The Obelisk Gate Page 4

  “They were making sugar batteries when I left Yumenes,” you say. She’s not saying obelisk, either. Good; she gets it. “Safer than acid and metal. Batteries can be made more than one way. But if a battery is too powerful for the circuit you attach it to…” You figure that’s enough to get the idea across.

  She shakes her head again, but you think she believes you. As she turns and starts to pace in thought, you notice Lerna. He’s been quiet all this time, listening to you and Ykka talk. Now he seems deep in thought, and that bothers you. You don’t like that a still is thinking so hard about this.

  But then he surprises you. “Ykka. How old do you think this comm really is?”

  She stops and frowns at him. The other Castrimans shift as if uncomfortable. Maybe it bothers them, being reminded that they live in a deadciv ruin. “No clue. Why?”

  He shrugs. “I’m just thinking of similarities.”

  You understand then. Crystals in Castrima-under that glow through some means you can’t fathom. Crystals that float in the sky by some means you can’t fathom. Both mechanisms meant to be used by orogenes and no one else.

  Stone eaters showing an inordinate interest in orogenes who use either. You glance at Hoa.

  But Hoa isn’t looking at the sky, or at you. He’s stepped off the porch and has crouched on the ashy ground just off the walkway, staring at something. You follow his gaze and see a small mound in what was once the front yard of the house next door. It looks like just another pile of ash, maybe three feet high, but then you notice a tiny desiccated animal foot poking out of one end. Cat, maybe, or rabbit. There are probably dozens of small carcasses around here, buried under the ash; the beginning of the Season likely caused a huge die-off. Odd that this carcass seems to have accumulated so much more ash than the ground around it, though.

  “Too long gone to eat, kid,” says one of the men, who’s also noticed Hoa and clearly has no idea what the “kid” is. Hoa blinks at him and bites his lip with just the perfect degree of unease. He plays the child so well. Then he gets up and comes over to you, and you realize he’s not playacting. Something really has unnerved him.

  “Other things will eat it,” he says to you, very softly. “We should go.”

  What. “You’re not afraid of anything.”

  His jaw tightens. Jaw full of diamond teeth. Muscles over diamond bones? No wonder he’s never let you try to lift him; he must be heavy as marble. But he says, “I’m afraid of things that will hurt you.”

  And… you believe him. Because, you suddenly realize, that’s been the commonality of all his strange behavior so far. His willingness to face the kirkhusa, which might have been too fast even for your orogeny. His ferocity toward other stone eaters. He’s protecting you. So few have ever tried to protect you, in your life. It’s impulse that makes you lift a hand and stroke it over his weird white hair. He blinks. Something comes into his eyes that is anything but inhuman. You don’t know what to think. This, though, is why you listen to him.

  “Let’s go,” you say to Ykka and the others. You’ve done what Alabaster asked. You suspect he won’t be displeased by the extra obelisk when you tell him—if he doesn’t already know. Now, maybe, finally, he’ll tell you what the rust is going on.

  Before, gather into stable rock for each citizen one year’s supply: ten rullets of grain, five of legume, a quarter-tradet dry fruit, and a half storet in tallow, cheese, or preserved flesh. Multiply by each year of life desired. After, guard upon stable rock with at least three strong-backed souls per cache: one to guard the cache, two to guard the guard.

  —Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse four

  3

  Schaffa, forgotten

  YES. YOU ARE HIM, TOO, or you were until after Meov. But now he is someone else.

  The force that shatters the Clalsu is orogeny applied to air. Orogeny isn’t meant to be applied to air, but there’s no real reason for it not to work. Syenite has had practice already using orogeny on water, at and since Allia. There are minerals in water, and likewise there are dust particles in air. Air has heat and friction and mass and kinetic potential, same as earth; the molecules of air are simply farther apart, the atoms shaped differently. Anyhow, the involvement of an obelisk makes all of these details academic.

