The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  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 tender 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 clotted 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, 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. A Dhai from here, anyway.”

  “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.”

  “What did you want to be?” Lilia asked.

  “What?”

  “When you were younger.”

  “I’m only twenty.”

  “Did you always just hit people with a sword for Kalinda?”

  Gian laughed. Lilia loved to hear her laugh; it was a rich, deep laugh. She wished she was better at telling jokes, just so she could hear it more.

  “I want to save the world,” Gian said.

  “Is that all?”

  Gian turned onto her side, propped herself up on one arm. She caught Lilia with her black stare, and Lilia’s heart fluttered. Gian leaned forward, as if she might kiss her. Which would be an absurd thing to do, without consent. But Lilia did not move. Gian paused, her face a breath from Lilia’s.

  “It’s full of many things worth saving,” Gian said.

  It took nearly two weeks to reach the coast. They had to abandon the bear outside a tangled woodland it could not squeeze through. By then, the sticky rice was nearly gone, supplemented with fiddleheads, acorn meal, and whatever half-digested tuber remains they could pull out of the massive pitcher plants that littered the boggy areas around springs and streambeds.

  Lilia smelled the sea long before she saw it. When they pushed into a ragged clearing and beheld the edge of the plateau and pounding violet waters below, she caught her breath. The sky was pale lavender along the horizon, and brilliant azure blue above, on fire with the light of Para.

  “Familiar?” Gian asked.

  “Yes,” Lilia said. “The smell is, at least.”

  “Just a little further north,” Gian said. “That’s when the plateau breaks off into the sea.”

  They followed a game trail the rest of the day, keeping the sea to their left. As dusk fell, Lilia spotted a treeglider staring at them from the lowest branches of a rattler tree, its eyes bright. Somewhere distant, Lilia heard the familiar hulking crash of a walking tree.

  They drove deeper into the plateau. Gian kept asking her if anything looked familiar. But Lilia saw no signs of her old village – no decaying cocoons or the charred remains of seedpods.

  Then Lilia saw it.

  A gray spur of rock, jutting up from the weeds on the other side of a broad clearing. She knew that ledge. She had played there. It didn’t look nearly as tall, of course. What a foolish child she’d been, to think that she could fly if she just hurled herself off it enough times.

  Lilia hurried across the clearing, looking for the remains of the thorn fence. But there were no bunches of sticks or charred root balls. All she saw were the shriveled poppies, their leaves browning with the coming of low autumn.

  Gian called after her. Lilia kept going.

  She scrambled around the rock ledge and up the low hill, following the creek. As she came over the rise of the hill, she half-expected to see the massive webbing that protected her village. She was out of breath, and wheezing hard, harder than she had the whole trip.

  Lilia gasped and stumbled. Caught herself on a nearby tree. Ahead was a grove of birch trees. Massive butterfly cocoons as long as Lilia’s arm hung from their branches. A few of the cocoons were as large as Lilia herself. She saw scattered seedpods on the ground… just big enough for a small child to hide in. In the distance, on the other side of the hill, she heard the thrashing of walking trees, and shuddered. There was no webbing here to keep them out.

  She saw no broken old trees or char in what should have been her village; nothing had been touched by fire here for hundreds of years, at least. The grove itself was not inhabited. She saw no paths. No stone structures.

  This place had never been her home.

  Gian came up behind her. “Is this it?”

  Lilia nodded. Her chest hurt.

  “I need my mahuan powder,” Lilia said, wheezing.

  Gian retrieved the powder. She bent next to Lilia, mixed the powder with water, and made her drink it.

  Lilia coughed and coughed. She pointed to the chalky outcrop below them, obscured now by the woods they had traveled through. “That’s where I saw… the riders. The Kai and her militia. It was…. it was right here.”

  “Strangled heart,” Gian said. “Don’t you see, yet?”

  “Hey there!”

  A man rounded the top of the rise in what had been Lilia’s village. He raised a large walking stick, then began climbing down toward them.

  Gian rose. “He’s a woodland Dhai,” she said.

  Lilia finished her mahuan powder as the man came toward them. The day was hot, and he was bare chested. He wore what looked like leather trousers. A linen tunic hung from his belt. He carried no pack, only the walking stick.

  “Are you traveling alone?” he said. “You valley Dhai?”

  Lilia noticed his accent now; she had met a few other woodland Dhai at the temple. She didn’t have much of an accent anymore, but his felt warm and familiar.

