The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  When the food was finished, they sat at the table together: Nusi and Giska; Natanial and Anavha; and six of the eight siblings, all called in for supper. Natanial laughed and flirted with all of them, and Anavha found himself envious of Natanial’s great confidence.

  When the meal was done, Natanial helped clean up, and they all moved outside to enjoy the cool evening. Most of the siblings retired to their quarters, and Anavha went to bed as well, before Natanial could ask him more questions, leaving Natanial to argue his case with Nusi and Giska.

  Anavha could just hear the murmur of their voices through the open window.

  “He belongs to neither of us,” Nusi said, voice rising. “When he came here, he was broken. In many ways, he still is. Dorinah twists all their people into one type of broken child or another.”

  Natanial answered; Anavha knew the tone of his voice, but he spoke too softly, and the tenor of the conversation dimmed.

  Nusi came to bed several hours later. Anavha was still awake, staring at the ceiling. As Nusi undressed, they said, “I understand why he frightens you.”

  “He doesn’t frighten you?”

  “On the contrary,” Nusi said, lifting the covers and pressing their warm, naked body to his. “I always have suspicions about Natanial’s motives. You did not seem keen to join him. He talks of murdering your own people.”

  “I’m not, and yet…”

  “Yes, Natanial has that effect on people,” Nusi said, stroking his hair, and their voice was as warm as their body. He pressed closer to them. “If you leave us here, you forget all this peace.”

  “Just because Aaldia is at peace doesn’t mean I am,” he said. “Maybe I can learn things from them, and bring what I’ve learned back here.”

  “If they let you leave, after Daorian is fallen.”

  “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Stay here, love,” Nusi said, and they brushed his hair with their long fingers. The high window was open, though it was cool, and he caught the scent of the fields, the loamy scent of manure and straw; he heard the lone cry of some plains cat, celebrating a meal. “You want me to stay?” he asked.

  “What I want is unimportant. As is what Natanial wants. You came here to discover what you want. You have power, he is right. But that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to use it. You have no responsibility to anyone but yourself, and your community. And we are your community, now.”

  “It seems a shame not to use it,” he said. “Oma won’t be in the sky forever, will it? They say it will be ten, maybe twenty years. Then I won’t be anyone at all anymore. I liked that, when I wasn’t anyone special. Just someone… loved.”

  “Owned,” Nusi said softly.

  “Owned,” he murmured. “I know it’s wrong, I know you and Natanial don’t like it, but I miss it. I miss other people telling me what to do. I hate having choices, Nusi. Just tell me to stay.”

  “You know I cannot.”

  “Then tell me to go.”

  Nusi laughed. “You miss the point of this exercise.”

  “I can’t decide.”

  “Then sleep, love. Answers often come in sleep.”

  “I’m so afraid of the world,” he said. “It’s collapsing all around us. I want to hide.”

  “I know. We all do. But…” Nusi sighed. “The gods are not kind. They break the world when they do this dance. We’ve all known this day was coming. Now we must endure it.”

  “I don’t know if I can… Should I just keep sitting here?”

  “You keep trying to get me to make your decision.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m going to sleep now, Anavha. We’ll talk about this over breakfast.”

  Nusi closed their eyes. Anavha lay watching the shadows move across their face, dimly illuminated by the outside perimeter lights. All this peace, all this quiet.

  He lay next to Nusi for a long time, until Nusi’s breath came regularly and they shifted away from him in the dark. Then he got up, quietly, and crept outside into the cool air.

  Anavha sat on a large chair on the porch, watching the night flies sparkling across the fields. He pinched the inside of his arm, bringing pain, and with it, a sharper sense of the world, an awareness of being alive. Again, he had the urge to take a blade in his hand and cut away his worry and uncertainty, but instead he breathed deeply and closed his eyes. He had longed for control over his life. It was what led him to the cutting in the first place. And he did have control over his life now. Nusi did not bind him. He had his own small income from working on the journal. Natanial had made no show of force, and given no indication that he would haul Anavha away if he did not go freely. He did not think Natanial would kidnap him again, not now that he was free of Saradyn and the dream of Tordin.

