Steel has told them that the deadciv ruin is here, at the center—but all Nassun sees ahead of them is a dainty, rising curl of metal, seemingly set directly into the white material. She tenses, as wary of something new as any Seasoned survivor. Schaffa, however, walks over to it without hesitation. He stops beside it, and for an instant there is an odd expression on his face that Nassun suspects is caused by the momentary conflict between what his body has done out of habit and what his mind cannot remember—but then he puts a hand on the curlicue at the tip of the metal.
Flat shapes and lines of light suddenly appear out of nothingness on the stone around him. Nassun gasps, but they do nothing other than march and ignite others in turn, spreading and glowing until a roughly rectangular shape has been etched out on the stone at Schaffa’s feet. There is a faint, barely audible hum that makes Nassun twitch and look around wildly, but a moment later the white material in front of Schaffa vanishes. It doesn’t slide aside, or open like a door; it’s just gone. But it is a doorway, Nassun abruptly realizes. “And here we are,” Schaffa murmurs. He sounds a little surprised himself.
Beyond this doorway is a tunnel that curves gradually down into the ground and out of sight. Narrow rectangular panels of light edge the steps on either side, illuminating the way. The curling bit of metal is a railing, she sees now, her perception reorienting as she moves to stand beside Schaffa. Something to hold on to, as one walks down into the depths.
In a distant part of the grass forest that they just traversed, there is a high-pitched grating noise that Nassun immediately identifies as animal. Chitinous, maybe. A closer, louder version of the screeches they heard the night before. Nassun flinches and looks at Schaffa.
“Some sort of grasshopper, I believe,” he says. His jaw is tight as he gazes back at the pass they just traversed, though nothing moves there—yet. “Or cicadas, perhaps. Inside now. I’ve seen something like this mechanism before; it should close after we pass through.”
He gestures for her to go first so that he can guard the rear. Nassun takes a deep breath and reminds herself that this is what is necessary to make a world that will hurt no one else. Then she trots down the stairs.
The light panels ignite five or six steps ahead as she progresses, and fade three steps behind. Once they’re a few feet down, just as Schaffa predicted, the white material that covered the stairwell reappears, cutting off further screeches from the forest.
Then there is nothing but the light, and the stairs, and the long-forgotten city somewhere below.
2699: Two Fulcrum blackjackets summoned to Deejna comm (Uher Quartent, Western Coastals, near Kiash Traps) when Mount Imher showed eruption signs. Blackjackets informed comm officials that eruption was imminent, and that it would likely touch off the whole Kiash cluster, including Madness (local name for the supervolcano that triggered the Madness Season; Imher sits on the same hot spot). Upon determining that Imher was beyond their ability to quell, the blackjackets—one three-ringer, the other supposedly seven although did not wear rings for some reason—made the attempt anyway, due to insufficient time to send for higher-ringed Imperial Orogenes. They successfully stilled the eruption long enough for a nine-ring senior Imperial Orogene to arrive and push it back into dormancy. (Three-ringer and seven-ringer found holding hands, charred, frozen.)
—Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Syl Anagist: Three
FASCINATING. ALL OF THIS GROWS easier to remember with the telling … or perhaps I am still human, after all.
At first our field excursion is simply the act of walking through the city. We have spent the brief years since our initial decanting immersed in sesuna, the sense of energy in all its forms. A walk outside forces us to pay attention to our other, lesser senses, and this is initially overwhelming. We flinch at the springiness of pressed-fiber sidewalks under our shoes, so unlike the hard lacquerwood of our quarters. We sneeze trying to breathe air thick with smells of bruised vegetation and chemical by-product and thousands of exhaled breaths. Their first sneeze frightens Dushwha into tears. We clap hands over our ears to try, and fail, to screen out many voices talking and walls groaning and leaves rustling and machinery whining in the distance. Bimniwha tries to yell over it all, and Kelenli must stop and soothe her before she will try speaking normally again. I duck and yelp in fear of the birds that sit in a nearby bush, and I am the calmest of us.
