N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

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.

In the turning depths, I resonate with my enemy—or attempt to. “A truce,” I say. Plead. There has been so much loss already, on all sides. A moon. A future. Hope.

Down here, it’s nearly impossible to hear a reply in words. What comes to me is furious reverberation, savage fluctuations of pressure and gravitation. I’m forced to flee after a time, lest I be crushed—and though this would be only a temporary setback, I cannot afford to be incapacitated right now. Things are changing amid your kind, quickly as your kind so often do things when you finally make real decisions. I have to be ready.

The rage was my only answer, in any case.

IT HAS BEEN ONE MONTH since you last went aboveground. It has been two days since you killed Alabaster, in your folly and pain. All things change in a Season.

Castrima-over is occupied. The tunnel that you first passed through to enter the comm is blocked; one of the comm’s orogenes has pulled a big slab of stone up from the earth to effectively seal it off. Probably Ykka, or Cutter before Ykka killed him; they were the two others in the comm with the best fine control besides you and Alabaster. Now two of those four are dead, and the enemy is at the gates. The Strongbacks who are clustered in the tunnel mouth behind the stone seal jump up as you walk into the electric-light circle, and the ones who were already standing stand straighter. Xeber, Esni’s second-in-command among the Strongbacks, actually smiles at the sight of you. That’s how bad things are. That’s how worried everyone is. They’ve so lost their minds as to think of you as their champion.

“I don’t like this,” Ykka has said to you. She’s back in the comm, organizing the defense that will be necessary if the tunnels are breached. The real danger is if the Rennanis scouts discover the ventilation ducts of Castrima’s geode. They’re well hidden—one in the cavern of an underground river, others in equally out-of-the-way places, as if the people who built Castrima feared attack themselves—but the comm’s people will be forced out if those are sealed off. “And they’ve got stone eaters working with them. You’re dangerous and ruster enough to fuck up an army, Essie, I’ll give you that, but none of us can fight stone eaters. If they kill you, we lose our best weapon.”

She said this to you at Scenic Overlook, where the two of you went to work things out. It was awkward for about a day, between you. By forbidding a vote, you undercut Ykka’s authority and destroyed everyone’s illusion of having a say in the comm’s management. That was necessary, you still believe; everyone shouldn’t have a say in whose life is worth fighting for. She actually agreed, she admitted as you talked. But it damaged her.

You didn’t apologize for that, but you’ve tried to spackle the cracks. “ You are Castrima’s best weapon,” you said firmly. You even meant it. That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.

It eased the awkwardness between you. “Well, just don’t rusting die,” she told you at last. “Not sure I can keep this mess together without you, at this point.” Ykka’s good at that, making people feel like they’ve got a reason to do something. That’s why she’s the headwoman.