I slice up into the ceiling again.
The membrane bursts.
Bloody fluid pours over me, hot and sticky. It pushes me off my feet. I fall and almost drop my blade. I swing from the branch as the warm, coppery flood gushes from the wound and pools below.
Arankadash is shouting. Casamir seems to be floating away in the flood.
I wipe the gore from my eyes as the initial tide abates. I grab for the branch and haul myself back up. I peer into the hole I’ve torn into the sky. The bloody stuff is still pumping from it, but only from the bottom now. It trickles over the lip of the hole with every pulse. I reach into the hole and lever myself up to get a good look inside. It’s absolutely dark and stinks of copper and afterbirth.
I try to peer up, but there’s nothing to see but more darkness. The artery is as wide as I am tall but has hard ridges around it. As I sit in the lip of it, I can feel it pulsing, trying to push the trickle of life that’s now burst all over the world below farther up into the far reaches of the world.
“Come up!” I yell. I gaze over the edge and see that the leaves have begun to fall. It’s only then, as I see them all struggling below, that I realize Das Muni is not going to be able to climb the tree by herself.
I hurriedly untie the rope from around my waist and the nearby branches and hurl it down as far as it will go.
“Casamir!” I say. “Help Das Muni up!”
There is movement below. They are all covered in red-black fluid. Casamir is coming up first, and she throws the rope down.
“Casamir!” I yell, but she does not look at me, only continues climbing.
I heft my weapon. The leaves are falling in earnest now, bursting apart as they hit Casamir’s head.
Arankadash is still below, standing with Das Muni. By the time I get to the ground, it will be too late for me to get back up. I know this, but I want to go down anyway. Instead, I stare at Arankadash and Das Muni.
Will Arankadash kill her for being a mutant? Will she shrug and tell me it is for the best, after losing her own sisters and that . . . thing she birthed? Is nothing precious?
Casamir is halfway up the tree. And then I see what had caused the other women to flee. There is a gory army of women with wan skin and fungi bursting from their heads, slowly shambling toward us from out in the surrounding forest. I see that they have no fingers. I know now where the baskets of finger bones have come from. But why cut off their fingers, if . . . I gaze upward. They are coming for the tree.
“Arankadash!” I say, pointing. “They’re coming.”
Arankadash leans over Das Muni. I turn my head away because I can’t look.
I stare up into the dark and wonder how we are going to ascend this slimy, trembling thing. Casamir says her people know of eighteen levels. We have not even traveled up half that many, and there could be twice or three times or even four times that. But there is nowhere else to go. Maybe there never was. It’s just up. Always up.
I gaze back down, expecting to see Das Muni’s little body there on the ground below, floating in the bloody sea.
Instead, I see Casamir’s head just a few paces below, and Arankadash making her way up slowly, hand over hand, with Das Muni strapped to her back.
I help Casamir into the hole. She sits across from me. We don’t say anything. She’s breathing hard, and I expect some story, but no, she knows what she did.
We wait as Arankadash ascends. Below her, the diseased women swarm the tree. They batter at it with the stumps of their hands. And I see now why they cut off their hands and not their heads. The women are trying to climb the tree. They, too, want to get to the center of the world, or at least eat whatever it is up here that powers it.
Arankadash finally reaches us. I grab hold of her left hand, and Casamir takes her right. We haul her and Das Muni up into the broken artery.
For a long moment, the four of us sit up here together, exhausted, covered in grime. I gaze at each of their faces, and though Arankadash does not look at me, I see Das Muni staring at her with eyes big as globes, and Das Muni starts to cry.
Love, I think. Just love. Fear has driven too much of this world.
“We should get going,” I say. “It’s not a steep climb. We should be able to walk for a while. You have your torch, Casamir?”
She digs into her pack and pulls it out. Holds it high above her head. It lights up the membrane that encompasses us, like peering into the throat of some monster.
I walk around the edge of the hole and take the torch from her. “I’ll lead,” I say. “You take up the rear, Casamir.”
