The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  Lilia was not paying much attention to Taigan anymore, though. She was already moving toward the next stage of her attack on the Tai Mora. She had gained some measure of power. She intended to use it.

  A few hours later, after relaying news to Mohrai about Lilia’s place at the harbor and going over Liona’s defenses and current supplies with Arasia, Ahkio found Ghrasia at the bedside of the parajista they had cut from the boughs of the walking tree. She bowed over the woman’s still body, muttering a prayer to Sina. The parajista’s skin was slimy, her eyes sightless. Ahkio saw that the ends of her fingers were melted, like soft butter. Two doctors stood some ways distant, conferring quietly as they snuck pitying looks at Ghrasia.

  A door was open on the other side of the ward, and he could hear a lute playing. Someone was singing an old ballad about Faith Ahya in a high, clear voice.

  “I’m sorry,” Ahkio said, low.

  Ghrasia did not raise her head. “She torched those trees without a thought for the people in them,” Ghrasia said. “We could have saved them. Not this one, no, but others. And she burned them up without a thought.” She shifted in her seat. “I heard you’re sending her to the harbor. I hope you are able to take responsibility for whatever she does there.”

  “Word travels very fast in Liona.”

  Ghrasia rose and took her blade from the edge of the bed. Sheathed it. “You should know that my daughter is dead.”

  “Oma’s breath, I didn’t know. Was she out there?”

  “No.” Ghrasia moved past him without meeting his look. “She killed herself. Ora Nasaka has held a great deal over the two of us, her and me, for some time. That’s over now.”

  “Is it really? Or is this some new game?”

  Ghrasia finally met his look. Her eyes were red from crying. “No games,” she said. “Those are over. Ora Nasaka ruled my life for far too long. Now she’s trying to rule yours. You best stop her before she meddles any more with your life.”

  “I intend to exile her.”

  Ghrasia laughed lightly. “So did your mother. You see how that turned out. And my daughter… she felt there was only one way to free us from Ora Nasaka, too.” She marched from the room without a backward glance. It took a great deal of effort for him not to reach out for her.

  Ahkio stared at the body on the stretcher. There were more wounded on the far side of the infirmary, and dozens more downstairs who had been too fragile to take up. The sound of the singing from the hall both attracted and repulsed him. Who would be singing at a time like this?

  He crossed the infirmary and went out into the hall. He followed a broad band of golden light spilling out from an archway, and stepped into the rays.

  Mohrai sat in the music room playing the lute in a deep padded chair. She was bathed in the brilliant light of the double suns streaming through the windows. She sang a very old ballad that brought him back to his childhood. It was called The Lament of Hahko. He had a memory of an old woman sitting over him, singing the very same ballad. His grandmother, maybe? His grandparents had died when he was very young, three of them dead from a run of yellow fever that had swept through the country, taking mostly the old and infirm.

  Mohrai stopped singing when he entered.

  She set the lute aside. “Do you play an instrument?”

  “I never had the talent or the time for it,” he said. “I need to discuss–”

  “My family insisted,” she said, cutting him off. “It teaches discipline, they said. Dancing or defense forms would teach the same thing, but I suspect my father hoped I’d be a singer instead of… whatever I am now.”

  Ahkio did not have the time to soothe her bruised ego over the defense of the harbor, but knew he needed to make it. He sat on the long chaise opposite her. He was preparing to leave Liona and go back to the temple, now that the situation in Liona would be eased with the movement of the refugees to Kuallina. He didn’t want to believe a word Lilia had said, but the other jistas in Liona verified that Lilia called not on Sina but on Oma. There was no other star that could give one the powers she wielded with such ease and force during Para’s ascendance. Everything was coming together now.

  “You didn’t have much to say when I told you to escort Lilia to the harbor,” he said.

  “It didn’t seem like something up for discussion. I don’t see what you expect some dajian scullery girl to achieve there that my family hasn’t. She’s a child.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “You trust she isn’t the enemy?” Mohrai said. “After what you’ve told me about them?”

