The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,21
throbs of grief and guilt. “I have to get her away from him. He killed my son!”
“He hasn’t killed your daughter yet. He’s had, what, twenty months? Twenty-one? That means something.” Tonkee spies Lerna coming back toward you through the crowd, and sighs. “There are just things you ought to think about, is all I’m saying. And I can’t even believe I’m saying it. She’s another obelisk-user, and I can’t even go investigate it.” Tonkee utters a frustrated grumbly sound. “I hate this damn Season. I have to be so rusting practical now.”
You’re surprised into a chuckle, but it’s weak. The questions Tonkee’s raised are good ones, of course, and some of them you can’t answer. You think about them for a long time that night, and in the days thereafter.
Rennanis is nearly into the Western Coastals, just past the Merz Desert. Castrima is going to have to go through the desert to get there, because skirting around it would drastically increase the length of your journey—a difference of months versus years. But you’re making good time through the central Somidlats, where the roads are decently passable and you haven’t been bothered by many raiders or significant wildlife. The Hunters have been able to find a lot of forage to supplement the comm’s stores, including a little more game than before. Unsurprising, since they’re no longer competing against hordes of insects. It’s not enough—small voles and birds just aren’t going to hold a comm of a thousand-plus people for long. But it’s better than nothing.
When you start noticing changes in the land that presage desert—thinning of the skeletal forest, flattening of the topography, a gradual drawing away of the water table amid the strata—you decide that it’s time to finally try to talk to Ykka.
By now you’ve entered a stone forest: a place of tall, sharp-edged black spires that claw irregularly at the sky above and around you as the group edges through its depths. There aren’t many of these in the world. Most get shattered by shakes, or—back when there was a Fulcrum—deliberately destroyed by Fulcrum blackjackets at local comms’ commissioned request. No comm lives in a stone forest, see, and no well-run comm wants one nearby. Apart from stone forests’ tendency to collapse and crush everything within, they tend to be riddled with wet caves and other water-hewn formations that make marvelous homes for dangerous flora and fauna. Or people.
The road runs straight through this stone forest, which is bullshit. That is to say, no one in their right mind would have built a road through a place like this. If a quartent governor had proposed using people’s taxes on this dangerous bit of bandit-bait, that governor would’ve been replaced in the next election … or shanked in the night. So that’s your first clue that something’s off about the place. The second is that there’s not much vegetation in the forest. Not much anywhere this far into the Season, but also no sign that there was ever any vegetation here in the first place. That means this stone forest is recent—so recent that there’s been no time for wind or rain to erode the stone and permit plant growth. So recent that it didn’t exist before the Season.
Clue number three is what your own sessapinae tell you. Most stone forests are limestone, made by water erosion over hundreds of millions of years. This one is obsidian—volcanic glass. Its jagged spikes aren’t straight up and down, but more inwardly curved; there are even a few unbroken arcs stretching over the road. Impossible to see up close, but you can sess the overall pattern: The whole forest is a blossom of lava, solidified mid-blast. Not a line of the road has been knocked out of place by the tectonic explosion around it. Beautiful work, really.
Ykka’s in the middle of an argument with another comm member when you find her. She’s called for a halt about a hundred feet away from the forest, and people are milling about, looking confused about whether this is just a rest stop or whether they should be making camp since it’s relatively late in the day. The comm member is one you finally recognize as Esni Strongback Castrima, the use-caste’s spokesperson. She throws you an uneasy glance as you come to a halt beside them, but then you take off your goggles and mask, and her expression softens. She didn’t recognize you before because you’ve stuffed rags into the sleeve of your missing arm