The Stone Sky

  It’s nighttime. Nassun stands on what she thinks of as Corepoint’s town green. It isn’t; a city built before the Seasons would have no need of such a thing. It’s just a place near the enormous hole that is Corepoint’s heart. Around the hole are strangely slanted buildings, like the pylons she saw in Syl Anagist—but these ones are huge, stories high and a block wide apiece. She’s learned that when she gets too near these buildings, which don’t have any doors or windows that she can see, it sets off warnings composed of bright red words and symbols, several feet high apiece, which blaze in the air over the city. Worse are the low, blatting alarm-sounds that echo through the streets—not loud, but insistent, and they make her teeth feel loose and itchy.

  (She’s looked into the hole, despite all this. It’s enormous compared to the one that was in the underground city—many times that one’s circumference, so big that it would take her an hour or more to walk all the way around it. Yet for all its grandeur, despite the evidence it offers of feats of geneering long lost to humankind, Nassun cannot bring herself to be impressed by it. The hole feeds no one, provides no shelter against ash or assault. It doesn’t even scare her—though that is meaningless. After her journey through the underground city and the core of the world, after losing Schaffa, nothing will ever frighten her again.)

  The spot Nassun has found is a perfectly circular patch of ground just beyond the hole’s warning radius. It’s odd ground, slightly soft to the touch and springy beneath her feet, not like any material she’s ever touched before—but here in Corepoint, that sort of experience isn’t rare. There’s no actual soil in this circle, aside from a bit of windblown stuff piled up along the edges of the circle; a few seagrasses have taken root here, and there’s the desiccated, spindly trunk of a dead sapling that did its best before being blown over, many years before. That’s all.

  A number of stone eaters have appeared around the circle, she notes as she takes up position at its center. No sign of Steel, but there must be twenty or thirty others on street corners or in the street, sitting on stairs, leaning against walls. A few turned their heads or eyes to watch as she passed, but she ignored and ignores them. Perhaps they have come to witness history. Maybe some are like Steel, hoping for an end to their horrifyingly endless existence; maybe the ones who’ve helped her have done so because of that. Maybe they’re just bored. Not the most exciting town, Corepoint.

  Nothing matters, right now, except the night sky. And in that sky, the Moon is beginning to rise.

  It sits low on the horizon, seemingly bigger than it was the night before and made oblong by the distortions of the air. White and strange and round, it hardly seems worth all the pain and struggle that its absence has symbolized for the world. And yet—it pulls on everything within Nassun that is orogene. It pulls on the whole world.

  Time for the world, then, to pull back.

  Nassun shuts her eyes. They are all around Corepoint now—the spare key, three by three by three, twenty-seven obelisks that she has spent the past few weeks touching and taming and coaxing into orbit nearby. She can still feel the sapphire, but it is far away and not in sight; she can’t use it, and it would take months to arrive if she summoned it. These others will do, though. It’s strange to see so many of the things in the sky all together, after a lifetime with only one—or no—obelisks in sight at any given time. Stranger to feel them all connected to her, thrumming at slightly different speeds, their wells of power each at slightly different depths. The darker ones are deeper. No telling why, but it is a noticeable difference.

  Nassun lifts her hands, splaying her fingers in unconscious imitation of her mother. Very carefully, she begins connecting each of the twenty-seven obelisks—one to one, then those to two apiece, then others. She is compelled by lines of sight, lines of force, strange instincts that demand mathematical relationships she does not understand. Each obelisk supports the forming lattice, rather than disrupting or canceling it out. It’s like putting horses in harness, sort of, when you’ve got one with a naturally quick gait and another that plods along. This is yoking twenty-seven high-strung racehorses … but the principle is the same.

  And it is beautiful, the moment when all of the flows stop fighting Nassun and shift into lockstep. She inhales, smiling in spite of herself, feeling pleasure again for the first time since Father Earth destroyed Schaffa. It should be scary, shouldn’t it? So much power. It isn’t, though. She falls up through torrents of gray or green or mauve or clear white; parts of her that she has never known the words for move and adjust in a dance of twenty-seven parts. Oh, it is so lovely! If only Schaffa could—

  Wait.

