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.”
Liaro said, “I found him three months ago, wandering up in the hills above Oma’s Temple. He was half-mad, living on moss and tree bark. It’s taken this long to get his head straight. He’s missing great gaps of time. But it’s him, Meyna. I wouldn’t have spent all this time trying to find you both, and Mohrai too, if I didn’t believe it was him.”
“There are all sorts of people wandering around now,” Yisaoh said. “There’s no way to determine if he’s truly our Ahkio, or not.”
“That’s true of anyone here, then,” Liaro said. “By that logic no one should be listening to a word you’re saying either.”
Ahkio waved his hand. “I remember everything that happened here, yes, in this Dhai, right up until the end of summer, before–” He exchanged a glance with Liaro. “Before what happened at Kuallina. That… I have no memory of anything after that. But the rest of my memory is very clear. I remember Nasaka telling me Kirana had died. I remember Ghrasia… Sai Hofsha, the terrible Tai Mora emissary. And I remember bringing all the clans together, and exiling you, Yisaoh, and you, Meyna. I still stand by that.”
“Now we’re all stuck in exile together,” Yisaoh muttered.
“How did he lose this last year?” Lilia said. “A whole year? That’s… I’ve never heard of that.”
“Exactly!” Liaro said. “A Tai Mora would have had a much better story, wouldn’t they?”
Lilia’s skin prickled. She did not like any of this: not his face, not his stories, not what this could mean for their carefully negotiated alliance and her plan to hit back at the Tai Mora. The Ahkio she knew had been averse to naked conflict of any kind, and Lilia did not like how Meyna looked at him. There was something between them still, even if it was just the memory of what they had.
“Not just Tai Mora,” Lilia said, raising her voice. “There are far more worlds in play now. It’s going to become easier and easier for all of us to get replaced by impostors. If Meyna saw him dead, this isn’t him. But maybe he’s not a Tai Mora, either. Maybe he is from some closer world, one even more like ours. He may not even know he’s an impostor himself.”
“Liaro, speak to us privately,” Meyna said.
Liaro crossed the thorn fence. Lilia drew back a step. The stink of him carried, this close; the two men desperately needed a wash. Neither had answered how they found the camp yet, and that disturbed her. A patrol stood a few paces distant; the same patrol that had escorted them here. But they should not even have come this close. The Woodland was a large place, and Lilia had worked hard to disguise their presence here and distract Tai Mora patrols into covering other areas.
Yisaoh and Meyna broke away from Meyna’s retinue, and Lilia followed them to the lee of a great bonsa tree. From there they could still see Ahkio, Meyna’s people, and Lilia’s supporters, but could not be overheard.
Rain still dripped from the giant leaves above. Lilia kept blinking to clear her eyes. Namia circled around to the other side of the tree, where it was drier.
“You’re convinced of this?” Yisaoh asked Liaro.
“He’s the real Ahkio,” Liaro said. “Ask him anything.”
“Are you the real Liaro?” Lilia said. “We have no way of verifying who either of you are.”
“Are you the real… whoever you are?” Liaro said, lip curled.
Lilia said, “Your tone won’t gain you any favor here.” Her foot ached, and her mind was already elsewhere. Mohrai dead, and Ahkio suddenly alive. It would upset the power balance here. If she wanted to strike back at the Tai Mora, it needed to be now, before all of this was settled.
“He remembers nothing of Kuallina,” Liaro said, ignoring her and turning back to Meyna, “or the events leading up to it. Now, here’s the strange part. I’m going to tell you something and it’s going to sound mad.”
“Madder than you do already?” Yisaoh said, digging into her pocket for another cigarette stub and coming up empty. “This should be entertaining.”
“Something happened to Ahkio before Kuallina,” Liaro said. “The day he finally locked up Ora Nasaka and booted out Sai Hofsha, he said he did it because he’d come to know the future. He had already seen the day after that one, and whatever he saw drove him to make those two decisions. He had all these outrageous questions that morning, when he came upstairs from the temple basement. Was Ora Nasaka alive? Who was Kai? Did he look the same? Who teaches mathematics? He said he’d gone… back. He went into the belly of Oma’s Temple, there among the roots, and pressed his hand to a stone bearing the temple’s mark and–”
“And he proved this to you?” Yisaoh said.
“I was there the first time he touched that stone,” Liaro said. “The second, he went alone.”
“I’m confused,” Lilia said. “Did he go back in time the first time he touched the stone?”
“No, he said he met a temple keeper? But the second time, that’s when it was different.”
“Why would it be different?” Yisaoh asked.
“Because someone sabotaged the stone,” Liaro said. “He thinks it may have been Ora Almeysia. Whatever she did, he lost access to this temple keeper, but what the keeper, or the temple, or someone left behind was this… strange ability to leap back a
day.”
“How many times has it done it?” Lilia asked. “Leapt back?”
“Just the once,” Liaro said. “He told me about it, and how inconsequential the day seemed. He wondered why he was given this chance to relive a day that wasn’t important. So, I guess he decided to make it important, and that’s when he decided to put Ora Nasaka in the gaol and kicked out the Tai Mora emissary, as I said. He would never have done those things if he hadn’t been rattled. He’s telling the truth. I know it.”
Spittle flecked Liaro’s lips. The passion and insistence in his voice convinced Lilia that whether or not this really was their Ahkio, Liaro believed Ahkio’s story. Stepping back a day in time certainly wasn’t the strangest thing she’d seen or heard since Oma came into the sky.
Lilia noted that they were drawing a few onlookers, despite the threat of the tumbleterrors. “Let’s take this to the tent,” Lilia said. “We are going to draw the tumbleterrors.”
They brought Ahkio and Liaro to one of the above-ground tents that had been set up for the funerary feast. Meyna put a standing order on keeping any more onlookers below ground until their next move was sorted. But Lilia knew enough about the life of gossip to suspect that would do little but enflame the rumors no doubt already circling through the chambers below.
Lilia led the questioning, speaking up before the others were ready. The Tai Mora were interested in the temple basements, Caisa had said. But if they had encountered this stone that Ahkio and Liaro talked about, it hadn’t appeared in any of Caisa’s reports.
“What else can you tell us about the temple basements?” Lilia asked. “The Tai Mora have uncovered a level below the one you speak of. An old room for channeling the power of the satellites. Did you ever access that room?”
“No,” Ahkio said. He folded his hands in his lap and stared at Namia. Shifted uncomfortably. He touched his hair once or twice; the matted tangle of it pulled away from his thin, pretty face. “Liaro and I found the stone while investigating something Kirana and my aunt Etena alluded to in some of their writings. When I touched the obelisk… I… went somewhere else.”
The Broken Heavens (The Worldbreaker Saga) Page 11