“No,” Gian said. “No alcohol, either.”
“We can use honey,” Lilia said. “It’ll take me awhile to find. Keep that sword close. There are bears and wolverines. Can you still call on Para?”
Gian nodded, but her face was very drawn. Lilia worried she would go into shock.
“I’ll be back,” Lilia said. “I promise.”
She rinsed the wound with the water they had and collected a handful of scorch pods from Gian’s pack. Her mother once taught her how to track and take a beehive, and she desperately needed one now. I should be running before the sanisi catches up to us, she thought. But her heart would not let her.
She found a small spring an hour up the trail. She refilled their water, then followed the heady, fragrant smell of fungus flowers. Two more hours of stalking bees the size of her thumb paid off. She knocked down a massive papery beehive and used the heat of the broken scorch pods to confuse the remaining bees.
Six stings later, she had four bricks of honeycomb. Dusk was falling. She moved quickly, following the broken branches and little stone markers she had left along her way.
When she arrived, Gian was slumped to one side. Her hand rested limply on her bloody thigh. Too late.
“I’m a murderer,” Lilia breathed. “Gian?”
She came up beside Gian and rested a hand on her bare arm. It was cool, but not cold.
Lilia worked quickly in the dim light. She mashed the honeycomb inside a woody seed pod, mixing it with water and a few leaves of night dagger she’d collected.
She pulled back the tunic she’d left over Gian’s wound as a makeshift bandage and recoiled at the smell. It had mortified quickly.
Lilia washed the wound out a second time, then began to pack it with the honeycomb mixture. Gian came to as she did.
“Get away!” Gian said, slapping weakly at her hands.
Lilia ignored her. She had seen her mother with feverish patients.
“I won’t tell you anything,” Gian said.
Lilia unknotted the tourniquet. She used it to secure the tunic around the wound again. All the while, Gian babbled.
“It wasn’t me,” Gian said. “I won’t do it.” She grabbed at Lilia’s arm. “I love you,” she said. “I won’t do it.”
Lilia tugged Gian’s pack from her shoulders and pulled out their food. Most was packed in waxed linen, so hadn’t been poisoned too badly. She sat over the pack for a few minutes, staring at its contents. There was enough food to get only one of them back to the valley.
She glanced up at Gian. Gian’s head lolled back against the great trunk of the rattler tree.
Lilia thought of Roh, and the Temple of Oma, the Oras there who sheltered her, the drudges who worked with her, and the farmers and herders and craftspeople who cared for her after her mother pushed her through to the other side.
“I’m sorry, Gian,” she said. “My place is here.”
Lilia left the food in Gian’s pack. Lilia could forage on her own, but Gian wouldn’t be fit for it. She set a full water bladder at Gian’s elbow.
Then Lilia slung the second bladder over her shoulder and skirted around the bladder trap. She looked back once because she felt a stab of longing. She wanted to take Gian’s hand in hers and never let go. Her journey with Gian had been the first time in a long time she didn’t feel alone.
Lilia pushed back out into the woods, into the slithering darkness. She was tired of being hunted, tired of running in circles.
It was time to hunt down the sanisi in turn. Her mother, even if it was just a shadow of her, was in Dorinah. And if anyone could get Lilia there in one piece, it was the man who could not kill her.
Taigan collected the little sparrows into his palm and breathed on them. Maralah’s message was a brilliant blue fragrance excreted from the sparrows; blueberry and sugar, like something created by an exceptionally gifted confectioner.
He – for he still felt comfortable using that pronoun in Saiduan, at least for another turn of the moon – stood at the center of a little Woodland village, its inhabitants neatly and bloodlessly broken, like discarded farm implements.
Coding messages with the power of the satellites had its drawbacks. Only the very skilled could tailor a living thing to change its nature as it traveled from icy tundra to spitting sea to dripping jungle. These sparrows had likely begun their journey as flies or beetles, then birds. They reacted intelligently to their surroundings, cycling through forms according to what their tirajista shaper had encoded in them.
