Or maybe it’s Hoa’s appearance that puts them off, so you turn to the boy. He stops when you do, looking worried again, and you feel abruptly ashamed for letting him walk around like this, even if you didn’t ask to have some strange child tagging along.
You look around. There’s a creek on the other side of the road. No telling how long before you reach another roadhouse; they’re supposed to be stationed every twenty-five miles on an Imperial Road, but the shake from the north might have damaged the next one. There are more trees around now—you’re leaving the plains—but not enough to provide any real cover, and many of the trees are broken, anyway, after the shake from the north. The ashfall helps, a little; you can’t see more than a mile off. What you can see, though, is that the plainsland around the road is beginning to give way to rougher territory. You know from maps and talk that below the Tirimas mountains there’s an ancient, probably-sealed minor fault, a strip of young forest that’s grown up since the last Season, and then in perhaps a hundred miles the plains become salt flats. Beyond that is desert, where comms become few and far between, and where they tend to be even more heavily defended than comms in more hospitable parts.
(Jija can’t be going as far as the desert. That would be foolish; who would take him in there?)
There will be comms along the road between here and the salt plains, you’re certain. If you can get the boy decent-looking, one of them will probably take him in.
“Come with me,” you say to the boy, and veer off the road. He follows you down the gravel bed; you notice how sharp some of the rocks are and add good boots to the list of things you need to get for him. He doesn’t cut his feet, thankfully—though he does slip on the gravel at one point, badly enough that he falls and rolls down the slope. You hurry over when he stops rolling, but he’s already sitting up and looking disgruntled, because he’s landed square in the mud at the edge of the creek. “Here,” you say, offering him a hand up.
He looks at the hand, and for a moment you’re surprised to see something like unease on his face. “I’m okay,” he says then, ignoring your hand and pushing himself to his feet. The mud squelches as he does it. Then he brushes past you to collect the rag bundle, which he lost hold of during the fall.
Fine, then. Ungrateful little brat.
“You want me to wash,” he says, a question.
“How’d you guess?”
He doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm. Setting his bundle down on the gravel bank, he walks forward into the water until it rises to about his waist, then he squats to try to scrub himself. You remember and rummage in your pack until you find the slab of soap. He turns at your whistle and you toss it to him. You flinch when he misses the catch entirely, but he immediately dives under and resurfaces with it in his hands. Then you laugh, because he’s staring at the soap like he’s never seen such a thing.
“Rub it on your skin?” You pantomime doing it: sarcasm again. But he straightens and smiles a little as if that actually clarified something for him, and then he obeys.
“Do your hair, too,” you say, rummaging in the pack again and shifting so you can keep an eye on the road. Some of the people passing by up there glance down at you, curiosity or disapproval in their gaze, but most don’t bother looking. You like it that way.
Your other shirt is what you were looking for. It’ll be like a dress on the boy, so you cut a short length off the spool of twine in your pack, which he can use to belt the shirt below his hips for modesty and to retain a little warmth around his torso. It won’t do in the long term, of course. Lorists say that it doesn’t take long for things to turn cold when a Season begins. You’ll have to see if the next town you pass is willing to sell you clothes and additional supplies, if they haven’t already implemented Seasonal Law.
Then the boy comes out of the water, and you stare.
Well. That’s different.
Free of mud, his hair is ashblow-coarse, that perfect weatherproof texture the Sanzed value so much, already beginning to stiffen and pouf up as it dries. It will be long enough to keep his back warm, at least. But it is white, not the normal gray. And his skin is white, not just pale; not even Antarctic people are ever quite that colorless, not that you’ve seen. His eyebrows are white, above his icewhite eyes. White white white. He almost disappears amid the falling ash as he walks.
Albino? Maybe. There’s also something off about his face. You wonder what you’re seeing, and then you realize: There’s nothing Sanzed about him, except the texture of his hair. There’s a broadness to his cheekbones, an angularity to his jaw and eyes, that seems wholly alien to your eyes. His mouth is full-lipped but narrow, so much so that you think he might have trouble eating, though obviously that’s not true or he wouldn’t have survived to this age. His short stature is part of it, too. He’s not just small but stocky, as if his people are built for a different kind of sturdiness than the ideal that Old Sanze has spent millennia cultivating. Maybe his race are all this white, then, whoever they are.
But none of this makes sense. Every race in the world these days is part Sanzed. They did rule the Stillness for centuries, after all, and they continue to do so in many ways. And they weren’t always peaceful about it, so even the most insular races bear the Sanzed stamp whether their ancestors wanted the admixture or not. Everyone is measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean. This boy’s people, whoever they are, have clearly managed to remain outliers.
“What in fire-under-Earth are you?” you say, before it occurs to you that this might hurt his feelings. A few days of horror and you forget everything about taking care of children.
But the boy only looks surprised—and then he grins. “Fire-under-Earth? You’re weird. Am I clean enough?”
You’re so thrown by him calling you weird that only much later do you realize he avoided the question.
