N. Jemisin: The Obelisk Gate

The hunger spurs you up and into the apartment’s living room. There’s a small hempen satchel on the table, which Tonkee must’ve acquired, partially open to reveal mushrooms and a small pile of dried beans and other cachefood. That’s right: As accepted members of Castrima, you now get a share of the comm’s stores. None of it is the kind of food you can just eat for a snack, except maybe the mushrooms, but you’ve never seen those before, and some varieties of mushrooms need to be cooked to be edible. You’re tempted, but… is Castrima the sort of comm that would give dangerous foodstuffs to newcomers without warning them?

Hmm. Right. You fetch your runny-sack, rummage in it for the remaining provisions you brought to Castrima with you, and make a meal out of dried oranges, cachebread crusts, and a lump of bad-tasting jerky that you traded for at the last comm you passed, and which you suspect is hydro-pipe rat meat. Food is that which nourishes, the lorists say.

You’ve just choked the jerky down, and are sitting there sleepily pondering how merely summoning an obelisk took so much out of you—as if anything regarding the obelisks can be described with the adjective merely —when you become aware of a high, rhythmic scraping sound outside. You dismiss it immediately. Nothing about this comm makes sense; it will probably take you weeks if not months to get used to its peculiar sounds. (Months. Are you giving up on Nassun so easily?) So you ignore the sound even as it grows louder and closer, and you keep yawning, and you’re about to get up and head back to bed when it belatedly dawns on you that what you’re hearing is screaming .

Frowning, you go to the door of the apartment, pulling open the thin curtain. You’re not particularly concerned; your sessapinae haven’t even twitched, and anyway if there’s ever a shake down here in Castrima-under, everyone’s dead no matter how quickly they leave their homes. Outside there are lots of people up and about. A woman passes right by your door, carrying a big basket of the same mushrooms you almost ate; she nods at you distractedly as you come out, then almost loses her load as she tries to turn toward the noise and nearly bumps into a man pushing a covered, wheeled bin that stinks to the sky and is probably from the latrines. In a comm with no functional day-night cycle, Castrima effectively never sleeps, and you know they have six work shifts instead of the usual three because you’ve been put on one. It won’t start till midday—or twelvebell, as the Castrima folk say—when you’re supposed to look for some woman named Artith near the forge.

And none of this is relevant because through the scatter and jut of Castrima’s crystals, you can see a small cluster of people coming into the big rectangular tunnel-mouth that serves as the entrance to the geode. They’re running, and they’re carrying another person, who’s doing all the screaming.

Even then, you’re tempted to ignore it and go back to sleep. It’s a Season. People die; there’s nothing you can do about it. These aren’t even your people. There’s no reason for you to care.

Then someone shouts, “ Lerna! ” And the tone of it is so panicked that you twitch. You can see the squat gray crystal that houses Lerna’s apartment from your balcony, three crystals away and a little below your own. His door-curtain jerks open and he hurries out, shrugging on a shirt as he runs down the nearest set of steps. Heading for the infirmary, where the cluster of running folk seems to be going as well.

For reasons that you cannot name, you glance back at your own apartment doorway. Tonkee, who sleeps like petrified wood, hasn’t come out—but Hoa is there, statue-still and watching you. Something about his expression makes you frown. He doesn’t seem to be able to do the emotionless stoneface of his kin, maybe because he doesn’t have a face of actual stone. Regardless, the first thing you interpret of his expression is… pity.

You’re out of the apartment and running for the ground level in the next breath, almost before you’ve thought about it. (You think as you run: The pity of a disguised stone eater has galvanized you as the screams of a fellow human being haven’t. Such a monster you are.) Castrima is as frustratingly confusing as always, but this time you’re aided by the fact that other people have started running along the bridges and walkways in the direction of the trouble, so you can just go with the flow.

By the time you get there, a small crowd has formed around the infirmary, most of the people milling about in curiosity or concern or anxiety. Lerna and the cluster of people carrying their injured companion have gone inside, and the awful screech is obvious now for what it is: the throat-tearing howl of someone in appalling pain, pain beyond bearing, who nevertheless is somehow forced to bear it.

It is not an intentional thing that you start pushing forward to get inside. You know nothing about giving medical care… but you do know pain. To your surprise, though, people glance at you in annoyance—then blink and shift aside. You notice those who look blank being pulled aside for quick whispers by those whose eyes have widened. Oh-ho. Castrima’s been talking about you.

Then you’re inside the infirmary, and you nearly get knocked down by a Sanzed woman running past with some sort of syringe in her hands. Can’t be safe to do that. You follow her over to an infirmary bed where six people hold down the person doing the screaming. You get a look at the person’s face when one of them shifts aside: no one you know. Just another Midlatter man, who has clearly been topside to judge by the gray layer of ash on his skin and clothing and hair. The woman with the syringe shoulders aside someone else and ostensibly administers the syringe’s contents. A moment later, the man shudders all over, and his mouth begins to close. His scream dies off, slowly, slowly. Slowly. He jerks once, mightily; his holders all shift with the strength of his effort. Then at last, mercifully, he subsides into unconsciousness.

The silence almost reverberates. Lerna and the Sanzed healer keep moving, though the people who have been holding the man down draw back and look at each other as if asking what to do now. In the now-silent confusion, you cannot help glancing off toward the far end of the infirmary, where Alabaster still sits unnoticed by the infirmary’s new guests. His stone eater stands where you last saw her, though her gaze is also fixed on the tableau. You can see Alabaster’s face over the beds; his eyes slide over to meet yours, but then they shift away.

Your attention is recaptured by the man on the bed as some of the people around him step back. At first you can’t tell what the problem is, other than that his pants seem oddly wet in patches, caked with muddy ash. The wetness isn’t red, it’s not blood, but there’s a smell that you’re not sure how to describe. Meat in brine. Hot fat. His boots are off, baring feet which still spasmodically twitch a little, the splayed toes relaxing only reluctantly even in unconsciousness. Lerna is cutting open one pants leg with a pair of scissors. What you notice first, as he peels away the damp cloth, are the small round blue hemispheres that dot the man’s skin here and there, each perhaps two inches in diameter and an inch of rounded height, shiny and foreign to his flesh. There are ten or fifteen of them. Each sits at the center of a patch of bloated pink-brown flesh covering perhaps a handspan of the man’s legs. You think the lumps are jewels, at first. That’s kind of what they look like, metallic over the blue, and beautiful.

“Fuck,” says someone, voice soft with shock, and someone else says, “What the rust.” Someone else pushes into the infirmary behind you after a moment’s argument with the people who’ve blocked off the door. She comes to stand beside you and you look over at Ykka, whose eyes widen in confusion and revulsion for an instant before she schools her expression to blankness. Then she says, sharply enough to jerk people out of staring, “What happened?”