The Fifth Season

13 you’re on the trail

THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE at the vein, this small and petty creature. This is the bedrock of your life. Father Earth is right to despise you, but do not be ashamed. You may be a monster, but you are also great.

* * *

The commless woman is called Tonkee. That’s the only name she gives you: no use name, no comm name. You’re sure she is, despite her protestations, a geomest; she admits it — sort of — when you ask her why she’s following you. “He’s just too damn interesting,” Tonkee says, jerking her chin toward Hoa. “If I didn’t try to figure him out, my old masters at the uni would hire assassins to hunt me down. Not that they haven’t done that already!” She laughs like a horse, all bray and big white teeth. “I’d love a sample of his blood, but fat lot of good that will do me without proper equipment. So I’ll settle for observation.”

(Hoa looks annoyed at this, and pointedly makes an effort to keep you between himself and Tonkee as you walk.)

“The uni” she referred to, you are certain, is the Seventh University in Dibars — the most famous center of learning for ’mests and lorists in all the Stillness, located in the second-largest city of the Equatorials. And if that prestitious place is where Tonkee trained, rather than at some jumped-up regional creche for adults, or at the knee of some local tinkerer, then she has fallen very far indeed. But you’re too polite to say this aloud.

Tonkee does not live in an enclave of cannibals, despite her creative threats. You discover this when she leads you to her home that afternoon. Her home is a cave situated in a vesicle — the ancient fallen-in remains of a solidified lava bubble, this one once as big as a small hill. Now it’s a secluded glen in a pocket of forest, with curving columns of gleaming black glass interspersed among the trees. There are all sorts of odd little cavelets tucked into its sides, where smaller bubbles must’ve nestled against the larger, and Tonkee warns you that some of the ones on the far side of the vesicle are home to forest cats and other animals. Most of them are no threat, normally, but everything changes in a Season, so you’re careful to follow Tonkee’s lead.

Tonkee’s cavern is full of contraptions, books, and junk she’s scavenged, amid a lot of actually useful things like lanterns and storecache food. The cavern smells of fragrant resins from the fires she’s burned, but it quickly takes on Tonkee’s stench once she’s in and bustling about. You resign yourself to endure it, though Hoa doesn’t seem to notice or maybe care; you envy his stoicism. Fortunately it turns out that Tonkee did indeed bring all that water with her for a bath. She does this in front of you, shamelessly stripping down and squatting by a wooden basin to scrub at her pits and crotch and the rest. You’re a little surprised to notice a penis somewhere amid this process, but, well, not like any comm’s going to make her a Breeder. She finishes up by rinsing her clothes and hair with a murky green solution that she claims is antifungal. (You have your doubts.)

Anyway, the place smells much better when she’s done, so you spend a remarkably pleasant and cozy night there on your bedroll — she’s got spares, but you don’t want to risk lice — and even let Hoa curl up against you, though you turn your back to him so he won’t cuddle. He does not try.

The next day you resume the journey south, with Tonkee the commless geomest and Hoa the… whatever he is. Because you’re pretty sure by now that he’s not human. That doesn’t bother you; officially speaking, you’re not human, either. (Per the Second Yumenescene Lore Council’s Declaration on the Rights of the Orogenically Afflicted, a thousand-ish years ago.) What does bother you is that Hoa won’t talk about it. You ask about what he did to the kirkhusa and he refuses to answer. You ask him why he won’t answer, and he just looks miserable and says, “Because I want you to like me.”

It almost makes you feel normal, traveling with these two. The road demands most of your attention, in any case. The ashfall only gets heavier over the next few days, until you finally do pull the masks out of your runny-sack — you have four, fortunately, horribly — and hand them around. It’s clumpy ash for now, not the floating haze of death that stonelore warns against, but no sense being incautious. Other people have broken out their masks, too, you see when they materialize out of the grayness, their skin and hair and clothing hardly distinguishable from the ash-painted landscape, their eyes grazing over you and away. The masks make everyone equally unknown and unknowable, which is good. No one pays attention to you or Hoa or Tonkee, not anymore. You’re happy to join the indistinct masses.

By the end of a week, the crowds of people traveling along the road have begun to thin into knots and, occasionally, trickles. Everyone who has a comm is hurrying back there, and the thinning crowds mean most of them are finding somewhere to settle in. Now only those journeying farther than usual remain on the road, or people who don’t have a home to return to — like the hollow-eyed Equatorials you’ve seen, many of them sporting terrible burns or injuries that come from falling debris. The Equatorials are a brewing problem, because there’s a lot of them on the road even if the injured ones are mostly getting sick with infection and starting to die. (You pass at least one or two people every day who just sit there on the edges of the road, pale or flushed, curled up or shaking, waiting for the end to come.) There’s plenty left who seem hale enough, though, and they’re commless now. That’s always a problem.

You talk to a small group of these folk at the next roadhouse: five women of wildly varied ages and a very young, uncertain-looking man. This lot have removed most of the flowing, uselessly pretty garments that people in the Equatorial cities used to consider fashionable, you notice; somewhere along the way they’ve stolen or traded for sturdy clothes and proper travel gear. But each of them sports some remnant of the old life: The oldest woman wears a headscarf of frilly, stained blue satin; the youngest has gauzy sleeves poking out from under the heavier, more practical cloth of her tunic; the young man has a sash around his waist that is soft and peach colored and there solely for decoration, as far as you can tell.

