You didn’t apologize for that, but you’ve tried to spackle the cracks. “You are Castrima’s best weapon,” you said firmly. You even meant it. That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.
It eased the awkwardness between you. “Well, just don’t rusting die,” she told you at last. “Not sure I can keep this mess together without you, at this point.” Ykka’s good at that, making people feel like they’ve got a reason to do something. That’s why she’s the headwoman.
And that is why, now, you walk through a Castrima-over that has been turned into a camp by the soldiers of Rennanis, and you are actually afraid. It’s always harder to fight for other people than for the self.
The ash has been falling steadily for a year now, and the comm is knee-deep in the stuff. There’s been at least one rain to tamp it down recently, so you can sess a kind of damp-mud crust underneath the powdery layer on top, but even that’s substantial. Enemy soldiers crowd the porches and doorways of the once-empty houses, watching you, and the untamped ash under the eaves is halfway up most of the houses’ walls. They’ve had to dig out the windows. The soldiers look like… just people, because they don’t wear uniforms, but there is a uniformity to them nevertheless: They are all fully Sanzed or very Sanzed-looking. Where you can see color in their ash-faded travel clothing, you spot that telltale scrap of prettier, more delicate cloth tied around their upper arms or wrists or foreheads. No longer displaced Equatorials, then; they’ve found a comm. Something older and more primal than a comm: They are a tribe. And now they’re here to take what’s yours.
But beyond that they are just people. Many are your age or older. You guess that a lot of them are surplus Strongbacks or commless trying to prove their usefulness. There are slightly more men than women, but that follows, too, since most comms are quicker to kick out those who can’t produce babies than those who can—but the number of women here means that Rennanis isn’t hurting for healthy repopulators. A strong comm.
Their eyes follow you as you walk down Castrima-over’s main street. You stand out, you know, with your ashless skin and clean hair and your clothes bright with color. Just brown leather pants and unbleached white in your shirt, but these are colors that have become rare in this world of gray streets and gray dead trees and a gray, heavily clouded sky. You’re the only Midlatter that you see, too, and you’re small compared to most of them.
Doesn’t matter. Behind you floats the spinel, remaining precisely one foot behind the back of your head and turning slowly. You aren’t making it do that. You don’t know why it’s doing that, really. Unless you hold it in your hand, that’s what the thing does: You tried to set it down, but it floated back up and moved behind you like this. Should’ve asked Alabaster how to make it behave before you killed him, oh well. Now it’s flickering a little, real to translucent to real again, and you can hear—not sess, hear—the faint hum of its energies as it turns. You see people’s faces twitch as they notice. They might not know what it is, but they know a bad thing when they hear it.
At the center of Castrima-over is a domed, open pavilion that Ykka tells you was once the comm’s gathering center, used for wedding dances and parties and the occasional comm-wide meeting. It’s been turned into some sort of operations center, you see as you walk toward it: A gaggle of men and women stand, squat, or sit around within it, but one knot of them stands around a freshly made table. When you get close enough, you see that they’ve got a crudely made diagram of Castrima and map of the local area side by side, which they’re discussing. To your dismay, you can see that they’ve marked at least one of the ventilation ducts—the one that’s behind a small waterfall at the nearby river. They probably lost a scout or two finding it: The river’s banks are by now infested with boilbug mounds. Doesn’t matter; they found it, and that’s bad.
Three of the people talking over the maps look up as you approach. One of them elbows another, who turns and shakes awake someone else as you walk into the pavilion and stop a few feet from the table. The woman who gets up, rubbing her face blearily as she comes to join the others, does not look particularly impressive. She’s cut her hair on the sides to just above her ears—a painfully blunt chop that looks to have been done with a knife. It makes her look small, even though she’s not particularly: Her torso is a smooth barrel, brief breasts blending into a belly that’s probably carried at least one child, and legs like basalt pillars. She’s not wearing anything more than the others; her sash of tribe membership is just a fading yellow silk kerchief hanging loosely around her neck. But there’s a gravity in her gaze, even half-asleep, that makes you focus on her.
“Castrima?” she asks you, by way of greeting. It’s all that really matters about who you are, anyway.
You nod. “I speak for them.”
She rests her hands on the table, nodding. “Our message got delivered, then.” Her gaze flicks to the spinel hovering behind you, and something adjusts in her expression. It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that. Indifference is worse than hate.
Well. You can’t muster indifference in response; you can’t help but see her as human. Have to make do with hate, then. And what’s more interesting is that she somehow knows what the spinel is, and what it means. Very interesting.
“We’re not joining you,” you say. “You want to fight over that, so be it.”
She tilts her head to one side. One of her lieutenants chuckles into their hand, but is swiftly glared silent by another. You like the silencing. It’s respectful—of your abilities if not of you per se, and of Castrima even if they don’t think you have a chance. Even if you actually, probably, don’t have a chance.
“We don’t even have to attack, you realize,” the woman says. “We can just sit up here, kill anybody who comes up to hunt or trade. Starve you out.”
