The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  Alabaster, being Alabaster, seems to think there was more to his near-death brush. And Syenite doesn’t want to admit that he might be right.

  “Fine, then,” she says, and gets dressed.

  It’s a pleasant evening. The sun’s just setting as they walk down a sloping avenue that leads toward the harbor. Their shadows stretch long before them, and the buildings of Allia, which are mostly stuccoed sandy-pale in color, briefly bloom with deeper jewel tones of red and violet and gold. The avenue they’re on intersects a meandering side street that ends at a small cove off the harbor’s busier area; when they stop here to take in the view, Syen can see a group of the comm’s adolescents playing and laughing along the black-sand beach. They are all lean and brown and healthy, and obviously happy. Syen finds herself staring, and wondering if that is what it’s like to grow up normal.

  Then the obelisk—which is easily visible at the end of the avenue they’re standing on, where the thing hovers perhaps ten or fifteen feet above the harbor waters—emits another of the low, barely perceptible pulses that it’s been spitting out since Syenite raised it, and that makes her forget about the kids.

  “Something’s wrong with that thing,” Alabaster says, very softly.

  Syenite looks at him, annoyed and on the brink of saying, What, now you want to talk about it? when she notices that he’s not looking at it. He’s scuffing the ground with one foot, his hands in his pockets, appearing—oh. Syen almost laughs. Appearing, for the moment, like a bashful young man who’s about to suggest something naughty to his pretty female companion. The facts that he is not young, or bashful, and that it doesn’t matter if she’s pretty or he’s naughty because they’re already fucking, aside. A casual observer would not realize he was paying any attention to the obelisk.

  Which abruptly makes Syenite realize: No one sesses its pulse but them. The pulse is not a pulse, exactly. It’s not brief, or rhythmic; more a momentary throb that she sesses now and again, at random and ominously, like a toothache. But if the other people of the comm had sessed that last one, they wouldn’t be laughing and playing and winding down comfortably at the end of a long golden day. They would all be out here watching this massive, looming thing to which Syenite is increasingly beginning to apply the adjective dangerous in her head.

  Syen takes a clue from ’Baster and reaches for his arm, cuddling close as if she actually likes him. She keeps her voice to a murmur, even though she has no clue who or what he’s trying to conceal the conversation from. There are people out on the street as the city’s business day winds down, but nobody’s nearby, or paying attention to them for that matter. “I keep waiting for it to rise, like the others.”

  Because it’s hanging far, far too close to the ground, or the water’s surface as it were. Every other obelisk Syen has ever seen—including the amethyst that saved Alabaster’s life, and which is still drifting a few miles offshore—floats amid the lowest layer of clouds, or higher.

  “It’s listing to one side, too. Like it’s barely able to stay up at all.”

  What? And she cannot help looking up at it, though ’Baster immediately squeezes her arm to make her look away again. But that brief glimpse was enough to confirm what he said: The obelisk is indeed listing, just a little, its top end tilted toward the south. It must wobble, very slowly, as it turns. The slant is so slight that she wouldn’t have noticed it at all if they hadn’t been standing on a street surrounded by straight-walled buildings. Now she can’t unsee it.

  “Let’s go this way,” she suggests. They’ve lingered here too long. Alabaster obviously agrees, and they start down the side street to the cove, strolling casually.

  “It’s why they’re keeping us here.”

  Syen’s not paying attention to him when he says this. In spite of herself she’s distracted by the beauty of the sunset, and the long, elegant streets of the comm itself. And another couple, passing on the sidewalk; the taller woman nods to them even though both Syen and ’Baster are wearing their black uniforms. It’s strange, that little gesture. And nice. Yumenes is a marvel of human achievement, the pinnacle of ingenuity and geneering; if it lasts a dozen Seasons, this paltry little Coaster comm will never even come close to matching it. But in Yumenes, no one would ever have deigned to nod to a rogga, no matter how pleasant the day.

  Then Alabaster’s last words penetrate her ruminations. “What?”

