The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  But Evil Earth, this is so much better than sitting around on the island, fishing and singing lullabies.

  It’s over in minutes. When the commotion dies down and Syenite dares to venture up top again, she sees that planks have been run between the two vessels and Innon’s people are running back and forth along them. Some of them have captured members of the cargo vessel’s crew and corralled them on deck, holding them at glassknife-point; the rest of the crew is surrendering, giving up weapons and valuables, for fear the hostages will be hurt. Already some of Innon’s sailors are going into the holds, bringing up barrels and crates and carting them across to the Clalsu’s deck. They’ll sort out the booty later. Speed is of the essence now.

  But all at once there are shouts and someone in the rigging hits a bell frantically—and out of the roiling fog looms the attack ship that accompanied the cargo vessel. It’s on them, and belatedly Syenite realizes her error: she had assumed that the attack ship would stop given that it couldn’t see, knowing itself in proximity to other vessels. People are not that logical. Now the attack ship is coming at full speed, and even though she can hear cries of alarm from its decks as they also realize the danger, there’s no way it will be able to stop before it rams into Clalsu and the cargo ship… and probably sinks all three.

  Syenite is brimming with power drawn from the warmth and boundless waves of the sea. She reacts, as she has been taught in a hundred Fulcrum drills, without thinking. Down, through the strange slipperiness of seawater minerals, through the soggy uselessness of the ocean sediment, down. There is stone beneath the ocean, and it is old and raw and hers to command.

  In another place she claws up with her hands and shouts and thinks Up, and suddenly the attack ship cracks loudly and jerks to a halt. People stop screaming, shocked into silence, on all three vessels. This is because suddenly there is a massive, jagged knife of bedrock jutting several feet above the attack ship’s deck, skewering the vessel from the keel up.

  Shaking, Syenite lowers her hands slowly.

  The cries aboard the Clalsu turn from alarm into ragged cheers. Even a few of the cargo vessel’s people look relieved; one ship damaged is better than three ships sunk.

  Things go quickly after that, with the attack ship helpless and skewered as it is. Innon comes to find her just as the crew reports that the cargo ship’s hold is empty. Syen has moved to the bow, where she can see people on the attack ship’s deck trying to chisel at the pillar.

  Innon stops beside her, and she looks up, braced for his anger. But he is far from angry.

  “I did not know one could do such things,” he says wonderingly. “I thought you and Alabaster were only boasting.”

  It is the first time Syenite has been praised for her orogeny by someone not of the Fulcrum, and if she had not already begun to love Innon, she would now. “I shouldn’t have brought it up so high,” she says, sheepishly. “If I’d thought first, I would’ve raised the column only enough to breach the hull so they’d think they ran over an obstacle.”

  Innon sobers as he understands. “Ah. And now they know we have an orogene of some skill aboard.” His expression hardens in a way that Syenite does not understand, but she decides not to question it. It feels so good to stand here, with him, basking in the glow of success. For a while they just watch the cargo vessel’s unloading together.

  Then one of Innon’s crewmen runs up to say they’re done, the planks have been withdrawn, the ropes and hooks rolled back onto their crankwheels. They’re ready to go. Innon says in a heavy voice, “Hold.”

  She almost knows what is coming then. But it still makes her feel ill when he looks at Syenite, his expression ice. “Sink them both.”

  She has promised never to question Innon’s orders. Even so, she hesitates. She has never killed anyone before, not deliberately. It was just a mistake that she brought the stone projection up so high. Is it really necessary that people die for her folly? He steps close, and she flinches preemptively, even though he has never harmed her. Her hand bones twinge regardless.

  But Innon only says into her ear, “For ’Baster and Coru.”

  That makes no sense. ’Baster and Coru are not here. But then the full implication of his words—that the safety of everyone in Meov depends on the mainlanders seeing them as a nuisance rather than a serious threat—sinks in, and makes her cold, too. Colder.

  So she says, “You should move us away.”

  Innon turns at once and gives the order for the Clalsu to set sail. Once they have drifted to a safe distance, Syenite takes a deep breath.

