The Broken Heavens

by Kameron Hurley

  Gian, the one she had lost because of her own terrible choices.

  Even as she was overcome, Saradyn picked Gian up and wrapped a big hand around her throat.

  “Don’t kill her!” Lilia cried. “Wait, just. Let me think.” Her breath came quickly. “Let her be, just a moment, I–”

  “Anavha!” Kadaan said. “It’s time. Lilia! Get back here!”

  Anavha raised his hands.

  Smoke still poured in from the stairwell and escaped through the shattered hole in the ceiling.

  Roh said, “Lilia, come in. I need to block that smoke.”

  Anavha’s gate winked into existence. The others jumped through the wink above the table: Maralah first, then Luna, Salifa and the rest.

  Salifa immediately ran up to Lilia, white ribbons streaming from her hair. “Are you all right? What’s–”

  “Go!” Lilia said, pointing back at the table. “Get in place. I can handle this.”

  Salifa winced and retreated.

  Taigan chuckled. “She isn’t even the right Gian, bird.”

  “Shut your face!” Lilia said. Her hands trembled. The memories tore over her. Gian’s face as she gagged and fell over at the table they had shared while trying to parley with Kirana, so long ago, at Kuallina. The spray of black bile. Gian convulsing, another dead Gian. All dead.

  “Not this one!” Lilia said firmly. “Not. One. More.”

  Taigan was right. This was another of her overly complicated plans. This wasn’t going to work. She had put them all in danger. She was failing them, just like she had failed Gian. How many more would she sacrifice because she just wanted… to win? To be right?

  Gian stared at her, wide-eyed. Lilia crept toward her, hesitant.

  “You know me?” Lilia asked.

  “I do,” Gian said softly.

  “Don’t scream,” Lilia said, “or this big man will harm you. I won’t stop him.”

  Gian nodded again.

  Lilia said to Saradyn, in Dorinah, “Release her, all right? Just loosen your grip so she can talk.”

  Roh called to the others, “Make a circle here around the table. Lilia! We need you and Saradyn! Let her be!”

  “How do you know me?” Lilia asked.

  “I know your face,” Gian rasped, “as it seems you know mine. Some other you, though. She died.”

  “Most versions of me seem to,” Lilia said. She remembered gasping in the foyer and blacking out, left to die for the millionth time by Taigan.

  “And me?” Gian asked.

  “You’ve died a lot too,” Lilia said. “I’m very tired of watching you die.”

  Lilia turned back to the others, who had made a circle around the table.

  “Let her go, Saradyn,” Lilia said.

  Saradyn grunted, said to Roh, “You say?”

  “Lilia, she’ll tell them–” Roh sputtered.

  “They can’t follow us,” Lilia said. “They don’t have a Guide or a Kai.”

  “Fine,” Roh said. “Do as she says. Just… take that woman’s sword. Lilia, hurry!”

  Saradyn took Gian’s sword and shoved her back against the wall, knocking the breath from her.

  Lilia made her way to the circle, and stood between Salifa and Taigan.

  “Hold hands!” Roh said.

  Taigan smirked and took Lilia’s hand on one side, Luna’s on the other. “Are we going to sing religious songs now?”

  “All right,” Roh said. “Everyone step onto the ring into the floor, on my mark. Now.” Roh stepped onto the circle of temple flesh in the floor. The others followed. Lilia felt the warmth of the temple’s beating heart beneath her feet.

  Nothing happened.

  For a long moment no one said anything.

  “Well,” Taigan said, “I’m glad I murdered as many of them as possible. This was certainly an excit–”

  They fell through the floor.

  40

  A banging on the door. Kirana shifted in her sleep, pushing away sticky dreams. Shouting. She roused herself and sat bolt upright. Threw off her coverlet. Why did she feel so woozy? Her head ached. Was that the smell of smoke?

  Yisaoh wiped at her eyes. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The door opened.

  Kirana let loose her infused weapon. It snapped out of her wrist. She pushed herself up. The flame fly lanterns came alive at all the movement and noise.

