The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(62)
I’m confused. “To their graves?”
“Life is sacred in Syl Anagist,” she says over her shoulder. She’s passed through the door; now she keeps going without stopping or turning back. “Don’t you know that?” And then she is gone.
It is an answer that I feel I should understand – but in my own way, I am still innocent. Kelenli is kind. She lets me keep that innocence for the rest of the night.
***
To: Alma Innovator Dibars
From: Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Alma, the committee can’t pull my funding. Look, this is just the dates of the incidents I’ve gathered. Just look at the last ten!
2729
2714–2719: Choking
2699
2613
2583
2562
2530
2501
2490
2470
2400
2322–2329: Acid
Is Seventh even interested in the fact that our popular conception of the frequency of Season-level events is completely wrong? These things aren’t happening every two hundred or three hundred years. It’s more like every thirty or forty! If not for roggas, we’d be a thousand times dead. And with these dates and the others I’ve compiled, I’m trying to put together a predictive model for the more intensive Seasons. There’s a cycle here, a rhythm. Don’t we need to know in advance if the next Season is going to be longer or worse somehow? How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?
9
the desert, briefly, and you
Deserts are worse than most places, during Seasons. Tonkee lets Ykka know that water will be easy; Castrima’s Innovators have already assembled a number of contraptions they’re calling dew-catchers. The sun won’t be an issue either, thanks to the ash clouds that you never thought you’d have cause to thank. It will be chilly, in fact, though less so by day. You might even get a bit of snow.
No, the danger of deserts during a Season is simply that nearly all animals and insects there hibernate, deep under the sand where it’s still warm. There are those who claim to have figured out a surefire method of digging up sleeping lizards and such, but those are usually scams; the few comms that edge the desert guard such secrets jealously. The surface plants will have already shriveled away or been eaten by creatures preparing for hibernation, leaving nothing aboveground but sand and ash. Stonelore’s advice on entering deserts during Seasons is simply: don’t. Unless you mean to starve.
The comm spends two days camped at the edge of the Merz, preparing, though the truth is – as Ykka has confided in you, while you sat with her sharing your last mellow – there’s really no amount of preparation that will make the journey any easier. People are going to die. You won’t be one of them; it’s a curious feeling knowing that Hoa can whisk you away to Corepoint if there’s any real danger. It’s cheating, maybe. Except it’s not. Except you’re going to help as much as you can – and because you won’t die, you’re going to watch a lot of other people suffer. That’s the least you can do, now that you’ve committed to the cause of Castrima. Bear witness, and fight like earthfires to keep death from claiming more than its share.
In the meantime, the folks on cookfire duty pull double shifts roasting insects, drying tubers, baking the last of the grain stores into cakes, salting meat. After they were fed enough to have some strength, Maxixe’s surviving people turned out to be especially helpful with foraging, since several are locals and remember where there might be abandoned farms or debris from the Rifting shake that hasn’t been too picked over. Speed will be of the essence; survival means winning the race between the Merz’s width and Castrima’s supplies. Because of this, Tonkee – who is increasingly becoming a spokesperson for the Innovators, much to her own disgruntlement – oversees a quick and dirty breakdown and rebuilding of the storage wagons to a new lighter, more shock-resistant design that should pull more easily over desert sand. The Resistants and Breeders redistribute the remaining supplies to make sure the loss of any one wagon, if it must be abandoned, won’t cause some kind of critical shortage.
The night before the desert, you’re hunkered down beside one of the cookfires, still-awkwardly navigating how to feed yourself with one arm, when someone sits down beside you. It startles you a little, and you jerk enough to knock your cornbread off the plate. The hand that reaches into your view to retrieve it is broad and bronze and nicked with combat scars, and there’s a bit of yellow watered silk – filthy and ragged now, but still recognizable as such – looped around the wrist. Danel.
“Thanks,” you say, hoping she won’t use the opportunity to strike up a conversation.
“They say you were Fulcrum once,” she says, handing the cornbread back to you. No such luck, then.
It really shouldn’t surprise you that the people of Castrima have been gossiping. You decide not to care, using the cornbread to sop up another mouthful of stew. It’s especially good today, thickened with corn flour and rich with the tender, salty meat that’s been plentiful since the stone forest. Everybody needs as much fat on them as they can pack away, to prepare for the desert. You don’t think about the meat.
“I was,” you say, in what you hope sounds like a tone of warning.