The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  You don’t want to hear it. You hurry forward and pick up Hoa’s arm. The thing is heavy as stone; you have to put your legs into it or risk your lower back. You turn and people move out of your way and you hear Lerna say, “Essun?” But you don’t want to hear him, either.

  There are threads, see. Silver lines that only you can see, flailing and curling forth from the arm’s stump, but they shift as you turn. Always pointing in a particular direction. So you follow them. No one follows you, and you don’t care what that means. Not at the moment.

  The tendrils lead you to your own apartment.

  You step through the curtain and stop. Tonkee’s not home. Must be either at Hjarka’s or up in the green room. There are two more limbs on the floor in front of you, bloody stumps with diamond bones poking forth. No, they are not on the floor; they are in the floor, partially submerged in it, one down to the thigh, the other just a calf and foot. Caught, as if climbing out. There are twin trails of blood, thick enough to be worrisome, over the homey rug that you bartered one of Jija’s old flintknives for. They go toward your room, so you follow them in. And then you drop the arm. Fortunately it does not land on your foot.

  What is left of Hoa crawls toward the floor-mattress that passes for your bed. His other arm is also gone, you don’t know where. Hanks of his hair are missing. He pauses when you come in, hearing or sessing you, and he lies still as you circle him and see that his lower jaw has been ripped away. He has no eyes, and there is a… a bite, just above his temple. That’s why his hair is missing. Something has bitten into his skull like an apple, incising a chunk of flesh and the diamond bone underneath. You can’t see what’s inside his head for the blood. That’s good.

  It would frighten you, if you did not immediately understand. Beside your bed is the little cloth-wrapped bundle that he has carried since Tirimo. You hurry to it, open it up, bring it to the ruin of him, and hunker down. “Can you turn over?”

  He responds by doing so. For a moment you’re stymied by the lack of a lower jaw, and then you think fuck it and shove one of the stones from the bundle directly into the ragged hole of Hoa’s throat. The feel of his flesh is warm and human as you push it down with your finger until the muscles of his swallowing reflex catch it. (Your gorge rises. You will it back down.) You start to feed him another, but after a few breaths he begins to shiver all over violently. You don’t realize you’re still sessing magic until suddenly Hoa’s body becomes alive with glimmering silver threads, all of them whipping about and curling like the stinging tentacles of ocean creatures from lorists’ tales. Hundreds of them. You draw back in alarm, but Hoa makes a raw, breathy sound, and you think maybe it means more. You push another stone into his throat, and then another. There weren’t many left to begin with. When you’re down to only three, you hesitate. “You want them all?”

  Hoa hesitates, too. You can see that in his body language. You don’t understand why he needs them at all; aside from that lashing of magic—he is made of it, every inch of him is alive with it, you’ve never seen anything like this—nothing about his damaged body is improving. Can anyone survive or recover from this degree of damage? He’s not human enough for you to even guess. But finally he croaks again. It is a deeper sound than the first. Resigned, maybe, or maybe that is your imagination patterning humanity over the animal sounds of his animal flesh. So you push the last three stones into him.

  Nothing happens for a moment. Then.

  Silver tendrils billow and swell around him so rapidly, with such frenzy, that you scramble back. You know some of the things that magic can do, and something about this seems altogether wild and uncontrolled. It fills the room, though, and—and you blink. You can see it, not just sess it. All of Hoa glimmers now with silver-white light, growing rapidly too bright to look at directly; even a still would be able to see this. You move into the living room, peering through the bedroom door because that seems safer. The instant you cross the room’s threshold, the substance of the whole apartment—walls, floor, everywhere there is crystal—shivers for an instant, becoming translucent and obelisk-unreal. Your bedroom furniture and belongings float amid the flickering white. There is a soft thump from behind you that makes you jump and whirl, but it’s Hoa’s legs, which are out of the living room floor and sliding along the trails of blood into your room. The arm you dropped is moving, too, already nudging up against the bright morass of him, becoming bright, too. Leaping to rejoin his body, as the gray stone eater’s hand rejoined his wrist.

