The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,129

as before: silent and still, despite the crowd of stone eaters that has assembled to watch her work. (In Corepoint, it is easy to feel alone in a crowd.) Then she spies … movement. Something—some one—lurching from one shadow to another.

Startled, Nassun takes a step toward that moving figure. “H-hello?”

The figure staggers toward some kind of small pillar whose purpose Nassun has never understood, though there seems to be one on every other corner of the city. Nearly falling as it grabs the pillar for support, the figure twitches and looks up at the sound of her voice. Icewhite eyes spear at Nassun from the shadows.

Schaffa.

Awake. Moving.

Without thinking, Nassun begins to trot, then run after him. Her heart is in her mouth. She’s heard people say things like that and thought nothing of it before—just poetry, just silliness—but now she knows what it means as her mouth goes so dry that she can feel her own pulse through her tongue. Her eyes blur. “Schaffa!”

He’s thirty, forty feet away, near one of the pylon buildings that surround Corepoint’s hole. Close enough to recognize her—and yet there is nothing in his gaze that seems to know who she is. Quite the contrary; he blinks, and then smiles in a slow, cold way that makes her stumble to a halt in deep, skin-twitching unease.

“Sch-Schaffa?” she says again. Her voice is very thin in the silence.

“Hello, little enemy,” Schaffa says, in a voice that reverberates through Corepoint and the mountain below it and the ocean for a thousand miles around.

Then he turns to the pylon building behind him. A high, narrow opening appears at his touch; he stagger-stumbles through. It vanishes behind him in an instant.

Nassun screams and flings herself after him.

You are deep in the lower mantle, halfway through the world, when you sense the activation of part of the Obelisk Gate.

Or so your mind interprets it, at first, until you master your alarm and reach forth to confirm what you’re feeling. It’s hard. Here in the deep earth, there is so much magic; trying to sift through it for whatever is happening on the surface is like trying to hear a distant creek over a hundred thundering waterfalls nearby. It’s worse the deeper Hoa takes you, until finally you have to “close your eyes” and stop perceiving magic entirely—because there’s something immense nearby that is “blinding” you with its brightness. It is as if there’s a sun underground, silver-white and swirling with an unbelievably intense concentration of magic … but you can also feel Hoa skirting wide around this sun, even though that means the overall journey has taken longer than absolutely necessary. You’ll have to ask him why later.

You can’t see much besides churning red here in the depths. How fast are you going? Without referents, it’s impossible to tell. Hoa is an intermittent shadow in the redness beside you, shimmering on the rare occasions when you catch a glimpse of him—but then, you’re probably shimmering, too. He isn’t pushing through the earth, but becoming part of it and transiting the particles of himself around its particles, becoming a waveform that you can sess like sound or light or heat. Disturbing enough if you don’t think about the fact that he’s doing it to you, too. You can’t feel anything like this, except a hint of pressure from his hand, and the suggestion of tension from Lerna’s arm. There’s no sound other than an omnipresent rumble, no smell of sulfur or anything else. You don’t know if you’re breathing, and you don’t feel the need for air.

But the distant awakening of multiple obelisks panics you, nearly makes you try to pull away from Hoa so you can concentrate, even though—stupid—that would not just kill you but annihilate you, turning you to ash and then vaporizing the ashes and then setting the vapor on fire. “Nassun!” you cry, or try to cry, but words are lost in the deep roar. There is no one to hear your cry.

Except. There is.

Something shifts around you—or, you realize belatedly, you are shifting relative to it. It isn’t something you think about until it happens again, and you think you feel Lerna jerk against your side. Then it finally occurs to you to look at the silver wisps of your companions’ bodies, which at least you can make out against the dense red material of the earth around you.

There is a human-shaped blaze linked to your hand, heavy as a mountain upon your perception as it