The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  Maralah dragged him for a good hour, down stair after stair, until he stopped struggling and she was dripping with sweat. Kovaas was finally able to help her toward the end, and it made the going easier. She had no supplies and only the glimmering of a plan. Getting the others to rally a small group, thinking she was waiting on them, bought her time. By the time they realized she had gone off on her own, the Tai Mora would be at the gates, and they would have bigger problems than her.

  She collapsed at the entrance to the long tunnel at the bottom of the hold. Kovaas went to scout ahead to ensure the tunnel was clear. She had another mile to drag him. Her whole body shook, and she was breathing hard. She leaned against the wall. Listened to Rajavaa mumble. She pulled back the sheet from his face.

  “Thirsty,” he said.

  “Not taking liquor with us.”

  “Let me die.”

  “Not a chance. I can resurrect you now, you know.”

  “And I’ll die again. I’m not… your monster.”

  “That’s precisely what you are,” she said.

  “Usurper.”

  “That’s the best you have? All these months you imprisoned me, and that’s all you came up with?”

  He spat at her. Misty flecks that merely wet his own face. Fresh air moved over them, coiling down through the passage.

  “Cheer up, brother,” she said. “We’re going to Anjoliaa. Taigan will meet us there. Just as I promised.”

  “Too late.”

  She showed her teeth, gritting them so hard her face hurt. “Feel free to die as much as you like on the way there. Over and over and over again. I’ll bring you back, Rajavaa. And then Taigan will heal you.”

  “I want to die… with Morsaar.”

  Maralah covered his face back up. He mumbled at her. She stood. “I wanted to stay out of prison,” she said. “We don’t all get what we want.”

  She took him by the heels again, and dragged him into the dark, damp corridor after Kovaas.

  49

  “Wrong,” Korloria said, and slapped Roh’s hands with a switch. He sat with the other hundred captive translators in a huge dining hall while Korloria and three other attendants walked their lines, ensuring everyone’s hands were in their laps, attention fixed forward. When the four attendants were pleased with the captives’ behavior, they went to the high table and hit a gong, signaling that it was time to eat. The translators attacked their food as if it were their last meal, and sometimes it was. By the time Roh ate that first meal, he had not eaten in nearly a day. He wolfed it down so fast it nearly came back up again.

  Hierarchies thrived on ordered systems. Roh had learned that in his classes on governance. The system that controlled Roh and his fellow captive translators was a perfectly structured one, even though it must have been less than two years old. A gong woke them before dawn. He learned that he could not talk to anyone without punishment, so he learned the routine by watching them. The few voices he did hear were after dark, hours after bed check, when some of the more rebellious dared to exchange whispers.

  He made his bed and washed his face and put on his clothes the same way everyone else did. They wore the same drab gray robes, like temple drudges. The gong signaled every new task – get to breakfast, tea and hard bread. Get to the library for six hours of research work. Break for more tea and hard bread and half a citrus fruit of some kind. Six more hours sitting in hard chairs with dusty books. Gong for dinner, meat and vegetables, which Roh didn’t eat for the first week, until hunger overcame him and he choked down the dead animal flesh with the same abhorrence he would have had for eating his own vomit. Gong for bed. The monotony made him want to crawl out of his skin.

  His escape from the drudgery lay in the texts themselves, the records of some Kai two thousand years dead who talked to him of a Caisau that was much warmer than this one, almost tropical. She talked of great frilled fishes in the sea. Massive land animals that moved across the tundra in the thousands, so large that just one of them fed the people of Caisau for a week. And cities… she spoke of cities spiraling out across what was then a semi-tropical plain. What he knew of geography and weather confounded her accounts, because it seemed impossible that a continent this far north could ever be warm, but what did he know of the world before it broke?

  He brought his translations to Korloria at the end of each day, and she took them without comment. One day two of the translators got into a fight in the archive room. Roh raised his head, so shocked that anything different was happening that he didn’t react for a full minute.

