Lilia looked back at her once, and resigned herself to the girl’s company.
It took two days for Lilia to catch up to the fleeing refugees, in part because she had to stop often to hide from Tai Mora scouts. A cry went up when the refugees saw her, as if she were a hero coming home. She rode to the head of the column, expecting to find Mohrai there, but when she asked, everyone directed her to Yisaoh.
Confused in the rush of bodies, she waited until the group camped before going off to find her. Tasia ran to keep up with her, the feral girl trailing behind. Lilia had been trying to figure out a name for the feral girl, but came up with nothing.
She found Yisaoh standing over a map drawn in the dirt. Mohrai’s cousin, Alhina, and the parajista from the wall of the harbor, Hasina, stood with her.
“I thought you were dead,” Hasina said.
“Exaggerations,” Lilia said. “Where is Mohrai?”
“Bad pregnancy,” Yisaoh said. “Barely made it back to the hold after that fiasco.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “So you lived after all.”
“Will Mohrai be all right?”
Yisaoh shrugged. “Most likely. She needed some time to sit. Got some blood. Hopefully nothing.”
“That doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“I am, actually.”
Yisaoh narrowed her eyes. “You’re a lot of things.”
“Where is the Kai, then?”
Yisaoh shook her head. “We have reports that there are groups ahead of us, fleeing the clans and temples, doing the same as we are. I put out runners so we can meet up with them. He may be with them.”
“We shouldn’t meet.”
“Shouldn’t we?”
“As one force, we’re easy to kill,” Lilia said. “If we stay split up, it makes us difficult to track down.”
“Fair,” Yisaoh said, and then Lilia liked her, because she knew she was not a fool. Lilia had suspected there was some sense to Yisaoh, when she drugged the Kai and sent Lilia down to the table.
“The map?” Lilia said.
“Options,” Yisaoh said.
Lilia looked at the map. She pointed to the finger of the peninsula, the place where her village had been. “I know this place. It once supported a village of five hundred. It will be suitable for us.”
“Have to go further south, around Mount Ahya,” Hasina said. “I know this topography. If we go north, it looks shorter, but the terrain is rugged. We have too many young and infirm with us.”
“South, then,” Lilia said. “It will take us past Oma's Temple, though. We may pick up some other refugees.”
“If this place only holds five hundred, we can’t take any more,” Yisaoh said.
“No, but we can start creating networks,” Lilia said. “We can be disparate, but we’ll need ways to speak to each other. If we can’t speak, we can’t organize.”
“Organize,” Alhina said, “for what?”
Lilia cocked her head at her. “To take back Dhai, of course.”
None of them said anything.
Yisaoh just stared at her, smoking. The silence stretched.
“Well?” Lilia said. “Anything else? Let’s go, then.”
Lilia bent and wiped away the map with her hands. She took Tasia’s hand and led her back to the bear.
That night, she slept better than she had in a year, though the feral girl whined and farted in her sleep rather terribly.
Lilia stood among the last of the low summer poppies, breathing in the heady scent of them. Above her, the first of the adenoak leaves were just beginning to change. From here she could see the Temple of Oma, and the great Tai Mora army marching across the plateau to take up residence there. They had already begun setting up tents. Her group had indeed had to come south, around Mount Ahya. The journey had taken much longer than it should have – over three weeks through angry, spitting woodlands with the sick and young and injured in tow. Their route, despite their caution, took them perilously close to the temple, which they had learned by now was already fallen. She assumed the Kai and his second Catori and child were dead. Still, after weeks of exhausted trekking in the woodland, Lilia wanted to see it one last time. The army she saw now was the great Dhai army in the valley, the one she remembered hearing about as a child. This was the Dhai she had expected from the very start, and her worlds had collided.
Emlee came up beside her. “The others are asking for you,” she said. “You know those Tai Mora will send scouts up here, once they are secure in the temple. We must be swift.”
Lilia placed her hand on Emlee’s arm, and wished, for a breath, that it was Kalinda Lasa there, Kalinda who told her what to do, where to go, or Gian, who believed in her, who had secrets Lilia would never unravel.
“We’ll come back,” Lilia said.
“You are the only one of them who says that. No one says that now. You sound a fool.”
“Not a fool,” Lilia said. “I have faith.”
“A fool,” Emlee said, patting her arm absently. “Come along, now. Your people are waiting for you.”
Lilia turned her back on the temple and the great Dhai army, and plunged deeper into the woodland, just as the sky above her exploded.
Epilogue
Oma's Temple, seat for five hundred years of the descendants of former slaves Faith Ahya and Hahko, was an enormous green claw soaring toward the blushing sky. Its reflective glass dome caught Sina’s light, turning the plateau and all who walked upon it a fiery lavender.
