The Mirror Empire (2 page)

She fell through the waving tatters between the reflected worlds, tumbling into the field of black poppies under the new sky. She looked behind her.

Her mother had turned her back on the gate. The Kai stood before her, bloody everpine weapon in hand, a tangle of poisonous vines crawling up her opposite arm. Blood wet the vine. The Kai swung her weapon.

The weapon crushed Lilia’s mother’s collarbone. Her body crumpled, a mangled succulent.

The Kai stepped over her mother’s body, shiny crimson armor soaked in blood and shredded plant matter. The vine on her arm was shriveling now, turning to brown dust.

The Kai reached for Lilia–

But her fingers stopped short on the other side of the parting of the worlds, as if they met some invisible barrier. The Kai’s face twisted in anger.

“Motherless woodland fool,” the Kai said. “I have other cats to whip. Oma is rising, and we will rise with it.”

The air around Lilia contracted. The world pulled her down, as if she had gained three times her weight. She put her hands over her ears. Closed her eyes.

When Lilia opened her eyes, she stood alone in the field of poppies in the middle of a deep, wooded glen. The tear in the world was gone. She saw the emerald light of Tira high in the lavender-blue sky, and the hourglass of the twin suns. Her foot ached badly; the numbness was wearing off. She saw the bloody, melted flesh of her ruined foot covered in dirt and curious flies.

Lilia retched.

“Child?”

A plump woman stood at the edge of the clearing. She had a kind face and a thick mane of silver hair; swaths of it peeked out from beneath the broad hood of her coat. She held a large walking stick.

“Where is Nava, child? Your mother? Where are the others?”

Lilia held out her wrists. “Please cut me,” she said. “If you’re a blood witch too, you can bring her back.”

The woman recoiled. “Child, drop your hands. Don’t speak that way here, no, no. Things are very different here. I’m Kalinda Lasa. You’re to come with me, you understand? And no more talk of blood witches. Witches, of all things? Tira’s tears.”

Lilia kept her hands outstretched. “I made a promise.” Her voice caught. “I have to find my mother. I promised.”

“We all want a good many things, child, but it doesn’t mean we get them,” Kalinda said. “I’m sorry. The world – all worlds – are bigger than the both of us and your mother, too.” She glanced at Lilia’s foot. “If you want to keep that limb, we must go quickly.”

“My mother,” Lilia said, and finally dropped her hands. It was like grasping at air. Already the horrifying morning felt like a terrible story that had happened to someone else.

“Your mother is dead, likely,” Kalinda said. “You’ll meet her fate, too, unless you come with me.”

“But I have to–”

Kalinda gently took her arm. Lilia felt numb. Her attention grew hazy. The light here was so different, dazzling, as if she’d come from a place where she only saw things through a haze of smoke. It was the sky, she realized, staring up at the blue-lavender wash. The sky was so different.

“You can keep your promise,” Kalinda said softly, “but do so when you’re a woman, not a little girl. Your mother will forgive you for waiting awhile longer.”

Kalinda brought her to a small camp on the other side of the field and bound her foot. Then she loaded Lilia into the back of a bear-pulled cart. They traveled some time before halting at the steps of a grand temple. Lilia recognized it as the structure she had seen when she first peered through the tear in the world.

“A pity you have no magical talent yet,” Kalinda said, gazing up at Tira’s waning light. “But we all have our place. The Temple of Oma will look after you, child. Keep your head down. Don’t cause any trouble. And don’t tell any wild stories. You’ve been ill, and your mother is dead. That’s all they need to know. No blood witches. No armies. You understand?”

Lilia nodded, even though she didn’t understand at all.

“You’ll be safe here,” Kalinda said. “Until they come for you again. But we’ll be ready then, won’t we?”

It was only after Lilia woke the next morning in her simple bed in the Temple of Oma scullery and saw that the red tendril her mother had pressed into her flesh was gone, the skin red and blistered as if she’d been washed in poison ivy, that she wondered if she herself was just some shadow, another person’s memory from some other life.

It was in the Temple of Oma, many months later, that Lilia met the Kai a second time.

