The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  “We don’t have anything of value.”

  “I’ll speak to them.”

  Luna slept and ate, curled in a tiny uninhabited cave, more like a divot in the stone, one of the few that offered a buffer from the wind that wasn’t occupied. Kadaan woke hir at midnight, which rolled in with the tide.

  He led Luna down to the waiting rowboat. Luna trembled, listening to the men haggle with the shivering families on the beach. Jewelry and coins traded hands, and when there were not jewelry or coins, Luna saw parents sobbing over their young children, then turning around, shaking their heads. No, they would rather stay here than give over their children as slaves. Luna’s heart raced.

  The big man beckoned Kadaan over. Luna hung back, watching the Aaldian man speaking. He gestured at Kadaan, then back at Luna. Luna stared at Kadaan and wondered what terrible bargain Kadaan would make, now, to ensure the book went to Dhai. When Kadaan glanced back at Luna, Luna lost hir nerve, and turned away, ze ran across the rocky beach.

  “Luna!”

  The rowboat, the mix of Saiduan accents, the sound of Aaldian, the smell of the sea.

  Kadaan caught hir. Grabbed hir around the waist. “Luna! Where–”

  “I won’t go! You won’t sell me!”

  “Luna, stop. No one’s selling anything. You want to get to Dhai? Luna!”

  “You’re a liar!”

  Kadaan pinned hir against the ground. The stone bit into Luna’s shoulders. Hir heart pounded. Hir whole body shook. The smell of the sea, the sound of Saiduan…

  “Enough.” Kadaan held hir arms. “They’ll take my weapon, Luna. My infused weapon, in exchange for your passage. Do you understand? You are free. Free to go to Dhai. Deliver the stupid book. Understand?”

  Luna stopped struggling. “I’m not a fool. Just tell me.”

  “I’ve told you. You want freedom? This is freedom. You’ll be alone, you understand? You get on that boat, and you’re alone. The blade is only good for one passage, though it’s worth an estate. They have us at their mercy.”

  Kadaan’s grip eased. Luna sat up.

  “You hear me, Luna?”

  “Yes.”

  “The harbor in Dhai is closed. The Tai Mora have invaded. But this ship is going to Dorinah. From there you’ll need to get to Dhai.”

  “I can’t go to Dorinah. The Dhai are slaves there, too.”

  “The only other option is Aaldia, then. They’re traveling from Dorinah to Aaldia.”

  “Then I go there. I can find a way to Dhai from there.”

  “You won’t know the language. You’ll have no money–”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  “You’ll be alone, Luna.”

  Luna met his look. “I have always been alone, Kadaan. Don’t you know that?”

  Kadaan stood. Held out his hand. “Let me put a ward on you, at least.”

  “What kind? I can’t be bound–”

  “Not that kind. A ward of protection. It will help protect you against the gifted arts. All right?”

  “For Roh?”

  Kadaan waved a hand at hir. “Does it matter?”

  “That’s why you’re not going, isn’t it? You waited here for Roh.”

  “If I find Roh and I tell him I abandoned you here, what would he think of me?”

  “Set the ward,” Luna said. Hir heart clenched. Luna could not imagine anyone ever loving hir so much as to travel over a thousand miles to find hir.

  A few words, a wave of Kadaan’s hands, and the ward was set. Luna’s skin prickled. Then Kadaan led hir back to the Aaldian rowboat.

  Luna watched Kadaan unsheathe his glowing blue weapon and hand it over to the second man in the boat, this one stouter than the first. The man murmured something over it, and nodded. The other beckoned to Luna.

  Luna climbed into the rowboat with four other refugees, the only ones able to pay the price.

  Kadaan stood on a rocky spur a few paces away and watched as they pushed off. The moons were out. The night was bright. So Luna knew Kadaan watched all the way across the water, until the rowboat met the side of the great Aaldian ship. Luna climbed up after the others. When ze got to the top of the deck and gazed back, Kadaan was gone.

  55

  Anavha recovered from his injury in Coryana’s house outside Galina. He bled badly, but she said there was very little true damage. Her worst fear was infection. She packed his wound with honey and lemon juice and some other terrible things just to be certain.

