The Obelisk Gate

12 Nassun, falling up

AGAIN, MUCH OF THIS IS SPECULATION. You know of Nassun, and she is part of you, but you cannot be Nassun… and I think we have established by now that you do not know her as well as you think. (Ah, but no parent does, with any child.) Another has the task of encompassing Nassun’s existence. But you love her, and that means that some part of me cannot help but do the same.

In love, then, we shall seek understanding.

With her consciousness anchored deep within the earth, Nassun listens.

At first there is only the usual impingement upon the ambient sesuna: the minute flex-and-contract of strata, the relatively placid churn of the old volcano beneath Jekity, the slow unending grind of columnar basalt rising and cooling into patterns. She’s gotten used to this. She likes that she can listen to this freely now, whenever she wants, instead of having to wait until the dark of night, lying awake after her parents have gone to bed. Here in Found Moon, Schaffa has given Nassun permission to use the crucible whenever she wants, for as long as she wants. She tries not to monopolize it, because the others need to learn, too… but they do not enjoy orogeny as much as she does. Most of them seem indifferent to the power they wield, or the wonders they can explore by mastering it. A few of the others are even afraid of it, which makes no sense to Nassun—but then, it also makes no sense to her now that once she wanted to be a lorist. Now she has the freedom to be fully who and what she is, and she no longer fears that self. Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.

So now Nassun rides an eddy within the Jekity hot spot, balancing perfectly amid the conflicting pressures, and it does not occur to her to be afraid. She does not realize this is something a Fulcrum four-ringer would struggle to do. But then, she doesn’t do it the way a four-ringer would, by taking hold of the motion and the heat and trying to channel both through herself. She reaches, yes, but just with her senses and not her absorption torus. But where a Fulcrum instructor would warn that she can’t affect anything like this, she follows the lesson of her own instincts, which say she can. By settling into the eddy, swirling with it, she can relax enough to winnow down through its friction and pressure to what lies beneath: the silver.

This is the word she has decided to give it, after questioning Schaffa and the others and realizing they don’t know what it is, either. The other orogene kids can’t even detect it; Eitz thought he sessed something once, when she shyly asked him to concentrate on Schaffa instead of the earth, because the silver is easier to see—more concentrated, more potent, more intent—within people than it is in the ground. But Schaffa stiffened and glared at him in the next instant, and Eitz flinched and looked guiltier and more haunted than ever, so Nassun felt bad that she hurt him. She never asked him to try it again.

The others, however, can’t do even that much. It is the other two Guardians, Nida and Umber, who help the most. “This is a thing that we culled for in the Fulcrum when we found it, when they heard the call, when they listened too closely,” Nida begins, and Nassun braces herself because once Nida gets started there’s no telling how long she’ll run on. She stops only for the other Guardians. “The use of sublimates in lieu of controlling structures is dangerous, determinate, a warning. Important to cultivate for research purposes, but most such children we steered into node service. Among the others we cut—cut—cut them, for it was forbidden to reach for the sky.” Amazingly, she shuts up after this. Nassun wonders what the sky has to do with anything, but she knows better than to ask, lest Nida get going again.

But Umber, who is as slow and quiet as Nida is fast, nods. “We allowed a few to progress,” he translates. “For breeding. For curiosity. For the Fulcrum’s pride. No more than that.”

Which tells Nassun several things, once she sifts sense from the babble. Nida and Umber and Schaffa are not proper Guardians anymore, though they used to be. They have given up the credo of their order, chosen to betray the old ways. So the use of the silver is clearly an issue of violent concern to ordinary Guardians—but why? If only a few of the Fulcrum’s orogenes were allowed to develop the skill, to “progress,” what was the danger if too many did it? And why do these ex-Guardians, who once “culled for” the skill, allow her to do it unfettered now?

Schaffa is there for this conversation, she notes, but he does not speak. He merely watches her, smiling and twitching now and again as the silver sparks and tugs within him. That’s been happening to him a lot, lately. Nassun isn’t sure why.

