Mirrorstrike, Page 2

  Fatigue catches up with her suddenly—she has been on her feet for eighteen hours. Sieges are grueling things, especially when one cannot simply demolish the gates and break down the walls. Court inventors boast that soon they'll make flying crafts capable of not just ferrying soldiers but to make precision strikes from the air. They boast that war will become as efficient and bloodless as an elegant meal, that the reign of winter will be as impregnable as glaciers and spread across the world entire. Lussadh has tried to imagine this, not the expansion of empire but the aerial strikes, and she cannot. She is no dreamer. She sees what is before her, and prioritizes that.

  Then there will be the matter of civilians, what is to be done with them, how their guilt might be determined. Her own subjects. Many will go into the ghost-kilns, young or old, lame or abled, there will be no discriminating. Such a thing has been done before many times, though the queen will be the one who hands out the sentence, absolving Lussadh of the fact. I shall not allow you to be burdened with guilt, the queen has told her. Let me shoulder it. Guilt on you is as rust upon steel.

  Always a weapon. But she has chosen her wielder, and that too matters. Wielding, the heart and constant of all relations, whatever else glazes it, whatever the veneer.

  "Go to Guryin," she tells her aide. "I will send a message to the queen."

  Ulamat bows and retreats, though not before he fusses over the pot of ginger tea the camp chiurgeon has left for Lussadh. More for his sake than her own she pours a cup and drains it. Aromatic and golden, the way good ginger ought to be. A campaign, even one like this, is no place for luxuries. Nevertheless, Ulamat insists, and her pavilion is absurd in its proportions. The bright flooring, the unnecessary mahogany furniture, the freight carriage for all this. As soon as tomorrow she will reclaim the palace. Already she has plans: soft gloves first, for those can draw out answers, sometimes better than pliers and heated brands.

  She covers herself so that the injury will not show, and exhales on her calling-glass.

  Nuawa's face appears. On her end she is outdoors, leaning on bleached mothstone, her hair tousled as though she's been walking downwind. "General. I have been waiting to hear from you."

  "Much is concluded here." Moving so that the blanket bares half her chest but not the wound, she casually adds, "Perhaps you'd care to join me? I may have to remain here a while, and what a dull time it would be, deprived of your company."

  The faintest smile. Nuawa's face is not a mobile one, and her expression is meticulous the way portraits are, precise ink and minimalist color. But sometimes Lussadh catches it lighting up, illuminating from within as though by soft radiance. "We've been apart for less than two months. You cannot already miss me."

  "May I not?" She moves a little more, angles herself so that lamplight and shadow sculpt her features. "To wake up beside you each morning. That's what I miss, my newest lieutenant."

  Nuawa startles—the surprise is sharp, genuine—and lowers her eyes. Not quite blushing, but flustered. "You don't need to persuade me. You can simply order me there."

  "That would be odious of me. Will you come?"

  "Yes. Of course."

  "Excellent. I'll introduce you formally to one of the other glass-bearers. You still haven't met any of them. Be soon," Lussadh adds softly, "for I'd like to have you in my arms again."

  Two

  Four months new to the queen's service as she is, Nuawa has not yet been given anything resembling a duty. Instead she has been left to idle in the capital, and has spent her weeks exploring the palace, its brittle corridors that seem to have been carved from solid glaciers, its immense and often empty halls. Unfurnished for the most part, but sometimes she would open a door—they are unlocked—and she'd find standing all by itself an unused mirror frame. Ornate or plain, made of brass or copper or granite, no two alike. The sight unnerves her more than she would like to admit. She's examined them closely and never found them to be anything but the most ordinary of furniture, and yet there is the inescapable sense that the empty frames are waiting like open mouths.

  She climbs to the highest floor, past flights of steep treacherous steps, and emerges on the palace's roof. Her exhalation curls out in white tendrils. From here she can see most of the capital, insofar as it can be called one. More than a city, it is a fastness, chiseled into the shoulder of a mountain and concealed by a long, curved hand of stone and stalagmites. The only real building is the palace itself, the rest lesser edifices raised to accommodate the most ambitious politicians who believe proximity to the throne is synonymous with power. A small hospital, warehouses, and a compound of public bath and teahouse. The nearest train station is far down, two days' trek or—a privilege reserved for the queen's personnel—a vertiginous airdrift.

