The Mirror Empire (24 page)

“Oma’s rising. We’ve been born under the wrong star.”

Ghrasia stared at the floor a long time, trying to untangle her thoughts. Javia had spoken often of Oma and the collision of worlds written of in
The Book of Oma
. Legends and mysticism, Javia had said. But Ghrasia knew better. Far greater minds than her own had written
The Book of Oma
many thousands of years ago. It was the only guide they had now. She murmured a prayer to Tira, the star she had been born under. She wished, not for the first time, that she had been born in another time, under some other star.

“You understand I won’t be an aggressor,” Ghrasia said. “I defend the Dhai. I don’t go out and murder people for no cause or for political gain, no matter what star’s in the sky.”

“You insult me,” Nasaka said, but her tone was flat. “I have others for that.”

“Your casual attitude toward the living makes me question your own humanity.”

Nasaka frowned. “You are as troublesome as–”

“Who, Javia?”

“Let’s pretend to be friends, Ghrasia. Do I need to bring up your daughter’s offenses again? Let’s not argue about the sanctity of life.”

“No,” Ghrasia said. It never took long for Nasaka to bring up her daughter. Murder was murder, no matter the circumstances; Ghrasia knew that better than anyone. But Madah was her only daughter and had hardly known better when she was twelve. Mistakes happened. Ghrasia should never have gone to Nasaka for help when she found Madah standing over her cousin’s body.

“You have my loyalty,” Ghrasia said. “You know that. But loyalty doesn’t mean I won’t argue with you. I’m not foolish enough to think I won the Pass War on my own, but I know how to lead people, the sort of people who don’t like you very much. So, though you may not like me at all, I would ask for your respect.”

“You know you have it.”

Ghrasia smiled. It improved her mood just by forcing it; an old trick she learned from her mother. “Is there anything else, Ora Nasaka?”

“Keep an eye on him for me,” Nasaka said. “He knows you were a confidant of his mother’s. He will trust you. I need to know what he confides.”

“As you like,” Ghrasia said, but the words tasted bad. “I’m going to go prepare for our departure.

Nasaka turned away. Her usual dismissal.

Ghrasia made her way back downstairs. Elaiko shadowed her until she reached the second floor, asking if she needed food or tea.

“I’ve been assisted enough,” Ghrasia said, and she failed to hide the exhaustion in her voice. It was not going to get any easier in Garika.

Once she was free of Elaiko, Ghrasia did not go back to her room but instead walked into the long foyer that looped around the Sanctuary. Inside the Sanctuary, the dead and wounded had been removed, and little seemed amiss. She walked until she reached the large, intricate tapestry of the Liona Stronghold. The scene was meant to depict the Dorinahs at the pass during the Pass War. The massive walls of the stronghold were shown from the viewpoint of an invading horde of maned, red-eyed women. And there, at the top of the battlements, stood the Dhai, calling their fistfuls of air and fire and snarling green plant life. It was difficult to ignore that one woman stood out among them, a tall, massive figure with a long tail of black hair. Her red tunic and skirt glowed, the way Faith Ahya’s vestments were said to glow when she appeared to her people.

It was a terribly inaccurate depiction of Ghrasia, but it was her favorite. Many of the other portraits included her with Javia and her family, or standing among a number of great historical Dhai and Oras and clan leaders and heroes. And in those depictions, she looked more as she saw herself – a diminutive woman whose only real strength appeared to be the squint of her gaze and the profound loyalty she inspired in those who collected around her like flies to honeyed pitcher plants. It was not a fame she cultivated. It was something she was good at. Her face, her people often told her, was open and kind. And when she spoke, she did so with authority. One did not learn how to speak with authority in Dhai, not unless they had been raised as Ghrasia had, vying for very limited resources in a very poor clan. She was not truly of Clan Taosina. Her birth mother relocated there from Clan Mutao when she was very small, after her spouses were killed in a mining accident. She gave them both the moniker of Clan Taosina and pretended the past had not existed.

“We build the story of ourselves,” her mother often said.

Ghrasia stared at the glowing woman on the battlements. This was how they all saw her – a shining god who could push back a tide of evil.

