“Doesn’t matter,” snaps Hjarka. “This is a threat, whoever it’s coming from. What are we going to do about it?”
They devolve into speculations and argument, all with a rising edge of panic. Without really planning to, you lean back against the wall of Ykka’s meeting room. Against the wall of the crystal that her apartment inhabits. Against the rind of the geode, in which the crystal shaft is rooted. It is not an obelisk. Not even the flickering portions of crystal in the control room feel of power as they should; even if they are in an obelisk-like state of unreality, that is the only point of similarity they share with real obelisks.
But you’ve also remembered something that Alabaster told you a long time ago, on a garnet-hued afternoon in a seaside comm that is now smoldering ruins. Alabaster murmuring of conspiracies, watchers, nowhere was safe. You’re saying someone could hear us through the walls? Through the stone itself? you remember asking him. Once upon a time, you thought the things he did were just miracles.
And now you’re a nine-ringer, Alabaster says. Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic. Castrima exists amid ancient sedimentary rock laced through with veins of long-dead forests turned to crumbly coal, all of it balanced precariously over a crisscross of ancient fault-scars that have all but healed. The geode has been here long enough, however awkwardly jammed amid the strata, that its outermost layers are thoroughly fused with local minerals. This makes it easy for you to push your awareness beyond Castrima in a fine, gradually attenuating extrusion. This is not the same thing as extending your torus; a torus is your power, this is you. It’s harder. You can sense what your power cannot, though, and—
“Hey, wake up,” Hjarka says, shoving you in the shoulder, and you snap back to glare at her.
Ykka groans. “Remind me, Hjar, to someday tell you what usually happens when someone interrupts high-level orogeny. I mean, you can probably guess, but remind me to describe it in gory detail, so that maybe it can have some actual deterrent value.”
“She was just sitting there.” Hjarka sits back, looking disgruntled. “And the rest of you were just looking at her.”
“I was trying to hear the north,” you snap. They all look at you like you’re crazy. Evil Earth, if only someone else here were Fulcrum-trained. Though this isn’t something anyone but a senior would understand, anyway.
Lerna ventures, “Hear… the earth? Do you mean sess?”
It’s so hard to explain with words. You rub your eyes. “No, I mean hear. Vibrations. All sound is vibrations, I mean, but…” Their expressions grow more confused. You’re going to have to contextualize. “The node network is still there,” you say. “Alabaster was right. I can sess it if I try, a zone of stillness where the rest of the Equatorials are a seething disaster. Someone is keeping them, the node maintainers around Rennanis, alive, so—”
“So this is really them,” Cutter says, sounding troubled. “An Equatorial city really has decided to induct us.”
“Equatorials don’t induct,” Ykka says. Her jaw is tight as she speaks, gazing at the scrap of leather in her hand. “They’re Old Sanze, or what’s left of it. When Sanze wanted something back in the day, Sanze took it.”
After a tense silence, they start quietly panicking again. Too many words. You sigh and rub your temples and wish you were alone so you could try again. Or…
You blink. Or. You sess the hovering potentiality of the topaz, which drifts in the sky above Castrima-over, where it has been for the past six months, half-hidden amid the ash clouds. Evil Earth. Alabaster isn’t just sessing half the continent; he’s using the spinel to do it. You haven’t even thought about using an obelisk to extend your reach, but he does it like breathing.
“No one touch me,” you say softly. “No one speak to me.” Without waiting to see if they understand, you plunge into the obelisk.
(Because, well, some part of you wants to do this. Has dreamt of upward-falling water and torrential power for months. You are only human, whatever they say about your kind. It’s good to feel powerful.)
Then you’re in the topaz and through it and stretching yourself across the world in a breath. No need to be in the ground when the topaz is in air, is the air; it exists in states of being that transcend solidity, and thus you are capable of transcending, too; you become air. You drift amid the ash clouds and see the Stillness track beneath you in humps of topography and patches of dying forest and threads of roads, all of it grayed over after the long months of the Season. The continent seems tiny and you think, I can make the equator in the blink of an eye, but this thought scares you a little. You don’t know why. You try not to think—how far of a leap is it from thrilling in such power to using it to destroy the world? (Did Alabaster feel this, when he…?) But you are committed; you have connected; the resonance is complete. You launch yourself northward anyhow.
