The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  We have heard enough, however. Later, when we process all this, I will tell the others, She wants to be a person.

  She wants the impossible, Dushwha will say. Gallat thinks it better to own her himself, rather than allow Syl Anagist to do the same. But for her to be a person, she must stop being … ownable. By anyone.

  Then Syl Anagist must stop being Syl Anagist, Gaewha will add sadly.

  Yes. They will all be right, too, my fellow tuners … but that does not mean Kelenli’s desire to be free is wrong. Or that something is impossible just because it is very, very hard.

  The vehimal stops in a part of town that, amazingly, looks familiar. I have seen this area only once and yet I recognize the pattern of the streets, and the vineflowers on one greenstrate wall. The quality of the light through the amethyst, as the sun slants toward setting, stirs a feeling of longing and relief in me that I will one day learn is called homesickness.

  The other conductors leave and head back to the compound. Gallat beckons to us. He’s still angry, and wants this over with. So we follow, and fall slowly behind because our legs are shorter and the muscles burn, until finally he notices that we and our guards are ten feet behind him. He stops to let us catch up, but his jaw is tight and one hand taps a brisk pattern on his folded arms.

  “Hurry up,” he says. “I want to do start-up trials tonight.”

  We know better than to complain. Distraction is often useful, however. Gaewha says, “What are we hurrying to see?”

  Gallat shakes his head impatiently, but answers. As Gaewha planned, he walks slower so that he can speak to us, which allows us to walk slower as well. We desperately catch our breath. “The socket where this fragment was grown. You’ve been told the basics. For the time being each fragment serves as the power plant for a node of Syl Anagist—taking in magic, catalyzing it, returning some to the city and storing the surplus. Until the Engine is activated, of course.”

  Abruptly he stops, distracted by our surroundings. We have reached the restricted zone around the base of the fragment—a three-tiered park with some administrative buildings and a stop on the vehimal line that (we are told) does a weekly run to Corepoint. It’s all very utilitarian, and a little boring.

  Still. Above us, filling the sky for nearly as high as the eye can see, is the amethyst fragment. Despite Gallat’s impatience, all of us stop and stare up at it in awe. We live in its colored shadow, and were made to respond to its needs and control its output. It is us; we are it. Yet rarely do we get to see it like this, directly. The windows in our cells all point away from it. (Connectivity, harmony, lines of sight and waveform efficiency; the conductors want to risk no accidental activation.) It is a magnificent thing, I think, both in its physical state and its magical superposition. It glows in the latter state, crystalline lattice nearly completely charged with the stored magic power that we will soon use to ignite Geoarcanity. When we have shunted the world’s power systems over from the limited storage-and-generation of the obelisks to the unlimited streams within the earth, and when Corepoint has gone fully online to regulate it, and when the world has finally achieved the dream of Syl Anagist’s greatest leaders and thinkers—

  —well. Then I, and the others, will no longer be needed. We hear so many things about what will happen once the world has been freed from scarcity and want. People living forever. Travel to other worlds, far beyond our star. The conductors have assured us that we won’t be killed. We will be celebrated, in fact, as the pinnacle of magestry, and as living representations of what humanity can achieve. Is that not a thing to look forward to, our veneration? Should we not be proud?

  But for the first time, I think of what life I might want for myself, if I could have a choice. I think of the house that Gallat lives in: huge, beautiful, cold. I think of Kelenli’s house in the garden, which is small and surrounded by small growing magics. I think of living with Kelenli. Sitting at her feet every night, speaking with her as much as I want, in every language that I know, without fear. I think of her smiling without bitterness and this thought gives me incredible pleasure. Then I feel shame, as if I have no right to imagine these things.

  “Waste of time,” Gallat mutters, staring at the obelisk. I flinch, but he does not notice. “Well. Here it is. I’ve no idea why Kelenli wanted you to see it, but now you see it.”

  We admire it as bidden. “Can we … go closer?” Gaewha asks. Several of us groan through the earth; our legs hurt and we are hungry. But she replies with frustration. While we’re here, we might as well get the most out of it.

