The Mirror Empire (30 page)

“You’re serious?”

She shrugged. “I studied a lot of things.”

“You never mentioned this.”

“I studied anatomy, too, and agricultural science. I studied magic, and astronomy, and plant biology. I didn’t clean sinks
all
the time.”

“You are serious about everyone in Dhai knowing how to read?”

“When you forget your history and where you came from, you might forget where you’re going. That’s what Ora Gaiso always said.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen, almost.”

Taigan shook his head. “Too old for magic,” he said. “It’s a shame. You looked much younger.”

“What are you saying?”

He kicked the stones away. “Only that I wish we’d found you ten or twelve years ago, so we could have shaped you into something useful.”

 

Taigan sat above the camp several nights later, perched on a massive boulder that still retained the suns’ heat. Below, the scullery girl tossed and turned in her bedroll. By all counts, she should have been so exhausted that sleep came easily. But her stamina was better than he expected for a cripple.

He saw a swarm of long-tailed swallows dive toward him in the semi-darkness. He held out his hands and dismantled them. They broke apart into the wispy tails of Saiduan characters. He smelled burnt bread and something more pungent: mold, rot.

Over the last few days, he had run the scullery girl through a number of famous battles, using stones as markers – battles the Saiduan had fought against the Dhai while they warred for the continent for a thousand years. Taigan considered himself fair at strategy, and he had the advantage of already knowing both the best and actual outcomes, but the girl seemed to have a knack for it. He played through multiple scenarios and watched her trounce him in three out of every five. This from a pacifist with no training. What could she do with instruction? With actual knowledge on the field?

The Saiduan characters unfurled into Maralah’s message, a response to the update he had sent her two days before. It was a much shorter, simpler message than he expected.

 

Taigan stirred the characters with a breath of wind for a long time, watching them swirl and pull apart until they were completely illegible. Then he crawled down from the boulder and walked back into camp.

“Was that Saiduan writing?” Lilia asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Was the symbol the man wrote on the stone a Saiduan character?”

“What, in the riddle?”

“Yes, the one about the illiterate men.”

“Yes, the symbol he wrote was a Saiduan character.”

“It was his name, then,” Lilia said. “If you’re illiterate, you still have to sign documents. Agreements. Papers. Those sorts of things. You do those in Saiduan, just like here. We’ve had treaties with you. So if you were illiterate, the one symbol you would know for sure, the one with the most power, was your name. The young man knew that.”

“And how did he get it into a bladder trap, then?”

“He lived in the same village with the older man,” Lilia said. “He planned the trick a long time before, when he was a child. He wrote the man’s name, the symbol, on the stone and planted it many years before. Then he chose that same man for the trick. He knew that man would write the one symbol he knew. His name.”

“Is that what you’ve been up thinking about?” Taigan asked.

“I tried to think what one symbol everyone would know,” Lilia said. “Something that was the same across Saiduan and Dhai. We’d have to know our names. To sign public records.”

Taigan grunted.

“See, I’m doing well,” Lilia said, and rolled onto her side.

But he needed a gifted young girl, not a clever one. He had been a clever girl once, and Oma, Lord of Heaven, knew how that turned out for him. He scratched at the wound at the base of his spine.

Taigan suspected being clever would not turn out any better for her than it had for him. He sniffed the air. Their trackers were closer. Another day, and they’d be upon them. He needed to decide how much of the girl to leave to them.

 

At midday, Lilia stopped to gather water in the trickling gully of a streambed that looked like it was once a huge clay pipe, as big around as Lilia was tall. The water came from a massive hole milled from the side of a sheer rock face that stretched on and on, covered in scraggly trees and vines Lilia had no name for. She was tired, and Taigan had been surly all morning.

Taigan regarded the cliff face as Lilia rubbed at her sore rump. “Where now?” she said, gesturing to the cliff. “It’ll take a long time to go around.”

“We go up.”

“We can’t climb that.”

“Up,” Taigan said. “Draw on Oma, as I’ve taught you, and propel yourself up.”

