text: Wrapped in the shroud of winter in the abandoned prison called Shoratau, Roh studied, and brooded, and wished he had made better decisions. He and Luna sat up most nights with the other sanisi in the dining hall, huddled together in their own stink because it was so much warmer than going out and exploring the hold on their own. But Roh had never been one to stick close to the herd. Sometimes he needed time away from them, so he climbed the towers and explored the old cells, and when he was too cold, his energy expended, he came back to Luna and they sat over the Talamynni book. The book could hold the key to unlocking what the Tai Mora wanted in Saiduan, but they still couldn't figure out how to read it. It was his only real diversion, besides training with Kadaan and Wraisau.
  
  During the four weeks of winter's siege, they lived on the prison's meager store of root vegetables and rice. Roh was so sick of rice and onions that the smell of it made him gag, but he choked it down every morning and every night because the alternative was starving.
  
  With very little to do but endless dice games and fighting exercises, the book became his focus. He and Luna sat over it every morning, and much of the evening, until they ran out of candles, and then they sat up against the windows, huddled together against the cold drafts, soaking up as much daylight as possible.
  
  It was during the tail end of one of these cold evenings, Luna nodding to sleep against his shoulder, that Roh realized what had eluded him about the text for so long.
  
  He was reading it backwards.
  
  It seemed like such a stupid mistake, and the way Roh noticed it was even more foolish. He was so tired he dozed off next to Luna, and the book fell out of his hands. He woke at the sound of it. He pulled the book back into his lap, not paying attention to the orientation, just peering at the columns as he ran his fingers down the line of letters again, reading them left to right instead of right to left. That gave him pause, because he realized he'd never used the Kai cipher while reading it in the opposite direction. It just hadn't occurred to him that the Talamynni would write anything in the other direction. Luna said every other Talamynni text read in long columns, right to left.
  
  He pulled out the characters according to the method he'd been taught as part of the Kai cipher, and then arranged them into words. The first word sent a shiver down his spine.
  
  Worldbreaker.
  
  "Luna," Roh said, shaking him awake. "I figured it out, Luna."
  
  "Sure," Luna said, "and I figured out gravity."
  
  "Really," Roh said, and pointed at the Dhai word on the page in front of him.
  
  Luna looked dubious. They had been close too many times. "Do another one," he said.
  
  It took another week to translate the book. After he learned that they had cracked it, Kadaan came in nightly and asked for updates on their progress. He fairly loomed, expression as grim as their living situation. He was much leaner now. He looked hungry all the time. When Roh pulled off his tunic to wash himself in a basin of warm water once a week, he could see his own hip bones poking painfully out from under his skin. They were becoming walking skeletons.
  
  "It's some kind of instruction manual," Roh said. "Let us get to the end."
  
  They made it halfway through the book, untangling references to coteries of jistas and their arrangements inside temples, and some great spiraling game of spheres, before the Tai Mora came to Shoratau.
  
  Roh leaned over the broad edge of a busted window high up in the west tower, trying to spot the group of Tai Mora the scouts had reported. He was wrapped in a thick, foul-smelling ubel coat and hood, his face covered from throat to nose. Eighteen sanisi stood watch along the walls below him, but he had not left the window in hours.
  
  "Roh?"
  
  Luna entered the broad doorway behind him. It had been a recreation hall for the prison's staff. They had cleared out all the furniture and burned it for heat. One sanisi had already died of exposure – caught in a storm, blinded, unable to get back before it overtook him. That left just twenty of them, plus Luna and Roh.
  
  "They're here," Luna said. He was bundled up as Roh was, narrow little face nearly lost in the great hood of his ubel coat. He held a large pack in one hand. Roh suspected it held the Talamynni book. Luna went nowhere without it. He slept with it under his head every night.
  
  "How many Tai Mora in the party? Does Kadaan know?"
  
  "Forty, at least."
  
  Roh gazed back out the window.
  
  "Kadaan wants to see us. About the book, and what we do next."
  
  Roh slid out of the window. The cold and waiting had been much worse than fighting. If this was where he was going to die, gutted on some frozen tundra, among Saiduan who considered him a slave, he just wanted it over with. The waiting – that was too much.
  
  He followed Luna downstairs. The halls were mostly dark, and they had to make their way by feel for much of it. Finally, they came to the main floor where the sanisi had set up house. Roh glanced into the great hall as they passed. Another sanisi, Wraisau, was coming out as they went by, so Roh could see inside. Flickering torches. Bowed heads. Empty plates. Endless games of dice.
  