  The air is bitterly frigid; she imagines that to those without a sliver of glass in their hearts, it is like trying to breathe knives. Even insulated in so much fur and sealskin, Nuawa is not impervious. Icicles have gathered on the seams of her hood. But it is a calm day.

  Down the sheer roof of a palace wing, two snow-girls are sprinting. They are child-sized but share the features of their larger counterparts, no younger or rounder, no hints that they were ever toddlers or infants. They are giggling soundlessly, hair flaring behind them like stunted wings. They don't wear the hyacinth, but it is not as though what they are—who owns them—can ever be ambiguous. She studies them for a time, tries to picture just what it is that their minds contain, if anything. Theirs is not the remoteness of wolves or hawks. The snow-girls are more like marionettes. Serving no purpose at all, and without instincts of their own. She has never heard them talk and hasn't been able to discover whether they feel pain.

  A hand falls on her shoulder and brushes against her cheek. The texture of velvet-sheathed wood, or perhaps cutin. The snow-maid regards her, beaming placidly, and indicates that she should follow. Unlike the others this one is of adult proportions, though still far slighter than Nuawa.

  It would be the first audience she has with the queen since her arrival. Since Sirapirat.

  The further she ventures into the palace, the less it resembles that which is built for human habitation. The pretense of architecture gives way to craggy outcrops and stalactites, corridor to tunnel, and civilization to cavern. The walls curve, the ice on them like wounds newly scabbed over, blue-black at the core. Nuawa pulls her coat tighter. She licks the inside of her mouth gingerly; for now, her teeth are still bone and enamel rather than rime.

  A door gapes at her. An isosceles triangle twice Nuawa's height, built of black steel fringed in turquoise that might be ice or stone. Ghost-lights, in their raw heatless form, illuminate the chamber. The queen has her back to Nuawa, studying a tall object covered in rime-stiffened cloth and snakeskin patchwork. Albino python, black cobra, peridot asp. "My thanks for being prompt, Lieutenant," the queen says. "Go ahead, uncover it. This is for you to see."

  The cover does not come free easily, soldered in place by the arctic temperature that radiates from the queen herself. But the moment Nuawa catches a glimpse of the bronze sheen, the half-and-half visage, she lets the cover drop. There is no need to see the rest.

  "The assassin told me of what ey offered you and that gave me an ... idea. I'm almost upset that I allowed you to execute em." The queen blends into the room, chameleon, clad in what may well be a dress of rime and tundra. Only her face stands distinct, the eyes like pits. "Modifications will need to be made, but the core and the shell are present."

  "Your Majesty, I don't see what you mean."

  The queen circles her—she resists the impulse to spin around like a baited dog—and takes her hand from behind. One fingernail, sharp, drags along the creases in her palm, the tributaries. "What do you want, Nuawa? I can grant you so much. Even my general you can have all to yourself, if you badly wish."

  Her stomach twitches. "I don't imagine the general would care to be granted to anyone. Save to you."

  An exhalation on the nape of her neck, razor-c
old. "You underestimate yourself. In all the years she's been in my service she has given her attentions on the most passing of basis. But it is good. I cherish harmony among my best. What monarch or commander could ask for more? And I've been considering assigning you to oversee the governance of Sirapirat. Not immediately, not so soon. To others that may look unseemly, and they'll resent you terribly, wouldn't they? But in a year or two when you're more senior."

  To be given what Lussadh has, in every sense, high rank and administration of her home city. Agree, and in submission, be owned. "Your largesse takes my breath away, Your Majesty. What, may I ask, have I done to merit it?"

  "Lussadh has summoned you to her country. That is fortuitous, for in Kemiraj lives a mathematician and inventor from whom your assassin nemesis learned much. I'd like you to find this person, and persuade them to work on the god-engine Vahatma for me." The queen lets go. She peels away a fold of snakeskin, sliding it off with languor that veers close to obscene, as though she is undressing the god. "You may tell this inventor whatever lies you like, offer them any reward—true or imaginary. Anything that'll convince them. Their name is Penjarej Manachakul, lately of the Sirapirat Academy of Innovation and Applied Theory."

