The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  But also in spite of herself … she thinks. She feels old, Nassun, at the world-weary age of not-quite-eleven. So much has happened since the day she came home to find her little brother dead on the floor. She is a different person now, hardly Nassun at all; sometimes she is surprised to realize Nassun is still her name. How much more different will she be in three years? Ten? Twenty?

  Steel pauses until he sees some change in her expression—some evidence, perhaps, that she is listening to him. Then he says, “I have reason to believe, however, that your Schaffa is much, much older than most Guardians. He isn’t quite first-generation; those have all long since died. Couldn’t take it. He’s one of the very early ones, though, still. The languages, you see; that’s how you can always tell. They never quite lose those, even after they’ve forgotten the names they were born with.”

  Nassun remembers how Schaffa knew the language of the earth-traversing vehicle. It is strange to think of Schaffa having been born back when that tongue was still spoken. It would make him … she can’t even imagine. Old Sanze is supposed to be seven Seasons old, eight if one counts the present Season. Almost three thousand years. The Moon’s cycle of return and retreat is much older than that, and Schaffa remembers it, so … yes. He’s very, very old. She frowns.

  “It’s rare to find one of them who can really go the distance,” Steel continues. His tone is casual, conversational; he could be talking about Nassun’s old neighbors back in Jekity. “The corestone hurts them so much, you see. They get tired, and then they get sloppy, and then the Earth begins to contaminate them, eating away at their will. They don’t usually last long once that starts. The Earth uses them, or their fellow Guardians use them, until they outlive their usefulness and one side or the other kills them. It’s a testament to your Schaffa’s strength that he lasted so much longer. Or a testament to something else, maybe. What kills the rest, you see, is losing the things that ordinary people need to be happy. Imagine what that’s like, Nassun. Watching everyone you know and care about die. Watching your home die, and having to find a new one—again, and again, and again. Imagine never daring to get close to another person. Never having friends, because you’ll outlive them. Are you lonely, little Nassun?”

  She has forgotten her anger. “Yes,” she admits, before she can think not to.

  “Imagine being lonely forever.” There’s a very slight smile on his lips, she sees. It’s been there the whole while. “Imagine living here in Corepoint forever, with no one to talk to but me—when I bother to respond. What do you think that will feel like, Nassun?”

  “Terrible,” she says. Quietly now.

  “Yes. So here is my theory: I believe your Schaffa survived by loving his charges. You, and others like you, soothed his loneliness. He truly does love you; never doubt that about him.” Nassun swallows back a dull ache. “But he also needs you. You keep him happy. You keep him human, where otherwise time would have long since transformed him into something else.”

  Then Steel moves again. It’s inhuman because of its steadiness, Nassun finally realizes. People are quick to do big movements and then slower with fine adjustment. Steel does everything at the same pace. Watching him move is like watching a statue melt. But then he stands with arms outstretched as if to say, Take a look at me.

  “I am forty thousand years old,” Steel says. “Give or take a few millennia.”

  Nassun stares at him. The words are like the gibberish that the vehimal spoke—almost comprehensible, but not really. Not real.

  What does that feel like, though?

  “You’re going to die when you open the Gate,” Steel says, after giving Nassun a moment to absorb what he’s said. “Or if not then, sometime after. A few decades, a few minutes, it’s all the same. And whatever you do, Schaffa will lose you. He’ll lose the one thing that has kept him human throughout the Earth’s efforts to devour his will. He’ll find no one new to love, either—not here. And he won’t be able to return to the Stillness unless he’s willing to risk the Deep Earth route again. So whether he heals somehow, or you change him into one of my kind, he will have no choice but to go on, alone, endlessly yearning for what he will never again have.” Slowly, Steel’s arms lower to his sides. “You have no idea what that’s like.”

  And then, suddenly, shockingly, he is right in front of Nassun. No blurring, no warning, just flick and he is there, bent at the waist to put his face right in front of hers, so close that she feels the wind of the air he’s displaced and smells the whiff of loam and she can even see that the irises of his eyes are striated in layers of gray.

  “BUT I DO,” he shouts.

  Nassun stumbles back and cries out. Between one blink and the next, however, Steel returns to his former position, upright, arms at his sides, a smile on his lips.

  “So think carefully,” Steel says. His voice is conversational again, as if nothing has happened. “Think with something more than the selfishness of a child, little Nassun. And ask yourself: Even if I could help you save that controlling, sadistic sack of shit that currently passes for your adoptive father figure, why would I? Not even my enemy deserves that fate. No one does.”

  Nassun’s still shaking. She blurts, bravely, “Sch-Schaffa might want to live.”

  “He might. But should he? Should anyone, forever? That is the question.”

  She feels the absent weight of countless years, and is obliquely ashamed of being a child. But at her core, she is a kind child, and it’s impossible for her to have heard Steel’s story without feeling something other than her usual anger at him. She looks away twitchily. “I’m … sorry.”