What settles us, at last, is finally having the chance to gaze upon the full beauty of the amethyst plutonic fragment. It is an awesome thing, pulsing with the slow flux of magic as it towers over the city-node’s heart. Every node of Syl Anagist has adapted in unique ways to suit its local climate. We have heard of nodes in the desert where buildings are grown from hardened giant succulents; nodes on the ocean built by coral organisms engineered to grow and die on command. (Life is sacred in Syl Anagist, but sometimes death is necessary.) Our node—the node of the amethyst—was once an old-growth forest, so I cannot help thinking that something of ancient trees’ majesty is in the great crystal. Surely this makes it more stately and strong than other fragments of the machine! This feeling is completely irrational, but I look at my fellow tuners’ faces as we gaze at the amethyst fragment, and I see the same love there.
(We have been told stories of how the world was different, long ago. Once, cities were not just dead themselves, stone and metal jungles that did not grow or change, but they were actually deadly, poisoning soil and making water undrinkable and even changing the weather by their very existence. Syl Anagist is better, but we feel nothing when we think of the city-node itself. It is nothing to us—buildings full of people we cannot truly understand, going about business that should matter but does not. The fragments, though? We hear their voices. We sing their magic song. The amethyst is part of us, and we it.)
“I’m going to show you three things during this trip,” Kelenli says, once we’ve gazed at the amethyst enough to calm down. “These things have been vetted by the conductors, if that matters to you.” She makes a show of eying Remwha as she says this, since he was the one who made the biggest stink about having to go on this trip. Remwha affects a bored sigh. They are both excellent actors, before our watching guards.
Then Kelenli leads us forward again. It’s such a contrast, her behavior and ours. She walks easily with head high, ignoring everything that isn’t important, radiating confidence and calm. Behind her, we start-and-stop-and-scurry, all timid clumsiness, distracted by everything. People stare, but I don’t think it’s actually our whiteness that they find so strange. I think we just look like fools.
I have always been proud, and their amusement stings, so I straighten and try to walk as Kelenli does, even though this means ignoring many of the wonders and potential threats around me. Gaewha notices, too, and tries to emulate both of us. Remwha sees what we are doing and looks annoyed, sending a little ripple through the ambient: We will never be anything but strange to them.
I answer in an angry basso push-wave throb. This is not about them.
He sighs but begins emulating me, too. The others follow suit.
We have traveled to the southernmost quartent of the city-node, where the air is redolent with faint sulfur smells. Kelenli explains that the smell is because of the waste reclamation plants, which grow thicker here where sewers bring the city’s gray water near the surface. The plants make the water clean again and spread thick, healthy foliage over the streets to cool them, as they were designed to do—but not even the best genegineers can stop plants that live on waste from smelling a bit like what they eat.
“Do you mean to show us the waste infrastructure?” Remwha asks Kelenli. “I feel more contextual already.”
Kelenli snorts. “Not exactly.”
She turns a corner, and then there is a dead building before us. We all stop and stare. Ivy wends up this building’s walls, which are made of some sort of red clay pressed into bricks, and around some of its pillars, which are marble. Aside from the ivy, though, nothi
ng of the building is alive. It’s squat and low and shaped like a rectangular box. We can sess no hydrostatic pressure supporting its walls; it must use force and chemical fastenings to stay upright. The windows are just glass and metal, and I can see no nematocysts growing over their surfaces. How do they keep safe anything inside? The doors are dead wood, polished dark red-brown and carved with ivy motifs; pretty, surprisingly. The steps are a dull tawny-white sand suspension. (Centuries before, people called this concrete.) The whole thing is stunningly obsolete—yet intact, and functional, and thus fascinating for its uniqueness.
“It’s so … symmetrical,” says Bimniwha, curling her lip a little.