  Which left him here, in his own skin, alone, to make his own decisions. It was not as exhilarating as he’d always hoped. It was far more terrifying. If he chose wrong, he had only himself to blame for it.

  A sharp flash lit up the sky, breaking the stillness. He squinted, but the lightning or tear had already vanished. Out here, he could almost pretend the world was normal. Almost.

  He went back inside and slept, fitfully, until the first gray tendrils of dawn woke him. Oma, Tira and Sina winked in the sky, static though the suns were not, their soft light blending to turn the sky a deeper shade of lavender.

  Anavha got up before Nusi and made tea. He pulled on a short coat and went outside to see how the sheep had spent the night. He enjoyed living on a farm, enjoyed walking outside to see a long expanse of gold fields in every direction. Their nearest neighbors lived over the next hill, a two hour walk distant.

  He went out to the sheep pen to let them loose to graze. The dogs outside the kennel raised their heads as he passed. He had feared them when he first came here, but they recognized each other as participants with the same goal: to protect the livestock.

  Anavha opened the paddock and counted the sheep as they came out onto the meadow to feed. He stood up on the rail to get a better look, and something in the distance, on the other side of the large run, caught his eye.

  He clambered down and made his way along the brush fence, running his hand along the exterior. He loved the feel of the fence. He had helped Giska and Nusi pull young saplings from the woods just south of here and wend them through the broken patch of fence to mend it.

  An object in the distance that appeared to be a pile of rags and brush began to resolve itself into the form of a human being. Anavha came up short just fifty paces distant, staring long at the figure to see if it moved.

  When it didn’t, he crept closer.

  The body was strangely serene. Only the absolute stillness and awkward twist to the torso and left leg made it seem unnatural. There were no footprints, no broken grasses leading to or from the body. Only the bent stems on which it rested.

  Anavha gazed upward. The sky rippled ominously. He took a step away from the body, fearful more might tumble from this sky. This was not the first one he had seen. Nusi had discovered three in their fields over the last few months. The Tai Mora weren’t the only people fleeing to this world anymore. To his mind, there was enough room for everyone, but was that really true?

  He stood among the grass as flies circled the body. The clothing was foreign, the hairstyle strange. This was an alien person, a worldly invader. But he found he could summon up no hatred for them. If his world was dying, he would throw himself into the tears between his world and another, too.

  The morning was cool, and he shivered, though from the cold or the body, he did not know. He gazed back at the house. From this distance, the old Aaldian house was like a ship on a great green plain. The Aaldians had such a love for the sea that it should not have surprised him that they built their houses with riggings on which plants could twine their way from the sod gardens that insulated the roofs. The house itself was half-buried in the ground, which protected it from windstorms and the great tornadic clouds that prowled the plains. Carved totems,
like those on the prows of ships, bookended the house.

  As the double helix of the suns rose over the house, Natanial stepped out onto the stone porch. It reminded Anavha of the house in Tordin, when Anavha had opened the gate to Aaldia and turned back to see Natanial there, letting him choose his path. Maybe Natanial had not given him a choice at all. Anavha had thought journeying from Tordin would mean escaping the madness, but as long as the world was mad, it would intrude upon his life. Anavha had been fighting himself for so long that he didn’t know what it would be like to fight other people. Maybe Natanial was right, and Anavha would only have to open a few gates, help mend the world in a small way, and then he could come home.

  Natanial walked across the porch and followed the fence until he stood at Anavha’s side.

  “You’re seeing more of them,” Natanial said, nodding at the body.

  “I don’t want to destroy Dorinah,” Anavha said. “It was, is, where my family lives. But this… this is what they are trying to stop, aren’t they? The Tai Mora? They can protect us from this?”

