The Fifth Season (7 page)

The one who steps forward to greet Rask is actually the smallest of them—a man you know, though you don’t remember his name. His children have been in your classes at the town creche. He remembers you, too, you see, when his eyes fix on you and narrow.

Rask stops and sets the crate down, opening it and handing you the runny-sack. “Karra,” he says to the man you know. “Everything okay here?”

“Was till now,” Karra says, not taking his eyes off you. The way he’s looking at you makes your skin tighten. A couple of the other Strongbacks are watching, too, glancing from Karra to Rask and back, ready to follow someone’s lead. One woman is openly glaring at you, but the rest seem content to glance at you and away in quick slashes.

“Good to hear,” Rask says. You see him frown a little, perhaps as he reads the same signals you’re picking up on. “Tell your people to open the gate for a minute, will you?”

Karra doesn’t take his eyes off you. “Think that’s a good idea, Rask?”

Rask scowls and steps sharply up to Karra, getting right in his face. He’s not a big man, Rask—he’s an Innovator, not a Strongback, not that it really matters anymore—and right now he doesn’t need to be. “Yeah,” Rask says, his voice so low and tight that Karra focuses on him at last with a stiffening of surprise. “I do. Open the gate, if you don’t
mind
. If you’re not too rusting
busy
.”

You think of a line from stonelore, Structures, verse three.
The body fades. A leader who lasts relies on more.

Karra’s jaw flexes, but after a moment he nods. You try to look absorbed in shrugging on the runny-sack. The straps are loose. Jija was the last one to try it on.

Karra and the other gate-minders get moving, working on the system of pulleys that helps to winch the gate open. Most of Tirimo’s wall is made of wood. It’s not a wealthy comm with the resources to import good stone or hire the number of masons needed, although they’re doing better than poorly managed comms, or newcomms that don’t even have a wall yet. The gate, though, is stone, because a gate is the weakest point of every comm wall. They only need to open it a little for you, and after a few slow, grinding moments and calls from those hauling to those spotting for approaching intruders, they stop.

Rask turns to you, plainly uncomfortable. “Sorry about—about Jija,” he says. Not about Uche, but maybe that’s for the best. You need to keep your head clear. “About all of it, shit. Hope you find the bastard.”

You only shake your head. Your throat is tight. Tirimo has been your home for ten years. You only started to think of it as such—home—around the time of Uche’s birth, but that’s more than you ever expected to do. You remember chasing Uche across the green after he first learned to run. You remember Jija helping Nassun build a kite and fly it, badly; the kite’s remmants are still in a tree somewhere on the eastern side of town.

But it is not as hard to leave as you thought it would be. Not now, with your former neighbors’ stares sliding over your skin like rancid oil.

“Thanks,” you mutter, meaning for it to cover many things, because Rask didn’t have to help you. He has damaged himself by doing so. The gate-minders respect him less now, and they’ll talk. Soon everyone will know he’s a rogga-lover, which is dangerous. Headmen can’t afford that kind of weakness when a Season’s coming on. But for the moment what matters most to you is this moment of public decency, which is a kindness and an honor you never expected to receive. You aren’t sure how to react to it.

He nods, uncomfortable as well, and turns away as you start toward the gap in the gate. Perhaps he does not see Karra nod to another of the gate-minders; perhaps he does not see the latter woman quickly shoulder her weapon and orient it on you. Perhaps, you will think later, Rask would have stopped the woman, or somehow prevented everything to come, if he had seen.

You
see her, though, mostly out of the periphery of your vision. Then everything happens too fast to think. And because you
don’t
think, because you’ve been trying
not
to think and this means you’re out of the habit, because thinking means you will remember that your family is
dead
and everything that meant happiness is now
a lie
and thinking of that will make you
break
and start screaming and screaming and screaming

and because once upon a time and in another life you learned to respond to sudden threats in a very particular way, you

reach for the air around you and
pull
and

brace your feet against the earth beneath you and
anchor
and
narrow
and

when the woman fires the crossbow, the bolt blurs toward
you. Just before the bolt hits, it bursts into a million glittering, frozen flecks.

