The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  He nods as if this makes sense. “You survived, though. That’s very good.” She glows with this praise, even though she has no idea what he means. He considers for a moment. “Did you sess anything else, while you were connected?”

  (She will not wonder at this word, connected, until much later.)

  “There was a place, up north. Lines, in the ground. All over.” She means all over the Stillness. Schaffa cocks his head with interest, which encourages her to keep babbling. “I could hear people talking. Where they touched the lines. There were people in the knots. Where the lines crossed. I couldn’t figure out what anybody was saying, though.”

  Schaffa goes very still. “People in the knots. Orogenes?”

  “Yes?” It’s actually hard to answer that question. The grip of those distant strangers’ orogeny was strong—some stronger than Nassun herself. Yet there was a strange, almost uniform smoothness to each of these strongest ones. Like running fingers over polished stone: There is no texture to catch on. Those were also the ones spread across the greatest distance, some of them even farther to the north than Tirimo—all the way up near where the world has gone red and hot.

  “The node network,” Schaffa says thoughtfully. “Hmm. Someone is keeping some of the node maintainers alive, up north? How interesting.”

  There’s more, so Nassun has to keep babbling it out. “Closer by, there were a lot of them. Us.” These felt like her fellows of Found Moon, their orogeny bright and darting like fish, many words schooling and reverberating along the silver lines connecting them. Conversations, whispers, laughter. A comm, her mind suggests. A community of some sort. A community of orogenes.

  (She does not sess Castrima. I know you’re wondering.)

  “How many?” Schaffa’s voice is very quiet.

  She cannot gauge such things. “I just hear a lot of people talking. Like, houses full.”

  Schaffa turns away. In profile, she sees that his lips have drawn back from his teeth. It isn’t a smile, for once. “The Antarctic Fulcrum.”

  Nida, who has quietly come into the room in the meantime, says from over near the door: “They weren’t purged?”

  “Apparently not.” There is no inflection to Schaffa’s voice. “Only a matter of time until they discover us.”

  “Yes.” Then Nida laughs softly. Nassun sesses the flex of silver threads within Schaffa. Smiling eases the pain, he has said. The more a Guardian is smiling, laughing, the more something is hurting them. “Unless…” Nida laughs again. This time Schaffa smiles, too.

  But he turns again to Nassun and strokes her hair back from her face. “I need you to be calm,” he says. Then he stands and moves aside so that she can see Eitz’s corpse.

  And after she has finished screaming and weeping and shaking in Schaffa’s arms, Nida and Umber come over and lift Eitz’s statue, carrying it away. It is obviously much heavier than Eitz ever was, but Guardians are very strong. Nassun doesn’t know where they take him, the beautiful sea-born boy with the sad smile and the kind eyes, and she never knows anything of his ultimate fate other than that she has killed him, which makes her a monster.

  “Perhaps,” Schaffa tells her as she sobs these words. He holds her in his lap again, stroking her thick curls. “But you are my monster.” She is so low and horrified that this actually makes her feel better.

  Stone lasts, unchanging. Never alter what is written in stone.

  —Tablet Three, “Structures,” verse one

  13

  you, amid relics

  IT BEGINS TO FEEL AS though you’ve lived in Castrima all your life. It shouldn’t. Just another comm, just another name, just another new start, or at least a partial one. It will probably end the way all the others have. But… it makes a difference that here, everyone knows what you are. That is the one good thing about the Fulcrum, about Meov, about being Syenite: You could be who you were. That’s a luxury you’re learning to savor anew.

  You’re topside again, in Castrima-over as they’ve been calling it, standing on what used to be the town’s token greenland. The ground around Castrima is alkaline and sandy; you heard Ykka actually hoping for a little acid rain to make the soil better. You think the ground probably needs more organic matter for that to work… and there isn’t likely to be much of that, since you saw three boilbug mounds on the way here.

  The good news is that the mounds are easy to detect, even when they’re only a little higher than the ash layer that covers the ground. The insects within them tickle your awareness as a ready source of heat and pressure for your orogeny. On the walk here, you showed the children how to sess for that pent difference from the cooler, more relaxed ambient around it. The younger ones made a game of it, gasping and pointing whenever they sensed a mound and trying to outdo one another in the count.

  The bad news is that there are more of the boilbug mounds this week than there were last week. That’s probably not a good thing, but you don’t let the children see your worry.

  There are seventeen children altogether—the bulk of Castrima’s complement of orogenes. A couple are in the teen range, but most are younger, one only five. Most are orphans, or might as well be, and that does not surprise you at all. What does surprise you is that all of them must have relatively good self-control and quick wits, because otherwise they wouldn’t have survived the Rifting. They would’ve had to sess it coming in time enough to get to someplace isolated, let their instincts save them, recover, and then go someplace else before anybody started trying to figure out who was at the center of the circle of non-destruction. Most are Midlatter mongrels like you: lots of not-quite-Sanzed-bronze skin, not-quite-ashblow hair, eyes and bodies on a continuum from the Arctic to the Coaster. Not much different from the kids you used to teach in Tirimo’s creche. Only the subject matter, and by necessity your teaching methods, must be different.