  Something makes the hairs on the back of Nassun’s neck prickle. Dangerous to lose concentration now, so she forces herself to methodically touch each obelisk in turn and soothe it back into something like an idle state. They mostly tolerate this, though the opal bucks a little and she has to force it into quiescence. When all are finally stable, though, she cautiously opens her eyes and looks around.

  At first the black-and-white moonlit streets are as before: silent and still, despite the crowd of stone eaters that has assembled to watch her work. (In Corepoint, it is easy to feel alone in a crowd.) Then she spies … movement. Something—some one—lurching from one shadow to another.

  Startled, Nassun takes a step toward that moving figure. “H-hello?”

  The figure staggers toward some kind of small pillar whose purpose Nassun has never understood, though there seems to be one on every other corner of the city. Nearly falling as it grabs the pillar for support, the figure twitches and looks up at the sound of her voice. Icewhite eyes spear at Nassun from the shadows.

  Schaffa.

  Awake. Moving.

  Without thinking, Nassun begins to trot, then run after him. Her heart is in her mouth. She’s heard people say things like that and thought nothing of it before—just poetry, just silliness—but now she knows what it means as her mouth goes so dry that she can feel her own pulse through her tongue. Her eyes blur. “Schaffa!”

  He’s thirty, forty feet away, near one of the pylon buildings that surround Corepoint’s hole. Close enough to recognize her—and yet there is nothing in his gaze that seems to know who she is. Quite the contrary; he blinks, and then smiles in a slow, cold way that makes her stumble to a halt in deep, skin-twitching unease.

  “Sch-Schaffa?” she says again. Her voice is very thin in the silence.

  “Hello, little enemy,” Schaffa says, in a voice that reverberates through Corepoint and the mountain below it and the ocean for a thousand miles around.

  Then he turns to the pylon building behind him. A high, narrow opening appears at his touch; he stagger-stumbles through. It vanishes behind him in an instant.

  Nassun screams and flings herself after him.

  You are deep in the lower mantle, halfway through the world, when you sense the activation of part of the Obelisk Gate.

  Or so your mind interprets it, at first, until you master your alarm and reach forth to confirm what you’re feeling. It’s hard. Here in the deep earth, there is so much magic; trying to sift through it for whatever is happening on the surface is like trying to hear a distant creek over a hundred thundering waterfalls nearby. It’s worse the deeper Hoa takes you, until finally you have to “close your eyes” and stop perceiving magic entirely—because there’s something immense nearby that is “blinding” you with its brightness. It is as if there’s a sun underground, silver-white and swirling with an unbelievably intense concentration of magic … but you can also feel Hoa skirting wide around this sun, even though that means the overall journey has taken longer than absolutely necessary. You’ll have to ask him why later.

  You can’t see much besides churning red here in the depths. How fast are you going? Without referents, it’s impossible to tell. Hoa is an intermittent shadow in the redness beside you, shimmering on the rare occasions when you catch a glimpse of him—but then, you’re probably shimmering, too. He isn’t push
ing through the earth, but becoming part of it and transiting the particles of himself around its particles, becoming a waveform that you can sess like sound or light or heat. Disturbing enough if you don’t think about the fact that he’s doing it to you, too. You can’t feel anything like this, except a hint of pressure from his hand, and the suggestion of tension from Lerna’s arm. There’s no sound other than an omnipresent rumble, no smell of sulfur or anything else. You don’t know if you’re breathing, and you don’t feel the need for air.

  But the distant awakening of multiple obelisks panics you, nearly makes you try to pull away from Hoa so you can concentrate, even though—stupid—that would not just kill you but annihilate you, turning you to ash and then vaporizing the ashes and then setting the vapor on fire. “Nassun!” you cry, or try to cry, but words are lost in the deep roar. There is no one to hear your cry.

  Except. There is.

