The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  Nassun sits down on a log nearby—after checking it carefully for insects or other creatures that might have turned aggressive since the start of the Season. (Nassun has learned to treat nature and her father with the same wary caution.) She watches Jija pace back and forth, pausing now and again to kick at one of the ribbons where it rises sharply from the ground. He mutters to himself. He’ll need time to admit what must be done.

  Finally he turns to her. “Can you do it?”

  She stands up. He stumbles back as if startled by the sudden movement, then stops and glowers at her. She just stands there, letting him see how much it hurts her that he fears her so.

  A muscle flexes in his jaw; some of his anger fades into chagrin. (Only some.) “Will you have to kill this forest, to do it?”

  Oh. She can understand some of his worry now. This is the first green place they’ve seen in a year. “No, Daddy,” she says. “There’s a volcano.” She points down under their feet. He flinches again, glaring at the ground with the same naked hatred he occasionally flashes at her. But it is as pointless to hate Father Earth as it is to wish the Seasons would end.

  He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth, and Nassun is so expecting him to say all right that she is already beginning to form the smile that he will need, in reassurance. Thus they are both caught completely off guard when a loud clack resounds through the forest around them, setting off a flock of birds she didn’t know was there. Something chuffs into the ground nearby, making Nassun blink with the faint reverberations of the blow through the local strata. Something small, but striking with force. And then Jija screams.

  Once, Nassun froze in reaction to being startled. Mama’s training. Some of that conditioning has slipped over the past year, and although she grows still, she sinks her awareness into the earth nevertheless—just a few feet, but still. But she freezes in two kinds of ways as she sees the heavy, huge, barbed metal bolt that has been shot through her father’s calf. “Daddy!”

  Jija is down on one knee, clutching his leg and making a sound through his teeth that is less than a scream, but no less agonized. The thing is huge: several feet long, two inches in circumference. She can see the way it has pushed aside his flesh on its terrible path. The tip is buried in the ground on the other side of his calf, effectively pinning him in place. A harpoon, not a crossbow bolt. It even has a thin chain attached to the blunt end.

  A chain? Nassun whirls, following it. Someone’s holding it. There are feet pounding on the strata nearby, crunching leaves as they move. Darting shadows flicker past tree trunks and vanish; she hears a call in some Arctic language she’s heard before but does not know. Bandits. Coming.

  She looks at Daddy again, who is trying to take deep breaths. His face is pale. There’s so much blood. But he looks up at her with his eyes wide and white with pain, and suddenly she remembers the comm where the people attacked them, the comm she iced, and the way he looked at her afterward.

  Bandits. Kill them. She knows she must. If she does not, they will kill her.

  But her father wants a little girl, not an animal.

  She stares and stares and breathes hard and cannot stop staring, cannot think, cannot act, can do nothing but stand there and shake and hyperventilate, torn between survival and daughterhood.

  Then someone leaps down the lava-flow ridge, bouncing from one ribbon of rock to the other with a speed and agility that is—Nassun stares. No one can do that. But the man lands in a crouch amid the gravelly soil at the foot of the ridges with a heavy, ominous thud. He’s solidly built. She can tell he’s big even though he stays low as he half rises, his gaze fixed on something in the trees beyond Nassun, and draws a long, wicked glassknife. (And yet, somehow, the weight of his landing on the ground does not reverberate on her senses. What does that mean? And there is a… She shakes her head, thinking maybe it’s an insect, but the odd buzzing is a sensation and not a sound.)

  Then the man is off, running straight into the brush, his feet pushing against the ground with such force that clods of dirt kick up in his wake. Nassun’s mouth falls open as she turns to follow him, losing track amid the green, but there are shouts in that language again—and then, in the direction that she saw the man run, a soft, guttural sound, like someone reacting to a hard blow. The moving people amid the trees stop. Nassun sees an Arctic woman stand frozen in the clear gap between a tangle of vines and an old, weathered rock. The woman turns, inhaling to call out to someone else, and in a near-blur the man is behind her, punching her in the back. No, no, the knife—And then he is gone, before the woman falls. The violence and speed of the attack are stunning.

