That is entirely unreassuring. It’s also frustrating that you care, and that others can tell you care. You used to be such a steelheart.
But you know why you aren’t, all of a sudden.
“Nassun,” you say to Tonkee.
“What?”
“Nassun. I know where she is, Tonkee.” You try to raise your right hand to catch hers, and there is a sensation that thrums through your shoulder like aching and floating. You hear a ringing sound. It doesn’t hurt, but you privately curse yourself for forgetting. “I have to go find her.”
Tonkee darts a look at your stretcher-bearers, and then in the direction Ykka went. “Speak softer.”
“What?” Ykka knows full well you’re going to want to go find your daughter. That was practically the first thing you ever said to her.
“If you want to be dumped on the side of the rusting road, keep talking.”
That shuts you up, along with the continued effort of restraining your orogeny. Oh. So Ykka’s that pissed.
The ash keeps falling, eventually obscuring your goggles because you don’t have the energy to brush it away. In the gray dimness that results, your body’s need to recover takes precedence; you fall asleep again. The next time you wake and brush the ash off your face, it’s because you’ve been put down again, and there’s a rock or branch or something poking you in the small of the back. You struggle to sit up on one elbow and it’s easier, though you still can’t manage much else.
Night has fallen. Several dozen people are settling onto some kind of rock outcropping amid a scraggly not-quite forest. The outcropping sesses familiar from your orogenic explorations of Castrima’s surroundings, and it helps you place yourself: a bit of fresh tectonic uplift that’s about a hundred and sixty miles north of the Castrima geode. That tells you that the journey from Castrima must have only just begun a few days before, since a large group can only walk so fast; and that there’s only one place you could be going, if you’re headed north. Rennanis. Somehow everyone must know that it’s empty and habitable. Or maybe they’re just hoping that it is, and they’ve got nothing else to hope for. Well, at least on that point, you can reassure them … if they’ll listen to you.
The people around you are setting up campfire circles, cooking spits, latrines. In a few spots throughout the camp, little piles of broken, lumpy Castrima crystals provide additional illumination; good to know there must be enough orogenes left to keep them working. Some of the activity is inefficient where people are unused to it, but for the most part it’s well-ordered. Castrima having more than its share of members who know how to live on the road is turning out to be a boon. Your stretcher-bearers have left you where they dumped you, though, and if anyone’s going to build you a fire or bring you food, they haven’t started yet. You spot Lerna crouching amid a small group of people who are also prone, but he’s busy. Ah, yes; there must have been a lot of wounded after Rennanis’s soldiers got into the geode.
Well, you don’t need a fire, and you’re not hungry, so the others’ indifference doesn’t trouble you for the moment, except emotionally. What does bother you is that your runny-sack is gone. You carried that thing halfway across the Stillness, stashed your old rank-rings in it, even saved it from getting scorched to powder when a stone eater transformed himself in your quarters. There wasn’t much in it that still mattered to you, but the bag itself holds a certain sentimental value, at this point.
Well. Everyone’s lost something.
A mountain suddenly weighs down your nearby perception. In spite of everything, you find yourself smiling. “I wondered when you would show up.”
Hoa stands over you. It’s still a shock to see him like this: a mid-sized adult rather than a small child, veined black marble instead of white flesh. Somehow, though, it’s easy to perceive him as the same person—same face shape, same haunting icewhite eyes, same ineffable strangeness, same whiff of lurking whimsy—as the Hoa you’ve known for the past year. What’s changed, that a stone eater no longer seems alien to you? Only superficial things about him. Everything about you.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Better.” The arm pulls when you shift to look up at him, a constant reminder of the unwritten contract between you. “Were you the one who told them about Rennanis?”
“Yes. And I’m guiding them there.”
“You?”
“To the degree that Ykka listens. I think she prefers her stone eaters as silent menaces rather than active allies.”
This pulls a weary laugh out of you. But. “Are you an ally, Hoa?”
“Not to them. Ykka understands that, too, though.”