Kirana Javia, descendant of conquerors and flesh dealers, entered Oma's Temple through the front gates, bathed in Sina’s light. The doors opened for her and her retinue without force or violence. This was the one plan she had needed to go off without incident, and it pleased her to find it working perfectly. It had taken her army most of the summer season to clean up Kuallina and clear out the villages between there and Oma's Temple. Many orchards and fields were burned by the Dhai in their retreat, and cleaning up the fields and planting a late autumn harvest had been one of her army’s higher priorities. Now, on the cusp of autumn, she had arrived. Kirana slipped off her bear in the front gardens and passed the reins to kennel keepers who were clearly not her people, but cowering, wide-eyed Dhai. Until she could replace them, they would need some cowed Dhai to remain in service.
She expected to see Nasaka at the bottom of the grand tongue of the steps, eagerly awaiting her, but instead she found a mincing little boy called Pasinu. He said he was Nasaka’s assistant, and apologized for Nasaka’s absence. Kirana suggested they go up and find her, as Kirana was in a jolly mood, and she wanted to meet Nasaka here in her own world, finally, in the flesh, and conclude their decade-long deal for the handover of the Dhai temples.
Pasinu led her upstairs, where she saw the first of the bodies – all children and young people – their limp forms stacked neatly outside classrooms like corded wood. They had died without much fuss, which Kirana counted a blessing. She had ensured Nasaka had enough help to wipe the place clean well ahead of her arrival. She marveled at how well the taking of the temples had gone – clearing out all the full Oras, tying them up at Kuallina for weeks, giving them just enough time to feel they may triumph before she crushed them, had made the temples easy to infiltrate and control with a minimal amount of damage. Remarkable, that after all this time some grand scheme of hers had finally paid off. Walking through this temple after a decade of war and strategy and planning, after so much had been lost, after so many failures, was deeply satisfying.
She pushed open the door to Nasaka’s study. Nasaka’s body lay prone on the floor in front of her desk, riddled with at least two dozen stab wounds. Blood smeared the floor, the desk. Bloody footprints came all the way from the desk to the door. She even saw blood on the bookcases. It was the most brutal death she’d seen in the whole temple.
“I see she finally ate what she sowed,” Kirana said.
Behind her, Pasinu gasped. “Who–”
&nb
sp; “Settling grudges during coups is a popular pastime,” Kirana said. “I suspect whomever assaulted her escaped cleanly.”
“Perhaps it was a novice–”
“No,” Kirana said. “This was very personal.” She stepped away, and shut the door behind her. It made things easier, though. “As her assistant, I expect you to give me a full briefing,” Kirana said.
“Of course.”
“We have great plans for this little temple, and its sisters,” Kirana said.
It took a day to clean up the temple in a way that Kirana deemed presentable. She went through room after room, reassigning quarters to jistas, her squad commanders, the stargazers, logistics, supply heads, and various support staff. She walked into the great Assembly Chamber at the top of the temple and admired the sky writ large in the atrium.
As they prepared to open a gate to admit her family, she tarried in the Kai quarters, sighing over all the things that needed to be replaced. She pulled open the curtains and stared out over the vast woodlands. Reports told her that many had retreated there. She already had squads in pursuit. She still needed Yisaoh.
Yisaoh. She turned away from the window. Something flashed in the sky, and she went back, squinted. Sina blazed merrily in the sky, but something was folding in on itself just to the east of it, pushing into the sky like a fist through wet tissue paper.
The sky flashed red, and the blazing eye of a star she had seen only in books appeared in the sky.
Kirana ran from the window, yelling for her omajistas.
“Up here!” she called. “Open the wink here! Call my children in! Let them see this!”
The two omajistas came up the stairs, huffing.
“Can you feel it?” Kirana asked.
Oma, finally risen after all this time. It was glorious.
“Heaven above, yes,” the woman, Mysa, said. A smile split her haggard face. “You want a wink, Empress?” She held out her hands, and parted the seams between the world as if carving through a brick of warm lard, with not a drop of blood in sight.
Kirana clapped her hands like a child. She caught herself, but only just. She laughed so hard she put her hands over her mouth to stop herself. The omajistas, too, were merry, perhaps too merry, but after all the horror of the last decade, it was welcome.
She saw Yisaoh on the other side, sitting up from her work.
“Oma!” Kirana said. “Yisaoh! Send the children! Oma is risen!”
Yisaoh rushed outside Kirana’s frame of vision.
Kirana called to the other omajista. “Go downstairs and open up a wink on the plateau. Start bringing them through, anyone you can. All of them. What we can’t support here, we’ll send to Dorinah.”
Gaiso would have Dorinah in hand soon enough. They already controlled half of that country.
Yisaoh returned with the girls. The two youngest clung to her, but the eldest, Moira, came boldly forward.
Kirana strode through the wink, popping out onto the other side, and embraced her family. Yisaoh held her tightly. The children grabbed fists of her clothes.
“We took the temple,” Kirana said. “It was almost easy. You wouldn’t think that took a decade of planning.”
Yisaoh met her look. Kirana knew the question. She shook her head. “Soon,” she said.
“Take them,” Yisaoh said. “It’s time.”
“I’ll come back for you.”
“I know.”
“Travel is easier now. With Oma risen, we are the most fearsome force–”
“We have been very fearsome,” Yisaoh agreed, but Kirana heard the implied question, “if we are so fearsome, why can we not kill one woman?”
