The Broken Heavens

by Kameron Hurley

“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 at

  “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.”
<
br />   “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 sorted 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.”

  “What are your plans here?”

  “To leave. Do you want to eat?”

  Roh was indeed hungry, and wanted both food and a bath, but the urgency had overcome him among all these people. He wanted to tell them everything, and see if they could help him puzzle out what the temples had told him.

  “Is there…” Roh considered the stories he had heard traveling through Dhai, about a rebel leader with a twisted foot, all dressed in white. “Do you know if there’s anyone here called Lilia Sona? Or someone who knows where she is? I heard stories about–”

  Maralah came up short. “Lilia Sona. Now that’s a name that continues to haunt me.”

  “You know her?”

  “I sent Taigan to Dhai to find a worldbreaker. He hoped it might be her.”

  “That was you?”

  “Yes.” She waved a hand. “A lifetime ago. We gathered a number of young people, hoping one of them would turn out to be gifted enough to act as a worldbreaker, once we understood how to harness the power of the satellites when Oma was risen. All that work for nothing. We still ended up–” a darkness passed across her face as she surveyed the cluttered camp, “–still ended up here.”

  “I don’t think it’s too late.”

  “Good for you. I’m out of the business of changing the world. I just want to die old.” She conferred with a group of Saiduan. A young Woodland Dhai was with them, thumbs stuck in her belt, parroting back some passable Saiduan.

  “I can show them the springs,” said the young Woodland Dhai. Her head was shaved, displaying the full breadth of the tattoos that covered her face and scalp. “I’m Naori. I want to work on my Saiduan. And my valley Dhai!”

  “Good,” Maralah said. “Thank you, Naori. Roh, when you’re clean and fed, there’s someone else who wants to see you.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything we can do now?” Roh asked. “Anavha could–”

  “Could what?” Maralah said, coolly. “Take us home? No, I’m sure a soft Dorinah man like him has never been to Saiduan. Yes, I know how traveling gates work, when they are used to travel across this world and not another. Could he take us to where we were going? No. I’m sure he hasn’t been to Hrollief either, which is where I pointed those ships before the storms captured us. And I admit I’m annoyed that you have any fight left in you, boy. Let it go.”

  “But I think… I think we could–”

  “Then you are delusional. Drunk on hope.” She pointed at Saradyn. “Be sure you wash him, first. He has the stink of a fucking bear.” She left them and followed after two more Saiduan woman descending the long tongue of the cavernous pathway that led below.

  “Don’t mind her,” Naori said. “She has struggled a long time. Her people are dead. You knew each other, though? Was she kind to you?”

  “She didn’t do any of this,” Roh said, though he did not gesture to his legs, or his other scars, physical and mental. “Not to me, anyway.”

  Naori cheerfully showed them around the camp and took them down another well-worn path to a bubbling hot springs. “My people, clan Kosilatu, we come here every year for bluestones, and to soak in the hot springs.”

  “Does your clan… Do you know about rebel Dhai living here? Valley Dhai? Refugees?”

  “Oh yes,” Naori said. “There are several camps, but like us, most of them move.”

  Roh sighed. The faint smell of sulfur permeated the air around the hot springs. Saradyn pulled off a boot, filling the air with a far grimmer stench, and dipped his foot in.

  “Ahh!” Saradyn said, and began to strip off his grimy clothing without any urging.

  “I can find some clean clothes,” Naori said. She laughed at Saradyn. “Him, though? I don’t know. He’s too broad for anything I have. I’ll see.”

  Roh stripped, heedless of the others, but Anavha hung back. “What is it?” Roh asked. “Don’t you want to get clean?”

  “When you’re through,” Anavha said, face reddening. Roh found that amusing. Was it something about being Dorinah?

  Naori met them back at the camp with clean clothes for Roh and Anavha, both Saiduan cuts, so they were too long. Roh helped Anavha with the hems.

  There was tea, and mashed tubers, a vegetable broth of leek and early spring shoots. Much of it was tasteless, but it was filling, and that’s all Roh wanted.

  “What are the Saiduan doing here?” he asked Naori. “She said they were going somewhere else?”

  “To Hrollief,” Naori said. “They were some of the last of the Saiduan, but their ship washed up here last month.”

  “What of the rest of the Dhai?”

  Naori gestured to the woods around them. “There are many camps. Some are resisting. I heard Catori Meyna and Yisaoh lead a good number of them. Maralah says they will meet her here and head south to Hrollief as well.”

  “What about the Kai?”

  “We had thought him dead.”

  “Had?”

  “There’s been a rumor he’s taken back up with Catori Meyna, and Yisaoh. I got the impression the Saiduan were bickering about that. My Saiduan is still… so-so.”

  Roh watched Maralah, who was working at the other side of the camp, helping three other Saiduan he
ave a small felled tree back down through the looping path to the sea.

  “Maralah was one of the most powerful sanisi,” Roh said. “She was… at the right hand of the Patron. It’s just… strange to see her like this.”

  “She is as human as you or I,” Naori said. “She bleeds and sweats, I can tell you that. My clan understands this.” She snorted. “All Woodland Dhai understand this. Power, titles, things… we are each of us only a disaster away from losing everything. Best to live without anything. Enjoy each moment as it takes you.”

  It was evening before Roh got a chance to speak to Maralah again. He had fallen asleep after eating, and it was well into dusk when he woke; the largest of the three moons, Ahmur, was full. The smaller moons, Mur and Zini, were only slivers in the night sky. The satellites were more difficult to see at night, as if the suns’ rays illuminated them, made them brighter during the day the way they made the suns bright at night.

  The sound of the sea was loud, but not loud enough to drown out Saradyn’s snoring, beside him. Anavha sat near one of the big fires, where a trio of Dhai were telling stories. The firelight played across Anavha’s eager face. He was rapt, like a child, though he probably couldn’t understand any of it. Maralah stood near the fire, apart from the rest, drinking something from a cup made from a hollowed out seed the size of Roh’s fist.

  Roh stretched and limped over to her. The night was cool. He rubbed his arms absently.

  “You’re awake,” she said. She offered him the cup. “Aatai?”

  Roh shook his head. “Where did you get it?”

  “We brought cases of it with us. Only a few left, though, at the rate my people drink it.”

  “How many came with you?”

  Maralah gazed at the fire. “We had fifty-seven, when we got on the ship. We have thirty now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She drank deeply from the cup. “War of attrition. The Tai Mora have won it. We have plenty of room for your people on the boats, though. I suppose there’s that. Imagine, a little settlement somewhere of Saiduan and Dhai, trying to make some life together. Who would have dreamed it?”

  “You should know that we found the book,” Roh said. “The one you and the other Saiduan were looking for, that tells us how to use the temples to close the ways between worlds, and… much more, besides. Luna and I translated it.”