The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  “My name,” Lilia said. “Of course. Like the boy with the stone.”

  Lilia used Taigan’s dagger to cut three neat Dhai characters into each of them, between their shoulder blades.

  Taigan said to Tulana, “Do you swear to remain loyal to Lilia Sona of Dhai, to aid her in every way, to keep all oaths and promises, to not deal falsely with her or her kin, or to play her false at pain of a death at your own hand?” The knife bit into her flesh.

  Tulana sucked in a breath. “I swear,” she hissed.

  The others swore and were cut. The air around them was heavy, electric. Lilia could not tell if any of them were working against Taigan, trying to unbind the flesh and blood he manipulated to bind their bodies to their words. If they did, Taigan said nothing of it, and Lilia saw no red mist massing around Tulana. Lilia watched the way Taigan braided the red mist so she could replicate the ward in the future. It was an intricate thing, like a piece of prose poetry set to music.

  When Taigan finished cutting, Gian cleaned their wounds.

  Lilia sat awake with Taigan on a mass of rough cut stones. They gazed up the height of the wall. Taigan passed her a pipe of sen leaves. She took a few puffs, choked on the smoke, handed it back.

  “You’re a brave bird,” Taigan said.

  “No,” Lilia said. “Brave people are afraid. I’m not afraid anymore.”

  They sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Lilia asked, “Why did you come back for me? You left me to die, Taigan.”

  “I wanted your opinion on the Battle at Roasandara, the one fought two thousand years ago,” she said.

  Laughter bubbled up. Lilia choked on it. She laughed so hard she doubled over. Tears streamed down her face.

  Taigan said, “Should I pound your back? Are you dying?”

  Her serious tone made Lilia laugh harder. She remembered being broken at the bottom of the ravine, the karoi pecking her apart, piece by piece. She thought of the dead child severed by the gate, the burning legionnaires, the burst mirror, and how she had killed her own mother.

  “If you wanted my opinion on a battle,” she said, “you should have turned around sooner.”

  “No,” Taigan said. “I came back for you at just the right time.”

  49.

  Zezili was getting happily drunk when the world exploded.

  She supposed she should have expected who it would be shaking her awake the next morning while she slept off the drink and violence of the night before in the cold, crooked roots of a tree stump.

  She rubbed her gummy eyes and saw Monshara standing above her. “You’re predictable, at least,” Monshara said. “You want to go in chains back to your Empress, or take a dog and walk in on your own two feet?”

  Zezili gazed up at the rotten sky of Monshara’s world. “It was worth it,” she said.

  “We’ll see,” Monshara said.

  By the time Zezili was delivered back to her own world, put back into her proper clothes, and escorted back to Daorian by Monshara and two of her omajistas, Daorian was already wreathed in red, the color of mourning. Great red banners flanked the tower gates, the spires of the distant keep. The city people had put out red kerchiefs in their windows, hung them from the snow-heavy awnings of their shops. Zezili wondered who died. Then wondered if it was supposed to be her.

  People knew her by her armor, the plaited skirt knotted with the hair of dajians, the image of Rhea holding a sword over a dead bear etched into the breastplate, outlined in flaking silver. Her helm had no plume, ended instead in a curve of metal like a snake’s tail. The people came out to see her, muttered about her on their doorsteps, pointed. Some saw her and hid. Two old women made a ward against evil as she passed. It told Zezili something of the Empress’s silent ambiguity regarding her station that they did not spit at Zezili or curse her. It helped that Monshara hadn’t bound her.

  It was a small kindness, Zezili supposed.

  The city waited on the Empress’s judgment.

  Zezili reined her dog within the courtyard of the keep. Monshara and her omajistas slid off their bears. A kennel girl darted out from the warmth of the kennels, and took the reins of Zezili’s dog without looking Zezili in the face.

  Zezili reached up a hand to her dog’s ears and rubbed at the base of them. She pressed her cheek to his, and pretended he was Dakar. She had lost her husband and her dog. She had betrayed her Empress. It was the end of all things.

