The Fifth Season (11 page)

“The air doesn’t turn cold?” Damaya tries, really tries, to restrain her curiosity, but the story is too good. And the idea of using orogeny in a safe way, a way that will cause no harm, is too intriguing. “No one dies?”

She feels him nod. “Not when you use earth-power, no. But of course, Father Earth never moves when one wishes. When there is no earth-power nearby, an orogene can still make the earth move, but only by taking the necessary heat and force and motion from the things around her. Anything that moves or has warmth—campfires, water, the air, even rocks. And, of course, living things. Shemshena could not take away the ground or the air, but she most certainly could, and did, take away everything else. When she and the Emperor met Misalem at the obsidian gates of Yumenes, they were the only living things in the city, and there was nothing left of the city but its walls.”

Damaya inhales in awe, trying to imagine Palela empty and denuded of every shrub and backyard goat, and failing. “And everybody just… went? Because she said?”

“Well, because the emperor said, but yes. Yumenes was much smaller in those days, but it was still a vast undertaking. Yet it was either that or allow a monster to make hostages of them.” Schaffa shrugs. “Misalem claimed he had no desire to rule in the Emperor’s stead, but who could believe that? A man willing to threaten a city to get what he wants will stop at nothing.”

That makes sense. “And he didn’t know what Shemshena had done until he got to Yumenes?”

“No, he didn’t know. The burning was done by the time he arrived; the people had traveled away in a different direction. So as Misalem faced the Emperor and Shemshena, he reached for the power to destroy the city—and found almost nothing. No power, no city to destroy. In that moment, while Misalem floundered and tried to use what little warmth he could drag from the soil and air, Shemshena flung a glassknife over and into the torus of his power. It didn’t kill him, but it distracted him enough to break his orogeny, and Shemshena took care of the rest with her other knife. Thus was ended the Old Sanze Empire’s—pardon;
the Sanzed Equatorial Affiliation’s
—greatest threat.”

Damaya shivers in delight. She has not heard such a good story in a long time. And it’s true? Even better. Shyly she grins up at Schaffa. “I liked that story.” He’s good at telling them, too. His voice is so deep and velvety. She could see all of it in her head as he talked.

“I thought you might. That was the origin of the Guardians, you know. As the Fulcrum is an order of orogenes, we are the order that
watches
the Fulcrum. For we know, as Shemshena did, that despite all your terrible power, you are not invincible. You can be beaten.”

He pats Damaya’s hands on the saddle-pommel, and she doesn’t squirm anymore, no longer liking the story quite as much. While he told it, she imagined herself as Shemshena, bravely facing a terrible foe and defeating him with cleverness and skill. With every
you
and
your
that Schaffa speaks, however,
she begins to understand: He does not see her as a potential Shemshena.

“And so we Guardians train,” he continues, perhaps not noticing that she has gone still. They are deep into the shatterland now; sheer, jagged rock faces, as high as the buildings in Brevard, frame the road on both sides for as far as the eye can see. Whoever built the road must have carved it, somehow, out of the earth itself. “We train,” he says again, “as Shemshena did. We learn how orogenic power works, and we find ways to use this knowledge against you. We watch for those among your kind who might become the next Misalems, and we eliminate them. The rest we take care of.” He leans over to smile at her again, but Damaya does not smile back this time. “I am your Guardian now, and it is my duty to make certain you remain helpful, never harmful.”

When he straightens and falls silent, Damaya does not prompt him to tell another story, as she might have done. She doesn’t like the one he just told, not anymore. And she is somehow, suddenly certain: He did not
intend
for her to like it.

The silence lingers as the shatterlands finally begin to subside, then become rolling green hillside. There’s nothing out here: no farms, no pastures, no forests, no towns. There are hints that people once lived here: She sees a crumbling, moss-overgrown hump of something in the distance that might have been a fallen-over silo, if silos were the size of mountains. And other structures, too regular and jagged to be natural, too decayed and strange for her to recognize. Ruins, she realizes, of some city that must have died many, many Seasons ago, for there to be so little of it left now. And beyond the ruins, hazy
against the cloud-drifted horizon, an obelisk the color of a thundercloud flickers as it slowly turns.