(
Naughty, naughty,
chides a voice in your head. The voice of your conscience, deep and male. You forget this thought almost the instant it occurs. That voice is from another life.)

Life. You look at the woman who just tried to kill you.

“What the—Shit!” Karra stares at you, as if stunned by your failure to fall down dead. He crouches, hands balled into fists, nearly jumping up and down in his agitation. “Shoot her again! Kill her! Shoot, Earth damn it, before—”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Rask, finally noticing what’s happening, turns back. It’s too late.

Down below your feet and everyone else’s, a shake begins.

It’s hard to tell, at first. There is no warning jangle of sesuna, as there would be if the movement of the earth came
from
the earth. That’s why people like these fear people like you, because you’re beyond sense and preparation. You’re a surprise, like a sudden toothache, like a heart attack. The vibration of what you’re doing rises, fast, to become a rumble of tension that can be perceived with ears and feet and skin if not sessapinae, but by this point it’s too late.

Karra frowns, looking at the ground beneath his feet. Crossbow Woman pauses in the middle of loading another bolt, eyes widening as she stares at the shivering string of her weapon.

You stand surrounded by swirling flecks of snow and disintegrated crossbow bolt. Around your feet, there is a two-foot circle of frost riming the packed earth. Your locks waft gently in the rising breeze.

“You can’t.” Rask whispers the words, his eyes widening at
the look on your face. (You don’t know what you look like right now, but it must be bad.) He shakes his head as if denial will stop this, taking a step back and then another. “Essun.”

“You killed him,” you say to Rask. This is not a rational thing. You mean you-plural, even though you’re speaking to you-specific. Rask didn’t try to kill you, had nothing to do with Uche, but the attempt on your life has triggered something raw and furious and cold.
You cowards. You animals, who look at a child and see prey.
Jija’s the one to blame for Uche, some part of you knows that—but Jija grew up here in Tirimo. The kind of hate that can make a man murder his own son? It came from everyone around you.

Rask inhales. “Essun—”

And then the valley floor splits open.

The initial jolt of this is violent enough to knock everyone standing to the ground and sway every house in Tirimo. Then those houses judder and rattle as the jolt smooths into a steady, ongoing vibration. Saider’s Cart-Repair Shop is the first to collapse, the old wooden frame of the building sliding sideways off its foundation. There are screams from inside, and one woman manages to run out before the door frame crumples inward. On the eastern edge of town, closest to the mountain ridges that frame the valley, a rockslide begins. A portion of the eastern comm wall and three houses are buried beneath a sudden grinding slurry of mud and trees and rocks. Far below the ground, where no one but you can detect, the clay walls of the underground aquifer that supplies the village wells are breached. The aquifer begins to drain. They will not realize for weeks that you killed the town in this moment, but they will remember when the wells run dry.

Those who survive the next few moments will, anyhow. From your feet, the circle of frost and swirling snow begins to expand. Rapidly.

It catches Rask first. He tries to run as the edge of your torus rolls toward him, but he’s simply too close. It catches him in mid-lunge, glazing his feet and solidifying his legs and eating its way up his spine until, in the span of a breath, he falls to the ground stone-stiff, his flesh turning as gray as his hair. The next to be consumed by the circle is Karra, who’s still screaming for someone to kill you. The shout dies in his throat as he falls, flash-frozen, the last of his warm breath hissing out through clenched teeth and frosting the ground as you steal the heat from it.

You aren’t just inflicting death on your fellow villagers, of course. A bird perched on a nearby fence falls over frozen, too. The grass crisps, the ground grows hard, and the air hisses and howls as moisture and density is snatched from its substance… but no one has ever mourned earthworms.

Fast. The air swirls briskly all down Seven Seasons now, making the trees rustle and anyone nearby cry out in alarm as they realize what’s happening. The ground hasn’t stopped moving. You sway with the ground, but because you know its rhythms, it is easy for you to shift your balance with it. You do this without thinking, because there is only room left in you for one thought.

These people killed Uche. Their hate, their fear, their unprovoked violence. They.

(He.)

Killed your son.

(Jija killed your son.)

