The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  After a while, Antimony begins to sing again. It’s strangely relaxing. You sleep better than you have in months.

  Seek the retrograde [obscured] in the southern sky. When it grows larger, [obscured]

  —Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse six

  11

  Schaffa, lying down

  HIM AGAIN. I WISH HE hadn’t done so much to you. You don’t like being him to any degree. You will like less knowing that he is part of Nassun… but don’t think about that right now.

  The man who still carries the name of Schaffa even though he hardly qualifies as the same person, dreams fragments of himself.

  Guardians don’t dream easily. The object embedded deep within the left lobe of Schaffa’s sessapinae interferes with the sleep-wake cycle. He does not often need sleep, and when he does, his body does not often enter the deeper sleep that enables dreaming. (Ordinary people go mad if they are deprived of dreaming-sleep. Guardians are immune to that sort of madness… or perhaps they’re just mad all the time.) He knows it’s a bad sign that he dreams more often these days, but it cannot be helped. He chose to pay the price.

  So he lies on a bed in a cabin and groans, twitching fitfully, while his mind flails through images. It’s poor dreaming because his mind is out of practice, and because so little remains of the material that might have been used to construct the dreams. Later he will speak of this aloud, to himself, as he clutches his head and tries to pull the scattering bits of his identity closer together, and that’s how I’ll know what torments him. I will know that as he thrashes, he dreams…

  … Of two people, their features surprisingly sharp in his memory though all else has been stripped away: their names, their relationship to him, his reason for remembering them. He can guess, seeing that the woman of the pair has icewhite eyes rimmed with thick black eyelashes, that she is his mother. The man is more ordinary. Too ordinary—carefully so, in a way that immediately stirs a suspicion in Schaffa’s Guardian mind. Ferals work hard to seem so ordinary. How they came to produce him, and how he came to leave them, is lost to the Earth, but their faces are interesting, at least.

  … Of Warrant, and black-walled rooms carved into layered volcanic rock. Gentle hands, pitying voices. Schaffa doesn’t remember the hands’ or voices’ owners. He is helped into a wire chair. (No, the nodes were not the first to use these.) This chair is sophisticated, automated, working smoothly even though something about it seems old to Schaffa’s eye. It whirs and reconfigures and turns him until he is suspended facedown beneath bright artificial lights, with his face trapped between unyielding bars and the nape of his neck bared to the world. His hair is short. Behind and above him he hears the descent of ancient mechanisms, things so esoteric and bizarre that their names and original purposes have long been lost. (He remembers learning, around this time, that original purposes can be perverted easily.) Around him he can hear the snuffling and pleading of the others brought with him to this place—children’s snuffling and pleading. He is a child in this memory, he realizes. Then he hears the other children’s screams, followed by and mingling into whirring, cutting sounds. There is also a low watery hum that he will never hear again (yet it will be very familiar to you and any other orogene who has ever been near an obelisk), because from this moment forth his own sessapinae will be repurposed, made sensitive to orogeny and not to the perturbations of the earth.

  Schaffa remembers struggling, and even as a child he’s stronger than most. He gets his head and upper body almost free before the machinery reaches him. This is why the first cut goes so wrong, slicing far lower on his neck than it should and nearly killing him right there. The equipment adjusts, relentless. He feels the cold of it as the sliver of iron is inserted, feels the coldness of the other presence within him at once. Someone stitches him up. The pain is horrific and it never really ends, though he learns to mitigate it enough to function; all those who survive the implantation do. The smiling, you see. Endorphins ease pain.

