The Fifth Season

22 Syenite, fractured

IT’S THE MORNING AFTER A raucous party that the Meovites threw to celebrate the Clalsu’s safe return and acquisition of some especially prized goods — high-quality stone for decorative carving, aromatic woods for furniture building, fancy brocade cloth that’s worth twice its weight in diamonds, and a goodly amount of tradable currency including high-denomination paper and whole fingers of mother-of-pearl. No food, but with that kind of money they can send traders to buy canoesful of anything they need on the mainland. Harlas broke out a cask of fearsomely strong Antarctic mead to celebrate, and half the comm’s still sleeping it off.

It’s five days after Syenite shut down a volcano that she started, which killed a whole city, and eight days after she killed two ships full of people to keep her family’s existence secret. It feels like everyone is celebrating the multiple mass murders she’s committed.

She’s still in bed, having retired to it as soon as the ship was unloaded. Innon hasn’t come to the house yet; she told him to go and tell the stories of the trip, because the people expect it of him and she does not want him suffering for her melancholy. He’s got Coru with him, because Coru loves celebrations — everyone feeds him, everyone cuddles him. He even tries to help Innon tell the stories, yelling nonsense at the top of his lungs. The child is more like Innon than he has any physical right to be.

Alabaster is the one who’s stayed with Syen, talking to her through her silence, forcing her to respond when she would rather just stop thinking. He says he knows what it’s like to feel like this, though he won’t tell her how or what happened. She believes him regardless.

“You should go,” she says at last. “Join the storytelling. Remind Coru he’s got at least two parents who are worth something.”

“Don’t be stupid. He’s got three.”

“Innon thinks I’m a terrible mother.”

Alabaster sighed. “No. You’re just not the kind of mother Innon wants you to be. You’re the kind of mother our son needs, though.” She turns her head to frown at him. He shrugs. “Corundum will be strong, someday. He needs strong parents. I’m…” He falters abruptly. You practically feel him decide to change the subject. “Here. I brought you something.”

Syen sighs and pushes herself up as he crouches beside the bed, unfolding a little cloth parcel. In it, when she gets curious despite herself and leans closer, are two polished stone rings, just right for her fingers. One’s made of jade, the other mother-of-pearl.

She glares at him, and he shrugs. “Shutting down an active volcano isn’t something a mere four-ringer could do.”

“We’re free.” She says it doggedly, even though she doesn’t feel free. She fixed Allia, after all, completing the mission the Fulcrum sent her there for, however belatedly and perversely. It’s the sort of thing that makes her laugh uncontrollably when she thinks about it, so she pushes on before she can. “We don’t need to wear any rings anymore. Or black uniforms. I haven’t put my hair in a bun in months. You don’t have to service every woman they send you, like some kind of stud animal. Let the Fulcrum go.”

’Baster smiles a little, sadly. “We can’t, Syen. One of us is going to have to train Coru—”

“We don’t have to train him to do anything.” Syen lies down again. She wishes he would go away. “Let him learn the basics from Innon and Harlas. That’s been enough to let these people get by for centuries.”

“Innon couldn’t have stilled that blow, Syen. If he’d tried, he might have blown the hot spot underneath it wide, and set off a Season. You saved the world from that.”

“Then give me a medal, not rings.” She’s glaring at the ceiling. “Except I’m the reason that blow even existed, so maybe not.”

Alabaster reaches up to stroke her hair away from her face. He does that a lot, now that she wears it loose. She’s always been a little ashamed of her hair — it’s curly, but with no stiffness to it at all, whether the straight-stiffness of Sanzed hair or the kinky-stiffness of Coaster hair. She’s such a midlatter mutt that she doesn’t even know which of her ancestors to blame for the hair. At least it doesn’t get in her way.

“We are what we are,” he says, with such gentleness that she wants to cry. “We are Misalem, not Shemshena. You’ve heard that story?”

Syenite’s fingers twitch in remembered pain. “Yes.”

“From your Guardian, right? They like to tell that one to kids.” ’Baster shifts to lean against the bedpost with his back to her, relaxing. Syenite thinks about telling him to leave, but never says it aloud. She’s not looking at him, so she has no idea what he does with the bundle of rings that she didn’t take. He can eat them for all she cares.

“My Guardian gave me that nonsense, too, Syen. The monstrous Misalem, who decided to declare war against a whole nation and off the Sanzed Emperor for no particular reason.”

In spite of herself, Syenite frowns. “He had a reason?”

“Oh Evil Earth, of course. Use your rusting head.”

It’s annoying to be scolded, and annoyance pushes back her apathy a little more. Good old Alabaster, cheering her up by pissing her off. She turns her head to glare at the back of his. “Well, what was the reason?”

“The simplest and most powerful reason of all: revenge. That emperor was Anafumeth, and the whole thing happened just after the end of the Season of Teeth. That’s the Season they don’t talk about much in any creche. There was mass starvation in the northern-hemisphere comms. They got hit harder, since the shake that started the whole thing was near the northern pole. The Season took a year longer to take hold in the Equatorials and the south—”

“How do you know all this?” It’s nothing Syen’s ever heard, in the grit crucibles or elsewhere.

Alabaster shrugs, shaking the whole bed. “I wasn’t allowed to train with the other grits in my year-group; I had rings before most of them had pubic hair. The instructors let me loose in the seniors’ library to make up for it. They didn’t pay a lot of attention to what I read.” He sighs. “Also, on my first mission, I… There was an archeomest who… He… well. We talked, in addition to… other things.”

