The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  “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.”

  Steel, who vanished while Schaffa was putting away the other Guardians’ bodies, might also be listening from within the stone somewhere nearby. Does it mean something that he hasn’t popped up to tell them what to do yet? Maybe they don’t need him. “And what about the Antarctic Fulcrum? Don’t they have records and things?” She remembers seeing the Fulcrum’s library before she and Schaffa and Umber sat down with its leaders, had a cup of safe, then killed them all. The library was a strange high room filled floor to ceiling with shelves of books. Nassun likes books—her mother used to splurge and buy one every few months, and sometimes Nassun got the hand-me-downs if Jija deemed them appropriate for children—and she remembers boggling in awe, for she’d never seen so many books in her life. Surely some of those contained information about … very old cities no one has ever heard of, that only Guardians know how to get to. Um. Hmm.

  “Unlikely,” Schaffa says, confirming Nassun’s misgivings. “And by now, that Fulcrum has probably been annexed by another comm, or perhaps even taken over by commless rabble. Its fields were full of edible crops, after all, and its houses were livable. Returning there would be a mistake.”

  Nassun bites her lower lip. “Maybe … a boat?” She doesn’t know anything about boats.

  “No, little one. A boat won’t do for such a long journey.”

  He pauses significantly, and with this as warning Nassun tries to brace herself. Here is where he will abandon her, she feels painfully, fearfully certain. Here is where he will want to know what she’s up to—and then want no part of it. Why would he? Even she knows that what she wants is a terrible thing.

  “I take it, then,” Schaffa says, “that you mean to assume control of the Obelisk Gate.”

  Nassun gasps. Schaffa knows what the Obelisk Gate is? When Nassun herself only learned the term that morning from Steel? But then, the lore of the world, all its strange mechanisms and workings and aeons of secrets, is mostly still intact within Schaffa. It’s only things connected to his old self that are permanently lost … which means that the route to Corepoint is something that Old Schaffa needed to know, particularly. What does that mean? “Uh, yes. That’s why I want to go to Corepoint.”

  His mouth quirks at her surprise. “Finding an orogene who could activate the Gate was our original purpose, Nassun, in creating Found Moon.”

  “What? Why?”

  Schaffa glances up at the sky. The sun’s beginning to set. They could get maybe another hour of walking in before it gets too dark to continue. What he’s looking at is the sapphire, though, which hasn’t noticeably moved from its position over Jekity. Rubbing absently at the back of his head, Schaffa gazes at its faint outline through the thickening clouds and nods, as if to himself.

  “I and Nida and Umber,” he says. “Perhaps ten years ago, we were all … instructed … to travel southward, and to find one another. We were bidden to seek and train any orogenes who had the potential to connect to obelisks. This is not a thing Guardians normally do, understand, because there can be only one reason to encourage an orogene along the obelisk path. But it’s what the Earth wanted. Why, I don’t know. During that time, I was … less questioning.” His mouth curves in a brief, rueful smile. “Now I have guesses.”

  Nassun frowns. “What guesses?”

  “That the Earth has its own plans for human—”

  Abruptly Schaffa tenses all over, and he sways in his crouch. Quickly Nassun grabs him so he won’t fall over, and reflexively he puts an arm around her shoulders. The arm is very tight, but she does not protest. That he needs the comfort of her presence is obvious. That the Earth is angrier than ever with him, perhaps because he’s giving away its secrets, is as palpable as the raw, flensing pulse of the silver along every nerve and between every cell of his body.

  “Don’t talk,” Nassun says, her throat tight. “Don’t say anything else. If it’s going to hurt you like this—”

  “It does not rule me.” Schaffa has to say this in quick blurts, between pants. “It did not take the core of me. I may have … nnh … put myself into its kennel, but it cannot leash me.”

  “I know.” Nassun bites her lip. He’s leaning on her heavily, and that’s made her knee, where it braces against the ground, ache something awful. She doesn’t care, though. “But you don’t have to say everything now. I’m figuring it out on my own.”

  She has all the clues, she thinks. Nida once said, of Nassun’s ability to connect to obelisks, This is a thing that we culled for in the Fulcrum. Nassun hadn’t understood at the time, but after perceiving something of the Obelisk Gate’s immensity, now she can guess why Father Earth wants her dead if she is no longer under Schaffa’s—and through him, the Earth’s—control.

  Nassun chews her lip. Will Schaffa understand? She isn’t sure she can take it if he decides to leave—or worse, if he turns on her. So she takes a deep breath. “Steel says the Moon is coming back.”

  For an instant there is silence from Schaffa’s direction. It has the weight of surprise. “The Moon.”