And then you stutter to a halt. Because there is something much closer than the equator that draws your attention. It is so shocking that you fall out of alignment with the topaz at once, and you are very lucky. There is a struck-glass instant in which you feel the shivering immensity of the obelisk’s power and know that you survive only because of fortunate resonances and careful long-dead designers who obviously planned for mistakes like yours, and then you are gasping and back within yourself and babbling before you quite remember what words mean.
“Camp, fire,” you say, panting a little. Lerna comes over and crouches in front of you, taking your hands and checking your pulse; you ignore him. This is important. “Basin.”
Ykka gets it instantly, sitting up straight and tightening her jaw. Hjarka, too; she’s not stupid, or Tonkee would never put up with her. She curses. Lerna frowns, and Cutter looks at all of you in rising confusion. “Did that actually mean something?”
Asshole. “An army,” you snap as you recover. But words are hard. “Th-there’s a… a rusting army. In the forest basin. I could. Sess their campfires.”
“How many?” Ykka is already getting up, fetching a longknife from a shelf and belting it round her thigh. Hjarka gets up, too, going to the door of Ykka’s apartment and pulling open the curtain. You hear her shouting for Esni, the head of the Strongbacks. The Strongbacks sometimes do scouting and supplement the Hunters, but in a situation like this, they are charged primarily with the comm’s defense.
You couldn’t count all the little blots of heat that pinged on your awareness when you were in the obelisk, but you try to guess. “Maybe a hundred?” That was the campfires, though. How many people around each fire? You guess six or seven apiece. Not a large force, under ordinary circumstances. Any decent quartent governor could field an army ten times that size on relatively short notice. During a Season, though, and for a comm as small as Castrima—whose total population is not much larger—an army of five or six hundred is a dire threat indeed.
“Tettehee,” Cutter breathes, sitting back. He’s gone paler than usual. You follow him, though. Six months ago, the stand of impaled corpses set up as a warn-off in the forest basin. The comm of Tettehee is beyond the basin, near the mouth of the river that wends through Castrima’s territory and ultimately empties into one of the great lakes of the Somidlats. You’ve heard nothing from Tettehee in months, and the trading party you sent past the warn-off failed to return. This army must have hit Tettehee around that time, then bunkered down there for a while, sending out scouting parties to mark territory. Replenishing stores, rebuilding arms, healing their wounded, maybe sending some of their spoils back north to Rennanis. Now that they’ve digested Tettehee, they’re on the march again.
And somehow, they know Castrima’s here. They’re saying hello.
Ykka heads outside and shouts alongside Hjarka, and within a few minutes someone is ringing the shake alarm and shouting for a gathering of the household heads at the Flat Top. You’ve never heard Castrima’s shake alarm—comm full of roggas—and it’s more annoying than you expected, low and rhythmic and buzzy. You u
nderstand why: Amid a bunch of crystalline structures, ringing bells aren’t the best idea. Still. You and Lerna and the rest follow Ykka as she strides along a rope bridge and around two larger shafts, her lips pressed together and face grim. By the time she reaches the Flat Top there’s a small crowd already there; by the time she yells for someone to stop blowing the rusting alarm and the alarm actually stops, the sheared-off crystal is starting to look dangerously packed with murmuring, anxious people. There’s a railing, but still. Hjarka shouts at Esni, and Esni in turn shouts at the Strongbacks amid the gathering, and they move clumsily to turn people away so there won’t be any horrible tragedies distracting from the possible horrible tragedy that looms imminent.
When Ykka raises her hands for attention, everyone falls silent instantly. “The situation,” she begins, and lays everything out in a few terse sentences.