  For her family. It is strange, thinking of them as such, though that is what they are. Stranger still to do something like this for a real reason, and not simply because she has been commanded to. Does that mean she is no longer a weapon? What does that make her, then, if not?

  Doesn’t matter.

  At a flick of her will, the bedrock column extracts itself from the attack ship’s hull—leaving a ten-foot hole near the stern. It begins sinking immediately, tipping upward as it takes on water. Then, dragging more strength from the ocean surface and raising fog enough to obscure sight for miles, Syenite shifts the column to aim at the cargo vessel’s keel. A quick thrust up, a quicker withdrawal. Like stabbing someone to death with a poniard. The ship’s hull cracks like an egg, and after a moment splits into two halves. It’s done.

  The fog completely obscures both sinking ships as the Clalsu sails away. The two crews’ screams follow Syenite long after, into the drifting whiteness.

  * * *

  Innon makes an exception for her, that night. Later, sitting up in his captain’s bed, Syen says, “I want to see Allia.”

  Innon sighs. “No. You don’t.”

  But he gives the order anyway, because he loves her. The ship charts a new course.

  * * *

  According to legend, Father Earth did not originally hate life.

  In fact, as the lorists tell it, once upon a time Earth did everything he could to facilitate the strange emergence of life on his surface. He crafted even, predictable seasons; kept changes of wind and wave and temperature slow enough that every living being could adapt, evolve; summoned waters that purified themselves, skies that always cleared after a storm. He did not create life—that was happenstance—but he was pleased and fascinated by it, and proud to nurture such strange wild beauty upon his surface.

  Then people began to do horrible things to Father Earth. They poisoned waters beyond even his ability to cleanse, and killed much of the other life that lived on his surface. They drilled through the crust of his skin, past the blood of his mantle, to get at the sweet marrow of his bones. And at the height of human hubris and might, it was the orogenes who did something that even Earth could not forgive: They destroyed his only child.

  No lorist that Syenite has ever talked to knows what this cryptic phrase means. It isn’t stonelore, just oral tradition occasionally recorded on ephemerals like paper and hide, and too many Seasons have changed it. Sometimes it’s the Earth’s favorite glassknife that the orogenes destroyed; sometimes it’s his shadow; sometimes it’s his most valued Breeder. Whatever the words mean, the lorists and ’mests agree on what happened after the orogenes committed their great sin: Father Earth’s surface cracked like an eggshell. Nearly every living thing died as his fury became manifest in the first and most terrible of the Fifth Seasons: the Shattering Season. Powerful as they were, those ancient people had no warning, no time to build storecaches, and no stonelore to guide them. It is only through sheer luck that enough of humankind survived to replenish itself afterward—and never again has life attained the heights of power that it once held. Earth’s recurrent fury will never allow that.

  Syenite has always wondered about these tales. There’s a degree of poetic license in them, of course, primitive people trying to explain what they didn’t understand… but all legends contain a kernel of truth. Maybe the ancient orogenes did shatter the planet’s crust, somehow. How, though? It’s clea
r now that there’s more to orogeny than what the Fulcrum teaches—and maybe there’s a reason the Fulcrum doesn’t teach it, if the legend is true. But facts are facts: Even if somehow every orogene in existence down to the infants could be yoked together, they could not destroy the world’s surface. It would ice everything; there’s not enough warmth or movement anywhere to do that much damage. They’d all burn themselves out trying, and die.

  Which means that part of the tale can’t be true; orogeny cannot be to blame for the Earth’s rage. Not that anyone but another rogga would accept this conclusion.

  It is truly amazing, though, that humanity managed to survive the fires of that first Season. Because if the whole world was then as Allia is now… Syenite has a fresh understanding of just how much Father Earth hates them all.

  Allia is a nightscape of red, blistering death. There is nothing left of the comm except the caldera ring that once cradled it, and even that is hard to see. Squinting through the red wavering haze, Syen thinks she can glimpse a few leftover buildings and streets on the caldera’s slopes, but that might just be wishful thinking.

