The Broken Heavens (The Worldbreaker Saga)

by Kameron Hurley

  “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 something 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 fe
w 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.

  “Remember,” Lilia said, huffing behind him, “we need to be enough of a distraction to get that chamber clear. If Anavha’s wink draws all the jistas here up there, and if Kirana is still there–”

  “Oh, fear not,” Taigan said. “My distraction will be much more… dramatic.”

  The fire had also drawn away the guards at the stone bridge leading to the temple. They were halfway to the garrison already.

  Taigan strode ahead of Lilia and Zezili, straight for the bridge, already spinning a powerful song to surprise the guards on the other side. He went across the bridge without pausing for them to catch up, though Zezili keep harping at him in Dorinah.

  Lilia wanted to distract these people, to cut them off from their stars and hobble them, to buy Anavha and Roh and the others time in the rooms above. But Taigan had other ideas. Hobbling was not enough. Not nearly enough.

  The guards inside the temple reached immediately for their respective stars, and six more guards came in behind him from the gardens, shocked at his passing. Taigan cut the jistas off neatly from their stars and immobilized the regular guards with an easy binding song.

  “I have a gift for your Empress,” Taigan said as Zezili caught up to him.

  “The fuck are you doing?” Zezili said in Dorinah.

  He pretended not to understand her.

  “She has gotten a good many gifts lately,” the older jista said. “What makes yours special?”

  “Do you want to risk angering her now, so close to the end?”

  “You can wait in the gaol.”

  “We can wait where the guests wait,” Taigan said. “Where is that?”

  Lilia finally came through the doorway, breathing hard. She narrowed her eyes at Taigan.

  “Guests wait here,” the jista said.

  Taigan flicked his wrist, and snapped every bone in her body. She fell to the floor like a broken puppet.

  Lilia gasped. “Taigan!”

  He set the rest of the guards on fire. They screamed.

  Zezili grabbed his shoulder. “What–”

  Taigan immobilized her in a neat net of Oma’s breath, spinning a little prison around her to keep her out of his way. She hung just above the floor, spitting and yelling.

  “What are you doing? This isn’t the plan!” Lilia said.

  Taigan shrugged. “These people murdered my entire country,” he said. “I didn’t think I was terribly upset about it until just this moment.”

  “But… what did you tell me about revenge? This is–”

  “I am very bad at taking my own advice,” he said, and burned up the next wave of soldiers and jistas coming down the stairs. He set everything on fire that would burn: the tables and chairs in the banquet hall. The doors. The drapes. The occasional wooden or otherwise organic panel. The carvings on the stairs. The portraits.

  Lilia choked and gasped behind him, but he had come here to satisfy a very deep craving, and he was far from being sated.

  He took the stairs two at a time, burning Tai Mora and Dhai without distinction. It simply did not matter to him. He paused on the third floor, far ahead of Lilia, and sent a tendril of Oma’s breath back down to pick her up. She yelled.

  Taigan set her down beside him.

  “Murder me too,” she gasped. “Just get it over with. Is that what you’re here for?”

  “Not at all,” Taigan said, as the black smoke crept up the stairs. “But if we fail at this little venture, and bird, you have a divine history of failure, I want to ensure I murder as many of these people as I can before the end.”

  He kept climbing, sending fire down every corridor, extinguishing the lives of every breathing inhabitant his star’s power could unearth. He marveled that there appeared to be no omajistas in the temple; without one, there were none who could counter him.

  “Kirana was as rash as you!” Taigan called down to Lilia. She had paused halfway up the fourth flight of stairs, huffing for breath.

  Ah. The smoke, of course. He considered leaving her. Certainly, she knew how to operate the device, but so did Luna. Taigan smirked at that. All this time, he had been searching for a worldbreaker, scouring one continent after another for the right person, for some chosen one, when it turned out all they’d had to do was train one. Oh, the irony. The years of wasted shit and toil.

  “She must have all her omajistas engaged in the temple!” he yelled down again.

  Could she hear him at all? Who knew? She was surely drowning, gasping for breath, her vision no doubt tunneling out. Oh well.

  He turned away to go up the final stair to the Assembly Chamber. How long it had been since he stood there, trying to convince these foolish pacifists that this was all coming, that this was how it would all end.

  “None of you listened!” he yelled at Lilia again, but he could not see her anymore. With everyone and everything burning around him, he had no audience to appreciate his work.

  Taigan sent a purl of Oma’s breath back for her, tapping along to the rhythm of the crackling flames as he waited for her arrival.

  The body he brought up was limp, barely breathing, but alive. He focused his power on her bruised and battered lungs. He eased the smothering infl
ammation and repaired the oxygen-starved tissue. It was all just so much easier with Oma risen. He felt like the most powerful person in the world.

  Lilia gasped and sat up. She clutched at her chest. Stared at Taigan.

  “Just this way,” he said brightly, holding out his hand.

  “You’re monstrous,” she said.

  “I never pretended to be anything else. We are a lovely group of monsters, Lilia, you and me and that construct you call Zezili. One has to be monstrous to do what we are about to do.”

  He released the tangle of Oma’s breath that held Zezili immobile in the foyer, assuming that she had yet to die, or that his resurrection of Lilia had also affected her. A curious binding, that one.

  Taigan was proven correct as he pushed open the door to the Assembly Chamber and Zezili came barreling up the stairs, yelling at him, hardly winded.

  “Did you even look back?” Zezili shouted.

  He waved at her. “Good of you to join us. So much confusion down there!”

  “Fuck you, you fucking–”

  He came up against the parajista barrier inside the door and called to Kadaan, “Would you let us pass? There’s a great deal of burning down here.” All of them appeared to be intact, inside: Anavha and Roh, Kadaan and Saradyn. A strange group of companions, no matter what the sky was doing.

  “Thanks to you,” Zezili said.

  “You’re welcome,” Taigan said.

  “Saradyn,” Roh said. “Grab her and keep her quiet when we drop the barrier.”

  Saradyn lumbered to the other side of the room where a woman was pressed against the wall by the barrier.

  Taigan had not anticipated her being there. He sighed. “Oh dear.”

  Lilia put a hand to her mouth, clearly recognizing Gian immediately.

  The barrier dropped.

  Lilia was exhausted, her chest still sore. She wanted to murder Taigan where he stood, but when she saw Gian on the other side of the room, she forgot it all for one brilliant moment.

  She would know Gian’s face anywhere. The woman who had taken her out to Fasia’s Point on a vain quest to find Lilia’s mother. And again, a different Gian but always the same Gian, in her memory: the Gian whose leg she had mended, whose hair she had brushed and braided, the Gian who loved her when she was no one, nothing, just a filthy, stinking scullery girl. Gian, the lovely face in the dark.