You respect her for holding nothing back. You respect the people of Castrima, too, for doing nothing more than gasping or murmuring in alarm, and not panicking. But then, they are all good stolid commfolk, and panic has always been frowned upon in the Stillness. The lorists’ tales are full of dire warnings about those who cannot master their fear, and few comms will grant such people comm names unless they’re wealthy or influential enough to push the issue. Those things tend to sort themselves out once a Season rolls around.
“Rennanis was a big city,” says one woman, once Ykka’s stopped talking. “Half the size of Yumenes but still millions of people. Can we fight that?”
“It’s a Season,” Hjarka says, before Ykka can reply. Ykka shoots her a dirty look, but Hjarka shrugs it off. “We have no choice.”
“We can fight because of the way Castrima’s built,” Ykka adds, throwing Hjarka one last quelling look. “They can’t exactly come at us from the rear. If push comes to shove, we can block off the tunnels; then nothing can get down here. We can wait them out.”
Not forever, though. Not when the comm needs both hunting and trading to supplement its storecaches and water gardens. You respect Ykka for not saying this. There’s a somewhat relieved stir.
“Do we have time to send a messenger south to one of our allied comms?” Lerna asks. You can feel him trying to skirt around the supply issue. “Would any of them be willing to help us?”
Ykka snorts at the last question. Lots of other people do, a few throwing pitying looks Lerna’s way. It’s a Season. But—“Trading’s a maybe. We could load up on critical supplies, medicines, and be more ready if there’s a siege. The forest basin takes days to get across with a small party; a big group will take a couple of weeks, maybe. Faster if they force-march it, but that’s stupid and dangerous on terrain they don’t know. We know their scouts are in our territory, but…” She glances at you. “How close are the rest of them?”
You’re caught off guard, but you know what she wants. “The bulk of them were near the impaling.” That’s about halfway across the forest basin.
“They could be here in days,” says someone, voice high-pitched with alarm, and many other people take up that murmur. They start getting louder. Ykka raises her hands again, but this time only some of the assembled people go quiet; the rest keep speculating, calculating, and you catch sight of a few people breaking for the bridges, clearly intent upon making their own plans, Ykka be damned. It’s not chaos, not quite panic, but there’s enough fear in the air to scent it faintly bitter. You get up, intending to move to the center of the gathering with Ykka, to try to add your voice to hers in calling for calm.
But you stop. Because someone is standing in the place you intended to move to.
It’s not like with Antimony, or Ruby Hair, or the other stone eaters you’ve glimpsed around the comm from time to time. Those, for whatever reason, don’t like to be seen moving; you’ll catch a blur now and again, but then the statue is there, watching you, as if there has always been a statue of a stranger in that position, sculpted by someone long ago.
This stone eater is turning. It keeps turning, letting everyone see and hear it turn, watching as you finally register its presence, the gray granite of its flesh, the undifferentiated slick of its hair, the slightly greater polish of its eyes. Carefully sculpted length and weight of jaw, and its torso is finely carved with male human musculature rather than the suggestion of clothing that most stone eaters adopt. This one obviously wants you to think of it as male, so fine, it’s male. He is allover gray, the first stone eater you have seen who looks like nothing more than a statue… except that he moves, and keeps moving, as everyone falls silent in surprise. He is taking all of you in, too, with a slight smile on his lips. He’s holding something.
You stare as the gray stone eater turns, and as your mind makes out the oddly shaped, bloody thing he holds, it is recent experience that makes you suddenly realize it is an arm. It is a small arm. It is a small arm still partially wrapped in cloth that is familiar, the jacket that you bought a lifetime ago on the road. The red-smeared inhumanly white skin on the hand is familiar, and the size is familiar, even though the lump of splintered bone at the bloody end is clear and glasslike and finely faceted and not bone at all.
Hoa it is Hoa that is Hoa’s arm
“I bear a message,” says the gray stone eater. The voice is pleasant, tenor. His mouth does not move, and the words echo up from his chest. This, at least, feels normal, insofar as you are currently capable of feeling normal, as you stare down at that dripping disaster of an arm.
Ykka stirs after a moment, perhaps pulling herself out of shock, too. “From whom?”
