The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  “Taigan, I’m –”

  “Up,” he repeated, and raised his hand. A whirlwind of air threw dirt and small stones at her. Taigan kicked up and grabbed hold of the tiny crevices and spurs of the rock. He jumped up the rock face like he weighed nothing – a feather pulled by a string, leaping from point to point, sixty feet up the face of the cliff.

  Lilia watched him, breathless, as he came to the top. He crouched. Peered down at her. “Your turn,” he called.

  “You know I can’t!” Lilia said.

  “You will,” he said, “or you’ll die down there.” He moved away from the edge of the cliff. She lost sight of him.

  “Taigan? Taigan! You promised to take me to my mother!”

  “Fly fly little bird!” Taigan called, his voice growing distant.

  “Taigan!” she moved against the wall. Stared up. She saw nothing that looked like it could hold her weight. She screwed her courage and jammed her good foot onto a small spur beneath her. She tried to lever herself up. The spur broke. She fell.

  The bear’s snout butted her from behind. She wasn’t sure how long it had been. At least a dozen repetitions of the song. She patted its snout.

  “I’ll play your stupid game,” she muttered. But not as he would expect.

  Lilia led the bear over to a nearby rock. She climbed up onto the rock and then slid onto the bear.

  Left or right? She looked back at the streambed. The broken pipe curved to the right. If whoever had built this pipe built them the way they did in Dhai, the pipe would be going downhill. She would go north, following the cliffside until she found a way across it, and then come back south until she either found Taigan or found where Taigan had waited for her. If he had waited.

  She heard the call of a bird, close, and urged the bear forward. In places, the way was impassable. She had to crawl around large boulders and knotted trees. The bear looked behind them often, snuffling, and she worried about predators. She found shelter that night in the arms of a tree, and tied herself tight so she didn’t fall off. In the morning, she went on, stopping for water when she found it.

  As the bear lumbered along, Lilia collected the big white leaves of the twisted pillar trees lining their way and strung them together. She had done the same with the leaves of bone trees as a child. In those days, wearing the cloak of bone tree leaves like the white muslin Faith Ahya had worn during her final days made her feel more powerful. Less small. People listened to Faith Ahya. People saw her. But the cloak of leaves was brittle. The leaves shriveled quickly. She abandoned them on the path.

  After two days, the long curve of the cliff tapered away. She crawled up the loose stone and shale, grabbing at knotted roots and bushes. At the top, she yanked on the bear’s lead and urged it to follow.

  She rode the bear the rest of the way, heading south again, back to the place where Taigan had abandoned her.

  It was midday when she heard Taigan say, “That was clever, but wrong.”

  Lilia started. Taigan dropped from the draping of a cluster of dense trees, twenty feet above her. He landed neatly in front of Lilia, sending up a little puff of dust, agile as a cat.

  “I’d rather be clever,” Lilia said. She slid off the bear.

  Taigan walked past her, to the lip of the cliff. He gazed at the streambed below. “Three days I waited, expecting you to fly back,” he said. “Then I realized what you’d do, and came to meet you. You really are just a mundane little scullery girl, aren’t you?”

  Lilia dropped the bear’s lead and met him at the edge of the precipice. “I’m sorry I’m not what you thought I was,” she said.

  “I don’t understand why you’re unteachable,” he said. “Perhaps you’re too old. That was a concern. The ones I’ve worked with before were ten or twelve, and most were from Dorinah. They had more discipline, and more...” he stared intently at her. “Fear. It made them easier to train.”

  “You know you’re fighting Dhai, don’t you? Another kind of Dhai.”

  Taigan sighed. “Yes. Some of us know. Why do you think I came to Dhai to find omajistas? What better way to fight the enemy than with the enemy himself?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lilia said. “I’m just not what you think I am.”

  “It’s a pointless exercise,” Taigan said. “I’m losing time. The world is losing time.”

  “But, my mother –”

  Taigan’s palm thumped hard into her sternum. Lilia lost her balance. Tipped over the cliff. Her ankle knocked a jutting spur of rock. Pain. The freedom of falling. She had a moment of abject terror. Shock.

