The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  “No. There’s no water in it. The hole goes into the volcano, and… beyond.” He takes a deep breath. “The city exists to contain the hole. Everything about the city is built for that purpose. Even its name, which the stone eaters told me, acknowledges this: Corepoint. It’s a ruin, Essun—a deadciv ruin like any other, except that it’s intact. The streets haven’t crumbled. The buildings are empty, but some of the furniture is even usable—made of things not natural, undecaying. You could live in them if you wanted.” He paused. “I did live in them, when Antimony brought me there. There was nowhere else to go and no one else to talk to… except the stone eaters. Dozens of them, Essun, maybe hundreds. They say they didn’t build the city, but it’s theirs now. Has been, for tens of thousands of years.”

  You’re mindful of how much he hates being interrupted, but he pauses anyway. Maybe he’s expecting commentary, or maybe he’s giving you time to absorb his words. You’re just staring at the back of his head. What’s left of his hair is getting too long; you’ll have to ask Lerna for scissors and a pick soon. There are absolutely no suitable thoughts in your head, besides this.

  “It’s something you can’t help thinking about, when you’re confronted with it.” He sounds tired. Your lessons rarely last more than an hour, and it’s been longer than that already. You would feel guilty if you had any emotion left in you right now other than shock. “The obelisks hint at it, but they’re so…” You feel him try to shrug. You understand. “Not something you can touch or walk through. But this city. Recorded history goes back what, ten thousand years? Twenty-five if you count all the Seasons the University’s still arguing about. But people have been around for much longer than that. Who knows when some version of our ancestors first crawled out of the ash and started jabbering at each other? Thirty thousand years? Forty? A long time to be the pathetic creatures we are now, huddling behind our walls and putting all our wits, all our learning, toward the singular task of staying alive. That’s all we make now: Better ways to do field surgery with improvised equipment. Better chemicals, so we can grow more beans with little light. Once, we were so much more.” He falls silent again, for a long moment. “I cried for you and Innon and Coru for three days, there in that city of who we used to be.”

  You ache, that he included you in his grief. You don’t deserve it.

  “When I… they brought me food.” Alabaster skips past whatever he would’ve said so seamlessly that at first the sentence doesn’t make sense. “I ate it, then tried to kill them.” His voice turns wry. “Took me a while to give that up, actually, but they kept feeding me. I asked them, again and again, why they’d brought me there. Why they were keeping me alive. Antimony is the only one who would speak to me at first. I thought they were deferring to her, but then I realized they just didn’t speak my language. Some of them weren’t used to interacting with people at all. They stared, and sometimes I had to shoo them away. I seemed to fascinate some, disgust others. The feeling was mutual.

  “I learned some of their language, eventually. I had to. Parts of the city talked in that language. If you knew the right words, you could open doors, turn on lights, make a room warmer or colder. Not everything still worked. The city was breaking down. Just slowly.

  “But the hole. There were markers all around it, lighting up as you got closer.” (You suddenly remember a chamber at the Fulcrum’s heart. Long narrow panels igniting in sequence as you walked toward the socket, glowing with no discernible fire or filament.) “Barriers big as buildings in themselves, which sometimes glowed at night. Warnings that would write themselves in fire on the air before you, sirens that would sound if you got too near. Antimony took me to it, though, on the first day that I was… functional. I stood on one of the barriers and looked down into a darkness so deep that it…”

  He has to stop. After he swallows, he resumes.

  “She’d told me already that she took me from Meov because they couldn’t risk me being killed. So there, at Corepoint’s heart, she told me, ‘This is why I saved you. This is the enemy you face. You are the only one who can.’”

  “What?” You’re not confused. You think you understand. You just don’t want to, so you decide that you must be confused.

  “That’s what she said,” he replies. Now he’s angry, but not at you. “Word for word. I remember it because I was thinking that was the reason Innon and Coru died and you got thrown to the rusting dogs: because sometime in the ass-end of history, some of our so-smart ancestors decided to dig a hole to the heart of the world for no rusting reason. No; for power, Antimony said. I don’t know how that was supposed to work but they did it, and they made the obelisks and other tools to harness that power.

