The Fifth Season (10 page)

You don’t realize what he is at first. It’s dark.
He’s
dark. You
wonder if he’s from an eastern Coastal comm. But his hair moves a little when the wind soughs again, and you can tell that some of it’s straight as the grass around you. Westcoaster, then? The rest of it seems stuck down with… hair pomade or something. No. You’re a mother. It’s dirt. He’s covered in dirt.

Bigger than Uche, not quite as big as Nassun, so maybe six or seven years old. You actually aren’t sure he’s a he; confirmation of that will come later. For now you make a judgment call. He sits in a hunched way that would look odd in an adult and is perfectly normal for a child who hasn’t been told to sit up straight. You stare at him for a moment. He stares back at you. You can see the pale glisten of his eyes.

“Hello,” he says. A boy’s voice, high and bright. Good call.

“Hello,” you say, at last. There are horror tales that start this way, with bands of feral commless children who turn out to be cannibals. Bit early for that sort of thing, though, the Season having just started. “Where did you come from?”

He shrugs. Unknowing, maybe uncaring. “What’s your name? I’m Hoa.”

It’s a small, strange name, but the world is a big, strange place. Stranger, though, that he gives only one name. He’s young enough that he might not have a comm name yet, but he had to have inherited his father’s use-caste. “Just Hoa?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He nods and twists aside and sets down some kind of parcel, patting it as if to make sure it’s safe. “Can I sleep here?”

You look around, and sess around, and listen. Nothing moving but the grass, no one around but the boy. Doesn’t explain how he approached you in total silence—but then, he’s small,
and you know from experience that small children can be very quiet if they want to be. Usually that means they’re up to something, though. “Who else are you with, Hoa?”

“Nobody.”

It’s too dim for him to see your eyes narrow, but somehow he reacts to this anyway, leaning forward. “Really! It’s just me. I saw some other people by the road, but I didn’t like them. I hid from them.” A pause. “I like you.”

Lovely.

Sighing, you tuck your hands back into your pockets and draw yourself out of earth-readiness. The boy relaxes a little—that much you can see—and starts to lie down on the bare earth.

“Wait,” you say, and reach for your pack. Then you toss him the bedroll. He catches it and looks confused for a few moments, then figures it out. Happily he rolls it out and then curls up on top of it, like a cat. You don’t care enough to correct him.

Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he is a threat. You’ll make him leave in the morning because you don’t need a child tagging along; he’ll slow you down. And someone must be looking for him. Some mother, somewhere, whose child is not dead.

For tonight, however, you can manage to be human for a little while. So you lean back against the post, and close your eyes to sleep.

The ash begins to fall in the morning.

* * *

They are an arcane thing, you understand, an alchemical thing. Like orogeny, if orogeny could manipulate the infinitesimal structure of matter itself rather than
mountains. Obviously they possess some sort of kinship with humanity, which they choose to acknowledge in the statue-like shape we most often see, but it follows that they can take other shapes. We would never know.

—Umbl Innovator Allia, “A Treatise on Sentient Non-Humans,” Sixth University, 2323 Imperial/Year Two Acid Season

6

Damaya, grinding to a halt

T
HE FIRST FEW DAYS ON
the road with Schaffa are uneventful. Not boring. There are boring parts, like when the Imperial Road along which they ride passes through endless fields of kirga stalks or samishet, or when the fields give way to stretches of dim forest so quiet and close that Damaya hardly dares speak for fear of angering the trees. (In stories, trees are always angry.) But even this is a novelty, because Damaya has never gone beyond Palela’s borders, not even to Brevard with Father and Chaga at market time. She tries not to look like a complete yokel, gawping at every strange thing they pass, but sometimes she cannot help it, even when she feels Schaffa chuckling against her back. She cannot bring herself to mind that he laughs at her.

Brevard is cramped and narrow and high in a way that she has never before experienced, so she hunches in the saddle as they ride into it, looking up at the looming buildings on either side of the street and wondering if they ever collapse in on passersby. No one else seems to notice that these buildings are
ridiculously tall and crammed right up against each other, so it must have been done on purpose. There are dozens of people about even though the sun has set and, to her reckoning, everyone should be getting ready for bed.

