The Mirror Empire (11 page)

“After my mother died. Kalinda brought me.”

“Who’s Kalinda?”

“A friend of my mother’s,” Lilia said.

Taigan pointed to her wrist. “And did Kalinda give you that?”

Lilia looked at her hand. “What?”

“The ward? You can see it, can’t you?”

Lilia realized the wrist Taigan pointed at was the same one where her mother had burned the trefoil into her skin. “There’s nothing here,” Lilia said. “I don’t see anything.”

Taigan laughed. “You will,” he said. His certainty made Lilia fearful. She had given herself away, and he’d come for her, just as Kalinda warned her.

The sanisi turned as two novices approached, leading a hulking white-and-brown bear that must have weighed a ton. It wasn’t until that moment, when the sanisi took the bear’s reins in his slender fingers, that she realized what she had done. Everything had happened very quickly.

“Up,” the sanisi said. He brought the bear beside her. The stink of it was nearly overpowering.

Lilia took a step back. The bear snuffled at her; its yellow eye seemed enormous, the size of her fist. Its great bifurcated paws dug impatiently into the soft ground. Fangs protruded from the upturned snout. It flicked its forked purple tongue at her; the yellow eye narrowed, slitted like a cat’s. The bears were native to the woodland and used their tongues to sample potentially deadly plants before ingesting them. That was why her mother kept one in the village. It helped them avoid contaminated vegetation or new mutations of familiar plants that may have become poisonous. The broad, split paws also made it effective at getting through marshy woodland. They were faster in the marsh than most people.

“I can’t go,” Lilia said.

“Too late,” Taigan said, and took her by the waist.

She was astonished by his strength. But even more at his rudeness. He had touched her without asking. Once she was in the saddle, he took the bear’s rein and walked beside it.

“You should ask first,” Lilia said, indignant.

“Ask about what?”

“You can’t just grab a person.”

“Those with strength rule over those without.”

“Strength doesn’t make you better. It makes you a bully.”

“You agreed to come with me, girl.”

“You could be less rude,” she said, and looked back at the temple. But there was no one to see her go. Just the novices stepping back into the shadows, as if fearful they too would catch the sanisi’s eye and be taken away. She feared that she was some sacrifice, a token sent to appease their northern neighbors, to ensure another five hundred years of peace. They would not miss her. Tomorrow, they would not remember her name.

She choked on a sob. She’d given herself away to save Roh, and now she had no idea how she was going to get to the woodland coast to find her mother.

“Hush now,” Taigan said. “The first thing you must learn is that there is a time to mourn, and a time to act. Now we act.”

Ahead of them, the great webbed netting that encircled the temple garden from the wild heath and untamed lands between clan territories loomed large. A parajista waited at the webbed gate. She pressed her hands forward and sliced through the gate with a cone of air.

The sanisi led the bear through. They traveled across the stone bridge connecting the rocky spur that housed the temple and the broad plateau it had been separated from. The plateau was barren of all but the most harmless of vegetation, most of it burned out. The sanisi took them to the head of the precipitous path that cut into the edge of the plateau. Down and down they went into the valley as the suns rose and Para’s light entered the sky with it, bathing the world in a blue wash. As they walked, the sanisi kept his short blade out. Squelching tripvines and bramblewash sensed their heat and motion, and slithered their way across the path. The bear ate most of what assailed them, but for the bigger plant life, the sanisi used his blade to hack and cut and beat back. Lilia clung tightly to either side of the high seat of the saddle. No one traveled the spaces between the temples and clans without a trained Ora by their side, preferably one skilled in drawing on the dominant body in the sky.

After hacking off the clawing fingers of the fifth yellow pox plant of the morning, the sanisi said, “Why your tirajistas haven’t irradiated this filth continues to baffle me.”

“Where do you think it all came from?” Lilia asked. “The Oras say we were the ones to blight the world, during the war with your people, two thousand years ago.”

Taigan frowned. “I cannot contest that. The world was a heaving wasteland after that. It took two thousand years just to become half-habitable again.”