He tugged at little red threads of Oma’s power to unravel the fragrances and turn them into Saiduan characters. It was a deft, complicated thing, taught to him by some long-dead old woman with a face like a stone slab. His peculiar birth had marked him from the very beginning as a herald of change. She was the only one who would touch him.
After he’d caught the little omajista girl, he’d sent a message to Maralah. Her response indicated she’d received it:
We broke the one Saarda found in Masaira, but the east coast was just invaded. The Patron’s running out of patience, and I’m running out of sanisi. Break her before you get here. We don’t have time to do it after.
Taigan sent out a little puff of air, tearing apart the misty characters. They dissipated like smoke. The sparrows, too, scattered. He watched them flit to the edges of the village, then shimmer and tremble and become small white parrots. They took flight, heading for the top of the broad canopy.
The man he’d sent out from here had not returned, but as Maralah’s message lit off, he saw the constructed butterfly he’d sent with the man fluttering toward him. Taigan pulled it apart now, catching a whiff of the sea. The smell caused a bright memory to waft up from his consciousness; he saw a game trail, a rocky outcrop, a birch orchard ringed in massive cocoons.
Not far now. He poked one last time at one of the dead Dhai, then struck back out into the woods, silent as a cat, toward the butterfly’s memory of the path.
Woodland Dhai were much less cooperative than their valley brethren. They also turned out to be more skilled at channeling the satellites than he anticipated. He suspected his reputation as a sanisi preceded him here, or perhaps the invaders had already sent a scouting party, and it had put them on edge. Few bothered to exchange words before attacking.
So much for petty pacifism.
He crossed the village and stepped over the low thorn fence that kept out the baby walking trees and various creatures that made this Woodland less than welcoming. He had tracked these people hoping the little servant girl and her companion had fallen in with them. The death of the innkeeper frustrated him. Death without answers or leads served no purpose. He should have known better than to shield her instead of immobilize her.
For several days, he had been able to smell the sea. It reminded him of better days. His family had been fishing people, illiterate and ungifted. Children only went out veiled twice a week, during prayer days, and then only until age nine. Learning he was still considered a child at thirteen in the capital had been frustrating.
Some days, he thought the only place in Saiduan the invaders hadn’t touched was that village he grew up in. He still looked for it on the lists of scoured cities and towns that Maralah kept in her study, compiled by sanisi posted across the empire. She inquired often which city he looked for, but he dared not say it aloud. Some part of him hoped that if he never heard of it, it would remain untouched. He hated the heat here and the cloying jungle. He wished he could bury the girl and her friends in the heat and forget them.
Taigan followed the smell of the sea, trying to pick up signs of the girl and her companions again. He marked several great insects with little tendrils of twisted air and fragrance, hoping they would offer something useful back to him.
Three hours later, one of the insects returned. He followed it to a mossy trail. When he looked up, he saw the scullery girl clinging to the tangled branches of a tree just across a clearing on the other side of the trail. Taigan did not l
ook directly at her at first, wondering if she thought she was spying on him. If so, she was doing a terrible job of it.
But the girl did not move.
He met her look.
She scrambled down the tree, much more quickly than he expected.
Taigan moved across the clearing after her.
A cold dagger of pain plunged into his chest. He threw out his right arm, too late. The bone-strung branches of the tree that dominated the clearing closed around him like a vise. Throwing out his arm had been a mistake; the bone tree snapped his arm clean through, torquing it backward and shoving it against his body.
He grunted. Tried to find leverage by kicking away with the heels of his boots. But the tree lifted him cleanly from the ground. Its bony fingers drove into his flesh like knobby needles.
His skin burned. Punctured flesh and organs tried to knit themselves back together. It was like boiling from the inside out.
As he struggled to center his mind, he saw the girl creeping toward him, skirting the edge of the clearing.
