The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  You’ve always known better. How dare you expect anything else? You’re just another filthy, rusty-souled rogga, just another agent of the Evil Earth, just another mistake of sensible breeding practices, just another mislaid tool. You should never have had children in the first place, and you shouldn’t have expected to keep them once you did, and why’s Tonkee pulling on your arms?

  Because you’ve lifted your hands to your face. Oh, and you’ve burst into tears.

  You should have told Jija, before you ever married him, before you slept with him, before you even looked at him and thought maybe, which you had no right to ever think. Then if the urge to kill a rogga had hit him, he would’ve inflicted it on you, not Uche. You’re the one who deserves to die, after all, ten thousand times the population of two comms.

  Also, you might be screaming a little.

  You shouldn’t be screaming. You should be dead. You should have died before your children. You should have died at birth, and never lived to bear them.

  You should have—

  You should have—

  Something sweeps through you.

  It feels a little like the wave of force that came down from the north, and which you shunted away, on that day the world changed. Or maybe a little like the way you felt when you walked into the house after a tiring day and saw your boy lying on the floor. A waft of potential, passing on unutilized. The brush of something intangible but meaningful, there and gone, as shocking by its absence as its existence in the first place.

  You blink and lower your hands. Your eyes are blurry and they hurt; the heels of your hands are wet. Ykka is off the porch and standing in front of you, just a couple of feet away. She’s not touching you, but you stare at her anyway, realizing she just did—something. Something you don’t understand. Orogeny, certainly, but deployed in a way you’ve never experienced before.

  “Hey,” she says. There’s nothing like compassion on her face. Still, her voice is softer as she speaks to you—though maybe that’s only because she’s closer. “Hey. You okay now?”

  You swallow. Your throat hurts. “No,” you say. (That word again! You almost giggle, but you swallow and the urge vanishes.) “No. But I’m… I can keep it together.”

  Ykka nods slowly. “See that you do.” Beyond her, the blond woman looks skeptical about the possibility of this.

  Then, with a heavy sigh, Ykka turns to Tonkee and Hoa—the latter of whom looks deceptively calm and normal now. Normal by Hoa standards, anyway.

  “All right, then,” she says. “Here’s how it is. You can stay or you can go. If you decide to stay, I’ll take you into the comm. But you need to know up front: Castrima is something unique. We’re trying something very different here. If this Season turns out to be short, then we’re going to be up a lava lake when Sanze comes down on us. But I don’t think this Season will be short.”

  She glances at you, sidelong, not quite for confirmation. Confirmation’s not the word for it, since there was never doubt. Any rogga knows it like they know their own name.

  “This Season won’t be short,” you agree. Your voice is hoarse, but you’re recovering. “It will last decades.” Ykka lifts an eyebrow. Yeah, she’s right; you’re trying to be gentle for the sake of your companions, and they don’t need gentleness. They need truth. “Centuries.”

  Even that’s an understatement. You’re pretty sure this one will last at least a thousand years. Maybe a few thousand.

  Tonkee frowns a little. “Well, everything does point to either a major epeirogenic deformation, or possibly just a simple disruption of isostasy throughout the entire plate network. But the amount of orogenesis needed to overcome that much inertia is… prohibitive. Are you sure?”

  You’re staring at her, grief momentarily forgotten. So’s Ykka, and the blond woman. Tonkee grimaces in irritation, glowering particularly at you. “Oh, for rust’s sake, stop acting all surprised. The secrets are done now, right? You know what I am and I know what you are. Do we have to keep pretending?”

  You shake your head, though you’re not really responding to her question. You decide to answer her other question instead. “I’m sure,” you say. “Centuries. Maybe more.”

  Tonkee flinches. “No comm has stores enough to last that long. Not even Yumenes.”

  Yumenes’s fabled vast storecaches are slag in a lava tube somewhere. Part of you mourns the waste of all that food. Part of you figures, well, that much quicker and more merciful an end for the human race.

  When you nod, Tonkee falls into a horrified silence. Ykka looks from you to Tonkee, and apparently decides to change the subject.