Nassun goes home in the evenings after her days at Found Moon. Jija has settled into his Jekity house, and every time she comes back, there are new touches of hominess that she likes: surprisingly rich blue paint on the old wooden door; cuttings planted in the small housegreen, though they grow scraggly as the ash thickens in the sky overhead; a rug he has bartered a glassknife for in the small room that he designates as her own. It’s not as big as the room she had back in Tirimo, but it has a window that overlooks the forest around Jekity’s plateau. Beyond the forest, if the air is clear enough, she can sometimes see the coast as a distant line of white just beyond the forest’s green. Beyond that is a spread of blue that fascinates her, though there’s nothing to see but that slice of color, from here. She has never seen the sea up close, and Eitz tells her wonderful stories of it: that it smells of salt and strange life; that it washes up onto thin stuff called sand in which little grows because of the salt; that sometimes its creatures wiggle or bubble forth, like crabs or squid or sandteethers, though the lattermost are said to appear only during a Season. There is the constant danger of tsunami, which is why no one lives near the sea if they can avoid it—and indeed, a few days after Nassun and Jija reach Jekity, she sessed rather than saw the remnant of a big shake far to the east, well out to sea. She sessed, too, the reverberations this caused when something vast shifted and then pounded at the land along the coast. For once she was glad to be so far away.

Still, it is nice having a home again. Life begins to feel normal, for the first time in a very long while. One evening during dinner, Nassun tells her father what Eitz has said about the sea. He looks skeptical, then asks where she heard these things. She tells him about Eitz, and he grows very quiet.

“This is a rogga boy?” he says, after a moment.

Nassun, whose instincts have finally pinged a warning—she’s gotten out of the habit of keeping vigilant for Jija’s mood shifts—falls silent. But because he will get angrier if she doesn’t speak, she finally nods.

“Which one?”

Nassun bites her lip. Eitz is Schaffa’s, though, and she knows that Schaffa will allow none of his orogenes to come to harm. So she says, “The oldest. He’s tall and very black and has a long face.”

Jija keeps eating, but Nassun watches the flex of muscles in his jaw that have nothing to do with chewing. “That Coaster boy. I’ve seen him. I don’t want you talking to him anymore.”

Nassun swallows, and risks. “I have to talk with all of the others, Daddy. It’s how we learn.”

“Learn?” Jija looks up. It’s banked, contained, but he’s furious. “That boy is what, twenty? Twenty-five? And he’s still a rogga. Still. He should have been able to cure himself by now.”

For a moment Nassun is confused, because curing herself of orogeny is the last thing she thinks of at the end of her lessons. Well, Schaffa did say that it was possible. Ah—and Eitz, who is only eighteen but obviously aged up in Jija’s head, is too old to have not utilized this cure, if he’s going to. With a chill, Nassun realizes: Jija has begun to doubt Schaffa’s claims that the erasure of orogeny is possible. What will he do if he realizes Nassun no longer wants to be cured?

Nothing good. “Yes, Daddy,” she says.

This mollifies him, as it usually does. “If you have to talk to him during your lessons, fine. I don’t want you making the Guardians angry. But don’t talk to him outside of that.” He sighs. “I don’t like that you spend so much time up there.”

He grumbles on about it for the rest of the meal, but says nothing worse, so eventually Nassun relaxes.

The next morning, at Found Moon, she says to Schaffa, “I need to learn how to hide what I am better.”

Schaffa is carrying two satchels uphill to the Found Moon compound as she says this. They’re heavy, and he’s freakishly strong, but even he has to breathe hard to do this, so she does not pester him for a response while he walks. When he has reached one of the compound’s tiny storeshacks, he sets the satchels down and catches his breath. It’s easier to keep goods up here for things like the children’s meals than to go back and forth to the Jekity storecaches or communal mealhouse.

“Are you safe?” he asks then, quietly. This is why she loves him.

She nods, biting her bottom lip, because it is wrong that she must wonder this about her own father. He looks at her for a long, hard moment, and there is a cold consideration to this look that warns her he’s begun to think of a simple solution to her problem. “Don’t,” she blurts.

He lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t…?” he challenges.

Nassun has lived a year of ugliness. Schaffa is at least clean and uncomplicated in his brutality. This makes it easy for her to set her jaw and lift her chin. “Don’t kill my father.”

