The Obelisk Gate

9 Nassun, needed

BECAUSE YOU ARE ESSUN, I should not need to remind you that all Nassun knew before Found Moon was Tirimo, and the ash-darkening world of the road during a Fifth Season. You know your daughter, don’t you? So it should be obvious therefore that Found Moon becomes something she never believed she had before: a true home.

It is not a newcomm. At its core is the village of Jekity, which was a city before the Choking Season some hundred years before. During that Season, Mount Akok blanketed the Antarctics with ash—but that is not what nearly killed Jekity, since the city had vast stores and sturdy wood-and-slate walls at the time. Jekity the city died because of human errors, compounded: A child lighting a lantern spilled oil, which set off a fire that swept the western end of the comm and burned a third of it before people managed to get it under control. The comm’s headman died in the fire, and when three qualified candidates stepped forward to take his place, factionalism and infighting meant that the burned section of the wall didn’t get rebuilt quickly enough. A tibbit-run—small, furred animals that swarm like ants when food is scarce enough—swept into the comm and took care of anyone too slow to get off the ground… and the comm’s ground-level storecaches. The survivors lasted for a time on what was left, then starved. By the time the sky cleared five years later, less than five thousand souls remained of the hundred thousand who’d begun the Season.

The Jekity of now is even smaller. The poor, unskilled repairs made to the wall during Choking are still in place, and while the stores have been elevated and replenished sufficiently to meet Imperial standards, this is only on paper: The comm has done a bad job of rotating old, spoiled stores out and laying in new. Strangers have rarely asked to join Jekity over the years. Even by Antarctic standards, the comm is seen as ill-fated. Its young people usually leave to talk or marry their way into other, growing communities where jobs are more plentiful and the memory of suffering does not linger. When Schaffa found this sleepy terrace-farming comm ten years before, and convinced the then-headwoman Maite to allow him to set up a special Guardian facility within the comm’s walls, she hoped that it was the beginning of a turnaround for her home. Guardians are a healthy addition to any community, aren’t they? And indeed, there are now three Guardians in Jekity including Schaffa, along with nine children of varying ages. There were ten, but when one of the children caused a brief but powerful earthshake amid a temper tantrum one evening, the child vanished. Maite did not ask questions. It’s good to know the Guardians are doing their jobs.

Nassun and her father do not know this as they move into the comm, though others will eventually tell them. The healers—an elderly doctor and a forest herbalist—spend seven days getting Jija out of danger, because he develops a fever not long after the surgery on his wound. Nassun tends him the whole while. When it becomes clear that he’ll survive, however, Schaffa introduces them to Maite, who’s delighted to learn that Jija is a stoneknapper. The comm has not had one for several decades, so they’ve been sending orders to knappers in the comm of Deveteris, twenty miles away. There’s an old, empty house in the comm with an attached kiln, and while a forge would’ve been more useful, Jija tells her he can make it work. Maite gives it a month to be sure, and listens when her people tell her that Jija is polite and friendly and sensible. He’s physically hearty, too, since he’s recovering from that wound like a proper Resistant, and since he managed to survive the road with no companion but a little girl. Everyone notices how well behaved and devoted his daughter is, too—not at all what anyone would expect of a rogga. Thus, at the end of the month, Jija receives the name Jija Resistant Jekity. They induct him with a ceremony that most of the comm has never seen before, so long has it been since anyone new joined the comm. Maite herself had to look up the details of the ceremony in an old lore-book. Then they throw a party, which is very nice. Jija tells them he’s honored.

Nassun remains just Nassun. No one calls her Nassun Resistant Tirimo, though she still introduces herself that way upon meeting new people. Schaffa’s interest in her is simply too obvious. But she causes no trouble, so the people of Jekity are as friendly toward her as they are toward Jija, if in a slightly more guarded fashion.

It is the other orogene children who unashamedly embrace Nassun for everything she is.