  The night sky is thick with ash clouds, underlit by the glow of fire. Where the harbor was, there is now a growing volcano cone, gushing deadly clouds and hot red birth-blood on its climb out of the sea. It’s already huge, occupying nearly the entire caldera bowl, and it has already borne offspring. Two additional vents crouch against its flank, belching gas and lava like their parent. Likely all three will eventually grow together to become a single monster, engulfing the surrounding mountains and threatening every comm in range of its gas clouds or subsequent blows.

  Everyone Syenite met in Allia is dead now. The Clalsu can’t go within five miles of the shore; any closer and they risk death, whether by warping the ship’s hull in the heated waters, or by suffocating in the hot clouds that periodically gout forth from the mountain. Or by cooking themselves over one of the subsidiary vents that are still developing around the area, spreading out from what was once Allia’s harbor like the spokes of a wheel and lurking like deadly mines beneath the waters offshore. Syen can sess every one of these hot spots, bright churning ragestorms just beneath the Earth’s skin. Even Innon can sess them, and he’s steered the ship away from those that are most likely to burst through anytime soon. But as fragile as the strata are right now, a new vent could open right under them before Syen has a chance to detect or stop it. Innon’s risking a lot to indulge her.

  “Many in the outlying parts of the comm managed to escape,” Innon says softly, beside her. The Clalsu’s whole crew has come up on deck, staring at Allia in silence. “They say there was a flash of red light from the harbor, then a series of flashes, in a rhythm. Like something… pulsing. But the initial concussion, when the whole damned harbor boiled away at once, flattened most of the smaller houses in the comm. That’s what killed most people. There was no warning.” Syenite twitches.

  No warning. There were almost a hundred thousand people in Allia—small by the standards of the Equatorials, but big for a Coaster comm. Proud, justifiably so. They’d had such hopes.

  Rust this. Rust it and burn it in the foul, hateful guts of Father Earth.

  “Syenite?” Innon is staring at her. This is because Syen has raised her fists before her, as if she is grasping the reins of a straining, eager horse. And because a narrow, high, tight torus has suddenly manifested around her. It isn’t cold; there’s plenty of earth-power for her to tap nearby. But it is powerful, and even an untrained rogga can sess the gathering flex of her will. Innon inhales and takes a step back. “Syen, what are you—”

  “I can’t leave it like this,” she murmurs, almost to herself. The whole area is a swelling, deadly boil ready to burst. The volcano is only the first warning. Most vents in the earth are tiny, convoluted things, struggling to escape through varying layers of rock and metal and their own inertia. They seep and cool and plug themselves and then seep upward again, twisting and winding every which way in the process. This, though, is a gigantic lava tube channeled straight up from wherever the garnet obelisk has gone, funneling pure Earth-hate toward the surface. If nothing is done, the whole region will soon blow sky-high, in a massive explosion that will almost surely touch off a Season. She cannot believe the Fulcrum has left things like this.

  So Syenite stabs herself into that churning, building heat, and tears at it with all the fury she feels at seeing Allia, this was Allia, this was a human place, there were people here. People who didn’t deserve to die because

  of me

  because they were too stupid to let sleeping obelisks lie, or because they dared to dream of a future. No one deserves to die for that.

  It’s almost easy. This is what orogenes do, after all, and the hot spot is ripe for her use. The danger lies in not using it, really. If she takes in all that heat and force without channeling it elsewhere, it will destroy her. But fortunately—she laughs to herself, and her whole body shakes with it—she’s got a volcano to choke off.

  So she curls the fingers of one hand into a fist, and sears down its throat with her awareness, not burning but cooling, turning its own fury back on it to seal every breach. She forces the growing magma chamber back, back, down, down—and as she does so, she deliberately drags together the strata in overlapping patterns so that each will press down on the one below it and keep the magma down, at least until it finds another, slower way to wend its way to the surface. It’s a delicate sort of operation, for all that it involves millions of tons of rock and the sorts of pressures that force diamonds into existence. But Syenite is a child of the Fulcrum, and the Fulcrum has trained her well.

