“You will remember me,” she said, and broke the face of the mirror with her bare fists.
She brought up her bloody hands as people began to stream toward her. She looked back at them only once. Then she pulled on Oma, a deep, frightful breath, and flayed the first wave of them where they stood.
Blood flecked her face. She brought up her hand, and another raw breath of Oma, and tangled together the blood of the dead into perfect trefoils, bound by their long tails. She sang the Saiduan song of the dead as she did it. She burned the image of the camp in her mind, the camp at the base of the Liona mountains, where Gian waited for her.
A gate winked open, just big enough to crawl through. Unsure how long she could hold it, she jumped through, and released Oma. The gate closed.
Lilia stood in the mud. The moons were out.
“Taigan!” she yelled. She looked back. The camp was intact. No fires. But she could still smell the burnt meat of the legion. “Taigan!”
“Here!” Taigan rode out to meet her from the far fence. “I thought you might return.”
“Is everyone safe?”
“They pulled back,” Taigan said. “I suspect they worried there were more of you. Where’s the legionnaire?”
“I don’t care,” Lilia said. “Where’s Gian and Emlee?”
“Your friends? Where they live, I expect.”
She began to trudge toward the camp.
“Where are you going?” Taigan asked.
“It’s time to fly,” Lilia said.
47.
Ahkio walked into the low bedroom of the private home in Raona where Liaro lay. He looked small. Ahkio sat on the edge of the bed. With the council house burned to the ground, the wounded were bedded down in whatever homes would take them.
Liaro reached out a hot, sweaty hand to him and said, “Ahkio.”
“I hear you’re supposed to live,” Ahkio said. He pulled Kirana’s book from his pocket. “If I practice reading aloud, I might get better at it, and you might get some sleep.”
Liaro laughed. It turned into a cough. “Run a man through, then tell him stories. Sounds very Dhai.”
“Ghrasia told me what you did just outside the square. It was brave.”
“I tripped over my own sword and fell on it,” Liaro said. “That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even an infused blade.”
“But brave that you tried,” Ahkio said.
“How is your friend Ghrasia?” Liaro said slyly.
“She’s as well as can be expected,” Ahkio said.
“Caisa told me you took that horrible painting down in Clan Leader Talisa’s room, before you blew it up.”
“I did. Why?”
Liaro leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t want all those dour people looking at me while some hero took me to bed, either.”
Ahkio’s face burned. He cleared his throat.
Liaro smirked. “I knew it.
“Can I read to you, or not?”
“You know I always thought Caisa played for the other side,” Liaro said.
Ahkio’s fingers lingered over the text. He still needed to deal with Caisa. But not yet. “Which one?”
“Good point. Not ours.”
“Don’t tell me you’re becoming as paranoid as Nasaka.”
“I’m just worried,” Liaro said. He bunched up his bed sheets in his fists.
“Because you care for her?”
“We’d have been a merry union in another life,” Liaro said, “me and you, Meyna and Caisa.”
“You never liked Meyna.”
“I didn’t dislike her.”
“Let me worry about Caisa,” Ahkio said. “I’m good at it.”
Liaro waved a hand. “Fine, fine. Read. It’s been one person after another jabbering away in here, asking when I’ll be ready for cards and bendar.”
Ahkio turned to the last story in Kirana’s book, titled Faythe. It was the story he heard at every Festival of Oma. He should have known it by heart. But as he read the story to Liaro, he found it was not at all the story he remembered. In this version, Faith was a slave from Aaldia. The child she carried was not Hahko’s, but an enslaved Dhai condemned for thievery in a dajian camp. Faith was not strong and brave and passionate. She was petty and weak and self-serving. The Dorinahian book made Faith into a figure of pity, not worship. Ahkio did not know if he liked it, and could not say if Liaro did, for he had fallen asleep.
