The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  She has heard grits whisper of this after lights-out. All Guardians are strange, but this is what makes them what they are: Somehow, they can stop orogeny with a flick of their will. And some of them are especially strange, specialized to be stranger than the rest. Some of them do not have orogene charges and are never allowed near untrained children, because they are dangerous merely by proximity. These Guardians do nothing but track down the most powerful rogue orogenes, and when they find them… well. Syenite never particularly wanted to know what they did, before now, but it seems she’s about to find out. Underfires, she’s as numb to the earth as the most rust-brained elder. Is this what it’s like for stills? Is this all they feel? She has envied their normalcy her whole life, until now.

  But. As Edki walks toward her with the poniard ready, there is a tightness around his eyes, a grim set to his mouth, which makes her think of how she feels when she has a bad headache. This is what makes her blurt: “A-are you, ah, all right?” She has no idea why she asks this.

  At this, Edki cocks his head; the smile returns to his face, gentle and surprised. “How kind you are. I’m fine, little one. Just fine.” But he’s still coming at her.

  She scrambles backward again, tries to get to her feet again, tries again to reach for power, and fails in all three efforts. Even if she could succeed, though—he’s a Guardian. It’s her duty to obey. It’s her duty to die, if he wills it.

  This is not right.

  “Please,” she says, desperate, wild with it. “Please, we haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t understand, I don’t…”

  “You need not understand,” he says, with perfect kindness. “You need do only one thing.” And then he lunges, aiming the poniard at her chest.

  Later she will understand the sequence of events.

  Later she will realize everything occurred in the span of a gasp. For now, however, it is slow. The passage of time becomes meaningless. She is aware only of the glassknife, huge and sharp, its facets gleaming in the fading dusk. It seems to come at her gradually, gracefully, drawing out her duty-bound terror.

  This has never been right.

  She is aware only of the gritty wood beneath her fingers, and the useless pittance of warmth and movement that is all she can sess beneath that. Can’t shift much more than a pebble with that.

  She is aware of Alabaster, twitching because he is convulsing, how did she not realize this before, he is not in control of his own body, there is something about the glassknife in his shoulder that has rendered him helpless for all his power, and the look on his face is of helpless fear and agony.

  She becomes aware that she is angry. Furious. Duty be damned. What this Guardian is doing, what all Guardians do, is not right.

  And then—

  And then—

  And then—

  She becomes aware of the obelisk.

  (Alabaster, twitching harder, opens his mouth wider, his eyes fixing on hers despite the uncontrollability of the rest of his flesh. The fleeting memory of his warning rings in her mind, though in that instant she cannot recall the words.)

  The knife is halfway to her heart. She is very very aware of this.

  We are the gods in chains and this is not. Rusting. Right.

  So she reaches again, not down but up, not straight but to the side—

  No, Alabaster is shaping his mouth to say, through his twitches.

  —and the obelisk draws her into its shivering, jittering bloodred light. She is falling up. She is being dragged up, and in. She is completely out of control, oh Father Earth, Alabaster was right, this thing is too much for her—

  —and she screams because she has forgotten that this obelisk is broken. It hurts as she grinds across the zone of damage, each of the cracks seaming through her and shattering her and splitting her into pieces, until—

  —until she stops, hovering and curled in agony, amid the cracked redness.

  It isn’t real. It cannot be real. She feels herself also lying on sandy wooden boards with fading sunlight on her skin. She does not feel the Guardian’s glassknife, or at least not yet. But she is here, too. And she sees, though sessapinae are not eyes and the “sight” is all in her imagination:

  The stone eater at the core of the obelisk floats before her.

  It’s her first time being close to one. All the books say that stone eaters are neither male nor female, but this one resembles a slender young man formed of white-veined black marble, clothed in smooth robes of iridescent opal. Its—his?—limbs, marbled and polished, splay as if frozen in mid-fall. His head is flung back, his hair loose and curling behind him in a splash of translucence. The cracks spread over his skin and the stiff illusion of his clothing, into him, through him.

  Are you all right? she wonders, and she has no idea why she wonders it, even as she herself cracks apart. His flesh is so terribly fissured; she wants to hold her breath, lest she damage him further. But that is irrational, because she isn’t here and this isn’t real. She is on a street about to die, but this stone eater has been dead for an age of the world.

  The stone eater closes his mouth, and opens his eyes, and lowers his head to look at her. “I’m fine,” he says. “Thank you for asking.”

  And then

  the obelisk

  shatters.

  15

  you’re among friends

  YOU REACH “THE PLACE WITH all the orogenes,” and it’s not at all what you were expecting. It’s abandoned, for one thing. It’s not a comm, for another.

  Not in any real sense of the word. The road gets wider as you approach, flattening into the land until it vanishes completely near the middle of town. A lot of comms do this, get rid of the road to encourage travelers to stop and trade, but those comms usually have some place to trade in, and you can’t see anything here that looks like a storefront or marketplace or even an inn. Worse, it doesn’t have a wall. Not a stone pile, not a wire fence, not even a few sharpened sticks jabbed into the ground around the town perimeter. There’s nothing to separate this community from the land around it, which is forested and covered in scraggly underbrush that makes perfect cover for an attacking force.

