Doppelganger

19 Doppelganger

Night was deepening, and Miryo was contemplating trying to sleep, when she heard a faint noise behind her.

She turned around just in time to see the window swing inward. Reflexively, not even thinking about it, something in her reached for an annihilating rash of power, to obliterate the intruder—

She choked it off, barely, as Mirage appeared in the window and climbed into the room. Miryo stood, trying to calm her breathing, wondering if Mirage noticed, as her doppelganger came forward. Eclipse followed her in, and shut the window behind himself.

One look at Mirage’s face was enough to tell her that her attempts to calm herself might be wasted. They weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow. What happened?

“There are more of them,” Mirage said curtly.

“More of them?” Miryo repeated, not catching on.

“Doppelgangers. At least four. Two at Silverfire, one at Windblade, one at Thornblood. Nobody’s guessed what they are, at least not as far as I know, but Jaguar at least knows there’s something strange about them. He asked me. I didn’t tell him.” Mirage’s eyes held a cold stoniness.

Miryo could sympathize with. Her own eyes would probably look the same, once she got over the shock.

“Crone’s teeth—where did they come from? Tari-nakana didn’t have any children.” Miryo’s breath caught, probably because her throat had closed off. “But Ashin has a daughter.”

Mirage’s eyes flicked to meet hers. “Would you recognize the girl if you saw her?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her. But if she looks like Ashin, probably.”

Her double turned to face Eclipse, who was still standing by the window. “What’s the schedule like for first-years?”

“Forest riding, every morning. And it’s not evaluation time.”

“Perfect.” Mirage turned back to Miryo. “Get your stuff and meet us on the west side of town. We’ll ride to Silverfire tonight and check the two of them tomorrow.”

The innkeeper would no doubt wonder why his spoiled, prissy guest was departing well after sunset, but that had suddenly been demoted in priority. Miryo nodded. “I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

The ride was crazy. Miryo wondered whether being a Hunter was always like this—skulking about, climbing through windows, and leaving town in the dead of night. And whether being an Air witch was anything like it. If so, her life was going to be very hard on the nerves.

They circled around Silverfire, giving the compound a wide berth, and approached the wood from the back. When they neared it, they left Eclipse with the horses. Mirage led Miryo forward on foot, creeping through the black murk of the trees. Miryo stumbled along in her wake, trying not to make too much noise, but it was hard; the ground was tricky and uneven. She had wandered around at night before, but generally either in Starfall’s well-kept grounds or on its roof. Here, in forest as near to trackless as made no difference, she had more trouble. She kept misjudging where exactly the ground was, and staggered as a result.

The twentieth or thirtieth time she did this, Mirage paused. Miryo cringed, imagining what her double must think of her. She hated being incompetent.

“Walk toe-heel,” Mirage advised, and continued on.

Miryo tried this and found it peculiar but helpful. The motion tired her legs, as they were unused to it, but walking toe-heel allowed her to find the ground with her foot before committing her weight to it. She still cracked twigs and rustled in the leaf mold, but she didn’t sound quite as much like a drunken donkey, which made her feel a good deal better. It gave her hope that she might, with practice, learn to do this well.

Some time later Mirage paused again. “Wait here,” she murmured, and then she was gone, swallowed up by the blackness. Miryo strained her ears, trying to track her by sound, but heard nothing more than the occasional rustle that might have been a squirrel.

Then Mirage was back. “Follow me.”

They went on only another ten steps before stopping again. “Can you climb trees?” Mirage asked.

Well-kept garden trees in Starfall, yes. But it couldn’t be harder than Starfall’s roofs. “I’ll manage.”

They scrambled up into the branches. It wasn’t as difficult as Miryo had feared. In fact, the tree seemed to have bees discreetly pruned to make climbing easier. Her suspicion was confirmed when Mirage led her onto a small platform nestled among the branches.

“Observation post,” her doppelganger explained. “The masters come up here to watch trainees, during evaluations.”

Miryo wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself and squirmed around until she was comfortable. “What time will they be riding through?”

“They leave Silverfire at First. Depending on which route they go, they’ll be here a half hour to an hour after that. They’ll pass by here, though, no matter which path they’re sent down.”

By Miryo’s reckoning, it was now somewhere between Low and Dark. They had at least four hours to kill, stuck in a damp, dark, cold tree. She sighed and squirmed a little bit more, then laid her head against a branch and tried to go to sleep.

She probably dozed, but it was hard to tell. Every time she opened her eyes, she saw Mirage, a motionless black shadow against the black of the tree. Miryo wondered if her double was sleeping at all.

“Is it always like this?” she asked at last, voicing her thought from before.

