text: Kirana's army swept through Dorinah like a plague. She likened it to a campaign she ran very early in the Great War, just before the toxic star entered the sky and everything went to Sina's maw. She needed blood, badly, to fuel the gates and find the missing omajistas the resistance was secreting away across a dozen worlds between hers and this one. She needed death in numbers she did not yet have an army large enough to mete out, so she relied on plague. Yisaoh worked at a field hospital in those days, and Kirana had her fold up the sheets and clothes and comforters of the dead, then donated them to the trading ships heading south to the newly discovered northern continents.
  
  Her army came in two weeks behind the plague, and bottled up blood to ship back to her omajistas. They took an entire northern continent like that. Later, she kept portions of every nation intact to swell the ranks of her army. Plague only worked on isolated populations.
  
  Still, the memory of the villages of corpses in the north was strong as she walked the empty Dorinah towns. She had come upon them so unexpectedly the Empress hadn't had time to mobilize her legions.
  
  She marched straight to Daorian, knowing that once the Empress's seat fell, there would be very little resistance. The upside to the Empress's absolute, unchanging dynasty was that it left very few powerful families in the field to take her place.
  
  "Why so little resistance?" Gaiso asked several weeks into the campaign while they lay camped outside Ladiosyn. Kirana had called her four line commanders together – Gaiso, Madah, Monshara, Yivsa – and Lohin, her intelligence officer.
  
  Lohin said, "She's sent two legions to Sebastyn on an unknown assignment. That's been verified. Without those, she has just two legions left inside the country that can move quickly enough to oppose us. One is already in place around Dorinah. If we can move quickly, we may reach it before the second. The eastern legion is behind us."
  
  "Hoping to smash us against the walls of Daorian," Kirana said. "Not a bad idea. How are we doing with the dajians?" she asked Madah.
  
  Madah was a slim young woman, and looked much like her mother Ghrasia. It had been easier to kill the Madah in this world than her mother, alas. Kirana had wanted to bring over her own Ghrasia. For now, the daughter would have to do. Circumstances were bound to change as the war progressed. They would get this world's Ghrasia eventually. It was only a matter of time.
  
  "A few stragglers," Madah said, "but we're making progress." She made as if to say more, but firmed her mouth. She was a fast-talking woman most days, but she had taken up the habit in recent weeks of cutting herself off after a few sentences and pressing her finger to her mouth, as if urging herself to quiet.
  
  "The farms?" Kirana asked Gaiso.
  
  Gaiso pointed to three large homesteads marked on the map near the lake where they'd crossed over. "These three are being worked now, by our own people. We had six we needed to come through who were stopped at the gate. Somewhere there's six here that are still alive. So we've had to make do."
  
  "Keep the farms untouched. I need every one assigned to our own people."
  
  Gaiso said, "Bringing in a dozen at a time isn't enough to work a farm."
  
  "Without the mirror, this is what we have. We need those farms producing." The mirror, her greatest triumph and greatest failure. She could have dumped an army big enough to colonize Saiduan in six hours if they'd had that mirror operational. Monshara had never given her a satisfactory answer about what had happened. She said only that she had been followed, and the mirror sabotaged. If they weren't so close to the end, she'd have killed Monshara for spite.
  
  "Without dajians–" Madah began.
  
  Kirana frowned at the map. She could bring all her people over, but that was worth nothing if they starved in three months. "Then we switch strategies," she said, remembering the shift she made after the plague left no one to join her army. "Let's save ten percent of every village we rout, to work the farms. Just make sure they're Dorinahs, not dajians."
  
  Monshara shifted her weight. Kirana said, "You have any problem with this, Monshara?"
  
  "Not at all," Monshara said. "She isn't my Empress."
  
  "No, I am," Kirana said. "And it's a testament to my faith in you and your abilities that you're alive after your little fuck up."
  
  Monshara bunched up her mouth into something very like a grimace. Outside the tent, it would have been.
  
  "You know Yisaoh isn't among the dajians here," Gaiso said.
  
  "Maybe, maybe not," Kirana said, "but the shadow of someone's lover or wife or husband or near-cousin certainly is. Eliminating these mirror images helps everyone. Are we decided, then?"
  
