The Obelisk Gate

  “I don’t believe it, though,” Tonkee says, when she’s had a moment to recover. “That we’ve always had Seasons.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of us.” She grins. “Life, I mean. It’s not different enough.”

  “What?”

  Tonkee leans forward. She’s not quite as excited as she gets about obelisks, but it’s clear that just about any long-hidden knowledge sets her off. For a moment, in the gleam of her open, cheeky face, you see Binof; then she speaks and becomes Tonkee the geomest again. “‘All things change during a Season,’ yes? But not enough. Think of it this way: Everything that grows or walks on land can breathe the world’s air, eat its food, survive its usual shifts in temperature. We don’t have to change to do that; we are precisely the way we need to be, because that’s how the world works. Right? Maybe people are the worst of the lot, because we have to use our hands to make coats instead of just growing fur… but we can make coats. We’re built for that, with clever hands that can sew and brains that can figure out how to hunt or grow animals for fur. But we aren’t built to filter ash out of our lungs before it turns into cement—”

  “Some animals are.”

  Tonkee gives you an ugly look. “Stop interrupting. It’s rude.”

  You sigh and gesture for her to go on, and she nods, mollified. “Now. Yes, some animals grow lung-filters during a Season—or start breathing water and move into the ocean where it’s safer, or bury themselves and hibernate, or whatever. We’ve figured out how to build not just coats, but storecaches and walls and stonelore. But these are afterthoughts.” She gestures wildly, groping for the words. “Like… when a cartwheel blows a spoke and you’re halfway between comms, you improvise. See? You put a stick or even a bar of metal into the space where the broken spoke was, just to keep the wheel strong enough to last until you can reach a wheelwright. That’s what’s happening when kirkhusa suddenly develop a taste for meat during a Season. Why don’t they just eat meat all the time? Why haven’t they always eaten meat? Because they were originally built for something else, they’re still better at eating something else, and eating meat during Seasons is the slapdash, last-minute fix nature threw in to keep kirkhusa from going extinct.”

  “That’s…” You’re a little awed. It sounds crazy, but it feels right, somehow. You can’t think of any holes to poke in the theory, and you’re not sure you want to. Tonkee’s not someone you mean to go toe-to-toe with in a battle of logic.

  Tonkee nods. “That’s why I can’t stop thinking about the obelisks. People built them, which means that as a species we’re at least as old as they are! That’s a lot of time to break things, start over, and break them again. Or, if the Leadership stories are true… maybe it’s enough time to put a fix in place. Something to tide us over till the real repairs can be made.”

  You frown to yourself. “Wait. The Yumenescene Leadership thinks the obelisks—leftover deadciv junk—are the fix?”

  “Basically. The stories say the obelisks held the world together when it would have come apart. And they imply there might someday be a way to end the Seasons, involving the obelisks.”

  An end to all Seasons? It’s hard even to imagine. No need for runny-sacks. No storecaches. Comms could last forever, grow forever. Every city could become like Yumenes.

  “It would be amazing,” you murmur.

  Tonkee glances sharply at you. “Orogenes might be a kind of fix, too, you know,” she says. “And without the Seasons, you’d no longer be needed.”

  You frown back at her, not sure whether to be disquieted or comforted by that statement, until she starts finger-combing her remaining hair and you realize you’ve run out of things to say.

  Hoa is gone. You’re not sure where. You left him behind in the infirmary, staring down Ruby Hair, and when you returned to your apartment to try to get a few more hours’ sleep he was not beside you when you woke. His little bundle of rocks is still in your room, next to your bed, so he must be planning to return soon. It’s probably nothing. Still, after so many weeks, you feel oddly bereft without his strange, subtle presence. But perhaps this is just as well. You have a visit to make, and it might go easier without… hostility.

  You walk to the infirmary again slowly, quietly. It’s early evening, you think—always hard to tell in Castrima-under, but your body is still acclimated to the rhythms of the surface. For now, you trust in that. Some of the people out on the platforms and walkways stare as you pass; this comm spends plenty of time gossiping, clearly. That doesn’t matter. All that does is whether Alabaster has had time enough to recover. You need to talk.

