The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  For a moment Nassun is confused, because curing herself of orogeny is the last thing she thinks of at the end of her lessons. Well, Schaffa did say that it was possible. Ah—and Eitz, who is only eighteen but obviously aged up in Jija’s head, is too old to have not utilized this cure, if he’s going to. With a chill, Nassun realizes: Jija has begun to doubt Schaffa’s claims that the erasure of orogeny is possible. What will he do if he realizes Nassun no longer wants to be cured?

  Nothing good. “Yes, Daddy,” she says.

  This mollifies him, as it usually does. “If you have to talk to him during your lessons, fine. I don’t want you making the Guardians angry. But don’t talk to him outside of that.” He sighs. “I don’t like that you spend so much time up there.”

  He grumbles on about it for the rest of the meal, but says nothing worse, so eventually Nassun relaxes.

  The next morning, at Found Moon, she says to Schaffa, “I need to learn how to hide what I am better.”

  Schaffa is carrying two satchels uphill to the Found Moon compound as she says this. They’re heavy, and he’s freakishly strong, but even he has to breathe hard to do this, so she does not pester him for a response while he walks. When he has reached one of the compound’s tiny storeshacks, he sets the satchels down and catches his breath. It’s easier to keep goods up here for things like the children’s meals than to go back and forth to the Jekity storecaches or communal mealhouse.

  “Are you safe?” he asks then, quietly. This is why she loves him.

  She nods, biting her bottom lip, because it is wrong that she must wonder this about her own father. He looks at her for a long, hard moment, and there is a cold consideration to this look that warns her he’s begun to think of a simple solution to her problem. “Don’t,” she blurts.

  He lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t…?” he challenges.

  Nassun has lived a year of ugliness. Schaffa is at least clean and uncomplicated in his brutality. This makes it easy for her to set her jaw and lift her chin. “Don’t kill my father.”

  He smiles, but his eyes are still cold. “Something causes a fear like that, Nassun. Something that has nothing to do with you, or your brother, or your mother’s lies. Whatever it is has left its wound in your father—a wound that obviously has festered. He will lash out at anything that touches upon or even near that reeking old sore… as you have seen.” She thinks of Uche, and nods. “That cannot be reasoned with.”

  “I can,” she blurts. “I’ve done it before. I know how to…” manipulate him, those are the words for it, but she’s barely ten years old so she actually says, “I can stop him from doing anything bad. I always have before.” Mostly.

  “Until you fail to stop him, once. That would be enough.” He eyes her. “I will kill him if he ever hurts you, Nassun. Keep that in mind, if you value your father’s life more than your own. I do not.” Then he turns back to the shed to arrange the satchels, and that’s the end of the conversation.

  Some while later, Nassun tells the others of this exchange. Little Paido suggests: “Maybe you should move into Found Moon with the rest of us.”

  Ynegen, Shirk, and Lashar are sitting nearby, relaxing and recovering after an afternoon spent finding and pushing around the marked rocks buried beneath the crucible floor. They nod and murmur agreement with this. “It’s only right,” says Lashar, in her haughty way. “You’ll never be truly one of us if you continue living down there among them.”

  Nassun has thought this herself, often. But… “He’s my father,” she says, spreading her hands.

  This elicits no understanding from the others, and a few looks of pity. Many of them still bear the marks of violence inflicted by the trusted adults in their lives. “He’s a still,” Shirk snaps back, and that is the end of the matter as far as most of them are concerned. Eventually Nassun gives up on trying to convince them otherwise.

  These thoughts invariably begin to affect her orogeny. How can they not, when an unspoken part of her wants to please her father? It takes all of herself, and the confidence that comes of delight, to engage with the earth to her fullest. And that afternoon, when she tries to touch the spinning silver threads of the hot spot and it goes so horribly wrong that she gasps and claws her way back to awareness only to find that she has iced all ten rings of the crucible, Schaffa puts his foot down.

  “You will sleep here tonight,” he says, after walking across the crusted earth to carry her back to a bench. She’s too exhausted to walk. It took everything she had not to die. “Tomorrow when you wake, I’m going with you to your house, and we’ll bring back your belongings.”

