The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(67)

“Those weird words? What did she say?”



“That this…” He grimaces. “Thing. It’s called a vehimal. The announcement says it will depart from this city and begin the transit to Corepoint in two minutes, to arrive in six hours. There was something about other vehicles, other routes, return trips to various… nodes? I don’t remember what that means. And she hopes we will enjoy the ride.” He smiles thinly.

“Oh.” Pleased, Nassun kicks a little in her chair. Six hours to travel all the way to the other side of the planet? But she shouldn’t be amazed by that, maybe, since these are the people who built the obelisks.

There seems to be nothing to do but get comfortable. Cautiously, Nassun unslings her runny-sack and lets it hang from the back of her chair. This causes her to notice that something like lichen grows all over the floor, though it cannot be natural or accidental; the blooms of it spread out in pretty, regular patterns. She stretches down a foot and finds that it is soft, like carpet.

Schaffa is more restless, pacing around the comfortable confines of the… vehimal… and touching its golden veins now and again. It’s slow, methodical pacing, but even that is unusual for him, so Nassun is restless, too. “I have been here,” he murmurs.

“What?” She heard him. She’s just confused.

“In this vehimal. Perhaps in that very seat. I have been here, I feel it. And that language – I don’t remember ever having heard it, and yet.” He bares his teeth suddenly, and thrusts his fingers into his hair. “Familiarity, but no, no… context! No meaning! Something about this journey is wrong. Something is wrong and I don’t remember what.”



Schaffa has been damaged for as long as Nassun has known him, but this is the first time he has seemed damaged to her. He’s speaking faster, words tumbling over one another. There is an oddness to the way his eyes dart around the vehimal interior that makes Nassun suspect he’s seeing things that aren’t there.

Trying to conceal her anxiety, she reaches out and pats the shell-chair beside her. “These are soft enough to sleep in, Schaffa.”



It’s too obvious a suggestion, but he turns to gaze at her, and for a moment the haunted tension of his expression softens. “Always so concerned for me, my little one.” But it stops the restlessness as she’d hoped, and he comes over to sit.

Just as he does – Nassun starts – the woman’s voice speaks again. It’s asking a question. Schaffa frowns and then translates, slowly, “She – I think this is the vehimal’s voice. It speaks to us now, specifically. Not just an announcement.”



Nassun shifts, suddenly less comfortable inside the thing. “It talks. It’s alive?”



“I’m not certain the distinction between living creature and lifeless object matters to the people who built this place. Yet —” He hesitates, then raises his voice to haltingly speak strange words to the air. The voice answers again, repeating something Nassun heard before. She’s not sure where some of the words begin or end, but the syllables are the same. “It says that we are approaching the… transition point. And it asks if we would like to… experience?” He shakes his head, irritable. “To see something. Finding the words in our own tongue is more difficult than understanding what’s being said.”



Nassun twitches with nerves. She draws her feet up into her chair, irrationally afraid of hurting the creature-thing’s insides. She isn’t sure what she means to ask. “Will it hurt, to see?” Hurt the vehimal, she means, but she cannot help also thinking, Hurt us.

The voice speaks again before Schaffa has time to translate Nassun’s question. “No,” it says.

Nassun jumps in pure shock, her orogeny twitching in a way that would have earned her a shout from Essun. “Did you say no?” she blurts, looking around at the vehimal’s walls. Maybe it was a coincidence.

“Biomagestric storage surpluses permit —” The voice slips back into the old language, but Nassun is certain she did not imagine hearing those oddly pronounced words of Sanze-mat. “— processing,” it concludes. Its voice is soothing, but it seems to come from the very walls, and it troubles Nassun that she has nothing to look at, no face to orient on while she’s listening to it. How is it even speaking with no mouth, no throat? She imagines the cilia on the outside of the vehicle somehow rubbing together like insects’ legs, and her skin crawls.

It continues, “Translation —” Something. “— linguistic drift.” That sounded like Sanze-mat, but she doesn’t know what it means. It continues for a few more words, incomprehensible again.

Nassun looks at Schaffa, who’s also frowning in alarm. “How do I answer what it was asking before?” she whispers. “How do I tell it that I want to see whatever it’s talking about?”



In answer, though Nassun had not meant to ask this question directly of the vehimal, the featureless wall in front of them suddenly darkens into round black spots, as if the surface has suddenly sprouted ugly mold. These spread and merge rapidly until half of the wall is nothing but blackness. As if they’re looking through a window into the bowels of the city, but outside the vehimal there’s nothing to see but black.

Then light appears on the bottom edge of this window – which really is a window, she realizes; the entire front end of the vehimal has somehow become transparent. The light, in rectangular panels like the ones that lined the stairway from the surface, brightens and marches forward into the darkness ahead, and by its illumination Nassun is able to see walls arching around them. Another tunnel, this one only large enough for the vehimal, and curving through dark rocky walls that are surprisingly rough-hewn given the obelisk-builders’ penchant for seamless smoothness. The vehimal is moving steadily along this tunnel, though not quickly. Propelled by its cilia? By some other means Nassun cannot fathom? She finds herself simultaneously fascinated and a little bored, if that is possible. It seems impossible that something which goes so slow can get them to the other side of the world in six hours. If all of those hours will be like this, riding a smooth white track through a rocky black tunnel, with nothing to occupy them except Schaffa’s restlessness and a disembodied voice, it will feel much longer.