“But you were hired to clear the harbor,” says Asael. “Permanently, not some temporary fix. If the problem has turned out to be bigger than you think, that’s no excuse for not finishing the job.” Her eyes narrow. “Unless there’s some reason you’re so reluctant to shift the obstruction.”
Syen resists the urge to call Asael one of several names. “I’ve explained my reasoning, Leader. If it was my intention to cheat you in some way, why would I have told you anything about the obstruction? I would’ve just cleared the coral and let you figure it out the hard way when the stuff grows back.”
That sways some of them, she can see; both of the group’s men stop looking so suspicious. Even Asael falters out of her accusatory stance, straightening a little in unease. Heresmith, too, nods and turns to the others.
“I think we’ll need to discuss this with the governor,” she says, finally. “Present him all the options.”
“Respectfully, Leader Heresmith,” says one of the other women, frowning, “I don’t see another option. We either clear the harbor temporarily, or permanently. Either way we pay the Fulcrum the same amount.”
“Or you do nothing,” Syenite says. They all turn to stare at her, and she sighs. She’s a fool to even mention this; Earth knows what the seniors will do to her if she scuttles this mission. She can’t help it, though. These people face the economic destruction of their whole community. It’s not a Season, so they can move somewhere else, try to start over. Or they can dissolve, with all the comm’s families trying to find places in other communities—
—which should work except for those family members who are poor, or infirm, or elderly. Or those who have uncles or siblings or parents who turned out to be orogenes; nobody will take those. Or if the community they try to join has too many members of their use-caste already. Or.
Rust it.
“If my colleague and I go back now,” Syenite continues in spite of everything, “without doing anything, then we’ll be in breach of contract. You’ll be within your rights to demand your commission fee back, less our expenses for travel and local accommodations.” She’s looking dead at Asael as she says this; Asael’s jaw muscles flex. “Your harbor will still be usable, at least for a few years more. Use that time, and the money you saved, to either study what’s happening and figure out what’s down there… or move your comm to a better location.”
“That’s not an option,” says Asael, looking horrified. “This is our home.”
Syen cannot help thinking of a fusty-smelling blanket.
“Home is people,” she says to Asael, softly. Asael blinks. “Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
Heresmith sighs. “That’s very poetic, Syenite Orogene. But Asael is correct. Moving would mean the loss of our comm’s identity, and possibly the fracturing of our population. It would also mean losing everything we’ve invested in this location.” She gestures around, and Syenite understands what she means: You can move people easily, but not buildings. Not infrastructure. These things are wealth, and even outside of a Season, wealth means survival. “And there’s no guarantee we won’t face worse problems elsewhere. I appreciate your honesty—I do. Really. But, well… better the volcano we know.”
Syenite sighs. She tried. “What do you want to do, then?”
“It seems obvious, doesn’t it?”
It does. Evil Earth, it does.
“Can you do it?” asks Asael. And maybe she doesn’t mean it as a challenge. Maybe she’s just anxious, because after all what Syen is talking about here is the fate of the comm Asael’s been raised in and trained to guide and protect. And of course, as a Leader-born child, Asael would know nothing of this comm but its potential and welcome. She would never have reason to view her community with distrust or hatred or fear.
Syen doesn’t mean to resent her. But she’s already in a bad mood, and she’s tired because she didn’t get much sleep while saving Alabaster from poisoning the night before, and Asael’s question assumes that she is less than what she is. It’s one time too many, throughout this whole long, awful trip.
“Yes,” Syenite snaps, turning and extending her hands. “You should all step back at least ten feet.”
There are gasps from the group, murmurs of alarm, and she feels them recede quickly along the unfolding map of her awareness: hot bright jittering points moving out of easy reach. They’re still in slightly less easy reach. So’s their whole comm, really, a cluster of motion and life all around her, so easy to grasp and devour and use. But they don’t need to know that. She’s a professional, after all.
