The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  Schaffa pushes himself up on one elbow. Something about the boy… perhaps. “Hello.”

  The boy looks so much like Litz that he needs only a few decades of weathering and less hair to be the old man’s twin. But there is a desperate hope in the boy’s eyes that would be completely out of place in Litz’s. Litz knows his place in the world. This boy, who is maybe eleven or twelve, old enough to be confirmed by his comm… something has unmoored him, and Schaffa thinks he knows what. “This is yours,” the boy says, holding up the garment.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a Guardian?”

  Fleeting almost-memory. “What is that?”

  The boy looks as confused as Schaffa feels. He takes a step closer to the bed, and stops. (Come closer. Closer.) “They said you didn’t remember things. You’re lucky to be alive.” The boy licks his lips, uncertain. “Guardians… guard.”

  “Guard what?”

  Incredulity washes the fear from the boy. He steps closer still. “Orogenes. I mean… you guard people from them. So they don’t hurt anyone. And you guard them from people, too. That’s what the stories say.”

  Schaffa pushes himself to sit up, letting his legs dangle over the edge of the bed. The pain of his injuries is nearly gone, his flesh repaired at a faster rate than normal by the angry power within him. He feels well, in fact, except for one thing.

  “Guard orogenes,” he says thoughtfully. “Do I?”

  The boy laughs a little, though his smile fades quickly. He’s very afraid, for some reason, though not of Schaffa. “People kill orogenes,” the boy says softly. “When they find them. Unless they’re with a Guardian.”

  “Do they?” It seems uncivilized of them. But then he remembers the ridge of spiky stones across the ocean, and his utter conviction that it was the work of an orogene. That’s why they have to be drowned as babes, Litz had said.

  Missed one, Schaffa thinks, then has to fight hysterical laughter.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” the boy is saying. “I will, one day, without… without training. I almost did when that volcano was doing things. It was so hard not to.”

  “If you had, it would have killed you and possibly many other people,” Schaffa says. Then he blinks. How does he know that? “A hot spot is far too volatile for you to quell safely.”

  The boy’s eyes alight. “You do know.” He comes forward, sinks to a crouch beside Schaffa’s knee. He whispers, “Please help me. I think my mother… she saw me, when the volcano… I tried to act like normal and I couldn’t. I think she knows. If she tells my grandfather…” He inhales suddenly, sharply, as if he is gasping for air. He’s holding back a sob, but the movement looks the same.

  Schaffa knows how it feels to drown. He reaches out and strokes the boy’s dense cloud of hair, crown to nape, and lets his fingers linger at the nape.

  “There is something I have to do,” Schaffa says, because there is. The anger and whispers within him have a purpose, after all, and this has become his purpose. Gather them, train them, make them the weapons they are meant to be. “If I take you with me, we must travel far from here. You’ll never see your family again.”

  The boy looks away, his expression turning bitter. “They’d kill me if they knew.”

  “Yes.” Schaffa presses, very gently, and draws the first measure of—something—from the boy. What? He cannot remember what it is called. Perhaps it has no name. All that matters is that it exists, and he needs it. With it, he knows somehow, he can hold on more tightly to the tattered remnants of who he is. (Was.) So he takes, and the first draught of it is like a sudden, sweet wash of fresh water amid gallons of burning salt. He yearns to drink it all, reaches for the rest as thirstily as he sought Litz’s canteen, though he forces himself to let go for the same reason. He can endure on what he has now, and if he is patient, the boy will have more for him later.

  Yes. His thoughts are clearer now. Easier to think around the whispers. He needs this boy, and others like him. He must go forth and find them, and with their help, he can make it to—

  —to—

  —well. Not everything is clearer. Some things will never come back. He’ll make do.

  The boy is searching his face. While Schaffa has been trying to put together the fragments of his identity, the boy has been wrestling with his future. They are made for each other. “I’ll go with you,” the boy says, having apparently spent the past minute thinking he has a choice. “Anywhere. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to die.”

  For the first time since a moment on a ship a few days before, when he was a different person, Schaffa smiles. He strokes the boy’s head again. “You have a good soul. I’ll help you all I can.” The boy’s tension dissolves at once; tears wet his eyes. “Go and gather some things to travel. I’ll speak with your parents.”