“Taigan, I’m–”

“Up,” he repeated, and raised his hand. A whirlwind of air threw dirt and small stones at her. Taigan kicked up and grabbed hold of the tiny crevices and spurs of the rock. He jumped up the rock face like he weighed nothing – a feather pulled by a string, leaping from point to point, sixty feet up the face of the cliff.

Lilia watched him, breathless, as he came to the top. He crouched. Peered down at her. “Your turn,” he called.

“You know I can’t!” Lilia said.

“You will,” he said, “or you’ll die down there.” He moved away from the edge of the cliff. She lost sight of him.

“Taigan? Taigan! You promised to take me to my mother!”

“Fly, fly little bird!” Taigan called, his voice growing distant.

“Taigan!” She moved up against the wall. She saw nothing that looked like it could hold her weight. She screwed her courage and jammed her good foot onto a small spur beneath her. She tried to lever herself up. The spur broke. She fell.

“I’ll play your stupid game,” she muttered. But not as he would expect.

Lilia led the bear over to a nearby rock. She climbed up onto the rock and slid onto the bear.

Left or right? She looked back at the streambed. The broken pipe curved to the right. If whoever had built this pipe built them the way they did in Dhai, the pipe would be going downhill. She would go north, following the cliffside until she found a way across it, and then come back south until she either found Taigan or found where Taigan waited for her. If he had waited.

She heard the call of a bird, close, and urged the bear forward. In places, the way was impassable. She had to crawl around large boulders and knotted trees. The bear looked behind them often, snuffling, and she worried about predators. She found shelter that night in the arms of a tree, and tied herself tight so she didn’t fall off. In the morning, she went on, stopping for water when she found it.

After two days, the long curve of the cliff tapered away. She crawled up the loose stone and shale, grabbing at knotted roots and bushes. At the top, she yanked on the bear’s lead and urged it to follow.

She rode the bear the rest of the way, heading south again, back to the place where Taigan had abandoned her.

It was midday when she heard Taigan say, “That was clever but wrong.”

Lilia started. Taigan dropped from the draping of a cluster of dense trees, twenty feet above her. He landed neatly in front of Lilia, sending up a little puff of dust, agile as a cat.

“I’d rather be clever,” Lilia said. She slid off the bear.

Taigan walked past her, to the lip of the cliff. He gazed at the streambed below. “Three days I waited, expecting you to fly back,” he said. “Then I realized what you’d do and came to meet you. You really are just a plain little scullery girl, aren’t you?”

Lilia dropped the bear’s lead and met him at the edge of the precipice. “I’m sorry I’m not what you thought I was,” she said.

“I don’t understand why you’re unteachable,” he said. “Perhaps you’re too old. That was a concern. The ones I’ve worked with before were still children, and most were from Dorinah. They had more discipline, and more…” He stared intently at her. “Fear. It made them easier to train.”

“You know you’re fighting Dhai, don’t you? Another kind of Dhai.”

Taigan sighed. “Yes. Some of us know. Why do you think I came to Dhai to find omajistas? What better way to fight the enemy than with the enemy himself?”

“I’m sorry,” Lilia said. “I’m just not what you think I am.”

“It’s a pointless exercise,” Taigan said. “I’m losing time. The world is losing time.”

“But my mother–”

Taigan’s palm thumped hard into her sternum. Lilia lost her balance. Tipped over the cliff. Her ankle knocked a jutting spur of rock. Pain. The freedom of falling. She had a moment of abject terror. Shock.

Taigan’s dark form, the edge of his coat fluttering in the wind. Gazing down at her, receding, falling away and away and away…

This is a long fall, she thought. It’s a mistake. He’ll stop it.

“Fly, fly little bird,” Taigan called.

Her mother used to call her that. There were three intonations in Dhai, and “Li” with the third intonation meant “bird.”

But she had always been broken, for as long as she could remember.

And broken birds didn’t fly.

Lilia pinwheeled her arms, clawing at air that whistled around her; a pretty, perfect song.