The oldest of them is a Coaster boy named Eitz, who speaks with a strange choppy accent that Nassun thinks of as exotic. He’s eighteen, tall, long-faced, and if there is a perpetual shadow in his expression, it does nothing to mar his beauty in Nassun’s eyes. He’s the one who welcomes Nassun on the first day after it becomes clear that Jija will live. “Found Moon is our community,” he says in a deep voice that makes Nassun’s heart race, leading her to the small compound that Schaffa’s people have built over near Jekity’s weakest wall. It’s up a hill. He leads her toward a pair of gates that swing open as they approach. “Yumenes had the Fulcrum, and Jekity has this: A place where you can be yourself, and always be safe. Schaffa and the other Guardians are here for us, too, remember. This is ours.”

Found Moon has walls of its own, shaped from the shafts of columnar rock that dominate this area—but these are uniformly sized and perfectly even in conformation. Nassun doesn’t even have to sess them to realize they have been raised by orogeny. Within the compound are a handful of small buildings, a few new but most parts of old Jekity left abandoned as the comm’s population dwindled. Whatever those used to be, they have since been refurbished into a house for the Guardians, a mess hall, a wide tiled practice area, several ground-level storesheds, and a dormitory for the children.

The other children fascinate Nassun. Two are Westcoasters, small and brown and black-haired and angle-eyed. Sisters, and they look it, named Oegin and Ynegen. Nassun has never seen Westcoasters before, and she stares until she realizes they are staring at her in turn. They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them. Then there is Paido, another Somidlatter, who looks like he’s got more than a little Antarctic in him because his hair is bright yellow and his skin is so white that it nearly glows. The others tease him about it, but Nassun tells him that sometimes she burns in the sun, too—though she carefully doesn’t mention that this takes the better part of a day rather than minutes—and his face alights.

The other children are all from lower Somidlats comms, and all have visible Sanzed in them. Deshati was in training to become a stoneknapper before the Guardians found her, and she asks Nassun all sorts of questions about her father. (Nassun warns her off talking to Jija directly. Deshati understands at once, though she is sad about it.) Wudeh gets sick when he eats certain kinds of grain and is very small and frail because he doesn’t get enough good food, though his orogeny is the strongest of the bunch. Lashar looks at Nassun coldly and sneers at her accent, though Nassun can’t tell the difference between how she speaks and how Lashar does. The others tell her it’s because Lashar’s grandfather was an Equatorial and her mother is a local comm Leader. Alas, Lashar is an orogene, so none of that matters anymore… but her upbringing tells.

Shirk is not Shirk’s name, but she won’t tell anyone what that really is, so they started calling her that after she tried to duck out of chores one afternoon. (She doesn’t anymore, but the name stuck.) Peek is similarly nicknamed, because she is tremendously shy and spends most of her time hiding behind someone else. She has only one eye, and a terrible scar down the side of her face—where her grandmother tried to stab her, the others whisper when Peek is not around. Her real name is Xif.

Nassun makes ten, and they want to know everything about her: where she came from, what kinds of foods she likes to eat, what life was like in Tirimo, has she ever held a baby kirkhusa because they are so soft. And in whispers they ask about other things, once it becomes clear that Schaffa favors her. What did she do on the day of the Rifting? How did she learn such skill with orogeny? This is how Nassun discovers that it is rare for their kind to be born to orogene parents. Wudeh comes the closest, because his aunt realized what he was and taught him what she could in secret, but this amounted to little more than how not to ice people by accident. Some of the others only learned that lesson the hard way—and Oegin grows very quiet during this conversation. Deshati actually didn’t know she was an orogene until the Rifting, which Nassun finds incomprehensible. She is the one who asks the most questions, but quietly, when the others are not around, and in a tone of shame.

Another thing Nassun discovers is that she is much, much, much better than any of them. It is not simply a matter of training. Eitz has had years more training than her, and yet his orogeny is as thin and frail as Wudeh’s body. Eitz is in control of it, enough to do no harm, but he can’t do much good with it, either, like find diamonds or make a cool spot to stand in on a hot day or slice a harpoon in half. The others stare when Nassun tries to explain the lattermost, and then Schaffa comes away from the wall of a nearby building (one of the Guardians is always watching while they gather and train and play) to take her for a walk.

“What you do not understand,” Schaffa says, resting a hand on her shoulder as they walk, “is that an orogene’s skill is not just a matter of practice, but of innate ability. So much has been done to breed the gift out of the world.” He sighs a little, sounding almost disappointed. “There are few left who are born with a high level of ability.”

