“Back me for Javia,” he said. “Back me on it for my mother.”
Masura’s face crumpled. She nodded. “Ora Nasaka will kill me.”
“She won’t,” Ahkio said. “She won’t hurt anyone again.”
Ahkio pressed himself against the doorway after he closed it, trying to get his head together. He would write up the papers tomorrow and call Ghrasia’s militia to exile Nasaka for betrayal and madness. He had to do it now, before the chaos started. Before the harbor was breached. Before the Tai Mora came to her, ready to pay whatever debt it was they owed her.
He was Kai. He kept telling people he was. Javia had exiled her own sister for less.
He could certainly exile his own mother for the same.
23
Lilia woke, screaming, to fire.
Figures rushed around her. She heard a great rumbling in the distance, and tried to move her fingers. Her skin burned. Lilia rolled over and scratched her way forward. Her hands were blistered, covered in char. From the burned gate? Oras and militia ran madly around the parapet. Shrieking. A booming crash.
The gates shuddered. Lilia pulled herself up onto the edge of the parapet, and peered over. The Tai Mora ships had docked at the harbor, buoyed by the high tide. Hundreds of figures in chitinous blue and green armor flooded across the piers like shiny beetles, swarming the gates.
“Parajistas,” Lilia huffed, but it hurt to breathe. She turned away and saw Naldri dead twenty feet up the walkway. A score of other bodies lay tangled across the top of the wall. The line of parajistas was long broken. Someone on the other side was shouting – Mohrai’s voice, calling up the militia.
“Get off the wall!”
This came from someone further away, a woman dressed in the blue tunic and trousers of an Ora.
Lilia stared at the shimmering horde of invaders, and raised her fist. She drew a breath, and called on Oma.
Nothing happened.
She started coughing. Dropped her arm. She hacked and hacked, like hocking up some piece of her lung.
“Off the wall!” The Ora came toward her. “Are you hurt? I will carry you, if you permit it.”
Lilia’s vision swam. She did not recognize the Ora. “Where’s Taigan?” she asked.
“We’re retreating,” the Ora said. “You’re the last on the wall. I thought you were dead. May I take your arm?”
“Yes, all right.”
The Ora looped a strong arm around her and hauled her down the steps just as a bubbling tide came over the lip of the parapet. Lilia glanced back and saw a great red algae swarm breach the wall.
The retreat from the harbor was a mad one, full of rushing bodies, shrieking, tears, sobs. Lilia navigated it all as though in some dream. She was ushered onto a cart with other injured. She fell back into a pile with the bloody, the bleeding, the maimed, and the newly dead.
She asked after Taigan, and Gian, but no one knew who she was speaking about. They had abandoned her up there on the wall. The betrayal hurt so badly she thought she might burst. She had lost Oma, and the worst had happened – her country invaded, her companions in retreat. Taigan had warned her about burning out. She tried to draw Oma again, and failed.
The other Dhai hushed her like she was some child. They did not know her. Lilia could get no answer about where they were going.
Her strength finally gave out. She collapsed in the back of the cart. From the rocking belly of the cart she watched the harbor gates burst open. A steely army of hundreds poured into the Asona Clan square and surrounding warehouses and shops. The square went up in moments, burning uncontrollably. In a quarter hour, the surrounding forest and grassland were on fire as well, sending choking clouds of smoke into the air.
Thick bands of smoke pushed forward ahead of the fire, low against the ground, as if some parajista manipulated their path. The smoke was a living thing, hot and cloying. Lilia saw the roiling blackness pursuing them, and knew she would not survive it. Her lungs still ached. Her skin was hot and painful. She tried to draw on Oma again, desperate. Burned out. It sounded final. Like death.
Cries came from the people around her – large family groups, traders; lost, screaming children picked up by strangers, their faces smeared in soot from the explosion at the gates. My explosion, Lilia thought. She closed her eyes, and the burning power of Oma filled her again.
She reached…
Nothing.
Lilia retched over the side of the cart.
