was not a living hold the way the temples were. She did not like touching the walls or the railings here. Even sleeping within them gave her nightmares.

  She ran into Nasaka’s little mincing assistant, Elaiko, two floors up.

  “Ghrasia Madah!” Elaiko said. “I apologize, but you must have an escort in the upper tiers of the temple.”

  “The Kai asked to see me,” Ghrasia said. “Is that not allowed?”

  Elaiko made some polite noises and small talk about tea as she accompanied Ghrasia up, never really answering her. Ghrasia already knew who was in charge of this temple, but it was good to get confirmation.

  The Kai stood in one of the open Ora libraries at the top of the temple, his wiry young body illuminated in the spill of the suns gleaming through the glass ceiling. She was always disappointed he did not look more like his mother, though she had to admit his beauty was still captivating. Javia had been a good friend and companion. Javia had confessed to never really understanding her young son. Reading and mathematics were a struggle for him, and he had never been gifted by the satellites. Seeing him now, Ghrasia had to push away a strong surge of desire; his was a hard beauty, the sort cut with sorrow. She had a softness for sorrow, because sorrow so often showed up on the map of her days. Sadly, a pretty face did not a politically savvy ruler make.

  He was arguing with Nasaka about something. Ghrasia expected they argued a good deal.

  “Kai?” she said.

  He turned, but did not smile. His expression was terribly serious. A small tragedy, she thought, to have that face and never smile. She tried – and again failed – to tuck that thought away. She suspected Nasaka was vetting this boy’s lovers with an eye toward some political end, and warding off all the others with a large stick.

  “Ghrasia,” he said.

  “Ghrasia Madah,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said. He clasped his hands behind his back, as if it mattered. The whole country had seen his scars, as had she, when she fought beside his cowering cousin Liaro in the temple foyer. She felt his mother’s loss, again. Burned up in a foreign country, driven out by fear and some terrible argument with Nasaka that not even Ghrasia understood. “Your mother was formidable in her own right.”

  He had not cared much for small talk when she met him in foyer. Understandable, of course, with their feet mired in a puddle of. “It’s an old name in our family, Madah,” she said. “I named my daughter Madah.”

  “You have many children?”

  “Just the one,” Ghrasia said, and she still cringed when she said it. She had often thought to adopt more children, but there never seemed to be a good time. Liona and the militia there were more family to her than her husbands and daughter, some days. “Oma does not bestow the same gifts on everyone.”

  “Indeed it does not.”

  “You wanted to speak with me?” she said, and her tone sounded harsher than she wanted it to. It wasn’t the boy’s fault for dredging up so many conflicting emotions. That was her burden. “I apologize for my abruptness, but I need to prepare and send home my own dead this evening.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. Nasaka was… wise to send for you.”

  Ghrasia glanced at Nasaka. Nasaka, too, bore a face that suffered no amusement. Ghrasia imagined Ahkio would look much like her in his old age – serious as death, his face scoured in deep lines, posture always rigid, formal. Ghrasia had not seen Nasaka smile in years; she suspected that after all of Nasaka’s crimes, she had very little to smile about.

  “Ora Nasaka’s instincts are often correct,” Ghrasia said. Even when Ghrasia never wanted them to be. She had kept far too many secrets for this woman, but then, Nasaka kept hers as well, hadn’t she?

  “We’re a people with very little experience in violence,” Ahkio said.

  “Based on what I saw downstairs, we’re getting a taste for it,” Ghrasia said. She felt the anger again, and tamped it down. Anger solved nothing. She had chosen a sword. No one forced it on her.

  “I know,” he said, “and it’s the beginning of something worse.”

  Ghrasia knew where the power was behind the boy. The same place the power had always been. “What’s he talking about?” she asked Nasaka.

  “We’ll require your services,” Nasaka said. “He wishes to return the bodies of Tir’s kin to Garika personally.”

  “Is that so?” Ghrasia regarded the boy again. Was he coldly calculating, or a simpleton? Always hard to tell, with young men. Even in Dhai, their passions often got the best of them. And this one had a reputation for losing his head.

