The Obelisk Gate

7 Nassun finds the moon

THE JOURNEY SOUTH FOR NASSUN and her father is long and fraught. They make most of the journey with the horse cart, which means that they travel faster than Essun, who is on foot and behind them to an increasing degree. Jija offers rides in exchange for food or supplies; this helps them move faster still because they don’t need to stop and trade often. Because of this pace, they stay ahead of the worst of the changing climate, the ashfall, the carnivorous kirkhusa and the boilbugs and all the worse things brewing in the lands behind them. They’re going so quickly when they pass through Castrima-over that Nassun barely feels Ykka’s summons—and when she does it is in her dreams, drawing her down and down into the warm earth amid white crystalline light. But she dreams this ten miles past Castrima, since Jija thought they could go a little farther that day before camping, and thus they do not fall prey to the honeypot of invitingly whole, empty buildings.

When they do have to stop at comms, some are only in lockdown and haven’t yet declared Seasonal Law. Hoping the worst of it won’t come so far south, probably; it’s rare for Seasons to affect the whole continent at once. Nassun never speaks of what she is to strangers, but if she could, she would tell them that there is nowhere to hide from this Season. Some parts of the Stillness will suffer the full effects later than others, but eventually it will be bad everywhere.

Some of the comms they stop at invite them to stay. Jija’s older, but still hale and strong, and his knapping skills and Resistant use-caste make him valuable. Nassun’s young enough to be trained in nearly any needed skill, and she’s visibly healthy and tall for her age, already showing signs of growing into her mother’s strong Midlatter frame. There are a few places they stop, strong comms with deep stores and friendly people, where she wishes they could stay. Jija always refuses, though. He’s got some destination in mind.

A few of the comms they pass try to kill them. There’s no logic to this, since one man and a little girl cannot possibly have enough valuables between them to be worth murdering, but there isn’t much logic in a Season. They run from some. Jija takes a longknife to a man’s head to get them out of a comm that has let them through the gates and then tried to close them in. They lose the horses and the cart, which is probably what the comm wanted, but Jija and Nassun escape, which is what matters most. It’s on foot from there, and slower, but they are alive.

At another comm, whose people don’t even bother to warn them before aiming crossbows, it is Nassun who saves them. She does this by wrapping her arms around her father and setting her teeth in the earth and dragging every iota of life and heat and movement out of the whole comm until it is a gleaming frosted confection of ice-slivered slate walls and still, solid bodies.

(She will never do this again. The way Jija looks at her afterward.)

They stay in the dead comm for a few days, resting in empty houses and replenishing their supplies. No one bothers this comm while they are there because Nassun keeps the walls iced as a clear danger here warn-off. They cannot stay long, of course. Eventually the other comms in the area will band together and come to kill the rogga whom they will assume threatens them all. A few days of warm water and fresh food—Jija cooks one of the comm’s frozen chickens for a real treat—and they move on. Before the bodies thaw and start stinking, see.

And so it goes: Bandits and scammers and a near-fatal gas waft and a tree that fires wooden spikes when warm bodies are in proximity; they survive it all. Nassun has a growth spurt, even though she is always hungry and rarely full. By the time they finally approach the place that Jija has heard about, she is three inches taller, and a year has passed.

They are out of the Somidlats at last, edging into the Antarctics. Nassun has begun to suspect that Jija means to take her all the way to Nife, one of the few cities in the Antarctic region, near which a satellite Fulcrum is said to be located. But he turns them off the Pellestane-Nife Imperial Road and they begin going eastward, stopping periodically so that Jija can consult with people along the way and see if he’s going in the right direction. It is after one of these conversations, conducted always in whispers and always after Jija thinks Nassun has gone to sleep, and only with people whom Jija considers level-headed after a few hours of chitchat and shared food, that Nassun finally learns where they are going. “Tell me,” she hears Jija whisper to a woman who was out scouting for a local comm, after they have shared an evening meal of meat she caught around a fire Jija built, “have you ever heard of the Moon?”

The question holds no meaning for Nassun; neither does the word at the end of it. But the woman inhales. She directs Jija to shift over to the southeast-running regional road instead of the Imperial Road, and then to divert due south at the turning of a river they’ll soon reach. Thereafter Nassun pretends to be asleep, because she can feel the woman’s narrow-eyed gaze on her. Eventually, though, Jija shyly offers to help warm her bedroll. Then Nassun has to listen while her father works to make the woman moan and gasp in repayment for the meat—and to make her forget that Nassun is there. In the morning they move on before the woman wakes so that she will not follow and try to hurt Nassun.