  Taigan’s dark form, the edge of his coat fluttering in the wind. Gazing down at her, receding, falling away and away and away…

  This is a long fall, she thought. It’s a mistake. He’ll stop it.

  “Fly, fly little bird,” Taigan called.

  Her mother used to call her that. There were three intonations in Dhai, and “Li” with the third intonation meant “bird.”

  But she had always been broken, for as long as she could remember.

  And broken birds didn’t fly.

  Lilia pin wheeled her arms, clawing at air that whistled around her; a pretty, perfect song.

  Songs. Trefoils. Oma.

  The litany. If she could just pull -

  She grabbed at all of it as she fell.

  Her fingers found only air.

  She opened her mouth to scream or call for help –

  Jutting branches and twisted tree limbs splintered beneath her. Snapped her ribs. Raked her flesh. Crack and heave. She broke through the low canopy of stunted trees at the base of the cliff and crashed into the sandy streambed below. She landed on her right side. Her right shoulder fractured beneath her. Her right arm snapped.

  She rolled another few feet into the soft ravine, sliding to a halt among heavier river stones at its bottom, her blood smearing the rocks.

  Lilia saw her own twisted arm, her hand folded back unnaturally, fingers grazing her wrist. Her mouth filled with saliva. Screaming. She wanted to scream. Blackness juddered across her vision.

  Fly, fly, little bird.

  25.

  The blood stained tents of Zezili’s army were an ugly harbinger for the dajian camp spread below them in the muddy valley. Massive fences and temporary housing had been allotted to this group for at least a century. Zezili sat at a makeshift table outside her tent, gazing across the valley as the dajians lit their fires and put out their laundry and nattered out prayers to Para on the little green space at the center of the camp. She imagined these little dajians as some monstrous horde of invaders, led by the sneering face of the Kai she had met on the other side; but her imagination failed her. The dajian camp here was enclosed by stout adenoak fences and peppered in guard towers staffed by local enforcers. Technically, these dajians belonged to the Queen herself, and were available for rent to neighboring farms that relied on their labor twice a year for harvest and planting. The rest of the time, they served as parasites and brood stock, ensuring there was always another generation of laborers at the ready. Zezili thought the whole thing was a mess, but she liked cheap food, and dajian labor made that possible.

  Every dajian she killed now reminded her of her country’s impending starvation, and destruction. Why had the Empress tasked her with this? Surely she understood the implications?

  Monshara approached Zezili in the dawn quiet - Zezili heard the squish of her boots in the turf and huff of her bear first - leading her mount behind her.

  “I have a delivery to make,” Monshara said, patting the leather canister at her hip; the map she’d received from the other side. “I’ll be back in the morning. You’ll have clearance from the towers by then to enter the camp?”

  Zezili grunted at her and returned to her breakfast. The morning was chilly and her tea was weak. Summer’s balmy evenings were well past, and low autumn was upon them. The season also brought fog that sometimes blanketed the world for miles in every direction, so thick it was like breathing soup
. The mist below was nothing compared to how it would be later in the month.

  Monshara seemed to take the grunt as an affirmative, and moved on past Zezili, toward the rocky, scorched road.

  Thoughts of fog put Zezili in mind of her childhood, and she remembered that her mother lived not far from this camp, in a little town called Saolina. Her mother, who knew how to make mirrors. Zezili dumped out her cold tea.

  “Jasoi!” she called.

  Jasoi stood outside her tent, throwing her dagger at a twisted stump littered in knife wounds. She had a good throw, and more often than not, Zezili found herself eating something from the pot that Jasoi had picked off with her dagger earlier in the day.

  At Zezili's call, Jasoi turned. Jasoi yanked at her helm and swore. Her long hair had gotten tangled in it again.

  “Cut it off,” Zezili said.

  Jasoi pulled her helm free. It took a hank of reddish hair with it. Zezili had never seen hair that color on anyone but a Tordinian. Jasoi sheathed her dagger.

