The Mirror Empire (31 page)

She took the main road into Saolina, three hours of riding past sprawling farm holds bursting with children and dajians. The popular refrain in the cities was that the farmsteads produced rice, yams, and the entire country’s children. City women tended to have the number required to avoid taxation, but country women often had twice as many. Children were cheaper than dajians and tended to be a good bit more loyal.

Zezili’s mother lived in a modest three-story brick house built around a dead bonsa tree that was at least as old as Dorinah. Curtains of weeping moss trailed from the skeletal branches. When Zezili knocked, the house dajian said her mother had gone to the salon. Zezili rode on, down into the central spiral of the city. At the end of the winding road was the Temple of Rhea. The way was lined in artisan and market shops.

She reined in Dakar outside the salon, a nondescript building faced in marble with a painted red awning. She tied up Dakar and pushed inside.

Like most salons, Saolina’s was a buzzing hub of activity. Zezili found salons a little beneath her station these days – she had dajians to do her hair – but for most of her life, her mother brought her here twice a week to have her hair trimmed, rolled, curled, and heated. Four women and one man sat in the waiting area, drinking tea and gossiping about local politics. The man was conservatively dressed and seemed to belong to two of the women, sisters from the cast of their faces. The air smelled of burnt hair, boiled agave, and pomade.

Zezili moved past the curtained waiting area and into the long rectangular room where a dozen hairdressers worked nimbly at the shoulders of their clients – twisting, clipping, rolling, and burning hair. The lacquered silver mirrors that stretched across both long walls were a familiar design, each infused with the emerald essence of Tira. Zezili walked past the open-air stations to the back, where gauzy curtains gave the clientele a bit more privacy.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Zezili said.

Her mother raised her gaze from her own image in the mirror and squinted at Zezili. Her feet did not quite touch the floor. She scrunched her plump, lined face as if she’d tasted something rotten. “A year of silence, and you come to me for favors?” She clucked her tongue and waved at her hairdresser. The hairdresser was as old as her mother – pushing toward sixty. Zezili had known her since she was a child.

“We’ll need a private room, Haodatia,” Zezili’s mother said, and then, to Zezili, “won’t we?”

Haodatia ducked her head and went to prepare a room. Zezili’s mother sat solidly in the padded seat, half her hair dampened with agave and rolled into tight curls at the front, bound in string, and the back knotted in triangles of paper that had already been heated to set the curls. The un-papered portion of her hair hung down to the middle of her back, waiting to be rolled and sewn into place with the rest. Zezili found the elaborate hairstyles exhausting, but her mother hadn’t let her cut her hair until she was fourteen, due to concerns about how it would upset their social standing.

Now Zezili stood before her in a dirty padded tunic, her stringy, tangled hair pulled back into a simple tail, blood and dirt smeared across her boots. If the whole town hadn’t known who she was, she expected she’d have been booted from the city limits the moment she began down the spiraling road to the temple.

“You should grow out your hair,” her mother said. “You look like a peasant.”

Zezili chose to ignore that and her mother’s challenging stare. They gazed at one another in the mirror until Haodatia returned.

“It’s ready, mistress,” Haodatia said.

She led them to one of the two private rooms at the rear of the salon. The wooden partitions were latticed at the top, letting in air and light but muffling conversation. Haodatia had lit two additional lamps to give her light to work by.

Haodatia took up another set of paper triangles and began looping the next roll of her mother’s hair.

“I hear you’re murdering slaves now,” her mother said. “How uplifting.”

“How do you destroy a mirror?” Zezili asked.

Her mother raised her brows. “Really? You came all this way for that?”

Zezili gestured to the green-glowing mirror in front of them. “You made all of these,” Zezili said, “and more besides. I thought I’d come to the expert.”

“You’re talking about infused mirrors?”

“No,” Zezili said, “the kind I can bash in with a sword. Yes, mother. Infused mirrors.”

“My daughter has a tongue,” her mother said.