  There’s no sign of the dead Hunter’s body from that morning; everything’s been cleaned up. Lerna’s inside, in fresh clothing, and he glances at you as you come in. There’s still a distance in his expression, you note, though he only meets your gaze for a moment before nodding and turning back to whatever he’s doing with what look like surgical instruments. There’s another man near him, pipetting something into a series of small glass vials; the man doesn’t even look up. It’s an infirmary. Anyone can come in.

  It’s not until you’re halfway down the infirmary’s long central aisle, walking between the rows of cots, that you consciously notice the sound you’ve been hearing all along: a kind of hum. It seems monotonous at first, but as you concentrate on it, you detect multiple tones, harmonies, a subtle rhythm. Music? Music so alien, so difficult to parse, that you’re not sure that word really applies. You can’t figure out where it’s coming from, at first. Alabaster is still where you saw him that morning, on a pile of cushions and blankets on the floor. No telling why Lerna hasn’t put him on a cot. There are flasks on a nightstand nearby, a roll of fresh bandages, some scissors, a pot of salve. A bedpan, thankfully unused since its last cleaning, though it still stinks near him.

  The music is coming from the stone eater, you realize in wonder as you settle into a crouch before them. Antimony sits cross-legged near Alabaster’s “nest,” utterly still, looking as though someone bothered to sculpt a woman sitting cross-legged with one hand upraised. Alabaster’s asleep—though in an odd, nearly sitting-up posture that you don’t understand until you realize he’s leaning back against Antimony’s hand. Maybe that’s the only way he can sleep comfortably? There are bandages on his arms today, shiny with salve, and he’s not wearing a shirt—which helps you see that he’s not as badly damaged as you first thought. There are no patches of stone on his chest or belly, and only a few small burns around his shoulders, most of those healed. But his torso is nearly skeletal—barely any muscle, ribs showing, belly almost concave.

  Also, his right arm is much shorter than it was that morning.

  You look up at Antimony. The music is coming from somewhere inside of her. Her black eyes are focused on him; they haven’t moved with your arrival. It’s peaceful, this strange music. And Alabaster looks comfortable.

  “You haven’t been taking care of him,” you say, looking at his ribs and remembering countless evenings putting food in front of him, glaring while he wearily chewed it, conspiring with Innon to get him to eat at the group meals. He always ate more when he thought people were looking. “If you were going to steal him from us, the least you could’ve done was feed him properly. Fatten him up before you ate him, or something.”

  The music continues. There is a very faint, stone-grating sound as her black cabochon eyes shift to you at last. They’re such alien eyes, despite their superficial resemblance to human. You can see the dry, matte material that comprises the whites of her eyes. No veins, no spots, no off-white coloring that would indicate weariness or worry or anything else human. You can’t even tell if there are pupils within the black of her irises. For all you know, she can’t even see with them, and uses her elbows to detect your presence and direction.

  You meet those eyes and realize, suddenly, that there’s so little left in you which is capable of fear.

  “You took him from us and we couldn’t do it alone.” No,
that is a lie of incompleteness. Innon, a feral, had no hope against Guardians and a trained Fulcrum orogene. You, though? You’re the one who fucked everything up. “I couldn’t do it alone. If Alabaster had been there… I hated you. Afterward, while I was wandering, I vowed to find a way to kill you. Put you in an obelisk like that other one. Bury you in the ocean, far enough out that no one will ever dig you up.”

  She watches you and says nothing. You can’t even read the catch of her breath, because she doesn’t breathe. But the music stops, dying into silence. That’s a reaction, at least.

  This really is pointless. But then the silence looms louder, and you’re still feeling kind of pissy, so you add: “Shame. The music was pretty.”

  (Later, lying in bed and considering the day’s errors, you will think belatedly, I am as crazy now as Alabaster was back then.)