Faith lay in childbed, to give birth to the first Kai of Dhai. But when Hahko burst in, it was not to claim her child and free her, but to steal the child and proclaim it Kai. Ahkio decided that no, he really didn’t like this story.
At the end of the last page of the book, Faith Ahya was still alive.
And though Ahkio had read the story, he was not certain how it would end. He would remain forever uncertain, because the last page of the book, the page following the broken sentence at the end of the final, intact page, recorder of the last days of Faith Ahya, had been torn out.
He had used it as kindling, to light the fire that drove back the shadows.
After Liaro was asleep, Ahkio made his way back to the clan square where the last of the Oras and militia Ghrasia had sent out to net the assassins had returned. They had sent out over a hundred Oras and militia, but he counted scarcely twenty in the square.
Ghrasia stood talking with the group’s leader, a grizzled militia man named Farosi Sana Nako.
“Is this all?” Ahkio asked.
“Afraid so,” Ghrasia said.
“And the assassins?”
“Here,” Farosi said, and pulled back the cover on a cart. Ahkio counted five bodies.
“The full dozen, then,” Ahkio said.
“At a great cost,” Farosi said.
“Walk with me, Kai,” Ghrasia said. She led him across the courtyard and onto a winding lane leading out to the rice fields. He kept his hands in his pockets.
As they walked, he noticed the sightless, feral little girl trailing after them along the weed-tangled road. He hadn’t asked Ghrasia if the girl followed her all the time, but he suspected that unless she was inside a building, the girl was always within shouting distance.
“You were right,” Ghrasia said.
“About what?”
“Me lording over the militia,” she said. “Those assassins did what they did out of blind obedience to their Kai. They made things like that.” She nodded to the feral girl. “And if they’re what we’ll fight… I’d rather we lost than become as they are.”
Ahkio stopped walking. She came up beside him. “What is it?” she said.
“You know this was the easiest part,” he said.
She faced him. Raised her hand. “May I touch you, Kai?”
“Always,” he said.
She put her arms around him. Her head rested just above his heart.
“I know it will get more difficult,” she said. “Just swear to me you’ll keep us the people we are.”
“I swear it,” he said. But even as he spoke the words, he remembered standing over the dying man in the blazing council house basemet, hacking him to death with a flaming sword.
“Then it will be all right,” she said, and pulled away.
48.
Lilia swept into Emlee’s house, her bleeding hand wrapped in strips of her tattered red tunic. Gian jumped up from the floor and embraced her. Lilia had missed the smell of her hair.
“You’re alive!” Gian said.
Taigan pushed in behind Lilia. She was much too tall for the low ceiling, and had to duck her head.
“What happened out there?” Emlee said.
“I need to see Larn’s priest, the one she gets all those nice things from,” Lilia said. “The ones who are new to camp. The ones you keep on the side of camp you won’t take me.”
Emlee and Cora exchanged a look.
“I’m going to find them with or without you,” Lilia said.
Cora handed her baby over to Emlee. He fussed.
“I’ll take you,” Cora said, “but I don’t know what you’d want with him. Him and his priestesses are a secretive bunch. Larn has to –”
“I know what Larn does,” Lilia said. “Take me to them.”
Cora looked up at Taigan. “Him too?”
“Him too.”
Lilia asked one of the orphan packs to guard Taigan’s bear. They would make enough of a stir without the bear.
Cora led them through deep mud, around dark hovels stained in smoke, to the far edge of the camp. She pointed to a large round hovel thatched in everpine and mud. “That’s the place,” she said.
Lilia strode toward the door. Taigan stayed silent.
She entered unbidden. It was dim inside, but she could see the women’s seamed faces, their broad frames and hands. An adenoak staff with a jeweled knob at the end rested near the door.
All talk ceased as Lilia entered. Someone pulled back a curtain at the other side of the room. Larn was lit in profile, sitting up thin and disheveled in the bed.
The man who had pulled back the curtain stared at her with dark eyes in a very Dorinahian face.
“Who are you?” the man said.
