The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you.

They’re still around, though they’ve forgotten how much they’ve forgotten.

Then there’s the fact that Alabaster wants this, when he’s the man who destroyed the world. Maybe you shouldn’t do anything he asks. He’s never hurt you, though. The world has, but not him. Maybe the world deserved to be destroyed. And maybe he’s earned a little of your trust, after all these years.

You understand then. Crystals in Castrima-under that glow through some means you can’t fathom. Crystals that float in the sky by some means you can’t fathom. Both mechanisms meant to be used by orogenes and no one else.

War is a poor word. Is it war when people find an infestation of vermin in some unwanted place and try to burn or poison it clean? Though that, too, is a poor metaphor, because no one hates individual mice or bedbugs. No one singles out for vengeance that one, that one right there, three-legged splotch-backed little bastard, and all its progeny down the hundreds of verminous generations that encompass a human life.

For a very long time, I was one of the vengeful ones… but what it keeps coming back to is this: Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times. That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted to win.

The Leadership legends have the air of a myth concocted to justify their place in society.

“The civilization that made the obelisks had a word for this,” he says, nodding at your epiphany. “I think there’s a reason we don’t. It’s because no one for countless generations has wanted orogenes to understand what we do. They’ve just wanted us to do it.”

“The Moon is something this world used to have, Essun. An object in the sky, much closer than the stars.” He keeps switching between calling you one name and another. It’s distracting. “Its loss was part of what caused the Seasons.” Father Earth did not always hate life, the lorists say. He hates because he cannot forgive the loss of his only child.

Some of the things that have changed between you, you cannot bear.

There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.

You think of the feeling that was in your heart as you pressed a hand over Corundum’s nose and mouth. Not the thought. The thought was simple and predictable: Better to die than live a slave. But what you felt in that moment was a kind of cold, monstrous love. A determination to make sure your son’s life remained the beautiful, wholesome thing that it had been up to that day, even if it meant you had to end his life early.

“They called it magic.” It’s meaningless. Just a word. But maybe you can give it meaning somehow. “Magic,” you repeat, memorizing. Then you nod farewell, and leave without looking back.

Much later, though, she will remember an instant after that touch, when the tips of the man’s fingers glimmered like the cut ends of the harpoon. A gossamer-thin thread of light-under-the-heat had seemed to flicker from her to him. She will remember, too, that for a moment that thread of light illuminated others: a whole tracework of jagged lines spreading all over him like the spiderwebbing that follows a sharp impact in brittle glass. The impact site, the center of the spiderweb, was somewhere near the back of his head. Nassun will remember thinking in that instant: He’s not alone in there.

The Guardians do not speak of Warrant, where they are made. No one knows its location. When asked, they only smile. —From lorist tale, “Untitled 759,” recorded in Charta Quartent, Eadin Comm, by itinerant Mell Lorist Stone

“Nice,” she says. “So you can ice someone without killing everyone around you. But if every rogga could do that, people wouldn’t have a problem with roggas.” You really hate that rusting word, no matter what Ykka thinks. And you’re not sure you agree with Hjarka’s assessment. People have problems with roggas for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with orogeny.

“It’s a waste of your time to teach them.” This dismissal, inexplicably, starts to eat through your patience. “It’s never a waste of time to educate others.”

It’s a reminder that these are not the old days and you cannot react in the old ways. If Alabaster has not changed, then it’s up to you. Because you have.

You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is part of you now, because you have since grown brave.

“That’s probably how they thought,” Alabaster says, when his laugh goes quiet. “The ones who decided to dig a hole to the world’s core. But just because you can’t see or understand a thing doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.”

“I don’t think it’s what they’re made of that makes stone eaters so different. I think it’s that no one can live that long and not become something entirely alien.”

If only he had a hand left that you could take. Your fingers twitch against his back instead. It’s not the same.

He whispers: “When I die, don’t bury me.” “Wh—” “Give me to Antimony.”

No matter how you try, you cannot imagine Antimony as having once been human. Too many things work against it: the stillness of her face, the dislocation of her voice. The fact that you hate her.

“Alabaster said the Moon was flung away.” “Into a degrading long-ellipsis orbit.” When you stare blankly, she speaks your language again. “It’s coming back.” Oh, Earth. Oh, rust. Oh, no. “You want me to catch the fucking Moon?”

Seek the retrograde [obscured] in the southern sky. When it grows larger, [obscured] —Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse six

Red is the color of lava pools. It is the color of a lake when everything in it has died except toxic algae: one warning sign of an impending blow. Some things do not change with time or culture, you feel certain. (You are wrong, generally speaking. But in this specific case, you’re quite right.)

“It follows: Put people in a cage and they will devote themselves to escaping it, not cooperating with those who caged them. What happened here was inevitable, I suppose.”

I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.

It’s still him. You can’t shake it off. So you sigh and also let go of the part of yourself that wants to treat him as something else, something frightening, something other. He’s Hoa. He wants to eat you, and he tried to help you find your daughter even though he failed. There’s an intimacy in these facts, however strange they are, that means something to you.

“You were a child.” “I looked like a child.” His voice softens. “I only did that for you.”

“Not ‘stone eaters.’ Not all of us want the same thing. Some like things as they are. Some even want to make the world better… though not all agree on what that means.” Instantly his posture changes—hands out, palms up, shoulders lifted in a What can you do? gesture. “We’re people.”

“You can’t trust the Strongbacks,” you say softly. Ykka looks up at you. “Castrima isn’t wherever you came from.” You want to smile, though you don’t because you know how ugly the smile will be. You’re from so many places. In every one of them you learned that roggas and stills can never live together.

