Kirana wanted to leap and shout and show her around the temple, but she saw the shock and exhaustion on Yisaoh’s face. She needed rest. The other soldiers began to come through, all the jistas and fighters Kirana had left to guard Yisaoh. Even in her rush of pleasure at having Yisaoh at her side, she could not help but also be grateful to see her forces surge again. She needed those jistas for the work ahead.
After baths and food and being reunited with the children, Kirana took them all up to the big bedroom behind the Assembly Chamber and drew the curtains. They all piled into bed, the whole family reunited at last.
“I can’t believe we’re all here,” Yisaoh said. Tasia lay her head onto Yisaoh’s stomach, and was asleep almost immediately. Corina and Moira curled up with one another at the center of the bed. Corina’s fingers were tangled in Yisaoh’s hair.
Kirana lay next to Yisaoh and stared at her face, absently stroking her forehead. “I’m sorry it took so long,” she said.
Yisaoh knit her brows. “Did you… was it you who…?”
“No,” Kirana said. And that was why she had not done it, because she knew Yisaoh would ask, and she would not be able to lie to her. “But it’s done.”
Yisaoh’s eyes filled. Her eyelids fluttered, and the tears wet her face like dew.
“Hush,” Kirana said. “We’re safe now. All of us. Every one. They can never separate us again.”
Through the seam of the curtains, the light of the pulsing satellites danced across the floor.
36
Aaldia was a country of games. Anavha knew that well, but he had not expected this particular game to play such an important part in the end of the world. As the dusk settled, he walked out the back porch and had the other jistas form a circle. The night was cool, lit by the spinning satellites and triad of moons.
Anavha raised his arms and carefully spun up the twinkling illusion that was the game of sphere. Hundreds of orbs twinkled to life in front of them. A whirling collection of spinning spheres formed in a myriad of colors. The smallest was no larger than his thumbnail, the largest as big as his head.
“We move to the center,” Anavha said, gesturing for Lilia and Luna.
Both gaped at the game. Lilia recovered first and said. “You… They just have this map, the same one each time?”
“Not always the same,” Anavha said. “There are different end states.”
The three of them moved to the center of the spinning orbs, which moved lazily along their elliptical orbits.
“Did it look like this?” Anavha asked. “What you saw in the temple?”
“Something like this,” Lilia said. “What’s the purpose of the game?”
“Each projected sphere is called a door,” Anavha said. “Now you will see a second set of pieces come up.” He gestured, and a sparkling net of additional spheres joined the first. Two hundred different pieces then, total. “These are the board pieces,” he said. “The goal is to match the doors and the pieces.”
“But…” Luna said. “There’s… I’m not seeing a difference between the board pieces and the door pieces.”
“This is the math part,” Anavha said. “It has to do with geometry, and where they sit on the board.”
Lilia followed a series of spheres along their path. “A three-dimensional game board, then?”
“Exactly,” Anavha said.
“How many ways are there to play?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The doors and pieces… I have an idea of what the end game for that would be. Pairing like and like. Other worlds and their people, maybe. But what else? How else do you win?”
Anavha considered that. “Well, there are other ways to play it, but they aren’t very sporting.”
“Teach me those ways,” Lilia said.
Anavha said, “I’m not sure–”
“Teach me,” Lilia said. “Luna, are you taking notes?”
“I… yes. This is just very similar to something I know.”
“What?” Lilia asked.
Luna shook her head. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Then let’s begin.”
Anavha made a sweeping motion with his left arm, and all the board pieces furled toward him and collected in a great sphere above his head. He moved his right arm in the opposite direction, and the door pieces joined them, all whirling together in the massive sphere.
“What was that?” Lilia asked. “What you just did?”
“Oh, that was nothing,” Anavha said. “That just resets the game.”
The twinkling spheres blinked back into their orbits.
It was a beautiful little game. Anavha loved it.
