The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  Kihin pulled off Luna’s boots. He rubbed Luna’s feet dry, and put his own dry boots onto Luna’s feet. He kept his stockings on.

  “Be quick,” Kihin said. “I’ll freeze out here.”

  “I’ll come back,” Roh said.

  With Kihin’s help, Roh pulled Luna up onto the dog with him. He put his arms around Luna, and took the reins.

  “Will the ice hold?” Kihin said.

  “It better,” Roh said. He navigated the bear back up toward the place they had crossed that morning, a dozen yards upstream. He whistled to the bear. “Fast,” he muttered. “Like the wind.”

  The bear shambled out over the ice. Roh nearly lost his grip on Luna. Luna shivered and clutched at the blankets with gray fingers.

  They cleared the river and loped out toward the curve of the road.

  Roh kept up the pace as long as he dared, but the bear was starting to balk. He slowed. An hour into the keep would be too long. He’d have to ask the garrison to bed Luna down. Even that might be too late.

  The road was utterly dark. He navigated by the lights of Kuonrada. He was still some way from the gate, moving up toward the curve of the hill, when he saw the dark rider.

  His heart stuck in his throat. He felt a tingling across his shoulders. The rider was tall, cloaked all in black. A shadow. Was it one of the invaders?

  Roh took a breath. If he called out, would there be another rider on the road? He gathered himself and prepared to call Para, though his hands trembled and his body shook.

  The rider’s voice called, “Have you found your way back, puppy?”

  Roh let out his breath.

  The dark rider’s bear loped to him, the shadow of a sanisi, not… something else.

  “Kadaan,” Roh said.

  “You expected someone else?” Kadaan said. “Your Ora Dasai said you were late. My Patron has an interest in where you are.”

  “Luna fell into the river. He’s going to freeze. Kihin’s back there, without boots.”

  Kadaan reined in next to him. His knee touched Roh’s. “This is what happens when Dhais are left alone,” he said. “You see it?”

  “Kadaan!”

  Kadaan placed a hand on Luna’s forehead. The air around Roh condensed, felt too heavy. The blue breath of Para cloaked Kadaan’s body and then encircled Luna. Luna glowed blue for a long moment. Then his shivering ceased.

  “That will do for a time,” Kadaan said. “Get him back, and get him warm. I’ll find your friend.”

  Kadaan whistled his dog past.

  Roh turned back. “Kadaan!” he shouted.

  Kadaan turned.

  “Thank you,” Roh said.

  “I do not do this for you,” Kadaan said. “I do this for my Patron. Best not confuse my intent.”

  39.

  They trussed Lilia up like a beast, slung a blanket over her, and put her across the back of a dog. Her skin was rubbed raw; she was jostled painfully, and rode that way for all the daylight hours and several more after dark. She offered no resistance. After a while, the enforcers stopped goading her.

  She had fulfilled her promise to her mother; some other woman’s mother, a shadow mother. And her mother didn’t want her. Lilia really was no one, a ghost, caught somewhere between this world and another.

  They arrived at the camps the evening of the sixth day. Lilia smelled the camps before she saw them. She didn’t think that any smell could overpower that of the dogs, but the camps stank like a mass grave. They passed through a gate onto muddy ground that put Lilia in mind of a churned-up dung pile. The women did not untie her. They pushed her off the dog and into the cold mud.

  Lilia landed on her stomach and choked on slushy mud. She rolled over onto her side. From the gate ran stone walls capped in iron spikes and wire. The wooden gate was wound in sharp metal. The enforcers shut the gate.

  Dirty figures squatted around campfires just outside makeshift shelters of old wood, stitched hides, and tangles of bonsa and everpine branches. Ice crusted the ridges of the muddy ground. The smell of the fires could not overpower the stench of unwashed bodies, and something fouler, more terrifying – the cloying stink of rotting flesh.

  Three men crouching under the awning of the nearest shack were already looking over at her. Others had stopped along the outer edges of the camp to look – outright or surreptitiously.

  Lilia saw something in their faces that scared her. It roused her from her misery. Motherless or not, if she did not move now they would devour her. She twisted her hands behind her back and tried to tug at the loops around her ankles with her fingers.

