“Because you should. All roggas should.”
Syenite flinches, just a little, at his rogga. The Fulcrum gives demerits to anyone who says it, so she doesn’t hear it much—just the odd muttered epithet from people riding past them, or grits trying to sound tough when the instructors aren’t around. It’s such an ugly word, harsh and guttural; the sound of it is like a slap to the ear. But Alabaster uses it the way other people use orogene.
He continues, still in the same cold tone: “And if you can feel what I’m doing, then you can do it, too.”
This startles Syen more, and angers her more. “Why in Earthfires would I quell microshakes? Then I’ll be—” And then she stops herself, because she was about to say as tired and useless as you, and that’s just rude. But then it occurs to her that he has been tired and useless, maybe because he’s been doing this.
If it’s important enough that he’s been wearing himself out to do it, then maybe it’s wrong of her to refuse out of hand. Orogenes have to look out for each other, after all. She sighs. “All right. I guess I can help some poor fool who’s stuck in the back end of beyond with nothing to do but keep the land steady.” At least it will pass the time.
He relaxes, just a little, and she’s surprised to see him smile. He hardly ever does that. But no, that muscle in his jaw is still going twitch twitch twitch. He’s still upset about something. “There’s a node station about two days’ ride from the next highroad turnoff.”
Syen waits for this statement to conclude, but he starts eating, making a little sound of pleasure that has more to do with him being hungry than with the food being especially delicious. Since she’s hungry, too, Syenite tucks in—and then she frowns. “Wait. Are you planning to go to this station? Is that what you’re saying?”
“We are going, yes.” Alabaster looks up at her, a quick flash of command in his expression, and all of a sudden she hates him more than ever.
It’s completely irrational, her reaction to him. Alabaster outranks her by six rings and would probably outrank her by more if the ring rankings went past ten; she’s heard the rumors about his skill. If they ever fought, he could turn her torus inside out and flash-freeze her in a second. For that alone she should be nice to him; for the potential value of his favor, and her own goals for advancement within the Fulcrum’s ranks, she should even try to like him.
But she’s tried being polite with him, and flattering, and it doesn’t work. He just pretends to misunderstand or insults her until she stops. She’s offered all the little gestures of respect that seniors at the Fulcrum usually seem to expect from juniors, but these just piss him off. Which makes her angry—and strangely, this state of affairs seems to please him most.
So although she would never do this with another senior, she snaps, “Yes, sir,” and lets the rest of the evening pass in resentful, reverberating silence.
They go to bed and she reaches for him, as usual, but this time he rolls over, putting his back to her. “We’ll do it in the morning, if we still have to. Isn’t it time for you to menstruate by now?”
Which makes Syenite feel like the world’s biggest boor. That he hates the sex as much as she does isn’t in question. But it’s horrible that he’s been waiting for a break and she hasn’t been counting. She does so now, clumsily because she can’t remember the exact day the last one started, and—he’s right. She’s late.
At her surprised silence he sighs, already halfway to sleep. “Doesn’t mean anything yet if you’re late. Traveling’s hard on the body.” He yawns. “In the morning, then.”
In the morning they copulate. There are no better words she can use for the act—vulgarities don’t fit because it’s too dull, and euphemisms aren’t necessary to downplay its intimacy because it’s not intimate. It’s perfunctory, an exercise, like the stretches she’s learned to do before they start riding for the day. More energetic this time because he’s rested first; she almost enjoys it, and he actually makes some noise when he comes. But that’s it. When they’re done he lies there watching while she gets up and does a quick basin bath beside the fire. She’s so used to this that she starts when he speaks. “Why do you hate me?”
Syenite pauses, and considers lying for a moment. If this were the Fulcrum, she would lie. If he were any other senior, obsessed with propriety and making sure that Fulcrum orogenes comport themselves well at all times, she would lie. He’s made it clear, however, that he prefers honesty, however indelicate. So she sighs. “I just do.”
