The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Bullshit,” you say, frowning. “No comm is that bad.”

  Danel just lets out a single bitter snort. It makes you uneasy.

  “Just think about it,” she says finally, and gets up to leave.

  “I agree that Danel should come with us,” Lerna says, later that night when you tell him about the conversation. “She’s a good fighter. Knows the road. And she’s right: she has no reason to betray us.”

  You’re half-asleep, because of the sex. It’s an anticlimactic thing now that it’s finally happened. What you feel for Lerna will never be intense, or guilt-free. You’ll always feel too old for him. But, well. He asked you to show him the truncated breast and you did, thinking that would mark the end of his interest in you. The sandy patch is crusty and rough amid the smoother brown of your torso—like a scab, though the wrong color and texture. His hands were gentle as he examined the spot and pronounced it sound enough to need no further bandaging. You told him that it didn’t hurt. You didn’t say that you were afraid you couldn’t feel anything anymore. That you were changing, hardening in more ways than one, becoming nothing but the weapon everyone keeps trying to make of you. You didn’t say, Maybe you’re better off with unrequited love.

  But even though you didn’t say any of these things, after the examination he looked at you and replied, “You’re still beautiful.” You apparently needed to hear that a lot more than you realized. And now here you are.

  So you process his words slowly because he’s made you feel relaxed and boneless and human again, and it’s a good ten seconds before you blurt, “‘Us’?”

  He just looks at you.

  “Shit,” you say, and drape an arm over your eyes.

  The next day, Castrima enters the desert.

  There comes a time of greater hardship for you.

  All Seasons are hardship, Death is the fifth, and master of all, but this time is different. This is personal. This is a thousand people trying to cross a desert that is deadly even when acid rain isn’t sheeting from the sky. This is a group force-march along a highroad that is shaky and full of holes big enough to drop a house through. Highroads are built to withstand shakes, but there’s a limit, and the Rifting definitely surpassed it. Ykka decided to take the risk because even a damaged highroad is faster to travel than the desert sand, but this takes a toll. Every orogene in the comm has to stay on alert, because anything worse than a microshake while you’re up here could spell disaster. One day Penty, too exhausted to pay attention to her own instincts, steps on a patch of cracked asphalt that’s completely unstable. One of the other rogga kids snatches her away just as a big piece simply falls through the substructure of the road. Others are less careful, and less lucky.

  The acid rain was unexpected. Stonelore does not discuss the ways in which Seasons can impact weather, because such things are unpredictable at the best of times. What happens here is not entirely surprising, however. Northward, at the equator, the Rifting pumps heat and particulates into the air. Moisture-laden tropical winds coming off the sea hit this cloud-seeding, energy-infusing wall, which whips them into storm. You remember being worried about snow. No. It’s endless, miserable rain.

  (The rain is not so very acid, as these things go. In the Season of Turning Soil—long before Sanze, you would not know of it—there was rain that stripped animals’ fur and peeled the skins off oranges. This is nothing compared to that, and diluted as it is by water. Like vinegar. You’ll live.)

  Ykka sets a brutal pace while you’re on the highroad. On the first day everyone makes camp well after nightfall, and Lerna does not come to the tent after you wearily put it up. He’s busy tending half a dozen people who are going lame from slips or twisted ankles, and two elders who are having breathing problems, and the pregnant woman. The latter three are doing all right, he tells you when he finally crawls into your bedroll, near dawn; Ontrag the potter lives on spite, and the pregnant woman has both her household and half the Breeders taking care of her. What’s troubling are the injuries. “I have to tell Ykka,” he says as you push a slab of rain-soaked cachebread and sour sausage into his mouth, then cover him up and make him lie still. He chews and swallows almost without noticing. “We can’t keep going at this pace. We’ll start losing people if we don’t—”

  “She knows,” you tell him. You’ve spoken as gently as you can, but it still silences him. He stares until you lie back down beside him—awkwardly, with only one arm, but successfully. Eventually exhaustion overwhelms anguish, and he sleeps.

