The Mirror Empire (34 page)

“And you passed?”

“She put me with you, didn’t she?”

“You make it sound like that was a prize.”

“It was…” Monshara finished her wine. “It was what it was.”

“Who did you deliver that map to?”

“You think it’s like that, do you? You think we’ll have some drinks and I’ll betray the Kai? You listen, Zezili–”

“You keep using my name like you think I forgot it.”

“I’m reminding
myself
of it,” Monshara said. “The woman I knew was much more compassionate than you are. Merciful. And hygienic. You’re… something very different.”

“Thank you.”

“Zezili,” she lowered her voice, “leave this thing about the mirror alone. If you interfere, I’ll report it.” She pulled the silver coin from her pocket and placed it on the table. “This woman on the coin, she was
my
mother. You understand?”

Zezili stared at the coin.

Monshara stood. “You can keep that,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning. It’s a long way to Janifa from here, so I expect you should turn in soon. Can’t go off killing people with a belly full of liquor and no sleep.”

After she left, Zezili reached across the table and picked up the coin. The figure looked nothing like the empress Zezili knew – the bronze-skinned, cant-legged woman with the big yellow eyes and wasp-like waist.
The Book of Rhea
said that Empress Casanlyn’s line had crossed into Dorinah from Rhea’s seat a very long time ago when Rhea’s world and their own came together. Her people came bearing great gifts of fertility and abundance to the people of Dorinah. Zezili always thought the Empress was the remnant of some eastern race, but now she wondered if her empress was from another world altogether that had failed to cross over completely during the last rise of Oma. On the other side, they had no bronze-skinned god leading their country. Empress Casanlyn’s people had never crossed over to that world. Never tried to take over. Never toed a hole in Dorinah big enough to hide in. They had only Monshara’s mother, and she had lost.

“But she is
my
empress,” Zezili muttered, and left the coin on the table. She bought another piece of paper from the bar matron and began writing a letter to Empress Casanlyn.

 

The dajian camps in Janifa lay on the other side of the country, on the coast. A week of hard travel brought Zezili’s angry, spitting legionnaires to within shouting distance of the eastern sea. Her women were wearying of blood, and she could feel their frustration. They bickered more. Got into bloody fights among themselves. Brute slaughter was bad for morale. Only the most sadistic took any pleasure from this game. The rest were ready to go home. She began to consider rotating out these women with a fresh group pulled from the primary legion.

The farther east they went, the hillier the way became. They passed through hills tiered with rice paddies, little dajians working up to their shins in the shallow water. They passed fields of ragged brown sunflower stalks, and spent two days in the coastal town of Jovonyn, where a late-autumn masque was held. Jasoi danced drunkenly with Monshara all night, and Zezili pretended not to notice Jasoi coming out of Monshara’s tent the next day. Zezili found the mardana men of Jovonyn intriguing and spent a night herself entwined with the young bodies of three boys who could not have been a day over sixteen. What they lacked in experience they made up for in stamina.

They climbed steep hills, and Monshara asked to stop for a day and explore colorful caverns and the great ruins of the city that had been razed by the Saiduans a thousand years before. Zezili watched her picking through the remnants of old temples and fountains and other, stranger structures. A good deal of twisted glass littered the streets. Monshara and the four legionnaires Zezili sent with her came back with cuts on their hands and faces.

Every night they camped, Zezili lay awake in her tent, listening to the squeal and cry and crackle of the camp all around her. She waited for a letter.

Finally, as they camped outside Janifa, the letter came.

Zezili broke the royal seal on the purple envelope and read:

 

Zezili burned the letter.

The next day, she slaughtered six hundred little dajians so sick and starved, they could barely raise their hands. The Empress had stopped sending out rations to the camp. If Zezili did not kill them, they would starve anyway.

Zezili spent that night getting drunk at a mardana two miles away. She stumbled back into the bar area after vomiting for the second time to see Jasoi waiting for her at her card table, looking nervous among so many half-clothed young men.

“What you want?” Zezili slurred.

“Syre Zezili,” Jasoi said, bowing her head stiffly. “I have news from your house.”

