The Obelisk Gate

18 you, counting down

WHEN THE SANZED WOMAN IS GONE, I pull you aside. Figuratively speaking.

“The one you call Gray Man doesn’t want to prevent the opening of the Gate,” I say. “I lied.”

You’re so wary of me now. It troubles you, I can see; you want to trust me, even as your very eyes remind you of how I’ve deceived you. But you sigh and say, “Yeah. I thought there might be more to it.”

“He’ll kill you because you can’t be manipulated,” I say, ignoring the irony. “Because if you open the Gate, you would restore the Moon and end the Seasons. What he really wants is someone who will open the Gate for his purposes.”

You understand the players now, if not the totality of the game. You frown. “So which purpose would that be? Transformation? Status quo?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Suppose not.” You rub a hand over your locs, which you’ve retwisted recently. “I guess that’s why he’s trying to get Castrima to kick out all its roggas?”

“Yes. He’ll find a way to make you do what he wants, Essun, if he can. If he can’t… you’re no use to him. Worse. You’re the enemy.”

You sigh with the weariness of the Earth, and do not reply other than to nod and walk away. I am so afraid as I watch you leave.

As you have in other moments of despair, you go to Alabaster.

There’s not much left of him anymore. Since he gave up his legs he spends his days in a drugged stupor, tucked up against Antimony like a pup nursing its mother. Sometimes you don’t ask for lessons when you come to see him. That’s a waste, because you’re pretty sure the only reason he’s forced himself to keep living is so that he can pass on the art of global destruction to you. He’s caught you at it a few times: You’ve woken up curled next to his nest to find him gazing down at you. He doesn’t chide you for it. Probably doesn’t have the strength to chide. You’re grateful.

He’s awake now as you settle beside him, though he doesn’t move much. Antimony has moved fully into the nest with him these days, and you rarely see her in any pose other than “living chair” for him—kneeling, legs spread, her hands braced on her thighs. Alabaster rests against her front, which is only possible now because, perversely, the few burns on his back healed even as his legs rotted. Fortunately she has no breasts to make the position less comfortable, and apparently her simulated clothing isn’t sharp or rough. Alabaster’s eyes shift to follow as you sit, like a stone eater’s. You hate that this comparison occurs to you.

“It’s happening again,” you say. You don’t bother to explain the “it.” He always knows. “How did you… at Meov. You tried. How?” Because you can’t find it in yourself anymore to bother fighting for this place, or building a life here. All your instincts say to grab your runny-sack, grab your people, and run before Castrima turns against you. That’s a probable death sentence, the Season having well and truly set in topside, but staying seems more certain.

He draws in a deep, slow breath, so you know he means to answer. It just takes him a while to muster the words. “Didn’t mean to. You were pregnant; I was… lonely. I thought it would do. For a while.”

You shake your head. Of course he knew you were pregnant before you did. That’s all irrelevant now. “You fought for them.” It takes effort to emphasize the last word, but you do. For you and Corundum and Innon, sure, but he fought for Meov, too. “They would’ve turned on us, too, one day. You know they would have.” When Corundum proved too powerful, or if they’d managed to drive off the Guardians only to have to leave Meov and move elsewhere. It was inevitable.

He makes an affirmative sound.

“Then why?”

He lets out a long, slow sigh. “There was a chance they wouldn’t.” You shake your head. The words are so impossible to believe that they sound like gibberish. But he adds, “Any chance was worth trying.”

He does not say for you, but you feel it. It is a subtext that is nearly sessable beneath the words’ surface. So your family could have a normal life among other people, as one of them. Normal opportunities. Normal struggles. You stare at him. On impulse you lift your hand to his face, drawing fingers over his scarred lips. He watches you do this and offers you that little quarter-smile, which is all he can muster these days. It’s more than you need.

Then you get up and head out to try to salvage Castrima’s thin, cracked nothing of a chance.

Ykka has called a vote for the next morning—twenty-four hours after Rennanis’s “offer.” Castrima needs to deliver some kind of response, but she doesn’t think it should be up to only her informal council. You can’t see what difference the vote will make, except to emphasize that if the comm gets through the night intact it will be a rusting miracle.