Mirage didn’t answer immediately, and Miryo thought for a moment she’d nodded off, or hadn’t understood the question. Then the shadow shrugged. “Depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs are more… lively than others.”

“Do you ever get a rest?”

A snort answered that. “I was supposed to, back before Midsummer. I’d ridden from one end of the land to the other, with three back-to-back jobs. Then Eclipse showed up with the commission.”

“And you’ve been on the road since then?”

“Yeah.”

Silence; even the wind had died down. “Do you enjoy it?”

Mirage laughed softly. Miryo couldn’t quite guess the meaning of that; it didn’t sound bitter, but neither was it particularly amused. “Yes. Probably more than is good for me. I’d like a rest, but I also feed on the challenge. I was bored stiff for a while, earlier this year. Getting the commission gave me more energy than a month of relaxation.”

“I’ve wondered about it myself. I’ve got to choose a Ray, you know, and I’d been leaning toward Air. But I didn’t know how I would take to being itinerant.”

“Not everyone likes it. The masters at Silverfire try to make sure that students who don’t, either take another profession or transfer to one of the schools we’re friendly with.” Mirage cocked her head to one side, and Miryo felt her double’s eyes on her. “You might enjoy it. I do, after all. But I don’t know if that’s one of the traits we share.”

“Well, I’m getting a sample of it, running around with you.”

“And what do you think?”

Miryo grinned, even though Mirage couldn’t see it. “I think I like it more than is good for me.”

That was the last they said for a while. Dawn came an hour or so before First; just as Miryo was able to see Mirage clearly, her double said, “We need to stay quiet from here on out. If anyone comes through and suspects we’re here, I’ll go down and talk to them. You have to stay as still as possible.”

Miryo nodded.

It was harder than she’d expected, though. Her legs became stiff, then threatened to cramp; she stretched them surreptitiously, but winced at every scrape of her boot against the platform. Mirage didn’t look at her, or say anything; still, Miryo could imagine her thoughts. She finally started meditating, just to take her mind off her growing discomfort.

She was jolted from this exercise by Mirage’s hand on her wrist. Miryo came alert, and eased forward on the platform, putting herself in a position to see the riders as they passed by.

They were strung out along the trail, each several minutes behind the last. Three went by before Miryo felt Mirage’s touch again. The rider who appeared was a thin, wiry girl, with close-cut brown hair.

When the girl had passed, Miryo glanced over at Mirage and shook her head.

Two more riders passed. Then Mirage tapped her wrist again.

Miryo hardly needed the touch. The girl’s cropped hair was a darker red than her mother’s, but it did little to disguise her; she might as well have had Ashin’s name symbol tattooed on her forehead, so striking was the resemblance.

They had to stay in the tree as the remainder of the class passed; then they climbed down and left as quickly as possible. No one crossed their path on the way out. Mirage nodded wordlessly to Eclipse as they took their horses’ reins; then the three of them mounted and rode swiftly away from Silverfire.

At first they rode with little or no sense of direction. It didn’t last, though. Before long Miryo pulled herself straighter in her saddle and chose for them all.

“Aystad,” she decided. “There’s a Void Hand there who might be able to tell us where Ashin is.”

“That was sudden,” Eclipse remarked.

Miryo smiled thinly. “It’s quite convenient, really. Back when I decided not to kill Mirage, I had no idea what I was going to do next. There was far too much we needed to do, and no way to sort through it. The problem’s solving itself, though. Things keep falling out such that I don’t really have much choice in what step I take next.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“I can’t do much about it, can I? So I might as well accept it.”

Mirage tuned them out and rode in an unseeing haze. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, but in her mind all she could see were the two girls. The two doppelgangers. Fighting. Moving like her, Eclipse had said.

It irritated her, perversely enough. She’d grown up with the stigma of being red-haired and unusual, and although she had hated it, it had formed a very real part of her identity. She simply wasn’t quite like the other Hunter trainees. She was fast and strong, and fighting just made sense to her. It was instinctive. And that was something that set her apart.

So now you’re upset that you’re not unique anymore. Get over yourself.

All kinds of new questions were cropping up now. Why did doppelgangers have these qualities? Why were they fast, and strong, and natural fighters? Were those traits somehow anathema to magical ability?

Maybe when we find Ashin-kasora, we can convince her to bring us her daughter—both of them—whatever. It’s possible that there is a solution, but it has to be done before that second ritual. If that were the case, it was too late for Miryo and Mirage, but at least they could do something to help those other girls.

And somehow, in the middle of all this, she would have to deal with Wraith.

Something slammed into her chest.

