The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus

by Kameron Hurley

  “It’s not too late. You think once the Tai Mora have access to the power of the transference engines inside the temples that all they can do is close the ways between the worlds? The power they could unleash is far worse than that. They could… break the world. Sink continents.”

  “Maybe the world needs breaking,” Taigan said.

  The door opened, and the old Tai Mora man who’d been arguing with the boy entered. Roh turned his gaze to the floor, and Taigan reached for a towel. The old man gave them both a once-over, then barked at Roh to check the bath water, which was nearly overflowing.

  “You should be better to the boy,” Taigan said, in Tai Mora. “These pretty little cannibals have no experience with servitude.”

  The old man peered at Taigan, and for a moment he wondered if the man could see through the glamor, but no: he was a sinajista. Taigan could sense that.

  “Best he get used to it, then,” the old man said. “As should you. Aaldia is next, you know, once we finish with the Dorinah.”

  “What a relief,” Taigan said. “We’ve gotten so tired of self-rule.”

  The old man’s shocked look made Taigan smile. Taigan reached forward, hand poised to snap the old man’s neck.

  Roh threw himself between them. “No!” he cried.

  Taigan laughed. “They have you cowed already,” he said, in Saiduan, and took up his coat. “If you think that old man’s status will protect you, you’re sorely wrong. All of you are going to die. By my hand or some other.”

  The old man barked at Roh again, but Taigan was already in the hall. He went upstairs to wait for his laundry. What fools these Dhai were. What a fool he was, to be here to witness it.

  He sat on the edge of his bed and gazed at the street below. Why was he here? To kill and maim, certainly, because it sounded like a fine way to spend the end of the world. But what if the boy was right? What if there was still a way forward that didn’t end in destruction? Taigan had been told his whole life that he was special, gifted or cursed; that his inability to die and Oma’s blessing were meant for some greater purpose. But that had come to nothing. He was just an assassin, a sanisi, like any other. If anything, he was simply an abomination, a random result of an infinite number of dice rolls thrown by the gods.

  Without Maralah to tug him about as that old man pulled the boy, he had become shiftless. Indecisive. He could not die. Alcohol did not affect him. Poisons worked their way through his system cleanly and efficiently. He had no choice but to live. Maybe he hoped that if he killed enough Tai Mora, one of them would figure out how to kill him.

  Encountering the boy had made him question too much. Killing was such an easy solution. He could have snapped that old man’s neck and the boy would have been free. But then what? Then what, indeed. It was what he asked himself, every day.

  Taigan called for his laundry. He pulled on the still-wet small clothes and exited the tavern the way he had come. Lashing out at the old man had been foolish. That man could summon a patrol, or worse, and Taigan had spent enough of his years inside prisons – hacked and slashed and murdered over and over – that he did not relish the thought of going back quite yet, not when he had just arrived.

  He moved through the press of people: sweat-slick stevedores, a few Aaldian merchants collecting exorbitant sums for moldering sacks of grain, and above all, the watchful eye of self-styled Tai Mora “guardians”, an armed and usually gifted force that he had seen in Anjoliaa as well, all clad in long blue tunics, black armbands, and soft bearskin boots. These were different than the soldiers, something new the Tai Mora had created for policing civilian spaces. The guardians were concentrated at the harbor gates, hands folded over infused weapons, which glowed blue, green, and violet. No omajista-infused weapons, Taigan noted.

  As he came into the shadow of the great harbor gates, its massive stones bound by living ropes of blue-green vines, a scream sounded behind him.

  Taigan stepped back, reflexively. A body tumbled from the sky. It thunked against one of the bulging vines above and landed ten paces ahead of Taigan, nearly crushing one of the guardians. The body came to rest with an odious sound of burst melon, limbs splayed, limp as a discarded marionette.

  The body drew the attention of nearby guardians and numerous gawkers, perhaps some hoping to steal a trifle thrown free of the corpse, others just morbidly curious.