So she stabs the fulcrum of her power into the earth in a sharp, deep point so that her torus will be narrow and high rather than wide and deadly. And then she probes around the local substrate again, searching for the nearest fault or perhaps a remnant bit of heat from the extinct volcano that once formed Allia’s caldera. The thing in the harbor is heavy, after all; she’s going to need more than ambient power to shift it.
But as she searches, something very strange—and very familiar—happens. Her awareness shifts.
Suddenly she’s not in the earth anymore. Something pulls her away, and over, and down, and in. And all at once she is lost, flailing about in a space of black constricting cold, and the power that flows into her is not heat or motion or potential but something entirely else.
Something like what she felt last night when Alabaster comandeered her orogeny. But this isn’t Alabaster.
And she’s still in control, sort of. That is, she can’t stop what’s happening—she’s taken in too much power already; if she tries to let it go, she’ll ice half the comm and set off a shake that makes the shape of the harbor academic. But she can use the flood of power. She can steer it, for example, into the rock bed underneath the thing she can’t see. She can push up, which lacks finesse and efficiency but gets the rusting job done, and she can feel the enormous blankness that is the object rise in response. If Alabaster’s observing from his inn room, he must be impressed.
But where’s the power coming from? How am I—
She can realize, belatedly and with some horror, that water moves much like rock in response to a sudden infusion of kinetic energy—but it’s much, much faster to react. And she can react herself, faster than she’s ever done before because she’s brimming with strength, it’s practically coming out of her pores and, Earthfire, it feels unbelievably good, it is child’s play to stop the massive wave that’s building and about to swamp the harbor. She just disippates its force, sending some back out to sea, channeling the rest into soothing the waters as the thing from the ocean floor breaks free of its encumbering sediment—and the coral, which just slides off and shatters—and begins to rise.
But.
But.
The thing isn’t doing what she wants it to do. She’d intended to just shunt it to the side of the harbor; that way if the coral grows back, it still won’t block the channel. Instead—
—Evil Earth—what the rust—instead—
Instead, it’s moving on its own. She can’t hold it. When she tries, all the power that she held just trickles away, sucked off somewhere as quickly as it infused her.
Syen falls back into herself then, gasping as she sags against the wooden railing of the boardwalk. Only a few seconds have passed. Her dignity will not allow her to fall to her knees, but the railing’s the only thing keeping her up. And then she realizes no one will notice her weakness, because the boards beneath her feet, and the railing she’s clinging to, are all rattling in an ominous sort of way.
The shake siren begins wailing, deafeningly loud, from a tower right behind her. People are running on the quays below the boardwalk and the streets around it; if not for the siren, she would probably hear screams. With an effort Syen lifts her head to see Asael, Heresmith, and their party hurrying away from the boardwalk, keeping well away from any buildings, their faces stark with fear. Of course they leave Syenite behind.
But that is not the th
ing that finally pulls Syen out of self-absorption. What does is a sudden spray of seawater that wafts across the quays like rain, followed by a shadow that darkens this whole side of the harbor. She turns.
There, rising slowly from the water and shedding the remnants of its earthen shell as it begins to hum and turn, is an obelisk.
It’s different from the one Syen saw last night. That one, the purple one, she thinks is still a few miles off coast, though she doesn’t look that way to confirm its presence. The one before her dominates all her vision, all her thought, because it’s rusting huge and it’s not even completely out of the water yet. Its color is the deep red of garnets, its shape a hexagonal column with a sharp-pointed, irregular tip. It is completely solid, not shimmering or flickering in the half-real way of most obelisks; it is wider than several ships put end to end. And of course it is long enough, as it continues to rise and turn, to nearly block off the whole harbor. A mile from tip to tip.
But something’s wrong with it, which becomes clear as it rises. At the midpoint of the shaft, the clear, crystalline beauty of the thing gives way to cracks. Massive ones, ugly and black-tinged, as if some contaminant from the ocean floor has seeped in during all the centuries that the thing must have lain down there. The jagged, spidering lines spread across the crystal in a radiant pattern. Syenite can feel how the obelisk’s hum jitters and stutters here, incomprehensible energies struggling through the place of damage.
