“Caisa and I can fill time.”
“You’ll break your stitches.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Much to Ahkio’s relief, the final mapped level of the temple was a finite space. He circled around the outer edges of it twice, and had to double back and follow the map again. He knew he was closer the third time, because the fleshy roots grew warmer; the air felt less congested.
He peered through a viney tangle marked on the map, and saw, on the other side, a small clearing, and a massive stone slab.
“Well,” Liaro said, “not a snake chase after all.”
“Stay here. I’m going to go through.”
Ahkio reached through the tangle and set the lantern down
on the other side. Then he squeezed into the narrow space between two roots. Halfway through, he got stuck. His ribs caught.
Liaro grabbed his legs and pushed from the other side. “Let your breath out,” he said.
Ahkio let out his breath. He pulled while Liaro pushed.
He slid onto the other side of the tangle, falling inelegantly onto the gritty floor. Scrambled up. Grabbed the lantern. The towering circular slab wasn’t quite stone. He pressed his fingers to it, and it felt slick and chalky. The face of it was inlaid in blue and red stones. Above, tangled vegetation and the temple’s thrumming roots held it upright. He tried to walk around it, but the mass of living plant flesh was too tight there for him to pass.
There were no Dhai characters on it, no writing at all. It was not until he stepped all the way back and raised the lantern higher that he saw the stones were arranged in a familiar shape – a double blue circle inside a red square.
“Is it some infused thing?” Liaro called.
Ahkio tried pressing the stones. He kicked gently at its base. Nothing happened.
Kirana had been gifted, and it wouldn’t surprise him if whatever he needed to do to this slab to get a reaction involved having a gift. It was the one thing he lacked. He wished that he’d brought Caisa all the way down. He would need to go back for her.
Ahkio set down his lantern and turned the map around a couple of times. There must be something he wasn’t seeing. Kirana spent time down here with these maps. It wasn’t as if this object was wholly inconspicuous. So what was it supposed to do?
He pulled the Dorinah book from his pocket, the one with the ciphered phrases. He had tucked a sheet with the translations inside. Mostly, Etena and Kirana had debated philosophy and Garika politics. They talked about lovers and old Dhai battles. But there was that exchange:
The Temple’s heart is barred to me, Etena. She says she will only speak to a Kai. Why close all the roads to me?
And Etena’s reply:
Because if you can open the way, so can your shadow.
Ahkio faced the slab again, and gazed up the face of it into the darkness where it seemed to merge with the roots of the temple. His mother had said the temples were living things. Living things had hearts.
It felt foolish to yell in the darkness, but he was out of ideas. “I’m Ahkio Javia Garika,” he said, “brother to Kirana Javia Garika, and I am Kai of the Dhai.”
His voice echoed.
Kai. Yes. He was Kai, and Kirana had believed he would get this far, for better or ill.
But nothing happened. The slab remained unchanged.
“Any other ideas?” Liaro asked.
Dead ends. Ghost trails. Kirana was killed by the invaders, the assassins he murdered in the square, just like the others. Trying to make it more than that would lead him down a path to madness, the way they all said Kirana had gone. He was trying to unpack riddles on top of riddles, and he had a country to secure.
But Kirana said she killed herself, and that only made sense in the context of who the invaders were. There was something down here she didn’t want her double to be able to use. Something she had to die to ensure only her successor had access to. Not her shadow. And not Nasaka.
The only way for her to raise another Kai, one recognized by a living temple, was to die.
Ahkio sighed. It had made more sense in that warm bed with Ghrasia than it did in this oppressive dark. He leaned forward. Pressed his head against the stone –
- and tumbled forward.
He landed hard on his side. Lost his breath. It was like falling through soup, as if the slab were some gauzy webbing. His face and hands felt sticky. He’d bit his lip. He tasted copper.
A warm glow suffused the darkness, like liquid gold. Ahkio shielded his eyes. A humming came from all around him.
“Kai Ahkio Javia Garika,” a tremulous voice said, “welcome to the soul of Oma’s seat. We’ve been waiting for you for some time.”
51.
Ghrasia arrived at the Liona Stronghold by Line. It had been a long time since she last saw its walls. The great living vines that bound the hold’s walls were comforting. When she stepped out of the Line chamber, familiar faces greeted her, though far fewer than she would have liked.
She met the hold’s temporary keeper, Arasia Marita Sorila, one floor up in Ghrasia’s former office. Arasia had stacks of correspondence on the table and books scattered across the floor.
“Have you given up defense for strategy?” Ghrasia asked.
Arasia was a very round woman; at least three times Ghrasia’s size. She held a magnifying lens in one hand and a Tordinian cigarette in the other.
“Thank Tira you’ve arrived,” Arasia said. “Don’t worry about this. We’re working with the parajistas to shore up the west end. Lots of history reading. I didn’t get into this for the reading you know.”
“What’s happening on the Wall?” Ghrasia asked.
“Best you see it for yourself,” Arasia said. She took her up the winding stairs to the ramparts. It was nearly dark. Ghrasia went to the edge of the rail and gazed across what must have been almost six hundred dajians camped at the bottom of the wall. She had seen groups of refugees camped before, but none like this. It was even bigger than the group she turned away during the Pass War.
Ghrasia stepped away from the rail. “They’re just refugees,” she said. “You know the policy.”
“Yes, but see that?” Arasia pointed. In the far distance, Ghrasia could see smoke. “They have a tail behind them. You know what a tail with cook fires that size looks like.”
“Hold the wall,” Ghrasia said. “You know the policy.”
Arasia seemed pleased. “I told the others that’s what you’d say. They didn’t believe it, but I knew the history.”
“Only a miracle would have us open these gates,” Ghrasia said. She tried not to think of how many people they just lost in Raona. She remembered Ahkio’s speech. And his mother’s. The same tired story. “Let’s have dinner. I’ll walk the ranks, and leave in the morning. I need to get to the Temple of Oma.”
Lilia tried the obvious thing first, just to get it out of the way. She pounded on the little sally port at the gates of Liona and demanded entrance. She called up her name, and her place at the Temple of Oma. No one answered.
There was no welcome for her at Liona. There certainly wouldn’t be any welcome for the rest of them. She would have to make one. In a way that was more politic than burning the whole stronghold down.
When the moons set and the sky began to gray, Taigan said, “It’s time for you to dress.”
“Yes,” she said. She took Taigan’s water bag.
She woke Gian. Gian opened her pack. Lilia washed her own face. Gian helped her take off her clothes. Lilia knelt on her dirty clothes to keep her knees out of the mud. Gian unpacked Lilia’s white dress. It wasn’t as white as it should be, and it would look terrible up close, but from a distance, it would do. Lilia pulled the dress over her head. Gian tied the white ribbons she had gifted her at Lilia’s wrists, and on her fingers. They had already re-bound her hands in white bandages.
Gian moved her hands through Lilia’s long hair and oiled and combed it. Lilia could not remember the last time she had long h
air. The Woodlands, maybe. A long time ago. Her hair was ragged at the ends, and needed a cut, but like the dress, it would do.
Gian braided back Lilia’s hair into an intricate swirl of knots and bound them in white ribbon. She used a fine stick of charred wood to outline Lilia’s eyes in black.
Gian helped Lilia to her feet, and regarded her in the graying light.
“Are you afraid?” Gian asked.
Lilia looked over her shoulder, at the height of the wall. “No,” she said.
They walked to the gate where Taigan and the Seekers waited.
“You have sworn to her,” he told them, “and to disobey that word forfeits your life. Remember that.”
“She’s gifted,” Tulana said. “I still don’t see why she can’t do this herself.”
“Faith Ahya wasn’t gifted,” Lilia said.
Taigan shrugged. “There it is.”
“Superstitious Dhai nonsense,” Tulana said.
Distant cries sounded behind them.
Taigan nodded to Lilia.
