The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  They talked on. He pushed them. “I have information about the Dhai,” he said. The admission came upon him suddenly, like a sickness. “I can help you defeat the Dhai. I know the Kai’s cipher.” He almost did vomit, then, but what was he without what he owned? He was dead. Dead right here, obliterated in this roiling, nightmarish land.

  No more voices. He watched their faces. They knew what the cipher was, then.

  “I know it,” he said, bumbling on, trying to buy time – for Luna, he told himself, but really, it was for him, he knew it in his heart. “I can help the Tai Mora, your Kai. I have… all sorts of information about the Dhai.” He was sweating, and it had little to do with the warm air.

  They conversed amongst themselves. The man turned away. The tall woman pushed toward him. She leaned over him, and he cowered, yes, he cowered in front of her, because even if he could fight, fighting was nothing when the person you faced stood under an ascendant star.

  “Get up,” she said.

  He scrambled to his feet. She towered over him by a head. “I’ll do anything you say,” Roh babbled. “I’m not dangerous.”

  The other woman said something. Roh thought it sounded very like something in Dhai about being “pretty.” They both laughed.

  Heat moved up his face.

  The tall woman grabbed his chin. Held it firmly. He didn’t resist. She tried to meet his look, but he stared at the ground. Luna would tell him to be meek, to stand down. He would not have tried it with Kadaan, but with the Tai Mora, the people who had murdered every Saiduan from the north sea to Anjoliaa…

  She licked his face.

  Roh stiffened. He willed himself not to tremble.

  “Fine, then,” the shorter woman said. “But if you run, you understand? If you run, I will cut you open myself, and fuck your corpse.”

  Roh worked some spit into his mouth. “I understand.”

  “Go get the other one,” the man said.

  When the two women left in pursuit of Luna, Roh sank to the ground. The man stood over him, staring. “If you’re lying about the cipher, or your temperament, they will do worse than fuck your corpse.”

  “I know,” Roh said. And he did. Oma knew, he did.

  45

  A prickling skein of power slid across Luna’s skin. Luna fell forward, and nearly lost hir grip on the bear. Something felt strange, as if ze were covered in spider’s webbing. Ze looked back and saw Roh collapsed in the mud, the Tai Mora hunched over him. One of them looked up at Luna, and gestured at hir.

  A whump of air struck Luna. Ze toppled. Hit the ground hard. Lost hir breath. Ze rolled right into a boiling, murky pool.

  Heat suffused Luna’s body, but ze did not feel wet. Hir face was dry. Ze sputtered to the surface, splashing. Water rolled off hir body in little droplets. Ze had some kind of protective coating over hir. Luna saw the Tai Mora advancing, and gazed across the broad pool. Luna kicked below the surface and swam hard for the other side of the pool, a good forty paces distant. The coating of air around hir made hir buoyant – staying under the surface was a struggle. Ze paddled hard for the other side, all the while looking for a root or spur of rock to hold onto, to keep hir under and away from their roving eye. Roh must have wrapped Luna in some parajista spell.

  Luna came to the other side, exhausted, and glanced back, keeping only hir eyes above the water. The steam and roiling bubbles of gas obscured hir view, but that was good. It would make it harder for them to see hir, too.

  Hir two pursuers – the others must have stayed with Roh – spoke in loud voices on the other side of the water. Hir bear had stopped at the next pool, and watched the Tai Mora with sticky yellow eyes.

  The tallest one, broad in the shoulders, gestured across the pool toward Luna. Luna submerged again, treading hard to stay below the surface. Ze was sweating terribly in the heat; it soaked hir clothes, dripped down hir face. How long would this spell last? Ze was going to drown in hir own sweat before long. Luna had a sudden urge to urinate. But dying at the hands of the Tai Mora looked a fair bit worse than drowning in urine, right now.

  The water was stifling. It was like being stuck inside a cave roiling with steam. Hir head crested the top of the water, and fresh air flowed around hir skin. Ze tried to breathe, and sucked in foul-smelling air. The skin was breathable.

