Around the next bend, Avosta met them, hand perpetually on the hilt of his standard sword, dark eyes widening at Lilia’s approach. He strode toward her, offering an arm though he knew she would not take it. Avosta was another of hers: a former member of Ghrasia Madah’s militia, whose gaze often made her intensely uncomfortable. He looked upon her as a god, big-eyed and sometimes bashful.
But he was useful. Like Salifa.
Avosta was a stout man with a pockmarked face and the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. His hair was knotted back in white ribbons, a style he had insisted she show him how to manage himself. The knotted white hair ribbons had become a symbol of loyalty to Lilia, a sign in their belief that she was divine, or perhaps Faith Ahya reborn… and she had not dissuaded them from that belief. It was among the many reasons the three married Catoris did not care much for her. But she couldn’t take revenge on the Tai Mora alone. It required a long embrace with what she had made of herself.
“The children are below,” he said. “There were two snapping lilies here. Are you all right?”
“We’re fine, Avosta,” Lilia said, sighing. “I was the one to tell you all how to spot the lilies, yes?”
Avosta put thumb to forehead, a gesture of respect. “Apologies, Li, I only meant–”
“I understand. Could you give Namia and I a moment to rest?”
“Certainly,” Avosta said. “I came to tell you, however, that Caisa has arrived with the week’s news.”
“She’s much earlier than expected.”
“She says there have been major developments.”
“No one following her?”
“Absolutely not. I give my word on that. I’ve trained our rangers very well.”
“Escort her to my rooms. I’ll speak to her after Catori Mohrai’s funeral. I need to keep my head clear and focus on this.”
“I will, yes.” He bobbed his head, but did not move from her path. “Are you… certain you wish to stay here alone?”
“I’m happy to stay with you,” Salifa said, good eye widening.
“I’ll meet you both at the tables,” Lilia said. “We’re quite near the village now. I have Namia, and my own gift, and I’m the one who taught you both to navigate snapping lilies.”
“You have been so ill, though,” Avosta said, “it’s been some time since you called Oma. I understand, of course, I just don’t want something to suddenly–”
“I’m fine,” Lilia said.
Avosta nodded once. “Of course. Apologies.”
Salifa put thumb to forehead and followed after him, but both kept glancing back at her, as if Lilia might blow away on the wind.
Big drops of rain splashed against the thick foliage above. Fitting, Lilia thought, that Mohrai’s funeral should begin with rain. She waited for Salifa and Avosta to disappear in the stir of others preparing for the funerary feast before she allowed herself a breath. Being some kind of infallible prophet was exhausting.
Beside her, Namia signed, “Noisy.”
“I agree,” Lilia said. “But they mean well.”
Ahead, in the area cleared around the great trees for public events, funerary attendants raced to cover the open fires with waxed linen; it was too dangerous to build stoves above ground, especially this close to their refuge. But the dead did not wait on the weather. They came and went at their leisure; far too many and far too quickly, of late.
Lilia stepped beneath the welcoming arms of a great bonsa tree to avoid the rain, carefully balancing on a tree root to keep her feet out of the gathering puddles. The smell of roasting flesh permeated the air. Her stomach grumbled, tightening into a needy fist of hunger. It had been just four days since the last funeral. But the meals between the funerary feasts were grim affairs. They were all starving for calories by the time another of their number succumbed to disease, age, or starvation. It made it doubly worse, then, that so many of the newly dead were children.
Namia crouched next to her, blind face turned up to the dripping canopy. She huffed at something: the spicy scent of Tordinian tobacco.
“You done indoctrinating the youth?” Yisaoh asked. She came up behind Lilia; the stink of the cigarettes still gave her away. She had kept a small cache of them for “special” occasions.
“Celebrating?” Lilia asked, nodding at the cigarette.
“Mourning, clearly,” Yisaoh said, taking a long drag.
“Are you going to speak at the funeral and tell everyone how much you loved Catori Mohrai as your own sister?
“Mohrai was always a pain in the ass. Her and all of Clan Sorai, really. Meyna is worse, though. Bigger pain. Bigger ass.”
