The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  “I have a plan for Kuallina,” Lilia said.

  He barked a laugh. “Do you?”

  “I’m not a seer,” Lilia said. “I’m a strategist. I didn’t anticipate that they would attack us while they had an emissary at Oma's Temple. I thought we could act first. But they thought the same. It was a matter of who moved fastest. We couldn’t get the sinajistas to the wall in time to build the warded spells to attach to the boats. We needed more time, and we did not have it.”

  “You didn’t tell me about this plan,” he said. “I could have… delayed the emissary.”

  “Do you trust every person around you?” Lilia said. She did not point fingers at those in the room, but Lilia had already met a lot of travelers, a lot of shadows. If there were none in his inner circle, she would be inordinately surprised. “If any of us sent you word, it could have been intercepted.”

  “Ghrasia is dead,” he said. He voice broke.

  “I know,” Lilia said.

  “And half of Asona. We’ve lost–”

  Lilia raised her voice. “And we’ll lose more if we sit here waiting for that second army,” she said.

  “There are injured,” Mohrai said. “Sick people, elders, children. You want to take those all into the woodland, for your fool plan?”

  “They’ll die if you keep them here. Do you want to lose everyone here, or just a few?”

  “You’re a cold person,” the Kai said.

  “You’re not cold enough,” she said. “It’s why we’re here. What happened with the emissary? Why did they attack?”

  The Kai raised a hand. “Mohrai, Caisa, the rest of you, leave us for a moment.”

  “Ahkio,” Mohrai said.

  “Just… leave us.”

  Lilia tried to hide her surprise. She’d expected to be thrown in the storage closet, or fed to the army.

  But the room cleared out, as he asked. She stood alone with him in the broad room with its streaming light and horrifying view of the burned-out plain and the camping army.

  “What are you?” he said. Cold. Keen eyes.

  “I told you–”

  “What. Are. You?”

  “My mother hid me here,” she said. “I was very young. I thought it was a dream. She opened a way between my world, the one with the burnt sky, and this one. I’ve lived here my whole life. They hid hundreds of omajista children here, the resistance. There’s a resistance on the other side, though I haven’t met many of them. Gian–” but it was the wrong Gian she wanted to tell him about, so she swallowed her words. “The woman who brought me here was one. I went to the other side to find my mother, just before we came here. They were building a great mirror there to keep the way between their world and ours open, and I destroyed it with the help of a Dorinah legionnaire. I killed my own mother there, too, when I did it. It was the only way.” Her voice rose. “I killed my own mother, and I’m just like them now. I’m everything Dhai hates. I can see how you look at me, and you should. You should look at me that way. But who better to fight them than me? They took everything from me. They will take everything from you, too, if you let them.”

  Silence.

  She swallowed hard. He turned away from her, and gazed long out the window at the army.

  “I agree with you that we’ll lose if we fight them,” he said. “Not just this war, but the one for who we are in the future, too. If all that’s left of us is the fighters, the killers, what kind of society will they build? I don’t want to save the strongest, the most ruthless of us. I want to save the smartest, the most compassionate, the very best of us. Do you understand?”

  She moved forward to the short end of the table, so she could hear him better. His voice was so low. “If you hold them here, they will all die,” Lilia said. “The way we did at the harbor.”

  “Mohrai will hold the bulk of the militia here,” he said, “and most of the Oras. You’ll have some novices, and those Dorinahs you brought with you.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’re going to need a distraction to get past that army.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” she said.

  “Another illusion?”

  “No one falls for an illusion twice,” she said. “They’ll anticipate that now.”

  “You should go before the second army gets here.”

  “I can’t,” Lilia said. “It’s better if there’s a second army, because it means we’ll have someone to invite to dinner.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to invite their leader to dinner,” Lilia said, “and tell her that we surrender.”

  40

  Lilia found Gian in Mohrai’s quarters, speaking in a voice so loud Lilia heard it through the door. Lilia opened the door without prelude, and stood frowning while Gian turned.

