The Broken Heavens

by Kameron Hurley

  “I’d like more certainties and fewer qualifiers like ‘should,’” Kirana said.

  A young scholar called Talahina had moved away from the others, and stood in front of the plinth with Para’s symbol at the base. She was a distant relative of Yisaoh’s, and didn’t often speak without being spoken to.

  “What do you see?” Kirana asked her.

  “I’m just… concerned,” Talahina said. “I’m sure you have heard, we have just one hundred days, at maximum–”

  “I know the timeline,” Kirana said.

  “If Almeysia had done her job correctly–” Suari began.

  Kirana waved a hand. “She did her best to sabotage that plinth she found above, tangled in those roots. But it wasn’t the lowest level, clearly. And she never would have gotten down here on her own. She would have needed Ahkio, or our resources. Alemeysia was a distraction, at best, and a poor one. She failed in convincing the temple I was Kai. Let’s leave that in the past.”

  “Perhaps you could let us speak to the ataisa again.” Orhin did not meet Kirana’s look as she said it, only stroked at his brow.

  “We tried that,” Kirana said. “Several times.”

  “It was some time ago,” Himsa said. “Perhaps the ataisa has softened. If we tell hir how far we have come now, since we last spoke–”

  It annoyed Kirana that Orhin used the Saiduan pronoun for the child, but nothing in Tai Mora fit what the Saiduan was. “You put far too much faith in a Saiduan slave. Have you no confidence in yourselves?”

  “We are confident,” Talahina blurted.

  “What do you think, Suari?” Kirana asked.

  “It could not hurt to show the ataisa what’s on the sandbar,” Suari said.

  Kirana held out hand. “Give me a copy of the book.”

  Orhin snapped up the one he was consulting and handed it to Kirana. “Empress.”

  “Stay here and work,” Kirana told Suari. “I have a meeting with my mother soon. I can visit the ataisa on the way up.”

  Kirana left them. She heard their voices behind her, low and urgent. Occasionally one of them would inform on another, hustle their way up to her quarters

  The sinajista guard bowed to her. Kirana went up two more levels, to the proper gaol where she had kept the little ataisa who had brought her the Saiduan tome. Unwillingly, of course, but brought it all the same.

  Inside, the two ungifted guards on duty played screes, a popular Dhai strategy game. They unlocked the cell she pointed to.

  Kirana pulled up the wobbly three-legged stool and sat in the narrow slant of light that spilled into the cell from the doorway.

  The ataisa was chained to the far wall, hands and feet given just enough chain so that ze could relieve hirself in a bucket in the corner, which was overflowing.

  “I’ll get them to empty that out,” Kirana said. It had been several weeks since she last visited, as the smell nauseated her and she’d had far more important business to attend to. Kirana called to the guards, “Is ze eating?”

  “Some bread, a bit of mashed yam,” the heavier woman said.

  “Water?”

  “We have to make her. Won’t do it on her own. Wants to waste away.”

  “Well, that won’t do.”

  The ataisa did not flinch in the onslaught of light. Hir hair was matted, mostly on the left side, and what remained of hir tunic was in tatters. Hir body bore a curve of breast and a curl of cock; one of those born with a mix of sexual characteristics. Kirana had thought of the ataisa variously as a stubborn girl and an annoying boy, but settled into using ataisa because it’s what her scholars used. Kirana had tried the more humane way to get the ataisa to divulge information, when her second, Gaiso, first delivered hir to the temple the year before. But the child had grown up in Saiduan. Saiduan made them tough.

  “I came to tell you we dredged up the fifth temple,” Kirana said. “The one central to the breaking of the world, as it’s written in the book.” She placed the book in her own lap, and rested her hands on top of it, palms down. “I understand your continued resolve. You crossed an ocean with this book. You understood its importance. But we are nearly at the end, here, and your silence buys neither us nor you anything, this far in the game.”

  Silence. Kirana wondered why she bothered. Perhaps the progress below had made her optimistic again.

  “Your silence buys you nothing but more long days of darkness,” Kirana said. “Help us. Give us the translation key to the Saiduan tome. Join us, and I’ll get you a bath, proper clothes. You can go free, Luna. When we awaken the temples again and close the ways between the worlds, there will be nothing to fear from one another any longer.”