  As if in agreement, Gallat sighs and starts forward, walking down the sloping road toward the base of the amethyst, where it has been firmly lodged in its socket since the first growth-medium infusion. I have seen the top of the amethyst fragment, lost amid scuds of cloud and sometimes framed by the white light of the Moon, but this part of it is new to me. About its base are the transformer pylons, I know from what I have been taught, which siphon off some of the magic from the generative furnace at the amethyst’s core. This magic—a tiny fraction of the incredible amount that the Plutonic Engine is capable of producing—is redistributed via countless conduits to houses and buildings and machinery and vehimal feeding stations throughout the city-node. It is the same in every city-node of Syl Anagist, all over the world—two hundred and fifty-six fragments in total.

  My attention is suddenly caught by an odd sensation—the strangest thing I have ever sessed. Something diffuse … something nearby generates a force that … I shake my head and stop walking. “What is that?” I ask, before I consider whether it is wise to speak again, with Gallat in this mood.

  He stops, glowers at me, then apparently understands the confusion in my face. “Oh, I suppose you’re close enough to detect it here. That’s just sinkline feedback.”

  “And what is a sinkline?” asks Remwha, now that I have broken the ice. This causes Gallat to glare at him in fractionally increased annoyance. We all tense.

  “Evil Death,” Gallat sighs at last. “Fine, easier to show than to explain. Come on.”

  He speeds up again, and this time none of us dares complain even though we are pushing our aching legs on low blood sugar and some dehydration. Following Gallat, we reach the bottommost tier, cross the vehimal track, and pass between two of the huge, humming pylons.

  And there … we are destroyed.

  Beyond the pylons, Conductor Gallat explains to us in a tone of unconcealed impatience, is the start-up and translation system for the fragment. He slips into a detailed technical explanation that we absorb but do not really hear. Our network, the nigh-constant system of connections through which we six communicate and assess each other’s health and rumble warnings or reassure with songs of comfort, has gone utterly silent and still. This is shock. This is horror.

  The gist of Gallat’s explanation is this: The fragments could not have begun the generation of magic on their own, decades ago when they were first grown. Nonliving, inorganic things like crystal are inert to magic. Therefore, in order to help the fragments initiate the generative cycle, raw magic must be used as a catalyst. Every engine needs a starter. Enter the sinklines: They look like vines, thick and gnarled, twisting and curling to form a lifelike thicket around the fragment’s base. And ensnared in these vines—

  We’re going to see them, Kelenli told me, when I asked her where the Niess were.

  They are still alive, I know at once. Though they sprawl motionless amid the thicket of vines (lying atop the vines, twisted among them, wrapped up in them, speared by them where the vines grow through flesh), it is impossible not to sess the delicate threads of silver darting between the cells of this one’s hand, or dancing along the hairs of that one’s back. Some of them we can see breathing, though the motion is so very slow. Many wear tattered rags for clothes, dry-rotted with years; a few are naked. Their hair and nails have not grown, and their bodies have not produced waste that we can see. Nor can they feel pain, I sense instinctively; this, at least, is
a kindness. That is because the sinklines take all the magic of life from them save the bare trickle needed to keep them alive. Keeping them alive keeps them generating more.

  It is the briar patch. Back when we were newly decanted, still learning how to use the language that had been written into our brains during the growth phase, one of the conductors told us a story about where we would be sent if we became unable to work for some reason. That was when there were fourteen of us. We would be retired, she said, to a place where we could still serve the project indirectly. “It’s peaceful there,” the conductor said. I remember it clearly. She smiled as she said it. “You’ll see.”

  The briar patch’s victims have been here for years. Decades. There are hundreds of them in view, and thousands more out of sight if the sinkline thicket extends all the way around the amethyst’s base. Millions, when multiplied by two hundred and fifty-six. We cannot see Tetlewha, or the others, but we know that they, too, are here somewhere. Still alive, and yet not.

