“I bear a message,” says the gray stone eater. The voice is pleasant, tenor. His mouth does not move, and the words echo up from his chest. This, at least, feels normal, insofar as you are currently capable of feeling normal, as you stare down at that dripping disaster of an arm.
Ykka stirs after a moment, perhaps pulling herself out of shock, too. “From whom?”
He turns to her. “Rennanis.” Turn again, eyes shifting from face to face amid the crowd, same as a human would do when trying to make a connection, get a point across. His eyes skim over you as if you aren’t there. “We wish you no harm.”
You stare at Hoa’s arm in his hand.
Ykka is skeptical. “So, the army camped on our doorstep…?”
Turn. He ignores Cutter, too. “We have plentiful food. Strong walls. All yours, if you join our comm.”
“Maybe we like being our own comm,” Ykka says.
Turn. His gaze settles on Hjarka, who blinks. “You have no meat, and your territory is depleted. You’ll be eating each other within a year.”
Well, that sets off the murmuring. Ykka shuts her eyes for a moment in pure frustration. Hjarka looks around angrily, as if wondering who has betrayed you.
Cutter says, “Would all of us be adopted into your comm? With our use-castes intact?”
Lerna makes a tight sound. “I don’t see how that’s the point, Cutter—”
Cutter throws a slashing look at Lerna. “We can’t fight an Equatorial city.”
“But it is a stupid question,” Ykka says. Her voice is deceptively mild, but in the part of your mind that is not stunned to silence by that arm, you note that she’s never backed up Lerna before. You’ve always gotten the impression she doesn’t much like him, and that it’s mutual—she’s too cold for him, he’s too soft for her. This is significant. “If I were these people, I would lie, take us all north, and shove us into a commless buffer-shanty somewhere between an acid geyser and a lava lake. Equatorial comms have done that before, especially when they needed labor. Why should we believe this one’s any different?”
The gray stone eater tilts his head. Between that and the little smile on his lips, it’s a remarkably human gesture—a look that says, Oh, aren’t you cute. “We don’t have to lie.” He lets those pleasant-toned words hang in the air for just the right amount of time. Oh, he’s good at this. You see people exchange looks, hear them shift uncomfortably; you feel the pent silence as Ykka has no retort to that. Because it’s true.
Then he drops the other boot. “But we have no use for orogenes.”
Silence. Shocked stillness. Ykka breaks it by uttering a swift, “Fire-under-Earth.” Cutter looks away. Lerna’s eyes widen as he grasps the implications of what the stone eater has just done.
“Where is Hoa?” you ask into the silence. It’s all you can think about.
The stone eater’s eyes slide to you. The rest of his face does not turn. For a stone eater, this is normal body language; for this stone eater, it is conspicuous. “Dead,” he says. “After leading us here.”
“You’re lying.” You don’t even realize you’re angry. You don’t think about what you’re about to do. You just react, like Damaya in the crucibles, like Syenite on the beach. Everything in you crystallizes and sharpens and your awareness facets down to a razor point and you weave the threads that you barely noticed were there and it happens just like with Tonkee’s arm; shiiiiing. You slice the stone eater’s hand off.
It and Hoa’s arm drop to the floor. People gasp. There is no blood. Hoa’s arm hits the crystal with a loud, meaty thud—it’s heavier than it looks—and the stone eater’s hand makes a second, even more solid clack, separating from the arm. The cross-section of its wrist is undifferentiated gray.
The stone eater does not seem to react at first. Then you sess the coalescence of something, like the silver threads of magic but so many. The hand twitches, then leaps into the air, returning to the wrist-stump as if pulled by strings. He leaves Hoa’s arm behind. Then the stone eater turns fully to face you, at last.
“Get out before I chop you into more pieces than you can put back together,” you say in a voice that shakes like the earth.
The gray stone eater smiles. It’s a full smile, eyes crinkling with crow’s feet and lips drawing back from diamond teeth—and marvel of marvels, it actually looks like a smile and not a threat display. Then he vanishes, falling through the surface of the crystal. For an instant you see a gray shadow within the crystal’s translucence, his shape blurred and not quite humanoid anymore, though that is probably the angle. Then, faster than you can track with eyes or sessapinae, he shoots down and away.
In the reverberating wake of his leaving, Ykka takes and lets out a deep breath.
“Well,” she says, looking around at her people. What she believes to be her people. “Sounds like we need to talk.” There is an uneasy stir.
You don’t want to hear it. You hurry forward and pick up Hoa’s arm. The thing is heavy as stone; you have to put your legs into it or risk your lower back. You turn and people move out of your way and you hear Lerna say, “Essun?” But you don’t want to hear him, either.
There are threads, see. Silver lines that only you can see, flailing and curling forth from the arm’s stump, but they shift as you turn. Always pointing in a particular direction. So you follow them. No one follows you, and you don’t care what that means. Not at the moment.
The tendrils lead you to your own apartment.
You step through the curtain and stop. Tonkee’s not home. Must be either at Hjarka’s or up in the green room. There are two more limbs on the floor in front of you, bloody stumps with diamond bones poking forth. No, they are not on the floor; they are in the floor, partially submerged in it, one down to the thigh, the other just a calf and foot. Caught, as if climbing out. There are twin trails of blood, thick enough to be worrisome, over the homey rug that you bartered one of Jija’s old flintknives for. They go toward your room, so you follow them in. And then you drop the arm. Fortunately it does not land on your foot.
What is left of Hoa crawls toward the floor-mattress that passes for your bed. His other arm is also gone, you don’t know where. Hanks of his hair are missing. He pauses when you come in, hearing or sessing you, and he lies still as you circle him and see that his lower jaw has been ripped away. He has no eyes, and there is a… a bite, just above his temple. That’s why his hair is missing. Something has bitten into his skull like an apple, incising a chunk of flesh and the diamond bone underneath. You can’t see what’s inside his head for the blood. That’s good.
It would frighten you, if you did not immediately understand. Beside your bed is the little cloth-wrapped bundle that he has carried since Tirimo. You hurry to it, open it up, bring it to the ruin of him, and hunker down. “Can you turn over?”
He responds by doing so. For a moment you’re stymied by the lack of a lower jaw, and then you think fuck it and shove one of the stones from the bundle directly into the ragged hole of Hoa’s throat. The feel of his flesh is warm and human as you push it down with your finger until the muscles of his swallowing reflex catch it. (Your gorge rises. You will it back down.) You start to feed him another, but after a few breaths he begins to shiver all over violently. You don’t realize you’re still sessing magic until suddenly Hoa’s body becomes alive with glimmering silver threads, all of them whipping about and curling like the stinging tentacles of ocean creatures from lorists’ tales. Hundreds of them. You draw back in alarm, but Hoa makes a raw, breathy sound, and you think maybe it means more. You push another stone into his throat, and then another. There weren’t many left to begin with. When you’re down to only three, you hesitate. “You want them all?”