When the bubble of the Line arrived inside the Line chamber of Tira’s temple, a novice already waited for them. She threw a bucket of living matter over the chrysalis, disintegrating it all around them.
Ahkio stepped free. “I have an appointment in the courtyard,” he said.
“You’re expected,” she said. “Please wait while I get the Elder Ora.”
Masura’s cousin, Aimuda – an aging man with just a thin wisp of white hair left atop his slightly conical head – stepped through the doors a few minutes later. Rumor had it a midwife had pulled him from the womb with a pair of tongs, permanently deforming his head.
“Welcome to the Temple of Tira, Kai,” Aimuda said, pressing thumb to forehead. “You are expected below.”
Aimuda led him down six flights of stairs, plenty of time for Ahkio to note how quiet the temple seemed. “Where is everyone?” he asked.
“Only a few of the novices and the support staff remain,” Aimuda said. “The rest have been sent to Kuallina.”
“I didn’t realize you sent so many,” he said.
“Elder Ora Soruza of Oma's Temple was very persuasive in their insistence that we send all we could spare, as the very survival of Dhai was at stake. We could spare all. We sent all.”
He led Ahkio into the rear courtyard among the great tiered gardens. A labyrinth of petrified bone trees stood at the center of the courtyard. The great grinning skulls leered down at him, creatures so long extinct he had no name for them.
There, at the edge of the bone tree labyrinth, stood Yisaoh, smirking and smoking.
He expected her to look haggard, pursued, thin and wan, but she was plump as ever, cleanly dressed, her hair combed to a fine luster.
“I heard you were looking for me,” Yisaoh said.
“How is it you’ve been here all this time?”
“I haven’t,” she said. “Easy answer.”
“You convinced the Elder Ora to harbor you for a meeting, though?”
“It’s for the good of Dhai,” she said, flicking ashes. “The two of us at odds has done neither of us any good.”
He stepped forward, but she retreated into the shadow of the misty bone trees, her face lost to the fog. He saw only the burning embers of her cigarette.
“I came to hear your apology,” she said.
“Apology?”
“What else would you call me out here for? I want to hear you apologize, and invite me back to Dhai, so I can spit in your face and laugh. Because what country do we have to return to? A bleeding mess. Your mess.”
“A mess I inherited.”
“Will you apologize or not?”
“The Tai Mora are looking for you.”
She inhaled a long draft. Smoke bloomed around her head like a cloud. “That is a fact I’m aware of.”
“If they hate you, and they hate me, that should make us great allies.”
“Enemy of my enemy, and all that?” she said. It took him a moment to understand the reference. It was a Tordinian saying.
“Something like that,” he said.
She nodded, then poked the hand with the cigarette at Caisa. “You still following this mad man, girl?”
“He’s Kai.”
“So where’s my apology, Kai?” Yisaoh asked.
“I’m not here to apologize,” he said. “I’m here to propose a solution to our impasse.”
“This should be terribly interesting. Do continue.”
“Marry me,” he said.
She laughed. Laughed so hard she choked on smoke, and doubled over, waving her hand at them. “No, no, really!” she said.
“It’s a very serious offer,” Ahkio said. “We have a problem easily resolved. A great many women who wanted a voice as Catori.”
“So your solution is to marry all of us? Oh, Ahkio, you are darling.” She finished the cigarette and stomped it out under her foot.
She turned and made to enter the bone tree maze.
“I need you, Yisaoh,” he said.
“Do you?”
“I need a united Dhai,” he said. “Help us in Kuallina.”
“Kuallina is lost.”
“We know that.”
“Then why ask?”
“I need you to lead the civilians out of Kuallina,” he said. “You know the woodlands, and they’ll follow you.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“I’ll go back to the Temple of Oma, and hold that position. The temples have greater defenses than the holds. But the woodlands have the best defenses, and I think you can disappear there. I think you’ve been planning that for some time.”
“This is too bold to be your idea.”
“No. There’s an omajista girl, Lilia. She came up with the plan. She says we should burn everything behind us.”
“She is right, you know.”
“I know.”
“Why not have Mohrai do it?”
“Mohrai grew up at the harbor.” He thought of the lute, and her soft fingers. “She’s not made for the woodlands. She doesn’t know it like you do. And what Lilia has planned to delay the army while we escape… I don’t think she’ll survive it. Many people still trust you. A lot of those who fled to Kuallina are from Garika. They’ll go with you.”
“If you aren’t speaking truthfully–”
“I’ve never lied to you, Yisaoh. You know I speak plainly.”
“I’ll do it on one condition,” she said.
He waited. She pulled out another cigarette. He wondered how she could stand to inhale so much smoke. “You tell everyone you apologized,” she said, “and never ask me to marry you again.”
Ahkio broke the news of Yisaoh’s arrival to Mohrai first. He found her in the great dining hall, poring over maps of the troop arrangements outside Kuallina.
“We’ve turned Yisaoh,” he said. “She’s agreed to lead the civilians if something happens to me.”
