Kirana laughed, and used the pass phrase they had agreed upon. “The ways between the worlds are ours.”
Her mother clapped her hands and stood. Embraced her. Used her appropriate response: “Happy day! This is so joyful.”
What an incredible thing, Kirana thought, to save herself and her own world from… well, herself.
“Mother, it’s going to be so grand,” Kirana said. “The power, the world. You’ve done so well. Thank you.”
Her mother leaned over and pressed her forehead to Kirana’s.
“I am so proud of you,” her mother said. “No one else could have done this. No one else could have saved us.”
“I did what had to be done,” Kirana said. She finished her tea and rose. “I suspect I should announce it to our people here. And I’ll need to find where they’ve hidden their version of Yisaoh and the children.”
“I’m sure you’ll make short order of it.”
As Kirana stepped down from the little raised tea table, the air suddenly became cold, so cold it hurt her bones. She paused. Stared at the sky.
“What is it?” her mother asked.
Kirana grimaced. Her bones knew, knew because she had felt this before, in some other life. Knew because something that she thought had come together was now pulling apart.
“I don’t know,” Kirana said.
The ground trembled.
And there was light.
46
Lilia gasped. She woke with the light of the swirling satellites in her eyes, peeping in through the window of the bed she slept in: the Aaldian farmhouse. She knew the pane of the window only too well.
She grabbed at her stomach where her wound was, but found her tunic untouched, her skin whole. No blood. No torn clothing. Silence, outside. Then the bark of a dog. A breath of wind. The creaking of the old house.
Namia barrelled into the doorway, signing at her: “Going?”
Lilia’s heart pounded hard. Sweat soaked her back. “Namia!” she said, and hugged her close. Namia wriggled from her grasp.
“Going?” Namia signed again.
Lilla stared at the window. Still dark, very dark, the same time she had woken the morning before.
She heard Maralah, Roh and Kadaan already awake and conferring in the kitchen, in Saiduan. Zezili lay beside her, not asleep but staring at the ceiling.
“Are you ready?” Zezili asked. “I never feel tired. It was nice to just sit here for a minute, I guess.”
Lilia just lay there, trying to still her racing heart. Namia shook her again.
“Not yet,” Lilia said. “Just… sit here with me awhile.”
“I’m so bored,” Zezili said.
“Go kill something,” Lilia said, slipping her shoes on. The floor was cold. “Just… Not a person. And not too far away, obviously.”
Zezili sighed.
Lilia went out into the kitchen where Maralah, Roh, and Kadaan stood. Maralah and Roh held cups of hot tea.
“Awake already?” Maralah said.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Lilia said. “Maralah was right. We need the sleep.”
“But everyone will be awake, then,” Roh said.
“It’s all right,” Lilia said. “I’ve learned… I know that there aren’t any omajistas in the temple, not in the Assembly Chamber. They’ve been called away. And if we wait, well… if we wait, there will be even fewer people in the temple, come morning. We can all go in together. We don’t need a second distraction.”
“When did you learn that?” Maralah asked sharply.
“Trust it,” Lilia said. “Taigan and I won’t go in by ourselves. We’ll come through the gate with the others. I know for certain no one will be there.”
Maralah and Kadaan exchanged a look. “This is all very unexpected. Did you have some kind of vision? Or have you lost your nerve?” Maralah asked.
“It could be called a vision, maybe. I just… I have new information. You were right. Anavha needs to sleep. You, the men, all of us. Tired people make mistakes.”
“When do we move then?” Maralah said. “You said yourself we’re very much out of time.”
“Just before noon,” Lilia said. “Most people will be going down to the banquet hall for the noon meal.”
“That’s… a lot of missing hours, Li,” Roh said. “You were so urgent before.”
“Please, just… could you trust that I know better? Maralah agreed.”
“I agreed that we needed more sleep,” Maralah said, “especially Anavha. But another ten hours or more?”
“What do you suggest?” Lilia asked.
“Dawn,” Maralah said. “That’s another three hours.”
“Roh?” Lilia asked. “Kadaan? Do you agree?”
“I’m good with dawn,” Kadaan said. “I’m heading back to sleep, then. Roh?”
“In a minute,” Roh said.
Maralah shook her head. “You can’t go shifting this plan around,” she said. “Any more changes–”
“It’s going to need to be flexible,” Lilia said. “There’s so much we don’t know.”
“To bed again with me, then,” Maralah said, eyeing them both one more time before she left.
Roh said, “What happened?”
“I can’t… I can’t really explain it.”
“Try.”
“You won’t believe it.”
“There’s a good many things I wouldn’t have believed two years ago,” he said. “I’d believe them now.”
She sat next to him at the table, so they almost touched. Reached for Maralah’s abandoned cup of tea. Sipped it. Bitter.
“We lost,” she said.
“We seem to do that.”
“No, I mean… It was like I’d done it, the whole plan. And it went terribly.”
“A dream?”
She rubbed her hand against her stomach, where the wound had been. “I don’t think so.”
“So, you have a better idea of how to do it this time?”
“I know how to do it differently.”
“Did we live? Any of us?”