  “So am I.” There’s a moment’s silence. In it, Nassun pulls herself together slowly. By the time she focuses on him again, Steel’s smile has vanished.

  “I cannot stop you, once you’ve opened the Gate,” he says. “I’ve manipulated you, yes, but the choice is still ultimately yours. Consider, however. Until the Earth dies, I live, Nassun. That was its punishment for us: We became a part of it, chained fate to fate. The Earth forgets neither those who stabbed it in the back … nor those who put the knife in our hand.”

  Nassun blinks at our. But she loses this thought amid misery at the realization that there can be no fixing Schaffa. Until now, some part of her has nursed the irrational hope that Steel, as an adult, had all the answers, including some sort of cure. Now she knows that her hope has been foolish. Childish. She is a child. And now the only adult she has ever been able to rely on will die naked and hurt and helpless, without ever being able to say goodbye.

  It’s too much to bear. She sinks into a crouch, wrapping one arm round her knees and folding the other over her head, so that Steel will not see her cry even if he knows that’s exactly what’s happening.

  He lets out a soft laugh at this. Surprisingly, it does not sound cruel.

  “You achieve nothing by keeping any of us alive,” he says, “except cruelty. Put us broken monsters out of our misery, Nassun. The Earth, Schaffa, me, you … all of us.”

  Then he vanishes, leaving Nassun alone beneath the white, burgeoning Moon.

  Syl Anagist: Zero

  A MOMENT IN THE PRESENT, BEFORE I speak again of the past.

  Amid the heated, fuming shadows and unbearable pressure of a place that has no name, I open my eyes. I’m no longer alone.

  Out of the stone, another of my kind pushes forth. Her face is angular, cool, as patrician and elegant as any statue’s should be. She’s shed the rest, but kept the pallor of her original coloring; I notice this at last, after tens of thousands of years. All this reminiscing has made me nostalgic.

  In token of which, I say aloud, “Gaewha.”

  She shifts slightly, as close as any of us gets to an expression of … recognition? Surprise? We were siblings once. Friends. Since then, rivals, enemies, strangers, legends. Lately, cautious allies. I find myself contemplating some of what we were, but not all. I’ve forgotten the all, just as much as she has.

  She says, “Was that my
name?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Hmm. And you were …?”

  “Houwha.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “You prefer Antimony?”

  Another slight movement, the equivalent of a shrug. “I have no preference.”

  I think, Nor do I, but that is a lie. I would never have given my new name to you, Hoa, if not in homage to what I remember of that old name. But I’m woolgathering.

  I say, “She is committed to the change.”

  Gaewha, Antimony, whoever and whatever she is now, replies, “I noticed.” She pauses. “Do you regret what you did?”

  It’s a foolish question. All of us regret that day, in different ways and for different reasons. But I say, “No.”

  I expect comment in return, but I suppose there’s really nothing to be said anymore. She makes minute sounds, settling into the rock. Getting comfortable. She means to wait here with me. I’m glad. Some things are easier when not faced alone.

  There are things Alabaster never told you, about himself.

  I know these things because I studied him; he is part of you, after all. But not every teacher needs every protégé to know of his every stumble on the journey to mastery. What would be the point? None of us got here overnight. There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion—unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made.

  Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they’re worth—because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don’t, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort. Fleetingly.

  The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

  No one reaches this place without a false start or two.

  When Alabaster was a young man, he loved easily and casually. Oh, he was angry, even then; of course he was. Even children notice when they are not treated fairly. He had chosen to cooperate, however, for the time being.

  He met a man, a scholar, during a mission he’d been assigned by the Fulcrum. Alabaster’s interest was prurient; the scholar was quite handsome, and charmingly shy in response to Alabaster’s flirtations. If the scholar hadn’t been busy excavating what turned out to be an ancient lore cache, there would be nothing more to the story. Alabaster would have loved him and left him, perhaps with regret, more likely with no hard feelings.

  Instead, the scholar showed Alabaster his findings. There were more, Alabaster told you, than just three tablets of stonelore, originally. Also, the current Tablet Three was rewritten by Sanze. It was actually rewritten again by Sanze; it had been rewritten several times prior to that. The original Tablet Three spoke of Syl Anagist, you see, and how the Moon was lost. This knowledge, for many reasons, has been deemed unacceptable again and again down the millennia since. No one really wants to face the fact that the world is the way it is because some arrogant, self-absorbed people tried to put a leash on the rusting planet. And no one was ready to accept that the solution to the whole mess was simply to let orogenes live and thrive and do what they were born to do.

  For Alabaster, the lore cache’s knowledge was overwhelming. He fled. It was too much for him, the knowledge that all of this had happened before. That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude. At the time he could see no end to the cycle, no way to demand the impossible of society. So he broke, and he ran.