  Ahkio tried to figure out a way to avoid the question, as it would needlessly prolong this conversation, and he had an urgent message in his pocket from Liaro telling him that the Tai Mora emissary at Oma’s temple was growing increasingly impatient. He suspected that if he didn’t meet with them soon, they would simply storm the harbor gates instead of blocking the piers, and then it wouldn’t matter if one little omajista girl was there or not.

  When he did not answer, Mohrai leaned forward. “We have defended the harbor for centuries. With enough Oras–”

  “Who will lead those Oras in battle?” Ahkio said. “We don’t teach Oras how to use their gifts in fighting scenarios. She can, though. You and your family have done an admirable job at the harbor, and I am sending you someone who can help you do an even better one. Ghrasia will stay here in Liona, and I’m moving twenty more militia to assist in Kuallina as well. We’ll be moving the refugees there.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it!”

  “Dorinah remains a threat,” he said. “Liona is also the only other possible incursion point for an army, any army. I want our best people at the harbor and in Liona.”

  “It won’t matter if they just open some gate between worlds and push through,” she said.

  “If they were going to do that,” he said, “they would have done it. They wouldn’t block the harbor.”

  She set the lute aside and stood. “I’ll listen to her ideas. But if she’s a fool–”

  “She isn’t.”

  “Best hope you aren’t making a mistake, Kai.” She started to the door.

  He raised the lute. “You don’t want to ask to take this with you? It seemed to give you pleasure.”

  “I gave all that up,” she said, “when my family told me I was to protect Asona Harbor. Best think about your priorities, Ahkio.” She shut the door.

  Ahkio took a long moment to compose himself, wondering if he would ever see her again, and wondering if he could have spoken more compellingly. As he pulled on his pack, he noted his hands were trembling. An emissary of the Tai Mora at Oma’s Temple, and Tai Mora at the harbor, while his head buzzed with questions presented to him by the temple keeper. He had to hold off the Tai Mora long enough to puzzle out the riddle of the temples, and that meant putting himself at the temple, not the harbor, however much he wished to see how Lilia meant to hold back an army that the Saiduan could not. The threat of civil war he had battled the year before seemed trifling now. A petty distraction. Now he faced so many enemies and priorities that he feared he was no longer making the best decisions.

  “Kai?” Caisa came in, tone sharp. He suspected she still had not forgiven him for following Ghrasia up into the tree. “Our escort is leaving for Oma's Temple.”

  The keeper’s words bubbled up again. What will you sacrifice?

  Everything. They would destroy everything.

  But if survival meant destroying everything, he should just give up now, and let the Tai Mora win. He gazed at Caisa’s broad, eager face, and found he did not have the heart to tell her that the reason he had sent a horrifyingly powerful young girl to Asona Harbor instead of going himself was because he knew she would be able to do what none of them could – she could become the very thing they were fighting against. She could be the evil that he could not be.

  And, perhaps, she could win.

  5

&nb
sp; Wrapped in the shroud of winter in the abandoned prison called Shoratau, Roh studied, and brooded, and wished he had made better decisions. He and Luna sat up most nights with the other sanisi in the dining hall, huddled together in their own stink because it was so much warmer than going out and exploring the hold on their own. But Roh had never been one to stick close to the herd. Sometimes he needed time away from them, so he climbed the towers and explored the old cells, and when he was too cold, his energy expended, he came back to Luna and they sat over the Talamynni book. The book could hold the key to unlocking what the Tai Mora wanted in Saiduan, but they still couldn’t figure out how to read it. It was his only real diversion, besides training with Kadaan and Wraisau.

  During the four weeks of winter’s siege, they lived on the prison’s meager store of root vegetables and rice. Roh was so sick of rice and onions that the smell of it made him gag, but he choked it down every morning and every night because the alternative was starving.