She doesn’t know why Alabaster bothers being shy about his affairs. She’s watched Innon fuck him into incoherence on more than one occasion. Then again, maybe it’s not the sex that he’s shy about.

“Anyway. It’s all there if you put the facts together and think beyond what we’re taught. Sanze was a new empire then, still growing, at the height of its power. But it was mostly in the northern half of the Equatorials at that time — Yumenes wasn’t actually the capital then — and some of the bigger Sanzed comms weren’t as good at preparing for Seasons as they are now. They lost their food storecaches somehow. Fire, fungus, Earth knows what. To survive, all the Sanzed comms decided to work together, attacking the comms of any lesser races.” His lip curls. “That’s when they started calling us ‘lesser races,’ actually.”

“So they took those other comms’ storecaches.” Syen can guess that much. She’s getting bored.

“No. No one had any stores left by the end of that Season. The Sanzeds took people.”

“People? For wh—” Then she understands.

There’s no need for slaves during a Season. Every comm has its Strongbacks, and if they need more, there are always commless people desperate enough to work in exchange for food. Human flesh becomes valuable for other reasons, though, when things get bad enough.

“So,” says Alabaster, oblivious while Syen lies there fighting nausea, “that Season is when the Sanzeds developed a taste for certain rarefied delicacies. And even after the Season ended and green things grew and the livestock turned herbivorous or stopped hibernating, they kept at it. They would send out parties to raid smaller settlements and newcomms held by races without Sanzed allies. All the accounts differ on the details, but they agree on one thing: Misalem was the only survivor when his family was taken in a raid. Supposedly his children were slaughtered for Anafumeth’s own table, though I suspect that’s a bit of dramatic embellishment.” Alabaster sighs. “Regardless, they died, and it was Anafumeth’s fault, and he wanted Anafumeth dead for it. Like any man would.”

But a rogga is not any man. Roggas have no right to get angry, to want justice, to protect what they love. For his presumption, Shemshena had killed him — and became a hero for doing it.

Syenite considers this in silence. Then Alabaster shifts a little, and she feels his hand press the bundle, the one with the rings in it, into her unresisting palm.

“Orogenes built the Fulcrum,” he says. She’s almost never heard him say orogene. “We did it under threat of genocide, and we used it to buckle a collar around our own necks, but we did it. We are the reason Old Sanze grew so powerful and lasted so long, and why it still half-rules the world, even if no one will admit it. We’re the ones who’ve figured out just how amazing our kind can be, if we learn how to refine the gift we’re born with.”

“It’s a curse, not a gift.” Syenite closes her eyes. But she doesn’t push away the bundle.

“It’s a gift if it makes us better. It’s a curse if we let it destroy us. You decide that — not the instructors, or the Guardians, or anyone else.” There’s another shift, and the bed moves a little as Alabaster leans on it. A moment later she feels his lips on her brow, dry and approving. Then he settles back down on the floor beside the bed, and says nothing more.

“I thought I saw a Guardian,” she says after a while. Very softly. “At Allia.”

Alabaster doesn’t reply for a moment. She’s decided that he won’t, when he says, “I will tear the whole world apart if they ever hurt us again.”

But we would still be hurt, she thinks.

It’s reassuring, though, somehow. The kind of lie she needs to hear. Syenite keeps her eyes closed and doesn’t move for a long while. She’s not sleeping; she’s thinking. Alabaster stays while she does it, and for that she is unutterably glad.

* * *

When the world ends three weeks later, it happens on the most beautiful day Syenite has ever seen. The sky is clear for miles, save for the occasional drift of cloud. The sea is calm, and even the omnipresent wind is warm and humid for once, instead of cool and scouring.

It’s so beautiful that the entire comm decides to head up to the heights. The able-bodied carry the ones who can’t make the steps, while the children get underfoot and nearly kill everyone. The people on cook duty put fish cakes and pieces of cut fruit and balls of seasoned grain into little pots that can be carried easily, and everyone brings blankets. Innon has a musical instrument Syenite has never seen before, something like a drum with guitar strings, which would probably be all the rage in Yumenes if it ever caught on there. Alabaster has Corundum. Syenite brings a truly awful novel someone found on the looted freighter, the sort of thing whose first page made her wince and burst into giggles. Then, of course, she kept reading. She loves books that are just for fun.

The Meovites spread themselves over the slope behind a ridge that blocks most of the wind but where the sun is full and bright. Syenite puts her blanket a ways from everyone else, but they quickly encroach on her, spreading out their blankets right alongside, and grinning at her when she glares.

She has come to realize over the past three years that most Meovites regard her and Alabaster as something like wild animals that have decided to scavenge off human habitations — impossible to civilize, kind of cute, and at least an amusing nuisance. So when they see that she obviously needs help with something and won’t admit it, they help her anyway. And they constantly pet Alabaster, and hug him and grab his hands and swing him into dancing, which Syen is at least grateful no one tries with her. Then again, everyone can see that Alabaster likes being touched, no matter how much he pretends standoffishness. It probably isn’t something he got a lot of in the Fulcrum, where everyone was afraid of his power. Perhaps likewise they think Syen enjoys being reminded that she is part of a group now, contributing and contributed to, and that she no longer needs to guard herself against everyone and everything.

They’re right. That doesn’t mean she’s going to tell them so.

