An hour passed, maybe two, before one of the servants came back and called them further up into the hold.
They climbed through broad, open halls filled with light. How the hold could be so filled with light and still so warm, Roh was uncertain. Servants and official-looking people moved past them. He passed great libraries, most of them empty. The empty libraries were the only sign that there had been any sort of violence or upset here at all. The Tai Mora had held Caisau for nearly two years now, and must have cleaned up much of it after the invasion.
The assistant came to a great glass door. The light was so bright that Roh squinted. This time of year, it would hardly get dark at all this far north. They entered a warm, humid atrium so vast it felt like walking into the open air.
Roh stared upward. They were under the massive dome at the center of the hold. All around them were huge, broad-leafed trees and twisted vines with leaves larger than Roh’s head, full of tangling gardens of flowers and fleshy succulents that Roh had no name for. He sweated in his coat, and peeled it off. The others did the same.
The servant led them through the meandering gardens. Roh heard the sound of running water. They passed a massive waterfall poking up from a clotted nest of vegetation. It sprayed a cool mist. Little birds flitted about the flowers. Yellow and orange birds, birds with stalks for eyes, birds with great long threaded tongues that they used to sip at the flowers. Birds with claws at the ends of their wings. Birds… so many birds…
They rounded the waterfall and came to the center of the atrium and a little park. Silver benches lined the walkway. A blue patterned walk made a large circular path at the center. In the center grew an enormous petrified bone tree so tall it blotted out much of the light. Roh gaped at the massive skulls. They had come from creatures with heads as big as he was. Bones twice as tall as him made up the trunk. The tree was as big around as six people standing side by side. He saw shapes moving up and down its length – tree gliders hopping quickly from bone to bone, branch to branch. That’s how he knew it was petrified, not alive. It would have eaten them all, and him too, if it still breathed.
Sitting across from the tree was a wizened old man. The servant came to him, bowing so low Roh thought her head might touch the ground.
Roh’s captors met him and they too bowed. As Roh reluctantly got to his knees to do the same, he met the man’s look, and froze halfway into his bow. He coughed or cried, he wasn’t sure which.
The man peered at him with black eyes in a heavily wrinkled face, a face with just one expression, an expression Roh knew well.
It was Dasai, his dead mentor.
Roh huffed out a breath and struggled to his knees, because saying Dasai’s name aloud won him nothing. He pressed his head to the floor so the man could not see the tears streaming down his face. The stone floor was very cool. He pressed his palms there too, and did not raise his head even as the man spoke to their captors, talking in Dasai’s voice – his Dasai – but in the language of the enemy, the people with their faces.
“Look up at me, boy,” Dasai said in Dhai now, and Roh rubbed his face and did what he was told. He looked at the man whose head he had watched hacked from his body.
“You know the Kai cipher?”
“Yes,” Roh said.
“We have books here in the Kai cipher,” Dasai said. “I expect you can get to work translating those for us.”
Roh wondered how they knew the books were in the Kai cipher, and how those books had gotten to Saiduan, but decided fewer questions were better. He would translate them from the cipher into Dhai, and presumably someone else would translate them from Dhai into Tai Mora. That was a tremendous amount of work for a few old books. The Tai Mora had one advantage above all else, and that was that there were more of them and those they had subjugated than any other nation Roh knew. Why had he ever thought they had a chance against these people?
“Can you do that?” Dasai said, more forcefully this time.
Roh had been staring right through him. “Yes,” Roh said. “I can do that.”
“Good. You’ll be bathed and given suitable clothes.” He said something else to his captors in their dialect, and Borasau nodded and said something in the affirmative.
Roh needed to learn their language, but it was like picking flies out of honey. His mind didn’t want to tangle with them.
His captors stood, so he scrambled up as well. Once they left the atrium, they chattered among themselves, seemingly in good spirits.
Borasau pushed Roh away from the group as they rounded a turn, and told him to sit on a bench. “Someone will come for you,” he said. He took a chain affixed to the wall. It was attached to a collar.