  You walk with Ykka one day. She’s setting the pace like a good comm leader should, pushing no one harder than herself. At the lone midday rest stop, she takes off one boot and you see that her feet are streaked with blood from blisters. You look at her, frowning, and it’s eloquent enough that she sighs. “Never got around to requisitioning better boots,” she says. “These are too loose. Always figured I’d have more time.”

  “If your feet rot off,” you begin, but she rolls her eyes and points toward the supply pile in the middle of the camp.

  You glance at it in confusion, start to resume your scolding, and then pause. Think. Look at the supply pile again. If every wagon carries a crate of the salted cachebread and another of sausage, and if those casks are pickled vegetables, and those are the grains and beans …

  The pile is so small. So little, for a thousand people who have weeks yet to go through the Merz.

  You shut up about the boots. Though she gets some extra socks from someone; that helps.

  It shocks you that you’re doing as well as you are. You’re not healthy, not exactly. Your menstrual cycle has stopped, and it’s probably not menopause yet. When you undress to basin-wash, which is sort of pointless in the constant rain but habit is habit, you notice that your ribs show starkly beneath loose skin. That’s only partly because of all the walking, though; some of it is because you keep forgetting to eat. You feel tired at the end of the day, but it’s a distant, detached sort of thing. When you touch Lerna—not for sex, you don’t have the energy, but cuddling for warmth saves calories, and he needs the comfort—it feels good, but in an equally detached way. You feel as though you’re floating above yourself, watching him sigh, listening to someone else yawn. Like it’s happening to someone else.

  This is what happened to Alabaster, you remember. A detachment from the flesh, as it became no longer flesh. You resolve to do a better job of eating at every opportunity.

  Three weeks into the desert, as expected, the highroad veers off to the west. From there on, Castrima must descend to the ground and contend with desert terrain up close and personal. It’s easier, in some ways, because at least the ground isn’t likely to crumble away beneath your feet. On the other hand, sand is harder to walk on than asphalt. Everyone slows down. Maxixe earns his keep by drawing enough of the moisture out of the topmost layer of sand and ash and icing it a few inches down, to firm it up beneath everyone’s feet. It exhausts him to do this on a constant basis, though, so he saves it for the worst patches. He tries to teach Temell how to do the same trick, but Temell’s an ordinary feral; he can’t manage the necessary precision. (You could have done it once. You don’t let yourself think about this.)

  Scouts sent forth to try to find a better path all come back and report the same thing: rusting sand-ash-mud everywhere. There is no better path.

  Three people got left behind on the highroad, unable to walk any further because of sprains or breaks. You don’t know them. In theory, they’ll catch up once they’ve recovered, but you can’t see how they’ll recover with no food or shelter. Here on the ground it’s worse: a half-dozen broken ankles, one broken leg, one wrenched back among the Strongbacks pulling the wagons, all in the first day. After a while, Lerna stops going to them unless they ask for his help. Most don’t ask. There’s nothing he can do, and everyone knows it.

  On a chilly day, Ontrag the potter just sits down and says she doesn’t feel like going any further. Ykka actually argues with her, which you weren�
�t expecting. Ontrag has passed on her skill of pottery to two younger comm members. She’s redundant, long past childbearing; it should be an easy headwoman’s choice, by the rules of Old Sanze and the tenets of stonelore. But in the end, Ontrag herself has to tell Ykka to shut up and walk away.

  It’s a warning sign. “I can’t do this anymore,” you hear Ykka say later, when Ontrag has fallen out of sight behind you. She plods forward, her pace steady and ground-eating as usual, but her head is down, hanks of wet ashblow hair obscuring her face. “I can’t. It isn’t right. It shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t just be—there’s more to being Castrima than being rusting useful, for Earth’s sake, she used to teach me in creche, she knows stories, I rusting can’t.”

  Hjarka Leadership Castrima, who was taught from an early age to kill the few so the many might live, only touches her shoulder and says, “You’ll do what you have to do.”

  Ykka doesn’t say anything for the next few miles, but maybe that’s just because there’s nothing to say.

