The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(52)

He doesn’t move as Nassun walks over to him. (Schaffa comes over, too, but he is slower, tense.) Steel’s gray gaze is fixed on an object beside him that is not familiar to Nassun but which would be to her mother: a hexagonal plinth rising from the floor, like a smoky quartz crystal shaft that has been sheared off halfway. Its topmost surface is at a slight angle. Steel’s hand is held toward it in a gesture of presentation. For you.

So Nassun focuses on the plinth. She reaches toward it and jerks back as something lights up around its rim before her fingers can touch the slanted surface. Bright red marks float in the air above the crystal, etching symbols into empty space. She cannot fathom their meaning, but the color unnerves her. She looks up at Steel, who has not moved and looks as if he’s been in the same position since this place was built. “What does it say?”

“That the transport vehicle I told you about is currently nonfunctional,” says the voice from within Steel’s chest. “You’ll need to power and reboot the system before we can use this station.”

“‘R-re… boot?’” She tries to figure out what putting on boots has to do with ancient ruins, then decides to run with the part she understands. “How do I give it power?”

Abruptly, Steel is in a different position, facing the archway that leads deeper into the station. “Go inside and provide power at the root. I’ll stay here and key in the start-up sequence once there’s enough power.”

“What? I don’t —”

His gray-on-gray eyes shift over to her. “You’ll see what to do inside.”

Nassun chews on the inside of her cheek, looking into the archway. It’s really dark in there.

Schaffa’s hand touches her shoulder. “I’ll go with you, of course.”

Of course. Nassun swallows and nods, grateful. Then she and Schaffa walk into the dark.

It doesn’t stay dark for long. Like on the white stair, small panels of light begin glowing along the sides of the tunnel as they progress. The lights are dim, and yellowy in a way that suggests age, weathering, or… well, or weariness. That’s the word that pops into Nassun’s head for some reason. The light is enough to glimmer off the edges of the tiles beneath their feet. There are doors and alcoves along the tunnel walls, and at one point Nassun spots a strange contraption jutting out about ten feet up. It looks like… a wagon bed? Without wheels or a yoke, and as if that wagon bed was made of the same smooth material as the stair, and as if that wagon bed ran along some kind of track set into the wall. It seems obviously made to transport people; maybe it’s how people who couldn’t or wouldn’t walk got around? Now it is still and dark, locked to the wall forever where its last driver left it.

They notice the peculiar bluish light illuminating the tunnel up ahead, but that still isn’t adequate warning enough to prepare them for when the path suddenly curves left, and they find themselves in a new cavern. This much smaller cavern isn’t full of dust, or at least not much of it. What it does contain, instead, is a titanic column of solid blue-black volcanic glass.

The column is huge, and irregular, and impossible. Nassun just stares, openmouthed, at this thing that fills nearly the whole cavern, ground to ceiling and beyond. That it is the solidified, rapidly cooled product of what must have been a titanic explosion is immediately obvious. That it is somehow the source of the lava canopy which flowed into the adjoining cavern is equally indisputable.

“I see,” Schaffa says. Even he sounds overwhelmed, his voice softened by awe. “Look.” He points down. This is what finally provides Nassun the focal point to establish perspective, and size, and distance. The thing is huge, because now she can see tiers that descend toward its base, ringing it in concentric octagons. Three of them. On the outermost tier are buildings, she thinks. They’re badly damaged, half fallen in, just shells, but she sesses at once why they still exist where the ones in the cavern beyond have crumbled. The heat that must have filled this cavern has metamorphized something in the buildings’ construction, hardening and preserving them. Some sort of concussion has done damage, too: All the buildings are torn open on the same side, facing the great glass column. Looking from what she guesses is a three-story building to the glass column, she guesstimates that the column is not as far away as it looks; it’s just much bigger than she initially guessed. The size of… oh.

“An obelisk,” she whispers. And then she can sess and guess what happened, as clearly as if she were there.

Long ago, an obelisk sat here, at the bottom of this cavern, one of its points jammed into the ground like some kind of bizarre plant. At some point, the obelisk lifted free of the pit, to float and shimmer like its fellows above the strange immensity of the city – and then something went very, very wrong. The obelisk… fell. Where it struck the earth, Nassun imagines she can hear the echo of the concussion; it did not merely fall, it drove its way in, punching through and churning down and down and down, powered by all the force of concentrated silver within its core. Nassun can’t track its path for more than a mile or so down, but there’s no reason to think it didn’t just keep going. To where, she cannot guess.

And in its wake, channeled straight up from the most molten part of the earth, came a literal fountain of earthfire to bury this city.

There’s still nothing around that looks like a way to supply power to the station. Nassun notices, though, that the cavern’s illumination comes from enormous pylons of blue light near the base of the glass column. These make up the lower-and innermost tier of the chamber. Something is making that light.