The Mirror Empire (56 page)

Roh traveled mostly with Luna at the back of the group, spending their rest periods and evenings poring over the Talamynii book.

“Did you tell them about Shodav?” Luna asked early on. It was the first thing Luna said to him.

It made Roh angry that he thought first of protecting Shodav, though it was his own friends who were already dead. Luna’s only protecting Shodav, Roh thought, so what happened to Dasai and the others doesn’t happen to him.

“I didn’t,” Roh said. “I said the book was just something Ora Dasai found.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” Luna said.

“It’s done,” Roh said.

“You could have run.”

“The way you and Kihin were going to run?”

Luna looked away, but not before Roh saw Luna’s eyes fill.

“I’m sorry,” Roh said.

“It’s all right,” Luna said. “It’s how it is here. Every time you think you find a way out, they hobble you again.”

“Did you love him?” Roh asked.

“Do you love Kadaan?”

“That’s a mean question,” Roh said.

“Yes,” Luna said.

“Kadaan is kind,” Roh said. “It could have turned out a lot worse.”

“Kihin was a nice boy,” Luna said, and did not speak of it again.

Roh and Luna worked on the book until their fingers were numb and the letters all looked the same. “Why do some of these look like Dhai characters?” Roh asked as Luna taught him the few Talamynii characters Luna knew.

“They borrowed from each other a lot,” Luna said. “It’s pretty rare to see one people take over without picking up a lot from the people they conquered. This is more likely a Dhai book than a Talamynii one – it’s the Talamynii that’s borrowed, not the Dhai.”

Roh turned to the back of the book, where there were simple line illustrations, mostly maps and circles. Without being able to read the characters, the circle figures were unintelligible. But at the beginning of the illustrated section were five symbols carefully drawn on a map with the familiar cross-section of mountains found only on Grania. This Grania, though, had no oceans. The map seemed to go on far past the page. Written onto the map were five familiar symbols. Roh knew them immediately. They were the same ones he had seen on the table in the Assembly Chamber in Oma’s Temple: a triangle with two circles; a circle with two lines through it; a coiled curl with a circle; a square with a double circle inside… and the trefoil with the tail. The one Lilia dreamed her mother pressed into her skin.

“I know these,” Roh said. “These symbols are in the Temple of Oma in Dhai.”

“What do they mean?”

“I don’t know,” Roh said. “Most of them marked the temples.” He traced the trefoil with the tail. The table map had shown that symbol over a spur of land that jutted into the ocean. But on this map, there was no ocean, just flat land. Whatever the trefoil had marked had probably fallen into the sea during the cataclysm the last time Oma rose.

“Symbols aren’t good for much if we can’t read the book,” Luna said.

Roh stared at the map for nearly an hour, flipping back and forth between the pages. The symbols showed up again – this time, each had their own page – later in the section, tucked into a corner on a page with more of the circular illustrations.

“Ora Dasai would know what this meant,” Roh said, frustrated.

“He isn’t here,” Luna said. “So we better figure this out.”

“I was supposed to die an old man in an orchard,” Roh said.

“I was supposed to marry a farmer,” Luna said. “Not everything happens the way it’s supposed to.”

Kadaan led their small party, and Roh only saw him at night after meeting with Luna, when they shared the same tent, but little else. Roh kept his hat on all the time. His bare scalp itched, and his ears burned with cold.

Roh had never known such a spare existence. They were mired by a windstorm over a frozen river whose breadth spanned a valley. They retreated inland and dug themselves into snow caves. They were stranded for a week, and killed and ate two of the bears. Kadaan cut everyone’s rations.

And at night… the nights were the worst. The sanisi and the bears patrolled the edges of the camp for the invaders. Most nights, they found them. Two sanisi died.

Then one morning, Kadaan took Roh to the top of an icy plateau and pointed north.

“There,” he said.

Roh gazed out over a white, ice-encrusted plain to the churning crush of ice floes in what must have been a harbor. There was a black spire jutting up from behind a pulsing gray wall. The frozen sea made eerie structures on three sides of the tower, great ice sculptures that clung to the hold as if carved by master craftspeople.