  Something shifts around you—or, you realize belatedly, you are shifting relative to it. It isn’t something you think about until it happens again, and you think you feel Lerna jerk against your side. Then it finally occurs to you to look at the silver wisps of your companions’ bodies, which at least you can make out against the dense red material of the earth around you.

  There is a human-shaped blaze linked to your hand, heavy as a mountain upon your perception as it forges swiftly upward: Hoa. He is moving oddly, however, periodically shifting to one side or another; that’s what you perceived before. Beside Hoa are faint shimmers, delicately etched. One has a palpable interruption in the silverflow of one arm; that has to be Tonkee. You cannot distinguish Hjarka from Danel because you can’t see hair or relative size or anything so detailed as teeth. Only knowing that Lerna is closer to you makes him distinct. And beyond Lerna—

  Something flashes past, mountain-heavy and magic-bright, human shaped but not human. And not Hoa.

  Another flash. Something streaks on a perpendicular trajectory, intercepting and driving it away, but there are more. Hoa lunges aside again, and a new flash misses. But it’s close. Lerna seems to twitch beside you. Can he see it, too?

  You really hope not, because now you understand what’s happening. Hoa is dodging. And you can do nothing, nothing, but trust Hoa to keep you safe from the stone eaters who are trying to rip you away from him.

  No. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re this afraid—when you’ve been merged into the high-pressure semisolid rock of the planet’s mantle, and when everyone you love will die in slow horror should you fail in your quest, and when you’re surrounded by currents of magic that are so much more powerful than anything you’ve ever seen, and when you’re under attack by murderous stone eaters. But. You did not spend your childhood learning to perform under the threat of death for nothing.

  Mere threads of magic aren’t enough to stop stone eaters. The earth’s winding rivers of the stuff are all you have to hand. Reaching for one feels like plunging your awareness into a lava tube, and for an instant you’re distracted by wondering whether this is what it will feel like if Hoa lets go—a flash of terrible heat and pain, and then oblivion. You push that aside. A memory comes to you. Meov. Driving a wedge of ice into a cliff face, shearing it off at just the precise time to smash a ship full of Guardians—

  You shape your will into a wedge and splint it into the nearest magic torrent, a great crackling, wending coil of a thing. It works, but your aim is wild; magic sprays everywhere, and Hoa must dodge again, this time from your efforts. Fuck! You try again, concentrating this time, letting your thoughts loosen. You’re already in the earth, red and hot instead of dark and warm, but how is this any different? You’re still in the crucible, just literally instead of a symbolic mosaic. You need to drive your wedge in here and aim it there as another flash of person-shaped mountain starts to pace you and darts in for the kill—

  —just as you shunt a stream of purest, brightest silver directly into its path. It doesn’t hit. You’re still not good at aiming. You glimpse the stone eater stop short, however, as the magic all but blazes past its nose. Here in the deep red it is impossible to see expressions, but you imagine that the creature is surprised, maybe even alarmed. You hope it is.

  “Next one’s for you, bastard cannibalson ruster!” you try to shout, but you are no longer in a purely physical space. Sound and air are extraneous. You imagine the words, then, and hope the ruster in question gets the gist.

  You do not imagine, however, the fact that the flitting, fleeting glimpses of stone eaters stop. Hoa keeps going, but there are no more attacks. Well, then. It’s good to be of some use.

  He’s rising faster now that he is unimpeded. Your sessapinae start to perceive depth as a rational, calculable thing again. The deep red turns deep brown, then cools to deep black. And then—

  Air. Light. Solidity. You become real again, flesh and blood unadulterated by other matter, upon a road between strange, smooth buildings, tall as obelisks beneath a night sky. The return of sensation is stunning, profound—but nothing compared to the absolute shock you feel when you look up.

  Because you have spent the past two years beneath a sky of variable ash, and until now you had no idea that the Moon had come.

  It is an icewhite eye against the black, an ill omen writ vast and terrifying upon the tapestry of stars. You can see what it is, even without sessing it—a giant round rock. Deceptively small against the expanse of the sky; you think you’ll need the obelisks to sess it completely, but you can see on its surface things that might be craters. You’ve traveled across craters. The craters on the Moon are big enough to see from here, big enough to take years to cross on foot, and that tells you the whole thing is incomprehensibly huge.