Days later they divert at the river, heading into the woods along a tree-shadowed path that is barely more than a tamped-down paler ribbon amid the forest scrub and undergrowth. The sky has not been completely shadowed for long in this part of the world; most of the trees still have leaves, and Nassun can even hear animals leaping about and darting away as they pass. Occasionally birds twitter or croon. There are no other people on this path, though obviously some have passed recently or the path would be even more overgrown than it is. The Antarctics are a stark, sparsely populated part of the world, she remembers reading in the textbooks of another life. Few comms, fewer Imperial roads, winters that are harsh even outside a Season. The quartents here take weeks to travel across. Swaths of the Antarctics are tundra, and the southernmost tip of the continent is said to become solid ice, which extends far into the sea. She’s read that the night sky, if they could see it through the clouds, is sometimes filled with strange dancing colored lights.

In this part of the Antarctics, though, the air is almost steamy despite the light chill. Beneath their feet, Nassun can sess the heavy, pent churn of an active shield volcano—actually erupting, just very slowly, with a trickle-trickle of lava flow further south. Here and there on the topography of her awareness Nassun can detect gas vents and a few boils that have come to the surface as hot springs and geysers. All this moisture and the warm ground are what keep the trees green.

Then the trees part, and before them looms something that Nassun has never seen before. A rock formation, she thinks—but one that seems to consist of dozens of long, columnar ribbons of brown-gray stone that ripple in an upslope, gradually slanting high enough to qualify as a low mountain or a tall hill. At the top of this river of stone, she can see bushy green tree canopies; the formation plateaus up there. Atop that plateau Nassun can glimpse something through the trees, which might be a rounded rooftop or storecache tower. A settlement of some kind. But unless they climb along the columnar ribbons, which looks dangerous, she’s not sure how to get up there.

Except… except. It is a scratch on her awareness, rising to a pressure, itching into certainty. Nassun glances at her father, who is staring at the river of stone, too. In the months since Uche’s death, she has come to understand Jija better now than ever before in her life, because her life depends on it. She understands that he is fragile, despite his outward strength and stolidity. The cracks in him are new but dangerous, like the edges of tectonic plates: always raw, never stable, needing only the merest brush to unleash aeons’ worth of pent-up energy and destroy everything nearby.

But earthquakes are easy to manage, if you know how.

So Nassun says, watching him carefully, “This was made by orogenes, Daddy.”

She has guessed that he will tense, and he does. She has guessed that he will need to take a deep breath to calm himself, which he also does. He reacts to even the thought of orogenes the way that Mama used to react to red wine: with fast breath and shaking hands and sometimes freezing or weak knees. Daddy could never even bring things that were burgundy-colored into the house—but sometimes he would forget and do it anyway, and once it was done there was no reasoning with Mama. Nothing to be done but wait for her shakes and rapid breathing and hand-wringing to pass.

(Hand-rubbing. Nassun did not notice the distinction, but Essun was rubbing one hand. The old ache, there in the bones.)

Once Jija is calm enough, therefore, Nassun adds, “I think only orogenes can get up that slope, too.” She’s sure of this, in fact. The stone columns are moving, imperceptibly. This whole region is a volcano in exquisitely slow eruption. Here it pushes up a steady incremental lava flow that takes years to cool and thus separates itself into these long hexagonal shafts as the stuff contracts. It would be easy for an orogene, even an untrained one, to push against that upwelling pressure, taste some of that slow-cooling heat, and raise another column. Ride it, to reach that plateau. Many of the stone ribbons before them are paler gray, fresher, sharper. Others have done this recently.

Then Daddy surprises her by nodding jerkily. “There are… there should be others like you in this place.” He never says the o-word or the r-word. It’s always like you and your kind and that sort. “It’s why I brought you here, sweetening.”

“Is this the Antarctic Fulcrum?” Maybe she was wrong about where that was.

“No.” His lip curls. The fault line trembles. “It’s better.”

It’s the first time he’s ever been willing to speak of this. He’s not breathing much faster, either, or staring at her in that way he so often does when he’s struggling to remember that she’s his daughter. Nassun decides to probe a little, testing his strata. “Better?”

“Better.” He looks at her, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he smiles at her the way he used to. The way a father should smile at his daughter. “They can cure you, Nassun. That’s what the stories say.”

Cure her of what? she almost asks. Then survival instinct kicks in and she bites her tongue before she can say the stupid thing. There is only one disease that afflicts her in his eyes, only one poison he would journey halfway across the world to have drawn out of his little girl.

