So this is the endgame: Of the nearly eleven hundred souls who went into the desert, a little over eight hundred and fifty reach the Imperial Road.
For a few days after that, the comm effectively dissolves. Desperate people, no longer willing to wait for orderly foraging by the Hunters, stagger off to dig through sour soil for half-rotted tubers and bitter grubs and barely chewable woody roots. The land around here is scraggly, treeless, half-desert and half-fertile, long depopulated by the Rennies. Before she loses too many people, Ykka orders camp made on an old farm with several barns that have managed to survive the Season thus far. The walls, apart from basic framing, haven’t fared as well, but then they haven’t collapsed, either. It’s the roofs she wanted, since the rain still falls here on the desert’s edge, though it’s lighter and intermittent. Nice to sleep dry, at last.
Three days, Ykka gives it. During that time, people creep back in ones and twos, some bringing food to share with others too weak to forage. The Hunters who bother to return bring fish from one of the river branches that’s relatively nearby. One of them finds the thing that saves you, the thing that feels like life after all the death behind you: a farmer’s private housecache of cornmeal, sealed in clay urns and kept hidden under the floorboards of the ruined house. You have nothing to mix it with, no milk or eggs or dried meat, just the acid water, but food is that which nourishes, stonelore says. The comm feasts on fried corn mush that night. One urn has cracked and teems with mealybugs, but no one cares. Extra protein.
A lot of people don’t come back. It’s a Season. All things change.
At the end of three days, Ykka declares that anyone still in the camp is Castrima; anyone who hasn’t returned is now ashed out and commless. Easier than speculating on how they might have died, or who might have killed them. What’s left of the group strikes camp. You head north.
Was this too fast? Perhaps tragedies should not be summarized so bluntly. I meant to be merciful, not cruel. That you had to live it is the cruelty … but distance, detachment, heals. Sometimes.
I could have taken you from the desert. You did not have to suffer as they did. And yet … they have become part of you, the people of this comm. Your friends. Your fellows. You needed to see them through. Suffering is your healing, at least for now.
Lest you think me inhuman, a stone, I did what I could to help. Some of the beasts that hibernate beneath the sand of the desert are capable of preying on humans; did you know that? A few woke as you passed, but I kept them away. One of the wagons’ wooden axles partially dissolved in the rain and began to sag, though none of you noticed. I transmuted the wood—petrified it, if you prefer to think that way—so that it would last. I am the one who moved the moth-eaten rug in that abandoned farmhouse, so that your Hunter found the cornmeal. Ontrag, who had not told Ykka about the growing pain in her side and chest, or her shortness of breath, did not live long after the comm left her behind. I went back to her on the night that she died, and tuned away what little pain she felt. (You’ve heard the song. Antimony sang it for Alabaster once. I’ll sing it for you, if …) She was not alone, at the end.
Does any of this comfort you? I hope so. I’m still human, I told you. Your opinion matters to me.
Castrima survives; that is also what matters. You survive. For now, at least.
And at last, some while later, you reach the southernmost edge of Rennanis’s territory.
Honor in safety, survival under threat. Necessity is the only law.
—Tablet Three, “Structures,” verse four
10
Nassun, through the fire
ALL OF THIS HAPPENS IN the earth. It is mine to know, and to share with you. It is hers to suffer. I’m sorry.
Inside the pearlescent vehicle, the walls are inlaid with elegant vining designs wrought of what looks like gold. Nassun isn’t sure if the metal is purely decorative or has some sort of purpose. The hard, smooth seats, which are pastel colors and shaped something like the shells of mussels that she ate sometimes at Found Moon, have amazingly soft cushions. They are locked to the floor, Nassun finds, and yet it is possible to turn them from side to side or lean back. She cannot fathom what the chairs are made of.
To her greater shock, a voice speaks in the air a moment after they settle in. The voice is female, polite, detached, and somehow reassuring. The language is … incomprehensible, and not remotely familiar. However, the pronunciation of the syllables is no different from that of Sanze-mat, and something about the rhythm of the sentences, their order, fits the expectations of Nassun’s ear. She suspects that part of the first sentence is a greeting. She thinks a word that keeps being repeated, amid a passage that has the air of a command, might be a softening word, like please. The rest, however, is wholly foreign.
The voice speaks only briefly, and then falls silent. Nassun glances at Schaffa and is surprised to see him frowning, eyes narrowed in concentration—though some of that is also tension in his jaw, and a hint of extra pallor around his lips. The silver is hurting him more, and it must be bad this time. Still, he looks up at her in something like wonder. “I remember this language,” he says.
“Those weird words? What did she say?”
“That this …” He grimaces. “Thing. It’s called a vehimal. The announcement says it will depart from this city and begin the transit to Corepoint in two minutes, to arrive in six hours. There was something about other vehicles, other routes, return trips to various … nodes? I don’t remember what that means. And she hopes we will enjoy the ride.” He smiles thinly.
“Oh.” Pleased, Nassun kicks a little in her chair. Six hours to travel all the way to the other side of the planet? But she shouldn’t be amazed by that, maybe, since these are the people who built the obelisks.
There seems to be nothing to do but get comfortable. Cautiously, Nassun unslings her runny-sack and lets it hang from the back of her chair. This causes her to notice that something like lichen grows all over the floor, though it cannot be natural or accidental; the blooms of it spread out in pretty, regular patterns. She stretches down a foot and finds that it is soft, like carpet.
Schaffa is more restless, pacing around the comfortable confines of the … vehimal … and touching its golden veins now and again. It’s slow, methodical pacing, but even that is unusual for him, so Nassun is restless, too. “I have been here,” he murmurs.
“What?” She heard him. She’s just confused.