  The vegetables run out first. Then the meat. The cachebread Ykka tries to ration for as long as she can, but the plain fact is that people can’t travel at this speed on nothing. She has to give everyone at least a wafer a day. That’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing—until there is nothing. And you keep walking anyway.

  In the absence of all else, people run on hope. On the other side of the desert, Danel tells everyone around a campfire one night, there’s another Imperial Road you can pick up. Easy traveling all the way to Rennanis. It’s a river delta region, too, with good soil, once the breadbasket of the Equatorials. Lots of now-abandoned farms outside of any comm. Danel’s army had good foraging there on its way south. If you can get through the desert, there will be food.

  If you can get through the desert.

  You know the end to this. Don’t you? How could you be here listening to this tale if you didn’t? But sometimes it is the how of a thing, not just the endgame, that matters most.

  So this is the endgame: Of the nearly eleven hundred souls who went into the desert, a little over eight hundred and fifty reach the Imperial Road.

  For a few days after that, the comm effectively dissolves. Desperate people, no longer willing to wait for orderly foraging by the Hunters, stagger off to dig through sour soil for half-rotted tubers and bitter grubs and barely chewable woody roots. The land around here is scraggly, treeless, half-desert and half-fertile, long depopulated by the Rennies. Before she loses too many people, Ykka orders camp made on an old farm with several barns that have managed to survive the Season thus far. The walls, apart from basic framing, haven’t fared as well, but then they haven’t collapsed, either. It’s the roofs she wanted, since the rain still falls here on the desert’s edge, though it’s lighter and intermittent. Nice to sleep dry, at last.

  Three days, Ykka gives it. During that time, people creep back in ones and twos, some bringing food to share with others too weak to forage. The Hunters who bother to return bring fish from one of the river branches that’s relatively nearby. One of them finds the thing that saves you, the thing that feels like life after all the death behind you: a farmer’s private housecache of cornmeal, sealed in clay urns and kept hidden under the floorboards of the ruined house. You have nothing to mix it with, no milk or eggs or dried meat, just the acid water, but food is that which nourishes, stonelore says. The comm feasts on fried corn mush that night. One urn has cracked and teems with mealybugs, but no one cares. Extra protein.

  A lot of people don’t come back. It’s a Season. All things change.

  At the end of three days, Ykka declares that anyone still in the camp is Castrima; anyone who hasn’t returned is now ashed out and commless. Easier than speculating on how they might have died, or who might have killed them. What’s left of the group strikes camp. You head north.

  Was this too fast? Perhaps tragedies should not be summarized so bluntly. I meant to be merciful, not cruel. That you had to live it is the cruelty … but distance, detachment, heals. Sometimes.

  I could have taken you from the desert. You did not have to suffer as they did. And yet … they have become part of you, the people of this comm. Your friends. Your fellows. You needed to see them through. Suffering is your healing, at least for now.

  Lest you think me inhuman, a stone, I did what I could to help. Some of the beasts that hibernate beneath the sand of the desert are capable of preying on humans; did you know that? A few woke as you passed, but I kept them away. One of the wagons’ wooden axles partially dissolved in the rain and began to sag, though none of you noticed. I transmuted the wood—petrified it, if you prefer to think that way—so that it would last. I am the one who moved the moth-eaten rug in that abandoned farmhouse, so that your Hunter found the cornmeal. Ontrag, who had not told Ykka about the growing pain in her side and chest, or her shortness of breath, did not live long after the comm left her behind. I went back to her on the night that she died, and tuned away what little pain she felt. (You’ve heard the song. Antimony sang it for Alabaster once. I’ll sing it for you, if …) She was not alone, at the end.

  Does any of this comfort you? I hope so. I’m still human, I told you. Your opinion matters to me.

  Castrima survives; that is also what matters. You survive. For now, at least.

  And at last, some while later, you reach the southernmost edge of Rennanis’s territory.

  Honor in safety, survival under threat. Necessity is the only law.

  —Tablet Three, “Structures,” verse four

  10

  Nassun, through the fire

  ALL OF THIS HAPPENS IN the earth. It is mine to know, and to share with you. It is hers to suffer. I’m sorry.