You shake your head to yourself, then hold out a hand for the soap, which he gives to you. “Yes. Here.” And you hold up the shirt for him to slip his arms and head into. He does this a bit clumsily, as if he’s not used to being dressed by someone else. Still, it’s easier than getting Uche dressed; at least this boy doesn’t wiggle—
You stop.
You go away for a bit.
When you return to yourself, the sky is brighter and Hoa has stretched out on the nearby low grass. At least an hour has passed. Maybe more.
You lick your lips and focus on him uncomfortably, waiting for him to say something about your… absence. He just perks up once he sees you’re back, gets to his feet, and waits.
Okay, then. You and he might get along, after all.
After that you get back on the road. The boy walks well despite having no shoes; you watch him closely for signs of limping or weariness, and you stop more frequently than you would have on your own. He seems grateful for the chance to rest, but aside from that, he does all right. A real little trouper.
“You can’t stay with me,” you say, though, during one of your rest breaks. Might as well not let him get his hopes up. “I’ll try to find you a comm; we’ll be stopping at several along the way, if they’ll open the gates to trade. But I have to move on, even if I find you a place. I’m looking for someone.”
“Your daughter,” the boy says, and you stiffen. A moment passes. The boy ignores your shock, humming and petting his little bundle of rags like it’s a pet.
“How did you know that?” you whisper.
“She’s very strong. I’m not sure it’s her, of course.” The boy looks back at you and smiles, oblivious to your stare. “There’s a bunch of you in that direction. That always makes it hard.”
There are a lot of things that probably should be in your mind right now. You only muster the wherewithal to speak one of them aloud. “You know where my daughter is.”
He hums again, noncommitally. You’re sure he knows just how insane this all sounds. You’re sure he’s laughing, somewhere behind that innocent mask of a face.
“How?”
He shrugs. “I just know.”
“How?” He’s not an orogene. You’d know your own. Even if he was, orogenes can’t track each other like dogs, homing in from a distance as if orogeny has a smell. Only Guardians can do anything like that, and then only if the rogga is ignorant or stupid enough to let them.
He looks up, and you try not to flinch. “I just know, all right? It’s something I can do.” He looks away. “It’s something I’ve always been able to do.”
You wonder. But. Nassun.
You’re willing to buy a lot of cockamamie things if any of them can help you find her.
“Okay,” you say. Slowly, because this is crazy. You’re crazy, but now you’re aware that the boy probably is, too, and that means you need to be careful. But on the thin chance that he’s not crazy, or that his crazy actually works the way he says it does…
“How… how far is she?”
“Many days’ walking. She’s going faster than you.”
Because Jija took the cart and horse. “Nassun’s still alive.” You have to pause after this. Too much to feel, too much to contain. Rask told you Jija left Tirimo with her then, but you’ve been afraid to let yourself think of her as alive now. Even though a part of you doesn’t want to believe that Jija could kill his own daughter, the rest of you not only believes it but anticipates it to some degree. An old habit, bracing yourself for pain to come.
The boy nods, watching you; his little face is oddly solemn now. There’s really not much that’s childlike about this child, you notice absently, belatedly.
But if he can find your daughter, he can be the Evil Earth incarnate and you won’t give a damn.
So you rummage in the pack and find your canteen, the one with the good water; you refilled the other at the creek but need to boil it first. After you take a swig yourself, however, you hand it to him. When he’s finished drinking, you give him a handful of raisins. He shakes his head and hands them back. “I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten.”
“I don’t eat much.” He picks up his bundle. Maybe he’s got supplies in there. Doesn’t matter. You don’t really care, anyway. He’s not your kid. He just knows where your kid is.
You break camp and resume the journey south, this time with the boy walking beside you, subtly leading the way.
* * *
Listen, listen, listen well.
There was an age before the Seasons, when life and Earth, its father, thrived alike. (Life had a mother, too. Something terrible happened to Her.) Earth our father knew He would need clever life, so He used the Seasons to shape us out of animals: clever hands for making things and clever minds for solving problems and clever tongues for working together and clever sessapinae to warn us of danger. The people became what Father Earth needed, and then more than He needed. Then we turned on Him, and He has burned with hatred for us ever since.
Remember, remember, what I tell.
—Lorist recitation, “The Making of the Three Peoples,” part one
8
Syenite on the highroad
IT EVENTUALLY BECOMES NECESSARY FOR Syenite to ask her new mentor’s name. Alabaster, he tells her—which she assumes someone gave him ironically. She needs to use his name fairly often because he keeps falling asleep in his saddle during the long days of riding, which leaves her to do all the work of paying attention to their route and watching out for potential hazards, as well as keeping herself entertained. He wakes readily when she speaks his name, which at first leads her to believe he’s just faking it in order to avoid talking to her. When she says this, he looks annoyed and says, “Of course I’m really asleep. If you want anything useful out of me tonight, you’ll let me sleep.”