  The dog licked her face with his hot tongue. She pulled away only to find that she had gripped the hair of his collar in both hands. She slowly uncurled her fingers. She turned away, and walked up the loop of the outdoor stair and into the foyer of the hold. She glanced back at Monshara. “I can get the rest of the way myself,” she said.

  Monshara swept her hand forward. “You should have listened to me,” she said.

  “I don’t listen to anybody,” Zezili said. “Not anymore.”

  Saofi, the Empress’s secretary, was waiting for her outside the audience chamber. She played with the eyeglass at the end of her chatelaine.

  “She’s been expecting you,” Saofi said.

  “You have too, no doubt,” Zezili said.

  “Your fate and mine are linked,” Saofi said. “So yes, I have an interest in this outcome.”

  At first, Zezili wasn’t sure what she meant. But of course everyone knew about the purging of the dajian camps by now. The privately-owned dajians knew it was only a matter of time before the bloody swords came for them, too. And for me, Zezili thought. Us.

  Saofi went inside the audience chamber to announce Zezili. Zezili felt oddly calm. She had been courting this day for some time.

  The secretary reappeared. Her expression was blank. “She’ll see you,” Saofi said. Saofi gripped the outer handle and leaned back with all her weight, pulling the door wide.

  A chandelier of crystal shards and flame flies hung from the ceiling. A purple carpet stretched the length of the hall to the raised dais at its end. Atop the dais sat the silver throne of eighteen hundred years of Dorinah rule, the throne usurped from the first Patron of Saiduan’s fiftieth son, constructed in the far north of that country two thousand years before by silversmiths whose like Zezili had never encountered, not in half a dozen offensives on neighboring islands. Saiduan was a continent – Dorinah was just a small country on the island of Grania at its southern tip, larger than Dhai or Aaldia or Tordin but still vulnerable if the Saiduan became expansionists again at some future date. The presence of the Saiduan-crafted throne served as both record of triumph and warning.

  Covering both long walls were tapestries depicting the uprising of the scullery in the fortress of Daorian: this fortress, where a green-eyed sorceress from a foreign place had expelled – from the kitchen upwards – the most powerful empire in the world.

  The Empress did not sit on the throne, but stood near it, surrounded by her enormous green-eyed cats, each as tall as Zezili’s shoulder. The sight of them sent a prickling up Zezili’s spine. The Empress herself was a tall, striking figure, slender, with knobby arms and legs that were often canted at awkward angles. Her face, neck and hands were smeared in a bronzer that gave her the color of dark honey. A blotch of red marked her lips. Her black brows and brilliant yellow eyes were smudged in kohl, and her hair – most of it her own – added another foot to her already extraordinary height. She dressed in a pale white dress with bone corseting that gave her the figure of a stick insect. The elaborate hooping under her gown created a wall of material belling out from her narrow frame, a distance that would have to be crossed before one touched her.

  Zezili had never seen anyone touch her.

  Zezili squared her shoulders. She concentrated on the length of purple carpet, but as she walked, her gaze was drawn to the Empress’s cats. They sat quietly watching her, their faces as inscrutable as the Empress’s.

  Zezili walked to within a yard of the cusp of the Empress’s belled white gown, stared at the hem, and got down on both knees before her. She took off
her helm, set it beside her.

  The cats wound closer. A dozen, more? She imagined them chewing on her body, saw claws rend flesh.

  She bowed her head and moved the tangled mass of her hair, baring her neck. One of the big cats lay down beside her. Its tail caressed her legs

  A delicate hand alighted on the base of Zezili’s neck. The fingers were cold.

  “I charged you,” the Empress said, her voice like a sigh.

  “I did as you bid,” Zezili said, “. All but one of the camps is cleansed, and I’m sure Monshara can take care of the last. I obeyed you in all things.”

  “You darkened their way. You interfered,” the Empress said. Her fingers dug into Zezili’s hair. “Worse, you may have hurt my other plans.” She took her hand away and beckoned to the cat lolling beside Zezili. She held out her hand. The cat licked it.

  Another of the cats hissed.

  “I find myself uncertain what to make of you, or to do with you.” The Empress sat in her silver throne, the fantastic menagerie of beaten silver rods and spires twisted into grotesque faces.

