The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  Syenite whispers, “What in the rusted burning Earth did you just do?”

  He laughs a little, opening his eyes to roll them toward her. She can tell it’s another of those laughs he does when he really wants to express something other than humor. Misery this time, or maybe weary resignation. He’s always bitter. How he shows it is just a matter of degree.

  “F-focus,” he says, between pants. “Control. Matter of degree.”

  It’s the first lesson of orogeny. Any infant can move a mountain; that’s instinct. Only a trained Fulcrum orogene can deliberately, specifically, move a boulder. And only a ten-ringer, apparently, can move the infinitesimal substances floating and darting in the interstices of his blood and nerves.

  It should be impossible. She shouldn’t believe that he’s done this. But she helped him do it, so she can’t do anything but believe the impossible.

  Evil Earth.

  Control. Syenite takes a deep breath to master her nerves. Then she gets up, fetches a glass of water, and brings it over. He’s still weak; she has to help him sit up to sip from the glass. He spits out the first mouthful of that, too, onto the floor at her feet. She glares. Then she grabs pillows to prop under his back, helps him into a recline, and pulls the unstained part of the blanket over his legs and lap. That done, she moves to the chair across from the bed, which is big and more than plush enough to sleep in for the night. She’s tired of dealing with his bodily fluids.

  After Alabaster’s caught his breath and regained a little of his strength—she is not uncharitable—she speaks very quietly. “Tell me what the rust you’re doing.”

  He seems unsurprised by the question, and doesn’t move from where he’s slumped on the pillows, his head lolling back. “Surviving.”

  “On the highroad. Just now. Explain it.”

  “I don’t know if… I can. Or if I should.”

  She keeps her temper. She’s too scared not to. “What do you mean, if you should?”

  He takes a long, slow, deep breath, clearly savoring it. “You don’t have… control yet. Not enough. Without that… if you tried to do what I just did… you’d die. But if I tell you how I did it—” He takes a deep breath, lets it out. “You may not be able to stop yourself from trying.”

  Control over things too small to see. It sounds like a joke. It has to be a joke. “Nobody has that kind of control. Not even ten-ringers.” She’s heard the stories; they can do amazing things. Not impossible things.

  “‘They are the gods in chains,’” Alabaster breathes, and she realizes he’s falling asleep. Exhausted from fighting for his life—or maybe working miracles is just harder than it seems. “‘The tamers of the wild earth, themselves to be bridled and muzzled.’”

  “What’s that?” He’s quoting something.

  “Stonelore.”

  “Bullshit. That’s not on any of the Three Tablets.”

  “Tablet Five.”

  He’s so full of shit. And he’s drifting off. Earth, she’s going to kill him.

  “Alabaster! Answer my rusting question.” Silence. Earth damn it. “What is it you keep doing to me?”

  He exhales, long and heavily, and she thinks he’s out. But he says, “Parallel scaling. Pull a carriage with one animal and it goes only so far. Put two in a line, the one in front tires out first. Yoke them side by side, synchronize them, reduce the friction lost between their movements, and you get more than you would from both animals individually.” He sighs again. “That’s the theory, anyway.”

  “And you’re what, the yoke?”

  She’s joking. But he nods.

  A yoke. That’s worse. He’s been treating her like an animal, forcing her to work for him so he won’t burn out. “How are you—” She rejects the word how, which assumes possibility where none should exist. “Orogenes can’t work together. One torus subsumes another. The greater degree of control takes precedence.” It’s a lesson they both learned in the grit crucibles.

  “Well, then.” He’s so close to sleep that the words are slurred. “Guess it didn’t happen.”

  She’s so furious that she’s blind with it for an instant; the world goes white. Orogenes can’t afford that kind of rage, so she releases it in words. “Don’t give me that shit! I don’t want you to ever do that to me again—” But how can she stop him? “Or I’ll kill you, do you hear? You have no right!”

  “Saved my life.” It’s almost a mumble, but she hears it, and it stabs her anger in the back. “Thanks.”