A cure. A cure. For orogeny? She hardly knows what to think. Be… other than what she is? Be normal? Is that even possible?

She’s so stunned that she forgets to watch her father for a moment. When she remembers, she shivers, because he has been watching her. He nods in satisfaction at the look on her face, though. Her surprise is what he wanted to see: that or maybe wonder, or pleasure. He would have reacted poorly to dislike or fear.

“How?” she asks. Curiosity he can tolerate.

“I don’t know. But I heard about it from travelers, before.” Just as there is only one your kind that he ever means, there’s only one before that matters, for both of them. “They say it’s been around for maybe the last five or ten years.”

“But what about the Fulcrum?” She shakes her head, confused. If anywhere, she would have thought…

Daddy’s face twists. “Trained, leashed animals are still animals.” He turns back to the rise of flowing stone. “I want my little girl back.”

I haven’t gone anywhere, Nassun thinks, but knows better than to say.

There’s no path to illustrate the way to go, no signs to indicate anything nearby. Part of that could be Seasonal defenses; they’ve seen a few comms that protected themselves not just with walls but seemingly insurmountable obstacles and camouflage. Doubtless the members of the comm know some secret way to get up to the plateau, but without this knowledge, Nassun and Jija are left with a puzzle to solve. There’s also no easy way past the rise; they could go around it, see if there are steps on the other side, but that might take days.

Nassun sits down on a log nearby—after checking it carefully for insects or other creatures that might have turned aggressive since the start of the Season. (Nassun has learned to treat nature and her father with the same wary caution.) She watches Jija pace back and forth, pausing now and again to kick at one of the ribbons where it rises sharply from the ground. He mutters to himself. He’ll need time to admit what must be done.

Finally he turns to her. “Can you do it?”

She stands up. He stumbles back as if startled by the sudden movement, then stops and glowers at her. She just stands there, letting him see how much it hurts her that he fears her so.

A muscle flexes in his jaw; some of his anger fades into chagrin. (Only some.) “Will you have to kill this forest, to do it?”

Oh. She can understand some of his worry now. This is the first green place they’ve seen in a year. “No, Daddy,” she says. “There’s a volcano.” She points down under their feet. He flinches again, glaring at the ground with the same naked hatred he occasionally flashes at her. But it is as pointless to hate Father Earth as it is to wish the Seasons would end.

He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth, and Nassun is so expecting him to say all right that she is already beginning to form the smile that he will need, in reassurance. Thus they are both caught completely off guard when a loud clack resounds through the forest around them, setting off a flock of birds she didn’t know was there. Something chuffs into the ground nearby, making Nassun blink with the faint reverberations of the blow through the local strata. Something small, but striking with force. And then Jija screams.

Once, Nassun froze in reaction to being startled. Mama’s training. Some of that conditioning has slipped over the past year, and although she grows still, she sinks her awareness into the earth nevertheless—just a few feet, but still. But she freezes in two kinds of ways as she sees the heavy, huge, barbed metal bolt that has been shot through her father’s calf. “Daddy!”

Jija is down on one knee, clutching his leg and making a sound through his teeth that is less than a scream, but no less agonized. The thing is huge: several feet long, two inches in circumference. She can see the way it has pushed aside his flesh on its terrible path. The tip is buried in the ground on the other side of his calf, effectively pinning him in place. A harpoon, not a crossbow bolt. It even has a thin chain attached to the blunt end.

A chain? Nassun whirls, following it. Someone’s holding it. There are feet pounding on the strata nearby, crunching leaves as they move. Darting shadows flicker past tree trunks and vanish; she hears a call in some Arctic language she’s heard before but does not know. Bandits. Coming.

She looks at Daddy again, who is trying to take deep breaths. His face is pale. There’s so much blood. But he looks up at her with his eyes wide and white with pain, and suddenly she remembers the comm where the people attacked them, the comm she iced, and the way he looked at her afterward.

Bandits. Kill them. She knows she must. If she does not, they will kill her.

But her father wants a little girl, not an animal.

She stares and stares and breathes hard and cannot stop staring, cannot think, cannot act, can do nothing but stand there and shake and hyperventilate, torn between survival and daughterhood.

Then someone leaps down the lava-flow ridge, bouncing from one ribbon of rock to the other with a speed and agility that is—Nassun stares. No one can do that. But the man lands in a crouch amid the gravelly soil at the foot of the ridges with a heavy, ominous thud. He’s solidly built. She can tell he’s big even though he stays low as he half rises, his gaze fixed on something in the trees beyond Nassun, and draws a long, wicked glassknife. (And yet, somehow, the weight of his landing on the ground does not reverberate on her senses. What does that mean? And there is a… She shakes her head, thinking maybe it’s an insect, but the odd buzzing is a sensation and not a sound.)

