On the other side, it was very dim. Luna stumbled into a piece of furniture. The soldier came after hir, one long leg and the arm that gripped hir pressing through the gate and then–
The hole in the world snapped shut.
Luna’s ears popped. The fingers wrapped around hir arm loosened. The arm, a chunk of the soldier’s left breast, and most of his left leg slopped to the floor, spraying blood.
Luna felt dizzy. Darkness kissed the edges of hir vision.
“Who’s there?” A voice in the hallway. A key in the door. Where was this? Another cell?
The smell of the blood tasted coppery. Luna tried to go around the furniture, but hir eyes hadn’t yet adjusted. Luna slipped in blood. Fell hard.
Darkness. A moment of consciousness, gazing at blood on hir own hands. Whose blood? Luna had forgotten. Another hand on hir arm. Alive?
Then dark again, a stutter of lost time, and a voice.
“My name is Yisaoh. What are you called?”
Luna peered behind the silhouette of the woman who spoke, and found hirself gazing out dirty windows. Beyond the streaked glass, the light was the color of weak tea. The air smelled of burning trash and tar; the smell lingered at the back of hir throat, so thick ze could taste it.
“I’m sorry for that… welcome,” the woman said again. She turned slightly, no longer in silhouette. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a bent nose and generous mouth. Her head appeared too large for her body, as if she carried far less weight than her frame demanded.
When Luna said nothing, the woman, Yisaoh, continued, “It’s all right. Talking uses more breath. Would you like to see why? I expect that’s what Kirana wants you to see. She told me you were coming. Something must have gone wrong with the wink. It does happen. I mourn the guard. I knew him. We have seen so much death together, and so much hope. But I am heartened that nothing happened to you.”
Luna did wonder at the source of the smell. And the hole in the world.
“How is your head?” Yisaoh offered a hot cup of foul-smelling tea. “This may help.”
Luna took it. Gagged a little. Hir stomach protested. It had been too long since ze ate or drank anything.
Yisaoh reached for her shoulder, then stopped. “I apologize. You are Dhai. You don’t like to be touched, is that right?”
Luna firmed hir mouth. Luna had been born in Dhai, but the culture ze knew was Saiduan. The Saiduan did what they wished to those who were weaker. They were much like the Tai Mora in that way.
“Until Oma begins to respond to the jistas again, we are stuck together,” Yisaoh continued. “There’s fresh bread downstairs. And it smells better than here.”
Yisaoh straightened. Her hands were bony, the veins prominent. The cuffs of her long violet robe shifted and covered them. She went to the door, waited for Luna.
Luna considered Yisaoh’s words. The smell of fresh bread. The tea in hir stomach. Ze had seen no soldiers here, just this woman. Was Yisaoh meant to be a jailer? Or was she a prisoner like Luna?
Ze rose from the bed. Drank a little more of the tea. Ze stumbled, and Yisaoh bent to catch hir. Her arm looped around Luna’s waist, a temporary bulwark against Luna’s own weak body. It felt oddly comforting, after so long in the dark among strangers who hated hir. Maybe this one hated hir too, but in this new air, this new space, Luna could pretend.
Yisaoh escorted Luna through shattered corridors. Crumbled bricks were lashed with mortar and knotted tendrils of plant matter too uniform to be natural. Luna recognized the work of tirajistas. Luna understood that they were… somewhere else. Perhaps on hir world, but most likely not. The air itself felt alien. The way the ground pulled down at hir, seeming somehow firmer. The stones beneath them had melted in places. As they began up a set of broad steps, the hold rumbled, groaning as if alive and in terrible pain. Luna froze on the stairs.
“It passes.” Yisaoh gestured for hir to continue. “The quakes usually aren’t severe enough to threaten the integrity of the hold. Our jistas have shored it up.”
At the top of the stairs was a door. Yisaoh pulled a scarf from a hook, and a pair of goggles that buckled behind the head. She handed another set to Luna. Ze struggled to get it all on.
“You should really eat before we go outside.” Yisaoh pulled a bit of hard candy from her pocket. Luna had not seen candy since ze was a child.
