You take a deep breath. Extend a hand to him. So much of your past keeps coming back to haunt you. You can never forget where you came from, because it won’t rusting let you. But maybe Ykka’s got the right of it. You can reject these dregs of your old self and pretend that nothing and no one else matters … or you can embrace them. Reclaim them for what they’re worth, and grow stronger as a whole.
“Let’s go talk to Ykka,” you say. “If she adopts you—and your people, I know—I’ll tell you everything.” And if he’s not careful, you’ll end up teaching him how to do it, too. He’s a six-ringer, after all. If you fail, someone else will have to take up the mantle.
To your surprise, he regards your hand with something akin to wariness. “Not sure I want to know everything.”
It makes you smile. “You really don’t.”
He smiles lopsidedly. “You don’t want to know everything that’s happened to me, either.”
You incline your head. “Deal, then. Only the good parts.”
He grins. One of his teeth is missing. “That’s too short to even make a good pop lorist tale. Nobody would buy a story like that.”
But. Then he shifts his weight and lifts his right hand. The skin is thick as horn, beyond callused, and filthy. You wipe your hand on your pants without thinking, after. His people chuckle at this.
Then you lead him back toward Castrima, into the light.
2470: Antarctics. Massive sinkhole began to open beneath city of Bendine (comm died shortly after). Karst soils, not seismic, but the sinking of the city generated waves that Antarctic Fulcrum orogenes detected. From the Fulcrum, somehow shifted whole city to more stable position, saving most of population. Fulcrum records note that doing this killed three senior orogenes.
—Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
6
Nassun makes her fate
THE MONTHLONG JOURNEY TO STEEL’S deadciv ruin is uneventful by the standards of mid-Season travel. Nassun and Schaffa have or forage sufficient food to sustain themselves, though both of them begin to lose weight. Nassun’s shoulder heals without trouble, though she is feverish and weak for a couple of days at one point, and on those days Schaffa calls a halt for rest sooner than she thinks he normally would have. On the third day the fever is gone, the wound is beginning to scab, and they resume.
They encounter almost no one else on the road, though that is unsurprising a year and a half into the Season. Anyone still commless at this point has joined a raider band, and there won’t be many of those left—just the most vicious, or the ones with some kind of edge beyond savagery and cannibalism. Most of those will have gone north, into the Somidlats where there are more comms to prey upon. Not even raiders like the Antarctics.
In many ways the near-solitude suits Nassun fine. No other Guardians to tiptoe around. No commfolk whose irrational fears must always be planned for. Not even other orogene children; Nassun misses the others, misses their chatter and the comradeship that she enjoyed with them for so brief a time, but at the end of the day, she resented how much time and attention Schaffa had to give them. She’s old enough to know that it’s childish for her to be jealous of such a thing. (Her parents doted on Uche, too, but it is horrifyingly obvious now that getting more attention isn’t necessarily favoritism.) Doesn’t mean she isn’t glad, and greedy, for the chance to have Schaffa all to herself.
Their time together is companionable, and largely silent, by day. At night they sleep, curled together against the deepening cold, secure because Nassun has reliably demonstrated that the slightest shift in the ambient, or footstep upon the nearby ground, is enough to wake her. Sometimes Schaffa does not sleep; he tries, but instead lies shuddering minutely, catching his breath now and again with half-suppressed muscle twitches, trying not to disturb her in his quiet agonies. When he does sleep, it is fitful and shallow. Sometimes Nassun does not sleep, either, aching in silent sympathy.
So she resolves to do something about it. It’s the thing she learned to do back in Found Moon, though to a lesser degree: She sometimes lets the little corestone in his sessapinae have some of her silver. She doesn’t know why it works, but she recalls seeing the Guardians in Found Moon all taking bits of silver from their charges and exhaling afterward, as if it eased something in them to give the corestone someone else to chew on.