  She opens her eyes to find herself in Innon’s arms, with the ship heaving beneath her feet. Blinking in surprise, she looks up at Innon, whose eyes are wide and wild. He notices that she’s back, and the expressions of relief and fear on his face are both heartening and sobering.

  “I told everyone you would not kill us,” he says, over the churning of the sea spray and the shouts of his crew. She looks around and sees them frantically trying to lower the sails, so that they can have more control amid a sea that is suddenly anything but placid. “Please try not to make me a liar, would you?”

  Shit. She’s used to working orogeny on land, and forgot to account for the effects of her fault-sealing on water. They were shakes for a good purpose, but shakes nevertheless, and—oh Earth, she can feel it. She’s touched off a tsunami. And—she winces and groans as her sessapinae set up a ringing protest at the back of her head. She’s overdone it.

  “Innon.” Her head is ringing agony. “You need—nnh. Push waves of matching amplitude, subsurface…”

  “What?” He looks away from her to shout something to one of the crewwomen in his tongue, and she curses inwardly. Of course he has no idea what she’s talking about. He does not speak Fulcrum.

  But then, all at once, there is a chill in the air all around them. The wood of the ship groans with the temperature change. Syen gasps in alarm, but it’s not much of a change, really. Just the difference between a summer night and an autumn one, albeit over the span of minutes—and there is a presence to this change that is familiar as warm hands in the night. Innon abruptly inhales as he recognizes it, too: Alabaster. Of course his range stretches this far. He quells the gathering waves in moments.

  When he’s done, the ship sits on placid waters once more, facing the volcano of Allia… which has now gone quiet and dark. It’s still smoking and will be hot for decades, but it no longer vents fresh magma or gas. The skies above are already clearing.

  Leshiye, Innon’s first mate, comes over, throwing an uneasy look at Syenite. He says something too fast for Syenite to translate fully, but she gets the gist of it: Tell her next time she decides to stop a volcano, get off the ship first.

  Leshiye’s right. “Sorry,” Syen mutters in Eturpic, and the man grumbles and stomps off.

  Innon shakes his head and lets her go, calling for the sails to be unfurled once again. He gla
nces down at her. “You all right?”

  “Fine.” She rubs at her head. “Just never worked anything that big before.”

  “I did not think you could. I thought only ones like Alabaster—with many rings, more than yours—could do so. But you are as powerful as he.”

  “No.” Syenite laughs a little, gripping the railing and clinging to it so she won’t need to lean on him for support anymore. “I just do what’s possible. He rewrites the rusting laws of nature.”

  “Heh.” Innon sounds odd, and Syenite glances at him in surprise to see an almost regretful look on his face. “Sometimes, when I see what you and he can do, I wish I had gone to this Fulcrum of yours.”

  “No, you don’t.” She doesn’t even want to think about what he would be like if he had grown up in captivity with the rest of them. Innon, but without his booming laugh or vivacious hedonism or cheerful confidence. Innon, with his graceful strong hands weaker and clumsier for having been broken. Not Innon.

  He smiles ruefully at her now, as if he has guessed her thoughts. “Someday, you must tell me what it’s like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent… and so very afraid.”

  With that, he pats her back and heads off to oversee the course change.

  But Syenite stays where she is at the railing, suddenly chilled to the bone in a way that has nothing to do with the passing flex of Alabaster’s power.

  That is because, as the ship tilts to one side in its turnabout, and she takes one last look back at the place that was Allia before her folly destroyed it—

  —she sees someone.

  Or she thinks she does. She’s not sure at first. She squints and can just make out one of the paler strips that wend down into the Allia bowl on its southern curve, which is more readily visible now that the ruddy light around the volcano has faded. It’s obviously not the Imperial Road that she and ’Baster traveled to get to Allia, once upon a time and one colossal mistake ago. Most likely what she’s looking at is just a dirt road used by the locals, carved out of the surrounding forest a tree at a time and kept clear by decades of foot traffic.