The Stars Are Legion

by Kameron Hurley

  I have spent so many nights locked in my rooms on Katazyrna, cursing my mother, that this treatment is not surprising, only disappointing. I will need to work harder to get close to Rasida if I’m not allowed to go to her. I have already tried the great door out of the foyer, but Rasida has two stout guards there who glare at me whenever I open the door.

  “You wish to know me better?” Rasida says, passing me the bulb of wine.

  “We’re to be paired,” I say, and drink.

  To my surprise, she lies down in my lap and rests her head against my stomach. She presses her ear to my belly and sighs. I carefully smooth the hair away from her brow, uncertain as to what comes next.

  “You will be the mother of a new generation,” she says. “My witches foretold it.”

  “Your witches still live?” I ask.

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Well, so much of this world is . . . I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she says, sighing and pressing herself closer to me. “You are right. Bhavaja is deteriorating. But all that will change soon.”

  “How?”

  She moves her mouth into that smile-that-is-not-a-smile. “You will see.”

  “I have heard . . .” And I must be careful here. My breath catches. “I have heard you can birth worlds. Is that what you will do?”

  She sits up. My heart races, and I lean back, instinctively, fearful I have overstepped.

  Rasida gets up and opens the door. She gestures to me. “Come to my quarters,” she says.

  I finish the wine, and I follow her. I tell myself that my smile is more convincing than hers.

  Rasida takes me through a circuitous route to another level of the world. It seems we have gone up, but I can’t be certain. There are heavily armed women on this level, posted every hundred paces. Rasida invites me inside a great room with high ceilings layered in lacy bones. She urges me to sit on a lavish divan layered in hemp cloth. Golden trinkets grace the walls. It takes me a moment to understand what they are. They are trophies, of a sort—pendants and religious symbols from lost worlds. I recognize two of them from a dead world called Valante, a silver-striped pin that was worn by all the daughters of the lord of that world. Now they lie scattered across whatever worlds salvaged the wreckage of that place before it rotted away.

  “More wine?” Rasida asks. She opens up a great globular wardrobe made of wood, an impossible expense. I wonder which world she salvaged that from. The wood is dark and shiny, ancient.

  “Yes,” I say, because I have some idea of what we are here for, and I need the courage. Rasida is a handsome woman, and though she presses me close and offers me baubles, I am fighting hard to remember that she is dangerous, too.

  But so are Zan and I.

  Rasida pours me a drink from a very old, very used metal decanter. The liquid is poured not into bulbs but into beautiful metal glasses inscribed with fanciful geometric designs. I have seen a few such things come out of the craftspeople in the lower levels of Katazyrna, but ones this beautiful tend to be salvage. I know the Katazyrnas have murdered and pillaged many worlds, but the things Anat keeps are the people, the organics, not these sorts of objects.

  I sip the wine and make an appreciative noise. I expected wine to taste more like beer. I know, vaguely, that they are made from different types of plants. I tremble. It has been a long time since I inhabited another world. A long time since I had to learn other rules.

  Rasida sits next to me. I am aware of the warmth and softness of her. The room is cool, and I am drawn to her in a way I find distracting. She radiates a calm confidence. The ropy muscles in her arms, the heavy thighs, the keen, dark stare she fixes on me, as if I am the most interesting person in the world, make me want to straddle Rasida like a pleasure seeker and press myself into her, become part of her, like we are all a part of the ships.

  Don’t be a fool, I think, but Rasida is gazing at me with her big dark eyes now, and I get a little thrill at this idea that a woman so powerful is so smitten with me. I could control her utterly.

  “This ship is yours,” Rasida says, “as it is mine. You have total freedom here. I hope you understand that.”

  “That is kind,” I say, and try to scramble back to my purpose. I am not here to fuck Rasida. I am here to get what I need from her and save the Legion.