  Taigan took advantage of the distraction to pass unmolested through the massive bonsa wood gates. He tilted his head up as he did, and saw that bodies in various states of decay swung from great cages hung on either side of the archway. Tatters of flesh still clung to some of the oldest bones. Fresher bodies teemed with flies. The constant sea wind blew away the stench of them. One body lay pressed with its face to the bottom of a cage, eyeball bulging at him. Just skin over bone, most of the hair gone, mouth stretched wide and silent. As he watched, the eyelid fluttered, blinked.

  Taigan trailed his hand over a bit of the twining infused tendrils etched into the face of the doors, which also bore charred scars from the Tai Mora assault. The arch of the gateway soared above him, three hundred paces high, testament to some other civilization, certainly predating the Dhai. The infused tendrils glowed faintly green, and bore an inscription that read, in Dhai: All who receive entrance are welcome, which Taigan found absurdly funny as the bodies above rattled in the wind.

  Coming through the other side of the thick walls, which were easily thirty paces or more thick, the babbling of the harbor-goers receding, he wondered if he should be offering his services to these industrious people instead of simply killing them. But did that make him any different than the boy, seeking a master to give him purpose?

  He was so very tired of losing.

  “If you live long enough,” his mentor had told him when he was a child, “all the worst this world has to offer will happen to you. But live long enough, and all the good things will happen, too.”

  If only, Taigan thought. If only.

  The sky seethed. Taigan pulled his hat low over his eyes, and entered the kingdom of Tai Mora, still uncertain of his destination, but anticipating a delightfully tumultuous journey.

  2

  Kirana Javia Garika, Kai of the Tai Mora, Empress of the Known Worlds, and Founder of Novoso Mora had won her decade-long campaign to overtake the mirrored land and bring all but a fraction of her people to safety. She was the most feared sentient being across dozens of worlds.

  She had expected that rising to such prominence would make her more cheerful. Instead, it left her anxious and irritable, plagued by dreams of burning worlds that tore away from the blank black canvas of the universe like charred paper, revealing her wife’s face, a face whose flesh bubbled and sloughed away, ruined by the force of a searing volcanic wind billowing from an amber sky.

  She shivered now under the double helix of the suns, which sat directly overhead. Kirana squinted and raised her hand to her eyes, peering at the great shivering mass her jistas had raised from the bottom of the ocean just off the northeastern coast of what had once been Dhai.

  She stood on a narrow sandbar, five hundred paces from the proper shoreline, joined by one of her stargazing omajistas, Suari, and Madah, her intelligence officer. She had tried to keep the number of people who knew about this operation limited, but there were spies in her temples. Every month her intelligence forces found another traitor and made an example by hanging their bodies up on the harbor gates for all to see. But it had done no good. It wasn’t only captive Dhai and Dorinah who had turned on her, which made it worse. The hungrier her people became, the crueler the choices they had to make here, the more her own people sided with those they had conquered. It was the very worst betrayal, to have saved them all from annihilation only to lose their loyalty in the aftermath.

  Cold, briny wind buffeted the sandbar, nearly taking Madah, the slightest of them, off her feet. Madah staggered and found her footing, bracing herself by digging her heel into the sandbar. Two scholars and another stargazer huddle
d nearby, just to the left of the wink that Suari had opened to bring them all here from Oma’s temple.

  It had been several days since they dredged the thing onto the sandbar, and Kirana was still not used to the sight of it. What had once presumably been a true temple with stone facades and sweeping arches and domes, tamed into being by generations of Dhai jistas, had shed its non-organic trappings, laying bare what she could only call the monstrous pulsing heart of some mythical beast. Like a living leviathan dragged from the deep, the mass of it towered over them, waves breaking around its gooey, barnacled base. The great beast was bound in large, tirajista-trained vines that served as scaffolding for a dozen or more soldiers and tirajistas who worked along the skin of the pulsing mass, seeking an entrance. They had been at it nearly three days, and Kirana had yet to see any progress.

  “You’ve yet to convince me this isn’t a sea creature,” Kirana said, raising her voice above the wind.

