“That’s not important. Come through. You’ll need a mount.” She called to one of the omajistas – well, there had to be such a thing, didn’t there, if they could do this? – who slid off her bear and handed the reins to Zezili.

Zezili grimaced. She hated the smell of bears. She mounted anyhow. She didn’t want to make a habit of arguing with women who used blood magic to open doors between spaces. She remembered Anavha crouched on the floor of his room again, and her heart clenched. She broke out in a cold sweat. It was someone else, she reminded herself. He didn’t do anything at all. Maybe it was one of these people, opening spaces to nowhere on accident. Maybe… Zezili sat straight and tall atop the bear. She needed to ask Tulana about omajistas. If the Empress had known people all along who could do something like this, she would have hidden them away with Tulana. Zezili understood now why her local priest had wanted to take Anavha away immediately.

Monshara began to move through the gate.

“Will it stay open behind us?” Zezili asked.

“Eight hundred dead should keep it open at least two hours,” Monshara said. “We have time.”

“And if it closes?”

“We’ll be done by then,” Monshara said. “We’re going to the tower.”

Zezili firmed her jaw. She thought of her fine estate, and Dakar, her dajians, and Anavha. If these people wanted her dead, there were far easier ways to do it.

She hissed at the bear beneath her and followed Monshara into the other side.

Dirty bones littered the field around the glowing blue tower. The air here was dry and smelled strangely of sulfur. Zezili put a kerchief over her nose, but it did nothing to keep the strange air from her lungs. She gave up and tucked the kerchief back inside her cuff.

“Who were these people?” Zezili asked.

“We had to remove a good many people,” Monshara said, “to gather enough blood to open the way between the worlds. Blood witches have known how to intensify the power of the satellites through the power of blood for centuries. It was only natural we apply those same strategies to intensify the tenuous power of Oma.”

“Blood witches? Worlds? Are we on the moons or something? Because you’re talking nonsense to me.”

“Not the moons, no,” Monshara said. “It’s… like looking at a series of reflections, you understand?”

“No.”

Monshara sighed. She looked around the charred, shattered ground and pointed to a fetid pool of standing water in a ditch along the beaten track they followed. “When you see the sky reflected in that pool, is it the sky you know, truly? Or some blacker version, some mirror version? Pretend that beneath every reflecting pool is some other version of that sky, layer upon layer of them, with slight differences in each. The deeper you go, the more different things are.”