“My father killed my brother because of it,” Nassun says. “Uche had more orogeny than me. All he ever did was listen with it, though, and say weird things sometimes. He made me laugh.”

She keeps the words soft because they still hurt to say, and because she’s said them so rarely. Jija never wanted to hear it, so she has had no one with whom she could discuss her grief until now. They’re over by the southern terraces of Jekity, successive platforms high above the floor of a lava-plain valley. The terraces are still heavily planted with grains, greens, and beans. Some of the plants are beginning to look sickly from the thinning sunlight. This will probably be the last harvest before the ash clouds get too thick.

“Yes. And that is a tragedy, little one; I’m sorry.” Schaffa sighs. “My brethren have done their job too well, I think, in warning the populace about the dangers of untrained orogenes. Not that any of those warnings were false. Just… exaggerated, perhaps.” He shrugs. She feels a flash of anger that this exaggeration is why her father looks at her with such hate sometimes. But the anger is nebulous, directionless; she hates the world, not anyone in particular. That’s a lot to hate.

“He thinks I’m evil,” she finds herself saying.

Schaffa looks at her for a long moment. There is something confused in his gaze for a moment, a wondering sort of frown that he gets from time to time. Not quite intentionally, Nassun sesses him in a fleeting pass, and yes—those strange silvery threads are flaring within him again, lacing through his flesh and tugging on his mind from somewhere near the back of his head. She stops as soon as his expression clears, because he is fiendishly sensitive to her uses of orogeny, and he does not like her doing anything without his permission. But when he is being tugged by the bright threads, he notices less.

“You aren’t evil,” he says firmly. “You are exactly as nature made you. And that is special, Nassun—special and powerful in ways that are atypical even for one of your kind. In the Fulcrum, you would have rings by now. Perhaps four, or even five. For one your age, that’s amazing.”

This makes Nassun happy, even though she doesn’t fully understand. “Wudeh says the Fulcrum rings go up to ten?” Wudeh has the most talkative of the three Guardians, agate-eyed Nida. Nida sometimes says things that don’t make sense, but the rest of the time she shares useful wisdom, so all the kids have learned to simply tune out the gibbering.

“Yes, ten.” For some reason, Schaffa seems displeased by this. “But this is not the Fulcrum, Nassun. Here, you must train yourself, since we have no senior orogenes to train you. And that’s good, because there are… things you can do.” His face twitches. Flicker of silver through him again, then quiescence. “Things you are needed to do, which… things that Fulcrum training cannot do.”

Nassun considers this, for the moment ignoring the silver. “Things like making my orogeny go away?” She knows her father has asked this of Schaffa.

“That would be possible, when you reach a certain point of development. But to reach that point, it is best that you learn to use your powers with no preconceptions.” He glances at her. His expression is noncommittal, but somehow she knows: He does not want her changing into a still, even if it does become possible. “You’re lucky to have been born to an orogene who was skilled enough to manage you as a child. You must have been very dangerous in your infancy and early years.”

It’s Nassun’s turn to shrug at this. She lowers her gaze and scuffs at a weed that has worked its way up between two basalt columns. “I guess.”

He glances at her, his gaze sharpening. Whatever is wrong with him—and there is something wrong with all of Found Moon’s Guardians—it vanishes whenever she tries to hide something from him. It is as if he can sess obfuscations. “Tell me more of your mother.”

Nassun does not want to talk about her mother. “She’s probably dead.” It seems likely, though she remembers feeling her mother’s effort to shunt the Rifting away from Tirimo. People would’ve noticed that, though, wouldn’t they? Mama always warned Nassun against doing orogeny during a shake, because that is how most orogenes get discovered. And Uche is what happens when orogenes get discovered.

“Perhaps.” His head cocks, like that of a bird. “I’ve seen the marks of Fulcrum training in your technique. You are… precise. It’s unusual to see in a grit—” He pauses. Looks confused again for a moment. Smiles. “A child of your age. How did she train you?”

Nassun shrugs again, thrusting her hands into her pockets. He will hate her, if she tells him. If not that, he will surely at least think less of her. Maybe he will give up.

Schaffa moves to sit on a nearby terrace wall. He also keeps watching her, smiling politely. Waiting. Which makes Nassun think of a third, worse possibility: What if she refuses to tell him, and he gets angry and kicks her and her father out of Found Moon? Then she will have nothing left but Jija.