  He keeps his pace easy, matching hers despite his naturally longer gait. “We can’t talk in the room. It’s risky even to talk out here. But you wanted to know why they’re keeping us here, telling us not to come back: That’s why. That obelisk is failing.”

  That much is obvious, but…“What’s that got to do with us?”

  “You raised it.”

  She scowls before she remembers to school her expression. “It raised itself. I just moved all the crap that was holding it down, and maybe woke it up.” That her mind insists it was sleeping before is not something she’s willing to question too deeply.

  “And that’s more control over an obelisk than anyone has ever managed in nearly three thousand years of Imperial history.” ’Baster shrugs a little. “If I were a jumped-up little five-ring pedant reading a telegram about this, it’s what I’d think, and it’s how I’d react: by trying to control the person who can control that.” His eyes flick toward the obelisk. “But it’s not the jumped-up pedants at the Fulcrum we have to worry about.”

  Syen doesn’t know what the rust he’s on about. It isn’t that his words don’t ring true; she can completely imagine someone like Feldspar pulling something like this. But why? To reassure the local population, by keeping a ten-ringer on hand? The only people who know ’Baster’s here are a bunch of bureaucrats who are probably too busy dealing with the sudden influx of ’mests and tourists to care. To be able to do something, should the obelisk suddenly… do something? That makes no sense. And who else is she supposed to worry about? Unless—

  She frowns.

  “You said something, earlier.” Something about… connecting to an obelisk? What did that mean? “And—and you did something, that night.” She throws an uneasy look at him, but he doesn’t glare at her this time. He’s gazing down at the cove, as if entranced by the view, but his eyes are sharp and serious. He knows what she’s talking about. She hesitates a moment more, then says, “You can do something with those things, can’t you?” Oh Earth, she’s a fool. “You can control them! Does the Fulcrum know that?”

  “No. And you don’t know it, either.” His dark eyes slide to hers for a moment, then away.

  “Why are you being so—” It’s not even secretive. He’s talking to her. But it’s as if he suspects someone of listening to them, somehow. “No one could hear us in the room.” And she nods pointedly toward a gaggle of children running past, one of them jostling Alabaster and apologizing; the street’s narrow. Apologizing. Really.

  “You don’t know that. The building’s main support column is whole-hewn granite, didn’t you notice? The foundation looks to be the same. If it sits directly on the bedrock…” His expression grows momentarily uneasy, and then he blanks his face.

  “What’s that got to do with—” And then she understands. Oh. Oh. But—no, that can’t be right. “You’re saying someone could hear us through the walls? Through the, the stone itself?” She’s never heard of anything like that. It makes sense, of course, because it’s how orogeny works; when Syen is anchored in the earth, she can sess not only the stone that her awareness is tied to, but anything that touches it. Even if she can’t perceive the thing itself, as with the obelisk. Still, to feel not just tectonic vibrations, but sound? It can’t be true. She’s never heard of a rogga with that kind of fine sensitivity.

  He looks at her directly for a long moment. “I can.” When she stares back, he sighs. “I always could. You can, too, probably—it just isn’t clear, yet. It’s just minute vibrations to you now. Around my eighth or ninth ring is when I started to distinguish patterns amid the vibrati
ons. Details.”

  She shakes her head. “But you’re the only ten-ringer.”

  “Most of my children have the potential to wear ten rings.”

  Syenite flinches, suddenly remembering the dead child in the node station near Mehi. Oh. The Fulcrum controls all the node maintainers. What if they have some way to force those poor damaged children to listen, and to spit back what they listen to, like some kind of living telegraph receivers? Is that what he fears? Is the Fulcrum like a spider, perching in Yumenes’s heart and using the web of nodes to listen in on every conversation in the Stillness?

  But she is distracted from these speculations by something that niggles at the back of her mind. Something Alabaster just said. His damn influence, making her question all the assumptions she’s grown up with. Most of my children have the potential to wear ten rings, he’d said, but there are no other ten-ringers in the Fulcrum. Rogga children are sent to the nodes only if they can’t control themselves. Aren’t they?

  Oh.

  No.

  She decides not to mention this epiphany aloud.