  These are Dhais, she told herself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. There will be people from Garika here, clan family, novices sent into exile…. They’ll be –

  The men were first to move.

  They started toward her like a pack of curious dogs. Then some of the other spectators were moving; two matrons with sticks, and a gaggle of scrawny children.

  Someone grabbed Lilia’s ankle. She kicked out, but there were hands on her, pulling at her hair, her clothes.

  She tried to curl up, bowed her head to protect it. One of the women tugged her short coat off as far as she could until Lilia’s bound hands prevented her from taking it. Then the pack of them; the men, the women, the children, and more stragglers, unknotted Lilia’s bonds, tore at them with teeth and fingers.

  They pulled the ropes free. One of the women yanked the coat from Lilia’s body. The woman tried to run with it. One of the men gripped the sleeve, pulled. The woman hit him with her stick. The children took Lilia’s boots.

  She was free, but Lilia’s feet and hands were numb from days of poor circulation. The other woman grabbed hold of Lilia’s tunic. Cold mud bit her bare skin. The tunic came free. She kicked out at one of them; hit him in the jaw with her bad hand. Pain rocked up her arm. The third man returned without the coat, and held her down while they stripped her of the last of her clothes. The men bunched up her pants and linen and ran back into the camp.

  Lilia staggered to her feet, and fell. It was the first time she had tried to stand in two days. She rubbed at her bare skin, and the new bruises forming over her old ones.

  Her despair was deep. But so was the cold.

  She crept toward the outer edges of the dwellings. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. The men watched her as she moved. Her feet and fingers were numb. She huddled against the flimsy side of a shelter, shivering. She concentrated on making herself warmer, freeing up the sluggish flow of blood in her hands and feet. She was hungry, tired, but she felt her body responding.

  The smell of urine was strong; someone was using the space between the shelters as a latrine.

  The temperature dropped as night lengthened. Lilia scooped up some of the mud and slathered it onto her body. She had read of someone doing that in a Dorinah novel, only they had mixed fat with the mud. Soon enough, the mud would freeze and dry and flake off.

  People passed her many times, but the only light in the camp came from the smoky fires, and she was so covered in mud that many did not even glance at her. She dozed sometime in the darkest hours of the night, and woke to find two men near her, the same men who had stolen her pants. She froze under their gazes; their outlines just visible – she remembered their forms, and their smell. She waited, thinking they had made a mistake, thought she had something else they could steal.

  Then the men grabbed hold of her, yanked her painfully up. They were big men. She twisted and bit at them, but they pulled her farther into the camp. They were laughing and joking, crude jokes. Lilia let out a long scream. The man holding her cuffed her. She tasted blood.

  He had a good hold on her, and his companion was just behind, ready to grab her up if she squirmed away. The man who held her had a ratted tongue of black hair circling his head, and a heavy beard.

  She let herself go lax and fell back into him with the full weight of her body. He stumbled again, not expecting her submission. Her head fell back onto
his shoulder. She looked at the folded flesh of his ear.

  Her gorge rose.

  The second man came from behind, kicked open the door to their shelter.

  Lilia took her assailant’s ear in her mouth and bit down, hard.

  The man screeched. He released her and jerked away. The top of his ear came away in Lilia’s mouth.

  Lilia staggered back onto her own feet. She spit the man’s flesh out, tasted coppery blood. She made to run, and fell into a stout woman. The two of them collapsed, a tangle of limbs. The woman had a heavy blanket around her shoulders.

  Lilia tore the cloak away from the woman and ran through the clutter of houses. She ran past banked fires, skirted around a refuse pile and what she suspected was a corpse. She ran and ran.

  Her chest felt tight and her breath was heavy. She darted left, then right again, and slowed her steps. She heard voices behind her, and kept walking. She twisted the ends of the cloak over one shoulder, knotted it at her hip. Her legs were trembling.

  Breathe.

  Breathe, Li.

  She had no mahuan powder here. An asthma attack would kill her.

