Zezili huffed her way to the lip of the hole and braced herself for whatever was on the other side.
She took a deep breath and popped her head out. Then ducked back down.
Her brain frantically tried to make sense of what she’d just seen. Zezili steadied herself. She looked again.
She had come up inside the living circular barrier – the strange anomaly on the map. Great, tangled tree limbs clawed upward from the top of the barrier, obscuring the sky.
The ground was littered with bodies for as far as Zezili could see, in various states of decay. Some were merely skeletons, tangles of bone and armor. Others were bloated bags of meat and she crawled over the lip of the hole carefully, weapon at the ready. She kept low, walked over to the first body. This one was very ripe, maybe six or seven days dead. She knew the armor. The Eye of Rhea was embossed on the helm.
All around her, above the bodies, hung massive cocoons as big as cages. They dangled from the broad branches of the trees. Some of them had split open. They dripped with some kind of plant goo or mucus. The one nearest her trembled softly.
Zezili stepped back, nearly falling back into the hole.
She heard a susurrus, like a swarm of insects rubbing its wings together. A hundred paces across the broad plain of bodies, six figures moved toward her, ducking their heads, their arms moving strangely, as if double-jointed. They were golden creatures, naked, with two sets of legs and absurdly narrow waists, like wasps.
But it was their gait that gave them away, the way they moved side to side, cocking their heads at her like curious cats, green eyes blinking furiously.
They walked like the Empress. They walked like the woman who had sent for them, their… mother? Their companion? These were the Empress’s weapon. Her own people.
The Empress always wore a big, beautiful belled skirt, hiding two sets of legs, padding out an impossibly small waist.
They were visitors from somewhere else, hidden in some other time for just this moment – the moment when Rhea herself was coming back into the sky, and the Empress called them home.
38
The Liona Stronghold disintegrated, like a body covered in lye.
Kirana sat at the head of her army, gaze fixed on Navaa, or Isoail, whatever she called herself here. She was not as powerful as Kirana had hoped, but it was enough to turn the tide. The wall fell, a body devoid of bones, skin sloughing away. The plants that held it together sizzled. The stones flowed like water, melting. And then there was the screaming.
Kirana had heard worse screaming. A woman stood on the wall, many women, yes, but Kirana remembered one woman, standing firm on the parapet, screaming at their parajistas while Navaa cut through their defenses like some horrifying specter.
All they loved, all they hoped for, all they wanted, dead in a few hours.
The steaming wreck of the wall littered the pass, a great morass of stone and blazing plant matter.
Kirana did not leap across it. She waited for her advance troops to go first, picking their way among the wreckage. Then she patted her bear over. Her weapon unfurled from her wrist. She kept it out as they crept across the stone barrier that had held back the people of Dorinah for five hundred years. Navaa went first, prodded along by Kirana’s loyal parajistas. Kirana kept a watch on her, looking for any sign of her turning. But what loyalty did this dajian have, to a country she had never known? None.
They trundled to the other side, passing body after body. Kirana saw mangled limbs. Grasping hands. Tattered clothing. She saw the remains of paintings and rugs and barrels and any number of things, and for a moment she lamented the waste. Surely they could have salvaged something from the destruction?
It was then that she saw the force waiting for them on the other side. At least four hundred militia and several hundred more support staff wielding sticks and stones rushed across the blasted wall to meet her.
Kirana had not expected so many to rally behind the wall, and certainly did not anticipate so many would stay once it was clear there would be no victory for them here.
It took another two hours to crush and scatter that force, which proved remarkably relentless for a bunch of pacifists.
Kirana dispatched a dozen of them herself, splattering more blood across her boots, feeding her hungry armor. When they were dispatched, Madah rode up beside her, so very young and strangely jolly.
“What do you see?” Kirana asked, because sometimes she could not trust her own sense of things.
