The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

“We’re going around,” he said.

  “You can’t go around the pass,” Lilia said. “It’s… impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Taigan said. “Simply not pleasant. You’ll need warmer clothes. Or perhaps I will cart you there in the belly of a bone tree.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Lilia said.

  “It will give me time to train you privately,” he said. “Some place no one will get hurt.”

  “I would never hurt anyone,” Lilia said, but then she remembered Gian.

  “It’s not other people I’m worried about,” Taigan said.

  Taigan couldn’t say how one spotted the difference between a person who could channel the satellites and a person who couldn’t. The old woman who’d mentored him spun great stories around seeing some bright essence about a person, but he had never seen it. Most teachers, he suspected, did as he did – probed at a person with the breath of the satellites and looked for resistance. Those who could channel had a natural inclination to resist the power of the stars. Many had drawn on that power from their birth - a function as innate to them as drawing their first breath. If one was lucky, the child might be able to draw on the same star as those who tested them. Then they could see the breath of the star when the child drew on it.

  But this girl, this little scullery girl… she resisted his every effort. Perhaps she was too old to train. Or simply not as skilled as he had hoped. He had three weeks to break her, provided the way across the mountains progressed as well as he expected. But as he watched her huff her breath into her cupped hands that first morning in the mountains, shivering despite four days of concentration exercises meant to take her mind away from such things – he didn’t think it would be enough. He began to wonder if it was worth it to find her mother, if all she had passed on to her daughter was this middling talent.

  Worse, he had caught a scent on the wind of someone following them. He suspected the only people who would follow them were those who thought the same about the girl as he did. And that meant invaders.

  The girl looked up at him from her hands, and made a moue. “What is it?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said, and rose, somewhat painfully, from his crouch near the cold fire pit. “Let’s go through the songs again.” His gut churned. The twisting of his insides had begun. Already his male organs had tucked themselves back up into his body, and his chest had begun to swell. He hated the change, every time, no matter what he changed into. Soon he would retch and bleed, and then he suspected it would be time to switch his pronouns again. He was already thinking of himself as ataisa – someone in-between. It still gave him some comfort, to match his physical sex to a gendered pronoun, even if he longed for some term more unique to him and his constantly changing body. There were three types of people in Saiduan – women, men and ataisa, but there was no word in any language for him, not truly. Sometimes he wondered if it meant he didn’t exist. If he lived outside history. His body was Oma’s to do with as it willed. Oma gifted him this unpredictably changing body and mind, which could not be killed, and hardly aged.

  He had yet to see how either gift served any use to anyone. Some things, he resolved, had no purpose, no matter what the seers said. Maralah needed omajistas who could open gates, but that was not his best skill.

  No, all he was good at was not dying.

  “I’m making good progress, aren’t I?” Lilia asked. Her mind was tangled with Saiduan songs. Taigan told her the songs were supposed to help her concentrate and build things with the breath of Oma, but they were just nonsense sounds to her.

  Taigan grunted. He was grumpier than usual, and even less responsive, since they had trudged into the mountains. The air here was colder, and drier. After two days of ascent, the plant life thinned out. The mountains were a rocky wasteland - jagged, sometimes porous rock shot through with hunks of twisted metal. When she asked Taigan where the metal came from, he’d looked at her strangely and said, “They don’t teach you that?”

  “What would they teach me?”

  “Ignorant parasites,” he had muttered.

  When they passed far grander things – massive slabs of soap-slick stones as tall as Lilia, shaped like hands or mossy, grotesque faces – he did not even glance at them. Lilia stared a long time at them, though, and traced the spidery writing on their bases with her outstretched fingers.

  “Do you think these are older than Faith Ahya?” Lilia asked.

  “Who?”

  “The first Kai. Do you think she saw these things when she came here from the slave camps in Dorinah?”

  “I should not be surprised that your primary political and religious figure was a slave,” Taigan said.

  “We were all slaves, once,” Lilia said.

  Taigan said something biting in Saiduan, and yanked at the bear’s lead again. With Lilia riding and Taigan walking, they traveled very slowly over the rough terrain.

  “Do you want to ride the bear for a while?” Lilia asked.

  “No. You’re too slow.”

  “If you’re such a great healer, why don’t you fix my foot?” It was something Lilia had wanted to ask him for a long time, ever since he healed Roh and reknit his own wounds form the bone tree. The tirajistas couldn’t rebuild a bone once it was destroyed. Or melted, like hers.

  “A sound idea,” Taigan said. “If you’d like me to chop off your leg and then spend three months legless while it grows back. We have no time for that. It’s an inconvenience, not life threatening.”

  “But you could fix it,” Lilia said.

  “Most things can be fixed,” Taigan said, “if they’re organic. Perhaps if you’re a better student I’ll chop your leg off someday.”

  “You make everything sound so kind,” Lilia said.

  “But there is one thing we should take care of,” Taigan said. He reached up and took her wrist.

  “What did I tell you about asking?” she said.

  Taigan’s grip was firm. He recited one of the songs he had taught her – the Song of Unmaking. Her skin prickled where he touched her.