  “D-don’t want to,” she pants, even though she knows Schaffa doesn’t like it when the children say no to him.

  “I don’t care what you want, little one. This is interfering with your training. It is why the Fulcrum took children from their families. What you do is too dangerous to allow any distractions, however beloved.”

  “But.” She does not have the strength to object more strongly. He holds her in his lap, trying to warm her up because the edge of her own torus was barely an inch from her skin.

  Schaffa sighs. For a while he says nothing, except to shout for someone to bring a blanket; Eitz is the one who delivers it, having already gone to fetch it once he saw what happened. (Everyone saw what happened. It is embarrassing. As you realized back during Nassun’s dangerous early childhood, she is a very, very proud girl.) As Nassun finally stops shivering and feeling as though her sessapinae have been methodically beaten, Schaffa finally says, “You serve a higher purpose, little one. Not any single man’s desire—not even mine. You were not made for such petty things.”

  She frowns. “What… what was I made for, then?”

  He shakes his head. The silver flashes through him, the webwork of it alive and shifting as the thing lodged in his sessapinae weaves its will again, or tries to. “To remedy a great mistake. One to which I once contributed.”

  This is too interesting to fall asleep to, though Nassun’s whole body craves it. “What was the mistake?”

  “To enslave your kind.” When Nassun sits back to frown at him, he smiles again, but this time it is sad. “Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we perpetuated their enslavement of themselves, under Old Sanze. The Fulcrum was nominally run by orogenes, you see—orogenes whom we had culled and cultivated, shaped and chosen carefully, so that they would obey. So that they knew their place. Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”

  For some reason he pauses here, sighs. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Smiles. This is how Nassun knows without sessing that the pain which lives always in Schaffa’s head has begun to flare hotter again. “And my kind—Guardians such as I once was—were complicit in this atrocity. You’ve seen how your father knaps a stone? Hammering at it, flaking away its weaker bits. Breaking it, if it cannot bear the pressure, and starting over with another. That is what I did, back then, but with children.”

  Nassun finds this hard to believe. Of course Schaffa is ruthless and violent, but that is to his enemies. A year commless has taught Nassun the necessity of cruelty. But with the children of Found Moon, he is so very gentle and kind. “Even me?” she blurts. It is not the clearest of questions, but he understands what she means: If you had found me, back then?

  He touches her head, smooths a hand over it, rests his fingertips against the nape of her neck. He takes nothing from her this time, but perhaps the gesture comforts him, for he looks so sad. “Even you, Nassun. I hurt many children, back then.”

  So sad. Nassun decides he would not have meant it back then, even if he’d done something bad.

  “It was wrong to treat your kind so. You’re people. What we did, making tools of you, was wrong. It is allies that we need—more than ever now, in these darkening days.”

  Nassun will do anything that Schaffa asks. But allies are needed for specific tasks, and they are not the same t
hing as friends. The ability to distinguish this is also something the road has taught her. “What do you need us as allies for?”

  His gaze grows distant and troubled. “To repair something long broken, little one, and settle a feud whose origins lie so far in our past that most of us have forgotten how it began. Or that the feud continues.” He lifts a hand and touches the back of his head. “When I gave up my old ways, I pledged myself to the cause of helping to end it.”

  So that’s it. “I don’t like that it hurts you,” Nassun says, staring at that blot on the silver map of him. It’s so tiny. Smaller than one of the needles her father sometimes uses to stitch up holes in clothing. Yet it is a negative space against the glimmer, perceptible in silhouette only, or by its effects rather than in itself. Like the motionless spider at a quivering dew-laden web’s heart. Spiders hibernate, though, during a Season, and the thing within Schaffa never stops tormenting him. “Why does it hurt you if you’re doing what it wants?”