Then the man is off, running straight into the brush, his feet pushing against the ground with such force that clods of dirt kick up in his wake. Nassun’s mouth falls open as she turns to follow him, losing track amid the green, but there are shouts in that language again—and then, in the direction that she saw the man run, a soft, guttural sound, like someone reacting to a hard blow. The moving people amid the trees stop. Nassun sees an Arctic woman stand frozen in the clear gap between a tangle of vines and an old, weathered rock. The woman turns, inhaling to call out to someone else, and in a near-blur the man is behind her, punching her in the back. No, no, the knife—And then he is gone, before the woman falls. The violence and speed of the attack are stunning.

“N-Nassun,” Jija says, and Nassun jumps again. She actually forgot him for a moment. She goes over, crouching and putting her foot on the chain to prevent anyone from using it to hurt him further. He grips her arm, too hard. “You should, unh, run.”

“No, Daddy.” She tries to figure out how the chain is fastened to the harpoon. The weapon’s shaft is smooth. If she can get the chain loose or cut off the barbed point, they can just drag Daddy’s leg off of it to free him. But what then? It’s such a terrible wound. Will he bleed to death? She doesn’t know what to do.

Jija hisses as she jiggles the end of the chain experimentally, trying to see if she can twist it loose. “I don’t… I think the bone…” Jija actually sways, and Nassun thinks the white of his lips is a bad sign. “Go.”

She ignores him. The chain is welded to a loop at the end of the shaft. She fingers it and thinks hard, now that the strange man’s appearance has broken her deadlock. (Her hand’s shaking, though. She takes a deep breath, trying to get hold of her own fear. Somewhere off in the trees, there is a gurgling groan, and a scream of fury.) She knows Jija has some of his stoneknapping tools in his pack, but the harpoon is steel. Wait—metal breaks if it’s cold enough, doesn’t it? Could she, maybe, with a high narrow torus…?

She’s never done this before. If she does it wrong, she’ll freeze off his leg. Yet somehow, instinctively, she feels certain that it can be done. The way Mama taught her to think about orogeny, as heat and movement taken in and heat and movement pushed out, has never really felt right to her. There is truth to it; it works, she knows from experience. But something about it is… off. Inelegant. She has often thought, If I don’t think about it as heat… without ever finishing that thought in a productive way.

Mama is not here, and death is, and her father is the only person left in the world who loves her, even though his love comes wrapped in pain.

So she puts a hand on the butt end of the harpoon. “Don’t move, Daddy.”

“Wh-what?” Jija is shaking, but also weakening rapidly. Good; Nassun can work with her concentration uninterrupted. She puts her free hand on his leg—since her orogeny has always flinched away from freezing her, even back when she couldn’t fully control it—and closes her eyes.

There is something underneath the heat of the volcano, interspersed amid the wavelets of motion that dance through the earth. It’s easy to manipulate the waves and heat, but hard to even perceive this other thing, which is perhaps why Mama taught Nassun to look for waves and heat instead. But if Nassun can grasp the other thing, which is finer and more delicate and also more precise than the heat and waves… if she can shape it into a kind of sharp edge, and file it down to infinite fineness, and slice it across the shaft like so—

There is a quick, high-pitched hiss as the air between her and Jija stirs. Then the chain tip of the harpoon shaft drops loose, the shorn faces of metal glimmering mirror-smooth in the afternoon light.

Exhaling in relief, Nassun opens her eyes. To find that Jija has tensed, and is staring beyond her with an expression of mingled horror and belligerence. Startled, Nassun whirls, to see the knife-wielding man behind her.

His hair is black, Arctic-limp, and long enough to fall below his waist. He’s so very tall that she falls onto her butt turning to look at him. Or maybe that’s because she’s suddenly exhausted? She does not know. The man is breathing hard, and his clothing—homespun cloth and a pair of surprisingly neat, pleated old trousers—is splattered liberally with blood centering on the glassknife in his right hand. He gazes down at her with eyes that glitter bright as the metal she just cut, and his smile is very nearly as sharp-edged.

“Hello, little one,” the man says as Nassun stares. “That’s quite the trick.”