Then it’s all Innon tossing Coru up in the air while Alabaster tries to pretend he’s not terrified even as his orogeny sends microshakes through the island’s underwater strata with every toss; and Hemoo starting some kind of chanted-poetry game set to music that all the Meovites seem to know; and Ough’s toddler Owel trying to run across the spread-out blankets and stepping on at least ten people before someone grabs her and tickles her down; and a basket being passed around that contains little clay bottles of something that burns Syen’s nose when she sniffs it; and.

And.

She could love these people, she thinks sometimes.

Perhaps she does already. She isn’t sure. But after Innon flops down for a nap with Coru already asleep on his chest, and after the poetry chant has turned into a vulgar-joke contest, and once she’s drunk enough of the bottle stuff that the world is actually beginning to move on its own… Syenite lifts her eyes and catches Alabaster’s. He’s propped himself on one elbow to browse the terrible book she’s finally abandoned. He’s making horrible and hilarious faces as he skims it. Meanwhile his free hand toys with one of Innon’s braids, and he looks nothing at all like the half-mad monster Feldspar sent her off with, at the beginning of this journey.

His eyes flick up to meet hers, and for just a moment there is wariness there. Syen blinks in surprise at this. But then, she is the only person here who knows what his life was like before. Does he resent her for being here, a constant reminder of what he’d rather forget?

He smiles, and she frowns in automatic reaction. His smile widens more. “You still don’t like me, do you?”

Syenite snorts. “What do you care?”

He shakes his head, amused — and then he reaches out and strokes a hand over Coru’s hair. The child stirs and murmurs in his sleep, and Alabaster’s face softens. “Would you like to have another child?”

Syenite starts, her mouth falling open. “Of course not. I didn’t want this one.”

“But he’s here now. And he’s beautiful. Isn’t he? You make such beautiful children.” Which is probably the most inane thing he could ever say, but then, he’s Alabaster. “You could have the next one with Innon.”

“Maybe Innon should have a say in that, before we settle his breeding future.”

“He loves Coru, and he’s a good father. He’s got two other kids already, and they’re fine. Stills, though.” He considers. “You and Innon might have a child who’s still. That wouldn’t be a terrible thing, here.”

Syenite shakes her head, but she’s thinking about the little pessary the island women have shown her how to use. Thinking maybe she will stop using it. But she says: “Freedom means we get to control what we do now. No one else.”

“Yes. But now that I can think about what I want…” He shrugs as if nonchalant, but there’s an intensity in his gaze as he looks at Innon and Coru. “I’ve never wanted much from life. Just to be able to live it, really. I’m not like you, Syen. I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t want to change the world, or help people, or be anything great. I just want… this.”

She gets that. So she lies down on her side of Innon, and Alabaster lies down on his side, and they relax and enjoy the sensation of wholeness, of contentment, for a while. Because they can.

Of course it cannot last.

Syenite wakes when Innon sits up and shadows her. She hadn’t intended to nap, but she’s had a good long one, and now the sun is slanting toward the ocean. Coru’s fussing and she sits up automatically, rubbing her face with one hand and reaching with the other to see if his cloth diaper is full. It’s fine, but the sounds he’s making are anxious, and when she comes more awake she sees why. Innon is sitting up with Coru held absently in one arm, but he is frowning as he looks at Alabaster. Alabaster is on his feet, his whole body tense.

“Something…” he murmurs. He’s facing the direction of the mainland, but he can’t possibly see anything; the ridge is in the way. Then again, he’s not using his eyes.

So Syen frowns and sends forth her own awareness, worrying that there’s a tsunami or worse on its way. But there’s nothing.

A conspicuous nothingness. There should be something. There’s a plate boundary between the island that is Meov and the mainland; plate boundaries are never still. They jump and twitch and vibrate against one another in a million infinitesimal ways that only a rogga can sess, like the electricity that geneers can make come out of water turbines and vats of chemicals. But suddenly — impossibly — the plate edge sesses as still.

Confused, Syenite starts to look at Alabaster. But her attention is caught by Corundum, who’s bouncing and struggling in Innon’s hands, whining and snotting and having a full-on tantrum, though he’s usually not the kind of baby who does that sort of thing. Alabaster’s looking at the baby, too. His expression changes to something twisted and terrible.

“No,” he says. He’s shaking his head. “No. No, I won’t let them, not again.”

“What?” Syenite’s staring at him, trying not to notice the dread that’s rising in her, feeling rather than seeing as others rise around them, murmuring and reacting to their alarm. A couple of people trot up the ridge to see what they can. “ ’Baster, what? For Earth’s sake—”

He makes a sound that is not a word, just negation, and suddenly he takes off running up the slope, toward the ridge. Syenite stares after him, then at Innon, who looks even more confused than she is; Innon shakes his head. But the people who preceded ’Baster up the ridge are shouting now, and signaling everyone else. Something is wrong.

Syenite and Innon hurry up the slope along with others. They all reach the top together, and there they stand looking at the span of ocean on the mainlandward side of the island.

Where there are four ships, tiny but visibly coming closer, on the horizon.

Innon says a bad word and shoves Coru at Syenite, who almost fumbles him but then holds him close while Innon rummages amid his pockets and packs and comes up with his smaller spyglass. He extends it and looks hard for a moment, then frowns, while Syenite tries ineffectually to console Coru. Coru is inconsolable. When Innon lowers it, Syenite grabs his arm and pushes Coru at him, taking the device from his hand when he does.

