Chapter 70
It spirals down through the soil in the dark, lit faintly gold from far below. Smurjan descends it barefoot, step by exact step. On the root walls around him, his three shadows follow: his own, Kali's, and the great maw, which keeps turning its head back toward the light above.
at the top of the stair, leaning down into the hole, the bruise purple on his jaw.
looking back up, his face half in gold light.
The stair opens out, and the dark gives way to a soft brown glow.
A vast warm cavern under the Fields, lit by glowing fungus in the walls, hung with roots like chandeliers. In long rows of dark soil, things are growing back: a fox with a curl of fern for a tail, half finished; a soldier's arm rising from a seed, the fingers just beginning; an old tree-stump slowly putting out a new face; a sparrow made of moss, not yet breathing. Everything here is halfway between gone and back.
kneeling at one of the beds over the moss-sparrow. She brings a finger close to stroke it, and where her finger nears, the moss-feathers brown. She pulls her hand back and folds it in her lap.
dry and silent. Fresh salt lines advance across the black soil toward Mosscap hill like white snakes, Cleaners hauling sacks behind them.
Drekk shovels soil over a burning fuse-line with the flat of his axe, mask down, working like a man digging a grave he refuses to fill.
Rougeina Swaps with a full salt sack, blink, and a Cleaner finds himself carrying nothing, staring at her.
Vigolas hurls a salt-sled end over end back down the hill.
at the rail of the beached Marka, Mingus pressed against his leg, eyes gold, watching the root-thread run down from the deck into the earth.
Röta leads Smurjan through an arch of roots into a cathedral of them: a vaulted crypt, roots meeting overhead like the ribs of a ship. And laid out in rows, stretching back into the gloom farther than the eye can follow, each in its own cradle of root and moss, lie Smurjan's bodies.
Grey husks, empty and peaceful, like knights on tombs, moss on their eyelids. Every one slightly different. A young one with short hair. One with a void-black third eye. One without a braid. One with a spear-wound through the chest. And at the far end of the first row, tiny, the first of them all: a gaunt boy-sized husk, all ribs.
Smurjan stands at the near end of the first row, small, looking at four hundred and seven of himself.
walking slowly down the first row, third eye open, reading them one by one.
with a black third eye.
a spear-wound through its grey chest.
reaching out and touching one husk's cheek. Her finger rests there. Nothing browns. Nothing rots. It's already dead.
Röta straightens, all two and a half metres of her, beetles stirring in her hair.
gentle, sure.
on the root wall behind Smurjan: enormous, utterly still, listening. Two small eyes in it.
His jaw sets.
out of the shadow at his side now, one arm, chin up, unusually serious.
A long beat. Then, softly, in the voice of someone who has loved without permission for ten thousand years:
Roots erupt from the crypt floor and wrap Smurjan's shadow. Not him: his shadow, at the place by his heels where the three shadows meet in a knot.
Smurjan's third eye blazes. Sightline: a crimson line drawn from his eye to the heart of the nearest root. He walks it, step, step, and strikes with his open palm. The root shatters. Three more take its place.
Kali hacks at the roots with her black-glass sickle, one-armed, screaming.
Röta, kneeling, lays one long hand flat on the knot of shadows on the floor.
The seam between Smurjan's shadow and the maw-shadow browns, softens, frays, and crumbles like a rotten rope.
With a sound like a tree tearing out of the earth by its roots, Bakasura is torn out of him. The maw rips free of Smurjan's shadow and isn't a shadow any more but a body: wet black hide, amber veins, broken-pillar teeth, rising in the crypt and smashing the roots overhead, bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
staggering, both hands on his chest. Below him on the floor: two shadows now. His own, and Kali's. Where the third one always was, there's only bare earth.
His eyes go wide. He's listening to the inside of his own chest, and there's nothing there.
looking up at what she's grown. The tenderness in her face turning, slowly, into horror.
Bakasura, loose and unhosted, eats the roots she sends to hold him. KRUNCH. He eats a row of growing-beds, fox and sparrow and all. He eats a piece of the crypt roof.
eyes gold. The root-thread he's been watching snaps. And then eighteen gold threads he knows by heart whip away from Smurjan's down-going line and start moving through the earth on their own: up. Fast. Toward the surface. Away from the ship.
A mile away, the dry black earth bulges. Cracks. Splits along a line like a seam tearing. Every mushroom on the hill turns its cap toward it.
Out of the split Fields, into the silent, rainless sky, rises a mountain of mouth: Bakasura, bigger than he has ever been, black hide streaming soil and roots, amber veins blazing like lava, teeth like a ruined temple. High above it all, two tiny eyes that have gone completely wild. No host. No shadow to go home to.