People look at you as you walk through the comm. You keep your gaze ahead and try not to let them visibly affect you.

In brief, private visits you pass Ykka’s orders on to Cutter and Temell, and tell them to spread the word. Temell usually takes the kids out for lessons anyway; he says he’ll visit his students at home and encourage them to form study groups of two and three, in the homes of trusted adults. You want to say, “No adults are trustworthy,” but he knows that. There’s no way around it, so it’s pointless to say aloud.

Cutter says he’ll pass on the word to the few other adult roggas. Not all of them have the skill to throw a torus or control themselves well; except for you and Alabaster, they’re all ferals. But Cutter will make sure the ones who can’t stick near those who can. His face is impassive as he adds, “And who’ll watch your back?”

Which means he’s offering. The revulsion that shivers through you at this idea is surprising. You’ve never really trusted him, though you don’t understand why. Something about the fact that he’s hidden all his life—which is hypocritical as hell after your ten years in Tirimo. But then, sweet flaking rust, do you trust anyone? As long as he does his job it doesn’t matter. You force yourself to nod. “Come find me after you’re done, then.” He agrees.

With that, you decide to get some rest, yourself. Your bedroom is wrecked thanks to Hoa’s transformation, and you’re not much interested in sleeping in Tonkee’s bed; it’s been months, but the memory of mildew dies hard. Also, you’ve realized belatedly that there’s no one to watch Ykka’s back. She believes in her comm, but you don’t. Hoa ate Ruby Hair, who at least had an assumable interest in keeping her alive. So you borrow another pack from Temell, and scrounge your apartment for a few basic supplies—not quite a runny-sack, there’s plausible deniability if Ykka protests—and then head to her apartment. (This will have the added purpose of making it hard for Cutter to find you.) She’s still asleep, from the sound of her breathing through the bedroom curtain. Her divans are pretty comfortable, especially compared to sleeping rough when you were on the road. You use your runny-sack for a pillow and curl up, trying to forget the world for a while.

And then you wake when Ykka curses and stumbles past you at full speed, half ripping down one of the apartment curtains in her haste. You struggle awake and sit up. “What—” But by then you, too, hear the rising shouts outside. Angry shouts. A crowd, gathering.

So it’s begun. You get up and follow, and it’s not an afterthought that you grab the packs.

The knot of people is gathered on the ground level, near the communal baths. Ykka scrambles to that level in ways you will not—sliding down metal ladders, hopping over the railing of one platform to swing down to the one she knows is below, running across bridges that sway alarmingly beneath her feet. You go down in the sensible, non-suicidal way, so by the time you get to the knot of people, Ykka is in full shout, trying to get everyone to shut up and listen and back the fuck off.

At the center of the knot is Cutter, clad in nothing but a towel, for once looking something other than indifferent. Now he’s tense, jaw set, defiant, braced to flee. And five feet away, the iced corpse of a man sits on the ground, frozen in mid-scrabble backward, a look of abject terror permanently on his face. You don’t recognize him. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that a rogga has killed a still. This is a match thrown right into the middle of a comm that is dried-out, oil-soaked kindling.

“—how this happened,” Ykka is shouting, as you reach the knot of people. You can barely see her; there are nearly fifty people here already. You could push to the front, but you decide to hang back instead. Now is not the time to call attention to yourself. You look around and see Lerna also lurking at the rear of the crowd. His eyes are wide and his jaw tight as he looks back at you. There’s also—oh, burning Earth—a cluster of three rogga kids here. One of them is Penty, who you know is the ringleader of some of the braver, stupider rogga children. She’s standing on tiptoe, craning her neck for a better look. When she tries to push forward through the crowd, you catch her eye and give her a Mother Look. She flinches and subsides at once.

“Who the rust cares how it happened?” That’s Sekkim, one of the Innovators. You only know him because Tonkee constantly complains that he’s too stupid to rightly be part of the caste and should instead be dumped into something nonessential, like Leadership. “This is why—”

Someone else shouts him down. “Fucking rogga!”

Someone else shouts her down. “Fucking listen! It’s Ykka!”

“Who the rust cares about another rogga monster—”

“Rusty son of a cannibal, I will beat you bloody if you—”

Someone shoves someone else. There are shoves back, more curses, vows of murder. It’s a catastrophe.