Three hours later, her mind spinning with glowing orbs and violet light, Lilia announced that she was done, and they could delay no longer. She had lost the game sixteen out of eighteen times. Namia had fallen asleep on the porch behind her.
“We don’t have time to go again,” Lilia said, gazing at the moons as they began their descent.
Luna shivered. The winking orrery went out.
Saradyn and Roh still sat outside with them on the soft grass; Saradyn snoring like a great bear, Roh nodding in and out of sleep.
Lilia wished for sleep, but knew she didn’t have time for it. Two days, Luna had said, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. How far had Kirana gotten already? Had she gotten into the fifth temple? Convinced the keepers to make one of her jistas a guide and worldbreaker? All she had to go on was this game and its various outcomes. Pull in the spheres, remake them, reshape them, put pieces back into the worlds they belonged. There had only been two hundred pieces here, though, and her memory of the orrery was that there were far more. And if they represented worlds, all these many versions of the worlds all colliding together… there could very well be millions. Trillions. She did not say that out loud, but it made her head ache: a pulsing pain behind her left eye.
Anavha yawned. She didn’t want to pause their plan for sleep, but realized it would be safer if he, at least, did so before opening a gate. Too much relied on the gates.
Meyna had bedded down all of the Dhai in the surrounding fields, and a few scouts with flame fly lanterns kept watch on the hills around the farm. The Saiduan had claimed the barn, since there were fewer of them.
But a few other Dhai were still up, and one came over to Lilia, catching her before she went inside.
“Li?” Salifa said.
“Ah!” Lilia said. “You’re alive! I’m sorry. It’s been–”
“I know,” Salifa said. “I wanted to say I was sorry I didn’t go with you.”
“It was my fault,” Lilia said. “I was embarrassed to tell you all that I burned out. And the rest, well… Meyna does not like me, does not like the white ribbons–”
“I heard you need a jista.”
“I do,” Lilia said.
Salifa touched the ribbon at her throat. “Avosta won’t speak to you. He says he hates you now. Harina never came back, and Mihina–”
“Salifa, I’m not asking you to go with us. Death is–”
“I know,” Salifa said. “What I’m telling you is, they all died to get us here. It’s foolish for me not to help now, here at the end.”
Tears wet Lilia’s cheeks. She wiped at them.
Namia yawned on the porch, rolled over, and came over to her, crooning to comfort her.
“It’s all right,” Lilia said. “Thank you, Salifa. Two hours? Come inside and I’ll have Maralah show you how this works.”
Lilia walked in and introduced Salifa to Maralah. “A tirajista,” Lilia said. “Could you show her?”
“You show her,” Maralah said, turning her back on Lilia.
Lilia sighed and went over the diagram with Salifa. “When we are in, this is where you will be. Me and Zezili, here. Taigan, that annoying sanisi, here. Maralah here. Anavha. And Kadaan, the Saiduan man, there.”
Salifa nodded. “If we don’t survive this,” she said, “I hope Sina takes our souls and does some
thing very useful with them.”
“Me too,” Lilia said.
A scuffle from the hall caught her attention. Anavha leaned against the doorframe leading back to the bedrooms. “I’m afraid,” he said.
Lilia went back outside and woke Roh and Saradyn. “Roh, can you and Saradyn sleep in the room with Anavha?” Lilia asked. “There are six good rooms here, and three beds.”
When she went back into the house, she found Taigan already asleep in one of the back bedrooms, breathing contentedly, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Lilia noted that he slept with his boots on though.
She entered his room. His eyes snapped open.
“Two hours,” Lilia said.
He grunted and rolled over.
When she returned, Salifa had gone, and Maralah stood over the kitchen table with Kadaan. They had wiped away the old diagrams and sketched out new ones. Roh skipped over to them on a little puff of Para’s breath. Said something to them in Saiduan. Lilia could not help smiling at seeing him use his gift again.
“You have everything sorted?” Lilia asked.
“You have a tirajista?” Maralah countered.
“I can have Salifa,” Lilia said.