  Gian stood in the door, panting, one hand pressed against her chest as if she’d been knocked about. “A bunch of Dhai came up here,” she said. “They just came in through the ceiling in the Assembly Chamber and dropped through the floor.”

  “And… you’re alive?”

  “There’s… a girl with them. I… knew her, in some other life. She was weak. That’s our one advantage. She said only a… Guide, or a Kai could follow them? Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Where’s Yivsa?”

  “I have no idea. I was alone in the chamber.”

  “What were you doing in there?” Kirana released her weapon and tugged on her trousers.

  “The children–” Yisaoh said, getting out of bed.

  “Stay with them,” Kirana said. The noise had woken Tasia. She was already calling at them from the adjoining room. Kirana rounded on Gian again. “What do you mean, you were the only one there?”

  “There wasn’t any other guard. Someone called them away. There’s something happening downstairs.”

  “Madness,” Kirana muttered.

  When she was dressed, she rushed into the chamber. Broken glass littered the table; a gaping hole had opened in the ceiling. How had she not heard that?

  “What…?”

  “They used sound barriers,” Gian said. “They had at least one, maybe two parajistas with them. You wouldn’t have heard anything, but you might have a headache from all the air pressure. It blocked the smoke, too.”

  “Where the fuck is everyone?” Kirana muttered. Smoke poured in from the stairwell. “What did they burn?”

  “Everything, I think,” Gian said. “The fire has cut us off. They’ll need to clear it out before we can get reinforcements up here.”

  “We need to leave immediately. Yisaoh! Bring the children!” Kirana darted back into her office.

  The children were bleary-eyed and whining. Kirana took Tasia into her arms. Yisaoh took Corina and Moira by the hands.

  “I need you to stay close,” Kirana said. “There’s a fire, you understand?”

  “Don’t try the stairs,” Gian said. “I can get us out.”

  “You?”

  “I have some skill with Para,” Gian said. “We can go out the way the others came in.” She pointed at the ceiling.

  Kirana exchanged a look with Yisaoh. Smoke continued to fill the chamber.

  Gian said, “We are bound, Kirana. Murdering you risks me as well. You wanted to be allies. This is something allies do.”

  Kirana took Yisaoh’s hand, and Gian bundled them all up into a puff of air and sent them flying through the tear in the ceiling. The children shrieked, and Kirana held onto them.

  Gian brought the group back down on the plateau, just in front of the bridge leading to the temple. The plateau, too, was burning, though the blaze there had been contained to the garrison. Kirana noted a number of parajistas working along the edges of the blaze to contain it.

  Gian alighted next to them.

  Kirana found Yivsa organizing those fleeing the temple, and asked what had happened.

  “A breach,” Yivsa said. “Some omajista.”

  “Far more than that,” Yisaoh said. “The Assembly Chamber was breached. Parajistas.”

  “Fuck,” Yivsa said. “The omajista was a fucking distraction.”

  “The basement. Is Oravan still–”

  “Yes, Empress, they’ve remained at their posts. The fire was contained to the upper floors.”

  “I need my wife and children moved.”

  “Of course. We’re re-housing key personnel
at Para’s Temple.”

  “Good, fine. Do we have an omajista?”

  “Oravan has a wink waiting, here. We sent three people up for you.”

  “None of them made it,” Kirana said. “I want to know what happened to my guards. The Assembly Chamber door was open, and six guards missing.”

  “We’ll look into it immediately, but it’s highly likely they were drawn downstairs when the fires started, and the omajista… Well, there are a lot of bodies.”

  “I don’t care what other issues we had to deal with,” Kirana said. “The security of this temple was paramount.”

  “Yes, Empress.”

  Kirana seethed, but knew that yelling at Yivsa in the middle of the crisis wasn’t going to solve anything.

  She got her family off to Para’s Temple, and made Yivsa personally escort them to safety. Kirana, for her part, lingered behind with Gian.

  When her family was gone, Kirana said, “What were you doing up there?”

  “I’d come to see you,” Gian said, “but all the guards were gone. I even knocked at that chamber door. It was already open. They must have had someone on the inside.”