Jija tries to move, shifting his leg along the harpoon shaft, and it is awful. There is the abortive sound of bone grating on metal, and he groan-coughs out an agonized cry, grabbing spasmodically for Nassun. Nassun catches his shoulder, but he’s heavy, and she’s tired, and she realizes in sudden horror that she lacks the strength to fight the man with the glassknife if that should be necessary. Jija’s shoulder shakes beneath her hand, and she’s shaking nearly as hard. Maybe this is why no one uses the stuff underneath the heat? Now she and her father will pay the price for her folly.

But the black-haired man hunkers down, moving with remarkably slow grace for someone who showed such swift brutality only moments before. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. He blinks then, something flickering and uncertain in his gaze. “Do I know you?”

Nassun has never before seen this giant with the icewhite eyes and the world’s longest knife. The knife is still in his hand, though now it dangles at his side, dripping. She shakes her head, a little too hard and fast.

The man blinks, the uncertainty clears, and the smile returns. “The beasts are dead. I came to help you, didn’t I?” Something is off about the question. He asks it as if he seeks confirmation: didn’t I? It’s too sincere, too heartfelt somehow. Then he says, “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Perhaps it is only coincidence that his gaze slides over to her father’s face after he says this. But. Something in Nassun unclenches, just a little.

Then Jija tries to move again and makes another pained sound, and the man’s gaze sharpens. “How unpleasant. Let me help you—” He sets down the knife and reaches for Jija.

“Stay the rust back—” Jija blurts, trying to move back and jerking all over with the pain of this. He’s panting, too, and sweating. “Who are you? Are you?” His eyes roll toward the flowing ridge of hex-stone. “From?”

The man, who has drawn back at Jija’s reaction, follows his gaze. “Oh. Yes. The comm’s sentries saw you coming along the road. Then we saw the bandits moving in, so I came to help. We’ve had trouble with that lot before. It was a convenient opportunity to eliminate the threat.” His white gaze shifts back to Nassun, flicking at the sheared-off harpoon along the way. He has never stopped smiling. “But you should not have had trouble with them.”

He knows what Nassun is. She cringes against her father, though she knows he is no shelter. It’s habit.

Her father tenses, his breath quickening to a rasp. “Are… are you…” He swallows. “We’re looking for the Moon.”

The man’s smile widens. His accent is something Equatorial; Equatorials always have such strong white teeth. “Ah, yes,” he says. “You’ve found it.”

Her father slumps in relief, to the degree that his leg allows. “Oh… oh. Evil Earth, at last.”

Nassun can’t take it anymore. “What is the Moon?”

“Found Moon.” The man inclines his head. “That is the name of our community. A very special place, for very special people.” Then he sheaths the knife and extends one hand, palm up, offering. “My name is Schaffa.”

The hand is held out only to Nassun, and Nassun doesn’t know why. Maybe because he knows what she is? Maybe only because her hand isn’t covered with blood, as both of Jija’s are. She swallows and takes the hand, which immediately and firmly closes around hers. She manages, “I’m Nassun. That’s my father.” She lifts her chin. “Nassun Resistant Tirimo.”

Nassun knows that her mother was trained by the Fulcrum, which means that Mama’s use name was never “Resistant.” And Nassun is only ten years old now, too young for Tirimo to recognize with a comm name even if she still lived there. Yet the man inclines his head gravely, as if it is not a lie. “Come, then,” he says. “Let’s see if between the two of us, we can’t get your father free.”

He rises, pulling her up with him, and she turns toward Jija, thinking that with Schaffa here they can maybe just lift Jija off the shaft and that if they do it fast enough maybe it won’t hurt him too much. But before she can open her mouth to say this, Schaffa presses two fingers to the back of her neck. She flinches and rounds on him, instantly defensive, and he raises both hands, wagging the fingers to show that he’s still unarmed. She can feel a bit of damp on her neck, probably a smear of blood.

“Duty first,” he says.

“What?”

He nods toward her father. “I can lift him, while you shift the leg.”

Nassun blinks again, confused. The man moves over to Jija, and she is distracted from wondering about that strange touch by her father’s cries of pain as they work him free.

Much later, though, she will remember an instant after that touch, when the tips of the man’s fingers glimmered like the cut ends of the harpoon. A gossamer-thin thread of light-under-the-heat had seemed to flicker from her to him. She will remember, too, that for a moment that thread of light illuminated others: a whole tracework of jagged lines spreading all over him like the spiderwebbing that follows a sharp impact in brittle glass. The impact site, the center of the spiderweb, was somewhere near the back of his head. Nassun will remember thinking in that instant: He’s not alone in there.

In the moment it is no matter. Their journey has ended. Nassun is, apparently, home.