  “Even a sea creature would have an orifice,” Madah said, hugging her arms to her chest. She wore a heavy bearskin coat, and sea foam collected around her slender ankles. “Maybe it’s some embryo, going to hatch a beast.”

  “Five temples,” Suari said quickly, consulting a parchment containing diagrams he had laboriously traced from the book they still called The Saiduan Tome because they had yet to decipher its actual title – or anything else written in it. The little Saiduan ataisa who had washed up with it had remained close-lipped about its origin and contents, despite the most persuasive efforts of Kirana’s interrogators.

  The wind caught at the edge of the paper, nearly tearing it in two. Suari clutched it to his chest, frantically rolling it back under his robe. “The symbols on the map in the Assembly Chamber match the locations of each temple. The trefoil with the tail marked this spot. This has to be the primary engine. The one where the power of the satellites is concentrated, the one a worldbreaker can use to manipulate the heavens. We are still working out the precise language in the book, of course, but the symbolism is clear. This temple, on the original map in the book, is sitting on a whole continent, in precisely this location, relative to the rest.”

  Kirana waved at him. “Yes, I’ve heard this,” she said. “Logically you’re correct, but look at the fucking thing.”

  “I understand,” Suari said. “I’m sure once we’re inside–”

  “And when will that be?” Kirana asked.

  “I’m afraid, I still… we still have no timeline, I mean, unless you, Madah–”

  “Don’t dump this on me,” Madah said. She turned to Kirana. “We got it up from the bottom. Suari and his scholars said they’d know what to do with it after that. This has got to be it, because there’s nothing else down there.”

  “So it’s either what we’re looking for, or what we’re looking for doesn’t exist,” Kirana said.

  “Precisely,” Suari said, as if she had said something particularly insightful.

  Not for the first time, Kirana wished she had left him behind, and raised up some other omajista with the knowledge necessary to navigate this moment. Too late to start over, alas.

  Everyone who could be evacuated from her world had been, in the days after she took Oma’s Temple and obliterated what remained of the free Dhai in the valley. The few who could not cross over to this world because their doubles still lived on Raisa had to be moved to a secondary world, one that wasn’t disintegrating quite as quickly. Those displaced souls included her own wife, Yisaoh, and their child, Tasia. It was a bitter reality, a decision that wrecked her heart and her ego, and it kept her up at night, after the nightmares roused her. Where could she move them next? For how much longer?

  Patrol after patrol had spent the last year murdering Dhai in the valley and in the Woodland. They arrived with hundreds of bodies, at first. Then dozens. Then one or two a week, until Kirana feared the Dhai survivors had left the continent entirely, taking the shadow versions of her wife and child with them. She sent her patrols to the east and south. Someone had to know where this world’s Yisaoh and Tasia were. She had put an exorbitant price on the heads of both.

  Finding this beast of a temple had been easy, comparatively. The logistics of moving it and keeping it intact, far more difficult. But Madah was good with logistics. She, at least, was worth the trouble. The lands of Dorinah and Dhai were at capacity, with more people coming through each day, and feeding them all and carting away their waste was a logistical battle. Madah had dumped the last few waves of refugees from their world into Saiduan, but they had little knowledge of local flora and fauna, and the land was not fertile enough for intense agriculture. Anything forced from the soil by tirajistas was of notoriously poor quality, devoid of nutrients, like eating sawdust. It filled the belly, but the body wasted. Kirana had brought them all a very long way only to face the reality that another wave of Tai Mora would be dead before the spring crops matured.

  Kirana rubbed her fingers, still bearing the sooty texture of the air in the secondary world where her wife and child remained with a limited force, sealed up in a crumbling fortress along the equator, the last place there with a somewhat bearable atmosphere. That world was fading too, just as hers had. Soon Raisa would be the only nearby world safe for any of her people. Soon she would be out of options.

  She raised her head to the sky again, peering past the suns to the steady, steely gaze of the satellites. “How much time do we really have to gain access to this thing?” she asked. “It took us months to break into the chambers under the other temples.”