“Yes,” says Kelenli. She’s stopped before this building to let us take it in. “Once, though, people thought this sort of thing was beautiful. Let’s go.” She starts forward.
Remwha stares after her. “What, inside? Is that thing structurally sound?”
“Yes. And yes, we’re going inside.” Kelenli pauses and looks back at him, perhaps surprised to realize that at least some of his reticence wasn’t an act. Through the ambient, I feel her touch him, reassure him. Remwha is more of an ass when he is afraid or angry, so her comfort helps; the spiky jitter of his nerves begins to ease. She still has to play the game, however, for our many observers. “Though I suppose you could stay outside, if you wanted.”
She glances at her two guards, the brown man and woman who stay near her. They have not kept back from our group, unlike the other guards of whom we catch glimpses now and again, skirting our periphery.
Woman Guard scowls back at her. “You know better.”
“It was a thought.” Kelenli shrugs then, and gestures with her head toward the building, speaking to Remwha now. “Sounds like you don’t actually have a choice. But I promise you, the building won’t collapse on your head.”
We move to follow. Remwha walks a little slower, but eventually he comes along, too.
A holo-sign writes itself in the air before us as we cross the threshold. We have not been taught to read, and the letters of this sign look strange in any case, but then a booming voice sounds over the building’s audio system: “Welcome to the story of enervation!” I have no idea what this means. Inside, the building smells … wrong. Dry and dusty, the air stale as if there’s nothing taking in its carbon dioxide. There are other people here, we see, gathered in the building’s big open foyer or making their way up its symmetrical twin curving stairs, peering in fascination at the panels of carved wooden decoration which line each stair. They don’t look at us, distracted by the greater strangeness of our environs.
But then, Remwha says, “What is that?”
His unease, prickling along our network, makes us all look at him. He stands frowning, tilting his head from one side to the other.
“What is—” I start to ask, but then I hear? sess? it too.
“I’ll show you,” says Kelenli.
She leads us deeper into the boxy building. We walk past display crystals, each holding preserved within itself a piece of incomprehensible—but obviously old—equipment. I make out a book, a coil of wire, and a bust of a person’s head. Placards near each item explain its importance, I think, but I cannot fathom any explanation sufficient to make sense of it all.
Then Kelenli leads us onto a wide balcony with an old-fashioned ornate-wood railing. (This is especially horrifying. We are to rely on a rail made from a dead tree, unconnected to the city alarm grid or anything, for safety. Why not just grow a vine that would catch us if we fell? Ancient times were horrible.) And there we stand above a huge open chamber, gazing down at something that belongs in this dead place as much as we do. Which is to say, not at all.
My first thought is that it is another plutonic engine—a whole one, not just a fragment of a larger piece. Yes, there is the tall, imposing central crystal; there is the socket from which it grows. This engine has even been activated; much of its structure hovers, humming just a little, a few feet above the floor. But this is the only part of the engine that makes sense to me. All around the central crystal float longer, inward-curving structures; the whole of the design is somehow floral, a stylized chrysanthemum. The central crystal glows a pale gold, and the supporting crystals fade from green bases to white at the tips. Lovely, if altogether strange.
Yet when I look at this engine with more than my eyes, and touch it with nerves attuned to the perturbations of the earth, I gasp. Evil Death, the lattice of magics created by the structure is magnificent! Dozens of silvery, threadlike lines supporting one another; energies across spectra and forms all interlinked and state-changing in what seems to be a chaotic, yet utterly controlled, order. The central crystal flickers now and again, phasing through potentialities as I watch. And it’s so small! I have never seen an engine so well constructed. Not even the Plutonic Engine is this powerful or precise, for its size. If it had been built as efficiently as this tiny engine, the conductors would never have needed to create us.
And yet this structure makes no sense. There isn’t enough magic being fed into the mini-engine to produce all the energy I detect here. And I shake my head, but now I can hear what Remwha heard: a soft, insistent ringing. Multiple tones, blending and haunting and making the little hairs on the back of my neck rise … I look at Remwha, who nods, his expression tight.