The four ships are bigger now. Their sails are white, ordinary; she can’t figure out what’s got Alabaster so upset. And then she notices the figures standing at one boat’s prow.

Wearing burgundy.

The shock of it steals the breath from her chest. She steps back, mouths the word that Innon needs to hear, but it comes out strengthless, inaudible. Innon takes the spyglass from her because she looks like she’s about to drop it. Then because they have to do something, she’s got to do something, she concentrates and focuses and says, louder, “Guardians.”

Innon frowns. “How—” She watches as he, too, realizes what this means. He looks away for a moment, wondering, and then he shakes his head. How they found Meov does not matter. They cannot be allowed to land. They cannot be allowed to live.

“Give Coru to someone,” he says, backing away from the ridge; his expression has hardened. “We are going to need you, Syen.”

Syenite nods and turns, looking around. Deelashet, one of the handful of Sanzeds in the comm, is hurrying past with her own little one, who’s maybe six months older than Coru. She’s kept Coru on occasion, nursed him when Syenite was busy; Syenite flags her down and runs to her. “Please,” she says, pushing Coru into her arms. Deelashet nods.

Coru, however, does not agree with the plan. He clings to Syenite, screaming and kicking and — Evil Earth, the whole island rocks all of a sudden. Deelashet staggers and then stares at Syenite in horror.

“Shit,” she murmurs, and takes Coru back. Then with him on her hip — he calms immediately — she runs to catch up with Innon, who is already running toward the metal stairs, shouting to his crew to board the Clalsu and ready it for launch.

It’s madness. It’s all madness, she thinks as she runs. It doesn’t make sense that the Guardians have discovered this place. It doesn’t make sense that they’re coming — why here? Why now? Meov has been around, pirating the coast, for generations. The only thing that’s different is Syenite and Alabaster.

She ignores the little voice in the back of her mind that whispers, They followed you somehow, you know they did, you should never have gone back to Allia, it was a trap, you should never have come here, everything you touch is death.

She does not look down at her hands, where — just to let Alabaster know she appreciated the gesture — she’s put on the four rings that the Fulcrum gave her, plus his two. The last two aren’t real, after all. She hasn’t passed any sort of ring test for them. But who would know whether she merits these rings better than a man who’s earned ten? And for shit’s sake, she stilled a rusting volcano made by a broken obelisk with a stone eater inside.

So Syenite decides, suddenly and fiercely, that she’s going to show these rusting Guardians just what a six-ringer can do.

She reaches the comm level, where it’s chaos: people pulling out glassknives and rolling out catapults and balls of chain from wherever-the-rust they’ve been keeping them, gathering belongings, loading boats with fishing spears. Then Syen’s running up the plank onto the Clalsu, where Innon is shouting for the anchor to be pulled up, and all at once it occurs to her to wonder where Alabaster has gone.

She stumbles to a halt on the ship’s deck. And as she does, she feels a flare of orogeny so deep and powerful that for a moment she thinks the whole world shakes. All the water in the harbor dances with tiny pointillations for a moment. Syen suspects the clouds felt that one.

And suddenly there is a wall rising from the sea, not five hundred yards off the harbor. It is a massive block of solid stone, as perfectly rectangular as if it were chiseled, huge enough to — oh flaking rust, no—seal off the damned harbor.

“ ’Baster! Earth damn it—” It’s impossible to be heard over the roar of water and the grind of the stone — as big as the island of Meov itself — Alabaster is raising. How can he do this with no shake or hot spot nearby? Half the island should be iced. But then something flickers at the corner of Syenite’s vision and she turns to see the amethyst obelisk off in the distance. It’s closer than before. It’s coming to meet them. That’s how.

Innon is cursing, furious; he understands full well that Alabaster is being an overprotective fool, however he’s doing it. His fury becomes effort. Fog rises from the water around the ship, and the deck planks nearby creak and frost over as he tries to smash apart the nearest part of the wall, so that they can get out there and fight. The wall splinters — and then there is a low boom behind it. When the part of the wall that Innon has shattered crumbles away, there’s just another block of stone behind it.

Syenite’s got her hands full trying to modulate the waves in the water. It is possible to use orogeny on water, just difficult. She’s getting the hang of it at last, after this long living near such a great expanse of water; it’s one of the few things Innon’s been able to teach her and Alabaster. There’s enough warmth and mineral content in the sea that she can feel it, and water moves enough like stone — just faster — that she can manipulate it a little. Delicately. Still, she does this now, holding Coru close so he’s within the safe zone of her torus, and concentrating hard to send shock waves against the coming waves at just enough velocity to break them. It mostly works; the Clalsu rocks wildly and tears loose from its moorings, and one of the piers collapses, but nothing capsizes and no one dies. Syenite counts this as a win.

“What the rust is he doing?” Innon says, panting, and she follows his gaze to see Alabaster, at last.

He stands on the highest point of the island, up on the slopes. Even from here Syen can see the blistering cold of his torus; the warmer air around it wavers as the temperature changes, and all the moisture in the wind blowing past him precipitates out as snow. If he’s using the obelisk then he shouldn’t need the ambient, should he? Unless he’s doing so much that even the obelisk can’t fuel it.

“Earthfires,” Syen says. “I have to go up there.”

Innon grabs her arm. When she looks up at him, his eyes are wide and a little afraid. “We’d only be a liability to him.”