But in truth, she was just like everyone else. Bowing and scraping to Nasaka and her endless political push. What was Nasaka’s true intent? She had gotten the boy the title, something Ghrasia had not thought possible. What else did she have in store for them?

Ghrasia had picked her side many years ago when she shared Javia’s bed, but it didn’t make the idea of spying on Javia’s son any easier. Oma was rising, as Faith Ahya had promised in
The Book of Oma
. And Nasaka was rising with it.

 

 

21

“The Dhai are coming,” Rainaa said, “and the Patron wishes to speak to you about it.”

Shao Maralah Daonia lowered her blade, resisting the urge to slice out at Rainaa with it. Maralah practiced bare-chested in the chilly air of the courtyard reserved for the women of the Patron’s hold in Caisau. As a general rule, she did not prefer segregated spaces, but since arriving in Caisau, she had enjoyed the relative solitude of the women’s quarter. Only half the Patron’s wives lived here, and they kept their personal slaves close. She sent her usual sparring partner, Shao Driaa Saarik, south to Alorjan on reconnaissance to shore up the city for their expected retreat south. That left Maralah with many hours of solitary training here.

She took up her tunic from the slush-filled fountain and wiped the sweat from her face. The pain in her torso was less today than the day before. A broad scar rippled up her body from navel to armpit, the gutting blow dealt to her by the invaders who’d taken Aaraduan. They’d left her to die, which was a blessing of the Lord of Unmaking, for a certainty. They didn’t realize she had the hold’s soul at her call, to repair her to some semblance of living.

Rainaa waited patiently, clasping her little hands in front of her. She was a big-eyed northerner; Maralah could always tell by the cant of the nose, with northerners. Like the rest of the Patron’s slaves, her head was shaved bald, and she wore a purple wrap around her flattened forehead. Those born into servitude had the same sloped foreheads, an easy deformation to manufacture and impossible to hide. Slaves often bore the deformity as a badge of pride; newly conquered people or those plunged into servitude by debt or misfortune weren’t so marked and were treated with more distrust. But flatheads like Rainaa surrounded the Patron and his family like loyal, well-prized dogs. The Patron thought them perfectly tame.

It was a foolish complacency, Maralah knew. She had been a slave, a long time ago, and trusted not one word or expression people like Rainaa tried to sell her.

In truth, Maralah had known the Dhai were coming three weeks before, when Taigan sent word of their acceptance of his terms and told her he had a possible omajista. But she had been in the middle of burning the fields behind her during the hasty retreat of their last remaining army in the west. When she shared the news with her Patron that they had lost all but three hundred soldiers, the Dhai scholars were the last thing on her mind. Not for the first time, she wished the Dhai were some fearsome people they could hire as mercenaries, not bookmaking philosophers.

Official word of the Dhais’ agreement had come to the Patron some time later, with the Dhais’ terms. They must have finished hashing out some kind of paper treaty by now. As if words on paper meant anything. Maralah remembered burning shelves and shelves of old treaties back in Aaraduan. Just so much ink on paper, or hide, or bone, or whatever other fool thing they thought to make marks on.

Above her, the sky was a gray wash. At night, the cloak of the stars sometimes rippled. Staring at the night sky too long now made her seasick. She had seen the invaders coming through the tears in the sky, driving omajistas far more skilled than Taigan before them. But countering their forces without an equal number of those who could channel the dark star was impossible. If Taigan did not find more people like him, they were lost.

“I come presently,” Maralah said. Her chest tightened, but she banished her anxiety in the next moment. Foolish thing, to lose even that bit of calm in front of a servant. Rainaa was one of the Patron’s little partridges; her every word and wince would find its way back to him.

Rainaa bowed stiffly at the waist.

Maralah watched her go. Every time a new Patron’s family ascended the throne, they killed all the prior family’s men and women, and raised their children as slaves. She wondered how much it delighted former Patrons to have the descendants of their enemies preparing their meals and washing their cocks. Maralah found the whole thing unsettling.