  Gian’s expression was difficult to read. Shock, horror? She leapt up and ran toward Lilia. Lilia did not open her arms, but endured the embrace stiffly, guardedly. Gian’s hair was clean, the clothes new. Gian took her so tightly that even more of Lilia’s charred clothes smeared away.

  “I thought you were dead,” Gian said, breathless. Lilia looked beyond her, to Mohrai.

  “What were you speaking of?” A question for Mohrai, not Gian.

  Mohrai stood. “Gian suggested we send her out to negotiate.”

  “Curious,” Lilia said, tone flat. “What makes you think they would listen to you?”

  “I…” Gian trailed off. Released her. “It’s just that, I thought–”

  “Are you theirs?”

  “What? Tai Mora? No! How could you think–”

  “Then why would you–”

  “Emlee told me about Gian,” Gian said. “Your… other Gian.”

  Lilia hissed out a breath. “She had no right to tell you that.”

  “If that Gian was part of some resistance, I could pretend–”

  “You will stay out of this,” Lilia said. “Emlee had no right to tell you about Gian. My Gian.”

  Gian’s face fell. “I thought–”

  “That’s enough here,” Lilia said. “The Kai and I have already discussed a plan. We’ll do it when the rest of the parajistas arrive from the temples. He’s had to call them all here. It could be a few more days.”

  “Lilia–” Gian’s tone was wheedling. Lilia didn’t like it.

  “I’m having a bath and going to bed,” Lilia said. “Do you have a place for me, Mohrai?”

  “No,” Mohrai said. “You’ll have to share with Gian.”

  Lilia nodded curtly. “I need to have my jistas accommodated. They are prepared for war, unlike ours. I’m putting them in charge of our defenses.”

  “The Kai approved that as well?”

  “I would not have–”

  “How many is he going to marry?” Mohrai said, bitterly.

  “What?”

  “Is that what he offered you? Do you have some secret child, too?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Mohrai waved at her. “Never mind.”

  “Show me where the room is, Gian,” Lilia said.

  Gian hung her head. Lilia felt guilty, then. Weren’t they all just doing the best they could? Gian led her to a small, cramped room with two narrow beds. The slim window looked out into the central courtyard, now packed with Dhai from the surrounding clans. Lilia gazed out over them, a swarm of desperate people.

  Gian closed the door. “The Kai married another woman,” Gian said, “and declared a Li Kai. They’re saying that’s not usual.”

  Lilia rubbed her face. It was tingly from all the mahuan root. She was salivating again, hungry. What was a little more? “No, that’s not very usual. Kais haven’t had multiple spouses since…” She racked her memory for the history of it. “Since at least the first two.”

  Married and declared a Li Kai… he must have thought he was going to die here in Kuallina. Lilia didn’t blame him.

  She took a breath. “It’s gone,” Lilia said.

  Gian s
tiffened. The rigidness of her body frightened Lilia.

  “Oma,” Lilia said. “It’s… gone.”

  “That can’t be.”

  Lilia started to cry. She hadn’t let herself cry yet, and it all came out now, loud and ugly. “I think I burned myself out. I didn’t know. I wasn’t trained. That’s all Taigan would say, how I wasn’t trained.”

  Gian tangled her fingers in Lilia’s hair and made soothing sounds. “It will be all right.”

  “Please stay with me,” Lilia said.

  “Of course, yes,” Gian said.

  “Will you hold me?”

  Gian lay next to her in the bed. She pressed her body against Lilia’s, spooning her from behind, but Lilia could feel the fear and anxiety in her body. It made Lilia tense too. Who was she, if not a powerful omajista? Without Oma, she was just a refugee girl with a bad leg and crumpled right hand.

  She needed to show strength, or she would lose all of them – Taigan, Gian, the refugees, the Kai, the Catori, the jistas. How long could she pretend nothing was different? The only omajistas she knew were Taigan and Tulana, and Taigan was gone.

  Lilia felt something lumpy under the pillow and pulled it out. It was a yellowish tuber, one her mother had warned her about. The sight of it nearly stilled her heart. “Gian! Where did you get this?” Lilia said. “You haven’t eaten it. Tell me you haven’t eaten it!”