  His Guardian found him, of course, three quartents away from where he was supposed to be and with no inkling of where he was going. Instead of breaking his hand—they used different techniques with highringers like Alabaster—Guardian Leshet took him to a tavern and bought him a drink. He wept into his wine and confessed to her that he couldn’t take much more of the world as it was. He had tried to submit, tried to embrace the lies, but it was not right.

  Leshet soothed him and took him back to the Fulcrum, and for one year they allowed Alabaster time to recover. To accept again the rules and role that had been created for him. He was content during this year, I believe; Antimony believes it, in any case, and she is the one who knew him best during this time. He settled, did what was expected of him, sired three children, and even volunteered to be an instructor for the higher-ringed juniors. He never got the chance to act on this, however, because the Guardians had decided already that Alabaster could not go unpunished for running away. When he met and fell in love with an older ten-ringer named Hessionite—

  I have told you already that they use different methods on highringers.

  I ran away, too, once. In a way.

  It is the day after our return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, and I am different. I look through the nematode window at the garden of purple light, and it is no longer beautiful to me. The winking of the white star-flowers lets me know that some genegineer made them, tying them into the city power network so that they can be fed by a bit of magic. How else to get that winking effect? I see the elegant vinework on the surrounding buildings and I know that somewhere, a biomagest is tabulating how many lammotyrs of magic can be harvested from such beauty. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist—sacred, and lucrative, and useful.

  So I am thinking this, and I am in a foul mood, when one of the junior conductors comes in. Conductor Stahnyn, she is called, and ordinarily I like her. She’s young enough to have not yet picked up the worst of the more experienced conductors’ habits. And now as I turn to gaze at her with eyes that Kelenli has opened, I notice something new about her. A bluntness to her features, a smallness to her mouth. Yes, it’s much more subtle than Conductor Gallat’s icewhite eyes, but here is another Sylanagistine whose ancestors clearly didn’t understand the whole point of genocide.

  “How are you feeling today, Houwha?” she asks, smiling and glancing at her noteboard as she comes in. “Up to a medical check?”

  “I’m feeling up to a walk,” I say. “Let’s go out to the garden.”

  Stahnyn starts, blinking at me. “Houwha, you know that’s not possible.”

  They keep such lax security on us, I have noticed. Sensors to monitor our vitals, cameras to monitor our movements, microphones to record our sounds. Some of the sensors monitor our magic usage—and none of them, not one, can measure even a tenth of what we really do. I would be insulted if I had not just been shown how important it is to them that we be lesser. Lesser creatures don’t need better monitoring, do they? Creations of Sylanagistine magestry cannot possibly have abilities that surpass it. Unthinkable! Ridiculous! Don’t be foolish.

  Fine, I am insulted. And I no longer have the patience for Stahnyn’s polite patronization.

  So I find the lines of magic that run to the cameras, and I entangle them with the lines of magic that run to their own storage crystals, and I loop these together. Now the cameras will display only footage that they filmed over the last few hours—which mostly consists of me looking out the window and brooding. I do the same to the audio equipment, taking care to erase that last exchange between me and Stahnyn. I do all of this with barely a flick of my will, because I was designed to affect machines the size of skyscrapers; cameras are nothing. I use more magic reaching for the others to tell a joke.

  The others sess what I am doing, however. Bimniwha gets a taste of my mood and immediately alerts the others—because I am the nice one, usually. I’m the one who, until recently, believed in Geoarcanity. Usua
lly Remwha is the resentful one. But right now Remwha is coldly silent, stewing on what we have learned. Gaewha is quiet, too, in despair, trying to fathom how to demand the impossible. Dushwha is hugging themselves for comfort and Salewha is sleeping too much. Bimniwha’s alert falls on weary, frustrated, self-absorbed ears, and goes ignored.

  Meanwhile, Stahnyn’s smile has begun to falter, as she only now realizes I’m serious. She shifts her stance, putting hands on her hips. “Houwha, this isn’t funny. I understand you got the chance to leave the other day—”

  I have considered the most efficient way to shut her up. “Does Conductor Gallat know that you find him attractive?”

  Stahnyn freezes, eyes going wide and round. Brown eyes in her case, but she likes icewhite. I’ve seen how she looks at Gallat, though I never much cared before. I don’t really care now. But I imagine that finding Niess eyes attractive is a taboo thing in Syl Anagist, and neither Gallat nor Stahnyn can afford to be accused of that particular perversion. Gallat would fire Stahnyn at the first whisper of it—even a whisper from me.

  I go over to her. She draws back a little, frowning at my forwardness. We do not assert ourselves, we constructs. We tools. My behavior is anomalous in a way that she should report, but that isn’t what has her so worried. “No one heard me say that,” I tell her, very gently. “No one can see what’s happening in this room right now. Relax.”

  Her bottom lip trembles, just a little, before she speaks. I feel bad, just a little, for having disturbed her so. She says, “You can’t get far. Th-there’s a vitamin deficiency … You and the others were built that way. Without special food—the food we serve you—you’ll die in just a few days.”