And—she sneaks another look at Schaffa. His brow has furrowed slightly, not in displeasure but concern. The concern does not seem false. He is concerned about her. No one has shown concern for her in a year.

Thus, finally, Nassun says, “We would go out to a place near the end of the valley, away from Tirimo. She would tell Daddy she was taking me out hunting for herbs.” Schaffa nods. That is something that children are normally taught in comms outside the Equatorial node network. A useful skill, should a Season come. “She would call it ‘girl time.’ Daddy used to laugh.”

“And you practiced orogeny there?”

Nassun nodded, looking at her hands. “She would talk to me about it, when Daddy wasn’t home. ‘Girl talk.’” Discussions of wave mechanics and math. Endless quizzes. Anger when Nassun did not answer quickly, or correctly. “But at the Tip—the place she took me to—it was just practice. She had drawn circles on the ground. I had to push around a boulder, and my torus couldn’t get any wider than the fifth ring, and then the fourth, and then the third. Sometimes she would throw the boulder at me.” Terrifying to have three tons of stone rumbling along the ground toward her, and to wonder, If I can’t do it, will Mama stop?

She had done it, so that question remains unanswered.

Schaffa chuckles. “Amazing.” At Nassun’s look of confusion, he adds, “That is precisely how orogene children are—were—trained at the Fulcrum. But it seems your training was substantially accelerated.” He tilts his head again, considering. “If you had only occasional practice sessions, to conceal them from your father…”

Nassun nods. Her left hand flexes closed and then open again, as if on its own. “She said there wasn’t time to teach me the gentle way, and anyway I was too strong. She had to do what would work.”

“I see.” Yet she can feel him watching her, waiting. He knows there’s more. He prompts, “It must have been challenging, though.”

Nassun nods. Shrugs. “I hated it. I yelled at her once. Told her she was mean. I told her I hated her and she couldn’t make me do it.”

Schaffa’s breathing is, when the silver light is not stuttering or flickering within him, remarkably even. She has thought before that he sounds like a sleeping person, so steady is it. She listens to him breathe, not asleep, but calming nevertheless.

“She got really quiet. Then she said, ‘Are you sure you can control yourself?’ And she took my hand.” She bites her lip then. “She broke it.”

Schaffa’s breath pauses, just for an instant. “Your hand?”

Nassun nods. She draws a finger across her palm, where each of the long bones connecting wrist to knuckle still ache sometimes, when it is cold. After he says nothing more, she can continue. “She said it didn’t m-matter if I hated her. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to be good at orogeny. Then she took my hand and said don’t ice anything. She had a round rock, and she hit my, my… my hand with it.” The sound of stone striking flesh. Wet popping sounds as her mother set the bones. Her own voice screaming. Her mother’s voice cutting through the pounding of blood in her ears: You’re fire, Nassun. You’re lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. But if you can control yourself through pain, I’ll know you’re safe. “I didn’t ice anything.”

After that, her mother had taken her home and told Jija that Nassun had fallen and caught herself badly. True to her word, she’d never made Nassun go to the Tip with her again. Jija had remarked, later, on how quiet Nassun had become that year. Just something that happens when girls start to grow up, Mama had said.

No. If Daddy was Jija, then Mama had to be Essun.

Schaffa is very quiet. He knows what she is now, though: a child so willful that her own mother broke her hand to make her mind. A girl whose mother never loved her, only refined her, and whose father will only love her again if she can do the impossible and become something she is not.

“That was wrong,” Schaffa says. His voice is so soft she can barely hear it. She turns to look at him in surprise. He is staring at the ground, and there is a strange look on his face. Not the usual wandering, confused look that he gets sometimes. This is something he actually remembers, and his expression is… guilty? Rueful. Sad. “It’s wrong to hurt someone you love, Nassun.”

Nassun stares at him. Her own breath catches, and she doesn’t notice until her chest aches and she is forced to suck in air. It’s wrong to hurt someone you love. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It has always been wrong.

Then Schaffa lifts a hand to her. She takes it. He pulls, and she falls willingly, and then she is in his arms and they are very tight and strong around her the way her father’s have not been since before he killed Uche. In that moment, she does not care that Schaffa cannot possibly love her, when he has known her for only a few weeks. She loves him. She needs him. She will do anything for him.