“It wasn’t just us,” Lilia said. “You’re no better.”

Taigan gazed at the wriggling tendril of a creeper spitting green, acidic bile into the dirt. “No,” he said, “We are not.”

Lilia leaned forward in the saddle. “Why did you save him?” she asked.

“What?”

“Roh. Why did you save him? Why trade him for me? I’m nothing. I’m nobody.”

The sanisi shook his head and tugged the bear forward. It caught up the wriggling tendril with its tongue and ate it.

“I think you know,” Taigan said.

Lilia looked away.

They traveled until midday and stopped for a rest on a scorched patch of ground that had been prepared for the purpose. The sanisi tried to feed her some kind of meat, which she refused. She foraged for fleshy tubers and the fat rose cones her mother had taught her to find. The sanisi turned up his nose at her fare and ripped into his meal of dead animal flesh. After letting the bear graze, they moved on. North. To the sea.

In the early afternoon, they came to a crossroads. Lilia only knew Dhai by maps. She hadn’t left the temple since Kalinda dropped her there. But maps told her that northwest lay Clan Sorila, populated mostly by timber farmers and plant sculptors, and northeast was Clan Garika. She knew from the letters she received from Kalinda that she kept a way house on the road to Garika.

Taigan began to pull them northwest, to Sorila. She bit her tongue, wondering if he would uncover the ruse. She waited a few minutes before she said, “I’m glad we’re going to Sorila. I have family there.”

“You said you have no family.”

“My mother is dead. But I have an aunt and cousins in Sorila.” Lilia had told many lies in her life, but telling that one, to a sanisi, felt the boldest by far.

He drew the bear to a halt.

“Never lie to me,” Taigan said. “It is a useless endeavor.”

“You could be nicer,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“
Everyone
could be nicer,” she said.

“And what a world that would be.”

“You build the world through your actions,” Lilia said. “Yours are very poor.”

“You argue like a mewling toddler,” he said. “The last girl was less talkative.”

“What girl?”

“Let me sit a moment in peace.”

This was the second longest conversation they’d had. She wondered what a rollicking noisy night in Saiduan sounded like.

“How did you know about the symbol on my wrist?” Lilia asked as Taigan started forward again.

“I can see it.”

“How?”

“Because I draw the breath of the same star as the person who made it,” Taigan said, “the blood witch you call mother, yes? Blood witches, ha. Only one people calls them that. Wards are complicated things, stitched together with litanies created just for the purpose. But yours is one I recognize. It’s a simple hazing ward. It makes it difficult for people to see and remember you. Useful, I imagine, in your state.”

“What’s my state?” Lilia asked.

“Don’t you know by now, little bird? Why would anyone try and protect you, a little nameless drudge?”

“Because she loved me,” Lilia said. “My mother put this ward on me, and she loved me very much.”

“Your mother wanted to save you for someone else,” Taigan said. “She was an omajista, based on the color and composition of that ward, and she likely suspected you would be the same.”

“There aren’t any omajistas,” Lilia said.

“Not many,” Taigan said. “Not yet. We’ll take off that ward tonight. I suspect it plays a role in reducing your sensitivity to Oma.”

Lilia gripped her wrist. “I’m not an omajista, or a blood witch, or anything like that.”

“Nor are you a woman grown,” he said, “but you will be.”

“I’m nearly five years past the age of consent!”

“In Saiduan, you’d still be a veiled child. Please, your chatter hurts my head.”

Lilia considered him the way she might a kindar piece on a board. What was his strategy? Surely the Saiduan didn’t want to kill her. But she couldn’t imagine they would keep her in their care when they found out she wasn’t gifted.

Dusk came much sooner under the massive canopy of the trees. Lilia only saw the dim lights of the way house when they were nearly on top of it. The way house was a large, sinuous thing hollowed out of a vine that wrapped its way up the trunk of a bonsa tree that must have been a thousand years old. For the last hour, Taigan’s pace had quickened. He glanced back more often. Now that the way house was in sight, she worried he might go past it.