  “Fuck,” says Danel, which makes you drag your eyes from the sky. She’s on her hands and knees, as if clinging to the ground and grateful for its solidity. Maybe she’s regretting her choice of duty now, or maybe she just didn’t understand before this that being a lorist could be fully as awful and dangerous as being a general. “Fuck! Fuck.”

  “That’s it, then.” Tonkee. She’s staring up at the Moon, too.

  You turn to see Lerna’s reaction, and—

  Lerna. The space beside you, where he held on to you, is empty.

  “I didn’t expect the attack,” Hoa says. You can’t turn to him. Can’t turn away from the empty space where Lerna should be. Hoa’s voice is its usual inflectionless, hollow tenor—but is he shaken? Shocked? You don’t want him to be shocked. You want him to say something like, But of course I was able to keep everyone safe, Lerna is just over there, don’t worry.

  Instead he says, “I should have guessed. The factions that don’t want peace …” He trails off. Falls silent, just like an ordinary person who is at a loss for words.

  “Lerna.” That last jolt. The one you thought was a near miss.

  It isn’t what should have happened. You’re the one nobly sacrificing yourself for the future of the world. He was supposed to survive this.

  “What about him?” That’s Hjarka, who’s standing but bent over with hands on her knees, as if she’s thinking about throwing up. Tonkee’s rubbing the small of her back as if this will somehow help, but Hjarka’s attention is on you. She’s frowning, and you see the moment when she realizes what you’re talking about, and her expression melts into shock.

  You feel … numb. Not the usual non-feeling that comes of you being halfway to a statue. This is different. This is—

  “I didn’t even think I loved him,” you murmur.

  Hjarka winces, but then makes herself straighten and take a deep breath. “All of us knew this might be a one-way trip.”

  You shake your head in … confusion? “He’s … he was … so much younger than me.” You expected him to outlive you. That’s how it was supposed to work. You’re supposed to die feeling guilty for leaving him behind and killing his unborn child. He’s supposed to—

  “Hey.” Hjarka’s voice sharpens. You know that look on her face now, though. It’s a
Leadership look, or one reminding you that you are the leader here. But that’s right, isn’t it? You’re the one who’s running this little expedition. You’re the one who didn’t make Lerna, or any of them, stay home. You’re the one who didn’t have the courage to do this by yourself the way you damn well should have, if you really didn’t want them hurt. Lerna’s death is on you, not Hoa.

  You look away from them and involuntarily reach for the stump of your arm. This is irrational. You’re expecting battle wounds, scorch marks, something else to show that Lerna was lost. But it’s fine. You’re fine. You look back at the others; they’re all fine, too, because battles with stone eaters aren’t things that anyone walks away from with mere flesh wounds.

  “It’s prewar.” While you stand there bereft, Tonkee has half turned away from Hjarka, which is a problem because Hjarka’s currently leaning on her. Hjarka grumbles and hooks an arm around Tonkee’s neck to keep her in place. Tonkee doesn’t seem to notice, so wide are her eyes as she looks around. “Evil, eating Earth, look at this place. Completely intact! Not hidden at all, no defensive structuring or camouflage, but then not nearly enough green space to make this place self-sufficient …” She blinks. “They would’ve needed regular supply shipments to survive. The place isn’t built for survival. That means it’s from before the Enemy!” She blinks. “The people here must have come from the Stillness. Maybe there’s some means of transportation around here that we haven’t seen yet.” She subsides into thought, muttering to herself as she crouches to finger the substance of the ground.

  You don’t care. But you don’t have time to mourn Lerna or hate yourself, not now. Hjarka’s right. You have a job to do.

  And you’ve seen the other things in the sky besides the Moon—the dozens of obelisks that hover so close, so low, their energy pent and not a single one of them acknowledging your touch when you reach for them. They aren’t yours. But although they’ve been primed and readied, yoked to one another in a way that you immediately recognize as Bad News, they’re not doing anything. Something’s put them on hold.