Kadaan sent a man ahead to scout. When he came back, he and Kadaan conferred for a few moments. Then Kadaan waved them all forward. “I’m afraid the invaders got there before us,” he said.

As they walked to the tower, bodies became visible within a hundred yards of the walls. The only reason they hadn’t seen them sooner was because the snow had claimed them, covering the churned-up ground, the bloody trails of the dying, the detritus of spent arrows and crossbow bolts, the discarded weapons of the dead.

As they neared, the frosty forms of the dead emerged from the snow heaps: a boot heel, the edge of a coat, a clawed fist frozen forever to the hilt of a weapon. The bodies had been so long on the tundra that they didn’t look real. They were pasty imitations of people, stiff and grotesque, bloodless.

The bodies reminded Roh of Dasai and Aramey, Nioni and Kihin. He thought of his brother dying alone in a pool of his own blood on icy tundra such as this. I was a coward, Roh thought. A selfish coward. His throat closed and tears came. It was so cold, the moisture froze at the corners of his eyes before it could fall.

“This is different,” Kadaan said. “They don’t usually leave the bodies. They spirit them off somewhere.”

Roh wiped his face and looked up at the ruined gate of the tower. The ironbound door had burst inward, shattered like glass. The edges of the gate that remained fixed on the hinges looked like the remnants of the windows.

There was no movement along the battlements. Just inside the gate were heaps of Saiduan bodies. The walls blocked most of the wind-carried snow, so the bodies remained almost entirely exposed. Crystallized blood, frosty entrails, headless corpses, men shattered in two. Great scorch marks stained the walls inside. The buildings surrounding the keep had been reduced to charred stone, their roofs and interiors carried away by fire.

The sanisi followed the trail of bodies and burned-out homes up into the interior of the tower.

The gate there had been broken open as well, with the same violent force that had torn apart the gate outside.

The party did not speak as they moved through the keep. Dead sanisi littered the floor. Roh wondered at first where they all had come from – wasn’t this a prison? Then he realized that people from the surrounding areas must have fled here, hoping it was a place of refuge. Among the dead Saiduan were the shorter, paler bodies of the invaders. The invaders who looked like Dhai. Roh looked from the dead to Kadaan and wondered why no one ever called the invaders by name.

For the first time, Roh understood what kind of battle they were fighting. This wasn’t a war at all. It was genocide. It was the complete decimation of an entire people. The invaders were doing to the Saiduan what the Saiduan tried to do to the Dhai, and what the Dhai had done to the Talamynii before them. There would be no middle ground. No peace. No end. Dasai and the others were dead for nothing. Why had he lived? To what purpose?

Luna came up beside him in the cold hallway. “What is it?” he said.

“We have to win,” Roh said.

“I’ll settle for dying old,” Luna said.

“I won’t,” Roh said.

Roh helped move the bodies out of the main rooms. They were to leave the bodies haphazardly: no stacking, no burning, nothing that so obviously left a trace of their passage. They raided the keep for food, and Kadaan allowed them to light up the braziers but no regular fires. Fires made too much smoke. They covered up the windows of the rooms they used so no light could be seen from the harbor. They posted sanisi at the gate to the keep but left the main gate into the city untouched.

There were only a handful of bears left in the kennels not yet starved or frozen – most of the others had been taken.

That night, Roh sat awake at the foot of Kadaan’s bed for many hours, though Kadaan did not come to bed. Luna always slept with the Talamynii book, and he thought about sitting up with him for a while and going over more characters. But he was restless.

Roh moved through the corridors in search of a friendly face. He found Kadaan in one of the ransacked libraries. Kadaan sat near the soft glow of a brazier. The room was bitterly cold. Roh could see his breath. The books were covered in frost.

Kadaan did not look at him, though Roh knew his presence was noted.

“How did they get in?” Roh asked softly, from the doorway.

“If I knew that, we would not see this. There is a good deal we do not know. More come every month. Like roaches. We cut them down, and still they come. Sanisi cannot train their children so quickly.” He gestured to the ransacked room around him. “They are coming here for knowledge no one has been able to give them. Maybe we should give up on this book business and take what remains of our people south. There is another continent there. Perhaps we will be welcome.”

