The Mirror Empire (17 page)

He ran into the sprawl to see if he could figure out who they were fighting. As he did, he saw the Kai’s brother, Ahkio, run past him, back toward the Sanctuary. Roh knew him from his early days at the temple, when the Kai’s brother visited her more often. Ahkio’s hair was matted with blood; the ascension ceremony, Chali had said. Was someone trying to take the country now, before the Kai came into power? Three militia members sprinted after Ahkio.

Roh did not hesitate. He grabbed the nearest militia woman by the collar of her tunic and yanked her back. He jabbed her twice in the kidneys, just as he’d learned in his defense classes. He took her everpine sword. The hilt curled around his wrist. He ran after the others. Ahkio entered the Sanctuary just as the two militia turned to see what had become of their companion.

Roh jumped up and jammed the fist of his weapon into the face of the one closest to him. He felt bone crunch. Blood spattered. He swung his blade just as the second man thrust forward. Their weapons met. Roh rolled smoothly away, ducked behind him, and hacked at the back of his legs. The second man fell.

Out of breath, his blood already pounding with adrenaline, Roh pushed into the Sanctuary – and stopped short. He still held Para beneath his skin. He itched to send an attacker spinning off into the void.

Almeysia stood at the center of the Sanctuary, facing Ahkio.

She raised her gaze to Roh’s, and he knew.

It was not a full memory. It was not some arcane knowledge. Just instinct. Something terrible passed between them in that moment. It was her fault. She had attacked him in the hall. Closed his eyes, so he could not see.

Almeysia was a tirajista, but a very sensitive one. It meant she could draw more deeply on Tira than many of her contemporaries, even in decline. Roh knew that, but he shook off his sword and channeled Para anyway.

The floor of the Sanctuary shook. Roh spun up a vortex of air as a slithering fanged vine burst from the floor of the temple, cracking through stones and overturning tables.

Roh pressed forward, unfazed, as the vine lashed at him, battering itself against the whirling winds. He ignored Ahkio’s defensive stance and focused more intently on his creation, intensifying the howling winds. He had never felt so powerful.

The fingers of the vine burst apart. The trunk split in two.

Another vine surfaced. Then another.

The third one nearly broke his concentration. Roh stumbled back. The vine caught him around one leg.

Ahkio stepped forward, grabbed Roh’s discarded sword–

–and sliced Roh free.

Ahkio was yelling something at him, but Roh knew the minute he lost his focus, Almeysia would conjure something to eat him. He pressed forward across the cracked stones and shattered bits of the tables, the burst vegetal matter and broken thorns.

He hadn’t mastered the ability to hold a shield and deploy an offense at the same time. Almeysia hounded him with more and more attacks. He broke a stout rattler tree, and severed woody varga vines, all the time advancing on her position.

Almeysia had to work harder for her manifestations, though. As he came forward, he saw she was drawn and trembling. Sweat soaked her tunic.

He was younger, fitter, and his star was ascendant.

The Sanctuary doors burst open behind him.

A blast of air took him off his feet. He created a fast bubble of air to cushion his fall and landed lightly on the other side of the Sanctuary.

Almeysia took the full force of the attack. The great stone lanterns of the gods ringing the altar smashed against the far side of the Sanctuary. Almeysia went with them, tossed to the floor like a tangle of seaweed.

Roh let go of Para. The tension that had held him upright left his body. Exhaustion rolled over him. He sank to his knees.

On the other side of the Sanctuary, Nasaka and Ohanni stood with Ahkio. Ohanni was a parajista and still had a whirling cone of air circling her, churning up dust and debris. Roh could see the misty blue shape of it, sapphire streamers whirling from her fingers.

The Sanctuary was a ragged mess of twisted, seeping plant flesh and broken tables. Tattered paper lanterns tumbled across the floor. The tiles of the floor were broken, jagged in places where Almeysia’s plants had torn through.

“Oma’s breath,” Ohanni said. “Did you do this, Roh?”

Nasaka strode across the Sanctuary to Almeysia. “She’s alive,” Nasaka said. “Bring a draught, Ora Ohanni. I want her drugged. And you–” Nasaka turned to Roh. “You stay where you are. You have much to explain.”