  But in addition to the town’s apparent abandonment, and lack of a wall, there are other oddities. Lots of them, you notice as you and the others look around. There aren’t enough fields, for one. A comm that can hold a few hundred people, as this one seems to be able to do, should have more than the single (stripped bare) hectare of scraggly choya stalks that you noticed on the way in. It should have a bigger pasture than the small plot of dried-out green you see near the town’s center. You don’t see a storehouse, either, elevated or otherwise. Okay, maybe that’s hidden; lots of comms do that. But then you notice that all the buildings are in wildly varied styles: this one tall and city-narrow, that one wide and flat to the ground like something from a warmer climate, yet another that looks to be a sod-covered dome half set into the earth like your old house in Tirimo. There’s a reason most comms pick a style and stick to it: Uniformity sends a visual message. It warns potential attackers that the comm’s members are equally unified in purpose and the willingness to defend themselves. This comm’s visual message is… confused. Uncaring, maybe. Something you can’t interpret. Something that makes you more nervous than if the comm had been teeming with hostile people instead.

  You and the others proceed warily, slowly, through the empty streets of the town. Tonkee’s not even pretending to be at ease. She’s got twin glassknives in her hands, stark and black-bladed; you don’t know where she’s been hiding them although that skirt of hers could conceal an army. Hoa seems calm, but who can really tell what Hoa feels? He seemed calm when he turned a kirkhusa into a statue, too.

  You don’t pull your knife. If there really are lots of roggas here, there’s only one weapon that will save you if they take exception to your presence.

  “You sure this is the right place?” you say to Hoa.

  Hoa nods emphatically. Which means that there are
lots of people here; they’re just hiding. But why? And how could they have seen you coming through the ashfall?

  “Can’t have been gone long,” Tonkee mutters. She’s staring at a dead garden near one of the houses. It’s been picked over by travelers or the former inhabitants, anything edible among its dried stalks gone. “These houses look in good repair. And that garden was healthy until a couple of months ago.”

  You’re momentarily surprised to realize you’ve been on the road for two months. Two months since Uche. A little less since the ash started to fall.

  Then, swiftly, you focus on the here and now. Because after the three of you stop in the middle of town and stand there awhile in confusion, the door of one of the nearby buildings opens, and three women come out on the porch.

  The first one you pay attention to has a crossbow in her hands. For a minute that’s all you see, same as that last day in Tirimo, but you don’t immediately ice her because the crossbow isn’t aimed at you. She’s just got it leaned against one arm, and although there’s a look on her face that warns you she has no problem using it, you also think she won’t do it without provocation. Her skin is almost as white as Hoa’s, although thankfully her hair is simply yellow and her eyes are a nice normal brown. She’s petite, small-boned and poorly fleshed and narrow-hipped in a way that would prompt the average Equatorial to make snide remarks about bad breeding. An Antarctic, probably from a comm too poor to feed its kids well. She’s a long way from home.

  The one who draws your eye next is nearly her opposite, and quite possibly the most intimidating woman you’ve ever seen. It has nothing to do with her looks. Those are just Sanzed: the expected pouf of slate-gray hair and the expected deep brown skin and the expected size and visible strength of build. Her eyes are shockingly black—shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she’s wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending. You don’t know whether to be awed or affronted by that.

  And she wields those black-clad eyes like piercing weapons, holding each of your gazes at eyepoint for an instant before finally examining the rest of your gear and clothing. She’s not quite as tall as Sanzeds like their women—shorter than you—but she’s wearing a thick brown-fur vest that hangs to her ankles. The vest sort of makes her look like a small, yet fashionable, bear. There’s something in her face, though, that makes you flinch a little. You’re not sure what it is. She’s grinning, showing all her teeth; her gaze is steady, neither welcoming nor uneasy. It’s the steadiness that you recognize, finally, from seeing it a few times before: confidence. That kind of utter, unflinching embrace of self is common in stills, but you weren’t expecting to see it here.

  Because she’s a rogga, of course. You know your own when you sess it. And she knows you.

  “All right,” the woman says, putting her hands on her hips. “How many in your party, three? I assume you don’t want to be parted.”

  You sort of stare at her for a breath or two. “Hello,” you say at last. “Uh.”

  “Ykka,” she says. You realize it’s a name. Then she adds, “Ykka Rogga Castrima. Welcome. And you are?”

  You blurt: “Rogga?” You use this word all the time, but hearing it like this, as a use name, emphasizes its vulgarity. Naming yourself rogga is like naming yourself pile of shit. It’s a slap in the face. It’s a statement—of what, you can’t tell.

  “That, ah, isn’t one of the seven common use names,” says Tonkee. Her voice is wry; you think she’s trying to make a joke to cover nerves. “Or even one of the five lesser-accepted ones.”

  “Let’s call this one new.” Ykka’s gaze flickers over each of your companions, assessing, then back to you. “So your friends know what you are.”

