Empire Ascendant

by Kameron Hurley

  “You should eat,” Gian said, “after we find Taigan. Let me help you.”

  Lilia took Gian’s arm and descended into the teeming chaos of Liona. Red-skirted militia bustled through the halls, carrying bundles of linen, sacks of rice, and messages bound in leather cases. Dead sparrows littered the hallways, expired after delivering messages to and from the surrounding clans about the influx of refugees. Lilia had never seen so many sparrows. She wondered if the messages getting ferried around were about more than refugees. She’d been gone for nearly a year. A lot could have changed.

  Milling among the militia were Lilia’s fellow refugees, often gathered in clusters outside storage rooms or shared privies. Lilia saw militia herding refugees back into their rooms like chattel, and bit back her annoyance. She wanted to send out a simmering wave of flame in their direction, boiling the offensive militia from the inside out. Her own skin warmed, briefly, and she saw a puff of red mist seep from her pores. The compulsion shocked and shamed her. Some days she felt more mad than gifted.

  Omajista. The word still tasted bad. A word from a storybook. Someone with great power. Everything she felt she was not. But she could draw on Oma’s power now. Omajista was the only word that fit.

  Lilia kept her arm hooked in Gian’s as she limped down the hall. Her hand hadn’t been the only thing twisted in her fall, and even before that, her gnarled left foot had made walking more difficult for her than others. She felt eyes on her even now. What did she look like to them? Some scarred, half-starved, misshapen lunatic, probably. And maybe she was. She opened her left fist, and saw a purl of red mist escape it. What did it feel like to go mad? They’d exiled gifted people for going mad with power, like the Kai’s aunt.

  As they rounded the corner to the next stairwell, Lilia heard shouting.

  A ragged figure loped up the stairs on all fours. Lilia thought it was an animal. She saw filthy skin, a tangle of long hair, a shredded hide of some kind that she only realized was a torn garment when the figure barreled into her. The thing thumped its head into her stomach, knocking Lilia back.

  The creature snarled at her, tearing at her face and clothes. Lilia lashed out with her good hand. Hit it in the face. It squealed. The face was young, the mouth twisted. Where its eyes should have been were two pools of scarred flesh.

  “What is it?” Gian shrieked. She cowered a few feet away, hands raised.

  Lilia called Oma, pulling a long thread of breath and knotting it into a burst of fire. The breathy red mist pushed the thing off her. It tangled with the spell, growling and snarling as it tumbled down the steps.

  Ghrasia Madah, leader of the militia in Liona, rushed up the steps just as the thing began to tumble. She caught it by the shoulders, shouting, “Off now!” as if the feral thing was a dog or a bear.

  Lilia pressed her hand to her cheek where it had scratched her. The thing began to whine and tremble at Ghrasia’s feet, and it was only then that Lilia realized it was a real human being, not some beast.

  Gian hurried to Lilia’s side and helped her up.

  “I’m sorry,” Ghrasia said. She held the little feral girl close. “She hasn’t attacked anyone here before.” Ghrasia straightened. The girl crouched beside her, head hanging low, hair falling into her face. She nuzzled Ghrasia’s hand like a dog. “She was treated badly,” Ghrasia said. “She’s my responsibility.”

  Lilia smoothed her dress. She was still wearing the white muslin dress and white hair ribbons she had put on to give her the appearance of the Dhai martyr Faith Ahya. In the shadow of the rising suns, her skin glowing through a gifted trick, and flying to the top of the wall with the aid of several air-calling parajistas bound to her cause, the ruse had worked to sway the Dhai of Liona to open the gate. But in the stark light of day, Lilia suspected she looked filthy, broken, and ridiculous.

  “Why are you responsible?” Lilia said. “Surely you aren’t her mother. She doesn’t have a clan, does she? She is not Dhai at all.”

  “Many would say the same of you,” Ghrasia said. “When I took up a sword, I accepted that there were some bad things I’d have to do. I wanted to temper them with good. It was up to me, now, to decide who was the monster, who the victim. That’s harder than you might think, and it’s a terrible power. One must use that power for something better, sometimes.” The feral girl nuzzled her hand.