  Gallat finishes up as we stare in silence. “So after system priming, once the generative cycle is established, there’s only an occasional need to reprime.” He sighs, bored with his own voice. We stare in silence. “Sinklines store magic against any possible need. On Launch Day, each sink reservoir should have approximately thirty-seven lammotyrs stored, which is three times …”

  He stops. Sighs. Pinches the bridge of his nose. “There’s no point to this. She’s playing you, fool.” It is as if he does not see what we’re seeing. As if these stored, componentized lives mean nothing to him. “Enough. It’s time we got all of you back to the compound.”

  So we go home.

  And we begin, at last, to plan.

  Thresh them in

  Line them neat

  Make them part of the winter wheat!

  Tamp them down

  Shut them up

  Just a hop, a skip, and a jump!

  Seal those tongues

  Shut those eyes

  Never you stop until they cry!

  Nothing you hear

  Not one you’ll see

  This is the way to our victory!

  —Pre-Sanze children’s rhyme popular in Yumenes, Haltolee, Nianon, and Ewech Quartents, origin unknown. Many variants exist. This appears to be the baseline text.

  11

  you’re almost home

  THE GUARDS AT THE NODE station actually seem to think they can fight when you and the other Castrimans walk out of the ashfall. You suppose that the lot of you do look like a larger-than-usual raider band, given your ashy, acid-worn clothing and skeletal looks. Ykka doesn’t even have time to get Danel to try to talk them down before they start firing crossbows. They’re terrible shots, which is lucky for you; the law of averages is on their side, which isn’t. Three Castrimans go down beneath the bolts before you realize Ykka hasn’t got a clue how to use a torus as a shield—but after you’ve remembered that you can’t do it, either, without Consequences. So you shout at Maxixe and he does it with diamond precision, shredding the incoming bolts into wood-flecked snow, not so differently from the way you started things off in Tirimo that last day.

  He’s not as skilled now as you were then. Part of the torus remains around him; he just stretches and reshapes its forward edge to form a barrier between Castrima and the big scoria gates of the node station. Fortunately there’s no one in front of him (after you shouted at people to get out of the way). Then with a final flick of redirected kinetics he smashes the gates apart and ices the crossbow wielders before letting the torus spin away. Then while Castrima’s Strongbacks charge in and take care of things, you go over to find Maxixe sprawled in the wagon bed, panting.

  “Sloppy,” you say, catching one of his hands and pulling it to you, since you can’t exactly chafe it between your own. You can feel the cold of his skin through four layers of clothing. “Should’ve anchored that torus ten feet away, at least.”

  He grumbles, eyes drifting shut. His stamina’s gone completely to rust, but that’s probably because starvation and orogeny don’t mix well. “Haven’t needed to do anything fancier than just freeze people, for a couple of years now.” Then he glowers at you. “You didn’t bother, I see.”

  You smile wearily. “That’s because I knew you had it.” Then you scrape away a patch of ice from the wagon bed so you can have somewhere to sit until the fighting’s done.

  When it’s over, you pat Maxixe—who’s fallen asleep—and then get up to go find Ykka. She’s just inside the gates with Esni and a couple of other Strongbacks, all of them looking at the tiny paddock in wonder. There’s a goat in there, eying everyone with indifference as it chews on some hay. You haven’t seen a goat since Tirimo.

  First things first, though. “Make sure they don’t kill the doctor, or doctors,” you say to Ykka and Esni. “They’re probably barricaded in with the node maintainer. Lerna won’t know how to take care of the maintainer; it takes special skills.” You pause. “If you’re still committed to this plan.”

  Ykka nods and glances at Esni, who nods and glances at another woman, who eyeballs a young man, who then runs into the node facility. “What are the chances the doctor will kill the maintainer?” Esni asks. “For mercy?”

  You resist the urge to say, Mercy is for people. That way of thinking needs to die, even if you’re thinking it in bitterness. “Slim. Explain through the door that you’re not planning to kill anyone who surrenders, if you think that will help.” Esni sends another runner to do this.