“No.”
“Well,” he said, standing. “Whatever we do this time will certainly be better than that.”
“What if there’s no way out, Roh?” she blurted.
He paused. “What do you mean?”
“What if this is all one big loop, one long cycle, that can’t ever be broken? What if we are fools to try?”
“We’d be fools not to,” he said.
Lilia fell asleep at the table. It was Zezili who woke her, just before dawn.
“Hey,” Zezili said. “Everybody said you delayed the plan?”
Lilia yawned, trying to snatch at her dreams, but she had slept soundly, no echoes or memories.
“That’s right,” she said. “Be flexible.”
Lilia woke Taigan up. He stretched and yawned and stilled as she told him the new plan.
Taigan frowned. “You and I won’t go in the front?” he said. “That’s so disappointing.”
“I’m sure,” Lilia said, giving him a long look that only made him shrug. She shivered at the memory of him burning the temple down around them, nearly murdering her on the stair. Taigan, ever the same in his unpredictability.
The others gathered around the table, making tea and pulling yams and turnips from the coals where they had been roasting since the evening before.
Lilia erased what they had mapped out a few hours earlier and said, “I’ve had some time to think. I still agree that the fire on the plateau will draw them out and create a distraction. But I don’t believe it’s necessary for Taigan and me to pull Kirana out. If we wait long enough, she will have left her chamber for the day.”
“Probably for the fifth temple, though,” Maralah said. “If she beats us to it–”
“We want her to.”
“Why?” Roh said.
“Because once her jistas are in place, they’re locked into the mechanism. And that also means she can’t use them.”
“I have… sources,” Lilia said. “All of her jistas are going to be concentrating their power there. She won’t be thinking about defense in there because we won’t have shown our hand too early. She’ll have no idea we’re coming.”
“We still have to make sure no one is in the Assembly Chamber,” Roh said. “It will be busier during the day.”
“Not if Kirana is gone,” Lilia said.
Maralah shook her head. “We don’t know that.”
“The Kai’s living quarters are there,” Roh said. “Her family could be there, and soldiers to guard them–”
“My contact can clear out the soldiers,” Lilia said.
“Her family–”
“If they are there, we’ll deal with them,” Lilia said. “They are the least of our concerns. We still go in through the ceiling. We still step through the circle.”
“Are we agreed in this?” Maralah asked.
Lilia held her breath.
Zezili said, “I’ll do this whatever way kills the most of them.”
Roh leaned over to Anavha, translating.
“How precise can you be?” Lilia asked Anavha. “Could you open a gate right on top of the table? Or right inside the door?”
Anavha considered that. “I could get you onto the table, yes. Or very near it.”
“We act quickly,” Lilia said. “If we are fast enough, focused enough, they will have no time to counter us. I know that now. I was… overthinking. I’m sorry. Kadaan and Roh go through Anavha’s gate first, pushing out a defensive wall to mask the sound and keep others out. The rest of us, we make a circle around the table. There will be a raised green circle beneath it. Step right onto it and hold hands.”
Taigan snorted. “And then what, we sing religious songs?”
The phrase sent a knife of fear through Lilia. She thought of the loop again, the possibility that all of this was going to end the same way. “Fast,” Lilia said. “No thinking. I want to practice it, right here, around this table. Anavha?”
“Are you serious?” Roh said.
“Yes,” Lilia said.
Anavha took them all outside, and opened a gate just above the kitchen table. They ran through the exercise three times. The third time, they were all through and in place in just twenty seconds. Lilia chewed at her fingernail after she finished the count the third time, wondering if that was going to be fast enough. Perhaps, perhaps not. Surely it would be fast enough to keep Taigan from burning the whole temple down around them. She could hope.
“That’s as fast as it’s getting,” Maralah said. “We’re losing time. If someone else gets up on that dais before you–”
“If someone’s up there when we get in,” Lilia said, “we’ll have enough free jistas to knock them off. Our focus is on getting me on that pedestal, no matter the cost.”
“And then we close the ways?” Maralah said.
“Yes,” Lilia said. She didn’t know what else to say, because she had no idea what she was actually going to do this time, knowing precisely what came next.
47
Kirana lay in bed with Yisaoh, absently stroking her temple while the light of the satellites streamed through the windows and the double helix of the suns made their slow bid for dominance of the sky. She wanted to linger much longer, but she already heard the children awake in the next room, laughing. And the sky waited for no one.
She pulled off her coverlet and dressed just as someone knocked at the door and peeked in. A little Dhai servant, come to stoke the fire and set out tea.
“Come in,” Kirana said.
“Shall I let in the children?” the Dhai girl asked.
“Give Yisaoh a few more moments to sleep.”
“Yes, Empress.” The girl set the tea tray on the table at the window and went to tend the banked fire.
Kirana had dreamed of death, of fighting herself in a large dark cavern as it slowly filled with water. She stood at the basin of water on her dresser and peeled off her sweaty shift. Wiped the stale sweat from her chest, under her arms, beneath her breasts. She gazed long at herself in the polished metal mirror, her face so thin and ravaged by worry and hunger that she could have been looking at a stranger. How would she know?