  These words fall from his mouth naturally, easily. He has said them before, though he doesn’t remember when. He remembers, though, that sometimes things don’t go as well as he says they will.

  The boy whispers his thanks, grabs Schaffa’s knee and tries to squeeze that thanks into him, then trots away. Schaffa pushes himself slowly to his feet. The boy has left the faded uniform behind, so Schaffa pulls this on again, his fingers remembering how the seams should lie. There should be a cloak, too, but that is gone. He can’t remember where. When he steps forward, a mirror on the side of the room catches his eye, and he stops. Shivers, not in pleasure this time.

  It is wrong. It is so wrong. His hair hangs lank and dry after the sun and salt’s ravaging; it should be black and glossy, and instead it is dull and wispy, burnt. The uniform hangs off him, for he has spent some of the substance of his own body as fuel in the push to reach shore. The uniform’s colors are also wrong and there is no reassurance in it of who he was, who he should be. And his eyes—

  Evil Earth, he thinks, staring at the icy near-white of them. He did not know his eyes looked like this.

  There is a creak on the floorboards near the door, and his alien eyes shift to one side. The boy’s mother stands there, blinking in the light of the lantern she holds. “Schaffa,” she says. “I thought I heard you up. And Eitz?”

  That must be the boy’s name. “He came to bring me these.” Schaffa touches his clothing.

  The woman comes into the room. “Huh,” she says. “Now that it’s all wrung out and dry, it looks like a uniform.”

  Schaffa nods. “I’ve learned something new of myself. I’m a Guardian.”

  Her eyes widen. “Truly?” There’s suspicion in her gaze. “And Eitz has been bothering you.”

  “It was no bother.” Schaffa smiles, to reassure her. For some reason, the woman’s frown twitches and deepens. Ah, well; he has forgotten how to charm people, too. He turns and goes over to her, and she falls back a step at his approach. He stops, amused by her fear. “He, too, has learned something of himself. I’ll be taking him away now.”

  The woman’s eyes widen. Her mouth works in silence for a moment, then she sets her jaw. “I knew it.”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t want to.” She swallows, her hand tightening; the little lantern flame wavers with whatever emotion flashes through her. “Don’t take him. Please.”

  Schaffa tilts his head. “Why not?”

  “It would kill his father.”

  “Not his grandfather?” Schaffa takes a step closer. (Closer.) “Not his uncles and aunts and cousins? Not you?”

  She twitches again. “I… don’t know how I feel, right now.” She shakes her head.

  “Poor, poor thing,” Schaffa says softly. This compassion is automatic, too. He feels the sorrow deeply. “But will you protect him from them, if I do not take him?”

  “What?” She looks at Schaffa in surprise and alarm. Can this truly have never occurred to her? Apparently not. “Protect… him?” That she asks this, Schaffa understands, is the proof that she is inadequate to the task.

  So he sighs and reaches up, as if to put a hand on her sh
oulder, and shakes his head, as if to convey regret. She relaxes minutely and does not notice when his hand instead curves around her neck. His fingers settle into place and she stiffens at once. “Wh—” Then she falls down dead.

  Schaffa blinks as she falls to the floor. For a moment he is confused. Was that supposed to happen? And then—his own thoughts freshened further by the dollop of something that she has given him, such a tiny amount of it relative to what Eitz possessed—he understands. This thing is only safe to do with orogenes, who have more than enough to share. The woman must have been a still. But Schaffa feels better. In fact—

  Take more, whispers the rage at the back of his mind. Take the others. They threaten the boy, which threatens you.

  Yes. That seems wise.

  So Schaffa rises and moves through the quiet, dark house, touching each member of Eitz’s family and devouring a piece of them. Most of them do not wake. The stupid son gives more than the rest; almost an orogene. (Almost a Guardian.) Litz gives the least, perhaps because he is old—or perhaps because he is awake and fighting against the hand Schaffa has clamped over his mouth and nose. He is trying to stab Schaffa with a fishknife pulled from under his pillow. What a pity that he must suffer such fear! Schaffa twists Litz’s head around sharply to get at the nape of his neck. There’s a snapping sound as he does this, which he doesn’t even notice until the flow of something out of Litz goes soft and dead and useless. Ah, yes, belatedly Schaffa remembers that it does not work on the dead. He’ll be more careful in the future.

