The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  He sighs, and there is great compassion in his voice. “You don’t even know how dangerous you are. To far, far more than me.”

  She doesn’t, and that bothers her a lot. Umber does not act out of cruelty. If he sees her as a threat, there must be some reason for it. But it doesn’t matter.

  “Schaffa wants me alive,” she says. “So I live. Even if I have to kill you.”

  Umber appears to consider this. She glimpses the quick flicker of the silver within him and knows, suddenly and instinctively, that she’s no longer talking to Umber, exactly.

  His master.

  Umber says, “And if Schaffa decides you should die?”

  “Then I die.” That’s what the Fulcrum got wrong, she feels certain. They treated the Guardians as enemies, and maybe they once were, like Schaffa said. But allies must trust in one another, be vulnerable to one another. Schaffa is the only person in the world who loves Nassun, and Nassun will die, or kill, or remake the world, for his sake.

  Slowly, Umber inclines his head. “Then I will trust in your love for him,” he says. For an instant there is an echo in his voice, in his body, through the ground, reverberating away, so deep. “For now.” With that, he moves past her and sits down near Schaffa, assuming a guard stance himself.

  Nassun does not understand Guardian reasoning, but she’s learned one thing about them over the months: They do not bother to lie. If Umber says he will trust Schaffa—no. Trust Nassun’s love for Schaffa, because there is a difference. But if Umber says this has meaning to him, then she can rely on that.

  So she lies down on her own bedroll and relaxes in spite of everything. She doesn’t sleep for some while, though. Nerves, maybe.

  Night falls. The evening is clear, apart from the faint haze of ash blowing from the north, and a few broken, pearled clouds that periodically drift southward along the breeze. The stars come out, winking through the haze, and Nassun stares at them for a long while. She’s begun to drift, her mind finally relaxing toward sleep, when belatedly she notices that one of the tiny white lights up there is moving in a different direction from the rest—downward, sort of, while the other stars march west to east across the sky. Slow. Hard to unsee it now that she’s made it out. It’s a little bigger and brighter than the rest, too. Strange.

  Nassun rolls over to turn her back to Umber, and sleeps.

  These things have been down here for an age of the world. Foolish to call them bones. They go to powder when we touch them.

  But stranger than the bones are the murals. Plants I’ve never seen, something that might be a language but it just looks like shapes and wiggling. And one: a great round white thing amid the stars, hanging over a landscape. Eerie. I didn’t like it. I had the blackjacket crumble the mural away.

  —Journal of Journeywoman Fogrid Innovator Yumenes. Archives of the Geneer Licensure, Equatorial East

  16

  you meet an old friend, again

  I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.

  You stare at the stone eater that has burst forth from the chalcedony chrysalis. It stands hunched and perfectly still, watching you sidelong through the slight heat-waver of the air around the split geode. Its hair is as you remember from that half-real, half-dream moment within the garnet obelisk: a frozen splash, what happens to ashblow hair when a hard gust of wind lifts it up and back. Translucent white-ish opal now instead of simply white. But unlike the fleshly form that you grew to know, this stone eater’s “skin” is as black as the night sky once was before the Season. What you thought were cracks back then, you now realize are actually white and silver marbling veins. Even the elegant drape of pseudo-clothing wrapped around the body, a simple chiton that hangs off one shoulder, is marbled black. Only the eyes lack the marbling, the whites now matte smooth darkness. The irises are still icewhite. They stand out from the black face, stark and so atavistically disturbing that it actually takes you a moment to realize the face around it is still Hoa’s.

  Hoa. He is older, you see at once; the face is that of a young man and not a boy. Still too wide, with too narrow a mouth, racially nonsensical. You can read anxiety in those frozen features, though, because you learned to read it on a face that was once softer and designed to elicit your compassion.

  “Which was the lie?” you ask. It is the only thing you can think to ask.

  “The lie?” The voice is a man’s now. The same voice, but in the tenor range. Coming from his chest somewhere.