Roh jerked away from him when he saw it, but Borasau caught him. He clipped the collar around Roh’s neck, patted his shoulder, and left him.
Roh shoved his hands under his thighs and waited. He needed to urinate, badly, and there was nowhere to go. Twenty very long minutes later, a tall woman wearing a long skirt and fur-lined leather tunic arrived. She had a high forehead, a twist of dark hair, and kept licking her lips.
“Dhai?” she said.
He nodded. “I’m told I should–”
“I know what you’re here for,” she said. “I’m to get you cleaned up. My name is Vestaria. We can do this kindly, or madly. Which way is up to you. I’m going to take off this collar and replace it with a warded one. The ward won’t permit you to leave the hold. You understand?”
He nodded. He knew what wards did.
“Lovely,” she said. “If you struggle, if–”
“I have to urinate,” he said, too quickly. “Please. I’ll do whatever you ask. Just let me piss in some place properly.”
His captors thought it funny when he pissed himself.
Her face softened. Pity. He saw it in her face and guilt roiled over him, guilt that he had come so far, and done so much, but was happy to do whatever some foreign force wanted of him, some evil people killing his, if only they would let him piss in a pot instead of on himself.
She clipped on the new collar, a leather one that chafed. It was too tight. Swallowing was uncomfortable. She led him to a latrine and he urinated sitting on it like a real human being, and even though she was right outside the door he let himself cry, just once, because he feared he wouldn’t get another chance.
Then she led him to a bathing room and scrubbed him clean like a child and helped him dress in new clothes.
“You are no doubt exhausted,” she said, “but I’m afraid you must come to the libraries now. It’s time to earn your breakfast.”
Roh expected her to take him to the libraries they had passed before, but she took him deeper into the hold instead. Deeper and deeper until they arrived at a set of double doors, already peeled open to reveal a vast room.
He stepped inside and gaped, for all around him, as far as he could see, were shelves and shelves of books. And, at the center of the room, milling about the shelves, were hundreds of collared slaves like him, not just Dhai but other people, too, from Dorinah and Tordin and Aaldia, and maybe other places he hadn’t heard of. Roh turned to Vestaria, trying to form a question.
“The ciphered books are here,” she said, leading him to a table already occupied by three other slaves, all Dhai. “These have worked on them for some time, but they were not as close to the Kai. I do hope you’re telling the truth, boy, because there is much work to do.”
The table was stacked with at least a hundred and fifty tomes, great things bound in green and black leather, each as thick as his palm was wide.
“All of these…?” Roh said.
She patted the top of the nearest stack. “Two thousand years of Kais kept records here,” she said. “Let’s hope for your sake that the Kai cipher hasn’t changed much. Get to work.”
She walked off.
Roh felt he should introduce himself to the others at the table, but they did not dare look at him.
Roh’s hand trembled as he picked up the boo
k nearest him. He opened it. And there were the familiar Dhai characters. He traced his fingers down the first column. They were nonsense words as written. He grabbed at one of the blank books at the center of the table, and picked up a squib of a pen. Counted out the letters as he would for the cipher, and wrote the first sentences in clear Dhai:
We lost sixteen ships today, and whatever it is that’s falling from the sky is getting closer. The creature of Caisau tells me we are too late.
He laughed softly.
All that time they worked in Kuonrada, and the Saiduan had lost much of what they needed during the taking of the first city, the first incursion. They would never have been able to unravel all this, though, if Roh had not come here, if Roh had not tried to make his own fate.
Too late, Roh thought. They were all too late. He stared out at the massive library swarming with scholars, and thought how foolish the efforts that he and Dasai and Kihin, Aramey and Chali, had made looked by comparison. They had always been a hundred steps behind the Tai Mora.
He pulled the book into his lap.
The creature of Caisau.
48
Maralah yanked the souls from every living thing in the courtyard. The shrieking filled her ears. Purple blasts of Sina’s breath enveloped the unprepared sanisi and infantrymen. There was no time for them to run. Morsaar had sent only parajistas for this task, and that left her the most powerful person on the field. She spared just one, a skinny tirajista who she wrapped in a field of violet flame.