  “Perhaps this was my fault,” she said. “I expected pure obedience. Look at me.”

  Zezili raised her gaze from the carpet. She did not know what she expected to see in the Empress’s face, but looking up she saw an unchanged visage, unmarked by feeling; grief or fear or anger. The Empress was, as ever, a blank bronze canvas, with the long, regal neck and supple form of her kind, the startling eyes.

  “I do have a platter for your head, here.” She patted the silver throne. “But my cats are not hungry, they say.”

  Zezili looked at the cats. They stared back at her.

  “There is another use for you,” the Empress said. “One for my sisters patiently waiting for Oma’s rise. You see, the Tai Mora are not the only world brought closer, now. Our alliance with the Tai Mora was for convenience only, until the world of my sisters was close enough to wake those of us left behind. I will charge you with the sacred task of preparing for their awakening. You will repair your legion in the spring and travel to Tordin.”

  “But… Empress… I thought I’d be feeding bugs in the dirt. I know what I did.” She wanted to say more; it bubbled up inside her, a mad anger she’d held back these months. “I can’t follow any more. I’m not your slave.”

  But the Empress continued as if Zezili had not spoken. “I will send mercenaries with you from the outer islands. Three thousand Sebastyn pike men, five hundred Jorian archers. You understand?”

  Zezili stood. Her knees ached. Cold sweat had gathered along her spine. She had not expected she would be allowed to rise. She had not thought past kneeling upon the carpet.

  “You know I can’t obey you any longer,” Zezili said.

  “I know you think that,” the Empress said. Her tone was light.

  The cats were uncurling from the floor. Zezili had never known such fear. But the fear of going back to her servitude was far worse.

  “I cannot serve,” Zezili said. “Me, the dajians, the other Dorinahs. We’re all the same to you. I know that now.”

  “I know you think you’ve turned your face from me,” the Empress said. “You think you’ve found some other path. But we’ll change your mind. You’ll know, when we are done, who it is you belong to.”

  Her cats crept up alongside Zezili, and blocked her from the door. They circled her.

  “My cats can be very persuasive,” the Empress said. “You understand?”

  “Yes,” Zezili said. And she did.

  The cats pounced.

  Zezili did not have time to bring up her hands.

  50.

  Ahkio welcomed Nasaka to Clan Raona three days after the massacre. What remained of Ahkio’s caravan was nearly packed up and ready for the journey back to the Temple of Oma. The air was cool and wet; the suns had beaten back the high winter frost so fiercely Ahkio worried low spring would come early this year. Far too early.

  Nasaka wound her way past the snuffling bears and carts and somber milita. Ahkio met her in front of the charred ruin of the council house, near the fountain where Caisa was filling water bladders for their trip.

  Ahkio had a ledger full of Kirana’s temple maps under his arm, and a letter from Mohrai’s family at the harbor. Spring had not yet broken in Saiduan, she said. But the watch houses were staffed double. His concern now was encouraging clans to begin rationing early, without inciting panic.

  “So you’ve slaughtered some people,” Nasaka said, “and lost us sixty-five good citizens.”

  Ahkio wondered at that greeting. Some people, he decided, would never change. “I sent you a message over a week ago,” Ahkio said. “You took your time.”

  “There are a great many tasks that need management and minding in order to run a country,” Nasaka said. “It’s not all blind heroic bloodbaths.”

  “We’ll need to speak about Ora Dasai’s mission,” Ahkio said. “I’ve had some news I wanted to speak to you about. In person.”

  “Indeed. It may be time to for us to speak of that in full.”

  “You heard, then?” Ahkio needed people closer to Nasaka, someone who could intercept correspondence. He had begun to think like Kirana, he realized. Like a Kai.

  “I summoned you here because I need to tie some things up at the temple,” Ahkio said. “I’ll be taking the Line back, but I need you to accompany my caravan. On foot.”

  Nasaka narrowed her eyes. “What’s this?”

  “You’re my political and religious advisor. Aren’t you? I’d like you to travel overland and report back. I need to assess our readiness for war. I can rely on your discretion?”

