N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

Alabaster failed to teach it to you because he was like you—Fulcrum-trained and Fulcrum-limited, taught only to think of power in terms of energy and equations and geometric shapes. He mastered magic because of who he was, but he did not truly understand it. Neither do you, even now. Ykka, feral that she is, with nothing to unlearn, was the key all along. If you hadn’t been so arrogant…

Well. No. You cannot say Alabaster would be alive. He was dead the instant he used the Obelisk Gate to rip the continent in half. The burns were killing him already; that you finished it was mercy. Eventually you’ll believe that.

Ykka blinks and frowns. “You okay?”

She knows the magic of you, and tastes your grief. You swallow against the lump in your throat—carefully, keeping tight hold of the power held pent within you. “Yeah,” you lie.

Ykka’s gaze is too knowing. She sighs. “You know… we both get through this, I have a stash of Yumenescene seredis in one of the storecaches. Want to get drunk?”

The tightness in your throat seems to snap, and you laugh it out. Seredis is a distilled liqueur made from a fruit of the same name that was harvested in the foothills just outside Yumenes. The trees didn’t grow well anywhere else, so Ykka’s stash might be the last seredis in the whole of the Stillness. “ Pricelessly drunk?”

“ Disastrously drunk.” Her smile is weary, but real.

You like the sound of this. “If we get through this.” But you’re pretty sure that you will now. There’s more than enough power in the orogene network and the spinel. You’ll make Castrima safe for stills and roggas and anything else that’s on your side. No one needs to die, except your enemies.

With that, you turn and raise your hands, splaying fingers as your orogeny—and magic—stretch forth.

You perceive Castrima: over, under, and all the matter between and below and above. Now the army of Rennanis is before you, hundreds of points of heat and magic on your mental map, some clustering in houses that do not belong to them and the rest clustering around the three tunnel mouths that lead into the underground comm. In two of the tunnels, they’ve broken through the boulders that one of Castrima’s roggas positioned to seal them. In one of these, rocks have collapsed the passageway. Some of the soldiers are dead, their bodies cooling. Other soldiers are working to clear the blockage. You can tell that’s going to take a few days, at least.

But in the other—flaking rust —they’ve found and disabled the charges. You taste the acridity of unspent chemical potential, and the sourness of bloodlust-sweat; they are making their way unobstructed toward Castrima-under, and are more than halfway to Scenic Overlook. In minutes the first of them, several dozen Strongbacks bristling with longknives and crossbows and slingshots and spears, will hit the comm’s defenses. Hundreds more file into the tunnel mouth behind them.

You know what you have to do.

You withdraw from this close view. Now the forest around Castrima spreads below you. Wider view: Now you taste the edges of Castrima’s plateau, and the nearby depression that is the forest basin. Obvious now that there was once a sea here, and a glacier before that, and more. Obvious, too, are the knots of light and fire that comprise the life of the region, scattered throughout the forest. More of it than you thought, though much of it is hibernating or hidden or otherwise guarding itself against the Season’s onslaught. Very bright along the river: Boilbugs infest both its banks and most of the plateau and basin beyond.

You begin with the river, then, delicately chilling the soil and air and stone along its length. You do this in pulsing waves, there and cool and there again and a little cooler. You drop the air pressure just on the inside of the circle of cold you’re shaping, which causes wind to blow inward, toward Castrima. It is encouragement and warning: Move and you’ll live. Stay and I’ll ice you little bastards to extinction.

The boilbugs move. You perceive them as a wave of bright heat that surges out of underground nests and aboveground feeding piles that have formed around their many victims—hundreds of nests, millions of bugs, you had no idea the forest of Castrima was so riddled with them. Tonkee’s warning about the meat shortage is meaningless and too late; you could never have competed against such successful predators. You were always going to have to get used to the taste of human anyway.

That’s neither here nor there. The ring of cold around Castrima’s territory is complete, and you direct the energy inward in waves, pushing, herding. The bugs are fast —and rusting hell, they can fly. You’d forgotten the wing covers.

And… oh, burning Earth. Suddenly you’re glad you can only sess what’s happening topside, not see or hear it.

What you perceive is painted in pressure and heat and chemical and magic. Here is a bright living cluster of Rennanis soldiers, bunched up within confines of wood and brick, as a swarm of blazing-hot boilbug motes reaches it. Through the foundation of the house you sess pounding feet, the slam of a door, the fleshier slam of bodies against each other and the floor. Mini-shakes of panic. The shapes of the soldiers glow brighter upon the ambient as the bugs land and do their work, boiling and steaming.

Terteis Hunter Castrima was unlucky; only a few bugs got him, which is why he didn’t die of it. This is dozens of boilbugs per soldier, covering every accessible bit of flesh, and it is a kindness. They do not thrash for long, your enemies, and one by one the houses of Castrima-over become still and silent once more.

(The network shudders in your yoke. None of the others like this. You steer them firmly, keeping them on task. There can be no mercy now.)

Now the swarms move into the basements, falling upon the soldiers gathered there, finding the hidden tunnels that lead down into Castrima-under. You lean on the spinel’s power more here, trying to sess which of the living motes in the tunnels are Rennanis soldiers and which are Castrima’s defenders. They’re in clusters, fighting. You have to help your people— ach —rusting—shit. Ykka bucks against your control, and though you are too embedded in the network to hear what she says out loud, you get the idea.

You know what you have to do .

So you pull a chunk out of the walls and use this to seal off the tunnels. Some of Castrima’s Strongbacks and Innovators are on the boilbug side of the seal. Some of Rennanis’s soldiers are on the safe side of it. No one ever gets everything they want.

Through the stone of the tunnels, you cannot help sessing the vibration of screams.

But before you can force yourself to ignore this, there is another scream, nearer-by, a vibration that you perceive with eardrums and not sessapinae. Startled, you begin to dismantle the network—but not fast enough, not nearly, before something yanks at your yoke. Breaks it, throwing you and all the other roggas tumbling over each other and canceling one another’s toruses as you come out of alignment. What the rust? Something has ripped two of your number loose.

You open your eyes to find yourself sprawled on the wooden platform, one arm painfully twisted under you, your face pressed against a storage crate. Confused and groaning—your knees are weak, being the yoke is hard —you push yourself up. “Ykka? What was…?”

There is a sound beyond the crates. A gasp. A groan of wood from the platform beneath you, as something incomprehensibly heavy stresses the supports. A crunch of stone, so startlingly loud that you flinch even as you realize you’ve heard this sound before. Grabbing the edge of the crate and the wooden railing, you haul yourself up on one knee. That’s enough for you to see: