Empire Ascendant

by Kameron Hurley

  Empire Ascendant

  Kameron Hurley

  This book is for Jayson, for helping out with the plants.

  “War turns its makers mad.”

  Dhai saying

  Prologue

  “The body’s here.”

  Kirana Javia, Empress of Dhai, Divine Kai of the Tai Mora, gazed across a field of corpses. She gnawed at a wizened apple, pausing only to pick a fat worm from its center and flick it over the railing of the thorny broken tower she stood upon. The sky was an amber-bronze wash; it always looked like it was on fire. The blackened husk that had once been the heavenly star Para glowed red-black. It turned the light of the double suns a malevolent orange, and the tiny third sun, Mora, was no longer visible. Below, her omajistas and their handlers went body to body, gutting the deceased and collecting their blood into massive clay urns. The first few years of the Great War, Kirana had commissioned glass jars, but they broke easily, and worse – seeing the blood carted off hurt her army’s morale. It reminded her people of what they were doing – bleeding out a sea of dead to save the living. You could measure the number of dead now by how many urns left the field. Carts stuffed with urns stretched across the muddy ground so far she lost sight of them in the woodlands beyond. If the infused mirror that could keep the way open between worlds had not been sabotaged, these people would still be alive, running after her army into a new world. But now she was back to killing and collecting. She told herself the deaths weren’t wasted, merely transformed. This close to the end, nothing could be wasted.

  She popped the apple core into her mouth and turned.

  Two soldiers in tattered coats stood at attention. The slashed violet circles on their lapels marked them as lower-level sinajistas, one of the more expendable jista castes, as their star wouldn’t be ascendant for another year, and this world would be dead by then. It made them more expendable, and they knew it. Their black hair was braided into intricate spirals and pinned in place. Hunger sharpened their faces into a grim severity. Kirana longed for the days when every face she saw was some jolly fat parody of itself. Even my own people look like corpses, she mused. How appropriate.

  The soldiers carried a large brown sack between them, stained dark with blood and – from the smell – the remains of a voided bowel.

  “What a lovely gift,” Kirana said. She trotted down the steps to join them. The turret room was a ruin, like most of the buildings they occupied in these final days of the routing of the world. Many knew they were coming, so they burned, broke, or poisoned anything of use before her people arrived. The furniture was smashed, and the resulting kindling burned. Kirana had found a shattered mirror near the door and used a fragment to dig out an arrow head that had pierced through a seam of her armor. The armor still bled where it’d been struck. It would take hours to repair itself. She rubbed at the sticky sap on her fingers.

  The soldiers yanked at the cord that bound the body in the bag, spilling the contents.

  Kirana leaned over for a better look. Tangled black curls, round face, straight nose.

  “It’s not her,” Kirana said, and she could not keep the disappointment from her voice. “Not even close. Are you just picking up random bodies and carting them over?”

  The taller soldier winced. “They all look alike.”

  Kirana sneered. “The only face that looks like yours in that world is your double’s, and I can tell you now that you’ll never meet them as long as you’re living. If you can’t do this one thing I’ll–”

  The body on the floor stirred.

  A stab of pain splintered up Kirana’s leg. She hissed and jumped back. The formerly dead woman yanked a knife from Kirana’s thigh and leapt up, spitting green bile. She slashed at Kirana again and darted between the two startled sinajistas.

  Kirana lunged after her, making a wild left hook. The woman dodged and bolted out the door – a shocking turn of events if she wanted Kirana dead. Who would send an assassin after Kirana that broke away so quickly? Unless Kirana wasn’t the target.

  “She’s after the consort!” Kirana yelled, and sprinted after her.

  The assassin was fast for a woman recently dead. Kirana saw the curve of her ass disappearing down the far corridor. Kirana went after her, sliding as she rounded the same corner. Her boots were losing their tread. The assassin huffed herself from the top of the stair down to the landing. Kirana jumped the curve of the banister after her, relying on her armor to cushion the fall. The assassin wasn’t running blind. She was making her way directly to the quarters of Kirana’s consort and children.