“My house?” Zezili said, and moved away from the table. She took Jasoi to a darker corner of the room where the tables were empty. “What’s happened?”

Jasoi pulled a leather wrap from her coat, unfolded it, and produced a wax-sealed letter.
Syre Zezili
was written in Daolyn’s neat hand, and it was sealed with Zezili’s house seal.

“Why you rush this?” Zezili slurred as she opened the letter.

“Monshara said to give it to you right away,” Jasoi said. “Any news from your house must be urgent, she said.”

Zezili read the letter. Muttered an oath.

“I must go,” Zezili said. “Jasoi, you’ll have to take First. Tell Monshara… I had to go. Emergency at my house.”

“Your house is a week away,” Jasoi said. “You aren’t leaving the legion to–”

Zezili said, “Can make it in four days on my own. Have to go.” Zezili hurried outside into the cool air, trying to will herself to sober up.

As she mounted her dog, she glanced once more at Daolyn’s letter before bunching it up in her fist and stuffing it into her coat:

 

 

 

28

The yellow eye of the filthy, feathered black raptor blotted out Lilia’s vision. Lilia huffed out a sound of distress. Pain rocked her anew. She’d only closed her eyes a moment, just a moment… The feathered raptor hopped back and flexed the claws at the ends of its winged arms. It opened its hooked beak and hissed at her. The wormy red tongue lashed out. Smacked her cheek.

Lilia fought fresh waves of pain with every breath. For hours, she had watched a tanglevine creeping toward her bloody leg exposed through her torn trousers. She saw red welts on her ankles now, in the bright light of the moons. Out in the sandy creek bed, she was completely exposed.

The raptor was a karoi, one of the four kinds of nighttime scavengers. This one stood as tall as her thigh. A pack of them could tear the flesh from her in a few hours, and unlike their daytime counterparts, they didn’t always wait until their food was dead before they started eating it.

Lilia watched the bird. Her tongue felt large and thick, her throat parched. The moons were up and Para had set. She had spent twelve hours enduring the pain in her torso and increasing numbness in her limbs. She was so thirsty. Death would be welcome. But being ripped apart… no. Not that. Fear, panic, terror… Now she lay exhausted, staring dumbly at her broken right wrist. The blood had clotted. If she didn’t reset the bone soon, she might lose her hand. She may have already. But the one time she had tried crawling back into the trees to find a broken branch, the pain was so intense, she blacked out.

And that left her here.

The raptor hissed.

Lilia watched it lever its long tail. Most bones in the tail were articulated, like the spine, but not the bone at the base of the tail. It was as sturdy and straight as any splint.

She closed her eyes. Flexed her good hand. Waited.

She heard the scuffle of the karoi’s claws in the sand. Its wingtips brushed her arm.

Lilia shot out her hand. Gripped the karoi’s neck. Pain jolted through her broken body. She screamed. The raptor drove its beak into her cheek. It flapped its wings and raked at her face and hand. Lilia tried to get up. Kept her grip on the bird’s neck. She felt the neck snap.

A mistake, moving. She was too broken.

Her stomach heaved. Darkness swam across her vision. The bird screamed and screamed.

Blackness took her.

Finally.

But she had beaten the bird.

 

“You know the price.” Not her voice. Someone else.

Lilia woke to the smell of wood smoke. The hungry claws of a bone tree dangled in front of her, and at their end – the hooked beak of a karoi. She realized the claw of the bone tree was not attached to a tree; it was just a severed limb from one, hanging now from the end of a long stick driven into the ground.

She tried to roll over. Pain blossomed across her chest. She hissed. Tried to raise her left hand. It was bound from shoulder to wrist, wrapped securely around a long, straight branch neatly cut in two. Pain stabbed up her shoulder.

“Drink,” the voice said. She knew it.

Lilia could not raise her head. The pain was too much. But the speaker bent over her. Long dark hair brushed her cheeks. The clawed wounds burned. Her face felt puffy.

Gian brought a warm cup to her lips; it smelled of poppy and everpine.

