The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(38)

As Steel instructed, they camp for the night a mile or two back from the Pucker. In the small hours before dawn, Nassun wakes, hearing a distant screech, but Schaffa soothes her. “I’ve heard that now and again,” he says softly, over the crackling of the fire. He insisted on a watch this time, so Nassun took the earlier shift. “Something in the Pucker forest. It doesn’t seem to be coming this way.”

She believes him. But neither of them sleeps well that night.

In the morning, they rise before dawn and start up the road. In the early-morning light, Nassun stares at the deceptively still double crater before them. Up close, it’s easier to see that there are breaks in the inner caldera’s walls at regular intervals; someone meant for people to be able to get inside. The outer caldera’s floor is completely overgrown, however, yellow-green and waving with a forest of treelike grass that has apparently choked out every other form of vegetation in the area. There’s no sess of even game trails across it.

The real surprise, though, is underneath the Pucker.

“Steel’s deadciv ruin,” she says. “It’s underground.”

Schaffa glances at her in surprise, but he does not protest. “In the magma chamber?”

“Maybe?” Nassun can’t believe it, either, at first, but the silver does not lie. She notices something else strange as she expands her sesunal awareness of the area. The silver mirrors the perturbations of topography and the forest here – the same way it does everywhere. Yet the silver here is brighter, somehow, and it seems to flow more readily from plant to plant and rock to rock. These blend to become larger, dazzling flows that all run together like streams, until the ruin sits within a pool of glimmering, churning light. She can’t make out details, there’s so much of it – just empty space, and an impression of buildings. It’s huge, this ruin. A city, like no city Nassun has ever sessed.

But she has sessed this torrential churn of silver before. She cannot help turning to glance back toward the sapphire that is faintly visible some miles off. They’ve outpaced it, but it’s still following.

“Yes,” Schaffa says. He’s been watching her, and missing nothing as she makes the connections. “I don’t remember this city, but I know of others like it. The obelisks were made in such places.”

She shakes her head, trying to fathom it all. “What happened to this city? There must have been a lot of people here once.”

“The Shattering.”

She inhales. She’s heard of it, of course, and believed in it the way children believe most stories. She remembers seeing an artist’s line rendering of the event in one of her creche books: lightning and rocks falling from the sky, fire erupting from the ground, tiny human figures running and doomed. “So that’s what it was like? A big volcano?”

“The Shattering was like this here.” Schaffa gazes out over the waving forest. “Elsewhere, it was different. The Shattering was a hundred different Seasons, Nassun, all over the world, all striking at once. It is a marvel that anything of humanity survived.”

The way he’s talking… It seems impossible, but Nassun bites her lip. “Were you… do you remember it?”

He glances at Nassun, surprised, and then smiles in a way that is equal parts weary and wry. “I don’t. I think… I suspect that I was born sometime after, though I have no proof of that. Even if I could remember the Shattering, though, I feel fairly certain that I wouldn’t want to.” He sighs, then shakes his head. “The sun is up. Let’s face the future, at least, and leave the past to itself.” Nassun nods, and they step off the trail into the trees.

The trees are strange things, with long, thin leaves like elongated grass blades, and narrow, flexible trunks that grow no more than a couple of feet apart. In some places Schaffa has to stop and push apart two or three trees so that they can wriggle through. This makes for hard going, though, and before long Nassun is out of breath. She stops, dripping sweat, but Schaffa pushes on. “Schaffa,” she says, about to ask for a break.

“No,” he says, pushing over another tree with a grunt. “Remember the stone eater’s warning, little one. We must reach the center of this forest by dusk. It’s now clear we will need every moment of that time.”

He’s right. Nassun swallows, starts taking deeper breaths so she can work better, and then resumes pushing through the forest with him.

She develops a rhythm, working with him. She’s good at finding the quickest paths that don’t require pushing through, and when she does, he follows her. When these paths end, however, he shoves and kicks and breaks trees until the way is clear, while she follows. She can catch her breath during these brief lulls, but it’s never quite enough. A stitch develops in her side. She starts having trouble seeing because the tree leaves keep pulling some of her hair loose from its twin buns, and sweat has made the curls lengthen and dangle into her eyes. She wants desperately to rest for an hour or so. Drink some water. Eat something. The clouds overhead get grayer as the hours pass, however, and it becomes increasingly hard to tell how much daylight is left.

“I can,” Nassun tries at one point, while trying to think of how she can use orogeny, or the silver, or something, to clear the way.

“No,” Schaffa says, somehow intuiting what she would have said. He’s produced a black glass poniard from somewhere. It’s not a useful knife for this situation, although somehow he has made it so by stabbing each of the grass-tree trunks before kicking them down. That helps them break more easily. “Freezing these plants would only make them more difficult to get through, and a shake could cause the magma chamber below us to collapse.”