  “N-Nassun,” Jija says, and Nassun jumps again. She actually forgot him for a moment. She goes over, crouching and putting her foot on the chain to prevent anyone from using it to hurt him further. He grips her arm, too hard. “You should, unh, run.”

  “No, Daddy.” She tries to figure out how the chain is fastened to the harpoon. The weapon’s shaft is smooth. If she can get the chain loose or cut off the barbed point, they can just drag Daddy’s leg off of it to free him. But what then? It’s such a terrible wound. Will he bleed to death? She doesn’t know what to do.

  Jija hisses as she jiggles the end of the chain experimentally, trying to see if she can twist it loose. “I don’t… I think the bone…” Jija actually sways, and Nassun thinks the white of his lips is a bad sign. “Go.”

  She ignores him. The chain is welded to a loop at the end of the shaft. She fingers it and thinks hard, now that the strange man’s appearance has broken her deadlock. (Her hand’s shaking, though. She takes a deep breath, trying to get hold of her own fear. Somewhere off in the trees, there is a gurgling groan, and a scream of fury.) She knows Jija has some of his stoneknapping tools in his pack, but the harpoon is steel. Wait—metal breaks if it’s cold enough, doesn’t it? Could she, maybe, with a high narrow torus…?

  She’s never done this before. If she does it wrong, she’ll freeze off his leg. Yet somehow, instinctively, she feels certain that it can be done. The way Mama taught her to think about orogeny, as heat and movement taken in and heat and movement pushed out, has never really felt right to her. There is truth to it; it works, she knows from experience. But something about it is… off. Inelegant. She has often thought, If I don’t think about it as heat… without ever finishing that thought in a productive way.

  Mama is not here, and death is, and her father is the only person left in the world who loves her, even though his love comes wrapped in pain.

  So she puts a hand on the butt end of the harpoon. “Don’t move, Daddy.”

  “Wh-what?” Jija is shaking, but also weakening rapidly. Good; Nassun can work with her concentration uninterrupted. She puts her free hand on his leg—since her orogeny has always flinched away from freezing her, even back when she couldn’t fully control it—and closes her eyes.

  There is something underneath the heat of the volcano, interspersed amid the wavelets of motion that dance through the earth. It’s easy to manipulate the waves and heat, but hard to even perceive this other thing, which is perhaps why Mama taught Nassun to look for waves and heat instead. But if Nassun can grasp the other thing, which is finer and more delicate and also more precise than the heat and waves… if she can shape it into a kind of sharp edge, and file it down to infinite fineness, and slice it across the shaft like so—

  There is a quick, high-pitched hiss as the air between her and Jija stirs. Then the chain tip of the harpoon shaft drops loose, the shorn faces of metal glimmering mirror-smooth in the afternoon light.

  Exhaling in relief, Nassun opens her eyes. To find that Jija has tensed, and is staring beyond her with an expression of mingled horror and belligerence. Startled, Nassun whirls, to see the knife-wielding man behind her.

  His hair is black, Arctic-limp, and long enough to fall below his waist. He’s so very tall that she falls onto her butt turning to look at him. Or maybe that’s because she’s suddenly exhausted? She does not know. Th
e man is breathing hard, and his clothing—homespun cloth and a pair of surprisingly neat, pleated old trousers—is splattered liberally with blood centering on the glassknife in his right hand. He gazes down at her with eyes that glitter bright as the metal she just cut, and his smile is very nearly as sharp-edged.

  “Hello, little one,” the man says as Nassun stares. “That’s quite the trick.”

  Jija tries to move, shifting his leg along the harpoon shaft, and it is awful. There is the abortive sound of bone grating on metal, and he groan-coughs out an agonized cry, grabbing spasmodically for Nassun. Nassun catches his shoulder, but he’s heavy, and she’s tired, and she realizes in sudden horror that she lacks the strength to fight the man with the glassknife if that should be necessary. Jija’s shoulder shakes beneath her hand, and she’s shaking nearly as hard. Maybe this is why no one uses the stuff underneath the heat? Now she and her father will pay the price for her folly.