  “There are whole foreign armies of them in Dorinah,” Natanial said, “pushing through the soft spaces between the worlds. It’s one reason they want Daorian. It’s a secure hold, with a good port. The Tai Mora can hold out against these other worlds far longer, in Daorian.”

  “They’ll stop this, then?” Anavha said. “Nusi and Giska, here… we can save this place?”

  “It’s possible,” Natanial said. “I want to keep you safe, Anavha. I want to keep everyone I care about safe, but to do that we need to align ourselves with the Tai Mora. The closer we are to them, the less likely we are to fall by their hand. You understand? It’s why I stayed close to Saradyn, because there was no one in Tordin more powerful than him. And it’s why I’m with the Tai Mora now.”

  “You can’t really save me if something goes wrong, though.”

  “I can try.”

  The body remained inert. Flies crawled at the edges of the eyes. Anavha thought they would have burst, but the eyes were half-open, dull, with just a hint of wetness at the corners.

  “Do you feel responsible for my decision?” Anavha asked.

  “I always feel responsible,” Natanial said.

  “If I go with you, I could come back here at any moment. I won’t make any promises, or accept any binding.”

  “I’m all right with that,” Natanial said. “Come, let’s tell them what you’ve decided.”

  Nusi waited for them on the porch, wiping their hands on an old dishrag, expression inscrutable.

  “So you are going?” Nusi said.

  “I will only be gone a little while,” Anavha said. “I’m going to stop all the people falling from the sky. He says I can help.”

  Nusi opened their arms and embraced him. Anavha cried. He wanted to take it back, then, as he inhaled the scent of them. But he knew Nusi would disapprove if he made a promise and broke it. So he just cried, and then went to his room to pack his things.

  When he returned to the porch, Nusi and Natanial were gazing at the sky. Great thunderheads roiled across the lavender expanse. Jagged lightning radiated from the largest of them. And there, to the north, just before the mountain range, a ragged line had opened, a great wound on the purple horizon through which a yellow fog emanated.

  Nusi pulled Anavha close and kissed him. He lingered as long as he could, and then he felt a few drops of rain carried by the wind, and he was moving away, following after Natanial.

  “Let’s see if you’re any better with opening those gates now,” Natanial said, and gestured to a broad area of meadow well clear of the house.

  Anavha held up his hands, because he found that it was easier to focus that way, and called on the power of Oma. He felt the breath of the satellite beneath his skin instantly, and his body was soon suffused in red tendrils of mist. He trembled a little with the pleasure and fear of it.

  “Where are we going?” Anavha said. “Which part of Daorian? It needs to be somewhere I’ve been, somewhere I’ve seen.”

  “There’s a village just outside,” Natanial said, “Asaolina. You know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring us out on the hill overlooking it, there in the south. Less likely to be people there.”

  Anavha closed his eyes. He remembered Asaolina, because it was where Zezili liked to stop and rest if they were coming into Daorian too late at night. She would tell him it was too dangerous to bring a man into town after dark. They stayed at an inn there, the Copper Maidenhead, and he remembered the way the sheets smelled of lavender and old socks, and the light was always orange, because the flame flies in all the lanterns were dying. The memory overcame him, and for a moment he was back in that tavern, and Zezili had her hands around his throat as she straddled him. They were both covered in sweat, and his fear and desire mixed in that old, heady way it had every time she touched him.

  Asaolina.

  Anavha breathed in, pulling the power of Oma into his body and neatly knitting and binding it into the shape he needed. He released his breath, and a great spiraling eye opened in the air in front of him. As he exhaled, it continued to open, further and further, until Anavha could see the familiar tiled roofs of Asaolina on the other side.

  Natanial whistled softly. “You’ve gotten much better,” he said. His gaze turned up, to the boiling sky. “We best hurry.”

  Natanial stepped quickly through the gate, and Anavha followed.

  Natanial saw Anavha stumble as he came out of the gate and onto a low hill outside Asaolina. Natanial caught him by the arm and hauled him up. Natanial turned to see what had tripped Anavha. As he did, light flashed across his vision. A massive black tear opened above the fields, not more than a few hundred paces away.

