And Katazyrna welcomes me home.
“TO THE PEOPLE BELOW, THERE IS NO SURFACE, NO OTHER WORLDS, NO LEGION. TO THE PEOPLE BELOW, WE ARE GODS AND MONSTERS.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
33
ZAN
There are a dozen bodies piled on the shallow valley floor. They are arranged in a loose, circular group, as if they were walking up toward where we are now and fell where they stood. A few have slumped on top of each other, their long brown limbs tangled in violet robes.
The color of the robes fascinates me, because I haven’t seen anyone else with clothing that color yet. Their hair is long and black and braided back into a single tail. Most of them have hair that falls nearly to their knees. They have not been dead long. If I hadn’t seen so many dead already, I’d guess they were sleeping. This thought gives me pause, though. Have I really seen so many dead? I remember a field. A bright orange field of long yellow grass and tremendous white fungi, tall as I am, and bodies littered among them. Body after body, as far as I can see. I shake my head, and it’s gone. I can’t remember who they are, or even where, but it doesn’t have the feeling of a dream.
“If there are people,” I say, “there must be a settlement not much farther on.”
“Settlement of dead people,” Casamir says.
“Be optimistic,” I say. “Sulfur probably killed them. There’s a breeze now. It’s clearing it out. Let’s see if there are any survivors.”
They are a mix of old and young women, though none younger than the age of puberty. Still no children, even here? I think as I pick up a staff. It has a hole carved at the top, and set into the hollow is a brilliant lavender stone. The staff itself is made of soft yellow wood. They can’t be weapons—they would break in combat, or in contact with someone’s head or even a strong arm.
I check the bodies, but they are already beginning to cool. I was right: they are not long dead. But they have all perished.
It’s three sleeping periods more before we finally see signs of a settlement. The world here is watery and vibrant, full of twittering, buzzing life. That’s great for survival but bad for comfort, as I find myself pulling the heads of little biting bugs from my flesh every morning. They nest in the seams of my suit and are easy to brush off, but my companions, with less durable clothing, are not so lucky. They carry the bugs with them every time we move.
There’s a clear sleeping cycle here, as great bioluminescent trees glow more brightly during some periods and drop all of their sticky, leaf-like compounds at the end of it, only to regrow them during what passes for a sleeping cycle. The animals follow suit, with some sleeping while the trees light up, and others only coming up to chirp and bother us after the leaves have dropped.
There are human-made decorations hanging from the trees, mostly bone ornaments that click and clack in the wind. I see more signs of human habitation. Baskets left to rest under the trees. A network of paths crisscrossing the forest. Stacks of dead tree limbs and, eventually, a small lean-to made of a fallen tree and hemp covering.
Ahead of us I see something like a village proper. There’s a ring of two dozen dwellings arranged around a large square made of bone and metal tree trunks. At the center of the village is a tree so large that its spidery branches make a massive canopy over the village and travel up and up into the darkness of the sky. The branches pulse with the occasional blue light speeding up and across the branches and into the ceiling above, where they ignite a series of red and orange lights in the distant ceiling. It’s mesmerizing to watch and reminds me of the dancing lights I saw in my quarters when I first woke, like a secret language.
I hear only the clacking of the bone wind chimes, and the rustling of little flying creatures in the trees.
I walk to one of the huts, where someone has scraped a written passage into the face of it. I don’t know the language.
“Can you read this, Casamir?” I ask.
She jogs up next to me, squints. “Huh,” she says.
“Is that yes or no?” I say.
“It says there are monsters here. It says they come when the leaves fall.”
“If there are monsters,” Arankadash says, patting her offspring, “we should go somewhere there aren’t any monsters.” Her offspring has tripled in size already and pulses against her like a second stomach.
“There are monsters everywhere,” I say. “Running never makes fewer of them. Let’s see how we can shore up this village for an attack.”
“An attack from what?” Casamir says.
“Anything,” I say. I’m staring at the big tree at the center of the square and the place where its branches meet the ceiling. “I have an idea,” I say.
Casamir kicks at the bones of the square. “Well, great.”
“We’ll need weapons,” I say.
We rifle through the huts, and Casamir uncovers a number of multicolored vials. She whistles softly. “Wizards,” she says.
“Wizards?”
“There’s a defensive ditch around the village,” Casamir says. “These should work pretty well in it.”
“Do I want to know what it is?”
“Probably not.”
We open up trunks and baskets, searching for weapons. There are two obsidian machetes and some bone knives. Not enough, but something.
I watch Casamir carefully load more vials into a leather bag, and ask, “Why did you really not turn back?”
“Because you’re great company,” Casamir says.
“Honestly,” I say.
She sighs. “There was a woman,” she says.
“Not another story about wearing wombs on people’s heads,” I say.
“There was a woman I loved,” she says. “We fought. I left her down there when we were on a run.”
“Really?”
“You think I’d make up something like that?”
“It doesn’t seem like you.”
“When you wake up and realize you don’t like yourself, you make changes,” Casamir says, “or become a drunk, I guess.”
