The Obelisk Gate

by N. K. Jemisin

  On another plane of existence you scream. This was a mistake. It’s eating you, and it is awful. Alabaster was wrong. Better to let the stone eaters kill every rogga in Castrima and destroy the comm than die like this. Better to let Hoa chew you to pieces with his beautiful teeth; at least you like him

  love him

  lo lo lo lo l o v e

  Whiplash tightening of magic, in a thousand directions. Light-lattice blazing alive, suddenly, against the black. You see. This is so far past your normal range that it is nearly incomprehensible. You see the Stillness, the whole of it. You perceive the half shell of this side of the planet, taste whiffs of the other side. It’s too much—and fire-under-Earth, you’re a fool. Alabaster told you: first a network, then the Gate. You cannot do this alone; you need a smaller network to buffer the greater. You fumble toward the orogenes of Castrima again, but you cannot grasp them. There are fewer of them now, their numbers flaring and snuffing out even as you reach, and they are too panicked for even you to claim.

  But there, right beside you, is a small mountain of strength: Hoa. You don’t even try to reach for him, because that strength is alien and frightening, but he reaches for you. Stabilizes you. Holds you firm.

  Which allows you to finally remember: The onyx is the key.

  The key unlocks a gate.

  The gate activates a network—

  And suddenly the onyx pulses, magma-deep and earthen-heavy, around you.

  Oh Earth not a network of orogenes he meant a network of

  The spinel is first, right there, as it is. The topaz is next, its bright airy power yielding to you so easily.

  The smoky quartz. The amethyst, your old friend, plodding after you from Tirimo. The kunzite. The jade.

  oh

  The agate. The jasper, the opal, the citrine…

  You open your mouth to scream and do not hear yourself.

  the ruby the spodumene THE AQUAMARINE THE PERIDOT THE

  “It’s too much!” You don’t know if you’re screaming the words in your mind or out loud. “Too much!”

  The mountain beside you says, “They need you, Essun.”

  And everything snaps into focus. Yes. The Obelisk Gate opens only for a purpose.

  Down. Geode walls. Flickering columns of proto-magic; what Castrima is made of. You sess-feel-know the contaminants within its structure. Those that crawl over its surfaces you permit.

  (Ykka, Penty, all the other roggas, and the stills who depend on them to keep the comm going. They all need you.)

  Yet there are also those interfering with its crystal lattices, riding along its strands of matter and magic, lurking within the rock around the geode shell like parasites trying to burrow in. They are mountains, too—But they are not your mountain.

  Pissed off the wrong rogga, Hoa said of his own incarceration. Yes, these enemy stone eaters rusting did.

  You shout again but this time it is effort, it is aggression. SNAP and you break lattices and magic strands and reseal them to your own design. CRACK and you lift whole crystal shafts to throw them like spears and grind your enemies beneath. You look for Gray Man, the stone eater who hurt Hoa, but he is not among the mountains that threaten your home. These are just his minions. Fine. You’ll send him a message, then, written in their fear.

  By the time you’re done, you’ve sealed at least five of the enemy stone eaters into crystals. Easy to do, really, when they are so foolish as to try to transit through them while you’re watching. They phase into the crystal; you simply de-phase them, freezing them like bugs in amber. The rest are fleeing.

  Some flee north. Unacceptable, and distance is nothing for you now. You pull up and wheel and pierce down again, and there is Rennanis, nestled within its lattice of nodes like a spider among its bundled, sucked-dry prey. The Gate is meant to do things on a planetary scale. It is nothing to you to drive power down and inflict upon every citizen of Rennanis the same thing you did to the woman who would’ve beaten Penty to death. Bullies are bullies. So simple to twist the flickering silver between their cells until those cells grow still, solid. Stone. It is done, and Castrima’s war won, in the span of a breath.

  Now it’s dangerous. Now you understand: To wield the power of this network of obelisks without a focus is to become its focus, and die. The wise thing to do, now that Castrima is safe, would be to dismantle the Gate and withdraw from the connection before it destroys you.