  “My mother thought very highly of you,” Ahkio said.

  “Many others do as well,” Nasaka said.

  Ghrasia wearied of Nasaka’s endless politics some days, but Nasaka was easily the smartest and most calculating woman in Dhai now that Javia was dead. It made Ghrasia’s heart ache, even now, a decade later. Because for all Nasaka’s cunning, Javia had still died under Nasaka’s watch. On purpose? Ghrasia often wondered. It was no accident this boy had the title now. Ghrasia suspected Nasaka had maneuvered him into it from birth, though by all counts he never wanted it.

  “If the Kai wishes it,” Ghrasia said, “I will, of course, accompany him to Clan Garika. I expect you will require the Liona militia I brought with me as well?”

  “It would be appreciated,” Nasaka said.

  Ghrasia put thumb to forehead. “Tonight, or tomorrow morning?”

  “The morning,” Nasaka said. “We have much to sort here.”

  “Thank you, Ghrasia Madah,” Ahkio said.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Did you want to speak with Ora Dasai?” Nasaka asked Ahkio. “The scholars leave for Saiduan in the morning.”

  “Yes, of course,” Ahkio said. “I’ll leave you to your business.”

  He nodded to Ghrasia and walked into the corridor.

  Ghrasia sighed and waited. She felt the familiar dread that came from being alone in Nasaka’s presence. Nasaka’s darker nature only manifested itself in private. Ghrasia straightened her spine, and stood a little taller. She could still beat Nasaka in a fair fight, and that was something.

  “So you bumbled in here three hours late,” Nasaka said, “and we nearly lost everything.”

  “I’m not some gifted Ora,” she said. “I can’t control the Line connecting the temple to Kuallina. There was some problem with the vine that links up to the chrysalis. They had four tirajistas out on that strand to repair it. I could have marched, I suppose, and shown up three days too late.”

  “You could have sent word.”

  “I’m a woman of action, not words. You’re the woman of words.”

/>   “Let’s not do this. I’m overtired.”

  “You know I would never stand for a Garika on that seat. What’s really happening here, Ora Nasaka?” In truth, she never thought Nasaka would dare to make Ahkio Kai. There were too many rumors about his parentage, mostly spread by Garikas, but the way Nasaka hovered over the boy only gave them greater strength.

  “Oma’s rising. We’ve been born under the wrong star.”

  Ghrasia stared at the floor a long time, trying to untangle her thoughts. Javia had spoken often of Oma, and the collision of worlds written of in the Book of Oma. Legends and mysticism, Javia had said. But Ghrasia knew better. Far greater minds that her own had written the Book of Oma, many thousands of years ago. It was the only guide they had, now. She murmured a prayer to Tira, the star she had been born under. She wished, not for the first time, that she had been born in another time, under some other star.

  “You understand I won’t kill for you,” Ghrasia said. “I defend the Dhai. I don’t go out and murder people for no cause, or for political gain, no matter what star’s in the sky.”

  “You insult me,” Nasaka said, but her tone was flat. “I have others for that.”

  “Your casual attitude toward the living makes me question your own humanity.”

  Nasaka frowned. “You are as troublesome as –”

  “Who, Javia?”

  “Let’s pretend to be friends, Ghrasia. Do I need to bring up your daughter’s offenses again? Let’s not argue about the sanctity of life.”

  “No,” Ghrasia said. It never took long for Nasaka to bring up her daughter. Murder was murder, no matter the circumstances; Ghrasia knew that better than anyone. But Madah was her only daughter, and had hardly known better when she was twelve. Mistakes happened. Ghrasia should never have gone to Nasaka for help when she found Madah standing over her cousin’s body.

  “You have my loyalty,” Ghrasia said. “You know that. But loyalty doesn’t mean I won’t argue with you. I’m not foolish enough to think I won a war on my own, but I know how to lead people, the sort of people who don’t like you very much. So though you may not like me at all, I would ask for your respect.”