  Lilia slunk deeper into the camp. She wiped at the blood and spit on her mouth and chin. She wandered until the graying of the sky found her at a large rectangular building propped up in a cleared square of trampled mud. The building’s entrance had no doors. Lilia saw the carving of a great eye above the mouth of the entry. Stones lined the front of the door in the mud, a makeshift stoop. Faint light trickled from two lanterns set high up on the interior walls.

  Lilia lingered at the entry, expecting to look inside and see alters to the gods, a Sanctuary. Instead, she saw battered benches facing a raised stage. It was a meeting house. The floor was smooth dirt. She walked to the other end of the room and squeezed into the corner between the raised stage and the wall. She rested her head in the crook of her arm, meant to doze, but she must have slept, because she dreamed.

  She dreamed of a cold stone hall, not the sinuous circular halls of the temples but a long, straight hall built on the assumption of sharp lines and angles. She went to the windows and gazed down from a great height across a black city. She saw a jumble of jagged buildings capped in snow, peaked roofs carved with grotesque faces at the eaves, above the doors, all of them laced in a fine, powdery snow. The snow collected in immense drifts along the streets. Tall stone walls ringed the city, three walls deep. The city sloped downward to the wide bay, a bay ringed in old, old mountains, their tops worn smooth, blanketed in white. The bay was a rolling landscape broken by the jutting pillars of ice jams along the coast. Farther out, the bay was a tumble of dirty ice floes and black water, seething with something else: Ships. A hundred – a thousand - ten thousand? More than she could count. From her vantage, Lilia saw movement outside and inside the walls, an immense black tide of figures. She caught the smell of smoke.

  She turned away –

  And looked into her mother’s face.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Her mother said. She wore a long robe of white. Her skin glowed with a faint luminescence, like Faith Ahya was said to glow. Her black hair was knotted with white ribbons. “You were meant to lead them.”

  Lilia woke so suddenly she knocked her head against the wall. She yelped. She sat alone in the meeting house as cold morning light seeped in through the doorway. I didn’t come this far to die in Dorinah, she thought.

  That woman hadn’t been her mother. What she had done didn’t matter. Lilia rubbed her wrist, where the ward had been. She was alone now, but in truth she’d always been alone. She would die alone in the mud if she didn’t act.

  From the stoop, she gazed out at the hovels ringing the meeting house. Figures tended fires. She heard the low wail of a child.

  She went to the first woman she saw, a stout, middle-aged woman who bent over a banked fire.

  “Pardon, mother,” Lilia said. “Do you know anyone looking for a healer, a midwife?”

  “You look more like you need a healer,” she said.

  “I’m a temple educated Dhai,” Lilia said. “I can read and write, Dorinah and Dhai. Do you know anyone who needs letters written, or read?”

  The woman turned her attention back to her fire. “Move on.”

  Lilia went to the next fire. She asked every woman if they needed a healer, a midwife. These people knew nothing of her, and there was some freedom in that. It meant she could be anything. Their language was a strange patois of Dhai and Dorinahian. Lilia picked it up quickly. She could be a good mimic, when she needed to be.

  “A healer or midwife?” Lilia asked.

  “Go on,” another woman said. She wasn’t much older than Lilia, and she had two young children at her skirt, another at her breast. “We got Emlee for all that.”

  “Where can I find Emlee?”

  The woman pointed. “To the place with the purple awning there, left, then a right when you see the orange flag. House with the big snapping lily out front.”

  “Thank you,” Lilia said. She turned away. Her feet were numb. The sky was gray, brooding, threatened more snow.

  She found the healer’s house after doubling back twice. An old woman ducked out almost immediately, nearly knocking her over. Her face was a map of wrinkles in a face of mottled flesh the color of river clay. The woman’s hair was a tangle of white knotted atop her head with ragged black ribbons. She held a stout staff of adenoak and wore a sturdy but well-used dress, Dorinah cut, practical, very long at the sleeves and hem. The hem was soaked in mud.

  “Are you the midwife?” Lilia asked.

  “Midwife, healer, sorceress. I’m all that and more. Do you have need of skill?”

  “I was educated in the temples.”

  “I can tell that in your talk,” the woman said. “Ah. You’re looking for work. But they don’t teach herbs, medicines in those shiny temples, do they? Can you tell stories? Are you gifted? Eh, probably not, the enforcers would have culled you out, but sometimes… Well, what is it?”

