Zezili rocked once in her chair. She steeled herself for a painful fall, then threw the chair over onto her right side. Pain jolted up her arm.
The guards came running. She stayed down until they were nearly on top of her, then crawled swiftly under the table, kicking the chair back at them.
She heaved herself onto the table and came right up on top of the nearest guard before his sword was out of its sheath. She headbutted him in the face so hard she saw a bank of static blur across her vision. She hooked the thumb and pointer finger of her right hand under the hilt of his sword and yanked it out the rest of the way. She braced it against her stomach, knowing her hand could not provide the needed pressure, and leaned into the chest of the second guard just as he brought up his dagger.
They both slammed into the ground. The hilt of the sword jammed badly into her ribs. She used the stump of her other hand to help get leverage on the hilt and pulled the sword out. The first guard was still hunched over, blood gushing down his face from his shattered nose. She kicked his legs out from under him.
He fell. Punched her hard. Her head whipped back. She headbutted him again.
He howled.
They flailed on the floor in a tangle of limbs and blood. She got the sword flat against his neck. She pressed a knee on either side of the sword, balancing herself on her toes, her ass on his chest, using her body weight to strangle him.
He kicked. She drooled in his bloody face.
Her right hand ached. She stared into his face, some fat bearded face, and she imagined Storm’s face there, and she pressed harder, because she would have to kill Storm too, she would have to kill them all if she was going to stop whatever this all was, whatever dark thing the Empress had planned for the Dhai, for the Dorinah, for the Tai Mora, for the world.
The guard kicked one last time. He went limp, his tongue lolling from his mouth.
She continued sitting over him, panting, for a full minute. The edges of the blade had bit into the bottom of his throat, making a red line. His face was bug-eyed, the eyes reddened. He was starved of oxygen, his windpipe crushed. The other man was bleeding out from the belly wound six paces away. She didn’t care to bother with him.
Zezili was trembling. She crawled to her feet, steadying herself on the table. There was no way out of here that wasn’t walking out the front door, and to do that... She stared at the dead man. Both men wore helms; though they didn’t cover their faces – making them terribly vulnerable to headbutting – it might get her out the door.
It so happened she knew a certain doctor who had a far better helmet for her purposes, and she knew where to find him. Without her left hand, she had no way to knot a weapon to her right. They didn’t leave her with a lot of options. She glanced over at the fireplace again, and the roasting spit at its center with the iron teeth on it. What was the stump of her left arm now, but a hunk of meat?
She put her left arm on the spit and painfully twisted the tongs to tighten them, so the metal closed over the top of her arm like teeth. It was heavy, and cumbersome, but she wasn’t going out into that hall without a weapon.
Zezili pulled on the padded leather armor of one of the dead men, sweating and swearing as she did it. How long did she have? Two minutes? Thirty?
She put the padded armor over her head without tightening it. All she needed was the padded bit over her chest where she could rest the blunt end of the spit. If she held her left arm low and tight next to her side, the spit turned to her chest, she could use the armor to leverage a good thrust.
Zezili strode to the doors, bleeding pain with every step. Her vision still swam. Her face ached from smashing the man’s nose, and her phantom fingers hurt twice as bad, as if someone had mashed the whole hand under a boot.
As she stepped up to the door, she heard footsteps in the hall – too few for an army of guards. Maybe she still had a chance. She braced her weapon, caught the door with her working fingers, and threw it open. Lunged forward.
A young man ran headlong into her, body thumping directly into the spitted weapon. The weight of him sent her reeling back. She landed with a huff on the floor, the man on top of her. She smacked her head on the stone. Her stump thumped into his body, preventing him from sliding all the way to her shoulder, launched there with the weight of his own momentum.
The breath left her body, knocked cleanly out of her. She tried to roll clear. He moved first, pushing himself up on his hands. His dark hair hung into his face. Blood bloomed across his tunic.
Zezili thought she was dreaming. The square jaw, hollowed cheekbones, the delicate face and features – she knew him, knew him like she knew the hand she had lost.
But she could not say his name.
Anavha rolled off her, grabbing at the bloody hole in his chest.
Zezili gasped for breath and clawed toward him. She pushed her right hand under his head, pulled him close to her, and stared down at him with wonderment.
His mouth moved.
“Ah, my love,” Zezili said.
More footsteps, a gaggle of men, led by Natanial Thorne.
Zezili bared her teeth. “Don’t you touch him,” she said. “He’s mine.”
Natanial punched her square in the face.
34
The stargazers were both men, slender and supple as reeds with words sweet as honey and opaque as molasses. Kirana drummed her fingers on her campaign table while they droned on about probability and the proposed speed of different types of light. Another week of war, hounding the Dorinahs to the sea, and the biting ulcer in her stomach was flaring up again, like some hungry animal. The stargazers’ avoidance of her question was not helping her mood. She made camp inside some petty Dorinah lord’s estate, hosting her stargazers through a rip in the fabric of the world right there in the lord’s former entertaining room.