  But it is so much better, now that the taut ache inside him has gone still. He feels… not whole. Never that, again. But when there is so much of another presence inside him, even a little regained ground is a blessing.

  “I am Schaffa Guardian… Warrant?” he murmurs, blinking as the last part finally comes to him. What comm is Warrant? He cannot remember. He is glad to have the name regardless. “I have done only what was necessary. Only what is best for the world.”

  The words feel right. Yes. He has needed the sense of purpose, which now sits like lead at the back of his brain; amazing that he did not have it before. Now, though? “Now I have work to do.”

  Eitz finds him in the living room. The boy is breathless, excited, carrying a small satchel. “I heard you and Mama talking. Did you… tell her?”

  Schaffa crouches to be on eye level with him, taking him by the shoulders. “Yes. She said she didn’t know how she felt, and then she said nothing more.”

  Eitz’s face crumples. He glances toward the corridor that leads to the adults’ rooms in the house. Everyone down that corridor is dead. The doors are closed and quiet. Schaffa has left Eitz’s siblings and cousins alive, however, because he is not a complete monster.

  “Can I say goodbye to her?” Eitz asks softly.

  “I think that would be dangerous,” Schaffa says. He means it. He doesn’t want to have to kill the boy yet. “These things are best done cleanly. Come; you have me now, and I will never leave you.”

  The boy blinks at this and straightens a little, then nods shakily. He’s old for such words to have the power on him that they do. They work, Schaffa suspects, because Eitz has spent the past few months living in terror of his family. It is nothing to play on such a lonely, weary state of mind. It isn’t even a lie.

  They leave the half-dead house behind. Schaffa knows that he should take the boy… somewhere. Somewhere with obsidian walls and gilded bars, a place that will die in a cataclysm of fire in ten years, so perhaps it is good that he is too damaged to remember this location. In any case the angry whispers have begun steering him in a different direction. Somewhere south. Where he has work to do.

  He puts his hand on Eitz’s shoulder to comfort the boy, or perhaps to comfort himself. Together they walk into the predawn dark.

  Don’t be fooled. The Guardians are much, much older than Old Sanze, and they do not work for us.

  —Last recorded words of Emperor Mutshatee, prior to his execution

  4

  you are challenged

  YOU’RE TIRED AFTER CALLING THE OBELISK. When you get back to your room and stretch out for half a moment on the bare pallet that came with the apartment, you fall asleep so fast you don’t even realize you’re doing it. In the dead of the night—or so your body clock says, since the glowing walls haven’t changed—your eyes blink open and it’s like only a moment has passed. But Hoa is curled beside you, apparently actually sleeping for once, and you can hear Tonkee snoring faintly in the room next door, and you feel much better than you did, if hungry. Well rested, for perhaps the first time in weeks.

  The hunger spurs you up and into the apartment’s living room. There’s a small hempen satchel on the table, which Tonkee must’ve acquired, partially open to reveal mushrooms and a small pile of dried beans and other cachefood. That’s right: As accepted members of Castrima, you now get a share of the comm’s stores. None of it is the kind of food you can just eat for a snack, except maybe the mushrooms, but you’ve never seen those before, and some varieties of mushrooms need to be cooked to be edible. You’re tempted, but… is Castrima the sort of comm that would give dangerous foodstuffs to newcomers without warning them?

  Hmm. Right. You fetch your runny-sack, rummage in it for the remaining provisions you brought to Castrima with you, and make a meal out of dried oranges, cachebread crusts, and a lump of bad-tasting jerky that you traded for at the last comm you passed, and which you suspect is hydro-pipe rat meat. Food is that which nourishes, the lorists say.