  But. There are other things you want besides Castrima’s safety.

  The Gate is like orogeny, you see. Without conscious control, it responds to all desires as if they are the desire to destroy the world. And you will not control this. You cannot. This desire is as quintessential to you as your past or your defensive personality or your many-times-broken heart.

  Nassun.

  Your awareness spins. South. Tracking.

  Nassun.

  Interference. It hurts. The pearl the diamond the

  Sapphire. It resists being pulled into the network of the Gate. You barely noticed before, overwhelmed as you were by dozens, hundreds of obelisks, but you notice now because

  NASSUN

  IT’S HER

  It is your daughter, it’s Nassun, you know the stolid complexity of her as you know your own heart and soul, it’s her, written all over this obelisk and you have found her, she is alive.

  Its (your) goal accomplished, the Gate automatically begins to disengage. The other obelisks disconnect; the onyx releases you last, albeit with a whiff of cold reluctance. Next time.

  And as your body sags and lists to one side because something suddenly throws off your balance, hands take hold of you and pull you upright. You can barely lift your head. Your body feels distant, heavy, like the sensation of being in stone. You have not eaten in hours, but you feel no hunger. You know you’ve been taxed far beyond your own endurance, but you feel no exhaustion.

  There are mountains around you. “Rest, Essun,” says the one you love. “I’ll take care of you.”

  You nod with a head heavy as a boulder. Then new presences pull at your attention, and you force yourself to look up one last time.

  Antimony stands before you, impassive as ever, but there is something comforting about her presence nevertheless. You know instinctively that she is no enemy.

  Beside her stands another stone eater: tall, slender, somehow awkward in its draped “clothing.” Allover white, though the shape of its facial features is Eastern Coaster: full mouth and long nose, high cheekbones and a sculpture of neatly sculpted, kinky hair. Only its eyes are black, and though they watch you with only faint recognition, with a puzzled flicker of something that might be (but should not be) memory… something about those eyes is familiar.

  How ironic. This is the first time you’ve ever seen a stone eater made of alabaster.

  And then you are gone.

  What if it isn’t dead?

  —Letter from Rido Innovator Dibars to Seventh University, sent via courier from Allia Quartent and Comm after the raising of the garnet obelisk, received three months after word of Allia’s destruction spread via telegraph. Unknown reference.

  INTERLUDE

  You fall into my arms, and I take you to a safe place.

  Safety is relative. You have driven off my unsavory brethren, those of my kind who would have killed you since they cannot control you. As I descend into Castrima, however, and emerge in a quiet space of familiarity, I smell iron on the air, amid the shit and stale breath and other scents of flesh, and smoke. The iron is a flesh scent, too: that variant of iron which is contained in blood. Outside, there are bodies along the walkways and steps. One even dangles from a ropeslide. The fighting is mostly over, however, because of two things. First, the invaders have realized they are trapped between the insect-infested surface and their enemies, who are greater in number now that most of the invading army is dead. Those who wish to live have surrendered; those who fear a worse death have flung themselves on the swords or crystals of Castrima.

 
The second thing that has stopped the fighting is the inescapable fact that the geode is badly damaged. All over the comm, the once-glowing crystals now flicker in irregular pulses. One of the longer ones has detached from the wall and broken, its dust and rubble scattered along the geode floor. On the ground level, warm water has stopped flowing into the communal pool, though occasionally there is a haphazard spurt of it. Several of the comm’s crystals are completely dark, dead, cracked—but within each, a darker shape can be seen, frozen and trapped. Humanoid.

  Fools. That’s what you get for pissing off my rogga.

  I lay you in a bed and make certain there is food and water nearby. Feeding you will be difficult, now that I have shed the quickened sheath I wore to friend you, but most likely someone will be along before I am forced to try. We are in Lerna’s apartment. I’ve put you in his bed. He will like that, I think. You will, too, once you want to feel human again.

  I do not begrudge you these connections. You need them.