What the—

Miryo’s horse reared, nearly throwing her. She hauled sideways on the reins as the gelding came down and just barely avoided trampling Mirage.

Mirage. On the ground. With—

With an arrow in her chest.

Another shaft streaked through the air and buried itself in a tree next to her horse’s head. Miryo’s gelding bolted.

The animal plunged off the road, leaping a rock and then narrowly avoiding a tree. Miryo hung on for dear life, hauling on the reins, staying low in the saddle lest a tree branch slap her down. She had to stop her horse. Mirage was somewhere behind her—

Dead.

She snarled. Can’t be sure of that. I’ve got to get back.

Her gelding stumbled, and finally she was able to rein him in. He’d run quite a distance in his panic. Miryo twisted in her saddle, trying to spot the road through the patchy trees. The ground was too broken, though, and she couldn’t be sure of her direction.

Steel crashing against steel was her guide. In the split second before her horse ran, Miryo had seen the uniformed and masked Hunter who had shot her double down. He and Eclipse must be fighting. So all she had to do was find them, and she’d find Mirage.

She kicked her horse into motion.

The rough terrain confused her, though; she kept being led astray. Under her breath, Miryo muttered a stream of increasingly vicious curses. I don’t have this kind of time to waste!

Then she crested a small rise, and saw the fighters.

Eclipse had crowded his horse close in against the other Hunter’s, trapping him against a sharp spur of stone, and the two of them were fighting furiously. But their struggle had carried them away from the road, and Mirage was nowhere in sight.

Miryo swallowed hard, forcing tears down. Then she took a deep breath and began to sing.

She meant to craft a holding spell, to stop the two combatants. Within three words, though, it was gone. Without even meaning to, Miryo reached up to the sun above her and the earth below her and the wind around her, and pulled them together into a spell of destructive force. Her control was poor, and the energy surged wildly, straining against her fragile hold.

Miryo was past caring.

Mirage had taken an arrow to the heart. If she was not dead, she was beyond Miryo’s ability to heal. And so Miryo had nothing to fear; she drew the power in to crush the Hunter before her.

He drove Eclipse back with a furious attack. And in that moment, Miryo gathered the maelstrom of nearly uncontrollable energy; it was oscillating violently, slipping out of her grasp, but she focused every fiber of her being to unleash its fallout on him.

And then she twisted desperately, wrenching the power sideways into the ground with an effort that made her entire body scream. The earth exploded into fire and dust, but through it she could still see the figure that had leapt from the outcrop and slammed the Hunter off his horse.

I don’t believe it.

Miryo stared, through the pounding of her sudden headache, as her doppelganger rolled to her feet and drew her sword in one swift motion. I saw her go down. She can’t be here—not fighting.

But she could not deny the evidence of her eyes. Mirage had leapt off the spur of rock as the Hunter neared it again, and with her momentum had wrenched him to the ground. It was a miracle she hadn’t landed on his drawn sword. Beyond them Miryo could see Eclipse, slack-jawed with startled disbelief, staring at the two of them. And now they were fighting, and Miryo finally saw what Eclipse had meant when he said Mirage was good. Wound or no wound, she was fighting, and even Miryo could tell that she was brilliant. She flowed from one motion to the next like liquid lightning. The other Hunter looked clumsy by comparison, and slow with the shock of seeing her. He sliced at her side, but she was long gone; then she leapt forward in his cut’s wake and nearly impaled him. Only a quick twist saved him. And now Mi-rage had him on the retreat, and she pressed her advantage.

She cut high, low, and then low again. Somehow he had gotten a dagger out, and was using it to parry some of her blows, but Mirage’s speed made her one blade seem like three. He took a nick to one hip, and then another on his shoulder. A thrust nearly caught him in the face, and he wasn’t fast enough to avoid a slice along his cheek and ear. Part of his mask flapped free. Beneath the blood Miryo could see a grim, hard expression.

Mirage kicked dust into his eyes. He shut them and for a moment seemed to be fighting by hearing alone. But it wasn’t enough; within a moment he’d lost his dagger, and a finger with it.

He howled and charged forward, opening his watering eyes. His momentum and greater bulk knocked Mirage off-balance, and the two of them went sprawling, blades flying across the ground. He should have kept his feet and his sword, though. Before he’d even finished rolling, Mirage was on her feet.

She waded in with a swift flurry of kicks. They caught him in the face, the chest, the groin; even where she was standing Miryo could hear bones breaking. The Hunter was barely putting up a token resistance now. And then Mirage slammed him onto his back, knelt on his chest, and drew her dagger. Miryo closed her eyes as she slashed it across his throat.