“She is spirited,” Haodatia said, “like her mother.” She reached for the heated crimping iron set in a bowl of coals on the counter.

“Once it’s been infused,” her mother said, “they don’t break. You know that. But why do you care now? You never took interest in my art.”

“I was in the area,” Zezili said. “Humor me.”

“I have humored you a good deal, girl.”

“Before it’s infused, you could destroy it, right? Same as any other mirror?”

“Certainly.”

“What if it was really big?”

“Big, what does that mean? Be precise, Zezili.”

Zezili wanted to tell her it was as big as the Temple of Rhea in Daorian, but suspected her mother wouldn’t believe that.

“Big as a building,” Zezili said.

“Ha,” her mother said. “A building.” She scrutinized Zezili’s face in the mirror. “Well, it’s fairly easy to destroy such a thing before it’s infused, but that would likely require help. A fairly skilled parajista could break it, or perhaps you and half your legion hacking away at it.”

“But once some parajista or tirajista infuses it, that’s it? No one can take it out?”

“Take it out? Are we targeting mirrors now on our military campaigns?”

“It’s important,” Zezili said.

“Indeed.” Her mother pursed her mouth, deepening the creases around her lips. She dyed her hair white to match her weathered face when she came to the salon. Zezili saw long white streaks in it, too bold for natural color. Elder women commanded more respect.

“Once it’s infused, the only one who can break it is the woman who created it,” her mother said. She lifted a finger and pointed at the greened mirror. Zezili watched a tiny crack appear on the bottom right of the glass. It spidered up along the edge of frame, ending abruptly halfway up the face. Her mother pulled her hand away. “It’s certainly possible another who could channel the same satellite could do it, but it would take longer. A woman’s patterns, the way she folds together the metal and power of the satellite, are unique. It would take another tirajista two or three weeks to unravel this mirror.”

Zezili stared long at the crack in the glass. She had never wanted talent; channeling the satellites was a rare gift among Dorinahs. Her mother’s station would have been far more advanced if she’d been more powerful. As it was, she could do a few tricks and infuse weapons and other items, but Zezili had never seen her shape trees into boats or grow and strip orchards with a glance. For the first time in many years, Zezili thought it might be a useful thing. The mirror had still been under construction when she went through. It was possible it wasn’t infused yet. But if it was… Breaking the shadow mirror would require someone to open the gate – one of Monshara’s omajistas – and a parajista to break the mirror. Or maybe an omajista could make a portal and break the mirror, too? Zezili didn’t know enough about how any of it was done yet. And she certainly didn’t have those types of people in her social circles. In truth, she didn’t have much of a social circle. All she could bring were the bodies to fuel the gate. At least she understood the bodies part.

“Thank you,” Zezili said, and turned away.

“Look at that, Haodatia; she thanks me!” her mother said.

Zezili waited until she was clear of the salon before thrusting her helm back on. Being in town made her suddenly self-conscious of her hair. She hated that.

As she began to untie Dakar, she saw Haodatia running after.

Zezili paused.

Haodatia handed her a folded piece of lavender paper. “Your mother wanted me to give you this,” she said, and touched Zezili’s sleeve. “It was good to see you again, Zee.”

Zezili grunted at her and turned away, taking the paper with her. She saw Haodatia’s tentative smile wither. The hairdresser went back inside.

Zezili unfolded the paper and read her mother’s neat script:

 

Zezili crumpled the note and stuffed it into her coat.

She’d need to burn it later. Lake Morta. There was no dajian camp anywhere near there. It was remote and, this time of year, would already be cold. In another month, snow would start to block up the passes around the country there, and she’d have no way in or out until late spring.

