(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)
Lately you’ve spent your mornings on a work crew doing water-gardening: sprouting seeds in trays of wet cloth, then moving the resulting seedlings to troughs of water and chemicals that the biomests devise so that they can grow. It’s soothing work, and reminds you of the housegreen you had back in Tirimo. (Uche sitting amid the edible ferns, making horrible faces as he chewed on a mouthful of dirt before you could stop him. You smile at this memory before the hurt blanks your face again. You still can’t smile over things Corundum did, and that’s been ten—no, eleven—years now.)
In the evenings you go to Ykka’s, to talk with her and Lerna and Hjarka and Cutter about the affairs of the comm. This includes stuff like whether to punish Jever Innovator Castrima for selling fans—since market economies are illegal during a Season per Imperial Law—and how to stop Old Man Crey (who isn’t that old) from complaining again that the communal baths are too tepid. He’s getting on everyone’s nerves. And who’s going to step in if Ontrag, the potter, keeps breaking the bad practice pottery of the two people apprenticed to her? It’s how Ontrag was taught, but that’s also how one teaches people who want to learn pottery. Ontrag’s apprentices are only there because Ykka ordered them to learn the old woman’s skill before she kicks off. At the rate things are going, they might kill her themselves.
It’s ridiculous, mundane, incredibly tedious stuff, and… you love it. Why? Who knows. Perhaps because it’s similar to the sorts of discussions you had back during the two times you were part of a family? You remember arguing with Innon about whether to teach Corundum Sanze-mat early, so he wouldn’t have an accent, or later, and only if Coru ever wanted to leave Meov. You had an argument with Jija once because he believed putting fruit in the cold cache ruined the taste, and you didn’t care because it made the fruit last longer. The arguments that you have with the other advisors are more important: Your decisions affect more than a thousand people now. But they have the same silly, pedantic feel. Silly pedantry is a luxury that you’ve rarely been able to enjoy in your life.
You’ve gone topside again, standing silent on the porch of a gateway house in the falling ash. The sky’s a little different today: thinnish gray-yellow instead of thickish gray-red, and the pattern of the clouds is long and wavelike in lieu of the chains of beads you’ve seen since the Rifting. One of the Strongback guards says, looking up, “Maybe things are getting better.” The yellow of the clouds almost feels like sunlight. You can see the sun itself now and again, a pale and strengthless disc occasionally framed by the gentle drifting curves.
You don’t tell the guard what you can sess, which is that the yellow clouds contain more sulfur than usual. Nor do you say what you know, which is that if it rains right now, the forest that surrounds Castrima and currently provides a significant portion of the comm’s food will die. Somewhere up north, the rift that Alabaster tore has simply belched out a great waft of the gas from some long-buried underground pocket. Cutter, who’s come up here with you and Hjarka, glances at you, face carefully blank; he knows, too. But he doesn’t say anything, either, and you think you know why: Because of the guard, and his wistful hope that things are getting better. It would be cruel to break that hope before it fades on its own. You like Cutter better for this moment of shared kindness.
Then you turn your head a little and the feeling vanishes. There’s another stone eater nearby, lurking in the shadows of a house not far off. This one is male-ish, butter-yellow marble laced with veins of brown, with a swirling cap of brass hair. He isn’t looking at anyone, isn’t moving, and you wouldn’t have even noticed him if not for the bright metal of his hair, so striking against the haze of the day. You wonder, for the third or fourth time, why they cluster around Castrima. Are they trying to help, as Hoa helps you? Are they expecting more of you to turn to delicious, chewable stone? Are they just bored?
You can’t deal with these creatures. You push Butter Marble from your mind and look away, and later when you’re ready to set off and you glance that way again, he is gone.
