“I’ve seen what Das Muni gives birth to,” I say. “I don’t think that’s necessary for any world.”
“You can’t pretend to understand the will of the Lord,” Casamir says. She finds what she is looking for in her pack and munches on it.
I help Das Muni back into the sledge.
“So, you all just . . . get pregnant?”
“Predictable as breathing,” Casamir says. “But more dangerous, of course. It can still kill you.”
“What do you . . . give birth to?” It’s another question I’ve been afraid to ask. But it’s time to start reconciling myself with the answers.
“Mine is an amsharasa,” Arankadash says.
“But . . . what is that?”
“A necessary piece of the greater whole,” she says.
“And mine doesn’t happen often,” Casamir says, “which I think is pretty lucky. Maybe once every six cycles. So, it’s only happened twice. The seers all say they’re necessary things, yes, but we don’t always keep them.”
“Blasphemer,” Arankadash says.
“Engineer,” Casamir says. “It’s not logical to keep something you have no use for. Sometimes we just put it into vats, make protein cakes out of it.”
“That sounds . . . awful,” I say.
Casamir shrugs. “It’s life, is all.”
We continue. The sledge gets stuck occasionally in the pitted road, and once, we have to unload and lift the whole thing up over a rotten hunk of the ceiling that has fallen across the path. I lift Casamir’s torch and try to see the where it’s fallen from, but far above us is only darkness.
“There used to be lights along here,” Arankadash says. “But it’s become unstable since I was a child. It gets worse and worse. We worry sometimes that the rot will reach our home. Maybe not this generation but the next.”
“Can it be stopped?” I ask.
She shrugs. “We have too much invested in our settlement. It’s the strongest in the region. When this rot comes up there . . . I don’t know. We try to study it, but what’s there to study? The world is old. Perhaps it has a limited lifespan, the way we do. Perhaps we are coming to the end of it.”
“But there are . . . thousands of people here,” I say. “Where will you all go?”
“Perish with the world,” Arankadash says. “Me, you, everyone.”
“That’s a long way off,” Casamir says. “There’s nothing like this on my level.”
“There will be,” Arankadash says. “We didn’t think it was real either when traders told us stories. But after a time, the traders stopped coming, and the rot spread.”
I think of Anat’s great war being raged all across the Outer Rim of the Legion, and I wonder how much she knows about how rotten the world is. Is that why she wants the Mokshi? Is it a younger world? But if what everyone has told me is true about how we are bound to the worlds we’re born on, then moving her people to the Mokshi won’t solve anything. Will it? Or is it more complicated than that?
Much of the task I’ve been given since I woke is sorting out the truth from the lies, the real from the rhetoric.
We camp for five sleeping periods before I finally smell the sea. The smell is brackish and rotten. A cool wind blows over us from the direction of the sea, and I wonder, again, about where the blasts of air are coming from. It’s like the whole world is breathing.
Above us, great stalactites hang from the ceiling, dripping salty moisture onto us. The formations are mottled red and orange, the colors swirling. They are met from below by stalagmites, great rearing teeth twice as tall as I am, which make navigating the sledge difficult.
We stop twice more to free the sledge from an entanglement. The deercats are impatient and tug hard. Arankadash yanks at their reins and whistles for obedience, but they have caught the smell of the sea.
We come over a low rise, and there it is. The sea is a flat viscous gray soup. Great blue lights glow and shift within it, roiling like living things. After a moment, I decide they are living things—it’s their heads and spines that glow. Each is long as the sledge. I climb to the top of an outcropping along the edge of the sea and gaze out. There are lights moving along the ceiling, too, a forest of green glowing fungi. I can see far enough across the sea to note a horizon, that place where the blue-shimmering sea meets the green sky. Dark shapes are flying over the sea and occasionally skim the water. They have black leathery wings wide as hands and bulbous bodies, but that’s all I can make out from this distance and in this light.
“I stood exactly there when I first saw the sea,” Arankadash says. “I did not believe such a thing could exist.”
“It’s extraordinary,” I say.
Casamir points to the flying beasts. “Can we eat those?”
“We can eat anything,” Arankadash says, “but I’ll tell you they are difficult to catch, and when they claw up your face, you will regret your decision to pursue them. They taste awful. Not worth the effort.”
Das Muni stands at the edge of the sea, silent, her cowl up.
I have not noticed a swell in her belly, but I can see it now on Arankadash as the wind blows against her body, pushing her long robe behind her and revealing her full outline. Doesn’t it terrify them all, I think, to have no control over when and what they give birth to? But it’s normal here, isn’t it? As normal as eating one’s companions and swimming across a viscous sea. I press my hands to my own belly. What am I meant to give birth to? Is this another reason my memory is stripped away, because the truth is too much for me?
“I don’t see a boat,” Casamir says.
I tear my gaze from the horizon and back to the shore. She is right. There is no boat, only a long beach made up of bits of calcified deposits and ground metal pieces. I hop off the crag and take up a fistful of the stuff. No doubt Casamir’s people will sift all the metal from this and make a fortune with it.
“Sometimes it’s farther down,” Arankadash says.
“When were you here last?” I ask her.
“When I left my child here and gave it to the light,” she says. “It was born wrong.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
Casamir heads farther down the shore.
“Das Muni and I will look the other way,” I say. Arankadash waves a hand at me.
I start in the opposite direction, but Das Muni isn’t following me. She is still staring at the sea.
“What is it?” I say. “Come on.”
“It’s so beautiful,” she says.
“The Mokshi doesn’t have seas?”
“It’s a very different place,” she says.
“You should tell me about it.”
“No. It was a long time ago. It’s better to forget.” She walks down the beach, head lowered.