Then a man rushes forward from the crowd, crouching beside the iced corpse and trying his best to fling his arms around it. The resemblance between him and the body is obvious even through the ice: brothers, perhaps. His wail of anguish causes a sudden, flustered silence to ripple across the crowd. They shuffle uneasily as his wail subsides into deep, soul-tearing sobs.

Ykka takes a deep breath and steps forward, using the opportunity that grief has provided. To Cutter, she says tightly, “What did I say? What did I rusting say?”

“He attacked me,” Cutter says. There’s not a scratch on him.

“Bullshit,” Ykka says. Several people in the crowd echo her, but she glares them down until they subside. She looks at the dead man, her jaw tight. “Betine wouldn’t have done that. He couldn’t even kill a chicken that time it was his turn to look after the flock.”

Cutter glares. “All I know is, I wanted to take a bath. I sat down to wash and he moved away from me. I figured fine, that’s how it’s going to be, and I didn’t care. Then I went past him to get into the pool and he hit me. Hard, in the back of the neck.”

There is a low, angry murmur at this—but also a troubled shuffle. The back of the neck is rumored to be the best place to strike a rogga. It’s not true. Only works if you hit hard enough for a concussion or a cracked skull, and then that’s what takes them down, not any sort of damage to the sessapinae. It’s still a popular myth. And if it’s true, it might be reason enough for Cutter to fight back.

“Rust that.” This is growled; the man who holds Betine’s faintly hissing corpse. “Bets wasn’t like that. Yeek, you know he wasn’t—”

Ykka nods, going over to touch the man’s shoulder. The crowd shuffles again, pent fury shifting with it. With her, tenuously, for the moment. “I know.” A muscle in her jaw flexes once, twice. She looks around. “Anybody else see the fight?”

Several people raise hands. “I saw Bets move away,” says one woman. She swallows, looking at Cutter; sweat dots her upper lip. “I think he just wanted to get closer to the soap, though.”

“He looked at me,” Cutter snaps. “I know what it rusting means when somebody looks at me like that!”

Ykka cuts him off with a wave of her hand. “I know, Cutter, but shut up. What else?” she asks the woman.

“That was it. I looked away and then when I looked back there was that—swirl. Wind and ice.” She grimaces, her jaw tightening. “You know how you people kill.”

Ykka glares back at her, but then flinches as there are more shouts, this time in agreement with the woman. Someone tries to shove through the crowd to get at Cutter; someone else holds the attacker back, but it’s a near thing. You see the realization come over Ykka that she’s losing them. She’s not going to make her people see. They’re working themselves into a mob, and there’s nothing she can do to stop them.

Well. You’re wrong about that. There’s one thing she can do.

She does it by turning and laying a hand on Cutter’s chest and sending something through him. You’re not actively sessing at the moment, so you only get the backwash of it, and it’s—what? It’s like… the way Alabaster once slammed a hot spot into submission, years ago and a fifth of a continent away. Just smaller. It’s like what that Guardian did to Innon, except localized, and not overtly horrific. And you didn’t realize roggas could do anything like it.

Whatever it is, Cutter doesn’t even have a chance to gasp. His eyes fly wide. He staggers back a step. Then he falls down, with a look of shock on his face to match that of Betine’s fear.

Everyone’s silent. Yours is not the only mouth that hangs open.

Ykka catches her breath. Whatever she did took a lot out of her; you see her sway a little, then get a hold of herself. “That’s enough,” she says, turning to look at everyone in the crowd. “More than enough. Justice has been done, see? Now all of you, go the rust home.”

You don’t expect that to work. You figure it’ll only whet the crowd’s bloodthirst… but shows how much you know. People mill a little, mutter a little more, but then begin to disperse. A grieving man’s quiet sobs follow them all away.

That’s midnight, the time-keeper calls. Eight hours till the vote in the morning.

“I had to do it,” Ykka murmurs. You’re in her apartment again, sort of, standing beside her. The curtain’s open so she can see her people, so they can see her, but she’s leaning against the doorsill and she’s trembling. It’s only a little. No one would see it from afar. “I had to.”

You offer her the respect of honesty. “Yes. You did.”

