The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(84)
She gets him into the bed, leaving a pad of cloths under his bare bottom. She trickles water from their canteens into his mouth, and when that runs out, she cautiously tries to get more from the strange water pump in the kitchen. There are no levers or handles on it, but when she puts her canteen beneath the spigot, water comes out. She’s a diligent girl. First she uses the powder in her runny-sack to make a cup of safe from the water, checking for contaminants. The safe dissolves but stays cloudy and white, so she drinks that herself and then brings more water to Schaffa. He drinks readily, which probably means he was really thirsty. She gives him raisins that she first soaks in water, and he chews and swallows, although slowly and without much vigor. She hasn’t done a good job of taking care of him.
She will do better, she decides, and heads outside to the garden to pick food for them both.
***
Syenite told me the date. Six years. It’s been six years? No wonder she’s so angry. Told me to go jump in a hole, since it’s been so long. She doesn’t want to see me again. Such a steelheart. Told her I was sorry. My fault, all of it.
My fault. My Moon. Turned the spare key today. (Lines of sight, lines of force, three by three by three? Cubical arrangement, like a good little crystal lattice.) The key unlocks the Gate. Dangerous to bring so many obelisks to Yumenes, though; Guardians everywhere. Wouldn’t have time before they got me. Better to make a spare key out of orogenes, and who can I use? Who is strong enough. Syen isn’t, almost but not quite. Innon isn’t. Coru is but I can’t find him. He’s just a baby anyway, not right. Babies. Lots of babies. Node maintainers? Node maintainers!
No. They’ve suffered enough. Use the Fulcrum seniors instead.
Or the node maintainers.
Why should I do it here? Plugs the hole. Do it there, tho… Get Yumenes. Get the Fulcrum. Get a lot of the Guardians.
Stop nagging me, woman. Go tell Innon to fuck you, or something. You’re always so cranky when you haven’t gotten laid. I’ll jump in the hole tomorrow.
***
It becomes a routine.
She takes care of Schaffa in the mornings, then goes out in the afternoon to explore the city and find things they need. There’s no need to bathe Schaffa, or to clean up his waste again; astonishingly, the bed takes care of that, too. So Nassun can spend her time with him talking, and asking him to wake up, and telling him that she doesn’t know what to do.
Steel vanishes again. She doesn’t care.
Other stone eaters periodically show up, however, or at least she feels the impact of their presence. She sleeps on the couch, and one morning wakes to find a blanket covering her. It’s just a simple gray thing, but it’s warm, and she’s grateful. When she starts picking apart one of her sausages to get the fat out of it, intending to make tallow – the candles from her runny-sack are getting low – she finds a stone eater in the stairwell, its finger curled in a beckoning gesture. When she follows it, it stops beside a panel covered in curious symbols. The stone eater is pointing toward one in particular. Nassun touches it and it alights with silver, glowing golden and sending threads questing over her skin. The stone eater says something in a language Nassun does not understand before it vanishes, but when she returns to the apartment, it’s warmer, and soft white lights have come on overhead. Touching squares on the wall makes the lights go off.
One afternoon she walks into the apartment to find a stone eater crouched beside a pile of things that look to have come from some comm’s storecache: burlap sacks full of root vegetables and mushrooms and dried fruit, a big round of sharp white cheese, hide bags of packed pemmican, satchels of dried rice and beans, and – precious – a small cask of salt. The stone eater vanishes when Nassun approaches the pile, so she cannot even thank it. She has to blow ash off of everything before she puts it away.
Nassun has figured out that the apartment, like the garden, must have been used until recently. The detritus of another person’s life is everywhere: pants much too big for her in the drawers, a man’s underwear beside them. (One day these are replaced with clothing that fits Nassun. Another stone eater? Or maybe the magic in the apartment is even more sophisticated than she thought.) Books are piled in one of the rooms, many of them native to Corepoint – she’s beginning to recognize the peculiar, clean, not-quite-natural look of Corepoint things. A few, however, are normal-looking, with covers of cracking leather and pages still stinky with chemicals and handwritten ink. Some of the books are in a language she can’t read. Something Coaster.
One, however, is made of the Corepoint material, but its blank pages have been handwritten over, in Sanze-mat. Nassun opens this one, sits down, and begins to read.
***
WENT
IN THE HOLE
DON’T
don’t bury me
please DON’T, Syen, I love you, I’m sorry, keep me safe, watch my back and I’ll watch yours, there’s no one else who’s as strong as you, I wish so much that you were here, please DON’T
***
Corepoint is a city in still life.
Nassun begins losing track of time. The stone eaters occasionally speak to her, but most of them don’t know her language, and she doesn’t hear enough of theirs to pick it up. She watches them sometimes, and is fascinated to realize that some of them are performing tasks. She watches one malachite-green woman who stands amid the windblown trees, and belatedly realizes the woman is holding a branch up and to one side, to make it grow in a particular way. All of the trees, which look windblown and yet are a little too dramatic, a little too artful in their splaying and bending, have been shaped thus. It must take years.