The Mirror Empire

by Kameron Hurley

  “That’s why I remember it. Odd request. I thought there might be a fugitive down there, some rogue novice or Ora she didn’t want to tell me about.”

  “Something she… feared,” Ahkio said.

  “That’s possible.”

  Ahkio closed the book. “What if I told you I’d heard someone say that Kirana killed herself? Why would a person do something like that?”

  Ghrasia touched his hands. “To save someone they love.”

  Ahkio heard raised voices again. A shout. The noise was coming from the other side of the council house.

  Ahkio glanced at the door. He saw light coming from beneath it. The house was abuzz with movement.

  Ghrasia released him. “Oma’s breath,” she muttered, and began pulling on her clothes.

  Ahkio lit a lantern. He tucked the book back into his tunic and pulled on the tunic. He yanked the bed sheets straight and grabbed his trousers.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall, closer.

  Just as Ahkio noticed the edge of Clan Leader Talisa’s terrible painting sitting behind the bed – he’d taken it down before taking Ghrasia to bed – the door burst open.

  Caisa and Ohanni ran into the room.

  Ghrasia was standing by the fire, still knotting her hair back. Ahkio put his hands on his hips. “What is it?” he said. His heart hammered. For fear of being found out or fear of what they had to say, or both.

  Caisa glanced quickly from one of them to the other.

  “We have one of the assassins downstairs,” Ohanni said.

  “Alive,” Caisa said.

  44.

  “You mean Casa Maigan,” Maralah said. They were still mopping up the halls from the coup four days earlier; the Patron’s former dining room now served as her strategy room while they took out the three remaining groups of rogue sanisi holed up in the keep. The hold still shook occasionally, caused by dueling parajistas. Dust trickled from cracks in the ceiling.

  Maralah stood with Kadaan and his little Dhai ward, Roh, in the dining room. Her brother was asleep in the next room with his mouthy second, and Wraisau and a squad of Rajavaa’s own men guarded them. Kadaan had brought Roh to her after discovering he knew something about a book the other Dhai were hiding. It turned out that slaughtering his companions had shaken something loose in him. As much as Maralah abhorred what the Patron had done – it was very unlike him – she had to admit it was effective.

  “I thought it was a name you might know,” Kadaan said. “It sounded like someone from the north, one of Alaar’s women.”

  “I’m familiar with her, yes,” Maralah said. “She was part of Alaar’s harem in Isjahilde, inherited from the prior Patron. She was one of those we had to leave behind. And you heard this from one of your Dhai friends?”

  “From Aramey,” Roh said. The boy stood straight, with his hands clasped behind his back just like Kadaan. Kadaan had dressed the boy in a dark tunic cut in the Saiduan style, and shaved his head. Maralah thought it better fit his new status. Kadaan had undertaken his scrubbing up with an eye for utility. She appreciated that. It would make things easier on the boy, too, though Maralah was uncertain how much he knew of that yet.

  “Keeper Takanaa had your friends’ rooms cleaned,” she said, “and the contents returned to the scholars.”

  “There was a book there,” Roh said, “written in talamynii. Ora Dasai said it was very important. I thought maybe the woman’s name had to do with the book. Maybe they meant to give it to her? To translate?”

  “Indeed,” Maralah said. “It was the first book our scholars brought to my attention, after the rooms were cleared. I’ve never seen two men so excited. There was no record of it in the archives. Do you know where Ora Dasai found it?”

  Roh shook his head. He met her look when he did it, but Maralah suspected that any boy smart enough to survive the slaughter of his comrades would be smart enough to tell half-truths when the time came for it.

  “The issue with the book is translation, as you noted,” Maralah said. “Casa had talamynii roots. Hers was a very old and isolated family. It wouldn’t surprise me if they wanted her to translate this book.”

  “Isjahilde is under enemy control,” Kadaan said. “Even if she still lives –”

  “We can find other translators,” Maralah said. “All this death and politics and tracking down omajistas… you think what we need is in this dusty book?”

