The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  But what you suddenly understand is this: Magic derives from life—that which is alive, or was alive, or even that which was alive so many ages ago that it has turned into something else. All at once this understanding causes something to shift in your perception, and

  and

  and

  You see it suddenly: the network. A web of silver threads interlacing the land, permeating rock and even the magma just underneath, strung like jewels between forests and fossilized corals and pools of oil. Carried through the air on the webs of leaping spiderlings. Threads in the clouds, though thin, strung between microscopic living things in water droplets. Threads as high as your perception can reach, brushing against the very stars.

  And where they touch the obelisks, the threads become another thing entirely. For of the obelisks that float against the map of your awareness—which has suddenly become vast, miles and miles, you are perceiving with far more than your sessapinae now—each hovers as the nexus of thousands, millions, trillions of threads. This is the power holding them up. Each blazes silvery-white in flickering pulses; Evil Earth, this is what the obelisks are when they aren’t real. They float and they flicker, solid to magic to solid again, and on another plane of existence you inhale in awe at the beauty of them.

  And then you inhale again, as you notice close by—

  Ykka’s control tugs at you, and belatedly you realize she has used your power even as you meandered through epiphany. Now there is a new tunnel slanting up through the layers of sedimentary and igneous rock. Within it is a staircase of broad, shallow steps, straight up except for wide regular landings. Nothing has been excavated to make room for these stairs; instead, Ykka has simply deformed the rock away, pressing it into the walls and compressing it down to form the stairs and using the increased density to stabilize the tunnel against the weight of the rock around it. But she has stopped the tunnel just shy of breaching the surface, and now she unweaves you from the network (that word again). You blink and turn to her, understanding why at once.

  “You can finish it,” Ykka says. She’s getting up from the platform, dusting off her butt. Already she looks weary; it must have tired her, trying to modulate your surprised fluctuations. She cannot do this thing she has chosen to do. She’ll burn out before she’s made it halfway around the valley.

  And she doesn’t have to now. “No. I’ll take care of it.”

  Ykka rubs her eyes. “Essie.”

  You smile. For once, the nickname doesn’t bother you. And then you use what you just learned from her, grabbing her the way Alabaster once did, grabbing all the other roggas in the comm, too. (There is a collective flinch as you do this. They’re used to it from Ykka, but they know a different yoke when they sess it. You have not earned their trust as she has.) Ykka stiffens, but you don’t do anything, just hold her, and now it’s obvious: You really can do it.

  Then you drive the point home by connecting to the spinel. It is behind you, but you sess the instant that it stops flickering and instead sends forth a silent, earth-shivering pulse. Ready, you think it’s saying. As if it speaks.

  Ykka’s eyes widen suddenly as she sesses just how the obelisk’s catalysis… charges? awakens? awakens—the network of roggas. That’s because you’re now doing the thing that Alabaster tried to teach you for six months: using orogeny and magic together in a way that supports and strengthens each, making a stronger whole. Then integrating this into a network of orogenes working toward a single goal, all of them together stronger than they are individually, and plugged into an obelisk that amplifies their power manifold. It is amazing.

  Alabaster failed to teach it to you because he was like you—Fulcrum-trained and Fulcrum-limited, taught only to think of power in terms of energy and equations and geometric shapes. He mastered magic because of who he was, but he did not truly understand it. Neither do you, even now. Ykka, feral that she is, with nothing to unlearn, was the key all along. If you hadn’t been so arrogant…

  Well. No. You cannot say Alabaster would be alive. He was dead the instant he used the Obelisk Gate to rip the continent in half. The burns were killing him already; that you finished it was mercy. Eventually you’ll believe that.

  Ykka blinks and frowns. “You okay?”

  She knows the magic of you, and tastes your grief. You swallow against the lump in your throat—carefully, keeping tight hold of the power held pent within you. “Yeah,” you lie.

  Ykka’s gaze is too knowing. She sighs. “You know… we both get through this, I have a stash of Yumenescene seredis in one of the storecaches. Want to get drunk?”