Except it’s not really decoration. You notice how they look at you when you walk up: a sweep of the eyes, an inspection of your wrists or neck or ankles, a frown as you are found wanting. The impractical cloth has one very practical use: It is the marker of a new tribe in the process of being born. A tribe to which you do not belong.

Not a problem. Yet.

You ask them what happened in the north. You know, but being aware of a geological event and knowing what that event means in the real human sense are two very different things. They tell you, once you’ve held up your hands and made it clear you offer no (visible) threat.

“I was on my way home from a concert,” says one of the younger women, who does not introduce herself but should be — if she is not already — a Breeder. She’s what Sanzed women are supposed to look like, tall and strong and bronze and almost offensively healthy, with nice even features and wide hips, all of it crowned with a shock of gray ashblow hair that’s almost like a pelt about her shoulders. She jerks her head toward the young man, who lowers his gaze demurely. Just as pretty; probably a Breeder, too, though a bit on the scrawny side. Well, he’ll beef up if he’s got five women to service for his keep. “He was playing at the improvisation hall on Shemshena Street; this was in Alebid. The music was so beautiful…”

She trails off, and for a moment you see her detach from the here and now. You know Alebid is — was — a mid-sized city comm, known for its art scene. Then she snaps back, because of course she is a good Sanzed girl, and Sanzeds hold little truck with daydreamers.

She continues: “We saw something sort of—tear, off to the north. Along the horizon, I mean. We could see this… red light flare up at one point, then it spread off to the east and west. I couldn’t tell how far away, but we could see it reflected on the underside of the clouds.” She’s drifting again, but remembering something terrible this time, and so her face is hard and grim and angry. That’s more socially acceptable than nostalgia. “It spread fast. We were just standing in the street, watching it grow and trying to figure out what we were seeing, and sessing, when the ground started to shake. Then something — a cloud — obscured the red, and we realized it was coming toward us.”

It had not been a pyroclastic cloud, you know, or she wouldn’t be here talking to you. Just an ash storm, then. Alebid is well south of Yumenes; all they got was the dregs of whatever more northerly comms did. And that’s good, because those dregs alone almost broke the much-further-south Tirimo. By rights Alebid should have been pebbles.

An orogene saved this girl, you suspect. Yes, there’s a node station near Alebid, or there was.

“Everything was still standing,” she says, confirming your guess. “But the ash that followed — no one could breathe. The ash was getting in people’s mouths, into their lungs, turning into cement. I tied my blouse around my face; it was made of the same stuff as a mask. That’s the only thing that saved me. Us.” She glances at her young man, and you realize the scrap around his wrist is part of what used to be a woman’s garment, by the color. “It was evening, after a beautiful day. It’s not like anybody had their runny-sacks with them.”

Silence falls. This time everyone in the group lets it go on, and drifts with her for a moment. The memory’s just that bad. You remember, too, that not many Equatorials even have runny-sacks. The nodes have been more than enough to keep the biggest cities safe for centuries.

“So we ran,” the woman concludes abruptly, with a sigh. “And we haven’t stopped.”

You thank them for the information, and leave before they can ask questions in return.

As the days pass, you hear other, similar, stories. And you notice that none of the Equatorials you meet are from Yumenes, or any comms from the same approximate latitude. Alebid is as far north as the survivors run.

Doesn’t matter, though. You’re not going north. And no matter how much it bothers you — what’s happened, what it means — you know better than to dwell too much on it. Your head’s crowded enough with ugly memories.

So you and your companions keep going through the gray days and ruddy nights, and all that really concerns you is keeping your canteen filled and your food stores topped up, and replacing your shoes when they start to wear thin. Doing all this is easy, for now, because people are still hoping this will be just a brief Season — a year without a summer, or two, or three. That’s how most Seasons go, and comms that remain willing to trade during such times, profiting off others’ poor planning, generally come out of it wealthy. You know better — this Season will be much, much longer than anyone could have planned for — but that won’t stop you from taking advantage of their misconception.

Now and again you stop at comms you pass on the road, some of them huge and sprawling with granite walls that loom overhead, some of them protected merely by fencewire, sharpened sticks, and poorly armed Strongbacks. The prices are beginning to go strange. One comm will take currency, and you use up nearly all of yours buying Hoa his own bedroll. The next won’t take currency at all, but they will take useful tools, and you’ve got one of Jija’s old knapping hammers at the bottom of your bag. That buys you a couple weeks’ worth of cachebread and three jars of sweet nut paste.

