“And that’s me.”
“Yes.”
“And when it’s not any longer?”
Natanial gave a small shrug. Monshara grimaced, as if he had just agreed to become a human torch, and maybe he had.
“You want to work for me?” Kirana said. “You ward yourself to me, or I light you up like I did Dasai.”
Natanial peered at the smoking ruin of the old man, considering his options. He had chosen to put himself here, at her mercy, so he could survive until the end of all this. But in return, who would she have him destroy next?
“I want to find the boy, the omajista,” Natanial said. “I want to live through this breaking of the world, and I care enough for him that I’d like him to live, as well. Let me do that, and I’ll do anything else you’d like.”
“If he’s intelligent, he winked himself off to Aaldia or Tordin,” she said. “Be happy you’re rid of him. An omajista one cannot control is worse than no omajista at all. Trust me in that. I can offer you protection, but frankly, running after that boy would be a fool’s errand.”
Natanial gazed up at Oma again, turning over his limited options. Bound was better than dead. He had made worse pairings. Saradyn had not been his finest moment, either.
“All right,” Natanial said. “I’d like to bring my soldiers over. Pay them, and they’ll be as loyal as I will.”
“Fine,” Kirana said. “With Daorian in hand, both of you are worth more to me scouring the Woodland for a few… key individuals I have been seeking for some time. A child, calling herself Tasia. And a woman called Yisaoh. Both Dhai. I have portraits for you. We’ve found that it’s better to have small but well-trained groups working in the Woodland. We’ve met nothing but disaster trying to move larger units. Those fucking plants eat them like candy.”
“Tordin has similar issues with plant life,” Natanial said. “I can help Monshara and her soldiers navigate the Woodland.”
“Excellent,” Kirana said. “So you’ll be useful after all. Let’s get you warded, and get you your soldiers. What is a useful mercenary without his soldiers?”
As the Empress’s omajista advanced to ward his loyalty to the Empress into his flesh, Natanial took a knee, and wondered if he would ever get the smell of burning flesh from his nose.
22
Zezili snapped away the remaining bone branches. She had to pull out the bones that had skewered Lilia’s shoulder and belly. The wounds did not bleed out, only oozed a greenish sap or pus. Zezili supposed the tree preferred to preserve its prey and feed off it slowly, like a spider.
“Hey, can you hear me?” Zezili asked. “I need you awake. I don’t know where the fuck I am.”
“It’s fine,” Lilia muttered. “It’s fine.”
Zezili spotted a thin line of blood on Lilia’s forearm – she must have created it when she pulled her down.
She had a strange compulsion to clear it away. She pressed her lips to the wound. Sucked at the blood. The blood came away sweet. So sweet! Sweeter and more delightful than anything she had ever tasted before.
She pulled herself away from the wound, suddenly dizzy. She scrambled further from Lilia, overcome with revulsion. Had the tree done something to the blood? Zezili headed for the trees. She got eight paces before she felt the pain in her sternum again. The urge to go back, the feeling that if she continued on her own, she would die horribly, rent limb from limb.
“Fuck you!” Zezili yelled at the sky. But no one answered. Not Rhea, not her daughters, certainly not the woozy Dhai girl.
“This is a rude fucking joke!” Zezili yelled. She picked up a skull from the field of bones and threw it into the woods. “Fuck you! Fuck you! I chose to fucking die!” She threw a few more until the gesture was no longer cathartic. Then went back to the girl.
She yanked Lilia up, as easily as if she were a bag of yams, and headed into the woods with her. Zezili wasn’t thirsty, but the girl probably would be, and the wounds could do with a wash. Bonded, were they? Well, she couldn’t just let her die then, she supposed.
Zezili sensed water before she saw it: a metallic taste at the back of her throat. Had she been able to sense water like that before? Surely not.
As she turned to head toward it, she noted a movement at the corner of her vision. Two young men, Dhai probably, as they did not wear armor. They bore plain metal blades, not infused weapons, which was something.