“We can’t just sit here and wait! He’s not… reliable.” Even as she says this, her belly clenches. Innon has never seen Alabaster lose it. She doesn’t want Innon to see that. Alabaster’s been so good here at Meov; he’s almost not crazy anymore. But Syen thinks

what broke once will break again, more easily

and she shakes her head and tries to hand him Coru. “I have to. Maybe I can help. Coru won’t let me give him to anyone else — please—”

Innon curses but takes the child, who clutches at Innon’s shirt and and puts his thumb in his mouth. Then Syen is off, running along the comm ledge and up the steps.

As she gets above the rock barrier, she can finally see what’s happening beyond it, and for a moment she stumbles to a halt in shock. The ships are much closer, right beyond the wall that ’Baster has raised to protect the harbor. There are only three of them, though, because one ship has floundered off course and is listing badly — no, it’s sinking. She has no idea how he managed that. Another is riding strangely in the water, mast broken and bow raised and keel visible, and that’s when Syenite realizes there are boulders piled on its rear deck. Alabaster’s been dropping rocks on the bastards. She has no idea how, but the sight of it makes her want to cheer.

But the other two ships have split up: one coming straight for the island, the other peeling off, perhaps to circle around or maybe get out of Alabaster’s rock-dropping range. No you don’t, Syen thinks, and she tries to do what she did to the attack ship during their last raid, dragging a splinter of bedrock up from the seafloor to spear the thing. She frosts a ten-foot space around her to do it, and makes chunks of ice spread over the water between her and the ship, but she gets the splinter shaped and loose, and starts to pull it up—

And it stops. And the gathering strength of her orogeny just… disippates. She gasps as the heat and force spill away, and then she understands: This ship has a Guardian on it, too. Maybe they all do, which explains why ’Baster hasn’t destroyed them already. He can’t attack a Guardian directly; all he can do is hurl boulders from outside the Guardians’ negation radius. She can’t even imagine how much power that must take. He could never have managed it without the obelisk, and if he weren’t the crazy, ornery ten-ringer that he is.

Well, just because she can’t hit the thing directly doesn’t mean she can’t find some other way to do it. She runs along the ridge as the ship she tried to destroy passes behind the island, keeping it in sight. Do they think there’s another way up? If so, they’ll be sorely disappointed; Meov’s harbor is the only part of the island that’s remotely approachable. The rest of the island is a single jagged, sheer column.

Which gives her an idea. Syenite grins and stops, then drops to her hands and knees so she can concentrate.

She doesn’t have Alabaster’s strength. She doesn’t even know how to reach the amethyst without his guidance — and after what happened at Allia, she’s afraid to try. The plate boundary is too far for her to reach, and there are no nearby vents or hot spots. But she has Meov itself. All that lovely, heavy, flaky schist.

So she throws herself down. Deep. Deeper. She feels her way along the ridges and the layers of the rock that is Meov, seeking the best point of fracture — the fulcrum; she laughs to herself. At last she finds it, good. And there, coming around the island’s curve, is the ship. Yes.

Syenite drags all the heat and infinitesimal life out of the rock in one concentrated spot. The moisture’s still there, though, and that’s what freezes, and expands, as Syenite forces it colder and colder, taking more and more from it, spinning her torus fine and oblong so that it slices along the grain of the rock like a knife through meat. A ring of frost forms around her, but it’s nothing compared to the long, searing plank of ice that’s growing down the inside of the rock, levering it apart.

And then, right when the ship approaches the point, she unleashes all the strength the island has given her, shoving it right back where it came from.

A massive, narrow finger of stone splits away from the cliff face. Inertia holds it where it is, just for a moment — and then with a low, hollow groan, it peels away from the island, splintering at its base near the waterline. Syenite opens her eyes and gets up and runs, slipping once on her own ice ring, to that end of the island. She’s tired, and after a few steps she has to slow to a walk, gasping for breath around a stitch in her side. But she gets there in time to see:

The finger of rock has landed squarely on the ship. She grins fiercely at the sight of the deck splintered apart as she hears screams, as she sees people already in the water. Most wear a variety of clothing; hirelings, then. But she thinks she sees one flash of burgundy cloth under the water’s surface, being dragged deeper by one of the sinking ship halves.

“Guard that, you cannibalson ruster.” Grinning, Syenite gets up and heads in Alabaster’s direction again.

As she comes down from the heights she can see him, a tiny figure still making his own cold front, and for a moment she actually admires him. He’s amazing, in spite of everything. But then, all of a sudden, there is a strange hollow boom from the sea, and something explodes around Alabaster in a spray of rocks and smoke and concussive force.

A cannon. A rusting cannon. Innon’s told her about these; they’re an invention that the Equatorial comms have been experimenting with in the past few years. Of course Guardians would have one. Syen breaks into a run, raggedly and clumsily, fueled by fear. She can’t see ’Baster well through the smoke of the cannon blast, but she can see that he’s down.

By the time she gets there, she knows he’s hurt. The icy wind has stopped blowing; she can see Alabaster on his hands and knees, surrounded by a circle of blistered ice that is yards wide. Syenite stops at the outermost ring of ice; if he’s out of it, he might not notice that she’s within the range of his power. “Alabaster!”

