The Obelisk Gate

5 Nassun takes the reins

MAMA MADE ME LIE TO YOU, Nassun is thinking. She’s looking at her father, who’s been driving the wagon for hours at this point. His eyes are on the road, but a muscle in his jaw jumps. One of his hands—the one that first struck Uche, ultimately killed him—is shaking where it grips the reins. Nassun can tell that he is still caught up in the fury, maybe still killing Uche in his head. She doesn’t understand why, and she doesn’t like it. But she loves her father, fears him, worships him, and therefore some part of her yearns to appease him. She asks herself: What did I do to make this happen? And the answer that comes is: Lie. You lied, and lies are always bad.

But this lie was not her choice. That had been Mama’s command, along with all the others: Don’t reach, don’t ice, I’m going to make the earth move and you’d better not react, didn’t I tell you not to react, even listening is reacting, normal people don’t listen like that, are you listening to me, rusting stop, for Earth’s sake can’t you do anything right, stop crying, now do it again. Endless commands. Endless displeasure. Occasionally the slap of ice in threat, the slap of a hand, the sickening inversion of Nassun’s torus, the jerk of a hand on her upper arm. Mama has said occasionally that she loves Nassun, but Nassun has never seen any proof of it.

Not like Daddy, who gives her knapped stone kirkhusa to play with or a first aid kit for her runny-sack because Nassun is a Resistant like her mama. Daddy, who takes her fishing at Tirika Creek on days when he doesn’t have commissions to fulfill. Mama has never lain out on the grassy rooftop with Nassun, pointing at the stars and explaining that some deadcivs are said to have given them names, though no one remembers those. Daddy is never too tired to talk at the ends of his workdays. Daddy does not inspect Nassun in the mornings after baths the way Mama does, checking for poorly washed ears or an unmade bed, and when Nassun misbehaves, Daddy only sighs and shakes his head and tells her, “Sweetening, you knew better.” Because Nassun always does.

It was not because of Daddy that Nassun wanted to run away and become a lorist. She does not like that her father is so angry now. This seems yet another thing that her mother has done to her.

So she says, “I wanted to tell you.”

Daddy does not react. The horses keep plodding forward. The road stretches before the cart, the woods and hills inching past around the road, the bright blue sky overhead. There aren’t a lot of people riding past today—just some carters with heavy wagons of trade goods, messengers, some quartent guards on patrol. A few of the carters, who visit Tirimo often, nod or wave because they know Daddy, but Daddy does not respond. Nassun doesn’t like this, either. Her father is a friendly man. The man who sits beside her feels like a stranger.

Just because he doesn’t reply doesn’t mean he’s not listening. She adds, “I asked Mama when we could tell you. I asked her that a lot. She said never. She said you wouldn’t understand.”

Daddy says nothing. His hands are still shaking—less now? Nassun cannot tell. She starts to feel uncertain; is he angry? Is he sad about Uche? (Is she sad about Uche? It does not feel real. When she thinks of her little brother, she thinks of a gabby, giggly little thing who sometimes bit people and still shit his diaper occasionally, and who had an orogenic presence the size of a quartent. The crumpled, still thing back at their house cannot be Uche, because it was too small and dull.) Nassun wants to touch her father’s shaking hand, but she finds herself oddly reluctant to do so. She isn’t sure why—fear? Maybe just because this man is so much a stranger, and she has always been shy of strangers.

But. No. He is Daddy. Whatever is wrong with him now, it’s Mama’s fault.

So Nassun reaches out and grips Daddy’s nearer hand, hard, because she wants to show him that she is not afraid, and because she is angry, though not at Daddy. “I wanted to tell you!”

The world blurs. At first Nassun isn’t sure of what’s happening, and she locks up. This is what Mama has drilled her to do in moments of surprise or pain: lock down her body’s instinctive fear reaction, lock down her sessapinae’s instinctive grab for the earth below. And under no circumstances is Nassun to react with orogeny, because normal people do not do that. You can do anything else, Mama’s voice says in her head. Scream, cry, throw something with your hands, get up and start a fight. Not orogeny.

So Nassun hits the ground harder than she should because she has not quite mastered the skill of not reacting, and she still stiffens up physically along with not reacting orogenically. And the world blurs because she has not only been knocked off the driver’s seat of the wagon, but she has actually rolled off the edge of the Imperial Road and down a gravel-strewn slope, toward a small creek-fed pond.

(The creek that feeds it is where, in a few days, Essun will bathe a strange white boy who acts as if he has forgotten what soap is for.)