“You think we’re going to die like they did?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Roh said. “I’m supposed to die an old man in an orchard. If I don’t, it means the seer was wrong.”

“A farmer. Yes.” Kadaan laughed. It sounded very strange in the cold, ruined room. “That explains much about your decisions.”

“I suppose I should have asked what kind of orchard,” Roh said. “A Dhai one? A Saiduan one? Or an orchard on some other continent…”

Kadaan gave a thin smile. “Or an orchard on this world at all,” he said.

“Who are the invaders, Kadaan?”

“I think you know.”

“They’re Dhai.”

“Yes. Dhai who live on some other world, where the Saiduan didn’t kill them.”

Roh let out a breath. “Gods. Why are they killing you? Us? All of us, I guess.”

Kadaan shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters. We may be at an end of Maralah’s hunt through the archives. Whatever they’re looking for wasn’t made for us to understand. It’s something only some old Dhai would know.”

Roh remembered the Dhai-looking characters in the Talamynii book and swore softly. “They’re our people. Dhai. They can read all these books. That’s why they want them,” he said.

“What?”

“I need to talk to Luna. Just… give me a few minutes.”

Roh woke Luna from a dead sleep.

“Lord of Light, Roh,” Luna said. “What–”

“I need to see the book.”

“It’s under the bed.”

Roh pulled the Talamynii book from beneath the bed and unwrapped it. He set his lantern beside the book and grabbed Luna’s sketchbook and a charcoal pencil.

He opened to the inside pages and counted the characters. He put them down in the order of the Kai cipher – two down, four across, three up, over one. He set down each letter, then reversed the order.

Luna pulled off the blanket and knelt next to Roh. “What’s that?”

“Kai cipher,” Roh muttered.

“What? Really?”

Roh scribbled out what he’d written. It was all nonsense.

He groaned and started over. More nonsense. Nothing.

“I just thought…” Roh wrote it out yet again, but the letters made no sense; they didn’t form any words he knew. He threw down the charcoal pencil and rubbed his face.

Luna took up the book. “I think that made it worse,” Luna said. “Good idea, though. How did you have the Kai’s cipher?”

Roh cried. He didn’t even realize he was crying until Luna touched his face, and Roh pulled his hands away, and they were wet.

“Roh?” Luna said. “Roh, there’s not an answer to everything.”

Roh sobbed then. It bubbled up from inside him like some terrible sickness. His shoulders shook. He wrapped his arms around his knees and keened like a child. Nothing made any sense. Nothing was what it was supposed to be.

“Roh, don’t cry,” Luna said.

“It was all for nothing,” Roh said. “Ora Dasai’s dead, Aramey… my brother… for nothing.”

“What happened to making your own fate? Isn’t that what you always say?”

“I did make it,” Roh said. “This is it. Freezing to death, at the end of everything, for no purpose.”

Luna pulled Roh’s hands from his knees. “Living is the purpose, Roh. For however long we have to do it, we live. That’s all. That’s all there ever was.”

“We aren’t going to win,” Roh said.

“No,” Luna said, “but we’re going to live.”

 

47

Ahkio stared down at the slight man surrounded by Oras and militia on the council house floor. His wrists and ankles were bound. He lay on his side. Dark fluid oozed from his mouth, his broken nose. His long, dark hair stuck to his sweaty neck. Ghrasia stood between him and Ahkio, hand already on her sword, the hilt wrapped around her wrist.

“We had him talking,” Caisa said.

“Is that so?” Ahkio asked the man.

“I can talk,” the man said. He sounded like any other Dhai. No trace of an accent. Of course not.

“Why are you here, then; have you answered that?” Ahkio asked. “We could resolve our differences peacefully. There was no need for violence.”

“This is where the hunting ends,” the man said. He showed dark, stained teeth.

“You’re right about that,” Ahkio said. “We took your messenger. We’ll take the rest of you.”

“There are more of us than you can imagine.”

“And I’ll kill you one at a time.”

“Bold words for a pacifist.”