The Stars Are Legion(89)

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.”

“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.