The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  “I want an update in this evening’s daily report,” Kirana said.

  Suari walked to the edge of the wink and gestured for her to enter. The omajista on the other side was already making her way to the wink. Current protocol was to wait until an omajista was in place on both sides before stepping through. Having an omajista on each side had reduced the number of accidents due to Oma’s fickle nature. However, it meant that the vast majority of her omajistas were constantly engaged in managing the flow of traffic from far-flung regions of her empire. It was not a popular use of them, according to the last few line commanders engaged in conflicts across the Saiduan continent and island of Grania, but it was hers to make. Transit of food stores and supplies was more important than mopping up resistance outside of Dhai.

  The wink wavered. “Kai?” Suari said, “We’re ready for you.”

  Kirana stepped through and into the Assembly Chamber of Oma’s Temple. Suari followed her, and together they crossed the bustling room and descended the long tongue of the grand staircase, passing libraries full of researchers, stargazers, and parajistas, all sorting through the temple’s many records in search of old plans, instructions, and diagrams like the ones that had told her about the hidden chambers beneath the temples, the ancient guts of the transference engines that the Dhai had called home for centuries.

  The old records confirmed that Faith Ahya and Hahko, the Dhai founders, believed the temples were gods capable of channeling the power of the satellites. Kirana had always believed the ancient living holds of Saiduan and the temples of Dhai were magicked things created by sinajistas and tirajistas in some distant time, to capture the power of the satellites. But seeing the naked heart of them dredged up from the ocean floor made her wonder if they were older and more alien beings, harnessed by some old civilization for this purpose.

  She broke into the foyer, Suari at her heels, and passed the great domed meeting room where the temple garrison went through their lessons in reading and arithmetic. She heard them chanting the equation for determining the trajectory of a projectile.

  The guard at the basement entrance admitted her and Suari. She went past the bathing chambers and storage rooms to the second level of the holding cells. Most of the cells were full – the first level was where they kept their own troublesome people, those caught fighting or left locked up until they were sober enough to beg forgiveness for transgressions.

  The second level was for the people who most assuredly were not theirs – Dhai who required further interrogation, a few suspected Saiduan spies, and at least half a dozen scouts from other worlds. The scouts were giving them the most trouble, because once they had been squeezed of information, all they could do with them was kill them and bury them in the pits. They were far too fervent about protecting their little rebel leader, a girl they called Light. And there was no reforming someone else’s cultist.

  The next level of guards let them through after confirming her ward and the week’s password. She did not expect a brute attack this deep into the temple; it would be a clever double agent ruse, no doubt, hence the changing passwords.

  They reached the very lowest level of the temple, or the level they had believed to be the lowest until consulting the Saiduan tome. On this level was a massive chamber filled to bursting with twisted tree roots. Kirana’s scholars had found a plinth at the center of the twisting maze. The stone obelisk was carved with the symbol for Oma, and a tattered flame fly lantern lay nearby, as if someone had come down and… not come up again.

  What work had been done on this level prior to her arrival was uncertain. Her stargazers and scientists had yet to reveal its purpose. She was far more interested in what lay beneath this level.

  Ahead of her, a mound of rubble coated with a thick, oozing liquid lay piled up next to a gaping wound in the floor. Light beamed from below, emitted by dozens of flame fly lanterns.

  Suari went on ahead of her, sweeping away the fluid on the floor with a searing tail of Oma’s breath.

  “I hope that stops, eventually,” Kirana said.

  “Vital fluid,” Suari said. “The wounds keep leaking. They are difficult to keep open. Forcing ourselves into these chambers without a Kai…” He cleared his throat.

  “Hopefully we won’t need to much longer.” She was tiring of his obsession with the temple’s rejection of her title.

  The months of jista assaults to penetrate this cavern – which they had found clearly marked in the Saiduan tome – had driven two jistas mad, and a cave-in had killed another. The temples were not meant to be hacked apart. They were nearly indestructible, which was why she ultimately turned the inhabitants to her cause instead of trying to take them by force. The Dhai could have locked themselves up in the temples and resisted her for years. Better to have traitors on the inside who would open the doors for her.