  Luna raised hir head. The feral look she gave Kirana chilled her, like looking into the face of a wild creature. Busting this ataisa down into hir most basic needs and wants was part of the exercise, but Kirana was always surprised at how easy it was to accomplish. Kirana had gotten information from far tougher people than this one by simply offering them a piece of clothing, a bath, a mango.

  Kirana returned the stool to its place inside the doorway. She should send one of the scholars here, perhaps someone pretty and young, someone this ataisa could confide in. She tucked the book under her arm and beckoned the meaty guard over.

  “Keep hir eating,” Kirana said.

  Keep eating, keep breathing, she thought, as she went back up through the temple, as if in a dream, an ascent from the very belly of the breathing beast that was Oma’s Temple.

  She paused on the landing that opened onto the foyer and pressed her hand to the smooth skin of the temple. “I am your true Kai,” she murmured.

  The beast’s skin roiled beneath her. Kirana heard the distant drip of a water clock in one of the garrison offices. The ever-relentless advance of time.

  One minute less. One hour less. One day less.

  At the top of the stairs, she saw her mother, Javia.

  Javia reached for her arm, and Kirana allowed her to take it. They stood with their bodies pressed close, and wandered out into the back gardens, neither saying a word. Kirana missed the family she had left behind; but she had her parents, at least, her cousins, friends, colleagues in arms. They had saved more than she dreamed possible.

  As they came to a little stand of early blooming dandy flowers, her mother smiled and said, “Oh, how your brother loved dandy flower tea.” Her voice quavered.

  “It was peppermint tea,” Kirana corrected, gently. Her mother had been making small mistakes more often since her arrival in this world. “It was father who loved the dandy flower.”

  “Ah, of course, of course,” her mother said, patting at her hair. The style was a little different today: two plaited ropes instead of three. “Ahkio lost, and Yisaoh and the children…”

  “Not Yisaoh. Or the children. Not yet.”

  “Are we doing the right thing, Kirana?”

  “Right and wrong have no meaning here. There are shades of gray. Always more than two choices. Come, let’s eat.”

  “Did we choose correctly?” Her mother gazed across the garden at a flickering rent in the sky. On the other side, a blazing amber wash. Little bits of ash and char rained over the fire river, localized as a cloud burst. A tea table stood up on a low platform that overlooked the vast chasm of the Fire River, below. Kirana set the book on the table, and manuevered her mother into one of the intricate iron chairs. She poured her mother a cup of the still steaming amber tea. Small tea biscuits lay on a plate at the center, ringed in raw fiddleheads and dandelion flowers. She suspected the biscuits would be dry and dusty, crawling with weevils, but she knew from long experience that dunking them into the tea for a few minutes would make them more or less palatable.

  “The other worlds are dying,” Kirana said, “or, at best, being transformed. There are no good choices.” She sat across from her mother.

  Her mother’s gaze moved to the book. “Have you been praying?”

  “No, it’s the foreign book. The guide to
how,” she gestured at the temple, “all of this works. I was questioning the ataisa again.”

  Her mother pursed her mouth, as if tasting something sour. “You believe too much in the fist. You will get more flies with honey.”

  “I already tried coddling–”

  “Show the child why we are here. What drove us. Convince that child as you convinced me. Love runs deeper than fear.” She reached out and touched Kirana’s hand. She had been more affectionate, since they came over. Perhaps Javia too understood how lucky they were to be alive at all. “You know that.”

  Kirana thought of Yisaoh, huffing in the detritus of a dying world. “I do.”

  Javia waggled her fingers. “We must grow their love, their loyalty. Start with this one.”

  “That ataisa isn’t a flower you can make bloom with some huff of Tira’s breath.”

  “Show the child, then,” Javia repeated, and took up her tea in both hands. She sipped, winced. “I much preferred dandy flower.”

  Kirana said, “We are lucky to have the mint at all.” Behind them, the temple sighed.

  She lifted her gaze again to the heavens, waiting. Not long, now. Not long at all.