“None of us are perfect.”
“I’ll be happy to eat Mohrai’s finger bones.”
“I’m sure your responsibilities will be easier shared with just you and Meyna.”
“Only the two of us?” Yisaoh chuckled. “And what about you, our third leg, with her three hundred little followers flouncing about here displaying their hair ribbons like war trophies.”
“I never asked them to.”
“I never asked the Tai Mora to take over the country,” Yisaoh said. “And here we are. Listen, Meyna bedded Ahkio for years, him and half of clan Garika. All respect for that, but it means Meyna is a social climber with increasingly strong ties to what remains of Dhai, and she’s the sort who’d murder us both where we stand, probably with smiles still on our faces.”
“I have no experience of Meyna in that way,” Lilia said, “but she has a keen sense for how to get what she wants from people. That’s a useful skill. We both agreed on that.”
“I’m watching you, Lilia, and your followers. So is Meyna. Just warning you about that.”
Lilia smirked. She could not help it. She rested a hand on Namia’s shoulder to ease the burden on her twisted leg. Namia leaned into her. “I’m not a threat to anyone,” Lilia said. “I’m just a scullery drudge.”
Yisaoh choked on cigarette smoke and burst into a fit of coughing. “That’s… a wonderful joke,” she wheezed.
A thump sounded in the canopy above. Patter of leaves. Crackling branches. A single blue-black frog, big as Lilia’s thumbnail, landed on the ground at her feet and burrowed into the loam. Snaking green tendrils wavered up from the detritus, in pursuit of it.
“Tira’s tears,” Yisaoh muttered, gazing up at the canopy.
“Maybe it will be a small swarm,” Lilia said.
“I hate the Woodland.”
They stood in silence a moment as a half-dozen more frogs tumbled from above. Lilia sighed and asked, “What is it you want, Yisaoh? I need to prepare for this speech.”
“I want to know what you’re going to say up there,” Yisaoh said, “so I can prepare for the fallout if Meyna wants to eat your face off. You think it’s me and her with the political headbutting, but it’s you she hates. I’m family, painful as it may be for her to admit.”
“I’ll share a wholesome message about unity.”
“You’re a hungry little wolf.”
“You’re seeing the reflection of a dove in a teacup and thinking it’s a snake.”
Yisaoh laughed. “I haven’t heard that one in quite some time. Your mother use that?”
“She did.” Another frog landed on Lilia’s shoe. One tangled into her hair, gripping tightly with its tiny feet. She brushed it away. “Oma’s breath,” Lilia said.
The patter of frogs grew louder. Namia snorted and pressed herself closer to the bonsa tree. Lilia did the same.
“Fire and fear, these frogs,” Yisaoh said. “The crowd will take it for a bad omen.”
“It’s the season for it,” Lilia said. “With all the warmer weather this spring, we’ll see more of them. That’s just the cycle of things.”
The frogs continued to rain from above, trapping the three of them together under the spread of the bonsa. The frogs hopped across the forest floor, darting in the direction of the baleful eye of Oma. Whorls of snapping ground sage darted from their subterra
nean nests and dragged the little frogs back under the loam with them. Soon the frogs piled up nearly ankle high, moving like a great wave across the forest, interrupted occasionally by the burst of ground sage. The smell of sage filled the air, mixing with the scent of cooking flesh from the funerary feast.
“Meyna won’t start it until this passes,” Lilia said. She glanced over at Yisaoh, who had put out her cigarette but still gripped what remained of it. They had come to confide in one another, brought together by their shared experiences in Kuallina at the feast with Kirana, self-styled Kai of the Tai Mora, but Lilia knew better than to trust her completely. Yisaoh had nearly toppled the country by contesting the former Kai’s rule.
“You know Meyna is pregnant again?” Lilia said.
“Of course she’s pregnant again.” Yisaoh spit a bit stray, spicy tobacco onto the ground. It was immediately overwhelmed by a slurry of frogs, though the worst of the stampede was over. Only the occasional amphibian dove from the canopy now. “It’s something she’s incredibly good at.”