Kirana kissed her and stepped back through the wink, holding out her arms.
“Moira, Tasia, Corina, come through.”
“Go on,” Yisaoh said.
The children gazed back at Yisaoh once, twice, until she pushed them through, herding them like wayward cats.
Kirana opened her arms to welcome her children home.
It was not until Moira and Corina were safe in her arms, weeping and trembling, that she realized Tasia was not with them. Kirana looked to the wink and saw Tasia still stuck on the other side, her face pressed against the wink, fingers splayed on the invisible barrier between them. Yisaoh held Tasia’s shoulders, her face stricken.
This was not the vision of the future that Kirana had promised herself.
Kirana stood in a new, vibrant world with two of her children, while one child and her wife remained on a toxic wreck of a world she had killed millions to free them from. For the first time since the beginning of the Great War, the Empress of Dhai, Divine Kai of the Tai Mora, wept – and the baleful eye of Oma bathed her in bloody light.
After all this time, the war Kirana had waged for the survival of her people was not over.
The war for this world had just begun.
The Worldbreaker Saga will conclude in:
The Broken Heavens
The Worldbreaker Saga, Book III
Glossary
Aaldia
Country on the southwestern shore of Grania, led by a conclave of three queens and two kings, each representing one of the five former independent states of the region.
Aaldians
The people of Aaldia, a country on the southwestern shore of Grania, known for their passion for mathematics.
Aaraduan
Far north-eastern city in Saiduan, home to one of the infamous "living holds" of the western half of Raisa. Before the Saiduans, the city was called Roasandara, and was part of the ancient Dhai empire. The city was destroyed by the Tai Mora.
Aatai
Saiduan liquor.
Abas Morasorn
A Saiduan dancer at Kuonrada.
Adenoak
A type of yellowish hardwood tree commonly grown in Dhai.
Ahkio Javia Garika
Son of Javia Mia Sorai and Rishin Garin Badu. Li Kai. Brother to Kirana Javia Garika.
Ahmur
The largest of Raisa’s three moons.
Aimuda Mosifa Taosina
Elder Ora of the Temple of Tira. Masura’s cousin.
Alaar Masoth Taar
The Patron of Saiduan; eighth in the country’s current line of rulers. A tirajista.
Alais Sohra Garika
Birth mother to Yisaoh Alais Garika. Married Garika clan master, Tir, and Moarsa, and Gaila.
Alasu Carahin Sorila
A Kuallina militia member found dead in Clan Sorila.
Albaaric
A city in Saiduan on the coast. Home city of Maralah Daonia.
Alhina Sabita Sorai
Mohrai’s cousin.
Almeysia Maisia Sorila
An Ora and the Mistress of Novices at the Temple of Oma. A very sensitive tirajista who can call upon her powers even when Tira is in decline.
Aloerian
A city in Dorinah near a dajian camp.
Alorjan
An island nation currently claimed by both Saiduan and Dorinah forces. Both nations removed their forces to deal with Tai Mora matters.
Amelia Novao
A Dorinah Seeker. Recruited and bound by Lilia to help her get the dajian refugees across the Dhai border.
Anavha Hasaria
Zezili Hasaria’s husband. Son of Gilyna Lasinya. The Empress awarded Anavha to Zezili as a token for her service.
Anjoliaa
A port city in southern Saiduan.
Aradan Foswen
A leader in an alternate version of Raisa.
Arakam Solaan, Ren
An ataisa sanisi.
Aramey Dahina Dasina
A Dhai scholar. Married to Lanilu Asaila Sorila.
Arasia Marita Sorila
Temporary keeper of Liona Stronghold.
Arisaa Saara
One of Alaar Masoth Taar’s wives. Known as his most formidable wife, Arisaa is the mother of Alaar’s most beloved sons and provides him with valued advice.
Ashaar Toaan
Asona Harbor
Harbor on the Hareo Sea, in Clan Sorai. This defensive structure was built by Faith Ahya and Hahko in anticipation of raids from Saiduan and Dorinah.
Azorum
A dead people conquered by the Tai Mora on their world.
Bael Asaraan
Record keeper for the archives at Kuonrada. Native of Caisau.
Battle at Roasandara
A battle between the Saiduan and the ancient Dhai at the city of Roasandara, taught to every member of the Saiduan military.
Bendi
A strategy game played in Dhai.
Bleeding pen
A pen made from the stamens of claw-lilies.
Blinding tree
A tree that emits a deadly acid that numbs flesh and can eat through skin, bone and armor.
Bone Festival
One of the winter festivals held in Saiduan.
Bone tree
A tree with yellowish bark and spiny branches, made of bone. It catches small animals in its branches, and secretes a poisonous sap that kills its prey.
Bonsa
Large, yellow-barked trees trained to become living establishments in Dhai. Saplings are also used to create weapons infused with the breath of Para.
Book of Dhai
A written set of religious practices, codes and laws followed by the Tai Mora. The book states that when Oma rises, one world will die and another will be transformed. In the book, omajistas are referred to as the hand of Oma, and will decide the fate of the worlds.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 100