Another knock at the door.
“Yes?”
“Madah has urgent news from the beachhead.”
Kirana pulled on her shift again and opened the door. A little Tai Mora page stood there, fairly shaking. “She opened a way into the Assembly Chamber?”
“Yes, Empress.”
“Tell her I’ll be a moment.”
Kirana dressed. Kissed Yisaoh. Yisaoh murmured something, but did not wake.
Kirana went through her office and into the Assembly Chamber where Madah already waited, pacing the room with Mysa Joasta, one of the omajistas Kirana had assigned to her.
“News?” Kirana asked.
“The sand bar has become unstable,” Madah said. “I don’t suggest we try and brute force our way in any longer. I can move the temple, if you give me a few more jistas, but I’m worried it relies on the sea water. That it breathes it.”
“I have a better idea,” Kirana said. “I’ll have Yivsa bring a gift, one the temple may well recognize.”
“The boy’s blood?”
“Oravan said it worked downstairs, to wake the temple keeper. They got little out of it, though. Just more nonsense about a guide and a key.”
“You think it will recognize you, with his blood?”
“I will make it recognize me,” Kirana said. “You have everyone assembled on the beachhead?”
“We’re ready.”
“Give me a few minutes to prepare. I want Himsa and Talahina to come with us.”
When she had gathered her stargazers, Mysa opened a wink between the temple’s Assembly Chamber and the sandbar about fifteen hundred paces from the shoreline where Gian and her jistas waited for them.
“This is quite an undertaking,” Gian said.
“I expected nothing less,” Kirana said.
The seething leviathan of the temple pulsed so strongly the water rippled around it; the sandbar trembled slightly.
Kirana freed the blood inside her jar and smeared it on her palm. She peered at the gooey creature and smiled grimly. “Let’s see what you say now, friend.” She pressed her palm to its skin.
A tremor. A sigh.
A seam opened in the side of the leviathan, and a gush of seawater poured out, soaking Kirana’s shoes.
“In!” Kirana called to those behind her. “I want to open another wink between this temple and the basement in Oma’s Temple so we can communicate with them there. Are the jistas still locked into the other temples?”
“Yes,” Madah said. “No change.”
Kirana waited for her force of jistas and fighters to enter ahead of her; many were the same trusted people she had left with Yisaoh back on their world. When Kirana finally slipped through the slit in the temple’s skin, Talahina was already ordering around the jistas and getting them up onto pedestals. The great cavern sparkled with light; the constellations on the ceiling began to move and shimmer.
Kirana gaped, taking in the measure of the cavern. Her feet splashed in the water beneath her. “An organic machine,” she said.
Gian, beside her, said, “Like our ark. Something built, awakened, and left… sleeping, for a time.”
“Now we wake it up,” Kirana said.
Her parajista stepped onto a glowing blue pedestal and a surge of power bent him nearly double. His mouth opened in a silent scream.
The tirajista and sinajista were next. Talahina conferred with Oravan, and they argued over something.
Kirana came over to them. “What is it?”
“We need someone to go in there, the Key,” Oravan said, gesturing to a great white webbing that bisected the cavern. “These last two pieces we were… less certain about. Let’s ask Mysa.”
“I don’t
want to risk too many omajistas,” Kirana said. “I don’t want to get stuck in here.”
“Suari would have been–” Talahina began.
“We don’t have him,” Kirana snapped. “Does it have to be a jista?”
“Yes,” Talahina said.
“Gian?” Kirana said. “You have a strong jista?”
Gian frowned. Nodded. She called up three of her people and gave them over to Oravan.
Oravan instructed the first to get up into the webbing and then call on his star.
There was a brilliant flash of white light, then a sound like a burst melon. Bits of flesh and blood, broken bones and gooey viscera, splattered them all as the jista was obliterated by the combined burst of power.
“Well, that… didn’t work,” Oravan said, staring at the fleshy bits of what was left of the jista.
“Try another until it does work!” Kirana said. “I’m getting up on that pedestal.”
Talahina said, “Are you sure? What if–”
“If anyone’s going to break the world, it’s me,” Kirana said. She climbed up. Once standing there, she wiped her palms on her tunic. Below, Gian looked less than impressed.
“How much of this are you guessing at?” Gian called.
Kirana said, “Have you done this before? Make a good suggestion or get out of the way.”
A sound behind her. A gasp from the jistas nearby. Oravan swore.
Kirana swung her gaze to the other side of the chamber where a group of around two dozen people were already scrambling to their feet. They had simply… appeared. No wink, no–
She felt the wave of air headed toward her, too late. Kirana tumbled off the pedestal and into the water below.
48
Lilia did not know where or when she lost the little container of Hasao’s blood, but she knew the moment she realized the little vial was missing from her tunic pocket. Blood was the key to everything, and it was missing.
She stepped through the wink and into the Assembly Chamber just behind Zezili. Distracted, Lilia squeezed at her pockets even as the others leapt off the table and assembled quickly around it. Kadaan had a wall of air up to shield them; Lilia knew they only had a few precious seconds before someone sensed them here.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 142