When we are rested, we start the long walk up the waterway. When the space opens up into a broad, watery plain that runs off in many directions, I suggest we follow the main flow of the river.
“It’s always going to flow downward, right?” I say. “To the center of the world. So it makes sense to follow it back up to wherever it’s coming from.”
The watery plain is teeming with biting bugs. We itch and scratch at them. My skin blisters, and when the blisters burst, little larvae squirm out. I should not be bothered by this after everything I’ve seen, but this feels like a grave imposition.
It’s Casamir who stops the second cycle in and screams and screams, though. It’s not a scream of fear but one of frustration.
I plant my feet in the spongy plain and I scream too. Das Muni echoes me, then Arankadash, and for several long minutes, we are a group of four women screaming at the top of our lungs in the middle of a buzzing bog. We scream until our mouths fill with bugs, and then we stop.
And we carry on.
After a time, the waves of biting insects subside, and we camp on a bit of higher ground near a long plain of water. While Arankadash and Das Muni make camp, I walk down to where Casamir is by the water.
She stands at the edge of the milky lake, throwing stones. “What’s wrong?” I ask, expecting a long and convoluted story, a rant about Das Muni’s table manners, or some snide remarks about Arankadash.
“I’m pregnant,” she says. “I was hoping it would wait a little longer. But I guess not.”
“Oh.” I put my hands in my pockets. “What do you . . . Is it all right to ask what you have?”
“It’s only been a couple times,” she says. “Usually you get pregnant when the world has a need, I guess. It’s some great organ thing, like what Arankadash has, only it grows much bigger. We kept the last one for some time, did experiments on it. They aren’t living, not really. They’re part of the world, I think. I think they replace parts that wear down.”
“Shouldn’t you always have them, then?”
“What?” Casamir says. She stops throwing stones. “Are you mad? I’m not giving myself over to some god, some creature bigger than me. I own what I am. Nobody else.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Maybe what Das Muni has is useful,” she says grudgingly, “and maybe Arankadash is so desperate for a child that she’ll try to nurse that thing, but that’s not how things are for me. I’ll just get rid of it.”
“You can do that?”
“You can do anything you want,” Casamir says. “It’s your flesh, you know. If there is cancer eating out my arm, you wouldn’t tell me I can’t cut it off.”
“These things don’t seem like cancer.”
“Don’t they? How do we know, really, what they are or what our purpose is? We take it all on faith. But every level is the same. They all rationalize it by saying it’s something they don’t understand, but it’s necessary. I reject that. No one’s in charge of my fate but me.” She jabs a finger at my belly. “You know that, or you knew it, clearly.”
Casamir wanders off as we all bed down, telling us she’s going to forage. I lie awake with Arankadash as she rocks her pulsing offspring in her arms. She sings it a song in her language, something soft and very soothing.
“Casamir’s pregnant,” I say.
“Yes,” Arankadash says. “It’s easy to tell.”
“I can’t.”
“You are blind to a good many things.” She raises her head from the thing in her arms. “It’s odd, isn’t it, that you are the only one not to become infused with a spark of life, here on this long journey?
“Is it?” I ask. “How often do people get pregnant?”
“It depends on the will of the Lord,” she says. “When it needs something, it gets it from us.”
“How?”
“How is there air to breathe?” Arankadash says. “It’s like that.”
“It sounds like we’re slaves to this ship,” I say.
“This world,” she says. “No. It gives us shelter and food. It shields us from the black horror of the abyss that lies in wait for us after death. It keeps us warm and protected. We are as much a part of the light as it is a part of us.”
I remember the great metal door that Casamir cracked open, and the Legion of worlds above, and the corridor of giant bodies whose purpose I hope I’ll never know.