He smiles, but his eyes are still cold. “Something causes a fear like that, Nassun. Something that has nothing to do with you, or your brother, or your mother’s lies. Whatever it is has left its wound in your father—a wound that obviously has festered. He will lash out at anything that touches upon or even near that reeking old sore… as you have seen.” She thinks of Uche, and nods. “That cannot be reasoned with.”

“I can,” she blurts. “I’ve done it before. I know how to…” manipulate him, those are the words for it, but she’s barely ten years old so she actually says, “I can stop him from doing anything bad. I always have before.” Mostly.

“Until you fail to stop him, once. That would be enough.” He eyes her. “I will kill him if he ever hurts you, Nassun. Keep that in mind, if you value your father’s life more than your own. I do not.” Then he turns back to the shed to arrange the satchels, and that’s the end of the conversation.

Some while later, Nassun tells the others of this exchange. Little Paido suggests: “Maybe you should move into Found Moon with the rest of us.”

Ynegen, Shirk, and Lashar are sitting nearby, relaxing and recovering after an afternoon spent finding and pushing around the marked rocks buried beneath the crucible floor. They nod and murmur agreement with this. “It’s only right,” says Lashar, in her haughty way. “You’ll never be truly one of us if you continue living down there among them.”

Nassun has thought this herself, often. But… “He’s my father,” she says, spreading her hands.

This elicits no understanding from the others, and a few looks of pity. Many of them still bear the marks of violence inflicted by the trusted adults in their lives. “He’s a still,” Shirk snaps back, and that is the end of the matter as far as most of them are concerned. Eventually Nassun gives up on trying to convince them otherwise.

These thoughts invariably begin to affect her orogeny. How can they not, when an unspoken part of her wants to please her father? It takes all of herself, and the confidence that comes of delight, to engage with the earth to her fullest. And that afternoon, when she tries to touch the spinning silver threads of the hot spot and it goes so horribly wrong that she gasps and claws her way back to awareness only to find that she has iced all ten rings of the crucible, Schaffa puts his foot down.

“You will sleep here tonight,” he says, after walking across the crusted earth to carry her back to a bench. She’s too exhausted to walk. It took everything she had not to die. “Tomorrow when you wake, I’m going with you to your house, and we’ll bring back your belongings.”

“D-don’t want to,” she pants, even though she knows Schaffa doesn’t like it when the children say no to him.

“I don’t care what you want, little one. This is interfering with your training. It is why the Fulcrum took children from their families. What you do is too dangerous to allow any distractions, however beloved.”

“But.” She does not have the strength to object more strongly. He holds her in his lap, trying to warm her up because the edge of her own torus was barely an inch from her skin.

Schaffa sighs. For a while he says nothing, except to shout for someone to bring a blanket; Eitz is the one who delivers it, having already gone to fetch it once he saw what happened. (Everyone saw what happened. It is embarrassing. As you realized back during Nassun’s dangerous early childhood, she is a very, very proud girl.) As Nassun finally stops shivering and feeling as though her sessapinae have been methodically beaten, Schaffa finally says, “You serve a higher purpose, little one. Not any single man’s desire—not even mine. You were not made for such petty things.”

She frowns. “What… what was I made for, then?”

He shakes his head. The silver flashes through him, the webwork of it alive and shifting as the thing lodged in his sessapinae weaves its will again, or tries to. “To remedy a great mistake. One to which I once contributed.”

This is too interesting to fall asleep to, though Nassun’s whole body craves it. “What was the mistake?”

“To enslave your kind.” When Nassun sits back to frown at him, he smiles again, but this time it is sad. “Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we perpetuated their enslavement of themselves, under Old Sanze. The Fulcrum was nominally run by orogenes, you see—orogenes whom we had culled and cultivated, shaped and chosen carefully, so that they would obey. So that they knew their place. Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”

For some reason he pauses here, sighs. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Smiles. This is how Nassun knows without sessing that the pain which lives always in Schaffa’s head has begun to flare hotter again. “And my kind—Guardians such as I once was—were complicit in this atrocity. You’ve seen how your father knaps a stone? Hammering at it, flaking away its weaker bits. Breaking it, if it cannot bear the pressure, and starting over with another. That is what I did, back then, but with children.”

