There’s no solution to this problem. Even orogenes can only do so much in the martial sense, here in the shadow of the Rifting where orogeny is dangerous. Danel’s army was Rennanis’s surplus population, and it’s currently feeding a boilbug boom down in the southeastern Midlats – not that you’d want them here, anyway, treating you like the interlopers you are. Ykka orders the Breeders to ramp up to replacement-level production, but even if they recruit every healthy comm member to assist, Castrima won’t have enough people to secure the comm for generations. Nothing to do but at least guard the portion of the city that the comm now occupies, as best you can.
“And if another army comes along,” you catch Ykka muttering, “we’ll just invite them in and assign them each a room. That ought to settle it.”
The third catch – and the biggest one, existentially if not logistically – is this: Castrima must live amid the corpses of its conquered.
The statues are everywhere. Standing in apartment kitchens washing dishes. Lying in beds that have sagged or broken beneath their stone weight. Walking up the parapet steps to take over from other statues on guard duty. Sitting in communal kitchens sipping tea long since dried to dregs. They are beautiful in their way, with wild smoky-quartz manes of hair and smooth jasper skin and clothes of tourmaline or turquoise or garnet or citrine. They wear expressions that are smiles or eye rolls or yawns of boredom – because the shockwave of Obelisk Gate power that transformed them was fast, mercifully. They didn’t even have time to be afraid.
The first day, everyone edges around the statues. Tries not to sit in their line of sight. To do anything else would be… disrespectful. And yet. Castrima has survived both a war that these people initiated, and life as that war’s refugees. It would be equally disrespectful of Castrima’s dead to let guilt eclipse this truth. So after a day or two, people start to simply… accept the statues. Can’t do anything else, really.
Something about it bothers you, though.
You find yourself wandering one night. There’s a yellow-X building that’s not too far from the complex, and it’s beautiful, with a facade covered in etched vinework and floral motifs, some glimmering with peeling gold foil. The foil catches the light and flickers a little as you move, its angles of reflection shifting to create the overall illusion of a building covered in living, moving greenery. It’s an older building than most of those in Rennanis. You like it, though you’re not sure why. You go up to the roof, finding only the usual apartments inhabited by statues along the way. The door here is unlocked and stands open; maybe someone was on the roof when the Rifting struck. You check to make sure there’s a lightning rod in place before you step through the door, of course; this is one of the taller buildings of the city, though it’s only six or seven stories altogether. (Only, sneers Syenite. Only? thinks Damaya, in wonder. Yes, only, you snap at both, to shut them up.) There’s not only a rod, there’s an empty water tower, so as long as you don’t go leaning on any metal surfaces or linger in the rod’s immediate vicinity, you probably won’t die. Probably.
And here, poised to face the Rifting cloudwall as if he were built up here, gazing north since the building’s floral motifs were new, Hoa awaits.
“There aren’t as many statues here as there should be,” you say as you stop beside him.
You can’t help following Hoa’s gaze. From here, you still can’t see the Rifting itself; looks like there’s a dead rainforest and some hilly ridges between the city and the monster. The Wall is bad enough, however.
And maybe one existential horror is easier to face than another, but you remember using the Obelisk Gate on these people, twisting the magic between their cells and transmuting the infinitesimal parts of them from carbon to silicate. Danel told you how crowded Rennanis was – so much that it had to send out a conquering army to survive. Now, however, the city is not crowded with statues. There are signs that it was, once: statues deep in conversation with partners that seem to be missing; only two people sitting at a table set for six. In one of the bigger green-X buildings there’s a statue that is lying naked in bed, mouth open and penis permanently stiff and hips thrusting up, hands positioned in just the right places to grip someone’s legs. He’s alone, though. Someone’s horrible, morbid joke.
“My kind are opportunistic feeders,” Hoa says.
Yeah, that’s exactly what you were afraid he would say.
“And apparently very damned hungry? There were a lot of people here. Most of them must be missing.”
“We, too, put aside surplus resources for later, Essun.”
You rub your face with your one remaining hand, trying and failing to not visualize a gigantic stone eater larder somewhere, now stuffed full of brightly colored statues. “Evil Earth. Why do you bother with me, then? I’m not as – easy a meal as those.”
“Lesser members of my kind need to strengthen themselves. I don’t.” There is a very slight shift in the inflection of Hoa’s voice. By this point you know him; that was contempt. He’s a proud creature (even he will admit). “They are poorly made, weak, little better than beasts. We were so lonely in those early years, and at first we had no idea what we were doing. The hungry ones are the result of our fumbling.”
You waver, because you don’t really want to know… but you haven’t been a coward for some years now. So you steel yourself and turn to him and then say, “You’re making another one now. Aren’t you? From – from me. If it’s not about food for you, then it’s… reproduction.” Horrifying reproduction, if it is dependent on the death-by-petrification of a human being. And there must be more to it than just turning people to stone. You think about the kirkhusa at the roadhouse, and Jija, and the woman back in Castrima whom you killed. You think about how you hit her, smashed her with magic, for the not-crime of making you relive Uche’s murder. But Alabaster was not the same, in the end, as what you did to that woman. She was a shining, brightly colored collection of gemstones. He was an ugly lump of brown rock – and yet the brown rock was finely made, precisely crafted, careful, where the woman was a disorderly mess beneath her surface beauty.
Hoa is silent in answer to your question, which is an answer in itself. And then you finally remember. Antimony, in the moments after you closed the Obelisk Gate, but before you teetered into magic-traumatized slumber. Beside her, another stone eater, strange in his whiteness, disturbing in his familiarity. Oh, Evil Earth, you don’t want to know, but – “Antimony used that…” Too-small lump of brown stone. “Used Alabaster. As raw material to – to, oh rust, to make another stone eater. And she made it look like him.” You hate Antimony all over again.
“He chose his own shape. We all do.”
This slaps your rage out of its spiral. Your stomach clenches, this time in something other than revulsion. “That – then —” You have to take a deep breath. “Then it’s him? Alabaster. He’s… he’s…” You can’t make yourself say the word.
Flick and Hoa faces you, expression compassionate, but somehow also warning. “The lattice doesn’t always form perfectly, Essun,” he says. The tone is gentle. “Even when it does, there is always… loss of data.”
You have no idea what this means and yet you’re shaking. Why? You know why. Your voice rises. “Hoa, if that’s Alabaster, if I can talk to him —”
“No.”
“Why the rust not?”
“Because it must be his choice, first.” Harder voice here. A reprimand. You flinch. “More importantly, because we are fragile at the beginning, like all new creatures. It takes centuries for us, the who of us, to… cool. Even the slightest of pressures – like you, demanding that he fit himself to your needs rather than his own – can damage the final shape of his personality.”
You take a step back, which surprises you because you hadn’t realized you were getting in his face. And then you sag. Alabaster is alive, but not. Is Stone Eater Alabaster even remotely the same as the flesh-and-blood man you knew? Does that even matter anymore, now that he has transformed so completely? “I’ve lost him again, then,” you murmur.