Taigan showed his teeth. “You’re less stupid,” he said. He tried to rip his arm free. The bones of the tree dug deeper. His flesh bubbled. The air was filled with the smell of burnt meat.
“I have a proposal for you,” Lilia said.
He wanted to mash her face in, Maralah be cast to Sina’s maw.
His songs for concentrating Oma were elusive, broken to pieces like the bones of his arm. He found his focus briefly and sliced his good arm free. He reached for the girl.
She darted back.
Another bony branch curled up from the ground, pulling his arm back. He hissed.
“We both need things,” Lilia said.
“You’ll need a fine surgeon,” Taigan said, “when I have done with you.”
“I know the Woodland,” Lilia said. “I don’t think you do, though.”
“If you think this tree can kill me, you know very little.”
“You won’t be conscious much longer, no matter how strong you are. That’s a bone tree. It’s poisonous. Like most things here.”
“Where’s your little friend?” Taigan asked. “You think a parajista can hold me when I burst free of this?”
“I think we can help each other,” Lilia said. She spoke loudly but stayed at the edge of the clearing. He had seen enough young people bluster to recognize it. She was alone, then. He wondered how such a slip of a girl had freed herself of a parajista, and then considered his own predicament. Well.
Taigan felt the poison. It was a subtle thing, twisting through his body like a cold, snaking elixir. He had been poisoned before by any number of things, and though it would not likely kill him, it would dull his access to Oma, a connection that was tenuous at the best of times.
“Talk fast,” Taigan said.
She puffed out her chest. Cheeky little child. “You need people who can channel Oma,” she said. “That’s why you’re after me. I want to help you. I do. I know what’s happening now.”
“Do you?” Taigan grunted. “Then you are well ahead of me.”
“Help me find my mother in Dorinah, and I’ll go with you willingly.”
“Haven’t we already made this bargain, girl? I gave you that boy’s life, and you betrayed your oath to me.”
“Only because I made another oath first. My mother is a blood… she’s… well, you know already. She can channel Oma.”
“You have a very strange way of asking favors,” Taigan said. His voice was slurred. He tried to move his fingers.
“You wouldn’t help me otherwise,” Lilia said. “Not even if I asked nicely.”
He could not argue that. “You said your mother was dead.”
“Do you always say things that are true?”
“They’ll gut you open if you try and go to Dorinah alone. You’ll end up a slave.”
“That’s why I’m asking for your help.”
“Why not your Dhai friends?”
“You’re the only person I know who isn’t Dhai… and I know for sure you won’t kill me.”
“Do you?”
“I’m important to you.”
“Cut me loose, then, or whatever it is you’re going to do,” Taigan said.
“You’ll take me?”
Taigan saw Maralah’s swirling note before him, and something older, darker – a searing brand, a ward Maralah burned into his spine, sealed with the power of Sina to ensure he did Maralah’s bidding. He was almost impossible to kill, but like any other thing of flesh, he could be coerced with the right ward. It compelled him now; he could not destroy the girl, no matter how much he wished it. He fought the ward the same way he fought the tree’s poison, and with the same results.
“If I escort you,” he said, “you both come to Saiduan.”
“All right,” Lilia said.
He wondered at her lack of hesitation. She must believe her mother powerful indeed or believe him a great idiot. She had run from him once, of course. In her arrogance, she might believe she could escape again. But he knew what she did not – there were children of Oma scattered all over the country, and the more he had of them, the better his chances for success. She herself was weak. If not in spirit, then body. She would flame out gloriously, if she ever learned to call on Oma at all. He needed more than just one girl before he trekked home.
She stepped forward. He waited for something fantastic. Perhaps the parajista had already taught her how to draw Oma’s breath. Instead, she stepped around to the back of the tree and kicked something at the base of it.
The tree spasmed.
