Chapter 27

Zezili sat at the back of the public house outside Ladiosyn, writing a response to Daolyn’s letter about her house finances. Zezili’s sister Taodalain had asked for a small loan – they always ended up being gifts, but she still called it a loan – and Daolyn needed Zezili’s permission to grant it.

Give her no more than 50 dhorins, she wrote, and hesitated before continuing: I will be at Lake Morta later this month. If she has any other urgent requests, have her send post to me there.

Zezili sealed the letter with a bit of noxious gonsa sap and called over one of the lazy pages at another table to run it to the post general. As the girl opened the door to leave, Monshara came in. The girl held the door open for her, and the girl’s eyes were big as apples. Ever since Monshara’s people opened the gate on the slaughtering field, Zezili’s women had all taken a reverent shine to her. Oma was on everyone’s minds now. Zezili heard the talk at every village and town. Seeing that bloody gate open was enough to make even a nonbeliever zealous. Zezili had prayed to Rhea eight times since the gate opened, expecting Oma was close enough that she might even hear Rhea respond. But no. Things were just the same. Rhea was quiet. Waiting.

Zezili ordered another drink. Monshara sat across from her.

“I’m still not used to the liquor,” Monshara said. “Can you get me watered wine?” she called to the house matron.

“What do you need?” Zezili asked.

“Do you play cups?” Monshara asked, nodding at the stack of three round wooden cups at Zezili’s elbow – detritus from her afternoon of imbibing.

“The card game?”

“No, the gambling game,” Monshara said. She took up the cups and set them upside down on the table in a neat row.

Monshara opened her hand to reveal a small silver coin. On it was the head of some monarch, but not the Empress Zezili knew. Monshara placed the coin under the middle cup.

“Now tell me where the coin is,” Monshara said, and began to push the cups about the table in a series of figure eights.

“You must be very popular at children’s parties,” Zezili said.

“Humor me, Syre. It’s been a long day.”

Zezili idly tracked the cups. She had played games like this often and knew the trick of it.

When Monshara ceased her cup spinning, Zezili pointed to the center cup.

Monshara lifted it. As she did, Zezili lifted the other two cups as well. There was no sign of the coin beneath any of the cups.

Zezili dropped the cups. They clattered loudly. “Shocking,” she said.

“It surprises me very little that you have no friends,” Monshara said, retrieving the overturned cups.

“I just don’t care for games made to part stupid people from their money.”

Monshara put the cups back on the table, upside down. “I suspect your choice was right the first time.” She lifted the center cup again. The silver coin appeared beneath it.

Zezili snorted. She took up the coin and examined it. The writing was Dorinah. “Freedom from tyranny and want,” was written along the edge. The portrait was of a bold-nosed woman with large lips and a noticeable overbite. Her mane of hair was knotted and beribboned in intricate bows.

“Is this your empress?” Zezili asked.

“Was,” Monshara said. “She was killed fourteen years ago. The country was scoured soon after.” She gently took the coin from Zezili’s hand. Her fingers were warm. “You used to like–” she began, and stopped.

Goosebumps rose on Zezili’s arms. Hearing about somebody else with her face still chilled her. “Whoever that person was you knew, she wasn’t me,” Zezili said. “No more than the empress on that coin is mine.”

“I have no illusions,” Monshara said.

Zezili stared at the coin again. “How’s it possible things are so different there compared to here? How did you lose to those slaves?”

“They were never slaves,” Monshara said. “They have always been powerful. We just made different choices over there. Small choices that grew large over time.” She shrugged. “I’m not a philosopher.”

The bar matron brought over Zezili’s three fingers of hard lemon liquor and Monshara’s watered wine.

When the woman left, Zezili asked, “What do you want?”

Monshara played idly with the coin, flipping it across her knuckles like some cheap backstreet conjurer. “Can we not sit and drink together?”

“Considering your people are about to wipe the world of mine? I see no need for us to be friends.”

“My people?” Monshara pocketed the coin. “The Tai Mora are not my people.”

“I think you’ve done a pretty good job of being Tai Mora.” Zezili leaned back in her broad-backed chair.

“I came to you with a warning.”

“From your masters?”

“From me. I know your mother lives in Saolina. I heard you visited her.”

“You heard, did you?” Zezili expected the woman had a number of little birds among Zezili’s women, especially after the business with the gate, but she was as yet uncertain how many.

“I can suspect what you visited her about.”

“Can you?” She took a long swallow of her drink.

“I didn’t survive the end of my people because I was slow,” Monshara said. “No doubt your mother had interesting things to say about how she would build a mirror, maybe even one that could focus Oma’s power. I think you should forget all that.”

Zezili forced a laugh. “Forget? Forget walking into that star-blasted wasteland you call home? If that’s what you people will make of this world–”

“Not my people,” Monshara said firmly.

“They bleed,” Zezili said.