Sanze is the only nation that has ever survived a Fifth Season intact—not just once, but seven times. She learned this in creche. Seven ages in which the earth has broken somewhere and spewed ash or deadly gas into the sky, resulting in a lightless winter that lasted years or decades instead of months. Individual comms have often survived Seasons, if they were prepared. If they were lucky. Damaya knows the stonelore, which is taught to every child even in a little backwater like Palela.
First guard the gates
. Keep storecaches clean and dry. Obey the lore, make the hard choices, and maybe when the Season ends there will be people who remember how civilization should work.

But only once in known history has a whole nation,
many
comms all working together, survived. Thrived, even, over and over again, growing stronger and larger with each cataclysm. Because the people of Sanze are stronger and smarter than everyone else.

Gazing at that distant, winking obelisk, Damaya thinks,
Smarter even than the people who built that?

They must be. Sanze is still here, and the obelisk is just another deadciv leftover.

“You’re quiet now,” says Schaffa after a while, patting her hands on the pommel to bring her out of her reverie. His hand is more than twice the size of hers, warm and comforting in its hugeness. “Still thinking about the story?”

She has been trying not to, but of course, she has. “A little.”

“You don’t like that Misalem is the villain of the tale. That
you are like Misalem: a potential threat, without a Shemshena to control you.” He says this matter-of-factly, not as a question.

Damaya squirms. How does he always seem to know what she’s thinking? “I don’t want to be a threat,” she says in a small voice. Then, greatly daring, she adds, “But I don’t want to be… controlled… either. I want to be—” She gropes for the words, then remembers something her brother once told her about what it meant to grow up. “
Responsible
. For myself.”

“An admirable wish,” Schaffa says. “But the plain fact of the matter, Damaya, is that you
cannot
control yourself. It isn’t your nature. You are lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. You’re fire—a warm light on a cold dark night to be sure, but also a conflagration that can destroy everything in its path—”

“I won’t destroy anybody! I’m not bad like that!” Suddenly it’s too much. Damaya tries to turn to look at him, though this overbalances her and makes her slip on the saddle. Schaffa immediately pushes her back to face forward, with a firm gesture that says without words,
sit properly
. Damaya does so, gripping the pommel harder in her frustration. And then, because she is tired and angry and her butt hurts from three days on horseback, and because her whole life has gone
wrong
and it hits her all at once that she will never again be normal, she says more than she means to. “And anyway, I don’t need you to control me. I can control myself!”

Schaffa reins the horse to a snorting halt.

Damaya tenses in dread. She’s smarted off to him. Her mother always whopped her in the head when she did that back home. Will Schaffa whop her now? But Schaffa sounds as pleasant as usual as he says, “Can you really?”

“What?”

“Control yourself. It’s an important question. The
most
important, really. Can you?”

In a small voice, Damaya says, “I… I don’t…”

Schaffa puts a hand on hers, where they rest atop the saddle-pommel. Thinking that he means to swing down from the saddle, she starts to let go so he can get a grip. He squeezes her right hand to hold it in place, though he lets the left one go. “How did they discover you?”

She knows, without having to ask, what he means. “In creche,” she says in a small voice. “At lunch. I was… A boy pushed me.”

“Did it hurt? Were you afraid, or angry?”

She tries to remember. It feels so long ago, that day in the yard. “Angry.” But that had not been all, had it? Zab was bigger than her. He was always
after
her. And it had hurt, just a little, when he’d pushed her. “Afraid.”

“Yes. It is a thing of instinct, orogeny, born of the need to survive mortal threat. That’s the danger. Fear of a bully, fear of a volcano; the power within you does not distinguish. It does not recognize
degree
.”

As Schaffa speaks, his hand on hers has grown heavier, tighter.

“Your power acts to protect you in the same way no matter how powerful, or minor, the perceived threat. You should know, Damaya, how lucky you are: It’s common for an orogene to discover themselves by killing a family member or friend. The people we love are the ones who hurt us the most, after all.”