  “It may be a list of recipes, for all we know,” Kadaan said.

  “It’s not,” Roh said. “There were two books mentioned in a text we found from an old Dhai scholar. They were specifically about omajistas. He referenced them as among the first books they tried to get rid of, to punish the Saiduan during the next rising of Oma. This could be one of those books.”

  “I can’t spare many for this,” Maralah said. “Take Roh Luna, and a small team. I need Driaa here, but any of the others can go.”

  “Where?” Kadaan said.

  “The Shoratau. Tell anyone in there who can translate the book that we’ll free them.”

  Kadaan shook his head. “Trusting prisoners to speak truth -”

  “I suspect having a squad of sanisi over them, looking to sniff out lies, will aid in preventing some of that,” she said. “So will having two Dhai. Luna knows later talamynii, though Bael says the ancient is beyond him. They’ll know if anyone is bluffing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roh said, “What’s Shoratau?”

  “A prison,” Maralah said, “where we put the people we should have killed, but thought we might need later.”

  “It’s north of here,” Kadaan said. “We won’t be able to find a clear road –”

  “It’s north east,” Maralah said. “You’re a small group. You may be able to avoid detection. We’ll be retreating south to Harajan. If the weather holds long enough, you still may be able to meet us there before it takes you.”

  “Yes, Shao,” Kadaan said.

  Maralah held out her hand. Kadaan gripped her elbow. She leaned in. “It was a good hard run,” she said.

  “If you can’t keep him on the seat, I expect you to take it,” he said.

  “A woman on the seat? Then you’ll know we’re lost,” she said, and pulled away.

  She watched the sanisi and the boy leave the dining room. Then she sat in one of the tall chairs and stared at the crystal place settings. The slaves had set the table for eight – for Patron Rajavaa and his ministers of finance, agriculture, commerce, foreign relations, health and education, transport and infrastructure, and her, the acting minister of war. She remembered standing here at Alaar’s side, more than twenty years before, when he was the Minister of Commerce, and she just a young sanisi bound by oath and blood to the Patron at the head of the table. She did not know what she saw in Alaar then. It went beyond his quick wit and generous but firm hand. She realized it was his willingness to end all the bloody internal wars and rebellions and invest heavily in their gifted arts and infrastructure. Oma was only a century from rising, he had told the table. Every astronomer said it. It was not just myth. It was coming. Saiduan had to be the most stable country in the world, united, strong, to take on whatever invaders Oma brought with it this turn. It was he who reinstated the minister of health and education. After his bloody ascension they had sat here together to build a fine new country.

  Alaar had not been made for war. He was made for peace. Perhaps Kadaan had done her a favor. She could never have killed him herself, even knowing the rules, even knowing it was necessary. She would have secreted him away somewhere – simply sent him into stasis by slowing down his fibrous heart – and brought him back after the tide was turned back, and they needed a man with a head for politics instead of a stomach for strategy.

  The loss was still painful. Putting her brother on the seat meant she had finally given up on that dream of peace.

  “Maralah?”

  She glanced up. Rajavaa entered, dressed in Alaar’s soft amber robes. Her heart clenched. She stood.

&nb
sp; “Yes, Patron,” she said.

  “I need a woman’s guidance on something,” he said.

  “Then I am not the person to ask,” she said.

  The Saiduan had six words that described types of snow, and Roh had seen every one of them. He trudged across an icy tundra, trailing after twelve sanisi. They had thrown off their dark garb for white ubel fur coats and boots. They were making for Shoratau, staying far away from the roads and regular paths. The days blurred together, so many Roh woke one day and felt blinded by the blank stretch of white.

  Roh traveled mostly with Luna at the back of the group, spending their rest periods and evenings poring over the talamynii book.

  “Did you tell them about Shodav?” Luna asked early on. It was the first thing Luna said to him.

  It made Roh angry, that he thought first of protecting Shodav, though it was his own friends who were already dead. He’s just protecting Shodav, Roh thought, so what happened to Dasai and the others doesn’t happen to him.