  “Sess what I do—just sess, don’t imitate yet,” you say, and then you construct a torus around yourself. You do it several times, each time a different way—sometimes spinning it high and tight, sometimes holding it steady but wide enough that its edge rolls close to them. (Half the children gasp and scramble away. That’s exactly what they should do; good. Not good that the rest just stood there stupidly. You’ll have to work on that.) “Now. Spread out. You there, you there; all of you stay about that far apart. Once you’re in place, spin a torus that looks exactly like the one I’m making now.”

  It isn’t how the Fulcrum would’ve taught them. There, with years of time and safe walls and comforting blue skies overhead, the teaching could be done gently, gradually, giving the children time to get over their fears or outgrow their immaturities. There’s no time for gentleness in a Season, though, and no room for failure within Castrima’s jagged walls. You’ve heard the grumbling, seen the resentful looks when you join use-caste crews or head down to the communal bath. Ykka thinks Castrima is something special: a comm where rogga and still can live in harmony, working together to survive. You think she’s naive. These children need to be prepared for the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them.

  So you demonstrate, and correct their imitations with words when you can and once with a torus-inversion slap when one of the older children spins his too wide and threatens to ice one of his comrades. “You cannot be careless!” The boy sits on the icy ground, staring at you wide-eyed. You also made the ground heave under his feet to throw him down, and you’re standing over him now, shouting, deliberately intimidating. He almost killed another child; he should be afraid. “People die when you make mistakes. Is that what you want?” A frantic headshake. “Then get up, and do it again.”

  You flog them through the exercise until every one of them has demonstrated at least a basic ability to control the size of their torus. It feels wrong to teach them only this without any of the theory that will help them understand why and how their power works, or any of the stabilizing exercises designed to perfect the detachment of instinct from power. You must teach them in days what you maste
red over years; where you are an artist, they will be only crude imitators at best. They are subdued when you walk them back to Castrima, and you suspect some of them hate you. Actually, you’re pretty sure they hate you. But they will be more useful to Castrima like this—and on the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them, they’ll be ready.

  (This is a familiar series of thoughts. Once, as you trained Nassun, you told yourself that it did not matter if she hated you by the end of it; she would know your love by her own survival. That never felt right, though, did it? You were gentler with Uche for that reason. And you always meant to apologize to Nassun, later, when she was old enough to understand… Ah, there are so many regrets in you that they spin, heavy as compressed iron, at your core.)

  “You’re right,” Alabaster says as you sit on an infirmary cot and tell him about the lesson later. “But you’re also wrong.”

  It’s later than usual for you to be visiting Alabaster, and as a result he is restless and in visible pain amid his nest. The medications that Lerna usually gives him are wearing off. Being with him is always a competition of desires for you: You know there’s not much time for him to teach you this stuff, but you also want to prolong his life, and every day that you wear him down grates on you like a glacier. Urgency and despair don’t get along well. You’ve resolved to keep it brief this time, but he seems inclined to talk a lot today, as he leans against Antimony’s hand and keeps his eyes closed. You can’t help thinking of this as some kind of strength-saving gesture, as if just the sight of you is a drain.

  “Wrong?” you prompt. Maybe there’s a warning note in your voice. You’ve always been protective of your students, whoever they are.

  “For wasting your time, for one thing. They’ll never have the precision to be more than rock-pushers.” Alabaster’s voice is thick with contempt.

  “Innon was a rock-pusher,” you snap.

  A muscle flexes in his jaw, and he pauses for a moment. “So maybe it’s a good thing that you’re teaching them how to push rocks safely, even if you aren’t doing it kindly.” Now the contempt is gone from his words. It’s as close to an apology as you’re probably going to get from him. “But I stand by the rest: You’re wrong to teach them at all, because their lessons are getting in the way of your lessons.”

  “What?”

  He makes you sess one of his stumps again, and—oh. Ohhhh. Suddenly it’s harder to grasp the stuff between his cells. It takes longer for your perception to adjust, and when it does, you keep having to reflexively jerk yourself out of a tendency to notice only the heat and jittering movement of the small particles. One afternoon of teaching has set your learning back by a week or more.

  “There’s a reason the Fulcrum taught you the way it did,” he explains finally, when you sit back and rub your eyes and fight down frustration. He’s opened his eyes now; they are hooded as they watch you. “The Fulcrum’s methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away from magic. The torus isn’t even necessary—you can gather ambient energy in any number of ways. But that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny, never up. Nothing above you matters. Only your immediate surroundings, never farther.” He shakes his head to the degree that he can. “It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”

  You’d almost forgotten this part of him: the dreamer, the rebel, always reconsidering the way things have always been because maybe they should never have been that way in the first place. He’s right, too. Life in the Stillness discourages reconsideration, reorientation. Wisdom is set in stone, after all; that’s why no one trusts the mutability of metal. There’s a reason Alabaster was the magnetic core of your little family, back when you were together.

  Damn, you’re nostalgic today. It prompts you to say, “I think you’re not just a ten-ringer.” He blinks in surprise. “You’re always thinking. You’re a genius, too—it’s just that your genius is in a subject area that no one respects.”

