The night was hot, and moths circled the lanterns along the path to the house. Clan Osono was known mostly for its sheep, and the warm wind carried the sound of their bleating. The smell of them was less noticeable. After two years in Osono, Ahkio had gotten used to it.
His students were deep in a discussion with Liaro about the virtues of the country’s second Kai, and whether or not Faith Ahya actually glowed when she appeared to prophets and seers.
Ahkio kept his hands tucked beneath his long sleeves. He gazed out past the students to the lights and laughter coming from the families nearby who were doing just as they were – congregating for good food and good company on one of high summer’s last vital nights. He heard someone swear, and stab out into the darkness at some flailing thing. The woman came back from the shadow beyond her table carrying a limp florid flower, its sticky tentacles still seething. She tossed it into her outdoor fireplace. Even from a hundred paces away, Ahkio heard the plant hissing.
“Ahkio?” Meyna said.
He started. “Yes?”
“Go get me wine, love. It’s your turn to fetch drinks.”
Ahkio touched thumb to forehead in a mocking way - an overly formal gesture between kin – and rose from the table. He paused a moment to admire her. She tilted her head, smiled; she was beautiful by any measure, and a formidable businesswoman.
“Are we drinking to our engagement?” he said.
“And what would you add to our house?”
“A pretty face isn’t enough?”
“You’re not that pretty,” she said.
Liaro laughed. “Now you’re just playing,” he said. “If I didn’t bring Ahkio along to the tea house I’d never lure over an accomplished woman.”
“Liaro has the truth of it,” Meyna said. “Those militia women in the house this morning surely kept you quite busy.”
“I’d give it all up for you,” Ahkio said, and though his tone was playful, his heart fluttered when he said it, because it was true. He would give up a great deal to marry Meyna and her husbands. More than he’d admit.
“Fetch us a drink,” Meyna said warmly. “We’ll discuss it.”
He grinned and pushed away from the table. Liaro called after him, “Don’t fall for it, Ahkio! She says that to everyone!”
Meyna said something less than complimentary in turn.
Ahkio walked around the side of the house and opened the entrance to the cellar. As he started down, something caught his attention. In the dim light of the flame fly lanterns at the front of the house, he saw someone on the porch.
Ahkio hid his hands in his sleeves. He called to the figure. “Welcome, kin. Food, rest, or company?”
The figure raised its head, and Ahkio’s chest tightened.
It was Nasaka, one of the Oras from the Temple of Oma.
The last time an Ora had come for Ahkio, his parents were murdered, and he was saved from a fiery death by his screaming sister and Nasaka’s glowing willowthorn sword.
Nasaka was a lean whip of a woman, well over fifty, hawk-nosed and gaunt, with a firm mouth and broad jaw. She was his aunt – his dead father’s sister - and people often remarked that she and Ahkio bore a resemblance to one another. The resemblance annoyed him. He’d rather look like some useful farmer.
She wore dark colors. Not temple colors. That meant she had traveled without wanting the locals to recognize her as an Ora. The scholarly magician-priests of the temples weren’t well favored in most clans. They dirtied up Dhai politics. As if Dhai politics weren’t dirty enough.
“Just a smoke, I’m afraid,” Nasaka said. “Come sit with me, Ahkio.”
Ahkio hesitated. Dread knotted his stomach. He heard Meyna’s laughter behind him. He wanted to turn around and pretend he had not seen Nasaka at all.
“Has my sister sent for me?” Ahkio asked. He leaned against the porch rail. He, Rhin, Hadaoh and Meyna had built the railing the year before, when Mey-mey had started to walk.
Nasaka pinched her fingers to the end of her pipe. A soft glow lit the end of the pipe. She began to puff. She drew her fingers away, shaking off ash. It was a trick Ahkio was surprised the old woman could manage. She was a sinajista, and Sina had been descendent many years. What little power Sina’s gifted still retained wouldn’t amount to much more than calling up a tiny flame or perhaps removing an uncomplicated ward. At its height, Sina bestowed far darker powers – sinajistas had been known to steal lives with a touch, and set forests ablaze with a look.
“You certain?” Nasaka said, gesturing with the pipe.