  You step into the room. It’s still unpleasantly hot, though cooling off quickly. You’re sweating anyway. “Your human shape, or this?”

  “Both have been true at different times.”

  “Ah, yes. Alabaster said all of you were human. Once, anyway.”

  There is a moment of silence. “Are you human?”

  At this, you cannot help but laugh once. “Officially? No.”

  “Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?”

  “Human.”

  “Then so am I.”

  He stands steaming between the halves of a giant rock from which he just hatched. “Uh, not anymore.”

  “Should I take your word for that? Or listen to what I feel myself to be?”

  You shake your head, walking as far as you can around the geode. Inside it there is nothing; it’s a thin stone shell bare of crystals or the usual precipitant lining. Probably doesn’t qualify as a geode, then. “How’d you end up in an obelisk?”

  “Pissed off the wrong rogga.”

  This surprises you into a laugh, which makes you stop and stare at him. It’s an uncomfortable laugh. He’s watching you the way he always used to, all eyes and hope. Should it really matter that the eyes are so strange now?

  “I didn’t know that could be done,” you say. “Trapping a stone eater, I mean.”

  “You could do it. It’s one of the only ways to stop one of us.”

  “Not kill you, obviously.”

  “No. There’s only one way to do that.”

  “Which is?”

  He flicks to face you. This seems instantaneous; suddenly the statue’s pose is completely different, serene and upright, with one hand raised in… invitation? Appeal? “Are you planning to kill me, Essun?”

  You sigh and shake your head and extend a hand to touch one of the stone halves, out of curiosity.

  “Don’t. It’s still too hot for your flesh.” He pauses. “This is how I get clean, without soap.”

  A day along the side of the road, south of Tirimo. A boy who stared at a bar of soap in confusion, then delight. It’s still him. You can’t shake it off. So you sigh and also let go of the part of yourself that wants to treat him as something else, something frightening, something other. He’s Hoa. He wants to eat you, and he tried to help you find your daughter even though he failed. There’s an intimacy in these facts, however strange they are, that means something to you.

  You fold your arms and pace slowly around the geode, and him. His eyes follow. “So who kicked your ass?” He has regenerated the eyes that were missing, and the lower jaw. The limbs that had been torn off are part of him again. There’s still blood in the living room, but whatever there had been in your bedroom is now gone, along with a layer of the floor and walls. Stone eaters are said to have control over the very smallest particles of matter. Simple enough to reappropriate one’s own detached substance, repurpose unused surplus material. You guess.

  “A dozen or so of my kind. Then one in particular.”

  “That many?”

  “They were children to me. How many children would it take to overwhelm you?”

  “You were a child.”

  “I looked like a child.” His voice softens. “I only did that for you.”

  There is a greater difference between this Hoa a
nd that Hoa than their states of being. When adult Hoa says things like this, the words have an entirely different texture from when child Hoa said them. You’re not certain you like that texture.

  “So you’ve been off getting into fights all this time,” you say, adjusting the subject back toward comfort. “There was a stone eater at the Flat Top. A gray—”

  “Yes.” You didn’t think it was possible for a stone eater to look disgruntled, but Hoa does. “That one isn’t a child. He was the one who defeated me, finally, though I managed to escape without too much damage.” You marvel for a moment that he thinks having all his limbs and jaw torn off is not much damage. But you’re a little glad, too. The gray stone eater hurt Hoa, and you hurt him back. Ephemeral revenge, maybe, but it makes you feel like you look out for your own.

  Hoa still sounds defensive. “It was also… unwise for me to face him while clothed in human flesh.”

  It’s too damned hot in the room. Mopping sweat from your face, you move into the living room, push aside and tie off the main-door curtain so cooler air will circulate in more easily, and sit down at the table. By the time you turn back, Hoa is in the door of your bedroom, framed beautifully by the arch of it: study of a youth in wary contemplation.

