“No family, then? No children?”
Isoail leaned back in the chair. She seemed amused. Her eyes sparkled. “Do you?”
“And mark them with this face? No.”
“My parents both bore some dajian blood, from very far back,” Isoail said. “But my mother was free. She claimed me, even after my father tried to call me some terrible Dhai name, Navarra or Nava.” She shrugged. “So I am free. It’s very easy to pass, especially here. All they see is a jista.”
“So it wasn’t your face that steered you away from children.”
“No,” Isoail said. “I had a child once. After a difficult pregnancy. The midwives told me to flush it, but I was stubborn. Then the last few months, it started to kill me. Poisoned my blood. So they cut me open.” She made a cutting motion across her belly. “Pulled out a deformed mass of twisted limbs. That might have been all right, but they botched the surgery. I didn’t realize how badly until I tried to conceive again. No luck.”
“Midwives often have very sound advice,” Zezili said. “Surgeons’ skill is less.”
“I was young,” Isoail said. “I thought I knew better. If I’d chosen to end it before it went bad, perhaps I’d have had other children. But I did not. So here we are.”
“Yet you have strange little dajian girls calling you mother,” Zezili said.
“I’m not her mother,” Isoail said softly. “Most likely she mistook me for someone else.”
Zezili picked up her brandy and drank too much of it. It warmed her stomach and softened her doubts. “When girls like this pass through these… tears in the lake… Could people here travel through them? Go after them?”
“If they were in the same area, yes. Ah, yes. You’re thinking of your husband.”
“He meant to meet me here.”
“Many things can happen to a man on the road.”
“My husband is loyal. He meant to meet me here. If he’s not here, it’s possible he’s on the other side, isn’t it?”
“Many things are possible. But why would you think that?”
“He… there was an incident at our house. I thought it meant nothing at the time. Thought it was some trick. But maybe, with all these people showing these gifts now… maybe he opened a door by accident.”
“Ah,” Isoail said. “That is… something.”
“Have you ever tried to go to the other side, through one of these doors?”
“I’m more than a double channeler,” Isoail said. “I thought for a good long time that’s all I was, until I saw the disturbances here. I could see them – the red breath of Oma. I shouldn’t have been able to.”
“Triple? Ha. End times, indeed. I can fairly feel the fiery eye of Rhea.”
“Who can say what will be rare in a year’s time? Maybe all jistas will be able to call on Oma in addition to their ascendant star. We don’t know. Oma hasn’t risen in two thousand years. Everything is strange now.”
“You figured out how to open a gate.”
“Yes. I tried to copy some of the patterns I saw on the lake. But it always opened to the same place, some blasted vista, and I could never pass through. It was like trying to get through a window made of steel.”
Zezili nodded. Isoail couldn’t pass over because she did have a double, then. Someone on the other side, possibly working with that… other Zezili to build the mirror? And if Anavha was there, too… She took another drink. Saw the head stamped on Monshara’s coin again. Monshara had lost her world and become a frightened tool, but Zezili was no one’s slave.
“There are things coming into this world that shouldn’t,” Zezili said. “You know that. You see it. I think there’s an easier way to stop them besides just pulling wreckage from a lake or murdering dajians at their order.”
“If you’re about to talk treason, I won’t hear it.”
“Not at all,” Zezili lied. “Have you ever built an infused mirror? One as big as a building?”
“That would be something,” she said, “but no.”
“If you had, could you destroy it?”
“Destroy an infused mirror?” Isoail said. “Yes. You unravel the pattern. Each channeler has a distinctive pattern. I’d know if it was mine.”
“My mother said you’re the best at what you do,” Zezili said. “The best in Dorinah at making infused mirrors. So, if we apply the logic of dual forces, that means your other self over there, she’s probably going to be good at building mirrors, right?”
Isoail shook her head. “That’s a large stretch.”
“You can help me stop them, Isoail.”
“That’s treason.”
“There’s a mirror they’re building there to keep open the way between worlds. Once it’s infused, their armies will spill through. Help me stop it.”
