“Rasida will just kill her anyway,” Sabita signs.
“Give me the womb,” I say. “I’ll bear the world to term. You can’t have long left.”
“Are you mad?” Nashatra says.
“Yes,” I say. “Sabita, you’re a tissue technician. You know how to pull out my womb and give me another one. Take mine, Nashatra. You’ll want children more than worlds, anyway.”
“That’s a serious surgery, Jayd,” Sabita signs.
“I know,” I say. “I’ve done it before, when Zan gave me her womb and we took out hers. Being able to bear children was the only leverage I would have, the only thing that could get me here. I couldn’t have gotten close enough to Rasida to get the world in that womb. And it’s the world we need, in the end.”
Sabita signs, “When did you do that?”
I say out loud, “On the Mokshi.”
“You and Zan—” Sabita signs.
“What we planned is bigger than the Legion,” I say. “That’s all I can tell you. We’re no madder than Rasida. No madder than staying here and enduring her wrath. Where’s the medical lounge?”
Nashatra considers.
“I know you don’t want that world,” I say. “What autonomy do you have when you cannot even decide what and when you birth? That was taken from you. We can fix it.”
“This way,” Nashatra says. “You’ll need the witches’ help or this will kill you. They will heal your—”
“All right,” I say, because I want it done. I want to go on. We need to move.
Nashatra leads us to the medical lounge. We pass several women, but because we are with Nashatra, they give us only passing glances. I hope Rasida is sleeping or on another assault to Katazyrna. But part of me expects her to be in the lounge already, waiting for us, one step ahead, always.
The medical lounge is as hideous as the one on Katazyrna, maybe more so. The witches are already there, and to my horror, they are standing over a slab on which rest the bodies of the girls who once served me.
The witches raise their heads.
“These are not natural deaths,” they say.
“Yours won’t be either,” Sabita signs, raising her bone knife. “I need healing salve, tissue repair gel, quick sutures, and liniment.”
“The lord will be displeased,” the witches say.
“She will not be lord much longer,” I say, and get up onto the slab next to the bodies.
“ALL I’VE LEARNED OF THE WORLD HAS TOLD ME THAT IT’S NECESSARY TO GIVE UP WHO I AM TO SAVE US. CALL THAT ALTRUISTIC. I CALL IT SENSE. THERE’S NO REASON TO LIVE LIKE I AM WITHOUT A FUTURE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
31
ZAN
When I wake, Das Muni is still breathing, but I cannot rouse her.
“Moving her will make her worse,” Casamir says. “I think we should split up.”
“We’ll just get more lost,” Arankadash says.
“If we each take a different direction, we might have a chance to get out,” Casamir says. “Right now there’s no chance. We’ll die of thirst.”
I had seen Casamir drinking her own urine before we slept. I don’t feel that bad off yet, but it’s tempting. I stare into my pack at the last half-globe of water I have. What an irony, to come this far from the belly of the world only to die for lack of water. I press my cheek to Das Muni’s. We must leave her and find a way out.
Hungry, thirsty, disoriented, we wander the crystal forest. I lose track of time, and maybe that’s better than whatever this is. We stumble off into opposite directions, though I can hear them all laboring not far away. Sound travels so far here. I hear Das Muni whining; it’s a sound that cuts me deeply, like listening to the crying of a child.
I’m so thirsty that when I doze, I dream of water. Bathing in it. Rolling in it. Drinking until I burst. When I wake from one of these reveries, I find myself staring at my own reflection in an opaque crystal just inches from my face. The light of the bluish crystals around it illuminates me and my reflection.
I gawk at myself. It is the first time since I woke to Jayd’s luminous face that I have seen my own reflection.
My skin, I know, is the same dark color as the Katazyrnas, but I am taller and broader. I have known all of this, but somehow seeing tall, lean Arankadash assured me that I was not aberrant, just different.
Now that I can see my face, I see something else entirely. I see someone who does not belong to the Katazyrnas at all. I have deep, sunken round eyes with gray irises, made to look deeper by broad, flat cheekbones unlike any I’ve seen here. My eyebrows are bushy and as ashen gray as my eyes, and they sweep back from my face like feathers. A long scar cuts across my brow, the same one I felt slathered in salve when I first woke. It’s twisted and ugly and pulls up the left half of my face, smoothing the lines there. I’m older than I thought, probably as old as Vashapaldi.
I lean away from the crystal so my reflection distorts and blurs, becoming just another refracted bit of shadow and light.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the soft sphere that Vashapaldi gave me.
I press the face of it, trying to understand why I would have left such a trinket behind. All I can think as I stare at its spongy mass is that I was as mad in my prior lives as I am now.
I stuff the thing back into my pocket and crawl along until I lose all sense of time and myself. I know only that I’m thirsty. Perhaps I am dying.
Is there a reason I shouldn’t die?
I gaze at the refracted images of my own face, fascinated.
Time skips.
Light. Reflections.
And then:
Das Muni leans over me, proffering a bit of gray flesh. I turn my face away, but she speaks in soothing tones and parts my lips with the slippery tail of the thing.
“It will make you better,” she murmurs.
I know this is a dream, because Das Muni is surely dead where I left her, five hundred paces behind me. I even twist my head to look behind me where I abandoned her body, but in place of Das Muni I see a slithering mass of black, toothy fishes crawling across the crystals, flopping in a sea of afterbirth.
Since this is a dream and I am very hungry, and even thirstier, I eat what she gives me. The thing is, thankfully, dead already and does not wriggle about in my mouth as I chew and swallow. It’s surprisingly salty-sweet. I feel my fog begin to lift almost immediately.
Das Muni holds me in her arms and sings to me, a song that sounds half-familiar. I lie there and stare at the crystal ceiling, trying to remember this song.
“How are you alive?” I ask. “You were dead.”
“A jinni came and saved me,” Das Muni says.
“What’s a jinni?”
“A spirit,” she says. “You must remember the spirits.”
“I don’t remember anything,” I say.
“It’s all right,” Das Muni says. “Sometimes only I can see them.”
“Lord of War,” I sigh, “I don’t know if you’re speaking the truth or delirious or both.”
“Both,” she says.”
“We are going to die here,” I say.
“No,” she says. “They are drawn to water.”