  Something slides up from the floor—no. You see the floor slide up, as if it were putty and not crystal, and wrap itself around his body. The light dies when he does it; the material immediately begins to change into something darker. When you blink away the afterimages enough to see, there is something huge and strange and impossible where Hoa once was.

  You step back into the bedroom—carefully, because the floor and walls might be solid again, but you know that’s possibly a temporary state. The once-smooth crystal is rough beneath your feet. The thing takes up most of the room now, lying next to your disordered bed that is now half submerged in the resolidified floor. It’s hot. Your foot tangles briefly in the strap of your half-empty runny-sack, which fortunately is still intact and unmerged with the room. You stoop quickly and grab it; the habits of survival. Earthfires it’s hot in here. The bed does not catch fire, but you think that’s only because it’s not directly touching the big thing. You can sess it, whatever it is. No, you know what it is: chalcedony. A huge, oblong lump of gray-green chalcedony, like the outer shell of a geode.

  You already know what’s happening, don’t you? I told you of Tirimo after the Rifting. The far end of the valley, where the shockwave of the shake loosed a geode that then split open like an egg. The geode hadn’t been there all along, you realize; this is magic, not nature. Well, perhaps a bit of both. For stone eaters, there’s little difference between the two.

  And in the morning, after you spend the night at the living room table, where you meant to stay awake and watch the steaming lump of rock but instead fell asleep, it happens again. The cracking open of the geode is loud, explosively violent. A flicker of pressure-driven plasma curls forth and scorches or melts all the belongings you left in the room. Except the runny-sack, since you took it. Good instincts.

  You’re shaking from being startled awake. Slowly you stand and edge into the room. It’s so hot that it’s hard to breathe. Like an oven—though the waft of warmth causes the apartment’s entry curtain to billow open. Quickly the heat diminishes to only uncomfortable, and not dangerous.

  You barely notice. Because what rises from the split in the geode, moving too human-smoothly at first but rapidly readjusting to a familiar sort of punctuated stillness… is the stone eater from the garnet obelisk.

  Hello, again.

  Our position is thoroughly identified with the physical integrity of the Stillness—for the obvious interest of long-term survival. Maintenance of this land is peculiarly dependent upon seismic equilibrium, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the orogenic can establish such. A blow at their bondage is a blow at the very planet. We rule, therefore, that though they bear some resemblance to we of good and wholesome lineage, and though they must be managed with kind hand to the benefit of both bond and free, any degree of orogenic ability must be assumed to negate its corresponding personhood. They are rightfully to be held and regarded as an inferior and dependent species.

  —The Second Yumenescene Lore Council’s Declaration on the Rights of the Orogenically Afflicted

  15

  Nassun, in rejection

  WHAT I REMEMBER OF MY youth is color. Greenness everywhere. White iridescence. Deep and vital reds. These particular colors linger in my memory, when so much of the rest is thin and pale and nearly gone. There is a reason for that.

  Nassun sits in an office within the Antarctic Fulcrum, suddenly understanding her mother better than ever before.

  Schaffa and Umber sit on either side of he
r. All three of them are holding cups of safe that the Fulcrum people have offered them. Nida is back at Found Moon, because someone must remain to watch over the children there and because she has the hardest time emulating normal human behavior. Umber is so quiet that no one knows what he’s thinking. Schaffa’s doing all the talking. They’ve been invited inside to speak with three people who are called “seniors,” whatever that means. These seniors wear uniforms that are all black, with neatly buttoned jackets and pleated slacks—ah, so that is why they call Imperial Orogenes blackjackets. They feel all over of power and fear.

  One of them is obviously Antarctic-bred, with graying red hair and skin so white that green veins show starkly just underneath. She has horsey teeth and beautiful lips, and Nassun cannot stop staring at both as she talks. Her name is Serpentine, which does not seem to fit her at all.