Nassun finds this hard to believe. Of course Schaffa is ruthless and violent, but that is to his enemies. A year commless has taught Nassun the necessity of cruelty. But with the children of Found Moon, he is so very gentle and kind. “Even me?” she blurts. It is not the clearest of questions, but he understands what she means: If you had found me, back then?

He touches her head, smooths a hand over it, rests his fingertips against the nape of her neck. He takes nothing from her this time, but perhaps the gesture comforts him, for he looks so sad. “Even you, Nassun. I hurt many children, back then.”

So sad. Nassun decides he would not have meant it back then, even if he’d done something bad.

“It was wrong to treat your kind so. You’re people. What we did, making tools of you, was wrong. It is allies that we need—more than ever now, in these darkening days.”

Nassun will do anything that Schaffa asks. But allies are needed for specific tasks, and they are not the same thing as friends. The ability to distinguish this is also something the road has taught her. “What do you need us as allies for?”

His gaze grows distant and troubled. “To repair something long broken, little one, and settle a feud whose origins lie so far in our past that most of us have forgotten how it began. Or that the feud continues.” He lifts a hand and touches the back of his head. “When I gave up my old ways, I pledged myself to the cause of helping to end it.”

So that’s it. “I don’t like that it hurts you,” Nassun says, staring at that blot on the silver map of him. It’s so tiny. Smaller than one of the needles her father sometimes uses to stitch up holes in clothing. Yet it is a negative space against the glimmer, perceptible in silhouette only, or by its effects rather than in itself. Like the motionless spider at a quivering dew-laden web’s heart. Spiders hibernate, though, during a Season, and the thing within Schaffa never stops tormenting him. “Why does it hurt you if you’re doing what it wants?”

Schaffa blinks. Squeezes her gently, and smiles. “Because I will not force you to do what it wants. I present its wishes to you as a choice, and I will abide if you say no. It is… less trusting of your kind. Admittedly, for good reason.” He shakes his head. “We can speak of this later. Now let your sessapinae rest.” She subsides at once—though she had not really meant to sess him, and hadn’t been really aware of doing so. Constant sessing is becoming second nature to her. “A nap will help you, I think.”

So he carries her into one of the dormitory buildings and lays her down on an unclaimed cot. She curls up within the cocooning blanket and drifts off to the sound of his voice instructing the other children not to trouble her.

And she wakes, the next morning, to the echo of her own screams and strangled gasps as she fights her way out of the blanket. Someone grabs her arm and it is everything it should not be: not now, not on her, not who she wants, not tolerable. She flails toward the earth and it is not heat or pressure that answer her call but silver lacing light that screams in echo and reverberates with her unspoken need for force. That scream echoes across the land, not just in threads but in waves, not just through the land but through water and air, and

and then

and then

something answers her. Something in the sky.

She does not mean what she does. Eitz certainly does not intend what happens as a result of his attempt to wake her from the nightmare. He likes Nassun. She’s a sweet kid. And even though Eitz is no longer a trusting child and it has occurred to him in the years since they left his Coastal home that Schaffa smiled too much that day and smelled faintly of blood, he understands what it means that Schaffa is so taken with Nassun. The Guardian has been looking for something all this time, and in spite of everything, Eitz loves him enough to hope that he finds it.

Perhaps that will comfort you, as it will not Nassun, when in her frightened, disoriented flailing, she turns Eitz to stone.

This is not like the thing happening, far away and underground, to Alabaster. That is slower, crueler, yet much more refined. Artful. What hits Eitz is a catastrophe: a hammer blow of disordered atoms reordered at not quite random. The lattice that should naturally form dissolves into chaos. It starts on his chest when Nassun’s hand tries to slap him away, and spreads in less time than it takes for the other children present to draw breath in gasps. It spreads over his skin, the brown hardening and developing an undersheen like tigereye, then into his flesh, though no one will see the ruby inside unless they break him. Eitz dies almost instantly, his heart solidifying first into a striated jewel of yellow quartz and deep garnet and white agate, with faint lacing veins of sapphire. He is a beautiful failure. It happens so fast that he has no time for fear. That may comfort Nassun later, if nothing else.

But in the moment, in the pent seconds after this happens, as Nassun writhes and tries to drag her mind back from falling, falling upward through watery blue light, and as Deshati’s gasp turns into a scream (which sets off others) and Peek comes forward to stare openmouthed at the glossy, brightly colored facsimile of himself that Eitz has become, a number of things happen simultaneously elsewhere.