  (I do not begrudge you these connections. You need them.)

  But I position you carefully, so that you will be comfortable. And I place your arm atop the covers, so you will know as soon as you awaken that you must now make a choice.

  Your right arm, which has become a thing of brown, solidified, concentrated magic. No crudeness here; your flesh is pure, perfect, wholesome. Every atom is as it should be, the arcane lattice precise and strong. I touch it once, briefly, though my fingers barely notice the pressure. Leftover longing from the flesh I wore so recently. I’ll get over it.

  Your stone hand is shaped into a fist. There’s a crack across the back of it, perpendicular to the hand bones. Even as the magic reshaped you, you fought. (You fought. This is what you must become. You have always fought.)

  Ah, I grow sentimental. A few weeks’ nostalgia in flesh and I forget myself.

  Thus I wait. And hours or days later when Lerna returns to his apartment, stinking of other people’s blood and his own weariness, he stops short at the sight of me, standing watchman in his living room.

  He’s still for only a moment. “Where is she?”

  Yes. He’s worthy of you.

  “In the bedroom.” He goes there immediately. There’s no need for me to follow. He’ll be back.

  Some while later—minutes or hours, I know the words but they mean so little—he returns to the living room where I stand. He sits, heavily, and rubs his face.

  “She will live,” I say unnecessarily.

  “Yes.” He knows it’s a coma and he will tend you well until you wake. A moment later he lowers his hands and gazes at me. “You didn’t, uh.” He licks his lips. “Her arm.”

  I know exactly what he means. “Not without her permission.”

  His face twists. I’m faintly repelled before I remember that not long ago I, too, was so constantly, wetly, in motion. Glad that’s over with. “How honorable of you,” he says, in a tone that he probably means as an insult.

  No more honorable than his decision not to eat your other arm. Some things are simple decency.

  Some while later, probably not years because he hasn’t moved, possibly hours because he does look so very tired, he says, “I don’t know what we’re going to do now. Castrima’s dying.” As if to emphasize these words, the crystal around us stops glowing for a moment, dropping us into darkness lit harshly by the light from outside the apartment. Then the light returns. Lerna exhales, his breath redolent of fear-aldehydes. “We’re commless.”

  It isn’t worth pointing out that they would have also been commless if their enemies had succeeded in slaughtering Essun and the other orogenes. He’ll figure it out eventually, in his plodding, sweaty way. But since there’s one thing he does not know, I speak it aloud.

  “Rennanis is dead,” I say. “Essun killed it.”

  “What?”

  He heard me. He just doesn’t believe what he heard.

  “You mean… she iced it? From here?”

  No, she used magic, but all that matters is, “Everyone within its walls is now dead.”

  He ponders this for eternities, or maybe seconds. “An Equatorial city would have vast storecaches. Enough to last us years.” Then his brow furrows. “Traveling there and bringing that many goods back would be a major undertaking.”

  He isn’t a stupid man. I ponder the past while he figures things out. When he gasps, I pay attention to him again.

  “Rennanis is empty.” He stares at me, then gets to his feet, thumping and sloshing across the room. “Evil Earth—Hoa, that’s what you’re saying! Intact walls, intact homes, storecaches… and who the rust are we going to have to fight for it? No one with sense goes north, these days. We could live there.”

  At last. I return to my contemplations even as he mutters to himself and paces and finally laughs aloud. But then Lerna stops, staring at me. His eyes narrow in suspicion.

  “You do nothing for us,” he says softly. “Only for her. Why are you telling me this?”

  I shape my lips into a curve, and his jaw tightens in disgust. I shouldn’t have bothered. “Essun wants somewhere safe for Nassun,” I say.

  Silence, for maybe an hour. Or a moment. “She doesn’t know where Nassun is.”

  “The Obelisk Gate permits sufficient precision of perception.”

  A flinch. I remember the words for movement: flinch, inhale, swallow, grimace. “Earthfires. Then—” He sobers and turns to look at the bedroom curtain.