  Luna knocked at the door to Kadaan's office. It was a former storage closet, not a proper study.
  
  "Yes," Kadaan said, and Roh felt a surge of anticipation at his voice even now, cold and hungry and on the edge of dying. He dreamed often of Kadaan taking him aside and declaring his passion for him, absurd as all that seemed here. Many of the sanisi had taken one another as lovers. It took the edge off their confinement, and gave them some comfort. It's why Roh slept next to Luna every night, though their relationship was purely friendly.
  
  Kadaan stood behind a battered table brimming with candles. Empty sacks and crates littered the room. There hadn't been much food in storage to start with, and twenty sanisi had made neat work of what was left. Roh worried they would begin to eat each other without going through the proper rituals, next. When he had brought it up with Luna once, Luna had looked so horrified he never spoke of it again. But to Roh, it wasn't eating the flesh of others that was horrifying. The horrifying part was not planning for it, and eating human flesh as if it were the offal of some dark animal.
  
  "What do you want?" Roh asked.
  
  Kadaan regarded him coolly. "I'm often comforted that it was I who claimed you, and not a man with a taste for subservience."
  
  "I don't know that you've claimed anything," Roh said. He squared his stance and clasped his hands behind his back, expression as neutral as he could make it.
  
  Luna gave him a sidelong look.
  
  Roh had not been able to figure out Kadaan. He had taken Roh as a slave, claimed him after the death of the Saiduan Patron and Roh's companions in a bloody brawl. But Kadaan's interest ended, it seemed, after that. Roh wondered if he had imagined the kiss Kadaan had given him in the Patron's banquet hall. It felt like an age ago.
  
  "Luna still hasn't taught you deference," Kadaan said.
  
  "I was never good at that."
  
  And you like that I'm not good at it, Roh wanted to add, but thought that might be a bit much, especially in front of Luna. Kadaan was almost a decade older than him – twenty-five, maybe – and some days it seemed like an impossible chasm. Roh wondered if it was culture or age or just the fact that he was a sanisi that stood between them.
  
  "I want progress on the book," Kadaan said.
  
  Roh glanced over at Luna. "You need both of us?"
  
  "Yes," Kadaan said. "You're the Dhai. You have one duty. And it's put us here, in the middle of a raging storm with forty Tai Mora slogging toward us."
  
  Roh said, "We've learned that there are gates, engines of some kind, in the temples."
  
  "I've ascertained that much," Kadaan said. "How do we control them?"
  
  "Omajistas," Luna said. "But we knew that, too."
  
  Roh knit his brows. "You knew that?"
  
  "We always knew that," Kadaan said. "Omajistas open gates. It's why we went south to look for more of them."
  
  "How long have you known?" Roh asked.
  
  Kadaan said, "We knew who, but not how. We've lost nearly every omajista who could open a way between the worlds. That's why this work is important. It's why we called you."
  
  "But… we didn't even know–"
  
  "Roh," Kadaan said. "We need to know how to open them. Having an omajista means nothing if we have no way to open, or, more importantly now, close the tears between our worlds. These people are getting through. If this can stop them–"
  
  "The temples of Dhai are the key, as far as we can tell," Luna said. "Having omajistas is important – we'll need to have one for each temple that powers whatever this… process is."
  
  "So bringing omajistas to Saiduan–" Kadaan began.
  
  "Was probably not the best use of time," Luna said. "There are four temples in Dhai. There used to be a fifth, in the northwest, but it disappeared during the last rising of Oma, when the Dhai and the Saiduan ripped the world apart. We can spend years trying to find an omajista to successfully open or close a tear, or end everything using the temples. They magnify Oma's power."
  
  "But there's no instructions," Roh said. "At least not that we've translated yet. I think that's the second half of the book. There's something about spheres and mathematical equations that's–"
  
  A shout came from outside.
  
  Roh called Para. Calling Para had become almost like breathing, if breathing meant you sometimes drew enough air to drown, and sometimes took three breaths just to get air. Para, like all the satellites, was fickle. The gods liked to remind them who was actually in control.
  
  Luna opened the door. The sanisi from the main room were pouring into the hall. Wraisau drew his blade and shouted, "Breach downstairs!"
  
  "Stay here," Kadaan said. He leapt over the desk and sprinted after Wraisau.
  
  Roh started after him, but Luna grabbed his sleeve. "He said to stay."
  
  "He was talking to you!"
  
  "He was talking to us. We aren't them, Roh. Stay."
  