He rolls onto his back, looking up at the sky, and she thinks that’s the end of the conversation until he says, “I think you hate me because… I’m someone you can hate. I’m here, I’m handy. But what you really hate is the world.”
At this Syen tosses her washcloth into the bowl of water she’s been using and glares at him. “The world doesn’t say inane things like that.”
“I’m not interested in mentoring a sycophant. I want you to be yourself with me. And when you are, you can barely speak a civil word to me, no matter how civil I am to you.”
Hearing it put that way, she feels a little guilty. “What do you mean, then, that I hate the world?”
“You hate the way we live. The way the world makes us live. Either the Fulcrum owns us, or we have to hide and be hunted down like dogs if we’re ever discovered. Or we become monsters and try to kill everything. Even within the Fulcrum we always have to think about how they want us to act. We can never just… be.” He sighs, closing his eyes. “There should be a better way.”
“There isn’t.”
“There must be. Sanze can’t be the first empire that’s managed to survive a few Seasons. We can see the evidence of other ways of life, other people who became mighty.” He gestures away from the highroad, toward the landscape that spreads all around them. They’re near the Great Eastern Forest; nothing but a carpet of trees rising and falling for as far as the eye can see. Except—
—except, just at the edge of the horizon, she spots something that looks like a skeletal metal hand, clawing its way out of the trees. Another ruin, and it must be truly massive if she can see it from here.
“We pass down the stonelore,” Alabaster says, sitting up, “but we never try to remember anything about what’s already been tried, what else might have worked.”
“Because it didn’t work. Those people died. We’re still alive. Our way is right, theirs was wrong.”
He throws her a look she interprets as I can’t be bothered to tell you how stupid you are, although he probably doesn’t mean it that way. He’s right; she just doesn’t like him. “I realize you only have the education the Fulcrum gave you, but think, will you? Survival doesn’t mean rightness. I could kill you right now, but that wouldn’t make me a better person for doing so.”
Maybe not, but it wouldn’t matter to her. And she resents his casual assumption of her weakness, even though he’s completely right. “All right.” She gets up and starts dressing, pulling her clothes on with quick jerks. “Tell me what other way there is, then.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. She turns to look at him finally, and he’s looking uneasy. “Well…” He edges into the statement. “We could try letting orogenes run things.”
She almost laughs. “That would last for about ten minutes before every Guardian in the Stillness shows up to lynch us, with half the continent in tow to watch and cheer.”
“They kill us because they’ve got stonelore telling them at every turn that we’re born evil—some kind of agents of Father Earth, monsters that barely qualify as human.”
“Yes, but you can’t change stonelore.”
“Stonelore changes all the time, Syenite.” He doesn’t say her name often, either. It gets her attention. “Every civilization adds to it; parts that don’t matter to the people of the time are forgotten. There’s a reason Tablet Two is so damaged: someone, somewhere back in time, decided that it wasn’t important or was wrong, and didn’t bother to take care of it. Or maybe they even deliberately tried to obl
iterate it, which is why so many of the early copies are damaged in exactly the same way. The archeomests found some old tablets in one of the dead cities on Tapita Plateau—they’d written down their stonelore, too, ostensibly to pass it on to future generations. But what was on the tablets was different, drastically so, from the lore we learned in school. For all we know, the admonition against changing the lore is itself a recent addition.”
She didn’t know that. It makes her frown. It also makes her not want to believe him, or maybe that’s just her dislike for him surfacing again. But… stonelore is as old as intelligence. It’s all that’s allowed humankind to survive through Fifth Season after Fifth Season, as they huddle together while the world turns dark and cold. The lorists tell stories of what happens when people—political leaders or philosophers or well-meaning meddlers of whatever type—try to change the lore. Disaster inevitably results.
So she doesn’t believe it. “Where’d you hear about tablets on Tapita?”
“I’ve been taking assignments outside the Fulcrum for twenty years. I have friends out here.”