  Schaffa knows what’s coming the instant he feels the obelisk’s pulse. He is old, old, Syenite’s Guardian. So old. He knows what stone eaters do to powerful orogenes whenever they get the chance, and he knows why it is crucial to keep orogenes’ eyes on the ground and not the sky. He has seen what happens when a four-ringer—that’s how he still thinks of Syenite—connects to an obelisk. He does genuinely care about her, you realize (she does not realize). It isn’t all about control. She’s his little one, and he has protected her in more ways than she knows. The thought of her agonizing death is unbearable to him. This is ironic, considering what happens next.

  In the moment when Syenite stiffens and her frame becomes suffused with light, and the air within the Clalsu’s tiny forward compartment shivers and turns into a nearly solid wall of unstoppable force, Schaffa happens to be standing to one side of a hanging bulkhead rather than in front of it. His companion, the Guardian who has just killed Syenite’s feral lover, is not so lucky: When the force slams him backward, the bulkhead juts out from the wall at just the right height and angle to shear his head off before giving way itself. Schaffa, however, flies backward unobstructed through the Clalsu’s capacious hold, which is empty because the ship hasn’t been out on a piracy run in a while. There’s room enough for his velocity to slow a little, and for the greatest force of Syenite’s blow to move past him. When he finally does hit a bulkhead, it is with merely bone-breaking force and not bone-pulverizing force. And the bulkhead is buckling, crumbling along with the rest of the ship, when he hits it. That helps, too.

  Then when jagged, knifelike spikes of bedrock from the ocean floor begin spearing through the explosion of debris, Schaffa is lucky again: None of them pierce his body. Syenite is lost in the obelisk by this point, and lost in the first throes of a grief that will send aftershakes through even Essun’s life. (Schaffa saw her hand on the child’s face, covering mouth and nose, pressing. Incomprehensible. Did she not know that Schaffa would love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair.) She is part of something vast and globally powerful now, and Schaffa, once the most important person in her world, is beneath her notice. On some level he is aware of this even as he flies through the storm, and the knowledge leaves a deep burn of hurt in his heart. Then he is in the water and dying.

  It is difficult to kill a Guardian. The many broken bones Schaffa has suffered and the damage to his organs would not be enough to do the job, in and of themselves. Even drowning wouldn’t be a problem under ordinary circumstances. Guardians are different. But they do have limits, and drowning plus organ failure plus blunt force trauma is enough to breach them. He realizes this as he tumbles through the water, bouncing off shards of stone and debris from the destroyed ship. He can’t tell which way is up, except that one direction seems faintly brighter than the other, but he is being dragged away from this by the swiftly sinking aft end of the ship. He uncurls, hits a rock, recovers, and tries to paddle against the downward current even though one of his arms is now broken. There’s nothing in his lungs. The air’s been beaten out of him, and he’s trying not to inhale water because then he will surely die. He cannot die. He has so much left to do.

  But he is only human, mostly, and as the terrible pressure grows and spots of blackness encroach on his vision and his whole body grows numb with the weight of the water, he cannot help sucking in a mighty lungful. It hurts: salt acid in his chest, fire in his throat, and still no air. On top of everything else—he can bear the rest, has borne worse in his long awful life—it is suddenly too much for the ordered, careful rationality that has guided and guarded Schaffa’s mind up to this point.

  He panics.

  Guardians must neve
r panic. He knows this; there are good reasons why. He does it anyway, flailing and screaming as he is dragged into the cold dark. He wants to live. This is the first and worst sin, for one of his kind.

  His terror suddenly vanishes. A bad sign. It is replaced a moment later by an anger so powerful that it blots out everything else. He stops screaming and trembles with it, but even as he does so, he knows: This anger is not his own. In his panic, he has opened himself to danger, and the danger that he fears above all others has come striding through the door as if it owns the place already.

  It says to him: If you wish to live, that can be arranged.

  Oh, Evil Earth.

  More offers, promises, suggestions and their rewards. Schaffa can have more power—power enough to fight the current, and the pain, and the lack of oxygen. He can live… for a price.

  No. No. He knows the price. Better to die than pay it. But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.

  Something burns at the back of Schaffa’s skull. This is a cold burn, not like the fire in his nose and throat and chest. Something there is waking up, warming up, gathering itself. Ready for the collapse of his resistance.

