The Obelisk Gate

  It’s the winter that really kills, during Seasons. Starvation. Exposure. Even after the skies clear, though, the Rift could cause an age of winter that lasts millions of years. None of which matters, because humanity will have gone extinct long before. It’ll be just the obelisks floating over plains of endless white, with no one left to wonder at or ignore them.

  His eyelids flicker. “Hnh.” To your surprise, he turns to face you. Even more surprising is that his anger seems to be gone, though it has been replaced by a kind of bleakness that feels familiar. It’s his question, though, that floors you:

  “So what are you planning to do about it?”

  Your mouth actually falls open. After a moment you manage to reply, “I wasn’t aware there was anything I could do about it.” Just like you hadn’t thought there was anything you could do about the boilbugs. Alabaster is the genius. You’re the grunt.

  “What are you and Alabaster doing with the obelisks?”

  “What is Alabaster doing,” you correct. “He just asked me to summon one. Probably because—” It hurts to say. “He can’t do that kind of orogeny anymore.”

  “Alabaster made the Rift, didn’t he?”

  You close your mouth fast enough that your teeth clack. You’ve just said Alabaster can’t do orogeny anymore. Enough Castrimans hear that they’re living in an underground rock garden because of him, and they’ll find a way to kill him, stone eater or not.

  Lerna smiles lopsidedly. “It’s not hard to put together, Essun. His wounds are from steam, particulate abrasion, and corrosive gas, not fire—characteristic of being in close proximity to an erupting burn. I don’t know how he survived, but it’s left its mark on him.” He shrugged. “And I’ve seen you destroy a town in five minutes without breaking a sweat, so I’ve got an inkling of what a ten-ringer might be capable of. What are the obelisks for?”

  You set your jaw. “You can ask me six different ways, Lerna, and I’ll give you six different versions of ‘I don’t know,’ because I don’t.”

  “I think you at least have an idea. But lie to me if you want.” He shakes his head. “This is your comm now.”

  He falls silent after that, as if expecting a response from you. You’re too busy vehemently rejecting the idea to respond. But he knows you too well; he knows you don’t want to hear it. That’s why he says it again. “Essun Rogga Castrima. That’s who you are now.”

  “No.”

  “Leave, then. Everyone knows Ykka can’t really hold you if you put your mind to leaving. I know you’ll kill us all if you feel the need. So, go.”

  You sit there, looking at your hands, which dangle between your knees. Your thoughts are empty.

  Lerna inclines his head. “You aren’t leaving because you aren’t stupid. Maybe you can survive out there, but not as anything Nassun would ever want to see again. And if nothing else, you want to live so that you can eventually find her again… however unlikely that is.”

  Your hands twitch once. Then they resume dangling limply.

  “When this Season doesn’t end,” Lerna continues, and it is so much worse that he does it in that same weary monotone which asked how long the Season would last, like he is speaking utter truth and knows it and hates it, “we’ll run out of food. Cannibalism will help, but it’s not sustainable. At that point the comm will either turn raider or simply dissolve into roving bands of commless. But even that won’t save us, long term. Eventually the remnants of Castrima will just starve. Father Earth wins at last.”

  It’s the truth, whether you want to face it or not. And it’s further proof that whatever happened to Lerna during his brief commless career changed him. Not really for the worse. It’s just made him the kind of healer who knows that sometimes one must inflict terrible agony—rebreak a bone, carve off a limb, kill the weak—in order to make the whole stronger.

  “Nassun’s strong like you,” he continues, softly and brutally. “Say she survives Jija. Say you find her, bring her here or any other place that seems safe. She’ll starve with the rest when the storecaches empty, but with her orogeny, she could probably force others to give her their food. Maybe even kill them and have the remaining stores for herself. Eventually the stores will run out, though. She’ll have to leave the comm, scrape by on whatever forage she can find under the ash, hopefully while not running afoul of the wildlife or other hazards. She’ll be one of the last to die: alone, hungry, cold, hating herself. Hating you. Or maybe she’ll have shut down by then. Maybe she’ll just be an animal, driven only by the instinct to survive and failing even at that. Maybe she’ll eat herself in the end, the way any beast might—”

  “Stop,” you say. It’s a whisper. Mercifully, he does. He turns away again instead, taking another long drag of his half-forgotten mellow.

