The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(23)

To her surprise, however, he tilts his head instead of laughing. “To Corepoint?”

“What?”

“A city on the other side of the world. There?”

She swallows, bites her lip. “I don’t know. I just know that what I need is —” She doesn’t have the words for it, and instead makes a pantomime with her cupped hands and waggling fingers, sending imaginary wavelets to clash and mesh with each other. “The obelisks… pull on that place. It’s what they’re made to do. If I go there, I think I might be able to, uh, pull back? I can’t do it anywhere else, because…” She can’t explain it. Lines of force, lines of sight, mathematical configurations; all of the knowledge that she needs is in her mind, but cannot be reproduced by her tongue. Some of this is a gift from the sapphire, and some is application of theories her mother taught her, and some is simply from tying theory to observation and wrapping the whole thing in instinct. “I don’t know which city over there is the right one. If I get closer, and travel around a little, maybe I can —”

“Corepoint is the only thing on that side of the world, little one.”

“It’s… what?”

Schaffa stops abruptly, tugging off his pack. Nassun does the same, reading this as a signal that it’s time for a rest stop. They’re just on the leeward side of a hill, which is really just a spar of old lava from the great volcano that lies beneath Jekity. There are natural terraces all around this area, weathered out of the obsidian by wind and rain, though the rock a few inches down is too hard for farming or even much in the way of forestation. Some determined, shallow-rooted trees wave over the empty, ash-frosted terraces, but most are now being killed by the ashfall. Nassun and Schaffa will be able to see potential threats coming from a good ways off.

While Nassun pulls out some food they can share, Schaffa draws something in a nearby patch of windblown ash with his finger. Nassun cranes her neck to see that he’s made two circles on the ground. In one, he sketches a rough outline of the Stillness that is familiar to Nassun from geography lessons back in creche – except this time, he draws the Stillness in two pieces, with a line of separation near the equator. The Rifting, yes, which has become a boundary more impassable than even thousands of miles of ocean.

The other circle, however, which Nassun now understands to be a representation of the world, he leaves blank save for a single spot just above the equator and slightly to the east of the circle’s middle longitude. He doesn’t sketch an island or continent to put it on. Just that lone dot.

“Once, there were more cities on the empty face of the world,” Schaffa explains. “A few civilizations have built upon or under the sea, over the millennia. None of those lasted long, though. All that remains is Corepoint.”

It is literally a world away. “How could we get there?”

“If —” He pauses. Nassun’s belly clenches when the blurry look crosses his face. This time he winces and shuts his eyes, too, as if even the attempt to access his old self has added to his pain.

“You don’t remember?”

He sighs. “I remember that I used to.”

Nassun realizes she should have expected this. She bites her lip. “Steel might know.”

There is a slight flex of muscle along Schaffa’s jaw, quick and there and then gone. “Indeed he might.”

Steel, who vanished while Schaffa was putting away the other Guardians’ bodies, might also be listening from within the stone somewhere nearby. Does it mean something that he hasn’t popped up to tell them what to do yet? Maybe they don’t need him. “And what about the Antarctic Fulcrum? Don’t they have records and things?” She remembers seeing the Fulcrum’s library before she and Schaffa and Umber sat down with its leaders, had a cup of safe, then killed them all. The library was a strange high room filled floor to ceiling with shelves of books. Nassun likes books – her mother used to splurge and buy one every few months, and sometimes Nassun got the hand-me-downs if Jija deemed them appropriate for children – and she remembers boggling in awe, for she’d never seen so many books in her life. Surely some of those contained information about… very old cities no one has ever heard of, that only Guardians know how to get to. Um. Hmm.

“Unlikely,” Schaffa says, confirming Nassun’s misgivings. “And by now, that Fulcrum has probably been annexed by another comm, or perhaps even taken over by commless rabble. Its fields were full of edible crops, after all, and its houses were livable. Returning there would be a mistake.”

Nassun bites her lower lip. “Maybe… a boat?” She doesn’t know anything about boats.

“No, little one. A boat won’t do for such a long journey.”

He pauses significantly, and with this as warning Nassun tries to brace herself. Here is where he will abandon her, she feels painfully, fearfully certain. Here is where he will want to know what she’s up to – and then want no part of it. Why would he? Even she knows that what she wants is a terrible thing.

“I take it, then,” Schaffa says, “that you mean to assume control of the Obelisk Gate.”

Nassun gasps. Schaffa knows what the Obelisk Gate is? When Nassun herself only learned the term that morning from Steel? But then, the lore of the world, all its strange mechanisms and workings and aeons of secrets, is mostly still intact within Schaffa. It’s only things connected to his old self that are permanently lost… which means that the route to Corepoint is something that Old Schaffa needed to know, particularly. What does that mean? “Uh, yes. That’s why I want to go to Corepoint.”