The tide of frogs thinned on the ground. Lilia wiped a few of them off one shoulder, and untangled yet another from her hair.
“I hate this place,” Yisaoh said. She kicked at a clump of frogs, scattering them ahead of a snarl of snapping sage.
“It won’t be much longer,” Lilia said. “One way or another.”
“What are you going to tell them, Lilia?”
“What I always have,” Lilia said. “That we are strongest when we work together. That there are some of us who understand that the best way to stop the Tai Mora is to strike back against them.”
“Retaliating against them is suicide. You intend to march your little followers down into that valley and start killing people? No one here knows how to kill people, not really.”
“Someone likely killed Mohrai,” Lilia said, “and there are Dhai militia here who fought the Tai Mora next to Ahkio. There are plenty of murderers among us. More importantly, there are those driven to fight back, as I am. Those are the ones that will help me. I’ve been planning a strike against the Tai Mora for a very long time.”
“Any retaliation just murders more of us.”
“So will doing nothing.”
“A better way to unite us would be asking your disciples to stop it with the white ribbons. And you could stop holding those religious meetings like you’re some kind of prophet.”
Lilia studied Yisaoh’s long face. Yisaoh gazed out over the funeral preparations as the attendants shooed frogs off the tables and swept piles of the dead and dying frogs away from the main speaking area. Sooty smudges darkened the area under her eyes. Her unwashed hair was twisted into a greasy tangle, held in place by old hair picks.
“What are you so afraid of?” Lilia asked. “I don’t want to be Catori.”
“No, because then you’d have real responsibility,” Yisaoh said. “I worry every day about all these blighted people. You don’t. You see them as pieces on a board.”
“Don’t pretend you aren’t ambitious, Yisaoh. We’ve known each other too long. You’re just worried about Meyna’s child being the legitimate heir to the title of Kai, and not one of yours. Consider Meyna’s child yours anyway. You are married, and you are kin. It’s the same.”
“I hate Meyna. More every day.”
“If the Tai Mora are going to come here for any of us, it won’t be me. It will be you, or Meyna, or Meyna’s child Hasao.”
“You certainly have a lot of little birds in those temples.”
“You helped choose them,” Lilia said. “I share all my reports with you. The Tai Mora need a Kai to access parts of the temple, the parts they believe will close the way between the worlds. That’s why they keep coming. They won’t stop until they take all three of you, trying to find out which is a legitimate heir the temples will acknowledge.”
“Legitimate heir,” Yisaoh said, grimacing. “Ahkio wasn’t even a legitimate heir. If he was Javia’s son, I’ll eat my own arm.”
“What matters is what the temples think,” Lilia said.
“Divinity is lovely,” Yisaoh said, “but so far I don’t see anything bigger than us, just people like you using divinity to get ahead.”
“There’s something much bigger than us,” Lilia said, pointing overhead. “The sky, and the satellites that inhabit it. If you have any doubt, the proof is there.”
“And in the gift the sky gives you?” Yisaoh said.
“Yes,” Lilia said, though she could not meet Yisaoh’s look. Her stomach ached at the mere mention of her gift. If Yisaoh knew she wasn’t gifted anymore, if any of them found out… Well, she could call on her beribboned supporters, she supposed. But how long would they support her if they knew she had burned herself out, that she was no Faith Ahya reborn, just a scullery drudge tangled up in events far larger than herself?
“Just don’t mess this up,” Yisaoh said. “I got Meyna calmed down, and you making declarations of divinity and power up there isn’t going to help relations.”
Yisaoh gestured to the Dhai assembling in the little gathering space above ground. It was a rare day that so many left the underground camp of old bladder traps connected by a maze of corridors.
“I don’t care that they believe in you,” Yisaoh said. “I’d like them to believe in something. But in turn, you need to believe in me, and Meyna, and you need to work with us, and go along with what we decide.”
“That’s fine,” Lilia said. “I don’t intend to come back from our retaliation.”
“Suicide, then? You really intend to die, trying to hurt the Tai Mora? To keep them rooted here with all the other worlds invading?”