  Some other world had found them. Someone was coming for them.

  Kirana jumped over the next curve in the stair and collided with the rail below her. It took the breath from her. She gasped and heaved forward, reaching for the assassin’s bare ankle. She got a kick in the face instead. Kirana scrambled up and moved down the long hall. Now that they were clear of the stairs, she shook her wrist, and the twisted willowthorn branch nestled inside her arm snarled free, snapped out.

  She slashed, searing the woman’s long tunic. The fabric fell away, hissing and smoking.

  They were three doors from her consort’s rooms. Kirana put on a burst of speed. She jumped and lunged, thrusting her weapon ahead of her, as far as she could reach.

  The willowthorn sword rammed into the assassin’s hip, drawing blood. Kirana hit the ground hard just as the assassin did. They came together in a snarl of arms and legs. Kirana climbed over her. Thrust again. The assassin caught her arm and bit her wrist. She flipped Kirana over neatly, as if she weighed nothing. Kirana headbutted her in the face. The assassin’s nose popped like a fruit, spraying blood. Kirana stabbed her twice in the torso and kicked her off.

  The assassin hit the floor and continued trying to scramble forward, sliding in her own blood.

  The sinajistas finally caught up with them. They grabbed for the assassin. Kirana knew restraint wasn’t going to work.

  “Take her head off!” Kirana yelled. They were tangling with the assassin. She was a tireless ball of sinew and flesh brought back to life by Sina alone knew what.

  Kirana pushed to her feet and took her weapon in both hands and swung. She caught the assassin in the jaw, ripping it free of the face. She hacked again, opening up the throat. The sinajistas dropped the body, and Kirana finished it, detaching the head from the neck while the widening pool of blood licked her boots. She bent over, trying to catch her breath. The body still twitched.

  “Burn it,” Kirana said. She clutched at a pain in her side; she had overstretched or torn something. She winced and straightened as one of the sinajistas went back upstairs to collect the bag for the body. A handful of the house guards she had put in charge of the hold came up now too, full of questions. She’d deal with them later.

  Kirana limped down to her consort’s door and knocked heavily.

  “It’s the Kai,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  The door opened. She must have been listening to the scuffle in the hall. Yisaoh stood just over the threshold. Her scarlet robe brushed the floor. She was medium height, broad, her dark hair twisted into a knot on top of her head. Her nose was crooked, broken twice during her very long apprenticeship in the army before Kirana signed her discharge papers.

  Kirana leaned into her, spent. She pressed her face to Yisaoh’s neck and breathed in the scent of her.

  “Are you safe?”

  Yisaoh pressed her hands to Kirana’s hair. “This blood–”

  “Not mine,” Kirana said. She raised her head and searched Yisaoh’s face. “You’re all right? Where are the children?” She moved past Yisaoh, heading toward the nursery.

  “They’re fine, love,” Yisaoh said. “There’s a storm coming, the sta
rgazers say. We need to close everything up.”

  Kirana crossed the sitting room, stumbling over a heavy piece of furniture. The room was mostly in order, though a few things were still overturned. She had had these quarters meticulously searched and set up for her family the moment the siege ended.

  She opened the door to the nursery, weapon up. The children slept together in a big bed at her right. The room had no windows, making it a safe refuge from the storms. Kirana counted their three perfect heads.

  Yisaoh placed a hand on Kirana’s shoulder. She flinched.

  “I gave them a draft,” Yisaoh said softly. “They were up all night in camp during the siege, worrying over you. They needed to sleep.”

  The weapon in Kirana’s hand softened. She released it, and it snaked back into her wrist. She let out a breath.

  A low, insistent bell clanged outside. The familiar three-by-two-by-three gong that warned of a dust storm.

  “Stay here with us, you fool,” Yisaoh said. She shut the door behind them, sealing all of them into the quiet black of the children’s room. She rummaged around in the dark and took hold of some kind of rustling fabric.

  Kirana watched her stuff it under the seam of the door, muffling the last of the light. The dull moan of the bell changed, muted by the change in air pressure.