  “Of course we have no new grits coming in,” Serpentine says. For some reason she looks at Nassun as she speaks and spreads her hands. The fingers shake slightly. That’s been happening since this meeting began. “It’s a difficulty we hadn’t quite anticipated. If nothing else, it means we have grit dormitories going unused in a time when safe shelter is quite valuable. That would be why we extended an offer to nearby comms to take in their unparented children, those too young to have earned acceptance into a comm. Only sensible, yes? And we took in a few refugees, which would be why we had no choice but to open trade negotiations with the locals for supplies and such. With no resupply coming from Yumenes…” Her expression falters. “Well. It’s understandable, isn’t it?”

  She’s whining. Doing it with a gracious smile and impeccable manners, doing it with two other people nodding sagely along with her, but doing it. Nassun isn’t sure why these people bother her so much. It has something to do with the whining, and with the falseness of them: They are clearly uncomfortable with the arrival of Guardians, clearly afraid and angry, and yet they pretend courtesy. It makes her think of her mother, who pretended to be kind and loving when Father or anyone else was around, and who was cold and fierce in private. Thinking of the Antarctic Fulcrum as a place populated by endless variants of her mother makes Nassun’s teeth and palms and sessapinae itch.

  And she can see by the icy placidity of Umber’s face, and the brittle-edged friendliness of Schaffa’s smile, that the Guardians don’t like it, either. “Understandable indeed,” Schaffa says. He turns the cup of safe in his hands. The cloudy solution has remained white as it should, but he hasn’t taken a single sip. “I imagine the local comms are grateful to you for housing and feeding their surplus population. And it is only sensible that you would put those people to work, too. Guarding your walls. Tending your fields—” He pauses, smiles more widely. “Gardens, I mean.”

  Serpentine smiles back, and her companions shift uncomfortably. It is something Nassun doesn’t understand. The Season hasn’t yet taken full hold here in the Antarctic region, so it does seem wise that a comm would plant its greenland and put Strongbacks on its walls and start preparing for the worst. Somehow it is bad that the Antarctic Fulcrum has done this, however. Bad that this Fulcrum is functional at all. Nassun has stopped drinking the cup of safe the seniors gave her, even though she’s only had safe a couple of times before and sort of likes being treated like a grown-up—but Schaffa isn’t drinking, and that warns her the situation is not really safe.

  One of the seniors is a Somidlats woman who could pass for a relative of Nassun’s: tall, middling brown, curling thick hair, a body that is thick-waisted and broad-hipped and heavy-thighed. They introduced her, but Nassun can’t remember her name. Her orogeny feels the sharpest of the three, though she is the youngest; there are six rings on her long fingers. And she is the one who finally stops smiling and folds her hands and lifts her chin, just a little. It is another thing that reminds Nassun of her mother. Mama often held herself the same way, feeling of soft dignity layered over a core of diamond obstinacy. The obstinacy is what comes to the fore now as the woman says, “I take it you are unhappy, Guardian.”

  Serpentine winces. The other Fulcrum orogene, a man who introduced himself as Lamprophyre, sighs. Schaffa and Umber’s heads tilt in near-unison, Schaffa’s smile widening with interest. “Not unhappy,” he says. Nassun can tell that he is pleased to be done with the pleasantry. “Merely surprised. It is, after all, standard protocol for any Fulcrum facility to be shut down in the event of a declared Season.”

  “Declared by whom?” the six-ringed woman asks. “Until your arrival today, there have been no Guardians here to declare anything of the sort. The local comm Leaderships have varied: Some declared Seasonal Law, some are only in lockdown, some are business as usual.”

  “And had they all declared Seasonal Law,” Schaffa says, in that very quiet voice he uses when he knows the answer to a question already and only wants to hear you say it yourself, “would you truly have all killed yourselves? Since, as you note, there are no Guardians here to take care of the matter for you.”

  Nassun catches herself before she would have started in surprise. Kill themselves? But she is not quite good enough at controlling her orogeny to keep it from twitching where she does not. All three of the Fulcrum people glance at her, and Serpentine smiles thinly. “Careful, Guardian,” she says, looking at Nassun but speaking to Schaffa. “Your pet seems uncomfortable with the idea of mass extermination for no reason.”