People run out into the streets, screaming and wondering why there was no warning, and you kill any of them who are stupid or panicked enough to come near.

Jija. They are Jija. The whole rusting town is
Jija
.

Two things save the comm, however, or at least most of it. The first is that most of the buildings don’t collapse. Tirimo might be too poor to build with stone, but most of its builders are ethical and well paid enough to use only techniques that stonelore recommends: the hanging frame, the center beam. Second, the fault line of the valley—which you’re currently peeling apart with a thought—is actually a few miles to the west. Because of these things, most of Tirimo will survive this, at least until the wells die.

Because of these things. And because of the terrified, bouncing scream of a little boy as his father runs out of a madly swaying building.

You pivot toward the sound instantly, habitually, orienting on the source with a mother’s ears. The man clutches the boy with both arms. He doesn’t even have a runny-sack; the first and only thing he took the time to grab was his son. The boy looks nothing like Uche. But you stare as the child bounces and reaches back toward the house for something the man has left behind (favorite toy? the boy’s mother?), and suddenly, finally, you
think
.

And then you stop.

Because, oh uncaring Earth. Look what you’ve done.

The shake stops. The air hisses again, this time as warmer, moister air rushes into the space around you. The ground and
your skin grow instantly damp with condensation. The rumble of the valley fades, leaving only screams and the creak of falling wood and the shake-siren that has only belatedly, forlornly, begun to wail.

You close you eyes, aching and shaking and thinking,
No.
I
killed Uche. By being his mother
. There are tears on your face. And here you thought you couldn’t cry.

But there’s no one between you and the gate now. The gate-minders who could, have fled; besides Rask and Karra, several more were too slow to get away. You shoulder the runny-sack and head for the gate opening, scrubbing at your face with one hand. You’re smiling, too, though, and it is a bitter, aching thing. You just can’t help acknowledging the irony of the whole thing. Didn’t want to wait for death to come for you. Right.

Stupid, stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you.

* * *

Never forget what you are.

—Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse ten

4

Syenite, cut and polished

T
HIS IS SHIT,
S
YENITE THINKS
, behind the shield of her pleasant smile.

She doesn’t let the affront show on her face, however. Nor does she shift even minutely in the chair. Her hands—four fingers ringed respectively in plain bands of carnelian, white opal, gold, and onyx—rest on her knees. They’re out of sight below the edge of the desk, from Feldspar’s perspective. She could clench them with Feldspar none the wiser. She doesn’t.

“Coral reefs
are
challenging, you realize.” Feldspar, her own hands occupied with the big wooden cup of safe, smiles over its rim. She knows full well what’s behind Syenite’s smile. “Not like ordinary rock. Coral is porous, flexible. The fine control required to shatter it without triggering a tsunami is difficult to achieve.”

And Syen could do it in her sleep. A two-ringer could do this. A grit could do it—though, admittedly, not without substantial collateral damage. She reaches for her own cup of safe, turning the wooden hemisphere in her fingers so that they will not
shake, then taking a sip. “I appreciate that you have assigned me a mentor, senior.”

“No, you don’t.” Feldspar smiles, too, and sips from her cup of safe, ringed pinky in the air while she does so. It’s as if they’re having a private contest, etiquette versus etiquette, best shit-eating grin take all. “If it’s any consolation, no one will think less of you.”

Because everyone knows what this is really about. That doesn’t erase the insult, but it does give Syen a degree of comfort. At least her new “mentor” is a ten-ringer. That, too, is comforting, that they thought so much of her. She’ll scrape whatever morsels of self-esteem she can out of this.

“He recently completed a circuit in the Somidlats,” Feldspar says, gently. There’s no actual gentleness to the conversation’s subject matter, but Syen appreciates the older woman’s effort. “Ordinarily we’d allow him more time to rest before setting him back on the road, but the quartent governor was insistent that we do something about Allia’s harbor blockage as soon as possible. You’re the one who’ll do the work; he’s just there to supervise. Getting there should take a month or so, if you don’t make many detours and travel at an easy pace—and there’s no hurry, given that the coral reef isn’t exactly a sudden problem.”