  He pats her hand, perhaps playacting again, perhaps really trying to soothe her. Of course he knows, probably better than she, what they’ve done to his children.

  Then he repeats: “The seniors at the Fulcrum aren’t who we have to worry about.”

  Who else could he mean? The seniors are a mess, granted. Syen keeps an eye on their politics, because one day she’ll be among them and it’s important to understand who holds power and who only looks like they do. There are at least a dozen factions, along with the usual rogues: brown-nosers and idealists and those who would glassknife their own mothers to get ahead. But all at once it occurs to Syenite to consider who they answer to.

  The Guardians. Because no one would really trust a group of filthy roggas to manage their own affairs, any more than Shemshena would have trusted Misalem. No one in the Fulcrum talks about the Guardians’ politics, probably because no one in the Fulcrum understands them. The Guardians keep their own counsel, and they object to inquiries. Vehemently.

  Not for the first time Syenite wonders: To whom do the Guardians answer?

  As Syen’s considered this, they’ve reached the cove, and stopped at its railed boardwalk. The avenue ends here, its cobbles vanishing beneath a drift of sand and then the raised wooden walkway. Not far off there’s a different sandy beach from the one they saw earlier. Children run up and down the boardwalk’s steps, squealing in play, and beyond them Syen can see a gaggle of old women wading nude in the harbor’s waters. She notices the man who sits on the railing, a few feet down from where they stand, only because he’s shirtless, and because he’s looking at them. The former gets her attention for a moment—then she’s polite and looks away—because Alabaster’s not much to look at and it’s been a while since she had sex she actually enjoyed. The latter is something she would ignore, ordinarily, because in Yumenes she gets stared at by strangers all the time.

  But.

  She’s standing at the railing with ’Baster, relaxed and more comfortable than she’s been in a while, listening to the children play. It’s hard to keep her mind on the cryptic stuff they’re discussing. The politics of Yumenes seem so very far from here, mysterious but unimportant, and untouchable. Like an obelisk.

  But.

  But. She notices, belatedly, that ’Baster has gone stiff beside her. And although his face is turned toward the beach and the children, she can tell that he’s not paying attention to them. That is when it finally occurs to her that people in Allia don’t stare, not even at a couple of blackjackets out for an evening stroll. Asael aside, most of the people she’s met in this comm are too well-mannered for something like that.

  So she looks back at the man on the railing. He smiles at her, which is kind of nice. He’s older, maybe by ten years or so, and he’s got a gorgeous body. Broad shoulders, elegant deltoids under flawless skin, a perfectly tapered waist.

  Burgundy pants. And the shirt that hangs over the railing beside him, which he has ostensibly taken off in order to soak up some of the sunlight, is also burgundy. Only belatedly does she notice the peculiar, familiar buzz at the back of her sessapinae that warns of a Guardian’s presence.

  “Yours?” asks Alabaster.

  Syenite licks her lips. “I was hoping he was yours.”

  “No.” And then Alabaster makes a show of stepping forward to rest his hands against the railing, bowing his head as if he means to lean on it and stretch his shoulders. “Don’t let him touch you with his bare skin.”

  This is a whisper; she barely catches it. And then Alabaster straightens and turns to the young man. “Something on your mind, Guardian?”

  The Guardian laughs softly and hops down from the railing. He’s at least part Coaster, all-over brown and kinky-haired; a bit on the pale side, but aside from this he fits right in among the citizens of Allia. Well. No. He blends in superficially, but there’s that indefinable something about him that’s in every Guardian Syenite’s had the misfortune to interact with. No one in Yumenes ever mistakes a Guardian for an orogene—or for a still, for that matter. There’s just something different about them, and everyone notices.

  “Yes, actually,” the Guardian says. “Alabaster Tenring. Syenite Fourring.” That alone makes Syenite grind her teeth. She would prefer the generic Orogene, if she has to be called anything besides her name. Guardians, of course, understand perfectly well the difference between a four-ringer and a ten-ringer. “I am Edki Guardian Warrant. My, but you’ve both been busy.”