  Ze peeked hir head up. The Tai Mora were advancing, each taking a side of the pool.

  Luna ducked again.

  The press of the water made it difficult to breathe, even knowing Luna could. Ze pushed a single finger to the surface, let it skim the top to refresh hir air. Luna took shallow breaths. Waited. Ze expected hands on hir arms, or a great gout of air, yanking hir from the water. But Para was descendant now, and they would not use air, but fire. They’d burn hir up and leave hir a charred husk on the plain.

  Seconds ticked by. The air ze managed to suck in was warm, but felt stale. Ze started to hyperventilate. Calm would not come. Luna was drowning, like ze had when ze fell off the boat in the Haraeo sea as a child – falling, falling into a blackness alive with vast sea creatures larger than any building. Luna thrashed.

  But to surface… to surface was death, or worse.

  Darkness licked at hir; warm and inviting. Hir body, starved for oxygen, rebelled. Ze surfaced.

  The protective barrier around hir burst.

  Hot water soaked Luna’s clothes, and dragged hir under. Ze felt no bottom. Luna kicked and clawed for the edge of the pool. Ze found purchase and hauled hirself out. Luna lay on the bank, gasping. Ze looked for the Tai Mora, but saw no one over the misty swath of the pools. This soaked, ze couldn’t leave the protective warmth of the hot springs, not until ze dried out.

  Luna scrambled forward in search of hir bear; the bear would have some dry clothes, a blanket, hir fire-starting kit. Ze circled the pool once, and saw no Tai Mora, no bear. Luna walked on, fearful to whistle or clap hir hands in search of the bear in case the Tai Mora were still close.

  No bear.

  But ze did see the Tai Mora. They were tall figures moving through the mist. Ze pressed hirself to the ground. The air wasn’t blistering cold, but it had begun to cool hir watery clothes. Luna was already shivering.

  The Tai Mora had five bears now. They pulled Luna’s and Roh’s behind them. Ze looked for Roh among them, but did not see him before the whole party was swallowed up by the mist.

  Luna rolled over and started yanking off hir clothes.

  Ze was alone somewhere on the Saiduan tundra, without food, dry clothes, fire, or mount.

  As ze stripped, ze remembered the boat, and the bloated arms of hir dead parents.

  Ze had been in worse places than this, and survived them.

  Luna wrung out hir clothes, shivering in the cool air. Ze found one of the spindly pines nearby, and hung them out to dry. Ze unwrapped the book, ensuring it had not gotten wet, then slipped into the warmth of the hot springs. It would take hours for hir clothes to dry. It would be night by then.

  Ze closed hir eyes. Luna had been in worse places.

  If Luna repeated it often enough, ze might soon believe it.

  46

  Lilia’s first plan had been to serve the Tai Mora their own dead and set the whole table on fire as a massive distraction, believing that was appropriate, but Ahkio’s face at her suggestion put that idea to rest. When she found the forsia tubers among Gian’s hoarded food, she had a far better idea. Most of the refugees were eating plain rice now and little else, but Lilia proposed they spread out a proper banquet with fresh food shipped in via the Line from the Temple of Tira. If they pretended they were well stocked and eating well, it told the Tai Mora they were comfortable with a long siege. And the tubers would be just one dish among many.

  The Line had become a front of sorts for the battle of Kuallina – the Tai Mora had already severed the lines going to Asona Harbor, Liona, the Temple of Sina, and the Temple of Para, leaving only the routes to the Temple of Oma and Temple of Tira intact. Lilia had Laralyn protecting t
he remaining two lines. Those who took the second shift were weaker, less experienced. It was only a matter of time before the Tai Mora hit them when the second shift protected them, and then they were completely cut off.

  The banquet they planned was one Lilia would have eaten at the temple during the high spring festival season – honeyed fiddleheads, curried yams, caramelized onions and salted weed plantains, marigold blossoms in buttery cilantro rice, soft braided bread braised in garlic, and fried edamame.

