Above them, something red and malevolent seethed in the sky.
58
Nasaka did not believe in losing. She never had. It was why, when Kai Javia’s second child died just days after birth, Nasaka made the decision to give up her own child to Javia and her Catori – Nasaka’s brother Rishin. Javia’s elder daughter Kirana, a favorite for the seat, was in poor health. Kirana had been sickly from the moment she was born, and they needed another child to ensure the line of the Kai remained unbroken, at least in the eyes of the people. Tir and his family in Garika were already making noise about Javia being unfit to rule. But Javia was, Nasaka thought, more malleable than Etena. Etena knew too much about the coming invasion. So even if it caused some strife, Nasaka convinced Javia to have Etena exiled.
So many people. So many pieces. And for what? To preserve the peace of Dhai. To ensure the existence of a country built on principles the rest of the world thought were unreasonable. But if you were committed to an ideal, you gave everything for it, and Nasaka had, time and again. She preserved Dhai at all costs, even when it meant turning her back on the very ideals she supported. Someone needed to make the hard choices. Someone needed to do the killing, the manipulating, the threatening, to save the others from those things. She was obligated to wear that mantle, and she wore it proudly, if heavily, every day of her life.
She wore it now, as she looked across the advancing Tai Mora armies stretching across the plateau. She had manufactured this. She was part of this. But it was because of her that any would survive. If Ahkio had gotten his way… Ahkio…
She pressed her fists to her eyes. Etena dead, Ahkio cut to pieces and dumped down the latrine, Mohrai overwhelmed in Kuallina; that left just one final player for the seat of the Kai that she had to eliminate before the new Kirana called her debt repaid, and allowed Nasaka and the few she had chosen to live in the new Dhai she had planned.
Nasaka cleared her eyes and took a long breath. She already had several people out looking for Meyna. How had she escaped the temple when Nasaka burned her way up from the basements, Nasaka was uncertain, but she would be dealt with.
A creaking sound came from behind her. Odd, as Pasinu would have announced herself. She turned–
And a knife plunged into her left breast.
Nasaka gasped, so shocked at the surge of pain she reeled backwards.
“My daughter,” Meyna said.
Nasaka’s lips moved in a litany. Meyna stabbed her again.
Nasaka fell hard. She saw her own blood flowing across the floor, fast as that from a gutted pig. She had seen one once, in the woodland, when they fed the blood of a boar to the thorn fence. The blood was thick and black.
“You nearly killed me, my daughter, you horror!”
Blood flecked Nasaka’s lips. She gurgled and grinned, and her chest heaved. Trying to call Sina, but the pain came again and again, breaking her concentration, the knife stabbing and stabbing, throwing bloody flecks across Meyna’s face.
Meyna had not run. She had hidden here, in Nasaka’s study, for just this moment. Nasaka admired it. It was something she would have done.
“Formidable woman,” Nasaka said. “Should have been Kai.”
Meyna’s hand came down fiercely, thwack, thwack, thwack.
Nasaka tasted copper. Meyna was sobbing and yelling. Nasaka could not make sense of the words she spoke; gibberish, rants, anger… The world began to bleed to black.
Nasaka lay on her side as Meyna withdrew. She heard noise in the hall. Shouting as the army arrived, and Nasaka’s supporters uncovered and eradicated the small groups of resisters. Meyna breathed heavily. Tears and sweat soaked her face and her tunic. She wiped her bloody, drool-smeared chin with her trembling hand.
Meyna hissed at her. Hers was the last face Nasaka saw, and the last words she ever heard.
“Curse you,” Meyna said, “and everything you built.”
59
Rohinmey.
He had not heard his full name aloud in a very long time. Since arriving in Caisau not one person had used any version of his name. They called him boy, or scraps, or nothing at all.
Roh descended into inky blackness until he lost all sense of time. His knees ached. He paused to rest often. Finally, he came to the end of the long descent, and paused before a great door inscribed with a symbol – six circles traversed by a triangle. He raised his lantern, and saw writing in living green text circling the doorway. It glowed eerily.