  Kirana narrowed her eyes. “What did you want to discuss?”

  The double helix of the suns was just beginning to rise, washing the eastern mountains in a warm red glow.

  “Progress on the People’s Temple.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “I thought you’d be up.”

  Kirana peered at her, but could detect no deception.

  “We’re close,” Kirana said, shifting her attention back to the rising suns. “If the Dhai infiltrated the temple, it will have something to do with that. How did they… ah, the boy. He sank himself through the floor here. I wonder…”

  “I’ll need to gather my people,” Gian said. “I left them waiting in the gardens.”

  “Better that than the banquet hall,” Kirana said, and grimaced again at the smoke rising from the shimmering temple.

  She went to the ring on the floor, the raised bit of the temple’s flesh.

  “Yivsa?” Kirana asked, toeing the smooth surface. “Where did that soldier put my brother’s body?”

  41

  Lilia fell heavily down and back, tweaking her left leg. She howled. Pain ran up her knee and through her hip like a dagger. The air was damp. She pushed against the spongy floor, trying to get her bearings. A thin film of water covered the ground, soaking into her clothes. She bumped into someone else in the darkness.

  “Light?” Roh’s voice. “Maralah?”

  A flicker of orange light brightened the immediate area. Lilia had a sense of a great deal of space, but all she could see in the ball of flame in Maralah’s palm was the outer edges of their group, all tumbled around inside a large greenish circle on the floor that mirrored the one in the Assembly Chamber. The reek of rot and damp permeated everything. Lilia wrinkled her nose.

  “Is this it?” Maralah asked, clearly disappointed.

  “Raise the light higher,” Lilia said.

  Maralah released the ball of flame, and it floated above her, three, four, six more paces, then doubled in size, tripled, until its light finally reached the shadowy walls that enclosed them, if not the great bones of the ceiling.

  Lilia gaped. It was not like the other temples. This chamber was at least four times the size, and each of the compass points had a circle on the floor like the one they stood within. Massive ribbed columns stretched from the circumference of the walls all the way to the center of the room, where they dipped beneath a massive pool of water and twisted up again, winding around a giant dais that glistened with damp and something more substantive, alive? The floor was off-kilter, and liquid pooled on the other side of the room; the drip of water sounded all around them. The air tasted stale.

  She stared at the floor. It pulsed beneath her, moist and blue-black, pebbled with tiny bumps like the papillae on a tongue. Lilia walked out of the circle, following the downward tilt of the floor toward one of the columns that looked more like a fibrous band of muscle in this light. As she left the circle, the whole room began to glow. She gasped and froze.

  “Don’t move!” Roh said.

  A blue band of light appeared at the edges of the floor and the ceiling. The muscular colonnades gave off a faint green glow, and the floor sprang to life, a roiling field of deep crimson so dark it was almost black. Above them, the ceiling seemed to move. The great eye of Oma appeared there, illuminating what had been hidden: the ceiling here mirrored the ceiling in the Assembly Chamber, only on a much grander scale. The blinking eye of Oma shed light onto a glistening raised platform. The rest of the ceiling came alive: blue Para, over another dais; green Tira; and purple Sina, its light bleeding across another pedestal. Twinkling stars speckled the ceiling, glowing faint blue and red and white. As Lilia watched, they began to move, orbiting around the top of the chamber.

  “It’s like it’s… like we woke it up,” Lilia said.

  Roh slowly came after her, stepping gingerly on the spongy floor. “It matches the drawings,” Roh said.

  “You have any idea where to start?” she asked. “We don’t have much time. I… Everyone, get into the places with the right symbols!”

  Luna trailed after Lilia, quiet as a ghost. The others fanned out across the squelching floor, examining the strange architecture.

  Roh snatched at Lilia’s sleeve. “Li,” he blurted. “Oma’s Temple said something to me, when we came through the floor.”

  “It talks to you?”

  “It said you were going to destroy them, the temples. That you were here to ruin everything. Is that true?”