“That’s only one tirajista,” Maralah said. “We need two.”
“That’s what we have,” Lilia said. “Anavha helped me send word to my contact in the temple earlier. My contact will meet you inside, in the Assembly Chamber, when the moons set.”
“That’s in two hours,” Maralah said.
“That’s what I said. We’re out of time,” Lilia said. “Kirana is ahead of us.”
Roh said, “We can trust your contact?”
“Yes. She’s the one who’s given me all the information I have from Oma’s Temple so far.”
“I’m worried about how fast this needs to happen,” Roh said.
“We have one chance,” Lilia said. “If we don’t take it now, we lose it forever. Or at least for the length of our own lives.”
“I think we should wait,” Maralah said. “Roh is right. We are all tired. Tired people make mistakes.”
“We have to get our people into that fifth temple before Kirana does,” Lilia said. “If her people end up taking those places… I don’t know that we’ll be able to get them out.”
“We know so little,” Maralah muttered.
“It’s more than Kirana knows,” Lilia said.
“You can’t guarantee that,” Roh said.
“I’m willing to take this risk,” Lilia said. “I’m going to walk in the front with Taigan to buy you some time. With Kirana sleeping in the Kai quarters, surrounded by jistas… she could murder you all coming out of the wink in that Assembly Chamber. We have to call her down below. A distraction that rouses the whole temple. A spectacle.”
“We need sleep,” Maralah said.
“Then sleep,” Lilia said, turning away so she didn’t have to see Maralah’s face. “Two hours.”
Roh came after her. “Li, listen.”
“I need to sleep,” Lilia said. She paused at the door of the room she was going to share with Namia and Zezili.
“Maralah made a good–”
“We go in two hours or we don’t go,” Lilia said. “Those are the choices.”
“That’s garbage, Li,” he said. “There are more than two choices. It’s not all good or evil, this or that. We have the power to find other choices. If I learned nothing else in Saiduan, it was that. I… You don’t know what happened there. How I lived, and others… It was very bad. I thought I had two choices, always, but there were more than that, always. And I… made mistakes. Don’t make those mistakes.”
“I’m not going to make any more mistakes,” Lilia said, and closed the door.
37
Lilia woke with the light of the swirling satellites in her eyes, peeping in through the window of the bed she slept in. They had not winked out in the two hours she had tried to sleep.
It was Namia who woke her. “Going?” Namia signed.
“No,” Lilia said. “You’re staying here. I told you that.” She heard Maralah, Roh and Kadaan already awake and conferring in the kitchen, in Saiduan. She hated it when they spoke Saiduan together because she knew so little of it.
Zezili lay beside her, not asleep but staring at the ceiling.
“Do you sleep at all?” Lilia asked.
“No,” Zezili said. “I don’t think so. I never feel tired. It was nice to just sit here for a minute, I guess.”
Lilia went to the rear bedroom and woke up Taigan. “It’s time.”
“It’s not even light.”
“That’s the point.”
He grumbled, but got out of bed.
Lilia found Saradyn and Anavha asleep in another room, and got them up as well. She sent Namia out to round up the other jistas and fighters they needed. When Lilia saw Salifa with them, she dared to have a little hope.
“Thank you,” Lilia said.
Salifa inclined her head. “It’s an honor, Li.”
Lilia counted them all up, and Maralah confirmed it.
“Are you worried what Meyna will do when you’re gone?” Roh asked. “That maybe she will… I don’t know.”
“I don’t care,” Lilia said. “It’s always been about this, about striking back. Either we come back victorious, or we die trying. Either way, what comes after is up to Meyna, not me. I want no part in it.”
Roh raised his brows, but said nothing.
“Anavha?” Lilia said. “You take Maralah first. Roh and Kadaan next.” She doubted he could do two gates at once, and she wanted to keep things simple.
Anavha took a deep breath. Closed his eyes.
The gate wavered just outside, through the open back door.
