The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(53)
Schaffa, too, has come to the same conclusion. “The tunnel ends here,” he says, gesturing toward the blue pylons and the column’s base. “There’s nowhere else to go but to the foot of this monstrosity. But are you certain you want to follow in the footsteps of whoever did this?”
Nassun bites her bottom lip. She does not. Here is the wrongness that she sessed from the stair, though she cannot tell its source yet. Still… “Steel wants me to see whatever is down there.”
“Are you certain you want to do what he wishes, Nassun?”
She isn’t. Steel cannot be trusted. But she’s already committed herself to the path of destroying the world; whatever Steel wants cannot be worse than this. So when Nassun nods, Schaffa simply inclines his head in acquiescence, and offers her his hand so that they can walk down the road to the pylons together.
Walking past the tiers feels like moving through a graveyard, and Nassun feels compelled to a respectful silence for that reason. Between the buildings, she can make out carbonized walkways, melted-glass troughs that must have once held plants, strange posts and structures whose purpose she isn’t sure she’d be able to fathom even if they weren’t half-melted. She decides that this post is for tying horses, and that frame is where the tanners racked drying hides. Remapping the familiar onto the strange doesn’t work very well, of course, because nothing about this city is normal. If the people who lived here rode mounts, they were not horses. If they made pottery or tools, those were not shaped from clay or obsidian, and the crafters who made such things were not merely knappers. These are people who built, and then lost control of, an obelisk. There is no telling what wonders and horrors filled their streets.
In her anxiety, Nassun reaches up to touch the sapphire, mostly just to reassure herself that she can do so through tons of cooled lava and petrifying decayed city. It is as easy to connect to here as it was up there, which is a relief. It tugs at her gently – or as gently as any obelisk does – and for a moment she lets herself be drawn into its flowing, watery light. It does not frighten her to be so drawn in; to the degree that one can trust an inanimate object, Nassun trusts the sapphire obelisk. It is the thing that told her about Corepoint, after all, and now she senses another message in the shimmering interstices of its tight-packed lines —
“Up ahead,” she blurts, startling herself.
Schaffa stops and looks at her. “What?”
Nassun has to shake her head, drawing her mind back into itself and out of all that blue. “The… the place to put in power. Is up ahead, like Steel said. Past the track.”
“Track?” Schaffa turns, gazing down the sloping walkway. Up ahead is the second tier – a smooth, featureless plane of more of that not-stone white stuff. The people who built the obelisks seem to have used that stuff in all their oldest and most enduring ruins.
“The sapphire… knows this place,” she tries to explain. It’s a fumbling sort of explanation, as hard as trying to describe orogeny to a still. “Not this place specifically, but somewhere like it…” She reaches for it again, asking for more without words, and is nearly overwhelmed with a blue flicker of images, sensations, beliefs. Her perspective changes. She stands at the center of three tiers, no longer in a cavern but facing a blue horizon across which pleasant clouds churn and race and vanish and are reborn. The tiers around her teem with activity – though it all blurs together, and what she can discern of the few instants of stillness makes no sense. Strange vehicles like the car she saw in the tunnel run along the sides of buildings, following tracks of differently colored light. The buildings are covered in green, vines and grassy rooftops and flowers curling over lintels and walls. People, hundreds of them, go in and out of these, and walk up and down the paths in unbroken blurs of motion. She cannot see their faces, but she catches glimpses of black hair like Schaffa’s, earrings of artfully curled vine motifs, a dress swirling about ankles, fingers flicking while adorned with sheaths of colored lacquer.
And everywhere, everywhere, is the silver that lies beneath heat and motion, the stuff of the obelisks. It spiders and flows, converging not just into trickles but rivers, and when she looks down she sees that she stands in a pool of liquid silver, soaking in through her feet —
Nassun staggers a little as she comes back this time, and Schaffa’s hand lands firmly on her shoulder to steady her. “Nassun.”
“I’m all right,” she says. She isn’t sure of that, but she says it anyway because she doesn’t want him to worry. And because it is easier to say this than I think I was an obelisk for a minute.
Schaffa moves around to crouch in front of her, gripping her shoulders. The concern in his expression almost, almost, eclipses the weary lines, the hint of distraction, and the other signs of struggle that are building beneath the surface of him. His pain is worse, here underground. He hasn’t said that it is, and Nassun doesn’t know why it’s getting worse, but she can tell.
But. “Don’t trust the obelisks, little one,” he says. This does not seem nearly as strange or wrong a thing for him to say as it should. On impulse Nassun hugs Schaffa; he holds her tight, rubbing comfort into her back. “We allowed a few to progress,” he murmurs in her ear. Nassun blinks, remembering poor, mad, murderous Nida, who said the same thing once. “Back in the Fulcrum. I was permitted to remember that much because it’s important. The few who reached ninth-or tenth-ring status… they were always able to sense the obelisks, and the obelisks could sense them in turn. They would have drawn you to them one way or another. They’re missing something, incomplete somehow, and that’s what they need an orogene to provide.