  “Have you talked to anyone since you got here?” he asks finally. It’s not really a change of subject. You don’t relax. He nods toward the infirmary. “Anyone but Alabaster and that menagerie you’ve been traveling with? More than a meeting; talked.”

  Not enough to count. You shake your head.

  “The rumor’s spreading, Essun. And now everyone’s thinking about how slowly their children will die.” He finally flicks away the mellow. It’s still burning. “Thinking about how they can’t do anything about it.”

  But you can, he doesn’t need to say.

  Can you?

  Lerna walks away so abruptly that you’re surprised. You hadn’t realized he was done. It’s an ingrained flinch at the idea of waste that makes you go pick up his discarded cigarette. Takes you a moment to figure out how to inhale without choking; you’ve never tried before. Orogenes aren’t supposed to ingest narcotics.

  But orogenes aren’t supposed to live, either, during a Season. The Fulcrum had no storecaches. No one ever mentioned it, but you’re pretty sure that if a Season ever hit Yumenes hard enough, the Guardians would have swept the place and slaughtered every one of you. Your kind is useful in preventing Seasons, but if the Fulcrum ever so failed in its duty, if ever the worthies of the Black Star or the Emperor had felt a whiff of a thought of a tremor, you and your fellow Imperial Orogenes would not have been rewarded with survival.

  And why should you have been? What survival skills does any rogga offer? You can keep people from dying in a shake, yay. Fat lot of good that does when there’s no food.

  “Enough!” You hear Ykka’s voice from a short distance away, though you can’t see her around the ground-level crystals. She’s shouting. “It’s done! You want to be there for it or stay here wasting breath on me?”

  You get up, your knees aching. Head in that direction.

  Along the way, you pass a young man whose face is streaked with tears of fury and incipient grief. He storms past you back to the infirmary. You keep going and eventually see Ykka standing near the side of a high, narrow crystal. She’s planted a hand against its wall and stands with her head bowed, her bush of hair falling around her face so you can’t see it. You think she’s shaking a little.

  Maybe that’s your imagination. She seems so coldhearted. But then, so do you.

  “Ykka.”

  “Not you, too,” she mutters. “I don’t want to hear it, Bugkiller.”

  Belatedly you realize: By killing the boilbugs, you made this a harder choice for her. Before, she could have ordered the Hunter killed as a mercy, and the bugs would have been at fault. Now it’s pragmatism, comm policy. That’s on her.

  You shake your head and step closer. She straightens and turns in an instant, and you sess the defensive orientation of her orogeny. She doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t set a torus or start an ambient-draw, but then, she wouldn’t, would she? Those are Fulcrum techniques. You don’t really know what she’s going to do, this strangely trained feral, to defend herself.

  Part of you is curious, in a detached sort of way. The other part notes the tension on her face. So you offer her the still-lit mellow.

  She blinks at it. Her orogeny settles into quiescence again,
but her eyes lift and study yours. Then she tilts her head, bemused, considering. Finally she puts one hand on her hip, plucks the mellow from your fingers with the other, and takes a long drag. It works quickly; after a moment she turns to lean back against the crystal, her face settling into weary rather than tense lines as she blows out curls of smoke. She offers it back. You settle beside her and take it.

  It takes another ten minutes to finish the cigarette, passing it back and forth between the two of you. Both of you linger, however, after it’s done, by unspoken agreement. Only when you hear someone begin to utter loud, broken sobs from the infirmary behind you do you nod to each other, and part ways.

  It is unfathomable that any sensible civilization would be so wasteful as fill prime storage caverns with corpses! No wonder these people died out, whoever they were. I estimate another year before we can clear all of the bones, funeral urns, and other debris, then perhaps another six months to fully map and renovate. Less if you can get me those blackjackets I requested! I don’t care if they cost the Earth; some of these chambers are unstable.