  Because really, can she blame a drowning man for grabbing anyone nearby to save himself?

  Or to save thousands of people?

  Or to save his son?

  He’s asleep now, sitting beside the little puddle of ick he threw up. Of course that’s on her side of the bed. In disgust, Syen drags her legs up to curl into the plush chair and tries to get comfortable.

  Only when she settles does it occur to her what’s happened. The core of it, not just the part about Alabaster doing the impossible.

  When she was a grit, she did kitchen duty sometimes, and every once in a while they would open a jar of fruit or vegetables that had gone bad. The funky ones, those that had cracked or come partially open, were so foul-smelling that the cooks would have to open windows and set some grits on fanning duty to get the stench out. But far worse, Syen had learned, were the jars that didn’t crack. The stuff inside them looked fine; opened, it didn’t smell bad. The only warning of danger was a little buckling of the metal lid.

  “Kill you deader than swapthrisk bite,” the head cook, a grizzled old Resistant, would say as he showed them the suspect jar so they could know what to watch for. “Pure poison. Your muscles lock up and stop working. You can’t even breathe. And it’s potent. I could kill everybody in the Fulcrum with this one jar.” And he would laugh, as if that notion were funny.

  Mixed into a bowl of stew, a few drops of that taint would be more than enough to kill one annoying middle-aged rogga.

  Could it have been an accident? No reputable cook would use anything from a pucker-lidded jar, but maybe the Season’s End Inn hires incompetents. Syenite had placed the order for the food herself, speaking with the child who’d come up to see if they needed anything. Had she specified whose order was whose? She tries to remember what she said. “Fish and yams for me.” So they would’ve been able to guess that the stew was for Alabaster.

  Why not dose them both, then, if someone at the inn hates roggas enough to try to kill them? Easy enough to drop some toxic vegetable juice into all the food, not just Alabaster’s. Maybe they have, and it just hasn’t affected her yet? But she feels fine.

  You’re being paranoid, she tells herself.

  But it’s not her imagination that everyone hates her. She’s a rogga, after all.

  Frustrated, Syen shifts in the chair, wrapping her arms around her knees and trying to make herself sleep. It’s a losing game. Her head’s too full of questions, and her body’s too used to hard ground barely padded by a bedroll. She ends up sitting up for the rest of the night, gazing out the window at a world that has begun to make less and less sense, and wondering what the rust she’s supposed to do about it.

  But in the morning when she leans out the window to inhale the dew-laden air in a futile attempt to shake herself to alertness, she happens to glance up. There, winking in the dawn light, is a great hovering shard of amethyst. Just an obelisk—one she vaguely remembers seeing the day before, as they were riding into Allia. They’re always beautiful, but so are the lingering stars, and she hardly pays attention to either in the normal course of affairs.

  She notices this one now, however. Because today, it’s a lot closer than it was yesterday.

  * * *

  Set a flexible central beam at the heart of all structures. Trust wood, trust stone, but metal rusts.

  —Tablet Three, “Structures,” verse one

  10

  you walk beside the beast

  YOU THINK, MAYBE, YOU NEED to be someone else.


  You’re not sure who. Previous yous have been stronger and colder, or warmer and weaker; either set of qualities is better suited to getting you through the mess you’re in. Right now you’re cold and weak, and that helps no one.

  You could become someone new, maybe. You’ve done that before; it’s surprisingly easy. A new name, a new focus, then try on the sleeves and slacks of a new personality to find the perfect fit. A few days and you’ll feel like you’ve never been anyone else.

  But. Only one you is Nassun’s mother. That’s what’s forestalled you so far, and ultimately it’s the deciding factor. At the end of all this, when Jija is dead and it’s finally safe to mourn your son… if she still lives, Nassun will need the mother she’s known all her life.

  So you must stay Essun, and Essun will have to make do with the broken bits of herself that Jija has left behind. You’ll jigsaw them together however you can, caulk in the odd bits with willpower wherever they don’t quite fit, ignore the occasional sounds of grinding and cracking. As long as nothing important breaks, right? You’ll get by. You have no choice. Not as long as one of your children could be alive.