  With very little to do but endless dice games and fighting exercises, the book became his focus. He and Luna sat over it every morning, and much of the evening, until they ran out of candles, and then they sat up against the windows, huddled together against the cold drafts, soaking up as much daylight as possible.

  It was during the tail end of one of these cold evenings, Luna nodding to sleep against his shoulder, that Roh realized what had eluded him about the text for so long.

  He was reading it backwards.

  It seemed like such a stupid mistake, and the way Roh noticed it was even more foolish. He was so tired he dozed off next to Luna, and the book fell out of his hands. He woke at the sound of it. He pulled the book back into his lap, not paying attention to the orientation, just peering at the columns as he ran his fingers down the line of letters again, reading them left to right instead of right to left. That gave him pause, because he realized he’d never used the Kai cipher while reading it in the opposite direction. It just hadn’t occurred to him that the Talamynni would write anything in the other direction. Luna said every other Talamynni text read in long columns, right to left.

  He pulled out the characters according to the method he’d been taught as part of the Kai cipher, and then arranged them into words. The first word sent a shiver down his spine.

  Worldbreaker.

  “Luna,” Roh said, shaking him awake. “I figured it out, Luna.”

  “Sure,” Luna said, “and I figured out gravity.”

  “Really,” Roh said, and pointed at the Dhai word on the page in front of him.

  Luna looked dubious. They had been close too many times. “Do another one,” he said.

  It took another week to translate the book. After he learned that they had cracked it, Kadaan came in nightly and asked for updates on their progress. He fairly loomed, expression as grim as their living situation. He was much leaner now. He looked hungry all the time. When Roh pulled off his tunic to wash himself in a basin of warm water once a week, he could see his own hip bones poking painfully out from under his skin. They were becoming walking skeletons.

  “It’s some kind of instruction manual,” Roh said. “Let us get to the end.”

  They made it halfway through the book, untangling references to coteries of jistas and their arrangements inside temples, and some great spiraling game of spheres, before the Tai Mora came to Shoratau.

  Roh leaned over the broad edge of a busted window high up in the west tower, trying to spot the group of Tai Mora the scouts had reported. He was wrapped in a thick, foul-smelling ubel coat and hood, his face covered from throat to nose. Eighteen sanisi stood watch along the walls below him, but he had not left the window in hours.

  “Roh?”

  Luna entered the broad doorway behind him. It had been a recreation hall for the prison’s staff. They had cleared out all the furniture and burned it for heat. One sanisi had already died of exposure – caught in a storm, blinded, unable to get back before it overtook him. That left just twenty of them, plus Luna and Roh.

  “They’re here,” Luna said. He was bundled up as Roh was, narrow little face nearly lost in the great hood of his ubel coat. He held a large pack in one hand. Roh suspected it held the Talamynni book. Luna went nowhere without it. He slept with it under his head every night.

  “How many Tai Mora in the party? Does Kadaan know?”

  “Forty, at least.”

  Roh gazed back out the window.

  “Kadaan wants to see us. About the book, and what we do next.”

  Roh slid out of the window. The cold and waiting had been much worse than fighting. If this was where he was going to die, gutted on some frozen tundra, among Saiduan who considered him a slave, he just wanted it over with. The waiting – that was too much.

  He followed Luna downstairs. The halls were mostly dark, and they had to make their way by feel for much of it. Finally, they came to the main floor where the sanisi had set up house. Roh glanced into the great hall as they passed. Another sanisi, Wraisau, was coming out as they went by, so Roh could see inside. Flickering torches. Bowed heads. Empty plates. Endless games of dice.

  Luna knocked at the door to Kadaan’s office. It was a former storage closet, not a proper study.

  “Yes,” Kadaan said, and Roh felt a surge of anticipation at his voice even now, cold and hungry and on the edge of dying. He dreamed often of Kadaan taking him aside and declaring his passion for him, absurd as all that seemed here. Many of the sanisi had taken one another as lovers. It took the edge off their confinement, and gave them some comfort. It’s why Roh slept next to Luna every night, though their relationship was purely friendly.