Lilia moved to the front of their half circle. Some of the Dhais and dajians camped around them had woken. They sat up and stared.
“All right,” Lilia said.
Taigan held out his palm toward her. She felt a prickling across her shoulders. The air in front of her shimmered bloody red.
She took a deep breath and shouted up at the wall,
“I am a Dhai, and I demand entrance through Liona!”
The funnel of air Taigan shaped carried her words to the top of the wall. Her voiced boomed through the Pass. She clapped her hands over her ears. The shout was deafening.
Cries came from the top of the wall, shouts, sounding small and plaintive after Lilia’s cry.
“Who’s there? What’s happened?” someone called from the
wall.
“Open up the gate! These are Dhais at your gate! We have
legionnaires behind us! I ask passage!”
“What right do you have for passage?”
“We are Dhai! That is enough!” An echoing call, the voice
of a god.
Something in her hesitated before she said the rest - and committed herself to blasphemy.
Lilia closed her eyes and shouted, “I am the rightful Kai, and by the laws of our country, you are bound to open these gates for me and all those I harbor!”
Banging on the door.
Ghrasia started awake. Grabbed her sword. Shoved it forward just as the door opened.
The small woman in the doorway jumped back. “Ghrasia Madah!”
Ghrasia shook herself awake. She had been dreaming of blinding-trees. “I’m sorry. What is it?”
“One of the refugees is shouting. Arasia said to bring you upstairs.”
“Of course they’re shouting, they’re –”
“The legionnaires are going to press them against the gates, just like in the Pass War. Please!”
Ghrasia swore. “I’m coming, all right.” She knew why Arasia wanted her on the gate. She didn’t want the blood on her hands. No one wanted the blood. Gods. She thought of Ahkio. And Nasaka, and what Nasaka could do to her daughter.
Ghrasia dressed quickly and walked up to the ramparts. It wasn’t even dawn yet. On the ground below, she saw a girl dressed all in white down there, standing among a half circle of figures.
There were already two dozen militia on the walls. Arasia strode toward her. “She says she’s the Kai,” Arasia said.
“Well, that’s obviously untrue,” Ghrasia said. “I was just with the Kai in Raona, and I can assure you this person is of the wrong sex.”
“Well,” Arasia said, low, “some people do say he’s the wrong sex, really. The Kai has always been –”
“Hold your ground. They are just refugees.”
Lilia glanced over at Taigan. She was watching the sun rise along the horizon directly behind them.
Taigan held up a hand, telling her to wait.
ThenTaigan nodded.
Lilia held out her arms. She felt the Seekers behind her tense. She took a deep breath. She heard more shouting behind them.
Someone screamed, “Dorinahs!”
Lilia focused on her breathing. She felt the heat of Oma just beneath her skin. She held it, but did not draw it. Just in case. She had fallen too many times already.
“I’m ready,” she murmured.
Her skin began to itch. She felt the suns at her back, cresting the edge of the world. She turned her head up, toward the top of the wall.
I want to go there, she thought.
Something cold crawled up her spine. She resisted the urge to grab at it. The air around her became heavy, murky. She took deeper breaths.
Her skin began to glow.
Her view of the wall altered. It looked like the wall was getting shorter, but she was actually moving upward. She kept her arms out, trailing white ribbons. She did not look down, but concentrated on the top of the wall. A false wind caught at her bound hair, the streamers in her hands, and blew them back behind her. The wall was rushing past her.
Lilia flew.
Her skin felt hot. She did not look at her arms to see if the divine glow had become a blistering flame. She could not look at anything but the top of the wall, and the figures rushing back and forth as her glowing body shot up through the air.
Lilia crested the top of the wall with the blinding glare of the sunsrise. She alighted on one of the big parapet stones.
She looked down at the walkway atop the wall, and the dozens of skirted militia staring up at her in fear and awe.
Only one woman had not shielded her eyes. She was small and slight. She was familiar, though Lilia could not place her.
“You will open these gates,” Lilia said softly, but Taigan’s amplification of her voice set the militia to covering their ears. All but the little woman.