He looked for a knob or a latch, but saw nothing. Roh came up to the door and pressed his hand to it. It opened easily, as if made of nothing but air. The great portal yawned open. He smelled honeysuckle and lavender. A brilliant blue light suffused the room. He shielded his eyes.
“Welcome, Patron.”
Roh walked into the room, trying to make out shapes in the blue light, but saw nothing.
“I’m not the Patron,” Roh said. “I’m Rohinmey Tadisa Garika.” It felt good to say it aloud. He had a name. A purpose. “You’re the creature of Caisau,” he said.
“I’ve been called many things.” Tinkling laughter. He kept trying to see something in the blue light, but it was like looking into a star.
“If I am a creature, you are a Patron,” the voice said.
Roh remembered the slaughter in the tower room in Kuonrada. He remembered picking up the blazing weapon from the floor, hurling it at the Patron, and pinning him to the wall. “By law, you’re Patron,” Kadaan had said. And no one was to know. But Caisau knew.
“Who says I am?” Roh asked.
“I am the keeper of Caisau,” it said.
“The creature.”
“That sounds so dangerous,” it said. “You must give me a name.”
“You don’t have one? Then you’re a creature.”
“Is that how it works? Those without names are creatures? Well, I cannot argue. It’s how you have traversed through me, all this time, a nameless piece of meat. What do I know of your culture? Perhaps this is all normal. All things pass on, in time.”
“You’ve been talking to me,” Roh said.
“You’ve been talking to me,” it said. “They have poked and prodded, but there are rules, are there not? I have been bound by many rules. I was bound to the Kai before the Saiduan, but when the Saiduan came they bound me to the Patron, but soon they, too, forgot about me. What am I? No one cares to know until the end of all things.”
“The Kai spoke to you when this was still Roasandara,” Roh said. “Why couldn’t she turn things back? Why couldn’t she stop it? I read her journals.”
“The world broke before she could get to the transference engines.”
“What are those? Is that how we keep people from other worlds from coming here? Can we stop it? The Tai Mora think you can stop it.”
“Not from here.”
“From where, then?”
“At the center of the world there are five temples…” A blazing map appeared in the air above Roh. He hopped back, banging his knee. Pain shot up his leg.
The map painted itself in the air in green and gray, like a parajista-trained illusion. Roh had been learning to build those, before he left the temple. He saw a strange continent. The top half looked like Saiduan, but the bottom was something else. It wasn’t until the map unfurled, pressed itself into his vision, that he recognized Mount Ahya, the spur of the plateau where Oma's Temple rested, and the mountain borders of Dhai. But in this map, Dhai was not part of the island called Grania at the tip of the Saiduan continent. It was part of the continent.
“There are four temples in Dhai,” Roh said. “Not five.”
“That is unfortunate,” the creature said. The map winked out.
Roh started. “What, is that all? That’s all you have to say? It’s unfortunate?”
“The world broke,” it said. “I cannot see all futures.”
“How do we work the transference engines?”
“You will need a guide,” the creature said, and its voice sounded clos
e now, right in his ear. He flinched.
A warm breath of air moved over him, sending a shiver through his body. “You are that guide now, Patron.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The creature on the plateau will know you,” it said. “Step into her circle, and the map will unfold. You carry the map now. You are the guide.”
“I can’t get back to Dhai,” Roh said.
“That is unfortunate.”
The blue glow around him stuttered, like a disturbed lantern of flame flies.
“Please,” Roh said, “say something I can understand.”
“Five parajistas, five omajistas, five tirajistas, five sinajistas – one of each to power the great hearts of the creatures there at the center of the world. Then you need a guide, a key, and a worldbreaker.”
“And I’m the guide? Who are the others?”
“That is for the other creatures to decide,” it said. “I have done my part.”
The light went out.