Yes. This is probably why you’re still alive. As long as Ykka keeps you safe and fed, Hoa will help. You’re back on the road and everything’s a rusting transaction again. The comm that was Castrima lives, but it isn’t really a community anymore, just a group of like-minded travelers collaborating to survive. Maybe it can become a true comm again later, once it’s got another home to defend, but for now, you get why Ykka’s angry. Something beautiful and wholesome has been lost.
Well. You look down at yourself. You’re not wholesome anymore, but what’s left of you can be strengthened; you’ll be able to go after Nassun soon. First things first, though. “We going to do this?”
Hoa does not speak for a moment. “Are you certain?”
“The arm’s not doing me any good, as it is.”
There is the faintest of sounds. Stone grinding on stone, slow and inexorable. A very heavy hand comes to rest on your half-transformed shoulder. You have the sense that, despite the weight, it is a delicate touch by stone eater standards. Hoa’s being careful with you.
“Not here,” he says, and pulls you down into the earth.
It’s only for an instant. He always keeps these trips through the earth quick, probably because longer would make it hard to breathe … and stay sane. This time is little more than a blurring sensation of movement, a flicker of darkness, a whiff of loam richer than the acrid ash. Then you’re lying on another rocky outcropping—probably the same one that the rest of Castrima is settling on, just away from the encampment. There are no campfires here; the only light is the ruddy reflection of the Rifting off the thick clouds overhead. Your eyes adjust quickly, though there’s little to see but rocks and the shadows of nearby trees. And a human silhouette, which now crouches beside you.
Hoa holds your stone arm in his hands gently, almost reverently. In spite of yourself, you sense the solemnity of the moment. And why shouldn’t it be solemn? This is the sacrifice demanded by the obelisks. This is the pound of flesh you must pay for the blood-debt of your daughter.
“This isn’t what you think of it,” Hoa says, and for an instant you worry that he can read your mind. More likely it’s just the fact that he’s as old as the literal hills, and he can read your face. “You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too. This is not the ugly thing it seems.”
It seems like he’s going to eat your arm. You’re okay with it, but you want to understand. “What is it, then? Why …” You shake your head, unsure of even what question to ask. Maybe why doesn’t matter. Maybe you can’t understand. Maybe this isn’t meant for you.
“This is not sustenance. We need only life, to live.”
The latter half of that was nonsensical, so you latch onto the former half. “If it isn’t sustenance, then …?”
Hoa moves slowly again. They don’t do this often, stone eaters. Movement is the thing that emphasizes their uncanny nature, so like humanity and yet so wildly different. It would be easier if they were more alien. When they move like this, you can see what they once were, and the knowledge is a threat and warning to all that is human within you.
And yet. You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too.
He lifts your hand with both his own, one positioned under your elbow, his fingers lightly braced under your closed, cracked fist. Slowly, slowly. It doesn’t hurt your shoulder this way. Halfway to his f
ace he moves the hand that had been under your elbow, shifting it to cup the underside of your upper arm. His stone slides against yours with a faint grinding sound. It is surprisingly sensual, even though you can’t feel a thing.
Then your fist rests against his lips. The lips don’t move as he says, from within his chest, “Are you afraid?”
You consider this for a long moment. Shouldn’t you be? But … “No.”
“Good,” he replies. “I do this for you, Essun. Everything is for you. Do you believe that?”
You don’t know, at first. On impulse you lift your good hand, smooth fingers over his hard, cool, polished cheek. It’s hard to see him, black against the dark, but your thumb finds his brows and traces out his nose, which is longer in its adult shape. He told you once that he thinks of himself as human in spite of his strange body. You belatedly realize that you’ve chosen to see him as human, too. That makes this something other than an act of predation. You’re not sure what it is instead, but … it feels like a gift.
“Yes,” you say. “I believe you.”
His mouth opens. Wide, wider, wider than any human mouth can open. Once you worried his mouth was too small; now it’s wide enough to fit a fist. And such teeth he has, small and even and diamond-clear, glinting prettily in the red evening light. There is only darkness beyond those teeth.
