Empire Ascendant

by Kameron Hurley

  Roh recited the Litany of Breath, drawing Para beneath his skin and holding it. He drew his sword. Peeked above the table.

  Two Tai Mora took out the legs of a sanisi four paces distant. One of them looked right at him. Roh let out his breath, forming a wall of air with the Litany of the Balustrade. One held up a hand and blasted an impossibly powerful glut of Para’s breath at Roh’s wall, tearing it apart.

  The parajista advanced, a little smile on his face that turned Roh’s stomach.

  Roh drew his weapon. Pulled Para. He made a simple litany and created a wall. He struck with his weapon while pushing the wall forward.

  He saw the misty blue defenses of the Tai Mora swirl to counter, and called a new litany. A cyclone. But the parajista must have been able to read the pattern of his cast, and retaliated with a burst of air that broke the cone of the call.

  All the while, the parajista advanced, his weapon snarling out ahead of him. Roh parried, countered, but he was stuck in a defensive position. Behind him, one of the Tai Mora fell into the open fireplace. Screamed. He crawled out, his coat aflame, and fought on, a blazing specter.

  Roh tried to put a table between him and his attacker. His stamina was not what it was, cooped up in this hold so many weeks. His breath came hard. His concentration wavered. The parajista thrust forward again, faster.

  Roh pivoted – and smacked right into the wall behind him, face first. Pain exploded across his face. He went down hard. Blood poured from his burst nose. He tried to push away from the parajista. Pain drowned out the litany for a shield.

  The parajista raised his weapon. Kadaan came from behind and gutted him like a fish.

  Roh hocked blood and snot.

  Kadaan took Roh by the collar and yanked him up. He hauled him across the body-strewn floor, slipping in blood as he did. Roh’s face throbbed.

  “Take your feet!” Kadaan yelled, then – “Luna!”

  Luna scrambled out from under a table and came after them. Several sanisi followed. The Tai Mora in the room were dead, but Roh heard more below.

  Roh stumbled after Kadaan into the stairwell.

  “Here, stop,” Kadaan said, and gestured to one of the sanisi, a parajista.

  The parajista knocked out the wall with a burst of air.

  Roh yelped, expecting it to come down on them, but Para’s blue mist suffused the outer edges of the wound, keeping it sound.

  Luna leapt out first, then Wraisau and another sanisi. Kadaan pushed Roh. Roh pin-wheeled his arms and fell the ten feet to the ground. The breath left his lungs. He gasped for air that wasn’t there. Tasted more blood and snot.

  The sanisi were already moving. Luna helped him up. Roh looked back, once, and wished he hadn’t. Dozens of Tai Mora were pushing through the scar in the stairwell.

  Wraisau ran ahead to the outer wall and broke it open with another blast of air. Without the protection of a jista or an especially powerful ward, walls and doors and gates meant little.

  Wraisau waved at Kadaan.

  Kadaan grabbed at Roh’s collar again.

  “Stop that!” Roh said.

  “Go,” Kadaan said.

  “What?”

  “Go!” He pushed Roh ahead. “Take Luna, and that fiery book, and find Maralah in Anjoliaa. If she hasn’t retreated there yet, she will. Do it.”

  “I’m here to fight!” Roh said.

  “You’ll be here to die.”

  “I can’t–”

  “Roh!” Luna grabbed his sleeve. “Please!” Luna slid through the break in the wall. Held out his hand.

  Roh saw the storm of Tai Mora running across the yard. Wraisau and the five remaining sanisi held their ground.

  Kadaan glanced back once at the Tai Mora, then grabbed Roh by the collar. Pulled him close. Kissed him fiercely.

  Roh had been waiting for it for so long it took his breath from his body. Or maybe he was still recovering from the fall. No matter. He gripped Kadaan tightly.

  Kadaan released him. “I will meet you in Anjoliaa,” Kadaan said. “We’ll hold them for you. Go.”

  Roh ran after Luna, to the kennels.

  Luna worked at the dogs’ tack with trembling fingers. Roh helped saddle them.

  “I’ll scatter the rest,” Roh said.

  “Tie an extra dog behind. We’ll run them.”