It’s two o’clock.

By five o’clock, you’re thinking about sleeping. It’s been quieter than you expected. Lerna and Hjarka have come to join you at Ykka’s. No one says you’re keeping vigil, commiserating in silence, mourning Cutter, waiting for the world to end (again), but that’s what you’re doing. Ykka’s sitting on a divan with her arms wrapped around her knees and her head propped against the wall, gaze weary and empty of thought.

When you hear shouts again, you close your eyes and think about ignoring them. It’s the high-pitched screams of children that drag you out of this complete failure of empathy. The others get up and you do, too, and all of you go out onto the balcony. People are running toward one of the wide platforms that surround a crystal shaft too small to hold any apartments. You and the others head that way, too. The comm uses such platforms for storage, so this one is stacked with barrels and crates and clay jars. One of the clay jars is rolling around but looks intact; you see this as you and the others reach the platform. Which does not at all explain what else you’re seeing.

It’s the rogga kids again. Penty’s gang. Two of them are doing all the screaming, tugging and hitting at a woman who has pinned Penty down and is shouting at her, gripping her throat. Another woman stands by, yelling at the kids, too, but no one’s paying any attention to her. Her slurred voice is just the goad.

You know the woman that’s got Penty down, sort of. She’s maybe ten years younger than you, with a heavier build and longer hair: Waineen, one of the Resistants. She’s been nice enough when you’ve done shifts in the fungus flats or latrines, but you’ve heard the others gossip behind her back. Waineen makes the mellows that Lerna periodically smokes, and the moonshine that a few people in the comm drink. Sometime back before the Season she had quite a lucrative sideline helping the native Castrimans perk up their lives of tedious mining and trading, and she stored the product down in Castrima-under to keep the quartent tax inspectors from ever finding it. Convenient, now that the world has ended. But she’s her own biggest customer, and it’s not unusual to find her stumbling about the comm, red-faced and too loud, emitting more fumes than a fresh blow.

Waineen’s not usually a mean drunk, and she shares freely, and she never misses a shift, which is why nobody really cares what she does with her stuff. Everybody handles the Season in their own way. Still, something’s set her off now. Penty is aggravating. Hjarka and some of the other Castrimans are striding forward to pull the woman off the girl, and you’re telling yourself it’s a good thing Penty has enough self-control to not ice the whole damned platform, when the woman lifts an arm and makes a fist.

a fist that

you’ve seen the imprint of Jija’s fist, a bruise with four parallel marks, on Uche’s belly and face

a fist that

that

that

no

You’re in the topaz and between the woman’s cells in almost the same instant. There is no thought in this. Your mind falls, dives, into the upward wash of yellow light as if it belongs there. Your sessapinae flex around the silver threads and you draw them together, you are part of both obelisk and woman and you will not let this happen, not again, not again, you could not stop Jija but—

“Not one more child,” you whisper, and your companions all look at you in surprise and confusion. Then they stop looking at you, because the woman who was egging on the fight is suddenly screaming, and the kids are screaming louder. Even Penty is screaming now, because the woman on top of her has turned to glittering, multicolored stone.

“Not one more child!” You can sess the ones nearest you—the other council members, the screaming drunk, Penty and her girls, Hjarka and the rest, all of them. Everyone in Castrima. They trod upon the filaments of your nerves, tapping and jittering, and they are Jija. You focus on the drunk woman and it is almost instinctual, the urge to begin squeezing the movement and life out of her and replacing that with whatever the by-product of magical reactions really is, this stuff that looks like stone. This stuff that is killing Alabaster, the father of your other dead child, NOT ONE MORE RUSTING CHILD. For how many centuries has the world killed rogga children so that everyone else’s children can sleep easy? Everyone is Jija, the whole damned world is Schaffa, Castrima is Tirimo is the Fulcrum NOT ONE MORE and you turn with the obelisk torrenting its power through you to begin killing everyone within and beyond your sight.

Something jars your connection to the obelisk. Suddenly you have to fight for power that it so readily gave you before. You bare your teeth without thinking, growl without hearing yourself, clench your fists and shout in your mind NO I WON’T LET HIM DO IT AGAIN and you are seeing Schaffa, thinking of Jija.

But you are sessing Alabaster.