  “It’s real,” she blurts. She has no idea if this is true, though, does she? There’s only Steel’s word to go on. She’s not even sure what a moon is, beyond being Father Earth’s long-lost child, like the tales say. And yet somehow she knows that this much of what Steel says is true. She doesn’t quite sess it, and there are no telltale threads of silver forming in the sky, but she believes it the way she believes that there is another side of the world even though she’s never seen it, and the way she knows how mountains form, and the way she’s certain Father Earth is real and alive and an enemy. Some truths are simply too great to deny.

  To her surprise, however, Schaffa says, “Oh, I know the Moon is real.”
Perhaps his pain has faded somewhat; now his expression has hardened as he gazes at the hazy, intermittent disc of the sun where it’s managed to not quite pierce the clouds near the horizon. “That, I remember.”

  “You—really? Then you believe Steel?”

  “I believe you, little one, because orogenes know the pull of the Moon when it draws near. Awareness of it is as natural to you as sessing shakes. But also, I have seen it.” Then his gaze narrows sharply to focus on Nassun. “Why, then, did the stone eater tell you about the Moon?”

  Nassun takes a deep breath and lets out a heavy sigh.

  “I really just wanted to live somewhere nice,” she says. “Live somewhere with … with you. I wouldn’t have minded working and doing things to be a good comm member. I could have been a lorist, maybe.” She feels her jaw tighten. “But I can’t do that, not anywhere. Not without having to hide what I am. I like orogeny, Schaffa, when I don’t have to hide it. I don’t think having it, being a—a r-rogga—” She has to stop, and blush, and shake off the urge to feel ashamed for saying such a bad word, but the bad word is the right word for now. “I don’t think being one makes me bad or strange or evil—”

  She cuts herself off again, yanks her thoughts out of that track, because it leads right back to But you have done such evil things.

  Unconsciously, Nassun bares her teeth and clenches her fists. “It isn’t right, Schaffa. It isn’t right that people want me to be bad or strange or evil, that they make me be bad …” She shakes her head, fumbling for words. “I just want to be ordinary! But I’m not and—and everybody, a lot of people, all hate me because I’m not ordinary. You’re the only person who doesn’t hate me for … for being what I am. And that’s not right.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Schaffa shifts to sit back against his pack, looking weary. “But you speak as though it’s an easy thing to ask people to overcome their fears, little one.”

  And he does not say it, but suddenly Nassun thinks: Jija couldn’t.

  Nassun’s gorge rises suddenly, sharply enough that she must clap a fist to her mouth for a moment and think hard of ash and how cold her ears are. There’s nothing in her stomach except the handful of dates she just ate, but the feeling is awful anyway.

  Schaffa, uncharacteristically, does not move to comfort her. He only watches her, expression weary but otherwise unreadable.

  “I know they can’t do it.” Yes. Speaking helps. Her stomach doesn’t settle, but she no longer feels on the brink of dry heaves. “I know they—the stills—won’t ever stop being afraid. If my father couldn’t—” Queasiness. She jerks her thoughts away from the end of that sentence. “They’ll just go on being scared forever, and we’ll just go on living like this forever, and it isn’t right. There should be a—a fix. It isn’t right that there’s no end to it.”

  “But do you mean to impose a fix, little one?” Schaffa asks. It’s soft. He’s guessed already, she realizes. He knows her so much better than she knows herself, and she loves him for it. “Or an end?”

  She gets to her feet and starts pacing, tight little circles between his pack and hers. It helps the nausea and the jittery, rising tension beneath her skin that she cannot name. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

  But that is not the whole truth, and Schaffa scents lies the way predators scent blood. His eyes narrow. “If you did know how, would you fix it?”

  And then, in a sudden blaze of memory that Nassun has not permitted herself to see or consider for more than a year, she remembers her last day in Tirimo.

  Coming home. Seeing her father standing in the middle of the den breathing hard. Wondering what was wrong with him. Wondering why he did not quite look like her father, in that moment—his eyes too wide, his mouth too loose, his shoulders hunched in a way that seemed painful. And then Nassun remembers looking down.

  Looking down and staring and staring and thinking What is that? and staring and thinking Is it a ball? like the ones that the kids at creche kick around during lunchtime, except those balls are made of leather while the thing at her father’s feet is a different shade of brown, brown with purplish mottling all over its surface, lumpy and leathery and half-deflated but No, it’s not a ball, wait is that an eye? Maybe but it’s so swollen shut that it looks like a big fat coffee bean. Not a ball at all because it’s wearing her brother’s clothes including the pants Nassun put on him that morning while Jija was busy trying to get their lunch satchels together for creche. Uche didn’t want to wear those pants because he was still a baby and liked to be silly so Nassun had done the butt dance for him and he’d laughed so hard, so hard! His laugh was her favorite thing ever, and when the butt dance was over he’d let her put his pants on as a thank-you, which means the unrecognizable deflated ball-thing on the floor is Uche that is Uche he is Uche—

  “No,” Nassun breathes. “I wouldn’t fix it. Not even if I knew how.”