  … Of the Fulcrum, and a high-ceilinged chamber at the heart of Main, and familiar artificial lights that march toward and around a yawning pit from whose walls grow endless slivers of iron. He and the other Guardians gaze down at a small, shredded body crumpled at the bottom of the pit. Every now and again the children find the place; poor foolish creatures. Don’t they understand? The Earth is indeed evil, and it is cruel, and Schaffa would protect them all from it, if he could. There is a survivor: one of the children attached to Guardian Leshet. The girl cringes as Leshet approaches, but Schaffa knows Leshet will let her live. Leshet has always been softer, kinder than she should be, and her children suffer for it…

  … Of the road, and the endless flinching eyes of strangers who see his icewhite irises and unchanging smiles and know that they are seeing something wrong even if they don’t know what it is. There is a woman one night, at an inn, who tries to be intrigued rather than frightened. Schaffa warns her, but she’s insistent, and he cannot help but think of how the pleasure will keep the pain at bay for hours, perhaps the whole night. It’s good to feel human for a while. But as he warned her, he circuits back in a few months. She’s got a child in her belly, which she says isn’t his, but he cannot permit the uncertainty. He uses the black-glass poniard, which is a thing made in Warrant. She was kind to him, so he targets only the child; hopefully she’ll pass its corpse, and live. But she’s furious, horrified, and she calls out for help and draws a knife of her own as they struggle. Never again, he resolves as he slaughters all of them—her whole family, a dozen bystanders, half the town as they attack him en masse. Never again can he forget that he is not, and has never been, human.

  … Of Leshet again. He can barely recognize her this time: Her hair has gone white and her once-smooth face is all over lines and sagging skin. She’s smaller, her softening bones compressing her into a hunched posture, which often happens to Arctics when they grow old. But Leshet has seen more centuries even than Schaffa. Old is not supposed to mean this for them: feebleness, senescence, shrinking. (Happiness, and a smile that means something other than mere mitigation of the pain. They’re not supposed to have these either.) He stares at her broad, welcoming smile as she hobbles toward him from the cottage to which he has tracked her. He is filled with dim horror and a burgeoning disgust that he’s not even aware of until she stops before him and he reaches out to reflexively break her neck.

  … Of the girl. The girl. One of dozens, hundreds; they blur together over the endless years… but not this one. He finds her in a barn, poor frightened sad thing, and she loves him instantly. He loves her, too, wishes he could be kinder to her, is as gentle as he can be while he trains her to obedience with broken bones and loving threats and chances he should not give. Has Leshet infected him with her softness? Maybe, maybe… but her face. Her eyes. There’s something about her. He is not surprised later, when he receives word that she is involved in the raising of an obelisk in Allia. His special one. He does not believe she is dead after. Indeed, he is filled with pride as he goes to reclaim her, and as he prays to the voice in his head that she will not force him to kill her. The girl…

  … whose face causes him to wake with a soft cry. The girl.

  The other two Guardians look at him with the Earth’s judging eyes. They are as compromised as he, more. All three of them are everything the Guardian order has warned them against. He remembers his name but they do not remember theirs. That’s the only real difference between him and them… isn’t it? Yet they seem so much less than he, somehow.

  Irrelevant. He pushes himself up from the cot, rubs his face, and heads outside.

  The children’s cabin. It’s time to check on them, Schaffa tells himself, though he makes a beeline to Nassun’s cot. She’s asleep as he lifts a lantern to examine her face. Yes. It has always been there in her eyes and maybe cheekbones, tickling his mind, the fragments of his memory and the solidity of her features finally coming together. His Damaya. The girl who did not die, reborn.


  He remembers breaking Damaya’s hand and flinches with it. Why would he do such a thing? Why did he do any of the horrible things he did, in those days? Leshet’s neck. Timay’s. Eitz’s family. So many others, whole towns of them. Why?

  Nassun stirs in her sleep, murmuring softly. Automatically Schaffa reaches out to stroke her face, and she quiets at once. There is a dull ache in his chest that perhaps might be love. He remembers loving Leshet and Damaya and others, and yet he did such things to them.

  Nassun stirs a little, and half wakes, blinking in the lantern light. “Schaffa?”

  “It’s nothing, little one,” he says. “I’m sorry.” Many degrees of sorry. But the fear is in him, and the dream lingers. He cannot help trying to expunge it. He finally blurts, “Nassun. Are you afraid of me?”