  “Is that why you changed back? To face him?” You didn’t see the bit of rag that contained his rocks while you were in the bedroom. Maybe it caught fire and is just charred cloth amid the rest, purpose served.

  “I changed back because it was time.” There’s that tone of resignation again. He sounded that way when you first realized what he was. Like he knows he’s lost something in your eyes, and he can’t get it back, and he has no choice but to accept that—but he doesn’t have to like it. “I could have kept that shape only for a limited time. I made a choice to decrease the time, and increase the chance you will survive.”

  “Oh?”

  Beyond him, in your room, you suddenly notice that the leftover shell of his, er, egg, is melting. Sort of. It is dissolving and lightening in color and merging back into the clear material of the crystal, parting around the detritus of your belongings as it rejoins its former substance and solidifies again. You stare at that instead of him for a moment, fascinated.

  Until he says, “They want you dead, Essun.”

  “They—” You blink. “Who?”

  “Some of my kind. Some merely want to use you. I won’t let them.”

  You frown. “Which? You won’t let them kill me, or you won’t let them use me?”

  “Either.” The echoing voice grows sharp suddenly. You remember him crouching, baring his teeth like some feral beast. It occurs to you, with the suddenness of an epiphany, that you haven’t seen as many stone eaters around lately. Ruby Hair, Butter Marble, Ugly Dress, Toothshine, all the regulars; not a glimpse in months. Ykka even remarked on the sudden absence of “hers.”

  “You ate her,” you blurt.

  There is a pause. “I’ve eaten many,” Hoa says. It is inflectionless.

  You remember him giggling and calling you weird. Curling against you to sleep. Earthfires, you can’t deal with this.

  “Why me, Hoa?” You spread your hands. They are ordinary, middle-aged woman hands. A bit dry. You helped with the leather-tanning crew a few days ago, and the solution made your skin crack and peel. You’ve been rubbing them with some of the nuts you got in the previous week’s comm share, even though fat is precious and you should be eating it rather than using it for your vanity. In your right palm there is a small, white, thumbnail-shaped crescent. On cold days that hand’s bones ache. Ordinary woman hands.

  “There’s nothing special about me,” you say. “There must be other orogenes with the potential to access the obelisks. Earthfires, Nassun—” No. “Why are you here?” You mean, why has he attached himself to you.

  He is silent for a moment. Then: “You asked if I was all right.”

  This makes no sense for a moment, and then it does. Allia. A beautiful sunny day, a looming disaster. As you hovered in agony amid the cracked, dissonant core of the garnet obelisk, you saw him for the first time. How long had he been in that thing? Long enough for it to be buried beneath Seasons’ worth of sediment and coral growth. Long enough to be forgotten, like all the dead civilizations of the world. And then you came along and asked how he was doing. Evil Earth, you thought you hallucinated that.

  You take a deep breath and get up, going to the entrance of the apartment. The comm is quiet, as far as you can tell. Some people are going about their usual business, but there are fewer of them around than usual. The ones following routine are no proof of peace; people went about their business in Tirimo, too, right before they tried to kill you.

  Tonkee didn’t come home again last night, but this time you’re not so sure that she’s with Hjarka or up in the green room. There is a catalyst alive in Castrima now, accelerating unseen chemical reactions, facilitating unexpected outcomes. Join us and live, the gray one had told them, but not with your roggas.

  Will the people of Castrima stop to think that no Equatorial comm really wants a sudden influx of mongrel Midlatters, and at best will make slaves or meat of them? Your mothering instinct is alive with warning. Look after your own, it whispers in the back of your mind. Gather them close and guard them well. You know what happens when you turn your back for even a minute.

  You shoulder the runny-sack that’s still in your hand. Keeping it with you isn’t even a question at this point. Then you turn to Hoa. “Come with me.”

  Hoa’s suddenly smiling again. “I don’t walk anymore, Essun.”

  Oh. Right. “I’m going to Ykka’s, then. Meet me there.”