“And they kill,” Monshara said. “They’ve killed you once. And I… don’t want to witness that again. That’s why I’m warning you instead of stringing you up myself.”

“How did you know me?” Zezili asked. “The other me?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re planning, the Kai is eight steps ahead of you. Let’s finish these last few camps. Then you can go back to your empress, and I’ll go back to mine.”

“But that’s not what’s really going to happen, is it?” Zezili said.

Monshara gulped her wine. “Truly? No, probably not.”

“They haven’t told you their full plans.”

“You thought you’d torture it out of me?” Monshara laughed. “I’d like to see you try. They only tell me a piece at a time. I didn’t know I’d be working here with you until the day we traveled over.”

“But you saw their battle plans. She gave them to you.”

“You really think they’d give over something like that to a woman who could read Dhai?”

“You can’t read Dhai?”

“Of course not.”

“What the Kai turned over to me was likely in some cipher,” Monshara said. “I can’t even say with absolute certainty that it was an invasion plan. It wouldn’t be the first time the Kai sent me on a fool’s errand, telling me I had something important that turned out to be garbage. It’s how she tests loyalty.”

“And you passed?”

“She put me with you, didn’t she?”

“You make it sound like that was a prize.”

“It was…” Monshara finished her wine. “It was what it was.”

“Who did you deliver that map to?”

“You think it’s like that, do you? You think we’ll have some drinks and I’ll betray the Kai? You listen, Zezili–”

“You keep using my name like you think I forgot it.”

“I’m reminding myself of it,” Monshara said. “The woman I knew was much more compassionate than you are. Merciful. And hygienic. You’re… something very different.”

“Zezili,” she lowered her voice, “leave this thing about the mirror alone. If you interfere, I’ll report it.” She pulled the silver coin from her pocket and placed it on the table. “This woman on the coin, she was my mother. You understand?”

Zezili stared at the coin.

Monshara stood. “You can keep that,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning. It’s a long way to Janifa from here, so I expect you should turn in soon. Can’t go off killing people with a belly full of liquor and no sleep.”

After she left, Zezili reached across the table and picked up the coin. The figure looked nothing like the empress Zezili knew – the bronze-skinned, cant-legged woman with the big yellow eyes and wasp-like waist. The Book of Rhea said that Empress Casanlyn’s line had crossed into Dorinah from Rhea’s seat a very long time ago when Rhea’s world and their own came together. Her people came bearing great gifts of fertility and abundance to the people of Dorinah. Zezili always thought the Empress was the remnant of some eastern race, but now she wondered if her empress was from another world altogether that had failed to cross over completely during the last rise of Oma. On the other side, they had no bronze-skinned god leading their country. Empress Casanlyn’s people had never crossed over to that world. Never tried to take over. Never toed a hole in Dorinah big enough to hide in. They had only Monshara’s mother, and she had lost.

“But she is my empress,” Zezili muttered, and left the coin on the table. She bought another piece of paper from the bar matron and began writing a letter to Empress Casanlyn.

The dajian camps in Janifa lay on the other side of the country, on the coast. A week of hard travel brought Zezili’s angry, spitting legionnaires to within shouting distance of the eastern sea. Her women were wearying of blood, and she could feel their frustration. They bickered more. Got into bloody fights among themselves. Brute slaughter was bad for morale. Only the most sadistic took any pleasure from this game. The rest were ready to go home. She began to consider rotating out these women with a fresh group pulled from the primary legion.

The farther east they went, the hillier the way became. They passed through hills tiered with rice paddies, little dajians working up to their shins in the shallow water. They passed fields of ragged brown sunflower stalks, and spent two days in the coastal town of Jovonyn, where a late-autumn masque was held. Jasoi danced drunkenly with Monshara all night, and Zezili pretended not to notice Jasoi coming out of Monshara’s tent the next day. Zezili found the mardana men of Jovonyn intriguing and spent a night herself entwined with the young bodies of three boys who could not have been a day over sixteen. What they lacked in experience they made up for in stamina.

They climbed steep hills, and Monshara asked to stop for a day and explore colorful caverns and the great ruins of the city that had been razed by the Saiduans a thousand years before. Zezili watched her picking through the remnants of old temples and fountains and other, stranger structures. A good deal of twisted glass littered the streets. Monshara and the four legionnaires Zezili sent with her came back with cuts on their hands and faces.

Every night they camped, Zezili lay awake in her tent, listening to the squeal and cry and crackle of the camp all around her. She waited for a letter.

Finally, as they camped outside Janifa, the letter came.

Zezili broke the royal seal on the purple envelope and read:

Zezili burned the letter.

The next day, she slaughtered six hundred little dajians so sick and starved, they could barely raise their hands. The Empress had stopped sending out rations to the camp. If Zezili did not kill them, they would starve anyway.

Zezili spent that night getting drunk at a mardana two miles away. She stumbled back into the bar area after vomiting for the second time to see Jasoi waiting for her at her card table, looking nervous among so many half-clothed young men.