  “I’ve put another ward on it,” Suari said. He descended the ladder ahead of her.

  The dusty air made her sneeze. As she mounted the ladder and started after him, the temple trembled again. A dollop of the gooey fluid tangled into her hair. She dropped the last foot to the floor and lifted her head.

  The flame fly lanterns only revealed portions of the room, which was largely circular. The walls were the same warm green material that made up the skin of the temple. It was warmer here than above, and the walls throbbed like a beating heart, just like the blob on the sandbar. All along the circumference of the room, the skin of the temple had been scarred with raised symbols, elaborate characters that the scholars said was possibly a very old form of Dhai, but in the month since they had finally breached these levels of each temple, none had managed to decipher it.

  Her scholars and stargazers clustered at the center of the room, where four bulbous plinths surrounded a low altar. With the light concentrated there from their lanterns, Kirana could see a great white webbing draping from the ceiling, connecting all the plinths to the temple itself.

  Kirana approached the center of the chamber, walking across the spongy floor. A fat copy of the Saiduan tome sat at the center of the stone altar. One scholar stood over it, muttering. Kirana had already had two copies made and sent to scholars in Caisau and Anjoliaa, which were far faster journeys when one had access to omajistas and their powerful winks. Two more scholars worked at a chalkboard on the far side of the room, writing out characters and equations.

  All three scholars lifted their gazes from their work and stared at her like animals spotted by a predator.

  “Kai,” said Himsa, the eldest, sitting next to the book, her voice breathy and urgent, “we did not expect you this early in the day.”

  Kirana stepped up to the altar. As she did, it began to glow, blue-green, like some living fungus. She gazed at the great round face of it. At the center was the Dhai symbol for “Kai.”

  She could not help herself. She pressed her hand to the center of the altar. She was, of course, the wrong Kai. The altar did nothing, as it had done nothing the last dozen times she placed her hands on it.

  “Have you chosen which jistas will be posted here?” Kirana asked.

  Orhin, a tall and gawky older stargazer with a habit of tugging at one eyebrow, said, “We recommend the most powerful are posted to the People’s Temple. The other chambers – here – we believe that so long as those who stand in the correct niches can call the correct star, that should be sufficient.”

  “I’d like more certainties and fewer qualifiers like ‘should,’” Kirana said.

  A young scholar called Talahina had moved away from the others, and stood in front of the plinth with Para’s symbol at the base. She was a distant relative of Yisaoh’s, and didn’t often speak without being spoken to.

  “What do you see?” Kirana asked her.

  “I’m just… concerned,” Talahina said. “I’m sure you have heard, we have just one hundred days, at maximum–”

  “I know the timeline,” Kirana said.

  “If Almeysia had done her job correctly–” Suari began. />
  Kirana waved a hand. “She did her best to sabotage that plinth she found above, tangled in those roots. But it wasn’t the lowest level, clearly. And she never would have gotten down here on her own. She would have needed Ahkio, or our resources. Alemeysia was a distraction, at best, and a poor one. She failed in convincing the temple I was Kai. Let’s leave that in the past.”

  “Perhaps you could let us speak to the ataisa again.” Orhin did not meet Kirana’s look as she said it, only stroked at his brow.

  “We tried that,” Kirana said. “Several times.”

  “It was some time ago,” Himsa said. “Perhaps the ataisa has softened. If we tell hir how far we have come now, since we last spoke–”

  It annoyed Kirana that Orhin used the Saiduan pronoun for the child, but nothing in Tai Mora fit what the Saiduan was. “You put far too much faith in a Saiduan slave. Have you no confidence in yourselves?”

  “We are confident,” Talahina blurted.

  “What do you think, Suari?” Kirana asked.

  “It could not hurt to show the ataisa what’s on the sandbar,” Suari said.

  Kirana held out hand. “Give me a copy of the book.”

  Orhin snapped up the one he was consulting and handed it to Kirana. “Empress.”

