The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

“Taigan’s indiscretion was very public. In this case, you and I are the only ones to know. We’ve kept it quiet, waiting on your return.”

  “No witnesses, then?”

  He saw her hesitate. Her large mouth firmed slightly. Just enough.

  “No,” she said. “Just me.”

  Her, the sanisi, and a dozen slaves, more likely. Rajavaa said, “You do have a way of sitting on the seat without wearing the cowl.”

  “I could never harm Alaar,” she said, “but others are not so gutless. He was going to hold our ground here. Kuonrada was to be the final stand.”

  “We don’t have enough to hold Kuonrada.”

  “I know that. His sanisi know that. I believe he knew it as well. But it’s been a long war, and he wanted to go out at a place of his choosing.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “No,” Maralah said. “You did.”

  “Milk and tits, Maralah, I can’t –”

  “We’re purging the harem and nursery now, and eliminating the sanisi who will not follow you.”

  “I can’t be Patron, Maralah.”

  “You will,” she said. “Who else is there? It can’t be a sanisi. He only has two adult sons left, and they’re in the far north, already targeted by the invaders. They’ll be dead in a month. They have no army. Your force is the largest standing company we still have, and we can grow it as we retreat south.”

  “It’s not the right time,” he said.

  “When you see what’s been done upstairs, you’ll disagree,” she said. “His family is already slaughtered. If you don’t take up this mantle now, this hold will descend into chaos, and what remains of the country with it. Divided, we’ll be decimated in three months. With you to lead us we could last three years.”

  “A year at best.”

  “Three, if you take my counsel.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I like breathing too much not to take your counsel.”

  “Then we are in agreement.”

  “I can’t, Maralah.”

  “Lords why? You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it. I’m handing it to you now, Rajavaa. I held this coup for just the right moment. There are people dead upstairs, my people. I have twenty dead women in this harem, and forty children –”

  Rajavaa stared at Maralah’s bloody boots. She had done it, then. Done the thing she always told him she would. When she was accepted into sanisi training, she had sent him a letter, “Someday you will be Patron, and I will be your sanisi.” A lifetime ago. It was her idea to leave their village together, to travel to far-off Caisau to become sanisi. He had failed the training – he was not gifted - and joined the military instead. Not because he had a passion for it, but because he needed to eat.

  Someday you will be Patron…

  He had never doubted it. He prepared for it. His men loved him. They flocked to him like bees to honey. He loved them like a father, a brother, a lover, a friend. He was all things to them. But he had not anticipated this long war of attrition, and what it would do to the country, and to him. For the last decade he had marched them to their deaths each day and drowned himself in drink every night, just like his mother.

  “I have the rot, Maralah.”

  Her grip on his arm tightened. “You don’t,” she said.

  He showed his teeth. “They tell me it’s the drink,” he said. “Blew out my guts. No way to fix it until Tira’s ascendant, and I won’t last that long.”

  “How long?” she said.

  “A year, maybe two,” he said.

  “That’s long enough.”

  “I’ll be vomiting blood before the end,” he said. He pulled his arm away.

  She leaned into him. Pressed her forehead to his, the way she had when they were children. “I can get it fixed,” she said. “If I tell you I can fix it, will you do it?”

  He choked on a laugh. “You’re mad. There’s no way to –”

  “Oma is rising,” she said. “We are gathering omajistas. I have one out on an assignment who can fix it.”

  “Lords, you don’t mean Taigan?”

  “Alaar is dead,” she said, “it’s up to you to pardon Taigan. I give you a few extra years, and you spend that time keeping our people together. What’s it hurt, if you weren’t even going to have those years anyway?”

  “You would call him to help even if I wasn’t going to be Patron.”

  “Would I?” she said softly.

  Her tone chilled him. “You insult me,” he said. “When have you ever had to threaten me?”

  “These are dark times, brother.”

  “And you need my army.”

  “Saiduan needs your army.”