  “Is there a village here?” Lilia asked. She coughed. “Maybe… they moved?”

  “Village?” he said. “No. I’m sorry to bother you, but if you’re traveling on your own, you should know there’s a man in the woods, a hunter. Foreign. Saiduan. I’ve been through three family camps now, all dead. I bedded down with another group just last night. Two girls there said he
’s been looking for one of ours.” He glanced at Lilia. “Young temple girl, they said.”

  “Thank you,” Gian said. “We’ll keep an eye out.”

  He gestured behind him. “There are family camps further up the peninsula, if you’re looking for rest or company. You look thin. Are you hungry?”

  “We’re fine,” Gian said.

  Lilia noticed, then, that he’d come from the direction of the crashing trees. No one – especially not s woodland Dhai, who should know better - would have trekked up the other side of that hill through a herd of walking trees.

  She glanced behind them, back at the game trail they’d followed along the coast. “Ahead of us?” she said. “You mean the camps are behind us, where you came from.”

  He grinned. Too hard. “Not sure I follow.” He pointed back up the hill with his stick. “I came down from there.”

  “You doubled around,” Lilia said. “You circled behind us and came up the hill to pretend you were ahead of us. Why were you following us?”

  Gian put her hand on the butt of her willowthorn sword. The hilt of it elongated and curled around her wrist.

  “Hold on now,” the man said, raising his free hand. “He said you were a temple Dhai, but you do have the eye of a woodlander, don’t you?”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” Gian said. “I suggest you move on and tell the sanisi you couldn’t find us.”

  “Afraid I can’t do that,” he said, and Lilia noticed a trembling in his voice. “He sent me to track you. I turn back now and he kills me, and my family.”

  “Then we are at an impasse,” Gian said.

  The man grinned again.

  He lashed out with his heavy stick.

  Gian yanked her sword out, too late. His stick thumped her in the chest, sent her stumbling back.

  He grabbed Lilia’s arm.

  Lilia shrieked and kicked at the dirt. She remembered chitinous red armor. Heavy air. And the trefoil with the long tail. She closed her eyes until she saw the bright, burning image of the trefoil in her mind.

  It will bring you back to me, her mother had said, but it had brought her back to the wrong place.

  Lilia kicked the man in the knee. He cursed, stumbled back. Swung his stick. Lilia covered her face.

  Pain seared her skin. Brilliant light surged across her vision. The image of the trefoil burst in her mind. A whump of air knocked her back. She landed hard on her tailbone. The man screeched.

  Gian ran forward. Lilia’s head ached; she began to tremble violently, uncontrollable spasms that shook her whole body. Her jaw clenched. Gian killed me, she thought.

  The man was screaming. Screaming. The way they had screamed in the village.

  “It’s all right,” Gian said. She made little shushing sounds. “It’s all right.”

  Lilia thought Gian was talking to the man, but as her vision cleared she saw Gian crouching next to her, one hand on her forehead, the other on her sternum, holding her down as she jerked and flailed on the forest floor.

  The fit lasted several minutes. When it was over, Lilia was exhausted, spent.

  Gian pulled her into her arms. She carried Lilia back down the hill to the clearing near the rocky outcrop. Lilia had not realized how strong she was. Lilia buried her face in Gian’s hair and wept.

  Gian held her while she cried.

  “It’s all right,” Gian said. Her voice sounded distant. She was staring off into the woods. “I drew too much. I hurt you too. I’m sorry. I won’t let that happen again.”

  “You can’t do that,” Lilia said. “You can’t hurt the ungifted like that.”

  “I used up a great deal of power,” Gian said. “It was my fault. Sometimes I panic and pull too much. Kalinda says it’ll burn me out someday.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “I flayed him,” Gian said. “Don’t go back there. I’ll get his heart, and his liver. We’ll eat well tonight.”

  “The sanisi will find us.”

  “He’s close, no doubt,” Gian said. “But we’ll keep moving. My people aren’t far from here. It’s why I agreed to take you. Just another day to the northeast, and you’ll have your answers.”

  Lilia saw the bloody body of the man crumpled on the hill. Gian could do anything she wanted with her. She wasn’t bound by temple rules. Why had she taken Lilia’s bargain, then?

  “Kalinda wanted you kept safe from the Kai,” Gian said, “and I promised to do the same.”

  “Kalinda brought me to the Kai. I live at the Temple of Oma where the Kai lives. Kalinda never saved me from anything. She delivered me to her door!”