  Roh shook him off, angrily. "They can call me a slave, but I'm not one. You choose what you want."
  
  Luna made a face so angry Roh thought Luna was going to hit him. "Only a man who's been free would say such a thing."
  
  "I'm not a coward. Not like you."
  
  Luna crinkled his face; a rush of unshed tears glistened in his eyes. "Cowardice isn't what keeps me here," Luna said. "You have no idea what it is to belong to someone. I've run a hundred times before."
  
  Roh pushed past Luna into the hall.
  
  The other sanisi had disappeared down the stairs. Roh barreled after them, holding onto Para's breath. He got four steps down before he saw blue mist crawling toward him. He fell back, too late. A roiling thread caught at his ankles. Bound him. He fell over. He'd been holding the Litany of Breath, and preparing other litanies, but none would help him with this. The curling tendrils of Para's breath snaked up his body and bound him like a vise.
  
  Roh gasped. Choked. The litany. What was right? Litany of Unmaking, Litany of Breaking, Litany of… He fell on the stairs, gasping.
  
  Luna came up behind him. "Who hit you?"
  
  Roh flailed.
  
  Luna coughed and recoiled. He drew a deep breath, hooked his arms under Roh's, and pulled him up the stairs.
  
  Roh hacked up great gobs of blue mist. Litany of Unbinding. That was it. He called Para, mouthing the words between heaves, and broke the triangular bindings of the deadly trap. The balls of mist burst apart and dissipated.
  
  Noise on the stairs. Cries. The clash of metal.
  
  "They're coming up," Luna said. He tugged at Roh's tunic and headed toward the dining hall.
  
  "There's no way out that way," Roh said. Too late. Luna was already inside. Roh struggled after him.
  
  The sounds of fighting reached the hall. The doors burst open, and a wave of fighting sanisi broke in. The tables blew off the floor, upturned to serve as barricades. Ten sanisi took up positions behind the tables.
  
  Roh pitched himself backward. He rolled over the table behind him and used it for cover. Vortex, vacuum, blast… the litanies for binding Para's breath tickled the edges of his mind, just out of reach. All around him, blades clashed. People screamed. Furniture flew about the room, cracking against the walls. Roh saw the bubbling blue mist of Para suffusing everything, a roiling stir of conflicting litanies.
  
  Roh recited the Litany of Breath, drawing Para beneath his skin and holding it. He drew his sword. Peeked above the table.
  
  Two Tai Mora took out the legs of a sanisi four paces distant. One of them looked right at him. Roh let out his breath, forming a wall of air with the Litany of the Balustrade. One held up a hand and blasted an impossibly powerful glut of Para's breath at Roh's wall, tearing it apart.
  
  The parajista advanced, a little smile on his face that turned Roh's stomach.
  
  Roh drew his weapon. Pulled Para. He made a simple litany and created a wall. He struck with his weapon while pushing the wall forward.
  
  He saw the misty blue defenses of the Tai Mora swirl to counter, and called a new litany. A cyclone. But the parajista must have been able to read the pattern of his cast, and retaliated with a burst of air that broke the cone of the call.
  
  All the while, the parajista advanced, his weapon snarling out ahead of him. Roh parried, countered, but he was stuck in a defensive position. Behind him, one of the Tai Mora fell into the open fireplace. Screamed. He crawled out, his coat aflame, and fought on, a blazing specter.
  
  Roh tried to put a table between him and his attacker. His stamina was not what it was, cooped up in this hold so many weeks. His breath came hard. His concentration wavered. The parajista thrust forward again, faster.
  
  Roh pivoted – and smacked right into the wall behind him, face first. Pain exploded across his face. He went down hard. Blood poured from his burst nose. He tried to push away from the parajista. Pain drowned out the litany for a shield.
  
  The parajista raised his weapon. Kadaan came from behind and gutted him like a fish.
  
  Roh hocked blood and snot.
  
  Kadaan took Roh by the collar and yanked him up. He hauled him across the body-strewn floor, slipping in blood as he did. Roh's face throbbed.
  
  "Take your feet!" Kadaan yelled, then: "Luna!"
  
  Luna scrambled out from under a table and came after them. Several sanisi followed. The Tai Mora in the room were dead, but Roh heard more below.
  
  Roh stumbled after Kadaan into the stairwell.
  
  "Here, stop," Kadaan said, and gestured to one of the sanisi, a parajista.
  
  The parajista knocked out the wall with a burst of air.
  
  Roh yelped, expecting it to come down on them, but Para's blue mist suffused the outer edges of the wound, keeping it sound.
  
