The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(101)

He’s thirty, forty feet away, near one of the pylon buildings that surround Corepoint’s hole. Close enough to recognize her – and yet there is nothing in his gaze that seems to know who she is. Quite the contrary; he blinks, and then smiles in a slow, cold way that makes her stumble to a halt in deep, skin-twitching unease.

“Sch-Schaffa?” she says again. Her voice is very thin in the silence.

“Hello, little enemy,” Schaffa says, in a voice that reverberates through Corepoint and the mountain below it and the ocean for a thousand miles around.

Then he turns to the pylon building behind him. A high, narrow opening appears at his touch; he stagger-stumbles through. It vanishes behind him in an instant.

Nassun screams and flings herself after him.

***

You are deep in the lower mantle, halfway through the world, when you sense the activation of part of the Obelisk Gate.

Or so your mind interprets it, at first, until you master your alarm and reach forth to confirm what you’re feeling. It’s hard. Here in the deep earth, there is so much magic; trying to sift through it for whatever is happening on the surface is like trying to hear a distant creek over a hundred thundering waterfalls nearby. It’s worse the deeper Hoa takes you, until finally you have to “close your eyes” and stop perceiving magic entirely – because there’s something immense nearby that is “blinding” you with its brightness. It is as if there’s a sun underground, silver-white and swirling with an unbelievably intense concentration of magic… but you can also feel Hoa skirting wide around this sun, even though that means the overall journey has taken longer than absolutely necessary. You’ll have to ask him why later.

You can’t see much besides churning red here in the depths. How fast are you going? Without referents, it’s impossible to tell. Hoa is an intermittent shadow in the redness beside you, shimmering on the rare occasions when you catch a glimpse of him – but then, you’re probably shimmering, too. He isn’t pushing through the earth, but becoming part of it and transiting the particles of himself around its particles, becoming a waveform that you can sess like sound or light or heat. Disturbing enough if you don’t think about the fact that he’s doing it to you, too. You can’t feel anything like this, except a hint of pressure from his hand, and the suggestion of tension from Lerna’s arm. There’s no sound other than an omnipresent rumble, no smell of sulfur or anything else. You don’t know if you’re breathing, and you don’t feel the need for air.

But the distant awakening of multiple obelisks panics you, nearly makes you try to pull away from Hoa so you can concentrate, even though – stupid – that would not just kill you but annihilate you, turning you to ash and then vaporizing the ashes and then setting the vapor on fire. “Nassun!” you cry, or try to cry, but words are lost in the deep roar. There is no one to hear your cry.

Except. There is.

Something shifts around you – or, you realize belatedly, you are shifting relative to it. It isn’t something you think about until it happens again, and you think you feel Lerna jerk against your side. Then it finally occurs to you to look at the silver wisps of your companions’ bodies, which at least you can make out against the dense red material of the earth around you.

There is a human-shaped blaze linked to your hand, heavy as a mountain upon your perception as it forges swiftly upward: Hoa. He is moving oddly, however, periodically shifting to one side or another; that’s what you perceived before. Beside Hoa are faint shimmers, delicately etched. One has a palpable interruption in the silverflow of one arm; that has to be Tonkee. You cannot distinguish Hjarka from Danel because you can’t see hair or relative size or anything so detailed as teeth. Only knowing that Lerna is closer to you makes him distinct. And beyond Lerna —



Something flashes past, mountain-heavy and magic-bright, human shaped but not human. And not Hoa.

Another flash. Something streaks on a perpendicular trajectory, intercepting and driving it away, but there are more. Hoa lunges aside again, and a new flash misses. But it’s close. Lerna seems to twitch beside you. Can he see it, too?

You really hope not, because now you understand what’s happening. Hoa is dodging. And you can do nothing, nothing, but trust Hoa to keep you safe from the stone eaters who are trying to rip you away from him.

No. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re this afraid – when you’ve been merged into the high-pressure semisolid rock of the planet’s mantle, and when everyone you love will die in slow horror should you fail in your quest, and when you’re surrounded by currents of magic that are so much more powerful than anything you’ve ever seen, and when you’re under attack by murderous stone eaters. But. You did not spend your childhood learning to perform under the threat of death for nothing.

Mere threads of magic aren’t enough to stop stone eaters. The earth’s winding rivers of the stuff are all you have to hand. Reaching for one feels like plunging your awareness into a lava tube, and for an instant you’re distracted by wondering whether this is what it will feel like if Hoa lets go – a flash of terrible heat and pain, and then oblivion. You push that aside. A memory comes to you. Meov. Driving a wedge of ice into a cliff face, shearing it off at just the precise time to smash a ship full of Guardians —



You shape your will into a wedge and splint it into the nearest magic torrent, a great crackling, wending coil of a thing. It works, but your aim is wild; magic sprays everywhere, and Hoa must dodge again, this time from your efforts. Fuck! You try again, concentrating this time, letting your thoughts loosen. You’re already in the earth, red and hot instead of dark and warm, but how is this any different? You’re still in the crucible, just literally instead of a symbolic mosaic. You need to drive your wedge in here and aim it there as another flash of person-shaped mountain starts to pace you and darts in for the kill —