  A moment later Alabaster stirs, lifting his head and uttering a soft groan that throws your thoughts and your heart ten years away before they circle back. He blinks at you in disorientation for a moment, and you realize he doesn’t recognize you with your hair twice as long and your skin weathered and your clothes Season-faded. Then he blinks again, and you take a deep breath, and you’re both back in the here and now.

  “The onyx,” he says, his voice hoarse with sleep. Of course he knows. “Always biting off more than you can chew, Syen.”

  You don’t bother to correct him on the name. “You said an obelisk.”

  “I said the rusting topaz. But if you could call the onyx, I’ve underestimated your development.” His head cocks, his expression thoughtful. “What have you been doing, these last few years, to have refined your control so much?”

  You can’t think of anything at first, and then you can. “I had two children.” Keeping an orogene child from destroying everything in its vicinity took a lot of your energy, in those earliest years. You learned to sleep with one eye open, your sessapinae primed for the slightest twitch of infant fear or toddler pique—or, worse, a local shake that might prompt either child to react. You quelled a dozen disasters a night.

  He nods, and belatedly you remember waking up during the night in Meov sometimes to find Alabaster blearily awake and watching Corundum. You remember teasing him, in fact, on his worrying, when Coru was clearly no threat to anyone.

  Earth burn it, you hate figuring out all this stuff after the fact.

  “They left me with my mother for a few years after I was born,” he says, almost to himself. You’d guessed this already, given that he speaks a Coaster language. How his Fulcrum-bred mother had known it, though, is a mystery that will never be solved. “They took me away once I was old enough to be threatened effectively, but before that, she apparently prevented me from icing Yumenes a few times. I don’t think we’re meant to be raised by stills.” He paused, his gaze distant. “I met her years later by chance. Didn’t know her, though she somehow recognized me. I think she’s—she was—on the senior advisory board. Topped out at nine rings, if I recall.” He falls silent for a moment. Perhaps he’s contemplating the fact that he killed his mother, too. Or maybe he’s trying to remember something of her other than a hurried meeting between two strangers in a corridor.

  His focus sharpens abruptly, back to the present and you. “I think you might be a nine-ringer now.”

  You can’t help surprise and pleasure, though you cover both with the appearance of nonchalance. “I thought things like that didn’t matter anymore.”

  “They don’t. I was careful to wipe out the Fulcrum when I tore Yumenes apart. There are still buildings where the city was, perched on the edges of the maw, unless they’ve fallen in since. But the obsidian walls are rubble, and I made sure Main went into the pit first.” There’s a deep, vicious satisfaction in his voice. He sounds like you a moment ago, as you imagined murdering stone eaters.

  (You glance at Antimony. She’s gone back to watching Alabaster, her hand still supporting his back. You could almost think of her as doing it out of devotion or kindness, if you didn’t know his hands and feet and forearm were in whatever passes for her stomach.)

  “I only mention rings so you can have a point of reference.” Alabaster stirs, sitting up carefully and then, as if he heard your thought, extending his stubby, stone-capped right arm. “Look inside this. Tell me what you see.”

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Alabaster?” But he doesn’t answer, just looking at you, and you sigh. All right.

  You look at his arm, which stops at the elbow now, and wonder what he means by look inside. Then, unbidden, you remember a night when he willed poison out of the cells of his own body. But he had help for that. You frown, impulsively glancing at the strangely shaped pink object behind him—the thing that looks like an overly long, big-handled knife, and which is actually, somehow, an obelisk. The spinel, he called it.

  You glance at him; he must have seen you eye it. He doesn’t move: not a twitch of his burned and stone-crusted face, not a flicker of his nonexistent eyelashes. All right, then. Anything goes, as long as you do what he says.