  3

  Lilia herded the children toward the thorn fence, picking her way through the tangled vines and roots smothering the path. She smelled the boars patrolling the thorn fence before she saw them, a musky, pungent odor that reminded her of another world, another time, before the worlds began to come together. The dozen or so children shrieked and collected around her. She bent and showed them how to fill a shallow dish with blood and feed it to the boars.

  “They help protect our encampment,” Lilia said, pressing the last few drops of her own blood into the dish.

  She handed the bowl to Tasia, the young orphan who had clung to Lilia since the mad retreat from Asona Harbor the year before. Tasia stuck out her lower lip and regarded the yellow-eyed boars as if they were Tai Mora in disguise.

  “Go on,” Lilia said. The other children held their collective breaths.

  Tasia took the bowl and thrust it toward the boars’ mucus-crusted snouts. The boars greedily licked up the blood, snorting and squealing for their offspring. Half a dozen spotted piglets came trotting out of the nearby bushes. Tasia’s eyes lit up with delight.

  “They love it!” Tasia said. “Look at the babies!”

  “The thorn fence keeps out the walking trees,” Lilia said. She began to rise, painfully, and the little feral girl, Namia, turned her blind face to Lilia and offered a shoulder. Lilia thanked her and heaved herself up.

  Lilia’s mother once told her that nothing could cross through a thorn fence, but that was not true, and she did not repeat the lie to these children. The fence did help dissuade some of the worst of what the Woodland had to throw at them, and the boars sent up loud, squealing alarms when dangerous flora and fauna approached the Woodland camp that Lilia had founded in the aftermath of the retreat from the burning ruin of Kuallina.

  Tasia had grown bolder over the last year. The children had an easier time adjusting to life in the woods than the adults. Lilia had knotted Tasia’s hair with ribbons, a style preferred by the dajian refugees that Lilia had brought with her into the Woodland. Tasia tugged at one frayed white ribbon as she watched the hungry boars.

  “Mother Lilia,” Tasia said, and Lilia did not dissuade her from calling her that, because it seemed to placate her. Lilia knew what it was to miss one’s mother. “Are we safe now?”

  “Safer,” Lilia said. She peered up at the massive cover of the trees, so thick that in the woods below they lived in perpetual twilight. Safer than we were, she thought, but safety and comfort were a lie, out here, a dream.

  Lilia had kept the Dhai alive in exile far longer than should have been possible. She knew that. Her people knew that. Even cigarette-toting Yisaoh and smirking Meyna could not argue about Lilia’s role in their survival. Lilia knew the Woodland in a way that even Meyna did not, and using it to their advantage against the Tai Mora had been Lilia’s idea from the very start. They only moved to a new area once the Tai Mora patrols had been over it. These days the Tai Mora concentrated their time to the south, scouring the foothills and craggy valleys around Mount Ahya. They were as safe in the north, here, as they ever would be. For a time.

  “Why couldn’t the boars protect Catori Mohrai?” Tasia asked, fingers sticky with blood.

  Lilia tugged at Tasia’s frayed ribbon and retied it. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself. Anxious panic often overwhelmed her during the strangest times. It had come more often the last few months. “They can protect us from enemies outside the fence,” Lilia said, “but not enemies already inside.”

  “Are there a lot of enemies inside?” Tasia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lilia said, mindful of the other children.

  “I thought we were safe in the Woodland,” Tasia said, “safer than in the valley.”

  “We are, love.” Fleeing to the Woodland had been their only option after the Tai Mora invasion. They had no access to Asona Harbor, and trying to climb over Mount Ahya and into Aaldia would have killed the old, the children – and the infirm, like Lilia, would never have managed it.

  Even in the Woodland, Mohrai, the Kai’s first Catori, never seemed to fully recover from her difficult pregnancy, and Yisaoh, with the loyalty of the Garika and the Badu clans, had a voice that grew stronger over the weeks and months instead of weaker. Meyna – parading around the young child she insisted was the chosen Kai – was in hale health. It was Mohrai they finally lost, and Lilia admitted that she sometimes dreamed it would be her own death next. Maybe all of them together, in one Tai Mora raid. The fear gripped her again; a racing of the heart, a sense of impending doom.