  Kadaan stood behind a battered table brimming with candles. Empty sacks and crates littered the room. There hadn’t been much food in storage to start with, and twenty sanisi had made neat work of what was left. Roh worried they would begin to eat each other without going through the proper rituals next. When he had brought it up with Luna once, Luna had looked so horrified he never spoke of it again. But to Roh, it wasn’t eating the flesh of others that was horrifying. The horrifying part was not planning for it, and eating human flesh as if it were the offal of some dark animal.

  “What do you want?” Roh asked.

  Kadaan regarded him coolly. “I’m often comforted that it was I who claimed you, and not a man with a taste for subservience.”

  “I don’t know that you’ve claimed anything,” Roh said. He squared his stance and clasped his hands behind his back, expression as neutral as he could make it.

  Luna gave him a sidelong look.

  Roh had not been able to figure out Kadaan. He had taken Roh as a slave, claimed him after the death of the Saiduan Patron and Roh’s companions in a bloody brawl. But Kadaan’s interest ended, it seemed, after that. Roh wondered if he had imagined the kiss Kadaan had given him in the Patron’s banquet hall. It felt like an age ago.

  “Luna still hasn’t taught you deference,” Kadaan said.

  “I was never good at that.”

  And you like that I’m not good at it, Roh wanted to add, but thought that might be a bit much, especially in front of Luna. Kadaan was almost a decade older than him – twenty-five, maybe – and some days it seemed like an impossible chasm. Roh wondered if it was culture or age or just the fact that he was a sanisi that stood between them.

  “I want progress on the book,” Kadaan said.

  Roh glanced over at Luna. “You need both of us?”

  “Yes,” Kadaan said. “You’re the Dhai. You have one duty. And it’s put us here, in the middle of a raging storm with forty Tai Mora slogging toward us.”

  Roh said, “We’ve learned that there are gates, engines of some kind, in the temples.”

  “I’ve ascertained that much,” Kadaan said. “How do we control them?”

  “Omajistas,” Luna said. “But we knew that, too.”

  Roh knit his brows. “You knew that?”

  “We always knew that,” Kadaan said. “Omajistas open gates. It’
s why we went south to look for more of them.”

  “How long have you known?” Roh asked.

  Kadaan said, “We knew who, but not how. We’ve lost nearly every omajista who could open a way between the worlds. That’s why this work is important. It’s why we called you.”

  “But… we didn’t even know–”

  “Roh,” Kadaan said. “We need to know how to open them. Having an omajista means nothing if we have no way to open, or, more importantly now, close the tears between our worlds. These people are getting through. If this can stop them–”

  “The temples of Dhai are the key, as far as we can tell,” Luna said. “Having omajistas is important – we’ll need to have one for each temple that powers whatever this… process is.”

  “So bringing omajistas to Saiduan–” Kadaan began.

  “Was probably not the best use of time,” Luna said. “There are four temples in Dhai. There used to be a fifth, in the northwest, but it disappeared during the last rising of Oma, when the Dhai and the Saiduan ripped the world apart. We can spend years trying to find an omajista to successfully open or close a tear, or end everything using the temples. They magnify Oma’s power.”

  “But there’s no instructions,” Roh said. “At least not that we’ve translated yet. I think that’s the second half of the book. There’s something about spheres and mathematical equations that’s–”

  A shout came from outside.

  Roh called Para. Calling Para had become almost like breathing, if breathing meant you sometimes drew enough air to drown, and sometimes took three breaths just to get air. Para, like all the satellites, was fickle. The gods liked to remind them who was actually in control.

  Luna opened the door. The sanisi from the main room were pouring into the hall. Wraisau drew his blade and shouted, “Breach downstairs!”

  “Stay here,” Kadaan said. He leapt over the desk and sprinted after Wraisau.