  Natanial had picked him up after punching Zezili senseless, and said he was taking Anavha to the infirmary, but he didn’t. He rolled Anavha into the back of a bear-pulled cart and paid a boy to take him to Coryana’s.

  “Be quiet and wait for me.” The last thing Natanial said to him.

  Days dragged into weeks, and summer brought with it heat and muggy days. News came from the north that Saradyn’s army had suffered a terrible loss. The rumors caused unrest in the town, and Coryana made it clear through her gestures and the limited number of words they both knew in one another’s languages that she didn’t want him to go far. He worked with her in the garden, and practiced his concentration exercises in the afternoon. In the evening, he wrote poetry, and though Coryana understood none of it, she nodded as he spoke, and smiled like one of Zezili’s sisters humoring him.

  The day Tanays, Saradyn’s second in command, declared himself king of the region, Anavha sat out on the stoop with Coryana drinking sugar water and watching red birds flit through the forest canopy. He could stay here and wait for Natanial forever, or for Zezili, or for Tanays to find him, or Saradyn – if he still lived. His whole life had been here, sitting on this porch, waiting for someone to tell him what to do.

  That night, he said goodbye to Coryana and thanked her for her kindness, and she nodded and smiled like she knew what he was saying and tucked him into bed like a child.

  Anavha waited until she had put out the lights and the moons had risen. Then he rose from his bed, packed the few clothes and books and papers he had traded for, and walked into the middle of the garden, barefoot. He carried his shoes in one hand. He wanted to feel the dirt under his toes one last time.

  Then he opened a door.

  Tordinian poetry, not beautiful, but what it unlocked in his mind was lovely – a path to another place, another life. He peered at the sky on the other side, fearing he may have wound the snarls of Oma’s light into the wrong configuration. But no, that was his sky. His moons.

  And there was a little rocky path leading down to a tiled city lit with a thousand lights, all twinkling like the stars come to the ground.

  He stepped through the door. The air warmed. It was hot, almost sticky out here. The drone of the insects was loud. He glanced once behind him, at Coryana’s house, and saw someone on the porch.

  It was Natanial.

  Natanial did not move from the porch, though. Just watched him.

  Anavha raised his hand. Greeting or goodbye? Both. All of it.

  Natanial raised his in turn.

  Anavha remembered their last day together, before Natanial went after Saradyn and the army.

  “What am I supposed to be out here?” Anavha had asked. “What am I without her?”

  “Power is a funny thing,” Natanial said. “You get to decide what to do with it.”

  “The way Zezili did?”

  “She made her choice. Now you get to make yours.”

  “I’m not… I don’t… that’s not who I am.”

  “Then don’t make Zezili’s choices.”

  Anavha released his hold on Oma, and the door between Tordin and Aaldia closed, and his past with it.

  56

  The sea of women descended on Saradyn like a snarling plague of field rats. He fell hard onto their bodies, buoyed by their strong arms, which reached out to rip him limb from limb – or so he believed – until he found himself carried aloft while they hissed and clicked around him. When he struggled, one of them bit his arm. Another twisted his leg. He f
elt the bone snap. Saradyn screamed, overcome with visions of being roasted and eaten alive by these creatures from some other world.

  They carried him across the corpse-ridden field, then down and down, through the long, twisting corridors of the ziggurat.

  When he saw them rip the gibbering body of the Dorinah legionnaire from the floor, Saradyn started screaming again, because he knew what they meant to do with him.

  The great twisted root that connected the throne to the wall had repaired itself. It pulsed now with an eerie green light that glimmered from the pool at his feet as well as the walls. The light shimmered across the throne, and made the women’s snarling faces all the more horrifying.

  The women heaved him onto the great throne. It exerted a powerful force, pulling him into its grasp as they pushed him into it. His fingers gripped the arms of the throne of their own volition. He sat straight and tall, still screaming. A jolt of pain ran through him, and then there was darkness. Silence.

  And from the dark and the silence, a pinprick of light. A voice.

  “Saradyn, it has been too long.”

  He knew the voice. Knew it as he knew his own. If he still had a body he could feel, he would tremble and curse and beg her to let him be. But he was nothing, now, just a wisp of consciousness propelled by some dark force.