  Rajavaa closed his eyes. He could not bear to look at her face so close. It reminded him too much of their mother’s face. He wondered if that was what made it so ugly.

  “Call your omajista,” he said.

  “Come upstairs, Patron,” she said, and pulled away.

  41.

  Lilia turned Gian’s care over to Emlee long before the woman regained consciousness. She knew it could not be the same Gian, but her heart had swelled at the sight of her, and that frightened Lilia too much for words. A week after seeing Gian again, Lilia sat alone in the community house at the center of the camp, huddled in a tattered coat and new mittens Emlee had made her. Flame fly lanterns licked away the darkness. It was far too late for her to be out alone, but the day after prayer days members of the camp congregated to drink homebrewed liquor and tell stories. The warmth and camaraderie reminded her of the temple.

  As she listened to the drunken rambling of the young man on the stage, she noticed a tall woman walk into the room. She had a bold, regal face and broad shoulders. She was too-skinny for her big frame, and had the hollowed look of those who had spent some time in the camps. There was something in the kiss of her mouth that reminded Lilia of someone. The woman’s hair was a spill of black knotted at the back of her head, very long and well-kept.

  It was Gian. A thinner, warier version of Gian. She did not have the same confident walk or lustrous skin as the woman Lilia watched die in the mountains.

  Gian came over to her. She wore a skirt that was too short for her, and her ankles were muddy.

  Lilia tensed. She looked straight ahead.

  Gian sat next to her.

  “I know you,” Gian said.

  “I’m sorry,” Lilia said. “All the things I did, it didn’t-”

  “You’re the one who saved me,” Gian said. Her voice was very soft, much softer than Lilia remembered, and she had a Dorinah accent, the same accent all the Dhai had when speaking the patois of the camps.

  Another man took the stage. He told the tale of Faith Ahya’s death. Lilia had heard the dajian version before. It was different than the one in Dhai, where Faith died in childbed, birthing the first Kai and ushering in Dhai’s five hundred years of peace. In the version here, she was betrayed by her lover and confidant, beheaded and hung from the ramparts of Daorian long after her child was born. Lilia did not like the story, not until the end. Because at the end of this story, Faith Ahya flew.

  “I’m Gian,” the woman said. “You remember me? You and Emlee cleaned me up, my leg. I was half mad, I think.”

  “Oh,” Lilia said. “You aren’t Gian.”

  “But I am.”

  Lilia remembered what Gian had said about her twin having a double in this world. This was, of course, not Lilia’s Gian. It was the twin Gian would have had if she’d been born under a lavender sky.

  “I’m sorry. Yes,” Lilia said. “Of course you’re Gian.”

  Gian frowned, and hunched her shoulders. “I understand if you don’t want to talk to me,” she said. “It’s just that you’re a temple Dhai. I thought you must be different.”

  “Because you betrayed the Empress?”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  Lilia gestured to the stage. “You should tell them your story.”

  “My story is mine,” Gian said.

&
nbsp; “We’re one people,” Lilia said.

  “You really are a temple Dhai.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have yet to tell a story here either,” Gian said. “I know. I’ve been standing at the back, watching to see if you’ll speak.”

  “Why didn’t you come up to me before?”

  Gian’s colored deepened. “I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “This,” Gian said.

  Lilia shifted in her seat and tried to think of something else to say. “I don’t think they’d be interesting, my stories. Mostly I tell stories about what I’ve read.”

  Gian leaned toward her, and spoke softly into her ear, “I think you could spin a beautiful story.”

  “I –”

  Gian pressed her hand to Lilia’s. She had strong hands, with long, slender fingers. Just like the other Gian. Lilia stared at their joined fingers.

  Lilia withdrew her hand. “You should ask first,” she said. “I’m not a dajian.”

  “I apologize,” Gian said. “I want to know the woman who saved me. Most of these people would have let me die.”

  “Emlee –”

  “It’s your face I remember.”

