—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
9
ZAN
The whole of Katazyrna, more people than I have yet seen, pour out into the hangar to watch Jayd go. All of them bear faces so similar to those of Jayd and Anat and the women I met in the banquet hall that it is easy to see they are related. I know from seeing it from the outside that the world is enormous, though, so even this gathering is likely only a slim number of the world’s actual inhabitants.
Anat seems to pull open the skin of the world with her iron arm without letting in the cold; this display must be for the benefit of the Bhavajas, because Jayd whispered at dinner that the arm does nothing on Katazyrna, and is just a trophy. Out there in the black waits a whole fleet of Bhavaja vehicles mounted with cephalopod cannons. I think it’s disingenuous of them to come here with weapons mounted on their vehicles, but at least they didn’t try to carry any inside. I’m stuck with the horde of others I’ve never seen before, just a spectator. I see a few people with extra limbs, and one woman with eight fingers on one hand, and I wonder what they do here. Most are thin; I doubt they’ve seen a meal like the one we all just ate in their whole lives. There is something about their skin that bothers me, and I see a woman beside me scratching at a lesion. Growths bloom from the necks and arms of many; several bare-chested women only have one breast. They are cancerous. This horde of women is dying of starvation and cancer, slowly but inevitably.
The crowd parts for Jayd and Rasida and the rest of the Bhavaja clan. Gavatra and our sister Neith are to accompany Jayd as well, at least for a turn. I think that’s a small kindness of Anat’s, but realize she probably hopes to gain keen intelligence from Gavatra about the real state of the Bhavaja worlds. I wonder if it’s as bad as Katazyrna.
Peace or no, Anat has been fighting a long time, and the instincts of a fighter die hard. I know, because I still want to rip Rasida limb from limb.
The procession passes me. The first wave comes to the air port and steps inside. The film of the room closes over them, and they are whisked outside. I see them floating free out on the surface, kicking off the skin of the world and hurling themselves onto their great vehicles.
Anat did not let them park in the hangar, which is, at least, practical. Bhavaja vehicles have weapons mounted on them, and if they had something explosive . . . I ponder that thought awhile longer, wondering at my own assumptions. Is that something I would have done? Brought weapons to a peaceful trade meeting?
Jayd steps past me with barely a glance, and my heart clenches. Is this how it all ends, then? Jayd sold off to the Bhavajas so I can get to the Mokshi unhindered? What does that get her or me? Peace? Is peace worth it? What do she and I care about peace for?
Jayd walks another four steps, then turns. She breaks from Rasida’s arm and runs to me. It has the feeling of a dream, or of something I’ve seen happen before.
I push through the crowd to meet her, and Jayd hurls herself into my embrace. For one heady moment, I believe Jayd has changed her mind. But she only holds me and whispers, “I’ll bring you the world once you’re on the Mokshi. Wait for me with Anat and her arm.”
Then she runs back to Rasida, and Rasida wraps her arm around Jayd’s waist and pulls her close, and Jayd gazes up into Rasida’s face, and Jayd’s gaze is so loving, so radiant, that I almost believe she never ran into my arms at all, and she didn’t just promise to bring me a world.
Jayd is escaping Anat, escaping Katazyrna, escaping this rotting world. I want to be happy for her, but the darkness in Rasida’s eyes is not diminished when she smiles. I can see that as well as anything. The darkness is not eclipsed by the crinkling at the edges of her eyes, by the flash of her white teeth, by the little pink tongue she bites when she is paying especial attention to Jayd’s words, rapt like a hopeless lover. No, the darkness is there, always, and I worry. I worry that back on Bhavaja, away from me, from Anat, from Katazyrna, the darkness will crawl out.
Rasida sprays on her suit, then Jayd’s, and they step into the air port with the last of her little party, including Rasida’s mother Nashatra and her sisters, Aditva and Samdi. Their family could be a mirror of Anat’s.
I watch them through the tear in the world as they are sucked onto the surface. I watch them until Jayd is secured to Rasida’s vehicle, and they shoot out after the others, toward the trailing necklace of the Bhavaja worlds. So far away.