Friends who talk to an orogene? About historical heresy? It sounds ridiculous. But then again… well. “Okay, so how do you change the lore in a way that—”
She’s not paying attention to the ambient strata, because the argument has engrossed her more than she wants to admit. He, however, is apparently still quelling shakes even as they speak. Plus he’s a ten-ringer, so it’s fitting that he abruptly inhales and jerks to his feet as if pulled by strings, turning toward the western horizon. Syen frowns and follows his gaze. The forest on that side of the highroad is patchy from logging and bifurcated by two lowroads branching away through the trees. There’s another deadciv ruin, a dome that’s more tumbled stone than intact, in the far distance, and she can see three or four small walled comms dotting the treescape between here and there. But she doesn’t know what he’s reacting to—
—and then she sesses it. Evil Earth, it’s a big one! An eighter or niner. No, bigger. There’s a hot spot about two hundred miles away, beneath the outskirts of a small city called Mehi… but that can’t be right. Mehi is at the edge of the Equatorials, which means it’s well within the protective network of nodes. Why—
It doesn’t matter why. Not when Syen can see this shake making all the land around the highroad shiver and all the trees twitch. Something has gone wrong, the network has failed, and the hot spot beneath Mehi is welling toward the surface. The proto-shakes, even from here, are powerful enough to make her mouth taste of bitter old metal and the beds of her fingernails to itch. Even the most sess-numb stills can feel these, a steady barrage of wavelets rattling their dishes and making old people gasp and clutch their heads while babies suddenly cry. If nothing stops this upwelling, the stills will feel a lot more when a volcano erupts right under their feet.
“What—” Syenite starts to turn to Alabaster, and then she stops in shock, because he is on his hands and knees growling at the ground.
An instant later she feels it, a shock wave of raw orogeny rippling out and down through the pillars of the Highroad and into the loose schist of the local ground. It’s not actual force, just the strength of Alabaster’s will and the power it fuels, but she cannot help watching on two levels as his power races—faster than she could ever go—toward that distant radiating churn.
And before Syen even realizes what’s happening, Alabaster has grabbed her, in some way that she’s never experienced before. She feels her own connection to the earth, her own orogenic awareness, suddenly co-opted and steered by someone else, and she does not like it one bit. But when she tries to reclaim control of her power it burns, like friction, and in the real world she yelps and falls to her knees and she has no idea what’s happening. Alabaster has chained them together somehow, using her strength to amplify his own, and there’s not a damned thing she can do about it.
And then they are together, diving into the earth in tandem, spiraling through the massive, boiling well of death that is the hot spot. It’s huge—miles wide, bigger than a mountain. Alabaster does something, and something shoots away and Syenite cries out in sudden agony that stills almost at once. Redirected. He does it again and this time she realizes what he’s doing: cushioning her from the heat and pressure and rage of the hot spot. It’s not bothering him because he has become heat and pressure and rage as well, attuning himself to it as Syen has only ever done with small heat chambers in otherwise stable strata—but those were campfire sparks in comparison to this firestorm. There is nothing in her that can equal it. So he uses her power, but he also vents the force that she can’t process, sending it elsewhere before it can overwhelm her awareness and… and… actually, she’s not sure what would happen. The Fulcrum teaches orogenes not to push past their own limits; it does not speak of what happens to those who do.
And before Syenite can think through this, before she can muster the wherewithal to help him if she cannot escape him, Alabaster does something else. A sharp punch. Something has been pierced, somewhere. At once the upward pressure of the magma bubble begins to ebb. He pulls them back, out of the fire and into the still-shuddering earth, and she knows what to do here because these are just are shakes, not Father Earth’s rage incarnate. Abruptly something changes and his strength is at her disposal. So much strength; Earth, he’s a monster. But then it becomes easy, easy to smooth the ripples and seal the cracks and thicken the broken strata so that a new fault does not form here where the land has been stressed and weakened. She can sess lines of striation across the land’s surface with a clarity that she has never known before. She smooths them, tightens the earth’s skin around them with a surgical focus she has never previously been able to achieve. And as the hot spot settles into just another lurking menace and the danger passes, she comes back to herself to find Alabaster curled into a ball in front of her and a scorchlike pattern of frost all around them both which is already sublimating into vapor.