With her face pressed into Schaffa’s shoulder, Nassun sesses it when the silver flicker happens again. This time, in contact with him, she also feels the slight flinch of his muscles. It is barely a fluctuation, and might be anything: a bug bite, a shiver in the cooling evening breeze. Somehow, though, she realizes that it is actually pain. Frowning against his uniform, Nassun cautiously reaches toward that strange place at the back of Schaffa’s head, where the silver threads come from. They are hungry, the threads, somehow; as she gets closer to them, they lick at her, seeking something. Curious, Nassun touches them, and sesses… what? A faint tug. Then she is tired.

Schaffa flinches again and pulls back, holding her at arm’s length. “What are you doing?”

She shrugs awkwardly. “You needed it. You were hurting.”

Schaffa turns his head from side to side slowly, not in negation, but as if checking for something he expects to be there, which is now gone. “I am always hurting, little one. It’s part of what Guardians are. But…” His expression is wondering. By this, Nassun knows the pain is gone, at least for now.

“You’re always hurting?” She frowns. “Is it that thing in your head?”

His gaze snaps back to her immediately. She has never been afraid of his icewhite eyes, even now as they turn very cold. “What?”

She points at the back of her own skull. It is where the sessapinae are located, she knows from lectures on biomestry in creche. “There’s a little thing in you. Here. I don’t know what it is, but I sessed it when I met you. When you touched my neck.” She blinks, understanding. “You took something then to make it bother you less.”

“Yes. I did.” He reaches around her head now, and sets two of his fingers just at the top of her spine, beneath the back edge of her skull. This touch is not as relaxed as other times he has touched her. The two fingers are stiffened, held as if he’s pantomiming a knife.

Only he isn’t pantomiming, she realizes. She remembers that day in the forest when they reached Found Moon and the bandits attacked them. Schaffa is very, very strong—easily strong enough to push two fingers through bone and muscle like paper. He wouldn’t have needed a rock to break her hand.

Schaffa’s gaze searches hers and finds that she understands precisely what he’s thinking about doing. “You aren’t afraid.”

She shrugs.

“Tell me why you aren’t.” His voice brooks no disobedience.

“Just…” She cannot help shrugging again. She can’t really figure out how to say it. “I don’t… I mean, if you have a good reason?”

“You have no inkling of my reasons, little one.”

“I know.” She scowls, more out of frustration with herself than anything else. Then an explanation occurs to her. “Daddy didn’t have a reason when he killed my little brother.” Or when he knocked her off the wagon. Or any of the half-dozen times he’s looked at Nassun and thought about killing her so obviously that even a ten-year-old can figure it out.

An icewhite blink. What happens then is fascinating to watch: Slowly Schaffa’s expression thaws from the contemplation of her murder into wonder again, and a sorrow so deep that it makes a lump come to Nassun’s throat. “And you have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?”

He’s so much better at talking. She nods emphatically.

Schaffa sighs. She feels his fingers waver. “But this is not a thing that can be known beyond my order. I let a child live once, who saw, but I should not have. And we both suffered for my compassion. I remember that.”

“I don’t want you to suffer,” Nassun says. She puts her hands on his chest, wills the silver flickers within him to take more. They begin to drift toward her. “It always hurts? That isn’t right.”

“Many things ease the pain. Smiling, for example, releases specific endorphins, which—” He jerks and takes his hand from the back of her neck, grabbing her hands and pulling them away from him just as the silver threads find her. He actually looks alarmed. “That will kill you!”

“You’re going to kill me anyway.” This seems sensible to her.

He stares. “Earth of our fathers and mothers.” But with that, slowly, the killing tension begins to bleed out of his posture. After a moment, he sighs. “Never speak of—of what you sess in me, around the others. If the other Guardians learn that you know, I may not be able to protect you.”

Nassun nods. “I won’t. Will you tell me what it is?”

“Someday, perhaps.” He gets to his feet. Nassun hangs on to his hand when he tries to pull away. He frowns at her, bemused, but she grins and swings his hand a little, and after a moment he shakes his head. Then they head back into the compound, and that is the first day Nassun thinks of it as home.