The Mirror Empire (59 page)

Nothing happened.

What had she done back there with the legionnaires? How had she called Oma then?

I’m afraid, she realized. Back then, I wasn’t afraid.

Fear. Fear of death, fear of life, fear of failure, fear of succeeding. Bundles of fear that knotted her insides and tore at her guts. Kept her wound tight, closed off.

She took a breath. Then another. Only fools didn’t feel fear; that’s what Ora Dasai had always taught. But that wasn’t true. Heroes felt fear. Villains did not. She was always afraid to let it go, because if the fear went, so did everything else.

She remembered the burning legion.

She let go.

Opened her eyes.

The braids of Oma’s breath were suddenly clearer. It wasn’t mist but intricately bound symbols. They were trefoils with long, curled tails. The tails bound them together.

Lilia took a deep breath. Her lungs opened. Her skin burned. She focused her power on the delicate end of one of the trefoils and pushed.

Something pushed back.

Lilia gasped.

Great, clawing figures of trefoil-bound mist gathered her up. Pulled her from the ground. Yanked her forward.

Lilia rushed into the air. She dangled eight stories up, propelled to the top of the mirror. The body there had come alive. It was more a torso, really, with stumps for arms and sightless eyes. Weeping thyme sprouted from the eye sockets, covering the cheeks of the face.

Lilia recoiled. But she was bound tightly from head to foot in Oma’s breath. She looked down. A mistake. The height was dizzying. She had fallen from this height once already. Fear riddled her. Oma, she could not fall again. She was already so broken.

The body that was – or had once been – her mother lurched toward her as far as her buried torso would allow. Her mother opened her mouth and made strange garbling sounds. Her tongue was gone.

Tears streamed down Lilia’s cheeks. She knew then why her mother pushed her through the gate so many years ago. This is what the Kai meant to do to Lilia.

“I promised I’d find you,” Lilia said. “And I did. But you opened a gate for them. I have to close it.”

Her mother sank back toward the edge of the mirror. Lilia watched the ropy bands of power pulse and shimmer. Her mother cocked her head. She wasn’t sure how much of her mother was in there, or if the Kai had truly made her into something else.

“The trefoil,” Lilia said. “I can break it, but you have to let me.”

Lilia saw the bands of power begin to grow more sluggish. Her mother grunted. Spasmed.

“Let me go!” Lilia said. “Let me go so I can–”

The breath holding her aloft was suddenly gone.

Lilia fell.

She gasped – air and the breath of Oma, one breath. She envisioned the trefoil with the long tail. She had half a breath to choose – break her fall, or break the mirror? She chose. Lilia pushed her hands forward. She recited the Song of Unmaking and directed the surge at the apex of the mirror. At her mother.

Her mother screamed. The bloody red mist around the mirror’s edge evaporated.

Lilia braced for impact.

She landed in a field of succulents. The broad, slime-filled leaves cushioned her fall. She landed amid a tangle of broken leaves and watery plant matter.

Lilia crawled out of the field and saw the white pillars in front of her. Looked back. The succulents had grown spontaneously, just in time to catch her. Her mother’s final gift.

She gazed up at the mirror. The surface had gone dark. It reflected the fires of the camp, the flags, and the broken succulents. The infused power that had made it glow was gone. Where her mother had been was a scorched mark.

Lilia heard raised voices behind her, the sounds of a kicked nest swarming. But she walked to the face of the mirror anyway. She stared into her own scarred, grimy face. Her torn tunic, smeared in the guts of succulents. Her matted hair, her forgettable face.

“You will remember me,” she said, and broke the face of the mirror with her bare fists.

She brought up her bloody hands as people began to stream toward her. She looked back at them only once. Then she pulled on Oma, a deep, frightful breath, and flayed the first wave of them where they stood.

Blood flecked her face. She brought up her hand and another raw breath of Oma, and tangled together the blood of the dead into perfect trefoils, bound by their long tails. She sang the Saiduan Song of the Dead as she did it. She burned the image of the camp in her mind, the camp at the base of the Liona mountains, where Gian waited for her.