Smoke rolled over a nearby creek. The smoke did not follow the curvature of the ground. There was clear air above the creek bed. As the smoke rose, a parajista barrier above it kept it from escaping.
The smoke chased them another mile. When Lilia could reach out her hand and touch it, she rolled out of the cart, and into the huffing legion of refugees. She could not raise her breath to shout, to urge them to keep low, but she tried anyway, calling until the smoke clogged her nostrils and she had to press her face to the ground to breathe.
She held the ground tight. People ran past her and over her, hacking and coughing. Lilia crawled toward the streambed, wheezing. Someone tripped over her, a small girl. Lilia grabbed her ankle, hissed, “Stay low. Stay against the ground.”
The little girl trembled like ashy paper. She pressed herself against Lilia. She was only six or seven, far from the age of consent, so Lilia took her by the arm without asking, and told her to come along.
“My mothers–”
“They’ll find you,” Lilia lied, because in truth they ran through a death trap, like rats smoked out by poison.
Lilia tumbled into the streambed. She submerged her scorched, aching body. She lay her face in the mud and remained still. Beside her, the girl did the same, taking great gasping breaths of clean air while the black smoke moved over them like a shroud.
As Lilia watched the back of the girl’s head, she was reminded of Nirata’s granddaughter, Esau. Sliced in two when the portal between Dorinah and Dhai closed. A seared side of meat. Half a person. A needless death.
Lilia smoothed the girl’s hair and held her tight, like calming a terrified rabbit. The girl’s heart pounded harder than her own.
“What’s your name?” Lilia asked.
“Tasia.”
“We’ll wait until the smoke is gone, then we’ll follow after the others.”
“But won’t the Dorinahs come?”
Dorinah. Is that what everyone thought they were?
Tasia said, “There are so many of them. Why do they hate us?”
“I don’t know,” Lilia said, because though something more complex than hate fueled this invasion, she could not imagine killing something she did not hate – like those Dorinah legionnaires.
But the image of Esau flashed in front of her again; a little girl killed so one selfish, desperate person could get out of a terrible situation.
Was Lilia any better than the Tai Mora, in that moment?
She lay still in the creek bed. Tears rolled down her cheeks. The smoke moved past them. The air cleared.
Tasia poked her head up.
“Stay down,” Lilia said. She shifted painfully up the edge of the creek bed and peeked over. Dozens of bodies littered the grassy plain. The fire still burned north of them – Asona on fire, and the woods blazing – but it would be some time before it caught up to them.
She gestured for Tasia to come up. Together they limped across the trampled grass. Lilia moved among the bodies, collecting food and a water sling, searching for other useful items. She found a large stone, and slipped it in her pocket.
“There are so many of them,” Tasia said.
Lilia wasn’t sure if she meant the bodies, or the Tai Mora.
“How will we fight them?” Tasia said, and there was a note of fear in the voice, a note that told Lilia the girl was about to start shrieking. Shrieking would put them both in danger. It was likely the Tai Mora would send scouts ahead of the main force. She would have.
“We must be clever,” Lilia said. She c
ame up short. There was a figure lying on the ground near the trees on the other side of the road, crawling on all fours, making terrible hacking sounds. It wore red armor shiny as any beetle’s carapace.
“Stay here,” Lilia told Tasia, and she crept toward the figure. She pulled the stone from her pocket and brandished it in her good hand.
The figure raised its head. The face was mostly covered in the flat plains of the helm. She saw two eyes, a hint of a chin. But it was not only the smoke that felled them. There was a crack in the helm at the back. She recognized the sap and residual peridium of a capsillium plant, all sticky and bubbling around a hole in the back of the helm. They must have stumbled into a mating plant, and gotten stuck with its pollinator.
Lilia raised the rock and smashed it into the open wound. The figure jerked. She hit it again, in the same place, and again, until blood spattered her arm and the helm was cracked even further. The armor wasn’t metal, but chitin. Once cracked, it gave way easily around the wound.