She frowns but doesn’t protest.
And so, we climb.
We climb so long and so far in the dark that I lose track of time completely. We all fall silent, even Casamir. We stop for water and rest, and we climb again.
When I sleep, I dream of climbing, and when I wake, I am climbing.
I squeeze the sphere in my pocket. When the climbing and sleeping all blurs together, I take out the sphere again and play the recording.
Das Muni sits next to me as I watch it, munching on a mushroom. Her eyes are big and glassy. We have all taken on a numbed, distant look. When she gazes at me, it’s as if she sees through me to some other place. “I once believed that all we were is the sum of our memories,” Das Muni says, “but in this place, I found that it isn’t the memories that made us; it is what we decided to do with them. I tried to build a life down there, in the dark, based on the pain I’ve endured. But you can’t do that, can you? You have to . . . remake it. Transform. We are more than the sum of what’s happened to us, aren’t we?”
She is pleading for an answer. “I’m afraid my memory will never come back,” I say.
Das Muni rocks back on her heels. “Maybe you should be more afraid of what you’ll discover if it does,” she says.
We climb.
The way grows steeper. We can no longer simply walk. We must dig our fingers and toes into the ridges of the great artery and climb. We rope ourselves together, though I don’t know how much good that will do. It’s Casamir’s idea, and I don’t want to argue about it. If one of us falls, all of us will fall. But we use our weapons to steady ourselves, shoving them into the flesh to provide us with leverage and some reliable fallback holds.
It’s only as the neck of the artery begins to narrow and curve off to the left that I worry we have already reached as far as this artery goes up and are coming back down again.
I climb onto the flat, curved surface of the artery and help the others up.
We sleep, exhausted from what must have been a climb over several lost sleeping periods.
When we wake, I pat the artery floor at our feet. “Here,” I say.
They all look at me. “It’s going down again,” I say. “That means eventually it will turn back to go deep below the world again. This is as high as it goes.”
Our faces look garish in the light. I think they would gnaw their way out of this thing immediately if I told them to.
But Casamir unhooks her pouch of potions and comes over to me, presses her ear to the ground. “I can get it open,” she says. She pulls a vial from her bag and makes a circle of it on the fleshy floor.
There’s a hissing sound and then the smell of burnt flesh.
We all come up around the edge of the hole, and we wait.
The fleshy cap half falls out, revealing a wash of blue-green light from below. I kick at the flesh. Wherever we are, I’m heading down now, not up, for the first time in this long, exhausting trek.
The flesh tears farther. I punch out another seam and squeeze through, huffing out my breath as I do it to make myself smaller. I see the ground below, and it’s not too far. I let myself fall and roll onto the porous floor.
The green-blue light seems very bright after the dim of the artery, but also familiar. I raise my head—
And stare into the armed tentacles of a cephalopod gun.
PART III:
RESURRECTION
&n
bsp; “IF YOU CANNOT KILL WHAT YOU LOVE, MAKE BEST FRIENDS WITH IT.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
35
JAYD
I stagger into the hangar on Katazyrna like a dying woman, and maybe I am. I pinch off my suit, and it dissolves around me. I take in fresh, warm air.
I fear the world inside of me will miscarry. I had to come here because I still know Katazyrna better than the Mokshi, and without the arm, the Mokshi will murder me. I can pin Rasida here. Maybe not easily, but it’s far more likely than it would be on Bhavaja. We are closer to the Mokshi. Closer to Zan.
I stumble through the interior hangar door, cephalopod gun up. Rasida won’t have been able to let them know that I’ve escaped and to look for me, but I don’t look like a Bhavaja. I’ll stand out for what I am.
I make for the witches, to the holdout they always use when the ship is under attack. It’s how they’ve survived so long here when so many others have perished. If I can make it there, I know I’ll have a safe haven to sit and wait for Rasida to find me. I have the world, and she has the arm. Perhaps the witches may even help me hold out there. Allegiances shift when there are fewer options.
