The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  Schaffa inclines his head. “Father Earth, of course. It is a common delusion.”

  Damaya blinks. What? It’s angry. What?

  “And you’re right; Timay wasn’t herself any longer. I’m sorry she hurt you. I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m so sorry, little one.” And there is such genuine regret in his voice, such compassion in his face, that Damaya does what she has not since a cold dark night in a Nomidlats barn: She begins to cry.

  After a moment Schaffa gets up and comes around the table and picks her up, sitting in the chair and letting her curl in his lap to weep on his shoulder. There is an order to life in the Fulcrum, see, and it is this: If one has not displeased them, the Guardians are the closest thing to safety a rogga will ever have. So Damaya cries for a long time—not just because of what she’s seen tonight. She cries because she has been inexpressibly lonely, and Schaffa… well. Schaffa loves her, in his tender and terrifying way. She does not pay attention to the bloody print his right hand leaves on her hip, or the press of his fingers—fingers strong enough to kill—against the base of her skull. Such things are irrelevant, in the grand scale.

  When the storm of weeping subsides, though, Schaffa strokes her back with his clean hand. “How are you feeling, Damaya?”

  She does not lift her head from his shoulder. He smells of sweat and leather and iron, things that she will forever associate with comfort and fear. “I’m all right.”

  “Good. I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  He squeezes her gently, encouraging. “I’m going to take you down the hall, to one of the crucibles, and there you will face the first ring test. I need you to pass it for me.”

  Damaya blinks, frowning, and lifts her head. He smiles at her, tenderly. By this she understands, in a flash of intuition, that this is a test of more than her orogeny. After all, most roggas are told of the test in advance, so that they can practice and prepare. This is happening for her now, without warning, because it is her only chance. She has proven herself disobedient. Unreliable. Because of this, Damaya will need to also prove herself useful. If she cannot…

  “I need you to live, Damaya.” Schaffa touches his forehead to her own. “My compassionate one. My life is so full of death. Please; pass this test for me.”

  There are so many things she wants to know. What Timay meant; what will happen to Binof; what is the socket and why was it hidden; what happened to Crack last year. Why Schaffa is even giving her this much of a chance. But there is an order to life in the Fulcrum, and her place within it is not to question a Guardian’s will.

  But…

  But…

  But. She turns her head, and looks at that single drop of her blood on the table.

  This is not right.

  “Damaya?”

  It isn’t right, what they’re doing to her. What this place does to everyone within its walls. What he’s making her do, to survive.

  “Will you do it? For me?”

  She still loves him. That isn’t right, either.

  “If I pass.” Damaya closes her eyes. She can’t look at him and say this. Not without letting him see the it isn’t right in her eyes. “I, I picked a rogga name.”

  He does not chide her on her language. “Have you, now?” He sounds pleased. “What?”

  She licks her lips. “Syenite.”

  Schaffa sits back in the chair, sounding thoughtful. “I like it.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do. You chose it, didn’t you?” He’s laughing, but in a good way. With her, not at her. “It forms at the edge of a tectonic plate. With heat and pressure it does not degrade, but instead grows stronger.”

  He does understand. She bites her lip and feels fresh tears threaten. It isn’t right that she loves him, but many things in the world are not right. So she fights off the tears, and makes her decision. Crying is weakness. Crying was a thing Damaya did. Syenite will be stronger.

  “I’ll do it,” Syenite says, softly. “I’ll pass the test for you, Schaffa. I promise.”

  “My good girl,” Schaffa says, and smiles, holding her close.

  * * *

  [obscured] those who would take the earth too closely unto themselves. They are not masters of themselves; allow them no mastery of others.

  —Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse nine

  18

  you discover wonders down below

  YKKA TAKES YOU INTO THE house from which she and her companions emerged. There’s little furniture inside, and the walls are bare. There’s scuffing on the floor and walls, a lingering smell of food and stale body musk; someone did live here, until recently. Maybe until the Season began. The house is only a shell now, though, as you and the others cut through to a cellar door. At the bottom of the steps you find a large, empty chamber lit only by wood-pitch torches.