  We all do what we have to do, comes the seducer’s whisper, and this is the same reasoning Schaffa has used on himself too many times, over the centuries. Justifying too many atrocities. One does what one must, for duty. For life.

  It’s enough. The cold presence takes him.

  Power suffuses his limbs. In just a few suddenly restarted heartbeats, the broken bones have knitted and the organs have resumed their traditional function, albeit with a few work-arounds for the lack of oxygen. He twists in the water and begins to swim, sensing the direction he must go. Not up, not anymore; suddenly he finds oxygen in the water that he is breathing. He has no gills, yet his alveoli suddenly absorb more than they should be able to. It’s only a little oxygen, though—not even enough to feed his body properly. Cells die, especially in a very particular part of his brain. He is aware of this, horribly. He is aware of the slow death of all that makes him Schaffa. But the price must be paid.

  He fights it, of course. The anger tries to drive him forward, keep him underwater, but he knows that everything of him will die if he does. So he swims forward, but also upward, squinting through the murk at the light. It takes a long, dying time. But at least some of the rage within him is his own, fury that he has been forced into this position, rage at himself for succumbing, and that keeps him at it even as the tingling sets into his hands, his feet. But—

  He reaches the surface. Breaches it. Concentrates hard on not panicking while he vomits up water, coughs out more, and finally sucks in air. It hurts so much. Still, with the first inhalation, the dying stops. His brain and limbs get what they need. There are still spots in his vision, still that awful coldness at the back of his head, but he is Schaffa. Schaffa. He holds on to this, digs in claws and snarls away the encroaching cold. Fire-under-Earth, he’s still Schaffa, and he will not let himself forget this.

  (He loses so much else, though. Understand: The Schaffa that we have known thus far, the Schaffa whom Damaya learned to fear and Syenite learned to defy, is now dead. What remains is a man with a habit of smiling, a warped paternal instinct, and a rage that is not wholly his own driving everything he does from this point on.

  Perhaps you will mourn the Schaffa who is lost. It’s all right if you do. He was part of you, once.)

  He resumes swimming. After about seven hours—this is the strength his memories have bought him—he sees the still-smoking cone of Allia against the horizon. It’s a longer distance than straight to shore, but he adjusts his direction to swim toward it. There will be help there, he knows somehow.

  It is well past sunset now, fully dark. The water is cold, and he’s thirsty, and he hurts. Thankfully none of the monsters of the deep attack him. The only real threat he faces is his own will, and the question of whether it will falter in the battle against the sea, or against the cold rage eating his mind. It does not help that he is alone save for the indifferent stars… and the obelisk. He sees it once, when he glances back: a wavering now-colorless shape against the sparkling night sky. It looks no farther away than when he first noticed it from the deck of the ship, and ignored it in favor of focusing on his quarry. He should have paid closer attention, studied it to see if it was approaching, remembered that even a four-ringer can be a threat under the right circumstances, and—

  He frowns, pausing for a moment to float on his back. (This is dangerous. Fatigue immediately begins to set in. The power that sustains him can do only so much.) He stares at the obelisk. A four-ringer. Who? He tries to remember. There was someone… important.

  No. He is Schaffa. That is all that is important. He resumes swimming.

  Near dawn, he feels gritty black sand under his feet. He stumbles up out of the water, alien to himself and the movement of limbs on land, half crawling. The surf recedes behind him; there’s a tree ahead. He collapses upon its roots and does something that resembles sleep. It’s closer to a coma.

  When he wakes, the sun’s up and he is afire with pain of every kind: sore lungs, aching limbs, throbbing unhealed fractures in his nonessential bones, a dry throat, cracking skin. (And another, deeper ache.) He groans and something shadows his face. “You all right?” asks a voice that sounds like he feels. Rough, dry, low.

  He peels his eyes open to see an old man crouching before him. The man’s an Eastcoaster, thin and weathered, most of his curly white hair gone except a fringe round the back of his head. When Schaffa looks around, he sees that they are in a small, tree-shadowed cove. The old man’s rowboat has been pulled onto the shore, not far away. A fishing rod pokes out of it. The trees of the cove are all dead and the sand beneath Schaffa blows with ash; they’re still very close to the volcano that was Allia.