  “You’re just jealous,” Jasoi said. She still ended her sentences with a rising intonation and slushy consonants; a typical Tordinian accent, though she had been in Dorinah for two decades.

  “No, I’m practical. You should have buzzed your head when you got lice.”

  “It wasn’t a problem.”

  “Eight hours in a chair getting insects picked off my head is a problem,” Zezili said.

  “What did you want, Syre?” Jasoi said, tucking the helm under her arm.

  “You have the legion,” Zezili said. “I’ll be going into Saolina this morning.”

  “Yes, Syre.”

  Zezili kicked awake one of her pages – some rosy-cheeked kid from Daorian – and had Dakar groomed and saddled. Some days she suspected Dakar was better groomed than she was.

  She took the main road into Saolina, four hours of riding past sprawling farm holds bursting with children and dajians. The popular refrain in the cities was that the farmsteads produced rice, yams, and the entire country’s children. City women tended to have the number required to avoid taxation, but country women often had twice as many. Children were cheaper than dajians, and tended to be a good bit more loyal.

  Zezili’s mother lived in a modest three-story brick house built around a dead bonsa tree that was at least as old as Dorinah. Curtains of weeping moss trailed from the skeletal branches. When Zezili knocked, the house dajian said her mother had gone to the salon. Zezili rode on, down into the central spiral of the city. At the end of the winding road was the Temple to Rhea. The way was lined in artisan and service shops.

  She reined in Dakar outside the salon, a nondescript building faced in marble with a painted red awning. She tied up Dakar and pushed inside.

  Like most salons, Saolina’s was a buzzing hub of activity. Zezili found salons a little beneath her station these days – she had dajians to do her hair – but for most of her life, her mother brought her here twice a week to have her hair trimmed, rolled, curled, and heated. Four women and one man sat in the waiting area drinking tea and gossiping about local politics. The man was conservatively dressed, and seemed to belong to two of the women, sisters, from the cast of their faces. The air smelled of burnt hair, boiled agave, and pomade.

  Zezili moved past the curtained waiting area and into the long rectangular room where a dozen hairdressers worked nimbly at the shoulders of their clients – twisting, clipping, rolling and burning hair. The lacquered silver mirrors that stretched across both long walls of the room were a familiar design, each infused with the emerald essence of Tira. Zezili walked past the open air stations to the back, where gauzy curtains gave the clientele a bit more privacy. Her mother wouldn’t have the masses see her with her hair undone.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” Zezili said.

  Her mother raised her gaze from her own image in the mirror, and squinted at Zezili. Her feet did not quite touch the floor. She scrunched her plump, lined face as if she’d tasted something rotten. “A year of silence, and you come to me for favors?” she clucked her tongue, and waved at her hairdresser. The hairdresser was as old as her mother – pushing toward sixty. Zezili had known her since she was a child.

  “We’ll need a private room, Haodatia,” Zezili’s mother said, and then, to Zezili, “won’t we?”

  Haodatia ducked her head and went to prepare a room. Zezili’s mother sat solidly in the padded seat, half her hair dampened with agave and rolled into tight curls at the front, bound in string, and the back knotted in triangles of paper which had already been heated to set the curls. The other half of her hair hung down to the middle of her back, waiting to be rolled and sewn into place with the rest. Zezili found the elaborate hairstyles exhausting, but her mother hadn’t let her cut her hair until she was fourteen due to concerns about how it would upset their social standing.

  Now Zezili stood before her in a dirty padded tunic, her stringy, tangled hair pulled back into a simple tail, blood and dirt smeared across her boots. If the whole town hadn’t known who she was, she expected she’d have been booted from the city limits the moment she began down the spiraling road to the temple.

  “You should grow out your hair,” her mother said, “you look like a peasant.”

  Zezili chose to ignore that, and her mother’s challenging stare. They gazed at one another in the mirror until Haodatia returned.

  “It’s ready, mistress,” Haodatia said.

  She led them to one of the two private rooms at the rear of the salon. The wooden partitions were latticed at the top, letting in air and light, but muffling conversation. Haodatia had lit two additional lamps to give her light to work by.