“They’re gifted,” Taigan said.
“Dorinah’s gifted,” Lilia said. “Soon to be my gifted.”
The faces of the Empress of Dorinahs Seekers stared out at her. “What are your names?” Lilia said. They told her: Voralyn, Amelia, Laralyn. Their leader – they called her a Ryyi, was Tulana. Tulana sat on a raised bench on the other side of the room, combing out her hair. Their clothes were tatters, their faces smeared in grime.
“And you?” Lilia asked the man.
“Sokai,” he said.
“Zezili says hello,” Lilia said. “And you’re all going to help me. You’re going to bind yourself to me, and you’re going to come back to Dhai with me.”
There was nervous laughter in the room.
But Tulana did not smile. Lilia saw a soft red mist began to suffuse the woman’s body.
Lilia pushed out her hands and yanked them forward. She bound a skein of Oma’s breath around the woman, cutting her off from the satellite.
Tulana’s face paled.
Taigan nodded. “That was very good,” she said.
“So you have omajistas too,” Lilia said. She kept the woven breath that held Tulana taut. In the back of her mind, she recited the Saiduan Song of Binding.
“I am many things,” Tulana said. “Dangerous enough for my own Empress to try and kill me, in fact.”
“I can promise I won’t kill you,” Lilia said. “But if you don’t go with me, you’ll die here. They have omajistas outside, much more powerful than you or me. They’re going to burn us out. They’ll come looking for you. But I can get you into Dhai. I can get you over the wall.”
“No one gets over the wall,” Tulana said. “You could force it, but –”
“No,” Lilia said. “Listen.”
And she told them her plan.
They stared at her in stunned silence. Only Gian laughed.
“You have grown bold,” Taigan said.
“No bolder than a sanisi who pushed me off a cliff,” Lilia said sharply.
Tulana gritted her teeth. “They will pound us against the wall. They will slaughter us like boars.”
“They’ll do that anyway,” Lilia said. “Yes or no?”
“You get us through that wall… then yes.”
“Taigan, can you bind them to their word? Can you bind them in blood?”
“What?” Tulana said.
“You can’t –” Voralyn spat.
“This is not –” Sokai said.
Lilia’s voice rose. “You will bind yourselves in blood, or we’re done.”
“No,” Tulana said.
So Lilia left them.
Taigan followed after her, said, “What are you trying to do, raise some kind of army?”
“They’ll come,” Lilia said, with conviction.
Lilia went to the meeting house at the center of the camp. She took the stage. The whole camp was already abuzz with what had happened at the gates. They had begun to collect in the meeting house.
“I’m leaving for the Pass,” Lilia said loudly.
“You’re mad!” someone yelled back.
“Maybe so,” Lilia shouted at him. “Maybe so! Listen, I’m going. If you stay here, you’re dead. I cannot protect you like I did yesterday. You understand? We’re going home, or not at all.”
“It’s not our home!” someone else said.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Lilia said. “It’s the home of every Dhai. They will open those gates to you as your kin. I swear my life on it. Will you join me, or burn here?”
She tried to jump off the stage, but her bad leg made it difficult. Taigan offered her hand. Lilia took it. They walked back to Emlee’s house. Lilia announced she was leaving.
“I have known no other home but this,” Emlee said. “I will not smash myself against your wall.”
“It’s different this time,” Lilia said.
“Why?”
“Because you have me.”
“You are powerful, girl, but you aren’t a god.”
“We’ll see about that,” Lilia said.
Lilia held out her hand to Gian. Gian took it.
“Are you with me?” Lilia asked.
“Yes,” Gian said.
People collected behind them as they made their way to the western gate. Hungry people. Big women and thin old men, and the orphans, some of them almost adults, but most of them young and small and scared. Lilia believed they followed Taigan, not her. But as they gathered, the refugees touched her hands, grabbed at her tattered short coat. She had been their midwife and healer all winter. Yet only a tiny thread of less than thirty followed after Lilia, most of them very young, headstrong. Few were as old as Cora, none as old as Taigan.