“Who are you?” one of them shouted, older, bearded, the one in charge. “You put that girl back! She’s no concern of yours.”
Zezili placed Lilia back on the ground. She could not help it: a grin split her face.
They must have understood that grin, because they bolted from her.
Zezili pursued them, humming all the while, a neat little ditty from some puppet show. The men slid in the mud. One knocked into a tree. She caught them easily, in three paces, before her sternum even began to ache.
She took the oldest by the beard and headbutted him. His eyes crossed. He fell. She broke his neck cleanly. Looked about for the other one.
He was scrambling up rugged terrain backwards, sword out, sweating profusely. “What are you?” he said. “Wh– What?”
“I don’t know,” Zezili said. She grabbed the flat blade of the sword and twisted it from his hands. A quick flip of the sword, a thrust, and she skewered him neatly through the heart.
He spit blood. Shuddered. She twisted the blade. Blood spurted across his chest. The blood was so very beautiful.
Zezili straddled the body and pressed her hands into the blood and brought it to her lips. It smelled divine. She tasted it, and like the girl’s blood it was sweet. So very, very delicious. She cut the man’s jugular and cupped her hands beneath the wound, grinning at every flesh spurt of blood. She drank the blood like water until her belly was full and her whole body tingled.
Only when sated did she become aware of her bloody hands. Her sticky face. “What the fuck am I doing?” she muttered. But the blood had made her feel more… alive. Strong. She squeezed the man’s neck, sending more blood into her cupped palm, and took it back up to Lilia. She cradled the girl’s head with her other arm, and brought the blood to her lips.
“Hey, you hear me?” Zezili said. “Drink.”
She wet Lilia’s lips with the blood, made her sip at it. Lilia coughed once, grimaced, but then she drank it down as greedily as Zezili had.
A beat, no more than a moment, and Lilia opened her eyes, gaze clear now, not muddled. At the sight of Zezili, Lilia’s eyes widened.
“Tira,” she breathed, and blood wet Lilia’s own chin. “What have you done?”
“You feel better?” Zezili asked. “You here?”
“You look… like an animal. Did you murder–”
“Are you well or not?”
“I… yes… did you…?” Lilia touched her finger to her lips; the finger came away bloody. “Did you feed me… blood?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Lilia turned over and spit.
“How are your wounds?” Zezili asked. She checked them; they were still pus-filled and oozing, but not bleeding out. “Not a cure-all, then. We have to get you some real care. Where the fuck can we go? You’ve made a lot of enemies.”
“I’ve made enemies? You made far more enemies than I did.”
“Yeah, well, this isn’t Dorinah we’re in, is it? What day is it? What month?”
“I only know the Dhai months.”
“And?”
Lilia told her.
Zezili sat back on her heels. It felt like she’d been punched. “I’ve… been gone… a year?”
“Your face is different. You look… younger. No scars.”
Zezili pressed her hands to her smooth face. She had a dim memory of gazing into a mirror after the cats came at her, her swollen right eye, the jagged rent, the lopsided smile, and her fingers… Rhea, she had lost fingers. No, more than that. Saradyn. Saradyn had taken her hand. But this girl knew nothing of that. They had last
seen each other in the other world, when Lilia broke the mirror, yes. She must be talking about her other scars, the battle scars, the ones that Zezili had borne so long she had thought herself born with them.
She pulled her hands away and stared at them again. They were whole. No scars. No missing digits. Two smooth, perfect hands.
“This is a miracle,” Zezili said. “A fucking Rhea-blessed miracle. What am I?”
“I don’t know.”
“Someone brought me to you… in a box? That’s what… some woman said, when I woke.”
“Emlee? Yes. You were supposed to be some great warrior, from Kalinda.”
“I don’t know who Kalinda is.”
“I’m not sure how she found you, or why she was looking. I’m sorry. I… didn’t know. I just… needed allies.”
“Whatever way you could get them.”