  The tightness in your throat seems to snap, and you laugh it out. Seredis is a distilled liqueur made from a fruit of the same name that was harvested in the foothills just outside Yumenes. The trees didn’t grow well anywhere else, so Ykka’s stash might be the last seredis in the whole of the Stillness. “Pricelessly drunk?”

  “Disastrously drunk.” Her smile is weary, but real.

  You like the sound of this. “If we get through this.” But you’re pretty sure that you will now. There’s more than enough power in the orogene network and the spinel. You’ll make Castrima safe for stills and roggas and anything else that’s on your side. No one needs to die, except your enemies.

  With that, you turn and raise your hands, splaying fingers as your orogeny—and magic—stretch forth.

  You perceive Castrima: over, under, and all the matter between and below and above. Now the army of Rennanis is before you, hundreds of points of heat and magic on your mental map, some clustering in houses that do not belong to them and the rest clustering around the three tunnel mouths that lead into the underground comm. In two of the tunnels, they’ve broken through the boulders that one of Castrima’s roggas positioned to seal them. In one of these, rocks have collapsed the passageway. Some of the soldiers are dead, their bodies cooling. Other soldiers are working to clear the blockage. You can tell that’s going to take a few days, at least.

  But in the other—flaking rust—they’ve found and disabled the charges. You taste the acridity of unspent chemical potential, and the sourness of bloodlust-sweat; they are making their way unobstructed toward Castrima-under, and are more than halfway to Scenic Overlook. In minutes the first of them, several dozen Strongbacks bristling with longknives and crossbows and slingshots and spears, will hit the comm’s defenses. Hundreds more file into the tunnel mouth behind them.

  You know what you have to do.

  You withdraw from this close view. Now the forest around Castrima spreads below you. Wider view: Now you taste the edges of Castrima’s plateau, and the nearby depression that is the forest basin. Obvious now that there was once a sea here, and a glacier before that, and more. Obvious, too, are the knots of light and fire that comprise the life of the region, scattered throughout the forest. More of it than you thought, though much of it is hibernating or hidden or otherwise guarding itself against the Season’s onslaught. Very bright along the river: Boilbugs infest both its banks and most of the plateau and basin beyond.

  You begin with the river, then, delicately chilling the soil and air and stone along its length. You do this in pulsing waves, there and cool and there again and a little cooler. You drop the air pressure just on the inside of the circle of cold you’re shaping, which causes wind to blow inward, toward Castrima. It is encouragement and warning: Move and you’ll live. Stay and I’ll ice you little bastards to extinction.

  The boilbugs move. You perceive them as a wave of bright heat that surges out of underground nests and aboveground feeding piles that have formed around their many victims—hundreds of nests, millions of bugs, you had no idea the forest of Castrima was so riddled with them. Tonkee’s warning about the meat shortage is meaningless and too late; you could never have competed against such successful predators. You were always going to have to get used to the taste of human anyway.

  That’s neither here nor there. The ring of cold around Castrima’s territory is complete, and you dire
ct the energy inward in waves, pushing, herding. The bugs are fast—and rusting hell, they can fly. You’d forgotten the wing covers.

  And… oh, burning Earth. Suddenly you’re glad you can only sess what’s happening topside, not see or hear it.

  What you perceive is painted in pressure and heat and chemical and magic. Here is a bright living cluster of Rennanis soldiers, bunched up within confines of wood and brick, as a swarm of blazing-hot boilbug motes reaches it. Through the foundation of the house you sess pounding feet, the slam of a door, the fleshier slam of bodies against each other and the floor. Mini-shakes of panic. The shapes of the soldiers glow brighter upon the ambient as the bugs land and do their work, boiling and steaming.

  Terteis Hunter Castrima was unlucky; only a few bugs got him, which is why he didn’t die of it. This is dozens of boilbugs per soldier, covering every accessible bit of flesh, and it is a kindness. They do not thrash for long, your enemies, and one by one the houses of Castrima-over become still and silent once more.

