Ykka gets it instantly, sitting up straight and tightening her jaw. Hjarka, too; she’s not stupid, or Tonkee would never put up with her. She curses. Lerna frowns, and Cutter looks at all of you in rising confusion. “Did that actually mean something?”
Asshole. “An army,” you snap as you recover. But words are hard. “Th-there’s a… a rusting army. In the forest basin. I could. Sess their campfires.”
“How many?” Ykka is already getting up, fetching a longknife from a shelf and belting it round her thigh. Hjarka gets up, too, going to the door of Ykka’s apartment and pulling open the curtain. You hear her shouting for Esni, the head of the Strongbacks. The Strongbacks sometimes do scouting and supplement the Hunters, but in a situation like this, they are charged primarily with the comm’s defense.
You couldn’t count all the little blots of heat that pinged on your awareness when you were in the obelisk, but you try to guess. “Maybe a hundred?” That was the campfires, though. How many people around each fire? You guess six or seven apiece. Not a large force, under ordinary circumstances. Any decent quartent governor could field an army ten times that size on relatively short notice. During a Season, though, and for a comm as small as Castrima—whose total population is not much larger—an army of five or six hundred is a dire threat indeed.
“Tettehee,” Cutter breathes, sitting back. He’s gone paler than usual. You follow him, though. Six months ago, the stand of impaled corpses set up as a warn-off in the forest basin. The comm of Tettehee is beyond the basin, near the mouth of the river that wends through Castrima’s territory and ultimately empties into one of the great lakes of the Somidlats. You’ve heard nothing from Tettehee in months, and the trading party you sent past the warn-off failed to return. This army must have hit Tettehee around that time, then bunkered down there for a while, sending out scouting parties to mark territory. Replenishing stores, rebuilding arms, healing their wounded, maybe sending some of their spoils back north to Rennanis. Now that they’ve digested Tettehee, they’re on the march again.
And somehow, they know Castrima’s here. They’re saying hello.
Ykka heads outside and shouts alongside Hjarka, and within a few minutes someone is ringing the shake alarm and shouting for a gathering of the household heads at the Flat Top. You’ve never heard Castrima’s shake alarm—comm full of roggas—and it’s more annoying than you expected, low and rhythmic and buzzy. You understand why: Amid a bunch of crystalline structures, ringing bells aren’t the best idea. Still. You and Lerna and the rest follow Ykka as she strides along a rope bridge and around two larger shafts, her lips pressed together and face grim. By the time she reaches the Flat Top there’s a small crowd already there; by the time she yells for someone to stop blowing the rusting alarm and the alarm actually stops, the sheared-off crystal is starting to look dangerously packed with murmuring, anxious people. There’s a railing, but still. Hjarka shouts at Esni, and Esni in turn shouts at the Strongbacks amid the gathering, and they move clumsily to turn people away so there won’t be any horrible tragedies distracting from the possible horrible tragedy that looms imminent.
When Ykka raises her hands for attention, everyone falls silent instantly. “The situation,” she begins, and lays everything out in a few terse sentences.
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