  Lilia could not bite back her retort. “That girl attacked me. It’s not as if I left thousands of people to die, crushed up against that wall, the way you did during the Pass War.”

  Ghrasia said nothing, but her expression was stony. Lilia regretted what she’d said immediately. But before she could recant, Ghrasia called the girl back, and they walked down the long curving tongue of the stairs.

  “Let’s find another stairway,” Gian said. “I want to find Taigan before she makes a mess. Her jokes don’t go over well here.”

  But Lilia stayed rooted there, looking after Ghrasia. “She thinks she’s better,” Lilia said, “because she guards some monster. I’m protecting hundreds of people. Innocent, peaceful people.”

  Lilia imagined all of Dhai burning, just the way the Tai Mora wanted. She needed to speak to Taigan more urgently than ever, because choosing sides was becoming more difficult.

  “Let them make their own mistakes,” Gian said, pulling at her hand again. “They aren’t your people any more than they’re mine.”

  But Lilia had lost track of who her people were supposed to be a long time ago.

  * * *

  They found Taigan tussling with a young man on the paving stones outside the dog and bear kennels. Lilia thought for a moment that Taigan had indeed started telling her morbid jokes, and gravely offended him.

  “Tira’s tears,” Lilia said. “Who is this?”

  Taigan gripped the man by the back of his tunic and flung him at Lilia’s feet. “Ask this man where he’s been,” Taigan said.

  The man wasn’t much older than Lilia – maybe eighteen or nineteen. His face was smeared in mud and bear dung. She saw blood at the corner of his mouth.

  For a moment, the sight of the blood repulsed her. Then she squared her shoulders and said, with a voice surer than she felt, “You should have known better than to provoke a Saiduan.”

  “You’ll both be exiled for this abuse,” he said. “Violence against me. Touching without consent. These are crimes!”

  “I caught him in your room,” Taigan said, gesturing behind her to the storage room off the kennels that they had been housed in by the militia.

  “They say you’re Faith Ahya reborn,” the man said. “My grandmother is ill, and with Tira in decline, there’s no tirajista powerful enough to save her. But they say Faith Ahya could heal people, even when Tira was in decline. Can you?”

  “He’s lying. He’s a spy,” Taigan said.

  “Where is your grandmother?” Lilia asked. His plea reminded her of her own mother. She would have given anything to save her mother, but she had not been powerful enough, or clever enough.

  “Clan Osono,” he said.

  “Perhaps I will see her,” Lilia said, “when things have settled here. I have a responsibility to the Dhai as much as the dajians I’ve brought here.”

  Taigan said something harsh in Saiduan, and whirled back toward their shared room.

  “Forgive Taigan,” she said. “She has a very strange sense of things. It may be a few days before I can see your grandmother. There is much to sort out here, and the Kai may still condemn me to exile.”

  “It won’t happen,” the man said. “We won’t let it.” He scrambled to his feet and ran off, clutching at his side. Lilia wondered if Taigan had broken his ribs. Violence would call even more attention to them than bad jokes.

  “Can you help him, really?” Gian asked.

  “Maybe,” Lilia said. She knew that helping the Dhai in the valley would go a long way toward the acceptance of the refugees. If she had turned him away, he would have brought back stories to his clan about some arrogant litt
le no-nothing girl and her stinking refugees. She needed to create another story, or the refugees would find no welcome in Dhai.

  Gian stroked her arm. Lilia pulled away, annoyed. She had gotten used to touching without consent in the camps – it wasn’t considered rude in Dorinah – but that didn’t make it easier to tolerate. In that moment she found it deeply offensive. Something about seeing Taigan’s brute rage at the young man had shaken her. It reminded her of who she could be.

  Gian said she would get them food, though Lilia knew they needed none. Gian had become obsessed with food since they arrived in Liona, and had started secreting bits of it away in their sleeping quarters. Lilia once found an apple under her pillow.

  Lilia walked back into the musty storage room they had called home for nearly a week. Taigan sat on a large barrel, muttering to herself in Saiduan. She ran a stone across her blade.