  “My mother was a midwife, and herbalist. From the Woodlands. And I know lots of stories.”

  “Do you now? We’ll see. You coming?”

  “Now? Yes, oh yes.”

  Emlee pushed open the hide door of the low lying plank house. The house’s seams were stuffed with mud and grass. Lilia stepped inside to warmth. Her body throbbed.

  “We have a straggler, Cora,” Emlee said.

  A stout young woman sat at the fireside nursing a baby at her breast. Her hair was pulled back from a sharp, wolfish face; she looked at Lilia as if she would devour her.

  “Don’t have room for another one,” Cora said.

  “We have any water? She’s filthy. And listen to that breathing! Where’s my wax wraith?”

  “There were some bad people at the gate,” Lilia said tentatively.

  “Gate trash,” Emlee said. “Parasites are always hanging around the gates. I assure you the rest of us are quite civilized. Cora, did you hear me? Where’s Larn?”

  “Fucking that priest and asking favors of his women,” Cora said. She got to her feet, and pushed her big baby onto her hip. The baby squirmed, began to whine. “Him and those women set up in Tolda’s hatch, and Larn’s got enough gossip in her lungs to trade over for bread.”

  Emlee grunted. She rested her staff near the door, said, “We’ll talk that later. This is... what’s your name?”

  “Lilia.”

  Emlee raised her brows. “Haven’t heard that name in some time. Thought no one named girls that anymore. Clean up now. I’ve got a full list today. I’ve three cases of yaws and enough sex diseases to last me two lifetimes. You think I have all day, temple Dhai?”

  Lilia dropped her filthy blanket. Cora brought out a pan of tepid, mostly clean, water. Lilia sponged herself off as best she could. She wiped at her thighs and saw tendrils of blood leaking back into the pan. She had not wiped her face. She looked down between her thighs, saw a smear of blood. She pressed her fingers between her legs. They came bac
k red.

  “I’m bleeding,” Lilia said. It sounded stupid, to say it out loud, but seeing the blood reminded her of her bare, scarred arms, and the power that could be called with blood.

  “Get her something,” Emlee said. She had settled by the fire and was stirring up some sort of cake mixture.

  Cora handed over a wadded rag. “I’ll find you some linen, and a belt,” Cora said.

  Lilia tied on the linen belt that secured the clean rag between her thighs. She dressed in a long skirt of Cora’s, too big and too long for her. The tunic they gave her was also too big, and made of itchy wool, but it was warm. Cora loaned Lilia her shoes and stuffed them with straw to keep them on Lilia’s feet.

  “The sick wait on no one but me,” Emlee said. “Up, up. Let’s go now.”

  Cora handed her a sticky rice ball as Emlee pushed her out the door.

  Lilia walked after Emlee, wolfing down the rice. Emlee strode purposefully down paths, around refuse. She called to those sitting around the fires, knew the names of all the dirty children, at the breast and apron strings, and the others, the orphans who ran in packs.

  Emlee greeted two young women sitting outside the awning of a lopsided hide tent. One of them carried a twisted bundle of firewood. Both women looked relieved to see Emlee. Emlee introduced Lilia. They led them inside the dim tent.

  “Have you seen yaws before?” Emlee asked.

  Lilia shook her head.

  They stooped over a young man who lay in a corner of the tent. He turned his face to them.

  Lilia’s stomach lurched.

  Something had chewed away the center of the man’s face. Where a nose and upper lip should have been was an open wound of flesh, leaving the top of the mouth open, the lower teeth visible. His left eye was lower than the right, drawn down into the wound that was his face.

  Emlee handed Lilia her pack of supplies. “Open that up,” Emlee said. “Get familiar with it.”

  Lilia sat down behind Emlee as the old woman settled beside the faceless man. Lilia unrolled Emlee’s pack of supplies. She had two dozen vials of herbs and mixed concoctions, none of them labeled. She had several kinds of scalpels, a mirror on the end of a metal rod, a small file-saw that Lilia could hold easily in the palm of her hand, and a length of clean gauze wrapped in a thin paper that smelled of everpine.