  “You are my consort,” Rasida says, “not just a petty bit of organic fodder. You understand? If that was all I wanted, I could have any number of women from other worlds. What I wanted was you. Always you. From the time we were both small.” She places her fingers on my arm, runs them from wrist to elbow. When she pulls her hand away, my skin is warm where she has touched me. It has been some time since anyone touched me with desire, not since the last time Zan was herself. Oh, how I love Zan, the Zan she was before all this started, before we gave up everything to get me here, trembling under Rasida’s fingers.

  I finish the wine, hoping for courage or perhaps sense. I wish for a message or sign from the Lord of War that tells me how to handle myself now that this plan has worked. I never counted on Rasida being so irresistible, after all this time. I never counted on the desire that lights me up like a torch when she looks at me. I feel that my body is betraying me and my purpose. I don’t know why desire has to be so complicated. I know what I need and what I want, and there is a place where those two things intersect, but it is a dangerous place.

  I want it nonetheless.

  Rasida sets aside her own glass and gets onto her knees in front of me. She bends her head and gently parts my knees.

  I freeze, uncertain of how to react. I wear only a long tunic, with nothing beneath. I feel Rasida’s hot breath against my skin. Then her tongue.

  I gasp. My precious metal goblet falls to the floor. The thirsty flooring laps up the wine as Rasida presses her lips to me, as if her tongue seeks to find the heart of me. She is a flickering, insistent whisper.

  I dig my hands into Rasida’s long hair and cry out. Rasida pushes up my tunic, stripping me bare. Rasida pulls me against her, hungry and passionate, the way Zan had taken me in the early days, before she was rewritten and erased into some pale shadow; a woman without a past, only purpose.

  Is that me? Can I be a woman without a past, in this moment? I want that, desperately. I want to start over the way that Zan has.

  Rasida’s desire is contagious. I wrap myself around Rasida’s thigh and cry out.

  “I love you,” Rasida says into my hair. “You make the very Lord of War tremble. I am yours. I am your lord.”

  “My lord,” I gasp. I hold Rasida’s head against my chest, feeling the warmth and power of her. How exhilarating, to hold this woman in my arms. I am drunk on her desire of me.

  “You are the love of my life, the mother of worlds,” Rasida murmurs, stroking my belly.

  I move Rasida’s hands away. “I am more than that, love,” I say, and it tastes strange on my lips, to call some other woman love. My enemy. My love.

  “Of course,” Rasida says, and she strokes my cheek and moves her hands lower.

  “When will we be joined?” I say, and I don’t say, “Because I want to see Zan again,” because I am not a fool, but with Rasida’s hands on me, I see Zan again, the way she was before all of this started, and I want Zan. I want our old life. I want to see her one more time before I do what must be done.

  “Soon,” Rasida says. “Let us slake our thirst first.”

  “My family will be there?” I ask.

  “They are invited to the world of the joining,” Rasida says, and her fingers find me again, and I close my eyes and think of Zan. “But first,” Rasida says, “I must do one last thing.”

  “ONCE YOU HAVE THE HEART, TAKE THE HEAD.”

  —LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION

  11

  ZAN

  It’s Sabita who wakes me while the glowing blue lights of the wall in my room tangle before me. I spray on a simple suit, something a bottom-worlder left for me before I went to sleep. It i
s red and black, and clings to my skin the same way my suit did, only it does not cover my hands or face.

  “Maibe says you were reassigned,” I say to Sabita.

  Sabita gives a small smile but says nothing. She leads me to the hangar and the stir of my sisters, where we gather to attend Jayd’s binding.

  “Sabita?” I say as she moves away.

  She opens her mouth. Her tongue is gone. I open my own mouth to cry after her, but she closes the hangar door behind her, leaving me with Anat and the others. I’m struck dumb with both shock and horror.

  Anat is pulling at the collar of a suit. The others are dressed in far too many clothes, it seems to me, vests and long jackets over their regular clothing.

  “Sabita—” I begin, but Anka, one of the twins, shushes me.

  “Let it lie,” Anka says.