  Schaffa blinks. Squeezes her gently, and smiles. “Because I will not force you to do what it wants. I present its wishes to you as a choice, and I will abide if you say no. It is… less trusting of your kind. Admittedly, for good reason.” He shakes his head. “We can speak of this later. Now let your sessapinae rest.” She subsides at once—though she had not really meant to sess him, and hadn’t been really aware of doing so. Constant sessing is becoming second nature to her. “A nap will help you, I think.”

  So he carries her into one of the dormitory buildings and lays her down on an unclaimed cot. She curls up within the cocooning blanket and drifts off to the sound of his voice instructing the other children not to trouble her.

  And she wakes, the next morning, to the echo of her own screams and strangled gasps as she fights her way out of the blanket. Someone grabs her arm and it is everything it should not be: not now, not on her, not who she wants, not tolerable. She flails toward the earth and it is not heat or pressure that answer her call but silver lacing light that screams in echo and reverberates with her unspoken need for force. That scream echoes across the land, not just in threads but in waves, not just through the land but through water and air, and

  and then

  and then

  something answers her. Something in the sky.

  She does not mean what she does. Eitz certainly does not intend what happens as a result of his attempt to wake her from the nightmare. He likes Nassun. She’s a sweet kid. And even though Eitz is no longer a trusting child and it has occurred to him in the years since they left his Coastal home that Schaffa smiled too much that day and smelled faintly of blood, he understands what it means that Schaffa is so taken with Nassun. The Guardian has been looking for something all this time, and in spite of everything, Eitz loves him enough to hope that he finds it.

  Perhaps that will comfort you, as it will not Nassun, when in her frightened, disoriented flailing, she turns Eitz to stone.

  This is not like the thing happening, far away and underground, to Alabaster. That is slower, crueler, yet much more refined. Artful. What hits Eitz is a catastrophe: a hammer blow of disordered atoms reordered at not quite random. The lattice that should naturally form dissolves into chaos. It starts on his chest when Nassun’s hand tries to slap him away, and spreads in less time than it takes for the other children present to draw breath in gasps. It spreads over his skin, the brown hardening and developing an undersheen like tigereye, then into his flesh, though no one will see the ruby inside unless they break him. Eitz dies almost instantly, his heart solidifying first into a striated jewel of yellow quartz and deep garnet and white agate, with faint lacing veins of sapphire. He is a beautiful failure. It happens so fast that he has no time for fear. That may comfort Nassun later, if nothing else.

  But in the moment, in the pent seconds after this happens, as Nassun writhes and tries to drag her mind back from falling, falling upward through watery blue light, and as Deshati’s gasp turns into a scream (which sets off others) and Peek comes forward to stare openmouthed at the glossy, brightly colored facsimile of himself that Eitz has become, a number of things happen simultaneously elsewhere.

  Some of these things you will have guessed. Perhaps a hundred miles away, a sapphire obelisk shimmers into solid reality for an instant, then flickers back to translucence—before ponderously beginning to drift toward Jekity. Many more miles in a different direction, somewhere deep within a magmatic vein of porphyry, a shape that is suggestive of the human form turns, alert with new interest.

  Another thing happens that you may not have guessed—or perhaps you will have, because you know Jija as I do not. But in the precise moment that his daughter rips a boy’s protons loose, Jija finishes his laborious climb to the plateau that houses the Found Moon compound. Too angry for courtesy after a night of seething, he shouts for his daughter.

  Nassun does not hear him. She is convulsing in the dormitory. Hearing the other children’s screams, Jija turns toward the building—but before he can start in that direction, two of the Guardians emerge from their building and move across the compound. Umber heads toward the dormitory at a brisk pace. Schaffa veers off to intercept Jija. Nassun will hear of all this later from the children who witness it. (So will I.)

  “My daughter didn’t come home last night,” Jija says as Schaffa stops him in his tracks. Jija is alarmed by the children’s screams, but not by much. Whatever madness is happening within the dorm, he expects nothing better of the den of iniquity that Found Moon surely must be. As he confronts Schaffa, he has a set to his jaw that you will recognize from other occasions on which he has felt himself righteous. He will therefore be unwilling to back down.