And at the center of the radiating cracks, she can see some kind of occlusion. Something small. Syenite squints, leaning harder on the railing as she cranes her neck to follow the rising mote. Then the obelisk turns a little more as if to face her, and all at once her blood ices over as she realizes what she’s seeing.
A person. There’s someone in the thing, stuck like a bug in amber, limbs splayed and still, hair a frozen spray. She can’t make out the face, not quite, but in her imagination the eyes are wide, the mouth open. Screaming.
That’s when she realizes she can make out an odd marbling along the figure’s skin, black-bruised through the dark red of the shaft. The sunlight flickers and she realizes its hair is clear, or at least translucent enough to be lost in the garnet around it. And there’s just something about what she’s seeing, something maybe she knows because for a moment she was a part of this obelisk, that’s where the power was coming from, something she won’t question too deeply because, Evil Earth, she can’t take this. The knowledge is there in her mind, impossible to deny no matter how much she might want to. When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt.
So she accepts that what she is looking at is a broken obelisk that has lain unknown on the floor of Allia’s harbor for Earth knows how long. She accepts that what is trapped at its heart, what has somehow broken this massive, magnificent, arcane thing… is a stone eater.
And it’s dead.
* * *
Father Earth thinks in ages, but he never, ever sleeps. Nor does he forget.
—Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse two
13
you’re on the trail
THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE at the vein, this small and petty creature. This is the bedrock of your life. Father Earth is right to despise you, but do not be ashamed. You may be a monster, but you are also great.
* * *
The commless woman is called Tonkee. That’s the only name she gives you: no use name, no comm name. You’re sure she is, despite her protestations, a geomest; she admits it—sort of—when you ask her why she’s following you. “He’s just too damn interesting,” Tonkee says, jerking her chin toward Hoa. “If I didn’t try to figure him out, my old masters at the uni would hire assassins to hunt me down. Not that they haven’t done that already!” She laughs like a horse, all bray and big white teeth. “I’d love a sample of his blood, but fat lot of good that will do me without proper equipment. So I’ll settle for observation.”
(Hoa looks annoyed at this, and pointedly makes an effort to keep you between himself and Tonkee as you walk.)
“The uni” she referred to, you are certain, is the Seventh University in Dibars—the most famous center of learning for ’mests and lorists in all the Stillness, located in the second-largest city of the Equatorials. And if that prestitious place is where Tonkee trained, rather than at some jumped-up regional creche for adults, or at the knee of some local tinkerer, then she has fallen very far indeed. But you’re too polite to say this aloud.
Tonkee does not live in an enclave of cannibals, despite her creative threats. You discover this when she leads you to her home that afternoon. Her home is a cave situated in a vesicle—the ancient fallen-in remains of a solidified lava bubble, this one once as big as a small hill. Now it’s a secluded glen in a pocket of forest, with curving columns of gleaming black glass interspersed among the trees. There are all sorts of odd little cavelets tucked into its sides, where smaller bubbles must’ve nestled against the larger, and Tonkee warns you that some of the ones on the far side of the vesicle are home to forest cats and other animals. Most of them are no threat, normally, but everything changes in a Season, so you’re careful to follow Tonkee’s lead.
Tonkee’s cavern is full of contraptions, books, and junk she’s scavenged, amid a lot of actually useful things like lanterns and storecache food. The cavern smells of fragrant resins from the fires she’s burned, but it quickly takes on Tonkee’s stench once she’s in and bustling about. You resign yourself to endure it, though Hoa doesn’t seem to notice or maybe care; you envy his stoicism. Fortunately it turns out that Tonkee did indeed bring all that water with her for a bath. She does this in front of you, shamelessly stripping down and squatting by a wooden basin to scrub at her pits and crotch and the rest. You’re a little surprised to notice a penis somewhere amid this process, but, well, not like any comm’s going to make her a Breeder. She finishes up by rinsing her clothes and hair with a murky green solution that she claims is antifungal. (You have your doubts.)