“I have come to free these people,” Lilia said. “You will open these gates for them.”
Lilia’s skin burned. The heat of the suns throbbed at her back. Her fingers were numb from holding the ribbons. She wanted to cry. Her shadow swallowed the form of the woman in front of her. Her shadow was a great thing, a massive specter burning along the battlements.
Lilia dropped her arms. She had run out of words.
The little woman stared up at Lilia. Her jaw hardened. Her eyes were black under the length of Lilia’s shadow.
Ghrasia watched Faith Ahya land lightly atop the parapet. The breath left Ghrasia’s body. She had the absurd urge to kneel. Streamers of white cascaded from Faith’s fingertips, like wings. How many times had Ghrasia wished for a world where she could take back everything she had done twenty years ago as a foolish girl obediently following the words of the Kai?
She remembered the little feral girl. Remembered the screams of the dying during the Pass War, and the screams of her people slain by the shadow-men in Liona. Oma help her, she thought of the dead shadows, too.
“Am I any better than them,” Ghrasia asked the girl, “if I slay you here?”
“Only you can answer that,” the girl said.
Ghrasia thought of the woman in the tapestry. The woman her country thought she was. That woman would not open these gates.
But she was not that woman.
She turned to Arasia. “Open the gates,” Ghrasia said.
“But you said –”
Ghrasia did not raise her voice. “Open the gates of Liona.”
Arasia shouted at the militia on the parapet, relaying the order.
Ghrasia watched the girl. The suns’ light was harsher now, and Ghrasia could see scars on her face. She saw how tattered her white garments were, some shoddy patchwork piece. The ribbons in her hair had obviously been salvaged from some other, finer garment. She leaned awkwardly to one side, and her left hand was a twisted little claw.
The girl was little more than a child – a child desperate enough to fly.
“You’re very brave,” Ghrasia said.
“I know
,” Lilia said.
She listened to the sound of the militia opening the gates. Below her, Lilia’s people began to sing.
EPILOGUE
Nasaka climbed into the mossy hills surrounding the temple of Oma. She stood in a field of withered black poppies, their massive blooms frozen and crushed in the winter chill. She looked back at the amber haze of sunlight glinting from the massive dome of the temple. Out here, the temple seemed very small, nearly swallowed in the naked, tangled claws of the bonsa trees. It all looked very fragile. She gripped the hilt of her willowthorn sword, tensing her arthritic fingers. The pain was getting worse, and she would not be able to hide it much longer.
The air around her grew heavy. She turned to face the woods. As she waited, the air in front of her shimmered, as if tempered by a wave of heat. Black tears appeared in the air. She stepped back.
The seams between the worlds parted, as if raked by the claws of some great beast. There were places where the fabric between the worlds was thin, and the cost to peer from one to the other was not quite so high, even with Oma’s face still shrouded. This soft spot was closest to Oma’s temple, and Nasaka thanked Oma each day that no adult could fit through the seams that opened here.
Through the tears between the worlds, Nasaka saw the other Kirana, dressed in shiny red armor. She stood in the sweltering ruin of some dead city. Nasaka saw the tail end of the black, dying satellite in the sky behind her. Scorched bodies hung from parched trees, and lay mangled on broken plates of pink glass and blood-smeared marble. From what Nasaka could make out of the bodies’ remaining clothes and features, the dead were of no people she recognized.
Three of Kirana’s generals conferred nearby. Nasaka had seen them a few times before. One of them looked a lot like Gaiso, perhaps a bit plumper, but she had never asked the woman’s name. She didn’t like seeing the doubles. Knowing they existed was one thing. Seeing them was quite another.
“Is it done?” Kirana asked. She pulled off her left gauntlet and wiped the sweat from her face. She was a lean but powerful woman, far more physically fit than the Kirana that Nasaka had once known.
“He’s left the temple for Liona,” Nasaka said. “By the time I got back he was already gone.”
The Mirror Empire Page 49