Lilia drank.

“You’ll heal faster with a tirajista,” Gian said. “We don’t have one at the camps, so I’m taking you to a friend, but–” She looked behind her, and Lilia saw they were in a low cavern. It smelled of damp beneath the smoke. “We’re being followed. And I don’t know how much longer I can keep us hidden.”

“How did you find me?” Lilia rasped.

Gian nodded at the karoi beak. “I followed the birds,” she said. “They circled for hours, I expect. Had to beat six of them off you.”

Gian pulled the cup away. The warmth spread from Lilia’s throat and stomach, engulfing her throbbing torso. The edges of the pain blurred, retreated. The absence of pain was shocking. Like freedom.

“Followed me,” she said.

“Yes,” Gian said. “I could ride a bear just fine with this leg, and there were plenty in the woodland who needed taming. You didn’t think I’d give you up to some Saiduan, did you?”

“Pushed me,” Lilia said.

“Did he? I hoped you’d run from him and fallen. Why was he so angry with you?”

“Wanted me to fly.”

“I expect he did.”

“Gian,” Lilia muttered. “I’m sorry.” Speaking was becoming more difficult. The world was swimming, warm and pleasant. The tide of blackness would take her again, and she was glad.

“You saved my life,” Gian said. “Nothing to be sorry about. Except going back on your promise to me.”

“Won’t go to your people,” Lilia said. She tried to move again, but the darkness was taking over. It was so nice. “I promised… my mother.”

“I keep telling you you don’t have a choice about that,” Gian said. “I wish you’d stop being so stubborn. I just hope I can get you to my people before… before we end up with what’s behind us.”

 

“You know the price.” That voice, again. Gian’s? No, this was another. “She lives, then?”

An old woman bent over her. Lilia stared down the length of her own body, covered over in a hemp cloth.

“Where… how long?” Lilia asked. “Gian?”

“I’m here,” Gian said. Lilia saw her outlined in the doorway. Lilia was not lying on the floor but set up on some kind of slab or table. Above her, she saw a great vent in a nest of dead boughs. The seams between them were filled with living stranglethorn and purple-blooming fire vine. It was the sort of house only a tirajista could make.

“We’re farther up the mountain,” Gian said. “This is Nirata. She’s a friend from… where I’m from.”

“Friend! Ha. We are kin,” the old woman said.

Lilia was aware of the muzzy promise of pain, as if it lurked there at the edges of her fingertips.

“I did the best I could,” Nirata said, “but I’m afraid we need to move you now.”

“But I’m–”

Nirata drew the hemp cloth from Lilia’s body. Beneath, she was naked; thin and knob-kneed, with great yellow bruises pinwheeling across her chest.

“Give me your left hand,” Nirata said.

Lilia raised her left arm. A knife of pain hammered up her torso. She cried out. Her arm only moved a few inches.

Nirata took Lilia’s left hand. Lilia remembered seeing the broken wrist, the mangled fingers. It was still bruised. She saw puckered red scars where the bone had splintered through the skin.

“Rotate that for me, child,” Nirata said.

Lilia tried. She could not bend it back. But it did come forward a little, with great effort. And pain. Sina, why was there so much pain?

“Make a fist.”

“I… can’t,” Lilia said.

“You can.”

Lilia tensed her fingers. They would not meet her palm.

“We don’t have time,” Gian said. “Can she walk?”

“It’s not the walking that worries me,” Nirata said. “Eight days is not long enough for a woman with a descendent star. If you gave me eight weeks, I could heal her properly.”

“Your star isn’t descendent,” Gian said. “It’s rising. I expected more.”

“I’m a woman with a great many stars,” Nirata said. “Oma knits flesh more easily than bone.”

“Eight days?” Lilia said. “That long?”

“Should have been longer,” Nirata said. “You won’t have much movement in that shoulder. Your collarbone was broken. It may still hurt to breathe. Avoid further injury to your torso, too – you broke seven ribs. It’s a wonder none of them punctured a lung. Your ankle was broken, too. Take my hand. Let’s get you up on that now.”