  Schaffa says, “I hide nothing from her,” and Nassun’s surprise is swallowed up by love and pride. He glances at Nassun. “Historically, the Fulcrum has survived on the sufferance of its neighbors, depending on the walls and resources of comms nearby. And as with all who have no viable use during a Season, there is most certainly an expectation that Imperial Orogenes will remove themselves from the competition for resources—so that normal, healthy people have a better chance to survive.” He pauses. “And since orogenes are not permitted to exist outside the supervision of a Guardian or the Fulcrum…” He spreads his hands.

  “We are the Fulcrum, Guardian,” says the third senior, whose name Nassun has forgotten. This is a man from some Western Coastal people; he is slender and straight-haired and has a high-cheekboned, nearly concave face. His skin is white, too, but his eyes are dark and cool. His orogeny feels light and many-layered, like mica. “And we are self-sufficient. Quite apart from being a drain on resources, we provide needed services to the nearby communities. We have even—unasked and uncompensated—worked to mitigate the aftershakes of the Rifting on the occasions when they reach this far south. It is because of us that few Antarctic comms have suffered serious harm since the start of this Season.”

  “Admirable,” says Umber. “And clever, making yourselves invaluable. Not a thing your Guardians would have permitted, though. I imagine.”

  All three of the seniors grow still for a moment. “This is Antarctic, Guardian,” says Serpentine. She smiles, though the expression does not reach her eyes. “We are a fraction of the size of the Fulcrum at Yumenes—barely twenty-five ringed orogenes, a handful of mostly grown grits. There were never many Guardians permanently stationed here. Most of what we got were visiting Guardians on circuit, or delivering us new grits. None at all since the Rifting.”

  “Never many Guardians stationed here,” agrees Schaffa, “but there were three, as I recall. I knew one.” He pauses, and for a fleeting instant his expression goes distant and lost and a little confused. “I remember knowing one.” He blinks. Smiles again. “Yet now there are none.”

  Serpentine is tense. They are all tense, these seniors, in a way that makes the itch at the back of Nassun’s mind grow. “We endured several raids by commless bands before we finally put up a wall,” Serpentine says. “They died bravely, protecting us.”

  It’s so blatant a lie that Nassun stares at her, mouth open.

  “Well,” Schaffa says, setting down his cup of safe and letting out a little sigh. “I suppose this went about as well as could be expected.”

  And even though Nassun has guessed by
now what is coming, even though she has seen Schaffa move with a speed that is not humanly possible before, even though the silver within him and Umber ignites like matchflame and blazes through them in the instant just before, she is still caught off guard when Schaffa lunges forward and puts his fist through Serpentine’s face.

  Serpentine’s orogeny dies as she does. But the other two seniors are up and moving in the next instant, Lamprophyre falling backward over his chair to escape Umber’s blurring reach for him and the six-ringed woman drawing a blowgun from one sleeve. Schaffa’s eyes widen, but his hand is still stuck in Serpentine; he tries to lunge at her, but the corpse is deadweight on his arm. She lifts the gun to her lips.

  Before she can get off a puff, Nassun is up and in the earth and beginning to spin a torus that will ice the woman in an instant. The woman jerks in surprise and flexes something that shatters Nassun’s torus before it can form completely; it is a thing her mother used to do during their practices, if Nassun did something she wasn’t supposed to. The shock of this realization causes Nassun to stagger and stumble back.

  Her mother learned that trick here, in the Fulcrum, this is how people from the Fulcrum train young orogenes, everything Nassun has known of her mother is tainted by this place and has always been—

  But the fleeting distraction is enough. Schaffa rips his hand free of the corpse at last and is across the room in another breath, grabbing the blowgun and snatching it away and stabbing it into the woman’s throat before she can recover. She falls to her knees, choking, reaching instinctively for the earth, but then something sweeps the room in a wave and Nassun gasps when suddenly she cannot sess a single thing. The woman gasps, too, then wheezes, scrabbling at her throat. Schaffa grabs her head and breaks her neck with a swift jerk.

  Lamprophyre is scrambling backward as Umber stalks him, fumbling at his clothing where some kind of small, heavy object has gotten lodged in cloth. “Evil Earth,” he blurts, jerking at the buttons of his jacket. “You’re contaminated! Both of you!”