  Startled, you look at Tonkee, who’s staring at Ykka the way she stares at Hoa when Hoa isn’t hiding behind you—as if Ykka is a fascinating new mystery to maybe get a blood sample from. Tonkee meets your gaze for a moment with such an utter lack of surprise or fear that you realize Ykka’s right; she probably figured it out sometime ago.

  “Rogga as a use name.” Tonkee’s thoughtful as she focuses on Ykka again. “So many implications to that one. And Castrima; that’s not one of the Imperial Registry-listed Somidlats comm names, either, although I’ll admit I might just have forgotten it. There’s hundreds, after all. I don’t think I have, though; I’ve got a good memory. This a newcomm?”

  Ykka inclines her head, partly in affirmation and partly in ironic acknowledgment of Tonkee’s fascination. “Technically. This version of Castrima has been around for maybe fifty years. It isn’t really a comm at all, officially—just another lodging stop for people heading along the Yumenes–Mecemera and Yumenes–Ketteker routes. We get more business than most because there are mines in the area.”

  She pauses then, gazing at Hoa, and for a moment her expression tightens. You look at Hoa, too, puzzled, because granted, he’s strange-looking, but you’re not sure what he’s done to merit that kind of tension from a stranger. That’s when you finally notice that Hoa has gone utterly still, and his little face has sharpened from its usual cheerfulness into something taut and angry and almost feral. He’s glaring at Ykka like he wants to kill her.

  No. Not Ykka. You follow his gaze to the third member of Ykka’s party, who’s stayed slightly behind the other two till now, and whom you haven’t really paid attention to because Ykka’s so eye-catching. A tall, slender woman—and then you stop, frowning, because all at once you’re not sure about that designation. The female part, sure; her hair is Antarctic-lank and deep red in color, decoratively long, framing features that are finely lined. It’s clear she means to be read as a woman, though she’s only wearing a long, loose sleeveless gown that should be far too thin for the cooling air.

  But her skin. You’re staring, it’s rude, not the best way to start things off with these people, but you can’t help it. Her skin. It’s not just smooth, it’s… glossy, sort of. Almost polished. She’s either got the most amazing complexion you’ve ever seen, or—or that isn’t skin.

  The red-haired woman smiles, and the sight of her teeth confirms it even as you shiver to your bones.

  Hoa hisses like a cat in reply to that smile. And as he does so, finally, terribly, you see his teeth clearly for the first time. He never eats in front of you, after all. He never shows them when he smiles. They’re colored in where hers are transparent, enamel-white as a kind of camouflage—but not so different from the red-haired woman’s in shape. Not squared but faceted. Diamondine.

  “Evil Earth,” mutters Tonkee. You feel that she speaks for the both of you.

  Ykka glances sharply at her companion. “No.”

  The red-haired woman’s eyes flick toward Ykka. No other part of her moves, the rest of her body remaining stock-still. Statue-still. “It can be done without harm to you or your companions.” Her mouth doesn’t move, either. The voice sounds oddly hollow, echoing up from somewhere inside her chest.

  “I don’t want anything ‘done.’” Ykka puts her hands on her hips. “This my place, and you’ve agreed to abide by my rules. Back off.”

  The blond woman shifts a little. She doesn’t bring the crossbow up, but you think she’s ready to do so at a moment’s notice. For whatever good that will do. The red-haired woman doesn’t move for a moment, and then she closes her mouth to hide those awful diamond teeth. As she does this, you realize several things at once. The first is that she wasn’t actually smiling. It was a threat display, like the way a kirkhusa draws back its lips to bare its fangs. The second is that with her mouth closed and that placid expression, she looks far less unnerving.

  The third realization you have is that Hoa was making the same threat display. But he relaxes, and closes his mouth, as the red-haired woman eases back.

  Ykka exhales. She focuses on you again.

  “I think perhaps,” she says, “you’d better come inside.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the
best idea in the world,” Tonkee says to you, pleasantly.

  “Neither am I,” says the blond woman, glaring at Ykka’s head. “You sure about that, Yeek?”

  Ykka shrugs, though you think she’s not nearly as nonchalant as she seems. “When am I sure about anything? But it seems like a good idea, for now.”

  You’re not sure you agree. Still—strange comm or not, mythical creatures or not, unpleasant surprises or not, you came here for a reason.

  “Did a man and a girl come through here?” you ask. “Father and daughter. The man would be about my age, the girl eight—” Two months. You’ve almost forgotten. “Nine years old. She—” You falter. Stutter. “Sh-she looks like me.”

  Ykka blinks, and you realize you’ve genuinely surprised her. Clearly she was braced for entirely different questions. “No,” she says, and—

  —and there’s a sort of skip inside you.

  It hurts to hear that simple “no.” It hits like a hachet blow, and the salt in the wound is Ykka’s look of honest perplexity. That means she’s not lying. You flinch and sway with the impact, with the death of all your hopes. It occurs to you through a haze of floating not-quite-thought that you’ve been expecting something since Hoa told you about this place. You were beginning to think you would find them here, have a daughter again, be a mother again. Now you know better.

  “S—Essun?” Hands grasp your forearms. Whose? Tonkee. Her hands are rough with hard living. You hear her calluses rasp on the leather of your jacket. “Essun—oh, rust, don’t.”