Empire Ascendant

by Kameron Hurley

  He moved slowly to his feet. His hands hurt from his fall. He saw a great streak of crimson and violet bands of light tangling with one another above the windows. They wove strange characters in the air. He couldn’t quite make out what they were meant to be.

  “We are almost out of time,” she said.

  “I just got here,” Ahkio said, confused.

  She gestured to the tangling bands of light. “I have been compromised,” she said. “That’s our water clock. Quickly now. I am the heart of the temple, and your predecessor warned me you would come. She said she would educate those who came after, but now that I have been… altered, I suspect much has gone wrong.”

  “My predecessor… My sister, Kirana, the former Kai?”

  She withdrew her hands from behind her. They fluttered. It wasn’t a motion she was making, but some kind of distortion of her form, as if she were reflected on a pool of water.

  “Has Oma risen?” she asked.

  “No,” Ahkio said. “What are you and how did I get here?”

  “We built these beasts to take us to the moon, but that’s pointless now, listen–”

  “What are you talking about?” He was beginning to think this was a hallucination. He remembered seeing his sister’s ghost. He remembered how she had ripped herself from Sina’s maw to deliver a message that had, eventually, brought him here. Was this Sina? Had he been transported to the star that carried the souls of the dead?

  Her expression did not change, but her tone was not as confident. She pointed to the vast bank of windows. “We broke the sky.”

  Above her, the snarl of figures continued to whirl. Instructions? Numbers? A ward losing its integrity? He still wasn’t certain.

  Ahkio went to the windows. They were not the smooth skin of the temple he knew, but metal. Had he stepped through a door to some other world? He gazed at the jagged teeth of the mountains beyond the windows, ringed in wreaths of cloud. It was a foreign vista, but not a foreign place. Mount Ahya rose high from the cloak of mountains, its crown so tall it lost itself to the sky. He saw cities now at the base of the slopes and along the river. Was that the Fire River? The same one that circled Oma’s temple? Shimmering blue tiles seemed to seethe along the rooftops. Brightly clothed figures moved over sinuous roads the color of obsidian. And something else was circling in the sky, too large for a bird.

  “Where is this?” Ahkio asked.

  The woman floated toward him. She had no feet. He shrank away.

  “This is a shard of time, stuck between spaces. When we broke the sky, we broke a good deal more. Broke reality itself. Do you understand these concepts? Your predecessor had some knowledge of the parallel theory of worlds, but many before her have not.”

  “I’ve met people with our faces,” Ahkio said. “Is this some other world too?”

  “Not another world,” she said. “Another time.”

  “I don’t–”

  She pointed at the flickering light above the window again. “I have been sabotaged. One of your number put a ward here tailored to your presence. If you do not leave now, you will perish with me. There is no telling what will happen when the heartstone breaks. It could fracture us into a hundred different times or realities.”

  “Who could get down here but me?” he asked. “I’m the Kai. Only Kirana and I–”

  “Only a Kai can cross over into this space,” she said. “Only a Kai can speak to the heart of the temple. But she did not set the ward on the heart, only the stone. It will break, Kai, and when it breaks, you will be trapped here with me. Please go.”

  “Not until I have answers.” He pointed to the sky. “Where’s Para, in this time? You said this wasn’t another world, so where are the satellites, then?”

  “The satellites are…” She brought her hands together. “Let us pretend the gods were once one creature. They were a creature we did not understand, one that brought great strife and madness. The effects of this god were felt across the whole of the world. It hung in the sky for years, poisoning us. We had already been planning our escape, there.” She pointed to the edge of the eastern horizon, where a massive rising crescent blotted out the edge of the world. “See how large it was? The moon. We planned to escape there through transference. You understand?”

  “You wanted to open a door to another world. To the moon?”

  “See, you’re not so dense. So many Kais I have told this to, so many, and here I am again, repeating it. You never learn.” She sighed and turned to stare at again at the bands of light. “Not once.”