But being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

“Stills learned to hate us. They can learn differently.” “Now? With an enemy literally at the gate?” You’re so tired. So tired of all this shit. “Now is when we’ll see the worst of them.”

She is always polite to Nida and Umber. Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners.

She makes herself available because her presence eases the pain for him, and because she does not believe he will actually kill her. This is folly, she knows. Love is no inoculation against murder. But she needs to believe it of him.

Nassun gazes down at her huddled, panicking father. Perhaps she should feel pity, or regret. What she actually feels, however, is cold fury toward her mother. She knows it’s irrational. It is no one’s fault except Jija’s that Jija is too afraid of orogenes to love his own children. Once, however, Nassun could love her father without qualification. Now, she needs someone to blame for the loss of that perfect love. She knows her mother can bear it. You should have had us with someone stronger, she thinks at Essun, wherever she is.

“Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that. Indifference is worse than hate. Well. You can’t muster indifference in response; you can’t help but see her as human. Have to make do with hate, then.

Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply… a thinning of who you are.

You’ve observed her before when she does orogeny, but this is the first time she’s tried to be precise about something. And—it’s completely not what you expected. She can’t shift a pebble, but she can slice out corners and lines so neatly that the end result looks machine-carved. It’s better than you could have done, and suddenly you realize: Maybe she couldn’t shift a pebble because who the rust needs to shift pebbles? That’s the Fulcrum’s way of testing precision. Ykka’s way is to simply be precise, where it is practical to do so. Maybe she failed your tests because they were the wrong tests.

Choking Season: 2714–2719 Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: the Antarctics near Deveteris. The eruption of Mount Akok blanketed a five-hundred-mile radius with fine ash clouds that solidified in lungs and mucous membranes. Five years without sunlight, although the northern hemisphere was not affected as much (only two years).

Acid Season: 2322–2329 Imperial. Proximate cause: plus-ten-level shake. Location: unknown; far ocean. A sudden plate shift birthed a chain of volcanoes in the path of a major jet stream. This jet stream became acidified, flowing toward the western coast and eventually around most of the Stillness. Most coastal comms perished in the initial tsunami; the rest failed or were forced to relocate when their fleets and port facilities corroded and the fishing dried up. Atmospheric occlusion by clouds lasted seven years; coastal pH levels remained untenable for many years more.

Boiling Season: 1842–1845 Imperial. Proximate cause: hot spot eruption beneath a great lake. Location: Somidlats, Lake Tekkaris quartent. The eruption launched millions of gallons of steam and particulates into the air, which triggered acidic rain and atmospheric occlusion over the southern half of the continent for three years. The northern half suffered n...

Breathless Season: 1689–1798 Imperial. Proximate cause: mining accident. Location: Nomidlats, Sathd quartent. An entirely human-caused Season triggered when miners at the edge of the northeastern Nomidlats coalfields set off underground fires. A relatively mild Season featuring occasional sunlight and no ashfall or acidification except in the region; few comms declared Seasonal Law. Approximately fourteen million people in the city of Heldine died in the initial natural-gas eruption and rapidly spreading fire sinkhole before Imperial Orogenes successfully quelled and sealed the edges of the fires to prevent further spread. The remaining mass could only be isolated, where it continued to burn for one hundred and twenty years. The smoke of this, spread via prevailing winds, caused respiratory problems and occasional mass suffocations in the region for several decades...

The Season of Teeth: 1553–1566 Imperial. Proximate cause: oceanic shake triggering a supervolcanic explosion. Location: Arctic Cracks. An aftershock of the oceanic shake breached a previously unknown hot spot near the north pole. This triggered a supervolcanic explosion; witnesses report hearing the sound of the explosion as far as the Antarctics. Ash went upper-atmospheric and spread around the globe rapidly, although the Arctics were most heavily affected. The harm of this Season was exacerbated by poor preparation on the part of many comms, because some nine hundred years had passed since the last Season; popular belief at the time was that the Seasons were merely legend. Reports of cannib...

Fungus Season: 602 Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: western Equatorials. A series of eruptions during monsoon season increased humidity and obscured sunlight over approximately 20 percent of the continent for six months. While this was a mild Season as such things go, its timing created perfect conditions for a fungal bloom that spread across the Equatorials into the northern and southern Midlats, wiping out then-staple-crop miroq (now extinct). The resulting famine lasted four years (two for the fungus blight to run its course, two more for agriculture and food distribution systems to recover). Nearly all affected comms were able to subsist on their own stores, thus proving the efficacy of Imperial reforms and Season planning, and the Empire was generous in sharing stored s...

Madness Season: 3 Before Imperial–7 Imperial. Proximate cause: volcanic eruption. Location: Kiash Traps. The eruption of multiple vents of an ancient supervolcano (the same one responsible for the Twin Season of approximately 10,000 years previous) launched large deposits of the dark-colored mineral augite into the air. The resulting ten years of darkness was not only devastating in the usual Seasonal way, but resulted in a higher than usual incidence of mental illness. The Sanzed Equatorial Affiliation (commonly called the Sanze Empire) was born in this Season as Warlord Verishe of Yumenes conquered multiple ailing comms using psychological warfare techniques. (See The Art of Madness, various authors, Sixth University Press.) Verishe named herself Emperor on the day the first sunlight returned. [Editor’s...

Wandering Season: Approximately 800 Before Imperial. Proximate cause: magnetic pole shift. Location: unverifiable. This Season resulted in the extinction of several important trade crops of the time, and twenty years of famine resu...