Mohrai raised her head. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t for her to shake her head resignedly. “ You never wanted to be Kai,” Mohrai said.
“I wanted to be a teacher.” Ahkio rubbed his forehead. “And you wanted to play the lute. Yet here we are, neither teaching nor singing.”
He thought she might throw something at him, but she just shrugged resignedly. “What you did is done,” Mohrai said. “And so are we. Let her in, and let us discuss what’s next.”
41
Lilia sent out word to the armies that they wanted to parley, but received no response. The parajistas pummeled their defenses relentlessly for six days.
Lilia had Tulana, Voralyn, Laralyn and Amelia running shifts, taking turns managing the jistas on the walls. Their faces were haggard after three days. On the fourth, Tulana had a screaming fit, throwing plates and cups in Lilia’s vicinity and telling her this was a fool’s enterprise, and they were lost, and to just let her drop the barrier. Lilia slapped her, a woman almost twenty years her senior.
But they held out.
On the sixth day, Lilia walked down to the defenses herself. She surveyed the massive ring around the refugees, and stared into the faces of their enemy. From the ground, the army was even more horrifying. The refugees had all pushed as close to the walls of Kuallina as they could. The latrine ditches were overfull. Foodstuffs were still coming in by Line, but they were heavily rationed. The people called at her as she passed, and she stopped to press her hands to people’s heads and hearts and murmur courageous words.
She strode right up to the barrier with exhausted Voralyn at her side while her people looked on. She supposed she looked like a fearless woman as she did it, but in truth she felt nothing as she pressed her nose to the barrier. The misty forces that assaulted them were invisible to her. With all the parajistas from the temples funneled into Kuallina, and the Seekers keeping discipline, they could hold out for a good long time.
But Tulana was the only omajista on the wall now, with Taigan gone and Lilia burned out. Tulana was powerful, but it was the relentle
ss volleys from the parajistas that kept them all safe.
Lilia leaned forward and gestured to Voralyn. Voralyn raised a hand. The air around her compressed a bit more. It was already a bit like soup, here at the front.
“Empress Kirana,” Lilia said. “I request an audience.”
Her voice thundered out across the army, and met resistance as it encountered various tangles of parajista offenses.
She repeated it twice more. Waited. The first line of infantry on the other side of the barrier raised their heads from their shields. They stood in long rows, waiting for a break in Kuallina’s defenses that they could stream through, ever alert.
But no one came forward.
Lilia put her hands in the broad pockets of her tunic.
“They know they can crush us,” Voralyn said. “Why should they care to parley?”
Why, indeed?
Lilia chewed her lip. She took another pinch of mahuan root. Long use killed people, she knew. Her mother warned her against it, and the Oras, all of her doctors. But it took twenty years to do it, and Lilia knew she would not make it the twenty years.
She slogged upstairs to speak with the Kai. She entered the great dining hall without announcing herself, and found him speaking in low tones with a broken-nosed woman smoking what smelled like a Tordinian cigarette.
“Their Kai isn’t answering,” Lilia said.
“Yisaoh has another idea,” Ahkio said.
“Yisaoh?” Lilia said. She had heard of the woman, but didn’t realize she was in Kuallina.
Yisaoh put out her cigarette on the table. Lilia thought it very rude. “We’ve held here three weeks,” Yisaoh said. “It’s the Feast of All Souls in just a few days. I suggest we ask for a cessation of hostilities, and a parley over a banquet.”
“Isn’t that what I already asked for?”
“We’re going to remind her we have something she wants more than Kuallina,” Ahkio said.
“What’s that?” Lilia asked.
Yisaoh said, “Me.”
When Lilia went out onto the plain this time, Voralyn at her side to give her words strength, she said, “Empress Kirana. I am the daughter of Navaa Sona, speaking for Kai Ahkio Javia Garika. We propose a parley on the Feast of All Souls. We have news of Yisaoh Alais Garika.”
Three hours later, Kirana sent a messenger to parley.
42
Zezili crawled into a nearby cocoon, sliding in its mucus. She grabbed a moldering body and yanked it up against the opening to the cocoon, shielding her from the view of the approaching monsters. She could just peer over the back of the stinking corpse and see the alien women hissing past her, close enough that she could throw a rock and hit one.
They sniffed the air as they approached. Zezili froze. They swung their heads about. Zezili stopped breathing.
They exchanged rapid-fire clicks and guttural sounds – some kind of language.
Then the gaggle of figures moved on, and Zezili let out her breath.
She needed to find out where Storm had gone when he breached this barrier. Waking up these things was supposed to require some kind of ritual. It was why they brought the jistas. So where had he performed it?
Zezili crawled out of the cocoon and loped across the field, keeping low. She paused often to flatten herself against the ground whenever she heard or saw one of the strange women. She made for what looked like a ziggurat at the center of the anomaly. At first she’d thought it was some plant-plagued hill, but now that she was closer, it was clear it was a building that had been reclaimed by the woods.