  Gian snatched the tuber from her. “Sorry,” she said. “They grow by the river. I was just saving them. I–”

  Lilia found two more of them in the bed. She took them to the window and started throwing them out.

  “No!” Gian said.

  “These are poisonous,” Lilia said. “How did you even–” And then she stopped throwing the tubers. She held the last in her hand, and squeezed it tight. “Oh,” Lilia said. “Oh, this is much better.”

  “Can I have it back?” Gian said.

  “I’ll do better,” Lilia said. “I’ll bring you a dozen more. But don’t eat them. Not yet. Not until you understand them.” Lilia kissed Gian’s forehead. “I have a plan, Gian. Oh, I have such a better plan now.”

  “What plan?” Gian said.

  “I can’t tell you yet. But it’s going to be beautiful.”

  The army came from Liona, and smashed against Kuallina’s eastern defenses. Ahkio stood on the wall with Lilia and Mohrai when it happened. They were a vast force, far more terrifying than the few hundred who had come down from the harbor. This was several thousand. They bore great colored banners and wore chitinous red, green and blue armor that made them look like a swarm of beetles. They burned much of the wood as they went, so the smoke preceded them.

  “How do you know their leader is with them?” Ahkio asked Lilia.

  She shrugged. “I don’t. But if it were me, and I’d waited my whole life to take Dhai, and I wanted it untouched, I’d be here in person. She’s with one of these armies, or someone who can speak for her is.”

  “I’m going down to calm the militia,” Mohrai said. “I don’t want panic.”

  “Gian,” Lilia said. “Could you get me a coat?”

  Ahkio eyed her sharply. The season was moving into low spring. It was unlikely she was cold.

  Gian nodded and left them.

  Lilia leaned toward Ahkio. She was a head shorter than him, though it seemed like more when she hunched over as she did now, leaning on the parapet. “I can go alone, Kai. Someone needs to lead them from here.”

  “We should both go,” he said. “Mohrai will lead them.”

  She put her chin in her hand. “You have another wife at the temple, they said, and a child. Maybe things being less complicated will be good.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve considered the options. If Meyna and her child are lost, there’s still Mohrai and hers. If Mohrai and hers are lost, we have Meyna.” He had considered every angle. In another country they may have thought multiple heirs would divide them, but all Ahkio could think of now was redundancy. What made them different than the Tai Mora? How could they use it to their advantage?

  “And you–”

  “If I’m lost, it doesn’t matter,” he said. He was surprised at the sound of the resignation in his own voice.

  “Kai, I think you should return to the temples, once I go down there.”

  “Is this part of your grand scheme?”

  “Someone needs to lead the people from the temples into the woodland. If you go at the same time I do, you can have them cleared out before her armies get there.”

  “I don’t see–”

  “More importantly… Kai, there’s something you should do, have done, when you go up. You need to have them burn the fields behind them. The temples, too. Burn every orchard. Every house. Burn down everything in the temples. All of it.”

  “I thought you were mad before, but this–”

  “They want Dhai untouched,” Lilia said. “Did you consider why?”

  “I know what they want in the temples.”

  “Then burn it down. Burn it all down.”

  Ahkio gripped the rail. His face was hard, knuckles clenched. “This strategy–”

  “It’s not nice,” she said. “But when we were out there, we saw that they weren’t destroying anything. They mean to live here, Kai. The only way to thwart that is to make it uninhabitable. Mohrai will lead them into the woodland here while I distract them. The Seekers will help. But while we’re doing that, you need to start the burning. Only you can do that.”

  He pressed his fists to his face. “Oma’s breath,” he said.

  “I’ve thought about it a hundred times,” she said. “If we go, we have to burn it down.”

  He wept, then. He felt nothing when he did it, and Lilia just stood there dumbly beside him, chewing her mahuan root and gazing out at the army.

  “If I hadn’t broken the mirror it would be a much bigger army,” she said, “one we couldn’t have held even this long. One we couldn’t run from.”