She pointed at Kovaas. “Let’s bring him back.”
The tirajista shook his head. Maralah urged the purple flames closer. Burned at his heels. “You’ll spend the rest of the war encased in this weapon otherwise. You understand?”
He spat at her. “I am a sanisi,” he said.
“So you are.” She yanked his soul from his body. The wispy lavender essence of him came free, and the flesh that remained crumpled. Her weapon consumed the soul’s energy.
With enough souls at her command, she didn’t need any allies. The last known sinajista who could manipulate souls the way she could died a decade before. So long as Sina rode the sky, she was the most powerful person in Saiduan.
Maralah clung tightly to her weapon. It was not a willowthorn branch, so it would not respond to her touch. It did not slide around her wrist, nor would it hold Sina’s power indefinitely. These souls would bleed out in days if she didn’t use them.
Good thing she didn’t expect to hold onto them that long.
Maralah called Sina and held a wave of power beneath her skin as she marched across the courtyard. She burned the infantry in the hall, then the three sanisi who charged at her. The shock on their faces warmed her stomach. She was a filthy, stinking wreck, her hair a matted tangle. As they burned around her she found her face had taken on a grinning rictus. The small muscles of her face hurt.
She made her way to the Patron’s wing, burning as she went. It was two floors before she met resistance. Two sinajistas put up a wall of purple flame that singed her clothes. She flashed up her willowthorn sword in a broad arc, sending a wave of fire out in turn. Their sinajista-spun defenses tangled in the narrow corridor, sparking and hissing.
Maralah cut her way forward, calling wave after wave of Sina’s breath and twisting it to her will. The door to the Patron’s quarters was locked and warded. It was an old sinajista ward she had put on herself for Alaar. She untangled it now with a deft tug of six long threads. The door was locked. She blasted it open with a burst of purple flame. Eight sanisi stood ready, flanked by twenty members of the Patron’s broodguard. Four of the sanisi were wrapped in purple mist, sinajistas ready to unleash a final defense.
She pushed forward a wave of purple fire and held it just inches from their faces, because she saw something there that gave her pause. Three of the sanisi were hers, or had been, months ago.
“Is Driaa behind you?” Maralah said. “I have something special for hir.”
The sanisi and broodguard stood with weapons raised.
“Is Rajavaa alive?” she asked.
Sovaan, a tall man at the far end – one of hers – said, “Maralah, it is Patron Rajavaa who said we must keep you from this room.”
Maralah admitted she’d had months to consider that possibility. Morsaar was not a usurper. He didn’t have the gall. He had done all of this at Rajavaa’s order, which is why she’d been left alive this long instead of killed immediately.
So typical. So Saiduan. So be it.
“And who is your Patron, Sovaan, when Rajavaa is dead in a month?”
This was the moment. The moment she had avoided all her life. Or perhaps the moment she had been building up to all these years. She was too old for this, and she knew it. She should have moved twenty years before, instead of holding Alaar’s hand.
“I’m going to burn this place down around me,” Maralah said. “If you’re too young to have seen me do it before, you’ll see it now.”
Three submitted, and bowed their heads. The rest she killed. While they smoked she said, “I need a sinajista and a tirajista to raise a man from the dead in the yard,” she said. “Kovaas, you know him?”
Two sanisi pulled away at the end and trotted down the stairs.
“Hold this position,” Maralah said to the last. He bowed.
She pushed open the door to Rajavaa’s room.
Rajavaa lay halfway off the bed, weapon clutched in his swollen hand.
Morsaar swung from her right, leaping out from behind the door. Maralah skewered him through the gut. She kicked him off her weapon, and strode to Rajavaa’s side.
Rajavaa should not have been alive. She’d half suspected Kovaas was luring her into some bigger plot. But no.
“Rajavaa, you fool,” she said.