  “But–”

  “Do it.”

  Roh did as he said, then pushed wide the kennel doors. But the dogs weren’t stupid. Beyond the shelter of the kennels was a blasted white tundra. They had nowhere to go. He cursed and crawled up onto his dog’s saddle and whistled the animal forward.

  Luna trotted off ahead of him into the late afternoon light. They would be easy to track in the daylight. If they were lucky, these Tai Mora wouldn’t care anything for two Dhai slaves who escaped Shoratau. But if they’d come specifically for the book…

  Roh tried to banish that thought. The sun on the white tundra was blinding. “You know the way?” he shouted at Luna.

  Luna yelled back, “I’ve been planning an escape my whole life! I know what way is south!”

  Roh held on tight as the dogs leapt forward. Not even a year in Saiduan, and already he was running back home. He glanced back, once, at the dwindling hulk of Shoratau. He called Para to settle in beneath his skin. The blue mist gathered about his own body. He said a prayer to Para and released its breath. The wind picked up, catching icy particles of snow and sending them into a swirling vortex. It would not last, but it would cover their tracks.

  Roh’s resolve faltered in the face of the unending tundra. They were just two slaves, running across a wasteland into some uncertain future.

  * * *

  Luna lay still and silent against the belly of the dog, wrapped firmly in a thick coat. It was the first night in ten years Luna had slept without fear of a fist or a whip or a noose or a drunken master. Luna woke up twice in the night, expecting Kadaan or Wraisau or the Tai Mora, but there was only the cold, cold wind. It sounded like something Luna remembered from hir childhood – dogs howling in a kennel, or maybe the sea. Luna had grown up near the sea… maybe? Sometimes Luna confused old memories with things ze had read about Dhai. Luna had spent hir whole life clinging to those memories, hot and muddled, all tangled together with accounts Luna had read in the great libraries when trained as a runner and translator as a child.

  Luna and Roh dared not light a fire. They had circled the dogs for warmth instead and bedded down with them. Roh pretended to know a lot of things, but it was difficult for him to pretend he knew anything about the north. So Luna had to tell him to let the dogs dig down into the snow, and when the little shelter was built, Luna pulled Roh down at the center of the mass of dogs, and they slept as a soft layer of snow drifted all around them, covering their tracks and their burrow. To an untrained eye, their snowy mass would look like just another snow drift. A kink in the landscape. Luna had grown used to the soft weight of Roh against hir, and the comfort was painful sometimes, because ze knew that’s all it was to Roh. Luna was a coward, a slave, in Roh’s eyes. He never saw hir, just the idea of hir, like a figure in some old dusty text, a slave from his books, maybe. He never once asked about Luna’s life, about what ze liked to eat, or what ze did as a child. Roh talked about himself, and Luna put up with it because Roh was so beautiful he made Luna’s heart ache. But here in the wind and the cold, Luna realized how little that beauty mattered. What they needed now was to be clever and resilient, and ze worried that Roh did not have enough resilience to make the journey they needed to make. Riding from Shoratau to Anjoliaa would take months during the winter, longer if they lost the dogs and had to go by foot. Ze worried over Roh more than ze should have. Why should Luna care what happened to him? But hir heart hurt when ze thought about making this journey alone. Ze wanted to protect the way ze had never been protected. Ze spent much of hir time in Shoratau trying to shield Roh from how bad things could be for him. Luna distracted the sanisi who talked about him in low tones, and told Kadaan w
henever ze heard someone meant to do Roh harm. But Roh went through life in Shoratau merrily and arrogantly, as if his safety was assured. Luna knew, more than anyone, that being small and enslaved meant nothing was assured.

  The wind had died down. Luna blinked snow from hir lashes and shifted uncomfortably against the dog. Luna needed to piss. Always the worst part of nights on the tundra. Ze crawled a few paces away from their circle and found a place to squat. Hir urine turned to ice far too quickly, and ze yanked hir trousers back, chilled to the bone. Luna dug back into their circle, squeezing hirself in between the dogs and Roh.

  Luna began to tremble, so hard hir teeth rattled. Roh stirred beside hir.