  When he did not stop crying, she seemed to soften, but that wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t what he needed. He wanted her to comfort him in some way, but she stood resolute. It was why he had given her this chance in the first place, because she was more ruthless than him. He knew it the moment he met her. He had unleashed this monster. It was the only way he could think to save them all, and what they were. She would be the monster. He would be the politician. He would not have a drop of blood on his own hands, though he would know, always know, that every life she took was his to share.

  “I can do it myself,” Lilia said. So certain.

  “No,” he said. “I should meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s my sister,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I never had a sister.”

  A runner arrived for him, and he excused himself, grateful for an excuse to flee from her company. Farosi waited for him below with a message written on delicate green paper.

  “From Yisaoh,” Farosi said.

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “No,” he said, “but I had the handwriting verified in Garika.”

  Ahkio opened the note.

  If you’ve a desire to meet, it will be on my terms. Temple of Tira courtyard.

  She wrote a date two days from the current one. There was still a clear Line path between Kuallina and the Temple of Tira. With the army blocking them in from the north, the temples of Sina and Para could be considered behind enemy lines now. Anything north of Kuallina was gone – burned and routed – the inhabitants driven south ahead of the army. Ahkio had every parajista they could muster at Kuallina now, running in shifts, backed up by sinajistas and tirajistas, directed by Lilia’s omajista captain, Tulana. He had not thought they would last a day, let alone weeks, against the armies that smashed them here at Kuallina, but the Seeker ran her teams with an iron discipline, rotating them out in two-hour shifts. The constantly shifting parajistas on the wall ran like a water clock winding down.

  “Can you take a response
to her?” he asked Farosi.

  He shook his head. “The runner who brought it said it was a one-time offer. You meet on her terms or not at all.”

  Ahkio let out a huff of displeasure.

  Someone knocked at the door. Caisa entered. “Kai?” She had arrived with the last of the parajistas from the Temple of Para, all that were able to get onto the last Line out.

  “News?” he said.

  “The… Lilia would like to see you to discuss the banquet again.”

  “Let that lie,” he said. “I need you to come with me to the Temple of Para tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll discuss that on the way.”

  He told only Mohrai he was leaving. She was not pleased, but he pitched it as a trip to take stock of their resources at the Temple of Tira. Food was at a premium now with so much of the stores at the harbor overrun.

  “No surprises,” she said. “I’m sick to death of surprises.”

  He rode the Line south to the Temple of Tira. It took a few hours. Caisa read the whole way from The Book of Oma. He saw her mouthing the words and nearly started to recite along with her.

  “Is there a Book of Oma over there?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Ours is The Book of Dhai. It’s about our history, mostly, how we are the blessed of Oma, how Oma delivers us from evil during times of madness.”

  “How many times?”

  “Four thousand years, two turns of Oma,” she said. She leaned forward. Space in the bubbled chrysalis was tight, so her nose nearly brushed his. “Thank you for taking me back.”

  “You heard about Liaro. Did you know?”

  “I know he loves you very much, Kai. I know… whatever happened, he thought he was doing the right thing.”

  “I’ve had enough of betrayal.”

  She moved back. “Kai, you know this is just starting.”

  “I thought it was ending.”

  She pointed at the sky. “Oma hasn’t even risen yet. That’s when things get very bad, the books all say.”

  He laughed out loud at that.

  They arrived at the Temple of Tira under a misty rain. The Line carried them up and up through a massive tangle of trees, deep into the woodland. Perched atop a massive cliff, its great foundations spanning two huge rivers spilling over the side, was the Temple of Tira, a green-black fist of a temple with the same domed top as the Temple of Oma. Even this far into the woodland, the plants had not reclaimed the temple. It kept them away with some kind of inner defense, one the Oras had never understood. Ahkio heard it posited that the temple’s living skin secreted some kind of chemical or pheromone that repelled living things, but if that were so, it would have been impossible to keep a garden within the temple grounds, and Tira’s gardens were the most renowned in the country. Its walls were made of tiered gardens, spilling with red and purple and yellow blossoms.