  Yisaoh grabbed Kirana’s hand and pulled her down beside her in the darkness. Pain stitched up Kirana’s leg, and she hissed. She had almost forgotten about the wound.

  “Are you hurt?” Yisaoh asked. “Oma’s eye, Kirana, I’ve sewn your limbs back on and seen you with half your face torn away. Don’t hide an injury from me.”

  They pressed against one another. Kirana’s breath sounded loud in her ears. She was still filled with adrenaline, ready to leap at shadows. The storm hit the hold. The stones trembled. Air hissed between the seams of the stones, and Kirana smelled the dry apricot breath of the black wind kicked up by their dying star. Getting caught exposed in storms like this could rip flesh from bone, and fill one’s lungs with rot.

  “Kirana?” Yisaoh again.”I will sew your seat in place if you don’t tell me if –”

  Kirana took a lock of Yisaoh’s hair in her fingers, and felt a pang of love and regret. Love for a woman she had conquered three countries to save from a fractious rival, and regret that she was so devoted to a single soul that she could not leave this dying world unless she had this woman by her side. The wind moaned through the hold.

  “I’m fine,” Kirana said. “We’ll find her soon. You will all come with me to the new world.”

  “This is the second person she’s sent to kill you,” Yisaoh said. “That other woman, that other me, she is ruthless. She will not stop.”

  Kirana did not correct her, did not say the assassin had cared little for Kirana, and run straight here for Yisaoh. “We don’t know it’s her. There are half a hundred worlds with–”

  “It’s her,” Yisaoh said, and the certainty in her voice chilled Kirana. “It’s what I would have done, if you had sent people to kill me.”

  Kirana pressed her fingers to the wound in her leg where the assassin had stabbed her. The armor had already sealed itself with sticky sap. The sap had closed the wound inside, too, or at least stopped it from bleeding. She would need to see a doctor soon. Poison was a possibility.

  “You tell me they have no armies there,” Yisaoh said, her voice barely audible now above the wind buffeting the hold. Kirana wondered when they would get the worst of it.

  “No armies,” Kirana said, “but they aren’t complete fools. Not all of them. Little groups of people like the Dhai survive by being clever. I suspect she’s as clever as you, and that does make her dangerous.”

  Yisaoh wrapped her arms around Kirana. It was awkward, with Kirana in full armor. Yisaoh’s robe was crushed velvet, soft, but beneath, Yisaoh was all knobby bones and cold flesh. “You remember when I was plump?” Yisaoh said. Yisaoh never did like it when Kirana reminded her about what it was that made her so effective in the army – her ruthlessness, her cleverness. Yisaoh had given all that up to rear their children. She was tired of torture and death. But the past followed them, relentless as the burning star in the sky.

  “I remember,” Kirana said. She felt a stab of loss, as if she’d failed Yisaoh. Failed them all. Her stomach growled in answer. The apple was the first thing she’d eaten all day. “This isn’t over yet. If they hadn’t broken the mirror I’d have sent every one of my legions after her. They have wards on her, so I’ll send a ward-breaker this time, and take her head for good measure. Then you and I will cross over and–”

  Yisaoh pressed her fingers to Kirana’s lips. Kirana remembered the day they had met. Yisaoh had emerged from the warm waters of the Shadow Sea, brown-gold and beaming at some shared joke between her and her companions. Kirana had stood on a low rise above the rocky beach, and had been struck dumb by the sight of her. Kirana was bleeding out from some wound inflicted in a minor skirmish over the next hill. Isolated on the little beach amid the pounding surf, Yisaoh and her companions had not heard the fighting. It was like stumbling into some forgotten world, like Kirana’s bright childhood, carefree, before the sky imploded. Before the world began to die.

  The wind wailed. The children stirred. Kirana listened to the sound of her own heartbeat begin to tick down. Surely she would have felt the poison by now, if it was a poisoned blade? She had to admire the act – the forethought to hire a lookalike good with a weapon, one not afraid to feign death through drugs or some gifted trick, and hurl herself into some other world to murder Kirana’s family. It was a bold move for a supposed pacifist.

