The Mirror Empire (3 page)

“Was she the one?” Maralah asked.

Taigan shifted his weight as another cold wind curled in through the windows, bringing with it the smell of the sea and the acrid stink of the plants. “She died in the ruin of a ragged gate,” he said, “so let’s hope not. Perhaps all of those who can open gates are dead, and you can let me go in peace.”

Maralah went back to the rail and watched the invaders disembark from their bloated boats. The men’s chitinous armored forms rippled up the beach. All men. She had yet to see a woman among them. They rode no dogs or bears, brought with them no pack animals or siege engines, only the burbling plants and fungi and red algae tides, and those they tugged with them from coast to coast, like fish dragged along in great nets.

As she watched, a bit of the sky tore above the ships, like something from a fantastic nightmare. She had a glimpse of some… other place where the sky was a murky amber-orange, as if on fire. A rippling shadow crossed the sky there, a black mass that made her skin crawl and her breath catch. The sky shimmered again, and the seams between her world and… the other closed. She let out her breath. She pointed at the sky. “The world is ready to come apart on its own. There’s an omajista more skilled than you who can control it.”

They had started seeing those mad tears in the sky eight years before, in the far, far north. She had not believed the sightings at first, thought it was just some drunk tuber farmer enchanted by especially brilliant northern lights. But no. Oma, the dark star, was creeping back into orbit. The worlds were coming together again far sooner than anyone anticipated.

“There will be an omajista among the Dhai people who can open the way,” she said. “There always is, when Oma rises. You don’t have that many Dhai to pick through. We only need one.”

“The Dhai are weak-minded cannibals. Let the invaders take that maggoty country and their omajistas with it.”

Maralah had fought the invaders on every coast, in every province, at the height of every snowy peak. When she sought out her father’s house in Albaaric after the fighting, she found only a weeping ruin and the slimy remnants of red algae smearing the walls at knee height, where the highest tide had reached. She and her brother had not spoken to her father or sisters in twenty years, but she went to the house in search of living kin – a near-cousin, a second-mother, even a village brother – despite the silence. She found nothing but the taste of smoke. They never left the bodies, these invaders. What they did with them… Maralah did not care to guess. But rumor had it they had a taste for blood.

“The city is done, Taigan,” Maralah said. “Now you must decide if you’ll perish with it.”

“May your roads run long, then,” Taigan said, grimacing.

“And yours,” Maralah said. “Don’t come back without an omajista. A real one. You understand?”

“They’ve reached the walls,” he said.

Maralah looked. Black, slithering plant flesh swarmed the shimmering blue walls, even as the structure spat and hissed at them. The sanisi standing at the top of the walls raised their hands to call on the ascendant star Para, Lord of the Air, for protection.

When she looked back, Taigan had gone.

Maralah took the worn hilt of her weapon and pulled it from the sheath at her back. The room cooled. A soft violet light emanated from the length of the willowthorn branch. In response to her touch, the branch awakened; the hilt elongated and snapped around her wrist twice, binding her fate to the weapon’s. She watched blood weep from the branch, gather at its end, and fall to the stones. The weapon sang to her, the voices of hungry ghosts, all Saiduan, all collected in the living weapon when Sina was at its height. The invaders did not have ghosts, because their souls were not of this world. A pity, that. Her weapon was always so hungry.

Maralah swept the sword over her head and slammed it into the living flesh of the hold. Violet light burst across her vision. The weapon keened. The hold wailed as a massive wound appeared on its face. Thick, viscous green fluid gushed from the hold, pouring across her forearms, her boots. Her weapon licked greedily at the soul of the hold.

She prayed to Sina it would be enough to survive the night.

2

High summer, the festival season, when the Temple of Oma played host to dozens of traders and craftspeople, all of them eating and sweating and drinking in the temple’s great banquet hall. During her decade in Oma’s temple, Lilia had learned how to navigate through its mass of humanity like a skilled sea captain.

She spent her time in the temple scullery cleaning sinks with morvern’s drake and bottling honey from the giant spotted beehives in the back garden. In the afternoons, she hobbled up the long tongue of the grand stairway, favoring her mangled right foot – which had never healed properly – and changed the bed linens for the temple’s novice Oras – the parajistas, tirajistas, and sinajistas who would claim the title of Ora on passing their initiation. The other temples – those dedicated to Para, Sina, and Tira – only trained one type of jista, but Oma’s temple claimed the very best of them all, bringing them together into one very powerful – and, in Lilia’s opinion, very arrogant – bunch.