  Lohin said. "There's the matter of Nava Sona."
  
  "I'm saving her for Daorian," Kirana said. "That's the problem with shadows. She isn't nearly as well trained as our Nava was. Osoria says she tested with half the ability as our Nava. How that's possible, I don't know. But an omajista is an omajista, and I'm not going to dump her. Anything else?"
  
  Silence. She liked silence. "Then let's get some sleep. Lohin, you stay."
  
  The others left. Lohin waited patiently while she poured herself a drink. She sat in one of the field chairs. Her feet hurt from all the standing. The march to Daorian had been sixteen hours a day for three days straight. Now they rested before the final push, but even the resting was exhausting. She had pushed this army to its limit. Some had already deserted since crossing over. Now that they'd made the crossing to the new world safely, there was nothing binding them to her. She had pondered having them all warded to her, but the logistics of that were even more complicated than feeding upwards of a million new mouths in this country in six months.
  
  "Have we found any more omajistas?" she asked.
  
  "Just Nava," he said. "Nava says the Empress murdered all her Seekers months ago."
  
  "What madness was that?"
  
  "She says the Empress said it was at our order."
  
  Kirana sipped her drink. "Interesting."
  
  "It's possible she thought we'd infiltrated them?"
  
  "No," Kirana said. "The Empress knew we were coming. This was about burning out the fields. She knew we'd look to the Seekers to increase our numbers. I need to know why those legions are in Sebastyn and Tordin, though. That's key."
  
  "Still no progress on that."
  
  "Then get progressing."
  
  Lohin bowed stiffly and took his leave.
  
  She stared after him. A man as point of contact for intelligence in Dorinah was not her first choice, but like Madah, she'd had to make allowances for those who couldn't come over because their shadows lived. All this killing, and the physical rules of the seams between worlds still limited her options.
  
  She took her cup with her and pushed outside her tent. She walked behind the stir of the army to the very edges of the camp. She climbed a slight rise and found a break in the trees. Kirana gazed up at the moons – the same moons as her world, mostly. Ahmur on her world had no tiara of satellites. She wondered where they had gone, on her side – fallen from the sky, in some other part of the world? Or had the diseased versions of her satellites gobbled them up on their entry into the world?
  
  She drank. Questions for thinkers and star gazers. She was neither, really. She heard something behind her. The weapon at her wrist throbbed in answer, and partially extended. She turned.
  
  "Empress?"
  
  It was some infantry-level man, one of the foreign ones. She didn't recall ever having learned his name, though.
  
  "Something I can do for you?" she said.
  
  He bowed deeply, did not meet her gaze. "I saw you walk over here–"
  
  "Out with it."
  
  "I apologize, but there is something you should know… about Lohin."
  
  "Is there now? I suspect you have little to share I don't know, but do entertain me."
  
  "Of course," he said, bowing lower still. "Lohin has been keeping intelligence from you."
  
  "Is that so?" It was not the first time she'd been approached by a member of the infantry hoping to win favor by outing one of her inner circle. "You could have taken this to your line commander."
  
  "I could. But I could not guarantee it reached you."
  
  "Well?"
  
  "There is a legion just a few days behind us."
  
  "I know that, soldier. So does anyone with ears. An entire legion is difficult to hide."
  
  "It's not a legion of Dorinahs."
  
  "What, did they hire mercenaries? How do you know what they're composed of?"
  
  He glanced behind him. "Send another scout. Not one of Lohin's. I could go, but you won't believe me."
  
  "And what's your name?"
  
  "Marister, Empress."
  
  "Marister. From what blighted place? I know that accent. Havasharia? Osadaina?"
  
  "Osadaina," he said. He straightened. "I offered to join your army. I wasn't conscripted."
  
  "It was conscription or death."
  
  "That's how I know they're mercenaries," he said. "They speak my language."
  
  "There is no Osadaina on this world," Kirana said. "You were mistaken."
  
  "That's what I'm trying to tell you," he said. "If there's no Osadaina here, and you… killed or conscripted those of us on our world, where did the Dorinahs get these ones?"
  
  "Fuck," Kirana said.
  
  The other worlds were on the move.