What is your ten-year-old daughter doing playing with an obelisk?
How is your ten-year-old daughter alive after playing with an obelisk?
You think of how that momentary contact felt. Familiar vibration-taste of an orogeny which you’ve been quelling since before she was born and training since she was two – but so much sharper and more intense now. You weren’t trying to take the sapphire from Nassun, but the Gate was, following instructions that long-dead builders somehow wrote into the layered lattices of the onyx. Nassun kept the sapphire, though. She actually fought off the Obelisk Gate.
What has your little girl been doing, this long dark year, to develop such skill?
“You don’t know what her situation is,” Tonkee continues, which makes you blink out of this terrible reverie and focus on her. “You don’t know what kind of people she’s living with. You said she’s in the Antarctics, somewhere near the eastern coast? That part of the world shouldn’t be feeling the Season much yet. So what are you going to do, then, snatch her out of a comm where she’s safe and has enough to eat and can still see the sky, and drag her north to a comm sitting on the Rifting, where the shakes will be constant and the next gas vent might kill everyone?” She looks hard at you. “Do you want to help her? Or just have her with you again? Those two things aren’t the same.”
“Jija killed Uche,” you snap. The words don’t hurt, unless you think about them as you speak. Unless you remember your son’s smell or his little laugh or the sight of his body under a blanket. Unless you think of Corundum – you use anger to press down the twin throbs of grief and guilt. “I have to get her away from him. He killed my son!”
“He hasn’t killed your daughter yet. He’s had, what, twenty months? Twenty-one? That means something.” Tonkee spies Lerna coming back toward you through the crowd, and sighs. “There are just things you ought to think about, is all I’m saying. And I can’t even believe I’m saying it. She’s another obelisk-user, and I can’t even go investigate it.” Tonkee utters a frustrated grumbly sound. “I hate this damn Season. I have to be so rusting practical now.”
You’re surprised into a chuckle, but it’s weak. The questions Tonkee’s raised are good ones, of course, and some of them you can’t answer. You think about them for a long time that night, and in the days thereafter.
Rennanis is nearly into the Western Coastals, just past the Merz Desert. Castrima is going to have to go through the desert to get there, because skirting around it would drastically increase the length of your journey – a difference of months versus years. But you’re making good time through the central Somidlats, where the roads are decently passable and you haven’t been bothered by many raiders or significant wildlife. The Hunters have been able to find a lot of forage to supplement the comm’s stores, including a little more game than before. Unsurprising, since they’re no longer competing against hordes of insects. It’s not enough – small voles and birds just aren’t going to hold a comm of a thousand-plus people for long. But it’s better than nothing.
When you start noticing changes in the land that presage desert – thinning of the skeletal forest, flattening of the topography, a gradual drawing away of the water table amid the strata – you decide that it’s time to finally try to talk to Ykka.
By now you’ve entered a stone forest: a place of tall, sharp-edged black spires that claw irregularly at the sky above and around you as the group edges through its depths. There aren’t many of these in the world. Most get shattered by shakes, or – back when there was a Fulcrum – deliberately destroyed by Fulcrum blackjackets at local comms’ commissioned request. No comm lives in a stone forest, see, and no well-run comm wants one nearby. Apart from stone forests’ tendency to collapse and crush everything within, they tend to be riddled with wet caves and other water-hewn formations that make marvelous homes for dangerous flora and fauna. Or people.
The road runs straight through this stone forest, which is bullshit. That is to say, no one in their right mind would have built a road through a place like this. If a quartent governor had proposed using people’s taxes on this dangerous bit of bandit-bait, that governor would’ve been replaced in the next election… or shanked in the night. So that’s your first clue that something’s off about the place. The second is that there’s not much vegetation in the forest. Not much anywhere this far into the Season, but also no sign that there was ever any vegetation here in the first place. That means this stone forest is recent – so recent that there’s been no time for wind or rain to erode the stone and permit plant growth. So recent that it didn’t exist before the Season.
Clue number three is what your own sessapinae tell you. Most stone forests are limestone, made by water erosion over hundreds of millions of years. This one is obsidian – volcanic glass. Its jagged spikes aren’t straight up and down, but more inwardly curved; there are even a few unbroken arcs stretching over the road. Impossible to see up close, but you can sess the overall pattern: The whole forest is a blossom of lava, solidified mid-blast. Not a line of the road has been knocked out of place by the tectonic explosion around it. Beautiful work, really.
Ykka’s in the middle of an argument with another comm member when you find her. She’s called for a halt about a hundred feet away from the forest, and people are milling about, looking confused about whether this is just a rest stop or whether they should be making camp since it’s relatively late in the day. The comm member is one you finally recognize as Esni Strongback Castrima, the use-caste’s spokesperson. She throws you an uneasy glance as you come to a halt beside them, but then you take off your goggles and mask, and her expression softens. She didn’t recognize you before because you’ve stuffed rags into the sleeve of your missing arm to keep warm. Her reaction is a welcome reminder that not everybody in Castrima is angry with you. Esni is alive because the worst part of the attack – Rennanis soldiers trying to carve a bloody path through the Strongbacks holding Scenic Overlook – ended when you locked the enemy stone eaters into crystals.
Ykka, though, doesn’t turn, although she should easily be able to sess your presence. She says, you think to Esni, though it works for you as well, “I really don’t want to hear any more arguments right now.”
“That’s good,” you say. “Because I understand exactly why you’ve stopped here, and I think it’s a good idea.” It’s a bit louder than it needs to be. You eyeball Esni so she’ll know you mean to have it out with Ykka right now, and maybe Esni doesn’t want to be here for that. But a woman who leads the comm’s defenders isn’t going to scare easily, so you’re not entirely surprised when Esni looks amused and folds her arms, ready to enjoy the show.
Ykka turns to you, slowly, a look of mingled annoyance and incredulity on her face. She says, “Nice to know you approve,” in a tone that sounds anything but pleased. “Not that I actually care if you do.”
You set your jaw. “You sess it, right? I’d call it the work of a four- or five-ringer, except I know now that ferals can have unusual skill.” You mean her. It’s an olive branch. Or maybe just flattery.
She doesn’t fall for it. “We’re going as far as we can before nightfall, and setting up camp in there.” She nods toward the forest. “It’s too big to get through in a day. Maybe we could go around, but there’s something…” Her eyes unfocus, and then she frowns and turns away, grimacing at having revealed a weakness to you. She’s sensitive enough to sess the something, but not to know exactly what she’s sessing.
You’re the one who spent years learning to read underground rocks with orogeny, so you fill in the detail. “There’s a leaf-covered spike trap in that direction,” you say, nodding toward the long-dead grass edging the stone forest on one side. “Beyond it is an area of snares; I can’t tell how many, but I can sess a lot of kinetic tension from wire or rope. If we go around the other way, though, there are partially sheared-off stone columns and boulders positioned at points along the edge of the stone forest. Easy to start a rockslide. And I can sess holes positioned at strategic points along the outer columns. A crossbow, or even an ordinary bow and arrow, could do a lot of damage from there.”