“I see victory,” Madah said, and Kirana looked at the destruction anew, now from Madah’s eyes, and she saw a clear way across the rubble. They would move through the towering trees on the other side and make their passage into Dhai, then to Kuallina, and further on, to the temples, their ultimate goal, a goal her people had been struggling to reach for thousands of years, the goal that would be hers, the one all the history books would assign to her. She took a deep breath, pulling in the scent of the stone dust, the pulped plant matter. This was her achievement. This was her legacy.
They broke out across the wreck of Liona and into the clearing beyond. Kirana saw refugees running from the destruction, people caught outside the fall of the wall, or those who were camping outside it. Shrieks. Calls for mercy. Nothing she had not heard before. But as her bear trundled into the clearing, she pulled it to a halt and watched them, really watched them for the first time. She had sent many to kill these people in her stead. She had ships in their harbor, ships that had obliterated their defenses there. But here she saw them. Really saw them.
Her people.
Kirana frowned. Her weapon began to retreat into her wrist, a bonsa branch that had lost its will. She curled her fingers, coaxing it back to life, and it extended. She gripped it tightly. Not her people, no. Pacifists. Cannibals. Fools. Every one of them.
“Pursue them,” she barked at Madah.
“Yes, Kai.”
Madah called to the squad behind her, and six dozen Tai Mora, weapons raised, galloped after the fleeing Dhai.
Kirana curled a lip in disgust. To come so far and lose her stomach now would be a tragedy. She snarled and raised her own weapon. Slapped her bear forward. She pursued Madah and her squad.
She cut down the fleeing Dhai. Great slashing hacks. A young man with a crooked nose. A grandmother carrying a small child. Three adolescents hardly old enough to fuck. She sliced them down, yanking them from the world like hunks of rice.
Kirana caught up to Madah’s forces. Bodies littered the long plain from Liona to the woods. Bunches of floxflass collected around their bears’ paws.
“Walking trees out there,” Madah said. “Waiting for them to pass.”
“How many escaped?”
“We got all we could see.”
Kirana stared back at the ruin of the wall. “Hold here in case any more escape the wreckage,” she said. “I need to wait on intelligence.”
“Yes, Kai,” Madah said, and Kirana adored what she saw in her face – the fierceness, the absolute certainty. There was more certainty in that face than Kirana had felt in twenty years. She thought again of Yisaoh, and her heart ached. Would this all be worth it without Yisaoh?
Kirana shook the thought from her head and paced back to the bulk of her force as they streamed over the wall that had once been Liona. They were stabbing at the rubble, dispatching those who had survived the fall.
She called one of her lieutenants, and had him open a wink to Gaiso, at the outskirts of Dorinah.
“We’re in Dhai,” Kirana said.
“We arrived in Daorian just ahead of those fourth world travelers,” Gaiso said. “The Empress is hardened against us. She has some kind of… I don’t know what she has up around this wall. It’s like nothing I’ve seen.”
“Hold there. We may be able to take the temples soon.”
“Timeline?”
“Uncertain. I’m getting reports that Honorin’s force at the harbor is pushing the remaining resistance to Kuallina. If we can break them at
Kuallina, we have them.”
“Without the rice fields in Dorinah–”
“I rely on you for that.”
“I can take Dorinah, but without the dajians to farm this land, we’ve got very little to keep us going past the fall. You know that.”
“I rely on your resourcefulness.”
“Kai, I–”
“There are a good number of people in Dorinah,” Kirana said. “Put them to good use.”
Gaiso smacked her lips. “The Dorinahs won’t make good slaves.”
“When the alternative is death, you’d be surprised at who chooses slavery,” Kirana said. “They will submit.”
Gaiso pursed her mouth. Kirana didn’t like that look. “Kai, the logistics of this–”
“When have the logistics been possible?” Kirana said. “Yet here we are. We are almost there, Gaiso. I close these gates–”
“We’re still missing the instructions–”
“The temple will know me. It will speak to me. Have a heart, Gaiso.”