Decadent furniture carved with fanciful living shapes – wildflowers, vines, and belled faces of pitcher plants – clashed with the blood smearing the table, and her boots. She had the lord’s table taken out and her campaign table put in. She did not sit at it, as the furniture in Dorinah was all too low, as if they liked to kiss the floor and the creatures on it. So she stood, impatient, while the blood of the household fueled this useless conversation.
“Six people died to get this wink open,” she said. “Tell me how many worlds have entered the field of battle? It’s a simple question.”
“As we’ve tried to explain–” The elder, a bearded fellow called Suari, made a broad, expansive gesture with one hand, which she recognized as the prelude to another circular lecture. He had blue tattoos winding up his arms, twin mermen with forked tails and giant fangs. She once asked him if they were a relation, and he had asked if it was a serious question.
She addressed the younger instead. “Masis, tell me what he won’t.”
Masis eyed Suari a long moment, stroking his scraggly beard. Young men trying in vain to grow spotty beards put her in mind of molting young birds playing at being adults. He cleared his throat. “As we’ve discussed, there is no way to accurately determine how many worlds may gain access during Oma’s rise,” he said. “I can tell you no world is fool enough to cross over into ours, at least that we’ve determined. It seems quite clear our world is one of the many that will not survive this latest rise of Oma. But our preliminary theories suggest that the closer a world is to the prime – the world where the break initially occurred, making this travel possible – the softer and more sensitive it will be to travel from other realms, allowing the mixing and merging of people fleeing catastrophes on other worlds.”
“Plain language,” Kirana said.
Masis said, “Because it’s easier to get to the world you’re on, now the one where the primary break occurred, it’s statistically more likely to be the world more people will travel to as the worlds come closer together.”
“So we could have hundreds of worlds invading this one right now? I could have dozens of usurpers take everything I’ve gained here?”
/>
Suari turned up his nose, though she suspected it was an unconscious gesture. She was well aware of what he thought of her – daughter to a cobbler, murderer of half the world. “We are stargazers, Kai, not priests.”
Masis said, “There could be any number of adjacent realities pushing into your sphere right now. It will only get worse when Oma rises. The fact that you have identified others is a bold sign, though – it means Oma’s rise is very close.”
“How close?” Kirana said.
“Weeks,” Masis said. “Perhaps a month or two, at maximum.”
“And that means travel without blood,” Suari said. “So perhaps next time you could spare the six.”
“It’s six fewer left here to till your garden when you arrive, that’s all,” Kirana said. That made them both stand a little straighter. They all yearned to cross over. The toxic sky was getting worse. She had no equipment here, no safe observatory, to put them in, not until she had taken Dhai and its temples. And if she failed to close the rifts from the temples… she, too, could be overrun by some other world.
She said, “Do you have recommendations on sealing these soft areas where the other worlds are getting people through? Something we can do before we crack Dhai?”
“Only what we told you before,” Suari said. “Until the machines that caused the initial break are engaged to seal it, or Oma leaves the sky – which could be twenty years or more – you will see visitations from other worlds. Perhaps twenty. Perhaps thousands.”
“Why is it you never give me comforting news?”
“As I said–” Suari began.
“You’re not priests.” Kirana waved a hand at them. “Go, then. Get back to observing that cancer speeding across our sky. I’ve not given up on a solution for that.”
Suari’s eyes widened, but Masis just nodded. Did they think she had killed too many to go back? But killing was wearying, and she knew exactly how much more she had to do before this was all over, and Yisaoh could cross over, and they could build a real life here.
“Tell the minder to fetch Yisaoh,” she said, “if she isn’t engaged in something else.”
The stargazers nodded and moved out of the frame. The wink looked out onto a shadowy green wall lit with smoky outlines of people. Kirana had moved her entire army closer to the equator, as the poison from the sky was worse the closer one went to the poles. The northern continent she’d murdered with plague was uninhabitable now, as were the great glass cities of the only empire that had held out against hers. They’d negotiated an uneasy peace five years before. The people of the glass cities told her their gods would save them. So when death rained from the sky, its people went out into the streets and raised their hands to it, and died there. Millions dead. Such a waste of blood.
This outpost with the green walls and shadowy memories of death belonged to a people called the Azorum who had made the most beautiful green stone temples and public buildings. They were not a warring people, and they had come out to meet her army with open palms and warm smiles and she had cast great waves of fire into their sprawling cities so powerful the blast of it seared the outlines of their terrified bodies against those same walls.
Kirana supposed they would have painted over them, in time, but they did not intend to stay in the cities of the Azorum. The band of civilizations moving to the equator where the effect of the dying satellite wasn’t as toxic would wither and die soon enough.
Yisaoh moved into the frame of the wink, sitting just in front of the shadowy outline on the wall. Her hollowed face was made more cavernous as the long shadows of the evening began to creep across the room.
“The stargazers tell us we’re about out of time,” Kirana said.
“I remember the first time you told me that.”
“It convinced your mothers,” Kirana said. “They wouldn’t have given permission for us to wed if I hadn’t told them the world was ending.”
“You have a persuasive way about you.” Yisaoh smiled a mirthless smile; lips making the motions. Her eyes remained shadowed. She held her hands in her lap, tightly. She only did that when she had too much to say and a fear of saying it.
