The Broken Heavens Read online

  She woke to the sound of soft footsteps. Bird song. The smell of acrid bonsa sap. Crackle of crunching poppies.

  “So you came,” Kalinda said, and turned to find the girl there, flanked by two very young jistas with dark mops of messy hair. Kalinda had a mind to wipe their mouths and smooth their hair for them. The whole lot of them needed a wash, as did she, which made her appreciate their company all the more.

  “I know your face,” the girl said.

  “It’s a time for familiar faces. I know yours as well.”

  “Is your name Kalinda?”

  “It is. And you are Lilia.”

  This Lilia was in a terrible state, far worse than the one Kalinda had known on her world. The girl before her held a stout walking stick and leaned heavily to one side, favoring her twisted foot. Shiny roundish scars peppered her face, and one of her hands was new and soft, clearly a replacement for one long gone. The other, which clutched the staff, lacked tension in the little finger. She wore an absurdly large bearskin coat, and beneath it a too-big tunic and trousers hung from her slight, gaunt frame. Her eyes were sharp in her sallow face, and dark bruises beneath her eyes made her gaze appear larger, more weary, than that of a woman thrice her age.

  Poor child, this.

  Behind the girl and her jistas, something rattled in the bushes. Kalinda expected a dog, or a small bear, but it was another girl, hunched over, eyes smooth pools of flesh, twisting her blind face this way and that, sniffing and tasting the wind. She settled next to Lilia as if they were close companions.

  Lilia patted the girl’s shoulder with her soft hand. “Did you help me, on your world?” Lilia asked, gazing not at Kalinda, but at the disfigured girl pressed against her.

  “No. I ruled that world, before I lost it.”

  Lilia did not look convinced. “You tried to help me, here,” she said. “Was there someone like me over there?”

  “No,” Kalinda lied, because the truth was always far more complicated. “But I understand your need. And I’ve brought a gift, as I said in my letter.”

  “I wondered what sort of Kalinda you were,” Lilia said. “I assure you, there are more jistas nearby, should you attempt anything deceptive.”

  Kalinda cackled. “Oh, child, I could crush the breath from your body in a wink.”

  One of the jistas stepped forward. The air thickened.

  “No, no,” Kalinda said, waving her hand. “I’m not here for that. I wanted to meet you personally, to gauge how serious your little rebellion truly is. They complain about you burning their wagons, down in the valley.”

  “We will do worse than that,” Lilia said, “but for now we prefer to be but biting flies. In the days after we fled Kuallina, I promised my people we would take back Dhai. A year later, I’m nearly prepared to make good on that promise.”

  “Oh child,” Kalinda said, “don’t you know that now is the time for coming together? Not breaking apart. That’s why I’ve brought you this gift. You will need it, for where you’re going. The Tai Mora have found the fifth temple, the People’s Temple, long buried beneath the sea. But it’s missing a very vital piece.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’m the one who took the piece.” Kalinda nodded to the box. “There is a great warrior in there, and within them, a vital piece the Tai Mora, or some other, would need in order to call on the full power of the satellites from the People’s Temple.”

  “We’ve been watching their progress,” Lilia said, “off the western coast, near Fasia’s Point. Is that what they’ve been dredging up? A whole temple?” She shook her head. “Mad.”

  “Not too difficult, with so many stars in the sky.”

  “You’re giving me this… vital piece? Why? I want to take back the country. I care nothing for closing the ways between the worlds.”

  “Don’t you? The time for worldbreakers is not over, Lilia. It’s just beginning. But you can’t do this alone.”

  The girl recoiled. “Don’t use that word!” she snapped. “There’s no such thing. I’ve been pushed and pulled by others using that word for me, and it was all a lie. There’s no grim purpose, no chosen one, nothing to save us but ourselves and the plans I have put together–”

  Kalinda bent and pulled the top off the box. She presented the bones to the girl, triumphant. “What do you say to that, then?”

  Lilia stared into the box. The bones were bound tightly in a throbbing, tangled root mass that oozed sticky green sap. Mixed in with it were dried leaves, bits of dead ivy, and a single node of intricate silver-green metal shaped like a trefoil with a tail.