Schaffa, however, has not taken silver from her or anyone else since the day she offered all of hers to him—the day she realized the true nature of the metal shard in his brain. She thinks maybe she understands why he stopped. Something changed between them that day, and he can no longer bring himself to feed on her like some sort of parasite. But that is why Nassun sneaks him magic now. Because something changed between them, and he’s not a parasite if she needs him, too, and if she gives what he will not take.
(One day soon, she will learn the word symbiosis and nod, pleased to have a name for it at last. But long before that, she will have already decided that family will do.)
When Nassun gives Schaffa her silver, though he is asleep, his body swallows it so quickly that she must snatch her hand away to avoid losing too much. She can spare only dribbles. Any more and she will be the one tired and unable to travel the next day. Even that tiny amount is enough to let him sleep, however—and as the days pass, Nassun finds herself gradually making more silver, somehow. It’s a welcome change; now she can ease his pain better without wearying herself. Every time she sees Schaffa settle into a deep, peaceful sleep, she feels proud and good, even though she knows she isn’t. Doesn’t matter. She is determined to be a better daughter to Schaffa than she was to Jija. Everything will be better, until the end.
Schaffa sometimes tells stories in the evenings, while dinner cooks. In them, the Yumenes of the past is a place both wondrous and strange, as alien as the bottom of the sea. (It is always the Yumenes of the past. Recent Yumenes is lost to him, along with his memories of the Schaffa he used to be.) Even the idea of Yumenes is hard for Nassun to comprehend: millions of people, none of them farmers or miners or anything that fits within the range of her experience, many of them obsessed with strange fads and politics and alignments far more complex than those of caste or race. Leaders, but also the elite Yumenescene Leadership families. Strongbacks of the union and those without, varying by their connections and financial security. Innovators from generations-old families who competed to be sent off to the Seventh University, and Innovators who merely built and repaired trinkets out of the city’s shantytowns. It is strange to realize that much of Yumenes’s strangeness was simply because it lasted so long. It had old families. Books in its libraries that were older than Tirimo. Organizations that remembered, and avenged, slights from three or four Seasons back.
Schaffa also tells her about the Fulcrum, although not much. There is another memory hole here, deep and fathomless as an obelisk—though Nassun finds herself unable to resist probing its edges. It is a space that her mother once inhabited, after all, and in spite of everything, this fascinates her. Schaffa remembers Essun poorly, however, even when Nassun works up the courage to ask direct questions about the matter. He tries to answer Nassun, but his speech is halting when he does, and the look that crosses his face is pained, troubled, paler than usual. She therefore forces herself to ask these questions slowly, hours or days apart, to give him time to recover in between. What she learns is little more than she has already guessed about her mother and the Fulcrum and life before the Season. It helps to hear it, nevertheless.
The miles pass like this, in memory and edged-around pain.
Conditions in the Antarctics grow worse by the day. The ashfall is no longer intermittent, and the landscape has begun to turn into a still life of hills and ridges and dying plants chiseled in gray-white. Nassun starts to miss the sight of the sun. One night they hear the squeals of what must be a large kirkhusa romp out hunting, though fortunately the sound is distant. One day they pass a pond whose surface is mirror-gray from floating ash; the water underneath is disturbing
ly still, given that the pond is fed by a rapid stream. Although their canteens are low, Nassun looks at Schaffa, and Schaffa nods in silent, wary agreement. There’s nothing overtly wrong, but … well. Surviving a Season is as much a matter of having the right instincts as having the right tools. They avoid the still water, and live.
On the evening of the twenty-ninth day, they reach a place where the Imperial Road abruptly plateaus and veers southward. Nassun sesses that the road edges along something that feels a bit like a crater rim. They have crested the ridge that surrounds this circular, unusually flat region, and the road follows the ridge in an arc around the zone of old damage, resuming its westward track on the other side. In the middle, though, Nassun at last beholds a wonder.