“You’re welcome here,” the Kai said to Lilia and the twelve other girls and boys admitted to the temple that season as they lined up in the great foyer to meet her, safe behind the crown of webbing that kept out the worst of the toxic plant life that still crawled across the valley. This Kai had the same severe, unwelcoming face that Lilia remembered from their first meeting. But she wore no armor, and her wrist bore no seed of a retracting weapon. If she knew Lilia at all, she did not show it.

“And what brings you here?” the Kai asked.

“My mother,” Lilia said. “Some people say she’s dead, but I’m going to find her.”

The Kai smiled, but it was a sad smile. “You’re a woodland Dhai,” the Kai said. “I can tell from your accent.”

“And you’re one of the Dhai from the valley,” Lilia said. “But where is your army?”

The Kai laughed. “Army? I’m not sure what the woodland Dhai tell their children, but there is no army here. We are a peaceful people, just like you.”

“But I saw you with a sword.”

“I’m sorry, child, I’ve never picked up a weapon in my life.” She hesitated, then said, “It must be very confusing to lose your family. Don’t fear. We’re your family now. Everything may seem very different for a time. But we’ll help you get through it.”

Lilia thought to ask her about the sky, too, but the Kai was already moving on to the next child.

The Dhai people in the valley were not at all what she thought they were. In truth, she wondered if these were really the same people who burned her village, or if she’d dreamed the whole thing after all.

For many years after, Lilia dreamed of treegliders. Some years, she even forgot about her promise to her mother. But when she was fifteen, well after Tira’s descent, when Para, the Breathmaker, bathed the world in blue light, she made a sketch on the back of a book in the temple library. She drew the trefoil with the tail her mother had pressed into her flesh. Then she handed the book over to her best friend Roh – a novice learning to draw the breath of Para – in the hope he’d find some record of it in the temple libraries she didn’t have access to. She wanted to know how much of her memory of her former life was the terrified fantasy of a young girl.

“What’s this for?” Roh asked as he pondered the paper, bouncing back on his heels.

“I’ve been a coward too long,” she said. “It’s time to be brave.”

He laughed. She didn’t.

That night, for the first time in over a decade, Lilia did not dream of a bloody Dhai army.

 

1

Because ruin so often came from the sky, borne by fickle satellites on erratic orbits, Shao Maralah Daonia did not think to look to the sea until it was too late. She expected the next wave of invaders to come in over land after falling from a tear in the sky, the way they had the last six years.

Instead, the invaders came in on the morning tide. They drove before them a boiling swarm of vegetal flesh – a massive black surge of death that slithered up the coast like ravenous snakes of acidic kelp, devouring all it touched. Six cities had fallen to the same onslaught in six weeks, driving Maralah and her army further south. Now they came for the seaside city of Aaraduan, last stronghold in Saiduan’s northernmost province.

Maralah expected they would take Aaraduan just as easily as the other cities, but not before she evacuated her Patron, burned the archives, and took a legion of them with her into death. She did not mind dying here. Her brother’s army was only half a day away, slowed by spongy tundra and permafrost made unpredictable by the summer’s heat. When he did finally sweep into the city, after it was taken, she relied on him to murder any stragglers she could not finish herself.

Maralah summoned an air-twisting parajista at the height of his power to secure Aaraduan’s inner and outer gates with shimmering skeins of air and soil. She gazed at the cracked face of the ascendant star, Para, glowing milky blue in the lavender sky. She cursed the invaders for not coming ashore fifteen years earlier, when her star, Sina, was ascendant, and she was the most deadly power in Saiduan. She felt only the most tenuous connection to her violet-burning satellite now, and could do little more to aid in the shoring up of the gates than give orders. Her days of calling lightning and fire from a clear sky were long behind her. If all here went as she foresaw, she would die before seeing Sina again.

Maralah marched into the hold to watch the burning of the archives. A half dozen sanisi – Saiduan assassins blessed to call on the stars, as she did – tossed ancient records of bamboo, human skin, carnivorous plant exoskeletons, finger bones, and the pounded carcasses of winged insects – most of them long since extinct – into the roaring hearth. On some other day, one not so mad, Maralah imagined the Patron of Saiduan himself sitting beside the hearth with a book of poetry, tracing the columns of text with his worn fingers as a sinajista conjured a flame for him to read by. But the Patron would never sit here again. The room itself would be eaten soon, and the sanisi with it.