Lilia waited until the dusk came, and she was certain no one else was coming.
But as Taigan approached the gate to open it, Lilia saw Tulana stepping from the crowd of houses. Amelia, Voralyn, and Laralyn behind her. Sokai took up the rear of their procession.
Lilia glanced over at Taigan. Taigan popped the lock with a simple burst of air.
Lilia and Gian went through. The others followed.
The western gate was unguarded. Most of the legionnaires had withdrawn.
They walked all night, hungry and cold, stopping to collect hasaen tubers as they went. Lilia had not eaten a full meal in some time, and she was light headed. The stronghold was a two day walk. She was glad, then, of the small group. They would have moved more slowly with the others.
Taigan trotted back up behind Lilia and Gian. They led the column of ragged Dhais and dajians and Seekers.
“There are more following,” he said.
“Who?” Lilia asked.
“There’s smoke to the east,” he said. “They’ve burned the camps. There are surviving Dhais following.”
“And legionnaires?” Lilia asked.
“Not yet,” he said, “But they will come.”
They pushed on.
Night found them inside the mouth of the Pass. At its widest point, the Pass was nearly a mile wide. Lilia knew it tapered to its narrowest point at Liona, two hundred yards across.
The trees became shorter, the path steeper. Finding a comfortable place to sleep that night was impossible. Lilia slept from sheer exhaustion, and woke cramped and aching, her body pressed to Gian’s. She was so cold she didn’t think her body could move, let alone stand, but she got up. Her body sometimes amazed her. She could keep going, long after she couldn’t.
At midmorning, the first of the later refugees caught up with them. Lilia recognized Pherl, the man with yaws whose nose was still a gaping hole, though some of the flesh had grown back over his missing upper jaw. His sisters were with him, Sazhina and Tal, Tal trailing behind, carrying her child. Someone else’s child clung to her apron strings. Their faces were smeared it soot.
> “What happened?” Lilia asked Sazhina.
“The legionnaires came,” Sazhina said. “Sent fire, first. They came in under the smoke.”
Lilia saw the lights of Liona long after dark. She didn’t know what time it was. The night was clear and cold. The moons were brilliant. They lit the rugged pass in a garish light. The lights of the stronghold glinted from behind the massive wall, a crown of square turrets topped in toothy parapets. The wall itself, even from so far away, was imposing.
As they neared, Lilia realized how big the wall was. Just one stone was as tall as she was. The beaten dirt road they traveled upon broke itself against a small gateway just tall enough for someone Lilia’s height to enter. It was not a wall meant to be breached. It was not a wall for idle travelers.
The steps of the refugees slowed as they approached the wall. Lilia stilled a dozen yards from it and gazed up. The height was staggering. Three hundred feet tall, easily. She could just make out dark figures patrolling the top.
Her resolve trembled.
“Tears of the goddess,” Gian said. “You don’t mean to get us through that?”
“At dawn,” Taigan said.
Lilia looked behind her. There were more ragged figures trailing after them in the moons’ light, far more than had begun the journey. And there would be legionnaires behind them. Soon.
“Where are the Seekers?” Lilia said. “We have to do this now.”
Tal sent the child at her apron to look for the Seekers.
The girl brought back Tulana and Sokai and the others.
“Are you ready, dajian?” Tulana asked.
Lilia nodded to Taigan.
“Take off your coats,” Taigan said.
Lilia watched the Seekers line up with their naked backs to Lilia and Taigan. Voralyn was cursing. Tulana’s face was unreadable. Amelia cried. For a moment, just a moment, Lilia felt sorry for them.
Taigan saw Lilia watching them, said softly, “Would you like to cut?”
“Yes,” Lilia said. “What’s the mark I put in?”
“Your name,” Taigan said.
The Mirror Empire Page 47