The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  If the Niess were merely human, the world built on their inhumanity would fall apart.

  So … they made us.

  We, the carefully engineered and denatured remnants of the Niess, have sessapinae far more complex than those of ordinary people. Kelenli was made first, but she wasn’t different enough. Remember, we must be not just tools, but myths. Thus we later creations have been given exaggerated Niess features—broad faces, small mouths, skin nearly devoid of color, hair that laughs at fine combs, and we’re all so short. They’ve stripped our limbic systems of neurochemicals and our lives of experience and language and knowledge. And only now, when we have been made over in the image of their own fear, are they satisfied. They tell themselves that in us, they’ve captured the quintessence and power of who the Niess really were, and they congratulate themselves on having made their old enemies useful at last.

  But we are not the Niess. We aren’t even the glorious symbols of intellectual achievement that I believed we were. Syl Anagist is built on delusions, and we are the product of lies. They have no idea what we really are.

  It’s up to us, then, to determine our own fate and future.

  When Kelenli’s lesson is done, a few hours have passed. We sit at her feet, stunned, changed and changing by her words.

  It’s getting late. She gets up. “I’m going to get us some food and blankets,” she says. “You’ll stay here tonight. We’ll visit the third and final component of your tuning mission tomorrow.”

  We have never slept anywhere but our cells. It’s exciting. Gaewha sends little pulses of delight through the ambient, while Remwha is a steady buzz of pleasure. Dushwha and Bimniwha spike now and again with anxiety; will we be all right, doing this thing that human beings have done throughout history—sleeping in a different place? The two of them curl together for security, though this actually increases their anxiety for a time. We are not often allowed to touch. They stroke one another, though, and this gradually calms them both.

  Kelenli is amused by their fear. “You’ll be all right, though I suppose you’ll figure that out for yourselves in the morning,” she says. Then she heads for the door to go. I am standing at the door, looking through its window at the newly risen Moon. She touches me because I’m in her way. I don’t move at once, though. Because of the direction that the window in my cell faces, I don’t get to see the Moon often. I want to savor its beauty while I can.

  “Why have you brought us here?” I ask Kelenli, while still staring at it. “Why tell us these things?”

  She doesn’t answer at once. I think she’s looking at the Moon, too. Then she says, in a thoughtful reverberation of the earth, I’ve studied what I could of the Niess and their culture. There isn’t much left, and I have to sift the truth from all the lies. But there was a … a practice among them. A vocation. People whose job it was to see that the truth got told.

  I frown in confusion. “So … what? You’ve decided to carry on the traditions of a dead people?” Words. I’m stubborn.

  She shrugs. “Why not?”

  I shake my head. I’m tired, and overwhelmed, and perhaps a little angry. This day has upended my sense of self. I’ve spent my whole life knowing I was a tool, yes; not a person, but at least a symbol of power and brilliance and pride. Now I know I’m really just a symbol of paranoia and greed and hate. It’s a lot to deal with.

  “Let the Niess go,” I snap. “They’re dead. I don’t see the sense in trying to remember them.”

  I want her to get angry, but she merely shrugs. “That’s your choice to make—once you know enough to make an informed choice.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to be informed.” I lean against the glass of the door, which is cool and does not sting my fingers.

  “You wanted to be strong enough to hold the onyx.”

  I blurt a soft laugh, too tired to remember I should pretend to feel nothing. Hopefully our observers won’t notice. I shift to earthtalk, and speak in an acid, pressurized boil of bitterness and contempt and humiliation and heartbreak. What does it matter? is what it means. Geoarcanity is a lie.

  She shakes apart my self-pity with gentle, inexorable slipstrike laughter. “Ah, my thinker. I didn’t expect melodrama from you.”

  “What is melo—” I shake my head and fall silent, tired of not knowing things. Yes, I’m sulking.

  Kelenli sighs and touches my shoulder. I flinch, unused to the warmth of another person’s hand, but she keeps it in place and this quiets me.

  “Think,” she repeats. “Does the Plutonic Engine work? Do your sessapinae? You aren’t what they made you to be; does that negate what you are?”

  “I—That question doesn’t make sense.” But now I’m just being stubborn. I understand her point. I’m not what they made me; I’m something different. I am powerful in ways they did not expect. They made me but they do not control me, not fully. This is why I have emotions though they tried to take them away. This is why we have earthtalk … and perhaps other gifts that our conductors don’t know about.

  She pats my shoulder, pleased that I seem to be working through what she’s told me. A spot on the floor of her house calls to me; I will sleep so well tonight. But I fight my exhaustion, and remain focused on her, because I need her more than sleep, for now.

  “You see yourself as one of these … truth-tellers?” I ask.

  “Lorist. The last Niess lorist, if I have the right to claim such a thing.” Her smile abruptly fades, and for the first time I realize what a wealth of weariness and hard lines and sorrow her smiles cover. “Lorists were warriors, storytellers, nobility. They told their truths in books and song and through their art engines. I just … talk. But I feel like I’ve earned the right to claim some part of their mantle.” Not all fighters use knives, after all.