The bodies made a neat trail to the structure, and they got fresher. She recognized three women from those she’d brought with her, and one of the Sebastyn jistas. They had lost at least one jista back in that stupid town, Mordid. That left three to do whatever needed doing to wake up these things. How many would it take to put them back to bed?
Zezili found the doors of the temple – was it a temple? A fortress? – open. They were massive slabs of stone. She wasn’t sure how Storm had gotten them open. The jistas, maybe? She stepped inside and pushed the arm with the dagger ahead of her. Inside, great bronze mirrors reflected the light from the entrance, spilling in back and back, further than Zezili could see. What she could make out was a broad foyer with a massive ceiling painted in strange geometric figures. The room had six broad exits – not counting the one she walked in from. She saw that the mirrors directed the light to just one of the entrances, at her left.
Inside were more bodies, all less than a week old. The odor was so strong that Zezili’s eyes watered. She picked her way across the bodies and made for the archway. As she rounded the corner, she saw another body ahead of her jerking erratically on the floor. A breath of horror escaped her. Then a bloodied face rose from the flopping body – it was some serpentine creature with great black fangs and eyes the color of silver. It had four front limbs. She saw the lash of a black tail. She had never seen anything like it.
Zezili put the wall at her back. The creature rose up. It was at least twice as tall as her. It moved so fast she had no time to retreat. In a breath it was on her. It clamped on her thigh. She stabbed it in the eye. It howled, and released her. She stabbed the other eye. The tail lashed, and caught her across the face. She fell and stabbed it in the torso. It was thrashing now. It was the thrashing that would kill her, that fucking tail–
Zezili stabbed it in the throat. The face came at her again. She batted it away with her left arm and stabbed with her right. The blood was black, and made her skin itch. She hissed. The tail smashed her face. She stabbed at the eyes over and over, splattering black, irritating blood until it stopped moving.
Zezili took great gasping breaths. She drooled into its mashed face, and spit black ichor. She got up, and stumbled past the body. The tail thumped. She hollered at it, kicked it, but it was just reflexive nerves. It flopped on the floor.
She pushed on, deeper into the ziggurat. She was definitely headed below ground now, following the slightly sloping floor. The creature’s blood burned her skin. She wondered how poisonous it was, and if she’d be dead before she got to the end of this fucking maze. She spat. The blood made her mouth tingle.
Down and down she went, passing great open doors inscribed with strange writing. They reminded her of the stories she’d heard of Tordinian tombs. The open doors led to rooms the size and shape of her wardrobe at home, and the walls were covered in mucus. She saw great plant-like protrusions covering the interior of each. Like the cocoons outside, the tombs glowed with a faint green bioluminescence. She tried to imagine spending… what? Two thousand, a thousand years cradled in one of those things? This must be where the Empress had buried her kin.
The corridor opened up. Zezili walked into a broad, spherical room. The room was lined in the same sticky tentacles as the tombs she’d passed, and the floor was green. It roiled like something alive, and lights rippled across its surface. She saw what remained of her three Sebastyn jistas on the edge of the pool, their skin charred. At the center of the pool was a great dais, and on top of the dais was what looked like a silver throne made of skulls, all coated in silver. She did not recognize the skulls of the creatures that made up the throne. They looked vaguely human, but distorted. Some had three eyes, or four eyes, and massive bulbous foreheads, and jutting mouths. A few even looked like they had horns. They were some parody of humanity, some dark vision. On top of the throne was Storm, slumped forward with chin on chest. Zezili could not see him well, but suspected he was as dead as the jistas.
“What the fuck?” she muttered aloud, because none of it made any sense. She was not gifted, and suspected there must be some kind of barrier or switch or something she couldn’t see.
Zezili looked around for something to throw into the pool, and settled for yanking a satchel off one of the jistas and tossing it in. The pool was not a pool – the bag sat on it like it was a solid surface, disturbing only the light. But it didn’t hiss or eat it or burst into flame.
She raised her foot to mount the silver steps–
And Storm’s head jerked up. He gabbled at her, jerking about like a puppet on a string. Zezili jumped back, shoving her daggered hand ahead of her.
Storm swung his head toward her, and the gabbling became something she could understand. “Do not defy her!”
“What happened?”
“Do not defy her!”
Green bile dribbled from Storm’s mouth. His eyes were unfocused. His flesh looked moldered, to her. It had taken on a greenish tint.
“Storm?”
“Do… not… defy…”
His chin slumped back to his chest. The body relaxed, as if the puppet master released the strings.
Zezili stepped gingerly around the back of the throne. The top of the throne was attached to the back wall by a giant, pulsing thread of green tentacles, all fused with the silvery throne. She thought of the Empress’s silver throne back in Daorian. Fashioned after this one?
That’s when she heard the whispering.
Zezili crept behind the throne and hid under the massive pulsing tentacle. She peered around the other side, back the way she had come.
It wasn’t whispering. It was hissing.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 88