She sat for a long moment over the prone body, trying to catch her breath. Then she gently pulled off the helmet. The face was twisted. Lilia regarded the helmet, remembering her ruse with Zezili on the other world.
“We need to bring this armor with us,” Lilia said. “Can you help me take it off?”
“Is it dead?”
“Yes. Don’t be afraid. If we take this armor we can fool them if they get too close. I can pretend I’m one of them.”
“It’s too big for you.”
It sounded like an accusation. Lilia found herself irrationally angry. To survive an attack on the harbor, to botch it so badly, to lose her power, to crawl into a creek bed and escape certain death, and here was this child, seeing right through her, all her big and important ideas, fanned by Taigan’s great expectations for her. Taigan, who had abandoned her on the wall. And where was Gian? When the end came, they all ran. They cared for her only so long as she was useful, one no better than the other. And this little girl knew. Knew the task Lilia had been given was far beyond her capabilities. She had no power now. Maybe she never had.
Lilia started to cry. She gripped the helmet and sobbed, a few choking huffs. It lasted half a minute, maybe more. Then she knelt next to the dead scout and started pulling off the armor, piece by awkward piece.
“Cleverness,” she said aloud. “Not with swords.”
Clever, like the Seekers had been, hiding from their Empress and the Tai Mora in plain sight.
Were the Seekers still bound to her? Taigan had created the ward, and she had bound it with her own hand. Lilia went very still, searching for some tenuous connection to the five Seekers. She found them fluttering at the edges of her consciousness, in the same place she reached for and did not find Oma; some bundled reserve of power tethering her to them. She closed her eyes and pulled at the lines of power. She knew no litany to draw them to her. But a ward, once set, could only be undone when the one who made it released it, or some very skilled jista understood the maker well enough to figure out how to untangle it.
“Mother.”
Lilia opened her eyes. Tasia had hold of her charred tunic. “Mother” was often used as a polite term for an older woman. No one had ever called Lilia that before. She was just a girl, wasn’t she? But in this little girl’s eyes, she saw that those days were long past, her childhood wants and desires, so simple, really, for a mother and a home, buried here on the killing field.
“We’re going to Kuallina, child,” Lilia said. “But we must be quiet and keep to the woods. You understand?”
“My parents are going to Kuallina.”
“There, see? We’ll find them together.”
But as they started off, Lilia found she could barely walk more than a hundred paces before she was out of breath and exhausted. She had to dump the idea of hiding in the armor. As the girl pointed out, Lilia was too small, and weak. They rested often, following the curve of the creek.
“Look out for a little plant here in the creek bed,” Lilia said. “Its roots are round and pop above the surface. The stems are mostly brown right now, but they grow long and tall as my arm.”
Putting Tasia on the hunt was a good idea. It kept her busy, even when Lilia was wheezing along the creek bed. It was an hour before Tasia clapped her hands and announced she’d found the plant – raw mahuan.
Lilia dug into the cold mud and pulled out the bulbous yellow roots. She washed them, broke them apart, and chewed them, careful not to swallow.
“I’m hungry,” Tasia said.
“It’s not food,” Lilia said. “It’s medicine.”
Raw mahuan was dangerous, but so was dying here, asphyxiated like a beached sea creature. She broke out sticky rice and dried yams from the stores she’d taken from the dead, and sat silently chewing the mahuan root while Tasia ate and poked at things in the creek.
The army caught up to them that night.
Lilia camped up in the welcoming arms of a bonsa tree, its great bows so broad and thick that she could wedge herself into them without fearing a fall. Even so, her newfound fear of heights prevented her from going up more than six paces. It was enough. Tasia fell asleep almost immediately, bunched up close to Lilia in the leafy canopy. Lilia envied her. She lay awake watching the first wave of the army coming up the road, hacking and burning vegetation as they went to clear the way. The landscape of Dhai itself was a good defense. If people had any sense they would flee to the edges of things instead of bunching up in the clan squares. But they would want to be together, wouldn’t they? Together until the end.