  "And the general?"

  "Will be informed of the same task, but you're best suited to this. You do not require her assistance to accomplish so small a duty." A slight tip of the head; the queen's smile is thin-lipped and knowing. "Lussadh says you are a creature of utmost economy. I'm sure you will carry this out flawlessly."

  * * *

  All trains bound for Kemiraj have been rerouted or suspended, save those delivering supplies or personnel to General Lussadh. Belonging to the latter category, Nuawa is given priority. Express train, stopping nowhere, and very fast. She has barely slept before she is woken up by the smells of incense burning. Tidying herself, she leaves her compartment, following the drumbeats and thin smoke.

  In the first carriage, the train's priest is refueling the ghosts. A gold-leafed spread of rice, crystallized plantains and pineapples, chocolates and egg-yolk sweets. Five cups of liquor, in black and red and green, and two paper dolls sitting between. "We'll be there in a few hours, Lieutenant," the priest says without looking up from his hand drum or from the lambent cloud of feasting ghosts.

  Nuawa peers at the ghosts, trying to discern features, something that'd give an idea that these things were once human. She can't find any, can't even tell how many souls precisely are in that translucent fog. They make indistinct sounds and the gold leaves disappear when they've passed through the food, but in this state they are more like small, tame animals than the dead. Without the offerings and the rites to direct them—animate this train, heat this hospital, push the assembly line in this factory—they would wither and fade, but once they've received their initial instruction, they will keep to them with the steadiness of clocks. "This must be thankless work."

  "On the contrary, I am well compensated by the queen." He does not dress like the monks of Sirapirat; rather than saffron he wears white and rather than a bare shaved scalp he keeps his hair underneath a tall, black headpiece. A priest in the Yatpun tradition, devoted to Kidashoten, the one god the queen is known to give prayer. "I prefer to conduct this without company. If you would be so kind."

  She considers staying regardless—a court priest is beneath a glass-bearer—and asking him whether he genuinely believes in that foreign and unseen god Kidashoten, or if the queen herself forms the pillar of his faith. Whether she is the one to whom he dedicates his rites. But she returns to her compartment.

  She dozes, though never deeply enough for dreams; wakes in time to see Kemiraj's approach. The most beautiful city in winter, it is said, best favored of all territories: a jewel ascendant. She has never before seen it except in broadcasts, in paintings.

  The walls first, the color of magnolias, so high that they blot out the sky. The train slows down through a tunnel behind the Gate of Glaives—a checkpoint, one of Kemiraj's defenses—and then upward, climbing a steep incline. A few minutes in the dark and then they are through, on an overpass that leads to the station. Below her the city spreads out, nested gates and garlanded terraces, dome roofs sheathed in brass and copper, and minarets like spears. Stone gardens run along the boundaries that divide districts, ophidian lines that are at points porous, at others solid as steel. From here she cannot see the bottom: Kemiraj is a city that has built upon itself, vertical, looking skyward. Once it was as tall as two storeys, three at the most. Now it is as high as a building of five or seven floors, the tiers overlapping and knotted together, interwoven by immaculate streets.

  From this distance, Nuawa cannot spot a single worn façade, a single cracked roof or window. All of Kemiraj is as lustrous as a necklace of pearls, as polished.

  The horns blare arrival. She pulls down her luggage—she travels light and leaves most of her belongings in the queen's palace, except for one object. She opens her suitcase to make sure it is there and secure. The diptych is not easy to carry, but there are plenty of hinges and it folds compact. It still takes up most of the suitcase, and she's needed a second case to put her clothes.

  She carries them out, two pieces of luggage, for the moment the sum of her life. Nuawa is nearly the only person disembarking, other than a handful of priests and chiurgeons. Most of the train's freight is supplies.

  "Let me take that for you."