  “What… What is this?” Lilia said.

  “A box of bones.”

  “I can see that. But this?” She pointed to the silver-green shape.

  “It’s the symbol for the People’s Temple. You recognize it, don’t you? I spent weeks digging through old rooms and tunnels, but it was part of the throne, of all things, that gooey silvery throne room packed with bones, and…” She trailed off. Certainly the girl didn’t need to know the details.

  Lilia rubbed at her wrist. Peered at Kalinda anew. “Are you a… blood witch? Is that why you think you can bring a body back that’s this far gone?”

  “On my world, yes. But it’s not my skill alone. I found this among the detritus of another race, one that can twist a soul’s memory into the shape of a root and let it rest for an age – a thousand years, or more – before awakening it again. It was simply very lucky for us that so many died trying to murder them, and I was able to retrieve these bones. Two thousand years of creeping star-magic in that wood, magic foreign even to me, but it has given us a safe place to put this silver piece of the People’s Temple. Only you will know it’s here.”

  But Lilia did not seem to hear her. She was staring past Kalinda, across the field of poppies. “When I saw you here, or, my Kalinda here,” Lilia said, “so long ago, I thought you were a blood witch. Do you know what that is?”

  “I do. The closer a world is to yours, the more alike it is. Your world and mine were even closer than yours and this one.”

  Lilia came back to herself and staggered forward, the color draining from her face. Her jistas made to follow, but she waved them back. She bent close to Kalinda, and spoke just above a whisper, her breath tickling Kalinda’s ear. “Don’t talk about what world I’m from.”

  Ah, of course her little followers wouldn’t know where Lilia was from, would not know her mother had bundled her up and stowed her here, slicing a hole between two worlds to do it.

  “I know what you are,” Kalinda said softly. “I know your mother brought you here from the Tai Mora’s world, to save you. And she did more than that. She made it possible for this to end some other way. But you haven’t chosen which way, yet. There are many possible futures, most terrible. Some good. You must decide if you truly hate yourself so much that you will murder the people from your own world, or if you will find some other way. I don’t envy you that choice.”

  Lilia pulled away. “What if I don’t want this… piece? What if I don’t want to go to the People’s Temple at all? It’s crawling with Tai Mora. I have plans for a different assault, one that will hurt them far more easily.”

  “You clearly needed aid,” Kalinda said, “and I’ve brought what I could. As I have for you always, haven’t I? Some version of me.”

  Lilia squeezed her eyes shut. Inhaled deeply through her nose. “Stop invoking the name of someone else. You aren’t her.”

  “But I am,” Kalinda said. “We all are. Don’t you understand that yet?”

  “Don’t twist my head,” Lilia said. “Tell me about who this is, then. The soul of a great warrior?”

  “Oh, it is. I chose the soul very carefully. Of course, for a body this far gone… it does require a bit of sacrifice on your part. It’s nigh impossible to bring a body back that’s this dead, without some… blood witchery, you understand?”

  “Very well,” Lilia said. “What do you want for it
?”

  “It’s what you need to give it.” Kalinda had already used up a great deal of energy fighting the rangers two weeks before. This last bit of binding would be tricky. Kalinda muttered an intricate litany, one she had not used since she was a girl, and cast a purl of breathy power across the bones. “Now I need you to spit into the box,” Kalinda said.

  “And… what happens then?”

  “That will begin the process of binding.”

  “Binding… what?”

  “This was a very complicated spell, child. I was not alone when I began this journey. I had two powerful sinajistas and six tirajistas with me. All gone now, but all necessary to make this possible. When you spit into the box, the warrior contained within will begin to be reborn, and will be bound to you. But you must spit into the box.”

  “This is mad,” Lilia muttered.

  “Let’s leave it, Lilia,” said the shorter tirajista. “She’s just another old woman made addled by all this.”

  “A moment, Salifa,” Lilia said, raising her voice to be heard by those behind her. She lowered it again and said, “Kalinda, I want the truth. About the Lilia you knew in your world.”