  Inside the pearlescent vehicle, the walls are inlaid with elegant vining designs wrought of what looks like gold. Nassun isn’t sure if the metal is purely decorative or has some sort of purpose. The hard, smooth seats, which are pastel colors and shaped something like the shells of mussels that she ate sometimes at Found Moon, have amazingly soft cushions. They are locked to the floor, Nassun finds, and yet it is possible to turn them from side to side or lean back. She cannot fathom what the chairs are made of.

  To her greater shock, a voice speaks in the air a moment after they settle in. The voice is female, polite, detached, and somehow reassuring. The language is … incomprehensible, and not remotely familiar. However, the pronunciation of the syllables is no different from that of Sanze-mat, and something about the rhythm of the sentences, their order, fits the expectations of Nassun’s ear. She suspects that part of the first sentence is a greeting. She thinks a word that keeps being repeated, amid a passage that has the air of a command, might be a softening word, like please. The rest, however, is wholly foreign.

  The voice speaks only briefly, and then falls silent. Nassun glances at Schaffa and is surprised to see him frowning, eyes narrowed in concentration—though some of that is also tension in his jaw, and a hint of extra pallor around his lips. The silver is hurting him more, and it must be bad this time. Still, he looks up at her in something like wonder. “I remember this language,” he says.

  “Those weird words? What did she say?”

  “That this …” He grimaces. “Thing. It’s called a vehimal. The announcement says it will depart from this city and begin the transit to Corepoint in two minutes, to arrive in six hours. There was something about other vehicles, other routes, return trips to various … nodes? I don’t remember what that means. And she hopes we will enjoy the ride.” He smiles thinly.

  “Oh.” Pleased, Nassun kicks a little in her chair. Six hours to travel all the way to the other side of the planet? But she shouldn’t be amazed by that, maybe, since these are the people who built the obelisks.

  There seems to be nothing to do but get comfortable. Cautiously, Nassun unslings her runny-sack and lets it hang from the back of her chair. This causes her to notice that something like lichen grows all over the floor, though it cannot be natural or acciden
tal; the blooms of it spread out in pretty, regular patterns. She stretches down a foot and finds that it is soft, like carpet.

  Schaffa is more restless, pacing around the comfortable confines of the … vehimal … and touching its golden veins now and again. It’s slow, methodical pacing, but even that is unusual for him, so Nassun is restless, too. “I have been here,” he murmurs.

  “What?” She heard him. She’s just confused.

  “In this vehimal. Perhaps in that very seat. I have been here, I feel it. And that language—I don’t remember ever having heard it, and yet.” He bares his teeth suddenly, and thrusts his fingers into his hair. “Familiarity, but no, no … context! No meaning! Something about this journey is wrong. Something is wrong and I don’t remember what.”

  Schaffa has been damaged for as long as Nassun has known him, but this is the first time he has seemed damaged to her. He’s speaking faster, words tumbling over one another. There is an oddness to the way his eyes dart around the vehimal interior that makes Nassun suspect he’s seeing things that aren’t there.

  Trying to conceal her anxiety, she reaches out and pats the shell-chair beside her. “These are soft enough to sleep in, Schaffa.”

  It’s too obvious a suggestion, but he turns to gaze at her, and for a moment the haunted tension of his expression softens. “Always so concerned for me, my little one.” But it stops the restlessness as she’d hoped, and he comes over to sit.

  Just as he does—Nassun starts—the woman’s voice speaks again. It’s asking a question. Schaffa frowns and then translates, slowly, “She—I think this is the vehimal’s voice. It speaks to us now, specifically. Not just an announcement.”

  Nassun shifts, suddenly less comfortable inside the thing. “It talks. It’s alive?”

  “I’m not certain the distinction between living creature and lifeless object matters to the people who built this place. Yet—” He hesitates, then raises his voice to haltingly speak strange words to the air. The voice answers again, repeating something Nassun heard before. She’s not sure where some of the words begin or end, but the syllables are the same. “It says that we are approaching the … transition point. And it asks if we would like to … experience?” He shakes his head, irritable. “To see something. Finding the words in our own tongue is more difficult than understanding what’s being said.”