  Here’s where you first start to realize this is more than just a bizarre community of people and not-people: The walls of the cellar are solid granite. Nobody quarries into granite just to build a cellar, and… and you’re not sure anyone dug this. Everyone stops while you go to one of the walls and touch it. You close your eyes and reach. Yes, there is the feel of something familiar here. Some rogga shaped this perfectly smooth wall, using will and a focus finer than you can imagine. (Though not the finest focus you’ve ever sessed.) You’ve never heard of anyone doing anything like this with orogeny. It’s not for building.

  Turning, you see Ykka watching you. “Your work?”

  She smiles. “No. This and other hidden entrances have been around for centuries, long before me.”

  “The people in this comm have worked with orogenes for that long?” She’d said the comm was only fifty years old.

  Ykka laughs. “No, I just mean that this world has passed through many hands down the Seasons. Not all of them were quite as stupid as ours about the usefulness of orogenes.”

  “We aren’t stupid about it now,” you say. “Everyone understands perfectly well how to use us.”

  “Ooh.” Ykka grimaces, pityingly. “Fulcrum trained? The ones who survive it always seem to sound like you.”

  You wonder how many Fulcrum-trained orogenes this woman has met. “Yes.”

  “Well. Now you’ll see how much more we’re capable of when we’re willing.” And Ykka gestures toward a wide opening in the wall a few feet beyond her, which you hadn’t noticed in your fascination with the cellar’s construction. A faint draft wafts into the cellar from beyond it. There’re also three people loitering at the mouth of the opening, watching you with varied expressions of hostility, wariness, amusement. They’re not carrying any weapons—those are propped against the wall nearby—and they’re not conspicuous about it, but you realize these are the gate guards this comm should have, for the gate this comm doesn’t have. Here, in this cellar.

  The blond woman speaks quietly with one of the guards; this emphasizes even more how tiny she is, a foot shorter and probably a hundred pounds lighter than the smallest of them. Her ancestors really should’ve done her a few favors and slept with a Sanzed or two. Anyway, then you move on and the guards stay behind, two taking seats on chairs nearby, the third heading back up the steps, presumably to keep a lookout from within the empty buildings topside.

  You make the paradigm shift then: The abandoned village up there is this comm’s wall. Camouflage rather than a barrier.

  Camouflage for what, though? You follow Ykka through the opening and into the dark beyond.

  “The core of this place has always been here,” she explains as you walk down a long dark tunnel that might be an abandoned mine shaft. There’s tracks for carts, though they’re so old and sunken into the gritty stone that you can’t really see them. Just awkward ridges beneath your feet. The wooden bracers of the tunnel look old, as do the wall sconces that hold cord-strung electric lights—they look like they were originally made to hold wooden torches and got retrofitted by some geneer. The lights are still working, which me
ans the comm’s got functional geo or hydro or both; better than Tirimo already. It’s warm in the shaft, too, but you don’t see any of the usual heating pipes. It’s just warm, and getting warmer as you follow the gently sloping floor downward.

  “I told you there were mines in the area. That’s how they found these, back in the day. Someone cracked a wall they shouldn’t have and blundered into a whole warren of tunnels nobody knew were there.” Ykka falls silent for a long while as the shaft widens out, and you all go down a set of dangerous-looking metal steps. There’s a lot of them. They look old, too—and yet strangely, the metal doesn’t seem distressed or rusted out. It’s smooth and shiny and all-over whole. The steps aren’t shaky at all.

  After a time you notice, belatedly, that the red-haired stone eater is gone. She didn’t follow you down into the shaft. Ykka doesn’t seem to notice, so you touch her arm. “Where’s your friend?” Though you sort of know.