You shut your eyes.
She was in a foul mood. Old age, one of her children told me. She said it was just the stress of trying to warn people who didn’t want to hear that bad times were coming. It wasn’t a foul mood, it was the privilege that age had bought her, to dispense with the lie of politeness.
“There isn’t a villain in this story,” she said. We sat in the garden dome, which was only a dome because she’d insisted. The Syl Skeptics still claim there’s no proof things will happen the way she said, but she’s never been wrong in one of her predictions, and she’s more Syl than they are, so. She was drinking sef, as if to mark a truth in chemicals.
“There isn’t a single evil to point to, a single moment when everything changed,” she went on. “Things were bad and then terrible and then better and then bad again, and then they happened again, and again, because no one stopped it. Things can be … adjusted. Lengthen the better, predict and shorten the terrible. Sometimes prevent the terrible by settling for the merely bad. I’ve given up on trying to stop you people. Just taught my children to remember and learn and survive … until someone finally breaks the cycle for good.”
I was confused. “Are you talking about Burndown?” That was what I’d come to talk about, after all. One hundred years, she predicted, fifty years ago. What else mattered?
She only smiled.
—Transcribed interview, translated from Obelisk-Builder C, found in Tapita Plateau Ruin #723 by Shinash Innovator Dibars. Date unknown, transcriber unknown. Speculation: the first lorist? Personal: ’Baster, you should see this place. Treasures of history everywhere, most of them too degraded to decipher, but still … Wish you were here.
2
Nassun feels like busting loose
NASSUN STANDS OVER THE BODY of her father, if one can call a tumbled mass of broken jewels a body. She’s swaying a little, light-headed because the wound in her shoulder—where her father has stabbed her—is bleeding profusely. The stabbing is the outcome of an impossible choice he demanded of her: to be either his daughter or an orogene. She refused to commit existential suicide. He refused to suffer an orogene to live. There was no malice in either of them in that final moment, only the grim violence of inevitability.
To one side of this tableau stands Schaffa, Nassun’s Guardian, who stares down at what is left of Jija Resistant Jekity in a combination of wonder and cold satisfaction. At Nassun’s other side is Steel, her stone eater. It is appropriate to call him that now, hers, because he has come in her hour of need—not to help, never that, but to provide her with something nevertheless. What he offers, and what she has finally realized she needs, is purpose. Not even Schaffa has given her this, but that’s because Schaffa loves her unconditionally. She needs that love, too, oh how she needs it, but in this moment when her heart has been most thoroughly broken, when her thoughts are at their least focused, she craves something more … solid.
She will have the solidity that she wants. She will fight for it and kill for it, because she’s had to do that again and again and it is habit now, and if she is successful she will die for it. After all, she is her mother’s daughter—and only people who think they have a future fear death.
In Nassun’s good hand thrums a three-foot-long, tapering shard of crystal, deep blue and finely faceted, though with some slight deformations near its base that have resulted in something like a hilt. Now and again this strange longknife flickers into a translucent, intangible, debatably real state. It’s very real; only Nassun’s attention keeps the thing in her hands from turning her to colored stone the way it did her father. She’s afraid of what might happen if she passes out from blood loss, so she would really like to send the sapphire back up into the sky to resume its default shape and immense size—but she can’t. Not yet.
There, by the dormitory, are the two reasons: Umber and Nida, the other two Guardians of Found Moon. They’re watching her, and when her gaze lands on them, there is a flicker in the lacing tendrils of silver that drift between the pair. No exchanged words or looks, just that silent communion which would have been imperceptible, if Nassun were anyone but who she was. Beneath each Guardian, delicate silvery tethers wend up from the ground into their feet, connected by the nerve-and-vein glimmer of their bodies to tiny shards of iron embedded in their brains. These taproot-like tethers have always been there, but maybe it’s the tension of the moment that makes Nassun finally notice how thick those lines of light are for each Guardian—much thicker than the one linking the ground to Schaffa. And at last she understands what that means: Umber and Nida are just puppets of a greater will. Nassun has tried to believe better of them, that they are their own people, but here, now, with the sapphire in her hands and her father dead at her feet … some maturations cannot wait for a more convenient season.