As Lilia came downstairs, dragging a bag of dirty linen too massive to take through the scullery stair, she saw her friend Roh waiting for her next to the heavy carved talon of the banister.

She hesitated on the stair. He saw her and grinned. His grin could fill a room. It pierced her heart every time she saw it, because that grin made her want to trail after him like some love-struck fool, and she had seen enough novices and drudges acting just that way around him to realize how silly it was.

A plump novice named Saronia passed behind him. Seeing him grinning at Lilia, she said, “You should be pickier with your affections, Roh. You can afford to be.”

Roh paid her no mind. He offered a hand to Lilia and said, “Leave the laundry. I want to show you something.”

Saronia rolled her eyes. Two others had joined her, smooth-cheeked, well-fed novices from Clan Garika. They wore the blue tunic, trousers, and green apron of novices; their hair was shorn short and dark, like Roh’s – like Lilia’s. “All she’s good at is laundry,” Saronia said. “Didn’t your mothers ever tell you you should flirt with Garikas, not drudges? My mothers know yours, you know, and they wouldn’t approve.”

Roh rounded on Saronia. “Go wrap your head in a litany,” he said. “Maybe next time you’ll remember it, then, instead of dropping Para in the middle of building a vortex.”

“I’m more talented than–”

“You’re talented at getting people to think you’re talented,” Roh said. “I could bury you chest-deep in laundry and you wouldn’t be able to breathe your way out of it with Para.”

“You’re an arrogant child.”

“And you’re a terribly jealous woman,” Roh said, “because my mother could have been yours. Too bad you were barely gifted and she gave you away.”

There were five genders in Dhai – female-assertive, female-passive, male-assertive, male-passive, and ungendered. Saronia always used the female-assertive for herself, while Lilia thought of herself in the female-passive. But Roh happily used the ungendered pronoun in reference to Saronia. It was considered a rude thing, of course, to use the wrong one, but it seemed to especially annoy Saronia.

“I’m telling Ora Almeysia you said that.”

“Go ahead. And I’ll tell her where you light off to after dark,” Roh said.

Saronia curled her lip and turned away.

Lilia waited until they were in retreat, then started down the stairs again. Her clothes were the same as the novices’, only the simple gray of the temple’s drudges to their brilliant novice blue.

Roh hopped up the steps to meet her. She had a desperate urge to put her hands in his silky hair and draw him closer. But she pulled away from him instead and averted her gaze.

“I found that symbol,” he said. “The trefoil with the tail that you drew.”

He pulled the book she’d written in out of his tunic pocket. She also noticed the edge of one of Kalinda’s letters peeking out, which she was fairly certain she’d never given him. Had he stolen it?

“Where?” Lilia said.

“First, tell me how it helps you find your mother,” he said. “I asked around, Li. You’re supposed to be an orphan.”

“It’s my business, Roh.”

“You asked me to help.”

Lilia tried to snatch the book back, but Roh was too fast. Spry, light on his feet, it was always difficult to tell how much of that was his dance training and how much was him playing with the forces of Para. He fairly floated away from her, lighter than air.

“How will you evade me when Para is descendent?” Lilia said. “Your tricks won’t work then.”

“By then, I’ll be a fine fighter,” he said, “married to a dozen powerful sinajistas who’ll protect me from you.”

Roh was at least six years away from becoming a fully trained Ora – one of the jistas trained in theology and ethics across the Dhai valley – and Para would be descendent far sooner than that. Even with its erratic orbit, it wouldn’t dominate the sky more than another two or three years. Sina was coming around next. She wondered how Roh would get along then, because she couldn’t imagine him being happy without a satellite to call on.

“So, are you going to tell me what it means or not?” Lilia said. She had slept very well the last week after turning over the symbol; not one shrieking treeglider or bloody-eyed bear. It reinforced her convictions. She was old enough to make good on her promise. She wasn’t such a weak little girl anymore.

“It’s just upstairs,” he said, pointing.