“Morsaar!” he gasped.
“You could have asked me to leave,” she said. “It would have suited me better than prison.”
“You’d… never leave… never. Let them come… for me. You killed him. You…”
“We’re not all going to die here, Rajavaa.”
“Morsaar,” he said. He clawed at the sheets and began to weep. The weeping became coughing. Blood spattered his beard.
“You’re not getting out of this so easily,” she said. She yanked the bedding up and bound him in it. He was so weak he hardly struggled. She knotted him up at the chest and the feet.
The door opened. She tangled a breath of Sina into a protective wall, but it was only the returning sinajista and tirajista, dragging Kovaas with them. But he was still very dead. They dropped him on the floor.
“What is this?” Maralah asked.
The sinajista bowed. “I don’t have the skill. I’ve never… seen Sina rise.”
Maralah waved them both over. She knelt next to Kovaas’s body. “You’ve done a resurrection?” she asked the tirajista.
Another shake of the head. Of course not. They were both barely into their twenties.
“I can get his blood flowing again. I’ll pull his soul back into his body.” She tapped her weapon. “It’s stored here. When I do that, he’ll just die again unless you heal up the worst of the wounds.”
“Tira is descendent. I’m not sensitive.”
“Then you’ll work harder,” Maralah said. “You don’t have to heal everything. Just the killing blow. You understand? Start now.”
The tirajista’s hands moved over the body.
Maralah placed her blade on Kovaas’s chest and knelt before him, calling on Sina deeply, until purple mist suffused her whole body. She expelled the breath, and sang the Song of Dead, the Song of Unmaking, the Song of Souls, lacing each spell together with deft, delicate accuracy. She had feared that to lose Sina for so many years meant losing her knowledge and skill with it, but some things were learned by the body and the mind, and what the mind forgot, the body remembered.
She pulled the strength of the souls from the blade and into the meshed spell of resurrection she had created, then let go of it.<
br />
Kovaas’s eyes opened. He gasped. Arched his back. Screamed.
The tirajista jerked away from him.
“Mend the wound!” Maralah said.
The tirajista concentrated hard, muttering several songs Maralah knew now by heart, after years on the battlefield bringing back the dead.
Finally, the tirajista sat back, spent. “That’s all I can do,” he said.
Kovaas lay panting on the floor. Maralah took her blade from his chest and peered at him. Sometimes the dead came back bad. Sometimes it was too late.
“You know who you are?” she asked.
“Maralah,” he said, breathless. He gazed at her as a man would gaze at his ascendant star.
“You,” she repeated. “Tell me your name.”
“Kovaas,” he said. “I… you’ve brought me back.”
“Come up now,” she said. “I need you to help me.” She glanced at the other two sanisi. “What of the Tai Mora army?”
“We can see them from the walls,” the sinajista said. “A few hours at best. Coming from the northeast.”
“No flanking force to hem us in?”
“Runners say no. Just one force.”
“Take six slaves. Twelve sanisi. Twenty infantry. Rally those and meet their force.”
“We’ve got those invaders a few hours from the gates. They’ll see this as running.”
“It’s preserving the line.”
“The Patron wanted to die here.”
“Now he doesn’t. Do you?”
The sinajista glanced over at the rolled-up form of Rajavaa, wriggling and grunting on the cold floor. “I’ll rally them.”
“You too,” Maralah told the tirajista. “We’ll be here.”
She waited until they’d gone, then told Kovaas they were retreating.
“Help me take the Patron,” she said.
“The others?”
“Just us,” she said.
He was still too weak to help her with Rajavaa, so Maralah hoisted her brother over her shoulder. He was much lighter now, but she was not in the best shape after months in prison. She kicked open the latch that opened up the panel near the mantel. A wedge opened up, just big enough for her to huff Rajavaa into it and squeeze after him. She closed the secret door behind her and took Rajavaa by the ankles. She dragged him down the long, dark hall. She had been this way only once before, with Alaar, during an attempted coup. It was a long way to freedom from here.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 92