  “Who did that to Sabita?” I say.

  “Why aren’t you wearing your exterior suit?” Anat spits.

  “Who did that?” I say, louder this time.

  “Who do you think?” Anat says. “Jayd, of course. Sabita talks too much. She gets you overly agitated.”

  I gape.

  Anat snorts. “Dumb idiot,” she says. “Put on your exterior suit over those clothes.”

  Aiju, the other twin, rolls her eyes and says to me, “It’s a show of strength to wear both clothes and suits. You think every world can afford clothes like these? Most wear nothing, like some kind of bottom-feeder. We’re one of the wealthiest worlds on the Outer Rim.”

  I stare at the peeling blank walls of the hangar. It huffs gently with the thrum of the world’s heartbeat. I gaze at the grungy gunk lining the corridors, the haggard faces of these women, and wonder what the poorest places must be like. And I think all this rot hides an even more rotten center, just like Jayd’s smile.

  “Maibe and Prisha will look after Katazyrna,” Anat says. “That leaves Suld and the twins to go with us. Neith and Gavatra are already with Jayd.”

  She then gives careful instructions to the security team tasked with following us, and I recognize some of them as the women I sparred with while in recovery.

  I know I’m not the only one to note how the security team salutes Anat and keeps their eyes on me. Why do they treat me as more of a threat than the Bhavajas?

  When we are all suited up and situated on our vehicles, Anat waves her great arm, and the hangar opens, and we speed off into the black between the worlds, shooting from the comforting embrace of Katazyrna and into the cold, airless space that threatens to devour it.

  I keep to the back of the party, just ahead of the rear security team. If it is a true peace, if Anat believes in it, she wouldn’t have brought so many security people.

  We aren’t heading to Bhavaja but to some contested world, one the Bhavajas stole from Anat just a few turns before, best I can gather from Anka’s signs with her twin. I like that better than the idea of riding right into enemy territory.

  Anat rides at the head of the group. Great plumes of spent yellow fuel curl behind her. We pass the Katazyrna worlds, which I find that I can name: Ashorok, Musmala, Titanil, the names unwinding in my mind like a litany. As we pass Titanil, the great engine of the sun unshutters at the center of the Legion, sending a shaft of light directly into my vision.

  When my vision clears, I see Anat speeding toward a new world, a great red throbbing thing with a milky atmosphere. My memory offers no name for this world, so all I know is that we and the Bhavajas both want it, and in exchange for Jayd, we get it. After seeing the cancerous rot on the outside of Katazyrna, I can see why this world must be valuable. The crimson skin of it is entirely intact, and I suspect the atmosphere, though thin, may be breathable.

  We line up behind Anat and wait for the outer defenses to go down. When they do, we speed toward a ripple in the world’s skin that puckers open as we advance. I see smaller tentacles on this world’s surface, and they wave out at us and guide the vehicles inside. Perhaps I should consider them comforting fingers, but I can’t help but think we’re being pulled into the maw of some great, dangerous creature.

  Inside, this world is much different from Katazyrna. We dismount inside a narrow hangar lined in pulsing orange growths all along the ceiling. Passages snake out all around us; I can’t begin to think which way we should go. When the skin of the world seals behind us, Anat dismounts from her vehicle and leads us down a passage at our left. As we walk, something happens to the air around us. It’s as if the skin of the passage itself normalizes the pressure as we pass through it, though I’m not sure how this is possible without having the passages properly sealed up the way they are on Katazyrna.

  The passage opens up into a broad room lined in glowing statues made of a white calcified substance. It’s only on peering at the faces of them that I determine they are made of bone. Human, presumably, as I’ve seen nothing else here. The statues are fixed in the walls as if they are trying to crawl out of them. The faces are somewhat off, not quite human, to my eye. Some of the figures have tails. Their large eyes are wide; mouths open in horror. I consider what event this room is trying to commemorate. A great war? People escaping a dying world?