Luna’s fingers shook as ze took it. The burst of flavor on hir tongue made hir shiver. So sweet! It suffused hir body like some vital elixir.
Yisaoh opened the door.
A blast of black, tarry particles. The stench of burning hair, and something far more foul that Luna could not name. Ze stumbled after Yisaoh, fingers pressed to the scarf around hir face for fear it would blow away in the hot, dry wind.
As they trod across the roof, they left deep footprints in the ash. Luna’s curiosity nearly got the better of hir. Luna opened hir mouth to ask what had happened here, but ze had not spoken in so long that no sound came out. Luna coughed.
“Don’t breathe too deeply,” Yisaoh said. “Here. You can see it just through the cover.” She pointed across the roof of the building. Flat roof, Luna noted. Not a place that was used to getting snow, not like Saiduan. A gory orange-black fire blazed in the sky, like a watery eye trailing tears of wispy smoke.
“It’s been poisoning this world for years,” Yisaoh said. “The one Kirana and I are from is already dead, did you know that? This is another, adjacent to it, very similar. It had a great army as well, one that failed. We had to retreat here to the middle of the world, along the equator. You know what that is? The midpoint of a world. It’s the only place still warm enough, here. With the cleanest air. You see? We had few choices.”
Luna searched for the rest of the satellites. Low along the horizon, the faint red pulse of Oma shuddered like a tremulous heart. Luna took in the breadth of the roof. Behind hir, squat towers rose into cloudy brown haze. The windows higher up lay open; what was left of the shutters wept from crumbling frames.
Ze coughed, and wheezed, “There is always another choice.” Hir voice sounded foreign to hir, after spending so long silent. Always another choice, that’s what Maralah would have said, when Luna tried to explain why this or that task had not been completed. People with power always believed there were choices for others, but no other options for themselves except the path of least resistance.
“I assure you we explored many options.”
Luna gazed at the edge of the rooftop. They were only two stories up. Hir body tensed. It was not a terribly long drop. Could Luna make it? Get away?
Ze was moving before ze realized it. Legs stumbling across the dusty rooftop, toward the edge.
“Wait!” Yisaoh, incredulous.
Luna leaped, hurling hirself into the great black abyss that embraced hir.
The smack of a forgiving surface.
A deep plunge.
Luna bobbed in the water of a shallow moat. Pulled acrid air into hir lungs. Coughed fitfully. Luna splashed toward a dark shape ze took to be the shoreline of the sludgy moat, only a few paces distant. As ze crawled onto land, the air cleared for a brief moment. Ze had every intention of running, of getting as far and fast as hir legs would carry hir, but exhaustion overcame hir again. Luna had not eaten, or moved so vigorously, in some time.
Hir hands sank into the deep mud. Knocked against what Luna thought was stone, but no, this was more brittle. Porous. Luna smeared away the mud on the shore and found half a human skeleton there.
Luna recoiled. Lifted hir gaze. Let hirself sink back in the mud.
Across the whole of the broad valley, just visible below the dirty air, lay piles of bones. Luna’s mind could not make sense of it. The wind was warm, but Luna shivered, tucking hir hands under hir arms. Hir damp hair clung to hir face.
Luna gaped at the valley of bones: chitinous rotting helmets, tattered military banners, rusting weapons, the tangled remains of abandoned gear kits, packs and pouches; the sorts of things
no living person would leave behind. What had killed them so quickly that they could not flee?
Ze had never been in a place to make life and death decisions for anyone but hirself, though hir Saiduan masters had certainly sent hundreds of thousands to death at a word. Here was a whole army, thousands of people all at once… Who had decided if they lived or died?
Luna heard raised voices. The bark of a dog.
Yisaoh broke through the misty fog, riding a great pale dog, its body ravaged by mange. The expression on her face was pained. She slid off the dog. A girl came with her, tagging behind, and finally, here, a soldier wearing chitinous armor astride a dog as well, her face as sunken as Yisaoh’s.
“That was foolish,” Yisaoh said. “How far did you think you could go, in your condition? Are you hurt?”
Luna shook hir head. Gazed again to the valley of bones. Yisaoh followed hir look.