  “She will be remaining here,” Schaffa says, smiling politely. “We’ve found that returning to your home in the evenings is interfering with her training. Since your leg has clearly healed enough to allow you to make the climb, could you be so kind as to bring her things, later today?”

  “She—” The screams get louder for a moment as Umber opens the door to go inside, but he closes it behind him and they stop. Jija frowns at this, but shakes his head in order to focus on what is important. “She will not be rusting staying here! I don’t want her spending any more time than she has to with these—” He stops short of vulgarity. “She isn’t one of them.”

  Schaffa tilts his head for an instant, as if he is listening to something only he can hear. “Isn’t she?” His tone is contemplative.

  Jija stares at him, momentarily confused into silence. Then he curses and tries to move past Schaffa. His leg has indeed mostly healed since his arrival at Jekity, but he still limps heavily, the harpoon having torn nerves and tendons that will be slow to heal, if they ever fully do. Even had Jija been able to move easily, however, he could not have evaded the hand that comes out of nowhere to cover his face.

  It is Schaffa’s big hand that splays over his face, moving so fast that it blurs before it seats itself. Jija doesn’t see it till it’s over his eyes and nose and mouth, picking him up bodily and slamming him to the ground on his back. As Jija lies there, blinking, he is too dazed to wonder what just happened, too stunned for pain. Then the hand pulls away, and from Jija’s perspective the Guardian’s face is just there, nose nearly touching Jija’s own.

  “Nassun does not have a father,” Schaffa says softly. (Jija will remember later that Schaffa smiles the whole time that he says this.) “She needs no father, nor mother. She does not know this yet, though someday she will learn. Shall I teach her early how to do without you?” And he positions two fingertips just under Jija’s jaw, pressing the tender skin there with enough force that Jija instantly understands his life depends on his answer.

  Jija goes still for a long, pent breath. There’s nothing in his head worth relating, even speculatively. He says nothing, though he makes a sound. When the children speak later of this tableau, they leave out this detail: the small, strangled whine uttered by a man who is trying not to loose his bladder and bowels, and who can think
of nothing beyond imminent death. It is mostly nasal, back-of-the-throat sound. It makes him want to cough.

  Schaffa seems to take Jija’s whine for an answer in itself. His smile widens for a moment—a real, heartening smile, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes his gums show. He is delighted that he does not have to kill Nassun’s father with his bare hands. And then he very deliberately lifts the hand that had been positioned under Jija’s jaw, waggling the fingers before Jija’s eyes until Jija blinks.

  “There,” Schaffa says. “Now we may behave again like civilized people.” He straightens, head turning toward the dormitory; it is clear he has forgotten Jija already, but for an afterthought. “Don’t forget to bring her things, please.” Then he rises, steps over Jija, and heads into the dormitory.

  No one really cares what Jija does after that. A boy has been turned to stone, and a girl has manifested power that is strange and horrifying even for a rogga. These are the things everyone will remember about this day.

  Everyone, I suspect, except Jija, who quietly limps home in the aftermath.

  In the dormitory, Nassun has finally managed to withdraw her awareness from the watery column of blue light that nearly consumed it. This is an amazing feat, though she does not realize it. All she knows, as she finally comes out of the fit and finds Schaffa leaning over her, is that a scary thing happened, and Schaffa is there to take care of her in the aftermath.

  (She is your daughter, at her core. It is not for me to judge her, but… ah, she is so very much yours.)

  “Tell me,” Schaffa says. He has sat on the edge of her cot, very close, deliberately blocking her view of Eitz. Umber is ushering the other children out. Peek is weeping and hysterical; the others are silent in shock. Nassun does not notice, having her own trauma to deal with in the moment.

  “There was,” she begins. She’s hyperventilating. Schaffa cups a big hand over her nose and mouth, and after a few moments her breathing slows. Once she is closer to normal, he removes his hand and nods for her to continue. “There was. A blue thing. Light and… I fell up. Schaffa, I fell up.” She frowns, confused by her own panic. “I had to get out of it. It hurt. It was too fast. It burned. I was so scared.”