  In earthtalk there can be nothing but truth—and sometimes more truth than one wants to convey. I sense … something, in her sorrow. Grim endurance. A flutter of fear like the lick of salt acid. Determination to protect … something. It’s gone, a fading vibration, before I can identify more.

  She takes a deep breath and smiles again. So few of them are real, her smiles.

  “To master the onyx,” she continues, “you need to understand the Niess. What the conductors don’t realize is that it responds best to a certain emotional resonance. Everything I’m telling you should help.”

  Then, finally, she pushes me gently aside so that she can go. The question must be asked now. “So what happened,” I say slowly, “to the Niess?”

  She stops, and chuckles, and for once it is genuine. “You’ll find out tomorrow,” she says. “We’re going to see them.”

  I’m confused. “To their graves?”

  “Life is sacred in Syl Anagist,” she says over her shoulder. She’s passed through the door; now she keeps going without stopping or turning back. “Don’t you know that?” And then she is gone.

  It is an answer that I feel I should understand—but in my own way, I am still innocent. Kelenli is kind. She lets me keep that innocence for the rest of the night.

  To: Alma Innovator Dibars

  From: Yaetr Innovator Dibars

  Alma, the committee can’t pull my funding. Look, this is just the dates of the incidents I’ve gathered. Just look at the last ten!

  2729

  2714–2719: Choking

  2699

  2613

  2583

  2562

  2530

  2501

  2490

  2470

  2400

  2322–2329: Acid

  Is Seventh even interested in the fact that our popular conception of the frequency of Season-level events is completely wrong? These things aren’t happening every two hundred or three hundred years. It’s more like every thirty or forty! If not for roggas, we’d be a thousand times dead. And with these dates and the others I’ve compiled, I’m trying to put together a predictive model for the more intensive Seasons. There’s a cycle here, a rhythm. Don’t we need
to know in advance if the next Season is going to be longer or worse somehow? How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?

  9

  the desert, briefly, and you

  DESERTS ARE WORSE THAN MOST places, during Seasons. Tonkee lets Ykka know that water will be easy; Castrima’s Innovators have already assembled a number of contraptions they’re calling dew-catchers. The sun won’t be an issue either, thanks to the ash clouds that you never thought you’d have cause to thank. It will be chilly, in fact, though less so by day. You might even get a bit of snow.

  No, the danger of deserts during a Season is simply that nearly all animals and insects there hibernate, deep under the sand where it’s still warm. There are those who claim to have figured out a surefire method of digging up sleeping lizards and such, but those are usually scams; the few comms that edge the desert guard such secrets jealously. The surface plants will have already shriveled away or been eaten by creatures preparing for hibernation, leaving nothing aboveground but sand and ash. Stonelore’s advice on entering deserts during Seasons is simply: don’t. Unless you mean to starve.

  The comm spends two days camped at the edge of the Merz, preparing, though the truth is—as Ykka has confided in you, while you sat with her sharing your last mellow—there’s really no amount of preparation that will make the journey any easier. People are going to die. You won’t be one of them; it’s a curious feeling knowing that Hoa can whisk you away to Corepoint if there’s any real danger. It’s cheating, maybe. Except it’s not. Except you’re going to help as much as you can—and because you won’t die, you’re going to watch a lot of other people suffer. That’s the least you can do, now that you’ve committed to the cause of Castrima. Bear witness, and fight like earthfires to keep death from claiming more than its share.

  In the meantime, the folks on cookfire duty pull double shifts roasting insects, drying tubers, baking the last of the grain stores into cakes, salting meat. After they were fed enough to have some strength, Maxixe’s surviving people turned out to be especially helpful with foraging, since several are locals and remember where there might be abandoned farms or debris from the Rifting shake that hasn’t been too picked over. Speed will be of the essence; survival means winning the race between the Merz’s width and Castrima’s supplies. Because of this, Tonkee—who is increasingly becoming a spokesperson for the Innovators, much to her own disgruntlement—oversees a quick and dirty breakdown and rebuilding of the storage wagons to a new lighter, more shock-resistant design that should pull more easily over desert sand. The Resistants and Breeders redistribute the remaining supplies to make sure the loss of any one wagon, if it must be abandoned, won’t cause some kind of critical shortage.

  The night before the desert, you’re hunkered down beside one of the cookfires, still-awkwardly navigating how to feed yourself with one arm, when someone sits down beside you. It startles you a little, and you jerk enough to knock your cornbread off the plate. The hand that reaches into your view to retrieve it is broad and bronze and nicked with combat scars, and there’s a bit of yellow watered silk—filthy and ragged now, but still recognizable as such—looped around the wrist. Danel.

  “Thanks,” you say, hoping she won’t use the opportunity to strike up a conversation.

  “They say you were Fulcrum once,” she says, handing the cornbread back to you. No such luck, then.

  It really shouldn’t surprise you that the people of Castrima have been gossiping. You decide not to care, using the cornbread to sop up another mouthful of stew. It’s especially good today, thickened with corn flour and rich with the tender, salty meat that’s been plentiful since the stone forest. Everybody needs as much fat on them as they can pack away, to prepare for the desert. You don’t think about the meat.

  “I was,” you say, in what you hope sounds like a tone of warning.