Feeling him, in blazing white tendrils that lash at your obelisk link. That is Alabaster’s strength contending against yours and… not winning. He does not shut you down the way you know he can. Or the way you thought he could. Is he weaker? No. You’re just a lot stronger than you used to be.

And suddenly the import of this slaps through the fugue of memory and horror that you’re trapped in, bringing you back to cold, shocking reality. You’ve killed a woman with magic. You’re about to wipe out Castrima with magic. You’re fighting Alabaster with magic—and Alabaster cannot bear more magic.

“Oh, uncaring Earth,” you whisper. You stop fighting at once. Alabaster dismantles your connection to the obelisk; he’s still got a more precise touch than you. But you feel his weakness when he does so. His fading strength.

You’re not even aware of running at first. It barely qualifies as running, because the contest of magic and the abrupt disconnection from the obelisk have left you so disoriented and weak that you lurch from railing to rope as if drunk, yourself. Someone’s shouting in your ear. A hand grabs your upper arm and you shake it off, snarling. Somehow you make it to the ground floor without falling to your death. Faces blur past you, irrelevant. You can’t see because you’re sobbing aloud, babbling, No, no, no. You know what you’ve done, even as you deny it with your words and body and soul.

Then you are in the infirmary.

You are in the infirmary, looking down at an incongruously small, yet finely made, stone sculpture. No color to this one, no polish, just dull sandy brown all over. It is almost abstract, archetypal: Man in His Final Moment. Truncation of the Spirit. Neverperson, Unperson. Once Found but Now Lost.

Or maybe you can just call it Alabaster.

It’s five thirty.

At seven o’clock, Lerna comes to where you huddle on the floor in front of Alabaster’s corpse. You barely hear him settle nearby, and you wonder why he’s come. He knows better. He should go, before you snap again and kill him, too.

“Ykka’s talked the comm into not killing you,” he says. “I told them about your son. It’s been, ah, mutually agreed that Waineen could’ve killed Penty, hitting her like that. Your overreaction was… understandable.” He pauses. “It helps that Ykka killed Cutter earlier. They trust her more now. They know she’s not speaking for you just out of…” He inhales, shrugs. “Kinship.”

Yes. It’s as the teachers told you back in the Fulcrum: Roggas are one and the same. The crimes of any are the crimes of all.

“No one will kill her.” That’s Hoa. Of course he’s here now, guarding his investment.

Lerna shifts uneasily at this. But then another voice agrees, “No one will kill her,” and you flinch because it is Antimony.

You push yourself up from the huddle slowly. She sits in the same position as always—she’s been here all along—with the stone lump that was Alabaster resting against her as his living body once did. Her eyes are already on you.

“You can’t have him,” you say. Snarl. “Or me, either.”

“I don’t want you,” Antimony says. “You killed him.”

Oh, shit. You try to maintain abject fury, try to use it to focus and reach for the power to defy her, but the fury dissolves into shame. And anyway, you only get as far as that damned obelisk-longknife of Alabaster’s. The spinel. It kicks back your flailing grab for it almost at once, as if spitting in your face. You are worthy of contempt, aren’t you? The stone eaters, the humans, the orogenes, even the flaking obelisks all know it. You are nothing. No; you are death. And you’ve killed yet another person you loved.

So you sit there on your hands and knees, bereft, rejected, so hurt that it is like a clockwork engine of pain gear-ticking at the core of you. Maybe the obelisk-builders could have invented some way to harness pain like this, but they are all dead.

There is a sound that drags you out of grief. Antimony is standing now. Her pose is imposing, straight-legged and implacable. She looks down her nose at you. In her arms is the brown lump of Alabaster’s remains. From this angle it doesn’t look like anything that used to be human. Officially, it wasn’t.

“No,” you say. No defiance this time; it is a plea. Don’t take him. Yet this is what he asked for. This is what he wanted—to be given to Antimony and not Father Earth, who took so much from him. That’s the choice here: Earth or a stone eater. You’re not on the list.

“He left you a message,” she says. Her inflectionless voice is no different, and yet. Somehow. Is that pity? “‘The onyx is the key. First a network, then the Gate. Don’t rust it up, Essun. Innon and I didn’t love you for nothing.’”