“This world’s army,” Yisaoh said. “The one that failed to make it to yours in time. I know what we did on your world is reprehensible. We are not good people. But what would you have done, in the face of this much death?”
“You should have died,” Luna rasped.
Yisaoh brought the girl next to her closer. A simple girl who shared Yisaoh’s high forehead and dark hair. “This is my daughter Tasia. She has a double in your world. As do I. We will die here. Does that make you feel better?”
Luna shook hir head.
“Kirana says you can help. I don’t know how. But if you can, please… even if you can’t save me, you can’t save my daughter… closing those seams between the worlds will save the people who did make it. You can decide now. It’s up to you. Not Kirana, or me. You.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Nothing about the world is fair.”
A gentle trembling rocked the ground beneath them. Yisaoh pulled her daughter to her. “You go back inside with Sorida.”
“Mam–”
“Go.”
Sorida, the soldier, also protested. Yisaoh was firm. They rode together back to the hold.
Yisaoh bent to help Luna up. Luna accepted her hand.
“There are no monsters,” Yisaoh said. “Only choices.”
“What just happened?” Kirana yelled.
Suari raised his hands. Scowled. The other jistas milled about like startled chickens.
“I… lost Oma. Give it a moment. It can be fickle, sometimes. One can lose a thread of power on occasion and–”
“Open it back up!” Kirana said. “That little shit is in there with my wife.”
“A moment, I–” Suari furrowed his brows.
The air shuddered.
A great moaning roar came from overhead.
“The fuck…” Kirana muttered. She rushed to the broad windows at the back of the room. The remaining guard and the jistas followed.
The satellites still hung in the sky: fiery green Tira to the northeast; purple Sina higher up and further west, and red Oma, a knuckle of dark ochre smearing the sky between them, its orbit taking it nearly as high as the double suns at midday.
But now a great rent had opened in the sky beside Oma, smearing the rush of its red light, sending shadows across the ground below. The gory black wedge of some mountainous form pushed through the rent between the worlds, blotting out the suns. It knifed toward the ground, like an upside-down peak trying to embed itself into the woodlands.
“What in Sina’s maw is that?” Kirana said.
A great cracking made the air rumble. The sky closed. The massive form that had cut through the passage lost its mooring and fell.
The boom came first.
“Shit,” Kirana said. She braced herself against the wall.
A rippling quake sent the whole temple shaking. She nearly lost her feet. Dust filled the air, making her choke and cough.
When the shaking stopped, Kirana again gazed out at the sky. Oma winked madly above them. Below, the heaving monolith that had fallen from the sky lay silent and still as the dust and debris it had kicked up began to settle. Its jagged black form towered above the nearby treetops. It was as if Dhai had grown a mountain at the center of the country.
“Kuallina is there,” Kirana said. Two of her legions, three of her commanders, were stationed at Kuallina. “Do you have Oma yet?” she said to Suari.
He shook his head; bits of glass tinkled. “Whatever that was disrupted it.”
“Then we do this blind,” she said. Pointed at the guard. “I need our bird master and the runners. Go.”
He went, crunching across the glass. The dappled light had transformed the room, as if she stood in some other place. Kirana shook her head. Staying sane as the world broke apart took stubborn patience.
“Suari, you’re coming with me. I want that little ataisa back if we have to rip apart the sky again to do it.”
9
Lilia gripped her walking stick so tightly her hand hurt. This could not be, she thought. Not after all this time, after all the work she had done, after how far she had come, after all the delicate alliances they had maintained. Ahkio the coward, the pacifist, was dead, surely? Meyna herself had seen it, wept over it, thrown things and rent her own garments and then happily taken the title of Catori.
Had Meyna lied?
Lilia just inside the thorn fence at the edge of camp, gnawing at one of her new nails; the quick was already exposed, soft as a dragonfly wing. It had become an unconscious habit gnawing away at pieces of herself while her mind was elsewhere.
