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So you say, with your back to him: “What did they call it?”

“Hn?”

“The obelisk-builders. You said they had a word for the stuff in the obelisks.” The silvery stuff thrumming between the cells of Alabaster’s body, concentrating and compacting in the solidifying stone of him. “The stuff of orogeny. What was their word, since we don’t have one anymore?”

“Oh.” He shifts, perhaps readying himself for the bedpan. “The word doesn’t matter, Essun. Make one up if you like. You just need to know the stuff exists.”

“I want to know what they called it.” It’s a small piece of the mystery he’s trying to shove down your throat. You want to wrap your fingers around it, control the ingestion, at least taste some of it along the way. And, too, the people who made the obelisks were powerful. Foolish, maybe, and clearly awful for inflicting the Seasons upon their descendants, if they are indeed the ones who did so. But powerful. Maybe knowing the name will give you power somehow.

He starts to shake his head, winces as this causes him pain somewhere, sighs instead. “They called it magic.”

It’s meaningless. Just a word. But maybe you can give it meaning somehow. “Magic,” you repeat, memorizing. Then you nod farewell, and leave without looking back.

* * *

The stone eaters knew I was there. I’m certain of it. They just didn’t care.

I observed them for hours as they stood motionless, voices echoing out of nowhere. The language they spoke to each other was… strange. Arctic, perhaps? One of the Coastals? I’ve never heard the like. Regardless, after some ten hours I will admit that I fell asleep. I woke to the sound of a great crash and crunch, so loud that I thought the Shattering itself was upon me. When I dared to lift my eyes, one of the stone eaters was scattered chunks upon the ground. The other stood as before, save for one change, directed right at me: a bright, glittering smile.

—Memoir of Ouse Innovator (nat Strongback) Ticastries, amateur geomest. Not endorsed by the Fifth University.

7

Nassun finds the moon

THE JOURNEY SOUTH FOR NASSUN and her father is long and fraught. They make most of the journey with the horse cart, which means that they travel faster than Essun, who is on foot and behind them to an increasing degree. Jija offers rides in exchange for food or supplies; this helps them move faster still because they don’t need to stop and trade often. Because of this pace, they stay ahead of the worst of the changing climate, the ashfall, the carnivorous kirkhusa and the boilbugs and all the worse things brewing in the lands behind them. They’re going so quickly when they pass through Castrima-over that Nassun barely feels Ykka’s summons—and when she does it is in her dreams, drawing her down and down into the warm earth amid white crystalline light. But she dreams this ten miles past Castrima, since Jija thought they could go a little farther that day before camping, and thus they do not fall prey to the honeypot of invitingly whole, empty buildings.

When they do have to stop at comms, some are only in lockdown and haven’t yet declared Seasonal Law. Hoping the worst of it won’t come so far south, probably; it’s rare for Seasons to affect the whole continent at once. Nassun never speaks of what she is to strangers, but if she could, she would tell them that there is nowhere to hide from this Season. Some parts of the Stillness will suffer the full effects later than others, but eventually it will be bad everywhere.

Some of the comms they stop at invite them to stay. Jija’s older, but still hale and strong, and his knapping skills and Resistant use-caste make him valuable. Nassun’s young enough to be trained in nearly any needed skill, and she’s visibly healthy and tall for her age, already showing signs of growing into her mother’s strong Midlatter frame. There are a few places they stop, strong comms with deep stores and friendly people, where she wishes they could stay. Jija always refuses, though. He’s got some destination in mind.

A few of the comms they pass try to kill them. There’s no logic to this, since one man and a little girl cannot possibly have enough valuables between them to be worth murdering, but there isn’t much logic in a Season. They run from some. Jija takes a longknife to a man’s head to get them out of a comm that has let them through the gates and then tried to close them in. They lose the horses and the cart, which is probably what the comm wanted, but Jija and Nassun escape, which is what matters most. It’s on foot from there, and slower, but they are alive.

At another comm, whose people don’t even bother to warn them before aiming crossbows, it is Nassun who saves them. She does this by wrapping her arms around her father and setting her teeth in the earth and dragging every iota of life and heat and movement out of the whole comm until it is a gleaming frosted confection of ice-slivered slate walls and still, solid bodies.

(She will never do this again. The way Jija looks at her afterward.)

They stay in the dead comm for a few days, resting in empty houses and replenishing their supplies. No one bothers this comm while they are there because Nassun keeps the walls iced as a clear danger here warn-off. They cannot stay long, of course. Eventually the other comms in the area will band together and come to kill the rogga whom they will assume threatens them all. A few days of warm water and fresh food—Jija cooks one of the comm’s frozen chickens for a real treat—and they move on. Before the bodies thaw and start stinking, see.

And so it goes: Bandits and scammers and a near-fatal gas waft and a tree that fires wooden spikes when warm bodies are in proximity; they survive it all. Nassun has a growth spurt, even though she is always hungry and rarely full. By the time they finally approach the place that Jija has heard about, she is three inches taller, and a year has passed.

They are out of the Somidlats at last, edging into the Antarctics. Nassun has begun to suspect that Jija means to take her all the way to Nife, one of the few cities in the Antarctic region, near which a satellite Fulcrum is said to be located. But he turns them off the Pellestane-Nife Imperial Road and they begin going eastward, stopping periodically so that Jija can consult with people along the way and see if he’s going in the right direction. It is after one of these conversations, conducted always in whispers and always after Jija thinks Nassun has gone to sleep, and only with people whom Jija considers level-headed after a few hours of chitchat and shared food, that Nassun finally learns where they are going. “Tell me,” she hears Jija whisper to a woman who was out scouting for a local comm, after they have shared an evening meal of meat she caught around a fire Jija built, “have you ever heard of the Moon?

The question holds no meaning for Nassun; neither does the word at the end of it. But the woman inhales. She directs Jija to shift over to the southeast-running regional road instead of the Imperial Road, and then to divert due south at the turning of a river they’ll soon reach. Thereafter Nassun pretends to be asleep, because she can feel the woman’s narrow-eyed gaze on her. Eventually, though, Jija shyly offers to help warm her bedroll. Then Nassun has to listen while her father works to make the woman moan and gasp in repayment for the meat—and to make her forget that Nassun is there. In the morning they move on before the woman wakes so that she will not follow and try to hurt Nassun.

Days later they divert at the river, heading into the woods along a tree-shadowed path that is barely more than a tamped-down paler ribbon amid the forest scrub and undergrowth. The sky has not been completely shadowed for long in this part of the world; most of the trees still have leaves, and Nassun can even hear animals leaping about and darting away as they pass. Occasionally birds twitter or croon. There are no other people on this path, though obviously some have passed recently or the path would be even more overgrown than it is. The Antarctics are a stark, sparsely populated part of the world, she remembers reading in the textbooks of another life. Few comms, fewer Imperial roads, winters that are harsh even outside a Season. The quartents here take weeks to travel across. Swaths of the Antarctics are tundra, and the southernmost tip of the continent is said to become solid ice, which extends far into the sea. She’s read that the night sky, if they could see it through the clouds, is sometimes filled with strange dancing colored lights.