  Yes. When you wake, you will want to go find your daughter. I watch this realization soften Lerna’s face, weigh down the tension of his muscles, slacken his posture. I have no idea what any of these things means.

  “Why?” It takes a year for me to realize he’s speaking to me and not himself. By the time I figure it out, however, he has finished the question. “Why do you stay with her? Are you just… hungry?”

  I resist the urge to crush his head. “I love her, of course.” There; I’ve managed a civil tone.

  “Of course.” Lerna’s voice has grown soft.

  Of course.

  He leaves then, to ferry the information I’ve given him to the comm’s other leaders. There follows a century, or a week, of frantic activity as the other people of the comm pack and prepare and gather their strength for what is sure to be a long, grueling, and—for a few—deadly journey. But they have no choice. Such is life, in a Season.

  Sleep, my love. Heal. I’ll stand guard over you, and be at your side when you set forth again. Of course. Death is a choice. I will make certain of that, for you.

  (But not for you.)

  20

  Nassun, faceted

  BUT ALSO…

  I listen through the earth. I hear the reverberations. When a new key is cut, her bittings finally ground and sharpened enough that she can connect to the obelisks and make them sing, we all know of it. Those of us who… hope… seek out that singer. We are forever barred from turning the key ourselves, but we can influence its direction. Whenever an obelisk resonates, you may be sure that one of us lurks nearby. We talk. This is how I know.

  In the dead of the night Nassun wakes. It’s dark in the barracks, still, so she’s careful not to step on the creakier floorboards as she pulls on her shoes and jacket and makes her way across the room. None of the others stirs, if they even wake and notice. They probably just think she has to go to the outhouse.

  Outside, it’s quiet. The sky is beginning to lighten with dawn in the east, though it’s harder to tell now that the ash clouds have thickened. She goes to the top of the downhill path and notices a few lights on in Jekity. Some of the farmers and fishers are up. In Found Moon, though, all is still.

  What is it that tugs at her mind? The feel of it is irritating, gummy, as if something is caught in her hair and needs to be yanked free. The sensation is centered in her sessapinae—no. Deeper. This tugs at the light of her spine, the silver between her cells, the threads that bind her to the ground and to Found Moon and to Schaffa and to the sapphire that hovers just
above the clouds of Jekity, visible now and again when the clouds break a little. The irritation is… it is… north.

  Something is happening up north.

  Nassun turns to follow the sensation, climbing the hill up to the crucible mosaic and stopping at its center as the wind makes her hair puffs shiver. Up here she can see the forest that surrounds Jekity spread before her like a map: rounded treetops and occasional outcroppings of ribbon-basalt. Part of her can perceive shifting forces, reverberating lines, connections, amplification. But of what? Why? Something immense.

  “What you perceive is the opening of the Obelisk Gate,” says Steel. She is unsurprised to find him suddenly standing beside her.

  “More than one obelisk?” Nassun asks, because that’s what she’s sessing. Lots more.

  “Every one stationed above this half of the continent. A hundred parts of the great mechanism beginning to work again as they were meant to.” Steel’s voice, baritone and surprisingly pleasant, sounds wistful in this moment. Nassun finds herself wondering about his life, his past, whether he has ever been a child like her. That seems impossible. “So much power. The very heart of the planet is channeled through the Gate… and she uses it for so frivolous a purpose.” A faint sigh. “Then again, so did its original creators, I suppose.”

  Somehow, Nassun knows that Steel is talking about her mother with that she. Mama is alive, and angry, and full of so much power.

  “What purpose?” Nassun makes herself ask.

  Steel’s eyes slide toward her. She has not specified whose purpose she means: her mother’s, or those ancient people who first created and deployed the obelisks. “The destruction of one’s enemies, of course. A small and selfish purpose that feels great, in the moment—though not without consequence.”

  Nassun considers what she has learned, and sessed, and seen in the dead smiles of the other two Guardians. “Father Earth fought back,” she says.