A few of her most fervent supporters stood a good way distant, Salifa at the head of them, hand on her weapon. Yisaoh and Meyna had tried to keep everyone away from the two men who had arrived at the fence, but the beribboned heads of Lilia’s supporters were visible even from the trees. Lilia worried over them, too, and how they would react to the arrival of this man with Ahkio’s face. Namia kept close to Lilia’s side, nose raised, sniffing the air.
Lilia admitted that one of the men did look like Ahkio; longer hair, leaner face, his eyes more sunken, and shoulders bowed, but it was more than a mere resemblance. He either really was the Kai, or he was another version of the Kai, seeking to throw them into exactly this kind of turmoil.
She kept to one side, letting Yisaoh and Meyna meet the two men as equals. Yisaoh’s face was haggard, shocked, but Meyna only stared at the men fiercely. Lilia tried to place who the sly little man next to Ahkio might be. Liaro? The cousin? That sounded right. An average man, with a long pockmarked face and twisted mouth that made it seem as if he found everything around him either terribly funny or mind-bogglingly complex.
Yisaoh already had the nub of her cigarette out. She did not light it, but sucked on the end, contemplative. “I heard you were dead.”
“And I heard you were dead,” said the man who shared Kai Ahkio’s face. He folded his hands under his armpits. Both men bore bloody scratches on their necks and faces. Brambles clung to their rough-spun clothing. They were sweat-soaked, in need of a wash, with tangled hair and grubby knees. Lilia suspected that having all your limbs sewn back on – or whatever he was going to propose had happened to him – resulted in some rough living.
Meyna followed Ahkio’s gesture. “I saw you die,” Meyna said. “Ora Nasaka came down covered in your blood. I hid, but I saw your body. It’s impossible that you are our Kai. You are someone else.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” Ahkio said. “I’m afraid there’s a good deal I don’t remember about the final days of Dhai.”
The last time Lilia had seen Ahkio was when he told her he refused to go through with her plan to poison the Tai Mora Empress, back at Kuallina before its eventual fall. Yisaoh had drugged him, and they’d gone around him to hold the dinner anyway. They then tried and failed to kill Kirana on their own. The real Ahkio would remember that, but this one didn’t even seem to recall his own death.
“You were supposed to secure Oma’s temple,” Yisaoh said, “after Kuallina fell. That didn’t go very well, turns out. We’re all a
little mad about that, as those temples could have outlasted any seige. You had only to secure them.”
“I’m sorry,” Ahkio said. “I… have no memory of any of that, either. I’ve been–”
“He’s been very ill,” Liaro said. “It’s a strange time.”
“How did you find us?” Lilia asked.
Liaro glanced over at her, as if noticing her for the first time. He picked at his lip; an old scab. From what? Had Ahkio hit him? “There’s much to explain. We understand that. If you will sit with us, offer tea, and–”
“Your hands,” Meyna said, holding out her own.
“You really should be offering tea first,” Liaro said, wryly.
“I’m not Mohrai,” Meyna said. “Perhaps she would have been more welcoming to potential Tai Mora.”
“Where is Mohrai?” Ahkio asked, voice a little high and warbling, like a child’s.
“Dead,” Meyna said, sharply. “But our child is alive, if that concerns you.”
“Our… child?”
“Ahkio, you declared little Hasao Li Kai in the Sanctuary of Oma’s Temple. We have dozens of witnesses.”
“I don’t…” Ahkio shook his head. “I’m sorry, there’s much I don’t remember.”
Liaro reached over and squeezed Ahkio’s shoulder.
“Your hands,” Meyna insisted.
“Meyna,” Ahkio said, “I’m still trying to understand the state of things here. Where is Tir? Rhin and Hadaoh? Is Mey-mey–”
“Your hands!”
He held them out.
His hands were covered in old burn scars; twisted, shiny flesh that had never healed properly. Lilia heard that he had gotten the scars trying to pull his mother from a burning shelter in one of the old Dorinah camps for Dhai exiles.
Meyna took his hands in hers and scrutinized them; Yisaoh did the same, bending just over her shoulder, though honestly, Lilia thought, Meyna was the one more likely to notice a difference in the scar patterns. The Kai had lived with her for several years.
Meyna pushed his hands away. “I’m sorry, but… you’re dead, Ahkio.”
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 113