I shoot three women along the way to the next umbilicus, and my vision tunnels. Focus. One foot. Another. Pain is a constant companion. My walk is painfully slow, like a drunk, like a mutant, like some maimed, disfigured thing. And I am all of those things now, aren’t I? Some savage merging of Katazyrna, Bhavaja, and Mokshi. I’ve been slashed and battered and changed by all three. I’m something else now.
I find the place in the wall and drag the bodies of the women I’ve shot up under it so I can reach the thin scab that covers the metal hinge of the door. I lever it open and pull myself inside. I close the hatch behind me. It’s dark and smells of piss and sulfur. I crawl for ten thousand steps. I know because in the heat and darkness, the counting is the only thing that can keep me calm.
The heart room where the witches are is different from the cortex. I don’t know its function, but when I come up over the organic mesh above it, I can see the witches inside. They are resting on the large slab at the center of the room, gabbling to themselves in an unknown language.
They peer up at me as I punch through the organic mesh with my weapon.
The left head says, “This is a foolish final stand.”
I heave the rest of my body through the opening and dangle there a moment. When I let go, I drop heavily to the spongy floor. The witches scuttle toward me, hands reaching for me, but I raise the weapon again.
“Foolish,” the right head says.
“Every stand is foolish,” I say.
“What will you do?” left says.
“I’m going to wait for Rasida,” I say. A twinge of pain shoots through my belly. I wince. I don’t want to give birth to this world on Katazyrna, but if that’s what happens, so be it. At least I will have upheld my part in this long, agonizing drama. I wish only that Zan knew how close I came before the end. “I need her arm,” I say. “The world and the arm. I’m going to get those two things together if it’s the last thing I do with the last of my breath.”
“We are all destroyed,” right says.
“I’m remaking it,” I say. “You never did believe that’s what we were going to do, but it is. Working with other worlds is the only way to save the Legion.”
Right begins to speak again, but left rides over her, says, “There has been too much death.”
“If you want Lord Bhavaja here,” right says, “we’ll need to broadcast where we are.”
“Do it,” I say.
The walls light up: misty red, whorls of blue. I prepare my final stand.
“ALL I AM, AND ALL I LOVE, IS WAR. I DON’T KNOW WHO I WILL BE IF I STOP. THE WORLD, IF IT IS TO SURVIVE, NEEDS A LEADER, NOT A WARMONGER. THE WORLD I WANT TO MAKE DOES NOT REQUIRE ME.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
36
ZAN
When I dream in the long throat of the artery, it’s often in hazy snatches, half-dream, half-memory, but what I see with the cephalopod gun in my face is not a dream but a memory, so stark and abrupt it bowls me over.
I’m in a room full of people I don’t trust, but I don’t trust myself, either, so none of that is very surprising.
Jayd has brought me back to Katazyrna as her prisoner. We both know this is a ruse, but it is Anat we must convince, and Anat is having none of it. I attempted my first assault on the Mokshi, pretending I was a regular conscript, and failed. Anat has one punishment for failure.
“Let Zan go again,” Jayd says. “She was close. It was the Bhavajas who ruined our chance. If we had peace with the Bhavajas—”
“There will never be peace with the Bhavajas,” Anat says.
I am standing along the far wall of the great banquet hall, watching the two of them talk at the table. They are standing. Jayd has reports with her, tangles of light inscribed on foamy tablets. I have been here just a few sleeping periods, and I can already see that reports will not sway Anat. Like me, she is driven with blind purpose, a fanaticism. It’s what has gotten her this far. It’s allowed her to survive when so many worlds out here at the edge of the Legion have fallen.
“Why didn’t the Mokshi kill her like it does your sisters?” Anat says, pointing at me. “Who have you brought me?”
She is wearing the iron arm, and I want to rip it off of her, but there are security women at the doors, including Gavatra, and Gavatra especially wants nothing more than to murder me.
