The Mirror Empire (22 page)

Lilia pressed her hands to her face. Her mother had been a little pale like her, she knew. But she had never seen a Dorinah outside a history book. No one told her she had the face of those people, so maybe she did. Maybe they were all too polite to say anything. She didn’t know who she was anymore – a ghost from some other world.

“I made a promise,” Lilia said. Her voice cracked.

“You made a promise to a dead woman.”

 

As Gian hacked through the undergrowth the next day, Lilia hung back, watching her swing her sword. The heat was intense. Gian had stripped to the waist. Lilia watched her, fascinated by the banded cords of muscle in Gian’s shoulders as she worked beneath the sky. Lilia was strangely mesmerized by her in the warm air and felt foolish because of it. Gian was no more to be trusted than the sanisi, and she was just as ready to use force to get her way. Cicadas buzzed all around them, their song broken only by the screech of some small mammal.

Lilia trudged forward, kicking up the first of the browning leaves. She had not slept.

Gian’s course wavered. She chose to go right instead of left, down a path with less vegetation.

Lilia saw a spidery red tendril curling up from the ground ahead of Gian. She knew it immediately – it was the lure of a bladder trap.

Lilia slowed her pace. Stopped. Gian continued on, oblivious. She was still eight paces from the bladder trap. Plenty of time for Lilia to call out and turn her back.

Gian glanced over her shoulder. “You coming? Our rations won’t last at this pace.”

“Of course, master,” Lilia said. Too haughty, she knew, and immediately regretted it.

Gian stopped. Lowered her sword. “Don’t be like that.” Sweat poured down her face. For a long instant, Lilia wondered, again, who Gian would be, what fate she would have chosen for herself, if she was not bound to Kalinda.

“This was your choice,” Lilia said.

“I like you, Lilia. You’re stubborn and spiteful, just like Kalinda. Don’t make this harder.” She turned back to the brush and started hacking away again.

Lilia shuffled forward to catch up with her. Was she any better than Gian or the sanisi, if she didn’t warn her?

“Gian–”

Gian cursed.

And plunged out of sight.

Lilia dropped to the ground immediately. She clawed her way forward the rest of the way on her belly. There were many kinds of pit traps and bladder traps in the woodland, most of them brimming with poisonous reservoirs and thorny protrusions. Many killed their prey neatly the moment they fell. Others took weeks to digest them.

“Gian!”

The ground softened under her reaching fingers. Lilia slid up to the lip of the torn turf. She peered over the edge.

Gian lay six feet below, coughing up green bile into the fleshy pit of a bladder trap.

“Are you hurt?” Lilia asked.

Gian spit more green liquid. “Dropped my sword. Nicked my leg.”

“Did you drink any of that?” Lilia asked.

The green digestive juices of the plant sloshed around her. “I think so,” she said.

Gian fished around for her sword. Took hold of it. As she stood, Lilia saw a gout of blood jet out from her leg.

Lilia held out her hands. “Quickly. You’re losing blood.”

Gian gripped her wrist with one hand and shoved her weapon into the soft flesh of the trap with the other. Lilia pushed the spines at the top of the trap down while Gian pulled them in. Squeezing through the bent spines without impaling Gian took time. Finally, both of them out of breath, Gian crawled out.

Lilia lay next to Gian, covered in blood and the plant’s digestive juices, panting.

Her mother would have called her a coward, letting this woman die. The Oras would call her a horror.

“I’m sorry,” Lilia said.

“I don’t feel… My head’s buzzing.”

“It’s poisonous. It’s all right. Everything will be all right.”

Lilia helped drag Gian away from the trap. It took all her strength to push Gian onto her side. She ripped open her trousers. The weapon had jabbed deeply into her thigh, cutting a great wound as big as Lilia’s fist. A killing wound. Gian would bleed out here.

Lilia dug into the wound, pinching off the affected artery. Gian cried out.

“What kind of trap?” Gian growled.

“Fellwort,” Lilia said. “We need to clean this wound.” She wanted to tell Gian the poison would eat her from the inside out, but didn’t think that would be helpful.