  “Something went wrong, though. I got the sense that even Antimony didn’t know exactly what. Or maybe the stone eaters are still arguing about it and nobody’s come to a consensus. Something just went wrong. The obelisks… misfired. The Moon was flung away from the planet. Maybe that did it, maybe some other things happened, but whatever the cause, the result was the Shattering. It really happened, Essun. That’s what caused the Seasons.” The muscles in his back flex a little against your hand. He’s tense. “Do you understand? We use the obelisks. To stills, they’re just big strange rocks. That city, all those wonders… that deadciv was run by orogenes. We destroyed the world just like they always say we did. Roggas.”

  He says it so sharply and viciously that his whole body reverberates with the word. You feel how he stiffens as he says it. Vehemence hurts him. He knew it would and said it anyway.

  “What they got wrong,” he continues, sounding weary now, “are the loyalties. The stories say we’re agents of Father Earth, but it’s the opposite: We’re his enemies. He hates us more than he hates the stills, because of what we did. That’s why he made the Guardians to control us, and—”

  You’re shaking your head. “’Baster… you’re speaking as if it, the planet, is real. Alive, I mean. Aware. All that stuff about Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.”

  And the world is just shit. You understand this now, after two dead children and the repeated destruction of your life. There’s no need to imagine the planet as some malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in—if you’re lucky—oblivion.

  He laughs. This hurts him, too, but it’s a laugh that makes your skin prickle, because it’s the laugh of the Yumenes-Allia highroad. The laugh of a dead node station. Alabaster was never mad; he’s just learned so much that would have driven a lesser soul to gibbering, that sometimes it shows. Letting out some of that accumulated horror by occasionally sounding like a frothing maniac is how he copes. It’s also how he warns you, you know now, that he’s about to destroy some additional measure of your naivete. Nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.

  “That’s probably how they thought,” Alabaster says, when his laugh goes quiet. “The ones who decided to dig a hole to the world’s core. But just because you can’t see or understand a thing doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.”

  You know that’s true. But more importantly, you hear the knowledge in Alabaster’s voice. It makes you tense. “What have you seen?”

  “Everything.”

  Your skin prickles.

  He takes a deep breath. When he speaks again, it’s a monotone. “This is a three-sided war. More sides than that, but only three that you need to concern yourself with. All three sides want the war to end; it’s just a question of how. We’re the problem, you see—people. Two of the sides are trying to decide what should be done with us.”

  That phrasing explains a lot. “The Earth and… the stone eaters?” Always lurking, planning, wanting something unknown.

  “No. They’re people, too
, Essun. Haven’t you figured that out? They need things, want things, feel things, same way we do. And they’ve been fighting this war much, much longer than you or I. Some of them from the very beginning.”

  “The beginning?” What, the Shattering?

  “Yes, some of them are that old. Antimony is one. That little one who follows you, too, I think. There are others. They can’t die, so… yeah. Some of them saw it all happen.”

  You’re too floored to really react. Hoa? Seven-ish years old, going on thirty thousand. Hoa?

  “One side wants us—people—dead,” Alabaster says. “That’s one way to end things, I suppose. One side wants people… neutralized. Alive, but rendered harmless. Like the stone eaters themselves: Earth tried to make them more like itself, dependent on itself, thinking that would make them harmless.” He sighs. “I guess it’s reassuring to know the planet can cock up, too.”

  Your flinch is a delayed reaction, because you’ve still got Hoa in mind. “He used to be human,” you murmur. Yes. It’s just a disguise now, a long-discarded set of clothes donned again for old times’ sake, but once upon a time, he was a real flesh-and-blood boy who looked like that. There’s nothing Sanzed in him because the Sanzed did not exist as a people in his day.