Lilia nodded.
“It got you stuck up a bone tree,” Zezili said.
“I don’t regret any of it.”
That was the dumbest thing Zezili had heard the girl say yet. “Then you’re a fool.”
“You said you want to kill the Tai Mora.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I can help you, like I said. We need to go west, until we reach the sea. Then north. There’s a great temple there. Something that can help us push them all back to their world.”
“Their world is dying.”
“Yes.”
“You intend to just… send them all back. Murder them all the way they’ve murdered all of you?”
“You have a better idea? Where did you get all this blood?” Lilia gestured at Zezili’s stained face and tunic.
Zezili snarled. “What if it hadn’t been me?”
“What do you mean?”
“If it was someone you didn’t know. Someone else who wanted to die. Would you have done it?”
“I needed allies.”
“You’re no better than any of us.”
“If you really wanted to die, you could have left me up there. You would have died soon enough.”
“I don’t know if that was possible. Your blood is delicious, but the idea of murdering you makes me seize up.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Is it? I’m sure it will work the other way. You can’t kill me either. If I can ever die. I don’t know. That’s depressing.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t ask how it works.”
“Where is the woman who did it?”
“Kalinda? I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Well, maybe I’m not. I needed an ally, and you were a terrible monster. Maybe this is what you deserved.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re always so angry.”
“You aren’t?”
“Of course I’m angry. But I don’t sit here complaining about it.”
“Fine.” Zezili stood. Let’s get moving.”
“You’ll come with me?”
“You haven’t given me much choice.” She tasted the remnants of the sugary blood on her lips, and felt a craving she could not name.
23
Roh and his companions fled across the Woodland, to the sea. He knew the Woodland more by reputation than experience, and the reality of the snapping, buzzing expanse of them overwhelmed him. On the Saiduan tundra, he could often see all the way to the horizon. Here, each jump brought them into a dense thicket of woods. The massive trees and twisting greenery got him turned around. Anavha had to stop several times to gaze back at where they had come to ensure they really were still heading north. Even the suns were difficult to see, here. The few glimpses of satellites he managed were obfuscated, fuzzy and indistinct.
It was their sixth wink in two days when he finally smelled the brackish promise of the sea. But still no sign of any Dhai, rebels or otherwise.
“We haven’t seen anything but plants,” Anavha said, shoulders sagging. He began to sit down, but a nest of creeping phlox wept toward him, and he darted away. “Are there any people at all here? Did this wood kill them?”
“I don’t know,” Roh said. He had given Anavha the same answer four times in the last hour. “Unless you can–”
“No, I’m too tired for more winks. Can we rest?”
“We rested an hour ago. Not yet.”
“It’s easy for you to say that because you aren’t even walking.”
“If you think being lugged around is a comfortable way to travel, you are mistaken.”
In truth, Roh was relieved to be out in the open air and on his own. He worried often about his ward. Could Dasai use it to track him? To compel him to go back? So far he had noticed nothing different, but that didn’t mean anything.
Something flickered ahead. He tried to look around Saradyn’s shaggy mane. The man stank terribly.
A bird hooted, unnaturally loud.
Roh tensed, peering into the tree cover ahead of them. A figure came around the nearest bonsa tree, holding an infused everpine weapon ahead of her. More figures slipped from the trees, six of them in all: three small, tawny Dhai and three tall, dark Saiduan.
Saiduan? Roh thought. That was not what he expected.
“We aren’t armed!” Roh shouted, and squeezed Saradyn’s neck, said to him in Dorinah, “Be still.”
A Saiduan woman – taller and older than the rest – stood a little apart from the group. Her hair was knotted against her scalp. She had a broad mouth, deeply lined skin, scarred knuckles… She looked familiar, but Roh’s mind refused to place her. Everyone started to blur together, when there were two or three or more of everyone.
“What motley crew is this?” she said in heavily accented Dhai.
“Let me down,” Roh told Saradyn.