“Are we stopping?” Lilia asked.

“Someone is following,” he said.

“So we aren’t stopping.”

“We must. They’re worse at night, and harder to sense.”

“Who?”

He led the bear into the light of the way house. “Come now, get down.” He called up at the way house. “Hello there; send someone out!”

Lilia thought it was very rude.

Taigan reached up to grab her.

She batted his hands away. “Ask first!”

“Do you want help off the bear or not?”

“Yes,” she said, and held out her arms.

When he pulled her off, she dropped to the ground and said, “See? Was that so difficult?” It took her a moment to find her balance. Her legs were sore. She clung to the side of the bear.

The sanisi muttered something in Saiduan, and she wished she’d paid more attention in Dasai’s classes.

Lilia walked toward the light of the house. She heard the hiss of the sanisi’s blade.

She expected to see something terrible as she turned – a rogue walking tree or some slithering nightwalker. Or, worse, the sanisi’s sword impaling her. But the attackers were human. Three men stepped out of the shadows, moving so quickly, she did not have time to scrutinize their faces. They bore the blue-glowing bonsa blades of parajistas in their fists. As they raised their arms, though, she saw the hilts were not wrapped around their wrists the way the militia’s did.

No, these blades protruded from the men’s wrists – hungry, snarling brambles that grew from some dark seed implanted in their flesh.

She panicked.

She’d seen those weapons before.

Lilia dropped beneath the bear and scrambled toward the way house, dragging her bad foot behind her. She heard the hissing kiss of the blades and the roar of the bear. But instead of going inside, she ran around to the other side of the way house. The ground immediately outside the house was scorched and safe. She crouched there and waited, listening to the fighting.

The sanisi could not save her from those men. Only one person had kept her safe all this time, and only one woman would believe her about those strange weapons. Could Kalinda help her again?

Taigan cursed. Lilia saw a burst of blue light.

She darted further into the woods, away from the purls of blue light. Her breath came fast. She tried to slow her breathing as she slogged, fearful of her poor lungs. She limped through snaking creepers and sticky pox tendrils and emerged again on the road, behind the sanisi and his attackers. She saw the bear snuffling off back the way they had come, spooked by the fight.

She hobbled forward, making soothing sounds, and – with great effort – climbed onto its back again. She glanced behind her only once. She saw the blue arc of the weapons, still whirling, the battle still undecided between Taigan and… who? The same people who’d come for her before, so many years ago. She had made a promise, and she intended to keep it. But things were spiraling out of hand, and she didn’t think she could do it alone.

“We’ll make our own fate,” she murmured to the bear, and urged him forward, back to the crossroads, back to Kalinda Lasa.

 

9

Ahkio stood at the eastern wall of the Assembly Chamber, staring out the wall of windows overlooking the Pana Woodlands. Para’s bluish light kissed the horizon, herald of the double dawn, which was just a few hours off. The light washed over deep green adenoaks and clumps of pale lime-colored bamboo and less savory things that rolled out across the plateau and into the distance. Clouds boiled over Mount Ahya, obscuring the summit. It was a rare day when one saw the peak.

He had come up here to be alone after the disturbance with the sanisi downstairs, but as ever, Nasaka found him. He knew the footsteps behind him were hers, even before she drew a breath and said, “They’re getting ready to prepare your sister. I suggest you spend your grieving hours with her.”

“If Oma isn’t rising, that sanisi made a good show of it,” Ahkio said.

Nasaka held a green sheaf of papers in one hand; the other rested on the butt of her willowthorn sword. “We hoped it was a century distant,” Nasaka said. “But as with all things as they pertain to the gods of the satellites, our calculations can only be approximate. They bend us to their own will.”

“He came here looking for omajistas,” Ahkio said.

“That’s a grand leap in logic.”

“Is it? He asked for Kirana first. She’s a powerful channeler, Nasaka. I’m not. And that girl…”

“We test every child in Dhai,” Nasaka said. “Could we have missed one, especially one not able to draw on a star we haven’t seen in two thousand years? Certainly.”