  “Well, this, you see, here,” Suari came up beside her, pulling out his parchment again; it crackled in the wind. He pointed to a figure at the center of a dais marked with the trefoil with the tail, which the scholars had worked out as the symbol for the People’s Temple. The figure at the center, they knew, was the Worldbreaker. Four additional marks ringing the Worldbreaker were color-coded, and presumably where a single jista who could draw on the power of each star was to place themselves relative to the central core. But there were two more figures with longer written explanations that still baffled her scholars. Suari pointed to the figure that held a raised hand to the outermost circle, presumably the skin of the temple. “This figure here is no doubt meant to be a Kai, one the temples recognize. Perhaps we could try–”

  Kirana loosened her glove. “It didn’t work on the others.”

  “It’s worth an attempt,” Suari said. “Perhaps it has been long enough, your power great enough now, unquestioned, that these beasts will recognize you as Kai.”

  Kirana sneered at the great pulsing blob. She tugged off her glove and walked to the edge of the sandbar where the creature had been beached. It gave off a distinct odor, this close: not unpleasant, but still sinister, promise of both birth and rot. She found a smooth stretch of skin, greenish-black, bare of barnacles, and pressed her hand to it.

  The skin of the thing was moist and almost hot: fleshy and comforting, like pressing one’s fingers into the mouth of a slick and welcoming womb. It pulsed beneath her, a slow, steady rhythm, like a heartbeat. She waited, pressing more firmly, but the skin of the thing remained unchanged, as did the beat of its body.

  Kirana grimaced and wiped her hand on her trousers. All she wanted to do was hold her wife. Cradle her young daughter. Create somewhere safe for them. And this is where it had led her.

  “And it’s impervious to all our weapons?” Kirana asked, turning back to Suari. “Even the infused ones? The ones we used at Liona, too?”

  “It is,” Madah said. “I even had the sinajistas bind together the same offensive spells we used at the harbor.”

  “You never answered my question,” Kirana said to Suari. “How much time do we have?”

  He shook his head. “Certainly fewer than one hundred days. The numbers in the Saiduan tome were much easier to translate than the words. A different script, and–”

  “I’m aware,” Kirana said. “I don’t care for the details.”

  “As with all things
to do with the satellites,” Suari said, “there is a range. Once Oma enters the sky, Tira and Sina follow soon after. Para is due a year later. And once all four are visible, we have only a few hours to ensure our jistas are in place at all four temples. It’s a narrow window in which they can harness all that power, but once they have grasped it, well… all signs we have deciphered thus far indicate that we may be able to draw on that power until Oma descends again. That’s nearly twenty years of power. Imagine!”

  “Oh, I have imagined it,” Kirana said. She followed the girth of the beast up and up and up. She stood in its shadow; it was so tall that this close the thing blotted out the sky. “But what’s most important to me is using that power to close the seams between this world and any others. I won’t have anyone usurping me. That’s our ultimate goal. Understood?”

  “Of course, Kai,” Suari said.

  “This one doesn’t like me either,” Kirana said, dismissing the blob. “Take me back to the chamber beneath Oma’s Temple. Walk me through that again. I want to begin choosing which jistas we assign to each temple.”

  “Yes,” Suari said, “though I must remind you it’s a bit… unstable. The temple, the beast at the heart of it, which I assume must be similar to this one, continues to be unimpressed with how we gained entrance.”

  “I don’t care if I piss them off,” Kirana said, “so long as I get what I want.”

  Suari put away his diagrams. He raised his arms and muttered a little omajista litany. The existing wink closed, and another snapped open. Orange light poured from the mouth of it, punctuated by the soft muttering of scholars. Kirana caught a glimpse of the scholars working on the other side in the Assembly Chamber of Oma’s Temple, consulting airy illusions sketched in the air above the great black walnut circle of the center table.

  “I’ll stay and oversee this,” Madah said. “Give it another hour and see if I can think of some other approaches.”