You share the food out among the three of you, because that’s important. Stonelore’s full of admonitions against hoarding within a group — and you are a group by now, whether you want to admit it or not. Hoa does his part, staying up most of the night to keep watch; he doesn’t sleep much. (Or eat anything. But after a while you try not to notice that, the same way you try not to think about him turning a kirkhusa into stone.) Tonkee doesn’t like approaching comms, even though with fresh clothing and no-worse-than-usual body odor she can pass for just another displaced person rather than a commless. So that part’s on you. Still, Tonkee helps where she can. When your boots wear out and the comm you’ve approached won’t take anything you offer, Tonkee surprises you by holding out a compass. Compasses are priceless, with the sky clouded over and no visibility through the ashfall. You ought to be able to get ten pairs of boots for it. But the woman doing the comm’s trading has you over a barrel and she knows it, so you get only two pairs of boots, one for you and another for Hoa, since his are already starting to look worn. Tonkee, who has her own spare boots dangling from her pack, dismisses the price when you complain about it later. “There are other ways to find our way,” she says, and then she stares at you in a way that makes you uneasy.

You don’t think she knows you’re a rogga. But who can really say, with her?

The miles roll on. The road forks often because there are a lot of big comms in this part of the midlats, and also because the Imperial Road intersects comm roads and cowpaths, rivers and old metal tracks that were used for transportation in some way or another by some ancient deadciv or another. These intersections are why they put Imperial Roads where they do; roads have always been the lifeblood of Old Sanze. Unfortunately that means it’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going — or if you don’t have a compass, or a map, or a sign saying filicidal fathers this way.

The boy is your savior. You’re willing to believe that he can somehow sense Nassun because for a while he’s better than a compass, pointing unerringly in the direction that you should go whenever you reach a crossroads. For the most part you follow the Imperial Road — this one is Yumenes-Ketteker, though Ketteker’s all the way in the Antarctics and you pray you won’t have to go that far. At one point Hoa takes you down a comm road that cuts between Imperial segments and probably saves you a lot of time, especially if Jija just stayed on the main roads the whole way. (The shortcut is a problem because the comm that built it is bristling with well-armed Strongbacks who shout and fire crossbow warning shots when they see you. They do not open their gates to trade. You feel their sights on you long after you’ve passed by.) When the road meanders away from due south, though, Hoa’s less certain. When you ask, he says that he knows the direction in which Nassun is traveling, but he cannot sense the specific route she and Jija took. He can only point out the path that’s most likely to get you there.

As the weeks pass, he begins to have trouble with even that. You stand with Hoa at one crossroads for a full five minutes while he chews his lip, until finally you ask him what’s wrong.

“There are a lot of you in one place now,” he says uneasily, and you change the subject quickly because if Tonkee doesn’t know what you are, then she will after a conversation like that.

A lot of you, though. People? No, that doesn’t make sense. Roggas? Gathering together? That makes even less sense. The Fulcrum died with Yumenes. There are satellite Fulcrums in Arctic — far north, past the now-impassible central latitude of the continent — and Antarctic, but you’re months away fom the latter. Any orogenes left on the roads now are people like her, hiding what they are and trying to survive same as the rest. It wouldn’t make sense for them to gather into a group; that would increase the chance of discovery.

At the crossroads Hoa picks a path, and you follow, but you can tell by the frown on his face that it’s a guess.

“It’s nearby,” Hoa finally tells you, one night while you’re eating cachebread and nut paste and trying not to wish it was something better. You’re starting to crave fresh vegetables, but those are going to be in short supply very soon if they aren’t already, so you try to ignore the craving. Tonkee is off somewhere, probably shaving. She’s run out of something in the past few days, some biomest potion she keeps in her pack and tries not to let you see her drinking even though you don’t care, and she’s been sprouting beard stubble every few days because of the lack. It’s made her irritable.

“The place with all the orogenes,” Hoa continues. “I can’t find anything past them. They’re like… little lights. It’s easy to see just one by itself, Nassun, but together they make one very bright light, and she passed close to it or through it. Now I can’t—” He seems to grope for the words. There are no words for some things. “I can’t, uh—”

“Sess?” you suggest.

He frowns. “No. That isn’t what I do.”

You decide not to ask what he does.

“I can’t… I can’t know anything else. The bright light keeps me from focusing on any little light.”

“How many”—you leave out the word, in case Tonkee’s coming back—“are there?”

“I can’t tell. More than one. Less than a town. But more are heading there.”

This worries you. They can’t all be chasing stolen daughters and murderous husbands. “Why? How do they know to go there?”

“I don’t know.”

Well, that’s helpful.

All you know for sure is that Jija headed south. But “south” covers a lot of territory — more than a third of the continent. Thousands of comms. Tens of thousands of square miles. Where’s he going? You don’t know. What if he turns east, or west? What if he stops?

There’s a notion. “Could they have stopped there? Jija and Nassun, in that place?”

“I don’t know. They went that way, though. I didn’t lose them until here.”

So you wait till Tonkee comes back, and you tell her where you’re going. You don’t tell her why, and she doesn’t ask. You don’t tell her what you’re going into, either — because, really, you don’t know. Maybe someone’s trying to build a new Fulcrum. Maybe there was a memo. Regardless, it’s good to have a clear destination again.

You ignore the feeling of unease as you start down the road that — hopefully — Nassun traveled.

* * *

Judge all by their usefulness: the leaders and the hearty, the fecund and the crafty, the wise and the deadly, and a few strong backs to guard them all.

— Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse nine