Lilia pulled a length of cord from Gian’s pack and used it as a tourniquet. “You have any honey?” Lilia asked.

“No,” Gian said. “No alcohol, either.”

“We can use honey,” Lilia said. “It’ll take me awhile to find. Keep that sword close. There are bears and wolverines. Can you still call on Para?”

Gian nodded, but her face was very drawn. Lilia worried she would go into shock.

“I’ll be back,” Lilia said. “I promise.”

She rinsed the wound with the water they had and collected a handful of scorch pods from Gian’s pack. Her mother once taught her how to track and take a beehive, and she desperately needed one now. I should be running before the sanisi catches up to us, she thought. But her heart would not let her.

She found a small spring an hour up the trail. She refilled their water, then followed the heady, fragrant smell of fungus flowers. Two more hours of stalking bees the size of her thumb paid off. She knocked down a massive papery beehive and used the heat of the broken scorch pods to confuse the remaining bees.

Six stings later, she had four bricks of honeycomb. Dusk was falling. She moved quickly, following the broken branches and little stone markers she had left along her way.

When she arrived, Gian was slumped to one side. Her hand rested limply on her bloody thigh. Too late.

“I’m a murderer,” Lilia breathed. “Gian?”

She came up beside Gian and rested a hand on her bare arm. It was cool, but not cold.

Lilia worked quickly in the dim light. She mashed the honeycomb inside a woody seed pod, mixing it with water and a few leaves of night dagger she’d collected.

She pulled back the tunic she’d left over Gian’s wound as a makeshift bandage and recoiled at the smell. It had mortified quickly.

Lilia washed the wound out a second time, then began to pack it with the honeycomb mixture. Gian came to as she did.

“Get away!” Gian said, slapping weakly at her hands.

Lilia ignored her. She had seen her mother with feverish patients.

“I won’t tell you anything,” Gian said.

Lilia unknotted the tourniquet. She used it to secure the tunic around the wound again. All the while, Gian babbled.

“It wasn’t me,” Gian said. “I won’t do it.” She grabbed at Lilia’s arm. “I love you,” she said. “I won’t do it.”

Lilia tugged Gian’s pack from her shoulders and pulled out their food. Most was packed in waxed linen, so hadn’t been poisoned too badly. She sat over the pack for a few minutes, staring at its contents. There was enough food to get only one of them back to the valley.

She glanced up at Gian. Gian’s head lolled back against the great trunk of the rattler tree.

Lilia thought of Roh, and the Temple of Oma, the Oras there who sheltered her, the drudges who worked with her, and the farmers and herders and craftspeople who cared for her after her mother pushed her through to the other side.

“I’m sorry, Gian,” she said. “My place is here.”

Lilia left the food in Gian’s pack. Lilia could forage on her own, but Gian wouldn’t be fit for it. She set a full water bladder at Gian’s elbow.

Then Lilia slung the second bladder over her shoulder and skirted around the bladder trap. She looked back once because she felt a stab of longing. She wanted to take Gian’s hand in hers and never let go. Her journey with Gian had been the first time in a long time she didn’t feel alone.

Lilia pushed back out into the woods, into the slithering darkness. She was tired of being hunted, tired of running in circles.

It was time to hunt down the sanisi in turn. Her mother, even if it was just a shadow of her, was in Dorinah. And if anyone could get Lilia there in one piece, it was the man who could not kill her.

 

Taigan collected the little sparrows into his palm and breathed on them. Maralah’s message was a brilliant blue fragrance excreted from the sparrows; blueberry and sugar, like something created by an exceptionally gifted confectioner.

He – for he still felt comfortable using that pronoun in Saiduan, at least for another turn of the moon – stood at the center of a little Woodland village, its inhabitants neatly and bloodlessly broken, like discarded farm implements.