“I don’t smoke,” Ahkio said. “You’re thinking of Kirana. How is my sister?”
Nasaka exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Your sister is dying,” she said.
Ahkio was glad for the rail, then. “You’re wrong,” Ahkio said. “Kirana is Kai, and Kais don’t die without heirs. I’ve spent all morning teaching that to children.”
“Just because a thing has not yet happened does not mean it can never happen,” Nasaka said. “She is dying. And she has summoned you. There is no one else, Ahkio. You knew this day might come.”
“Kirana isn’t going to die,” Ahkio said. Of the two surviving children of the former Kai, Kirana was the one who could channel the power of the satellites. When Tira was ascendant she could heal the blind and coax a morning star vine to become a sturdy ship’s rigging. The rest of the time, she excelled at talking down disputes among bitter clan-rivals and managing trade negotiations with the Aaldians and Tordins to the south.
Ahkio taught ethics to the children of shepherds.
Nasaka exhaled more sweet-smelling smoke. It was a foreign blend of cloves, purple hasaen flowers, and Tordinian tobacco, a spicy, not unpleasant scent that clung to the woman night and day; a smell uniquely Nasaka. It put Ahkio in mind of the temples, and another burning, a long time ago.
“I hoped you would marry,” Nasaka said, “a good strong Osono girl or two. It was why I permitted you to leave the temple.”
“Kirana married, and see how happily that turned out. You never got your heirs from her and what’s-his-name.”
“And look where we are because of that. I have a dying Kai and only her weak, irresponsible brother to tap for the seat.”
“My life is here,” Ahkio said. He looked into the dim yard. The moons were rising. “I’ve kept house with Meyna and her husbands-”
“Oh, Meyna this, Meyna that,” Nasaka said, and her tone let Ahkio know the low regard she held for her.
“Don’t speak ill of Meyna in her own house.”
“I need you at the temple tonight,” Nasaka said. “Clan Leader Saurika has someone prepared to take over your classes.”
Ahkio thought about telling her no. He thought about running off into the sheep fields. But telling Nasaka no never ended well. He knew that as well as anyone.
“Is she really dying?”
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Who did it, Nasaka?”
“It’s some illness.”
“Then call some sensitive tirajista who could still channel Tira in decline, and she’d fix it. Don’t take me for a fool.”
Nasaka sucked at the end of her pipe. The silence stretched. Then, “Whatever her illness, it can’t be cured. It’s gotten worse, Ahkio. I’m sorry. I don’t know how much time she has, and I want you to sit with her before the end.”
Ahkio pressed his hands to his eyes. Took a deep breath. “Was it Tir’s family?” he asked. “Rhin and Hadaoh’s father?”
“I suggest you pack your things and come with me,” Nasaka said softly. “If it was then this house is no longer safe for you.”
Ahkio turned away from her. He went back around the house to where his kin had gathered. He could not still his hands. Politics had caught up with him, a decade after he thought all those terrible days were dead and burned.
The remains of dinner smeared the bowls and plates. Eating sticks and hunks of half-eaten bread littered the table.
Meyna held
Mey-Mey, asleep, in her lap. Hadaoh was relating a story about birthing a lamb. Rhin conferred with one of Ahkio’s students, scribbling something in charcoal on the wooden table.
Liaro grabbed at Ahkio’s hand with his rough, calloused fingers. Ahkio had given him blanket consent some time ago, and the unexpected touch calmed him now. Liaro set his black stare on Ahkio.
“Something tells me that Ora isn’t here to propose marriage,” Liaro said, and from the look on Liaro’s face, on everyone’s faces, Ahkio had done nothing to conceal what he felt.
“How did you–”
“I sent him for wine,” Meyna said. “You were dallying. He saw Ora Nasaka. Is it true?”
“Kirana’s summoned me to the temple.”
Meyna cut a look at the house. He wanted to take her smooth, unblemished hands in his. He wanted her to tell him everything would be all right, and she would propose in the morning, and they would be his family now. Kirana was not dying. He wouldn’t be left all alone.
But all Meyna said was, “Be careful.”
Rhin and Hadaoh exchanged a look. “We should speak to Yisaoh,” Rhin said.