A gate winked open, just big enough to crawl through. Unsure how long she could hold it, she jumped through and released Oma. The gate closed.

Lilia stood in the mud. The moons were out.

“Taigan!” she yelled. She looked back. The camp was intact. No fires. But she could still smell the burnt meat of the legion. “Taigan!”

“Here!” Taigan rode out to meet her from the far fence. “I thought you might return.”

“Is everyone safe?”

“They pulled back,” Taigan said. “I suspect they worried there were more of you. Where’s the legionnaire?”

“I don’t care,” Lilia said. “Where’s Gian and Emlee?”

“Your friends? Where they live, I expect.”

She began to trudge toward the camp.

“Where are you going?” Taigan asked.

“It’s time to fly,” Lilia said.

49

Ahkio walked into the low bedroom of the private home in Raona where Liaro lay. He looked small. Ahkio sat on the edge of the bed. With the council house burned to the ground, the wounded were bedded down in whatever homes would take them.

Liaro reached out a hot, sweaty hand to him and said, “Ahkio.”

“I hear you’re supposed to live,” Ahkio said. He pulled Kirana’s book from his pocket. “If I practice reading aloud, I might get better at it, and you might get some sleep.”

Liaro laughed. It turned into a cough. “Run a man through, then tell him stories. Sounds very Dhai.”

“Ghrasia told me what you did just outside the square. It was brave.”

“I tripped over my own sword and fell on it,” Liaro said. “That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even an infused blade.”

“But brave that you tried,” Ahkio said.

“How
is
your friend Ghrasia?” Liaro said slyly.

“She’s as well as can be expected,” Ahkio said.

“Caisa told me you took that horrible painting down in Clan Leader Talisa’s room before you blew it up.”

“I did. Why?”

Liaro leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t want all those dour people looking at me while some hero took me to bed, either.”

Ahkio’s face burned. He cleared his throat.

Liaro smirked. “I knew it.”

“Can I read to you or not?”

“You know, I always thought Caisa played for the other side,” Liaro said.

Ahkio’s fingers lingered over the text. He still needed to deal with Caisa. But not yet. “Which one?”

“Good point. Not ours.”

“Don’t tell me you’re becoming as paranoid as Nasaka.”

“I’m just worried,” Liaro said. He bunched up his bedsheets in his fists.

“Because you care for her?”

“We’d have been a merry union in another life,” Liaro said, “me and you, Meyna and Caisa.”

“You never liked Meyna.”

“I didn’t
dislike
her.”

“Let me worry about Caisa,” Ahkio said. “I’m good at it.”

Liaro waved a hand. “Fine, fine. Read. It’s been one person after another jabbering away in here, asking when I’ll be ready for cards and bendar.”

Ahkio turned to the last story in Kirana’s book, titled
Faythe
. It was the story he heard at every Festival of Oma. He should have known it by heart. But as he read the story to Liaro, he found it was not at all the story he remembered. In this version, Faith was a slave from Aaldia. The child she carried was not Hahko’s but an enslaved Dhai condemned for thievery in a dajian camp. Faith was not strong and brave and passionate. She was petty and weak and self-serving. The book made Faith into a figure of pity, not worship. Ahkio did not know if he liked it, and could not say if Liaro did, for he had fallen asleep.

Faith lay in childbed to give birth to the first Kai of Dhai. But when Hahko burst in, it was not to claim her child and free her, but to steal the child and proclaim it Kai. Ahkio decided that no, he really didn’t like this story.

At the end of the last page of the book, Faith Ahya was still alive.

And though Ahkio had read the story, he was not certain how it would end. He would remain forever uncertain, because the last page of the book, the page following the broken sentence at the end of the final, intact page, recorder of the last days of Faith Ahya, had been torn out.

He had used it as kindling to light the fire that drove back the shadows.

 

After Liaro was asleep, Ahkio made his way back to the clan square, where the last of the Oras and militia Ghrasia had sent out to net the assassins had returned. They had sent out over a hundred Oras and militia, but he counted scarcely twenty in the square.

Ghrasia stood talking with the group’s leader, a grizzled militia man named Farosi Sana Nako.