He moves a little, and she can hear him groaning, murmuring. How bad is he hurt? Syenite dances at the edge of the ice for a moment, then finally decides to risk it, trotting to the clear zone immediately around him. He’s still upright, though barely; his head’s hanging, and her belly clenches when she sees flecks of blood on the stone beneath him.

“I took out the other ship,” she says as she reaches him, hoping to reassure. “I can get this one, too, if you haven’t.”

It’s bravado. She’s not sure how much she’s got left in her. Hopefully he’s taken care of it. But she looks up and curses inwardly, because the remaining ship is still out there, apparently undamaged. It seems to be sitting at anchor. Waiting. For what, she can’t guess.

“Syen,” he says. His voice is strained. With fear, or something else? “Promise me you won’t let them take Coru. No matter what.”

“What? Of course I won’t.” She steps closer and crouches beside him. “ ’Baster—” He looks up at her, dazed, perhaps from the cannon blast. Something’s cut his forehead, and like all head wounds it’s bleeding copiously. She checks him over, touching his chest, hoping he’s not more hurt. He’s still alive, so the cannon blast must have been a near miss, but all it takes is a bit of rock shrapnel at the right speed, in the wrong place—

And that’s when she finally notices. His arms at the wrists. His knees, and the rest of his legs between thighs and ankles — they’re gone. They haven’t been cut off or blown off; each limb ends smoothly, perfectly, right where the ground begins. And he’s moving them about as if it’s water and not solid stone that he’s trapped in. Struggling, she realizes belatedly. He’s not on his hands and knees because he can’t stand; he’s being dragged into the ground, against his will.

The stone eater. Oh rusting Earth.

Syenite grabs his shoulders and tries to haul him back, but it’s like trying to haul a rock. He’s heavier, somehow. His flesh doesn’t feel quite like flesh. The stone eater has made his body pass through solid stone by making him more stonelike, somehow, and Syenite can’t get him out. He sinks deeper into the stone with each breath; he’s up to his shoulders and hips now, and she can’t see his feet at all.

“Let him go, Earth take you!” The irony of the curse will occur to her only later. What does occur to her, in the moment, is to stab her awareness into the stone. She tries to feel for the stone eater—

There is something there, but it’s not like anything she’s ever felt before: a heaviness. A weight, too deep and solid and huge to be possible — not in such a small space, not so compact. It feels like there’s a mountain there, dragging Alabaster down with all its weight. He’s fighting it; that’s the only reason he’s still here at all. But he’s weak, and he’s losing the fight, and she hasn’t the first clue of how to help him. The stone eater is just too… something. Too much, too big, too powerful, and she cannot help flinching back into herself with a sense that she’s just had a near miss.

“Promise,” he pants, while she hauls again on his shoulders and tries pushing against the stone with all her power, pulling back against that terrible weight, anything, everything. “You know what they’ll do to him, Syen. A child that strong, my child, raised outside the Fulcrum? You know.”

A wire-frame chair in a darkened node station… She can’t think about that. Nothing’s working, and he’s mostly gone into the stone now; only his face and shoulders are above it, and that’s only because he’s straining to keep those above the stoneline. She babbles at him, sobbing, desperate for words that can somehow fix this. “I know. I promise. Oh, rust, ’Baster, please, I can’t… not alone, I can’t…”

The stone eater’s hand rises from the stone, white and solid and rust-tipped. Surprised, Syenite screams and flinches, thinking the creature is attacking her — but no. This hand wraps around the back of Alabaster’s head with remarkable gentleness. No one expects mountains to be gentle. But they are inexorable, and when the hand pulls, Alabaster goes. His shoulders slip out of Syen’s hands. His chin, then his mouth, then his nose, then his terrified eyes—

He is gone.

Syenite kneels on the hard, cold stone, alone. She is screaming. She is weeping. Her tears fall onto the stone where Alabaster’s head was a moment before, and the rock does not soak the tears up. They just splatter.

And then she feels it: the drop. The drag. Startled out of grief, she scrabbles to her feet and stumbles over to the edge of the cliff, where she can see the remaining ship. Ships, the one ’Baster’s hit with rocks seems to have righted itself somehow. No, not somehow. Ice spreads across the water’s surface around both ships. There’s a rogga on one of the ships, working for the Guardians. A four-ringer, at least; there’s too much fine control in what she’s feeling. And with that much ice — She sees a group of porpoises leap out of the water, racing away from the spreading ice, and then she sees it catch them, crawling over their bodies and solidifying them half in and half out of the water.

What the hell is this rogga doing with that much power?

Then she sees a portion of the rock wall that ’Baster raised shiver.

“No—” Syenite turns and runs again, breathless, sessing rather than seeing as the Guardians’ rogga attacks the wall’s base. It’s weak where the wall curves to meet the natural curve of Meov’s harbor. The rogga’s going to bring it down.

It takes an eternity to reach the comm level, and then the docks. She’s terrified Innon will set sail without her. He has to be able to sess what’s happening, too. But thank stone, the Clalsu is still there, and when she staggers up onto its deck, several members of the crew grab her and guide her to sit down before she collapses. They draw up the plank behind her, and she can see that they’re striking sails.

“Innon,” she gasps as she catches her breath. “Please.”

They half-carry her to him. He’s on the upper deck, one hand on the pilot’s wheel and the other holding Coru against his hip. He doesn’t look at her, all his attention focused on the wall; there’s already a hole in it, near the top, and as Syenite reaches him there is a final surge. The wall breaks apart and falls in chunks, rocking the ship something fierce, but Innon’s completely steady.