  Then he leapt up and ran to the tussle. Two middle-aged women wrestled on the floor; the larger, dark-haired one had the smaller one in a chokehold, legs locked around her torso. She yelled obscenities. Roh recognized the language as Saiduan, or some dialect of it. He made out something about cheating, or falsifying records, and then Korloria moved through the masses, and everyone ran away, back to their desks. They were faster than Roh. He didn’t take the hint.

  Korloria wiped her fingers at the two on the floor and they screamed, broke away, and writhed on the floor as if being flayed. Roh bolted back to his desk then, and sat hard in front of his books while they screamed and screamed.

  At day’s end, when Korloria took his translated pages, she smiled at him and said, “Your keepers said you were a fighter. What do you think of how we manage fighters?”

  “It’s efficient,” Roh said. He did not meet her gaze when he said it.

  That night, at dinner, Korloria clapped her hands before the start of dinner and announced they would have a bit of fun.

  “Since you all enjoy fighting so much,” she said, in Saiduan, “let’s have real stakes. That’s what you all wanted, isn’t it? Some excitement.”

  She called the two women from the day’s fight over, and brought them up in front of the high table.

  “End your disagreement here,” she said. “I can throw you both in confinement for three weeks, or one of you can kill the other here, now, and have an end of it.”

  The women shifted their feet. Exchanged looks.

  Korloria threw a cup of tea at them. Roh flinched. What was she getting at? What was the point?

  “Or I can kill you both here,” Korloria said. “Fight! Go on!” She flicked her fingers, and both women bowed over in pain.

  Roh turned away and stared at his plate. This is not my fight, he thought, over and over again, while the women keened. He heard one throw up her dinner.

  Quiet, Dasai had told him. Be quiet, Roh. Bow. Subservience. He had never been so good at being quiet.

  Roh leapt up from the table. “Enough!” he said. He strode toward the high table, already tense, anticipating Korloria’s counterattack. “You want someone to fight? Why don’t you fight me?”

  Korloria squeezed her fist. The women crumpled like rag dolls, dead on the floor.

  Roh stopped halfway to the table. All eyes were on him.

  “On your knees,” Korloria said.

  She came down from the high table. “Kneel,” she said. “Know your place.”

  “Fuck you,” he said. Saiduan had the vocabulary for it. Dhai didn’t.

  She squeezed her fist.

  His knees popped. He heard it before he felt it. He was on the floor before the pain registered, before he understood what had happened, before a sledgehammer of fiery needles shot through his knees. He squealed, a horrible sound like some dying animal. He couldn’t believe it came from his own throat.

  Korloria stood over him, expression bemused. “This is what happens to those who fight.”

  “Confinement” was a concrete box in the ground in some forgotten courtyard. They threw him down there for six days. He knew because he could see the suns rise and fall. Night was only four hours now. The searing pain in his knee was so bad, so deep, he could not sleep. On the sixth day they hauled him out and brought him to a doctor who chewed her lips and clucked her tongue and spun some tirajista trick that she said would heal him faster, but then they
put him back in the box, and he was there another two weeks lying in his own shit and piss. They hauled him out once a week, hosed him down, and tossed him in again.

  It was during his confinement that he began to hear the voices. Whispers, first. Then laughter. Sometimes he gripped the bars of the top of his cage and tried to break them. He spent a long time just screaming. He screamed that he was mad, hurt, thirsty. He screamed that he knew things, and that he was important. He screamed because he needed to convince them that his life meant something.

  He couldn’t walk without help when they pulled him out. The doctor proffered a crutch. When he came back to the library, no one looked at him.

  Korloria was there, though, smiling. She brought him a stack of books. “It’s a shame,” she said, “a boy so pretty, so fragile. It’s lucky you have such a talent with these, or we’d have had no further use for you.”

