“We are not helpless, you understand. If we must defend ourselves, we will.”
“I don’t doubt that. And I know you by reputation. We have certainly kept an eye on your people, though we were uncertain what this… monstrosity was for. There are more like you, as you know. Aradan, Kalinda, Sovonia, and those are just the leaders of the worlds closest to us, those who will find it easiest to cross over.”
“Kalinda failed,” Gian said. “Her people cast her out and dissolved into strife. That is one less.”
“That still leaves us the two knowns, and a limitless number of unknowns. My people and yours don’t need war. We need to settle here. There is still space, for us. But not for many more of our size.”
“What do you offer?”
“Peace,” Kirana said, spreading her palms, and Taigan sneered at the sight of it. Peace? “But we have a very short time frame in which to achieve it. And I will be bold: it would assist us greatly to have you as an ally and not a foe.”
Taigan was taken aback at that. This was the nation that had destroyed the Saiduan. He remembered the fallow fields he had passed on his journey south, the thin faces. He smirked, then, because he knew precisely their position. They had won the battle, but not the war. The world was still poised to eat them, and he was so terribly thrilled at the idea that, after all this time, they would die of starvation that he could barely contain his mirth.
“We can discuss it,” Gian said. “We are not tyrants, so I must consult our people.”
“I understand. Until then, my omajistas and tirajistas would be pleased to assist with any injuries.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“As you wish, however, I–”
“Our gifted are not permitted to harm, or to heal, unless they are protecting themselves or another from certain death.”
An awkward silence descended.
Taigan could not help it. He snorted.
Gian whipped round and met his look, steeling him with a gaze that said she clearly saw through his ward. Ah, yes, a parajista, likely – not a powerful one, but one did not have to be powerful to see through hazing wards, if one had the gift for it. His curiosity had made him a bit careless.
“Who are you to judge us?” Gian said.
Taigan sketched a little bow. There was some movement among Kirana’s retinue. Kirana narrowed her eyes. In the dim, perhaps, his features were not apparent, but he was tall and dark, and he knew only a few of her people this close to her would be foreigners like him. Taigan waited them out. He could bluff as well as this foreign empress. To admit he was an impostor here, among one she wanted to align with, was to admit her own security was faulty. Taigan merely inclined his head.
Kirana exchanged a look with one of her omajistas. “Yours may not be permitted,” she said, shifting her attention back to Gian. “Ours can. The offer is open. I’d like to invite you to a meal, the two of us, perhaps.” She indicated the mess around them. “Somewhere outside, in the open air. It’s a lovely world.”
“I’ll send word.”
Kirana tipped her chin. “Good.” She waved her people out with her, and spared another look at Taigan. Taigan could not help the smirk that crept up his face. He would very much like to murder her, but it was true that she was the only one prepared to close the ways between the worlds. He would just have to deal with another Kirana if she failed, and the mere thought exhausted him.
Taigan did not linger, but followed after them, weaving down the corridor until he found a large crack in the hull. He slipped into it, and waited there in the empty corridor. Wait long enough, and they would forget about him, and hardly recognize his face, foreign as it was among these people.
But even as he prepared to leave the great ship, Gian herself blocked his way back into the hall. Two omajistas stood with her, and another he could guess was a sinajista. The omajistas already had threads of Oma’s breath woven into elaborate spells.
Taigan instinctively reached for Oma. The power pulsed beneath his skin. The air grew heavy. He pushed out a defensive litany, the Song of the Proud Wall, and began to shape the Song of Sorrow, a devastating spell no one had yet countered.
The omajistas responded; their casts were not ones he recognized. Something of the Song of the Water Spider, perhaps, twisted with the Song of Unmaking, as if they sought to distract him long enough to cut him from Oma’s source.
Taigan wove a defense just as they deployed a second round of casts, these utterly alien to him. His defensive shield burst under the onslaught. He was just fast enough to buffer the blow with a counter spell, but the shockwave heaved him across the corridor and into the next room. He smashed against the oozing wall, widening the weeping wound that glugged essential, sticky fluid over him.