“She die?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Casamir says. “I thought I’d just scare her, teach her a lesson, so she wouldn’t treat me like she did. There weren’t any recyclers around, but . . . When I came back down a while later, she was gone. They sent a search party. I said she got lost. Never found her.”
“Still doesn’t answer why you don’t go back.”
“You’re relentless.”
“When you don’t know anything, you get good at asking questions.”
“Lots of people pop that little lock,” Casamir says. She jingles the bag. “Not everybody gets this far. No, not anyone gets this far. Just me. Just us. I’m not going back until I figure out if you’re mad or telling the truth.”
“Thought you’d made up your mind.”
“I like the suspense.”
“Thanks for not dropping me,” I say.
“If this is all true, all these stories about these warring families . . . How do you intend to beat them?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Who knows how much things have changed since I left? The Bhavajas are bad people. I’d need an army to defeat them.”
“You don’t need an army. You have us.”
“We’ve certainly got surprise on our side,” I say.
I call Arankadash over, and we walk the perimeter with her while Das Muni amuses herself inside one of the huts.
“The moat is probably something they can fill with a toxic miasma,” Casamir says. “That might work to keep most of this stuff out. We can also pull in some of those trees. The metal’s rotten in a lot of them but not all. Maybe set those up as spikes.”
“Are you going to tell us why we’re making a stand here?” Arankadash says.
I point at the tree. “See how far it goes up?”
“I do,” Casamir says. “To the sky.”
“I think we can climb it and hack up into the next level,” I say. “Save some time.�
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“If we don’t get eaten first,” Casamir says.
Das Muni comes out from one of the huts, humming to herself. She is digging through a basket. “What have you got over there?” I call.
“Finger bones,” she says.
I get up and examine the contents of the basket for myself. Sure enough, it’s full of finger bones, and possibly foot bones as well. They are small and easy to identify, though I’m curious as to why I know that.
“We need to get up that tree as fast as possible,” I say. I walk around the circumference of the tree. I press my hand to it. It throbs beneath my fingers. I follow the branches up and up, and see an answering throb there in the ceiling that reminds me of the arteries that ran above the corridors on the first level of Katazyrna.
“This is an artery that runs the length of the world,” I say. “I bet we can cut into it and climb all the way to the surface. Not just the next level.”
Casamir, too, stares at the crown of the tree. “Only one way to find out, I suppose.” She sighs. “I’m really tired of climbing things.”
“How will you get into the artery, though?” Arankadash says. “There’s no opening.”
I heft my blade. “I’ll make one,” I say.
“Easier said than achieved,” Arankadash says. “I was going to suggest resting, but—”
“Let’s not wait,” I say. The tree is budding, and it makes me think of how cycles have worked across the ship, and finger bones. “I’ll get some rest and then head up there.”
But when I settle into one of the abandoned houses, I can’t help but think of the dead we passed on the way here. Were they fleeing this place? Trying to find something better? I think all the way back the way we came, and try to imagine them finding a home somewhere there that could sustain them. They would have had to go down and down, all the way to Vashapaldi’s settlement.
I gaze at the tree, which I can just see through the doorway. They were going down. I’m going up. But I’m still not certain my direction is going to have an ending that’s any better.
“WHAT’S DOWN THERE AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD? CREATION. THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS. BUT SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO KNOCK EVERYTHING DOWN IN ORDER TO START AGAIN.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
34
ZAN
When I sleep, I dream, but I know it isn’t a dream but a new memory, a harsh memory, bubbling up now, finally, just as Jayd warned me:
Wave after wave of armies break themselves against the Mokshi. I know this because I am somehow able to watch it happen from inside the Mokshi. Four generals die, taking their armies with them, but the fifth . . . The fifth is more tactical. She loses fewer people. She tests defenses. She flanks and folds her people and times their assaults with the flow of the Mokshi’s defenses.
Yet her army, too, falls. One by one, until she is the last left. And unlike the others, she does not run away. She hurls herself at the Mokshi, one final stand.
I don’t know what comes over me in that instant. But I turn off the defenses, and I welcome her. I don’t know if it’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever done or the smartest.
She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her face is full-lipped and luminous. It could be that she is the most beautiful because she is also the best fighter, the most tactical, the most brilliant. All that, yes.
She is defiant even then, and I ask her why her people fight. Why the Katazyrnas fling their young, their old, their infirm, at the Mokshi, this endless tide of flesh.
I know already that power is not in the fist or the whip or the weapon. Power lies in the flesh. Who commands the bodies. These people race to their deaths.
“What compels them?” I say.
“Fear,” she says. “Fear of our mother, Lord Katazyrna.”
“Is that what fuels you?”
And she hesitates, but her answer is sincere. “Yes. Surely, your people slay for you out of fear.”
“No,” I say. “They do it out of love.”
“Love?”
“Just love. Love for those behind them. Love for those who come after them. Love.”