“What?” you ask, but then she flickers, becoming translucent. For the first time it occurs to you that the way stone eaters move through rock and the way obelisks shift between real and unreal states are the same.

It is a useless observation. Antimony vanishes into the Earth that hates you. With Alabaster.

You sit where she’s left you, where he’s left you. There are no thoughts in your head. But when a hand touches your arm, and a voice says your name, and a connection that is not the obelisk presents itself, you turn toward it. You can’t help it. You need something, and if it is not to be family or death, then it must be something else. So you turn and grab and Lerna is there for you, his shoulder is warm and soft, and you need it. You need him. Just for now, please. Just once, you need to feel human, never mind the official designations, and maybe with human arms around you and a human voice murmuring, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Essun,” in your ear, maybe you can feel like that. Maybe you are human, just for a little while.

At seven forty-five you sit alone again.

Lerna’s gone to speak to one of his assistants, and maybe to the Strongbacks who are watching you from the infirmary doorway. At the bottom of your runny-sack is a pocket for hiding things. It’s why you bought this particular runny-sack, years ago, from this particular leatherworker. When he showed you the pocket, you thought immediately of something that you wanted to put in it. Something that, as Essun, you didn’t let yourself think about often, because it was a thing of Syenite’s and she was dead. Yet you kept her remains.

You dig through the sack until your fingers find the pocket and wriggle inside. The bundle is still there. You tug them out, unfold the cheap linen. Six rings, polished and semiprecious, sit there.

Not enough for you, a nine-ringer, but you don’t care about the first four, anyway. They clack and roll across the floor as you discard them. The last two, the ones he made for you, you put on the index finger of each hand.

Then you get to your feet.

Eight o’clock. Representatives of the comm’s households gather at the Flat Top.

One vote per comm share is the rule. You see Ykka at the center of the circle again, her arms folded and face carefully blank, though you can sess an undertone of tension in the ambient that is mostly hers. Someone has brought out an old wooden box, and people are milling around, talking to each other, writing on scraps of paper or leather, dropping these into the box.

You walk toward the Flat Top with Lerna in tow. People don’t notice you until you’re nearly across the bridge. Nearly on top of them. Then someone sees you coming and gasps loudly. Someone else yelps an alarm: “Oh, rust, it’s her.” People scramble to get out of your way, almost tripping over themselves.

They should. In your right hand is Alabaster’s ridiculous pink longknife, the miniaturized and reshaped spinel obelisk. By now you have tapped it, resonated with it; it is yours. It rejected you before because you were unstable, floundering, but now you know what you need from it. You’ve found your focus. The spinel won’t hurt anyone as long as you don’t let it. Whether you will or not is an entirely different matter.

You walk into the center of the circle, and the man holding the ballot box scrambles back from you, leaving it there. Ykka frowns and steps forward and says, “Essun—” But you ignore her. You lunge forward and it is suddenly instinctual, easy, natural, to grip the hilt of the pink longknife with both hands and turn and swivel your hips and swing. The instant the sword touches the wooden box, the box is obliterated. It isn’t cut, it isn’t smashed; it disintegrates into its component microscopic particles. The eye processes this as dust, which scatters and glitters in the light before vanishing. Turned to stone. A lot of people are gasping or crying out, which means they’re inhaling their votes. Probably won’t hurt them. Much.

Then you turn and lift the longknife, pivoting slowly to point it at each face.

“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

Some of them shuffle or look at each other. Ykka stares at you like you are a possibly dangerous creature, which is hilarious. She should know by now that there’s no “possibly” about it. “Essun,” she starts to say, in the kind of even voice one uses with pets or the mad, “this is…” She stops because she doesn’t know what it is. But you do. It’s a fucking coup. Doesn’t matter who’s in charge, but on this one issue, you’re going to be the dictator. You will not allow Alabaster to have died saving these people from you for nothing.

“No vote,” you say again. Your voice is pitched to carry, as if they are twelve-year-olds in your old creche. “This is a community. You will be unified. You will fight for each other. Or I will rusting kill every last one of you.”

True silence this time. They don’t move. Their eyes are white and so far beyond frightened that you know they believe you.

Good. You turn and walk away.