“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.
“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?”