“Is this all?” Ahkio asked.

“Afraid so,” Ghrasia said.

“And the assassins?”

“Here,” Farosi said, and pulled back the cover on a cart. Ahkio counted five bodies.

“The full dozen, then,” Ahkio said.

“At a great cost,” Farosi said.

“Walk with me, Kai,” Ghrasia said. She led him across the courtyard and onto a winding lane leading out to the rice fields. He kept his hands in his pockets.

As they walked, he noticed the sightless, feral little girl trailing after them along the weed-tangled road. He hadn’t asked Ghrasia if the girl followed her all the time, but he suspected that unless she was inside a building, the girl was always within shouting distance.

“You were right,” Ghrasia said.

“About what?”

“Me lording over the militia,” she said. “Those assassins did what they did out of blind obedience to their Kai. They made things like that.” She nodded to the feral girl. “And if they’re what we’ll fight… I’d rather we lost than become as they are.”

Ahkio stopped walking. She came up beside him. “What is it?” she said.

“You know this was the easiest part,” he said.

“May I touch you, Kai?”

“Always,” he said.

She put her arms around him. Her head rested just above his heart.

“I know it will get more difficult,” she said. “Just swear to me you’ll keep us the people we are.”

“I swear it,” he said. But even as he spoke the words, he remembered standing over the dying man in the blazing council house basement, ready to impale him with his own blade.

“Then it will be all right,” she said, and pulled away.

 

50

Lilia swept into Emlee’s house, her bleeding hands wrapped in strips of her tattered red tunic. Gian jumped up from the floor and embraced her. Lilia had missed the smell of her hair.

“You’re alive!” Gian said.

Taigan pushed in behind Lilia. He was much too tall for the low ceiling and had to duck.

“What happened out there?” Emlee said.

“I need to see Larn’s priest, the one she gets all those nice things from,” Lilia said. “The ones who are new to camp. The ones you keep on the side of camp you won’t take me.”

Emlee and Cora exchanged a look.

“I’m going to find them with or without you,” Lilia said.

Cora handed her baby over to Emlee. He fussed.

“I’ll take you,” Cora said, “but I don’t know what you’d want with him. Him and his priestesses are a secretive bunch. Larn has to–”

“I know what Larn does,” Lilia said. “Take me to them.”

Cora looked up at Taigan. “Him, too?”

“Yes…
him
, too.”

Lilia asked one of the orphan packs to guard Taigan’s bear. They would make enough of a stir without the bear.

Cora led them through deep mud, around dark hovels stained in smoke, to the far edge of the camp. She pointed to a large round hovel thatched in everpine and mud. “That’s the place,” she said.

Lilia strode toward the door. Taigan stayed silent.

She entered unbidden. It was dim inside, but she could see the women’s seamed faces, their broad frames and hands. An adenoak staff with a jeweled knob at the end rested near the door.

All talk ceased as Lilia entered. Someone pulled back a curtain at the other side of the room. Larn was lit in profile, sitting up thin and disheveled in the bed.

The man who had pulled back the curtain stared at her with dark eyes in a very Dorinah face.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“They’re gifted,” Taigan said.

“Dorinah’s gifted,” Lilia said. “Soon to be my gifted.”

The faces of the Empress of Dorinah’s Seekers stared out at her. “What are your names?” Lilia asked. They told her: Voralyn, Amelia, Laralyn. Their leader – they called her a Ryyi – was Tulana. Tulana sat on a raised bench on the other side of the room, combing out her hair. Their clothes were tatters, their faces smeared in grime.

“And you?” Lilia asked the man.

“Sokai,” he said.

“Zezili says hello,” Lilia said. “And you’re all going to help me. You’re going to bind yourself to me, and you’re going to come back to Dhai with me.”

There was nervous laughter.

But Tulana did not smile. Lilia saw a soft red mist begin to suffuse the woman’s body.

Lilia pushed out her hands, throwing her own web of red mist. She bound a skein of Oma’s breath around the woman, cutting her off from the satellite.

Tulana’s face paled.

Taigan nodded. “That was very good,” he said.