“If I die, I die,” Lilia said. “If I end myself all this will go away, and I’ll take some Tai Mora with me.”
“Fool,” Yisaoh said. “It won’t go away. Only you will. It will all still be here, and you’ll just be some martyr, a story, until that story dies with the rest of us.”
“I’ve made my choice,” Lilia said.
“Doing any real damage to the Tai Mora would take a miracle.”
“It’s Faith Ahya’s ascendance day, Yisaoh,” Lilia said, stepping away from the bonsa tree and toward the funerary tables, careful of the frogs. “It’s a time for miracles.”
4
Daorian, capital of the former empire of Dorinah, was falling, and Natanial found himself inordinately pleased to be a part of it. He wanted to wrap his hands around the throat of the Empress and squeeze the life out of her the way he had squeezed the life out of her daughter. He entertained this fantasy again while sitting on a stinking bear in a cool, drizzling rain while the siege commander yelled at him.
“Head out of your ass, Natanial!” Monshara yelled, smacking the flank of Natanial’s bear with her sword as she worked her way down the line of mercenaries and regular soldiers. Monshara, sturdy as a bear herself, with a mane of hair to match, led the Tai Mora assault on Daorian. She rode up to the front where her six thousand soldiers stood in neat rows, armor a little worse for wear, hair knotted, all in desperate need of a wash.
Natanial scratched at his own scalp; he had shaved his head the week before after a breakout of lice among the squad he led. Most of the hundred or so mercenaries he commanded were from Tordin. Their numbers fluctuated depending on how violent their hangovers or how debilitating their gout. He had gathered them himself after King Saradyn’s disappearance left a power void in Tordin. Civil war broke out within weeks of the collapse of Saradyn’s army. Natanial did not care for any of the people making claims for the country, and left it in search of some nobler battle. The Tai Mora, it turned out, were recruiting fighters to topple Dorinah. Natanial had never liked Dorinah.
“She’s chipper this morning,” said his second, Otolyn, who sat on a scruffy bear at his right. She was a long, lean woman that most assumed was a man; she didn’t correct them. Natanial had only realized it himself when she got to talking about babies of hers back in Tordin, buried in the same grave, all dug by her
own hand. She had a good head, a good sword arm, and most importantly, a dry sense of humor.
“Every day is a new day to take down the wall,” Natanial said. “Makes me all warm inside, too.”
“Those sinajistas in there burned half a battalion last time.”
“We’re not here to be heroes.”
“Here she goes,” Otolyn said, gazing after Monshara. “We’ll likely sit this one out.”
Dawn was breaking; the satellite Sina winked at them, a purple blot along the northern horizon, blinkering there next to Oma and Tira. The double helix of the suns skimmed the east, warming the gently rolling hills which still bore charred skin from their razing the autumn before.
Tordin didn’t have many jistas; Natanial didn’t have a single one with him. The mercenary groups like his, spread out all across the rear of the assault, were there as a show of force, and a clean-up crew if the Tai Mora jistas ever breached the wall of the city of Daorian, which hadn’t happened once in the two months Natanial had been making a living out here as a mercenary for the Tai Mora.
“There they go,” Otolyn said.
Monshara’s battalions marched toward the walls of Daorian. Two moved off to flank the left, and two more to flank the right. The main force came from the south. Natanial suspected they meant to hammer at the same stretch of the city wall that had occupied them in the previous foray. Hitting it every day meant the Dorinah had little time to shore it up between assaults.
He sat with Otolyn up on a small embankment, their bears snuffling side by side, enormous forked tongues sniffing the air as they chewed their cud. Behind them were his fighters, a bored lot composed mostly of snot-nosed young men, criminals of all sorts, and women fleeing bad marriages and boring farms back in Tordin.
A flicker of movement from the east drew Natanial’s eye. As he turned, a force broke into his view, raising the bloody eye of Dorinah on their flags. He was so startled he thought for a moment they had come out of thin air. That was entirely possible during these strange times.
The Broken Heavens Page 6
