The Stars Are Legion(84)

There are no calls of encouragement from below. I suspect they are all waiting for me to fall again. They’re afraid to break my concentration. I realize just how strangely quiet it is to not hear Casamir complaining.

I find purchase on the lip of the wall and pull myself over while pushing with my good leg. I flop over the edge like a swollen fish and lie there gasping. Something flies above me and defecates on my face. I wipe it away and stare up. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of flapping creatures nesting in the high, rotten walls above the waterfall. The sky here stretches up and up, and it’s mostly dark. There are bioluminescent fungi here and there, glowing a faint blue, and some creature flashing white in the water. But after the disorienting maze of the crystal forest, the darkness is almost welcome.

I stagger to my feet and am pleased to see that the waterway that feeds the falls does indeed slope upward. We’re continuing our climb up from the bottom of the world to its surface, however slow and agonizing.

I take a few steps, but my strength gives out. Or perhaps it’s my will. I sink to my knees on the soft ground. No doubt it’s covered in the excrement of whatever creatures are roosting in the walls, but I don’t care. We’re all the same thing. We’re all shit. We’re all flesh. We’re all sentient.

The others have been telling me this from the very beginning, but it’s not until now, saved by Das Muni’s slithering offspring, revived by afterbirth and a thundering waterfall at the center of a hollowed-out world, that I really understand what they mean by it.

I pull the sphere Vashapaldi gave me from my pocket. The sequence comes easily now, like remembering the way to the home of a friend: the child, the fish, the bird, the water, the water.

The sphere warms in my hands. I drop it. It splits like an egg, revealing a gooey green core that sprays a red-green mist into the air above it. The mist coalesces into a head-and-shoulder view of a familiar face, the face I saw reflected back at me from the mirror of a crystal. This reflection of me has no scar on her face, though, and there is something different about her eyes. She is more confident, full of purpose. I see no fear in her, no indecision, only absolute faith.

“If you’re seeing this,” the woman who shares my face says, “it means we’ve been recycled again and Jayd is not with you. You have remembered enough to unlock this recording, but I expect there’s still a lot that’s unclear to you. That’s all right. That’s how it’s supposed to be right now. You’ll remember when you’re ready. That’s how it has to be. You and I both know you’re too emotional to do what needs to be done when you remember . . . Well, you don’t want to remember what happened. It will ruin you as it ruined me, and we must stay focused on the end goal.” The woman looks away at something outside the range of the recording, then back. “If Jayd hasn’t yet found her way to the Bhavajas, through marriage or prisoner exchange, then you’ll need to return to the Mokshi and start again. There are more answers there. If she is with the Bhavajas this time, though, it means we are closer to success than we’ve ever been. Get back to the surface and find her. If she has done her part, then she will meet you at the Mokshi. Be sure the two of you have the arm and the world before you go, though, or we will have to do this again. Don’t think about why this is. Trust me as one can only trust oneself. You don’t want to start over. The world and the arm.” She looks away again, starts to say something else, and frowns. The recording ends. The mist swirls back into the core of the sphere, and it closes.

“Who is that?” Arankadash asks. She has come up behind me. I didn’t hear her over the sound of my own voice. Her offspring is pulsing softly against her chest.

“It’s me,” I say.

*

I replay the recording for the others once everyone is up the waterfall.

“This is a trick,” Casamir says. “You recorded it just now.”

“She doesn’t have a scar in that image,” Arankadash says.

Das Muni says nothing. She has pulled up her cowl again, so I cannot see her expression.

“Do you believe me now?” I ask Casamir.

“I believe this delusion is very complicated,” Casamir says. “I’m going to find something to eat.”

We spend some time foraging along the waterfall to restock our supplies. There are mushrooms and fish-like animals and flying things, which Casamir catches by rigging up a throwing ball she had in her pack with a rope on the end that knocks them senseless. They are about as wide as both of my hands put together, and they are mostly wings, which makes for poor eating. But Casamir enjoys catching them, and after a time, we have a whole stack of them to skin and eat.

As we sit and skin and chew, I say, “How many levels are there to the world, that you know?”

“Hundreds,” Arankadash says. “That’s what we’ve always learned.” She gazes up at what will be our route very soon, following the river upward, ever upward.

Casamir says, “We have scouted and recorded eighteen. These Katazyrna people you talk about aren’t recorded on any of them.”

“I didn’t fall far enough for there to be hundreds,” I say. “Besides, I’m not the only one to fall. Das Muni has, too. She’s seen another world like I have.”

Casamir rolls her eyes but says nothing.

“She saved the lot of us,” I say. “You can be respectful.”