N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

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.