The omajistas pursued. Taigan sliced through the hull with a great burst of Oma’s breath and leapt out onto the buckled ground. He spun a glamor as he ran, but realized the threads of his own power would give him away to the omajistas. They could see him if he held a spell. He dropped it and darted into the maze of fallen trees, following the descent of the land to the water below.
He shrugged off his armor, retaining only the linen tunic and trousers beneath, and dove into the water. Taigan might not be able to die, but he was not fond of pain, generally, and these omajistas had spells he had never encountered before. It was entirely possible they could cut him off from Oma and torture him endlessly. He had experienced that a great many times, and did not enjoy that either.
Taigan let himself float down the icy river, keeping his legs ahead of him to cushion his encounters with the rocks. After a time, he rolled over and made for the other side of the river. He was numb, but knew from long experience that his body would combat hypothermia with ease.
The air, too, was cold; early spring was a terrible time to take a dip in a river. He gazed upstream to see if he could make out signs of pursuit, but there was nothing. No threaded tendrils of Oma, no shouts, no figures. He called a touch of Oma’s breath and warmed his clothes enough to dry them, then struck out further down the riverbed. Paused.
A noise? A breath. Someone, something, very close.
He drew deeply on Oma, preparing for the Song of the Mountain, an offensive spell instead of defensive.
Taigan twisted on his heel and brought up a great ball of Oma’s breath over his head.
“Oh!” a slender boy said, shrinking back into the undergrowth.
The boy seemed familiar, even in the dim light; it took Taigan a moment to realize it wasn’t a boy, though it had been years and several genders since he had last seen this little ataisa.
Both he and the ataisa had belonged to Maralah, he through binding, Luna as a piece of property won in a game of chance. It seemed absurd to see the ataisa here in Dhai, after all that had happened, as absurd as seeing some version of Gian fall from the sky in an ark. But surely there would be Saiduan refugees in the south, little clusters of holdouts who had succeeded in fleeing before Anjoliaa was taken?
He saw no tendrils of power around the ataisa, and no other figures.
“You are Luna,” Taigan said. “Are you alone?”
Ze nodded, shivering. Taigan noted the damp clothes, and how Luna leaned hard on a great branch ze had taken up as a walking stick.
“You’re injured.”
“I jumped into the river.”
“From where?”
“Oma’s Temple.”
“That is quite a trip from here.”
“I followed the river.”
“How did they find you, child?” Taigan asked, genuinely curious.
“I fled from Shoratau.”
“Ah, yes. Who else? Roh, that child, he escaped as well. How curious.”
“How did… Yes, he did. And Kadaan! He was alive, a year… maybe more, ago. He got me out of Anjoliaa.”
“And how have you survived here all this time? You were a slave?”
“I could understand how to power the temples, the beasts that can c
hannel the satellites. And close all these–” Luna gestured behind hir, toward the ark “–seams, you know. Their Empress does not like people just falling out of the sky and taking what she thinks is hers.”
“How is it done, then? Powering the beasts? I heard from a little bird that you found the book you sought in Saiduan.”
Luna took another step back. “Are you working for them? I should go.”
“I work for myself and my own purposes, now. I belong to no one. But you? Where will you go? Saiduan is destroyed. The Tai Mora own the world. The knowledge you have is useless without allies.”
“I’ve already told them all they need to know to figure out how to use the temples to focus the power. They don’t need me.”
“That makes you terribly expendable. That’s hardly a mark in your favor.”
Luna frowned. “Some days I wanted to destroy them all, did you know? Maybe we should. Maybe that’s better. If we keep doing this again and again…” Luna tilted hir head at him. “I’m tired of being afraid. Aren’t you?”