“We’re sailing out to face them,” he says grimly, as she sags onto the bench nearby, and as the ship pulls away from the dock. Everyone’s ready for a fight. The catapults are loaded, the javelins in hand. “We’ll lead them away from the comm first. That way, everyone else can evacuate in the fishing boats.”

There aren’t enough fishing boats for everyone, Syenite wants to say, and doesn’t. Innon knows it, anyway.

Then the ship is sailing through the narrow gap that the Guardians’ orogene has made, and the Guardians’ ship is on them almost at once. There’s a puff of smoke on their deck and a hollow whoosh right as the Clalsu emerges; the cannon again. A near miss. Innon shouts and one of the catapult crews returns the favor with a basket of heavy chain, which shreds their foresail and midmast. Another volley and this time it’s a barrel of burning pitch; Syen sees people on fire running across the deck of the Guardians’ ship after that one hits. The Clalsu whips past while the Guardians’ ship founders toward the wall that is Meov rock, its deck now a blazing conflagration.

But before they can get far there is another puff of smoke, another boom, and this time the Clalsu judders with the hit. Rust and underfires, how many of those things do they have? Syenite gets up and runs to the railing, trying to see this cannon, though she doesn’t know what she can do about it. There’s a hole in the Clalsu’s side and she can hear people screaming belowdecks, but thus far the ship is still moving.

It’s the ship that Alabaster dropped rocks on. Some of the boulders are gone from its aft deck and it’s sitting normally in the water again. She doesn’t see the cannon, but she does see three figures standing near the ship’s bow. Two in burgundy, a third in black. As she watches, another burgundy-clad figure comes to join them.

She can feel their eyes on her.

The Guardians’ ship turns slightly, falling farther behind. Syenite begins to hope, but she sees it when the cannons fire this time. Three of them, big black things near the starboard railing; they jerk and roll back a little when they fire, in near unison. And a moment later, there is a mighty crack and a groan and the Clalsu shudders as if it just got hit by a fiver tsunami. Syenite looks up in time to see the mast shatter into kindling, and then everything goes wrong.

The mast creaks and goes over like a felled tree, and it hits the deck with the same force. People scream. The ship groans and begins to list starboard, pulled by the collapsed, dragging sails. She sees two men fall into the water with the sails, crushed or smothered by the weight of cloth and rope and wood, and Earth help her, she cannot think of them. The mast is between her and the pilot deck. She’s cut off from Innon and Coru.

And the Guardians’ ship is now closing in.

No! Syenite reaches for the water, trying to pull something, anything, into her abused sessapinae. But there’s nothing. Her mind is as still as glass. The Guardians are too close.

She can’t think. She scrabbles over the mast parts, gets tangled in a thicket of ropes and must fight for endless hours, it feels like, to get free. Then finally she is free but everyone’s running back the way she came, glassknives and javelins in hand, shouting and screaming, because the Guardians’ ship is right there and they are boarding.

No.

She can hear people dying all around her. The Guardians have brought troops of some sort with them, some comm’s militia that they’ve paid or appropriated, and the battle isn’t even close. Innon’s people are good, experienced, but their usual targets are poorly defended merchant and passenger vessels. As Syenite reaches the pilot deck — Innon isn’t there, he must have gone below — she sees Innon’s cousin Ecella slash a militiaman across the face with her glassknife. He staggers beneath the blow but then comes back up and shoves his own knife into her belly. When she falls, he pushes her away, and she falls onto the body of another Meovite, who is already dead. More of the troops are climbing aboard by the minute.

It’s the same everywhere. They’re losing.

She has to get to Innon and Coru.

Belowdecks there’s almost no one there. Everyone has come up to defend the ship. But she can feel the tremor that is Coru’s fear, and she follows it to Innon’s cabin. The door opens as she reaches it, and Innon comes out with a knife in his hand, nearly stabbing her. He stops, startled, and she looks beyond him to see that Coru has been bundled into a basket beneath the forward bulkhead — the safest place in the ship, ostensibly. But as she stands there, stupidly, Innon grabs her and shoves her into the cabin.

“What—”

“Stay here,” Innon says. “I have to go fight. Do whatever you have—”

He gets no further. Someone moves behind him, too quick for Syenite to cry a warning. A man, naked to the waist. He claps hands onto either side of Innon’s head, fingers splayed across his cheeks like spiders, and grins at Syenite as Innon’s eyes widen.

And then it is—

Oh Earth, it is—

She feels it, when it happens. Not just in her sessapinae. It is a grind like stone abrading her skin; it is a crush along her bones; it is, it is, it is everything that is in Innon, all the power and vibrancy and beauty and fierceness of him, made evil. Amplified and concentrated and turned back on him in the most vicious way. Innon does not have time to feel fear. Syenite does not have time to scream as Innon comes apart.

It’s like watching a shake up close. Seeing the ground split, watching the fragments grind and splinter together, then separate. Except all in flesh.

’Baster, you never told me, you didn’t tell me it was like

Now Innon is on the floor, in a pile. The Guardian who has killed him stands there, splattered in blood and grinning through it.

“Ah, little one,” says a voice, and her blood turns to stone. “Here you are.”

“No,” she whispers. She shakes her head in denial, steps backward. Coru is crying. She steps back again and stumbles against Innon’s bed, fumbles for the basket, pulls Coru into her arms. He clings to her, shaking and hitching fitfully. “No.”