  But the black-haired man hunkers down, moving with remarkably slow grace for someone who showed such swift brutality only moments before. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. He blinks then, something flickering and uncertain in his gaze. “Do I know you?”

  Nassun has never before seen this giant with the icewhite eyes and the world’s longest knife. The knife is still in his hand, though now it dangles at his side, dripping. She shakes her head, a little too hard and fast.

  The man blinks, the uncertainty clears, and the smile returns. “The beasts are dead. I came to help you, didn’t I?” Something is off about the question. He asks it as if he seeks confirmation: didn’t I? It’s too sincere, too heartfelt somehow. Then he says, “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  Perhaps it is only coincidence that his gaze slides over to her father’s face after he says this. But. Something in Nassun unclenches, just a little.

  Then Jija tries to move again and makes another pained sound, and the man’s gaze sharpens. “How unpleasant. Let me help you—” He sets down the knife and reaches for Jija.

  “Stay the rust back—” Jija blurts, trying to move back and jerking all over with the pain of this. He’s panting, too, and sweating. “Who are you? Are you?” His eyes roll toward the flowing ridge of hex-stone. “From?”

  The man, who has drawn back at Jija’s reaction, follows his gaze. “Oh. Yes. The comm’s sentries saw you coming along the road. Then we saw the bandits moving in, so I came to help. We’ve had trouble with that lot before. It was a convenient opportunity to eliminate the threat.” His white gaze shifts back to Nassun, flicking at the sheared-off harpoon along the way. He has never stopped smiling. “But you should not have had trouble with them.”

  He knows what Nassun is. She cringes against her father, though she knows he is no shelter. It’s habit.

  Her father tenses, his breath quickening to a rasp. “Are… are you…” He swallows. “We’re looking for the Moon.”

  The man’s smile widens. His accent is something Equatorial; Equatorials always have such strong white teeth. “Ah, yes,” he says. “You’ve found it.”

  Her father slumps in relief, to the degree that his leg allows. “Oh… oh. Evil Earth, at last.”

  Nassun can’t take it anymore. “What is the Moon?”

  “Found Moon.” The man inclines his head. “That is the name of our community. A very special place, for very special people.” Then he sheaths the knife and extends one hand, palm up, offering. “My name is Schaffa.”

  The hand is held out only to Nassun, and Nassun doesn’t know why. Maybe because he knows what she is? Maybe only because her hand isn’t covered with blood, as both of Jija’s are. She swallows and takes the hand, which immediately and firmly closes around hers. She manages, “I’m Nassun. That’s my father.” She lifts her chin. “Nassun Resistant Tirimo.”

  Nassun knows that her mother was trained by the Fulcrum, which means that Mama’s use name was never “Resistant.” And Nassun is only ten years old now, too young for Tirimo to recognize with a comm name even if she still lived there. Yet the man inclines his head gravely, as if it is not a lie. “Come, then,” he says. “Let’s see if between the two of us, we can’t get your father free.”

  He rises, pulling her up with him, and she turns toward Jija, thinking that with Schaffa here they can maybe just lift Jija off the shaft and that if they do it fast enough maybe it won’t hurt him too much. But before she can open her mouth to say this, Schaffa presses two fingers to the back of her neck. She flinches and rounds on him, instantly defensive, and he raises both hands, wagging the fingers to show that he’s still unarmed. She can feel a bit of damp on her neck, probably a smear of blood.

  “Duty first,” he says.

  “What?”

  He nods toward her father. “I can lift him, while you shift the leg.”

  Nassun blinks again, confused. The man moves over to Jija, and she is distracted from wondering about that strange touch by her father’s cries of pain as they work him free.

  Much later, though, she will remember an instant after that touch, when the tips of the man’s fingers glimmered like the cut ends of the harpoon. A gossamer-thin thread of light-under-the-heat had seemed to flicker from her to him. She will remember, too, that for a moment that thread of light illuminated others: a whole tracework of jagged lines spreading all over him like the spiderwebbing that follows a sharp impact in brittle glass. The impact site, the center of the spiderweb, was somewhere near the back of his head. Nassun will remember thinking in that instant: He’s not alone in there.