  For the final dish, she walked with little Tasia along the creek bed running behind Kuallina. The creek was now festering with the piss and shit of the great army, which used it as a latrine. Kuallina itself had a well, so it didn’t threaten their own water, but the waste had polluted the stream, killing various types of fishes, toads and other, more delicate creatures, and that made Lilia angry. She had worked personally to oversee the digging of the latrines for the refugees outside the wall. Shitting in a creek was wasteful, irresponsible, filthy.

  Her anger made it easier for her to put up with the stink and mess of it on her shoes as she waded in and pulled out the great knobs of the dormant forsia lilies growing on the little islands at the center of the stream. Tasia carried them in a big sack that eventually dragged across the ground. Lilia needed one for every guest, and a half dozen more for practice.

  “Never eat these,” Lilia told Tasia as she put them in the sack, just as her mother had said to her when she was small.

  “But you’re going to eat them,” Tasia said.

  “They are poisonous,” Lilia said. “They have to be prepared the right way, and divided up and eaten correctly. Until you learn how, they will kill you. Understand?”

  Lilia hauled the forsia tubers back into the kitchens of Kuallina, and stood at the sink with her sleeves rolled up and scrubbed them herself. They had a spiny outer skin and soft, sweet-nutty interior. Lilia liked the idea of serving the Kai and her people some weed that grew in their own shit. Liked it very much.

  She cooked one of the forsia tubers in the oven, then called down Gian and the Kai to teach them how to eat the tubers without killing themselves. Yisaoh and Mohrai came down with the Kai, watching him and each other like predatory birds. War had a way of bringing people together.

  “This needs to be done correctly,” Lilia said, “or it will kill you.” She said it in the same tone she’d used with Tasia.

  Lilia carefully removed the skin of the root and put it aside. “Don’t eat this part,” she said. “This next is most important, though.” She took the knife and gently tucked it into the center of the tuber, and pulled the knife all the way around its stiff core. She pulled apart the two halves, revealing a sticky black center from which radiated three dark tendrils.

  “This whole black center must be removed,” Lilia said. “These tendrils, too. You must not eat this part. Not even a taste. It will kill you.” She began to de-vein the tuber.

  Mohrai examined the skin of the tuber. “We should at least have Ahkio’s already cleaned.”

  “It will give us away,” Lilia said.

  “What will happen if he dies at that table?” Mohrai said. “It took a year to unite the clans. Succession now, especially after that… performance in the temple, will be contested. This is much riskier than I thought.”

  Yisaoh shrugged. “Let him do it.”

  “You would say that,” Mohrai said.

  “How serious is this poison?” Ahkio said.

  Lilia neatly pulled the first black thread away, and set it aside. “An hour, maybe two. They can burst if you don’t handle them carefully.”

  “Can we wash them?” Ahkio said.

  Lilia sighed and set down the knife. She wiped her hands on her apron and then rubbed her aching head.

  “If we think they will fall without a head,” Mohrai said, “their… leader is certainly thinking the same thing. If this doesn’t kill Ahkio, sending him down there surely will. I’m having second thoughts about this. It sounds bold here inside, but out there–”

  “Kai?” Lilia said. “You thought this a fine idea when I proposed it.”

  Mostly fine, anyway.

  Ahkio folded his arms, tucking his hands under his armpits. It was an annoying, defensive gesture. He looked at the table as he did it, weighing and considering.

  Lilia smacked her hand on the table. “Now is not a time to talk,” she said. “Now is a time for action.”

  “I hate to say it,” Yisaoh said. “But Mohrai is right. Do you really think you can sit at that table and kill your own sister, Ahkio? We know she’s down there. I don’t think you can.”

  Ahkio raised his head. Lilia saw his answer. He was not a ruthless man, not a killer. It infuriated her more than she thought it would. She had given him a way out before, but he insisted on being part of this, and now, when the time came, he became a coward. He would not follow through.

  She stared hard at the knife on the table. “I have given a lot of things to fighting these people,” she said. “You–”

  “Revenge,” Ahkio said.