Their sister, Yisaoh, had contested Ahkio’s mother for the title of Kai just a decade before. Ahkio had thought Meyna inviting him into their house meant the end of all those bad feelings. He was not his mother. But Meyna’s expression had darkened. As Ahkio stood there rubbing his hands, the mood of the table sobered. Whoever had come for his sister would come for him next, he knew. He knew it and still rebelled against it, because to step back into the temple with Nasaka meant she would try and turn him into everything he hated.
“I want to stop the world right here,” Ahkio said aloud. “Just like this.”
“Too late,” Liaro said, and pushed away from the table.
4.
The Temple of Oma grew from a knotted rocky spur at the tip of a mountainous peninsula called the Fire Gate. As they glided over the spur from within the bubbled chrysalis that followed the giant living Line system that connected the temples and clans, Ahkio could not help but feel homesick already. The vegetation of the peninsula was burned out twice a year, so all Ahkio saw was the stubbly amber tips of newly seeded foraging grasses. It reminded him of the fields of Osono. They came in parallel to the peninsula. He had a view of the carved stone bridge that connected the spur of the temple to the greater land mass. As they passed, he heard the thundering roar of the river below them, continuing its quest to carve away the spur from its parent.
The translucent webbing that circled the gardens of the temple stretched from the bridge all the way around the spur. The webbing had caught many small insects. Captured flame flies and gleaming night dragons struggled in its grasp, lighting the web with a thousand twinkling lights. The temple itself was well lit, considering the time of night. Ahkio saw the tell-tale flicker of flame fly lanterns hung inside crystal chandeliers. The great dome of the temple glowed with a soft, ambient light; a beacon for weary travelers. Everything about the Temple of Oma was like a dream. He had not grown up in Dhai, and when he returned to it as a boy and saw the living temples and massive gonsa trees and delicate crimson spiders that patrolled the webs, he believed anything was possible. It made him want to cast off his parentage and board a ship at random in the harbor and head off to places unknown. What was the rest of the world like, if this was home? What wonders lay outside the great gates of the harbor?
“Bump, here,” Nasaka said. Ahkio braced himself as the bubbled chrysalis of the Line met the open lip of the Line chamber in the Temple of Oma.
Four Oras already waited for them in the chamber. They had long, pained looks on their faces as if Kirana were already dead.
Elder Ora Gaiso, the plump woman who oversaw the management of the Temple of Oma, made a sweeping gesture as they arrived. Their chrysalis immediately burst.
Ahkio covered his head.
“Was that necessary?” Nasaka asked as the shattered bits of the chrysalis melted and flowed into the depression at the center of the floor.
“There’s more news,” Gaiso said. She was a broad, imposing woman with a dart of white in her black hair.
Ahkio also recognized Elaiko, Nasaka’s young assistant, and Dasai, the ancient Ora who had taught Ahkio history and governance before he left the temple. He was the same Ora who told Ahkio the story of the Saiduan who’d come take away bad students, Ahkio remembered. Dasai held out a hand in greeting. He had a mean face, long and narrow, and he kept his mouth pursed when not speaking. His face was a morass of lined, weathered skin. He had already lived well over a century, and though Dhai were known to live a hundred and fifty years or more, few retained their wits and stamina as well as Dasai had.
“The Kai asks for you,” Dasai said. Dasai had a slight Saiduanese accent. He had spent many years studying in that country, though he spoke little of it.
Ahkio folded his arms.
“Like that, is it?” Dasai said.
“There’s another issue,” Gaiso said, moving her bulky body between them. “I tried to send you word before you got on the Line. We have a Saiduan sanisi here. He’s asking for the Kai. We can’t permit that. Not in her condition.”
“Where’s Ora Almeysia?” Nasaka asked. “I’m convening the Elder Ora council immediately.”
“She’s with Ora Masura,” Gaiso said, “trying to get her fit for company.”
“Is Ora Masura drinking again?” Nasaka asked.
“Like a drowning Tordinian priest,” Gaiso said.
“Will you ascend with me, Li Kai?” Dasai asked. “Your sister asked for you, and I’m not sure we can wait much longer.”