  “I’m afraid,” Yisaoh said.

  “I’ll take care of you.”

  “No,” Yisaoh said. “I’m afraid of what we’ve had to become to survive this.”

  “We can go back,” Kirana said. “When this is over–”

  “I don’t think we can.”

  Outside, the contaminated remnants of the dead star rained death and fire over the northern parts of the world. Kirana knew it would not be long now before it reached them here. Six months, a year, and the rest of the globe would be a fiery wasteland. The toxic storms blowing in the waste from the north were just the start of the end. If she had not murdered all the people she needed to fuel the winks between worlds, they would have died eventually. She was doing them a favor. Every last bloody one of them.

  “Promise you’ll take the children,” Yisaoh said, “even if–”

  “I won’t leave without you.”

  “Promise.”

  “I’ll save us all,” Kirana said. “I promise you that.”

  Sitting there in the dark, holding Yisaoh while her children slept and her leg throbbed and the wind howled around them, she decided it was time to begin the invasion of Dhai in earnest. She had been waiting for the right time, waiting until they had enough blood, until they had rebuilt enough resources after the mirror’s destruction. But she was out of time. The days were no longer numbered. The days were over.

  She held onto Yisaoh, and imagined walking into the great Dhai temple to Oma, Yisaoh at her arm, her children beside her, and her people spread out all across the plateau, cheering her name, calling her savior, already forgetting the atrocities they had had to commit to see that end. It was a vision she had nurtured now for almost a decade.

  It was time to see it through.

  1

  Lilia did not believe in miracles outside of history books, but she was beginning to believe in her own power, and that was a more frightening thing to believe in. Now she sat on the edge of the Liona Stronghold’s parapet as an icy wind threatened to unseat her. She had spent over a week here in Liona, waiting on the Kai and his judgment. Would he throw her back into slavery in the east? She imagined what it would be like to topple from such a great height now and avoid that fate, and trembled with the memory of being pushed from such a distance just six months before, and broken on the ground below. The memory was so powerful it made he
r nauseous, and she crawled back down behind the parapet, head bowed, breathing deeply to keep from vomiting. Climbing was a slow business, as her clawed right hand still wouldn’t close properly, and her twisted left foot throbbed in the cold weather. Her awkward gait had only grown more cumbersome over the last year.

  Dawn’s tremulous fingers embraced the sky. She squinted as the hourglass of the double suns moved above the jagged mountain range that made up the eastern horizon. The heat of the suns soothed her troubled thoughts. The satellite called Para already burned brilliant blue in the western sky, turning the horizon dark turquoise. Blue shadows purled across the jagged stone mountains that hugged Liona, festooning the trees and tickling at clumps of forgotten snow. She wasn’t ready for spring. With spring came the thawing of the harbor, and worse – the thawing of the harbors in Saiduan that held the Tai Mora, the invaders that would swallow the world country by country.

  “Li?” Her friend Gian walked across the parapet toward Lilia, hugging herself for warmth. “Your Saiduan friend got into a fight, and said it was important for me to fetch you.”

  Gian wore the same tattered jacket she had in the Dorinah slave camps. Most of the refugees who’d come over from Dorinah with Lilia’s ragtag band had been fed by the militia in Liona, but not clothed properly or seen by a doctor.

  Lilia said, “Wasn’t it Taigan who insisted we stay out of trouble?”

  “What do you expect from a Saiduan assassin, one of those sanisi? They are always fighting.”

  Lilia thought she could say the same about Dorinahs like Gian, but refrained. She didn’t like reminding herself that Gian’s loyalties had first lain with Dorinah. Lilia held out a hand. Gian took it. Lilia sagged against her.

  “Are you ill?” Gian asked.

  Lilia gazed into Gian’s handsome, concerned face, then away. She still reminded Lilia too strongly of another Gian, one long dead for a cause Lilia didn’t believe in. Lilia wondered often if she’d made the wrong choice in not joining with the other Gian’s people. What difference would saving six hundred slaves make if the country was overwhelmed by some foreign people from another world? Very little.