Pissed off the wrong rogga, Hoa said of his own incarceration. Yes, these enemy stone eaters rusting did.
You shout again but this time it is effort, it is aggression. SNAP and you break lattices and magic strands and reseal them to your own design. CRACK and you lift whole crystal shafts to throw them like spears and grind your enemies beneath. You look for Gray Man, the stone eater who hurt Hoa, but he is not among the mountains that threaten your home. These are just his minions. Fine. You’ll send him a message, then, written in their fear.
By the time you’re done, you’ve sealed at least five of the enemy stone eaters into crystals. Easy to do, really, when they are so foolish as to try to transit through them while you’re watching. They phase into the crystal; you simply de-phase them, freezing them like bugs in amber. The rest are fleeing.
Some flee north. Unacceptable, and distance is nothing for you now. You pull up and wheel and pierce down again, and there is Rennanis, nestled within its lattice of nodes like a spider among its bundled, sucked-dry prey. The Gate is meant to do things on a planetary scale. It is nothing to you to drive power down and inflict upon every citizen of Rennanis the same thing you did to the woman who would’ve beaten Penty to death. Bullies are bullies. So simple to twist the flickering silver between their cells until those cells grow still, solid. Stone. It is done, and Castrima’s war won, in the span of a breath.
Now it’s dangerous. Now you understand: To wield the power of this network of obelisks without a focus is to become its focus, and die. The wise thing to do, now that Castrima is safe, would be to dismantle the Gate and withdraw from the connection before it destroys you.
But. There are other things you want besides Castrima’s safety.
The Gate is like orogeny, you see. Without conscious control, it responds to all desires as if they are the desire to destroy the world. And you will not control this. You cannot. This desire is as quintessential to you as your past or your defensive personality or your many-times-broken heart.
Nassun.
Your awareness spins. South. Tracking.
Nassun.
Interference. It hurts. The pearl the diamond the
Sapphire. It resists being pulled into the network of the Gate. You barely noticed before, overwhelmed as you were by dozens, hundreds of obelisks, but you notice now because
NASSUN
IT’S HER
It is your daughter, it’s Nassun, you know the stolid complexity of her as you know your own heart and soul, it’s her, written all over this obelisk and you have found her, she is alive.
Its (your) goal accomplished, the Gate automatically begins to disengage. The other obelisks disconnect; the onyx releases you last, albeit with a whiff of cold reluctance. Next time.
And as your body sags and lists to one side because something suddenly throws off your balance, hands take hold of you and pull you upright. You can barely lift your head. Your body feels distant, heavy, like the sensation of being in stone. You have not eaten in hours, but you feel no hunger. You know you’ve been taxed far beyond your own endurance, but you feel no exhaustion.
There are mountains around you. “Rest, Essun,” says the one you love. “I’ll take care of you.”
You nod with a head heavy as a boulder. Then new presences pull at your attention, and you force yourself to look up one last time.
Antimony stands before you, impassive as ever, but there is something comforting about her presence nevertheless. You know instinctively that she is no enemy.
Beside her stands another stone eater: tall, slender, somehow awkward in its draped “clothing.” Allover white, though the shape of its facial features is Eastern Coaster: full mouth and long nose, high cheekbones and a sculpture of neatly sculpted, kinky hair. Only its eyes are black, and though they watch you with only faint recognition, with a puzzled flicker of something that might be (but should not be) memory… something about those eyes is familiar.
How ironic. This is the first time you’ve ever seen a stone eater made of alabaster.
And then you are gone.
What if it isn’t dead?
INTERLUDE
You fall into my arms, and I take you to a safe place.
Safety is relative. You have driven off my unsavory brethren, those of my kind who would have killed you since they cannot control you. As I descend into Castrima, however, and emerge in a quiet space of familiarity, I smell iron on the air, amid the shit and stale breath and other scents of flesh, and smoke. The iron is a flesh scent, too: that variant of iron which is contained in blood. Outside, there are bodies along the walkways and steps. One even dangles from a ropeslide. The fighting is mostly over, however, because of two things. First, the invaders have realized they are trapped between the insect-infested surface and their enemies, who are greater in number now that most of the invading army is dead. Those who wish to live have surrendered; those who fear a worse death have flung themselves on the swords or crystals of Castrima.
The second thing that has stopped the fighting is the inescapable fact that the geode is badly damaged. All over the comm, the once-glowing crystals now flicker in irregular pulses. One of the longer ones has detached from the wall and broken, its dust and rubble scattered along the geode floor. On the ground level, warm water has stopped flowing into the communal pool, though occasionally there is a haphazard spurt of it. Several of the comm’s crystals are completely dark, dead, cracked—but within each, a darker shape can be seen, frozen and trapped. Humanoid.
Fools. That’s what you get for pissing off my rogga.
I lay you in a bed and make certain there is food and water nearby. Feeding you will be difficult, now that I have shed the quickened sheath I wore to friend you, but most likely someone will be along before I am forced to try. We are in Lerna’s apartment. I’ve put you in his bed. He will like that, I think. You will, too, once you want to feel human again.
I do not begrudge you these connections. You need them.
(I do not begrudge you these connections. You need them.)
But I position you carefully, so that you will be comfortable. And I place your arm atop the covers, so you will know as soon as you awaken that you must now make a choice.
Your right arm, which has become a thing of brown, solidified, concentrated magic. No crudeness here; your flesh is pure, perfect, wholesome. Every atom is as it should be, the arcane lattice precise and strong. I touch it once, briefly, though my fingers barely notice the pressure. Leftover longing from the flesh I wore so recently. I’ll get over it.
Your stone hand is shaped into a fist. There’s a crack across the back of it, perpendicular to the hand bones. Even as the magic reshaped you, you fought. (You fought. This is what you must become. You have always fought.)
Ah, I grow sentimental. A few weeks’ nostalgia in flesh and I forget myself.
Thus I wait. And hours or days later when Lerna returns to his apartment, stinking of other people’s blood and his own weariness, he stops short at the sight of me, standing watchman in his living room.
He’s still for only a moment. “Where is she?”