  “No. I’m here to turn back the Tai Mora and close the ways between the worlds. That’s all. That’s our plan. Whatever you’re hearing… I don’t know what gave it that idea.” But what he said made her doubt herself. Was she going to do something wrong? Maybe it was best he didn’t give her the other options.

  Roh said, “Maybe… maybe we should have Luna operate the mechanism instead. You said the Worldbreaker could be either of you, anyone who could learn.”

  “It’s been decided, Roh, and planned. I’m not changing it. The temple was wrong. I know what I’m doing.”

  Roh met her look for a breath, then turned away. “There should be marks for the jistas,” he said, limping over to one of the knobby pedestals. “Here they are. Sinajista here. Maralah?”

  Kadaan said, “I want to make sure we have defenses up. If they come down through the floor like we did–”

  “I don’t think they can,” Roh said, “not without a Kai or a Guide. But there are certainly other ways they could get in, too. It’s entirely possible we’re underwater now, and they’ll pierce the dome here and swamp us. It’s likely they came to Fasia’s Point because it’s the closest land mass to the temple mark on the map.”

  Lilia stood at the edge of the pool of water surrounding the central dais. Luna came up beside her.

  “That’s not easy to get up on,” Luna said.

  “Let alone stay on,” Lilia said. The dais was easily as high as her shoulder. Had people been taller in the past?

  “Maybe it was meant for giants, or Saiduan,” Luna said.

  “Well, they have us.”

  Maralah went to the dais marked with the sinajista sign and wrinkled her nose. The dais bloomed, opening like a flower and revealing great red petals. She sniffed at it. “Smells like apples. What kind of device is this, really?”

  “I don’t know,” Lilia said. “I don’t need to. I just need it to work.”

  Kadaan said, “There’s something wrong.”

  “What?” Lilia asked.

  He still stood in the circle, one hand raised. “I can feel something… here. There’s a good deal of power.”

  “Let’s bring more,” Lilia said. “Salifa, you’re there. The one with Tira’s mark.”

  Salifa tentatively approached another pedestal, which glowed brilliant green and unfurled long, s
lithering green tentacles that wrapped the base of it. “Is this… safe?” Salifa ventured.

  “We’ll find out,” Lilia said. She was still eying the large pedestal over the water. “Roh, can you just… use Para to get me up there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Ready?”

  She nodded. An invisible twist of air circled Lilia’s waist and propelled her to the top of the dais. Roh set her down carefully, but she still stumbled, and went to one knee. The pedestal was warm beneath her hand, and had the same smooth texture as the skin of the temples. But it did nothing when she touched it.

  “Everyone get in place!” Lilia called.

  Maralah said, “You had best be ready. Once we are locked into this, there’s no going back.”

  “I’ve been ready my whole life,” Lilia said.

  Maralah stepped up into the center of the petaled dais, and raised her hand. The air thickened.

  A searing jet of purple mist enveloped her. Her body went rigid, back arched, mouth agape, as the mist suspended her six paces above the dais.

  The others recoiled, and Lilia had to direct them. “Salifa, Kadaan, Anavha! It’s time!”

  Kadaan exchanged one last look with Roh. “Hold the defensive wall?”

  “I have it,” Roh said.

  Kadaan stepped onto Para’s dais as it purled open, revealing slick blue leaves that trembled as he stepped onto them. Blue mist engulfed him, and he, too, became caught in the whirlwind of power, rising from his place.

  Salifa closed her eyes and stepped up onto her pedestal. Pulled on Tira. Lilia held her breath, fascinated to see the multicolored breath of all the satellites herself for the first time.

  Zezili shouted at the fighters, instructing them to take up defensive positions around the outer circle of pillars.

  “Anavha!” Roh said. “We need you to step in, Anavha.”

  Anavha trembled as he approached Oma’s dais, a great black knobby thing that began oozing red fluid, thick as mud, as he came forward.

  “I can’t!” Anavha said.

  Roh called to Saradyn. “Help him!”

  Saradyn took Anavha by the waist and hauled him up onto the dais. Anavha shrieked, but settled onto it, exchanging another look with Roh.