  Lilia sat on the straw mattress on the floor. She saw a brown wrapper peeking out from under the mattress and pulled it out. It was a hunk of rye bread wrapped in brown paper.

  Taigan grunted at it. “She’s going to start drawing vermin.”

  Lilia tapped at the flame fly lantern, rousing the flies to give them some light. “You sit in the dark too much,” she said.

  “This Gian girl is like your dog,” Taigan said. “Dogs hoard food and lick their masters’ feet. You trust a dog?”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “You know nothing of her.”

  “I know less of you. But I put up with you too.” In truth, her feelings about Gian were confused. Did she like this Gian for who she was, or because she reminded her so strongly of the woman who died for her? She tucked the bread back under the mattress. She didn’t want to know what else was under there.

  “Which is just as curious,” Taigan said. She balanced her blade on her thigh. Her mouth thinned. Lilia saw her arm flex. Then move.

  Taigan’s blade flashed at Lilia’s face.

  Lilia reflexively snatched at Oma. She caught the end of Taigan’s blade in red tangles of breath.

  Taigan blew a puff of misty breath over Lilia’s tangles, disintegrating them. “Still so much to learn,” Taigan said. She began to sharpen the blade again.

  Lilia pillowed her hands beneath her head. Taigan’s little tricks were growing tedious. Some days Lilia wanted to bundle Taigan up with some clever spell while she slept and leave her there. But most of what she knew of Oma now was self taught. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of songs and litanies to learn, and all she knew were those Taigan had taught her in the mountains and here during their long wait together.

  “I don’t have a lot of friends,” Lilia said. “Don’t try and make Gian mean.”

  “It’s a sorry day,” Taigan said, “when a young girl’s friends are an outcast sanisi and some politicking snake.”

  Taigan jabbed the sword at the wall now, feinting at some unseen enemy. Lilia wondered what enemies she fought when she slept. Taigan cried out in Saiduan at night, wrestling with terrible dreams that made her curse and howl. Lilia had taken to sleeping with a pillow over her head.

  “Not everyone is like you,” Lilia said, “some spy or assassin trying to use other people.”

  “You and I disagree on many things, bird,” Taigan said. She sheathed her blade and stood to look out the tiny window at the back of the storage room. Motes of dust clotted the air. “But we must agree on what comes next. You cannot stay here mending people’s mad mothers.” A blooming red mist surrounded her.

  Lilia countered with the Song of the Proud Wall, a defensive block, mouthing the words while calling another huff of breath to build a snarling counterattack.

  Taigan’s spell crashed into her barrier. The meshes of breath wrangled for dominance.

  Taigan deployed another offense. Always offensive, with Taigan. Lilia knotted up another defensive spell and let go.

  “These are my people,” Lilia said. “We won’t let that other Kai win.”

  “This country doesn’t know what to do with you,” Taigan said, and Lilia recognized the Song of the Cactus right before she spoke, and muttered her own counterattack. She released it before Taigan got out her next sentence. Ever since she had learned to draw on Oma, using the songs Taigan had taught her was easy. “I can take you away from here under the cover of dark. The Saiduan would welcome you. We know what you are, and how to…”

  “How to use me?”

  Lilia leaned forward, concentrating on the Song of the Mountain, trying to call it up and twist the strands she needed without mouthing the words and giving her move away while Taigan’s Song of the Cactus and her Song of the Water Spider warred in great clouds of seething, murderous power.

  “So indelicate.” Taigan said. Six tendrils from the Song of the Cactus kicked free of the Water Spider defense and grabbed Lilia’s throat. She huffed out another defense. She was sweating now.

  Taigan neatly deployed another offense, a roiling tide of red that spilled over their tangling spells and wafted over Lilia’s protective red bubble. Lilia had four active spells now. If she panicked, if she lost her focus, Taigan would overwhelm her. She did not like losing.

  “And what will they do here without us?” she wheezed, calling another huff of Oma’s power beneath her skin for a fifth offensive spell. Taigan had no defenses. All Lilia had to do was switch tactics long enough to overwhelm her.

  Taigan shrugged. But Lilia saw the movement of her lips, and the spell she was trying to hide with that shrug. Defensive barrier. It was coming.