The three of you are up here, following one of the Hunters through the forest, because they want you to come and see something. Ykka’s not along for the trip because she’s mediating a dispute between the Strongbacks and the Resistants about shift length or something. Lerna’s not here because he’s started teaching a class in wound care to anyone who wants to attend. Hoa’s not here because Hoa’s still missing, as he has been for the past week. But with you are seven of the Castrima Strongbacks, two Hunters, and the blond white woman you met on your first day in Castrima, who has since introduced herself as Esni. She’s been accepted into the comm as a Strongback, despite being barely over a hundred pounds and paler than ash. Turns out she was the head of a drover clan before the Rifting, which means she knows how to wrangle large animals and people with outsized egos. She and her people voluntarily joined Castrima because it was much closer than their home comm down in the Antarctics. The air-dried, pickled, salt-cured remnants of their last cattle herd have constituted Castrima’s only meat stores since the Rifting.
No one talks as you walk. The silence of the forest, save for the rustling of small creatures through the undergrowth and the occasional tap-tap of wood-boring animals in the distance, demands more of the same. The woods are changing, you see as you tromp through them. The taller trees lost their leaves months ago, sap drawing down to protect against the encroaching cold and the souring surface soil. But correspondingly, the shrubs and mid-level trees have grown thicker foliage, drinking in what little light they can capture, sometimes folding their leaves down at night to shed ash. This makes the ash thinner off the roads, so much that you can sometimes see the ground litter.
Which is good, because it makes the newest parts of the landscape stand out that much more: the mounds. They’re three or four feet high, usually, built of cemented ash and leaves and twigs, and on a brighter day like this they are easy to spot because they steam faintly. Occasionally you see small bones, the remains of paws or tails, poking through the base of each mound. Boilbug nests. Not many… but you don’t remember any, a week ago when you walked past this area of the forest. (You would’ve sessed the heat.) It’s a reminder that while most plants and animals struggle to survive in a Season, a rare few do more: deprived of their usual predators and given ideal conditions, they thrive, breeding wildly wherever they can find a food source, relying on numbers to ensure the species’ continuation.
Not good, regardless. You find yourself checking your shoes frequently, and you notice the others doing the same.
Then you’ve reached the top of a ridge that overlooks a spreading forest basin. It’s clear the basin is outside the zone of protection that Castrima’s orogenes maintain, because broad swaths of the forest here are flattened and dead in the aftermath of the Rifting. You’d be able to see hundreds of miles if not for the ash, but since this is such a bright, low-ash day, you can see perhaps a few dozen. It’s enough.
Because there, hazy in the golden light, you can see something standing above the flattened forest: a cluster of what must be stripped saplings or long branches set into the ground in an attempt at straightness, although many of them list to one side or the other. At the tip of each is a flapping bit of dark red cloth to draw the eye. You can’t tell whether the red is dye or something else, because mounted on each of these stakes is a body. The stakes jut from the bodies’ mouths or other parts; they are impaled upon them.
“Not our people,” says Hjarka. She’s looking through a distance glass, adjusting it while one of the Hunters hovers nearby, hands half-upraised to catch the precious instrument should Hjarka fumble it or, knowing Hjarka, toss the thing away. “I mean, it’s hard to tell from this distance, but I don’t recognize them, and I don’t think we’ve ever sent anyone out that far. And they look filthy. Commless band, maybe.”
“One that bit off more than it could chew,” mut
ters one of the Hunters.
“All our patrols are accounted for,” says Esni, folding her arms. “I don’t keep track of anybody but the Strongbacks, I mean, the Hunters do their own thing—but we do note goings and comings.” She’s already studied the bodies through the distance glass, and it was her call that members of the comm leadership be brought topside to see for themselves. “I figure the culprits are travelers. A late group trying to make it back to a home comm, better armed than the commless who attacked them. And luckier.”
“Travelers wouldn’t do this,” says Cutter quietly. He’s usually quiet. Hjarka’s the one you always expect to be difficult, but she’s actually predictable and far more easygoing than her fierce appearance would suggest. Cutter, though, opposes nearly everything you or Ykka or the others suggest. He’s a stubborn little ruster under that quiet demeanor. “The impaling, I mean. No reason to stop for that long. Someone spent time cutting down those poles, sharpening them, digging holes to post them, positioning them so they could be seen for miles around. Travelers… travel.”
