The Stars Are Legion(90)

“This is an artery that runs the length of the world,” I say. “I bet we can cut into it and climb all the way to the surface. Not just the next level.”

Casamir, too, stares at the crown of the tree. “Only one way to find out, I suppose.” She sighs. “I’m really tired of climbing things.”

“How will you get into the artery, though?” Arankadash says. “There’s no opening.”

I heft my blade. “I’ll make one,” I say.

“Easier said than achieved,” Arankadash says. “I was going to suggest resting, but—”

“Let’s not wait,” I say. The tree is budding, and it makes me think of how cycles have worked across the ship, and finger bones. “I’ll get some rest and then head up there.”

But when I settle into one of the abandoned houses, I can’t help but think of the dead we passed on the way here. Were they fleeing this place? Trying to find something better? I think all the way back the way we came, and try to imagine them finding a home somewhere there that could sustain them. They would have had to go down and down, all the way to Vashapaldi’s settlement.

I gaze at the tree, which I can just see through the doorway. They were going down. I’m going up. But I’m still not certain my direction is going to have an ending that’s any better.





“WHAT’S DOWN THERE AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD? CREATION. THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS. BUT SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO KNOCK EVERYTHING DOWN IN ORDER TO START AGAIN.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





34


ZAN


When I sleep, I dream, but I know it isn’t a dream but a new memory, a harsh memory, bubbling up now, finally, just as Jayd warned me:

Wave after wave of armies break themselves against the Mokshi. I know this because I am somehow able to watch it happen from inside the Mokshi. Four generals die, taking their armies with them, but the fifth . . . The fifth is more tactical. She loses fewer people. She tests defenses. She flanks and folds her people and times their assaults with the flow of the Mokshi’s defenses.

Yet her army, too, falls. One by one, until she is the last left. And unlike the others, she does not run away. She hurls herself at the Mokshi, one final stand.

I don’t know what comes over me in that instant. But I turn off the defenses, and I welcome her. I don’t know if it’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever done or the smartest.

She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her face is full-lipped and luminous. It could be that she is the most beautiful because she is also the best fighter, the most tactical, the most brilliant. All that, yes.

She is defiant even then, and I ask her why her people fight. Why the Katazyrnas fling their young, their old, their infirm, at the Mokshi, this endless tide of flesh.

I know already that power is not in the fist or the whip or the weapon. Power lies in the flesh. Who commands the bodies. These people race to their deaths.

“What compels them?” I say.

“Fear,” she says. “Fear of our mother, Lord Katazyrna.”

“Is that what fuels you?”

And she hesitates, but her answer is sincere. “Yes. Surely, your people slay for you out of fear.”

“No,” I say. “They do it out of love.”

“Love?”

“Just love. Love for those behind them. Love for those who come after them. Love.”

When I wake, the light outside has changed, and my dream feels less like memory. How would I have met Jayd on the Mokshi? Why would I have spared her? And how did that start all of this?

Arankadash is sitting across from me on another mattress, speaking softly to her offspring. She seems to be struggling with it.

“You all right?” I ask.

She does not respond. The hunk of living tissue she has carried with her all this way is squirming violently in her arms. She is openly weeping.

“Arankadash?” I say, but she only shakes her head.

She slowly unties the knots of the sling she has carried it in and sets the pulsing organ-thing down on the ground. It’s grown to nearly four times the size it was when she birthed it. What it’s eaten, I don’t know, as I haven’t seen her lactating. I wonder if it’s subsisting on the world itself, feeding at night on the floors, the walls, and the billions of tiny creatures that infect this place. It has taken on the shape of a large cog with a wide-open center and nubby teeth all around its circumference. It shudders once on the ground and then begins to roll away, leaving a slimy trail in its wake like a slug.

Arankadash sobs, great heaving sobs that make my chest hurt.

I crawl over to her and put my arm around her. She wraps her arms around me and cries into my shoulder so hard, I wonder that it does not break her in two.

“The light has come for it,” she says. “The light has taken it.”

I say nothing, because nothing I can say will bring any comfort. We are each of us alone, united only in our inability to be free of this sticky world.

After she has cried herself out, I leave Arankadash to sleep, and unpack the rope I have in my pack.

Casamir is telling Das Muni a very involved story about two women born joined at the head who were found to puzzle out logic problems four times faster than an average person. I wonder if she’s told Das Muni that the information, if true, is likely gleaned from a recycled pair that the engineers kept in cages.