“I love my Empress.”
“So do I,” Zezili said. “But she’s not loyal to you. Do you know what she has Syre Kakolyn doing?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Purging Seekers from Dorinah. Seekers like you. She cleared Tulana and Sokai and the rest from the Seeker Sanctuary.”
“That’s madness. Why are you here, really?”
“You can check out that story,” Zezili said, and stood. “Then if you want to help me, you let me know. I leave in the morning, but I’ll be at a camp in Aloerian for a week or so, if you want to join me.”
“The Empress would never–”
“I didn’t think she’d wipe out two million dhorins worth of dajians, either,” Zezili said. “It sounded fine, at first, but the more you think about it, the more the whole thing unravels. The Empress is planning something with these strangers, something that isn’t meant to benefit Dorinah.”
“If you mean to betray–”
“I don’t,” Zezili said, and she found the conviction in her own voice very comforting. “Ask about your Seeker Sanctuary. Ask where your friends are now.”
Zezili went to bed. She lay awake for hours, staring at the spiders crawling across the ceiling, each as big as her palm. She should have known Isoail would have a living double on the other side. If she couldn’t destroy the mirror, perhaps she could still help Zezili find Anavha. They could open a door here, and Zezili could spend… how long? How long would she look for him, before her Empress gave her up for dead or had her friends over there murder her for treason?
No. If the Empress destroyed her, she wanted to take something with her.
When she finally slept, Zezili dreamed Anavha was scratching on the door, his head covered in a hood of fine spiders’ silk. When she woke, a hooded form stood over her. Fear seized her. She grabbed the sword next to her bed.
Isoail threw back the hood of her coat. She looked pale and distraught in the early morning light.
“They came for the girl,” she said, “and brought me a message by sparrow, from the Sanctuary. It had died on the way. A tirajista with the enforcers kept it in tissue paper.”
“And?”
“I want to know what the Empress really has planned for us.”
“I thought you might,” Zezili said. “But if we’re going to destroy the new world they’re building, we need to figure out how to get there.”
“How would I know where this mirror is?”
“You don’t have to know. I know where it is.”
“Do you?”
“Right here,” Zezili said. “You said you always open a door to the same place? You say the easiest place to come through is here? Maybe the easiest place for you to build a gate to over there is the best place for them to put a mirror, too.”
“That is a great leap in logic.”
“I’m full of leaping today. But the bigger question is how we get you over there when your other self is still alive.”
“We don’t have to get me over,” Isoail said.
“Why not?”
“The girl,” Isoail said.
“What, from last night? What about her?”
“The girl could break the mirror if she knew the pattern.”
“Why?”
“She may not be my daughter here, but there… well. I went over our conversation many times last night. You believe I was the one who made this mirror, this great gate, over there. If that’s so, I can untangle it. And so can a very close blood relation, if they are gifted and know the pattern I used to create it. Sometimes they are able to see the pattern and unravel–”
Zezili threw off her blankets. The room was cold. “Let’s get her, then.”
“We can’t,” Isoail said.
“What do you mean? She’s in the next room!”
“Did you not hear me?”
“I’m half asleep, Isoail.”
“The enforcers came for her this morning, before I woke. That was six hours ago. I don’t know where they took her. There are eight camps within a few days’ march of here – north, south, east, west… they could have gone any direction.”
Zezili grabbed fistfuls of her own hair and grunted. Isoail could open the gate. The little dajian could destroy the mirror. And Zezili could use the ensuing chaos to find Anavha. Rhea had handed it to her all in one night, and she’d tossed it away.
Zezili stood. “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“I’m purging every last one of those camps in the coming weeks,” Zezili said. “The girl’s bound to be in one of them.”
Zezili swept into Monshara’s tent completely sober. She was cold but already had her helm under her arm and her gloves off. It showed a measure of trust, she thought.
Monshara stood bent over a field table with a steaming cup of tea clasped in her hands. Her hair was knotted atop her head in a loose tangle. A heavy woolen scarf that had once been blue and was now a washed-out gray swaddled her neck. If she was surprised at Zezili’s appearance, she did not show it.