Nassun flops to a stop, dazed and breathless. Nothing really hurts yet. By the time the world settles and she begins to understand what’s happened—Daddy hit me, knocked me off the wagon—Daddy has scrambled down the slope and is crying her name as he crouches beside her and helps her to sit up. Really crying. As Nassun blinks away dust and the stars that obscure her vision, she reaches up in confusion to touch Daddy’s face, and finds it streaked wet.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, sweetening. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t, you’re all I have left—” He jerks her close and holds her tightly, although it hurts. She has bruises all over. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—rusting—sorry! Oh, Earth, oh, Earth, you evil son of a ruster! Not this one! You can’t have this one, too!”

These are sobs of grief, long and throat-scraping and hysterical. Nassun will understand this later (and not very much later). She will realize that in this moment, her father is weeping as much for the son he murdered as for the daughter he has injured.

In the moment, however, she thinks, He still loves me, and starts crying, too.

So it is while they are like this, Daddy holding Nassun tight, Nassun shaking with relief and lingering shock, that the rippling shockwave of the continent being ripped in half up north reaches them.

They are nearly a whole day’s travel down the Imperial Road. Back in Tirimo, a few moments previous, Essun has just shunted the force of the wave so that it splits and goes around the town—which means that what comes at Nassun is incrementally more powerful. And Nassun has been knocked half-insensible, and she is less skilled, less experienced. When she sesses the onrush of the shake, and the sheer power of it, she reacts in exactly the wrong way: She locks up again.

Her father lifts his head, surprised by her gasp and sudden stiffness, and that is when the hammer lands. Even he sesses the loom of it, though it comes too fast and too powerfully to be anything but a jangle of run run RUN RUN at the back of his mind. Running is pointless. The shake is basically what happens when a person doing laundry flaps the wrinkles out of a sheet, writ on a continental scale and moving with the speed and force of a casual asteroid strike. On the scale of small, stationary, crushable people, the strata heave beneath them and the trees shake and then splinter. The water in the pond beside them actually leaps into the air for a moment, suspended and still. Daddy stares at it, apparently riveted to this single static point amid the relentless unpeeling of the world everywhere else.

But Nassun is still a skilled orogene even if she is a half-addled one. Though she did not muster herself in time to do what Essun did and break the force of the wave before it hits, she does the next best thing. She drives invisible pylons of force into the strata, as deep as she can, grabbing for the very lithosphere itself. When the kinetic force of the wave hits, incremental instants before the planetary crust above it flexes in reaction, she snatches the heat and pressure and friction from it and uses this to fuel her pylons, pinning the strata and soil in place as solidly as if glued.

There’s plenty of strength to draw from the earth, but she spins an ambient torus anyway. She keeps it at a wide remove, because her father is within it and she cannot cannot cannot hurt him, and she spins it hard and vicious even though she doesn’t need to. Instinct tells her to, and instinct is right. The freezing eye-wall of her torus, which disintegrates anything coming into the stable zone at its center, is what keeps a few dozen projectiles from puncturing them to death.

All of this means that when the world comes apart, it happens everywhere else. For an instant there is nothing to see of reality save a floating globule of pond, a hurricane of pulverized everything else, and an oasis of stillness at the hurricane’s core.

Then the concussion passes. The pond slaps back into place, spraying them with muddy snow. The trees that haven’t shattered snap back upright, some of them nearly bending all the way in the other direction in reactive momentum and breaking there. In the distance—beyond Nassun’s torus—people and animals and boulders and trees that have been flung into the air come crashing down. There are screams, human and inhuman. Cracking wood, crumbling stone, the distant screech of something man-made and metallic rending apart. Behind them, at the far end of the valley they have just left, a rock face shatters and comes down in an avalanche roar, releasing a large steaming chalcedony geode.

Then there is silence. In it, finally, Nassun pulls her face up from her father’s shoulder to look around. She does not know what to think. Her father’s arms ease around her—shock—and she wriggles until he lets her go so that she can get to her feet. He does, too. For long moments they simply stare around at the wreckage of the world they once knew.

Then Daddy turns to look at her, slowly, and she sees in his face what Uche must have seen in those last moments. “Did you do this?” he asks.

The orogeny has cleared Nassun’s head, of necessity. It is a survival mechanism; intense stimulation of the sessapinae is usually accompanied by a surge of adrenaline and other physical changes that prepare the body for flight—or sustained orogeny, if that is needed. In this case it brings an increased clarity of thought, which is how Nassun finally realizes that her father was not hysterical over her fall purely for her sake. And that what she sees in his eyes right now is something entirely different from love.