  Saradyn gazed upon the Empress of Dorinah, her face peering into his awareness as if she peered into a mirror. Behind her was a stone wall capped by a shimmering red carpet of something organic, some living thing that was creeping toward her, slowly but relentlessly.

  “I knew you could not resist my legionnaires,” she said. “I knew you could not resist following. You were always so curious. I’d hoped Storm and Zezili would lead my people, but Storm was not strong enough to reign here alone. You, though? Yes, you will do.”

  He tried to speak, but he had no body. Yet he screamed at her, still, screamed as he had the day she cast him out of her bed and he went home to conquer his nation and prove his worth. I WON’T.

  She smiled. “Oh, you will.”

  Saradyn surfaced from his fugue among the crowd of women. Were they women, even, or did he call them that only because they horrified him? He heard a great roaring above them, and high-pitched screaming from outside.

  “They are burning them,” the Empress said, “all they can find. But you are safe here, with those who remain. The temple protects you. Have no fear. There are more of my people here, still slumbering. We will wake them together.”

  Saradyn tried to claw his way off the throne. In control of his voice again, he said, “I serve no one!”

  A prickling pain rode along his spine. Words bloomed in his mind, “YOU SERVE ME.”

  “No!”

  He found his fist in his mouth, but had no memory of putting it there. He began to gnaw at his knuckles. He tasted his own blood. The Empress’s voice crowded out his thoughts.

  “Did you think you were hunting me? No, Saradyn. You are the only one who can put the people of Tordin to work for my women. You are the only one who can unite them to my purpose. And you will serve me.”

  Saradyn toppled off the throne. He let out a tangled sob, but it was still muffled by his fist in his mouth. He lay on his side in the center of the green pool as the women stood around him in a silent circle. Saradyn wept as the Empress of Dorinah compelled him to gnaw off his own arm.

  57

  The Aaldian ship was a living thing, like a Saiduan fortress. Luna had thought that was impossible. No Saiduan or Dhai knew how to ensoul a hold anymore, but when ze tried to ask the crew about it, they turned up their hands at hir and smiled bright white smiles. Only the man on the beach spoke Saiduan. Luna pressed hir ear to the hull at night, shoved into the packed hold of the ship with the other refugees, and listened to it breathing. The surface of the ship was spongy and slightly sticky, like undercooked bread.

  Aaldians were strange people. Luna knew little about them. They left their country only to trade. They sent no travelers but those in the ships, and none of them ever stayed behind when they docked. Where they had come from, no one seemed to know. Perhaps they had always been in Aaldia, hiding from the Dhai and Dorinah and Saiduan.

  They were lean, dark people with twisted hair the color of burnt wheat that they wore in tight locks, intricately woven into knotted crowns. Their sex, let alone their gender, was often difficult to tell, and Luna gave up on it. With no common language, Luna had no way to ask them what was polite or proper. Those on the ship seemed very young, for sailors. Ze did not see a single person older than thirty.

  The storm came upon them suddenly, driving great curtains of rain from the northwest. Luna stood on deck when it came, heaving the contents of hir breakfast as ze had done for the last six days. The wind knocked hir back from the rail, and nearly took hir from hir feet. One of the Aaldian crew called out from the main top, and the rest of the crew took to the rigging to bring down the sails.

  Luna slid below deck just as the deluge opened from the heavens. Ze clattered down the steps with a wave of water, instantly soaked. Ze ran to the long storage hold ze shared with the other refugees and pulled on hir coat. Ze huddled next to a barrel of salted fish, pressed hard against the spongy hull. Ze was still nauseous, and the rolling of the boat didn’t help. Another of the refugees, a little girl called Sola, vomited her meager breakfast. Luna gagged at the smell.

  Luna heard a great cracking overhead. A thump. The whole ship shuddered.

  Water poured into the hold.

  Luna made for the stairs. Ze got to the top just ahead of those behind hir, just as a great wave smashed into the side of the ship, sweeping hir overboard, heaving the ship over with hir.

  Water embraced hir.