  “I told you, there wasn’t–”

  “That’s a lie. You said your world and mine were closer than this one and mine.”

  Kalinda hummed a bit, an old lullaby, but Lilia did not react to it. A shame, really. She must not have raised this Lilia as long, here. “I trained you to be a great warrior,” Kalinda said, “to fight at my side. To come with me to this world and storm the People’s Temple and take control of the transference engine at the center of it and remake the world. I trained you to be a worldbreaker there. You were a powerful omajista, more powerful than any we encountered. You could have seared every one of these Tai Mora in an instant. We had so much more knowledge of what was to come that we could train you from the time you were very small.”

  “…But?”

  “But, yes… there’s that, isn’t it?” Kalinda’s throat ached. She coughed. “But, well…”

  “I failed,” Lilia said, darkly.

  “You did.”

  “All the knowledge, all the training, and I failed.”

  “That was a different Lilia. You have made different choices.”

  “I don’t think they’re better ones,” Lilia said.

  “You don’t know that! None of us does, you arrogant little spithead.”

  The bones rattled in the box.

  Lilia started. “What…?”

  Kalinda hefted up the box. Proffered it to Lilia. “I agree with you,” Kalinda said. “There is no chosen one, no absolute singular person who can turn the tide. But there are people who choose.”

  Lilia worked her mouth, gaze set on Kalinda, and spit into the box. “Is that enough?”

  Kalinda nodded. She put the lid back on the box. “That’s good.” The box lay inert at her feet again.

  “Nothing is happening,” Lilia said.

  “Patience,” Kalinda said. “The warrior will awaken.”

  “I don’t have time to wait.”

  “Tira’s tears, child, resurrection takes time. Pack this box into a trunk – three paces long, two paces high – and throw in two handfuls of fertile soil. Leave it in a cool, dry room for… at least seven days.”

  “And then?”

  “Then the warrior will awaken, and will be bound to you. You only become unbound in death, understand?

  “Wait, does that mean… if they die, I die? I didn’t agree to that!”

  “No, no,” Kalinda said. “But if you feel pain, they will feel pain. If you are in need, they are compelled to aid you. Come, what do you have to lose, Lilia Sona? Do you already have so many allies that you can turn down a gift from an old woman with a fond memory for who you might have been?”

  Lilia stared at the box. She chewed at her thumbnail, the feathery one on her soft, still-forming new hand. “You know what drives me, Kalinda Lasa, what has driven me from the time your shadow found me here, cast out from my world into a field of poppies?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course.” Kalinda raised a hand to brush Lilia’s cheek, but the girl recoiled. Kalinda would have wept, but she had spent those tears some time ago.

  “You continue in the face of the impossible,” Kalinda said, “because you are willing to destroy the world – and even yourself – to get your revenge. I know what the Tai Mora did to you, Lilia, because they did it to my Lilia, too.”

  Lilia’s grip on her walking stick tightened. The little blind girl at her feet whimpered. “It’s all right, Namia,” Lilia said. “I promise you we will destroy every one of them.”

  Kalinda held out the box one last time.

  At a gesture from Lilia, Salifa took the box from Kalinda’s hands. In that moment, a great weight lifted from Kalinda’s shoulders. She had done all she could. For this Lilia, and the last.

  1

  Taigan was already bored with the end of the world.

  It had been a year since Oma had risen, its shining bloody face purported to herald some apocalyptic ending for this world and those closest to it. But people marched on, as they were wont to do, scrabbling and squabbling and annoying him. The world kept spinning. He kept living. The promised apocalypse was a maddeningly slow one.

  Taigan found it a relief, then, when the naked man fell from the sky.

  The body landed with a wet thump a few feet from where Taigan stood at the aft of a great, living Aaldian cargo ship. The body kept its shape… all but one testicle. A single gonad popped free, like a shiny white egg. Taigan had a moment to wonder at the absurdity of that: not just a naked man falling from the sky but that the body had excreted its gonad on impact, like some dim bird shitting an egg.

