The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(54)

“But the obelisks killed them, my Nassun.” He presses his face into her hair. She’s filthy and hasn’t truly washed since Jekity, but his words strip away such mundane thoughts. “The obelisks… I remember. They will change you, remake you, if they can. That’s what that rusting stone eater wants.”

His arms tighten for an instant, with a hint of his old strength, and it is the most beautiful feeling in the world. She knows in this moment that he will never falter, never not be there when she needs him, never devolve into a mere fallible human being. And she loves him more than life for his strength.

“Yes, Schaffa,” she promises. “I’ll be careful. I won’t let them win.”

Him, she thinks, and she knows he thinks it too. She won’t let Steel win. At least not without getting what she wants first.

So they are resolved. When Nassun pulls back, Schaffa nods before getting to his feet. They go forward again.

The innermost tier sits in the glass column’s blue, gloomy shadow. The pylons are bigger than they looked from afar – perhaps twice as tall as Schaffa, three or four times as wide, and humming faintly now that Nassun and Schaffa are close enough to hear. They’re arranged in a ring around what must have once been the resting place of an obelisk, like a buffer protecting the outer two tiers. Like a fence, separating the bustling life of the city from… this.

This: At first Nassun thinks it is a thicket of thorns. The thornvines curl and tangle along the ground and up the inner surface of the pylons, filling all the available space between them and the glass column itself. Then she sees that they aren’t thornvines: no leaves. No thorns. Just these curling, gnarling, ropelike twists of something that looks woody but smells a little like fungus.

“How odd,” Schaffa says. “Something alive at last?”

“M-maybe they aren’t alive?” They do look dead, though they stand out by being still recognizably plants and not crumbled bits of decay on the ground. Nassun does not like it here, amid these ugly vines and in the shadow of the glass column. Is that what the pylons are for, to cut off sight of the vines’ grotesquerie from the rest of the city? “And maybe they grew here after… the rest.”

Then she blinks, noticing something new about the vine nearest her. It’s different from the others around it. Those are obviously dead, withered and blackened and broken off in places. This one, however, looks as though it might be alive. It is ropy and knotted in places, with a wood-like surface that looks old and rough, but whole. Debris litters the floor beneath it – grayish lumps and dust, scraps of dry-rotted cloth, and even a moldering length of frayed rope.

There is a thing Nassun has resisted doing since entering the cavern of the glass column; some things she doesn’t quite want to know. Now, however, she closes her eyes and reaches inside the vine with her sense of the silver.

At first it’s hard. The cells of the thing – because it is alive, more like a fungus than a plant, but there is also something artificial and mechanical about the way it has been made to function – press together so tightly that she doesn’t expect to see any silver between them. More dense than the stuff in people’s bodies. The arrangement of its substance is almost crystalline, in fact, cells lined up in neat little matrices, which she’s never seen in a living thing before.

And now that Nassun has seen down into the interstices of the vine’s substance, she can see that it doesn’t have any silver in it. What it has instead are… She isn’t sure how to describe it. Negative spaces? Where silver should be, but isn’t. Spaces that can be filled with silver. And as she gingerly explores them, fascinated, she begins to notice the way they pull at her perception, more and more, until – with a gasp, Nassun jerks her perception free.

You’ll see what to do, Steel has said. It should be obvious.

Schaffa, who has crouched to peer at the bit of rope, pauses and glances at her, frowning. “What is it?”

She stares back at him, but she doesn’t have the words to say what needs to be done. The words do not exist. She knows, however, what she needs to do. Nassun takes a step closer to the living vine.

“Nassun,” Schaffa says, his voice tight and warning with sudden alarm.

“I have to, Schaffa,” she says. She’s already lifting her hands. This is where all the silver of the outer cavern has been going, she realizes now; these vines have been eating it up. Why? She knows why, in the deepest and most ancient design of her flesh. “I have to, um, power the system.”

Then, before Schaffa can stop her, Nassun wraps both hands around the vine.

It does not hurt. That’s the trap of it. The sensation that spreads throughout her body is pleasant, in fact. Relaxing. If she could not perceive the silver, or the way the vine instantly starts dragging every bit of silver out of the spaces between her cells, she would think it was doing something good for her. As it is, it will kill her in moments.

She has access to more silver than just her own, though. Lazily, through the languor, Nassun reaches for the sapphire – and the sapphire responds instantly, easily.

Amplifiers, Alabaster called them, long before Nassun was ever born. Batteries is how you think of them, and how you once explained them to Ykka.

What Nassun understands the obelisks to be is simply engines. She’s seen engines at work – the simple pump-and-turbine things that regulated geo and hydro back in Tirimo, and occasionally more complex things like grain elevators. What she understands about engines would fill less than a thimble, but this much is clear even to a ten-year-old: To work, engines need fuel.