No, this is all very wrong. If I were a god, this is not how I would create a world, by enslaving everything that lived in it. Or would I? I gaze up at the ceiling. The world is a living thing, yes, but is it more than just a collection of organs and flesh and fluid? Is it conscious? Sentient? Is the world a literal god, some creature that’s captured us the way Casamir’s captured those women in the cages? I imagine us circling the misty Core of the sun for generation after generation, locked in a battle not just with ourselves but with the terrible things growing around us and inside of us, tying us so closely to themselves that we cannot exist without them.
Casamir returns a long time later. Everyone else is asleep. I peer at her from beneath my arm and watch her take off her pack and unroll her sleeping pad. She settles in. Sees me watching. Gives a little two-fingered wave.
“What is freedom, Zan?” she says.
It sounds like a saying, like something I should know. And the response comes bubbling up, the way the sign language did out in the black vacuum of space. “Freedom is the absence of outside control,” I say.
“What is freedom?” Arankadash says. “It is control of the body, and its issue, and one’s place in this world.”
“See?” Casamir says. “We aren’t all completely dead in the head.”
* * *
When we wake, it’s cold for the first time in my memory. A cold wind blows from above us, too high up for me to see the source. It’s as if there are cracks or holes in the ceiling, and cold air is being blasted in. Fifteen thousand steps later, as we crawl out of the wetlands and onto a rocky plain, I see a bright blue light in the distance. It flickers like a flame, and as we near I see it is a flame of a sort—it’s a rent in the sky oozing sulfurous blue lava.
The smell rolls over us. I cover my mouth with a hemp cloth from my pack, but it doesn’t do much to filter the air.
“This is dangerous,” Casamir says. “Can we go around?”
“It will take us farther from the river,” I say.
Arankadash shakes her head. “I don’t want to risk losing access to water again.” She moves past us, taking point.
“Water’s all well and good,” Casamir says, “but not if you can’t breathe.”
But we carry on. The toxic air grows denser. I suggest going back, but Arankadash is still in the lead, and she doesn’t seem to hear me over the bubbling of the burning sulfur. I wet my hemp cloth and tie it over my mouth. Das Muni has dampened her cowl and done the same.
A blast of cool air buffets us from behind, clearing the air briefly. We make our way between two dripping seas of blue blazing sulfur, up what appears to be a path.
Casamir says, “It’s about time we see some people.”
“Not all people are nice,” Das Muni says, and passes Casamir and me as we pause to look back over the burning blue sulfur seas.
“Long way back,” I say.
“Not really,” Casamir says. She shoulders her pack and starts walking again. “You take me to this surface of yours, and I’ll just jump right back down that recycling chute. Then I’m only a level away from home!” She laughs.
I hang back. The world is large, I know—I’ve seen it from the outside, but I never anticipated all of this. Maybe I thought the world was hollow, or that it was all corridors and spiraling doors like the surface. This is much more, and far more complicated. The Katazyrnas and Bhavajas were fighting for control over the Legion, but they didn’t even control their own worlds. What were they actually fighting for, then? A title? An idea?
“Zan!”
Arankadash has reached the head of the pa
th, high up on the ridge. She’s waving me forward.
I start climbing again. The air is thicker with sulfur up here, but just as I think I can’t stand it, there’s a thread of cool air running just above me that clears the toxic cloud away.
“What is it?” I ask as I come up beside her.
Arankadash points into the valley below. “Bodies,” she says.
“I DON’T HOPE FOR THE BEST ENDING. I PLAN FOR IT.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
32
JAYD
It was Zan’s idea.
I would like history to believe that, but what led us to this place is not something I want recorded in any way.
“What do the Bhavajas want more than anything?” she asked me there on the Mokshi, after all my terrible betrayals, when she still took me back because she still loved me. She believed me when I said I had changed my mind, and yes, I had changed it, but I never expected her to believe that.
“They need children,” I said. “It’s known that they haven’t had a child-bearer in at least five rotations. Like us, they’ve been stealing from other worlds. More than us, really. I heard they don’t have as much of a hierarchy because of it.”