Saradyn grunted and complied. Roh limped forward, hands out, palms up. “I am Rohinmey Tadisa–”
The woman hissed and spoke rapidly in Saiduan, “No, you’re not. Is this some joke?”
“It’s not,” he said, also in Saiduan.
“Who are these others?” she asked. “You bring them from the north with you?”
“Anavha, an omajista–” When she raised her weapon, Roh shook his head. “He is harmless, but he has a great skill. He can travel by wink – make gates – to anywhere he’s been before. The rest of those omajista things… I don’t know if he even knows them.”
“And the brute?”
“Saradyn. Mad, but he can tell you who’s from this world and who isn’t.”
“How do I know anything you tell me is the truth? By all counts, you should be dead. They killed those Saiduan scholars. I was there.”
“Who are you?”
She looked puzzled. “You don’t recognize me? Do I look so different, no longer dressed in black? I did cut my hair.” She smirked.
“Oma,” Roh said. “This isn’t–”
“Possible? Perhaps. Yet, here we are.”
“I thought you were dead, Shao Maralah.”
“It appears we both sought safety by appealing to the sea. Alas, my ships ran aground a few weeks back.”
“But… how did you… why…?”
“That is a very long story. First, I need to know you aren’t one of them, hiding behind a familiar face.”
“I have a ward,” he said. “Can you remove it?”
“I already did, the moment my first scout saw you. They can track you with those wards.”
“I don’t know how to prove who I am,” Roh said. “What questions you could–”
“Tell me about Kadaan,” Maralah said, and Roh felt heat move up his face.
Maralah laughed. “That will do. Come with us. We could use a few more jistas. We have much to discuss.”
The Woodland Dhai camp was too new to appear as if it had grown from the surrounding vegetation. Roh knew very little about the Woodland Dhai, except that they had rejected the prescription that the gifted be taught inside the temples to become religious leaders and teachers. As a rule, the Dhai either sorte
d out their differences or parted ways, and the Woodland Dhai had lived up in the hills on their own for nearly as long as Hahko and Faith Ahya had been dead and the new Kai established the temples as places of learning for the gifted.
This camp appeared to be a nomadic one. The shelters were all lean-tos wrapped in padded swathes of old bonsa leaves. Woodland Dhai stared at their party as they passed. The older Dhai bore blue tatooed faces and dressed in a motley mix of cast off fibers and animal skins. Unlike the valley Dhai, the Woodland Dhai ate meat. The idea still made Roh a little nauseous. The ground was sandy; the sea lay below them, churning in a dark cove that stretched back and back beneath them. A few Saiduan were walking up and down a winding path long worn into the stone they camped on.
“It leads below, to our ships,” Maralah said, following his gaze. “We pulled them into the cavern below, to hide them from the Tai Mora while we work. They are not far from us, here, busy with something they dredged out of the sea. We sleep in the caverns below, but these Woodland Dhai were passing through. I told them they draw too much attention, and they pretend they don’t understand my accent.”
Anavha kept close behind him, uncertain, gaze downcast. Many of the Dhai here would be able to speak Dorinah, but the predominant languages were Dhai and Saiduan, and he could speak neither. Roh felt a little sorry for him.
“I have news from the temples,” Roh said, to Maralah. “I was hoping to find someone who could help us. I heard there were rebel Dhai out here. Thought maybe we could be allies. But these are Woodland Dhai, you said?”
She grimaced. “Yes, you can see their tattoos. And you will see it in how they treat you. They are not fond of valley Dhai any more than Saiduan. Apparently they come here once a year to harvest blue stones from the sea. There are Dhai refugees around, including a camp south of here that wants to partner with us to leave the continent. I’m unsure if they are who you’re looking for, though.”
“Are you in charge here?”
Maralah laughed at that. “I’m in charge of my people, but certainly not these Woodland Dhai. No one is in charge of them. Some talk louder and are esteemed more. I can point them out to you. But they are at best a bickering collective.”
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 127