The mood becomes somber. I half-expect everyone to cheer, but it takes Anat to inspire that. Anat gets up on the backs of three bottom-worlders and shouts into the silence, “Peace! We rule the Outer Rim in peace henceforth! And soon, the Legion!”
Then the cheers rise up, from the bottom-worlders and the rest, and even a few of Jayd’s sisters, who I suppose aren’t cheering so much for peace as they are at the idea they weren’t the ones sacrificed to it.
I stand mute in the corridor as the people sieve away from it, and Anat closes the skin of the world once again.
As the hall clears, Anat comes up to me and sets her heavy iron hand on my shoulder. “Now we get to business,” Anat says. “They agreed the Mokshi is ours. After the joining on Bhavaja tomorrow, you will take the Mokshi for Katazyrna, and I will be the only Lord of the Legion.”
“And what becomes of me after that?” I say.
Anat pulls her arm away. “That will depend entirely on how well you do,” she says.
* * *
Without Jayd’s guidance, I find myself adrift. I go to the hangar and take comfort in cleaning the vehicles. I am here again repairing broken organic tubing and removing the hard, cracked shells of the vehicle casings, and the vehicles, at least, seem to appreciate my efforts. After that disastrous attempt at boarding the Mokshi and the loss of Jayd, this effort restores some of my confidence.
I work alone and in silence for a long time. When I look up from my work, one of the sisters from the banquet hall is standing a few paces distant. I remember her name is Maibe. She’s the one who told me I was a poor copy of myself.
If we were standing side by side, Maibe would barely reach my shoulder, but I am lying on my back now, covered in the juice of the organic fuel system, hands deep in the guts of a vehicle, and from that vantage Maibe looks formidable, a mountain of a woman with a face made more severe through the lack of hair. I see wounds on her head, nicks from the knife she must have used to shave away her hair. Metal seems to be a rare and expensive commodity here, and I wonder if it was a bone knife instead.
“She sending you to the Mokshi right after the joining?” Maibe asks.
“That’s what they’ve been telling me,” I say. “Been there once already, though, and not much came of that.” I think about amending that based on what I’ve been told, but I have never been given a hard number about how many times I’ve been to the Mokshi.
“You should talk to the witches first,” Maibe says.
“The . . . witches?”
Maibe shrugs. “That’s what Mother calls them. They can . . . talk to the world. The world sees things sometimes. Things you and I don’t see. They’re a good source for old Legion stuff.”
“Whatever the witches said about the Mokshi, Anat would have told me already.”
“Would she?” Maibe says. She picks at her ragged nails. Leans over me again. “Jayd isn’t here. Sabita has been reassigned. And you’re practically a half-wit now, aren’t you? I could do whatever I wanted to you.”
I sit up. Memory stirs again, hot and uncomfortable, but nothing comes up clearly from the blackness. I hold out both of my hands. One palm open, one squeezed into a fist. “I am a half-wit who throws a spectacular punch,” I say. “You should see it. Or we can skip that and share information.”
Maibe shrugs. “You do what you like. It’s not me she keeps throwing out there.” She ignores both hands and turns to go.
“How many times?” I ask. “How many times has she sent me out to the Mokshi?”
“Hundreds,” Maibe says.
Hundreds. A gaping hol
e in my memory comprising hundreds of missions. Failed missions.
“Not the rest of you?”
“Some of us, too,” Maibe says. “But you always got the closest. Nhim’s army died out there, and Ravi’s. Moira’s. Maybe a dozen others. But you were always the best. Jayd found you on some salvage run. Brought you in with thousands of other prisoners from some dead place, she said. Guess that worked out.”
“Jayd was a general?”
“Jayd’s a lot of things,” Maibe says. “Don’t think she’s some victim in all this. I don’t know what her plan is, but I can tell you it’s not meant to benefit any of us.”
“Why does Jayd want me to think I’m her sister?”
“Why do any of us pretend to be sisters?” Maibe says. “We all work better if we’re family.” She gives a little smirk. “Anat has her own reasons for doing what she does. If you’re mounting another assault, you go to the witches yourself and get their advice. Don’t go through Anat.”