Jayd makes her argument for peace with the Bhavajas, again, but I have already heard it twice since I’ve been here, and it’s not swaying Anat. I didn’t expect that. Trading Jayd for peace, allowing her to get the world from Rasida and freeing me to walk into the Mokshi and take back the arm from Anat when she walks into the Mokshi behind me thinking she’s a conqueror, was a fine plan back on the Mokshi. But here, in the face of Anat’s myopia, I’m not seeing a clear line to that future.
I come forward. “Anat,” I say, “we can take the Mokshi. You can have the only world that escaped the core of the Legion. You can use it to do whatever you like—blow up all the Bhavaja worlds, take over the core of the Legion. All of it. But sue for peace first. Let the Bhavajas think you’re cowed, then turn around and destroy them at the helm of the Mokshi.”
Anat turns her face slowly to me. “Are you telling me what to do, filth?”
“I’m telling you how to get what you want,” I say. Jayd told me I was some great woman, some great general, but it’s only now, when I remember this terrible moment, that I see it was not me who was the general; it was Jayd. I was a tactician. A very confident and high-strung tactician, full of fire. I feel like a badly copied version of her now, or maybe someone else entirely, just some woman bereft of memory who others are trying to imprint with the memories of some dead woman.
“Gavatra,” Anat says, still looking at me. “Recycle this presumptuous piece of trash.”
“No,” Jayd says.
“What?” I say.
Gavatra and four security women advance on me.
Jayd comes forward to shield me, but Anat snatches her with her iron fingers, holding her firmly.
“What do you care,” Anat says to Jayd, “when it was you who blew open the Mokshi and recycled their people? What’s one more of the Mokshi’s ilk sacrificed to feed Katazyrna?”
Anat does not touch me, but her words are like striking me in the chest. I stare at Jayd, incredulous. “You?” I say.
Jayd recoils from me. “Zan, don’t—”
“You said it was Anat!” I yell. “You said she stole the arm and recycled my people! Did you sabotage the Mokshi, Jayd? Blow it up? You? You?” She had murdered everything I loved and then had the audacity to come back to me and lie about it, and beg forgiveness for not trusting my plan for the Mokshi. We started anew.
I fight, because that’s what I do. I bash two women in the face. I take Gavatra by the hair and smash her s
kull into the wall; my fingers leave great gory scratch marks on her skull. She staggers. Grips me by the collar. Someone comes up from behind. I see a burst of light, then blackness.
So, Anat recycled me, and somehow, with the help of the people below, I crawled back up here, leaving messages for myself along the way. But why? How did I know then that I would lose my memory when I next assaulted the Mokshi? Clearly, it hadn’t happened during the assaults I’d been on before learning Jayd’s betrayal ran so deep. How had I trusted Jayd for so long and believed her lies? She must have known I would never have trusted her if I knew it was her who blew a hole in the Mokshi, her who recycled my people, instead of Anat. We could never have worked together if I had known.
But there are still holes in this memory. It doesn’t give me everything I need. It doesn’t tell me why I have no memory, or what I hoped to achieve out there on the Mokshi with the arm and the world. What happened when I returned from the bowels of Katazyrna? The version of me in this memory seems confident that she knows what the plan is, even if Jayd misled her in how they all got there.
I remember tangling my fingers in Jayd’s hair when she told me she was being sold off to the Bhavajas. I remember her telling me it was all going to be all right, that she knew what she was doing and this was all part of some greater plan. But had she foreseen Rasida’s betrayal and our mother’s death? Now she is alone out there, captive to the Bhavajas, at the mercy of Rasida’s whim, and I am here, stuck under countless megatons of rotting shit inside a dying world.
The cephalopod gun moves closer to my face.
I jerk back to the present, still reeling.
“Get up!” the woman holding the weapon barks.
I raise my hands.
My walking stick is slung across my back, and I have a bone blade at my hip, but I don’t go for either of them. Arankadash is just behind me, but Casamir is at least another twenty paces down, and Das Muni is ten more after that.
“I’m here to see Rasida Bhavaja,” I say.
The Stars Are Legion Page 28