The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(100)
(She’s looked into the hole, despite all this. It’s enormous compared to the one that was in the underground city – many times that one’s circumference, so big that it would take her an hour or more to walk all the way around it. Yet for all its grandeur, despite the evidence it offers of feats of geneering long lost to humankind, Nassun cannot bring herself to be impressed by it. The hole feeds no one, provides no shelter against ash or assault. It doesn’t even scare her – though that is meaningless. After her journey through the underground city and the core of the world, after losing Schaffa, nothing will ever frighten her again.)
The spot Nassun has found is a perfectly circular patch of ground just beyond the hole’s warning radius. It’s odd ground, slightly soft to the touch and springy beneath her feet, not like any material she’s ever touched before – but here in Corepoint, that sort of experience isn’t rare. There’s no actual soil in this circle, aside from a bit of windblown stuff piled up along the edges of the circle; a few seagrasses have taken root here, and there’s the desiccated, spindly trunk of a dead sapling that did its best before being blown over, many years before. That’s all.
A number of stone eaters have appeared around the circle, she notes as she takes up position at its center. No sign of Steel, but there must be twenty or thirty others on street corners or in the street, sitting on stairs, leaning against walls. A few turned their heads or eyes to watch as she passed, but she ignored and ignores them. Perhaps they have come to witness history. Maybe some are like Steel, hoping for an end to their horrifyingly endless existence; maybe the ones who’ve helped her have done so because of that. Maybe they’re just bored. Not the most exciting town, Corepoint.
Nothing matters, right now, except the night sky. And in that sky, the Moon is beginning to rise.
It sits low on the horizon, seemingly bigger than it was the night before and made oblong by the distortions of the air. White and strange and round, it hardly seems worth all the pain and struggle that its absence has symbolized for the world. And yet – it pulls on everything within Nassun that is orogene. It pulls on the whole world.
Time for the world, then, to pull back.
Nassun shuts her eyes. They are all around Corepoint now – the spare key, three by three by three, twenty-seven obelisks that she has spent the past few weeks touching and taming and coaxing into orbit nearby. She can still feel the sapphire, but it is far away and not in sight; she can’t use it, and it would take months to arrive if she summoned it. These others will do, though. It’s strange to see so many of the things in the sky all together, after a lifetime with only one – or no – obelisks in sight at any given time. Stranger to feel them all connected to her, thrumming at slightly different speeds, their wells of power each at slightly different depths. The darker ones are deeper. No telling why, but it is a noticeable difference.
Nassun lifts her hands, splaying her fingers in unconscious imitation of her mother. Very carefully, she begins connecting each of the twenty-seven obelisks – one to one, then those to two apiece, then others. She is compelled by lines of sight, lines of force, strange instincts that demand mathematical relationships she does not understand. Each obelisk supports the forming lattice, rather than disrupting or canceling it out. It’s like putting horses in harness, sort of, when you’ve got one with a naturally quick gait and another that plods along. This is yoking twenty-seven high-strung racehorses… but the principle is the same.
And it is beautiful, the moment when all of the flows stop fighting Nassun and shift into lockstep. She inhales, smiling in spite of herself, feeling pleasure again for the first time since Father Earth destroyed Schaffa. It should be scary, shouldn’t it? So much power. It isn’t, though. She falls up through torrents of gray or green or mauve or clear white; parts of her that she has never known the words for move and adjust in a dance of twenty-seven parts. Oh, it is so lovely! If only Schaffa could —
Wait.
Something makes the hairs on the back of Nassun’s neck prickle. Dangerous to lose concentration now, so she forces herself to methodically touch each obelisk in turn and soothe it back into something like an idle state. They mostly tolerate this, though the opal bucks a little and she has to force it into quiescence. When all are finally stable, though, she cautiously opens her eyes and looks around.
At first the black-and-white moonlit streets are as before: silent and still, despite the crowd of stone eaters that has assembled to watch her work. (In Corepoint, it is easy to feel alone in a crowd.) Then she spies… movement. Something – someone – lurching from one shadow to another.
Startled, Nassun takes a step toward that moving figure. “H-hello?”
The figure staggers toward some kind of small pillar whose purpose Nassun has never understood, though there seems to be one on every other corner of the city. Nearly falling as it grabs the pillar for support, the figure twitches and looks up at the sound of her voice. Icewhite eyes spear at Nassun from the shadows.
Schaffa.
Awake. Moving.
Without thinking, Nassun begins to trot, then run after him. Her heart is in her mouth. She’s heard people say things like that and thought nothing of it before – just poetry, just silliness – but now she knows what it means as her mouth goes so dry that she can feel her own pulse through her tongue. Her eyes blur. “Schaffa!”