Lilia saw no Ora watching them from the great spiraling bloom of the stairs. Above, the hourglass of the twin suns blinked at her through the giant dome that capped the temple’s foyer, twelve floors above her. She squinted. The afternoon meal had already been prepared and washed up. They wouldn’t be looking for her for some time. Even though she was just a drudge, she often took part in strategy games with the novices, and even some Oras, but her next game wasn’t until the early evening.

“Alright,” she said, and set the laundry out of the way, just outside the entrance to the scullery stair that ran behind the banquet hall. She made to go back to the main stair, but Roh gestured for her to go up through the scullery stair instead.

She limped along behind him, dragging her mangled foot. Kalinda had ensured she didn’t lose her whole leg, but she was missing two of her toes and much of the ball of her foot, and the melted flesh and scar tissue left behind wasn’t pretty. Roh once asked her if it hurt. Only when she looked at it, she told him. When he laughed at that, she knew they would be friends.

They went up four sets of stairs and passed two other curious drudges. Kinless and ungifted, just like Lilia.

“How far are we going up?” Lilia asked. “I’m not allowed above the sixth floor.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Her foot was already throbbing. Her breathing was labored. She felt the tightness in her chest that often signaled a seizing of her lungs. She firmed her jaw and leaned her weight on the rail and kept going. What she lacked in physical power she had to make up for in endurance and patience.

When they passed the eleventh floor, Lilia’s chest hurt. She hated that Tira had hindered her in so many ways. She tugged at Roh’s tunic. “We can’t go up there. That’s the Kai’s quarters and the Ora libraries. Drudges aren’t allowed.” She took a moment to catch her breath.

“Do you want to see it or not?” Roh said. “The Kai’s sick, so they’ve moved her a couple floors down. There’s nobody up there. Do you want to know what that mark means or not?”

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because you have to see it.”

Roh came to the top of the steps. They were in the corridor outside the Assembly Chamber, where the Kai often met with the elder Oras and clan leaders. Lilia had never seen it, but she knew it by the markings on the door.

Roh pushed open the door, an ancient construction of amberwood banded in iron and marked with the Dhai characters for “come together.” Lilia crept after him.

Inside the chamber, a massive round table of black walnut dominated the room. As they were at the top of the temple, the ceiling here was a tapestry of colored glass. The hourglass of the twin suns made up its center, directly above the table, illuminating it like some divine shrine to Oma. Lilia moved further into the room and saw the whole sky represented in the glass: the double suns, sometimes called Shar, the little red sun, Mora, and all three of the satellites – blue Para, green Tira, purple Sina. At the very edge of the patterned glass, closest to a second archway leading to a sitting room, was a fourth star, nearly black. The elusive Oma. Lilia did not see it represented often. Fingers of blackness followed it, like a great, spiny growth had crawled into the glass. On the other half of the ceiling were the moons – little Zini, irregular Mur, and great white Ahmur and its hazy tiara of satellites.

“Li,” Roh said.

Lilia pulled her gaze from the ceiling. Roh stood next to the great wooden table, pointing at the middle of it.

She saw a mosaic of patterned stones at the center of the table. It was a map of Dhai.

Roh tapped a section of the map at the edge of the woodlands, all the way on the other side of the country, past Mount Ahya, along the Hahko Sea. A jagged dart of green stones there made up a finger-length peninsula. Set just to the left of the peninsula was a piece of jade carved into the precise shape of the figure that Lilia’s mother had pressed into her flesh. It was shocking to see it, after all this time. She’d half thought she made it up, along with everything else that happened that day in the woods.

“You going to tell me what it means now?” Roh said.

“It means I’m not crazy,” Lilia said.

“Well, that’s debatable.”

Lilia leaned across the table to get a better look. She traced the shape of the jade: a perfect trefoil with a long, curled tail. Pain radiated up her bad leg, but she hardly noticed it. She saw other symbols, too, which she didn’t recognize. A triangle with two circles where the Temple of Para should be; a circle with two lines through it in the woodland around Tira’s temple; a coiled curl with a circle at the center near Sina’s temple; and a square with a double circle inside over the Temple of Oma. There was one more near the Liona Stronghold that marked the mountain pass that separated them from Dorinah – a trefoil with four tails, one at each compass point.