  * * *

  You wake to the sounds of battle.

  You and the boy have camped at a roadhouse for the night, amid several hundred other people who clearly had the same idea. No one’s actually sleeping in the roadhouse—which in this case is little more than a windowless stone-walled shack with a well pump inside—because by unspoken agreement it is neutral territory. And likewise none of the several dozen camps of people arrayed around the roadhouse have made much effort to interact, because by unspoken agreement they are all terrified enough to stab first and ask questions later. The world has changed too quickly and too thoroughly. Stonelore might have tried to prepare everyone for the particulars, but the all-encompassing horror of the Season is still a shock that no one can cope with easily. After all, just a week ago, everything was normal.

  You and Hoa settled down and built a fire for the night in a nearby clearing amid the plainsgrass. You have no choice but to split a watch with the child, even though you fear he’ll just fall asleep; with this many people around it’s too dangerous to be careless. Thieves are the greatest potential problem, since you’ve got a full runny-sack and the two of you are just a woman and a boy traveling alone. Fire’s a danger, too, with all these people who don’t know the business end of a matchflint spending the night in a field of dying grass. But you’re exhausted. It’s only been a week since you were living your own cushy, predictable life, and it’s going to take you a while to get back up to traveling condition. So you order the boy to wake you as soon as the peat block burns out. That should’ve given you four or five hours.

  But it’s many hours later, almost dawn, when people start screaming on the far side of the makeshift camp. Shouts rise on this side as people around you cry alarm, and you struggle out of the bedroll and to your feet. You’re not sure who’s screaming. You’re not sure why. Doesn’t matter. You just grab the runny-sack with one hand and the boy with the other, and turn to run.

  He jerks away before you can do so, and grabs his little rag bundle. Then he takes your hand again, his icewhite eyes very wide in the dimness.

  Then you—all of you, everyone nearby as well as you and the boy—are running, running, farther into the plains and away from the road because that’s the direction the first screams came from, and because thieves or commless or militias or whoever is causing the trouble will probably use the road to leave when they’ve finished whatever they’re doing. In the ashy predawn half-light all the people around you are merely half-real shadows running in parallel. For a time, the boy and the sack and the ground under your feet are the only parts of the world that exist.

  A long while later your strength gives out, and you finally stagger to a halt.

  “What was that?” Hoa asks. He doesn’t sound out of breath at all. The resilience of children. Of course, you didn’t run the whole way; you’re too flabby and unfit for that. The bottom line was to keep moving, which you did do, walking when you couldn’t muster the breath to run.

  “I didn’t see,” you reply. It doesn’t really matter what it was, anyway. You rub at a cramp in your side. Dehydration; you take out your canteen to drink. But when you do, you grimace at its near-empty slosh. Of course you didn’t take the chance to fill it while you were at the roadhouse. You’d been planning to do that come morning.

  “I didn’t see, either,” says the boy, turning back and craning his neck as if he ought to be able to. “Everything was quiet and then…” He shrugs.

  You eye him. “You didn’t fall asleep, did you?” You saw the fire before you fled. It was down to a smolder. He should’ve woken you hours ago.

  “No.”

  You give him the look that has cowed two of your own and several dozen other people’s children. He draws back from it, looking confused. “I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me when the peat burned down?”

  “You needed to sleep. I wasn’t sleepy.”

  Damnation. That means he will be sleepy later. Earth eat hardheaded children.

  “Does your side hurt?” Hoa steps closer, looking anxious. “Are you hurt?”

  “Just a stitch. It’ll go away eventually.” You look around, though visibility in the ashfall is iffy past twenty feet or so. There’s no sign that anyone else is nearby, and you can’t hear any other sounds from the area around the roadhouse. There’s no sound around you, in fact, but the very soft tipple of ash on the grass. Logically, the other people who were camped around the roadhouse can’t be that far away—but you feel completely alone, aside from Hoa. “We’re going to have to go back to the roadhouse.”