  "To think I'd have winter's commander as my porter." She lets Lussadh handle the heavier suitcase—the diptych will be seen eventually, and she means to be casual about it. No point rousing suspicion when it is only a sentimental object. "You spoil me, General."

  Lussadh leads her to the near-empty depot. There are traces of traffic and commerce—stains of food and mud on the ground—but they are hollow records. The only human presence is military. But even in this condition the station is prettily made, ziggurat chandeliers golden with ghosts, the wall mosaics kept fresh with witching or repainting. "Is that not my prerogative, to spoil whomever I wish?" the general is saying. "How was your journey?"

  There is no limp or weakness to the way Lussadh moves, but the general is delicate with her right side. A bicep injury, Nuawa judges, and not the harmless and incidental sort like a pulled ligament. It is a wound, as yet tender. "Comfortable. But not half as luxurious as it is to be in your presence."

  "You're a brazen flatterer. Have you been here before?"

  "No, I've never had cause." To look on this concentration of winter's favor and funds, and to remember how much has been stripped from Sirapirat, ghost-tax and otherwise. "It's warmer than I expected." Still not warm, still hardly summer, but where the rest of the territories are frigid, here the cold is tolerable. The citizens of Kemiraj require much less ghost-heat than elsewhere, need to spend much less on warm clothing.

  Lussadh's expression flickers. "Much colder than it once was."

  It is the first time she has witnessed something like ambiguity when it comes to the general's opinion on what the queen has done to her territories, the altering and erasing of topography. Nuawa makes herself smile. "The grandeur of Kemiraj is, as they say, peerless. I'm glad that you summoned me here, for back in the capital I had hardly anything to do. Idleness doesn’t suit me."

  "And here I thought you were about to say that you missed me."

  Nuawa gets small glimpses of the city-layers below as they cross the station: a trapezoid of walkways here, a triangle of market there, each brightly lit and dyed. A city that defies nature. "I'm saving that for later, General."

  They climb into the carriage, a sleek vehicle done in dark wood and fecund upholstery, its engine nearly silent. Nuawa sits close to the general, for all that there is plenty of space to go between them. She runs her finger along the paneling, feels the faint thrum of ghosts, though her eyes are always on Lussadh.

  The general puts a hand on the base of her spine, lightly. "There's something about you," Lussadh says, turning her around and kissing her.


  Each time they are apart, Nuawa would think she has had her fill: lust is basal, but it can be resisted, put aside. But the general's mouth, there is sweetness to it and heat, compelling, even addicting. She undoes her jacket so Lussadh can bite her throat and unbuttons her shirt so Lussadh can lick her breast. A vivid image takes hold of her, of straddling and taking the general inside her, and as the wheels run over ruts the carriage would jolt Lussadh deeper into her.

  The carriage does judder, but to a stop. Lussadh lets go. "My apologies. I forgot the ride was so short. You make me forget so much so easily."

  Nuawa quickly corrects her state of undress. Her nipples are hard and tender. "On the contrary you forget nothing at all," she says, a little breathy. "After having your mouth all over me, I can't imagine ever feeling cold again."

  "How delightful to hear from a woman ten years younger than I."

  "Who's to say I have not always pursued older partners? The wealth of experience." She looks up at the general through her eyelashes. "The mastery."

  Lussadh grins like a cat and Nuawa thinks how easy it is to fall into the role, this role. Not one she ever imagined she must don, yet it is effortless.

  Disembarking they are saluted by soldiers wearing the same uniforms they are, black and gray and silver, the uniform Nuawa never dreamed of wearing either. It too fits well, she moves with ease in it, the tailoring very fine as befits the queen's own. She wonders how the other glass-bearers react to this, the elevation from common gladiator to one of the most powerful officers in winter.

  The palace is not situated at the highest point of Kemiraj; rather it is central, mounted on an artificial hill at the heart of an eight-pointed star. Four minarets rise over the expanse of stone and glass. Each tower is in the shade of turquoise, citrine, sunstone, padparadscha. From this distance Nuawa can't tell if they are walled in semi-precious gems or merely painted stone, but they look enough like it, impossibly expensive.