This engine’s magics have no purpose that I can see, other than to look and sound and be beautiful. And somehow—I shiver, understanding instinctively but resisting because this contradicts everything I have learned from the laws of both physics and arcanity—somehow this structure is generating more energy than it consumes.
I frown at Kelenli, who’s watching me. “This should not exist,” I say. Words only. I don’t know how else to articulate what I’m feeling. Shock. Disbelief? Fear, for some reason. The Plutonic Engine is the most advanced creation of geomagestry ever built. That is what the conductors have told us, over and over again for all the years since we were decanted … and yet. This tiny, bizarre engine, sitting half-forgotten in a dusty museum, is more advanced. And it seems to have been built for no purpose other than beauty.
Why does this realization frighten me?
“But it does exist,” Kelenli says. She leans back against the railing, looking lazily amused—but through the soft shimmering harmony of the structure on display, I sess her ping on the ambient.
Think, she says without words. She watches me in particular. Her thinker.
I glance around at the others. As I do, I notice Kelenli’s guards again. They’ve taken up positions on either end of the balcony, so that they can see the corridor we came down as well as the display room. They both look bored. Kelenli brought us here. Got the conductors to agree to bringing us here. Means for us to see something in this ancient engine that her guards do not. What?
I step forward, putting my hands on the dead railing, and peer intently at the thing as if that will help. What to conclude? It has the same fundamental structure as other plutonic engines. Only its purpose is different—no, no. That’s too simple an assessment. What’s different here is … philosophical. Attitudinal. The Plutonic Engine is a tool. This thing? Is … art.
And then I understand. No one of Syl Anagist built this.
I look at Kelenli. I must use words, but the conductors who hear the guards’ report should not be able to guess anything from it. “Who?”
She smiles, and my whole body tingles all over with the rush of something I cannot name. I am her thinker, and she is pleased with me, and I have never been happier.
“You,” she replies, to my utter confusion. Then she pushes away from the railing. “I have much more to show you. Come.”
All things change during a Season.
—Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse two
7
you’re planning ahead
YKKA IS MORE INCLINED TO adopt Maxixe and his people than you were expecting. She’s not happy that Maxixe has an advanced case of ash lung—as Lerna confirms afte
r they’ve all had sponge baths and he’s given them a preliminary examination. Nor does she like that four of his people have other serious medical issues, ranging from fistulas to the complete lack of teeth, or that Lerna says they’re all going to be touch and go on surviving refeeding. But, as she informs those of you on her impromptu council, loudly so that anyone listening will hear, she can put up with a lot from people who bring in extra supplies, knowledge of the area, and precision orogeny that can help safeguard the group against attack. And, she adds, Maxixe doesn’t have to live forever. Long enough to help the comm will be enough for her.
She doesn’t add, Not like Alabaster, which is kind—or at least conspicuously not-cruel—of her. It’s surprising that she respects your grief, and maybe it’s also a sign that she is beginning to forgive you. It’ll be good to have a friend again. Friends. Again.
That’s not enough, of course. Nassun is alive and you’ve more or less recovered from your post-Gate coma, so now it becomes a struggle, daily, to remember why you’re staying with Castrima. It helps, sometimes, to go through the reasons for staying. For Nassun’s future, that’s one, so that you can have somewhere to shelter her once you’ve found her again. Because you can’t do it alone is the second reason—and you can’t rightly let Tonkee come with you anymore, however willing she might be. Not with your orogeny compromised; the long journey back south would be a death sentence for both of you. Hoa isn’t going to be able to help you get dressed, or cook food, or do any of the other things one needs two good hands for. And Reason Number Three, the most important of the set: You don’t know where to go anymore. Hoa has confirmed that Nassun is on the move, and has been traveling away from the site of the sapphire since you opened the Obelisk Gate. It was too late to find her before you ever woke up.