  Come all this way, this far…

  Luna gasped for air. Swallowed water. Gagged. Darkness.

  Clawed for the surface.

  Hir hands broke into the air.

  Luna’s head came up. Ze gasped. Got a mouth full of water. The waves pummeled hir. Ze splashed in the roaring sea, adrift. Saw wreckage. Paddled for a bobbing bucket. Grabbed it. The wind roared. Rain fell, nearly horizontal, like a shroud.

  Ze needed a miracle, Luna knew. But Luna only had hirself.

  Luna heard someone calling. Looked for the voice, nothing, but there… ze saw a shoreline. A coast. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? That long black bar gave the suggestion of land, a black sand beach. Ze held onto the bucket and kicked – it was futile, though. Luna was carried by the waves, buffeted, a buoy on the open water.

  The book was a heavy burden. Ze shrugged out of hir coat. Ze could lose the coat, not the book. Not after all this. Not when ze was so close.

  The sea fought hir.

  Ze fought back.

  Hours passed, though it felt like days. It had to be hours because ze saw the gray light of dawn, the burning brand of Sina piercing through the heavy cloud cover. Fog had descended sometime during the night. Luna couldn’t see much past hir outstretched arm. Just hir and the bucket, floating in a borderless sea.

  Ze was a ghost, unbound, and Sina would not take hir.

  Five years old, six years old, when the Saiduan took hir, but ze remembered so little of it, and so little before that. Hir first memory, this flat sea, blazing hot, the water so blue, and the horizon stretching out so far it looked like a painting. One mother dead, the other gasping like a fish, so thirsty, squeezing the last bit of dewy moisture she had wiped from the inside of the boat into Luna’s thirsty mouth.

  Luna was too young to ask why she bothered, why she persisted, in the face of certain death for all of them. Hope. Hir mother had hope. Hope drove the world, and despair destroyed it.

  Luna jerked awake, splashing.

  Ze had nodded off, slipped from the bucket. Ze kicked and pawed after it in the heavy surf.

  Hir legs hit something soft. Found purchase.

  Luna stood on the sandy bottom. Ze clawed forward. The fog thinned, and ze saw the black sand beach of
northern Grania stretching before hir. Ze slogged up onto the beach, pummeled by the surf. Luna collapsed a little ways up the beach, and crawled a few more feet forward, just out of the reach of the encroaching tide. If the tide was coming in, it meant ze would have to move at least a mile and a half more to escape the rising water, but hir exhaustion was so deep ze could not move.

  Luna put hir face into the crook of hir arm and made a terrible sobbing sound. Ze shed no tears, just made the noise, shuddering there in the sand until the feeling passed and ze could begin moving up the beach.

  Ze crawled and crawled as the fog cleared and the high tide line drew nearer. When ze finally collapsed, Luna had forgotten that there was anything in the world but this – struggling across the black sand to the tide line, hands scratched by black sand.

  When ze woke, massive black gulls circled the sky, screaming.

  “What’s this?” Voices, speaking Dhai.

  “Another body from a wreck. Storm must have taken several ships.”

  “Dhai ships? There are no Dhai in the water now. Ours?”

  Luna felt someone kick hir. Ze rolled over. Two Dhai faces peered down at hir. One short and fat; the other smaller, leaner, with a meaner face.

  “Ours?” the smaller one said.

  The fat one crinkled up her face. “Those are Saiduan clothes.” She switched languages, something that sounded very like Dhai, but wasn’t. Then waited expectantly.

  “Is this Dhai?” Luna said, in Dhai.

  The fat one sighed. “Dhai.” She pulled at a weapon on her hip.

  “Wait, wait!” Luna said. Ze pushed hirself up.

  “You have news for me, Dhai?” the fat one said.

  “Saiduan. I have news of Saiduan.”

  The leaner woman laughed. “You hear that, Gaiso, she has news of Saiduan.”

  “I have all the news I need,” the fat one, Gaiso, said. “I organized the final purge of Anjoliaa myself.”

  “Where am I?” Luna asked.

  “Where do you think you are?” Gaiso said. “You’ve got yourself washed up on Dorinah, the first commonwealth of Tai Mora reborn.”