Except no one is. They pass one building so bright with oil lanterns and raucous with laughter that she is overcome with curiosity enough to ask about it. “An inn, of sorts,” Schaffa replies, and then he chuckles as though she’s asked the question that’s in her mind. “But we won’t be staying at that one.”

“It’s really loud,” she agrees, trying to sound knowledgeable.

“Hmm, yes, that, too. But the bigger problem is that it’s not a good place to bring children.” She waits, but he doesn’t elaborate. “We’re going to a place I’ve stayed at several times before. The food is decent, the beds are clean, and our belongings aren’t likely to walk off before morning.”

Thus do they pass Damaya’s first night in an inn. She’s shocked by all of it: eating in a room full of strangers, eating food that tastes different from what her parents or Chaga made, soaking in a big ceramic basin with a fire under it instead of an oiled half-barrel of cold water in the kitchen, sleeping in a bed bigger than hers and Chaga’s put together. Schaffa’s bed is bigger still, which is fitting because he’s huge, but she gawps at it nevertheless as he drags it across the inn room’s door. (This, at least, is familiar; Father did it sometimes when there were rumors of commless on the roads around town.) He apparently paid extra for the bigger bed. “I sleep like an earthshake,” he says, smiling as if this is some sort of joke. “If the bed’s too narrow, I’ll roll right off.”

She has no idea what he means until the middle of that
night, when she wakes to hear Schaffa groaning and thrashing in his sleep. If it’s a nightmare, it’s a terrible one, and for a while she wonders if she should get up and try to wake him. She hates nightmares. But Schaffa is a grown-up, and grown-ups need their sleep; that’s what her father always said whenever she or Chaga did something that woke him up. Father was always angry about it, too, and she does not want Schaffa angry with her. He’s the only person who cares about her in all the world. So she lies there, anxious and undecided, until he actually cries out something unintelligible, and it sounds like he’s dying.

“Are you awake?” She says it really softly, because obviously he isn’t—but the instant she speaks, he is.

“What is it?” He sounds hoarse.

“You were…” She isn’t sure what to say.
Having a nightmare
sounds like something her mother would say to her. Does one say such things to big, strong grown-ups like Schaffa? “Making a noise,” she finishes.

“Snoring?” He breathes a long weary sigh into the dark. “Sorry.” Then he shifts, and is silent for the rest of the night.

In the morning Damaya forgets this happened, at least for a long while. They rise and eat some of the food that has been left at their door in a basket, and take the rest with them as they resume the trip toward Yumenes. In the just-after-dawn light Brevard is less frightening and strange, perhaps because now she can see piles of horse dung in the gutters and little boys carrying fishing poles and stablehands yawning as they heft crates or bales. There are young women carting buckets of water into the local bathhouse to be heated, and young men stripping to the waist to churn butter or pound rice in sheds behind the big
buildings. All these things are familiar, and they help her see that Brevard is just a bigger version of a small town. Its people are no different from Muh Dear or Chaga—and to the people who live here, Brevard is probably as familiar and tedious as she found Palela.

They ride for half a day and stop for a rest, then ride for the rest of the day, until Brevard is far behind and there’s nothing but rocky, ugly shatterland surrounding them for miles around. There’s an active fault nearby, Schaffa explains, churning out new land over years and decades, which is why in places the ground seems sort of
pushed up
and bare. “These rocks didn’t exist ten years ago,” he says, gesturing toward a huge pile of crumbling gray-green stone that looks sharp-edged and somehow damp. “But then there was a bad shake—a niner. Or so I hear; I was on circuit in another quartent. Looking at this, though, I can believe it.”

Damaya nods. Old Father Earth does feel closer, here, than in Palela—or, not
closer,
that’s not really the word for it, but she doesn’t know what words would work better. Easier to touch, maybe, if she were to do so. And, and… it feels… fragile, somehow, the land all around them. Like an eggshell laced with fine lines that can barely be seen, but which still spell imminent death for the chick inside.

Schaffa nudges her with his leg. “Don’t.”

Startled, Damaya does not think to lie. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

“You were listening to the earth. That’s something.”

How does Schaffa know? She hunches a little in the saddle, not sure whether she should apologize. Fidgeting, she settles
her hands on the pommel of the saddle, which feels awkward because the saddle is huge like everything that belongs to Schaffa. (Except her.) But she needs to do
something
to distract herself from listening again. After a moment of this, Schaffa sighs.