Zan folded her hands in her lap, just below the curve of her belly. “I can give them children,” she said. “Present me to them as a gift.”
“What about the arm?” I said. Because I had already stolen that from her too, and given it to Anat, because I was a young fool. It was the first betrayal, but not the worst. “You said you can’t restart the Mokshi without it. The Mokshi will never leave the Legion without a new world birthed on board. It’s too wrecked.” And I wince as I say it, but Zan doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind. How can she be so forgiving? Or does she not care? Does she love me at all, really, or is it all feigned, the way my love for her was feigned in the beginning?
“Can you steal the arm from Anat while I’m with the Bhavajas,” she said, “the way you stole it from me?”
“And do what with it?” I said. “It only works for you, here on the Mokshi.”
“What if you could bear children?” Zan says. “You convince Anat to trade you to the Bhavajas for peace. When the peace is set, I board the Mokshi, turn off the defenses, and get Anat inside. She’ll walk right in. I can take the arm easily once I have her on the Mokshi. That world obeys me.”
“And what,” I said, “I disarm Rasida and steal the world she’s got in her womb?”
Zan grinned. “You stole my arm out from under me,” she said, “and my heart. I suspect you can steal far more from Rasida.”
I climbed onto Zan’s lap then, and she put her strong arms around me, and for a moment I let myself be held. I felt her child kick in her belly, and I said, “We’ll need to do something with the child.”
That idea, I admit, was mine.
* * *
It was already a complicated plan. It relied on desperation more than anything else. What we had utterly failed to consider, though, was Rasida and what she had already put into motion. I think at some point, many cycles ago, I believed I did all of this out of love for Zan, but now, drifting in a cottony haze as Sabita lifts her bloody hands from my body, I think I am doing it for the love of something far greater than Zan. I’m doing it for the love of the Legion, the love of survival. I know just how precarious life is here, and I know that I must sacrifice a lot of it in order to save any of it.
That is my burden.
When I come awake finally, it is Sabita patting my face gently. “You’re still healing,” she signs, “but we must be quiet. Rasida has noticed that we’re gone.”
I glance over at Nashatra, who was beside me when the surgery started, but she is already gone, as are the witches.
“They’ve gone to distract her,” Sabita signs. “Can you get up? I know it’s difficult, but we must get you to the hangar.”
“I need the arm,” I say, “I have the world, but not—”
“We’ll tell Rasida you’ve escaped to the Katazyrna,” Sabita signs. “But you need a head start.”
“I don’t understand,” I mutter, but then I do. If I take the world to Katazyrna, Rasida will follow me. It’s impossible, in my current state, to defeat her in combat. But I know Katazyrna, and I know where the witches go when Katazyrna is boarded. I will take the world to Katazyrna, and Rasida will take the arm.
“If Zan is dead . . . ,” I say.
“If Zan is dead,” Sabita signs, “then at least the Katazyrna will be reborn. You’ll save our world. There is that. It must be enough.”
“I can’t fail,” I say.
Sabita helps me up. Pain rolls over me. She hands me a cup of something bitter, and I drink it without question. There’s a dagger of icy fire in my gut, and then the pain eases.
I don’t know the way to the hangar from here, but I am not the only one who has been counting steps. Sabita takes me left, another right, and down a crumbling umbilicus. We begin to climb a long set of stairs. I hear voices on the level just below us. Sabita presses us both up against the wall at the top of the stairs, and we wait until the women pass. Stairs. Lord of War have mercy. I lean hard on the stairwell, but Sabita puts her arm under mine and half-helps, half-drags me up.
When we reach the corridor outside the hangar, Sabita carves out a new door for us and seals it behind her. Row after row of vehicles stretch out before us, all of them in far worse repair than those on Katazyrna.
Sabita yanks me forward. “Stop,” I say. “Why are you helping me? You despise all I’ve done.”
She points to a vehicle. “This is a good one,” she signs, and starts it up for me. She finds several suit canisters in a bin at the back and throws me one.
