The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(42)
“Do you mean to show us the waste infrastructure?” Remwha asks Kelenli. “I feel more contextual already.”
Kelenli snorts. “Not exactly.”
She turns a corner, and then there is a dead building before us. We all stop and stare. Ivy wends up this building’s walls, which are made of some sort of red clay pressed into bricks, and around some of its pillars, which are marble. Aside from the ivy, though, nothing of the building is alive. It’s squat and low and shaped like a rectangular box. We can sess no hydrostatic pressure supporting its walls; it must use force and chemical fastenings to stay upright. The windows are just glass and metal, and I can see no nematocysts growing over their surfaces. How do they keep safe anything inside? The doors are dead wood, polished dark red-brown and carved with ivy motifs; pretty, surprisingly. The steps are a dull tawny-white sand suspension. (Centuries before, people called this concrete.) The whole thing is stunningly obsolete – yet intact, and functional, and thus fascinating for its uniqueness.
“It’s so… symmetrical,” says Bimniwha, curling her lip a little.
“Yes,” says Kelenli. She’s stopped before this building to let us take it in. “Once, though, people thought this sort of thing was beautiful. Let’s go.” She starts forward.
Remwha stares after her. “What, inside? Is that thing structurally sound?”
“Yes. And yes, we’re going inside.” Kelenli pauses and looks back at him, perhaps surprised to realize that at least some of his reticence wasn’t an act. Through the ambient, I feel her touch him, reassure him. Remwha is more of an ass when he is afraid or angry, so her comfort helps; the spiky jitter of his nerves begins to ease. She still has to play the game, however, for our many observers. “Though I suppose you could stay outside, if you wanted.”
She glances at her two guards, the brown man and woman who stay near her. They have not kept back from our group, unlike the other guards of whom we catch glimpses now and again, skirting our periphery.
Woman Guard scowls back at her. “You know better.”
“It was a thought.” Kelenli shrugs then, and gestures with her head toward the building, speaking to Remwha now. “Sounds like you don’t actually have a choice. But I promise you, the building won’t collapse on your head.”
We move to follow. Remwha walks a little slower, but eventually he comes along, too.
A holo-sign writes itself in the air before us as we cross the threshold. We have not been taught to read, and the letters of this sign look strange in any case, but then a booming voice sounds over the building’s audio system: “Welcome to the story of enervation!” I have no idea what this means. Inside, the building smells… wrong. Dry and dusty, the air stale as if there’s nothing taking in its carbon dioxide. There are other people here, we see, gathered in the building’s big open foyer or making their way up its symmetrical twin curving stairs, peering in fascination at the panels of carved wooden decoration which line each stair. They don’t look at us, distracted by the greater strangeness of our environs.
But then, Remwha says, “What is that?”
His unease, prickling along our network, makes us all look at him. He stands frowning, tilting his head from one side to the other.
“What is —” I start to ask, but then I hear? sess? it too.
“I’ll show you,” says Kelenli.
She leads us deeper into the boxy building. We walk past display crystals, each holding preserved within itself a piece of incomprehensible – but obviously old – equipment. I make out a book, a coil of wire, and a bust of a person’s head. Placards near each item explain its importance, I think, but I cannot fathom any explanation sufficient to make sense of it all.
Then Kelenli leads us onto a wide balcony with an old-fashioned ornate-wood railing. (This is especially horrifying. We are to rely on a rail made from a dead tree, unconnected to the city alarm grid or anything, for safety. Why not just grow a vine that would catch us if we fell? Ancient times were horrible.) And there we stand above a huge open chamber, gazing down at something that belongs in this dead place as much as we do. Which is to say, not at all.
My first thought is that it is another plutonic engine – a whole one, not just a fragment of a larger piece. Yes, there is the tall, imposing central crystal; there is the socket from which it grows. This engine has even been activated; much of its structure hovers, humming just a little, a few feet above the floor. But this is the only part of the engine that makes sense to me. All around the central crystal float longer, inward-curving structures; the whole of the design is somehow floral, a stylized chrysanthemum. The central crystal glows a pale gold, and the supporting crystals fade from green bases to white at the tips. Lovely, if altogether strange.
Yet when I look at this engine with more than my eyes, and touch it with nerves attuned to the perturbations of the earth, I gasp. Evil Death, the lattice of magics created by the structure is magnificent! Dozens of silvery, threadlike lines supporting one another; energies across spectra and forms all interlinked and state-changing in what seems to be a chaotic, yet utterly controlled, order. The central crystal flickers now and again, phasing through potentialities as I watch. And it’s so small! I have never seen an engine so well constructed. Not even the Plutonic Engine is this powerful or precise, for its size. If it had been built as efficiently as this tiny engine, the conductors would never have needed to create us.