  “It’s not revenge,” Lilia snapped. Reflexive. Of course it was about revenge.

  “I’m sorry about what they did to your mother,” Ahkio said. “I’m sorry about your world, your village, your leg. But destroying them fixes none of that.”

  “This is not about revenge, it’s–”

  “We’ll have a banquet,” Ahkio said, “without the poison. We’ll meet them like civilized people, and accept what happens. The more I’ve considered this duplicity, the more I dislike it.”

  “It’s the only way,” Lilia said.

  “Is it?” he said. He seemed disappointed in her. They all did. She was disappointed in herself, too – for failing at the harbor, for burning out, for not telling them. “Ghrasia wouldn’t have agreed to this,” he said. “It was compassion that had her open those gates for you. The same compassion that would stay her hand now.”

  “You can’t speak for the dead,” Lilia said.

  Yisaoh interrupted. “We’ll do as the Kai says.” She pulled a cigarette from a leather case in her tunic pocket. Lilia wondered if she would run out soon, and whether or not she would be so mellow, then.

  Lilia picked up the knife and jabbed it into the table. “Fine, then. But I won’t be part of it. This was my idea, and this was the only way it was going to work.”

  “The way it worked at the wall?” Mohrai said.

  “It would have–” Lilia stepped away from the table. “Do what you like. This isn’t my battle anyway.”

  She stormed out of the room. Gian ran after her, grabbing at her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Li,” Gian said.

  Lilia pushed away her hand.

  Lilia went to her room and curled up on her bed. No one but Gian and Tulana knew she could no longer call on Oma, but even with no power, with nothing but bluster, she was willing to do this – to sit with the leader of Tai Mora and feed her poison and risk the consequences. Because this was their only option. The illusion that shielded the retreating civilians was already going to be difficult to sell after the bold one she had used to cross the great army. She knew her plans sounded extreme, desperate, and they were. But doing nothing was worse.

  Gian came in to sit with her, but Lilia yelled at her to get out. She was increasingly agitated now, anxious. She chewed more mahuan root and lay alone in the dark room. Hunger gnawed at her belly, but she did not get up.

  Taigan was right. She should have gone to Saiduan. The Saiduan, at least, would do what needed to be done. The Dhai were cowards, just like she had been. They lived fearfully, like she had. But cowards never changed anything. Cowards didn’t win.

  She didn’t remember sleeping, but she must have dozed. She woke to the smell of Tordinian tobacco.

  Her door opened, slowly. In the pale light of the moons, she could just make out Yisaoh’s long face, the crooked nose.

  “I’ve drugged the Kai,” she said. “You and Mohrai are going out tomorrow, with
Gian and Mohrai’s cousin, Alhina. I’ll lead the civilians out while you distract them. Ahkio will go back to the temple, when he’s awake.”

  “What happens when he finds out?”

  Yisaoh shrugged. “I’m telling him you drugged him. If you succeed, he’ll have to forgive you. If you fail, we’ll say you went rogue and manufactured this yourself. Fair enough?”

  “But–”

  “I know what it is to be driven by revenge,” Yisaoh said. “You’re the only one of us foolish enough to do this.”

  The active assault of Kuallina’s defenses ceased the day the Empress accepted their parley, but as Lilia stepped through their own still-active parajista shield, her heart hammered so loudly she thought Mohrai, walking beside her, might tell her to turn back for being cowardly after all.

  They made an odd party – Lilia and Gian, Mohrai and Alhina. Gian held tightly to Lilia’s hand. It sweated terribly in hers, but Lilia dared not let go, not now.

  Behind them came the staff who had prepared the banquet. They carried dish after steaming dish.

  Two great tables had been moved from Kuallina, and set in a narrow space between the two barriers that protected each of the forces. Behind Lila’s side were the refugees, so close she could reach them in just fifty steps. And behind Kirana was her camped army, tent after tent aligned in neat rows, as if a siege were the most normal thing in the world.

  Lilia and her companions came up beside their chairs on the dais. The cooking staff spread out the food.