Some of these things you will have guessed. Perhaps a hundred miles away, a sapphire obelisk shimmers into solid reality for an instant, then flickers back to translucence—before ponderously beginning to drift toward Jekity. Many more miles in a different direction, somewhere deep within a magmatic vein of porphyry, a shape that is suggestive of the human form turns, alert with new interest.

Another thing happens that you may not have guessed—or perhaps you will have, because you know Jija as I do not. But in the precise moment that his daughter rips a boy’s protons loose, Jija finishes his laborious climb to the plateau that houses the Found Moon compound. Too angry for courtesy after a night of seething, he shouts for his daughter.

Nassun does not hear him. She is convulsing in the dormitory. Hearing the other children’s screams, Jija turns toward the building—but before he can start in that direction, two of the Guardians emerge from their building and move across the compound. Umber heads toward the dormitory at a brisk pace. Schaffa veers off to intercept Jija. Nassun will hear of all this later from the children who witness it. (So will I.)

“My daughter didn’t come home last night,” Jija says as Schaffa stops him in his tracks. Jija is alarmed by the children’s screams, but not by much. Whatever madness is happening within the dorm, he expects nothing better of the den of iniquity that Found Moon surely must be. As he confronts Schaffa, he has a set to his jaw that you will recognize from other occasions on which he has felt himself righteous. He will therefore be unwilling to back down.

“She will be remaining here,” Schaffa says, smiling politely. “We’ve found that returning to your home in the evenings is interfering with her training. Since your leg has clearly healed enough to allow you to make the climb, could you be so kind as to bring her things, later today?”

“She—” The screams get louder for a moment as Umber opens the door to go inside, but he closes it behind him and they stop. Jija frowns at this, but shakes his head in order to focus on what is important. “She will not be rusting staying here! I don’t want her spending any more time than she has to with these—” He stops short of vulgarity. “She isn’t one of them.”

Schaffa tilts his head for an instant, as if he is listening to something only he can hear. “Isn’t she?” His tone is contemplative.

Jija stares at him, momentarily confused into silence. Then he curses and tries to move past Schaffa. His leg has indeed mostly healed since his arrival at Jekity, but he still limps heavily, the harpoon having torn nerves and tendons that will be slow to heal, if they ever fully do. Even had Jija been able to move easily, however, he could not have evaded the hand that comes out of nowhere to cover his face.

It is Schaffa’s big hand that splays over his face, moving so fast that it blurs before it seats itself. Jija doesn’t see it till it’s over his eyes and nose and mouth, picking him up bodily and slamming him to the ground on his back. As Jija lies there, blinking, he is too dazed to wonder what just happened, too stunned for pain. Then the hand pulls away, and from Jija’s perspective the Guardian’s face is just there, nose nearly touching Jija’s own.

“Nassun does not have a father,” Schaffa says softly. (Jija will remember later that Schaffa smiles the whole time that he says this.) “She needs no father, nor mother. She does not know this yet, though someday she will learn. Shall I teach her early how to do without you?” And he positions two fingertips just under Jija’s jaw, pressing the tender skin there with enough force that Jija instantly understands his life depends on his answer.

Jija goes still for a long, pent breath. There’s nothing in his head worth relating, even speculatively. He says nothing, though he makes a sound. When the children speak later of this tableau, they leave out this detail: the small, strangled whine uttered by a man who is trying not to loose his bladder and bowels, and who can think of nothing beyond imminent death. It is mostly nasal, back-of-the-throat sound. It makes him want to cough.

Schaffa seems to take Jija’s whine for an answer in itself. His smile widens for a moment—a real, heartening smile, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes his gums show. He is delighted that he does not have to kill Nassun’s father with his bare hands. And then he very deliberately lifts the hand that had been positioned under Jija’s jaw, waggling the fingers before Jija’s eyes until Jija blinks.

“There,” Schaffa says. “Now we may behave again like civilized people.” He straightens, head turning toward the dormitory; it is clear he has forgotten Jija already, but for an afterthought. “Don’t forget to bring her things, please.” Then he rises, steps over Jija, and heads into the dormitory.