Dasai led him into the hall. Nasaka hung back to speak with the others.
“Nasaka won’t tell me what’s wrong with Kirana,” Ahkio said.
“It’s not known,” Dasai said.
“How’s it possible not to know what’s wrong with the Kai? Did someone poison her?”
“Eight doctors and four tirajistas have visited her. None can name the illness.”
“Someone close to her did it, then.”
“Let’s not start painting stories,” Dasai said.
“Nasaka thinks I’m in danger if I stay in Osono. She thinks whoever did this to Kirana is after the seat.”
“You should really use Ora Nasaka’s title. It’s respectful.”
“I’m aware,” Ahkio said. He hadn’t called Nasaka “Ora” in almost a decade.
Paper lanterns lined the corridor. The Temple of Oma, like the Temples of Para, Tira and Sina and many of the holds in Saiduan, was a living thing, a slumbering beast created in some distant time. The walls were smooth, and bore a greenish tint. If one tried to dig deep enough into the skin of the hold, it would weep and ooze a sticky amber sap. Whether plant or animal or some combination, no one knew. But the sinajistas said the holds had souls, vital energy that could mend wounds or melt flesh.
The Line chamber was on the eleventh floor of the temple. Ahkio expected they would travel up to the Assembly Chamber and Kirana’s rooms on the twelfth floor, but instead Dasai took him down two floors to the novice practice rooms and Ora studies. They passed open archways where novice parajistas practiced moving objects; building small towers of stones and blocks with skeins of air, or creating little vortexes and water spouts in pails. Ahkio couldn’t channel their star, so he did not see the blue breath they manipulated, only its result. The novices barely glanced up from their creations as Ahkio and Dasai passed
Dasai brought him to the end of the hall, down a short stair, and through another corridor. Ahkio had never been to this area of the temple before.
“Why did you move her?” Ahkio asked.
Dasai raised his hand to a broad door of amberwood. Ahkio saw that the door was banded in thorn vines, the same kind that made up the thorn fences that protected livestock in the clans.
“We feared for her,” Dasai said.
“If you think she’s in danger from someone inside the temple, why bring me here?
”
“Li Kai, if I had the chance to go back and bid my family farewell before their deaths, I would have leapt at the chance. This is yours. Don’t spoil it.”
“I’m afraid, Ora Dasai.”
“We’re all afraid, child,” Dasai said. “It’s what we do with that fear that sets us apart. Bid farewell to your sister.”
Dasai murmured a prayer to Sina and opened the door.
Inside, the darkness was complete. The windows were covered.
Dasai picked up a lantern in an alcove and shook the flame flies awake. The flickering light cast wide shadows, illuminating a raised bed draped with sticky webbing. Ahkio heard someone else breathing in the darkness – wet and ragged.
Ahkio approached the unfamiliar bed and sat on a stool beside it. Dasai brought the light closer. Ahkio took it.
Kirana’s face was a gaunt mask with deep circles under the hollows of the eyes. She had the look of their mother; the long, plain face; high forehead, sloping nose, strong square jaw. Her black hair was thin and tangled, tied at the nape of her damp neck. Displaced curls clung to her forehead. Her skinny hands clasped at the bed sheets like claws.
It was high summer in Dhai, and Ahkio felt cold.
“Ahkio,” she said. The clawed hands reached for him. He took her fingers. Her eyelids flickered. “I waited for you. There’s something coming.”
“You’ll meet it,” Ahkio said.
“I was never Kai,” she said.
Ahkio rubbed her cool fingers. “There was no one else, Kira.”
Kirana opened her eyes. Eyes the color of cinnamon. “Everything’s burning.”
“That was a long time ago,” Ahkio said. “Things are better now.”
“Get the others out,” Kirana said. “Get them out. Out!”
“Ora Dasai,” Ahkio said.
Dasai stood at the end of the bed, his face mired in shadow. “Call if there’s a need,” Dasai said.
After Dasai closed the door, Kirana urged Ahkio to lean in close. She smelled of rot from within. He saw his father in her, his mother, and the dead sisters his mother had buried before they had names.
The Mirror Empire Page 4