What records they could not save, they destroyed. Maralah had heard the same reports from every city – the invaders went first to the libraries and archives, drawn there like spotted beetles to the nectar of claw-lilies. Whatever knowledge they searched for, she would rather see it burned than give them the satisfaction of having it.

Like the other sanisi, Maralah dressed in a long black coat of firegrass and fibrous bark that touched the heels of her boots. She wore a knee-length padded tunic and long trousers. The hilt of her infused sword stuck up through her coat, a twisted branch of willowthorn that glowed faintly violet. The weapon marked her as one of Sina’s soul stealers. Even in Sina’s decline, the weapon retained its power. She could still kiss a conjurer to death with it.

The youngest of the sanisi, Kadaan, looked up from the stacks. His dark hands were smeared darker with soot. As a boy, it was Maralah who put a Para-infused bonsa weapon in his hand, a gnarled yellow branch that burned blue when he drew it. She ensured he was apprenticed to the best parajista she knew, a man who taught him to channel Para’s breath to unmake the weather and push down walls of solid stone with a strong breeze. It was she who took responsibility for his fate now.

“We’re nearly done here,” Kadaan said. “Let me die on the wall with the others. I won’t become their slave.” Maralah saw the fire reflected in his bright eyes. Oh, to be twenty-odd years old again. And foolish.

The archivist who oversaw the purging of the archives, Bael, was already well gone with what he chose to save. Maralah wished she could have sent her youngest sanisi with him.

“The ones at the wall will be dead in an hour,” Maralah said. “Killing a single biting tendril achieves nothing. You must burn out the weed’s nest. Keep burning.”

Maralah stepped into the corridor outside the archive room, seeking relief from the oppressive heat. She heard a great yawning sigh move through the hold. Maralah let her fingers linger on one of her shorter blades and walked into the long mirrored hall that faced the coast. She gazed across the jagged black city still bundled in a husk of late summer snow, to the harbor where the invaders anchored their fantastic bone and sinew boats. She’d had to sneak the Patron, his broodguard, and the archivist out across the mosquito-filled tundra in the other direction, hoping her brother’s army found them before some group of foreign scouts.

She looked for the source of the sigh but saw no evidence of it. From this vantage, the sound of the slithering plant life devouring the walls was indistinguishable from the thrashing of the sea; they drowned out all else.

She rested her hands on the warm railing. The holds this far north were ancient things, grown and manipulated by long-dead tirajistas, back when they had been called something else, something far more fearsome. Those sorcerers had since become priests, torturers, and engineers, because their work still breathed and grew; it lasted. But something that was grown could be eaten. And the invaders knew it.

Maralah heard the low, keening sigh again. She pulled at the collar of her coat. Some may have thought it was just the wind blowing through empty corridors, creeping through wounds in ancient living walls, stirring paper lanterns whose flame flies had long since died. But she knew better.

Maralah drew the short blade at her hip, pivoted left, and thrust deep into the shadows of the curtained balcony behind her. The blade met resistance. Slid through flesh.

A figure hissed and yanked its body from her blade. As it stepped into the light she saw it was most likely a man – always hard to tell, with Taigan – but yes, she could see the snarled beard that clothed his face now. He was especially particular about which pronoun others used, depending on his latest manifestation.

“Taigan,” she said as he pulled out of the shadows, clutching at his bleeding side. She sheathed her blade. “You have gotten soft… and noisy.”

“Release your ward on me,” he said, “and you’ll see just how soft I am.” He took his bloody fingers away from his side. The blood around the wound began to bubble and hiss as he repaired himself. She smelled burnt meat.

Taigan dressed in oiled leather and a padded brown dog-hair coat. He carried no visible weapon. Tall and dark, he wore his hair shorn short, and he stooped awkwardly: wreckage from a wound she had inflicted on him, one he could not repair himself, not unless he persuaded another sanisi with her talents to assist him, and only when Sina was again ascendant. When the Patron stripped Taigan of his title four years before for betraying him, Maralah removed the ward that bound Taigan to the Patron. Maralah suspected the Patron would have killed him, if killing Taigan was possible, but his talents were too useful to see him waste away in exile in some fishing village.