I heave at the bodies surrounding me, finally peeling myself free of the heap. It takes an age, and I am sweating and shaking, but I am free of the dead. Time is difficult to measure here. I have only the trembling light to go on, and the long shadows. Where is the light coming from? Are the tentacles trailing from the ceiling attached to something else, some greater horror?
If there is a way down here, there must be a way back up. How did these creatures get here?
I pass out on the other side of the corpses.
When I wake, I’m sweating and delirious. I know I’m delirious because I see little black animals crawling among the filth across from me, but when I squint hard they disappear and it is only me and sobbing Prisha dangling high above me.
Then the ground begins to tremble.
I hug the ground like it is a solid thing, though it is filled with bones and feces and darker things. I’m thirsty and shaking, but none of that is worse than the fear I feel as the monster approaches, wending its way through the corpses. I hear the crackling of bones as it moves closer.
It looms above me now like a terrible nightmare, a mother’s horror story. It grabs Prisha from the dangling tentacle and makes that huff-huffing sound, the one that is like laughter, and pops her head from her body and eats her.
I grip the ground hard, hanging on for my life.
The monster makes great walloping noises behind me, poking at the refuse. A heavy force thumps my shoulder.
Its massive fingers wrap around my torso. It clutches me so hard, the breath leaves my body. The monster lifts me high and pushes me right up in front of its great yellow eye.
I kick with my good leg, but miss the eye. The monster roars. Its hot, rank breath roils over me. I wish the fever and infection had had time to take me. Let the darkness come. Anything but this.
The monster barks. It yanks at another of the tendrils on the ceiling. Knots it around my torso.
“Fuck you,” I mutter, so softly I can barely hear it myself. “Just eat me. Just eat me.”
But it chortles instead. And leaves me.
The sticky tentacle clings to me like a living thing; I feel sharp little needles along its flesh, digging into my own.
I hang at least twenty paces above the ground. Even if I manage to get free, the fall will hurt, and I’m already pretty far gone. I don’t know how much more I can take.
I dangle there for a long time, drooling, nodding in and out of consciousness. I have enough strength on my third waking to try getting myself free of the tentacle. The blue light swings over me, and I see I am not far from a heap of very old corpses.
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.