Anyway, the place smells much better when she’s done, so you spend a remarkably pleasant and cozy night there on your bedroll—she’s got spares, but you don’t want to risk lice—and even let Hoa curl up against you, though you turn your back to him so he won’t cuddle. He does not try.
The next day you resume the journey south, with Tonkee the commless geomest and Hoa the… whatever he is. Because you’re pretty sure by now that he’s not human. That doesn’t bother you; officially speaking, you’re not human, either. (Per the Second Yumenescene Lore Council’s Declaration on the Rights of the Orogenically Afflicted, a thousand-ish years ago.) What does bother you is that Hoa won’t talk about it. You ask about what he did to the kirkhusa and he refuses to answer. You ask him why he won’t answer, and he just looks miserable and says, “Because I want you to like me.”
It almost makes you feel normal, traveling with these two. The road demands most of your attention, in any case. The ashfall only gets heavier over the next few days, until you finally do pull the masks out of your runny-sack—you have four, fortunately, horribly—and hand them around. It’s clumpy ash for now, not the floating haze of death that stonelore warns against, but no sense being incautious. Other people have broken out their masks, too, you see when they materialize out of the grayness, their skin and hair and clothing hardly distinguishable from the ash-painted landscape, their eyes grazing over you and away. The masks make everyone equally unknown and unknowable, which is good. No one pays attention to you or Hoa or Tonkee, not anymore. You’re happy to join the indistinct masses.
By the end of a week, the crowds of people traveling along the road have begun to thin into knots and, occasionally, trickles. Everyone who has a comm is hurrying back there, and the thinning crowds mean most of them are finding somewhere to settle in. Now only those journeying farther than usual remain on the road, or people who don’t have a home to return to—like the hollow-eyed Equatorials you’ve seen, many of them sporting terr
ible burns or injuries that come from falling debris. The Equatorials are a brewing problem, because there’s a lot of them on the road even if the injured ones are mostly getting sick with infection and starting to die. (You pass at least one or two people every day who just sit there on the edges of the road, pale or flushed, curled up or shaking, waiting for the end to come.) There’s plenty left who seem hale enough, though, and they’re commless now. That’s always a problem.
You talk to a small group of these folk at the next roadhouse: five women of wildly varied ages and a very young, uncertain-looking man. This lot have removed most of the flowing, uselessly pretty garments that people in the Equatorial cities used to consider fashionable, you notice; somewhere along the way they’ve stolen or traded for sturdy clothes and proper travel gear. But each of them sports some remnant of the old life: The oldest woman wears a headscarf of frilly, stained blue satin; the youngest has gauzy sleeves poking out from under the heavier, more practical cloth of her tunic; the young man has a sash around his waist that is soft and peach colored and there solely for decoration, as far as you can tell.
Except it’s not really decoration. You notice how they look at you when you walk up: a sweep of the eyes, an inspection of your wrists or neck or ankles, a frown as you are found wanting. The impractical cloth has one very practical use: It is the marker of a new tribe in the process of being born. A tribe to which you do not belong.
Not a problem. Yet.
You ask them what happened in the north. You know, but being aware of a geological event and knowing what that event means in the real human sense are two very different things. They tell you, once you’ve held up your hands and made it clear you offer no (visible) threat.
“I was on my way home from a concert,” says one of the younger women, who does not introduce herself but should be—if she is not already—a Breeder. She’s what Sanzed women are supposed to look like, tall and strong and bronze and almost offensively healthy, with nice even features and wide hips, all of it crowned with a shock of gray ashblow hair that’s almost like a pelt about her shoulders. She jerks her head toward the young man, who lowers his gaze demurely. Just as pretty; probably a Breeder, too, though a bit on the scrawny side. Well, he’ll beef up if he’s got five women to service for his keep. “He was playing at the improvisation hall on Shemshena Street; this was in Alebid. The music was so beautiful…”
The Fifth Season Page 20