  “You all right?” Roh asked.

  “Cold.”

  Roh wrapped his arms around Luna. Luna thought hir body would tense, but ze was so chilled the warmth was welcome. Luna instinctively moved in closer. Roh was strong, stronger than he looked, even thin and hungry. He held Luna tight, and Luna closed hir eyes and imagined they were living together in Dhai, married to half a dozen spouses, raising children on some farm far, far from here.

  As the trembling subsided, Luna considered how strange it would be in Dhai. Ze could be whatever ze wanted, not ataisa or slave or some fisher’s girl. In Dhai, Luna could be like Roh. They called hir ataisa here, but it never fit right on hir. Ze wanted to be a man, desperately, but people laughed when ze said it, and pointed out all of hir shortcomings, all of hir differences, all the things that made hir ataisa, so ze pushed that away, tried to forget about it. But Luna remembered a time when ze could choose what ze was, instead of having it thrust upon hir.

  “Roh? Promise me something?”

  “Sure.”

  “If I die first, don’t eat me, all right?”

  “I’m not going to eat you.”

  “Well, I know that Dhai–”

  “I wouldn’t eat someone who said it wasn’t all right. You think we murder babies, too? Cook them?”

  “Do you?” Luna had little memory of what Dhai was like when it came to funerary practices. But what ze knew was bad enough.

  “No. After all this, you’d ask that?”

  “It’s important.”

  “You’re all really upset about that. It’s not what you think it is. We don’t just go around killing people. It’s how we honor people, Luna. Family and friends. So no, I wouldn’t eat you.”

  “We aren’t friends?”

  “It’s complicated,” Roh said.

  Luna kept the silence. Above them, the stars were brilliant; a jeweled blanket across the heavens. All three moons were up. The largest was full and round, and the red moon was in half-shadow. The smallest was a mere crescent, ringed in its tiara of satellites. Para had gone down just before the suns, and would not rise again until they returned. Luna liked the stillness. Freedom, Luna imagined, felt like stillness.

  So did death, though. Luna closed hir eyes.

  When Luna woke next, it was morning, and ze was very cold. Frost rimed hir lashes. Ze sat up and stretched and found Roh rubbing the frost from the dogs’ coats.

  “We need to go,” he said, and Luna noted the twinge of fear in his voice.

  “What is it?” Luna asked.

  “Riders,” Roh said. “Far, still, but they could catch us if we don’t move.”

  Luna crawled to hir feet and surveyed the landscape. Ze could not see the riders Roh mentioned. The tundra here was hilly, shot through with stunted trees bowed over in snow and ice.

  “We’ll go north,” Luna said. “They’ll expect us to go south. Only a fool would go north.”

  “So what does that make us?” Roh said.

  “Clever fools,” Luna said.

  Luna shrugged into hir pack, checking reflexively to ensure the book was still secure in its waxed linen wrap. Ze was going to get to Dhai, and ze was going to keep Roh alive long enough to get there, too, no matter how relentlessly Roh tried to sabotage his own survival.

  6

  Blood poured down Anavha’s arm, thick and dark as honeyed wine. The injury from the animal that had attacked him before he opened the black gate was severe. He could barely move his fingers. Natanial stood over him, gripping Anavha’s uninjured arm in one hand and his own weapon in the other. Natanial peered out at the unfamiliar landscape, cursing the black gap in the world that had closed behind them. Natanial started up a slurry of Tordinian curses while Anavha wept.

  It had happened again – blood, fear, a door to nowhere…

  Natanial took him by the shoulders and shook him. Anavha imagined Zezili over him again, yelling “What did you do?”

  Anavha gasped. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

  “What happened?” Natanial said.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “There was a door. You opened a door. You must have closed it. Open it again. Laine curse you, where did you take us?”

  “I… don’t know.” The sky was black. Anavha saw something very far in the distance, some purple glowing orb that put him in mind of Sina, but Sina was at least two years from rising. It winked out, and the sky was clear again. He wondered if he was going mad.

  “Where are the moons?” Natanial said. “Stars, yes, but the moons…?”

  Anavha trembled. “Please, take me to my wife. Take me to Zezili. She’ll know what to do.”