  He just stared at the stack of books. He had missed the books. He had missed going somewhere else. Anywhere else. Roh opened them and began to translate again, though it was slow going. He was not well. He had a low fever, and the pain in his knees was constant, even when he wasn’t trying to walk; a cold nerve pain. He lived in dread of the idea of walking, fearing with every step that bubbling pain would get worse. And it did, sometimes.

  The creature of Caisau says the invading armies will not cease until we shut the way between the worlds, but these transference engines she references aren’t on any map. I think she’s as mad as we are.

  Roh woke that night to the sound of squealing laughter. He lay awake in the dormitory, fists clenched in his sheets. The squealing continued, but it wasn’t coming from inside the dormitory. It came from behind him. Behind the walls.

  Roh pressed his hand to the wall. The warm skin of the hold seemed to sigh at his touch. He felt the tremulous vibration of the laughter. He pushed himself closer to the wall, and pressed his ear against it.

  The laughter became a voice, young and high, like a precocious child.

  “Where are you, Patron? Why have you not asked after me? Do you not love me? I love you.”

  Roh shivered and moved away from the wall.

  A few days later he turned over his pages to Korloria and she said, “Stay here, you. You’ll come with me. Keeper Dasai wishes to see you.”

  He limped after Korloria down the long hall, expecting she would take him back to the great atrium. Instead, they stayed there in the library until all the other translators had gone. She told him to sit at his desk. He did.

  Dasai entered from the front door, walking confidently toward their table. Two tall, robed women accompanied him.

  “You have translated a good many books, boy,” Dasai said, and sat easily beside him at the table. “The work you’ve done has pleased us.”

  Roh tensed, uncertain what new horror they were cooking up. When he had first arrived, all he wanted was a shift in the monotony. Now he knew that any change in routine led to something terrible.

  Roh just nodded, knowing the likelihood that he’d say something stupid that would ultimately lead to more pain.

  “So after all this translation, what is your opinion of this Kai, this woman who wrote all these diaries?” Dasai asked. “Trustworthy accounts, do you think?”

  Roh wet his mouth. He looked at Korloria, trying to find some guidance, but she just smiled.

  Roh said, “I’m just trying to do as you tell me.”

  “And now I’m telling you to think,” Dasai said. His eyes were black, the gaze piercing. It was so like the look Roh’s Dasai gave when he was scolding him that Roh had to stare at the floor. “Was she a mad woman?”

  “The temples in Dhai are living things,” Roh said. “Maybe these holds are too. Maybe they used to talk to her. Maybe she wasn’t so mad.”

  Dasai leaned forward. “And why is it they won’t talk to us, boy?”

  The words bubbled up, “Because you’re not Dhai.”

  Dasai smiled as if he found the idea amusing. “That’s quite likely,” he said. “Tell me, how is it you’re so good at translating these books. Not every Dhai knows the Kai cipher.”

  “I knew the Kai,” Roh said, and came up with the rest of his lies on the spot. “I spied on him, his papers, and I learned it. It was on a dare.” Lies came easily when you spent most of your time with nothing to do but come up with stories and translate those of others.

  Dasai glanced at one of the robed women beside him, a tall woman with large hands and a lopsided face. Roh couldn’t tell if she had been born with her face that unbalanced or if it was the result of an injury.

  They spoke briefly in the Dhai dialect. Roh had gotten better at understanding it; many of the other translators spoke it.

  “I told you it would be easier to tap into the heart of Caisau with a Dhai,” Dasai said.

  “There is no discernible difference between us and them,” the woman said. “It should make no difference to who can hear the heart and who can’t. This boy must be a relative of the Kai. It’s all that makes sense.”

  “I’ve heard it said the King of Tordin can pick out those from neighboring worlds. Clearly some can see a difference between us.”

  “I’ve heard there are bears who can fly,” the woman said.

  Dasai laughed, a boisterous bark of a laugh so happily unguarded that Roh marveled at it. His Dasai had never laughed like that.