Zezili gazed along the clean, neat streets of Saolina. Women stopped under the awnings to chat. Lines of children sat outside the schoolhouse, eating hasty lunches of rice and dried fish. Dajians cleaned out the bubbling fountain of azure-colored stones in the square while traffic of all sorts – yellow carts pulled by bears and dogs, rickshaws, and the occasional ridiculous tirajista-trained organic tricycle – wove their way around the fountain, up and down the blue stones of the street. She loved her country. Loved it fiercely just the way it was, even when it hated her. Her Empress told her murdering dajians would save all of this, but she had heard that before when her mother said that murdering Zezili’s father would solve all of their problems. “We’ll have a fresh start,” her mother had said. “You can forget he had anything to do with you. You’re only mine now. A real Dorinah.” But even without him working inside the house and around the grounds, even after he was many years dead and burned, she thought of him still, and how his face was so like hers, and how she could see his eyes staring back at her when she looked into a mirror.

They had not been able to maintain her mother’s country estate after that. Her mother had tripped on a stair that should have been mended long before, and broken her arm, and lost her livelihood. A woman with only one good arm wasn’t called on as often to make mirrors.

Zezili thought about those consequences, about the ripples, and wondered how powerful were the ripples she made with the hundreds of deaths she was cutting out across Dorinah. Who would clean the fountains? Mend the stairs? Harvest the food? And how long would it be before they came for women like Zezili, too? She was not so insulated as the Empress, maybe. She could see it because she had lived in the country her whole life. She knew the economy relied on dajians, and she knew that there were plenty of women in Dorinah who would happily burn her with them, as if she weren’t a human being at all.

She thought of the day her mother fell and how it changed everything. She thought of how that day would look for Dorinah, when it woke up from the genocide of its dajians and found itself economically ruined… while a storm of invaders burst through the mirror connecting their worlds.

Zezili glanced back at the salon. She had hundreds more dajians to kill in the morning, and she needed to come up with a real plan on how to stop the madness of it all without forfeiting her own life.

26

The clan leaders arrived by dog, by bear, by foot, by cart, by boat, by Line. They assembled in the council house of Clan Osono for food and tea and polite conversation. The tension in the room chilled Ahkio. It took all his courage to smile and greet each clan leader and their companions.

After they settled in, Ahkio shut the windows in his room on the second floor of the council house and turned to face Liaro. Clan Leader Saurika had had the rooms cleared for him; it was a spacious chamber overlooking the square.

Liaro sat in the low divan at the center of the room, legs crossed, arms draped over the back of the divan. “I’m going to be a terrible audience,” he said.

“That’s why I want you to listen to it,” Ahkio said. “If I can convince you I’m competent, maybe I can convince them.”

“I know you too well.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”

“Well,” Liaro said, waving a hand. “Get on with it.”

Ahkio cleared his throat and began to recite the speech he’d prepared to give the clan leaders.

Liaro interrupted. “That’s enough,” he said.

“I haven’t even started.”

“Exactly,” Liaro said. He came over and stood next to Ahkio. “You look like you’re at your sister’s funeral. And that’s over. Back straight. Chest out. And stop hiding your cursed hands. They’ve all seen them a thousand times. Nobody cares.”

“I need to be serious.”

“You’re plenty serious,” Liaro said. “That’s the problem.” He stood straight next to Ahkio, feet slightly apart, shoulders back. It was a supremely confident stance, the one Liaro adopted every night they socialized in the Osono council house, charming women and men alike with an easy smile. Ahkio, by contrast, stayed upstairs with Caisa, going through all of his sister’s and Yisaoh’s books and papers, uncovering old temple maps and ciphered communications that made his head hurt.

“Oma,” Ahkio said. “I’m not you.”

“Listen,” Liaro said. “I’ve seen you on your own, trying to charm people. You’re terrible at it. Far too serious. Nobody wants a brooding leader. They want somebody they can relate to. Somebody they can laugh with and have a drink with.”

“No one wants that. They look at me and see a child.”

“Your sister smiled a lot,” Liaro said. “Mostly when she was pulling something over on them. When it was time to be serious, she was serious. It’s not just about trusting you. It’s about liking you. They think you’re sucking at Nasaka’s breast, and I don’t blame them.”