  “How many have you spoken to?”

  “Since the breaking of the world? At least a dozen.”

  “Do you know what date it is? What year?”

  “I told you – it doesn’t matter.”

  “Before Kirana, who was the last Kai you saw here?”

  “They blur together.”

  “Please.”

  Her form went still. He thought for a moment she was ill or having some kind of fit. Then she spoke. “They came after the battle of Roasandara. Kai Saohinla. But after Roasandara was far too late. Oma was in decline. They found me far too late. And the time before that, and before that… always, they came too late. My life is just this. This conversation. Over and over.”

  “What did Kirana speak to you about before she died?”

  “Kai Kirana asked how to control the transference engines to prevent the other worlds from colliding here.”

  “Engines?” When he thought of an engine, he thought of the devices like wind and water mills that converted energy into motion. Something told him she wasn’t thinking of a water mill.

  “The beasts.”

  “You created beasts?”

  “The engines are sentient beasts. Surely you know that by now? You have been living inside our beasts for centuries.”

  Ahkio thought of the warm skin of the temples. Many believed they had souls. “Your beasts, your engines, are the temples,” Ahkio said. “This is the literal heart of the temple.”

  “I have said that at least three times already. Listen, properly controlled, the engines act as great conductors for the energy from the satellites,” she said. “We thought we were able to kill the thing infecting our sky and harness its power. But it broke apart instead, and now its pieces travel across our world and many, many others. It poisons a new world every cycle. When Oma rises, all of these disparate worlds come together again. All the stars. All the worlds. Only the engines can stop it.”

  “How?”

  “I am not an engineer, Kai. Now our time is over. Quickly, move to the center of the room.”

  “Please, I–”

  “I am not a god, Kai. Just a woman unstuck in time.” She waved at him. He refused to move back. Her hands passed right through him, and he yelped. She really was a ghost. He stepped back to the center of the room, a few inches from a symbol on the floor that matched the one on the stone.

  “How do I stop the worlds coming together this time?” he said.

  “I can only tell you how we broke the worlds, not how to fix them. I was lost before anyone learned how to do that. Perhaps they never did.”

  Ahkio stared at the rising moon. It tinged the sky lavender. The double suns were the same – their hourglass form in the sky comforted him. He saw the smaller red sun, Shar, riding high up over their left shoulder. Whatever thing had killed this world, or this… time, was not visible in the sky, unless it was the moon itself. With all that he had seen and experienced since his sister’s death, maybe this wasn’t so remarkable. She could be a hallucination, a dream. He could have been spirited off to some other world, or some other time, as she said. Reality had become a questionable thing. Nothing would surprise him.

  The figures above the windows consisted of fewer characters now. Counting down? Unraveling?

  “Not everyone is prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to win,” she said. “What will you sacrifice, to stop these worlds from entering yours. Do you know, yet?”

>   “I don’t,” he said.

  She smacked her lips, making the motion but no sound. “You are the first to give me such an honest answer,” she said. “It’s time to go back. Step back.”

  “Who sabotaged you?” he asked.

  “An Ora,” she said, “one of your own.”

  “Nasaka?”

  “No.” Her form flickered. The room trembled, out of focus. Ahkio rubbed his eyes. “Step back, or die here.”

  “Almeysia,” Ahkio said, and stepped back onto the symbol on the floor–

  –and woke on the basement floor in Liaro’s trembling arms.

  * * *

  “What will you sacrifice?”

  Ahkio stabbed his sister Kirana in the eye. Blood gushed from her face, smearing his clothing and skin, until he could not tell where he ended and her body began. She screamed at him with his mother’s voice – the same screaming he had heard when his mother was burned alive, and he could not save her.