The Old Man’s Pucker is a sommian—a caldera inside a caldera. This one is unusual in being so perfectly formed; from what Nassun has read, usually the outer, older caldera is badly damaged by the eruption that creates the inner, newer caldera. In this case the outer one is an intact, nearly perfect circle, though heavily eroded by time and forested over; Nassun can’t really see it under the greenery, though she can sess it clearly. The inner caldera is a little more oblong, and it gleams so brightly from a distance that Nassun can guess what happened without even sessing it. The eruption must have been so hot, at least at one point, that the whole geological formation nearly destroyed itself. What remains has gone to glass, naturally tempered enough that not even centuries of weathering has damaged it much. The volcano that created this sommian is extinct now, its ancient magma chamber long since emptied, not even a whiff of leftover heat lingering. Once upon a time, though, the Pucker was the site of a truly awesome—and horrific—puncturing of the world’s crust.
As Steel instructed, they camp for the night a mile or two back from the Pucker. In the small hours before dawn, Nassun wakes, hearing a distant screech, but Schaffa soothes her. “I’ve heard that now and again,” he says softly, over the crackling of the fire. He insisted on a watch this time, so Nassun took the earlier shift. “Something in the Pucker forest. It doesn’t seem to be coming this way.”
She believes him. But neither of them sleeps well that night.
In the morning, they rise before dawn and start up the road. In the early-morning light, Nassun stares at the deceptively still double crater before them. Up close, it’s easier to see that there are breaks in the inner caldera’s walls at regular intervals; someone meant for people to be able to get inside. The outer caldera’s floor is completely overgrown, however, yellow-green and waving with a forest of treelike grass that has apparently choked out every other form of vegetation in the area. There’s no sess of even game trails across it.
The real surprise, though, is underneath the Pucker.
“Steel’s deadciv ruin,” she says. “It’s underground.”
Schaffa glances at her in surprise, but he does not protest. “In the magma chamber?”
“Maybe?” Nassun can’t believe it, either, at first, but the silver does not lie. She notices something else strange as she expands her sesunal awareness of the area. The silver mirrors the perturbations of topography and the forest here—the same way it does everywhere. Yet the silver here is brighter, somehow, and it seems to flow more readily from plant to plant and rock to rock. These blend to become larger, dazzling flows that all run together like streams, until the ruin sits within a pool of glimmering, churning light. She can’t make out details, there’s so much of it—just empty space, and an impression of buildings. It’s huge, this ruin. A city, like no city Nassun has ever sessed.
But she has sessed this torrential churn of silver before. She cannot help turning to glance back toward the sapphire that is faintly visible some miles off. They’ve outpaced it, but it’s still following.
“Yes,” Schaffa says. He’s been watching her, and missing nothing as she makes the connections. “I don’t remember this city, but I know of others like it. The obelisks were made in such places.”
She shakes her head, trying to fathom it all. “What happened to this city? There must have been a lot of people here once.”
“The Shattering.”
She inhales. She’s heard of it, of course, and believed in it the way children believe most stories. She remembers seeing an artist’s line rendering of the event in one of her creche books: lightning and rocks falling from the sky, fire erupting from the ground, tiny human figures running and doomed. “So that’s what it was like? A big volcano?”
“The Shattering was like this here.” Schaffa gazes out over the waving forest. “Elsewhere, it was different. The Shattering was a hundred different Seasons, Nassun, all over the world, all striking at once. It is a marvel that anything of humanity survived.”
The way he’s talking … It seems impossible, but Nassun bites her lip. “Were you … do you remember it?”
He glances at Nassun, surprised, and then smiles in a way that is equal parts weary and wry. “I don’t. I think … I suspect that I was born sometime after, though I have no proof of that. Even if I could remember the Shattering, though, I feel fairly certain that I wouldn’t want to.” He sighs, then shakes his head. “The sun is up. Let’s face the future, at least, and leave the past to itself.” Nassun nods, and they step off the trail into the trees.