  “There are twenty-two orogenes here,” she says. You flinch. “I expect there will be more as time passes. You all right with that?” She looks at Tonkee in particular.

  As subject changes go, it’s perfect for distracting everyone. “How?” asks Tonkee at once. “How are you making them come here?”

  “Never mind that. Answer the question.”

  You could’ve told Ykka not to bother. “I’m fine with it,” Tonkee says immediately. You’re surprised she’s not visibly salivating. So much for her shock over the inevitable death of humanity.

  “All right.” Ykka turns to Hoa. “And you. There are a few others of your kind here, too.”

  “More than you think,” Hoa says, very softly.

  “Yeah. Well.” Ykka takes this with remarkable aplomb. “You heard how it is. If you want to stay here, you follow the rules. No fighting. No—” She waggles her fingers and bares her teeth. This is surprisingly comprehensible. “And you do as I say. Got it?”

  Hoa cocks his head a little, his eyes glittering in pure menace. It’s as shocking to see as his diamond teeth; you’d started thinking of him as a rather sweet creature, if a bit eccentric. Now you’re not sure what to think. “You don’t command me.”

  Ykka, to your greater amazement, leans over and puts her face right in front of his.

  “Let me put it this way,” she says. “You can keep doing what you’ve obviously been doing, trying to be as avalanche-subtle as your kind ever gets, or I can start telling everyone what all of you are really up to.”

  And Hoa… flinches. His eyes—only his eyes—flick toward the not-woman on the porch. The one on the porch smiles again, though she doesn’t show her teeth this time, and there’s a rueful edge to it. You don’t know what any of this means, but Hoa seems to sag a little.

  “Very well,” he says to Ykka, with an odd formality. “I agree to your terms.”

  Ykka nods and straightens, letting her gaze linger on him for a moment longer before she turns away.

  “What I was going to say before your little, ah, moment, was that we’ve taken in a few people,” she says to you. She says this over her shoulder, as she turns and walks back up the steps of the house. “No men traveling with girls, I don’t think, but other travelers looking for a place, including some from Cebak Quartent. We adopted them if we thought they were useful.” It’s what any smart comm does at times like these: kicking out the undesirable, taking in those with valuable skills and attributes. The comms that have strong leaders do this systematically, ruthlessly, with some degree of cold humanity. Less well-run comms do it just as ruthlessly but more messily, like the way Tirimo got rid of you.

  Jija’s just a stoneknapper. Useful, but knapping’s not exactly a rare skill. Nassun, though, is like you and Ykka. And for some reason, the people of this comm seem to want orogenes around.

  “I want to meet those people,” you say. There’s a slim chance that Jija or Nassun is in disguise. Or that someone else might have seen them, on the road. Or that… well. It really is a slim chance.

  You’ll take it, though. She’s your daughter. You’ll take anything, to find her.

  “All right, then.” Ykka turns and beckons. “Come on in, and I’ll show you a marvel or three.” As if she hasn’t already done so. But you move to follow her, because neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinites
imal spark of hope.

  * * *

  The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.

  —Tablet Three, “Structures,” verse two

  16

  Syen in the hidden land

  SYENITE WAKES UP COLD ON one side of her body. It’s her left side—hip and shoulder and most of her back. The source of the cold, a sharp wind, blows almost painfully through the hair all along the back of her skull, which means her hair must have come loose from its Fulcrum-regulation bun. Also, there’s a taste like dirt in her mouth, though her tongue is dry.

  She tries to move and hurts all over, dully. It’s a strange kind of pain, not localized, not throbbing or sharp or anything that specific. More like her whole body is one big bruise. She groans inadvertently as she wills a hand to move and finds hard ground beneath it. She pushes against it enough to feel like she’s in control of herself again, though she doesn’t actually manage to get up. All she does successfully is open her eyes.