  “Stay here and work,” Kirana told Suari. “I have a meeting with my mother soon. I can visit the ataisa on the way up.”

  Kirana left them. She heard their voices behind her, low and urgent. Occasionally one of them would inform on another, hustle their way up to her quarters

  The sinajista guard bowed to her. Kirana went up two more levels, to the proper gaol where she had kept the little ataisa who had brought her the Saiduan tome. Unwillingly, of course, but brought it all the same.

  Inside, the two ungifted guards on duty played screes, a popular Dhai strategy game. They unlocked the cell she pointed to.

  Kirana pulled up the wobbly three-legged stool and sat in the narrow slant of light that spilled into the cell from the doorway.

  The ataisa was chained to the far wall, hands and feet given just enough chain so that ze could relieve hirself in a bucket in the corner, which was overflowing.

  “I’ll get them to empty that out,” Kirana said. It had been several weeks since she last visited, as the smell nauseated her and she’d had far more important business to attend to. Kirana called to the guards, “Is ze eating?”

  “Some bread, a bit of mashed yam,” the heavier woman said.

  “Water?”

  “We have to make her. Won’t do it on her own. Wants to waste away.”

  “Well, that won’t do.”

  The ataisa did not flinch in the onslaught of light. Hir hair was matted, mostly on the left side, and what remained of hir tunic was in tatters. Hir body bore a curve of breast and a curl of cock; one of those born with a mix of sexual characteristics. Kirana had thought of the ataisa variously as a stubborn girl and an annoying boy, but settled into using ataisa because it’s what her scholars used. Kirana had tried the more humane way to get the ataisa to divulge information, when her second, Gaiso, first delivered hir to the temple the year before. But the child had grown up in Saiduan. Saiduan made them tough.

  “I came to tell you we dredged up the fifth temple,” Kirana said. “The one central to the breaking of the world, as it’s written in the book.” She placed the book in her own lap, and rested her hands on top of it, palms down. “I understand your continued resolve. You crossed an ocean with this book. You understood its importance. But we are nearly at the end, here, and your silence buys neither us nor you anything, this far in the game.”

  Silence. Kirana wondered why she bothered. Perhaps the progress below had made her optimistic again.

  “Your silence buys you nothing but more long days of darkness,” Kirana said. “Help us. Give us the translation key to the Saiduan tome. Join us, and I’ll get you a bath, proper clothes. You can go free, Luna. When we awaken the temples again and close the ways between the worlds, there will be nothing to fear from one another any longer.”

  Luna raised hir head. The feral look she gave Kirana chilled her, like looking into the face of a wild creature. Busting this ataisa down into hir most basic needs and wants was part of the exercise, but Kirana was always surprised at how easy it was to accomplish. Kirana had gotten information from far tougher people than this one by simply offering them a piece of clothing, a bath, a mango.

  Kirana returned the stool to its place inside the doorway. She should send one of the scholars here, perhaps someone pretty and young, someone this ataisa could confide in. She tucked the book under her arm and beckoned the meaty guard over.

  “Keep hir eating,” Kirana said.

  Keep eating, keep breathing, she thought, as she went back up through the temple, as if in a dream, an ascent from the very belly of the breathing beast that was Oma’s Temple.

  She paused on the landing that opened onto the foyer and pressed her hand to the smooth skin of the temple. “I am your true Kai,” she murmured.

  The beast’s skin roiled beneath her. Kirana heard the distant drip of a water clock in one of the garrison offices. The ever-relentless advance of time.

  One minute less. One hour less. One day less.

  At the top of the stairs, she saw her mother, Javia.

  Javia reached for her arm, and Kirana allowed her to take it. They stood with their bodies pressed close, and wandered out into the back gardens, neither saying a word. Kirana missed the family she had left behind; but she had her parents, at least, her cousins, friends, colleagues in arms. They had saved more than she dreamed possible.

  As they came to a little stand of early blooming dandy flowers, her mother smiled and said, “Oh, how your brother loved dandy flower tea.” Her voice quavered.