  “Laine’s eye, you’re an omajista,” Natanial said, breathless, and started muttering in Tordinian again.

  “Please, don’t–” and Anavha wanted to finish by saying, “don’t tell anyone!” but this man answered to no woman. He was lawless. He would do whatever he liked, and there was no woman here to stop him.

  “Where did you take us?” Natanial asked. “Do you know that much? How do you use the power to navigate?”

  The air was cool, not cold. There was no snow like there had been in Dorinah. They sat in a great meadow of trampled reddish-brown grass.

  His arm throbbed. He clutched it to his chest while he bled. A soft wind started, blowing his hair from his face, and the clouds away from the sky, and there were the moons – big Ahmur and its tiara of satellites, and Zini and Mur.

  Natanial gave a whoop when he saw them, and raised his fist to the sky. “We are not so far lost on the web, then,” he said. The moons’ light illuminated the clearing. Anavha saw the bunched blackness of scrubland on the horizon, but mostly it was broken grass as far as he could see.

  “Let’s attend your arm,” Natanial said. He crouched next to Anavha and took his arm gently. Anavha shuddered. The pain was intense, as if his arm were on fire. “Get your tunic off,” Natanial said.

  It was difficult, so Natanial helped him. Natanial got behind him and unbound the girdle, then pulled off his tunic. The chill night air met Anavha’s skin, and he shivered. The tunic was off, but Natanial remained behind Anavha. Anavha turned. Natanial was staring at his back.

  “Did your wife do that to you?” Natanial said softly.

  He must have seen the scar on Anavha’s back – Zezili’s initials, carved into his skin. In the light of the triple moons, it would be easy to see. “I am hers,” Anavha said.

  Natanial said nothing. He knelt beside Anavha and began tearing up the already shredded sleeve of the tunic. Anavha held out his arm. It looked very thin and pale in the milky light.

  “Did she do these as well?” Natanial thumbed the scarred slashes on the inside of Anavha’s arm.

  “No,” Anavha said.

  “Someone else?”

  “I did,” Anavha said.

  Natanial grunted and bound Anavha’s arm. “I took you for a foppish Dorinah man,” Natanial said, “but this is something else. Not all men in Dorinah are treated this way.”

  “Zezili loves me.”

  “She hurts you.”

  Anavha’s face felt hot. “Sometimes… sometimes that’s all right. Sometimes I deserve it. I even… I even like it, sometimes.”

  “Some do,” Natanial said. He knotted the makeshift bandages. “I will grant
you that. But far more common are those who fetishize the abuse they endure because living under the alternative is too much to bear.”

  “Don’t tell me what I feel.” Tears burned Anavha’s eyes again, and for the first time in a long time, he hated himself for it. Hated to cry about his own life in front of a stranger. “You don’t understand anything.”

  “I understand more than you know,” Natanial said. “Come, we need to go on. If this is Aaldia we have a much longer distance to travel back to Tordin.”

  “Aaldia? How do you know it’s Aaldia?”

  “The stars,” Natanial said.

  They traveled all night. When Anavha collapsed, Natanial carried him, lifting him up over his shoulders as if he weighed nothing. And perhaps he did not. He was no one, of importance only to Zezili, and then only if he pleased her. Natanial carried him because Zezili would pay for him.

  Finally, Natanial came to a stop. He set Anavha back on his feet. The moons had risen and nearly set.

  “What is it?” Anavha asked.

  “Lights,” Natanial said. “Stay here. I want to make sure it’s safe.”

  “Don’t leave me!”

  “Anavha.”

  “Please!”

  “Stay three paces behind, then. Laine’s bloody spit.”

  Natanial crept across the broken grass and onto a worn path. He called out in Tordinian. An answering call came from the house in another language, one Anavha didn’t recognize.

  Natanial yelled something else, then returned to Anavha. “There’s a village two miles further on,” he said. “We should find a tavern and a room.”

  “So we are in Aaldia?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did we get here?”

  Natanial cocked his head at him. “You took us here, you tell me. Let’s just hope it’s our Aaldia.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You really have no idea? Has no one trained you?”