When I wake, the light outside has changed, and my dream feels less like memory. How would I have met Jayd on the Mokshi? Why would I have spared her? And how did that start all of this?
Arankadash is sitting across from me on another mattress, speaking softly to her offspring. She seems to be struggling with it.
“You all right?” I ask.
She does not respond. The hunk of living tissue she has carried with her all this way is squirming violently in her arms. She is openly weeping.
“Arankadash?” I say, but she only shakes her head.
She slowly unties the knots of the sling she has carried it in and sets the pulsing organ-thing down on the ground. It’s grown to nearly four times the size it was when she birthed it. What it’s eaten, I don’t know, as I haven’t seen her lactating. I wonder if it’s subsisting on the world itself, feeding at night on the floors, the walls, and the billions of tiny creatures that infect this place. It has taken on the shape of a large cog with a wide-open center and nubby teeth all around its circumference. It shudders once on the ground and then begins to roll away, leaving a slimy trail in its wake like a slug.
Arankadash sobs, great heaving sobs that make my chest hurt.
I crawl over to her and put my arm around her. She wraps her arms around me and cries into my shoulder so hard, I wonder that it does not break her in two.
“The light has come for it,” she says. “The light has taken it.”
I say nothing, because nothing I can say will bring any comfort. We are each of us alone, united only in our inability to be free of this sticky world.
After she has cried herself out, I leave Arankadash to sleep, and unpack the rope I have in my pack.
Casamir is telling Das Muni a very involved story about two women born joined at the head who were found to puzzle out logic problems four times faster than an average person. I wonder if she’s told Das Muni that the information, if true, is likely gleaned from a recycled pair that the engineers kept in cages.
“I need your rope,” I tell Casamir.
She gazes up at the tree. The leaves are starting to unfurl. “I guess it’s worth a try,” she says.
“Our other option is to go farther up into the city,” I say, “but I get the impression we’ll meet more of those monsters on the way, and the positions farther along are less defensible.”
“Up, then,” Casamir says.
I knot Casamir’s rope and mine together. I tie off the first knot when I get about twice my height up. Make the second knot a couple of paces above that. Crawl down and untie the first, make another a few paces above my second, and so on.
Casamir stares at me from below, hands on hips. “This is the first time I’ve seen you climb anything with a care for safety,” she says.
I don’t tell her that the dream makes me think we are closer to our goal now, and to die so close would be a tragedy. I keep on with my tying and untying, up and up and up as the lights flash in the tree branches beneath my palms.
I know, intellectually, that the sky is a long ways off. But I don’t realize just how long until I’ve been climbing for some time and I dare to look down. I can already blot out Casamir’s body if I hold up my palm. I gaze up, shifting the weight of my metal blade to the other shoulder, and wonder at the madness of what I have planned.
No madder than staying below, I guess.
I climb and climb. Leaves begin to break off in my hands. They are growing larger now, fully unfurled. I wonder how much time we have.
The branches become thinner, about half the size of those below, but do not become any thinner than that as I ascend, for which I’m thankful. This high up, I see little skittering creatures with enormous eyes that remind me of Das Muni’s. Their webbed feet cling to the branches. Some munch on the leaves and fling themselves off as I approach, hopping to another br
anch. I’m fascinated at the ecologies of all of these places, which each hold people and animals that exist nowhere else in the world. What happens when Katazyrna rots away? It will all be lost, leaves shed at the end of the season.
As I come to the top of the tree, I dare not look down. I knot the rope around me to the closest branch, in case I fall, and press my fingers to the ceiling. It’s warm and slick, and I feel the pulsing heartbeat of the world beneath it.
I have the urge to look down, but close my eyes instead. Take a deep breath. I pull the blade from my back, lean back a little until the rope holding me upright is taut, and then shove the blade with all my strength into the ceiling.
The blade encounters no resistance. It cuts clean through. I work it around in the wound a bit and draw it out.
A trickle of bloody gore oozes out as I release my weapon. My blade is covered in black ichor. I’m not sure if it’s really blood or just something like it. I hack again at the ceiling. Again and again, tearing out great hunks of flesh. I work until sweat streams down my face and the bloody ooze spatters my face and chest.
I hack and hack as the leaves shudder around me. The edges of them have turned orange.
I dare to look down now, and immediately regret it. The tree is in full foliage again; it’s a great jeweled yellow cushion, and down and down, so far down I can nearly erase their forms with my thumb, are the people I have traveled with from the belly of the world. They are all down there now—Das Muni and Arankadash, and Casamir, staring up as I stare down.
I’m running out of time. I can feel it. Perhaps they can too. Whatever assaulted this village will come for us soon.
I get back to hacking, though I am out of breath and my arms feel heavy as lead. My muscles are burning hot. The heat from the ceiling is also increasing, which doesn’t help. I’m nearing the core of the artery.
I hack out another slab of flesh and let it tumble down through the branches. It reminds me of the hunk of flesh I sacrificed to Casamir’s people. What are they doing with it right now? What will they do with it if I die here and don’t return?
The Stars Are Legion Page 27