  The same screaming…

  * * *

  Ahkio woke in a drab stone room, shivering but soaked in sweat. The presence of the stone told him he was no longer in one of the temples, which meant someone had moved him a great distance. He pushed out of bed, and found he was wearing little more than a linen shift. He moved groggily to the narrow window and looked out. He was high enough up to gauge that he was gazing west into massive woodlands of bamboo and bonsa and giant everpine. Above it all was the peak of Mount Ahya, its crown lost to cloud. The only place in Dhai with a view like that was the Kuallina Stronghold, at the center of Dhai.

  He heard raised voices in the hall. The door burst open, and Liaro and Caisa entered, arguing with a third woman who wore the green and violet apron of a Clan Osono doctor.

  “How long have I been here?” Ahkio asked.

  The three of them stopped short when they saw him. Liaro was the first to break away. He ran to Ahkio’s side and embraced him. “I thought you were lost,” Liaro said. “You’re the greatest fool in all of Dhai.”

  “Have I finally usurped that title from you?” Ahkio said.

  “A joke! Tira, it can’t really be you if you’re telling jokes,” Liaro said, and though his tone was light, Ahkio noticed that Liaro’s brow furrowed, and he peered into Ahkio’s face as if half expecting to find a stranger there.

  “We’ve kept you almost a week,” the doctor said.

  “It was necessary,” Caisa said quickly, and Ahkio sensed the length of his stay may have been what they had been arguing about.

  “We couldn’t leave you with Ora Nasaka,” Liaro said. “We got you out on the Line, just the two of us and some novices Caisa trusted. If Ora Nasaka thought you harmed, she’d have done some other awful thing like light a kitten on fire.”

  “There’s rumor she’s…” Caisa began, and then came up short, staring at the doctor.

  The doctor frowned. “I’ll see myself out, then,” she said, and left them.

  “She’s looking for your Aunt Etena,” Liaro said. “Or that’s what we’ve been hearing. She put out word to her little spies about it. No one looks for Etena if they want to keep you on the seat. So if you wondered what she was doing all that time we were hunting down Tai Mora spies, now you know.”

  “And there’s Liona!” Caisa said. “And the emissary.”

  “If you’re well enough,” Liaro said, “You should go to Liona first. Your friend Ghrasia says there are refugees swarming the wall. It’s a disaster.”

  “One disaster at a time,” Ahkio said. “Who’s minding Nasaka in the temple? Has she had full run of it?”

  Caisa and Liaro exchanged looks. “We’ve been busy saving you,” Liaro said, “in case that wasn’t clear. All your Oras from Raona are there, though – Ora Ohanni, Ora Shanigan, your third cousins–”

  Ahkio said, “Liaro, I want you back at the temple. Find out what’s changed, and dig more into what’s happening with Etena. I can’t imagine it will be any easier to find her now than it was before I took the seat. Also, let people at the temple know I’m traveling to Liona. The last thing we need is rumors I’m dead. There was an emissary coming, wasn’t there? Gods, if Nasaka’s handling that… put off the emissary, too. Caisa, come with me to Liona. I’ll need militia to accompany us, and a couple good jistas.”

  Caisa sniffed. “I’m a good jista.”

  “Another good jista, then. Move now. We’ve tarried long enough.”

  Caisa ran to the door, but Liaro lingered.

  “What happened to you, Ahkio?”

  He shook his head. “I went somewhere… else.”

  “But that’s the thing,” Liaro said. “You didn’t go anywhere. You slopped against that stone like a dead man. I couldn’t rouse you until the thing cracked.”

  “It’s broken?”

  “I thought you were dead, Ahkio. I thought you wouldn’t wake up.”

  Ahkio embraced him again. “Get things prepared for Liona,” Ahkio said. Was he mad? Was Liaro? “I can talk more about what I saw later.”

  “Don’t keep me in the dark.”

  “Don’t argue with me!” Ahkio said, more forcefully than he meant to.

  “You don’t know what it’s been like,” Liaro said, “loving a dead man.”

  Ahkio sat back on the bed. “I’m exhausted, and I’m doing the best I can.”

