The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(107)
She sesses it, though, and her eyes narrow. Your gray eyes, like ash. And an instant later, a wall of obsidian slams up from the ground in front of you, tearing through the fiber and metal of the city’s infrastructure, forming a barrier between you and her that spans the road.
The force of this upheaval flings you to the ground. When the stars clear from your vision and the dust dissipates enough, you stare up at the wall in shock. Your daughter did this. To you.
Someone grabs you and you flinch. It’s Tonkee.
“I don’t know if it’s occurred to you,” she says, hauling you to your feet, “but your child seems like she’s got your temper. So, you know, maybe you shouldn’t get too pushy.”
“I don’t even know what she did,” you murmur, dazed, though you nod thanks to Tonkee for helping you up. “That wasn’t… I don’t…” There was no Fulcrum-esque precision in what Nassun did, even though you taught her Fulcrum fundamentals. You lay your hand against the wall in confusion, and feel the lingering flickers of magic within its substance, dancing from particle to particle as they fade. “She’s blending magic and orogeny. I’ve never seen that before.”
I have. We called it tuning.
Meanwhile. No longer hampered by you, Nassun has climbed the pylon steps. She stands atop it now, surrounded by turning, bright red warning symbols that dance in the air. A heavy, faintly sulfurous breeze wafts up from Corepoint’s great hole, lifting the stray hairs from her twin plaits. She wonders if Father Earth is relieved to have manipulated her into sparing its life.
Schaffa will live if she turns every person in the world into stone eaters. That is all that matters.
“First, the network,” she says, lifting her eyes to the sky. The twenty-seven obelisks flicker from solid to magic in unison as she reignites them. She spreads her hands before her.
On the ground below her, you flinch as you sess – feel – are attuned to – the lightning-fast activation of twenty-seven obelisks. They act as one in this instant, thrumming so powerfully together that your teeth itch. You wonder why Tonkee isn’t grimacing the way you are, but Tonkee is only a still.
Tonkee’s not stupid, though, and this is her life’s work. While you stare at your daughter in awe, she narrows her eyes at the obelisks. “Three cubed,” she murmurs. You shake your head, mute. She glares at you, irritated by your slowness. “Well, if I was going to emulate a big crystal, I would start by putting smaller crystals into a cubiform lattice configuration.”
Then you understand. The big crystal that Nassun means to emulate is the onyx. You need a key to initialize the Gate; that’s what Alabaster told you. What Alabaster didn’t tell you, the useless ass, was that there are many possible kinds of keys. When he tore the Rifting across the Stillness, he used a network composed of all the node maintainers in his vicinity, probably because the onyx itself would have turned him to stone at once. The node maintainers were a lesser substitute for the onyx – a spare key. You didn’t know what you were doing that first time, when you yoked the orogenes in Castrima-under into a network, but he knew the onyx was too much for you to just grab directly, back then. You didn’t have Alabaster’s flexibility or creativity. He taught you a safer way.
Nassun, though, is the student Alabaster always wanted. She cannot have ever accessed the Obelisk Gate before – it’s been yours, till now – but as you observe in shock, in horror, she reaches beyond her spare-key network, finding other obelisks one by one and binding them. It’s slower than it would be with the onyx, but you can tell that it’s just as effective. It’s working. The apatite, connected and locked. The sardonyx, sending a little pulse from where it hovers out of sight, somewhere over the southern sea. The jade —
Nassun will open the Gate.
You shove Tonkee away. “Get as far from me as you can. All of you.”
Tonkee doesn’t waste time arguing. Her eyes widen; she turns and runs. You hear her shouting to the others. You hear Danel arguing. And then you can no longer pay heed to them.
Nassun will open the Gate, turn to stone, and die.
Only one thing can stop Nassun’s network of obelisks: the onyx. You need to reach it first, though, and right now it’s all the way on the other side of the planet, halfway between Castrima and Rennanis where you left it. Once, long ago at Castrima-over, it called you to itself. But do you dare wait for it to do that, now, with Nassun grabbing control of every part of the Gate? You need to get to the onyx first. For that, you need magic – much more of it than you can muster just by yourself, here without a single obelisk to your name.
The beryl, the hematite, the iolite —
She’s going to die right in front of you if you don’t do something.
Frantically you throw your awareness into the earth. Corepoint sits on a volcano, maybe you can —
Wait. Something pulls your attention back up to the volcano’s mouth. Underground, but closer by. Somewhere underneath this city, you sense a network. Lines of magic woven together, supporting one another, rooted deep to draw up more… It’s faint. It’s slow. And there is a familiar, ugly buzz at the back of your mind when you touch this network. Buzz upon buzz upon buzz.
Ah, yes. The network you’ve found is Guardians, nearly a thousand of them. Of rusting course. You have never consciously sought the magic of them before, but for the first time you understand what that buzz is – some part of you, even before Alabaster’s training, felt the foreignness of the magic within them. The knowledge sends a sharp, nearly paralyzing lance of fear through you. The network of them is close by, easy to grab, but if you do this, what’s to stop all these Guardians from boiling up out of Warrant like angry wasps from a disturbed nest? Don’t you have enough problems?