The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(89)

The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

No one reaches this place without a false start or two.

When Alabaster was a young man, he loved easily and casually. Oh, he was angry, even then; of course he was. Even children notice when they are not treated fairly. He had chosen to cooperate, however, for the time being.

He met a man, a scholar, during a mission he’d been assigned by the Fulcrum. Alabaster’s interest was prurient; the scholar was quite handsome, and charmingly shy in response to Alabaster’s flirtations. If the scholar hadn’t been busy excavating what turned out to be an ancient lore cache, there would be nothing more to the story. Alabaster would have loved him and left him, perhaps with regret, more likely with no hard feelings.

Instead, the scholar showed Alabaster his findings. There were more, Alabaster told you, than just three tablets of stonelore, originally. Also, the current Tablet Three was rewritten by Sanze. It was actually rewritten again by Sanze; it had been rewritten several times prior to that. The original Tablet Three spoke of Syl Anagist, you see, and how the Moon was lost. This knowledge, for many reasons, has been deemed unacceptable again and again down the millennia since. No one really wants to face the fact that the world is the way it is because some arrogant, self-absorbed people tried to put a leash on the rusting planet. And no one was ready to accept that the solution to the whole mess was simply to let orogenes live and thrive and do what they were born to do.

For Alabaster, the lore cache’s knowledge was overwhelming. He fled. It was too much for him, the knowledge that all of this had happened before. That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude. At the time he could see no end to the cycle, no way to demand the impossible of society. So he broke, and he ran.

His Guardian found him, of course, three quartents away from where he was supposed to be and with no inkling of where he was going. Instead of breaking his hand – they used different techniques with highringers like Alabaster – Guardian Leshet took him to a tavern and bought him a drink. He wept into his wine and confessed to her that he couldn’t take much more of the world as it was. He had tried to submit, tried to embrace the lies, but it was not right.

Leshet soothed him and took him back to the Fulcrum, and for one year they allowed Alabaster time to recover. To accept again the rules and role that had been created for him. He was content during this year, I believe; Antimony believes it, in any case, and she is the one who knew him best during this time. He settled, did what was expected of him, sired three children, and even volunteered to be an instructor for the higher-ringed juniors. He never got the chance to act on this, however, because the Guardians had decided already that Alabaster could not go unpunished for running away. When he met and fell in love with an older ten-ringer named Hessionite —



I have told you already that they use different methods on highringers.

I ran away, too, once. In a way.

***

It is the day after our return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, and I am different. I look through the nematode window at the garden of purple light, and it is no longer beautiful to me. The winking of the white star-flowers lets me know that some genegineer made them, tying them into the city power network so that they can be fed by a bit of magic. How else to get that winking effect? I see the elegant vinework on the surrounding buildings and I know that somewhere, a biomagest is tabulating how many lammotyrs of magic can be harvested from such beauty. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist – sacred, and lucrative, and useful.

So I am thinking this, and I am in a foul mood, when one of the junior conductors comes in. Conductor Stahnyn, she is called, and ordinarily I like her. She’s young enough to have not yet picked up the worst of the more experienced conductors’ habits. And now as I turn to gaze at her with eyes that Kelenli has opened, I notice something new about her. A bluntness to her features, a smallness to her mouth. Yes, it’s much more subtle than Conductor Gallat’s icewhite eyes, but here is another Sylanagistine whose ancestors clearly didn’t understand the whole point of genocide.

“How are you feeling today, Houwha?” she asks, smiling and glancing at her noteboard as she comes in. “Up to a medical check?”



“I’m feeling up to a walk,” I say. “Let’s go out to the garden.”



Stahnyn starts, blinking at me. “Houwha, you know that’s not possible.”



They keep such lax security on us, I have noticed. Sensors to monitor our vitals, cameras to monitor our movements, microphones to record our sounds. Some of the sensors monitor our magic usage – and none of them, not one, can measure even a tenth of what we really do. I would be insulted if I had not just been shown how important it is to them that we be lesser. Lesser creatures don’t need better monitoring, do they? Creations of Sylanagistine magestry cannot possibly have abilities that surpass it. Unthinkable! Ridiculous! Don’t be foolish.

Fine, I am insulted. And I no longer have the patience for Stahnyn’s polite patronization.

So I find the lines of magic that run to the cameras, and I entangle them with the lines of magic that run to their own storage crystals, and I loop these together. Now the cameras will display only footage that they filmed over the last few hours – which mostly consists of me looking out the window and brooding. I do the same to the audio equipment, taking care to erase that last exchange between me and Stahnyn. I do all of this with barely a flick of my will, because I was designed to affect machines the size of skyscrapers; cameras are nothing. I use more magic reaching for the others to tell a joke.