Roh stared into his hands. He had never been in a fight before. Not a real one.

He fell to his knees, trembling. He should be retching, he knew. He should be horrified at causing harm.

But he had never felt so alive.

 

 

16

The boar spiders swarmed Lilia at the edge of the Woodland. Each spider stood as high as her knee and whispered forth from deep burrows hidden by floxflass nests. Lilia froze, the way her mother had taught her. The spiders clambered up her trousers. One perched on her head. She closed her mouth and breathed through her nose, trying to stay calm. Boar spiders were like hornets – they only bit when provoked – but she was hungry and exhausted, and the fear that roiled over her was paralyzing.

The swarm continued to gain strength. She must have stepped on a nest. Nests were often connected, and her misstep had triggered others in the area. She closed her eyes so she did not have to look at their fangs.

A poor way to die, she thought, before even stepping foot in the woodlands.

She began to count her breaths. Something heavy, much larger than a spider, crunched in the undergrowth.

A vortex of air blasted her from above. She flailed, barely kept her feet. The tendrils of air bundled up dozens of spiders and propelled them into the dark woods around her. Lilia heard them land in the trees and crunch in the undergrowth. Several smashed wetly into massive tree trunks.

She opened her eyes.

Gian stood before her, just a dozen steps down the path, blue-glowing bonsa sword in hand. She looked much taller out here, formidable, like some historic hero from a tapestry come to life. A bear snuffled behind her, licking its snout.

Lilia patted herself down, skin still crawling with the memory of the spiders. “I was all right,” she said.

Gian smirked and came forward. “Of course you were.”

Lilia scrambled away from her, back into the hanging ivy that flanked the path. “I’m not going with you.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry. Tell Kalinda–”

“Kalinda’s dead.”

“Oh, no.”

“A sanisi,” Gian said. She sheathed her weapon, putting out the blue glow of it, surrendering them again to the dim light that filtered through the forest canopy. Lilia wasn’t sure of the time of day. She’d been walking for hours, and her bad leg throbbed. Her breath came so heavy, she’d had to stop twice and take her mahuan powder.

“Taigan killed her?”

“Is that his name?” Gian surveyed the woodland around them, as if looking for more spiders.

“Shouldn’t you be an Ora? You can channel Para. All the jistas become Oras.”

“Not all,” Gian said. “Some become healers and seers, those with poorer gifts.” She leaned in to Lilia, peering at her as if she were a mystery that needed unraveling. She had broad cheekbones and black, black eyes. Lilia thought she might stumble into them. “And some of us believe in freedom of the individual over the tyranny of the common good.”

Lilia wasn’t sure what that meant but let it lie. “What are you going to do, now that you’ve found me?”

“Lot of things I could do, couldn’t I? Wrap you up in a vortex and cart you back to my safe house. Maybe just cut you in two and leave you here.”

“You sound like the sanisi,” Lilia said.

“Don’t try and shame me,” Gian said. “It was my aunt killed back there. The woman who saved you, and me, and at least a hundred other children from that hungry war and the Kai’s army back home.”

“What war?” Lilia said. The Dhai had no armies. She shook her head. “You’re trying to confuse me.”

“Maybe,” Gian said. Lilia wasn’t sure she liked the way Gian looked at her. “How far away is this place you think you lived?”

“It’s on the coast. The other side of the woodland. In the northeast. There’s a peninsula that juts into the sea.”

“Fasia’s Point. Yes, I know it.”

“It has a name?”

“Most things do.”

“We can lose the sanisi in the woodland,” Lilia said, trying quickly to come up with a rational reason to plunge ahead. “He’ll know every road. Take me to Fasia’s Point. By the time we come back, he’ll have lost us.”

“What happens after Fasia’s Point?”

“Then, I’ll… I’ll go wherever you want.” She held out her scarred wrists, an old habit. “I swear it.”

Gian stared at her outstretched arms. “Your mother was a blood witch, wasn’t she?”

Lilia dropped her arms. “Where did you hear that? No one says that.”