  Luna leapt out first, then Wraisau and another sanisi. Kadaan pushed Roh. Roh pin-wheeled his arms and fell the ten feet to the ground. The breath left his lungs. He gasped for air that wasn't there. Tasted more blood and snot.
  
  The sanisi were already moving. Luna helped him up. Roh looked back, once, and wished he hadn't. Dozens of Tai Mora were pushing through the scar in the stairwell.
  
  Wraisau ran ahead to the outer wall and broke it open with another blast of air. Without the protection of a jista or an especially powerful ward, walls and doors and gates meant little.
  
  Wraisau waved at Kadaan.
  
  Kadaan grabbed at Roh's collar again.
  
  "Stop that!" Roh said.
  
  "Go," Kadaan said.
  
  "What?"
  
  "Go!" He pushed Roh ahead. "Take Luna, and that fiery book, and find Maralah in Anjoliaa. If she hasn't retreated there yet, she will. Do it."
  
  "I'm here to fight!" Roh said.
  
  "You'll be here to die."
  
  "I can't–"
  
  "Roh!" Luna grabbed his sleeve. "Please!" Luna slid through the break in the wall. Held out his hand.
  
  Roh saw the storm of Tai Mora running across the yard. Wraisau and the five remaining sanisi held their ground.
  
  Kadaan glanced back once at the Tai Mora, then grabbed Roh by the collar. Pulled him close. Kissed him fiercely.
  
  Roh had been waiting for it for so long it took his breath from his body. Or maybe he was still recovering from the fall. No matter. He gripped Kadaan tightly.
  
  Kadaan released him. "I will meet you in Anjoliaa," Kadaan said. "We'll hold them for you. Go."
  
  Roh ran after Luna, to the kennels.
  
  Luna worked at the dogs' tack with trembling fingers. Roh helped saddle them.
  
  "I'll scatter the rest," Roh said.
  
  "Tie an extra dog behind. We'll run them."
  
  "But–"
  
  "Do it."
  
  Roh did as he said, then pushed wide the kennel doors. But the dogs weren't stupid. Beyond the shelter of the kennels was a blasted white tundra. They had nowhere to go. He cursed and crawled up onto his dog's saddle and whistled the animal forward.
  
  Luna trotted off ahead of him into the late afternoon light. They would be easy to track in the daylight. If they were lucky, these Tai Mora wouldn't care anything for two Dhai slaves who escaped Shoratau. But if they'd come specifically for the book…
  
  Roh tried to banish that thought. The sun on the white tundra was blinding. "You know the way?" he shouted at Luna.
  
  Luna yelled back, "I've been planning an escape my whole life! I know what way is south!"
  
  Roh held on tight as the dogs leapt forward. Not even a year in Saiduan, and already he was running back home. He glanced back, once, at the dwindling hulk of Shoratau. He called Para to settle in beneath his skin. The blue mist gathered about his own body. He said a prayer to Para and released its breath. The wind picked up, catching icy particles of snow and sending them into a swirling vortex. It would not last, but it would cover their tracks.
  
  Roh's resolve faltered in the face of the unending tundra. They were just two slaves, running across a wasteland into some uncertain future.
  
  Luna lay still and silent against the belly of the dog, wrapped firmly in a thick coat. It was the first night in ten years Luna had slept without fear of a fist or a whip or a noose or a drunken master. Luna woke up twice in the night, expecting Kadaan or Wraisau or the Tai Mora, but there was only the cold, cold wind. It sounded like something Luna remembered from her childhood – dogs howling in a kennel, or maybe the sea. Luna had grown up near the sea… maybe? Sometimes Luna confused old memories with things she had read about Dhai. Luna had spent her whole life clinging to those memories, hot and muddled, all tangled together with accounts Luna had read in the great libraries when trained as a runner and translator as a child.
  