  How did he get here? He remembers swimming. Why was he in the water? That part is gone.

  “I—” Schaffa begins, and chokes on his own dry, swollen tongue. The old man helps him sit up, then offers him an open canteen. Brackish, leather-flavored water never tasted so sweet. The old man pulls it away after a few swallows, which Schaffa knows is wise, but he still groans and reaches after the canteen once. Only once, though. He is strong enough not to beg.

  (The emptiness inside him is not just thirst.)

  He tries to focus. “I’m.” This time speaking is easier. “I… don’t know if I’m all right.”

  “Shipwreck?” The old man cranes his neck to look around. In the near distance, very visible, is the ridge of knifelike stones that Syenite raised, from the pirates’ island all the way to the mainland. “Were you out there? What was that, some sort of shake?”

  It seems impossible that the old man does not know—but Schaffa has always been amazed at how little ordinary people understand about the world. (Always? Has he always been so amazed? Really?) “Rogga,” he says, too tired to manage the three syllables of the non-vulgar word for their kind. It’s enough. The old man’s face hardens.

  “Filthy Earth-spawned beasts. That’s why they have to be drowned as babes.” He shakes his head and focuses on Schaffa. “You’re too big for me to lift, and dragging will hurt. Think you can get up?”

  With help, Schaffa does manage to rise and stagger to the old man’s rowboat. He sits shivering in the prow while the old man rows them away from the cove, heading south along the coast. Some of why he’s shivering is cold—his clothes are still wet where he was lying down—and some of it is lingering shock. Some of it, however, is something entirely else.

  (Damaya! With great effort he remembers this name, and an impression: a small frightened Midlatter girl superimposed over a tall, defiant Midlatter woman. Love and fear in her eyes, sorrow in his heart. He has hurt her. He needs to find her, but when he reaches for the sense of her that should be embedded in his mind, there is nothing. She is gone along with everything else.)

  The old man chatters at
him through the whole ride. He is Litz Strongback Metter, and Metter is a little fishing town a few miles south of Allia. They’ve been debating whether to move since that whole mess with Allia happened, but then suddenly the volcano went dormant, so maybe the Evil Earth isn’t out to get them, after all, or at least not this time. He’s got two children, one stupid and the other selfish, and three grandkids, all from the stupid one and hopefully not too stupid themselves. They don’t have much, Metter’s just another Coaster comm, can’t even afford a proper wall instead of a bunch of trees and sticks, but folks gotta do what folks gotta do, you know how it is, everyone will take good care of you, don’t you worry.

  (What is your name? the old man asks amid the prattle, and Schaffa tells him. The man asks for more names than this, but Schaffa has only the one. What were you doing out there? The silence inside Schaffa yawns in answer.)

  The village is an especially precarious one in that it is half on the shore and half on the water, houseboats and stilt-houses connected by jetties and piers. People gather round Schaffa when Litz helps him onto a pier. Hands touch him and he flinches, but they mean to help. It is not their fault that there is so little in them of what he needs that they feel wrong. They push him, guide him. He is beneath a cold shower of fresh water, and then he is put into short pants and a homespun sleeveless shirt. When he lifts his hair while washing it, they marvel at the scar on his neck, thick and stitched and vanishing into his hairline. (He wonders at it himself.) They puzzle over his clothing, so faded by sun and salt water that it has lost nearly all color. It looks brownish-gray. (He remembers that it should be burgundy, but not why.)

  More water, the good kind. This time he can drink his fill. He eats a little. Then he sleeps for hours, with incessant angry whispering in the back of his mind.

  When Schaffa wakes, it’s late in the night, and there’s a little boy standing in front of his bed. The lantern’s wick has been turned down low, but it’s bright enough in the room that Schaffa can see his old clothing, now washed and dry, in the boy’s hands. The boy has turned one pocket inside out; there, alone on the whole garment, has it retained something of its original color. Burgundy.