  “Of course I’m still committed to the plan,” Ykka says. She’s rubbing her face, leaving streaks in the ash. Beneath the ash there’s just more ash, deeper ingrained. You’re forgetting what her natural coloring looks like, and you can’t tell if she’s wearing eye makeup anymore. “I mean, most of us can handle shakes in a controlled way, even the kids by now, but …” She looks up at the sky. “Well. There’s that.” You follow her gaze, but you know what you’ll see already. You’ve been trying not to see it. Everyone has been.

  The Rifting.

  On this side of the Merz, the sky doesn’t exist. Further south, the ash that the Rifting pumps forth has had time to rise into the atmosphere and thin out somewhat, forming the rippling clouds that have dominated the sky as you’ve known it for the past two years. Here, though. Here you try to look up, but before you even get to the sky, what grabs your eyes is something like a slow-boiling wall of black and red across the entire visible northern horizon. In a volcano, what you’re seeing would be called an eruption column, but the Rifting is not just some solitary vent. It is a thousand volcanoes put end-to-end, an unbroken line of earthfire and chaos from one coast of the Stillness to the other. Tonkee’s been trying to get everyone to call what you’re seeing by its proper term: Pyrocumulonimbus, a massive stormwall cloud of ash and fire and lightning. You’ve already heard people using a different term, however—simply, the Wall. You think that’s going to stick. You suspect, in fact, that if anybody’s still alive in a generation or two to name this Season, they’ll call it something like the Season of the Wall.

  You can hear it, faint but omnipresent. A rumble in the earth. A low, ceaseless snarl against your middle ear. The Rifting isn’t just a shake; it is the still-ongoing, dynamic divergence of two tectonic plates along a newly created fault line. The aftershakes from the initial Rifting won’t stop for years. Your sessapinae have been all a-jangle for days now, warning you to brace or run, twitching with the need to do something about the seismic threat. You know better, but here’s the problem: Every orogene in Castrima is sessing what you’re sessing. Feeling the same twitchy urge to react. And unless they happen to be Fulcrum-precise highringers able to yoke other highringers before activating an ancient network of deadciv artifacts, doing something will kill them.

  So Ykka is now coming to terms with a truth you’ve understood since you woke up with a stone arm: To survive in Rennanis, Castrima will need the node maintainers. It will need to take care of them. And when those node maintain
ers die, Castrima will need to find some way to replace them. No one’s talking about that last part yet. First things first.

  After a while, Ykka sighs and glances at the open doorway of the building. “Sounds like the fighting’s done.”

  “Sounds like,” you say. Silence stretches. A muscle in her jaw tightens. You add, “I’ll go with you.”

  She glances at you. “You don’t have to.” You’ve told her about your first time seeing a node maintainer. She heard the still-fresh horror in your voice.

  But no. Alabaster showed you the way, and you no longer shirk the duty he’s bestowed upon you. You’ll turn the maintainer’s head, let Ykka see the scarring in the back, explain about the lesioning process. You’ll need to show her how the wire minimizes bedsores. Because if she’s going to make this choice, then she needs to know exactly what price she—and Castrima—must pay.

  You will do this—make her see these things, make yourself face it again, because this is the whole truth of what orogenes are. The Stillness fears your kind for good reason, true. Yet it should also revere your kind for good reason, and it has chosen to do only one of these things. Ykka, of all people, needs to hear everything.

  Her jaw tightens, but she nods. Esni watches you both, curious, but then she shrugs and turns away as you and Ykka walk into the node facility, together.

  The node has a fully stocked storeroom, which you guess is meant to be an auxiliary storage site for the comm itself. It’s more than even hungry, commless Castrima can eat, and it includes things everyone’s been increasingly desperate for, like dried red and yellow fruit and canned greens. Ykka stops people from turning the occasion into an impromptu feast—you’ve still got to make the stores last for Earth knows how long—but that doesn’t prevent the bulk of the comm from getting into a nearly festive mood as everyone bunkers for the night with full bellies for the first time in months.