The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

© 2017 by N. K. Jemisin

Excerpt from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms © 2010 by N. K. Jemisin

Excerpt from Wake of Vultures © 2015 by Delores S. Dawson

Map © Tim Paul

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Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2017

First Edition: August 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jemisin, N. K., author.

Title: The stone sky / N.K. Jemisin.

Description: First Edition. | New York : Orbit, 2017. | Series: The broken earth ; book 3

Identifiers: LCCN 2017017064| 9780316229241 (paperback) | 9781478916291 (audio book downloadable) | 9780316229258 (ebook open)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3610.E46 S76 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017017064

s: 978-0-316-22924-1 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-22925-8 (ebook)

E3-20170628-JV-PC

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

MAP

PROLOGUE: ME, WHEN I WAS I

1: YOU, IN WAKING AND DREAMING

2: NASSUN FEELS LIKE BUSTING LOOSE

SYL ANAGIST: FIVE

3: YOU, IMBALANCED

4: NASSUN, WANDERING IN THE WILDERNESS

SYL ANAGIST: FOUR

5: YOU ARE REMEMBERED

6: NASSUN MAKES HER FATE

SYL ANAGIST: THREE

7: YOU’RE PLANNING AHEAD

8: NASSUN UNDERGROUND

SYL ANAGIST: TWO

9: THE DESERT, BRIEFLY, AND YOU

10: NASSUN, THROUGH THE FIRE

SYL ANAGIST: ONE

11: YOU’RE ALMOST HOME

12: NASSUN, NOT ALONE

SYL ANAGIST: ZERO

13: NASSUN AND ESSUN, ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE WORLD

14: I, AT THE END OF DAYS

CODA: ME, AND YOU

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX 1: A CATALOG OF FIFTH SEASONS THAT HAVE BEEN RECORDED PRIOR TO AND SINCE THE FOUNDING OF THE SANZED EQUATORIAL AFFILIATION, FROM MOST RECENT TO OLDEST

APPENDIX 2: A GLOSSARY OF TERMS COMMONLY USED IN ALL QUARTENTS OF THE STILLNESS

EXTRAS MEET THE AUTHOR

A PREVIEW OF THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS

A PREVIEW OF WAKE OF VULTURES

BY N. K. JEMISIN

PRAISE FOR THE OBELISK GATE

ORBIT NEWSLETTER

To those who’ve survived: Breathe. That’s it. Once more. Good. You’re good. Even if you’re not, you’re alive. That is a victory.

prologue

me, when I was I

TIME GROWS SHORT, MY LOVE. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.

It’s strange, though. My memories are like insects fossilized in amber. They are rarely intact, these frozen, long-lost lives. Usually there’s just a leg, some wing-scales, a bit of lower thorax—a whole that can only be inferred from fragments, and everything blurred together through jagged, dirty cracks. When I narrow my gaze and squint into memory, I see faces and events that should hold meaning for me, and they do, but … they don’t. The person who witnessed these things firsthand is me, and yet not.

In those memories I was someone else, just as the Stillness was someworld else. Then, and now. You, and you.

Then. This land, then, was three lands—though these are in virtually the same position as what will someday be called the Stillness. Repeated Seasons will eventually create more ice at the poles, sinking the sea and making your “Arctics” and “Antarctics” larger and colder. Then, though—

—now, it feels of now as I recall myself of then, this is what I mean when I say that it is strange—

Now, in this time before the Stillness, the far north and south are decent farmland. What you think of as the Western Coastals is mostly wetland and rainforest; those will die out in the next millennium. Some of the Nomidlats doesn’t yet exist, and will be created by volcanic effusion over several thousand years of eruptive pulses. The land that becomes Palela, your hometown? Doesn’t exist. Not so much change, all things considered, but then now is nothing ago, tectonically speaking. When we say that “the world has ended,” remember—it is usually

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