The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(80)

And since I know you, old friend, let me add this. You believe in logic. You think even our esteemed colleagues are immune to prejudice, or politics, in the face of hard facts. This is why you’ll never be allowed within a mile of the Funding and Allocations committee, no matter how many masterships you earn.

Our funding comes from Old Sanze. From families so ancient that they have books in their collections older than all the Universities – and they won’t let us touch them. How do you think those families got to be so old, Yaetr? Why has Sanze lasted this long? It’s not because of stonelore.

You cannot go to people like that and ask them to fund a research project that makes heroes of roggas! You just can’t. They’ll faint, and when they wake up, they’ll have you killed. They’ll destroy you as surely as they would any threat to their livelihoods and legacy. Yes, I know that’s not what you think you’re doing, but it is.

And if that isn’t enough, here is a fact that might be logical enough even for you: The Guardians are starting to ask questions. I don’t know why. No one knows what drives those monsters. But that’s why I voted with the committee majority, even if it means you hate me from here on. I want you alive, old friend, not dead in an alley with a glass poniard through your heart. I’m sorry.

Safe travels homeward.

12
Nassun, not alone

Corepoint is silent.

Nassun notices this when the vehimal in which she’s traversed the planet emerges in its corresponding station, on the other side of the world. This is located in one of the strange, slanting buildings that encircle the massive hole at Corepoint’s center. She cries for help, cries for someone, cries, as the vehimal’s door opens and she drags Schaffa’s limp, unresponsive body through the silent corridors and then the silent streets. He’s big and heavy, so although she tries in various ways to use magic to assist with dragging his weight – badly; magic is not meant to be used for something so gross and localized, and her concentration is poor in the moment – she makes it only a block or so away from the compound before she, too, collapses, in exhaustion.

***

Somerusting day, somerusting year.

Found these books, blank. The stuff they’re made of isn’t paper. Thicker. Doesn’t bend easily. Good thing, maybe, or would be dust by now. Preserve my words for eternity! Ha! Longer than my rusting sanity.

Don’t know what to write. Innon would laugh and tell me to write about sex. Right, so: I jerked off today, for the first time since A dragged me to this place. Thought about him in the middle of it and couldn’t come. Maybe I’m too old? That’s what Syen would say. She’s just mad I could still knock her up.

Forgetting how Innon used to smell. Everything smells like the sea here, but it’s not like the sea near Meov. Different water? Innon used to smell like the water there. Every time the wind blows I lose a little more of him.

Corepoint. How I hate this place.

***

Corepoint isn’t a ruin, quite. That is, it isn’t ruined, and it isn’t uninhabited.

On the surface of the open, endless ocean, the city is an anomaly of buildings – not very tall compared to either the recently lost Yumenes or the longer-lost Syl Anagist. Corepoint is unique, however, among both past and present cultures. The structures of Corepoint are sturdily built, of rustless metal and strange polymers and other materials that can withstand the often hurricane-force salt winds that dominate this side of the world. The few plants that grow here, in the parks that were constructed so long ago, are no longer the lovely, designer, hothouse things favored by Corepoint’s builders. Corepoint trees – hybridized and feral descendants of the original landscaping – are huge, woody things, twisted into artful shapes by the wind. They have long since broken free of their orderly beds and containers and now gnarl over the pressed-fiber sidewalks. Unlike the architecture of Syl Anagist, here there are many more sharp angles, meant to minimize the buildings’ resistance to the wind.

But there is more to the city than what can be seen.

Corepoint sits at the peak of an enormous underwater shield volcano, and the first few miles of the hole drilled at its center are actually lined with a hollowed-out complex of living quarters, laboratories, and manufactories. These underground facilities, originally meant to house Corepoint’s geomagests and genegineers, have long since been turned to a wholly different purpose – because this flip side of Corepoint is Warrant, where Guardians are made and dwell between Seasons.

We will speak more of this later.

Above the surface in Corepoint, though, it’s late afternoon, beneath a sky whose clouds are sparse amid a shockingly bright blue sky. (Seasons that start in the Stillness rarely have a severe impact on the weather in this hemisphere, or at least not for several months or years after.) As befits the bright day, there are people in the streets around Nassun as she struggles and weeps, but they do not move to help. They do not move at all, mostly – for they are stone eaters, with rose-marble lips and shining mica eyes and braids woven in pyrite gold or clear quartz. They stand on the steps of buildings that have not known human feet for tens of thousands of years. They sit along window ledges of stone or metal that have begun to deform under the pressure of incredible weight applied over decades. One sits with knees upraised and arms propped across them, leaning against a tree whose roots have grown around her; mosses line the upper surfaces of her arms and hair. She watches Nassun, only her eyes moving, in what might be interest.