You manage not to react. “We have a little meat. It’ll take awhile—months at least—for the vitamin deficiencies to set in. Our stores are pretty solid otherwise.” You force a shrug. “And other communities have gotten around meat shortages easily enough.”
She grins. Her teeth aren’t sharpened, but you think momentarily that her canines are longer than they strictly need to be. It’s probably projection. “True, if that’s your taste. Which is why we’re also working on finding your vents.” She taps the map. “Close them up and suffocate you till you’re weak, then break down those barriers you’ve put across the tunnels and dance right in. Stupid to live underground; once someone knows you’re there, you’re actually an easier target, not a harder one.”
This is true, but you shake your head. “We can be hard enough, if you push us. But Castrima isn’t rich, and our storecaches aren’t any better than those of another comm that’s not full of roggas.” You pause for effect. The woman doesn’t flinch, but there’s a shuffle among the other people in the pavilion as they realize. Good. That means they’re thinking. “So many easier nuts to crack out there. Why are you bothering with us?”
You know why they’re really doing this, because Gray Man’s after orogenes who can open the Obelisk Gate, but that can’t be what he’s told them. What could induce a strong, stable Equatorial comm to turn conqueror? Wait, no; it can’t be stable. Rennanis is relatively close to the Rift. Even with living node maintainers, life in such a comm would be hard. Daily blow-throughs of noxious gas. Ashfall much worse than here, requiring people to wear masks at all times. Earth help them if it rains; it could be pure acid, and that’s if rain is even possible with the Rift cranking out heat and ash nearby. Doubtful they have any livestock… so maybe they’re facing a meat shortage, too.
“Because this is what it will take to survive,
” the woman says, to your surprise. She straightens and folds her arms. “Rennanis has too many people for our stores. All the survivors of every other Equatorial city have come to camp on our doorstep. We would’ve had to do this anyway, or have problems with too large of a commless population in the area. Might as well weaponize them into feeding themselves, and bringing what’s left back home to the comm. You know this Season isn’t going to end.”
“It will.”
“Eventually.” She shrugs. “Our ’mests have calculated that if we grow enough ’shrooms and such, and strictly limit our population, we might achieve enough sustainability to survive until the Season ends. The odds are better if we take the storecaches of every other comm we encounter, though—”
You roll your eyes because you can’t help it. “You think cachebread’s going to last a thousand years?” Or two. Or ten. And then a few hundred thousand years of ice.
She pauses until you’re done. “—and if we set up supply lines from every comm with renewables. We’ll need some Coastal comms with oceanic resources, some Antarctics where growing low-light plants might still be possible.” She pauses, also for effect. “But you Midlatters eat too much.”
Well. “So basically, you’re here to wipe us out.” You shake your head. “Why didn’t you just say so? Why the foolishness about getting rid of the orogenes?”
Someone from beyond the pavilion calls, “Danel!” and the woman looks up, nodding absently. This is apparently her name. “Always a chance you’d turn on each other. Then we could just walk in and scrape up the leftovers.” She shakes her head. “Now things have to be hard.”
The dull, insistent buzz that suddenly impinges itself on your sessapinae is a warning as blatant as a scream.
It’s too late the instant you sess it, because that means you’re within range of the Guardian’s ability to negate your orogeny. You turn anyway, half tripping even as you start to spin a huge torus that will flash-freeze the whole rusting town, and it is because you were expecting negation and did not deploy a tight shielding torus that the disruption knife pegs you in the right arm.
You remember Alabaster saying that these knives hurt. The thing is small, made for throwing, and it should hurt given that it’s sunk into your bicep and probably chipping bone. But what Alabaster did not specify—you are irrationally furious with him hours after his death, stupid useless ruster—was that something about this knife seems to set your entire nervous system on fire. The fire is hottest, incandescent, in your sessapinae, even though those are nowhere near your arm. It hurts so much that all your muscles spasm at once; you flop onto your side and can’t even scream. You just lie there twitching, and staring at the woman who steps through the gaggle of Rennanis soldiers to grin down at you. She’s surprisingly young, or so she seems, though appearances are meaningless because she is a Guardian. She’s naked from the waist up, her skin shockingly dark amid all these Sanzeds, her breasts small and almost entirely areola, reminding you of the last time you were pregnant. You thought your tits would never shrink back down after Uche… and you wonder if it will hurt, when you are shaken to pieces the way Innon was.
Everything goes black. You don’t understand what’s happened at first. Are you dead? Was it that quick? Everything’s still on fire, and you think you’re still trying to scream. But you become aware of new sensations then. Movement. Rushing. Something rather like wind. The touch of foreign molecules against infinitesimal receptors in your skin. It is… oddly peaceful. You almost forget your pain.
Then light, startling against the eyelids you hadn’t realized you’d closed. You can’t open them. Someone curses nearby and comes near and hands press you down, which nearly makes you panic because you can’t do orogeny with your nerves exploding like this. But then someone yanks the knife out of your arm.
It is as though a shake siren within you has been suddenly silenced. You slump in relief, into just ordinary pain, and open your eyes now that you can control your voluntary muscles again.