The shirtless Guardian glances to one side, then he moves aside to make room for another to enter. No.

“There’s no need for these histrionics, Damaya,” Schaffa Guardian Warrant says, softly. Then he pauses, looks apologetic. “Syenite.”

She has not seen him in years, but his voice is the same. His face is the same. He never changes. He’s even smiling, though it fades a little in distaste as he notices the mess that was Innon. He glances at the shirtless Guardian; the man’s still grinning. Schaffa sighs, but smiles in return. Then they both turn those horrible, horrible smiles on Syenite.

She cannot go back. She will not go back.

“And what is this?” Schaffa smiles, his gaze fixing on Coru in her arms. “How lovely. Alabaster’s? Does he live, too? We would all like to see Alabaster, Syenite. Where is he?”

The habit of answering is too deep. “A stone eater took him.” Her voice shakes. She steps back again, and her head presses against the bulkhead. There’s nowhere left to run.

For the first time since she’s ever known him, Schaffa blinks and looks surprised. “A stone — hmm.” He sobers. “I see. We should have killed him, then, before they got to him. As a kindness, of course; you cannot imagine what they will do to him, Syenite. Alas.”

Then Schaffa smiles again, and she remembers everything she’s tried to forget. She feels alone again, and helpless as she was that day near Palela, lost in the hateful world with no one to rely on except a man whose love comes wrapped in pain.

“But his child will be a more than worthwhile replacement,” Schaffa says.

* * *

There are moments when everything changes, you understand.

* * *

Coru’s wailing, terrified, and perhaps he even understands, somehow, what has happened to his fathers. Syenite cannot console him.

“No,” she says again. “No. No. No.”

Schaffa’s smile fades. “Syenite. I told you. Never say no to me.”

* * *

Even the hardest stone can fracture. It just takes the right force, applied at the right juncture of angles. A fulcrum of pressure and weakness.

* * *

Promise, Alabaster had said.

Do whatever you have to, Innon had tried to say.

And Syenite says: “No, you fucker.”

Coru is crying. She puts her hand over his mouth and nose, to silence him, to comfort him. She will keep him safe. She will not let them take him, enslave him, turn his body into a tool and his mind into a weapon and his life into a travesty of freedom.

* * *

You understand these moments, I think, instinctively. It is our nature. We are born of such pressures, and sometimes, when things are unbearable—

* * *

Schaffa stops. “Syenite—”

“That’s not my rusting name! I’ll say no to you all I want, you bastard!” She’s screaming the words. Spittle froths her lips. There’s a dark heavy space inside her that is heavier than the stone eater, much heavier than a mountain, and it’s eating everything else like a sinkhole.

Everyone she loves is dead. Everyone except Coru. And if they take him—

* * *

— sometimes, even we… crack.

* * *

Better that a child never have lived at all than live as a slave.

Better that he die.

Better that she die. Alabaster will hate her for this, for leaving him alone, but Alabaster is not here, and survival is not the same thing as living.

So she reaches up. Out. The amethyst is there, above, waiting with the patience of the dead, as if it somehow knew this moment would come.

She reaches for it now and prays that Alabaster was right about the thing being too much for her to handle.

And as her awareness dissolves amid jewel-toned light and faceted ripples, as Schaffa gasps in realization and lunges for her, as Coru’s eyes flutter shut over her pressing, smothering hand—

She opens herself to all the power of the ancient unknown, and tears the world apart.

* * *

Here is the Stillness. Here is a place off its eastern coast, a bit south of the equator.

There’s an island here — one of a chain of precarious little land slabs that rarely last longer than a few hundred years. This one’s been around for several thousand, in testament to the wisdom of its inhabitants. This is the moment when that island dies, but at least a few of those inhabitants should survive to go elsewhere. Perhaps that will make you feel better.

The purple obelisk that hovers above it pulses, once, with a great throb of power that would be familiar to anyone who’d been in the late comm called Allia on the day of its death. As this pulse fades, the ocean below heaves as its rocky floor convulses. Spikes, wet and knifelike, burst up from the waves and utterly shatter the ships that float near the island’s shores. A number of the people aboard each — some pirates, some their enemies — are speared through, so great is the thicket of death around them.

This convulsion spreads away from the island in a long, wending ripple, forming a chain of jagged, terrible spears from Meov’s harbor all the way to what is left of Allia. A land bridge. Not the sort anyone would much want to cross, but nevertheless.

When all the death is done and the obelisk is calm, only a handful of people are still alive, in the ocean below. One of them, a woman, floats unconscious amid the debris of her shattered ship. Not far from her, a smaller figure — a child — floats, too, but facedown.

Her fellow survivors will find her and take her to the mainland. There she will wander, lost and losing herself, for two long years.

But not alone — for that is when I found her, you see. The moment of the obelisk’s pulse was the moment in which her presence sang across the world: a promise, a demand, an invitation too enticing to resist. Many of us converged on her then, but I am the one who found her first. I fought off the others and trailed her, watched her, guarded her. I was glad when she found the little town called Tirimo, and comfort if not happiness, for a time.

I introduced myself to her eventually, finally, ten years later, as she left Tirimo. It’s not the way we usually do these things, of course; it is not the relationship with her kind that we normally seek. But she is — was — special. You were, are, special.

I told her that I was called Hoa. It is as good a name as any.

This is how it began. Listen. Learn. This is how the world changed.