N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

She looks at Daddy again, who is trying to take deep breaths. His face is pale. There’s so much blood. But he looks up at her with his eyes wide and white with pain, and suddenly she remembers the comm where the people attacked them, the comm she iced, and the way he looked at her afterward.

Bandits. Kill them . She knows she must. If she does not, they will kill her.

But her father wants a little girl, not an animal.

She stares and stares and breathes hard and cannot stop staring, cannot think, cannot act , can do nothing but stand there and shake and hyperventilate, torn between survival and daughterhood.

Then someone leaps down the lava-flow ridge, bouncing from one ribbon of rock to the other with a speed and agility that is—Nassun stares. No one can do that. But the man lands in a crouch amid the gravelly soil at the foot of the ridges with a heavy, ominous thud. He’s solidly built. She can tell he’s big even though he stays low as he half rises, his gaze fixed on something in the trees beyond Nassun, and draws a long, wicked glassknife. (And yet, somehow, the weight of his landing on the ground does not reverberate on her senses. What does that mean? And there is a… She shakes her head, thinking maybe it’s an insect, but the odd buzzing is a sensation and not a sound.)

Then the man is off, running straight into the brush, his feet pushing against the ground with such force that clods of dirt kick up in his wake. Nassun’s mouth falls open as she turns to follow him, losing track amid the green, but there are shouts in that language again—and then, in the direction that she saw the man run, a soft, guttural sound, like someone reacting to a hard blow. The moving people amid the trees stop. Nassun sees an Arctic woman stand frozen in the clear gap between a tangle of vines and an old, weathered rock. The woman turns, inhaling to call out to someone else, and in a near-blur the man is behind her, punching her in the back. No, no, the knife—And then he is gone, before the woman falls. The violence and speed of the attack are stunning.

“N-Nassun,” Jija says, and Nassun jumps again. She actually forgot him for a moment. She goes over, crouching and putting her foot on the chain to prevent anyone from using it to hurt him further. He grips her arm, too hard. “You should, unh, run.”

“No, Daddy.” She tries to figure out how the chain is fastened to the harpoon. The weapon’s shaft is smooth. If she can get the chain loose or cut off the barbed point, they can just drag Daddy’s leg off of it to free him. But what then? It’s such a terrible wound. Will he bleed to death? She doesn’t know what to do.

Jija hisses as she jiggles the end of the chain experimentally, trying to see if she can twist it loose. “I don’t… I think the bone…” Jija actually sways, and Nassun thinks the white of his lips is a bad sign. “ Go .”

She ignores him. The chain is welded to a loop at the end of the shaft. She fingers it and thinks hard, now that the strange man’s appearance has broken her deadlock. (Her hand’s shaking, though. She takes a deep breath, trying to get hold of her own fear. Somewhere off in the trees, there is a gurgling groan, and a scream of fury.) She knows Jija has some of his stoneknapping tools in his pack, but the harpoon is steel. Wait—metal breaks if it’s cold enough, doesn’t it? Could she, maybe, with a high narrow torus…?

She’s never done this before. If she does it wrong, she’ll freeze off his leg. Yet somehow, instinctively, she feels certain that it can be done. The way Mama taught her to think about orogeny, as heat and movement taken in and heat and movement pushed out, has never really felt right to her. There is truth to it; it works, she knows from experience. But something about it is… off. Inelegant. She has often thought, If I don’t think about it as heat… without ever finishing that thought in a productive way.

Mama is not here, and death is, and her father is the only person left in the world who loves her, even though his love comes wrapped in pain.

So she puts a hand on the butt end of the harpoon. “Don’t move, Daddy.”

“Wh-what?” Jija is shaking, but also weakening rapidly. Good; Nassun can work with her concentration uninterrupted. She puts her free hand on his leg—since her orogeny has always flinched away from freezing her , even back when she couldn’t fully control it—and closes her eyes.

There is something underneath the heat of the volcano, interspersed amid the wavelets of motion that dance through the earth. It’s easy to manipulate the waves and heat, but hard to even perceive this other thing, which is perhaps why Mama taught Nassun to look for waves and heat instead. But if Nassun can grasp the other thing, which is finer and more delicate and also more precise than the heat and waves… if she can shape it into a kind of sharp edge, and file it down to infinite fineness, and slice it across the shaft like so —

There is a quick, high-pitched hiss as the air between her and Jija stirs. Then the chain tip of the harpoon shaft drops loose, the shorn faces of metal glimmering mirror-smooth in the afternoon light.

Exhaling in relief, Nassun opens her eyes. To find that Jija has tensed, and is staring beyond her with an expression of mingled horror and belligerence. Startled, Nassun whirls, to see the knife-wielding man behind her.

His hair is black, Arctic-limp, and long enough to fall below his waist. He’s so very tall that she falls onto her butt turning to look at him. Or maybe that’s because she’s suddenly exhausted? She does not know. The man is breathing hard, and his clothing—homespun cloth and a pair of surprisingly neat, pleated old trousers—is splattered liberally with blood centering on the glassknife in his right hand. He gazes down at her with eyes that glitter bright as the metal she just cut, and his smile is very nearly as sharp-edged.

“Hello, little one,” the man says as Nassun stares. “That’s quite the trick.”

Jija tries to move, shifting his leg along the harpoon shaft, and it is awful. There is the abortive sound of bone grating on metal, and he groan-coughs out an agonized cry, grabbing spasmodically for Nassun. Nassun catches his shoulder, but he’s heavy, and she’s tired, and she realizes in sudden horror that she lacks the strength to fight the man with the glassknife if that should be necessary. Jija’s shoulder shakes beneath her hand, and she’s shaking nearly as hard. Maybe this is why no one uses the stuff underneath the heat? Now she and her father will pay the price for her folly.

But the black-haired man hunkers down, moving with remarkably slow grace for someone who showed such swift brutality only moments before. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. He blinks then, something flickering and uncertain in his gaze. “Do I know you?”

Nassun has never before seen this giant with the icewhite eyes and the world’s longest knife. The knife is still in his hand, though now it dangles at his side, dripping. She shakes her head, a little too hard and fast.

The man blinks, the uncertainty clears, and the smile returns. “The beasts are dead. I came to help you, didn’t I?” Something is off about the question. He asks it as if he seeks confirmation: didn’t I? It’s too sincere, too heartfelt somehow. Then he says, “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Perhaps it is only coincidence that his gaze slides over to her father’s face after he says this. But. Something in Nassun unclenches, just a little.

Then Jija tries to move again and makes another pained sound, and the man’s gaze sharpens. “How unpleasant. Let me help you—” He sets down the knife and reaches for Jija.