“What did I see that I had to die for?” Roh said.
“Yisaoh doesn’t want me on this seat,” Ahkio said. “That’s no secret. But it does interest me that… well, I have others to speak to about that. This isn’t why I brought you here.”
Roh leaned forward.
“You want to go to Saiduan,” Ahkio said. “I’ve heard Ora Dasai and Ora Nasaka debating it, these weeks they thought you dead.”
“I want it more than anything,” Roh said.
“Even now?”
“Especially now.”
“Where do your loyalties lie?” Ahkio asked.
“My… Oh.” Yisaoh and the dead people downstairs were from clan Garika, just like him. “I know I’m a Garika, but that’s just my clan. I’m not related to Tir’s kin.”
“You showed me that in the temple this morning,” Ahkio said. “What I want to know is if you’re an Ora first, or a Dhai.”
“If you asked me to swear an oath to you, I would,” Roh said.
“Ora Dasai will permit you to go north,” Ahkio said.
“But… he really doesn’t –”
“He’ll take you with him. I’ve asked Ora Nasaka to speak to him. But there’s a condition.”
“I’ll do it,” Roh said. He pushed his hands under his thighs, because he wanted to jump out of his seat and hug the Kai. A profound sense of relief washed over him. He had pulled on Para, and faced down an Ora in defense of the Kai, and changed his fate. He’d known all along he could do it. He caught himself grinning.
“You’re happy to obey Ora Dasai?” Ahkio said. His tone was somber. Roh’s grin faded.
“I… well, shouldn’t I?”
“I need you to obey me first,” Ahkio said. “It’s no secret things are very bad, and people are divided. I need someone I can trust in Saiduan. You’re a talented boy, and a Garika who’ll still defend the Kai. I need you to work for me now, for Dhai. That’s the price. You understand?”
“I think so.” He really didn’t care to understand. All he cared about was seeing the tundra for the first time, and fighting with sanisi, and building some big life outside a farmhouse.
Ahkio said, “My sister, Kai Kirana, is dead. It wasn’t a natural death. There are many who would want her dead, the Saiduan among them.”
“How… how could I help?”
Ahkio pulled something from his tunic pocket - a sheet of green paper with neat rows of Dhai characters set beside jagged lines of script.
“I’m not asking you to uncover any great plot. I’m just asking you to tell me the truth as you see it. I need someone there with fresh eyes who isn’t Ora Dasai. Will you go to Saiduan and tell me all you see?”
“I will,” Roh said. His grin was back, and this time, he could not suppress it. “Thank you, Kai.”
But the Kai’s face was somber. Roh tried to match his expression.
“The is the cipher of the Kai,” Ahkio said. “We’ve used it for thousands of years to pass messages among kin. Today I’m going to count you as kin, and turn it over to you. It’s how you’ll send word of what you see in Saiduan, and how the battle is progressing there.”
Roh nodded.
“I know you’re a smart boy,” he said. “Ora Dasai does not speak highly of the dim-witted, nor does he try and keep them from being exiled. Hopefully you can learn this in a few afternoons.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Roh, this part is important,” Ahkio said. Roh sat up a little straighter. “You’re not to tell anyone else what you’re doing. Not Ora Dasai. Not Nasaka. No one but me. Put your trust in me, and if anything happens to you, know that I’ll do everything in my power to help.”
“I believe you,” Roh said.
Ahkio gestured to the massive wall of shelves. “Then select a few books, and let’s begin.”
19.
“If there are two Kais,” Lilia said, “it means there could be two of everyone, doesn’t it?”
Gian picked at the remains of the man’s liver. The suns had set, and cool darkness blanketed the clearing.
“I know it’s hard to wrap your head around,” Gian said. “It was hard for me too, when I first came here. I had a sister over there, a twin. She had to stay. She couldn’t come through because she already existed here. We’re twins there, but here… just one of us. Just her. So I could cross. She couldn’t, unless we found the woman here with my face, and… killed her. That’s the rules.” She shrugged. “I keep expecting to find my sister’s double someday. Keep expecting to look up and see my own face.”
“Two of everyone,” Lilia said. “Two of my mother?”
Gian’s expression was difficult to read in the low light of the fire. “Yes,” she said. “Two of your mother. But not of you. That’s why Kalinda could bring you here. You can’t bring someone over if they have a double that’s still alive. That’s why my sister had to stay, but I didn’t.”
“Where’s my mother?” Lilia said. “If there’s two of everyone, then, my mother –”
“Listen, Lilia, this may be difficult –”
“Where?”
“Your mother here isn’t the person you knew,” Gian said. “Kalinda already tried to get your mother here to join with us. But she’s… she’s Dorinah. And very loyal to Dorinah.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Believe me or don’t, but the version of your mother as she exists here, the one you’re so keen to find, serves the Empress. Your real mother, Nava… I’m sorry, Lilia, but she’s dead and gone and you must forget her. Come with us the way she wanted. Our worlds are coming together, and only one is going to live. You can help decide which one.”
“Why should I believe anything you say?”
“Has anyone else had answers for you but Kalinda? Trust me, Lilia. Your mother delivered you to Kalinda, and Kalinda turned you over to me. You have to trust that you’re on the right side.”
“I’ll find my mother in Dorinah, then.”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said?” Gian tapped the butt of her weapon. “I’m a parajista with a sword, Lilia, and I’m telling you now – we’re not going to Dorinah so you can track down some shadow working for the Empress.”
Outside the temple, it was people with weapons and strength who pushed others around. If Gian was a stone defender on a screes board, Lilia would employ a flanking defense to sweep her off it. But she had no pieces. And no sword.
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 their 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.
She slowed her pace. Stopped. Gian continued on, oblivious.
Lilia watched her hacking away with the sword. Gian 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 ground. 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 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. Lilia felt sick. 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 bee hive, 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 bee hive, 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,” she 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.
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 milled 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 wrangled hold of the little omajista-girl, he’d sent a
message to Maralah. Her response indicated she’d received it:
We broke the one Saarda found in Masaira, but the east coast was just invaded. The Patron’s running out of patience, and I’m running out of sanisi. Break her before you get here. We don’t have time to do it after.
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 tangled butterfly he’d sent with the man fluttering toward him. Taigan pulled it apart now, catching a whiff of sea. The smell caused a bright memory to flutter 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 scullery 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 fisher 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.
The Mirror Empire Page 17