  Crumbling silvery stone beneath her hand and in front of her face: monzonite, maybe, or one of the lesser schists. She can never remember the subvolcanic rocks because the grit instructor for geomestry back at the Fulcrum was unbelievably boring. A few feet away, the whatever-it-is stone is broken by clovers and a scraggle of grass and some kind of bushy-leafed weed. (She paid even less attention in biomestry.) The plants stir restlessly in the wind, though not much, because her body shields them from the worst of it.

  Blow that, she thinks, and is pushed awake by mild shock at her own mental crudeness.

  She sits up. It hurts and it’s hard to do, but she does it, and this allows her to see that she’s lying on a gentle slope of rock, surrounded by more weeds. Beyond that is the unbroken expanse of the lightly clouded sky. There’s an ocean smell, but it’s different from what she’s gotten used to in the past few weeks: less briny, more rarefied. The air is drier. The sun’s position makes it late morning, and the cold feels like late winter.

  But it should be late afternoon. And Allia is Equatorial; the temperature should be balmy. And the cold, hard ground she’s lying on should be warm, sandy ground. So where the burning rusty fuck is she?

  Okay. She can figure this out. The rock she’s lying on sesses high above sea level, relatively close to a familiar boundary: That’s the edge of the Maximal, one of the two main tectonic plates that make up the Stillness. The Minimal’s way up north. And she’s sessed this plate edge before: They’re not far from Allia.

  But they’re not in Allia. In fact, they’re not on the continent at all.

  Reflexively Syenite tries to do more than just sess, reaching toward the plate edge as she’s done a few times before—

  —and nothing happens.

  She sits there for a moment, more chilled than the wind can account for.

  But she is not alone. Alabaster lies curled nearby, his long limbs folded fetal, either unconscious or dead. No; his side rises and falls, slowly. Okay, that’s good.

  Beyond him, at the top of the slope, stands a tall, slender figure clad in a white flowing robe.

  Startled, Syen freezes for a moment. “Hello?” Her voice is a croak.

  The figure—a woman, Syen guesses—does not turn. She’s looking away, at something over the rise that Syenite cannot see. “Hello.”

  Well, that’s a start. Syen forces herself to relax, although this is difficult when she cannot reach toward the earth for the reassurance of power. There’s no reason to be alarmed, she chides herself; whoever this woman is, if she’d wanted to harm them, she could have easily done so by now. “Where are we?”

  “An island, perhaps a hundred miles off the eastern coast.”

  “An island?” That’s terrifying. Islands are death traps. The only worse places to live are atop fault lines and in dormant-but-not-extinct volcano calderas. But yes, now Syenite hears the distant sough of waves rolling against rocks, somewhere below the slope on which they lie. If they’re only a hundred miles from the Maximal’s edge, then that puts them entirely too close to an underwater fault line. Basically on top of it. This is why people don’t live on islands, for Earth’s sake; they could die in a tsunami any minute.

  She gets to her feet, suddenly desperate to see how bad the situation is. Her legs are stiff from lying on stone, but she stumbles around Alabaster anyway until she’s standing on the slope beside the woman. There she sees:

  Ocean, as far as the eye can see, open and unbroken. The rock slope drops off sharply a few feet from where she’s standing, becoming a sheer jagged cliff that stands some few hundred feet above the sea. When she eases up to that edge and looks down, froth swirls about knifelike rocks far below; falling means death. Quickly she steps back.

  “How did we get here?” she whispers, horrified.

  “I brought you.”

  “You—” Syenite rounds on the woman, anger already spiking through shock. Then the anger dies, leaving the shock to reign uncontested.

  Make a statue of a woman: not tall, hair in a simple bun, elegant features, a graceful pose. Leave its skin and clothing the color of old warm ivory, but dab in deeper shading at irises and hair—black in both cases—and at the fingertips. The color here is a faded and rusty gradient, ground in like dirt. Or blood.

  A stone eater.

  “Evil Earth,” Syenite whispers. The woman does not respond.

  There is a groan behind them that forestalls anything else Syenite might have said. (But what can she say? What?) She tears her eyes from the stone eater and focuses on Alabaster, who’s stirring and clearly feeling no better than Syenite about it. But she ignores him for the moment as she finally thinks of something to say.