She’s on her hands and knees, shaking. When she tries to move, it takes real effort not to fall onto her face. Her elbows keep trying to buckle. But she makes herself do it, crawl a foot or two to reach Alabaster, because he looks dead. She touches his arm and the muscle is hard through the uniform fabric, cramped and locked instead of limp; she thinks that’s a good sign. Tugging him a little, she gets closer and sees that his eyes are open, wide, and staring—not with the blank emptiness of death but with an expression of pure surprise.
“It’s just like Hessionite said,” he whispers suddenly, and she jumps because she didn’t think he was conscious.
Wonderful. She’s on a highroad in the middle of nowhere, half dead after her orogeny has been used by someone else against her will, with no one to help her but the rustbrained and ridiculously powerful ass who did it in the first place. Trying to pull herself together after… after…
Actually, she has no idea what just happened. It makes no sense. Seismics don’t just happen like that. Hot spots that have abided for aeons don’t just suddenly explode. Something triggers them: a plate shift somewhere, a volcanic eruption somewhere else, a ten-ringer having a tantrum, something. And since it was so powerful an event, she should’ve sessed the trigger. Should’ve had some warning besides Alabaster’s gasp.
And what the rust did Alabaster do? She can’t wrap her head around it. Orogenes cannot work together. It’s been proven; when two orogenes try to exert the same influence over the same seismic event, the one with the greater control and precision takes precedence. The weaker one can keep trying and will burn themselves out—or the stronger one can punch through their torus, icing them along with everything else. It’s why the senior orogenes run the Fulcrum—they aren’t just more experienced, they can kill anyone who crosses them, even though they’re not supposed to. And it’s why ten-ringers get choices: Nobody’s going to force them to do anything. Except the Guardians, of course.
But what Alabaster did is unmistakable, if inexplicable.
Rust it all. Sye
nite shifts to sit before she flops over. The world spins unprettily and she props her arms on her updrawn knees and puts her head down for a while. They haven’t gone anywhere today, and they won’t be going anywhere, either. Syen doesn’t have the strength to ride, and Alabaster looks like he might not make it off the bedroll. He never even got dressed; he’s just curled up there bare-assed and shaking, completely useless.
So it’s left to Syen to eventually get up and rummage through their packs, finding a couple of derminther mela—small melons with a hard shell that burrow underground during a Season, or so the geomests say—and rolling them into the remnants of their fire, which she’s very glad they hadn’t gotten around to smothering yet. They’re out of kindling and fuel, but the coals should be enough to cook the mela so they’ll have dinner in a few hours. She pulls a fodder bundle out of the pile for the horses to share, pours some water into a canvas bucket so they can drink, looks at the pile of their droppings and thinks about shoveling it off the highroad’s edge so they don’t have to smell it.
Then she crawls back to the bedroll, which is thankfully dry after its recent icing. There she flops down at Alabaster’s back, and drifts. She doesn’t sleep. The minute contortions of the land as the hot spot recedes keep jerking at her sessapinae, keeping her from relaxing completely. Still, just lying there is enough to restore her strength somewhat, and her mind goes quiet until the cooling air pulls her back to herself. Sunset.
She blinks, finding that she has somehow ended up spooned behind Alabaster. He’s still in a ball, but this time his eyes are closed and body relaxed. When she sits up, he jerks a little and pushes himself up as well.
“We have to go to the node station,” he blurts in a rusty voice, which really doesn’t surprise her at all.
“No,” she says, too tired to be annoyed, and finally giving up the effort of politeness for good. “I’m not riding a horse off the highroad in the dark while exhausted. We’re out of dried peat, and running low on everything else; we need to go to a comm to buy more supplies. And if you try to order me to go to some node in the ass end of beyond instead, you’ll need to bring me up on charges for disobedience.” She’s never disobeyed an order before, so she’s a little fuzzy on the consequences. Really, she’s too tired to care.
The Fifth Season Page 11
