The stairs are ever so slightly too wide for Nassun’s stride, even when she keeps to the more narrow inner bend. Periodically she has to stop and put both feet on one step in order to rest, then trot to catch up. He is drumbeat-steady, proceeding without her – but abruptly, just as she asks these questions, they reach a landing within the stairwell. To Nassun’s great relief, Schaffa stops at last, signaling that they can sit down and rest. She’s still soaked with sweat from the frantic scrabble through the grass forest, though it has begun to dry now that she’s moving slower. The first drink of water from her canteen is sweet, and the floor feels comfortingly cool, though hard. She’s abruptly sleepy. Well, it is night outside, up on the surface where grasshoppers or cicadas now cavort.
Schaffa rummages in his pack and hands her a slab of dried meat. She sighs and begins the laborious process of gnawing on it. He smiles at her grumpiness, and perhaps to soothe her, he finally answers her question.
“We leave during Seasons because we have nothing to offer to a comm, little one. I cannot have children, for one thing, which makes me a less than ideal community adoptee. However much I might contribute toward the survival of any comm, its investment in me will return only short-term gains.” He shrugs. “And without orogenes to tend, over time, we Guardians become… difficult to live with.”
Because the things in their heads make them want magic all the time, she realizes. And although orogenes make enough of the silver to spare, stills don’t. What happens when a Guardian takes silver from a still? Maybe that’s why Guardians leave – so no one will find out.
“How do you know you can’t have children?” she presses. This is maybe too personal a question, but he has never minded her asking those. “Did you ever try?”
He’s taking a drink from his canteen. When he lowers it, he looks bemused. “It would be clearer to say that I should not,” he says. “Guardians carry the trait of orogeny.”
“Oh.” Schaffa’s mother or father must have been an orogene! Or maybe his grandparents? Anyway, the orogeny didn’t come out in him the way it has in Nassun. His mother – she decides arbitrarily that it was his mother, for no particular reason – never needed to train him, or teach him to lie, or break his hand. “Lucky,” she murmurs.
He’s in the middle of raising the canteen again when he pauses. Something flows over his face. She’s learned to read this look of his in particular, despite the fact that it’s such a rare one. Sometimes he’s forgotten things he wishes he could remember, but right now, he is remembering what he wishes he could forget.
“Not so lucky.” He touches the nape of his neck. The bright, nerve-etched network of searing light within him is still active – hurting him, driving at him, trying to break him. At the center of that web is the shard of corestone that someone put into him. For the first time, Nassun wonders how it was put into him. She thinks about the long, ugly scar down the back of his neck, which she thinks he keeps his hair long to cover. She shivers a little with the implications of that scar.
“I don’t —” Nassun tries to drag her thoughts away from the image of Schaffa screaming while someone cuts him. “I don’t understand Guardians. The other kind of Guardian, I mean. I don’t… They’re awful.” And she cannot even begin to imagine Schaffa being like them.
He doesn’t reply for a while, as they chew through their meal. Then, softly, he says, “The details are lost to me, and the names, and most of the faces. But the feelings remain, Nassun. I remember that I loved the orogenes to whom I was Guardian – or at least, I believed that I loved them. I wanted them to be safe, even if that meant inflicting small cruelties to hold the greater at bay. Anything, I felt, was better than genocide.”
Nassun frowns. “What’s genocide?”
He smiles again, but it is sad. “If every orogene is hunted down and slain, and if the neck of every orogene infant born thereafter is wrung, and if every one like me who carries the trait is killed or effectively sterilized, and if even the notion that orogenes are human is denied… that would be genocide. Killing a people, down to the very idea of them as a people.”
“Oh.” Nassun feels queasy again, inexplicably. “But that’s…”
Schaffa inclines his head, acknowledging her unspoken But that’s what’s been happening. “This is the task of the Guardians, little one. We prevent orogeny from disappearing – because in truth, the people of the world would not survive without it. Orogenes are essential. And yet because you are essential, you cannot be permitted to have a choice in the matter. You must be tools – and tools cannot be people. Guardians keep the tool… and to the degree possible, while still retaining the tool’s usefulness, kill the person.”
Nassun stares back at him, understanding shifting within her like an out-of-nowhere niner. It is the way of the world, but it isn’t. The things that happen to orogenes don’t just happen. They’ve been made to happen, by the Guardians, after years and years of work on their part. Maybe they whispered ideas into the ears of every warlord or Leader, in the time before Sanze. Maybe they were even there during the Shattering – inserting themselves into ragged, frightened pockets of survivors to tell them who to blame for their misery, and how to find them, and what to do with the culprits found.
Everybody thinks orogenes are so scary and powerful, and they are. Nassun is pretty sure she could wipe out the Antarctics if she really wanted, though she would probably need the sapphire to do it without dying. But despite all her power, she’s still just a little girl. She has to eat and sleep like every other little girl, among people if she hopes to keep eating and sleeping. People need other people to live. And if she has to fight to live, against every person in every comm? Against every song and every story and history and the Guardians and the militia and Imperial law and stonelore itself? Against a father who could not reconcile daughter with rogga? Against her own despair when she contemplates the gargantuan task of simply trying to be happy?
What can orogeny do against something like that? Keep her breathing, maybe. But breathing doesn’t always mean living, and maybe… maybe genocide doesn’t always leave bodies.
And now she is more certain than ever that Steel was right.
She looks up at Schaffa. “Till the world burns.” It’s what he said to her, when she told him what she meant to do with the Obelisk Gate.
Schaffa blinks, then smiles the tender, awful smile of a man who has always known that love and cruelty are two faces of the same coin. He pulls her close and kisses her forehead, and she hugs him tight, so very glad to have one parent, at last, who loves her as he should.
“Till the world burns, little one,” he murmurs against her hair. “Of course.”
***
In the morning, they resume walking down the winding stair.
The first sign of change is the appearance of another railing on the other side of the stairwell. The railing itself is made of strange stuff, bright gleaming metal not marred at all by verdigris or tarnish. Now, though, there are twin railings, and the stairwell widens enough that two people can walk abreast. Then the winding stairwell begins to unwind – still descending at the same angle, but less and less curved, until finally it extends straight ahead, into darkness.
After an hour or so of walking, the tunnel suddenly opens out, walls and roof vanishing. Now they descend along a trail of lighted, linked stairs that are completely unsupported, somehow, in open air. The stairs should not be possible, held up as they are by nothing but the railing and, apparently, each other – but there is no judder or creak as Nassun and Schaffa walk down. Whatever the stuff that comprises the steps is, it’s much stronger than ordinary stone.
And now they’re descending into a massive cavern. It’s impossible to see how large it is in the darkness, although shafts of illumination slant down from occasional circles of cool white light that dot the cavern’s ceiling at irregular intervals. The light illuminates… nothing. The cavern’s floor is a vast expanse of empty space filled with irregular, lumpen piles of sand. But now that they are within what Nassun once thought was an empty magma chamber, she can sess things more clearly, and all at once she realizes just how wrong she was.