No one really cares what Jija does after that. A boy has been turned to stone, and a girl has manifested power that is strange and horrifying even for a rogga. These are the things everyone will remember about this day.

Everyone, I suspect, except Jija, who quietly limps home in the aftermath.

In the dormitory, Nassun has finally managed to withdraw her awareness from the watery column of blue light that nearly consumed it. This is an amazing feat, though she does not realize it. All she knows, as she finally comes out of the fit and finds Schaffa leaning over her, is that a scary thing happened, and Schaffa is there to take care of her in the aftermath.

(She is your daughter, at her core. It is not for me to judge her, but… ah, she is so very much yours.)

“Tell me,” Schaffa says. He has sat on the edge of her cot, very close, deliberately blocking her view of Eitz. Umber is ushering the other children out. Peek is weeping and hysterical; the others are silent in shock. Nassun does not notice, having her own trauma to deal with in the moment.

“There was,” she begins. She’s hyperventilating. Schaffa cups a big hand over her nose and mouth, and after a few moments her breathing slows. Once she is closer to normal, he removes his hand and nods for her to continue. “There was. A blue thing. Light and… I fell up. Schaffa, I fell up.” She frowns, confused by her own panic. “I had to get out of it. It hurt. It was too fast. It burned. I was so scared.”

He nods as if this makes sense. “You survived, though. That’s very good.” She glows with this praise, even though she has no idea what he means. He considers for a moment. “Did you sess anything else, while you were connected?”

(She will not wonder at this word, connected, until much later.)

“There was a place, up north. Lines, in the ground. All over.” She means all over the Stillness. Schaffa cocks his head with interest, which encourages her to keep babbling. “I could hear people talking. Where they touched the lines. There were people in the knots. Where the lines crossed. I couldn’t figure out what anybody was saying, though.”

Schaffa goes very still. “People in the knots. Orogenes?”

“Yes?” It’s actually hard to answer that question. The grip of those distant strangers’ orogeny was strong—some stronger than Nassun herself. Yet there was a strange, almost uniform smoothness to each of these strongest ones. Like running fingers over polished stone: There is no texture to catch on. Those were also the ones spread across the greatest distance, some of them even farther to the north than Tirimo—all the way up near where the world has gone red and hot.

“The node network,” Schaffa says thoughtfully. “Hmm. Someone is keeping some of the node maintainers alive, up north? How interesting.”

There’s more, so Nassun has to keep babbling it out. “Closer by, there were a lot of them. Us.” These felt like her fellows of Found Moon, their orogeny bright and darting like fish, many words schooling and reverberating along the silver lines connecting them. Conversations, whispers, laughter. A comm, her mind suggests. A community of some sort. A community of orogenes.

(She does not sess Castrima. I know you’re wondering.)

“How many?” Schaffa’s voice is very quiet.

She cannot gauge such things. “I just hear a lot of people talking. Like, houses full.”

Schaffa turns away. In profile, she sees that his lips have drawn back from his teeth. It isn’t a smile, for once. “The Antarctic Fulcrum.”

Nida, who has quietly come into the room in the meantime, says from over near the door: “They weren’t purged?”

“Apparently not.” There is no inflection to Schaffa’s voice. “Only a matter of time until they discover us.”

“Yes.” Then Nida laughs softly. Nassun sesses the flex of silver threads within Schaffa. Smiling eases the pain, he has said. The more a Guardian is smiling, laughing, the more something is hurting them. “Unless…” Nida laughs again. This time Schaffa smiles, too.

But he turns again to Nassun and strokes her hair back from her face. “I need you to be calm,” he says. Then he stands and moves aside so that she can see Eitz’s corpse.

And after she has finished screaming and weeping and shaking in Schaffa’s arms, Nida and Umber come over and lift Eitz’s statue, carrying it away. It is obviously much heavier than Eitz ever was, but Guardians are very strong. Nassun doesn’t know where they take him, the beautiful sea-born boy with the sad smile and the kind eyes, and she never knows anything of his ultimate fate other than that she has killed him, which makes her a monster.

“Perhaps,” Schaffa tells her as she sobs these words. He holds her in his lap again, stroking her thick curls. “But you are my monster.” She is so low and horrified that this actually makes her feel better.

****