  In the moment it is no matter. Their journey has ended. Nassun is, apparently, home.

  The Guardians do not speak of Warrant, where they are made. No one knows its location. When asked, they only smile.

  —From lorist tale, “Untitled 759,” recorded in Charta Quartent, Eadin Comm, by itinerant Mell Lorist Stone

  8

  you’ve been warned

  YOU’RE IN LINE TO PICK up your household’s share for the week when you hear the first whisper. It’s not directed at you, and it’s not meant to be overheard, but you hear it anyway because the speaker is agitated and forgets to be quiet. “Too Earthfired many of ’em,” an older man is saying to a younger man, when you pull yourself out of your own thoughts enough to process the words. “Ykka’s all right, earned her place, didn’t she? Gotta be a few good ones. But the rest? We only need one—”

  The man is shushed by his companion at once. You fix your gaze on a distant group of people trying to haul some baskets of mineral ore across the cavern by use of a guided ropeslide, so that when the younger man looks around he won’t see you looking at them. But you remember.

  It’s been a week since the incident with the boilbugs and it feels like a month. This isn’t just losing track of days and nights. Some of the strange elasticity of time comes from your having lost Nassun, and with her the urgency of purpose. Without that purpose you feel sort of attenuated and loose, as aimless as compass needles must have been during the Wandering Season. You’ve decided to try settling in, recentering your awareness, exploring your new boundaries, but that isn’t helping much. Castrima’s geode defies your sense of size as well as time. It feels cluttered when you stand near one of the geode’s walls, where the view of the opposite wall is occluded by dozens of jagged, crisscrossing quartz shafts. It feels empty when you pass entire crystals’ worth of unoccupied apartments, and realize the place was built to hold many more people than it currently does. The trading post on the surface was smaller than Tirimo—yet you’re beginning to realize that Ykka’s efforts at recruitment for Castrima have been exceptionally successful. At least half of the people you meet in the comm are new, same as you. (No wonder she wanted some new people on her improvised advising council; newness is a group trait here.) You meet a nervous metallorist and three knappers who are nothing like Jija, a biomest who works with Lerna two days a week, and a woman who once made a living selling artful leather crafts as gifts, who now spends her days tanning skins that the Hunters bri
ng in.

  Some of the new people have a bitter look, because like Lerna they did not intend to join Castrima. Ykka or someone else deemed them useful to a community that once consisted solely of traders and miners, and that meant the end of their journey. Some of them, however, are palpably feverish in their determination to contribute to and defend the comm. These are the ones who had nowhere to go, their comms destroyed by the Rifting or the aftershakes. Not all of them have useful skills. They’re youngish, usually, which makes sense because most comms won’t take in people who are elderly or infirm during a Season unless they have very desirable skills—and because, you learn upon talking with them, Ykka demands that a very specific question be put to most newcomers: Can you live with orogenes? The ones who say yes get to come in. The ones who can say yes tend to be younger.

  (The ones who say no, you understand without having to ask, are not permitted to travel onward and potentially join other comms or commless bands to attack a community that knowingly harbors orogenes. There’s a convenient gypsum quarry not far off, apparently, which is downwind. Helps to draw scavengers away from Castrima-over, too.)

  And then there are the natives—the people who were part of Castrima long before the Season began. A lot of them are unhappy about all the new additions, even though everyone knows the comm couldn’t have survived as it was. It was simply too small. Before Lerna they had no doctor, only a man who did midwifery, field surgery, and livestock medicine as a sideline to his farrier business. And they had only two orogenes—Ykka and Cutter, though apparently no one knew for sure that Cutter was one until the start of the Season; now there’s a story you want to hear someday. Without orogenes, Castrima-under becomes a deathtrap, which makes most of the natives reluctantly willing to accept Ykka’s efforts to attract more of her kind. So the old Castrimans look at you with suspicion, but the good thing is that they look at all the newcomers the same way. It’s not your status as an orogene that bothers them. It’s that you haven’t yet proven yourself.