  She blinks, barely lucid—and then she smiles. It untwists something within him. “Never.”

  Never. He swallows, his throat suddenly tight. “Good. Go back to sleep.”

  She drifts off at once, and perhaps she was never really awake to begin with. But he lingers near her, keeping watch until her eyelids flicker into dreaming again.

  Never.

  “Never again,” he whispers, and twitches with the memory of that, too. Then the feeling changes and his resolve refocuses. What happened before does not matter. That was a different Schaffa. He has another chance now. And if being less than himself means being less than the monster that he was, he cannot regret it.

  There is a quicksilver lightning strike of pain along his spine, too fast for him to smile it away. Something disagrees with his resolve. Automatically his hand twitches toward the back of Nassun’s neck… and then he stops himself. No. She is more to him than just relief from pain.

  Use her, commands the voice. Break her. So willful, like her mother. Train this one to obey.

  No, Schaffa thinks back, and braces himself to bear the lash of retaliation. It is only pain.

  So Schaffa tucks Nassun in, and kisses her forehead, and puts out the light as he leaves. He heads for the ridge that overlooks the town, and stands there for the rest of the night grinding his teeth and trying to forget the last of who he was and promising himself a better future. Eventually the other two Guardians come out onto the steps of their cabin as well, but he ignores the alien pressure of their gazes against his back.

  12

  Nassun, falling up

  AGAIN, MUCH OF THIS IS SPECULATION. You know of Nassun, and she is part of you, but you cannot be Nassun… and I think we have established by now that you do not know her as well as you think. (Ah, but no parent does, with any child.) Another has the task of encompassing Nassun’s existence. But you love her, and that means that some part of me cannot help but do the same.

  In love, then, we shall seek understanding.

  With her consciousness anchored deep within the earth, Nassun listens.

  At first there is only the usual impingement upon the ambient sesuna: the minute flex-and-contract of strata, the relatively placid churn of the old volcano beneath Jekity, the slow unending grind of columnar basalt rising and cooling into patterns. She’s gotten used to this. She likes that she can listen to this freely now, whenever she wants, instead of having to wait until the dark of night, lying awake after her parents have gone to bed. Here in Found Moon, Schaffa has given Nassun permission to use the crucible whenever she wants, for as long as she wants. She tries not to monopolize it, because the others need to learn, too… but they do not enjoy orogeny as much as she does. Most of them seem indifferent to the power they wield, or the wonders they can explore by mastering it. A few of the others are even afraid of it, which makes no sense to Nassun—but then, it also makes no sense to her now that once she wanted to be a lorist. Now she has the freedom to be fully who and what she is, and she no longer fears that self. Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.

  So now Nassun rides an eddy within the Jekity hot spot, balancing perfectly amid the conflicting pressures, and it does not occur to her to be afraid. She does not realize this is something a Fulcrum four-ringer would struggle to do. But then, she doesn’t do it the way a four-ringer would, by taking hold of the motion and the heat and trying to channel both through herself. She reaches, yes, but just with her senses and not her absorption torus. But where a Fulcrum instructor would warn that she can’t affect anything like this, she follows the lesson of her own instincts, which say she can. By settling into the eddy, swirling with it, she can relax enough to winnow down through its friction and pressure to what lies beneath: the silver.

  This is the word she has decided to give it, after questioning Schaffa and the others and realizing they don’t know what it is, either. The other orogene kids can’t even detect it; Eitz thought he sessed something once, when she shyly asked him to concentrate on Schaffa instead of the earth, because the silver is easier to see—more concentrated, more potent, more intent—within people than it is in the ground. But Schaffa stiffened and glared at him in the next instant, and Eitz flinched and looked guiltier and more haunted than ever, so Nassun felt bad that she hurt him. She never asked him to try it again.

