N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

Hoa, in a pose that your mind immediately and half-consciously names Warrior , stands with one arm extended. From the hand dangles a head. A stone eater’s head, hair a curling coiffure in mother-of-pearl, face gone below the top lip. The rest of the stone eater, lower jaw on down, stands in front of Hoa, frozen in a posture of reaching for something. You can see Hoa’s face in partial side view. It isn’t moving or chewing, but there’s pale stone dust on his finely carved black-marble lips. There’s a divot about the size of a bite wound in what’s left of the stone eater’s nape. That was the familiar crunch.

An instant later the stone eater’s remains shatter , and you realize Hoa’s position has changed to put a fist through its torso. Then his eyes slide toward you. He doesn’t swallow that you can see, but then he doesn’t need his mouth to speak anyway. “Rennanis’s stone eaters are coming for Castrima’s orogenes.”

Oh, Evil Earth. You make yourself get up, though you feel light-headed and unsteady on your feet. “How many?”

“Enough.” Flick and Hoa’s head has turned away, toward Scenic Overlook. You look and see heavy fighting there—the people of Castrima fighting back against the Rennanese who’ve made it down the tunnel. You spy Danel among the attackers, laying on with twin longknives against two Strongbacks as nearby, Esni shouts for another crossbow; hers has jammed. She drops her useless weapon and draws a knapped agate knife that flashes white in the light, then throws herself into the Danel fight.

And then your attention focuses on the nearer distance, where Penty has gotten herself tangled in a rope bridge. You see why: On the metal platform behind her stands another strange stone eater, this one allover citrine-gold but for the white mica around her lips. It stands with one hand extended, the fingers curled in a beckoning gesture. Penty is far from you, maybe fifty feet, but you can see tears streaking the girl’s face as she struggles to extract herself from the ropes. One of her hands flops uselessly. Broken.

Her hand is broken. Your skin prickles all over. “Hoa.”

There is a thunk against the wooden platform as he drops the head of his enemy. “Essun.”

“I need to go topside fast.” You can sess it up there, magic-feel it, looming and huge. It’s been here all along, but you’ve been shying away from it. Too much for what you needed before. Exactly what you need now.

“Topside’s crawling, Essie. Nothing but boilbugs.” Ykka is standing, just, by bracing herself against the crystal’s wall. You want to warn her—the stone eaters can come through the crystal—but there isn’t time. If you’re too slow, they’ll get her regardless.

You shake your head and stagger over to Hoa. He can’t come to you; he’s so damned heavy that it’s a wonder the wooden platform hasn’t collapsed already. His pose has changed again, now that the other stone eater is just chunks scattered around him; now he has moved to place one hand on the crystal’s wall, though the rest of him is facing you. His other hand extends toward you, open with invitation. You remember a day by a riverside, after Hoa fell into the mud. You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold. He refused you to keep his secret, and you were hurt, though you tried not to be.

Now his hand is cool compared to the warmth of Castrima. Solid—although he does not sess quite of stone, you realize in fleeting fascination. There’s a strange texture to his flesh. A very slight yielding to the pressure of your fingers. He has fingerprints. That surprises you.

Then you look up at his face. He’s reshaped his expression from the coldness that you saw when he destroyed his enemy. Now there is a slight smile on his lips. “Of course I’ll help you,” he says. So much of the boy is still in him that you almost smile back.

There isn’t time to parse this further, because all at once Castrima blurs into whiteness around you and then there is darkness, earthen-black. Hoa’s hand is on yours, however, so you do not panic.

Then you stand before the pavilion of Castrima-over, amid the dead and dying. Around you on the walkways and pavilion flagstones lie the soldiers of Rennanis, their bodies twisted, some of them impossible to see beneath carpets of insects, a very few of them still crawling and screaming. The table that Danel used to plan the attack is overturned nearby; beetles crawl over its surface. There’s that smell again, of meat in brine. The air swirls with boilbugs and the low-pressure breeze you created.

One of the bugs darts toward you and you cringe. An instant later Hoa’s hand is where the bug was, dripping hot water as the teakettle whistle of the crushed creature fizzles away. “You should probably raise a torus,” he advises. Flaking rust yes. You begin to pull away from him so you can do this safely, but his hand tightens on your own, just a little. “Orogeny can’t hurt me.”

You have more power at your disposal than just orogeny, but he knows that, so all right, then. You raise a high, tight torus around yourself, swirling with snow from the humidity, and immediately the boilbugs begin avoiding you. Perhaps they track prey by body heat. It’s all irrelevant.

You look up then, at the blackness that blots out the sky.

The onyx is like no obelisk you’ve ever seen. Most are shards—double-pointed hexagonal or octagonal columns—though you’ve seen a few that were irregular or rough-ended. This one is an ovoid cabochon, at your summons descending slowly through the cloud layer that has hidden it since its arrival a few weeks before. You can’t guess at its dimensions, but when you turn your head to take in the bowl of Castrima-over’s sky, the onyx nearly fills it, south to north, gray-clouded horizon to underlit red. It reflects nothing, and does not shine. When you look up into it—this is surprisingly hard to do without cringing—only scuds of cloud around its edges tell you that it is actually hovering high above Castrima. Looking at it, it feels closer. Right above you. You have but to lift your hand… but some part of you is terrified of doing this.

There is a strata-shaking thud as the spinel drops to the ground behind you, as if in supplication to this greater thing. Or perhaps it is only that, with the onyx here and pulling at you, drawing you in, drawing you up—

—oh, Earth, it draws you so fast —

—there is nothing left of you that can command any other obelisk. You’ve got nothing to spare. You are falling up, flying into a void that does not so much rush you along as suck at you. You have learned from other obelisks to submit to their current, but at once you know better than to do that here. The onyx will swallow you whole. But you cannot fight it, either; it will rip you apart.

The best you can manage is a kind of precarious equilibrium, in which you pull against it yet still drift through its interstices. And too much of it is in you already, so much. You need to use this power or, or, but no, something is wrong, something is slipping out of equilibrium, suddenly there is light lashing around you and you realize you are tangled in a trillion, quintillion threads of magic and they are tightening.

On another plane of existence you scream. This was a mistake. It’s eating you , and it is awful. Alabaster was wrong. Better to let the stone eaters kill every rogga in Castrima and destroy the comm than die like this. Better to let Hoa chew you to pieces with his beautiful teeth; at least you like him

love him

lo lo lo lo l o v e

Whiplash tightening of magic, in a thousand directions. Light-lattice blazing alive, suddenly, against the black. You see . This is so far past your normal range that it is nearly incomprehensible. You see the Stillness, the whole of it. You perceive the half shell of this side of the planet, taste whiffs of the other side. It’s too much—and fire-under-Earth, you’re a fool. Alabaster told you: first a network, then the Gate. You cannot do this alone; you need a smaller network to buffer the greater. You fumble toward the orogenes of Castrima again, but you cannot grasp them. There are fewer of them now, their numbers flaring and snuffing out even as you reach, and they are too panicked for even you to claim.