  You’ve just choked the jerky down, and are sitting there sleepily pondering how merely summoning an obelisk took so much out of you—as if anything regarding the obelisks can be described with the adjective merely—when you become aware of a high, rhythmic scraping sound outside. You dismiss it immediately. Nothing about this comm makes sense; it will probably take you weeks if not months to get used to its peculiar sounds. (Months. Are you giving up on Nassun so easily?) So you ignore the sound even as it grows louder and closer, and you keep yawning, and you’re about to get up and head back to bed when it belatedly dawns on you that what you’re hearing is screaming.

  Frowning, you go to the door of the apartment, pulling open the thin curtain. You’re not particularly concerned; your sessapinae haven’t even twitched, and anyway if there’s ever a shake down here in Castrima-under, everyone’s dead no matter how quickly they leave their homes. Outside there are lots of people up and about. A woman passes right by your door, carrying a big basket of the same mushrooms you almost ate; she nods at you distractedly as you come out, then almost loses her load as she tries to turn toward the noise and nearly bumps into a man pushing a covered, wheeled bin that stinks to the sky and is probably from the latrines. In a comm with no functional day-night cycle, Castrima effectively never sleeps, and you know they have six work shifts instead of the usual three because you’ve been put on one. It won’t start till midday—or twelvebell, as the Castrima folk say—when you’re supposed to look for some woman named Artith near the forge.

  And none of this is relevant because through the scatter and jut of Castrima’s crystals, you can see a small cluster of people coming into the big rectangular tunnel-mouth that serves as the entrance to the geode. They’re running, and they’re carrying another person, who’s doing all the screaming.

  Even then, you’re tempted to ignore it and go back to sleep. It’s a Season. People die; there’s nothing you can do about it. These aren’t even your people. There’s no reason for you to care.

  Then someone shouts, “Lerna!” And the tone of it is so panicked that you twitch. You can see the squat gray crystal that houses Lerna’s apartment from your balcony, three crystals away and a little below your own. His door-curtain jerks open and he hurries out, shrugging on a shirt as he runs down the nearest set of steps. Heading for the infirmary, where the cluster of running folk seems to be going as well.

  For reasons that you cannot name, you glance back at your own apartment doo
rway. Tonkee, who sleeps like petrified wood, hasn’t come out—but Hoa is there, statue-still and watching you. Something about his expression makes you frown. He doesn’t seem to be able to do the emotionless stoneface of his kin, maybe because he doesn’t have a face of actual stone. Regardless, the first thing you interpret of his expression is… pity.

  You’re out of the apartment and running for the ground level in the next breath, almost before you’ve thought about it. (You think as you run: The pity of a disguised stone eater has galvanized you as the screams of a fellow human being haven’t. Such a monster you are.) Castrima is as frustratingly confusing as always, but this time you’re aided by the fact that other people have started running along the bridges and walkways in the direction of the trouble, so you can just go with the flow.

  By the time you get there, a small crowd has formed around the infirmary, most of the people milling about in curiosity or concern or anxiety. Lerna and the cluster of people carrying their injured companion have gone inside, and the awful screech is obvious now for what it is: the throat-tearing howl of someone in appalling pain, pain beyond bearing, who nevertheless is somehow forced to bear it.

  It is not an intentional thing that you start pushing forward to get inside. You know nothing about giving medical care… but you do know pain. To your surprise, though, people glance at you in annoyance—then blink and shift aside. You notice those who look blank being pulled aside for quick whispers by those whose eyes have widened. Oh-ho. Castrima’s been talking about you.

  Then you’re inside the infirmary, and you nearly get knocked down by a Sanzed woman running past with some sort of syringe in her hands. Can’t be safe to do that. You follow her over to an infirmary bed where six people hold down the person doing the screaming. You get a look at the person’s face when one of them shifts aside: no one you know. Just another Midlatter man, who has clearly been topside to judge by the gray layer of ash on his skin and clothing and hair. The woman with the syringe shoulders aside someone else and ostensibly administers the syringe’s contents. A moment later, the man shudders all over, and his mouth begins to close. His scream dies off, slowly, slowly. Slowly. He jerks once, mightily; his holders all shift with the strength of his effort. Then at last, mercifully, he subsides into unconsciousness.