  “Stop it,” Lilia said.

  Her skin burned.

  She shrieked.

  Taigan released her.

  Lilia rubbed her wrist. The burning stopped. Her skin looked the same. “What did you do?”

  “I removed your ward,” he said. He squinted up at her. “Yes. You’ll be a bit easier to remember, now. I suspect you had few friends at the temple.” He picked up the bear’s lead again and started walking.

  “Roh was my friend,” Lilia said. “He could always see me.”

  “Some parajistas have the ability to see through or break wards,” Taigan said. “In truth, it’s impossible to bind a parajista with a ward. The pattern simply will not bind with their blood.”

  Lilia considered her wrist again. “How did you do it? You just unraveled it?”

  “The ward was created using the same symbol burned onto your skin,” Taigan said. “Any omajista could see it. You could, too, if you’d only open yourself to the star’s breath. I suspect she meant for you to unravel it. Your first task. But I fear you’re not as gifted as perhaps she hoped.”

  “You mean the trefoil with the tail? That’s the symbol?”

  “Yes. The ward was sewn into your skin using that pattern as the base. It was just many trefoils bound together, all hooked by their tails. Wards are easy enough to unravel if you know what symbol was used for the base.”

  “This is like being blind,” Lilia said. “I can’t see any of these things.”

  “Work harder,” Taigan said.

  “Would you tell me to work harder to see if I was blind?”

  Taigan snorted. “A better analogy is to say that you should not be surprised to be blind if you continue to close your eyes.”

  Every morning, Taigan ran her through a series of stretching and concentration exercises, not unlike those she started her mornings with at the temple in Ohanni’s dancing class. She found most of it boring,
the same way she did in the temple.

  “You’re not actually making any progress,” Taigan said. They sat around the remains of a fire, the charred ends of sappy crackling brush covered over in ash. It was the only thing that burned well in the mountains.

  “Then why are we still doing this?” she said.

  “Because you’re incompetent,” Taigan said.

  “That bone tree might have a different opinion.”

  Taigan stood. Lilia started. She clenched her fists and prepared for the worst, but he only sighed and said, “I have a story for you.”

  “A Saiduan legend?”

  “Something like that,” Taigan said. “A problem. A puzzle.”

  “I’m good at those,” Lilia said.

  “Let’s say there’s a man who does tricks. Not the sort someone gifted does. He’s mundane. Do you have these sorts of tricks in Dhai? Sleight of hand?”

  “Yes, of course. We play all sorts of strategy games, too. Screes, massar, bendi-”

  “Fine, fine,” Taigan said. “There are two men in a small village. Like most people in their village, they are illiterate.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “What?”

  “You’re saying they can’t read? Everyone can read.”

  “No, not everyone can read.”

  “Every clan has schools.”

  “They are Saiduanese. Not Dhai. We are a very large country. We cannot school every child.”

  “That’s very sad.”

  “Be that as it may,” Taigan said, and she could already hear the rising irritation in his voice. “A younger man approaches an old man and asks him to pick a stone from a bag. He asks the old man to write a symbol on the stone. Any symbol he likes but preferably one of great power. The young man puts the stone back into the bag. Hands the bag to the older man, and instructs him to find the stone he marked. But the stone is not in the bag. The young man tells him he can find the stone one mile from their village, in the belly of a bladder trap. When the older man goes off with the other villagers, they dig up the bladder trap, and find the stone, with the same exact symbol the older man wrote on it, deep within the flesh of the trap. How did the young man perform the trick?”

  “What does this have to do with magic?” Lilia asked. “Was he a tirajista?”

  “No. The whole village was full of ungifted, I told you. Not one could draw on the satellites.”

  “That’s not very realistic.”

  “Not in Dhai, perhaps. But in Saiduan and other places, it’s quite typical.”

  “The men lived in the same village together? All their lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were the women?”

  “What?”

  “You said they were all men.”

  “It’s just what one says.”

  “What did they do for a living?

  “What does that matter?

  “Details matter.”

  “Let’s say they were fisher people.”

  “Were the men in on this together? Or was it just the young man who knows how the trick is done?”

  “Just the young man.”

  Lilia pondered that. “If I was old, and I didn’t know any letters, what letter would I know? What symbols? I don’t know. That just doesn’t happen in Dhai.”

  “So you give up? Just like you give up learning to channel the satellites?”

  “This is different. You’re not giving me enough information.”

  “You can’t even think through a proper problem,” Taigan said. “Perhaps that’s why Oma’s breath eludes you.”

  “Your litanies and songs don’t go anywhere,” Lilia said. “There’s no… no problem.”

  “The problem is you’re shaping up to be a very poor omajista.”

  “Just because you want me to be something –”

  “Here’s a problem for you,” Taigan said. He scuffed away the large stones on the ground before them, and drew a circle in the dirt. Then he placed three sets of six stones facing one another. It looked much like a game board. “We have two opposing forces here,” Taigan said. “The line of stones closest to you is the defending force. The line closest to me is the offensive. You have three legions of mounted cavalry, two with long range weapons, and one infantry. I have four mounted cavalry and two infantry. If I move my mounted cavalry forward –” Taigan pushed four of his stones toward her. “How would you respond?”