Cutter’s much harder to read than Hjarka, too, you notice now. Hjarka is a woman who has never been able to hide the breadth and vigor of what she is, so she doesn’t bother to try. Cutter is a man who’s spent his life concealing the strength of mountains behind a veneer of meekness. Now you know what that looks like from the outside. But he’s got a point.
“What do you think it is, then?” You guess wildly. “Another commless band?”
“They wouldn’t do this, either. At this point they’re not wasting bodies anymore.”
You wince, and see several other people in the group sigh or shift. But it’s true. There are still animals to hunt, but the ones that aren’t hibernating are fierce enough or armored enough or toxic enough to be costly prey for anything but very well-prepared hunters. Commless rarely have good working crossbows, and desperation makes for poor stealth. And as the boilbugs have shown, there’s new competition for any carcasses.
Of course, if Castrima doesn’t find a new source of meat soon, you and the others won’t be wasting bodies anymore, either. That wince served many purposes.
Hjarka lowers the distance glass at last. “Yeah,” she sighs, responding to Cutter. “Fuck.”
“What?” You feel stupid, suddenly, as if everyone has started speaking another language.
“Somebody’s marking territory.” Hjarka gestures with the distance glass, shrugging; the Hunter deftly plucks it from her hand. “Doing this is a warn-off, but not to other commless—who don’t give a shit and will probably just pull the bodies down for snacks. To us. Letting us know what they’ll do if we cross their boundaries.”
“Only comm in that direction is Tettehee,” says one of the Hunters. “They’re friendly, have been for years. And we’re no threat to them. Not much water in that direction to support other comms; the river wends away to the north.”
North. That bothers you. You don’t know why. There’s no reason to mention this to the others, but still… “When’s the last time you heard from this Tettehee?” Silence greets you, and you look around. Everyone’s staring. Well, that answers that. “We need to send somebody to Tettehee, then.”
“‘Somebody’ who might end up on a pole?” Hjarka glares at you. “Nobody’s expendable in this comm, newcomer.”
It’s the first time you’ve ever sparked her ire, and it’s a lot of ire. She’s older, bigger, and in addition to her sharpened teeth, there’s her glare, which is black-eyed and fierce. But she reminds you, somehow, of Innon, so you feel anything but anger in response.
“We’re going to need to send out a trading party anyway.” You say it as gently as you can, which makes her blink. That’s the inevitable conclusion of all the talks you’ve had lately about the comm’s deepening meat deficit. “We might as well use this warn-off to make sure that party is armed, and a large enough group that no one can tackle them without paying for it.”
“And if whoever did this has a larger, better-armed group?”
It’s never just about strength, during a Season. You know that. Hjarka knows that. But you say, “Send an orogene with them.”
She blinks in genuine surprise, then lifts an eyebrow. “Who’ll kill half our people trying to defend them?”
You turn away from her and hold out a hand. None of them move away from you, but then none of them are from comms large enough to have been visited often by Imperial Orogenes; they don’t know what your gesture means. They gasp, though, and move back and murmur when you spin a five-foot-wide torus in the brush a few paces away. Ash and dead leaves swirl into a dust devil, glittering with ice in the sulfurous afternoon light. You didn’t have to spin it that fast. You’re just being dramatic.
Then you use what you dragged from that torus and turn, pointing at the stand of impaled bodies down in the basin. At this distance it’s impossible to tell what’s happening at first—but then the trees in the area shiver and the poles begin to sway wildly. A moment later a fissure opens, and you drop the poles and their grisly ornaments into the ground. You pull your hands together, slowly so as not to alarm anyone, and the trees stop shivering. But a moment later, everyone feels the faint judder of the ridge you’re standing on, because you’ve let a little of the aftershake come this way. Again, you didn’t have to. You just had a point to make.