  Alabaster stares at you for a moment. His eyes narrow. “Are you drunk?”

  “No I’m not—” Evil Earth, so much for your fond memories. “Go on with the rusting lesson.”

  He seems more relieved by the change of subject than you. “So that’s what Fulcrum training does to you. You learn to think of orogeny as a matter of effort, when it’s really… perspective. And perception.”

  An Allia-shaped trauma tells you why the Fulcrum wouldn’t have wanted every two-shard feral reaching for any obelisks nearby. But you spend a moment trying to understand the distinction he’s explaining. It’s true that using energy is something entirely different from using magic. The Fulcrum’s method makes orogeny feel like what it is: straining to shove around heavy objects, just with will instead of hands or levers. Magic, though, feels effortless—at least while one is using it. The exhaustion comes later. In the moment, though, it is simply about knowing it’s there. Training yourself to see it.

  “I don’t understand why they did this,” you say, tapping your fingers on the mattress in thought. The Fulcrum was built by orogenes. At least some of them, at some point in the past, must have sessed magic. But… you shiver as you understand. Ah, yes. The most powerful orogenes, the ones who detect magic most easily and perhaps have trouble mastering energy redistribution as a result, are the ones who end up in the nodes.

  Alabaster thinks in bigger pictures than just the Fulcrum. “I think,” he says, “they understood the danger. Not just that roggas who lacked the necessary fine control would connect to obelisks and die, but that some might do it successfully—for the wrong reasons.”

  You try to think of a right reason to activate a network of ancient death machines. Alabaster reads your face. “I doubt I’m the first rogga who’s wanted to tip the Fulcrum into a lava pit.”

  “Good point.”

  “And the war. Don’t ever forget that. The Guardians who work with the Fulcrum are one of the factions I told you about, so to speak. They’re the ones who want the status quo: roggas made safe and useful, stills doing all the work and thinking they run the place, Guardians actually in charge of everything. Controlling the people who can control natural disasters.”

  You’re surprised by this. No, you’re surprised you didn’t think of it yourself. But then you haven’t spent much time thinking about Guardians, when you weren’t in the immediate vicinity of one. Maybe this is another kind of thought aversion you’ve been conditioned to: Don’t look up, and don’t think about those damned smiles.

  You decide to make yourself think about them now. “But Guardians die during a Season…” Shit. “They say they die…” Shit. “Of course they don’t.”

  Alabaster lets out a rusty sound that might be a laugh. “I’m a bad influence.”

  He always has been. You can’t help smiling, though the feeling doesn’t last, because of the conversation. “They don’t join comms, though. They must go somewhere else to ride it out.”

  “Maybe. Maybe this ‘Warrant’ place. No one seems to know where it is.” He pauses, grows thoughtful. “I suppose I should have asked mine about that before I left her.”

  No one just leaves their Guardian. “You said you didn’t kill her.”

  He blinks, out of memory. “No. I cured her. Sort of. You know about the thing in their heads.” Yes. Blood, and the sting of your palm. Schaffa handing something tiny and bloody to another Guardian, with great care. You nod. “It gives them their abilities, but it also taints them, twists them. The seniors at the Fulcrum used to speak of it in whispers. There are degrees of contamination…” He sets his jaw, visibly steering himself away from that topic. You can guess why. Somewhere along the way, it lands on the shi
rtless Guardians who kill with a touch. “Anyway, I took that thing out of mine.”

  You swallow. “I saw a Guardian kill another once, taking it out.”

  “Yes. When the contamination becomes too great. Then they’re dangerous even to other Guardians, and must be purged. I’d heard they weren’t gentle about it. Brutes even to their own.”

  It’s angry, Guardian Timay had said, right before Schaffa killed her. Readying for the time of return. You inhale. The memory is vivid in your mind because that was the day that you and Tonkee—Binof—found the socket. The day of your first ring test, early and with your life in the balance. You’ll never forget anything of that day. And now—“It’s the Earth.”

  “What?”

  “The thing that’s in Guardians. The… contaminant.” It changed those who would control it. Chained them fate to fate. “She started speaking for the Earth!”

  You can tell you’ve actually surprised him, for once. “Then…” He considers for a moment. “I see. That’s when they switch teams. Stop working for the status quo and Guardian interests, and start working for the Earth’s interests instead. No wonder the others kill them.”

  This is what you need to understand. “What does the Earth want?”

  Alabaster’s gaze is heavy, heavy. “What does any living thing want, facing an enemy so cruel that it stole away a child?”

  Your jaw tightens. Vengeance.

  You shift down from the cot to the floor, leaning against the cot’s frame. “Tell me about the Obelisk Gate.”

  “Yes. I thought that would get you interested.” Alabaster’s voice has gone soft again, but there is a look on his face that makes you think, This is what he looked like on the day he made the Rift. “You remember the basic principle. Parallel scaling. Yoking two oxen together instead of one. Two roggas together can do more than each individually. It works for obelisks, too, just… exponential. A matrix, not a yoke. Dynamic.”