  “My—oh, that one. Moving the way we do is hard for them, so they’ve got their own ways of getting about. Including ways I would never have guessed.” She glances at Hoa, who’s come down the steps with you. He looks back at her, coldly, and she breathes out a laugh. “Interesting.”

  At the bottom of the stairs there’s another tunnel, though it looks different for some reason. Curved at its top rather than squared, and the supports are some sort of thick, silvery stone columns, which arch partway up the walls like ribs. You can almost taste the age of these corridors through the pores of your skin.

  Ykka resumes. “Really, all the bedrock in this area is riddled with tunnels and intrusions, mines on top of mines. One civilization after another, building on what went before.”

  “Aritussid,” says Tonkee. “Jyamaria. The lower Ottey States.”

  You’ve heard of Jyamaria, from the history you used to teach in creche. It was the name of a large nation, the one that started the road system Sanze later improved upon, and which once spread over most of what is now the Somidlats. It died around ten Seasons ago. The rest of the names are probably those of other deadcivs; that seems like the sort of thing geomests would care about, even if no one else does.

  “Dangerous,” you say, as you try not to be too obvious with your unease. “If the rock here’s been compromised so much—”

  “Yes, yes. Though that’s a risk with any mining, as much because of incompetence as shakes.”

  Tonkee is turning and turning as she walks, taking it all in and still not bumping into anyone; amazing. “That northern shake was severe enough that even this should have come down,” she says.

  “You’re right. That shake—we’re calling it the Yumenes Rifting, since nobody’s come up with a better name yet—was the worst the world’s seen in an age. I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying so.” Ykka shrugs and glances back at you. “But of course, the tunnels didn’t collapse, because I was here. I didn’t let them.”

  You nod, slowly. It’s no different than what you did for Tirimo, except Ykka must have taken care to protect more than just the surface. The area must be relatively stable anyway, or these tunnels would’ve all collapsed ages ago.

  But you say: “You won’t always be around.”

  “When I’m not, someone else will do it.” She shrugs. “Like I said, there’s a lot of us here now.”

  “About that—” Tonkee pivots on one foot and suddenly her whole attention is on Ykka. Ykka laughs.

  “Kind of single-minded, aren’t you?”

  “Not really.” You suspect Tonkee is still simultaneously taking note of the supports and wall composition, counting your paces, whatever, all while she talks. “So how are you doing it? Luring orogenes here.”

  “Luring?” Ykka shakes her head. “It’s not that sinister. And it’s hard to describe. There’s a… a thing I do. Like—” She falls silent.

  And all at once, you stumble while you’re walking. There’s no obstruction on the floor. It’s just suddenly difficult to walk in a straight line, as if the floor has developed an invisible downward slope. Toward Ykka.

  You stop and glare at her. She stops as well, turning to smile at you. “How are you doing that?” you demand.

  “I don’t know.” She spreads her hands at your disbelieving look. “It’s just something I tried, a few years ago. And not too long after I started doing it, a man came to town and said he’d felt me from miles away. Then two kids showed up; they didn’t even realize what they were reacting to. Then another man. I’ve kept doing it since.”

  “Doing what?” Tonkee asks, looking from you to Ykka.

  “Only roggas feel it,” Ykka explains, though by this point you’ve figured that out for yourself. Then she glances at Hoa, who is watching both of you, utterly still. “And them, I realized later.”

  “About that,” Tonkee blurts.

  “Earthfires and rustbuckets, you ask too many questions.” This comes from the blond woman, who shakes her head and gestures for all of you to keep walking.

  There are faint occasional noises up ahead now, and the air is moving, noticeably. But how can that be? You must be a mile down, maybe twice that. The breeze is warm and tinged with scents you’ve almost forgotten after weeks of breathing sulfur and ash through a mask. A bit of cooking food here, a waft of rotting garbage there, a breath of burning wood. People. You’re smelling people. Lots of them. And there’s a light—much stronger than the strings of electric lights along the walls—straight ahead.