Which pisses her off, because it’s not like he’s the one who’s got to have a baby for empire and Earth. It’s also not like the sex takes any great effort on his part, brief and boring as it is.
But perhaps a week into their trip, she finally notices what he’s doing during their daily rides and even at night, while they’re lying tired and sticky in the sleeping bag they share. She can be forgiven for missing it, she thinks, because it’s a constant thing, like a low murmur in a room full of chattering people—but he’s quelling all the shakes in the area. All of them, not just the ones people can feel. All the tiny, infinitesimal flexes and adjustments of the earth, some of which are building momentum to greater movement and some of which are essentially random: Wherever she and Alabaster pass, those movements go still for a time. Seismic stillness is common in Yumenes, but should not exist out here in the hinterlands where node network coverage is thin.
Once Syenite figures this out, she is… confused. Because there’s no point to quelling microshakes, and indeed, doing so might make things worse the next time a larger shake occurs. They were very careful to teach her this, back when she was a grit learning basic geomestry and seismology: The earth does not like to be restrained. Redirection, not cessation, is the orogene’s goal.
She ponders this mystery for several days as they pass along the Yumenes–Allia Highroad, beneath a turning obelisk that glints like a mountain-sized tourmaline whenever it’s solid enough to catch the sunlight. The highroad is the fastest route between the two quartent capitals, built as straight as possible in ways that only Old Sanze would dare: elevated along lengthy stone bridges and crossing vast canyons, and occasionally even tunneling through mountains too high to climb. This means the trip to the coast will take only a few weeks if they take it easy—half what it would take via lowroad travel.
But rusted reeking Earth, highroads are dull. Most people think they’re deathtraps waiting to be sprung, despite the fact that they’re usually safer than ordinary roads; all Imperial Roads were built by teams of the best geoneers and orogenes, deliberately placed only in locations deemed permanently stable. Some of them have survived multiple Seasons. So for days at a time Syenite and Alabaster encounter only hard-driving merchant caravanners, mailpost-riders, and the local quartent patrol—all of whom give Syenite and Alabaster the eye upon noticing their black Fulcrum uniforms, and do not deign to speak to them. There are few comms lining the route’s turnoffs, and almost no shops at which to buy supplies, although there are regular platforms along the road itself with prepared areas and lean-tos for camping. Syen has spent every evening swatting bugs beside a fire, with nothing to do but glare at Alabaster. And have sex with him, but that only kills a few minutes.
This, though, is interesting. “What are you doing that for?” Syenite finally asks, three days after she first noticed him quelling microshakes. He’s just done it again now, while they wait for dinner—cachebread heated with slabs of beef and soaked prunes, yum yum. He yawned as he did it, though of course it must have taken some effort. Orogeny always costs something.
“Doing what?” he asks as he shuts down a subsurface aftershock and pokes at the fire in apparent boredom. She wants to hit him.
“That.”
His eyebrows rise. “Ah. You can feel it.”
“Of course I can feel it! You’re doing it all the time!”
“Well, you didn’t say anything before now.”
“Because I was trying to figure out what you were doing.”
He looks perplexed. “Then maybe you should’ve asked.”
She’s going to kill him. Something of this must translate through the silence, because he grimaces and finally explains. “I’m giving the node maintainers a break. Every microshake I settle eases the burden on them.”
Syen knows of the node maintainers, of course. As the Imperial Roads link the former vassals of the old empire with Yumenes, so do the nodes connect far-flung quartents with the Fulcrum, to extend its protections as far as possible. All over the continent—at whatever points the senior orogenes have determined is best for manipulating nearby faults or hot spots—there is an outpost. Within that outpost is stationed a Fulcrum-trained orogene whose sole task is to keep the local area stable. In the Equatorials, the nodes’ zones of protection
overlap, so there’s nary a twitch; this, and the Fulcrum’s presence at its core, is why Yumenes can build as it does. Beyond the Equatorials, though, the zones are spaced to provide the greatest protection for the largest populations, and there are gaps in the net. It’s just not worthwhile—at least, not according to the Fulcrum seniors—to put nodes near every little farming or mining comm in the hinterlands. People in those places fend for themselves as best they can.
Syen doesn’t know any of the poor fools assigned to such tedious duty, but she’s very, very glad no one has ever suggested it for her. It’s the sort of thing they give to orogenes who’ll never make it to fourth ring—the ones who have lots of raw power and little control. At least they can save lives, even if they’re doomed to spend their own lives in relative isolation and obscurity.
“Maybe you should leave the micros to the node maintainers,” Syenite suggests. The food is warm enough; she uses a stick to push it out of the fire. In spite of herself, her mouth is watering. It’s been a long day. “Earth knows they probably need something to keep them from dying of boredom.”
She’s intent on the food at first, and doesn’t notice his silence until she offers him his portion. Then she frowns, because that look is on his face again. That hatred. And this time at least a little of it is directed at her.
“You’ve never been to a node, I take it.”
What the rust? “No. Why would I possibly go to one?”