  He does not nod, simply vanishes. No wasted movement. Eh, you’ll get used to it.

  People don’t look at you as you cross the bridges and walkways of the comm. The center of your back itches from their stares as you pass. You cannot help thinking of Tirimo again.

  Ykka’s not in her apartment. You look around, follow the patterns of movement in the comm with your eyes, and finally head toward the Flat Top. She cannot still be there. You’ve gone home, watched a child turn into a stone eater, slept several hours. She can’t be.

  She is. You see that only a few people are still on the Flat Top now—a gaggle of maybe twenty, sitting or pacing, looking angry and exasperated and troubled. For the twenty you see, there are surely another hundred gathering in apartments and the baths and the storage rooms, having the same conversation in hushed tones with small groups. But Ykka is here, sitting on one of the divans that someone has brought from her apartment, still talking. She’s hoarse, you realize as you draw close. Visibly exhausted. But still talking. Something about supply lines from one of the southern allied comms, which she’s directing at a man who is walking in circles with his arms folded, scoffing at everything she says. It’s fear; he’s not listening. Ykka’s trying to reason with him anyway. It’s ridiculous.

  Look after your own.

  You step around people—some of whom flinch away from you—and stop beside her. “I need to talk to you in private.”

  Ykka stops midsentence and blinks up at you. Her eyes are red and sticky-dry. She hasn’t had any water for a while. “What about?”

  “It’s important.” As a sop to courtesy you nod to the people sitting around her. “Sorry.”

  She sighs and rubs her eyes, which just makes them redder. “Fine.” She gets up, then pauses to face the remaining people. “Vote’s tomorrow morning. If I haven’t convinced you… well. You know what to do, then.”

  They watch in silence as you lead her away.

  Back in her apartment, you pull the front curtain shut and open the one that leads into her private rooms. Not much to this space to indicate her status: She’s got two pallets and a lot of pillows, but her clothes are just in a basket, and the books and scrolls on one side of the room are just stacked on the floor. No bookcases, no dresser. The food from her comm share is stacked haphazardly against one wall, beside a familiar gourd that t
he Castrimans tend to use for storing drinking water. You snag the gourd with your elbow and pick from the food pile a dried orange, a stick of dry bean curd that Ykka’s been soaking with some mushrooms in a shallow pan, and a small slab of salt fish. It’s not exactly a meal, but it’s nutrition. “On the bed,” you say, gesturing with your chin and bringing the food to her. You hand her the gourd first.

  Ykka, who has observed all this in increasing irritation, snaps, “You’re not my type. Is this why you dragged me here?”

  “Not exactly. But while you’re here, you need to rest.” She looks mutinous. “You can’t convince anyone of anything—” Let alone people whose hate can’t be reasoned with. “—if you’re too exhausted to think straight.”

  She grumbles, but it is a measure of how tired she is that she actually goes to the bed and sits down on its edge. You nod at the gourd, and she dutifully drinks—three quick swallows and down for now, as the lorists advise after dehydration. “I stink. I need a bath.”

  “Should’ve thought of that before you decided to try to talk down a brewing lynch mob.” You take the gourd and push the dish of food into her hand. She sighs and starts grimly chewing.

  “They’re not going to—” She doesn’t get far into that lie, though, before she flinches and stares at something beyond you. You know before you turn: Hoa. “Okay, no, not in my rusting room.”

  “I told him to meet us here,” you say. “It’s Hoa.”

  “You told—it’s—” Ykka swallows hard, stares a moment longer, then finally resumes eating the orange. She chews slowly, her gaze never leaving Hoa. “Got tired of playing the human, then? Not sure why you bothered; you were too weird to pass.”

  You go over to the wall near the bedroom door and sit down against it, on the floor. The runny-sack has to come off for this, but you make sure to keep it near to hand. To Ykka you say, “You’ve talked to the other members of your council and half your comm, still and rogga and native and newcomer. The perspective you’re missing is theirs.” You nod at Hoa.