Roh stood in the darkness, cold and alone. He raised the lantern and saw that inside, the room was just cold stone, unadorned.
“Wait!” Roh said. “How do I get to Dhai?”
The voice, tickling his ear, thrumming through the walls. “Most people walk.”
Then silence.
Roh yelled, “All this way I’ve come, for riddles! All this way, and we’re going to die, and you don’t care. You didn’t care when we died the first time. So what use are you! What use are any of you?”
He hit the skin of the hold with his crutch. The crutch sank through it, like butter.
Roh gasped, yanked it back.
He pressed his hand to the wall. The skin of it became pliable in his hands.
“Where in my hold do you wish to go, Patron?” the creature whispered. Tickling breath.
“The dormitory,” he said.
“Then step through.”
Roh had taken many things on faith. This was one more.
He stepped through the skin of the hold – and into the far end of his dormitory, coming through the wall as if the spaces between things were nothing. Roh hurried to the privy and took off his stolen clothes. It was nearly daylight already and someone might have seen him. He pulled off all the Tai Mora clothes and stuffed them down the latrines. Washed his face.
He limped back to his bed, knowing there were eyes on him, so many eyes. Roh slipped into bed, pulled the sheet over his head, and lay very, very still.
The creature’s laughter still moved through the walls.
“Can you take me to Dhai?” Roh whispered.
“Only through the seams between things here,” it said, “and any other living engine you may encounter. Alas, the rest is up to you.”
He lay awake still when the morning gong sounded. He raised himself from bed, dressed and smoothed his bed flat and washed his face again. He went through it all like some kind of dream.
They came for him three hours later, when he sat at his desk working on another series of translations. He had barely gotten through a page.
“Come with us.” It was one of the other translation administrators.
Roh rose slowly. “I need to see Dasai,” he said.
“I’ll decide who you need to see.”
“It’s very important.”
“I’m sure.”
As they led him out, every pair of eyes in the room looked up at his passing. Roh wanted to raise his voice and tell them to fight, wanted to tell them the Tai Mora were finished, that their time was running out, that if they all fought together, they could overwhelm them. But that would ruin everything he planned, and cause a disturbance that would ruin him as surely as it would ruin them.
“Tell Dasai I remember the story about the dancing,” Roh said. “You tell him that.”
A fake. A shot in the dark. That’s all he had now, though – darkness.
They put him in a holding room.
He knew the punishment for fornication.
He had yet to see the punishment for murder.
The administrator came back some time later. Roh raised his head, hopeful. The man punched Roh in the face.
Roh fell over. He hit the floor hard. The man kicked him four more times, and put a heavy foot into Roh’s face. Roh’s teeth loosened. He spit blood.
The administrator leered over him. “That was for Korloria,” He said. “The rest can wait.”
Two guards hauled him out of the cell. He was too weak to walk. They dragged him down a series of steps. He spit again. Two of his teeth rattled onto the steps. He probed the gap left behind – the canine and incisor on his left side.
Pretty, they all said. He looked forward to the day he was no longer pretty.
He tried not to think what they would do with him. He stared at the walls of the hold as he passed, and he thought he heard twinkling laughter. But all the creature had given him was the ability to move through the hold. He could not walk to Dhai. He could barely get up and down stairs.
A hot, muggy blast of air hit his face. He gazed into the great atrium, bathed in yellow light. He saw the winking face of Sina there on the eastern horizon, and pulled his gaze away, already dazzled. Summer had peaked some time before; he had hardly noted its passing inside the walls, but with the nearing of autumn he could see now that the way the sun moved in the sky was changing. The days were already growing shorter again.
Dasai lay at the end of a meandering path of red stones, lounging on a hammock. He raised his head as Roh approached, and folded his book onto his chest. The woman with the lopsided face sat on a living bench opposite him, legs crossed, tracing something on a printed paper.
The guards dropped Roh in front of Dasai. Roh stumbled, trying to keep his feet as needles of pain shot through his legs.