  Lilia looked into Gian’s eyes. Dark eyes. The same as the Gian she had watched hack through the undergrowth in the Woodland. It was unsettling.

  “Tell me a story,” Gian said.

  The man on the stage reached the end of his story. “And then Faith Ahya,” he said, “rose from her bed of birth and death, clothed all in white. She ascended to the peak of what we know today as Mount Ahya, and there she was engulfed by the radiant light of Sina. She is with us still, her soul enshrined in the satellite. She sees us, watches over us, protects us. When our need is greatest, she will come around to us again, and deliver us from darkness.”

  In the temples, they taught that Faith Ahya was just a woman, but here they treated her like a god. Lilia was uncomfortable with that at first, but the longer she lived among these people, the more she realized they needed more to believe in than the fickle gods of the satellites. They needed a leader. They needed a prophet. Living here made her want to take up that cloak of bone tree leaves again, as she had as a child, and pretend to be Faith Ahya.

  Lilia waited until the man was done. Then she stood. She had done so much else. Why not tell a story, a real one, instead of pretending?

  Lilia walked up onto the stage and looked out over the long rows of benches. She felt different up there. Taller. Stronger. She could be anyone, up there. The three or four dozen people before her looked cold and tired, but their eyes were bright – mostly with drink – and only a few were talking among themselves.

  “I once made my mother a promise,” Lilia said, “and I still intend to keep it.”

  It was an easy story. She thought it would make her sound brave. But as she spun out a story of Roh’s arrogant swagger and Taigan’s sour sense of humor, she felt like she was telling the story of someone who could be brave, if only she let go of all the bloody things that came before her, and forged some path not constrained by old promises.

  Lilia finished her story at the point when she fled from the sanisi and started down the road to Kalinda’s. She could not say much more, because that’s when Gian entered her story. The real Gian.

  As she left the stage, Gian’s twin walked toward her.

  “It was a fine story,” Gian said. “Did that really happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how did you end up here?”

  “I made a lot of bad choices,” Lilia said. “Can we be friends, do you think?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “No one really knows anyone. Do you have a better place to go?”

  Gian shook her head.

  “Then come with me,” Lilia said. “I’ll protect you.” Which sounded strange when she said it, because she had done so poor a job of protecting herself. But it was something Faith Ahya would say.

  Lilia invited Gian home to live with her, though Emlee made faces and Cora turned up her nose. At night, she watched the light play across Gian’s fine face, but dared not touch her.

  Sometimes she thought of the girl torn asunder by the gate. She knew, gazing into Gian’s gaunt, tired face, that despite her horror at the girl’s death, she would do it again to save herself, to have this moment. The Oras would say it was the direst kind of selfishness. Oma would eat her, Sina would not collect her soul.

  But Lilia had no soul. She wasn’t even of this world.

  More people began to come to Emlee’s door, but no longer solely for the help of Emlee. They asked about Lilia. They asked her to tell stories, and mend their flesh while she did it. Emlee told her that storytelling could get her new shoes, more food, vials of everpine to scrub the lice from her hair and clothing. And those things could buy her respect, too. Even more respect than she was earning from mending broken bones and fevers and delivering babies.

  So Lilia told stories. All the old stories from the books she read in the temples, and the history lessons she learned from Dasai and Chali. And when she ran out of those, she made some up. She began to ask for scraps of white cloth instead of payment. When she went home each night, she spent an hour sewing the pieces together into a dress, which she kept folded up and hidden beneath her pillow.

  Gian listened to all of Lilia’s stories, even the ones about Aaldian merchants who led rebellions and dog thieves who became empresses.

  “Why did you come to me?” Lilia asked her one night.

  “You have a very memorable face,” Gian said, tracing the karoi scars on her cheek.

  Lilia flinched. “You should ask.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What happened to your leg? You haven’t said.”

  “There are some stories that don’t want telling,” Gian said. “Some stories you tell, they make things worse. Not better.”