  Gian stood. “I need to prepare his heart and liver,” she said. “Do you like dandelion greens?”

  Lilia pressed her fists against her eyes. “Why won’t you tell me anything?”

  “You’ll understand when you meet the others,” Gian said. “I

  did what you asked and brought you here. Now you fulfill your end. You join me.”

  Lilia watched the hourglass of the suns begin to set in the blue-lavender sky above her. Lavender, not amber. The leaves here were just beginning to turn, far up in the forest canopy.

  Lilia struggled to her feet. The sky. The leaves. The village.

  “What is it?” Gian asked.

  Lilia walked back down to the stone outcrop. She gazed toward the clearing where the thorn fence had been, and stared at the sky. The blue-lavender sky. She covered her mouth.

  “Lilia?” Gian asked.

  “Oma,” Lilia said. “The sky. It’s the wrong color.”

  Gian’s expression was unreadable.

  Lilia persisted. “I thought it was because Tira’s descendent now. But the sky here, right here, wasn’t this color when I lived here. When the village was here. It was amber, and it caught fire at sunset, like a crimson cloak. Oh no, oh no…”

  “Lilia, I’m sorry,” Gian said. “I can explain –”

  Lilia’s legs gave out. She leaned against the rock outcrop. Terror squeezed her insides. “That’s why everything is different here,” Lilia said. “Dhai has no conscripted army here. The Kai wears no armor. This isn’t where my village was at all, is it?”

  Gian shook her head.

  Lilia burst into tears at the sad expression on the woman’s face. It was pity. Pity for a foolish child piece on a kinder board who suddenly understood the whole world was make-believe.

  “I’m not from this world, am I?” Lilia said, “and neither are you and Kalinda. That’s why you put me with the Kai in Oma’s Temple. It’s not this Kai you’re fighting.”

  “No,” Gian said.

  “You’re fighting a Kai somewhere else,” Lilia said. “You’re fighting a woman who looks just like her, from a world with an amber sky.”

  17.

  The churning mud sucked at Zezili’s boots as she slogged across the remains of the camp. Her legionnaires milled about the field, gutting corpses from navel to neck, to check if the dajians had swallowed any valuables before the raid. Zezili couldn’t imagine dajians having anything worth stealing in a camp like this, but some had been known to flee their owners after stealing from them. She heard the grumbling of her women as she went; easy slaughter was appreciated, but not cheap slaughter. Fighting that paid in nothing but blood would sour them quickly. She made a note to have a hundred kegs of cheap wine hauled in after the next raid. Mounts – a skinny dog or pox-ridden bear – were good prizes, too, for the most exuberant killers.

  Monshara waited at the center of the field. She sat astride her great black and white bear. Zezili had left Dakar behind; she had no interest in tacking him up just to watch some petty bit of magic.

  Four riders came through the camp, riding great bears like Monshara’s. They didn’t look like Monshara, though. They looked the same way Hofsha had – like Dhai. Zezili’s skin crawled. Were they opening a door of some kind to Dhai? Why would the Dhai want to kill dajians? They were petty pacifists. They’d vomit at the sight of blood.

 
“So what exactly are you going to do now?” Zezili called.

  “My sovereign wishes to meet you,” Monshara said. “These agents of mine will open the way. I’ll keep them with the legion from here on out. We may need them.”

  “Opening the way… to where you’re from?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they some kind of mutant jista?”

  Monshara laughed. “Nothing so grand. These are friends of mine. Omajistas.”

  “Omajistas?” Zezili laughed. “There aren’t…” She caught herself. What had Anavha said? “I opened a door.”

  “We put these omajistas in place many years ago,” Monshara said.

  “Years ago? Oma’s a myth.”

  “Like Rhea?” Monshara said. Zezili rankled. “Oma appears from between spaces. One cannot track it like a comet. Even Para, Tira, Sina, are irregular bodies. We can make estimates, but there appearances can sometimes be erratic, like their powers. Oma was not close enough to open a gate in those days. We had to force it. As we will do today. Many died.”

  “How many?”

  “A small country,” Monshara said, “called Saloria.”

  “The whole country?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s worth killing a country over?”

  “We knew what was coming,” Monshara said. “The sky has darkened on our world for decades. Bloody sunsets, first, as whatever poisons the satellites emitted as they decayed rained down on us. Then amber skies, and now… Well. We knew we didn’t have much time. When Para rose, it brought the full brunt of the decay it gathered from the spaces between things. It’s diseased. Now we are, too.”