“After the joining, on Bhavaja?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Maibe says. “I’ve only told you this a hundred times. But you never listen. You never fucking listen, Zan.” She leaves me.
I sit on the floor covered in the guts of the vehicles and consider my position. If I go to the witches now, it may tip off Anat that I have doubts about Anat’s command. That way leads to the recycler monster. The fact that I have some memory of it makes me think I’ve been down that path before. But if I wait, if I go after the joining, right before the assault, Anat will have no time to stop me, not if she wants the assault to happen in time.
I get up and stick my hands into the spongy blue surface of the far wall; it absorbs the fluid from my hands, leaving my skin clean and unblemished. Some parts of how the world works still seem very strange to me, like I expect it to work a different way, like how I’d been confused about this being a ship or a world or both. Or neither.
It’s the third option, the neither that gives me pause. I know about things outside of this world. But what they are, I have no complete idea. If Maibe’s telling the truth, and I was a prisoner brought here from some dying world, why did Jayd tell me I could lead armies? Did it make me a better leader, just as telling me I was her sister was supposed to make me more loyal? If I was her sister and not her prisoner, it would certainly make me trust Jayd more.
Don’t trust Jayd, they all said, and I didn’t. But I couldn’t help feeling that she and I were bound together, nonetheless. Some secret united us.
“I will bring you the world,” Jayd had said, and it was the first thing she said that I truly believed with all my heart.
“THE HEART IS A VITAL ORGAN. CONTROL THE HEART AND YOU CONTROL THE FLESH IT FEEDS. WE ALL HAVE WEAKNESSES. THE HEART IS MINE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
10
JAYD
I want to hate Rasida with all my heart. I want to hate her as I hate my mother, hate her as I hate the Bhavajas, hate her as I hate the slow apocalypse of the Legion that has brought me to this place. I have wanted to hate her all my life, but as I’ve learned since my early days pining after Rasida, I am drawn to and desire my enemies, and it may be my worst flaw.
Rasida, for her part, is perfectly charming.
From the moment I catch sight of the Bhavajas’ primary world, I can see that it, too, is dying. It’s much further gone than ours. The cancerous rot that eats the outer skin of Katazyrna at the poles, leaving it soft and vulnerable, covers half the world here. Much of the outer defenses look dead. I’m surprised Anat’s forces have never breached this world, but Anat has focused most of her attention on the Mokshi for some time, and I have not led an army anywhere but the Mokshi since the Mokshi entered the Outer Rim. Even the great tentacles that pull in debris from the outer edges of the Bhavaja’s home atmosphere are shriveled now. I see long lines of space walkers hauling in debris by hand from a half-dissected world that hangs desolately behind Bhavaja, its resources consumed by its neighbors.
Inside, Bhavaja is not much better, though its people seem in high spirits.
They reach for me but don’t touch me. Some fall to their knees before Rasida as if she is a god. And perhaps she is; in the same way Anat has styled herself Lord of the Legion, Rasida is their lord. Maybe a lord of salvation. I can’t help but fold my hands over my stomach. My last treatment was not long ago, and unless Rasida means to decide the time and place at which I’ll give birth to what’s growing inside of me, I will give her what she married me for in less than a rotation of the Legion.
We continue down the corridors. I expect to travel through the umbilicus between levels, the way we do on Katazyrna, but we descend on staircases instead, each carved into the fleshy guts of the world. Above us, in the narrow passages, I see the shriveled brown skin of the former umbilicus. I wonder when it stopped working for them.
On the second level, Rasida asks a member of her security team to take Neith and Gavatra to their quarters.
“They aren’t staying with me?” I say.
“You’ll see them again at the joining tomorrow,” Rasida says.
When Gavatra protests, Rasida says, “Jayd is Bhavaja now. Only Bhavajas may enter these parts of the world. I’m sorry, but you must stay in the guest quarters.”
“They are my family,” I say. “Doesn’t that make them your family?”
“This is not my rule,” Rasida says. “It is my mother’s.” I look around for her mother, Nashatra, but she has been swallowed by the crowd.
