You respect her for holding nothing back. You respect the people of Castrima, too, for doing nothing more than gasping or murmuring in alarm, and not panicking. But then, they are all good stolid commfolk, and panic has always been frowned upon in the Stillness. The lorists’ tales are full of dire warnings about those who cannot master their fear, and few comms will grant such people comm names unless they’re wealthy or influential enough to push the issue. Those things tend to sort themselves out once a Season rolls around.
“Rennanis was a big city,” says one woman, once Ykka’s stopped talking. “Half the size of Yumenes but still millions of people. Can we fight that?”
“It’s a Season,” Hjarka says, before Ykka can reply. Ykka shoots her a dirty look, but Hjarka shrugs it off. “We have no choice.”
“We can fight because of the way Castrima’s built,” Ykka adds, throwing Hjarka one last quelling look. “They can’t exactly come at us from the rear. If push comes to shove, we can block off the tunnels; then nothing can get down here. We can wait them out.”
Not forever, though. Not when the comm needs both hunting and trading to supplement its storecaches and water gardens. You respect Ykka for not saying this. There’s a somewhat relieved stir.
“Do we have time to send a messenger south to one of our allied comms?” Lerna asks. You can feel him trying to skirt around the supply issue. “Would any of them be willing to help us?”
Ykka snorts at the last question. Lots of other people do, a few throwing pitying looks Lerna’s way. It’s a Season. But—“Trading’s a maybe. We could load up on critical supplies, medicines, and be more ready if there’s a siege. The forest basin takes days to get across with a small party; a big group will take a couple of weeks, maybe. Faster if they force-march it, but that’s stupid and dangerous on terrain they don’t know. We know their scouts are in our territory, but…” She glances at you. “How close are the rest of them?”
You’re caught off guard, but you know what she wants. “The bulk of them were near the impaling.” That’s about halfway across the forest basin.
“They could be here in days,” says someone, voice high-pitched with alarm, and many other people take up that murmur. They start getting louder. Ykka raises her hands again, but this time only some of the assembled people go quiet; the rest keep speculating, calculating, and you catch sight of a few people breaking for the bridges, clearly intent upon making their own plans, Ykka be damned. It’s not chaos, not quite panic, but there’s enough fear in the air to scent it faintly bitter. You get up, intending to move to the center of the gathering with Ykka, to try to add your voice to hers in calling for calm.
But you stop. Because someone is standing in the place you intended to move to.
It’s not like with Antimony, or Ruby Hair, or the other stone eaters you’ve glimpsed around the comm from time to time. Those, for whatever reason, don’t like to be seen moving; you’ll catch a blur now and again, but then the statue is there, watching you, as if there has always been a statue of a stranger in that position, sculpted by someone long ago.
This stone eater is turning. It keeps turning, letting everyone see and hear it turn, watching as you finally register its presence, the gray granite of its flesh, the undifferentiated slick of its hair, the slightly greater polish of its eyes. Carefully sculpted length and weight of jaw, and its torso is finely carved with male human musculature rather than the suggestion of clothing that most stone eaters adopt. This one obviously wants you to think of it as male, so fine, it’s male. He is allover gray, the first stone eater you have seen who looks like nothing more than a statue… except that he moves, and keeps moving, as everyone falls silent in surprise. He is taking all of you in, too, with a slight smile on his lips. He’s holding something.
You stare as the gray stone eater turns, and as your mind makes out the oddly shaped, bloody thing he holds, it is recent experience that makes you suddenly realize it is an arm. It is a small arm. It is a small arm still partially wrapped in cloth that is familiar, the jacket that you bought a lifetime ago on the road. The red-smeared inhumanly white skin on the hand is familiar, and the size is familiar, even though the lump of splintered bone at the bloody end is clear and glasslike and finely faceted and not bone at all.
Hoa it is Hoa that is Hoa’s arm
“I bear a message,” says the gray stone eater. The voice is pleasant, tenor. His mouth does not move, and the words echo up from his chest. This, at least, feels normal, insofar as you are currently capable of feeling normal, as you stare down at that dripping disaster of an arm.
Ykka stirs after a moment, perhaps pulling herself out of shock, too. “From whom?”
He turns to her. “Rennanis.” Turn again, eyes shifting from face to face amid the crowd, same as a human would do when trying to make a connection, get a point across. His eyes skim over you as if you aren’t there. “We wish you no harm.”
You stare at Hoa’s arm in his hand.
Ykka is skeptical. “So, the army camped on our doorstep…?”
Turn. He ignores Cutter, too. “We have plentiful food. Strong walls. All yours, if you join our comm.”
“Maybe we like being our own comm,” Ykka says.
Turn. His gaze settles on Hjarka, who blinks. “You have no meat, and your territory is depleted. You’ll be eating each other within a year.”
Well, that sets off the murmuring. Ykka shuts her eyes for a moment in pure frustration. Hjarka looks around angrily, as if wondering who has betrayed you.
Cutter says, “Would all of us be adopted into your comm? With our use-castes intact?”
Lerna makes a tight sound. “I don’t see how that’s the point, Cutter—”
Cutter throws a slashing look at Lerna. “We can’t fight an Equatorial city.”
“But it is a stupid question,” Ykka says. Her voice is deceptively mild, but in the part of your mind that is not stunned to silence by that arm, you note that she’s never backed up Lerna before. You’ve always gotten the impression she doesn’t much like him, and that it’s mutual—she’s too cold for him, he’s too soft for her. This is significant. “If I were these people, I would lie, take us all north, and shove us into a commless buffer-shanty somewhere between an acid geyser and a lava lake. Equatorial comms have done that before, especially when they needed labor. Why should we believe this one’s any different?”
The gray stone eater tilts his head. Between that and the little smile on his lips, it’s a remarkably human gesture—a look that says, Oh, aren’t you cute. “We don’t have to lie.” He lets those pleasant-toned words hang in the air for just the right amount of time. Oh, he’s good at this. You see people exchange looks, hear them shift uncomfortably; you feel the pent silence as Ykka has no retort to that. Because it’s true.
Then he drops the other boot. “But we have no use for orogenes.”
Silence. Shocked stillness. Ykka breaks it by uttering a swift, “Fire-under-Earth.” Cutter looks away. Lerna’s eyes widen as he grasps the implications of what the stone eater has just done.
“Where is Hoa?” you ask into the silence. It’s all you can think about.
The stone eater’s eyes slide to you. The rest of his face does not turn. For a stone eater, this is normal body language; for this stone eater, it is conspicuous. “Dead,” he says. “After leading us here.”
“You’re lying.” You don’t even realize you’re angry. You don’t think about what you’re about to do. You just react, like Damaya in the crucibles, like Syenite on the beach. Everything in you crystallizes and sharpens and your awareness facets down to a razor point and you weave the threads that you barely noticed were there and it happens just like with Tonkee’s arm; shiiiiing. You slice the stone eater’s hand off.
It and Hoa’s arm drop to the floor. People gasp. There is no blood. Hoa’s arm hits the crystal with a loud, meaty thud—it’s heavier than it looks—and the stone eater’s hand makes a second, even more solid clack, separating from the arm. The cross-section of its wrist is undifferentiated gray.