The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I

and also the living one who remains. Whom you will get back. That’s not a spoiler. You are Essun, after all. You know this already. Don’t you?

In truth, lorists are an even older part of life in the Stillness. Twenty-five thousand years ago is simply when their role became distorted into near-uselessness.

Writers

The songs of the earth have always been his lullaby.

“Satellite. And all of it’s irrelevant if you can’t control the obelisks.”

“The topaz is floating somewhere nearby.

It’s so reasonable that you don’t know why you didn’t even consider it. Well, you know why. Ykka might be an orogene like you, but you spent too many years being thwarted and betrayed by other orogenes at the Fulcrum; you know better than to trust her just because she’s Your People. You should give her a chance because she’s Your People, though.

“When I ask about it, he just grins and says, ‘Just a bit longer, please. I’m waiting for someone.’”

every encampment you saw them look their fellow survivors over, picking out any Sanzeds who were better equipped or healthier or otherwise doing better than average. Speaking to those chosen people in quiet voices. Leaving the next morning in groups larger than those in which they had arrived. Does that mean anything? Like keeping to like is the old way, but races and nations haven’t been important for a long time. Communities of purpose and diverse specialization are more efficient, as Old Sanze proved.

“Why not? They’re here, too. More of them than we think.” She focuses on Hoa, who watches her, his expression unreadable. “That’s what you told me.” “It’s true,” he says quietly. Then: “I can’t speak for them, though. And we aren’t part of your comm.”

“Other things will eat it,” he says to you, very softly. “We should go.” What. “You’re not afraid of anything.”

He knows what stone eaters do to powerful orogenes whenever they get the chance, and he knows why it is crucial to keep orogenes’ eyes on the ground and not the sky.

He does genuinely care about her, you realize (she does not realize).

Did she not know that Schaffa would love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair.) She is part of something vast and globally powerful now, and Schaffa, once the most important person in her world, is beneath her notice. On some level he is aware of this even as he flies through the storm, and the knowledge leaves a deep burn of hurt in his heart. Then he is in the water and dying.

It is difficult to kill a Guardian.

Guardians are different. But they do have limits, and drowning plus organ

He panics. Guardians must never panic. He knows this; there are good reasons why. He does it anyway, flailing and screaming as he is dragged into the cold dark. He wants to live. This is the first and worst sin, for one of his kind. His terror suddenly vanishes. A bad sign. It is replaced a moment later by an anger so powerful that it blots out everything else.

Something burns at the back of Schaffa’s skull. This is a cold burn, not like the fire in his nose and throat and chest. Something there is waking up, warming up, gathering itself. Ready for the collapse of his resistance.

(He loses so much else, though. Understand: The Schaffa that we have known thus far, the Schaffa whom Damaya learned to fear and Syenite learned to defy, is now dead. What remains is a man with a habit of smiling, a warped paternal instinct, and a rage that is not wholly his own driving everything he does from this point on.

He resumes swimming. After about seven hours—this is the strength his memories have bought him—he sees the still-smoking cone of Allia against the horizon.

Gather them, train them, make them the weapons they are meant to be. “If

The stupid son gives more than the rest; almost an orogene. (Almost a Guardian.)

They leave the half-dead house behind. Schaffa knows that he should take the boy… somewhere. Somewhere with obsidian walls and gilded bars, a place that will die in a cataclysm of fire in ten years, so perhaps it is good that he is too damaged to remember this location. In any case the angry whispers have begun steering him in a different direction. Somewhere south. Where he has work to do.

“Crazy” is also what roggas who obey choose to call roggas that don’t. You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.

HIM AGAIN. I WISH HE hadn’t done so much to you. You don’t like being him to any degree. You will like less knowing that he is part of Nassun… but don’t think about that right now.

Guardians don’t dream easily. The object embedded deep within the left lobe of Schaffa’s sessapinae interferes with the sleep-wake cycle.

He can guess, seeing that the woman of the pair has icewhite eyes rimmed with thick black eyelashes, that she is his mother. The man is more ordinary. Too ordinary—carefully so, in a way that immediately stirs a suspicion in Schaffa’s Guardian mind.