  Dasai turned back to Roh, and said in Dhai, “If you were a relation to the Kai, it would make you very valuable to us. There’s no danger in admitting the truth.”

  “I’m not,” Roh said. “I wish I could say I was, but I’m not.”

  Dasai slapped his knee and stood. “Ah, well,” then, in the Tai Mora dialect, to Korloria, “You keep at the work you’re doing. The Empress has Dhai in her fist, now. What we can’t uncover here, she may be able to uncover there. The boy here will prove useful.”

  “I can awaken the heart of this hold without the boy,” Korloria said. “It’s already murmuring. You’ve heard it.”

  “I have,” Dasai said, “but my mother has murmured nonsense for years about pirate treasures and secret inheritances, and yet here I am, still a magistrate.”

  “There’s no use getting access to the engines in those temples if we don’t know how to use them,” Korloria said. “The heart of Caisau knows how to use them.”

  “I agree,” Dasai said. Roh noticed for the first time that Dasai carried no cane, and did not wince when he bent his legs. “Let’s hope this little menagerie isn’t for nothing.”

  Dasai and the tall woman bent together to talk in yet another language, one Roh didn’t follow at all. Dasai nodded, and they walked back out of the library, leaving Roh alone with Korloria.

  Roh started to get up.

  “Stay seated,” Korloria said.

  He froze.

  Korloria caressed his cheek. “You are a pretty boy, has anyone told you that?”

  Roh stared at her midsection, fixated on the eye of the silver belt that held her outer robe closed.

  She leaned over him, pressed her cheek to his, and whispered, “It pleases me when you please them.”

  Korloria stepped away. “Come now, it’s time for dinner, scraps. That’s a fine name, isn’t it? Scraps. What’s left of the Dhai. Go on.”

  Roh didn’t have to be asked twice.

  After dinner he lay awake with his ear pressed to the warm wall of the hold, listening for the voice. Instead, he heard voices inside the dormitory. Two giggling translators. It was rare enough to hear his companions speak, let alone laugh. He sat up. Slim windows lined the top of the southern face of the room, and nighttime now was just a blush, a dusky haze while the suns rode the edge of the horizon, so he could see two figures tumbling together in the sheets of one of the beds.

  Roh lay back, trying to ignore the twinge in his knees, and thought of Korloria’s breath in his ear. He had learned something of hierarchy now, and power. There were many kinds of power.

  The next day, when Ro
h gave Korloria his pages, he made sure to brush her fingers with his. When she came to him that morning with more books, she leaned over him, and he pressed his knee against her thigh. She made no mention of it, but she lingered there, far longer than she had in the days before.

  Roh felt nothing at all when he was near her – at best, he felt disgust and fear. But when he quailed at what he knew he needed to do, he thought of Dasai’s story about the slave who bowed, and pressed his head to the floor and waited for his moment, and gained his freedom.

  The sky moved, and the days passed. Korloria held him after the others went, finally, and they did not wait for anyone else to enter. She pulled him into the stacks, and pushed him against the wall, and kissed him, pinning him there. Roh thought of Kadaan, his finger wet with wine, wiping the rouge from his lip, and he let Korloria do whatever she wanted, though his knees ached, and he threw up in the hall afterward.

  Press your forehead to the floor.

  A few days later, Korloria swept into the dormitory with the three other archive administrators and called up two young men. Roh recognized them as the ones who’d been tangling in the sheets after dark.

  She whipped them both, and while the whole dormitory watched, one of the other administrators castrated them with an infused blade that cauterized the wounds. Roh smelled burnt flesh.

  “Let this be a lesson,” Korloria said, and her gaze swept right over Roh, “there will be no fornication here. None. You are here for one purpose.”

  One purpose.

  Korloria brought Roh up to her rooms the day he heard Caisau call his name.

  Roh ran his hands along the hall as he followed her up, stomach knotted with dread. He heard the burbling laughter again, and glanced at Korloria’s back to see if she had heard it too, but she didn’t react.