  Haodatia took up another set of paper triangles and began looping the next roll of her mother’s hair.

  “I hear you’re murdering slaves now,” her mother said. “How uplifting.”

  “How do you destroy a mirror?” Zezili asked.

  Her mother raised her brows. “Really? You came all this way for that?”

  Zezili gestured to the green glowing mirror in front of them. “You made all of these,” Zezili said, “and more besides. I thought I’d come to the expert.”

  “You’re talking about infused mirrors?”

  “No,” Zezili said, “the kind I can bash in with a sword. Yes, mother. Infused mirrors.”

  “My daughter has a tongue,” her mother said.

  “She is spirited,” Haodatia said, “like her mother.” She reached for the heated crimping iron set in a bowl of coals on the counter.

  “Once it’s been infused,” her mother said, “they don’t break. That’s the beauty of them. They’re indestructible. Why do you care? You never took interest in my art.”

  “I was in the area,” Zezili said. “Humor me.”

  “I have humored you a good deal, girl.”

  “Before it’s infused you could destroy it, right? Same as any other mirror?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What if it was really big?”

  “Big, what does that mean? Be precise, Zezili.”

  Zezili wanted to tell her it was as big as the temple of Rhea in Daorian, but suspected her mother wouldn’t believe that.

  “Big as a building,” Zezili said.

  “Ha,” her mother said. “A building.” She scrutinized Zezili’s face in the mirror. “Well, it’s fairly easy to destroy such a thing before it’s infused, but would likely require help. A fairly skilled parajista could break it, or perhaps you and half your legion hacking away at it.”

  “But once some parajista or tirajista infuses it, that’s it? No one to take it out?”

  “Take it out? Are we targeting mirrors now on our military campaigns?”

  “It’s important,” Zezili said.

  “Indeed.” Her mother pursed her mouth, deepening the creases around her lips. She dyed her hair white to match her weathered face, when she came to the salon. Zezili saw long white streaks in it, too bold for natural color. Elder women commanded more respe
ct.

  “Once it’s infused, the only one who can break it is the woman who created it,” her mother said. She lifted a finger, and pointed at the greened mirror. Zezili watched a tiny crack appear on the bottom right of the glass. It spidered up along the edge of frame, ending abruptly halfway up the face. Her mother pulled her hand away. “It’s certainly possible another who could channel the same satellite could do it, but it would take longer. A woman’s patterns, the way she folds together the metal and power of the satellite, are unique, like a fingerprint or a cornea. It would take another tirajista two or three weeks to unravel this mirror.”

  Zezili stared long at the crack in the glass. She had never wanted talent; channeling the satellites was a rare gift among Dorinahs. Her mother’s station would have been far more advanced if she’d been more powerful. As it was, she could do a few tricks, and infused weapons and other items, but Zezili had never seen her shape trees into boats or grow and strip orchards with a glance. For the first time in many years, Zezili thought it might be a useful thing. Breaking the shadow mirror would require someone to open the gate – one of Monshara’s omajistas - and a parajista to break the mirror? Or maybe an omajista could make a portal and break the mirror, too? Zezili didn’t know enough about how any of it was done yet. And she certainly didn’t have those types of people in her social circles. In truth, she didn’t have much of a social circle. All she could bring were the bodies to fuel the gate. At least she understood the bodies part.

  “Thank you,” Zezili said, and turned away.

  “Look at that, Haodatia, she thanks me!” her mother said.

  Zezili waited until she was clear of the salon before thrusting her helm back on. Being in town made her suddenly self-conscious of her hair. She hated that.

  As she began to untie Dakar, she saw Haodatia running after.

  Zezili paused.

  Haodatia handed her a folded piece of lavender paper. “Your mother wanted me to give you this,” she said, and touched Zezili’s sleeve. “It was good to see you again, Zee.”

  Zezili grunted at her and turned away, taking the paper with her. She saw Haodatia’s tentative smile wither. The hairdresser went back inside.