  So you stare down at his arm. You don’t want to chance the spinel. No telling what it will do. Instead, first you try letting your awareness go into the arm. This feels absurd; you’ve spent your life sessing layers of earth miles underground. To your surprise, however, your perception can grasp his arm. It’s small and strange, too close and almost too tiny, but it’s there, because at least the outermost layer of him is rock. Calcium and carbon and flecks of oxidized iron that must have once been blood, and—

  You pause, frowning, and open your eyes. (You don’t remember closing them.) “What is that?”

  “What is that?” The side of his mouth that hasn’t been seamed by a burn lifts in a sardonic smile.

  You scowl. “There’s something in this stuff that you’re—” Becoming. “—this stone stuff. It’s not, I don’t know. It’s rock, and not.”

  “Can you sess the flesh further down the arm?”

  You shouldn’t be able to. But when you narrow your focus to the limit that you can, when you squint and press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and wrinkle your nose, it’s there, too. Big sticky globules all bouncing against one another—You withdraw at once, revolted. At least stone is clean.

  “Look again, Syen. Don’t be a coward.”

  You could be annoyed, but you’re too old for this shit now. Setting your jaw, you try again, taking a deep breath so you won’t feel queasy. Everything’s so wet inside him, and the water isn’t even sequestered away between layers of clay or—

  You pause. Narrow your focus still further. Between the gelidity, moving, too, but in a slower and less organic way, you suddenly sess the same thing you found in the stone of him. Something else, neither flesh nor stone. Something immaterial, and yet it is there for you to perceive. It glimmers in threads strung between the bits of him, crossing itself in lattices, shifting constantly. A… tension? An energy, shiny and streaming. Potential. Intention.

  You shake your head, pulling back so you can focus on him. “What is that?”

  This time he answers. “The stuff of orogeny.” He makes his voice dramatic, since his facial expressions can’t change much. “I’ve told you before that what we do isn’t logical. To make the earth move we put something of ourselves into the system and make completely unrelated things come out. There’s always been something else involved, connecting the two. This.” You frown. He sits forward, growing more animated with his excitement, just the way he used to in the old days—but then something creaks on him, and he flinches with pain. Carefully he sits back against Antimony’s hand again.

  But you’re hearing him. And he’s right. It hasn’t ever really made sense, has it, the way orogeny works? It shouldn’t work at all, that willpower and concentration and perception should shift mountains. Nothing else in the world works this way. People cannot stop avalanches by dancing well, or make storms happen by refining their hearing. And on some level, you’ve always known that t
his was there, making your will manifest. This… whatever it is.

  Alabaster has always been able to read you like a book. “The civilization that made the obelisks had a word for this,” he says, nodding at your epiphany. “I think there’s a reason we don’t. It’s because no one for countless generations has wanted orogenes to understand what we do. They’ve just wanted us to do it.”

  You nod slowly. “After Allia, I can see why no one would’ve wanted us to learn how to manipulate obelisks.”

  “Rust the obelisks. They didn’t want us to create something better. Or worse.” He takes a deep breath carefully. “We’re going to stop manipulating stone now, Essun. That stuff you see in me? That’s what you have to learn to control. To perceive, wherever it exists. It’s what the obelisks are made of, and it’s how they do what they do. We have to get you to do those things, too. We have to make you a ten-ringer, at least.”

  At least. Just like that. “Why? Alabaster, you mentioned something. A… moon. Tonkee doesn’t have a clue what that is. And all the things you’ve said, about causing that rift and wanting me to do something worse—” Something moves at the periphery of your vision. You glance up and realize the man who’s been working with Lerna is coming with a bowl in his hands. Dinner, for Alabaster. You drop your voice. “I’m not, by the way. Helping you make things worse. Haven’t you done enough already?”

  Alabaster glances at the oncoming nurse, too. Watching him, Alabaster says in a low voice, “The Moon is something this world used to have, Essun. An object in the sky, much closer than the stars.” He keeps switching between calling you one name and another. It’s distracting. “Its loss was part of what caused the Seasons.”

  Father Earth did not always hate life, the lorists say. He hates because he cannot forgive the loss of his only child.