“I trained as a sanisi long before you were born,” Taigan said. “I was burned up eighteen times in various attempts to kill me. I have been hacked to pieces twenty-seven times. Maimed and mauled and broken and left for dead more than I can count. I know fear, and I know pain. I fear most that I will never die, that this is my punishment, that the gods doomed me to this for some terrible wrong I committed on some other world. Who is to say? But here is what I know, little Luna, little satellite. Without fear we are the humble herbivores lumbering on the plains. We are a flash of light in the sky. Without fear to drive us we never become what we are meant to be.”
“What about love?” Luna said.
“What about love, yes,” Taigan said. “Love is the fear of dying alone. That’s all.”
“That isn’t true.”
Taigan held open his hands, palms up. “If you are going to run, then run into the woods, Luna,” he said. “Run and run until you’re eaten by some bone tree or trapped inside a bladder plant. Run for fear of what could be. But that is what the herbivores do. Run and run, until mortality catches them. I chase, Luna. I chase, always.”
“These temples, these machines,” Luna said, “can do more than just close the ways between worlds. They could decide to use it in many ways. They could decide to destroy not only this world, but millions, trillions, an infinite number of others. If I give you that information, or give it to them, then I am complicit. All I gave them was the code, cipher. The other… well, they won’t find out what else it does, besides close the ways between the worlds.”
“Why not?”
“I tore out the appendix.”
“You… what?”
“When they captured me. I knew they would take the book, once they realized what it was.”
“Taigan laughed. “Where is the appendix?”
“Gone, thrown into the sea.”
“So no one will ever know?”
Luna hesitated. Ze opened hir mouth as if to say something, and thought better of it. Ze shook her head.
Taigan wondered if ze told the truth, or obfuscated to make hir case for freedom stronger.
“I’m going to build some other life with the Dhai,” Luna said. “With the appendix gone, well, we’re as safe as we’ll ever be, I guess. They could still figure out how to break the world, I know. But I did what I could to stop it.”
“The Dhai? Why those pacifists?”
“There are still free Dhai, in the woods. I’ve heard that all along the way here. The Woodland Dhai are free. They have a rebel leader, Faith Ahya reborn. They have evaded the Tai Mora all this time. Maybe they can use what I know. Or not. Maybe they could help hide me.”
Taigan felt a twist of… what emotion was it? Surely not hope. “Faith Ahya? A little girl in a white dress, her face covered in scars?”
“I don’t know. But she is very powerful. She leads the rebel Dhai in the woods. They wear white ribbons, that’s what people say. They are going to take back the country.”
“If there is some resistance of Dhai,” Taigan said, “perhaps they will be interested in what you know. If the temples truly are the source of power, if they find themselves a worldbreaker, well… we could destroy a good many Tai Mora this way.”
“You don’t want to help the Dhai!”
“No, I came here to kill Tai Mora, and it seems that could be a possibility if we are the ones wresting control of the temples. Do you know where the Dhai are? The Woodland is dangerous.”
“I’ll manage.”
“I have traversed that wood,” Taigan said. “I can help you survive it.”
“No tricks. A partnership between the two of us.”
“There can be no partnership between a sanisi and another.”
“Well, there is now. New world, new rules.”
Luna was right, of course, and Taigan did not think hir cowed for a moment. Taigan recognized that having a Dhai-looking companion could get him there among the rebel Dhai to see what they were truly composed of. Perhaps he could trade that information for an audience with the Empress. And though Luna may not tell him or Kirana how to close the seams between the worlds, it was entirely possible Luna would tell the Dhai. And if Luna did, Taigan would be listening.
Living as long as he had, had taught him patience. His only concern, as he gazed at the dying light outside, was that though he had patience, the sky did not. The sky was going to keep moving, and he knew that once Oma left them in twenty years, they would be stuck with whatever new neighbors had muscled their way in over the decades. Time was not quite as infinite as it had been. Oma waited for no one. Least of all him.
“I don’t believe you,” Luna said.
“I can heal your little leg, Luna. I can dry your clothes. We can indeed be partners.”
