At the center of Castrima-over is a domed, open pavilion that Ykka tells you was once the comm’s gathering center, used for wedding dances and parties and the occasional comm-wide meeting. It’s been turned into some sort of operations center, you see as you walk toward it: A gaggle of men and women stand, squat, or sit around within it, but one knot of them stands around a freshly made table. When you get close enough, you see that they’ve got a crudely made diagram of Castrima and map of the local area side by side, which they’re discussing. To your dismay, you can see that they’ve marked at least one of the ventilation ducts—the one that’s behind a small waterfall at the nearby river. They probably lost a scout or two finding it: The river’s banks are by now infested with boilbug mounds. Doesn’t matter; they found it, and that’s bad.
Three of the people talking over the maps look up as you approach. One of them elbows another, who turns and shakes awake someone else as you walk into the pavilion and stop a few feet from the table. The woman who gets up, rubbing her face blearily as she comes to join the others, does not look particularly impressive. She’s cut her hair on the sides to just above her ears—a painfully blunt chop that looks to have been done with a knife. It makes her look small, even though she’s not particularly: Her torso is a smooth barrel, brief breasts blending into a belly that’s probably carried at least one child, and legs like basalt pillars. She’s not wearing anything more than the others; her sash of tribe membership is just a fading yellow silk kerchief hanging loosely around her neck. But there’s a gravity in her gaze, even half-asleep, that makes you focus on her.
“Castrima?” she asks you, by way of greeting. It’s all that really matters about who you are, anyway.
You nod. “I speak for them.”
She rests her hands on the table, nodding. “Our message got delivered, then.” Her gaze flicks to the spinel hovering behind you, and something adjusts in her expression. It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that. Indifference is worse than hate.
Well. You can’t muster indifference in response; you can’t help but see her as human. Have to make do with hate, then. And what’s more interesting is that she somehow knows what the spinel is, and what it means. Very interesting.
“We’re not joining you,” you say. “You want to fight over that, so be it.”
She tilts her head to one side. One of her lieutenants chuckles into their hand, but is swiftly glared silent by another. You like the silencing. It’s respectful—of your abilities if not of you per se, and of Castrima even if they don’t think you have a chance. Even if you actually, probably, don’t have a chance.
“We don’t even have to attack, you realize,” the woman says. “We can just sit up here, kill anybody who comes up to hunt or trade. Starve you out.”
You manage not to react. “We have a little meat. It’ll take awhile—months at least—for the vitamin deficiencies to set in. Our stores are pretty solid otherwise.” You force a shrug. “And other communities have gotten around meat shortages easily enough.”
She grins. Her teeth aren’t sharpened, but you think momentarily that her canines are longer than they strictly need to be. It’s probably projection. “True, if that’s your taste. Which is why we’re also working on finding your vents.” She taps the map. “Close them up and suffocate you till you’re weak, then break down those barriers you’ve put across the tunnels and dance right in. Stupid to live underground; once someone knows you’re there, you’re actually an easier target, not a harder one.”
This is true, but you shake your head. “We can be hard enough, if you push us. But Castrima isn’t rich, and our storecaches aren’t any better than those of another comm that’s not full of roggas.” You pause for effect. The woman doesn’t flinch, but there’s a shuffle among the other people in the pavilion as they realize. Good. That means they’re thinking. “So many easier nuts to crack out there. Why are you bothering with us?”
You know why they’re really doing this, because Gray Man’s after orogenes who can open the Obelisk Gate, but that can’t be what he’s told them. What could induce a strong, stable Equatorial comm to turn conqueror? Wait, no; it can’t be stable. Rennanis is relatively close to the Rift. Even with living node maintainers, life in such a comm would be hard. Daily blow-throughs of noxious gas. Ashfall much worse than here, requiring people to wear masks at all times. Earth help them if it rains; it could be pure acid, and that’s if rain is even possible with the Rift cranking out heat and ash nearby. Doubtful they have any livestock… so maybe they’re facing a meat shortage, too.
“Because this is what it will take to survive,” the woman says, to your surprise. She straightens and folds her arms. “Rennanis has too many people for our stores. All the survivors of every other Equatorial city have come to camp on our doorstep. We would’ve had to do this anyway, or have problems with too large of a commless population in the area. Might as well weaponize them into feeding themselves, and bringing what’s left back home to the comm. You know this Season isn’t going to end.”
“It will.”
“Eventually.” She shrugs. “Our ’mests have calculated that if we grow enough ’shrooms and such, and strictly limit our population, we might achieve enough sustainability to survive until the Season ends. The odds are better if we take the storecaches of every other comm we encounter, though—”
You roll your eyes because you can’t help it. “You think cachebread’s going to last a thousand years?” Or two. Or ten. And then a few hundred thousand years of ice.
She pauses until you’re done. “—and if we set up supply lines from every comm with renewables. We’ll need some Coastal comms with oceanic resources, some Antarctics where growing low-light plants might still be possible.” She pauses, also for effect. “But you Midlatters eat too much.”
Well. “So basically, you’re here to wipe us out.” You shake your head. “Why didn’t you just say so? Why the foolishness about getting rid of the orogenes?”
Someone from beyond the pavilion calls, “Danel!” and the woman looks up, nodding absently. This is apparently her name. “Always a chance you’d turn on each other. Then we could just walk in and scrape up the leftovers.” She shakes her head. “Now things have to be hard.”
The dull, insistent buzz that suddenly impinges itself on your sessapinae is a warning as blatant as a scream.
It’s too late the instant you sess it, because that means you’re within range of the Guardian’s ability to negate your orogeny. You turn anyway, half tripping even as you start to spin a huge torus that will flash-freeze the whole rusting town, and it is because you were expecting negation and did not deploy a tight shielding torus that the disruption knife pegs you in the right arm.
You remember Alabaster saying that these knives hurt. The thing is small, made for throwing, and it should hurt given that it’s sunk into your bicep and probably chipping bone. But what Alabaster did not specify—you are irrationally furious with him hours after his death, stupid useless ruster—was that something about this knife seems to set your entire nervous system on fire. The fire is hottest, incandescent, in your sessapinae, even though those are nowhere near your arm. It hurts so much that all your muscles spasm at once; you flop onto your side and can’t even scream. You just lie there twitching, and staring at the woman who steps through the gaggle of Rennanis soldiers to grin down at you. She’s surprisingly young, or so she seems, though appearances are meaningless because she is a Guardian. She’s naked from the waist up, her skin shockingly dark amid all these Sanzeds, her breasts small and almost entirely areola, reminding you of the last time you were pregnant. You thought your tits would never shrink back down after Uche… and you wonder if it will hurt, when you are shaken to pieces the way Innon was.