“I expect the purging of the last camp went well,” Zezili said.
“Has your husband been rounded up and whipped? I understand that’s your way.”
“It’s cultural, not personal.”
“Indeed. Your desertion was reported.”
“You knew where I was and why. We share command. I answer only to the Empress.”
“She isn’t pleased. Nor is the woman I answer to.”
“I’ve spoken with my Empress personally,” Zezili lied. “She understands.” She pulled a piece of paper from her belt and unfolded it on the table. It was a rough sketch of the girl from the lake. Isoail knew an artist in the neighboring town who created it based on their shared memory. She’d passed it on to enforcement offices along the way, but to the enforcers, every dajian looked alike. “She’s asked me to find a dajian thought to be hiding in one of these final camps. We’ll need to circulate this before we run each purge.”
Monshara set down her tea and squinted at the page. “What’s she done?”
“I didn’t ask. You and I only follow orders, remember?”
Monshara leaned toward her. “If you think I’ll forget your desertion–”
Zezili thumped her helm on the table. “If you think you’re my superior, you’re sorely mistaken,” she said. “My business is my own and I answer only to the Empress of Dorinah.
My
Empress. So watch your tone and do as she tells you.”
Zezili snapped up the page and her helm. She walked out.
Monshara called after her, “Don’t think that’s the end of this, Zezili.”
“We have a lot of killing to do,” Zezili called over her shoulder, and slid her helm back on. “Best give your full attention to that.”
She had four full weeks, she guessed, before Monshara confirmed her story was hash. What happened when she found out, well… the world was ending anyway, wasn’t it?
36
“I should have told them the boy could see through wards,” Dasai said. He stood on the great wall of Kuonrada and gazed north. The days were getting shorter and colder. He huddled in a thick coat, but his feet were cold and his knees ached. It had been months since he woke without pain. He was a hundred and twenty-eight years old and felt a hundred and fifty.
“Not even the boy knew,” Nioni said. “It was still best left unspoken.”
“There it is,” Dasai said, and pointed to the shimmering amber blur in the sky. A flash, a moment, and it was gone. The wrong color for the northern lights.
“I thought it would be more dramatic,” Aramey said. He sat next to Nioni on the cold stone of the ramparts.
Dasai had yet to find another part of the hold where he felt he could speak freely. Most of the hold’s lookouts staffed the great spiraling thorn of the watchtower that grew from the center of the hold. Even so, he’d had Nioni construct an air bubble around them here to muffle sound. He had spent much of his youth in Saiduan. It’s why his bones hurt so much now.
“In a few weeks, the snow will be bad enough that it will be too late to send the boys home,” Nioni said. “We should do it now, before the Patron takes any more interest in how Rohinmey or any of the rest of us fit in his wider campaign. I’m dying, but these boys have their whole lives ahead.”
“I know you meant to protect him, Ora Dasai,” Aramey said, “but
this
much interest could harm him. And us.”
“If things go badly here, the Patron’s interest in that boy may save him,” Dasai said. “Rohinmey is many things but not stupid. You see how much he impressed those sanisi? They are taken with him. If they love him, they love us. It’s relationships that save us in the end. If I have to manipulate people to achieve that, I will.”
“You need to tell him,” Aramey said.
“I will discuss Rohinmey’s ability with him,” Dasai said. “He and the boys may require it on the way home. I admit I wished his brother had the talent he has. Ora Chali has a less passionate disposition.”
“That’s not always an asset,” Aramey said.
Nioni sighed. “Ora Chali has ambitions.”
“I wish to see him achieve them,” Dasai said. “So does Ora Nasaka. They must go back.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Nioni said.
“Not until we’ve prepared for our escape north,” Dasai said. “Ora Nasaka trusted my memory of what lies waiting for us in Caisau. Caisau is already under the sway of the invaders, but two of my colleagues are still in the city. We need our sinajista before we proceed. She is at least another week away. We hold until then.”