  Lila frowned. “This is a war game. We don’t play war games.”

  “Then pretend we’re throwing bread at one another,” Taigan said. “While riding bears.”

  Lilia contemplated the stones. It was like a game of bendar, she decided. “I move one of my ranged fighters to flank you on the right, and meet your cavalry with mine.” She took her two infantry stones and one ranged fighter stone and positioned them on the left flank of the cavalry. “I meet your exposed infantry with my ranged fighters, clear them with my infantry, and once they are out, have them come at the cavalry from the rear, with the support of the ranged fighters.”

  Taigan scrutinized her. “You said you didn’t play war games.”

  “We learn about war,” Lilia said. “I studied all the great Dhai battles, from before our exile. They made me better at strategy games. I won against my friend Roh all the time. I even played Oras and novices sometimes.”

  “You’re serious?”

  She shrugged. “I studied a lot of things.”

  “You never mentioned this.”

  “I studied anatomy, too, and agricultural science. I studied magic, and astronomy, and plant biology. I didn’t clean sinks all the time.”

  “You are serious about everyone in Dhai knowing how to read?”

  “Education is important,” Lilia said. “When you forget your history and where you came from, you might forget where you’re going. That’s what Ora Gaiso always said.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen, almost.”

  Taigan shook his head. “Too old for magic,” he said. “It’s a shame. You looked much younger.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He kicked the stones away. “Only that I wish we’d found you ten or twelve years ago, so we could have shaped you into something useful.”

  Taigan sat above the camp several nights later, perched on a massive boulder that still retained the suns’ heat. Below, the scullery girl tossed and turned in her bedroll. By all counts, she should have been so exhausted that sleep came easily. But her stamina was better than he expected, for a cripple.

  He saw a swarm of long-tailed swallows dive toward him in the semi-darkness. He held out his hands and dismantled them. They broke apart into the wispy tails of Saiduan characters. He smelled burnt bread and something more pungent; mold, rot.

  Over the last few days, he had run the scullery girl through a number of famous battles, using stones as markers – battles the Saiduan had fought against the Dhai while they warred for the continent for a thousand years. Taigan considered himself fair at strategy, and he had the advantage of already knowing both the best and actual outcomes, but the girl seemed to have a knack for it. He played through multiple scenarios, and watched her trounce him in three out of every five. This, from a pacifist with no training. What could she do with instruction? With actual knowledge on the field?

  The Saiduan characters unfurled into Maralah’s message, a response to the update he sent her two days before. It was a much shorter, simpler message than he expected.

  We have enough war heroes. I need an omajista. Break her or kill her.

  Taigan stirred the characters with a breath of wind for a long time, watching them swirl and pull apart, until they were completely illegible. Then he crawled down from the boulder and walked back into camp.

  “Was that Saiduan writing?” Lilia said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Was the symbol the man wrote on the stone a Saiduan character?”

  “What, in the riddle?”


  “Yes, the one about the illiterate men.”

  “Yes, the symbol he wrote was a Saiduan character.”

  “It was his name, then,” Lilia said. “If you’re illiterate, you still have to sign documents. Agreements. Papers. Those sorts of things. You do those in Saiduan, just like here. We’ve had treaties with you. So if you were illiterate, the one symbol you would know for sure, the one with the most power, was your name. The young man knew that.”

  “And how did he get it into a bladder trap, then?”

  “He lived in the same village with the older man,” Lilia said. “He planned the trick a long time before, when he was a child. He wrote the man’s name, the symbol, on the stone and planted it many years before. Then he chose that same man for the trick. He knew that man would write the one symbol he knew. His name.”

  “Is that what you’ve been up thinking about?” Taigan asked.

  “I tried to think what one symbol everyone would know,” Lilia said. “Something that was the same across Saiduan and Dhai. We’d have to know our names. To sign public records.”

  “You’re no fool, then,” Taigan said.

  “See, I’m doing well,” Lilia said, and rolled onto her side.

  No, she was not a fool. Not at all. But he needed a gifted young girl, not a clever one. He had been a clever girl once, and Oma, Lord of Heaven, knew how that turned out for him. He scratched at the wound at the base of his spine.

  He suspected being clever would not turn out any better for her than it had for him. He sniffed the air. Their trackers were closer. Another day, and they’d be upon them. He needed to decide how much of the girl to leave to them.

  At midday, Lilia stopped to gather water in the trickling gully of a streambed that looked like it was once a huge clay pipe, as big around as Lilia was tall. The water came from a massive hole milled from the side of a sheer rock face that stretched on and on, covered in scraggly trees and vines Lilia had no name for.

  Taigan regarded the cliff face as Lilia rubbed at her sore rump. “Where now?” she said, gesturing to the cliff. “It’ll take a long time to go around.”

  He glanced back at her. “We go up.”

  “We can’t climb that.”

  “Up,” Taigan said. “Draw on Oma, as I’ve taught you, and propel yourself up. You can go up.”