The Stars Are Legion(36)

I shift my torso back and forth, gaining momentum on the great tentacle, making myself into a pendulum. With slow and painful steadiness, I shift back and forth, back and forth. I swing closer and closer to the pile of bloated bodies.

In the distance, I hear a tremulous bellow.

I swing faster, working my body in the terrible grip of the tentacle as I go, praying to the Lord of War, though I’m uncertain if I believe in it, or anything, here in this place.

The corpses tremble. I hear the monster lurching out there in the distance, coming closer. Ever closer.

I will not die here. I will not be eaten at the center of the world without knowing who I am. Without a mother. Without a memory. Without Jayd.

I slip free of the tentacle. I grab it before I fall, and let go just as I begin the yawning swing toward the pile of corpses.

I land heavily in the bloated, gassy bodies. They rupture, billowing great gouts of gas. I retch and cough. Pain hammers through my open wounds, judders up my bad leg. I’ve likely lost the leg by now. What do I care for it? Just cut it off.

I pass out. Lose time. Pain. Darkness. Something skitters around me. I wake, once, and find a humanlike creature, tall as my knee, huddled over my leg, its lips smeared with blood, smiling a bloody smile in a twisted face. I swing my arm at it, limply, and it hops away on hands and feet, looking back just once, giggling sharply.

I’m not going to die. But maybe I’m going to get eaten alive, one way or another.

I hear the monster roaring, and I try to move through the bloated mess of leaking flesh. Skin sloughs off bones. Faces are barely recognizable as human. Maybe they aren’t.

I crawl to the edge of the heap of corpses.

Then I slide off it. Down and down. I land hard. Pain and blackness, pain and blackness. Some part of me wants to die, even if Jayd is alive. Even if I could save her.

Maybe that part is getting its wish.





“CARE NOT FOR YOUR SISTERS. THEY WILL LEAD YOU TO RUIN. I HAD TO KILL MY SISTERS FIRST, BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT BEAR THE CHANGE THAT WAS NECESSARY TO SAVE US ALL.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





15


ZAN


The smell of smoke; the warmth of fire. The stench brings with it the memory of a burning world. Whose world? I don’t know, but the smell evokes a deep feeling of loss and betrayal, of a people wasted, a purpose foiled. My purpose? What would I have had invested in the future of a world? Was it Maibe or Sabita who said I was supposedly a conscript from another world? Maybe that was my world burning.

It’s the smell that wakes me. I open my eyes. I am in a dripping cave or hovel of some kind. An emaciated woman crouches near a fire. The flames lick the air between us, casting the woman’s face in long shadows. Her hair is thin and greasy, her hands skinny and slender, bent slightly, curved like claws. Half her face is a twisted mass of scars.

“Who are you?” I croak. I gaze at the fire and worry over the hungry look on the woman’s face.

“Das Muni,” the woman says softly.

“What are you?” I feel groggy again. “The Bhavajas,” I say. “They’ve taken the world. I have to cast them out. I need to get back to Jayd.”

“I know,” Das Muni says.

“What are you?”

“Just a woman,” she says. “My world is dead.”

“What happens to dead worlds?”

Das Muni hugs her knees to her chest. “They are eaten. Salvaged for parts until they no longer hold together. Have you never seen the death of a world?”

I shiver. It’s as if she has been crouching over me and reading my thoughts. “Why did—”

“Hush,” Das Muni says. She holds her filthy hands to her own mouth, rolling her eyes to the entrance of the little stinking hovel of refuse. Bone and calcified organic structures make up the foundation of the thing, and the seams are stuffed with detritus.

The whole structure trembles. I hear the familiar roar of the great recycler monster shambling through the refuse.

After a few minutes, the sound of its lumbering fades, and Das Muni uncovers her mouth. “That’s the worst one,” she says. “That is Meatmoth. It loves you, I think. It finds you very delicious.”

“There are more?” I say, and it comes out a strained squeak, like some kid who just got her first lecture about what a vacuum is. That thought leads to another, a memory of standing in front of a room full of people my age, reciting the five rules of worldwalking. We aren’t speaking in the language the Katazyrnas use. It’s something else. I grasp at the name of that language, but it’s elusive.

“Many monsters,” Das Muni says. “We’re at the center of the world, or very near it. They recycle everything for the world. It’s a big job. On my world, there were more of them—”

“How did you get down here?” I say.

“Same as you,” Das Muni says, but she does not look at me as she says it. She is gazing out beyond the light of the fire again, to Meatmoth’s world. I wonder what it is she’s burning. “Someone recycled me.”

“Why?”

“Why did they recycle you?”

I don’t know how much to tell her. I’m still wondering if she’s going to eat me or not. “The world’s been breached,” I say. “The Bhavajas have taken over Katazyrna.”