  “Ahkio –”

  “Good. Ghrasia’s been summoned to the Liona Stronghold on an urgent matter, so I can’t have her do it. I’m sure you understand how important this is, without her to help.”

  “If you want a few days to yourself at the temple, you could have asked.”

  “I need a woman on the ground here who can assess this threat.”

  “I could give you Elaiko and –”

  “That will be all,” Ahkio said. He gestured to Caisa, who’d finished filling the bladders. “Let’s call Liaro and go.”

  She slipped on her pack and leapt forward.

  Ahkio left Nasaka with grim company in Raona. Caisa and Liaro accompanied Ahkio on foot to Kuallina, though Liaro’s pace was slow, to account for his fresh but healing injuries. Kuallina was a hulking fortress at the center of Dhai, a tirajista trained construction built for defense. From what, Ahkio wasn’t certain, as it was many days’ walk from both the harbor and the mountain pass that Liona guarded. It was a massive relic from another time, just like Liona, and the temples, and the twisted Line that carried people between them.

  They stepped into the shimmering organic chrysalis that rode the corded Line, and the attendant parajista wished them luck at Oma’s temple.

  “I wonder if she knows how much we’ll need it,” Ahkio said.

  “I’m still worried this is a dead end,” Caisa said.

  “Kirana didn’t think so.”

  Liaro said, “I’m already feeling a bit like some secret explorer. Think we’ll fall off the map of the temple basements all together? Uncover old artifacts? I’m hoping to find a cure for hangovers, myself.”

  Ahkio’s arrival at Oma’s Temple incited a flurry of activity. With Elder Ora Gaiso dead in the attempted coup, and Ora Almeysia banished, he found new faces occupying their places. Younger, less predictable Oras with unknown family connections. He had Caisa note their names. They would need to study them, find their weaknesses, and exploit family ties.

  Late that night, he woke Liaro, Caisa and Una, the gatekeeper, and gained access to the temple basements. The first floor below the temple were the baths, great stone basins of fresh water heated by the beating heart of the temple; low ceilings, steam, and luscious night-creeping plants that ran all along the warm walls. Many of their flowers were in bloom, great white and violet fingers that filled
the air with the smell of honey and roses.

  The four of them carried flame fly lanterns through the cloying heat. When they dropped to the second level, the warmth was gone, replaced by a dry chill that reminded Ahkio that spring threatened to warm the world and unlock the harbor.

  “Ora Nasaka doesn’t like people going down past the third basement level,” Una said as she cleared the bracken trap from the door leading to the third subfloor.

  “Ora Nasaka doesn’t like loud voices,” Liaro said, “or butterflies. I expect she strangles kittens in her spare time.”

  “You’re a rude boy,” Una said. She patted her nest of hair and huffed down the long corridor of storage rooms. The doors here were marked in old Dhai characters, labeling rooms for rice and rye storage, dried hasaen tubers and fiddleheads, honey and salted greens. When they reached the fourth level, Una refused to go any further.

  “Did you ever go down here with Kirana?” Ahkio asked her.

  “Kai Kirana only came down here by herself,” Una said. “You’ll pardon, but the former Kai was a strange bird.”

  Liaro rolled his eyes. “Pots and kettles.”

  Ahkio raised his lantern, so he could see the look on her face. He saw fear more than cunning. “Wait here for us, Ora Una.”

  Her chin trembled. “An hour, Kai. Then I call down the militia.”

  Ahkio plunged ahead, Caisa at his heels, Liaro grumbling behind. The store rooms went on forever. When they reached the sixth floor beneath the massive temple, Ahkio told Caisa to wait in the stairwell.

  “But Kai –”

  “If I’m not back by the time your flame flies settle, have Ora Una call for Nasaka.”

  Once he and Liaro were out of Caisa’s sight, Ahkio pulled out Kirana’s map of the lowest basement. There were no proper rooms here, just massive, tangled vines made out of the same stuff as the temple’s skin; they reminded him of tree roots. He had to squeeze between and among them. Soon his hands were covered in grit and mucus. He sneezed often.

  “I hope this isn’t a fool’s run,” Liaro said.

  “You have something better to do?”