Gaiso nodded. Curtly. Kirana flexed her left fist. They were committed. Gaiso would push to the end. They all would, the ones who had come this far. One did not destroy millions only to give up with the final twenty thousand already in the noose.
“Chin up, Gaiso. You’ll get your children over. I have them on the list.”
“When, Kai?”
“When we have them.” She would have found and killed Gaiso’s children before she found Yisaoh, she knew. But that was how it went. Gaiso’s children would still be in Clan Garika, ripe for picking on the way to Kuallina.
Kirana severed the connection and galloped about the ruins with the others, running through any Dhai still living. When it was done, she called back through to Shova on the other side, and told him to try pushing through another wave of their people.
She sat on a giant boulder inside the ruin where she had a clear view of the wink while they tried to send in another wave. Eighteen more of her people were able to get through. Eighteen! How many had they eliminated in this foray, to get that eighteen?
It frustrated her that there was no clear analog between her people and the ones they killed. Sometimes the ones they killed had doubles in her world, and sometimes they did not. That meant some of her people couldn’t get through, but many could. It was a stupid cosmic rule. She felt, often, as if Oma were making fun of her and her people, or perhaps making fun of the Dhai here. Who knew? But it was deplorable. Disgusting.
She made camp and settled in, but could not sleep. The killing gave her nightmares. The smell of the stone dust clogged her nostrils. When she closed her eyes, she saw Navaa looking at her with accusing eyes, so black. So cold. She was tired of the cold.
She closed her eyes.
Saw Yisaoh’s face.
She woke to a voice at the door to her tent. “Enter,” she said, without being absolutely certain who had knocked.
A young woman stood in front of her, a hunched, awkward looking thing, with scars on her face, as if she’d been stabbed with a sharp implement. She listed to one side, as if her left leg could not properly hold her weight.
Kirana feared sounding foolish, so didn’t ask her name. “What?”
“You’ve made a terrible mistake,” the girl said.
“Is that so?”
“I will meet you in Kuallina. We must speak. This destruction has gone on long enough.”
“The destruction is just starting,” Kirana said. “We must burn to start over. I’ve told all of you this many times. Who are you?”
“You’ll know,” the girl said. “You’ll know in Kuallina.”
Kirana felt dizzy. She staggered. When she looked up, the girl was gone. She huffed out a breath. Yelled for the guards. They ran in, oblivious. She asked if anyone had been past them, and they looked at her as if she were mad.
But she knew she wasn’t mad. It was the sky that was mad, and it was doing mad things to them. Everything was breaking apart – the worlds, the seams between them, the distances between people and places, even time itself, all muddled and distorted.
I’m dreaming of the Dhai, she thought, and they are dreaming of me. But those dreams will be true, soon. So very soon.
Kuallina. They would smash the Dhai at Kuallina.
39
Kuallina lay an hour distant. Lilia saw the bulk of it against the horizon from her perch on the topmost branches of an abandoned bonsa house. Tasia combed the garden below with Laralyn, looking for forgotten tubers or hidden food stores. The fires of the army still burned north of her at the harbor. The gates themselves must be on fire, not just the town, to burn like that over four days.
Lilia climbed down from the tree, breathing easy and free. Four days chewing raw mahuan had made her feel strong, weightless. For the first time in years she was nearly free of pain. Though her stomach cramped and her stool was bloody, she preferred this slow death to the faster one. She made her way carefully back down the side of the tree house, using a ladder made of trained vines. The nights were still cool, but the vines were flowering. They had passed great swaths of purple and white wildflowers on their long walk to Kuallina. Lilia insisted they stay off the road, which took longer. They had to haul Amelia out of a bladder trap. Laralyn nearly lost an eye to a lashing corpse flower. Her vision had gone misty. Tulana broke out into a rash after stumbling into some toxic flower.
Lilia had no illusions about where they were headed, or what their final fate would be. She knew in her heart – knew it and embraced it. She resolved to save nothing for the way back. There was no way back.