  “How many rings?”

  You grimace in distaste, consider trying to explain the “unofficial” rings that Alabaster gave you, consider how far you’ve come beyond even those, consider being humble … and then finally you settle for accuracy. “Ten.” Essun Tenring, the Fulcrum would call you now, if the seniors would bother to acknowledge your current name, and if the Fulcrum still existed. For what it’s worth.

  Danel whistles appreciatively. So strange to encounter someone who knows and cares about such things. “They say,” she continues, “that you can do things with the obelisks. That’s how you beat us, at Castrima; I had no idea you’d be able to rile up the bugs that way. Or trap so many of the stone eaters.”

  You pretend not to care and concentrate on the cornbread. It’s just a little sweet; the cookfire squad is trying to use up the sugar, to make room for edibles with more nutritional value. It’s delicious.

  “They say,” Danel continues, watching you sidelong, “that a ten-ring rogga broke the world, up in the Equatorials.”

  Okay, no. “Orogene.”

  “What?”

  “Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that.”

  Silence for a few breaths. “All right,” Danel says then, with no hint of either apology or humoring you. She just accepts the new rule. She also doesn’t insinuate again that you’re the person who caused the Rifting. “Point stands, though. You can do things most orogenes can’t. Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” You blow a stray ash flake off the baked potato.

  “They say,” Danel says, planting her hands on her knees and leaning forward, “that you know how to end this Season. That you’re going to be leaving soon to go somewhere and actually try. And that you’ll need people to go with you, when you do.”

  What. You frown at your potato. “Are you volunteering?”

  “Maybe.”

  You stare at her. “You just got accepted into the Strongbacks.”

  Danel regards you for a moment longer, expression unreadably still. You don’t realize she’s wavering, trying to decide whether to reveal something about herself to you, until she sighs and does it. “I’m Lorist caste, actually. Danel Lorist Rennanis, once. Danel Strongback Castrima’s never gonna sound right.”

  You must look skeptical as you try to visualize her with black lips. She rolls her eyes and looks away. “Rennanis didn’t need lorists, the headman said. It needed soldiers. And everybody knows lorists are good in a fight, so—”

  “What?”

  She sighs. “Equatorial lorists, I mean. Those of us who come out of the old Lorist families train in hand-to-hand, the arts of war, and so forth. It makes us more useful during Seasons, and in the task of defending knowledge.”

  You had no idea. But—“Defending knowledge?”

  A muscle flexes in Danel’s jaw. “Soldiers might get a comm through a Season, but storytellers are what kept Sanze going through seven of them.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She makes a palpable effort to not shake her head at Midlatter provincialism. “Anyway. Better to be a general than cannon fodder, since that was the only choice I was given. But I’ve tried not to forget who I really am …” Abruptly her expression grows troubled. “You know, I can’t remember the exact wording of Tablet Three anymore? Or the Tale of Emperor Mutshatee. Just two years without stories, and I’m losing them. Never thought it would happen so fast.”

  You’re not sure what to say to that. She looks so grim that you almost want to reassure her. Oh, it’ll be all right now that you’re no longer occupying your mind with the wholesale slaughter of the Somidlats, or something like that. You don’t think you could pull that off without sounding a little snide, though.

  Danel’s jaw tightens in a determined sort of way anyway as she looks sharply at you. “I know when I see new stories being written, though.”

  “I … I don’t know anything about that.”


  She shrugs. “The hero of the story never does.”

  Hero? You laugh a little, and it’s got an edge. Can’t help thinking of Allia, and Tirimo, and Meov, and Rennanis, and Castrima. Heroes don’t summon swarms of nightmare bugs to eat their enemies. Heroes aren’t monsters to their daughters.

  “I won’t forget what I am,” Danel continues. She’s braced one hand on her knee and is leaning forward, insistent. Somewhere in the last few days, she’s gotten her hands on a knife, and used it to shave the sides of her scalp. It gives her a naturally lean, hungry look. “If I’m possibly the last Equatorial lorist left, then it’s my duty to go with you. To write the tale of what happens—and if I survive, to make sure the world hears it.”

  This is ridiculous. You stare at her. “You don’t even know where we’re going.”

  “Figured we’d settle the issue of whether I’m going first, but we can skip to the details if you want.”

  “I don’t trust you,” you say, mostly in exasperation.

  “I don’t trust you, either. But we don’t have to like each other to work together.” Her own plate is empty; she picks it up and waves to one of the kids on cleanup duty to come take it. “It’s not like I have a reason to kill you, anyway. This time.”

  And it’s worse that Danel has said this—that she remembers siccing a shirtless Guardian on you and is unapologetic about it. Yes, it was war and, yes, you later slaughtered her army, but … “People like you don’t need a reason!”

  “I don’t think you have any real idea who or what ‘people like me’ are.” She’s not angry; her statement was matter-of-fact. “But if you need more reasons, here’s another: Rennanis is shit. Sure, there’s food, water, and shelter; your headwoman’s right to lead you there if it’s true that the city is empty now. Better than commlessness, or rebuilding somewhere with no storecaches. But shit otherwise. I’d rather stay on the move.”