The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(94)

Enough frivolity.

First the network, then the fragments of the Engine must be assembled. We reach for the amethyst because it is nearest on the globe. Though we are a world away from it, we know that it utters a low held note, its storage matrix glowing and brimful with energy as we dive, up, into its torrential flow. Already it has stopped suckling the last dregs from the briar patch at its roots, becoming a closed system in itself; now it feels almost alive. As we coax it from quiescence into resonant activity, it begins to pulse, and then finally to shimmer in patterns that emulate life, like the firing of neurotransmitters or the contractions of peristalsis. Is it alive? I wonder this for the first time, a question triggered by Kelenli’s lessons. It is a thing of high-state matter, but it coexists simultaneously with a thing of high-state magic made in its image – and taken from the bodies of people who once laughed and raged and sang. Is there anything left of their will in the amethyst?

If so… would the Niess approve of what we, their caricature children, mean to do?

I can spare no more time for such thoughts. The decision has been made.

So we expand this macro-level start-up sequence throughout the network. We sess without sessapinae. We feel the change. We know it in our bones – because we are part of this engine, components of humanity’s greatest marvel. On Earth, at the heart of every node of Syl Anagist, klaxons echo across the city and warning pylons blaze red warnings that can be seen from far away as one by one, the fragments begin to thrum and shimmer and detach from their sockets. My breath quickens when I, resonant within each, feel the first peeling-away of crystal from rougher stone, the drag as we alight and begin pulsing with the state-change of magic and then begin to rise —

(There is a stutter here, quick and barely noticeable in the heady moment, though glaring through the lens of memory. Some of the fragments hurt us, just a little, when they detach from their sockets. We feel the scrape of metal that should not be there, the scratch of needles against our crystalline skin. We smell a whiff of rust. It’s quick pain and quickly forgotten, as with any needle. Only later will we remember, and lament.)

— rise, and hum, and turn. I inhale deeply as the sockets and their surrounding cityscapes fall away below us. Syl Anagist shunts over to backup power systems; those should hold until Geoarcanity. But they are irrelevant, these mundane concerns. I flow, fly, fall up into rushing light that is purple or indigo or mauve or gold, the spinel and the topaz and the garnet and the sapphire – so many, so bright! So alive with building power.

(So alive, I think again, and this thought sends a shudder through the network, because Gaewha was thinking it, too, and Dushwha, and it is Remwha who takes us to task with a crack like a slipstrike fault: Fools, we will die if you don’t focus! So I let this thought go.)

And – ah, yes, framed there on-screen, centered in our perception like an eye glaring down at its quarry: the onyx. Positioned, as Kelenli last bade it, above Corepoint.

I am not nervous, I tell myself as I reach for it.

The onyx isn’t like the other fragments. Even the moonstone is quiescent by comparison; it is only a mirror, after all. But the onyx is powerful, frightening, the darkest of dark, unknowable. Where the other fragments must be sought and actively engaged, it snatches at my awareness the instant I come near, trying to pull me deeper into its rampant, convecting currents of silver. When I have connected to it before, the onyx has rejected me, as it has done for all the others in turn. The finest magests in Syl Anagist could not fathom why – but now, when I offer myself and the onyx claims me, suddenly I know. The onyx is alive. What is just a question in the other fragments has been answered here: It sesses me. It learns me, touching me with a presence that is suddenly undeniable.

And in the very moment when I realize this and have enough time to wonder fearfully what these presences think of me, their pathetic descendant made from the fusion of their genes with their destroyers’ hate —



— I perceive at last a secret of magestry that even the Niess simply accepted rather than understood. This is magic, after all, not science. There will always be parts of it that no one can fathom. But now I know: Put enough magic into something nonliving, and it becomes alive. Put enough lives into a storage matrix, and they retain a collective will, of sorts. They remember horror and atrocity, with whatever is left of them – their souls, if you like.

So the onyx yields to me now because, it senses at last, I too have known pain. My eyes have been opened to my own exploitation and degradation. I am afraid, of course, and angry, and hurt, but the onyx does not scorn these feelings within me. It seeks something else, however, something more, and finally finds what it seeks nestled in a little burning knot behind my heart: determination. I have committed myself to making, of all this wrongness, something right.

That’s what the onyx wants. Justice. And because I want that too —



I open my eyes in flesh. “I’ve engaged the control cabochon,” I report for the conductors.

“Confirmed,” says Gallat, looking at the screen where Biomagestry monitors our neuroarcanic connections. Applause breaks out among our observers, and I feel sudden contempt for them. Their clumsy instruments and their weak, simple sessapinae have finally told them what is as obvious to us as breathing. The Plutonic Engine is up and running.

Now that the fragments have all launched, each one rising to hum and flicker and hover over two hundred and fifty-six city-nodes and seismically energetic points, we begin the ramp-up sequence. Among the fragments, the pale-colored flow buffers ignite first, then we upcycle the deeper jewel tones of the generators. The onyx acknowledges sequence initialization with a single, heavy blat of sound that sends ripples across the Hemispheric Ocean.