  “It was peppermint tea,” Kirana corrected, gently. Her mother had been making small mistakes more often since her arrival in this world. “It was father who loved the dandy flower.”

  “Ah, of course, of course,” her mother said, patting at her hair. The style was a little different today: two plaited ropes instead of three. “Ahkio lost, and Yisaoh and the children…”

  “Not Yisaoh. Or the children. Not yet.”

  “Are we doing the right thing, Kirana?”

  “Right and wrong have no meaning here. There are shades of gray. Always more than two choices. Come, let’s eat.”

  “Did we choose correctly?” Her mother gazed across the garden at a flickering rent in the sky. On the other side, a blazing amber wash. Little bits of ash and char rained over the fire river, localized as a cloud burst. A tea table stood up on a low platform that overlooked the vast chasm of the Fire River, below. Kirana set the book on the table, and manuevered her mother into one of the intricate iron chairs. She poured her mother a cup of the still steaming amber tea. Small tea biscuits lay on a plate at the center, ringed in raw fiddleheads and dandelion flowers. She suspected the biscuits would be dry and dusty, crawling with weevils, but she knew from long experience that dunking them into the tea for a few minutes would make them more or less palatable.

  “The other worlds are dying,” Kirana said, “or, at best, being transformed. There are no good choices.” She sat across from her mother.

  Her mother’s gaze moved to the book. “Have you been praying?”

  “No, it’s the foreign book. The guide to how,” she gestured at the temple, “all of this works. I was questioning the ataisa again.”

  Her mother pursed her mouth, as if tasting something sour. “You believe too much in the fist. You will get more flies with honey.”

  “I already tried coddling–”

  “Show the child why we are here. What drove us. Convince that child as you convinced me. Love runs deeper than fear.” She reached out and touched Kirana’s hand. She had been more affectionate, since they came over. Perhaps Javia too understood how lucky they were to be alive at all. “You know that.”

  Kirana thought of Yisaoh, huffing in th
e detritus of a dying world. “I do.”

  Javia waggled her fingers. “We must grow their love, their loyalty. Start with this one.”

  “That ataisa isn’t a flower you can make bloom with some huff of Tira’s breath.”

  “Show the child, then,” Javia repeated, and took up her tea in both hands. She sipped, winced. “I much preferred dandy flower.”

  Kirana said, “We are lucky to have the mint at all.” Behind them, the temple sighed.

  She lifted her gaze again to the heavens, waiting. Not long, now. Not long at all.

  3

  Lilia herded the children toward the thorn fence, picking her way through the tangled vines and roots smothering the path. She smelled the boars patrolling the thorn fence before she saw them, a musky, pungent odor that reminded her of another world, another time, before the worlds began to come together. The dozen or so children shrieked and collected around her. She bent and showed them how to fill a shallow dish with blood and feed it to the boars.

  “They help protect our encampment,” Lilia said, pressing the last few drops of her own blood into the dish.

  She handed the bowl to Tasia, the young orphan who had clung to Lilia since the mad retreat from Asona Harbor the year before. Tasia stuck out her lower lip and regarded the yellow-eyed boars as if they were Tai Mora in disguise.

  “Go on,” Lilia said. The other children held their collective breaths.

  Tasia took the bowl and thrust it toward the boars’ mucus-crusted snouts. The boars greedily licked up the blood, snorting and squealing for their offspring. Half a dozen spotted piglets came trotting out of the nearby bushes. Tasia’s eyes lit up with delight.

  “They love it!” Tasia said. “Look at the babies!”

  “The thorn fence keeps out the walking trees,” Lilia said. She began to rise, painfully, and the little feral girl, Namia, turned her blind face to Lilia and offered a shoulder. Lilia thanked her and heaved herself up.

  Lilia’s mother once told her that nothing could cross through a thorn fence, but that was not true, and she did not repeat the lie to these children. The fence did help dissuade some of the worst of what the Woodland had to throw at them, and the boars sent up loud, squealing alarms when dangerous flora and fauna approached the Woodland camp that Lilia had founded in the aftermath of the retreat from the burning ruin of Kuallina.