Doppelganger (39 page)
"That's twice!"
"You're seeing things." Mirage refused to look at Eclipse as she retrieved her sword from the dust.
"No. The first time,
maybe
, that explanation would fly. But not now. He shot you down, Sen, and there's a hole in your jacket to prove it."
Now Miryo stepped forward, looking from one to the other of them. "What do you mean, 'the first time'?"
Mirage shot Eclipse a furious look, but it didn't silence him. And somehow hitting him didn't seem like a reasonable course of action. Since she couldn't think of anything else to do, she just stood, trying not to shake, as he answered Miryo's question.
"It was when we were students. She got into a fight with this other trainee. He hit her and killed her. I ran to get a master, but when we came back, Sen was on her feet again, and fighting him."
"He didn't kill me. I was just stunned."
"Not a
chance
, Sen. Even then I knew what a broken neck sounded like."
"And now it's happened again," Miryo said, her voice faint "I saw that Hunter shoot you. You were dead before you bit the ground."
"I
wasn't
dead."
Eclipse laughed wildly. "What are you going to say—the arrow bounced off you?"
Miryo held up her hands to silence both of them. "Please—just
think
about it. This would explain so much."
Mirage's eyebrows shot upward. "Like
what
?"
"Like how you didn't die twenty-five years ago. Maybe Kasane
did
kill you, and then you came back to life."
That produced a momentary silence. Then Mirage shook her head. "But how could I have ended up unkillable? Is there some spell that would do that? No, it doesn't make sense. Besides, if I'm invulnerable, why would the Primes send you to kill me?"
"Maybe they didn't know," Eclipse said.
But now Miryo was shaking her head, eyes wide with appalled understanding. "No, the Primes knew. But you're not completely invulnerable, either. When they sent me after you, the one thing they emphasized above everything else was,
I had to kill you myself
."
More silence. Then Eclipse said, "So if I were to attack her—"
"You stay away from me," Mirage snapped. "I'm damned if I'm going to let you test this theory on me." The very thought made her gut clench. She could still remember, though she had tried to forget, the sickening crunch in her neck as Leksen's foot collided with her jaw. That, and now the impact of the arrow, and the hot, spreading pain, and the blackness.
"It makes sense, though," Eclipse said.
"Except that neither of you has given me a good answer for how I ended up like this."
Miryo snorted. "We've already got ten thousand unanswered questions. What's one more or less?"
Mirage cleaned her sword of dust and her dagger of blood, then sheathed them both, the familiar tasks hiding the shaking of her hands. "Fine. So I'm hard to kill. What now?"
She succeeded in turning them from the subject, at least for the moment. The glance Miryo sent at the corpse on the ground looked involuntary, as though it drew her eyes against her will. "Is that the Wolfstar?"
"Wraith. Yeah. You can tell by his uniform."
"So your commission is finished."
"Only partly," Mirage said, grateful to be discussing something other than her deaths. "There's still the matter of who exactly hired him. Eclipse and I will write to our contact while you go see yours. Then we can decide whether to go after Ashin or our employers first" She snorted. "Assuming, of course, that
Ashin
isn't our employer."
Miryo gave her a startled look. "Do you think she is?"
"Not any of the ones we've met so far. From your description, she sounds too straightforward to be our first witch, and too confident to be our second. So there are at least four of them involved, counting Tari-nakana. But probably more than that, since there are four doppelgangers that we know of."
"Yeah. I'm trying to think of who else has a daughter the right age." Miryo pondered it, then gave it up with a shake of her head. "I'll have to think about it What should we do with him, though?" Again that involuntary glance, her eyes sliding sideways.
"We strip him," Eclipse said. "The uniform marks him, and generally the only way to get a complete one is to kill its owner. So that'll be proof of his death. The body, we'll bury." He raised one eyebrow at Miryo's reaction. "You seem surprised."
"I guess I just didn't expect you to show him that kind of respect."
"He was doing his job. Just as we are. I personally wouldn't have accepted a commission to kill Tari-nakana, but that's not an issue worth defiling his corpse over."
Mirage watched Miryo's reaction with interest.
Did she think we'd leave him for the crows? I didn't much like him, but that's not a fate he deserved
. It seemed that her double had in fact expected something of the sort.
Miryo closed her eyes, swallowed once, and opened them again. This time she looked at the body quite deliberately. "All right, then. Let's get this done and move on."
Snatches of conversation kept drifting to Eclipse's ears. He tried not to look as though he were eavesdropping, but it was hard; he wanted to hear what they were saying.
He could tell Miryo's voice from Mirage's. They were very similar, of course, being built of the same basic stock, but Miryo was a witch, and it showed. Mirage lacked the trained mellifluousness her double had. And there was a near-permanent edge to Mirage's voice that Miryo didn't have.
But the more they talked to each other, the more they began to sound alike. Not entirely, of course, but their tones did shift together. Eclipse had heard it before; people often picked up intonations and speech patterns from those around them. But it was more disturbing, hearing it from two voices that were so similar at their core.
He wondered if it was possible Mirage could pick up all the qualities of Miryo's voice. She had a tin ear, probably caused by the same division that made Miryo's reflexes ordinary. But could either of them develop to match the other? Or was there a basic divide between them, caused by the ritual that had made them two?
That was, in part, the topic of their conversation tonight.