  She has stopped pacing. She has one arm wrapped around her middle. The other hand is a fist, crammed against her mouth. She spits out words around it now, she chokes on them as they gush up her throat, she clutches her belly, which is full of such terrible things that she must let them out somehow or be torn apart from within. These things have distorted her voice, made it a shaky growl that randomly spikes into a higher pitch and a louder volume, because it’s everything she can do not to just start screaming. “I wouldn’t fix it, Schaffa, I wouldn’t, I’m sorry, I don’t want to fix it I want to kill everybody that hates me—”

  Her middle is so heavy that she can’t stand. Nassun drops into a crouch, then to her knees. She wants to vomit but instead she spits words onto the ground between her splayed hands. “G-g-gone! I want it all GONE, Schaffa! I want it to BURN, I want it burned up and dead and gone, gone, NOTHING l-l-left, no more hate and no more killing just nothing, r-rusting nothing, nothing FOREVER—”

  Schaffa’s hands, hard and strong, pull her up. She flails against him, tries to hit him. It isn’t malice or fear. She never wants to hurt him. She just has to let some of what’s in her out somehow, or she will go mad. For the first time she understands her father, as she screams and kicks and punches and bites and yanks at her clothes and her hair and tries to slam her forehead against his. Quickly, Schaffa turns her about and wraps one of his big arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides so that she cannot hurt him or herself in the transport of her rage.

  This is what Jija felt, observes a distant, detached, floating-obelisk part of herself. This is what came up inside him when he realized Mama lied, and I lied, and Uche lied. This is what made him push me off the wagon. This is why he came up to Found Moon this morning with a glassknife in his hand.

  This. This is the Jija in her, making her thrash and shout and weep. She feels closer than ever to her father in this moment of utter broken rage.

  Schaffa holds her until she is exhausted. Finally she slumps, shaking and panting and moaning a little, her face all over tears and snot.

  When it’s clear that Nassun will not lash out again, Schaffa shifts to sit down cross-legged, pulling Nassun into his lap. She curls against him the way another child curled against him once, many years before and many miles away, when he told her to pass a test for him so that she could live. Nassun’s test has already been met, though; even the old Schaffa would agree with that assessment. In all her rage, Nassun’s orogeny did not twitch once, and she did not reach for the silver at all.

  “Shhh,” Schaffa soothes. He’s been doing this all the while, though now he rubs her back and thumbs away her occasional tears. “Shhh. Poor thing. How unfair of me. When only this morning—” He sighs. “Shhh, my little one. Just rest.”

  Nassun is wrung out and empty of everything but the grief and fury that run in her like fast lahars, grinding everything else away in a churning hot slurry. Grief and fury and one last precious, whole feeling.

  “You’re the only one I love, Schaffa.” Her voice is raw and weary. “You’re the only reason I w-wouldn’t. But … but I …”

&n
bsp; He kisses her forehead. “Make the end you need, my Nassun.”

  “I don’t want.” She has to swallow. “I want you to—to be alive!”

  He laughs softly. “Still a child, despite all you’ve been through.” This stings, but his meaning is clear. She cannot have both Schaffa alive and the world’s hatred dead. She must choose one ending or the other.

  But then, firmly, Schaffa says again: “Make the end you need.”

  Nassun pulls back so she can look at him. He’s smiling again, clear-eyed. “What?”

  He squeezes her, very gently. “You’re my redemption, Nassun. You are all the children I should have loved and protected, even from myself. And if it will bring you peace …” He kisses her forehead. “Then I shall be your Guardian till the world burns, my little one.”

  It is a benediction, and a balm. The nausea finally releases its hold on Nassun. In Schaffa’s arms, safe and accepted, she sleeps at last, amid dreams of a world glowing and molten and in its own way, at peace.

  “Steel,” she calls, the next morning.

  Steel blurs into presence before them, standing in the middle of the road with his arms folded and an expression of faint amusement on his face.

  “The nearest way to Corepoint is not far, relatively speaking,” he says when she has asked him for the knowledge that Schaffa lacks. “A month’s travel or so. Of course …” He lets this trail off, conspicuously. He has offered to take Nassun and Schaffa to the other side of the world himself, which is apparently a thing that stone eaters can do. It would save them a great deal of hardship and danger, but they would have to entrust themselves to Steel’s care as he transports them in the strange, terrifying manner of his kind, through the earth.