Her heart breaks in this moment. Another small, quiet tragedy, amid so many others. But she speaks, because in the end she is her mother’s daughter, and if Essun has done nothing else, she has trained her little girl to survive.

“That was too big to be me,” Nassun says. Her voice is calm, detached. “What I did is this—” She gestures around them, at the circle of safe ground that surrounds them, distinct from the chaos just beyond. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop all of it, Daddy. I tried.”

The Daddy is what works, just as her tears saved her before. The murder in his expression flickers, fades, twists. “I can’t kill you,” he whispers, to himself.

Nassun sees the waver of him. It is also instinct that she steps forward and takes his hand. He flinches, perhaps thinking of knocking her away again, but this time she holds on. “Daddy,” she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father.

It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

And it works. Jija blinks rapidly, then murmurs something unintelligible to himself. His hand tightens on hers. “Let’s get back up to the road,” he says.

(He is “Jija,” now, in her head. He will be Jija hereafter, forever, and never Daddy again except out loud, when Nassun needs reins to steer him.)

So they go back up, Nassun limping a little because her backside is sore where she landed too hard on the asphalt and rocks. The road has been cracked all down its length, though it is not so bad in the immediate vicinity of their wagon. The horses are still hitched, though one of them has fallen to her knees and half entangled herself in the tack. Hopefully she hasn’t broken a leg. The other is still with shock. Nassun starts working on calming the horses, coaxing the downed one back up and talking the other out of near-catatonia, while her father goes to the other travelers whom they can see sprawled around the road. The ones who were within the wide circumference of Nassun’s torus are okay. The ones who were not… well.

Once the horses are shaky but functional, Nassun goes after Jija and finds him trying to lift a man who has been flung into a tree. It’s broken the man’s back; he’s conscious and cursing, but Nassun can see the flop of his now-useless legs. It’s bad to move him, but obviously Jija thinks it’s worse to leave him here like this. “Nassun,” Jija says, panting as he tries for a better grip on the man, “clear the wagon bed. There’s a real hospital at Pleasant Water, a day away. I think we can make it if we—”

“Daddy,” she says softly. “Pleasant Water isn’t there anymore.”

He stops. (The injured man groans.) Turns to her, frowning. “What?”

“Sume is gone, too,” she says. She does not add, but Tirimo is fine because Mama was there. She doesn’t want to go back, not even for the end of the world. Jija darts a glance back down the road they have walked, but of course all they can see are shattered trees and a few overturned chunks of asphalt along the road… and bodies. Lots of bodies. All the way to Tirimo, or so the eye suggests.

“What the rust,” he breathes.

“There’s a big hole in the ground up north,” Nassun continues. “Really big. That’s what caused this. It’s going to cause more shakes and things, too. I can sess ash and gas coming this way. Daddy… I think it’s a Season.”

The injured man gasps, not entirely from pain. Jija’s eyes go wide and horrified. But he asks, and this is important: “Are you sure?”

It’s important because it means he’s listening to her. It is a measure of trust. Nassun feels a surge of triumph at this, though she does not really know why.

“Yes.” She bites her lip. “It’s going to be really bad, Daddy.”

Jija’s eyes drift toward Tirimo again. That is conditioned response: During a Season, comm members know that the only place they can be sure of welcome is there. Anything else is a risk.

But Nassun will not go back, now that she is away. Not when Jija loves her—however strangely—and has taken her away and is listening to her, understanding her, even though he knows she is an orogene. Mama was wrong about that part. She’d said Jija wouldn’t understand.

He didn’t understand Uche.

Nassun sets her teeth against this thought. Uche was too little. Nassun will be smarter. And Mama was still only half-right. Nassun will be smarter than her, too.

So she says softly, “Mama knows, Daddy.”

Nassun’s not even sure what she means by this. Knows that Uche is dead? Knows who has beaten him to death? Would Mama even believe that Jija could do such a thing to his own child? Nassun can hardly believe it herself. But Jija flinches as if the words are an accusation. He stares at her for a long moment, his expression shifting from fear through horror through despair… and slowly, to resignation.

He looks down at the injured man. He’s no one Nassun knows—not from Tirimo, wearing the practical clothes and good shoes of a message runner. He won’t be running again, certainly not back to his home comm, wherever that is.

“I’m sorry,” Jija says. He bends and snaps the man’s neck even as he’s drawing breath to ask, For what?

Then Jija rises. His hands are shaking again, but he turns and extends one of them. Nassun takes it. They walk back to the wagon then, and resume their journey south.