  I’m so intent on the statues, I don’t notice Rasida’s security team come out to meet us until Anka prods me from behind. I step after Anat, still frowning at the statues.

  We slide through an umbilicus to a level below, and here we find the residents of the world. The ceilings here stretch up and up—I can hardly believe the umbilicus took us so far down—and there are shops and apartments carved into the walls, all lit by the glowing orbs on the ceiling, which I see now are a type of fungus.

  There are people here of all types—many look like Katazyrnas, many like Bhavajas, and still more appear to be from other worlds, unless this place simply breeds many different types of people in a way I have yet to see on Katazyrna. The worlds of the Legion cannot all be like Katazyrna. What if the rules are different in every place? That leaves me feeling vertiginous. There’s an entire system of worlds, each potentially with different rules, that I cannot remember. How awful to lose your knowledge of your world, but to lose knowledge of the universe? The loss overwhelms me.

  The joining of Jayd and Rasida is held in a monumental temple at the center of this level of the world. We walk up steps that go on and on, all carved into the flesh of the world. Inside the temple, Anat finally releases the catch on her suit, and it falls off and is absorbed by the world. The rest of us do the same, and now I can hear and smell the world as well as see it. Sound is muffled, no doubt absorbed by the porous walls. The smell is sharp, acidic, but the air tastes richer than it does on Katazyrna. I find myself taking shallower breaths.

  The joining itself takes place some time later, after we have all assembled and eaten from long tables surrounding a great dais. I have been looking for Jayd throughout the meal, but she and Rasida are still absent. A chorus of women perform from a balcony above, their voices high and warbling. I have no idea what they are singing about because I can’t understand the language.

  When a fat woman with a bloom of dark hair gets up on the dais and begins speaking, I can’t understand her, either. I lean over and ask Aiju, “What’s this language?”

  “Tiltre,” she says. “High Tiltre. They speak Low Tiltre on the level below.” She pats my hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just formal stuff.”

  “Why are we here if none of it matters?” I say.

  Anat glares at me. She’s sitting at the head of the table, and I hoped she wasn’t paying attention. I should have known better. She leans toward me. “It all matters,” she says. “We have worked to free these worlds from the Bhavajas since my mother’s day. We are seen as liberators.”

  In looking around at the wary gazes all the people here have been giving our table, I doubt that. Anat and Rasida are not so different.

  I recognize Rasida’s mother and other assorted relatives at a table opposite ours on the other side of the dais. The Bhavaja security team
stands between the two tables, ostensibly watching all the locals as well as us, but it’s clear which of us they think are more dangerous.

  Finally, after the food has been cleared and the little serving women come in carrying great jugs of red liquor, I see Jayd and Rasida enter the temple from the great stairway by which we came.

  I stand with the crowd—hundreds of us here—as Jayd and Rasida advance, and my heart aches as I watch Jayd walk arm in arm with Rasida, up and up to the dais where the fat local woman embraces them both. The woman gives another speech while holding hands with both Rasida and Jayd. The woman begins to cry.

  “What’s she saying?” I ask Aiju, but Aiju shushes me. The whole room is still on its feet, all gazes fixed on the dais.

  The fat woman gets down on her knees. She has a very kind face, and though I cannot understand what she says, she says it with passion.

  Rasida and Jayd lean over the woman. Each pulls out a long knife sheathed at the woman’s hips.

  I’m still not sure what I’m seeing. I start to ask Aiju, but she preemptively shushes me.

  Rasida and Jayd both repeat the same phrase, something in what must still be High Tiltre. Then, acting in unison, Jayd and Rasida each plunge their blades into either side of the woman’s neck.

  I make a choking sound and jerk out of my seat, but Aiju grabs my sleeve, shushing me again like a child. The woman on the dais sways and falls. Jayd takes a bowl from the podium and catches some of the woman’s blood in it. She offers the bowl to Rasida.

  Rasida drinks from it and passes it to Jayd. Jayd meets Rasida’s gaze and she, too, drinks the warm blood.