It’s commendable that Hjarka just looks impressed and not alarmed when you open your eyes and turn to her. “Nice,” she says. “So you can ice someone without killing everyone around you. But if every rogga could do that, people wouldn’t have a problem with roggas.”
You really hate that rusting word, no matter what Ykka thinks.
And you’re not sure you agree with Hjarka’s assessment. People have problems with roggas for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with orogeny. You open your mouth to reply—and then stop. Because now you can see the trap Hjarka’s set, the only way this conversation’s going to end, and you don’t want to go there… but there’s no avoiding it. Rusting fuck.
So that’s how you end up in charge of a brand-new Fulcrum, sort of.
“Stupid,” Alabaster says.
You sigh. “I know.”
It’s the next day, and another conversation about the principles of the unreal—how an obelisk works, how their crystalline structure emulates the strange linkages of power between the cells of a living being, and how there are theories about things even smaller than cells, somehow, even though no one has seen them or can prove that they exist.
You have these conversations with Alabaster every day, in between your morning work shift and evening politicking, because he is filled with a sense of urgency spurred by his own impending mortality. The sessions don’t last long, because Alabaster has limited strength. And the conversations so far haven’t been very useful, mostly because Alabaster is a terrible teacher. He barks orders and gives lectures, never answering your questions when you ask them. He’s impatient and snappish. And while some of this can be chalked up to the pain that he’s in, the rest is just Alabaster being himself. He really hasn’t changed.
You are frequently surprised at how much you’ve missed him, the irascible old ass. And because of this, you hold your temper… for a while, anyway.
“Someone’s got to teach the younger ones, anyway,” you say. Most of the comm’s orogenes are children or adolescents, simply because most ferals don’t survive childhood. You’ve heard rumors that some of the older orogenes are teaching them, helping them learn not to ice things when they stub their toes, and it helps that Castrima is as stable as the Equatorials once were. But that’s ferals teaching ferals. “And if I fail to do whatever it is you keep insisting that I do—”
“None of them are worth rust. You’d sess that yourself, if you’d bothered to pay any attention to them. It’s not just about skill, it’s also natural talent; that’s the whole reason the Fulcrum made us breed, Essun. And most of them will never be able to get past energy redistribution.” This is the te
rm that the two of you have concocted for orogeny done with heat and kinetics—the Fulcrum’s way. What Alabaster is now trying to teach you, and what you’re struggling to learn because it relies on things that make no sense whatsoever, is something you’ve started calling magic redistribution. That isn’t right, either; it’s not redistribution, but it’ll do until you understand it better.
Alabaster’s still on about the orogeny class you’ve agreed to teach, and the children who will fill it. “It’s a waste of your time to teach them.”
This dismissal, inexplicably, starts to eat through your patience. “It’s never a waste of time to educate others.”
“Spoken like a simple creche teacher. Oh, wait.”
It’s a cheap shot, disrespecting the vocation that gave you years of camouflage. You should let it go, but it feels like salt on a glass-cut and you snap. “Stop. It.”
Alabaster blinks, then scowls to the degree that he can. “I don’t have a great deal of time for coddling, Syen—”
“Essun.” Right now, here, it matters. “And I don’t rusting care if you’re dying. You don’t get to talk to me like this.” And you get up, because suddenly you’re rusting done.
He stares at you. Antimony is there as always, supporting him in silence, and her eyes shift to you for a moment. You think you read surprise in them, but that’s probably just projection. “You don’t care if I’m dying.”
“No, I don’t. Why the rust should I? You don’t care if any of the rest of us die. You did this to us.” Lerna, at the other end of the room, glances up and frowns, and you remember to lower your voice. “You’ll kick off sooner and more easily than the rest of us. We get to starve to death, well after you’re dust in the ash. And if you can’t be bothered to actually teach me anything, then fuck you; I’ll figure out how to fix things myself!”
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