  There are tablets in here, though. Something in verses, though we can’t read this bizarre language. Like stonelore. Five tablets, not three. What do you want to do with them? I say we give the lot to Fourth so they’ll stop whining about how much history we’re destroying.

  —Report of Journeywoman Fogrid Innovator Yumenes to the Geneer Licensure, Equatorial East: “Proposal to Repurpose Subsurface Catacombs, City of Firaway.” Master-level review only.

  INTERLUDE

  A dilemma: You are made of so many people you do not wish to be. Including me.

  But you know so little of me. I will attempt to explain the context of me, if not the detail. It begins—I began—with a war.

  War is a poor word. Is it war when people find an infestation of vermin in some unwanted place and try to burn or poison it clean? Though that, too, is a poor metaphor, because no one hates individual mice or bedbugs. No one singles out for vengeance that one, that one right there, three-legged splotch-backed little bastard, and all its progeny down the hundreds of verminous generations that encompass a human life. And the three-legged splotch-backed little bastards don’t have much chance of becoming more than an annoyance to people—whereas you and all your kind have cracked the surface of the planet and lost the Moon. If the mice in your garden, back in Tirimo, had helped Jija kill Uche, you would have shaken the place to pebbles and set fire to the ruins before you left. You destroyed Tirimo anyway, but if it had been personal, you’d have done worse.

  Yet for all your hatred, you still might not have managed to kill the vermin. The survivors would be greatly changed—made harder, stronger, more splotch-backed. Perhaps the hardships you inflicted would have fissioned their descendants into many factions, each with different interests. Some of those interests would have nothing to do with you. Some would revere and despise you for your power. Some would be as dedicated to your destruction as you were to theirs, even though by the time they had the strength to actually act on their enmity, you would have forgotten their existence. To them, your enmity would be the stuff of legend.

  And some might hope to appease you, or talk you around to at least a degree of peaceful tolerance. I am one of these.

  I was not always. For a very long time, I was one of the vengeful ones… but what it keeps coming back to is this: Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times.

  That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted to win.

  So this is a confession, my Essun. I’ve betrayed you already and I will do it again. You haven’t even chosen a side yet, and already I fend off those who would recruit you to their cause. Already I plot your death. It’s necessary. But I can at least try my damnedest to give your life a meaning that will last till the world ends.

  5

  Nassun takes the reins

  MAMA MADE ME LIE TO YOU, Nassun is thinking. She’s looking at her father, who’s been driving the wagon for hours at this point. His eyes are on the road, but a muscle in his jaw jumps. One of his hands—the one that first struck Uche, ultimately killed him—is shaking where it grips the reins. Nassun can tell that he is still caught up in the fury, maybe still killing Uche in his head. She doesn’t understand why, and she doesn’t like it. But she loves her father, fears him, worships him, and therefore some part of her yearns to appease him. She asks herself: What did I do to make this happen? And the answer that comes is: Lie. You lied, and lies are always bad.

  But this lie was not her choice. That had been Mama’s command, along with all the others: Don’t reach, don’t ice, I’m going to make the earth move and you’d better not react, didn’t I tell you not to react, even listening is reacting, normal people don’t listen like that, are you listening to me, rusting stop, for Earth’s sake can’t you do anything right, stop crying, now do it again. Endless commands. Endless displeasure. Occasionally the slap of ice in threat, the slap of a hand, the sickening inversion of Nassun’s torus, the jerk of a hand on her upper arm. Mama has said occasionally that she loves Nassun, but Nassun has never seen any proof of it.