  (The network shudders in your yoke. None of the others like this. You steer them firmly, keeping them on task. There can be no mercy now.)

  Now the swarms move into the basements, falling upon the soldiers gathered there, finding the hidden tunnels that lead down into Castrima-under. You lean on the spinel’s power more here, trying to sess which of the living motes in the tunnels are Rennanis soldiers and which are Castrima’s defenders. They’re in clusters, fighting. You have to help your people—ach—rusting—shit. Ykka bucks against your control, and though you are too embedded in the network to hear what she says out loud, you get the idea.

  You know what you have to do.

  So you pull a chunk out of the walls and use this to seal off the tunnels. Some of Castrima’s Strongbacks and Innovators are on the boilbug side of the seal. Some of Rennanis’s soldiers are on the safe side of it. No one ever gets everything they want.

  Through the stone of the tunnels, you cannot help sessing the vibration of screams.

  But before you can force yourself to ignore this, there is another scream, nearer-by, a vibration that you perceive with eardrums and not sessapinae. Startled, you begin to dismantle the network—but not fast enough, not nearly, before something yanks at your yoke. Breaks it, throwing you and all the other roggas tumbling over each other and canceling one another’s toruses as you come out of alignment. What the rust? Something has ripped two of your number loose.

  You open your eyes to find yourself sprawled on the wooden platform, one arm painfully twisted under you, your face pressed against a storage crate. Confused and groaning—your knees are weak, being the yoke is hard—you push yourself up. “Ykka? What was…?”

  There is a sound beyond the crates. A gasp. A groan of wood from the platform beneath you, as something incomprehensibly heavy stresses the supports. A crunch of stone, so startlingly loud that you flinch even as you realize you’ve heard this sound before. Grabbing the edge of the crate and the wooden railing, you haul yourself up on one knee. That’s enough for you to see:

  Hoa, in a pose that your mind immediately and half-consciously names Warrior, stands with one arm extended. From the hand dangles a head. A stone eater’s head, hair a curling coiffure in mother-of-pearl, face gone below the top lip. The rest of the stone eater, lower jaw on down, stands in front of Hoa, frozen in a posture of reaching for something. You can see Hoa’s face in partial side view. It isn’t moving or chewing, but there’s pale stone dust on his finely carved black-marble lips. There’s a divot about the size of a bite wound in what’s left of the stone eater’s nape. That was the familiar crunch.

  An instant later the stone eater’s remains shatter, and you realize Hoa’s position has changed to put a fist through its torso. Then his eyes slide toward you. He doesn’t swallow that you can see, but then he doesn’t need his mouth to speak anyway. “Rennanis’s stone eaters are coming for Castrima’s orogenes.”

  Oh, Evil Earth. You make yourself get up, though you feel light-headed and unsteady on your feet. “How many?”

  “Enough.” Flick and Hoa’s head has turned away, toward Scenic Overlook. You look and see heavy fighting there—the people of Castrima fighting back against the Rennanese who’ve made it down the tunnel. You spy Danel among the attackers, laying on with twin longknives against two Strongbacks as nearby, Esni shouts for another crossbow; hers has jammed. She drops her useless weapon and draws a knapped agate knife that flashes white in the light, then throws herself into the Danel fight.

  And then your attention focuses on the nearer distance, where Penty has gotten herself tangled in a rope bridge. You see why: On the metal platform behind her stands another strange stone eater, this one allover citrine-gold but for the white mica around her lips. It stands with one hand extended, the fingers curled in a beckoning gesture. Penty is far from you, maybe fifty feet, but you can see tears streaking the girl’s face as she struggles to extract herself from the ropes. One of her hands flops uselessly. Broken.

  Her hand is broken. Your skin prickles all over. “Hoa.”

  There is a thunk against the wooden platform as he drops the head of his enemy. “Essun.”

  “I need to go topside fast.” You can sess it up there, magic-feel it, looming and huge. It’s been here all along, but you’ve been shying away from it. Too much for what you needed before. Exactly what you need now.