  Lilia released her offensive spell, six brilliant woven balls of Oma’s breath, hurtling at Taigan like moths to claw lilies.

  “If I leave,” Lilia said, untangling the spell at her throat. “The Kai will throw my people back into Dorinah, and everyone left will be killed by the Tai Mora.”

  Her red mist collided with an offensive spell, something Lilia hadn’t anticipated. But one of hers got through, curling back behind Taigan’s left shoulder, half of it slipping through before Taigan’s defensive Song of the Pearled Wall went up.

  Taigan hissed, flicked her hand, and mitigated the worst of the damage. But Lilia felt a burst of satisfaction on seeing the shoulder of Taigan’s tunic smoking.

  “I am a sanisi, not a seer,” Taigan said. “I cannot see all futures.” Taigan clapped her hands, and deployed some song Lilia didn’t know, neatly cutting Lilia off from calling on Oma.

  Lilia’s warring spells dissipated, as did Taigan’s. The air smelled faintly of copper. Lilia sneezed.

  “It’s unfair to use a trick you won’t teach me,” Lilia said.

  “I’d be a fool to do that,” Taigan said. “The Song of Unmaking is all a teacher has to control a student. If I let you keep pulling, you’d burn yourself out.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You would. You seek to win at all costs, even when the odds are against you. But drawing on Oma isn’t some strategy game.”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “The stakes are higher.”

  Gian pushed in with a tray of food – lemon and cilantro rice, steamed vegetables, a decadent platter of fruit spanning a surprisingly wide range of colors, considering the season. She pressed the tray at Lilia.

  Seeing so much food made Lilia nauseous. “Where did you get this?”

  “I said it was for you. More people here like you than you think.” Gian set the tray on the floor. She pulled two sticky rice balls from her pockets and crawled to the edge of the mattress. Lilia watched her a moment, wondering where she would think to put them, but Gian simply held them, contentedly, in her lap.

  “What do you think about helping the Dhai fight?” Lilia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gian said. “What does it mean to be a god, Faith Ahya reborn?”

  “Bearing babies,” Taigan said.

  “Oh, be quiet,” Lilia said. “If there’s a war, I will win it. I’m not afraid anymore.”

  “Heroes are honest cowards,” Taigan sai
d, “who fight though they fear it. Only fools feel no fear.”

  “I was afraid my whole life, and it got me nothing.”

  Taigan muttered something in Saiduan. Then, “Fear tempers bad choices, bird.”

  “I’ve made my decision,” Lilia said. “You can help me convince the Kai to let the refugees stay, and to help me get them accepted here so we can fight the Tai Mora, or you can go. Both of you.”

  Gian said, “If you aren’t going to eat–”

  “Take it,” Lilia said.

  Gian picked up the tray. Taigan stood, muttering. “Bird, this choice changes everything. The whole landscape of your life. If you come to Saiduan…”

  “I made my choice,” Lilia said.

  She heard footsteps outside, and turned just as two of the militia stepped up to the door.

  Taigan moved to block them as the smallest one drew herself up and said, “The Kai is on his way to pass judgment, and Ghrasia Madah wishes to see you immediately.”

  2

  Ahkio had stumbled into the belly of Oma’s temple looking for the secret his dead sister had kept there. Now that he had arrived within the temple’s rapturous beating heart, he feared he had made a terrible mistake in pursuing this particular mystery.

  The light blinded him. He covered his eyes. Warmth suffused his body, and for a moment he thought he had fallen through the stone monolith in the temple’s basement into some bright day. There wasn’t supposed to be anything below the temple basements. Yet here he was, bathed in ethereal light, and clearly not alone.

  “Kai?”

  The voice again.

  Ahkio pulled his hands from his face. Squinted. He sat at the center of a circular stone room. The light came from a bank of windows twice his height. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a tall woman with intricately styled white hair bound in jeweled silver pins and combs standing a few paces away. The cut of her long skirt and belted tunic was wholly unfamiliar. She did not move toward him so much as she floated, hands clasped behind her. There was something uncanny in her demeanor. When she moved, nothing else moved – not her dress, not her hair. Even her serious expression remained fixed.