“So what is your grand plan?” Tulana said as Lilia kicked off the ladder.
“We need to get into Kuallina first,” Lilia said. “You’ll need to help with that.” In truth, Lilia had no plan. But no one followed a person without a plan. She needed more than compulsion to inspire these women.
“What do you need us for?” Tulana said. “This country is lost.”
Lilia glanced over at Tasia where she clawed at the remains of the garden.
“Come inside,” Lilia said, and motioned Tulana into the house. The door was unlocked, like all doors in Dhai. Its inhabitants had left in advance of the army.
“I can’t draw on Oma anymore,” Lilia said. She made herself look at Tulana as she said it, because to do any less would show weakness, and she had never been weaker than in this moment. Saying it aloud made her mournful again. How much differently would this war have gone if she had not burned out? If Taigan was still here?
“Burned out?” Tulana said. Her lip curled. “Is that so?”
“I don’t need a lecture.”
“I wasn’t going to lecture,” Tulana said, and her tone changed. It was she who looked away. “You aren’t the first arrogant little girl to destroy herself because she thought she didn’t need training.”
“You’re still bound to me. Your ward is still good. You’ve seen it.”
“Indeed I have,” Tulana said. Her face crumpled. She wiped her face with her fists, cleared her throat. “There’s a very popular story you dajians tell, about servitude. I’ve seen you playing at it in Dorinah, breaking your own farm implements so you don’t have to work. Burning your own crops. Letting giant floxflass nests devour the puppies you’re tending. It’s an ugly thing, but I’m told you call it resistance, and it gives you some pleasure. It’s a thing I’m coming to understand, this delight in destruction of what one has built.”
“No more talking,” Lilia said. “Doing.”
“And how is it you intend to stop me?”
The air vibrated. For a moment, Lilia thought she could see the red mist forming around Tulana, but no. It was just the memory of it, her mind conjuring a vision to pair with the milky air.
“You really have burned yourself out, haven’t you?” Tulana said. Whatever she held, she released. The air pressure normalized. It wasn’t as if Tulana could move against her. The ward prevented it. But whatever she spun must have been grim. “You
think your little dajian refugees love you? Just wait until they find out you’re not a god, just some ugly little girl. I can tell you exactly what happens next. You get stoned to death, or thrown off the top of that hulking fortress.”
“You don’t know anything about Dhai.”
“I know they’ll eat you alive – they won’t even give you the courtesy to wait until death! – if you don’t figure out very quickly how to put together an army and hold a position. You’ve lost Taigan. I worked with Zezili Hasaria, directing legions of women and Seekers against the outer islands, and even the Saiduan. I’ve seen war. I know it. You’ll lose.”
“My intention isn’t to have you fight a war on their terms,” Lilia said.
Tulana crossed her arms. “What are you proposing?”
“You led the Seekers in war.”
“Wait now–”
“When we get to Kuallina, I’ll need you to train the Oras who will go with us. I need them trained properly, to fight as units, the way they do in Dorinah.”
“You’d put me in charge of thousands of gifted?”
“There aren’t that many,” Lilia said. “I can get the full count, though.”
“How many do you think there are?”
“There are only twenty thousand people in Dhai,” Lilia said. “Oras? I don’t know, but not more than six or eight hundred.”
She saw something sorrowful pass over Tulana’s face. “What is it?” Lilia asked.
“That’s… we’ll lose that many in the first day facing that army coming up from the coast.”
“We aren’t going to stay and fight,” Lilia said. The plan was taking shape in her mind as she spoke.
“What will your Kai think of that?”
“It doesn’t matter what he thinks,” Lilia said. “They won’t be following him. They will follow me.”
“I have no reason to–”
Lilia thumbed at the ward.
Tulana’s knees buckled. She fell. She curled into a ball on the ground. The reaction was so fast, so potent, Lilia released the ward immediately.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 85