Coding messages with the power of the satellites had its drawbacks. Only the very skilled could tailor a living thing to change its nature as it traveled from icy tundra to spitting sea to dripping jungle. These sparrows had likely begun their journey as flies or beetles, then birds. They reacted intelligently to their surroundings, cycling through forms according to what their tirajista shaper had encoded in them.

He tugged at little red threads of Oma’s power to unravel the fragrances and turn them into Saiduan characters. It was a deft, complicated thing, taught to him by some long-dead old woman with a face like a stone slab. His peculiar birth had marked him from the very beginning as a herald of change. She was the only one who would touch him.

After he’d caught the little omajista girl, he’d sent a message to Maralah. Her response indicated she’d received it:

 

Taigan sent out a little puff of air, tearing apart the misty characters. They dissipated like smoke. The sparrows, too, scattered. He watched them flit to the edges of the village, then shimmer and tremble and become small white parrots. They took flight, heading for the top of the broad canopy.

The man he’d sent out from here had not returned, but as Maralah’s message lit off, he saw the constructed butterfly he’d sent with the man fluttering toward him. Taigan pulled it apart now, catching a whiff of the sea. The smell caused a bright memory to waft up from his consciousness; he saw a game trail, a rocky outcrop, a birch orchard ringed in massive cocoons.

Not far now. He poked one last time at one of the dead Dhai, then struck back out into the woods, silent as a cat, toward the butterfly’s memory of the path.

Woodland Dhai were much less cooperative than their valley brethren. They also turned out to be more skilled at channeling the satellites than he anticipated. He suspected his reputation as a sanisi preceded him here, or perhaps the invaders had already sent a scouting party, and it had put them on edge. Few bothered to exchange words before attacking.

So much for petty pacifism.

He crossed the village and stepped over the low thorn fence that kept out the baby walking trees and various creatures that made this Woodland less than welcoming. He had tracked these people hoping the little servant girl and her companion had fallen in with them. The death of the innkeeper frustrated him. Death without answers or leads served no purpose. He should have known better than to shield her instead of immobilize her.

For several days, he had been able to smell the sea. It reminded him of better days. His family had been fishing people, illiterate and ungifted. Children only went out veiled twice a week, during prayer days, and then only until age nine. Learning he was still considered a child at thirteen in the capital had been frustrating.

Some days, he thought the only place in Saiduan the invaders hadn’t touched was that village he grew up in. He still looked for it on the lists of scoured cities and towns that Maralah kept in her study, compiled by sanisi posted across the empire. She inquired often which city he looked for, but he dared not say it aloud. Some part of him hoped that if he never heard of it, it would remain untouched. He hated the heat here and the cloying jungle. He wished he could bury the girl and her friends in the heat and forget them.

Taigan followed the smell of the sea, trying to pick up signs of the girl and her companions again. He marked several great insects with little tendrils of twisted air and fragrance, hoping they would offer something useful back to him.

Three hours later, one of the insects returned. He followed it to a mossy trail. When he looked up, he saw the scullery girl clinging to the tangled branches of a tree just across a clearing on the other side of the trail. Taigan did not look directly at her at first, wondering if she thought she was spying on him. If so, she was doing a terrible job of it.

But the girl did not move.

He met her look.

She scrambled down the tree, much more quickly than he expected.

Taigan moved across the clearing after her.

A cold dagger of pain plunged into his chest. He threw out his right arm, too late. The bone-strung branches of the tree that dominated the clearing closed around him like a vise. Throwing out his arm had been a mistake; the bone tree snapped his arm clean through, torquing it backward and shoving it against his body.

He grunted. Tried to find leverage by kicking away with the heels of his boots. But the tree lifted him cleanly from the ground. Its bony fingers drove into his flesh like knobby needles.

His skin burned. Punctured flesh and organs tried to knit themselves back together. It was like boiling from the inside out.

As he struggled to center his mind, he saw the girl creeping toward him, skirting the edge of the clearing.

Taigan showed his teeth. “You’re less stupid,” he said. He tried to rip his arm free. The bones of the tree dug deeper. His flesh bubbled. The air was filled with the smell of burnt meat.