“Dancing?” Dasai said.
“Your story,” Roh said.
“Do tell me.”
Roh shook his head. “I needed to see you.”
“The man you knew is not me,” Dasai said.
“I know,” Roh said.
Dasai sat up. “It’s true I knew a boy like you,” Dasai said. “He is dead, alas, or I’d have killed you when I first set eyes on you, because he was a far fiercer boy. He would not have ended his days here.”
“I really am related to the Kai,” Roh lied. “You were right. I know how to work the transference engines, but you have to take me to Dhai.”
Dasai sighed. “And why would I do that?”
Roh got down to his knees, painfully. He pressed his head to the floor. The pain was so bad he thought he might pass out. He hissed out the words – “Because the creature of Caisau wills it. You read the journals. You know it was once tropical here. The land stretched from here to Hrollief without a sea between it. Grania was not an island, it was the heart of the continent. What did that? Oma. The rise of Oma. The breaking of the world. It’s coming for us too. You want to stop it. So do I.”
Roh raised his head.
But Dasai was not looking at him. He was looking up at the great height of the atrium, mouth agape. The woman beside him turned her head away, and suddenly the room was bathed in a bloody red light.
Roh raised his head and stared up at the heavens. A baleful red eye stared down at him, like the eye of a god, a great gory world-breaking god.
Roh heard the creature laugh.
60
Lilia left Gian’s side and ran from the rush of the army after Sina’s rise. She fell into a massive tent. It collapsed on her. She wrapped herself in it, willing herself still and silent so she could prepare for what she had to do next.
Heat scorched the air outside. Sweat slathered her body. But she waited. Quiet.
Boots. Blasts of hot air. Yelling armies. She waited for silence outside, counting the beats of her heart. When the waiting got to be too much, she palmed a piece of mahuan root and let her mind wander.
Finally, the din wore down.
She crawled from the stifling tent and peeked out. The plain
was churned with mud. A small child watched her from a tent opposite – too-big eyes in a starved face. Lilia pressed her finger to her lips.
When she staggered up and took in the measure of the camp, it was mostly empty. The big banquet table was a mess, scorched in places. Gian’s body still lay there, smoldering. Her hair, her beautiful hair, had been burned away, the scalp charred. Lilia felt nothing at all, as if her heart had been burned away with Gian’s hair.
Lilia walked across the devastated camp. It still smoked in places. Her people had gotten off a few good gouts of flame before being overrun. She glanced back at Kuallina only once. She did not linger to watch it burn. The massive Tai Mora army had already exploded through the gates, and now they were merely cleaning up. Smoke rose from the keep.
She felt a hot, needling pain in her side, and scratched at it. It took her a moment to realize what it was. She tugged at the wards she had on the Seekers and found – nothing. The Seekers had already perished. She was alone.
Lilia stumbled across the camp and made for the trees. There was more burning to come, and she was its catalyst.
On the other side of the camp, Tasia waited for her in the creek bed, still and silent as a cat. There was a dirty, snuffling figure beside her. Lilia recoiled.
“Where did you find that?” Lilia asked.
It was the feral girl who had followed Ghrasia around Liona, now curled up in a ball next to Tasia.
“She saved me,” Tasia said. “I got lost trying to find you like you asked me to, but she led me here. She found the bear. I couldn’t hold it myself. I was afraid.”
Lilia frowned. The feral girl raised her head, cocked it in Lilia’s direction. “You’re a filthy thing,” Lilia said.
The feral girl muttered something, though not in any language Lilia recognized. How had this girl escaped Liona?
“Did you tell anyone when you left?” Lilia asked.
Tasia shook her head. “Good girl,” Lilia said, and she took her hand and together they mounted the bear and rode west through the trees, to the woodland, to catch the last of the Dhai before Kirana’s great army turned south for the Temple of Oma. Lilia thought they could outrun the feral girl, but she took to her feet and ran after them, faster than any blind creature should have been able to.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 99