So Nassun roots a torus deep within the earth, because she knows that Umber and Nida will sense this. It’s a feint; she doesn’t need the power of the earth, and she suspects they know it. Still, they react, Umber unfolding his arms and Nida straightening from where she’d been leaning on the porch railing. Schaffa reacts, too, his eyes shifting sideways to meet hers. It’s an unavoidable tell that Umber and Nida will notice, but it cannot be helped; Nassun has no piece of the Evil Earth lodged in her brain to facilitate communication. Where matter fails, care makes do. He says, “Nida,” and that is all she needs.
Umber and Nida move. It’s fast—so fast—because the silver lattice within each has strengthened their bones and tightened the cords of their muscles so that they can do what ordinary human flesh cannot. A pulse of negation moves before them with storm-surge inexorability, immediately striking the major lobes of Nassun’s sessapinae numb, but Nassun is already on the offensive. Not physically; she cannot contest them in that sphere of battle, and besides she can barely stand. Will and the silver are all she’s got left.
So Nassun—her body still, her mind violent—snatches at the silver threads of the air around her, weaving them into a crude but efficient net. (She’s never done this before, but no one has ever told her that it can’t be done.) She wraps part of this around Nida, ignoring Umber because Schaffa told her to. And indeed, she understands in the next instant why he told her to concentrate on only one of the enemy Guardians. The silver she’s woven around Nida should catch the woman up fast, like an insect slamming into a spiderweb. Instead, Nida stumbles to a halt, then laughs while threads of something else curl forth from within her and lash the air, shredding the net around her. She lunges for Nassun again, but Nassun—after boggling at the speed and efficacy of the Guardian’s retaliation—snatches stone up from within the earth to spear Nida’s feet. This
impedes Nida only a little. She bulls forward, breaking the rock shards off and charging with them still jutting through her boots. One of her hands is held like a claw, the other a flat, finger-stiffened blade. Whichever of them reaches Nassun first will dictate how she begins tearing Nassun apart with her bare hands.
Here Nassun panics. Just a little, because she would lose control of the sapphire otherwise—but some. She can sense a raw, hungry, chaotic reverberation to the silver threads thrumming through Nida, like nothing she’s ever perceived before, and it is somehow, suddenly, terrifying. She doesn’t know what that strange reverberation will do to her, if any part of Nida should touch Nassun’s bare skin. (Her mother knows, though.) She takes a step back, willing the sapphire longknife to move between her and Nida in a defensive position. Her good hand is still on the sapphire’s hilt, so it looks as if she’s brandishing a weapon with a shaking and far-too-slow hand. Nida laughs again, high and delighted, because they can both see that not even the sapphire will be enough to stop her. Nida’s claw-hand flails out, fingers splaying and reaching for Nassun’s cheek even as she weaves like a snake around Nassun’s wild slash—
Nassun drops the sapphire and screams, her dulled sessapinae flexing desperately, helplessly—
But all of the Guardians have forgotten Nassun’s other guardian.
Steel does not appear to move. In one instant he stands as he has for the past few minutes, with his back to the tumbled pile of Jija, expression serene, posture languid as he faces the northern horizon. In the next he is closer, right beside Nassun, having transported himself so quickly that Nassun hears a sharp clap of displaced air. And Nida’s forward momentum abruptly stops as her throat is caught tight within the circle of Steel’s upraised hand.
She shrieks. Nassun has heard Nida ramble for hours in her fluttery voice, and perhaps that’s made her think of Nida as a songbird, chattery and chirruping and harmless. This shriek is the cry of a raptor, savagery turning to fury as she is thwarted from stooping on her prey. She tries to wrench herself back, risking skin and tendon to get loose, but Steel’s grip is as firm as stone. She’s caught.