Earlier in the evening they had experimented once more with magic. Miryo had described what happened to the spell she had built during Eclipse's fight with Wraith; she hadn't really been in control, and had barely managed to divert the energy when Mirage reappeared. She had speculated, however, that bad she completed the spell while Mirage was dead—or whatever—it might have worked. Mirage, of course, had flatly refused to test this theory. But they had compromised: Eclipse knocked her out, then moved back a safe distance while Miryo tried a spell.
It backfired. Miryo hadn't seemed surprised, but it was hard to tell; the fallout had all but completely paralyzed her, so her expression was a bit stiff. The spell's effects had only worn off a little while ago.
Eclipse snorted at the memory. The growing rapport between the two occasionally left him on the outside, but they needed him around; without him, they might start trying some of their more crack-brained ideas. Like getting Mirage drunk. Miryo thought the alcohol might inter-fere with the power sliding into her, but Eclipse had gotten her to postpone that particular test. Permanently, he hoped.
"I don't know how we'd do that, though."
He blinked and came back to himself. What had Mirage just suggested?
His year-mate shrugged. He pulled his eyes away and watched her out of his peripheral vision. "You're the witch," she said. "Can't you put something together?"
"It's not that easy," Miryo said, shaking her head. "You don't create a new spell by experimentation, you know."
"Oh, right, because I know
so
much about where spells come from. Does a little bird deliver them?"
There was real bite in Mirage's voice, but Miryo just rolled her eyes, unfazed. "No. They're created by intuition, mostly. Although that's not the way my teachers put it. I never quite understood how this works, but apparently, every so often, there's a witch who just finds herself following a pattern nobody's used before. And it works. They say it's a matter of closeness to the Goddess. That's the way Misetsu got started. Her faith was strong enough mat she received the gift of magic, and the ability to pass it on to her daughters. We're all descended from her."
"So new spells aren't something you can create at will."
"I'm afraid not. Still, the idea's worth looking into. Maybe someone else can find a way to make it work. It runs counter to the way I've been thinking, but we haven't had any luck so far combining our efforts. So maybe separating us completely
is
the solution."
Separation? Eclipse tried not to show his interest. After all, he wasn't even supposed to be listening. But as a potential answer to their problems, it had merit. As near as anyone could tell, the difficulties they were having were caused by the remaining connection between them. Severing it—if that was possible—might fix everything.
He wondered how
they
felt about that. What existed between them was not quite friendship, and not quite sisterhood; it was something different, and as far as he could tell neither of them ever thought about it. They had just accepted it as a matter of course, within a day of meeting. But how would this separation change mat?
He couldn't guess. He knew, however, that if a permanent severing was the only answer to their problems, they would both accept it without question. It was a cost they'd be willing to pay.
Once more they split up. Miryo rode directly into Aystad, while Mirage and Eclipse circled around to a different gate. There was less need for it, since Aystad wasn't a Hunter town like Angrim and Elensk. But caution seemed to be ingrained in the Hunters' bones, and Miryo was beginning to behave that way, too.
She found the Twin Hearths, her designated inn, and took a moment to get her luggage into her room. She didn't bother to unpack it, though. That was another thing she was beginning to pick up. She'd skipped out of enough places in the middle of the night lately that she knew better than to get settled in.
Then it was time to find her contact, Yaryoki. The names and locations of all the Void Hands was one of the things she'd been drilled on and tested over, but just because she knew the streets' names didn't mean she could find them. Aystad was a horribly tangled town. Miryo at least had the sense to ask her innkeeper, and he was very obliging, but following his directions turned out to be impossible. By the time Miryo found Yaryoki's house, nearly an hour later, her temper was frayed quite thin.
She took a moment outside the low garden wall to straighten her hair and calm herself. Then she walked in.
The perimeter spell tripped as she passed through the gate. Miryo kept her steps slow, to give the Cousin time to get to the door. It opened before she reached it, and the short, stocky woman inside bowed her in without a word.
Perhaps it was the way the Cousin seemed unaccountably tense. Perhaps it was the way she didn't ask Miryo's name, as if Yaryoki had been expecting her. Whatever it was, though, instinct prompted Miryo to draw herself suddenly erect as she was conducted into the sitting room.
Where she bowed to the Primes.
Being around Mirage had taught Miryo how to control her expression better. She was proud of herself as she straightened; that control, combined with her sudden suspicion before she walked in, allowed her to face the Primes without flinching, or showing any sign of surprise that they were here, in Aystad, in Yaryoki's house. Expecting her.
Satomi, of course, was in the center. They sat in an arc of high-backed chairs; the resemblance to their formal seats in the hall where they had sent her on her hunt was not accidental. Magical lights cast the room into stark relief. The effect left her feeling as though there was no place to hide.
"We are concerned," Satomi said.
Void it.
"The Cousins were sent with you for protection. We began to worry when they were seen by a Void Hand, and you were not in their company. We investigated."
So
Satomi's eyes were completely expressionless. "You have found your doppelganger."
"Yes."
No point in denying it
.
"And it is not dead."
Miryo found herself flinching at the pronoun. She had grown used to thinking of Mirage as a person; it was jarring to speak with someone who didn't. But Satomi was waiting for an answer. "No, Aken."
She expected the Void Prime to ask her why, and in fact was marshaling her arguments. Not that she thought they'd work, but it was worth a try. Satomi, however, surprised her by staying quiet. It was Rana who spoke next.
"We understand," the Water Prime said, and Miryo's jaw almost hit the floor. "It is difficult. To face one so like you in appearance, to strike that blow, is not an easy thing to ask."