But then, the lorists’ tales also say the obelisks are harmless.
“How do you know—” But then you stop, because the man has reached you, so you sit back against a nearby cot, digesting what you’ve heard while he spoon-feeds Alabaster. The stuff is watery mash of some kind, and not much of it. Alabaster sits there and opens his mouth for the feeding like a babe. His eyes stay on you throughout. It’s unnerving, and finally you have to look away. Some of the things that have changed between you, you cannot bear.
Finally the man is done, and with a flat look in your direction that nevertheless conveys his opinion that you should have been the one to administer the food, he leaves. But when you straighten and open your mouth to ask more questions, Alabaster says, “I’m probably going to need to use that bedpan soon. I can’t control my bowels very well anymore, but at least they’re still regular.” At the look on your face, he smiles with only a hint of bitterness. “I don’t want you to see that any more than you want to see it. So why don’t we just say you should come back later? Noon seems to work better for not interfering with any of my gross natural functions.”
That isn’t fair. Well. It is, and you deserve his censure, but it’s censure that should be shared. “Why did you do this to yourself?” You gesture at his arm, his ruined body. “I just…” Maybe you could take it better if you understood.
“The consequence of what I did at Yumenes.” He shook his head. “Something to remember, Syen, for when you make your own choices in the future: Some of them come with a terrible price. Although sometimes that price is worth paying.”
You can’t understand why he sees this, this horrible slow death, as a price worth paying for anything—let alone for what he got out of it, which was the destruction of the world. And you still don’t understand what any of it has to do with stone eaters or moons or obelisks or anything else.
“Wouldn’t it have been better,” you cannot help saying, “to just… live?” To have come back, you cannot say. To have made what little life he could with Syenite again, after Meov was gone but before she found Tirimo and Jija and tried to create a lesser version of the family she’d lost. Before she became you.
The answer is in the way his eyes deaden. This was the look that was on his face as you stood in a node station once, over the abused corpse of one of his sons. Maybe it’s the look that was on his face when he learned of Innon’s death. It’s certainly what you saw in your own face after Uche’s. That’s when you no longer need an answer to the question. There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.
You think of the feeling that was in your heart as you pressed a hand over Corundum’s nose and mouth. Not the thought. The thought was simple and predictable: Better to die than live a slave. But what you felt in that moment was a kind of cold, monstrous love. A determination to make sure your son’s life remained the beautiful, wholesome thing that it had been up to that day, even if it meant you had to end his life early.
Alabaster doesn’t answer your question. You don’t need him to anymore. You get up to leave so that he can at least keep his dignity in front of you, because that’s really all you have left to give him. Your love and respect aren’t worth much to anyone.
Maybe you’re still thinking of dignity when you ask one more question, so that the conversation doesn’t end on a note of hopelessness. It’s your way of offering an olive branch, too, and letting him know that you’ve decided to learn what he has to teach you. You’re not interested in making the Season worse or whatever he’s on about… but it’s clear that he needs this on some level. The son he made with you is dead, the family you built together has been rendered forever incomplete, but if nothing else he’s still your mentor.
(You need this, too, a cynical part of you notes. It’s a poor trade, really—Nassun for him, a mother’s purpose for an ex-lover’s, these ridiculous mysteries for the starker and more important why of Jija murdering his own son. But without Nassun to motivate you, you need something. Anything, to keep going.)
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 an
d 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.
In this part of the Antarctics, though, the air is almost steamy despite the light chill. Beneath their feet, Nassun can sess the heavy, pent churn of an active shield volcano—actually erupting, just very slowly, with a trickle-trickle of lava flow further south. Here and there on the topography of her awareness Nassun can detect gas vents and a few boils that have come to the surface as hot springs and geysers. All this moisture and the warm ground are what keep the trees green.
Then the trees part, and before them looms something that Nassun has never seen before. A rock formation, she thinks—but one that seems to consist of dozens of long, columnar ribbons of brown-gray stone that ripple in an upslope, gradually slanting high enough to qualify as a low mountain or a tall hill. At the top of this river of stone, she can see bushy green tree canopies; the formation plateaus up there. Atop that plateau Nassun can glimpse something through the trees, which might be a rounded rooftop or storecache tower. A settlement of some kind. But unless they climb along the columnar ribbons, which looks dangerous, she’s not sure how to get up there.