  And an army fell out of the sky.

  The gate closed.

  Natanial shivered. This vision of the army lingered; hundreds, no, thousands, descending onto the Aaldian farm like black insects. Whose army? What world? What nation? He had no idea. Everything was coming together. Everything was falling apart.

  “Is everything all right?” Anavha asked, and though the gate was closed and Anavha could not see what lay behind them, Natanial kept hold of his arm and propelled him forward, so he could not look back.

  “It’s fine,” Natanial said. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

  8

  Luna had long practice with silence.

  The Saiduan had shaped much of the childhood Luna remembered. It was a childhood where others spoke, and Luna obeyed. That childhood had taught Luna about the quiet resistance of hir own silence.

  Once Luna had decided not to speak about the book ze had toted across the ocean from Saiduan, it had become easier to give up speaking all together. Luna knew what the Empress had not yet intuited: that the temples could do far more than simply seal away the other worlds from crossing over. They could be used to remake the world. To shatter continents. Sink whole cities. Luna kept hir silence, because it was the only way ze could think to save the world.

  Instead, Luna spun stories in hir head, ruminated over deaths, cursed Roh, cursed hir parents, wept over what was lost, soaked in hir anger at all those who had owned hir over these many years.

  Luna pressed hir face to the cell floor, half-dozing. Hunger came and went. Starvation was at once like freeing one from the body and reminding one of just how vulnerable the flesh was, how transient. Luna had once lasted thirty-seven days without food. It had been among the best thirty-seven days of hir life, because Luna had been fully and completely in control of hir body for the first time.

  They would try to feed Luna again soon. Ze heard them bickering about it.

  The voices subsided. Footsteps sounded outside the door, gritty leather soles on stone. Dhai didn’t wear leather shoes. That was how Luna could distinguish the Dhai from Tai Mora.

  Creak of the cell door. A spill of light. The guards dragged Luna to the table at the center of the cellblock. One of the guards hefted hi
r onto the bench. Luna was too tired to struggle. Luna expected to see food: rice, eating sticks, maybe a bowl of broth and a spoon. Instead, they stripped Luna down and took hir up two flights of stairs to a big empty bathing room and tossed hir into a massive pool.

  The water was so cold, it shocked Luna breathless. For a moment ze was back under the icy surface of a Saiduan river, choking on death. Luna’s limbs felt wooden. Ze could not swim. With some chagrin, Luna realized the water was shallow enough to stand in.

  One of the guards called from the edge, “Get decent. Scrub up.”

  When Luna refused, they came in and scrubbed Luna roughly then hauled hir out. Luna did little to help them with their task, even as they pulled a clean tunic over hir head and dragged hir up the never-ending staircase. At the very top, in a chamber dominated by a massive circular table, the Empress of the Tai Mora waited, grim as ever.

  On either side of the Empress, two jistas in long robes waited, hands folded.

  “Hello again, Luna,” Kirana said. Luna had learned to hate her narrow face, the thin lips, the cold black eyes. “Please, do you want to sit? Eat?”

  Luna just stared at her.

  “I understand,” Kirana said. “I have been unfair, wrapped up in my own concerns. People I trust have suggested that you may not appreciate why we have done as we have, and why it’s in your best interests to assist us. I know it seems cruel, but it was very necessary. I could tell you, yes, or… I could show you what’s becoming of all these worlds that others are abandoning.”

  She gestured to one of the jistas next to her. “Suari?”

  The man raised his hand. The air trembled. Luna felt the pressure in hir ears and pressed hir hands to hir ears.

  Something in the air broke.

  Luna recoiled. The world split in two. A shimmering hole opened in the air just ahead of hir, very nearly touching the floor. Luna feared that anything going over the threshold that got caught on the lip between the worlds would blink out of existence.

  The guard at hir left took hir arm roughly and pushed hir through ahead of him. Luna shrieked as ze went over the lip of the hole in the world – to somewhere else.