Taigan dropped to the mossy ground. His body contorted; muscles tensed, flesh knit, organs regenerated. It was like some great rumbling storm churning through his torso. He hacked up a gob of blood. He wiped his mouth. From the corner of his vision, he saw the girl backing away, toward the edge of the circle.
He snapped hold of the song in his mind, the one that called the great gout of fire that the stone-faced old woman had taught him three days before he killed her with it.
But as he turned to focus it on the girl, the long length of the ward seared to his spine sent a wave of ragged fire deep into his bones. He hissed at her instead. He could not kill her. He had to deliver her.
She moved back another step. Stupid girl. He knew what she was the moment he saw her. It was a simple test. Call on Oma to murder every child or farmer or soldier from Saiduan to the southern ice flow, and discover which his body would allow him to burn and which it would not.
The ones Maralah had compelled him not to destroy with her ward, he was compelled to collect. Even the troublesome ones.
“Lead on, little scullery maid,” Taigan said. “I do hope you know what you’re doing.”
20
Ghrasia Madah said prayers to Sina over the now-deceased kin she had brought with her to Oma’s temple, and the smooth-cheeked young people she had thought of as kin. So many dead in that bloody hall two days ago, and for what? Petty politics. Power. Their names would fade from history or be erased from it because of their crimes. No one worshipped a kin-killer.
She had trained and cared for these youth at the Liona Stronghold for over a decade, only to see their blood spilled by their own people. Anger coursed through her, so high and hot that she took a long plunge in the cold pools beneath the temple. She swam through the marbled tiers of the pools, thinking of the future she was promised so long ago as a girl. Her mother was so angry when she joined the militia that they didn’t speak for three years. Her mother called her a warmonger and worse. Ghrasia had spent her life trying to prove her wrong, but when she closed her eyes, all she saw were all the people who died at her hand.
Some days, she wept to think her mother may have been right.
When Ghrasia emerged from the baths, the blood-red spite of her anger was gone. She was spent. Empty. The same way she had felt when she killed her first Dorinah during the Pass War. It was always the same. The blood tore her apart. Killing was like cutting off one
of her own limbs. Every time she killed, she felt like she was bleeding out with them. Losing some part of herself.
After bathing and dressing in the red tunic and skirt the drudges had cleaned for her, she walked up into the sky of the temple to meet with the Kai. The Liona Stronghold was not a living hold the way the temples were. She did not like touching the walls or the railings here. Even sleeping within them gave her nightmares.
She ran into Nasaka’s little mincing assistant, Elaiko, two floors up.
“Ghrasia Madah!” Elaiko said. “I apologize, but you must have an escort in the upper tiers of the temple.”
“The Kai asked to see me,” Ghrasia said. “Is that not allowed?”
Elaiko made some polite noises and small talk about tea as she accompanied Ghrasia up, never really answering her. Ghrasia already knew who was in charge of this temple, but it was good to get confirmation.
The Kai stood in one of the open Ora libraries at the top of the temple, his wiry young body illuminated in the spill of the suns gleaming through the glass ceiling. She was always disappointed he did not look more like his mother, though she had to admit his beauty was still captivating. Javia had been a good friend and companion. Javia had confessed to never really understanding her young son. Reading and mathematics were a struggle for him, and he had never been gifted by the satellites. Seeing him now, Ghrasia had to push away a strong surge of desire; his was a hard beauty, the sort cut with sorrow. She had a softness for sorrow, because sorrow so often showed up on the map of her days. Sadly, a pretty face did not a politically savvy ruler make.
He was arguing with Nasaka about something. Ghrasia expected they argued a good deal.
“Kai?” she said.
He turned but did not smile. His expression was terribly serious. A small tragedy, she thought, to have that face and never smile. She tried – and again failed – to tuck that thought away. She suspected Nasaka was vetting this boy’s lovers with an eye toward some political end, and warding off all the others with a large stick.
“Ghrasia,” he said.
“Ghrasia Madah,” she said.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 18