Except… except. It is a scratch on her awareness, rising to a pressure, itching into certainty. Nassun glances at her father, who is staring at the river of stone, too. In the months since Uche’s death, she has come to understand Jija better now than ever before in her life, because her life depends on it. She understands that he is fragile, despite his outward strength and stolidity. The cracks in him are new but dangerous, like the edges of tectonic plates: always raw, never stable, needing only the merest brush to unleash aeons’ worth of pent-up energy and destroy everything nearby.
But earthquakes are easy to manage, if you know how.
So Nassun says, watching him carefully, “This was made by orogenes, Daddy.”
She has guessed that he will tense, and he does. She has guessed that he will need to take a deep breath to calm himself, which he also does. He reacts to even the thought of orogenes the way that Mama used to react to red wine: with fast breath and shaking hands and sometimes freezing or weak knees. Daddy could never even bring things that were burgundy-colored into the house—but sometimes he would forget and do it anyway, and once it was done there was no reasoning with Mama. Nothing to be done but wait for her shakes and rapid breathing and hand-wringing to pass.
(Hand-rubbing. Nassun did not notice the distinction, but Essun was rubbing one hand. The old ache, there in the bones.)
Once Jija is calm enough, therefore, Nassun adds, “I think only orogenes can get up that slope, too.” She’s sure of this, in fact. The stone columns are moving, imperceptibly. This whole region is a volcano in exquisitely slow eruption. Here it pushes up a steady incremental lava flow that takes years to cool and thus separates itself into these long hexagonal shafts as the stuff contracts. It would be easy for an orogene, even an untrained one, to push against that upwelling pressure, taste some of that slow-cooling heat, and raise another column. Ride it, to reach that plateau. Many of the stone ribbons before them are paler gray, fresher, sharper. Others have done this recently.
Then Daddy surprises her by nodding jerkily. “There are… there should be others like you in this place.” He never says the o-word or the r-word. It’s always like you and your kind and that sort. “It’s why I brought you here, sweetening.”
“Is this the Antarctic Fulcrum?” Maybe she was wrong about where that was.
“No.” His lip curls. The fault line trembles. “It’s better.”
It’s the first time he’s ever been willing to speak of this. He’s not breathing much faster, either, or staring at her in that way he so often does when he’s struggling to remember th
at she’s his daughter. Nassun decides to probe a little, testing his strata. “Better?”
“Better.” He looks at her, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he smiles at her the way he used to. The way a father should smile at his daughter. “They can cure you, Nassun. That’s what the stories say.”
Cure her of what? she almost asks. Then survival instinct kicks in and she bites her tongue before she can say the stupid thing. There is only one disease that afflicts her in his eyes, only one poison he would journey halfway across the world to have drawn out of his little girl.
A cure. A cure. For orogeny? She hardly knows what to think. Be… other than what she is? Be normal? Is that even possible?
She’s so stunned that she forgets to watch her father for a moment. When she remembers, she shivers, because he has been watching her. He nods in satisfaction at the look on her face, though. Her surprise is what he wanted to see: that or maybe wonder, or pleasure. He would have reacted poorly to dislike or fear.
“How?” she asks. Curiosity he can tolerate.
“I don’t know. But I heard about it from travelers, before.” Just as there is only one your kind that he ever means, there’s only one before that matters, for both of them. “They say it’s been around for maybe the last five or ten years.”
“But what about the Fulcrum?” She shakes her head, confused. If anywhere, she would have thought…
Daddy’s face twists. “Trained, leashed animals are still animals.” He turns back to the rise of flowing stone. “I want my little girl back.”
I haven’t gone anywhere, Nassun thinks, but knows better than to say.
There’s no path to illustrate the way to go, no signs to indicate anything nearby. Part of that could be Seasonal defenses; they’ve seen a few comms that protected themselves not just with walls but seemingly insurmountable obstacles and camouflage. Doubtless the members of the comm know some secret way to get up to the plateau, but without this knowledge, Nassun and Jija are left with a puzzle to solve. There’s also no easy way past the rise; they could go around it, see if there are steps on the other side, but that might take days.
The Obelisk Gate Page 10