They stare back at him. Even Lashar seems nonplussed. Nassun, however, has seen Schaffa kill. He has given up some of who he was, but what remains is still an artist of terror. If he has seen fit to share the secrets of his artistry with them, they’re lucky. She hopes they appreciate it.
He goes on. “When the killing is done, make it clear to those present that you acted only in self-defense. Then offer to work in the dead person’s place, or to protect the rest from danger – but they’ll recognize the ultimatum. They must accept you into the comm.” He pauses, then fixes his icewhite gaze on Deshati. “If they refuse, what do you do?”
She swallows. “K-kill them all.”
He smiles again, for the first time since leaving Jekity, and cups the back of her head in fond approval.
Shirk gasps a little, shocked out of tears. Oegin and Ynegen hold each other, their expressions empty of anything but despair. Lashar’s jaw has tightened, her nostrils flaring. She means to take Schaffa’s words to heart. Deshati does, too, Nassun can tell… but it will kill something in Deshati to do so.
Schaffa knows this. When he stands to kiss Deshati’s forehead, there is so much sorrow in the gesture that Nassun aches afresh. “‘All things change during a Season,’” he says. “Live. I want you to live.”
A tear spills from one of Deshati’s eyes before she can blink it away. She swallows audibly. But then she nods and steps away from him, and backs up to stand with the others. There’s a gulf between them now: Schaffa and Nassun on one side, Found Moon’s children on the other. The ways have parted. Schaffa does not show discomfort with this. He should; Nassun notices that the silver is alive and throbbing within him, protesting his choice to allow these children to go free. He does not show the pain, though. When he’s doing what he feels is right, pain only strengthens him.
He stands. “And should the Season ever show real signs of abating… flee. Scatter and blend in elsewhere as best you can. The Guardians aren’t dead, little ones. They will return. And once word spreads of what you’ve done, they’ll come for you.”
The regular Guardians, Nassun knows he means – the “uncontaminated” ones, like he used to be. Those Guardians have been missing since the start of the Season, or at least Nassun hasn’t heard of any joining comms or being seen on the road. Return suggests they’ve all gone somewhere specific. Where? Somewhere that Schaffa and the other contaminated ones did not or could not go.
But what matters is that this Guardian, however contaminated, is helping them. Nassun feels a sudden surge of irrational hope. Surely Schaffa’s advice will keep them safe, somehow. So she swallows and adds, “All of you are really good at orogeny. Maybe the comm you pick… maybe they’ll…”
She trails off, unsure of what she wants to say. Maybe they’ll like you, is what she’s thinking, but that just seems foolish. Or maybe you can be useful, but that’s not how it used to work. Comms used to hire Fulcrum orogenes only for brief periods, or so Schaffa has told her, to do needed work and then leave. Even comms near hot spots and fault lines hadn’t wanted orogenes around permanently, no matter how much they’d needed them.
Before Nassun can think of a way to grope out the words, however, Wudeh glares at her. “Shut up.”
Nassun blinks. “What?”
Peek hisses at Wudeh, trying to shush him, but he ignores her. “Shut up. I rusting hate you. Nida used to sing to me.” Then, without warning, he bursts into sobs. Peek looks confused, but some of the others surround him, murmuring and patting comfort into him.
Lashar watches this, then throws a last reproachful look at Nassun before saying, to Schaffa, “We’ll be on our way, then. Thank you, Guardian, for… for what it’s worth.”
She turns and begins herding them away. Deshati walks with her head down, not looking back. Ynegen lingers for a moment between the groups, then glances at Nassun and whispers, “Sorry.” Then she, too, leaves, hurrying to catch up with the others.
As soon as the children are completely out of sight, Schaffa puts a hand on Nassun’s shoulder to steer her away, westward along the Imperial Road.
After several miles of silence, she says, “Do you still think it would have been better to kill them?”
“Yes.” He glances at her. “And you know that as well as I do.”
Nassun sets her jaw. “I know.” All the more reason to stop this. Stop everything.
“You have a destination in mind,” Schaffa says. It’s not a question.
“Yes. I… Schaffa, I have to go to the other side of the world.” This feels rather like saying I need to go to a star, but since that’s not too far off from what she actually needs to do, she decides not to feel self-conscious about this smaller absurdity.
To her surprise, however, he tilts his head instead of laughing. “To Corepoint?”
“What?”
“A city on the other side of the world. There?”
She swallows, bites her lip. “I don’t know. I just know that what I need is —” She doesn’t have the words for it, and instead makes a pantomime with her cupped hands and waggling fingers, sending imaginary wavelets to clash and mesh with each other. “The obelisks… pull on that place. It’s what they’re made to do. If I go there, I think I might be able to, uh, pull back? I can’t do it anywhere else, because…” She can’t explain it. Lines of force, lines of sight, mathematical configurations; all of the knowledge that she needs is in her mind, but cannot be reproduced by her tongue. Some of this is a gift from the sapphire, and some is application of theories her mother taught her, and some is simply from tying theory to observation and wrapping the whole thing in instinct. “I don’t know which city over there is the right one. If I get closer, and travel around a little, maybe I can —”
“Corepoint is the only thing on that side of the world, little one.”
“It’s… what?”
Schaffa stops abruptly, tugging off his pack. Nassun does the same, reading this as a signal that it’s time for a rest stop. They’re just on the leeward side of a hill, which is really just a spar of old lava from the great volcano that lies beneath Jekity. There are natural terraces all around this area, weathered out of the obsidian by wind and rain, though the rock a few inches down is too hard for farming or even much in the way of forestation. Some determined, shallow-rooted trees wave over the empty, ash-frosted terraces, but most are now being killed by the ashfall. Nassun and Schaffa will be able to see potential threats coming from a good ways off.
While Nassun pulls out some food they can share, Schaffa draws something in a nearby patch of windblown ash with his finger. Nassun cranes her neck to see that he’s made two circles on the ground. In one, he sketches a rough outline of the Stillness that is familiar to Nassun from geography lessons back in creche – except this time, he draws the Stillness in two pieces, with a line of separation near the equator. The Rifting, yes, which has become a boundary more impassable than even thousands of miles of ocean.
The other circle, however, which Nassun now understands to be a representation of the world, he leaves blank save for a single spot just above the equator and slightly to the east of the circle’s middle longitude. He doesn’t sketch an island or continent to put it on. Just that lone dot.
“Once, there were more cities on the empty face of the world,” Schaffa explains. “A few civilizations have built upon or under the sea, over the millennia. None of those lasted long, though. All that remains is Corepoint.”
It is literally a world away. “How could we get there?”
“If —” He pauses. Nassun’s belly clenches when the blurry look crosses his face. This time he winces and shuts his eyes, too, as if even the attempt to access his old self has added to his pain.
“You don’t remember?”
He sighs. “I remember that I used to.”
Nassun realizes she should have expected this. She bites her lip. “Steel might know.”
There is a slight flex of muscle along Schaffa’s jaw, quick and there and then gone. “Indeed he might.”