  Not like Daddy, who gives her knapped stone kirkhusa to play with or a first aid kit for her runny-sack because Nassun is a Resistant like her mama. Daddy, who takes her fishing at Tirika Creek on days when he doesn’t have commissions to fulfill. Mama has never lain out on the grassy rooftop with Nassun, pointing at the stars and explaining that some deadcivs are said to have given them names, though no one remembers those. Daddy is never too tired to talk at the ends of his workdays. Daddy does not inspect Nassun in the mornings after baths the way Mama does, checking for poorly washed ears or an unmade bed, and when Nassun misbehaves, Daddy only sighs and shakes his head and tells her, “Sweetening, you knew better.” Because Nassun always does.

  It was not because of Daddy that Nassun wanted to run away and become a lorist. She does not like that her father is so angry now. This seems yet another thing that her mother has done to her.

  So she says, “I wanted to tell you.”

  Daddy does not react. The horses keep plodding forward. The road stretches before the cart, the woods and hills inching past around the road, the bright blue sky overhead. There aren’t a lot of people riding past today—just some carters with heavy wagons of trade goods, messengers, some quartent guards on patrol. A few of the carters, who visit Tirimo often, nod or wave because they know Daddy, but Daddy does not respond. Nassun doesn’t like this, either. Her father is a friendly man. The man who sits beside her feels like a stranger.

  Just because he doesn’t reply doesn’t mean he’s not listening. She adds, “I asked Mama when we could tell you. I asked her that a lot. She said never. She said you wouldn’t understand.”

  Daddy says nothing. His hands are still shaking—less now? Nassun cannot tell. She starts to feel uncertain; is he angry? Is he sad about Uche? (Is she sad about Uche? It does not feel real. When she thinks of her little brother, she thinks of a gabby, giggly little thing who sometimes bit people and still shit his diaper occasionally, and who had an orogenic presence the size of a quartent. The crumpled, still thing back at their house cannot be Uche, because it was too small and dull.) Nassun wants to touch her father’s shaking hand, but she finds herself oddly reluctant to do so. She isn’t sure why—fear? Maybe just because this man is so much a stranger, and she has always been shy of strangers.

  But. No. He is Daddy. Whatever is wrong with him now, it’s Mama’s fault.

  So Nassun reaches out and grips Daddy’s nearer hand, hard, because she wants to show him that she is not afraid, and because she is angry, though not at Daddy. “I wanted to tell you!”

  The world blurs. At first Nassun isn’t sure of what’s happening, and she locks up. This is what Mama has drilled her to do in moments of surprise or pain: lock down her body’s instinctive fear reaction, lock down her sessapinae’s instinctive gr
ab for the earth below. And under no circumstances is Nassun to react with orogeny, because normal people do not do that. You can do anything else, Mama’s voice says in her head. Scream, cry, throw something with your hands, get up and start a fight. Not orogeny.

  So Nassun hits the ground harder than she should because she has not quite mastered the skill of not reacting, and she still stiffens up physically along with not reacting orogenically. And the world blurs because she has not only been knocked off the driver’s seat of the wagon, but she has actually rolled off the edge of the Imperial Road and down a gravel-strewn slope, toward a small creek-fed pond.

  (The creek that feeds it is where, in a few days, Essun will bathe a strange white boy who acts as if he has forgotten what soap is for.)

  Nassun flops to a stop, dazed and breathless. Nothing really hurts yet. By the time the world settles and she begins to understand what’s happened—Daddy hit me, knocked me off the wagon—Daddy has scrambled down the slope and is crying her name as he crouches beside her and helps her to sit up. Really crying. As Nassun blinks away dust and the stars that obscure her vision, she reaches up in confusion to touch Daddy’s face, and finds it streaked wet.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, sweetening. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t, you’re all I have left—” He jerks her close and holds her tightly, although it hurts. She has bruises all over. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—rusting—sorry! Oh, Earth, oh, Earth, you evil son of a ruster! Not this one! You can’t have this one, too!”

  These are sobs of grief, long and throat-scraping and hysterical. Nassun will understand this later (and not very much later). She will realize that in this moment, her father is weeping as much for the son he murdered as for the daughter he has injured.

  In the moment, however, she thinks, He still loves me, and starts crying, too.