  “They all did. It’s what’s wrong with them.” He’s very tired now, which may be why he speaks more softly. “I can barely remember things that happened to me fifty years ago; imagine trying to remember five thousand years ago. Ten thousand. Twenty. Imagine forgetting your own name. That’s why they never answer, when we ask them who they are.” You inhale in realization. “I don’t think it’s what they’re made of that makes stone eaters so different. I think it’s that no one can live that long and not become something entirely alien.”

  He keeps saying imagine, and you can’t. Of course you can’t. But you can think of Hoa in that moment. Being fascinated by soap. Curling against you to sleep. His sorrow, when you stopped treating him like a human being. He’d been trying so hard. Doing his best. Failing in the end.

  “You said three sides,” you say. Focusing on what you can, instead of mourning what you can’t. Alabaster is beginning to slouch, leaning harder against your hand. He needs to rest.

  Alabaster is silent for so long that you think he might have fallen asleep. Then he says, “I slipped out one night, when Antimony wasn’t there. I’d been there… years? Time got loose after a while. No one but them to talk to, and sometimes they forget that people need to talk. Nothing in the earth to listen to except the grumbling of the volcano. The stars are all wrong on that side of the world…” He trails off for a moment. Loose time, catching up with him. “I’d been looking at diagrams of the obelisks, trying to understand what their builders intended. My head hurt. I knew you were alive, and I missed you so much I was sick with it. I had this sudden, wild, half-rusted thought: Maybe, through the hole, I could get back to you.”

  If only he had a hand left that you could take. Your fingers twitch against his back instead. It’s not the same.

  “So I ran to the hole and jumped in. It’s not suicide if you don’t mean to die; that’s what I told myself.” Another felt smile. “But it wasn’t… The things around the hole are mechanisms, but not just for warning. I must have triggered something, or maybe that was how they were meant to work. I went down, but it wasn’t like falling. It was controlled, somehow. Fast, but steady. I should have died. Air pressure, heat, the same things Antimony took me through without the rock involved, but Antimony wasn’t there and I should have died. There are lights along the shaft at intervals. Windows, I think. People actually used to live down there! But mostly, it’s just the dark.

  “Eventually… hours or days later… I slowed down. I had reached—”

  He stops. You feel the prickle of goose bumps rise on his skin.

  “The Earth is alive.” His voice grows harsh, hoarse, faintly hysterical. “Some of the old stories are just stories, you’re right, but not that one. I understood then what the stone eaters had been trying to tell me. Why I had to use the obelisks to create the Rift. We’ve been at war with the world for so long that we’ve forgotten, Essun, but the world hasn’t. And we have to end it soon, or…”

  Alabaster pauses, suddenly, for a long and pent moment. You want to ask what will happen if a war so ancient doesn’t end soon. You want to ask what happened to him down there at the core of the Earth, what he saw or experienced that has so plainly shaken him. You don’t ask. You’re a brave woman, but you know what you can take, and what you can’t.

  He whispers: “When I die, don’t bury me.”

  “Wh—”

  “Give me to Antimony.”

  As if she has heard her name, suddenly, Antimony reappears, standing before you both. You glare at her, realizing that this means Alabaster has reached the end of his strength and that the conversation must end. It makes you resent his weakness, and hate that he is dying. It makes you seek a scapegoat for that hatred.

  “No,” you say, looking at her. “She took you from me. She doesn’t get to keep you.”

  He chuckles. It’s so weary that your anger breaks. “It’s either her or the Evil Earth, Essun. Please.”

  He begins to list to one side, and maybe you’re not as much of a monster as you think, because you give up and get up. Antimony blurs in that stone-eaterish way, slow except when they aren’t, and then she is crouched beside him, using both hands now to hold and support him as he slips into sleep.

  You gaze at Antimony. You’ve thought of her as an enemy all this time, but if what Alabaster says is true…

  “No,” you snap. You’re not really saying it to her, but it works either way. “I’m not ready to think of you as an ally yet.” Maybe not ever.