“We’ll go out together,” she signs. “Stay close. If they spot us, I’ll draw their fire.”
“Sabita,” I say. “I have to know whose side of this you’re on.”
She grimaces. “You don’t know yet? I’m on Zan’s side, Jayd. She came to after Anat recycled her, and she climbed up out of the pits. She came to me after you turned your back on her and told her to go out there to the Mokshi again, to do as Anat asked. She loved you, Jayd, and you broke her heart. This stopped being about your love for Zan when you let her be recycled. You never went after her. You think she dismissed that? You think she didn’t care?”
“I couldn’t go after her!” I say. “It would have given us away. Why would I have gone after some rogue prisoner? Anat would have known who she was.”
“She told me to protect you,” Sabita signs, “in case anything happened to her and your plan went wrong. It did. And I keep my promises.”
There’s a sound outside the hangar door.
Sabita snatches the canister from my hand and sprays my suit on me. She runs to the lights of the depressurization console and sprays her suit on as she goes. Yellow lights flash.
The hangar door leading into the corridor blinks blue.
I grip the vehicle tight and release a burst of fuel, and we are sucked up and up and pop free of Bhavaja like two vermin flicked from its skin.
We make it four hundred leaps away from Bhavaja before the first pursuers appear. It has been a long time since I fought out in open space. But it comes back to me, easy as breathing. The cephalopod guns take a moment to understand, but then I am firing back at our pursuers.
Is Rasida one of them? I don’t know, but I can’t risk a direct hit. I sign back at Sabita to wound them only, and her grimace tells me what she thinks of that.
I power forward, speeding through the worlds of the Legion. I have missed them and all this open space. My heart was never in leading armies—I was better at planning battles than fighting them—but the Legion from outside the worlds is a breathtaking wonder. When Zan told me she believed there were other Legions rotating around those stars in the vast distance, I told her there couldn’t be anything else like the Legion in existence. Why not? she said, and it revealed my own sense of ego. I believed we were somehow special, bles
sed of the War God. I believed She made all of this for us, and we were doomed to make of it what we will. We were stuck here in the belly of creation. There was no escaping this universe.
Zan convinced me otherwise, but I had done terrible things before I believed her.
Despite our head start, our pursuers are gaining. We come up over the contested worlds—I see Tiltre off at our left, and I have a terrible memory of the day of the joining. How long ago was it now? A full rotation ago, surely. It feels like a lifetime. I see that the skin of Tiltre has been pulled back in places; it’s black and scarred. How many wars has Rasida been waging on other worlds while I lay trapped beneath the skin of Bhavaja, fighting for a future for this place?
A cephalopod clips my vehicle. I spin out. The Legion dances around me as I go whirling into the black. I recover, look back, and Sabita is powering back behind me, headed toward our pursuers.
She cannot see me, so I don’t sign at her. I keep my gaze forward, ever forward, and there, as I come up over the contested worlds, I see the familiar worlds of the Katazyrnas. My worlds. I zip past salvage vehicles and roving patrols. It’s impossible to give them orders to tail me, out here, unless some scout arrived ahead of me, and that hasn’t happened.
They let me by unhindered, and that’s good, because there is a far greater force I must face. It’s my own world, the great rising face of Katazyrna there, engulfing my view as the great orb of the orange sun blooms behind me.
I think, What if the Katazyrna doesn’t recognize me? What if I’ve become too much like the Bhavajas? What if giving birth to Zan’s child has changed me and the world no longer wants me?
I steel myself as I dip into orbit around Katazyrna. There is a great hole blown into the side of the world now, not as terrible as the one on the Mokshi, but significant. I power toward it. My fuel is almost gone, but I can coast forward on momentum for a good long while.
I am going faster than I’d like, so I kick off the vehicle and snag one of the waving tentacles as I go past. It wraps itself around me, and I crawl down it and step onto the surface of Katazyrna, finally.
The Stars Are Legion Page 26