“We’ll be at the joining,” Neith says. “All I ask is that we get real food. Do you have real food?”
“Of course,” Rasida says. “Samdi, take our esteemed guests to the eating hall.”
Samdi makes a gesture of obeisance and peels away from us. Gavatra is still clearly not happy, and she signs something at me, fingers held low against her thigh. “Be careful,” her fingers say, and I sign back, “I am always careful.”
That makes Gavatra grimace. She has known me since I was a child.
Rasida’s people line the halls eight and ten deep, the smaller ones sitting on the shoulders of the larger, back and back and back, so many that I find it a wonder she can care for them all here on the first level. Where is she getting the resources to care for them up here? From that dead worldship they are scavenging? How functional is the heart of her world? I stare at the spongy floor at my feet. As I walk, my footprints do not fill with a thin film of water the way they do on Katazyrna before the fleshy floor springs back up behind me. Bhavaja is dying.
I glance at Rasida beside me as we continue on, and consider the rumors I have heard about her. If she has the ability to do what Zan and I believe she can do, why has she let her world deteriorate like this? I have to understand her, and to do that, I must get close to her.
Rasida parts a shimmering curtain, and suddenly we are alone in a broad room with sweeping high ceilings. There are no patterns of light here; instead, there are fanciful geometric shapes carved into the walls, all painted in reds and blues and golds. I caress the nearest wall, running my fingers into the rivulets, and find that the walls are not porous here but hard and calcified. I snatch my fingers away.
“Your rooms are here,” Rasida says, and she rolls open a great slab to reveal a long series of rooms. “I’m farther away,” she says, “but you’ll have access to this whole area.” She waves at the great room I’m still standing in, and I see that all seven of the round slabs that ring the room like great eyes are doors like this one.
Two young girls appear from the interior of my rooms, their eyes big and black, hair bound back from identical round faces. They are painfully thin. They wear no shoes, and their feet are callused and dirty.
“These are your attendants,” Rasida says.
“What are your names?” I ask, leaning over, because they look to be several rotations from menarche as yet.
“They don’t speak,” Rasida
says.
A chill crawls up my spine, but I straighten and smile. “I see,” I say.
“I don’t want them to bother you with needless chatter,” Rasida says. She runs her fingers down my arm, takes my hand, and opens my fingers. Her lips press against my palm. “I don’t like chatter,” she says.
“I see,” I say again, because for all the preparation Zan and I have done these many turns, I find that I am not at all ready to be here in this place with a woman with such power and so many unknown whims. What do I know about her, really? I have seen her at negotiations and across skirmish lines. But I know nothing of her world but what I have seen, and nothing of the woman who rules it, not really.
It’s not until I see her crinkling up the edges of her mouth into a smile that does not touch her eyes that I realize I have dealt with a woman just like this my whole life.
She is like Anat. She is my mother.
I smile back at her and press my fingers to her cheek.
“When will we be joined, love?” I say. “I look forward to the binding.”
“Soon,” Rasida says, and I cannot help but shiver.
* * *
The nameless girls comb out my hair and clean my clothes and fetch food. I feared the food would be as miserable as the rest of the world, but it’s fresh tubers and broth, not some twice-baked gelatin made from the dead. That eases my concern somewhat.
Time here is strange, as the ship does not seem to regulate it anymore. It’s the girls who wake the lights, rubbing their hands over the walls of the room after they have deemed my sleeping period has gone on long enough. Whatever is in the walls brightens for the length of the waking period, and then it is time to sleep, and we do it all over again.
When I wake, Rasida comes to me bearing wine and sweet treats, and sends the girls off into the main room.
“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” I say lightly. “I missed your company.” When I came up with this bit of fluff, I didn’t think I’d mean it, but I realize on seeing her sit down at the end of my bed that it’s true. The girls make for poor company. They won’t look at me, and they will not speak. I found a loom in one of the far rooms, and I’ve been re-teaching myself how to use it. Making textiles was always a bottom-world pastime. I prefer my numbers and reports. But there’s little of that here.
The Stars Are Legion Page 7