Maralah muttered something in Saiduan. Taigan laughed.
“One last great adventure,” Taigan said, in Dhai.
Lilia thought she should give some speech, something beautiful and a little melancholy, but she was too tired. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. She had to keep moving forward.
Maralah stepped through the gate and onto the plateau, and set the world on fire.
38
Roh stood in the woodland behind Oma’s Temple, Kadaan at his side. Anavha shivered behind them, though he was wrapped in a large dog-hair coat. Saradyn had insisted on coming, though Roh could not think of anything in particular he could help them with. Intimidation, maybe. An extra fighting arm. Though Roh knew that if it came to close combat, they would have already failed. With only one chance, though, Lilia and Maralah had insisted on many redundancies.
“You didn’t have to come,” Roh said to Kadaan in Saiduan.
“You needed a parajista.”
“We had a number of other parajistas,” Roh said softly. They were waiting for the spread of Maralah’s fire to wake up the temple and distract the Tai Mora. Lilia had wanted them to move immediately, but Maralah urged them to wait for the temple to light up. From here, the top of the temple appeared very far away.
Roh held out his hand. “After, I’d like–”
“Let’s not talk about after,” Kadaan said. “We go forward.”
Roh watched the top of the temple again. Lights began to flicker in the long series of slanted windows that marked corridors and foyers. Flame-fly lanterns roused to wakefulness.
“Another few minutes,” Kadaan said. “If we move too quickly, they’ll still be close enough to reach us.”
“Are you ready, Anavha?” Roh asked in Dorinah.
He nodded.
Kadaan was the more skilled parajista, so he pulled Para first, weaving an intricate web using the Song of Davaar and the Song of the Wind. Roh held out his hand for Anavha. Saradyn grimaced, but came forward, and Kadaan wrapped them all into the blue mist of Para’s embrace.
Anavha closed his eyes and began to tremble. He wouldn’t be able to see the threads of Para any more than Roh could see Anavha using Oma’s.
Roh sent a second thread of Para’
s power across the vast distance, tying it off at the crenulation that marked the end edge of the glass over the Assembly Chamber.
Then they were flying, weightless, with alarming speed. Anavha held onto Roh. Saradyn gaped at the ground as it disappeared beneath them.
“Wonderful!” Saradyn yelled in Dorinah.
Roh kept his gaze on the temple, looking for defensive threads of Para’s power. On the other side of the temple, over the plateau, a great bloom of blue mist crackled. Roh felt the wind it generated, and pulled Para to try to counteract it, but Kadaan hissed at him.
“Don’t do that again,” Kadaan said. “I have it.”
They alighted on the slippery glass of the Assembly Chamber. As Kadaan released his spell, Roh called a focused tornado of air and smashed through the ceiling while also damping the sound of the crash of glass. It was eerily silent.
Kadaan swung down first, weaving a defensive wall spell as he leapt.
Saradyn went next, landing heavily on the table at the center of the room. Roh stuck his head further in, trying to see who was inside. Kadaan held the defensive wall in place; someone was yelling. Roh heard it through the defense.
“Stay here,” Roh told Anavha. “I don’t want to risk you.”
“I don’t want to be here alone,” Anavha whispered.
“I’m right down here!” Roh said. He sent a whirl of Para’s breath below him to break his fall, and landed softly on the table.
Kadaan held a shimmering defensive wall around the table, pressing back a single woman who was nearly crushed against the far wall. Roh thought it was supposed to be empty, though.
“Where are Lilia and Taigan?” Roh asked.
Saradyn pointed at the door to the chamber. Smoke swirled under it from the stairwell.
“What’s burning?” Kadaan said.
39
Taigan stepped through the gate and onto the plateau outside Oma’s Temple. The garrison there was already on fire, a great billowing blaze that was quickly consuming the whole plateau, sending bits of charred grass into the sky that trickled onto the woodland below. More blazes would begin, burning out more of the Tai Mora. That pleased him.
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