  “An underground comm?” Tonkee says what you’re thinking, though she sounds more skeptical. (You know more about impossible things than she does.) “No, nobody’s that stupid.”

  Ykka only laughs.

  Then as the peculiar light starts to brighten the shaft around you, and the air moves faster and the noise grows, there’s a place where the tunnel opens out and becomes a wide ledge with a metal railing for safety. A scenic viewpoint, because some geneer or Innovator understood exactly how newcomers would react. You do exactly as that long-ago designer intended: You stare in openmouthed, abject wonder.

  It’s a geode. You can sess that, the way the rock around you abruptly changes to something else. The pebble in the stream, the warp in the weft; countless aeons ago a bubble formed in a flow of molten mineral within Father Earth. Within that pocket, nurtured by incomprehensible pressures and bathed in water and fire, crystals grew. This one’s the size of a city.

  Which is probably why someone built a city in this one.

  You stand before a vast, vaulted cavern that is full of glowing crystal shafts the size of tree trunks. Big tree trunks. Or buildings. Big buildings. They jut forth from the walls in an utterly haphazard jumble: different lengths, different circumferences, some white and translucent and a few smoky or tinged with purple. Some are stubby, their pointed tips ending only a few feet away from the walls that grew them—but many stretch from one side of the vast cavern into the indistinct distance. They form struts and roads too steep to climb, going in directions that make no sense. It is as if someone found an architect, made her build a city out of the most beautiful materials available, then threw all those buildings into a box and jumbled them up for laughs.

  And they’re definitely living in it. As you stare, you notice narrow rope bridges and wooden platforms everywhere. There are dangling lines strung with electric lanterns, ropes and pulleys carrying small lifts from one platform to another. In the distance a man walks down a wooden stairway built around a titanic slanted column of white; two children play on the ground far below, in between stubby crystals the size of houses.

  Actually, some of the crystals are houses. They have holes cut in them—doors and windows. You can see people moving around inside some of them. Smoke curls from chimney holes cut in pointed crystal tips.

  “Evil, eating Earth,” you whisper.

  Ykka stands with hands on her hips, watching your reaction with something like pride in her expression. “We didn’t do most of this,” she admits. “The recent additions, the newer bridges, yes, but t
he shaft-hollowing had already been done. We don’t know how they managed it without shattering the crystals. The walkways that are made of metal—it’s the same stuff as the steps in the tunnels we just passed through. The geneers have no idea how it’s made; metallorists and alchemists have orgasms when they see it. There are mechanisms up there”—She points toward the barely visible ceiling of the cavern, hundreds of feet above your heads. You barely hear her, your mind numb, your eyes beginning to ache from staring without blinking—“that pump bad air into a layer of porous earth that filters and disperses it back onto the surface. Other pumps bring in good air. There are mechanisms just outside the geode that divert water from an underground hot spring a ways off, through a turbine that gives us electric power—took ages to figure that part out—and also bring it in for day-to-day use.” She sighs. “But to be really honest, we don’t know how half the stuff we’ve found here works. All of it was built long ago. Long before Old Sanze ever existed.”

  “Geodes are unstable once their shells are breached.” Even Tonkee sounds floored. In your peripheral vision she is still for the first time since you met her. “It doesn’t make sense to even think of building inside one. And why are the crystals glowing?”

  She’s right. They are.

  Ykka shrugs, folding her arms. “No idea. But the people who built this wanted it to last, even through a shake, so they did things to the geode to make sure that would happen. And it did… but they didn’t. When people from Castrima found this, it was full of skeletons—some so old they turned to dust as soon as we touched them.”

  “So your comm forebears decided to move everyone into a giant deadciv artifact that killed the last few people who risked it,” you drawl. It’s weak snark, though. You’re too shaken to really get the tone right. “Of course. Why not repeat a colossal mistake?”