The Broken Heavens

by Kameron Hurley

  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 huddled 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 h
undred 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.”

  “I want an update in this evening’s daily report,” Kirana said.

  Suari walked to the edge of the wink and gestured for her to enter. The omajista on the other side was already making her way to the wink. Current protocol was to wait until an omajista was in place on both sides before stepping through. Having an omajista on each side had reduced the number of accidents due to Oma’s fickle nature. However, it meant that the vast majority of her omajistas were constantly engaged in managing the flow of traffic from far-flung regions of her empire. It was not a popular use of them, according to the last few line commanders engaged in conflicts across the Saiduan continent and island of Grania, but it was hers to make. Transit of food stores and supplies was more important than mopping up resistance outside of Dhai.

  The wink wavered. “Kai?” Suari said, “We’re ready for you.”

  Kirana stepped through and into the Assembly Chamber of Oma’s Temple. Suari followed her, and together they crossed the bustling room and descended the long tongue of the grand staircase, passing libraries full of researchers, stargazers, and parajistas, all sorting through the temple’s many records in search of old plans, instructions, and diagrams like the ones that had told her about the hidden chambers beneath the temples, the ancient guts of the transference engines that the Dhai had called home for centuries.

  The old records confirmed that Faith Ahya and Hahko, the Dhai founders, believed the temples were gods capable of channeling the power of the satellites. Kirana had always believed the ancient living holds of Saiduan and the temples of Dhai were magicked things created by sinajistas and tirajistas in some distant time, to capture the power of the satellites. But seeing the naked heart of them dredged up from the ocean floor made her wonder if they were older and more alien beings, harnessed by some old civilization for this purpose.

  She broke into the foyer, Suari at her heels, and passed the great domed meeting room where the temple garrison went through their lessons in reading and arithmetic. She heard them chanting the equation for determining the trajectory of a projectile.

  The guard at the basement entrance admitted her and Suari. She went past the bathing chambers and storage rooms to the second level of the holding cells. Most of the cells were full – the first level was where they kept their own troublesome people, those caught fighting or left locked up until they were sober enough to beg forgiveness for transgressions.

  The second level was for the people who most assuredly were not theirs – Dhai who required further interrogation, a few suspected Saiduan spies, and at least half a dozen scouts from other worlds. The scouts were giving them the most trouble, because once they had been squeezed of information, all they could do with them was kill them and bury them in the pits. They were far too fervent about protecting their little rebel leader, a girl they called Light. And there was no reforming someone else’s cultist.

  The next level of guards let them through after confirming her ward and the week’s password. She did not expect a brute attack this deep into the temple; it would be a clever double agent ruse, no doubt, hence the changing passwords.

  They reached the very lowest level of the temple, or the level they had believed to be the lowest until consulting the Saiduan tome. On this level was a massive chamber filled to bursting with twisted tree roots. Kirana’s scholars had found a plinth at the center of the twisting maze. The stone obelisk was carved with the symbol for Oma, and a tattered flame fly lantern lay nearby, as if someone had come down and… not come up again.

  What work had been done on this level prior to her arrival was uncertain. Her stargazers and scientists had yet to reveal its purpose. She was far more interested in what lay beneath this level.

  Ahead of her, a mound of rubble coated with a thick, oozing liquid lay piled up next to a gaping wound in the floor. Light beamed from below, emitted by dozens of flame fly lanterns.

  Suari went on ahead of her, sweeping away the fluid on the floor with a searing tail of Oma’s breath.

  “I hope that stops, eventually,” Kirana said.

  “Vital fluid,” Suari said. “The wounds keep leaking. They are difficult to keep open. Forcing ourselves into these chambers without a Kai…” He cleared his throat.

  “Hopefully we won’t need to much longer.” She was tiring of his obsession with the temple’s rejection of her title.

  The months of jista assaults to penetrate this cavern – which they had found clearly marked in the Saiduan tome – had driven two jistas mad, and a cave-in had killed another. The temples were not meant to be hacked apart. They were nearly indestructible, which was why she ultimately turned the inhabitants to her cause instead of trying to take them by force. The Dhai could have locked themselves up in the temples and resisted her for years. Better to have traitors on the inside who would open the doors for her.

  “I’ve put another ward on it,” Suari said. He descended the ladder ahead of her.

  The dusty air made her sneeze. As she mounted the ladder and started after him, the temple trembled again. A dollop of the gooey fluid tangled into her hair. She dropped the last foot to the floor and lifted her head.

  The flame fly lanterns only revealed portions of the room, which was largely circular. The walls were the same warm green material that made up the skin of the temple. It was warmer here than above, and the walls throbbed like a beating heart, just like the blob on the sandbar. All along the circumference of the room, the skin of the temple had been scarred with raised symbols, elaborate characters that the scholars said was possibly a very old form of Dhai, but in the month since they had finally breached these levels of each temple, none had managed to decipher it.

  Her scholars and stargazers clustered at the center of the room, where four bulbous plinths surrounded a low altar. With the light concentrated there from their lanterns, Kirana could s
ee a great white webbing draping from the ceiling, connecting all the plinths to the temple itself.

  Kirana approached the center of the chamber, walking across the spongy floor. A fat copy of the Saiduan tome sat at the center of the stone altar. One scholar stood over it, muttering. Kirana had already had two copies made and sent to scholars in Caisau and Anjoliaa, which were far faster journeys when one had access to omajistas and their powerful winks. Two more scholars worked at a chalkboard on the far side of the room, writing out characters and equations.

  All three scholars lifted their gazes from their work and stared at her like animals spotted by a predator.

  “Kai,” said Himsa, the eldest, sitting next to the book, her voice breathy and urgent, “we did not expect you this early in the day.”

  Kirana stepped up to the altar. As she did, it began to glow, blue-green, like some living fungus. She gazed at the great round face of it. At the center was the Dhai symbol for “Kai.”

  She could not help herself. She pressed her hand to the center of the altar. She was, of course, the wrong Kai. The altar did nothing, as it had done nothing the last dozen times she placed her hands on it.

  “Have you chosen which jistas will be posted here?” Kirana asked.

  Orhin, a tall and gawky older stargazer with a habit of tugging at one eyebrow, said, “We recommend the most powerful are posted to the People’s Temple. The other chambers – here – we believe that so long as those who stand in the correct niches can call the correct star, that should be sufficient.”