  “Why?” she asks. “Why did you bring us here?”

  “To keep him safe.”

  It’s just like the lorists say. The stone eater’s mouth doesn’t open when she speaks. Her eyes don’t move. She might as well be the statue she appears to be. Then sense reasserts itself, and Syenite notices what the creature has said. “To keep… him safe?” Again, the stone eater does not reply.

  Alabaster groans again, so Syenite finally goes to him, helping him sit up as he begins to stir. His shirt pulls at the shoulder and he hisses, and belatedly she remembers the Guardian’s throwing knife. It’s gone now, but the shallow wound is stuck to the cloth of his shirt with dried blood. He swears as he opens his eyes. “Decaye, shisex unrelabbemet.” It’s the strange language she’s heard him use before.

  “Speak Sanze-mat,” she snaps, though she’s not really irritated with him. She keeps her eyes on the stone eater, but the stone eater continues not to move.

  “… Flaking, fucking rust,” he says, grabbing at the injured area. “Hurts.”

  Syenite swats his hand away. “Don’t bother it. You might reopen the wound.” And they are hundreds of miles from civilization, separated from it by water as far as the eye can see in most directions. At the mercy of a creature whose race is the very definition of enigmatic, and also deadly. “We’ve got company.”

  Alabaster comes fully awake, blinking at Syenite and then looking beyond her; his eyes widen a little at the sight of the stone eater. Then he groans. “Shit. Shit. What have you done this time?”

  Somehow, Syenite is not entirely surprised to realize Alabaster knows a stone eater.

  “I’ve saved your life,” the stone eater says.

  “What?”

  The stone eater’s arm rises, so steadily that the motion surpasses graceful and edges into unnatural. No other part of her moves. She’s pointing. Syenite turns to follow the gesture and sees the western horizon. But this horizon is broken, unlike the rest: There’s a flat line of sea and sky to the left and right, but at the midpoint of this line is a pimple, fat and red-glowing and smoky.

  “Allia,” says the stone eater.

  * * *

  There’s a village on the island, it turns out. The island is nothing but rolling hills and grass and solid rock—no trees, no topsoil. An utterly useless place to live. And
yet as they reach the other side of the island, where the cliffs are a bit less jagged, they see another semicircular cove not unlike the one at Allia. (Not unlike the one that was at Allia.) The similarity stops there, however—because this harbor is much smaller, and this village is carved directly into the sheer cliff face.

  It’s hard to tell at first. Initially Syen thinks that what she’s seeing are the mouths of caverns, irregularly dotting the jagged rock face. Then she realizes the cave mouths are all uniformly shaped, even if they vary in size: straight lines across the bottom of the opening and up its sides, arching to a graceful point across the top. And around each opening, someone has carved out the facade of a building: elegant pillars, a beveled rectangle of a doorway, elaborate corbels of curled flowers and cavorting animals. She’s seen stranger. Not much, granted—but living in Yumenes, in the shadow of the Black Star and the Imperial Palace that crowns it, and in the Fulcrum with its walls of molded obsidian, makes one inured to oddities of art and architecture.

  “She doesn’t have a name,” Alabaster tells her as they walk down a set of railed stone steps they’ve found, which seem to wend toward the village. He’s talking about the stone eater, who left them at the top of the steps. (Syen looked away for a moment and when she glanced back the stone eater was gone. Alabaster has assured her that she is still nearby. How he knows this, Syen isn’t sure she wants to know.)

  “I call her Antimony. You know, because she’s mostly white? It’s a metal instead of stone, because she’s not a rogga, and anyway ‘Alabaster’ was taken.”

  Cute. “And she—it—answers to that.”

  “She does.” He glances back at Syenite, which is a precarious sort of thing to do considering the steps here are very, very sheer. Even though there’s a railing, anyone who takes a header down these stairs is likely to just flip over the railing and fall to a messy death down the rock face. “She doesn’t mind it, anyway, and I figure she’d object if she did.”