  “As we should be,” says Alabaster, and Syenite cannot help looking at him in surprise. He’s tensed in a way she’s never seen, the cords of his neck taut, his hands splayed and—ready? ready for what? she does not know why the word ready even occurred to her—at his sides. “We’ve completed our assignment for the Fulcrum, as you can see.”

  “Oh, indeed. A fine job.” Edki glances off then, almost casually, toward that listing, throbbing accident of an obelisk. Syenite is watching his face, however. She sees the Guardian’s smile vanish as if it were never there. That can’t be good. “Would that you had done only the job you were told to do, however. Such a willful creature you are, Alabaster.”

  Syenite scowls. Even here, she is condescended to. “I did this job, Guardian. Is there some problem with my work?”

  The Guardian turns to look at her in surprise, and that’s when Syenite realizes she’s made a mistake. A big one, because his smile doesn’t return. “Did you, now?”

  Alabaster hisses and—Evil Earth, she feels it when he stabs his awareness into the strata, because it goes so unbelievably deep. The strength of him makes her whole body reverberate, not just her sessapinae. She can’t follow it; he’s past her range in the span of a breath, easily piercing to the magma even though it’s miles down. And his control of all that pure earth energy is perfect. Amazing. He could shift a mountain with this, easily.

  But why?

  The Guardian smiles, suddenly. “Guardian Leshet sends her regards, Alabaster.”

  While Syenite is still trying to parse this, and the fact that Alabaster is about to fight a Guardian, Alabaster stiffens all over. “You found her?”

  “Of course. We must talk of what you did to her. Soon.”

  Suddenly—Syenite does not know when he drew it, or where from—there is a black glassknife in his hand. Its blade is wide, but ridiculously short, maybe only two inches in length. Barely enough to be called a knife at all.

  What the rust is he going to do with that, pare our nails?

  And why is he drawing a weapon on two Imperial Orogenes in the first place? “Guardian,” she tries, “maybe there’s been some kind of misun—”

  The Guardian does something. Syenite blinks, but the tableau is as before: She and Alabaster face Edki on a boardwalk stark with shadows and bloody sunset light, with children and old ladies playing beyond them. But something has changed. She’s not sure what, until Alabaster makes a choking sound
and lunges at her, knocking her to the ground a few feet away.

  How such a skinny man has the weight to throw her, Syenite will never know. She hits the planks hard enough to jar the breath out of herself; through a blur she sees some of the children who had been playing nearby stop and stare. One of them laughs. Then she struggles up, furious, her mouth already opening to curse Alabaster to Earth and back.

  But Alabaster is on the ground, too, only a foot or two away. He’s lying on his belly, his eyes fixed on her, and—and he’s making a strange sound. Not much of one. His mouth’s open wide, but the noise that comes out of it is more like the squeak of a child’s toy, or a metallorist’s air bladder. And he’s shivering all over, as if he can’t move more than that, which doesn’t make sense because nothing’s wrong with him. Syen’s not sure what to think until, belatedly, she realizes—

  —he’s screaming.

  “Why did you think I would aim at her?” Edki is staring at Alabaster, and Syenite shivers because the look on his face is gleeful, it is delighted, even as Alabaster lies there shuddering helplessly… with the knife that Edki once held now buried in the hollow of Alabaster’s shoulder. Syen stares at it, stunned that she missed it before. It stands out starkly even against the black of ’Baster’s tunic. “You have always been a fool, Alabaster.”

  And there is a new glassknife in Edki’s hand now. This one is long and viciously narrow: a chillingly familiar poniard.

  “Why—” Syenite can’t think. Her hands ache as she scrabbles backward along the boardwalk planks, trying to get to her feet and away all at once. Instinctively she reaches for the earth beneath her and that’s when she finally realizes what the Guardian has done, because there’s nothing in her that can reach. She cannot sess the earth past a few feet below her hands and backside; nothing but sand and salty dirt and earthworms. There is an unpleasant ringing ache in her sessapinae when she tries to reach farther. It’s like when she hits her elbow and shuts off all the sensation from there to the tips of her fingers; like that part of her mind has gone to sleep. It’s tingling, coming back. But for now, there’s nothing there.