“The other worlds are here,” Kirana said. It hurt to say. Her throat closed, as if she tried to swallow a stone.
“How many?”
“We don’t know. We’re turning away from assaulting Dorinah and going straight to Dhai, now. We don’t have time to make a foothold here. If we don’t begin the process of closing the seams between the worlds, we could be overrun by some other force.”
“Without doing the spring planting in Dorinah, you’ll be lost come summer. Many crops will already be in, but who will tend them? You said you needed Dorinah before Dhai, or we could not support ourselves there.”
“I know. But I have a boon.”
Yisaoh waited, brows raised.
“Navaa is here. Her double. We found her in some lodging near the crossover point. That’s a bit of luck, isn’t it?”
“Luck?”
Kirana leaned forward. “There is luck still, Yisaoh.”
Yisaoh’s lower lip trembled. Kirana put her hand through the gap in the world, though there was always a fear, a danger that it would snap shut and take her limb with it. Yisaoh gripped her hand, hard. Her skin was cold to the touch, like a corpse. But the air around her was very warm.
“Luck,” Kirana said.
“Luck,” Yisaoh whispered.
“I will take the wall of Liona. We’ll take Dhai and its temples and stop the encroachment of the others. This is our world now. We’ll find your shadow. It’s only a matter of time. I promised, Yisaoh.”
“So many promises,” Yisaoh said. She pressed Kirana’s hand to her face. Put her other hand up to the invisible wall between them, until it met resistance. Her double’s existence, pushing back at her.
“And I’ve kept them. For you, I’ve kept them.”
A knock at the door. A voice outside the frame of the wink. “Twenty minutes, before it closes, Consort.”
Kirana squeezed Yisaoh’s hand. “Soon,” she said. “Will you bring the children in?”
“Yes,” Yisaoh said. “They’ve been asking for you.”
Yisaoh moved outside the reach of the wink. Kirana heard a door close. Low voices. She waited patiently.
The children came in ahead of Yisaoh – tall, leggy Moira, already twelve; curly haired Corina, ten; and little Tasia, her youngest, six.
“Can we visit now?” Tasia said.
Kirana said, “We’re getting things well prepared for you. I don’t want to bring you over until I have everything ready.”
“Mother isn’t coming,” Moira said. Cool. Matter-of-fact. Kirana saw much of herself in her, though they were not her blood children. Moira and Tasia were her dead cousin’s, and Corina was Yisaoh’s. She and Yisaoh had raised all three since they were infants. Kirana still remembered coming home from delivering the plague-ridden goods to the docks and finding Moira toddling out to greet her. Kirana had been gone so long she had no idea she was already walking.
“I’ll follow after,” Yisaoh said.
“Mam,” Tasia said to Kirana, “Mother says the sky isn’t rotten there.”
“That’s right. We’ll all be together soon.” She thought to promise it again, but after her conversation with Yisaoh, promises tasted bad. No more promises. Action.
“Kai?” the voice of the sinajista on the other side again. “Consort, the wink’s becoming unstable.”
“Love to you,” Kirana said. “When you arrive you’ll have a big house, and rooms all to yourselves. What do you think of that?”
“It’s hot here,” Tasia said.
Moira folded her arms, frowned. “It better not be as hot,” she said.
Kirana restrained her annoyance. Oh, to be twelve. “It’s not as hot,” she assured her. “The wink’s going out. You take care of your mother.”
“I love you, Mam!” Corina burst out, spreading her arms wide.
The w
ink wavered, like ripples on a pool of water.
“I love–”
The wink closed.
Kirana stared hard at the other side of the blood-smeared house, now a blank wall.
One of her sinajistas knocked, opened the door. “Kai…”
“I know,” Kirana said. She hated that they knew her weakness. Did caring for Yisaoh make her stronger, or weaker, in their eyes? But they all cared for someone still on the other side. If she shared their motivation, didn’t that make her more like them? Make her more trustworthy?
“We march west tomorrow,” Kirana said. “Time is short.”
“It’s been relayed. And the force approaching from the east?”
“Not our concern. Let the Dorinahs deal with them. I want to concentrate our forces on Liona. We’re taking Dhai.”
“Yes, Kai.”
Kirana stood over her table. The lines were blurry, the map a fuzzy nonsense thing. Teardrops on the map. She wiped her face. Foolish. Tears saved no one. A decade-long campaign was about to end. She needed to stay focused here at the very end. The end of everything, and the beginning, too. Her beginning. Their beginning. A renewal.
“Kai?”
Lohin’s mewling voice. She called him in.
“I’ve heard we have a new destination,” he said.
“Correct.”
“With Navaa in our custody, we could breach the walls of Dorinah in a week and–”
“How long have you known of the second force?”
“The… second force, Kai?”
“The one coming from the east? The Osadainans. A people we already thoroughly destroyed.”
“I… it was purely speculative. I needed to confirm…”
“Do you think this is a joke, Lohin?”
“I… no? No, this is life or–”
“Not just your life. Or my life. But the lives of our entire people. How many times have our people fled destruction, looking for the prime world, the first world, the one with the power to stop the transitions, the apocalypse?”
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 82