He turns to her. “Rennanis.” Turn again, eyes shifting from face to face amid the crowd, same as a human would do when trying to make a connection, get a point across. His eyes skim over you as if you aren’t there. “We wish you no harm.”
You stare at Hoa’s arm in his hand.
Ykka is skeptical. “So, the army camped on our doorstep…?”
Turn. He ignores Cutter, too. “We have plentiful food. Strong walls. All yours, if you join our comm.”
“Maybe we like being our own comm,” Ykka says.
Turn. His gaze settles on Hjarka, who blinks. “You have no meat, and your territory is depleted. You’ll be eating each other within a year.”
Well, that sets off the murmuring. Ykka shuts her eyes for a moment in pure frustration. Hjarka looks around angrily, as if wondering who has betrayed you.
Cutter says, “Would all of us be adopted into your comm? With our use-castes intact?”
Lerna makes a tight sound. “I don’t see how that’s the point, Cutter—”
Cutter throws a slashing look at Lerna. “We can’t fight an Equatorial city.”
“But it is a stupid question,” Ykka says. Her voice is deceptively mild, but in the part of your mind that is not stunned to silence by that arm, you note that she’s never backed up Lerna before. You’ve always gotten the impression she doesn’t much like him, and that it’s mutual—she’s too cold for him, he’s too soft for her. This is significant. “If I were these people, I would lie, take us all north, and shove us into a commless buffer-shanty somewhere between an acid geyser and a lava lake. Equatorial comms have done that before, especially when they needed labor. Why should we believe this one’s any different?”
The gray stone eater tilts his head. Between that and the little smile on his lips, it’s a remarkably human gesture—a look that says, Oh, aren’t you cute. “We don’t have to lie.” He lets those pleasant-toned words hang in the air for just the right amount of time. Oh, he’s good at this. You see people exchange looks, hear them shift uncomfortably; you feel the pent silence as Ykka has no retort to that. Because it’s true.
Then he drops the other boot. “But we have no use for orogenes.”
Silence. Shocked stillness. Ykka breaks it by uttering a swift, “Fire-under-Earth.” Cutter looks away. Lerna’s eyes widen as he grasps the implications of what the stone eater has just done.
“Where is Hoa?” you ask into the silence. It’s all you ca
n think about.
The stone eater’s eyes slide to you. The rest of his face does not turn. For a stone eater, this is normal body language; for this stone eater, it is conspicuous. “Dead,” he says. “After leading us here.”
“You’re lying.” You don’t even realize you’re angry. You don’t think about what you’re about to do. You just react, like Damaya in the crucibles, like Syenite on the beach. Everything in you crystallizes and sharpens and your awareness facets down to a razor point and you weave the threads that you barely noticed were there and it happens just like with Tonkee’s arm; shiiiiing. You slice the stone eater’s hand off.
It and Hoa’s arm drop to the floor. People gasp. There is no blood. Hoa’s arm hits the crystal with a loud, meaty thud—it’s heavier than it looks—and the stone eater’s hand makes a second, even more solid clack, separating from the arm. The cross-section of its wrist is undifferentiated gray.
The stone eater does not seem to react at first. Then you sess the coalescence of something, like the silver threads of magic but so many. The hand twitches, then leaps into the air, returning to the wrist-stump as if pulled by strings. He leaves Hoa’s arm behind. Then the stone eater turns fully to face you, at last.
“Get out before I chop you into more pieces than you can put back together,” you say in a voice that shakes like the earth.
The gray stone eater smiles. It’s a full smile, eyes crinkling with crow’s feet and lips drawing back from diamond teeth—and marvel of marvels, it actually looks like a smile and not a threat display. Then he vanishes, falling through the surface of the crystal. For an instant you see a gray shadow within the crystal’s translucence, his shape blurred and not quite humanoid anymore, though that is probably the angle. Then, faster than you can track with eyes or sessapinae, he shoots down and away.
In the reverberating wake of his leaving, Ykka takes and lets out a deep breath.
“Well,” she says, looking around at her people. What she believes to be her people. “Sounds like we need to talk.” There is an uneasy stir.