“I suppose I can expect no better,” he says, and the disappointment in his tone bothers her immediately. “It isn’t your fault. Without training you’re like… dry tinder, and right now we’re traveling past a roaring fire that’s kicking up sparks.” He seems to think. “Would a story help?”

A story would be wonderful. She nods, trying not to seem too eager. “All right,” Schaffa says. “Have you heard of Shemshena?”

“Who?”

He shakes his head. “Earthfires, these little midlatter comms. Didn’t they teach you anything in that creche of yours? Nothing but lore and figuring, I imagine, and the latter only so you could time crop plantings and such.”

“There’s no time for more than that,” Damaya says, feeling oddly compelled to defend Palela. “Kids in Equatorial comms probably don’t need to help with the harvest—”

“I know, I know. But it’s still a shame.” He shifts, getting more comfortable in his saddle. “Very well; I’m no lorist, but I’ll tell you of Shemshena. Long ago, during the Season of Teeth—that’s, hmm, the third Season after Sanze’s founding, maybe twelve hundred years ago?—an orogene named Misalem decided to try to kill the emperor. This was back when the emperor actually did things, mind, and long before the Fulcrum was established. Most orogenes had no proper training in those days; like you, they acted purely on emotion and instinct, on
the rare occasions that they managed to survive childhood. Misalem had somehow managed to not only survive, but to train himself. He had superb control, perhaps to the fourth or fifth ring-level—”

“What?”

He nudges her leg again. “Rankings used by the Fulcrum. Stop interrupting.” Damaya blushes and obeys.

“Superb control,” Schaffa continues, “which Misalem promptly used to kill every living soul in several towns and cities, and even a few commless warrens. Thousands of people, in all.”

Damaya inhales, horrified. It has never occurred to her that roggas—she stops herself. She.
She
is a rogga. All at once she does not like this word, which she has heard most of her life. It’s a bad word she’s not supposed to say, even though the grown-ups toss it around freely, and suddenly it seems uglier than it already did.

Orogenes, then. It is terrible to know that orogenes can kill so many, so easily. But then, she supposes that is why people hate them.

Her. That is why people hate
her
.

“Why did he do that?” she asks, forgetting that she should not interrupt.

“Why, indeed? Perhaps he was a bit mad.” Schaffa leans down so that she can see his face, crossing his eyes and waggling his eyebrows. This is so hilarious and unexpected that Damaya giggles, and Schaffa gives her a conspiratorial smile. “Or perhaps Misalem was simply evil. Regardless, as he approached Yumenes he sent word ahead, threatening to shatter the entire city if its people did not send the Emperor out to meet him, and die.
The people were saddened when the Emperor announced that he would meet Misalem’s terms—but they were relieved, too, because what else could they do? They had no idea how to fight an orogene with such power.” He sighs. “But when the Emperor arrived, he was not alone: with him was a single woman. His bodyguard, Shemshena.”

Damaya squirms a little, in excitement. “She must have been really good, if she was the Emperor’s bodyguard.”

“Oh, she was—a renowned fighter of the finest Sanzed lineages. Moreover, she was an Innovator in use-caste, and thus she had studied orogenes and understood something of how their power worked. So before Misalem’s arrival, she had every citizen of Yumenes leave town. With them they took all the livestock, all the crops. They even cut down the trees and shrubs and burned them, burned their houses, then doused the fires to leave only cold wet ash. That is the nature of your power, you see: kinetic transferrence, sesunal catalysis. One does not move a mountain by will alone.”

“What is—”

“No, no.” Schaffa cuts her off gently. “There are many things I must teach you, little one, but that part you will learn at the Fulcrum. Let me finish.” Reluctantly, Damaya subsides.

“I will say this much. Some of the strength you need, when you finally learn how to use your power properly, will come from within you.” Schaffa touches the back of her head as he did that time in the barn, two fingers just above the line of her hair, and she jumps a little because there is a sort of spark when he does this, like static. “Most of it, however, must come from elsewhere. If the earth is already moving, or if the fire under the earth is
at or near the surface, you may use that strength. You are
meant
to use that strength. When Father Earth stirs, he unleashes so much raw power that taking some of it does no harm to you or anyone else.”