The trees are strange things, with long, thin leaves like elongated grass blades, and narrow, flexible trunks that grow no more than a couple of feet apart. In some places Schaffa has to stop and push apart two or three trees so that they can wriggle through. This makes for hard going, though, and before long Nassun is out of breath. She stops, dripping sweat, but Schaffa pushes on. “Schaffa,” she says, about to ask for a break.
“No,” he says, pushing over another tree with a grunt. “Remember the stone eater’s warning, little one. We must reach the center of this forest by dusk. It’s now clear we will need every moment of that time.”
He’s right. Nassun swallows, starts taking deeper breaths so she can work better, and then resumes pushing through the forest with him.
She develops a rhythm, working with him. She’s good at finding the quickest paths that don’t require pushing through, and when she does, he follows her. When these paths end, however, he shoves and kicks and breaks trees until the way is clear, while she follows. She can catch her breath during these brief lulls, but it’s never quite enough. A stitch develops in her side. She starts having trouble seeing because the tree leaves keep pulling some of her hair loose from its twin buns, and sweat has made the curls lengthen and dangle into her eyes. She wants desperately to rest for an hour or so. Drink some water. Eat something. The clouds overhead get grayer as the hours pass, however, and it becomes increasingly hard to tell how much daylight is left.
“I can,” Nassun tries at one point, while trying to think of how she can use orogeny, or the silver, or something, to clear the way.
“No,” Schaffa says, somehow intuiting what she would have said. He’s produced a black glass poniard from somewhere. It’s not a useful knife for this situation, although somehow he has made it so by stabbing each of the grass-tree trunks before kicking them down. That helps them break more easily. “Freezing these plants would only make them more difficult to get through, and a shake could cause the magma chamber below us to collapse.”
“The s-silver, then—”
“No.” He stops for only a moment and turns to fix a hard gaze on her. He’s not breathing harder, she notes with great chagrin, although a faint sheen of sweat does glisten on his forehead. His iron shard punishes him, but still grudgingly grants him greater strength. “Other Guardians may be near, Nassun. It’s unlikely at this point, but still a possibility.”
All Nassun can do is grope for another question, because this momentary pause is giving her time to catch her breath. “Other Guardians?” Ah, but then he has said that they all go somewhere during a Season, and that this station that Steel told them about is the means by which they do it. “Do you remember something?”
&n
bsp; “Nothing more, sadly.” He smiles a little, knowingly, as if he can tell what she’s doing. “Only that this is how we get there.”
“Get where?”
His smile fades, expression settling into that familiar, disturbing blankness for the briefest of instants. “Warrant.”
She remembers, belatedly, that his full name is Schaffa Guardian Warrant. It has never occurred to her to wonder where the comm of Warrant is. But what does it mean that the way to Warrant is through a buried dead city? “Wh-why—”
He shakes his head then, expression hardening. “Stop stalling. In this low light, not every nocturnal hunter will wait for night.” He glances up at the sky with a look that is only mildly annoyed, as if it does not threaten their lives.
It’s pointless to complain that she is ready to drop. It’s a Season. If she drops, she dies. So she forces herself through the gap he has broken, and starts questing again for the best route.
In the end they make it, which is good because otherwise this would become the rather straightforward tale of you learning that your daughter is dead, and letting the world wither in your grief.
It isn’t even a near thing. Abruptly the last patch of thick grass-trees thins out, revealing a smooth-cut pass through the inner caldera ring. The walls of the pass loom high overhead, though they did not look so tall from far away, and the pass itself is wide enough for two horse-drawn carriages to travel side by side without crowding. The walls of these passages are covered in tenacious mosses and some sort of woody vine, the latter of which is fortunately dead because otherwise it might entangle them and slow their progress more. Instead they hurry forward, cracking the dead branches aside, and then abruptly Nassun and Schaffa stumble out of the pass onto a wide, round slab of perfectly white material that is neither metal nor stone. Nassun’s seen something like it before, near other deadciv ruins; sometimes the stuff glows faintly at night. This particular slab fills the entirety of the space within the inner caldera.
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