“Why?”
“I always did prefer the underdog. And there is no dog more under-served than you.”
Luna glanced at hir leg, and Taigan knew then that he had hir. Taigan smiled broadly. “Let’s go see what the Dhai in the woods are up to. I suspect they will be just as eager to murder the Tai Mora as I am, bless their little pacifist hearts.”
16
A clattering of footsteps above and behind them. The smell of everpine and dust. The temple rumbled around them.
Lilia shivered. Elaiko squeaked.
“Someone is coming!” Elaiko said.
“Yes,” the creature said. “I’m afraid our time is limited. You should find the Guide. The Guide can bring you to the People’s Temple.”
“Who… who is the Guide?” Lilia asked.
“We need to get out!” Elaiko said. “Is there another way out? Can you help us?”
The creature gestured to the walls. “Step through,” it said. “I can take you to any other part of this temple. But only the Guide can step from one temple to another.”
“Who is the Guide?”
“The Creature of Caisau chose the Guide. The Guide is close. I feel him near. The Key, also.”
“But… the Worldbreaker?” Lilia asked, and it came out more desperate than she intended. She had learned to hate that word.
“When the three come together, you will know. The heavens themselves will draw them together.”
“But, who–”
“Choose,” the creature said, shaking its beribboned head. The image of it stuttered, shifted, purled away and reformed, like a brilliant aurora. “The Worldbreaker is the one who chooses. Anyone can stand at the center and direct the mechanism. ‘Worldbreaker’ is a poor translation. Better, perhaps, to say the figure who controls the flow of power that is channeled to the People’s Temple is a world-shaper. The Worldshaper, once in place, is the one who chooses what to do with all that power. And there are many choices. So very many.”
“But…”
A flicker of lanterns cast great shadows from the weeping wound in the ceiling. Raised voices. The air heaved and compressed. Lilia gasped, like breathing underwater. Sho
uting. The Tai Mora had found the bodies. The heavy air lifted.
“Please!” Elaiko hissed, grabbing Lilia’s sleeve.
“Does the Key know what, who it is?” Lilia asked. “Can the Key be anyone?”
“The Key was chosen long ago. The Key will be unique, able to bear the full power of the satellites.”
“So the Key isn’t the Kai?” Lilia said.
“The Kai can gain you access to the People’s Temple,” the creature said, “and converse with the temple creatures, as you have done with me. The Kai can gain access to these chambers, yes, without all this… ruination that the interloper has brought.” The creature paused, cocking its head as if listening to the patter of feet above them. “I fear your time here is short. You are nearly found. I see it in your face, though, don’t I? I see your desire, to shape the world.”
“I’m no one,” Lilia said.
“None of us are,” the creature said.
“Please!” Elaiko cried. “Can you get us out of here? Can you… someone get us to the back gardens? Please, they will kill us!”
“Can you take us… away?” Lilia said. “To the back gardens here in the temple?”
“If that is your wish,” the creature said, and gestured to the wall.
“Wait!” Lilia said as Elaiko tugged at her sleeve and the Tai Mora soldiers mounted the ladder above, shouting, the air heavy now, like soup. “How will I find them, the Guide and the Key?”
“They will find you,” the creature said. Its image broke apart again. Dimmed.
“Quickly!” Elaiko said, running for the oozing walls. She pressed her hands to the wall, but nothing happened. She wailed. “Oh no!”
“You must go together,” the creature said, its voice distant now.
“Take my hand!” Lilia held out her hand, and Elaiko took it.
A shout, from just behind them. The tickle of power; a tendril of Sina or Tira or Oma, seeking to hold them.
Lilia pressed her hand against the skin of the temple. The warm pool of it gave beneath her fingers and sucked her forward. She gasped and held her breath, yanking Elaiko with her.
The moment was nearly instantaneous. Darkness. Warmth. Then she was falling onto cold stones. Elaiko landed on top of her, driving the breath from her body.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 122