  Lilia didn’t ask again, even when Emlee confronted her about it some days later.

  “That woman’s a danger,” Emlee said. “They don’t dump dajians there for just anything. She clings to you for your reputation, and your warm bed. Don’t think it’s more than that.”

  “You don’t know her,” Lilia said. “Or me.”

  “Better than some man, I suppose,” Emlee said. “There’s only so much you can clean out of a womb. But you watch her, Lilia. She wants you for more than your quick tongue.”

  Lilia spent hours combing out Gian’s long hair. Gian tried to endear herself to Emlee and Cora and Larn by bringing them food, warm tea, clean water. Larn was still often gone, consorting with the man she called a priest and his priestesses, though Lilia doubted either of them was any such thing. Larn came home from those meetings pale and drawn, and Gian made her tea.

  As low winter became high winter, Gian presented her with a gift: eight white ribbons in a little box.

  “Where did you get these?” Lilia asked.

  “They will go with your dress,” Gian said.

  “You don’t know what the dress is for,” Lilia said.

  “I know you’ll tell me when you’re ready to.”

  Lilia kept the ribbons with the dress, and sat up at night imagining that she could fly.

  The days spun out. As winter dragged on, the camp began to stir with rumors of other camps. Camps purged by bloody legionnaires.

  “There have been rumors for months,” Emlee said one night while Cora cooked dinner. “About the other camps. Refugees, sometimes. But they won’t kill us all. Who would care for their children? Who would work in their fields?”

  “Why don’t you leave?” Lilia asked.

  Emlee glanced at Cora, who guffawed. Cora said, “And go where? To Dhai? You think they’d let us through the Pass? You think it hasn’t been tried?”

  “They’d let you in,” Lilia said.

  Emlee said, “My mother died at those gates during the Pass War. This is our place. We will die in it, if we must. Birth is everyone’s beginning. Death is
everyone’s end. Doesn’t much matter where you do it.”

  Lilia left her with a poultice of ever-root and strawberry and started toward the dwelling of her next case. She waved to those she passed. They greeted her by name. It was still strange, to be seen.

  She walked in a filthy, tattered skirt and tunic, on shoes that were no longer Cora’s, but her own. Gian had combed out her hair and braided it into a whirl of braids knotted in colorful string, the way Gian said she had done the hair of noble Dorinahian women.

  Lilia heard the muttering slosh of footsteps approaching, and turned to see one of the bands of orphans running toward her.

  “There’s a man asking for you!” one of the children yelled.

  Lilia stilled her steps. The rider rounded a collection of tents just behind the children. The rider wore black. The hilt of a blade stuck through the back of his coat. He called his dog to a halt, and dismounted.

  “You look terrible,” Taigan said, in Dorinah. He had a new scar running from his left cheek to her left ear, and there was something different about him; his voice a little higher, his posture a little stranger.

  “So you can fly after all, can you?” Taigan said.

  “I can,” Lilia said.

  “I’d very much like to see that,” Taigan said. “There are legionnaires outside the gate. One of them is passing about a picture of you. It won’t be long until someone turns you over.”

  “They won’t,” Lilia said.

  “Won’t they?”

  “No,” Lilia said. She looked at the wide-eyed children, and remembered her mother’s hands, and her mother’s face, back at the lake, when she said Lilia was not her daughter.

  Lilia said, “These are my people. I’m not going anywhere without them.”

  “The woman with your picture says she’s your mother,” Taigan said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “I think you may be mad,” Taigan said.

  “No,” Lilia said. “I’m a bird. And we’re going to fly away from here.”

  42.

  Zezili rode Dakar into the camp at the mouth of the pass to Dhai with Jasoi and two pages close at her heels. Isoail and four more legionnaires met them on the muddy field outside the sprawl of stinking tents and blocky housing. Monshara only gave her an hour before every purge to find the girl, and they were already forty minutes into it.