  The others, however, can’t do even that much. It is the other two Guardians, Nida and Umber, who help the most. “This is a thing that we culled for in the Fulcrum when we found it, when they heard the call, when they listened too closely,” Nida begins, and Nassun braces herself because once Nida gets started there’s no telling how long she’ll run on. She stops only for the other Guardians. “The use of sublimates in lieu of controlling structures is dangerous, determinate, a warning. Important to cultivate for research purposes, but most such children we steered into node service. Among the others we cut—cut—cut them, for it was forbidden to reach for the sky.” Amazingly, she shuts up after this. Nassun wonders what the sky has to do with anything, but she knows better than to ask, lest Nida get going again.

  But Umber, who is as slow and quiet as Nida is fast, nods. “We allowed a few to progress,” he translates. “For breeding. For curiosity. For the Fulcrum’s pride. No more than that.”

  Which tells Nassun several things, once she sifts sense from the babble. Nida and Umber and Schaffa are not proper Guardians anymore, though they used to be. They have given up the credo of their order, chosen to betray the old ways. So the use of the silver is clearly an issue of violent concern to ordinary Guardians—but why? If only a few of the Fulcrum’s orogenes were allowed to develop the skill, to “progress,” what was the danger if too many did it? And why do these ex-Guardians, who once “culled for” the skill, allow her to do it unfettered now?

  Schaffa is there for this conversation, she notes, but he does not speak. He merely watches her, smiling and twitching now and again as the silver sparks and tugs within him. That’s been happening to him a lot, lately. Nassun isn’t sure why.

  Nassun goes home in the evenings after her days at Found Moon. Jija has settled into his Jekity house, and every time she comes back, there are new touches of hominess that she likes: surprisingly rich blue paint on the old wooden door; cuttings planted in the small housegreen, though they grow scraggly as the ash thickens in the sky overhead; a rug he has bartered a glassknife for in the small room that he designates as her own. It’s not as big as the room she had back in Tirimo, but it has a window that overlooks the forest around Jekity’s plateau. Beyond the forest, if the air is clear enough, she can sometimes see the coast as a distant line of white just beyond the forest’s green. Beyond that is a spread of blue that fascinates her, though there’s nothing to see but that slice of color, from here. She has never seen the sea up close, and Eitz tells her wonderful stories of it: that it smells of salt and strange life; that it washes up onto thin stuff called sand in which little grows because of the salt; that sometimes its creatures wiggle or bubble forth, like crabs or squid or sandteethers, though the lattermost are said to appear only during a Season. There is the constant danger of tsunami, which is why
no one lives near the sea if they can avoid it—and indeed, a few days after Nassun and Jija reach Jekity, she sessed rather than saw the remnant of a big shake far to the east, well out to sea. She sessed, too, the reverberations this caused when something vast shifted and then pounded at the land along the coast. For once she was glad to be so far away.

  Still, it is nice having a home again. Life begins to feel normal, for the first time in a very long while. One evening during dinner, Nassun tells her father what Eitz has said about the sea. He looks skeptical, then asks where she heard these things. She tells him about Eitz, and he grows very quiet.

  “This is a rogga boy?” he says, after a moment.

  Nassun, whose instincts have finally pinged a warning—she’s gotten out of the habit of keeping vigilant for Jija’s mood shifts—falls silent. But because he will get angrier if she doesn’t speak, she finally nods.

  “Which one?”

  Nassun bites her lip. Eitz is Schaffa’s, though, and she knows that Schaffa will allow none of his orogenes to come to harm. So she says, “The oldest. He’s tall and very black and has a long face.”

  Jija keeps eating, but Nassun watches the flex of muscles in his jaw that have nothing to do with chewing. “That Coaster boy. I’ve seen him. I don’t want you talking to him anymore.”

  Nassun swallows, and risks. “I have to talk with all of the others, Daddy. It’s how we learn.”

  “Learn?” Jija looks up. It’s banked, contained, but he’s furious. “That boy is what, twenty? Twenty-five? And he’s still a rogga. Still. He should have been able to cure himself by now.”