  “I didn’t,” Roh said. “I said the book was just something Ora Dasai found.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” Luna said.

  “It’s done,” Roh said.

  “You could have run.”

  “The way you and Kihin were going to run?”

  Luna looked away, but not before Roh saw Luna’s eyes fill.

  “I’m sorry,” Roh said.

  Luna wiped his face. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s how it is here. Every time you think you find a way out, they hobble you again.”

  “Did you love him?” Roh asked.

  Luna hesitated. “Do you love Kadaan?”

  “That’s a mean question,” Roh said.

  “Yes,” Luna said.

  “Kadaan is kind,” Roh said. “It could have turned out a lot worse.”

  “Kihin was a nice boy,” Luna said, and did not speak of it again.

  Roh and Luna worked on the book until their fingers were numb and the letters all blurred together. “Why do some of these look like Dhai characters?” Roh asked as Luna taught him the few talamynii characters he knew.

  “They borrowed from each other a lot,” Luna said. “It’s pretty rare to see one people take over without picking up a lot from the people they conquered. This is actually more likely a Dhai book than a talamynii one – it’s the talamynii that’s borrowed, not the Dhai.”

  Roh turned to the back of the book where there were simple line illustrations, mostly maps and circles. Without being able to read the characters, the circle figures were unintelligible. But at the beginning of the illustration section were five symbols carefully drawn on a map with the familiar cross-section of mountains found only on Grania. This Grania, though, had no oceans. The map seemed to go on far past the page. Written onto the map were five familiar symbols. Roh knew them immediately. They were the same ones he had seen on the table in the Assembly Chamber in Oma’s Temple: a triangle with two circles; a circle with two lines through it; a coiled curl with a circle, a square with a double circle inside… and the trefoil with the tail. The one Lilia dreamed her mother pressed into her skin.

  “I know these,” Roh said. “These symbols are in the Temple of Oma, in Dhai.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Roh said. “Most of them marked the temples.” He traced the trefoil with the tail. The table map had shown that symbol over a spur of land that jutted into the ocean. But on this map, there was no ocean; just flatland. Whatever the trefoil had marked had probably fallen into the sea during the cataclysm, the last time Oma rose.

  “Symbols aren’t good for much if we can’t read the book,” Luna said.

  Roh stared at the map for nearly an hour, flipping back and forth between the pages. The symbols showed up again – this time each had their own page – later in the section, tucked into a corner on a page with more of the circular illustrations.

  “Ora Dasai would know what this meant,” Roh said, frustrated.

  “He isn’t here,” Luna said. “So we better figure this out.”

  “I was supposed to die an old man in an orchard,” Roh said.

  “I was supposed to marry a farmer,” Luna said. “Not everything happens the way it’s supposed to.”

  Kadaan led their small party, and Roh only saw him at night, after meeting with Luna, when they shared the same tent, but little else. Roh kept his hat on all the time. His bare scalp itched, and his ears burned with cold.

  Roh had never known such a spare existence. They were mired by a windstorm over a frozen river whose breadth spanned a valley. They retreated inland and dug themselves into snow caves. They were stranded for a week, and killed and ate two of the bears. Kadaan cut everyone’s rations.

  And at night… the nights were the worst. The sanisi and the dogs patrolled the edges of the camp for the invaders. Most nights, they found them. Two sanisi died.

  Then one morning Kadaan took Roh to the top of an icy plateau and pointed north.

  “There,” he said.

  Roh gazed out over a white, ice-encrusted plain to the churning crush of ice floes in what must have been a harbor. There was a black spire jutting up from behind a pulsing gray wall. The frozen sea made eerie structures on three sides of the tower, great ice sculptures that clung to the hold as if carved by master craftspeople.

  Kadaan sent a man ahead to scout. When he came back, he and Kadaan conferred for a few moments. Then Kadaan waved them all forward. “I’m afraid the invaders got there before us,” he said.