  “Topside’s crawling, Essie. Nothing but boilbugs.” Ykka is standing, just, by bracing herself against the crystal’s wall. You want to warn her—the stone eaters can come through the crystal—but there isn’t time. If you’re too slow, they’ll get her regardless.

  You shake your head and stagger over to Hoa. He can’t come to you; he’s so damned heavy that it’s a wonder the wooden platform hasn’t collapsed already. His pose has changed again, now that the other stone eater is just chunks scattered around him; now he has moved to place one hand on the crystal’s wall, though the rest of him is facing you. His other hand extends toward you, open with invitation. You remember a day by a riverside, after Hoa fell into the mud. You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold. He refused you to keep his secret, and you were hurt, though you tried not to be.

  Now his hand is cool compared to the warmth of Castrima. Solid—although he does not sess quite of stone, you realize in fleeting fascination. There’s a strange texture to his flesh. A very slight yielding to the pressure of your fingers. He has fingerprints. That surprises you.

  Then you look up at his face. He’s reshaped his expression from the coldness that you saw when he destroyed his enemy. Now there is a slight smile on his lips. “Of course I’ll help you,” he says. So much of the boy is still in him that you almost smile back.

  There isn’t time to parse this further, because all at once Castrima blurs into whiteness around you and then there is darkness, earthen-black. Hoa’s hand is on yours, however, so you do not panic.

  Then you stand before the pavilion of Castrima-over, amid the dead and dying. Around you on the walkways and pavilion flagstones lie the soldiers of Rennanis, their bodies twisted, some of them impossible to see beneath carpets of insects, a very few of them still crawling and screaming. The table that Danel used to plan the attack is overturned nearby; beetles crawl over its surface. There’s that smell again, of meat in brine. The air swirls with boilbugs and the low-pressure breeze you created.

  One of the bugs darts toward you and you cringe. An instant later Hoa’s hand is where the bug was, dripping hot water as the teakettle whistle of the crushed creature fizzles away. “You should probably raise a torus,” he advises. Flaking rust yes. You begin to pull away from him so you can do this safely, but his hand tightens on your own, just a little. “Orogeny can’t hurt me.”

  You have more power at your disposal than just orogeny, but he knows that, so all right, then. You raise a high, tight torus around yourself, swirling with snow from the humidity, and immediately the
boilbugs begin avoiding you. Perhaps they track prey by body heat. It’s all irrelevant.

  You look up then, at the blackness that blots out the sky.

  The onyx is like no obelisk you’ve ever seen. Most are shards—double-pointed hexagonal or octagonal columns—though you’ve seen a few that were irregular or rough-ended. This one is an ovoid cabochon, at your summons descending slowly through the cloud layer that has hidden it since its arrival a few weeks before. You can’t guess at its dimensions, but when you turn your head to take in the bowl of Castrima-over’s sky, the onyx nearly fills it, south to north, gray-clouded horizon to underlit red. It reflects nothing, and does not shine. When you look up into it—this is surprisingly hard to do without cringing—only scuds of cloud around its edges tell you that it is actually hovering high above Castrima. Looking at it, it feels closer. Right above you. You have but to lift your hand… but some part of you is terrified of doing this.

  There is a strata-shaking thud as the spinel drops to the ground behind you, as if in supplication to this greater thing. Or perhaps it is only that, with the onyx here and pulling at you, drawing you in, drawing you up—

  —oh, Earth, it draws you so fast—

  —there is nothing left of you that can command any other obelisk. You’ve got nothing to spare. You are falling up, flying into a void that does not so much rush you along as suck at you. You have learned from other obelisks to submit to their current, but at once you know better than to do that here. The onyx will swallow you whole. But you cannot fight it, either; it will rip you apart.

  The best you can manage is a kind of precarious equilibrium, in which you pull against it yet still drift through its interstices. And too much of it is in you already, so much. You need to use this power or, or, but no, something is wrong, something is slipping out of equilibrium, suddenly there is light lashing around you and you realize you are tangled in a trillion, quintillion threads of magic and they are tightening.