The Stars Are Legion(78)

What is she going to do with it?





“I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT I THOUGHT THE FIRST TIME THE KATAZYRNAS TRIED TO BOARD THE MOKSHI. NO, WAIT. I CAN. I CAN TELL YOU THE WOMAN WHO LED THEM FOUGHT LIKE A DEMON. SHE FOUGHT LIKE THE MOTHER OF WORLDS.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





29


ZAN


I come up through the hole in the sky and into a world of light. I shield my eyes. Hands grab my arms and waist and haul me over onto solid ground. Or mostly solid. My feet sink into a soggy mire.

They’re untying the ropes. I can see hands if I squint. “Where’s Das Muni?”

“I’m here.” I see her little grayish hands and let out a breath. My eyes are starting to adjust. “Where are—”And then I look up from the hands to the room, and I stop speaking. I stop moving. I stare.

The room is a massive circular space, voluminous like the region below, but lined in row upon row of massive bodies. The bodies are suspended in glowing amber. Light beams from their eyes and mouths and wafts up to a great orb at the center of the room that hovers above them. I have a long breath where I realize the orb reminds me of the artificial sun at the center of the Legion. But the bodies?

They are giants, these bodies. Three times taller than me, with hooked noses and hairless heads and faces. They are twisted unnaturally in their amber prisons. Some are half sunk in the floor, others reach out at us from the ceiling, only their hands visible, as if they have been consumed by the ship itself.

“We think they’re gods,” Das Muni says.

Casamir lets the balloon go, and it wafts out across the great room. The sense of space, flooded with light, is so great that I feel almost as if I’m outside of the ship.

“Giants,” I say.

Arankadash presses her hand to the amber casing of a figure, its torso bent half-backward, a rictus forever marked on its face. “Is this what they do to the babies?” she says softly.

“I’m . . . I’m sure that’s not . . .” But I can’t continue. “We need to go,” I say.

“I want to find my child,” Arankadash says. She gazes into the light-seared faces of the captured giants. Is this what becomes of these children? Trapped in amber? For what purpose?

I drop my voice low. “Whatever did this to the children will do it to us too if we don’t get out of here,” I say.

“Is this the place?” Arankadash says. “The place you threw away your child?”

“No,” I say. “The place where I threw away my child was dark. Very, very dark. And I don’t know if it is was my child, really, or someone else’s.”

“Can we stop talking about babies and move?” Casamir says. She’s already three rows of bodies down. “I’m not staying here to find out what this is.”

I head after her, and Das Muni grabs my hand and squeezes it hard. We meet up with Casamir. I turn and see Arankadash still frozen in front of the giant.

“Leave her,” Casamir says. “She is locked in the past.”

I let go of Das Muni’s hand. “You two go ahead. Find a way out.”

“Zan!” Casamir says. “Fire take you, Zan, you promised we’d see the surface.”

“You will!” I say, and lower, to myself, “All of us will.”

I gently take Arankadash’s arm. “It’s not yours,” I say.

“How do we know?” she says. “What are they doing to them?”

“Do you want to go back?” I ask.

“No.”

“Then we must go forward.”

She sags against me. I hang onto her and gaze up at the giant’s blazing eyes. “Come on,” I say.

I step away, but she grabs my arm hard.

“I . . . can’t,” she says, and gazes down at her feet.

I look, too, and yank my own feet up from the sucking floor. The floor is running up over her boots, oozing a thick, amber sap.

“Get out of your boots,” I say.

“I can’t—”

“You can. You will,” I say. I untie her boots, hopping from foot to foot as the ground tries to tug at me, too.

I yank her free and together we run, arm in arm, across the brilliant yellow room.

“Casamir!” I call. “Casamir! Das Muni!”

Nothing.

I pull Arankadash in the direction I last saw them in, and we sprint down another long aisle of bodies, each more grotesquely postured than the last.

I hear a terrible squealing and tug Arankadash the other way. “That sounds like Das Muni!” I say.

I’m out of breath now, but we keep on because the sticky fluid on the floor is building up on my shoes and her bare feet, and it’s only a matter of time before our feet become too heavy to move.

I turn a corner and see Das Muni halfway up a broken mound. It’s a shattered giant, upended. It’s torn a hole through the wall, opening a portal into inky darkness.

Casamir is wallowing in amber up to her ankles at the other end of the statue, trying to paw her way after Das Muni.

I yank out my walking stick as we near and bring it down hard on Casamir’s ankle.

She yelps. The amber cracks. I hit the casing around her twice, three times.

Das Muni shrieks again and slides back down the lower half of the statue. She lifts her feet up, avoiding the ground.