  As they walked to the tower, bodies become visible within a hundred yards of the walls. The only reason they hadn’t seen them sooner was because the snow had claimed them, covering the churned-up ground, the bloody trails of the dying, the detritus of spent arrows and crossbow bolts, the discarded weapons of the dead.

  As they neared, the frosty faces of the dead emerged from the snow heaps; a boot heel, the edge of a coat, a clawed fist frozen forever to the hilt of a sword. The bodies had been so long on the tundra that they didn’t look real. They were pasty imitations of people, stiff and grotesque, bloodless.

  The bodies reminded Roh of Dasai and Aramey, Nioni and Kihin. He thought of his brother dying alone in a pool of his own blood, on an icy tundra such as this. I was a coward, Roh thought. A selfish coward. Not a hero. His throat closed and tears came. It was so cold the moisture froze at the corners of his eyes before falling.

  “This is different,” Kadaan said. “They don’t usually leave the bodies. They spirit them off somewhere.”

  Roh wiped his face and looked up at the ruined gate of the tower. The iron-bound door had burst inward, shattered like glass. The edges of the gate that remained fixed on the hinges looked like the remnants of burst windows.

  There was no movement along the battlements. Just inside the gate were heaps of Saiduan bodies. The walls blocked most of the wind-carried snow, so the bodies remained almost entirely exposed. Crystallized blood, frosty entrails, headless corpses, men shattered in two. Great scorch marks stained the walls inside. The buildings surrounding the keep had been reduced to charred stone, their roofs and interiors carried away by fire.

  The sanisi followed the trail of bodies and burned-out homes up into the interior of the tower.

  The gate there had been broken open as well, with the same violent force that had torn apart the gate outside.

  The party did not speak as they moved through the keep. Dead sanisi littered the floor. Roh wondered at first where they all had come from – wasn’t this a prison? Then he realized that people from the surrounding areas must have fled here, hoping it was a place of refuge. Among the dead Saiduan were the shorter, paler bodies of the invaders. The invaders who looked like Dhai. Roh looked from the dead to Kadaan, and wondered why no one ever called the invaders by name.

  For the first time, Roh understood what kind of battle they were fighting. This wasn’t a war at all. It was a genocide. It was the complete decimation of an entire people. T
he invaders were doing to the Saiduan what the Saiduan tried to do to the Dhai, and what the Dhai had done to the talamynii before them. There would be no middle ground. No peace. No end. Dasai and the others were dead, for nothing. Why had he lived? To what purpose?

  Luna came up beside him in the cold hallway. “What is it?” he said.

  “We have to win,” Roh said.

  “I’ll settle for dying old,” Luna said.

  “I won’t,” Roh said.

  Roh helped move the bodies out of the main rooms. They were to leave the bodies haphazardly; no stacking, no burning, nothing that so obviously left a trace of their passage. They raided the keep for food, and Kadaan allowed them to light up the braziers, but no regular fires. Fires made too much smoke. They covered up the windows of the rooms they used, so no light could be seen from the harbor. They posted sanisi at the gate to the keep, but left the main gate into the city untouched.

  There were only a handful of bears left in the kennels not yet starved or frozen – most of the others had been taken.

  That night, Roh sat awake at the foot of Kadaan’s bed for many hours, though Kadaan did not come to bed. Luna always slept with the talamynii book, and he thought about sitting up with him for a while and going over more characters. But he was restless.

  Roh moved through the corridors in search of a friendly face. He found Kadaan in one of the ransacked libraries. Kadaan sat near the soft glow of a brazier. The room was bitterly cold. Roh could see his breath. The books were covered in frost.

  Kadaan did not look at him, though Roh knew his presence was noted.

  “How did they get in?” Roh asked softly, from the doorway.

  “If I knew that, we would not see this. There is a good deal we do not know. More come every month. Like roaches. We cut them down, and still they come. Sanisi cannot train their children so quickly.” He gestured to the ransacked room around him. “They are coming here for knowledge no one has been able to give them. Maybe we should give up on this book business, and take what remains of our people south. There is another continent there. Perhaps we will be welcome.”