“In the valley, they don’t,” Gian said. “In the woodlands, they do. And… other places.” For the first time, Gian pulled her hand away from her bonsa sword. The branch loosened its hold on her wrist, retracted. “I’ll take you to Fasia’s Point so you can see what’s there. But you won’t find your mother.”

“I promised I’d go back.”

“So after I take you there, and we lose the sanisi, and you see what you can see, you go where I want. No fuss. No arguing. No running off into the night alone.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because I made a promise, too, to Kalinda. I promised no harm would come to you, and I’d deliver you to her people. I make good on my promises. In that, we’re alike.”

“I’ll go,” Lilia said. Roh’s life for hers, fulfilling her promise for Gian’s… she was trading a good many things these days, all of which involved her freedom. She was done bargaining, but Gian didn’t need to know that yet.

They spent the rest of the day climbing up into the hills. Lilia knew they entered the Woodland proper at dusk, because that’s where the formal road ended. They traveled instead on a mossy path lined in red roses and fireweed. The trees, too, changed, from elegant and well-groomed bonsa trees to tangled rattlers and stinging foreshore. The trees grew twisted and massive, like a maze constructed by a mad giant with a very perverse idea of how to channel Tira. But it was the bone trees that evoked the Woodland the most for Lilia. She saw her first in many years as they climbed through a crush of rattler trees that grew across the path, Gian’s bear chomping through what they could not clear themselves. The bone tree stood alone in a little clearing, no taller than Lilia. Its dirty yellowish trunk and spiny branches were made of literal bone, the remnants of the small mammals and birds it caught in its clawed branches. The creatures were drawn by the sweet smell of the poisonous sap it secreted. The sap killed all nearby plant life, too, hence the patch of dead ground ringing the tree. A dozen long-toothed, grinning skulls made up one branch of the tree, twisted together with amber sap and a shimmering silver webbing of organic matter. The skulls were no bigger than her palm. They were treeglider skulls.

That night, they camped in an area Gian carved out for them just off the path. The cyclone she called cleared a perfect circle of poisonous vines and biting saplings. Lilia poked around in the underbrush, looking for bladder traps or root hooks.

“How’s your leg?” Gian asked. She crushed a handful of scorch pods together and lay flat on her belly in front of their flickering light to kindle a fire.

“Fine,” Lilia said. In truth, the pain had become constant. She rested when she could but considered it a point of pride to keep up with Gian.

“Really?”

“No. But when people ask, they don’t really want an answer. They want reassurance that it’s all right not to care.”

Gian pushed herself up, wiped her hands on her tunic. “Is that so?”

“I know how people are.”

Gian unpacked sticky balls of rice and dried mangos. “You must not know a lot of people,” she said, and offered the food to Lilia.

Hunger got the better of her. Lilia ate quickly and fell asleep not long after. She woke briefly when Gian bent over her with a thick bedroll. “I brought two,” Gian said. “Get inside before the bugs eat you up.”

Lilia crawled into the bedroll and slept like death.

Gian woke her at dawn the next day, and they started out again. Gian led the way with her sword, hacking at vegetation that clogged the path.

“Tell me a story,” Gian asked as she hacked away.

“What about?”

“Temple life. Baking. Did you do a lot of baking? What do ungifted people get up to there? It’ll be more than a week to Fasia’s Point, maybe two, at this pace.”

So, Lilia told her stories of strategy games and dancing class. She talked about Roh and Saronia and the temple’s great library. At night, when Lilia’s legs cramped up, Gian came to her side, asked to take Lilia’s feet into her palms, and pressed the balls of her feet forward to help lengthen her seizing muscles.

“Did you have any lovers in the temple?” Gian asked.

They lay next to one another in a clearing deep in the hills, staring up through a rare break in the canopy at the great patterned map of the stars above them. Lilia had never seen so many stars – the blackest time of the night, between Para’s rise and fall – lasted only a few hours. She had never sat up that long.

“No,” Lilia said. “I’m not like other Dhai.”

“You’re just fine for a Dhai.”

“What about you? Did the sanisi… did he hurt anyone else at Kalinda’s?”

“There’s just me here,” Gian said. “I came alone.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighed. “We’ll be at Fasia’s Point soon. You’ll know why you need to come with me then.”