The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(16)

Tonkee shrugs, then awkwardly bends to tuck into the little bowl of rice and beans she has from the communal pot. After she swallows, she says, “I prefer to make conservative estimates. You’d better, too.”

She means Lerna, who seems to be in the process of attaching himself to you. You don’t know why. You’re not exactly a prize, dressed in ash and with no arm, and half the time he seems to be furious with you. You’re still surprised it’s not all the time. He always was a strange boy.

“Anyway, here’s a thing I want you to think about,” Tonkee continues. “What was Nassun doing when you found her?”

And you flinch. Because, damn it, Tonkee has once again said aloud a thing that you would have preferred to leave unsaid, and unconsidered.

And because you remember that moment, with the power of the Gate sluicing through you, when you reached and touched and felt a familiar resonance touch back. A resonance backed, and amplified, by something blue and deep and strangely resistant to the Gate’s linkage. The Gate told you – somehow – that it was the sapphire.

What is your ten-year-old daughter doing playing with an obelisk?

How is your ten-year-old daughter alive after playing with an obelisk?

You think of how that momentary contact felt. Familiar vibration-taste of an orogeny which you’ve been quelling since before she was born and training since she was two – but so much sharper and more intense now. You weren’t trying to take the sapphire from Nassun, but the Gate was, following instructions that long-dead builders somehow wrote into the layered lattices of the onyx. Nassun kept the sapphire, though. She actually fought off the Obelisk Gate.

What has your little girl been doing, this long dark year, to develop such skill?

“You don’t know what her situation is,” Tonkee continues, which makes you blink out of this terrible reverie and focus on her. “You don’t know what kind of people she’s living with. You said she’s in the Antarctics, somewhere near the eastern coast? That part of the world shouldn’t be feeling the Season much yet. So what are you going to do, then, snatch her out of a comm where she’s safe and has enough to eat and can still see the sky, and drag her north to a comm sitting on the Rifting, where the shakes will be constant and the next gas vent might kill everyone?” She looks hard at you. “Do you want to help her? Or just have her with you again? Those two things aren’t the same.”

“Jija killed Uche,” you snap. The words don’t hurt, unless you think about them as you speak. Unless you remember your son’s smell or his little laugh or the sight of his body under a blanket. Unless you think of Corundum – you use anger to press down the twin throbs of grief and guilt. “I have to get her away from him. He killed my son!”

“He hasn’t killed your daughter yet. He’s had, what, twenty months? Twenty-one? That means something.” Tonkee spies Lerna coming back toward you through the crowd, and sighs. “There are just things you ought to think about, is all I’m saying. And I can’t even believe I’m saying it. She’s another obelisk-user, and I can’t even go investigate it.” Tonkee utters a frustrated grumbly sound. “I hate this damn Season. I have to be so rusting practical now.”

You’re surprised into a chuckle, but it’s weak. The questions Tonkee’s raised are good ones, of course, and some of them you can’t answer. You think about them for a long time that night, and in the days thereafter.

Rennanis is nearly into the Western Coastals, just past the Merz Desert. Castrima is going to have to go through the desert to get there, because skirting around it would drastically increase the length of your journey – a difference of months versus years. But you’re making good time through the central Somidlats, where the roads are decently passable and you haven’t been bothered by many raiders or significant wildlife. The Hunters have been able to find a lot of forage to supplement the comm’s stores, including a little more game than before. Unsurprising, since they’re no longer competing against hordes of insects. It’s not enough – small voles and birds just aren’t going to hold a comm of a thousand-plus people for long. But it’s better than nothing.

When you start noticing changes in the land that presage desert – thinning of the skeletal forest, flattening of the topography, a gradual drawing away of the water table amid the strata – you decide that it’s time to finally try to talk to Ykka.

By now you’ve entered a stone forest: a place of tall, sharp-edged black spires that claw irregularly at the sky above and around you as the group edges through its depths. There aren’t many of these in the world. Most get shattered by shakes, or – back when there was a Fulcrum – deliberately destroyed by Fulcrum blackjackets at local comms’ commissioned request. No comm lives in a stone forest, see, and no well-run comm wants one nearby. Apart from stone forests’ tendency to collapse and crush everything within, they tend to be riddled with wet caves and other water-hewn formations that make marvelous homes for dangerous flora and fauna. Or people.

The road runs straight through this stone forest, which is bullshit. That is to say, no one in their right mind would have built a road through a place like this. If a quartent governor had proposed using people’s taxes on this dangerous bit of bandit-bait, that governor would’ve been replaced in the next election… or shanked in the night. So that’s your first clue that something’s off about the place. The second is that there’s not much vegetation in the forest. Not much anywhere this far into the Season, but also no sign that there was ever any vegetation here in the first place. That means this stone forest is recent – so recent that there’s been no time for wind or rain to erode the stone and permit plant growth. So recent that it didn’t exist before the Season.