The stone eater steps forward, moving slowly. This sounds like the grind of a millstone, and looks as wrong as a moving statue should look. Nassun flinches in revulsion, and he stills. “Why did you stone them?”
“They were wrong.”
The stone eater steps forward again, onto the slab. Nassun half expects the slab to crack or tilt beneath the creature’s terrible weight, which she knows is immense. He is a mountain, compacted into the size and shape of a human being. The slab of deadciv material does not crack, however, and now the creature is close enough for her to see the fine detailing of his individual hair strands.
“You were wrong,” he says, in his strange echoing voice. “The people of the Fulcrum, and the Guardians, are not to blame for the things they do. You wanted to know why your Guardian must suffer as he does. The answer is: He doesn’t have to.”
Nassun stiffens. Before she can demand to know more, the stone eater’s head turns toward him. There is a flicker of… something. An adjustment too infinitely fine to see or sess, and… and suddenly, the alive, vicious throb of silver within Schaffa dies into silence. Only that dark, needle-like blot in his sessapinae remains active, and immediately Nassun sesses its effort to re-assert control. For the moment, though, Schaffa exhales softly and relaxes further into sleep. The pain that has been grinding at him for days is gone, for now.
Nassun gasps—softly. If Schaffa has the chance to truly rest at last, she will not destroy it. Instead she says to the stone eater, “How did you do that?”
“I can teach you. I can teach you how to fight his tormentor, his master, too. If you wish.”
Nassun swallows hard. “Y-yeah. I wish.” She isn’t stupid, though. “In exchange for what?”
“Nothing. If you fight his master, then you fight my enemy, too. It will make us… allies.”
She knows now that the stone eater has been lurking nearby, listening in on her, but she doesn’t care anymore. To save Schaffa… She licks her lips, which taste faintly of sulfur. The ash haze has been getting thicker in recent weeks. “Okay,” she says.
“What is your name?” If it’s been listening, it knows who she is. This is a gesture toward alliance.
“Nassun. And you?”
“I have no name, or many. Call me what you wish.”
He needs a name. Alliances don’t work without names, do they? “S-Steel.” It’s the first thing that pops into her mind. Because he’s so gray. “Steel?”
The sense that he does not care lingers. “I will come to you later,” Steel says. “When we can speak uninterrupted.”
An instant later he is gone, into the earth, and the mountain vanishes from her awareness in seconds. A moment later, Umber emerges from the forest around the deadciv slab and begins walking up the hill toward her. She’s actually glad to see him, even though his gaze sharpens as he draws nearer and sees that Schaffa is asleep. He stops three paces away, more than close enough for a Guardian’s speed.
“I’ll kill you if you try anything,” Nassun says, nodding solemnly. “You know that, right? Or if you wake him up.”
Umber smiles. “I know you’ll try.”
“I’ll try and I’ll actually do it.”
He sighs, and there is great compassion in his voice. “You don’t even know how dangerous you are. To far, far more than me.”
She doesn’t, and that bothers her a lot. Umber does not act out of cruelty. If he sees her as a threat, there must be some reason for it. But it doesn’t matter.
“Schaffa wants me alive,” she says. “So I live. Even if I have to kill you.”
Umber appears to consider this. She glimpses the quick flicker of the silver within him and knows, suddenly and instinctively, that she’s no longer talking to Umber, exactly.
His master.
Umber says, “And if Schaffa decides you should die?”
“Then I die.” That’s what the Fulcrum got wrong, she feels certain. They treated the Guardians as enemies, and maybe they once were, like Schaffa said. But allies must trust in one another, be vulnerable to one another. Schaffa is the only person in the world who loves Nassun, and Nassun will die, or kill, or remake the world, for his sake.
Slowly, Umber inclines his head. “Then I will trust in your love for him,” he says. For an instant there is an echo in his voice, in his body, through the ground, reverberating away, so deep. “For now.” With that, he moves past her and sits down near Schaffa, assuming a guard stance himself.
Nassun does not understand Guardian reasoning, but she’s learned one thing about them over the months: They do not bother to lie. If Umber says he will trust Schaffa—no. Trust Nassun’s love for Schaffa, because there is a difference. But if Umber says this has meaning to him, then she can rely on that.
So she lies down on her own bedroll and relaxes in spite of everything. She doesn’t sleep for some while, though. Nerves, maybe.
Night falls. The evening is clear, apart from the faint haze of ash blowing from the north, and a few broken, pearled clouds that periodically drift southward along the breeze. The stars come out, winking through the haze, and Nassun stares at them for a long while. She’s begun to drift, her mind finally relaxing toward sleep, when belatedly she notices that one of the tiny white lights up there is moving in a different direction from the rest—downward, sort of, while the other stars march west to east across the sky. Slow. Hard to unsee it now that she’s made it out. It’s a little bigger and brighter than the rest, too. Strange.
Nassun rolls over to turn her back to Umber, and sleeps.
These things have been down here for an age of the world. Foolish to call them bones. They go to powder when we touch them.
But stranger than the bones are the murals. Plants I’ve never seen, something that might be a language but it just looks like shapes and wiggling. And one: a great round white thing amid the stars, hanging over a landscape. Eerie. I didn’t like it. I had the blackjacket crumble the mural away.
16
you meet an old friend, again
I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.
You stare at the stone eater that has burst forth from the chalcedony chrysalis. It stands hunched and perfectly still, watching you sidelong through the slight heat-waver of the air around the split geode. Its hair is as you remember from that half-real, half-dream moment within the garnet obelisk: a frozen splash, what happens to ashblow hair when a hard gust of wind lifts it up and back. Translucent white-ish opal now instead of simply white. But unlike the fleshly form that you grew to know, this stone eater’s “skin” is as black as the night sky once was before the Season. What you thought were cracks back then, you now realize are actually white and silver marbling veins. Even the elegant drape of pseudo-clothing wrapped around the body, a simple chiton that hangs off one shoulder, is marbled black. Only the eyes lack the marbling, the whites now matte smooth darkness. The irises are still icewhite. They stand out from the black face, stark and so atavistically disturbing that it actually takes you a moment to realize the face around it is still Hoa’s.
Hoa. He is older, you see at once; the face is that of a young man and not a boy. Still too wide, with too narrow a mouth, racially nonsensical. You can read anxiety in those frozen features, though, because you learned to read it on a face that was once softer and designed to elicit your compassion.