The potent mahuan root opened her lungs. She took her first full breath in a day sometime in the darkest part of the night, her brain buzzing, hands trembling. Her body felt very light. She gazed at the stars through the breaks in the trees, and pretended to be a bird, flying faster and faster, until her vision swam and her head ached and she vomited bile and chewed more mahuan root.
Tasia woke her at the blushing blue of Para’s dawn. “There are women down there,” Tasia said.
Lilia peered through the branches and saw four figures in hooded coats picking among the snarling brambles of floxflass and morvern’s drake.
Lilia reached for her ward again, thumbing at the snarls of power still hidden there.
The figure at the front raised its head, then the other three. One actually fell to their knees, keening, and that drew Lilia up short.
She stopped poking at the ward.
Tulana pulled back her hood and peered up at her. There was a twist to her mouth that Lilia thought was anger, but when she spoke, the strained tone was not anger, but pain.
“Please desist that meddling,” Tulana said. “I’d hoped you were dead.”
Lilia palmed a bit of mahuan root from the bag at her side, and started chewing. Took a long, full breath.
“Where are the others?”
“Dead,” Tulana said. Flat tone.
“The Tai Mora?”
“You,” Tulana said. “Taigan didn’t teach you how to use that foul shit you seared into us, and this is what it gets you.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“Well, someone was going to murder us eventually,” Tulana said. “You. The Tai Mora. The Empress.” She laughed hollowly. She seemed to relax, now, though, as she came up under Lilia’s roost.
“I need to get down,” Lilia said. Her voice sounded tremulous, even to her. She said it again, more strongly, “Help me down.”
“Use your little powers,” Tulana said.
“I can order you.”
“You are loathsome.”
“How many Dhai have you killed, Tulana? You and your Seekers?”
“You’ve got more blood on your hands than I, girl.”
“You’re wrong.” Lilia felt the mahuan working on her aching, blistered body. She could barely feel any pain anymore, and breathing was like a dream, almost as lovely as when she could draw on Oma.
Tasia clung to her, trembling again. “Come and get the chi
ld,” Lilia said, and Tulana reluctantly raised her arms.
Tasia gave Lilia a furtive look, but obeyed, far more trusting than Tulana. What would this little girl think, if she knew what Lilia was?
Lilia went down next. She asked for no help, and none moved to help her. She fell, stumbled to her hands and knees, and shuffled to her feet with great difficulty.
“Where did you come from?” Lilia asked.
“The Dhai from the clans, all the ones stretching from here to the harbor, are meeting at a large stronghold inland. Kuallina? That’s where we were headed before… you called.”
Lilia glanced at the faces of the remaining Seekers – mean-faced Voralyn with the streak of gray hair in the black; plump Amelia; and Laralyn, the youngest. They were missing the man, Sokai, the lean, wolfish one who went everywhere with Tulana, the one Lilia once saw her singing to.
She glanced back at Tulana. “I am sorry, again.”
“There is no real regret,” Tulana said, “and no forgiveness to be had, between master and slave.”
“Did you tell your dajians that?”
“To make someone free into a slave is far worse than–”
“We bleed the same,” Lilia said. “I gave you a choice, and you made it.” Tasia clung to her frayed tunic. “Now which of you is a healer? Voralyn?” Lilia held out her blistered hands. Patches of her skin were weeping fluid. “Attend this, and then we must get back around the army to Kuallina.”
“You intend to make a stand there?” Tulana said. Sarcastic, almost sneering. “That did not turn out well last time.”
“We were unprepared. I have something else in mind.” Lilia spit the wad of mahuan pulp, and snapped off another bit.
“Some fool plan,” Tulana said. “You nearly killed us all last time.”
“The plan I had would have worked,” Lilia said, too sharply. “We never got a chance to use it. Something went wrong at the harbor. We should have had more time. But we didn’t. So you can follow me, or die here. The same as in Dorinah.” She almost plucked at the wards again. Almost. The worn, exhausted look on Voralyn’s face reminded her too much of Kalinda Lasa. When had she become a monster? She pressed her hand to Tasia’s head.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 75