Songs. Trefoils. Oma.

If she could just–

She grabbed at all of it as she fell.

Her fingers found only air.

Lilia opened her mouth to scream–

Jutting branches and twisted tree limbs splintered beneath her. Snapped her ribs. Raked flesh. Crack and heave. She broke through the low canopy of stunted trees at the base of the cliff and crashed into the sandy streambed below. She landed on her right side. Her right shoulder fractured beneath her. Her right arm snapped.

She rolled another few feet into the soft ravine, sliding to a halt among heavier river stones at its bottom, her blood smearing the rocks.

Lilia saw her own twisted arm, her hand folded back unnaturally, fingers grazing her wrist. Her mouth filled with saliva. Screaming. She wanted to scream. Blackness juddered across her vision.

Fly, fly little bird.

 

25

The bloodstained tents of Zezili’s army were an ugly harbinger for the dajian camp spread below them in the muddy valley. Massive fences and temporary housing had been allotted to this group for at least a century. Zezili sat at a makeshift table outside her tent, gazing across the valley as the dajians lit their fires and put out their laundry and belted out prayers to Para in the little green space at the center of the camp. She imagined these dajians as some monstrous horde of invaders, led by the sneering face of the Kai she had met on the other side, but her imagination failed her. The dajian camp here was enclosed by stout adenoak fences and peppered with guard towers staffed by local enforcers. Technically, these dajians belonged to the Empress herself and were available for rent to neighboring farms that relied on their labor twice a year for harvest and planting. The rest of the time, they served as parasites and brood stock, ensuring there was always another generation of laborers at the ready. Zezili thought the whole thing was a mess, but she liked cheap food, and dajian labor made that possible.

Every dajian she killed now reminded her of her country’s impending starvation and destruction. Surely the Empress understood the implications of these deaths?

Monshara approached Zezili in the dawn quiet – Zezili heard the squish of her boots in the turf and the huff of her bear first – leading her mount behind her.

“I have a delivery to make,” Monshara said, patting the leather canister at her hip: the map she’d received from the other side. “I’ll be back in the morning. You’ll have clearance from the towers by then to enter the camp?”

Zezili grunted at her and returned to her breakfast. The morning was chilly and her tea was weak. Summer’s balmy evenings were well past, and low autumn was upon them. The season also brought fog that sometimes blanketed the world for miles in every direction, so thick it was like breathing soup. The mist below was nothing compared to how it would be later in the month.

Monshara seemed to take the grunt as an affirmative and moved on past Zezili toward the rocky, scorched road.

Thoughts of fog put Zezili in mind of her childhood, and she remembered that her mother lived not far from this camp, in a little town called Saolina. Her mother, who knew how to make mirrors. Zezili dumped out her cold tea.

“Jasoi!” she called.

Jasoi stood outside her tent, throwing her dagger at a twisted stump littered in knife wounds. She had a good throw, and more often than not, Zezili found herself eating something from the pot that Jasoi had picked off with her dagger earlier in the day.

At Zezili's call, Jasoi turned. She yanked at her helm and swore. Her long hair had gotten tangled in it again.

“Cut it off,” Zezili said.

Jasoi pulled her helm free. It took a hank of reddish hair with it. Zezili had never seen hair that color on anyone but a Tordinian. Jasoi sheathed her dagger.

“You’re just jealous,” Jasoi said. She still ended her sentences with a rising intonation and slushy consonants; a typical Tordinian accent, though she had been in Dorinah for two decades.

“No, I’m practical. You should have buzzed your head when you got lice.”

“It wasn’t a problem.”

“Eight hours in a chair getting insects picked off my head is a problem,” Zezili said.

“What did you want, Syre?” Jasoi said, tucking the helm under her arm.

“You have the legion,” Zezili said. “I’ll be going into Saolina this morning.”

“Yes, Syre.”

Zezili kicked awake one of her pages – some rosy-cheeked kid from Daorian – and had Dakar groomed and saddled. Some days, she suspected Dakar was better groomed than she was.