  “For your things?”

  “Yes. And water.” You squint in the direction of the roadhouse, useless as that is when the plain just fades into white-gray haze a short ways off. You can’t be sure the next roadhouse will be usable. It might have been taken over by would-be warlords, or destroyed by panicked mobs; it might be malfunctioning.

  “You could go back.” You turn to the boy, who is sitting down on the grass—and to your surprise, he’s got something in his mouth. He didn’t have any food before… oh. He knots his rag bundle firmly shut and swallows before speaking again. “To the creek where you made me take a bath.”

  That’s a possibility. The creek vanished underground again not far from where you used it; that’s only a day’s walk away. But it’s a day’s walk back the way you came, and…

  And nothing. Going back to the stream is the safest option. Your reluctance to do this is stupid and wrong.

  But Nassun is somewhere ahead.

  “What is he doing to her?” you ask, softly. “He must know what she is, by now.”

  The boy only watches. If he worries about you, he doesn’t let it show on his face.

  Well, you’re about to give him more reason for concern. “We’ll go back to the roadhouse. It’s been long enough. Thieves or bandits or whatever would’ve taken what they wanted by now and moved on.”

  Unless what they wanted was the roadhouse. Several of the Stillness’s oldest comms started as sources of water seized by the strongest group in a given area, and held against all comers until a Season ended. It’s the great hope of the commless in such times—that with no comm willing to take them in, they might forge their own. Still, few commless groups are organized enough, sociable enough, strong enough, to do it successfully.

  And few have had to contend with an orogene who wanted the water more than they did.

  “If they want to keep it,” you say, and you mean it, even though this is such a small thing, you just want water, but in that moment every obstacle looms large as a mountain and orogenes eat mountains for breakfast, “they’d better let me have some.”

  The boy, whom you half-expect to run away screaming after this statement, merely gets to his feet. You purchased clothing for him at the last comm you passed, along with the peat. Now he’s
got good sturdy walking boots and good thick socks, two full changes of clothing, and a jacket that’s remarkably similar to your own. Apart from his bizarre looks, the matching garb makes you look like you’re together. That sort of thing sends unspoken messages of organization, shared focus, group membership; it’s not much, but every little deterrent helps. Such a formidable pair we are, crazy woman and changeling child.

  “Come on,” you say, and start walking. He follows.

  It’s quiet as you approach the roadhouse. You can tell you’re close by the disturbances in the meadow: Here’s someone’s abandoned campsite, with still-smoldering fire; there’s someone’s torn runny-sack, trailed by supplies grabbed and dropped in flight. There’s a ring of pulled grass, campfire coals, and an abandoned bedroll that might’ve been yours. You scoop it up in passing and roll it up, jabbing it through the straps of your sack to tie properly later. And then, sooner than you were expecting, there is the roadhouse itself.

  You think at first there’s no one here. You can’t hear anything but your own footsteps, and your breath. The boy is mostly silent, but his footsteps are oddly heavy against the asphalt when you step back onto the road. You glance at him, and he seems to realize it. He stops, looking intently at your feet as you keep walking. Watching how you roll from heel to toes, not so much planting a step as peeling your feet off the ground and carefully reapplying them. Then he begins doing the same thing, and if you didn’t need to pay attention to your surroundings—if you weren’t distracted by the racing of your own heart—you would laugh at the surprise on his little face when his own footfalls become silent. He’s almost cute.

  But that’s when you step into the roadhouse, and realize you’re not alone.

  First you notice just the pump and the cement casing it’s set into; that’s really all the roadhouse is, a shelter for the pump. Then you see a woman, who is humming to herself as she pulls away one large canteen and sets another, empty and even larger, in its place beneath the spigot. She bustles around the casing to work the pump mechanism, busy as you please, and only sees you after she’s started working the lever again. Then she freezes, and you and she stare at each other.