He’s upset, she thinks at first. Maybe he’s thinking of something terrible—whatever it is that makes him thrash and groan
in the night. Did someone kill a family member or best friend of his? Is that why his hand presses down on hers so hard? “Sch-Schaffa,” she says, suddenly afraid. She does not know why.

“Shhh,” he says, and adjusts his fingers, aligning them carefully with her own. Then he bears down harder, so that the weight of his hand presses on the bones of her palm. He does this deliberately.

“Schaffa!” It hurts. He
knows
it hurts. But he does not stop.

“Now, now—calm down, little one. There, there.” When Damaya whimpers and tries to pull away—it
hurts,
the steady grind of his hand, the unyielding cold metal of the pommel, her own bones where they crush her flesh—Schaffa sighs and folds his free arm around her waist. “Be still, and be brave. I’m going to break your hand now.”

“Wha—”

Schaffa does something that causes his thighs to tighten with effort and his chest to bump her forward, but she barely notices these things. All her awareness has focused on her hand, and his hand, and the horrid wet
pop
and jostle of things that have never moved before, the pain of which is sharp and immediate and so powerful that she
screams
. She scrabbles at his hand with her free one, desperate and thoughtless, clawing. He yanks her free hand away and presses it against her thigh so that she claws only at herself.

And through the pain, she becomes suddenly aware of the cold, reassuring peace of the stone beneath the horse’s feet.

The pressure eases. Schaffa lifts her broken hand, adjusting his grip so that she can see the damage. She keeps screaming, mostly from the sheer horror of seeing
her hand
bent in a way it
should not be, the skin tenting and purpled in three places like another set of knuckles, the fingers already stiffening in spasm.

The stone beckons. Deep within it there is warmth and power that can make her forget pain. She almost reaches for that promise of relief. And then she hesitates.

Can you control yourself?

“You could kill me,” Schaffa says into her ear, and despite everything she falls silent to hear him. “Reach for the fire within the earth, or suck the strength from everything around you. I sit within your torus.” This has no meaning for her. “This is a bad place for orogeny, given that you have no training—one mistake and you’ll shift the fault beneath us, and trigger quite the shake. That might kill you, too. But if you manage to survive, you’ll be free. Find some comm somewhere and beg your way in, or join a pack of commless and get along as best you can. You can hide what you are, if you’re clever. For a while. It never lasts, and it will be an illusion, but for a time you can feel normal. I know you want that more than anything.”

Damaya barely hears it. The pain throbs throughout her hand, her arm, her teeth, obliterating any fine sensation. When he stops speaking she makes a sound and tries again to pull away. His fingers tighten warningly, and she stills at once.

“Very good,” he says. “You’ve controlled yourself through pain. Most young orogenes can’t do that without training. Now comes the real test.” He adjusts his grip, big hand enveloping her smaller one. Damaya cringes, but this is gentle. For now. “Your hand is broken in at least three places, I would guess. If it’s splinted, and if you take care, it can probably heal with no permanent damage. If I crush it, however—”

She cannot breathe. The fear has filled her lungs. She lets out the last of the air in her throat and manages to shape it round a word. “No!”

“
Never say no to me
,” he says. The words are hot against her skin. He has bent to murmur them into her ear. “Orogenes have no right to say no. I am your Guardian. I will break every bone in your hand, every bone in your
body,
if I deem it necessary to make the world safe from you.”

He wouldn’t crush her hand. Why? He wouldn’t. While she trembles in silence, Schaffa brushes his thumb over the swollen knots that have begun to form on the back of her hand. There is something
contemplative
about this gesture, something
curious
. Damaya can’t watch. She closes her eyes, feeling tears run freely from her lashes. She’s queasy, cold. The sound of her own blood pounds in her ears.

“Wh-why?” Her voice is hitchy. It takes effort to draw breath. It seems impossible that this is happening, on a road in the middle of nowhere, on a sunny, quiet afternoon. She doesn’t understand. Her family has shown her that love is a lie. It isn’t stone-solid; instead it bends and crumbles away, weak as rusty metal. But she had thought that Schaffa
liked
her.