She walked back to her rooms and changed into a clean black tunic. She changed her padded shoes for a sanisi’s proper boots and donned her coat, though it was early in the season for it. Most days were still above freezing.

Caisau’s hold had been patched and rebuilt hundreds of times, so it was a hodgepodge of organic and inorganic matter. She walked from the tumorous growth that was the women’s court and across the sky bridge to the central keep. Air moved through the hold from its skin, but light was another matter. Skilled tirajistas had lined the ceiling with bioluminescent flora around the entire outer perimeter of the hold. Windows only made an appearance as one neared the core of the keep or one of the centralized courtyards. Wandering Caisau’s hold was like scurrying up and down four or five cities, each of them trundled up on top of each other, then suddenly bursting into the open spaces of the yards with their mosaic of fountains and shimmering green gardens. Even during the worst of the winter, yards in the central keep stayed warm, heated from below by great geothermal vents that carried heated air from the nearby hot springs beneath the floor and into the walls.

That meant that as Maralah ascended, the air got warmer, and she soon regretted bringing her coat. Before the routing of the western army, she had thought they might hold Caisau another three months, maybe even all winter, but every report she received from her scouts said the invaders were marching straight for Caisau, stopping only to pick over any field or farmhouse Maralah’s razing party had overlooked. It would only be a few weeks before they had to abandon Caisau and move further south. Only her brother’s army remained intact, and they were still holding the east. Eighteen armies massacred in just five years, cities swallowed, villages leveled. Some days, she felt like Saiduan had turned to sand, now slowly trickling through her clenched fingers.

Maralah asked after the Patron at his diplomatic secretary’s desk and was directed to his private garden. One of his personal sanisi, Ganaa, held her up at the entrance and insisted one of his body servants announce her.

Maralah remained relaxed, despite her annoyance. She had saved the Patron’s life numerous times. To be treated like one of his servants, like Rainaa, sometimes grated. She thought their sense of ceremony would have broken down here at the end, but it was the opposite: the closer they were to annihilation, the tighter they all clung to ritual and ceremony.

“You may enter,” the Patron’s chief attendant said, and Maralah moved past him into the garden.

The garden was a riotous mass of color. Massive bamboo bird cages hung from weeping willow and birch trees entangled with ivy and holly and some hardy purple flowered thing that looked like wisteria. A great copper-colored stone at the center of the garden pushed gouts of water over its surface, where it tumbled into elaborate channels carved into the floor. Maralah walked over them; the mosaic of the grate above the streams of water was solid and very old.

At first glance, it appeared the Patron was alone. He was a tall, straight-backed man with soft hands and bright eyes. He was about her age, though she would not have believed it if she hadn’t read his birth date in some scandalous rag put out by the merchants in Albaaric on the occasion of his forty-fourth year. His face was a puckered morass of scarred tissue just below his jawline; he had grown a fine beard in an attempt to mask the scars, but it only drew attention to them. The Patron’s beard had become all the rage among Saiduan men and a few hirsute women, though, and now they all grew them out and trimmed them to the same squared-off wedge at the end.

The Patron wore a single piece of jewelry – a gold ring on his little finger with a pale blue stone the size of a robin’s egg. For a man so often shielded by the flesh of others, he dressed remarkably practically, a fact she had always respected. Unlike more established Saiduan families, he had fought for his seat, murdering eight of his brothers for it. Or, rather, Maralah had killed them for him. She had joined the Patron because he had an eye for economics and infrastructure, something she felt the country sorely needed. She and her brother provided the teeth. It was a cruel irony that the man she chose for peace now led them in the bloodiest assault the country had seen in two thousand years.

As he turned, she saw another sanisi on the other side of the garden, one of the younger men she had trained four years before. The Patron went nowhere without one of her people, preferably at least two of them. She had seen to that.

“Do you have any new reports for me?” the Patron asked. “Perhaps some good news, like the northern half of the country sinking into the sea and taking these blighted people with it?” He had a warm, soothing voice, the sort of voice that could lull a man to sleep, making it easier to slit his throat. But this Patron was more likely to use his voice to sway a man to his side of an argument.