  “Even if you were,” says the voice from within the stone eater’s chest, “I’m his ally. Not yours.”

  People like us, with wants and needs. You want to reject this, too, but oddly it comforts you to know that she doesn’t like you, either. “Alabaster said he understood why you did what you did. But I don’t understand why he did what he did, or what he wants now. He said this was a three-sided war; what’s the third side? Which side is he on? How does the Rift… help?”

  No matter how you try, you cannot imagine Antimony as having once been human. Too many things work against it: the stillness of her face, the dislocation of her voice. The fact that you hate her. “The Obelisk Gate amplifies energies both physical and arcane. No single point of surface venting produces these energies in sufficient quantity. The Rift is a reliable, high-volume source.”

  Meaning… You tense. “You’re saying that if I use the Rift as my ambient source, channel it through my torus—”

  “No. That would simply kill you.”

  “Well, thanks for the warn-off.” You’re beginning to understand, though. It’s the same problem you keep having with Alabaster’s lessons; heat and pressure and motion are not the only forces in play here. “You’re saying the earth churns out magic, too? And if I push that magic into an obelisk…” You blink, recalling her words. “Obelisk Gate?”

  Antimony’s gaze has been focused on Alabaster. Now her flat black eyes slide to finally meet yours. “The two hundred and sixteen individual obelisks, networked together via the control cabochon.” While you stand there wondering what the rust a control cabochon is, and marveling that there are more than two hundred of the damned things, she adds, “Using that to channel the power of the Rift should be enough.”

  “To do what?”

  For the first time, you hear a note of emotion in her voice: annoyance. “To impose equilibrium on the Earth-Moon system.”

  What. “Alabaster said the Moon was flung away.”

  “Into a degrading long-ellipsis orbit.” When you stare blankly, she speaks your language again. “It’s coming back.”

  Oh, Earth. Oh, rust. Oh, no. “You want me to catch the fucking Moon?”

  She just stares at you, and belatedly you realize you’re practically sho
uting. You throw a guilty look at Alabaster, but he hasn’t woken. Neither has the nurse on the far cot. When she sees that you’re quiet, Antimony says, “That is an option.” Almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Alabaster made the first of two necessary course corrections to the Moon, slowing it and altering the trajectory that would have taken it past the planet again. Someone else must make the second correction, bringing it back into stable orbit and magical alignment. Should equilibrium be reestablished, it’s likely the Seasons will end, or diminish to such infrequency as to mean the same thing to your kind.”

  You inhale, but you get it now. Give Father Earth back his lost child and perhaps his wrath will be appeased. That’s the third faction, then: those who want a truce, people and Father Earth agreeing to tolerate one another, even if it means creating the Rift and killing millions in the process. Peaceful coexistence by any means necessary.

  The end of the Seasons. It sounds… unimaginable. There have always been Seasons. Except now you know that isn’t true.

  “Then it isn’t an option,” you say finally. “End the Seasons or watch everything die as this Season burns on forever? I’ll—” Catch the Moon sounds ridiculous. “I’ll do what you stone eaters want, then.”

  “There are always options.” Her gaze, alien as it is, abruptly shifts in a subtle way—or maybe you’re just reading her better. Suddenly she looks human, and very, very bitter. “And not all of my kind want the same thing.”

  You frown at her, but she says nothing more.

  You want to ask more questions, try harder to understand, but she was right: You weren’t ready for this. Your head’s spinning, and the words stuffed into it are starting to blur and jumble together. It’s too much to deal with.

  Wants and needs. You swallow. “Can I stay here?”

  She does not respond. You suppose it wasn’t really necessary to ask. You get up and move to the nearest cot. Its head is against the wall, which would put your head behind Alabaster and Antimony, and you don’t feel like staring at the back of the stone eater’s head. You grab the pillow and curl up with your head at the foot of the bed instead, so you can see Alabaster’s face. Once, you slept better when you could see him, across the expanse of Innon’s shoulders. This is not the same reassurance… but it’s something.