  Caisa sent clothes and broth, and Ahkio stumbled his way down into the banquet hall to meet with the head of Kuallina and assure her he was all right. Within a day he and Caisa and their little party of militia and six jistas were on the road to Kuallina. The party was too big to take the Line, the great organic transit system that linked the temples and holds. The way to Liona was perilous. Spring was rousing the snarling plant life of the valley, and they fought nests of floxflass and ambervine and pulled two of their number from hidden bladder traps, their mouths newly engaged. They heard roving bands and semi-sentient walking trees nearby for two days, and had to alter their route twice to avoid them. Caisa came down with a hacking cough their last night on the road, and one of the tirajistas coaxed up a great flowering plant tendril from her throat.

  “Bad season for traveling,” Ahkio told her as she shivered in bed. He fed her broth and took her hand when she asked and told her she wasn’t going to die.

  “I have too much to do before I die,” she said.

  “We all do,” he said, and pressed her hand to his face and wondered what Liaro would do. Tell some fine joke. Lighten her mood. But his mood was so dark he could see no light as far as he could glimpse into the future.

  Ahkio remembered the temple keeper’s words again as they approached the great wall of Liona. He was exhausted and drained, full of worry about Caisa, Ghrasia, Liaro, Nasaka, the clan leaders, the impending war, and gods, what had happened to Meyna – too many things for a mind already stretched to the edge of sanity. Liona was a fortress three hundred feet high made of massive cut stones and tirajista-trained vines. Ahkio rode at the head of the party astride his bear just outside the massive gates of Liona; Ahkio could barely see the top of the wall. Liaro was right that this was the immediate issue – the threat of more people pouring in at the borders as the Tai Mora escalated their war was very real. They could be sending anyone in with the refugees. All that killing in Raona meant nothing if they could not secure their borders.

  “What’s that noise?” Caisa asked. She rode beside him on a great brown bear.

  “I don’t hear it,” Ahkio said.

  Caisa rode ahead. He called after her just as their party broke through the woods and into the great meadow burned clean around the wall of Liona. He came up short as they did, struck dumb by the sight ahead of them. Four walking trees, the tallest over a hundred feet high, crashed across what should have been a bare clearing. But it was not empty. It was very much occupied. Camped all along the outside of the wall were hundreds of members of the militia, all dressed in red, and clumps of what must be the refugees, all of them hemmed in by a makeshift thorn fence. The trees blu
dgeoned their way through the mass of humanity, stirring them like a terrified hive of insects. The trees swung great sinewy tendrils, plucking up the defenseless people below them and depositing them into the great, poison-filled sacks swinging from their massive crowns.

  Ahkio waved back at his party. “Help them!” he yelled, and urged his bear forward, though he had no weapon. “Caisa!” he yelled as the bear galloped to catch up to her, its great tongue lolling.

  She already had her hands raised. He saw a small whirlwind skitter across the meadow, heading straight for the smallest of the trees.

  One of the militia behind him caught up to Ahkio and offered a big machete. He took it and raised it high, barreling at the same tree that Caisa had targeted. The largest of the trees whipped its sticky tendrils at him, moving laboriously into their path on its great undulating roots to protect the smaller tree.

  Ahkio glanced back at his jistas. He had no sinajista strong enough to produce a flame – the only thing the trees were truly afraid of. They would need to turn them back with brute force, a slow and dangerous thing with so many untrained people on the ground.

  He caught up to Caisa. She yelled, “Get inside!”

  “No,” he said.

  She huffed at him. The air was already heavy as cream. He saw the loop of the main gate open up, allowing him a brief glimpse into chaos as half a dozen figures came out to assist in the fray. He hoped one of them was a sinajista. He saw hundreds more dirty, haggard figures camped inside the lower courtyard. Sina’s breath, how many had Ghrasia let in?

  He turned his attention back to the big tree. “We need to coordinate with the ones at the gate,” Ahkio said. He raised his machete and gestured for his party to come forward.

  “Dangerous run,” Caisa said. “We didn’t bring you back just to–”