  A jagged tear rent the blue-violet sky directly overhead, revealing the amber-tinged atmosphere of some other world beyond. Dark shapes moved in the wavering rent in reality. The seam rippled, then closed, sealing Taigan’s world from the other just as swiftly as it had appeared.

  “Poor choice,” Taigan muttered, though he couldn’t imagine what had compelled this man to shoot himself through a rent in the sky. Certainly, that other world was dying, just as the Tai Mora’s had some months before, forcing the few still stuck there to flee to yet another nearby dying world, or perish. Yet, staring at the lonely gonad, Taigan imagined the man might have had a more dignified death if he had stayed on his own world.

  The crew shoved the body off the deck, muttering darkly about dire portents and desperate worlds. Birds circled and dived in the water behind them, enjoying the free meal. Taigan had not seen what happened to the gonad, but he suspected it had been a delicious treat for some sea bird.

  Taigan lifted his nose to the salty air. Beneath the brine he detected a more familiar scent: the taste of ruin. It was a heady mix of acrid kelp and charred flesh that filled his nostrils even in his dreams. It smelled like home. A home that no longer existed. Perhaps that’s why he had been drawn back to this doomed place.

  The ship rounded a rocky spur, revealing the source of the smell: the harbor once called Asona, gateway to what had once been the kingdom of Dhai.

  Taigan had been present for the harbor’s destruction, and remembered it as a smoking heap of wreckage. It was early spring, and the world the Tai Mora invaders had built for themselves on the broken backs of the defeated Dhai was quickly unfurling across the continent, despite the increasing number of interlopers able to hurl themselves from one world to the next under Oma’s watchful eye.

  The Tai Mora in the harbor lifted great stones using belts of Tira’s breath, training vines to set the stones in place. The way they worked reminded Taigan of insects: industrious, poisonous little things with many hands. They may have been the strongest force in the world at present, but Oma’s rise had signaled the assault of other worlds. They would need to fight for their supremacy against a great many more enemies in the coming years, if they did not find a way to c
lose the seams between this world and the others.

  If that was even possible anymore.

  The Patron of Saiduan and his War Minister, Maralah, had believed they could rally enough omajistas to stop the incursion of other worlds, once Oma had risen. But with the Patron dead and Maralah fled, there were few of Taigan’s people left to see that vision through. In truth, Taigan was not confident even the Tai Mora could achieve what his people could not. He had spent the last year roaming the decimated continent of Saiduan, killing and fucking indiscriminately. He never expected to be laid low by such increasing boredom. He needed a purpose, like the one Maralah had given him, and all the masters before her. For all his hatred of her, at least she had given him something useful to do.

  Here during the end times, Taigan intended to murder as many Tai Mora as possible. Killing was something he was good at, something he understood. It’s what he had wanted to do before Maralah sent him out on his mad mission to find gifted omajistas that they could train to become worldbreakers. What a farce.

  When he had boarded this ship in Anjoliaa, he clothed himself in an easy illusion, tangling the breath of Oma into a web around him that bent the light and deceived the eye. A breath, a blink, and he appeared to be a shorter, darker man with longer limbs and finer features, the very image of an Aaldian he knew decades ago, when he had sought worldbreakers in that soft little country. For good measure, he wore an approximation of Aaldian clothing, the long robes and elaborate yellow vest of a scholar. He could have done up some glamor to make him look Tai Mora, he supposed, but Aaldian would garner fewer questions and expectations. Holding a glamor this many days when Oma was descendant would have been impossible. Today it was simple as breathing.

  The great Aaldian ship slid into port, hugging the pier with its shiny organic skin. The fit little Aaldians sang as they worked, and the hull of the living ship pulsed in time to the rhythm of their tune.

  “You see how it loves us,” the Aaldian captain said, striding up next to Taigan, boots squelching on the membrane of the deck. There was but one pronoun in their language, though the captain used an honorific that indicated they had borne children. Taigan preferred just the one designation; the five genders in Dhai seemed entirely random in their application, and it confused him greatly.