  Luna and Roh dared not light a fire. They had circled the dogs for warmth instead and bedded down with them. Roh pretended to know a lot of things, but it was difficult for him to pretend he knew anything about the north. So Luna had to tell him to let the dogs dig down into the snow, and when the little shelter was built, Luna pulled Roh down at the center of the mass of dogs, and they slept as a soft layer of snow drifted all around them, covering their tracks and their burrow. To an untrained eye, their snowy mass would look like just another snow drift. A kink in the landscape. Luna had grown used to the soft weight of Roh against her, and the comfort was painful sometimes, because she knew that's all it was to Roh. Luna was a coward, a slave, in Roh's eyes. He never saw her, just the idea of her, like a figure in some old dusty text, a slave from his books, maybe. He never once asked about Luna's life, about what she liked to eat, or what she did as a child. Roh talked about himself, and Luna put up with it because Roh was so beautiful he made Luna's heart ache. But here in the wind and the cold, Luna realized how little that beauty mattered. What they needed now was to be clever and resilient, and she worried that Roh did not have enough resilience to make the journey they needed to make. Riding from Shoratau to Anjoliaa would take months during the winter, longer if they lost the dogs and had to go by foot. She worried over Roh more than she should have. Why should Luna care what happened to him? But her heart hurt when she thought about making this journey alone. She wanted to protect the way she had never been protected. She spent much of her time in Shoratau trying to shield Roh from how bad things could be for him. Luna distracted the sanisi who talked about him in low tones, and told Kadaan whenever she heard someone meant to do Roh harm. But Roh went through life in Shoratau merrily and arrogantly, as if his safety was assured. Luna knew, more than anyone, that being small and enslaved meant nothing was assured.
  
  The wind had died down. Luna blinked snow from her lashes and shifted uncomfortably against the dog. Luna needed to piss. Always the worst part of nights on the tundra. She crawled a few paces away from their circle and found a place to squat. Her urine turned to ice far too quickly, and she yanked her trousers back, chilled to the bone. Luna dug back into their circle, squeezing herself in between the dogs and Roh.
  
  Luna began to tremble, so hard her teeth rattled. Roh stirred beside her.
  
  "You all right?" Roh asked.
  
  "Cold."
  
  Roh wrapped his arms around Luna. Luna thought her body would tense, but she was so chilled the warmth was welcome. Luna instinctively moved in closer. Roh was strong, stronger than he looked, even thin and hungry. He held Luna tight, and Luna closed her eyes and imagined they were living together in Dhai, married to half a dozen spouses, raising children on some farm far, far from here.
  
  As the trembling subsided, Luna considered how strange it would be in Dhai. She could be whatever she wanted, not ataisa or slave or some fisher's girl. In Dhai, Luna could be like Roh. They called her ataisa here, but it never fit right on her. She wanted to be a man, desperately, but people laughed when she said it, and pointed out all of her shortcomings, all of her differences, all the things that made her ataisa, so she pushed that away, tried to forget about it. But Luna remembered a time when she could choose what she was, instead of having it thrust upon her.
  
  "Roh? Promise me something?"
  
  "Sure."
  
  "If I die first, don't eat me, all right?"
  
  "I'm not going to eat you."
  
  "Well, I know that Dhai–"
  
  "I wouldn't eat someone who said it wasn't all right. You think we murder babies, too? Cook them?"
  
  "Do you?" Luna had little memory of what Dhai was like when it came to funerary practices. But what she knew was bad enough.
  
  "No. After all this, you'd ask that?"
  
  "It's important."
  
  "You're all really upset about that. It's not what you think it is. We don't just go around killing people. It's how we honor people, Luna. Family and friends. So no, I wouldn't eat you."
  
  "We aren't friends?"
  
  "It's complicated," Roh said.
  
  Luna kept the silence. Above them, the stars were brilliant; a jeweled blanket across the heavens. All three moons were up. The largest was full and round, and the red moon was in half-shadow. The smallest was a mere crescent, ringed in its tiara of satellites. Para had gone down just before the suns, and would not rise again until they returned. Luna liked the stillness. Freedom, Luna imagined, felt like stillness.
  
  So did death, though. Luna closed her eyes.
  
  When Luna woke next, it was morning, and she was very cold. Frost rimed her lashes. She sat up and stretched and found Roh rubbing the frost from the dogs' coats.
  
  "We need to go," he said, and Luna noted the twinge of fear in his voice.
  
  "What is it?" Luna asked.
  
  "Riders," Roh said. "Far, still, but they could catch us if we don't move."
  
  Luna crawled to her feet and surveyed the landscape. She could not see the riders Roh mentioned. The tundra here was hilly, shot through with stunted trees bowed over in snow and ice.
  
  "We'll go north," Luna said. "They'll expect us to go south. Only a fool would go north."
  
  "So what does that make us?" Roh said.
  
  "Clever fools," Luna said.
  
  Luna shrugged into her pack, checking reflexively to ensure the book was still secure in its waxed linen wrap. She was going to get to Dhai, and she was going to keep Roh alive long enough to get there, too, no matter how relentlessly Roh tried to sabotage his own survival.