In love, then, we shall seek understanding.

So the use of the silver is clearly an issue of violent concern to ordinary Guardians—but why? If only a few of the Fulcrum’s orogenes were allowed to develop the skill, to “progress,” what was the danger if too many did it? And why do these ex-Guardians, who once “culled for” the skill, allow her to do it unfettered now?

“Something causes a fear like that, Nassun. Something that has nothing to do with you, or your brother, or your mother’s lies. Whatever it is has left its wound in your father—a wound that obviously has festered. He will lash out at anything that touches upon or even near that reeking old sore… as you have seen.” She thinks of Uche, and nods. “That cannot be reasoned with.”

As you realized back during Nassun’s dangerous early childhood, she is a very, very proud girl.)

“What… what was I made for, then?” He shakes his head. The silver flashes through him, the webwork of it alive and shifting as the thing lodged in his sessapinae weaves its will again, or tries to. “To remedy a great mistake. One to which I once contributed.” This is too interesting to fall asleep to, though Nassun’s whole body craves it. “What was the mistake?” “To enslave your kind.”

“Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we perpetuated their enslavement of themselves, under Old Sanze. The Fulcrum was nominally run by orogenes, you see—orogenes whom we had culled and cultivated, shaped and chosen carefully, so that they would obey. So that they knew their place. Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”

“It was wrong to treat your kind so. You’re people. What we did, making tools of you, was wrong. It is allies that we need—more than ever now, in these darkening days.”

The Guardian has been looking for something all this time, and in spite of everything, Eitz loves him enough to hope that he finds it. Perhaps that will comfort you, as it will not Nassun, when in her frightened, disoriented flailing, she turns Eitz to stone.

Some of these things you will have guessed. Perhaps a hundred miles away, a sapphire obelisk shimmers into solid reality for an instant, then flickers back to translucence—before ponderously beginning to drift toward Jekity. Many more miles in a different direction, somewhere deep within a magmatic vein of porphyry, a shape that is suggestive of the human form turns, alert with new interest.

(So will I.)

Is this I also you? Or me?

No one really cares what Jija does after that. A boy has been turned to stone, and a girl has manifested power that is strange and horrifying even for a rogga. These are the things everyone will remember about this day.

(She does not sess Castrima. I know you’re wondering.)

“Yes.” Then Nida laughs softly. Nassun sesses the flex of silver threads within Schaffa. Smiling eases the pain, he has said. The more a Guardian is smiling, laughing, the more something is hurting them. “Unless…” Nida laughs again. This time Schaffa smiles, too.

Filthy parasite, lurking only to take and give nothing back!

They speak of another old one—one who is known to me from conflicts long ago. He, too, has a vision for our kind, in opposition to mine. He knows of you, my Essun, and he would kill you if he could, because you mean to finish what Alabaster began. He can’t get to you with me in the way… but he can push you to destroy yourself. He’s even found some greedy human allies up north to help him do so.

So they leave the Antarctic Fulcrum behind, with new crops greening in its fields and cooling corpses in its administrative building and a collection of shining, multi-colored human statues scattered about its gardens and barracks and walls.

She kills thm all?!

“I can teach you. I can teach you how to fight his tormentor, his master, too. If you wish.”

The earth?

“Nothing. If you fight his master, then you fight my enemy, too. It will make us… allies.”

tiny white lights up there is moving in a different direction from the rest—downward, sort of, while the other stars march west to east across the sky. Slow. Hard to unsee it now that she’s made it out. It’s a little bigger and brighter than the rest, too. Strange.

There is a moment of silence. “Are you human?” At this, you cannot help but laugh once. “Officially? No.” “Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?” “Human.” “Then so am I.”

He wants to eat you,

Orogenes are named after stones! Stone eater! Duh!!!

“You told—it’s—” Ykka swallows hard, stares a moment longer, then finally resumes eating the orange. She chews slowly, her gaze never leaving Hoa. “Got tired of playing the human, then? Not sure why you bothered; you were too weird to pass.”

“There are many of us now,” Hoa replies. “Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.”