Lerna’s there. You’re on the floor of his apartment, the light is from his crystal walls, and he’s holding the knife and staring down at you. Beyond him, Hoa stands in a pose of entreaty, which he must have been directing toward Lerna. His eyes have shifted to you, though he hasn’t bothered to adjust the pose.
“Burning rusty fuck,” you groan-sigh. And then, because now you know what must have happened, you add, “Thanks,” to Hoa. Who pulled you down into the earth and away before the Guardian could kill you. Never thought you’d be grateful for something like that.
Lerna’s dropped the knife and already turned away to find bandages. You’re not bleeding much; the knife went in vertically, paralleling rather than cutting across the tendons, and it seems to have missed the big artery. Hard to tell when your hands are still shaking a little; shock. But Lerna’s not moving at that blurring, near-inhuman speed he tends to use when a life is on the line, so you’re encouraged by that.
Lerna says, his back to you as he assembles items, “I take it your attempt at parley didn’t go well.”
Things have been awkward between you and him lately. He’s made his interest clear, and you haven’t responded in kind. You haven’t rejected him, either, though, thus the awkwardness. At one point a few weeks back, Alabaster grumbled that you should just roll the boy already, because you were always crankier when you were horny. You called him an ass and changed the subject, but really—Alabaster’s why you’ve been thinking about it more.
You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply… a thinning of who you are.
And maybe now is not the time to consider your cataclysm of a love life.
“No,” you say. You shrug off your jacket. Underneath you’re wearing a sleeveless shirt good for Castrima’s warmth. Lerna turns back and crouches and begins swabbing away the blood with a pad of soft rags. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone up there. They had a Guardian.”
Lerna’s eyes flick up to yours, then back to your wound. “I heard they could stop orogeny.”
“This one didn’t have to. That damned knife did it for her.” You think you know why, too, as you remember Innon. That Guardian didn’t negate him, either. Maybe the skin thing only works on roggas whose orogeny is still active. That’s how she wanted to kill you. But Lerna’s jaw muscle is already tight, and you decide maybe he doesn’t need to know that.
“I didn’t know about the Guardian,” Hoa says unexpectedly. “I’m sorry.”
You eye him. “I didn’t expect stone eaters to be omniscient.”
“I said I would protect you.” His voice is more inflectionless, now that he’s not in flesh-shape anymore. Or maybe his voice is the same, and you just read it as inflectionless because he has no body language to embellish it. Despite this, he sounds… angry. With himself, maybe.
“You did.” You wince as Lerna starts winding a bandage around your arm tightly. No stitches, though, so that’s good. “Not that I wanted to be dragged into the earth, but your timing was excellent.”
“You were hurt.” Definitely angry with himself. This is the first time he’s sounded to you like the boy he appeared to be for so long. Is he young for one of his kind? Young at heart? Maybe just so open and honest that he might as well be young.
“I’ll live. That’s what matters.”
He falls silent. Lerna works in silence. Between the collective air of disapproval that the two of them exude, you can’t help feeling a little guilty.
Afterward you leave Lerna’s apartment to head to Flat Top, where Ykka has set up an operations center of her own. Someone’s brought the rest of the divans from her apartment, and she’s set them up in a rough semicircle, basically bringing her council out into the open. In token of
this, Hjarka sprawls over one divan as she usually does, head propped on fist and taking up the whole thing so no one else can sit down, and Tonkee is pacing in the middle of the semicircle. There are others around, anxious or bored people who’ve brought their own chairs or are sitting on the hard crystal floor, but not as many as you would’ve expected. There’s a lot of activity around the comm, you noticed as you headed to the Flat Top: people fletching arrows in one chamber that you pass, building crossbows in another. Down on the ground level you can see what looks like a longknife-wielding class; a slender young man is teaching about thirty people how to do an over-and-under strike. Over by Scenic Overlook some of the Innovators seem to be rigging what looks like a dropped-rocks trap.
The spectators perk up as you and Lerna come onto the Flat Top, though; that’s hilarious. Everyone knows you volunteered to go topside to deliver Castrima’s answer to Rennanis. You did this in part to show publicly that you weren’t taking over; Ykka’s still in charge. Everyone seems to be reading it as a sign that you may be crazy, but at least you’re on their side. Such hope in their eyes! It dies down quickly, though. That you are back, and that there is a visibly bloody bandage around one arm, is reassuring to no one.
Tonkee’s in full rant about something. Even she’s ready for battle, having traded her skirt for billowy pantaloons, tied her hair up atop her head in a scruffy pile of curls, and strapped twin glassknives to both thighs. She actually looks kind of stunning. Then you pay attention to what she’s saying. “The third wave will need to be the most delicate touch. Pressure sets them off, see? A temperature differential should make the wind gust enough, the air pressure drop enough. But it has to happen fast. And no shaking. We’re going to lose the forest either way, but shaking will just make them dig in. We need them moving.”
“I can handle that,” Ykka says, though she looks troubled. “At least, I can handle part of it.”
The Obelisk Gate Page 30