  “Are you scared?” Tasia asked.

  “No. Are you?” Lilia half-smiled at her own lie, because her guts roiled even as she breathed through the heart palpitations.

  “Sometimes.”

  “We have each other,” Lilia said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  A single tirajista, Salifa, stood a few paces distant, watchful for semi-sentient monstrosities from the woodland. She met Lilia’s look, warning her that the conversation was being followed with great attention by the other children.

  “We should go back,” Salifa said. She wasn’t much older than Lilia, only a novice when they fled Dhai and still not a proper Ora, but she bore an infused everpine weapon and carried herself like she had been born into the militia, puffing out her chest from the post at the fence. Her left eye sagged in its socket, gray and bleary; like the film of a rotten lizard’s egg. She’d lost the eye to a bone tree not long ago, and it was still in the long process of regenerating; a possibility only with Tira in the sky. She wore a single white ribbon around her throat.

  “Salifa is right,” Lilia said. “You’ve spent enough time above ground today.”

  The children protested. Lilia herded them ahead, thunking her walking stick like some old woman. The children went before her, easily navigating the deliberate maze of trees and scrub that hid the entrance to what had become their semi-permanent settlement the last few months.

  Lilia rubbed at her face with her soft, undersized left hand. A tirajista had cut the hand off and begun to regrow it the year before; there were a great many of them taking advantage of Tira. Lilia had been unable to grip anything due to a bad break and worse recovery. She had considered doing the same with her leg, but could not have afforded the time it took to heal. The hand was enough of an ordeal. The leg… the leg could wait until this was over.

  Namia kept at Lilia’s side, her ever-present shadow. Salifa, too, hung back, eying the children forging ahead as if they might sprout wings and fly away.

  A rustling caught Lilia’s attention, and she shrank away from the snapping violet tendril of a feeding lily. Salifa jumped between her and the lily, severing its trembling head neatly with her everpine sword.

  “Li,” Salifa said, “Let me walk between
you and the wood, here. The tirajistas haven’t been through to clean it out this morning.”

  “It’s all right,” Lilia said. “I saw it.”

  But Salifa remained between her and the edge of the path, mouth forming a thin line. Lilia sighed.

  “This is a dangerous place,” Salifa said, “and not all of that danger is from the trees.”

  “Mohrai died eating a hasaen tuber. It’s been known to happen.”

  “I knew this truce wouldn’t last,” Salifa said.

  “If someone deliberately harmed Catori Mohrai, there’s no proof of it. It’s best we continue to work toward our goals. Who is Catori, or Kai, doesn’t matter to the greater cause. You know that. I know that.”

  “Even with them all married to each other, they are still back-biting and snarling. I wish they were as easygoing as you, Li.”

  Lilia said nothing. Silence asked to be filled, and the people around her were always quick to fill it. The marriage of Mohrai, Meyna, and Yisaoh had been Lilia’s idea, soon after all the fractious groups of surviving Dhai had come together in the Woodland: a difficult, frightening, and fractured time.

  “It’s the unity of their marriage that saved us,” Lilia said. “The Tai Mora seek to fracture us. Remember that. Always. If anyone tries to tear us apart, you must ask why. Who does it serve?”

  “I know, I know,” Salifa said.

  “It could very well have been a Tai Mora agent,” Lilia said. The walking, and the conversation, made her wheeze. She slowed and tapped at the mahuan-laced water bulb in her pocket. Her fingers still trembled when she thought about eating raw mahuan instead of the powder, to ease her breathing, but that had nearly killed her. And only living people could get revenge. She often blamed her anxiety on the lack of raw mahuan.

  “Surely you don’t still think they have agents among us?”

  “Why not?” Lilia said. “We certainly still have our own informants among them. Why couldn’t the Tai Mora have done the same?”

  “They didn’t expect us to live this long,” Salifa said, and the pride in her voice made Lilia wince. But it was the pride that Lilia had used to her own advantage. Salifa loved to feel part of something larger than herself, something important. So many of them did. It made them pliable, easy to manipulate.