The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,48
anything that fits within the range of her experience, many of them obsessed with strange fads and politics and alignments far more complex than those of caste or race. Leaders, but also the elite Yumenescene Leadership families. Strongbacks of the union and those without, varying by their connections and financial security. Innovators from generations-old families who competed to be sent off to the Seventh University, and Innovators who merely built and repaired trinkets out of the city’s shantytowns. It is strange to realize that much of Yumenes’s strangeness was simply because it lasted so long. It had old families. Books in its libraries that were older than Tirimo. Organizations that remembered, and avenged, slights from three or four Seasons back.
Schaffa also tells her about the Fulcrum, although not much. There is another memory hole here, deep and fathomless as an obelisk—though Nassun finds herself unable to resist probing its edges. It is a space that her mother once inhabited, after all, and in spite of everything, this fascinates her. Schaffa remembers Essun poorly, however, even when Nassun works up the courage to ask direct questions about the matter. He tries to answer Nassun, but his speech is halting when he does, and the look that crosses his face is pained, troubled, paler than usual. She therefore forces herself to ask these questions slowly, hours or days apart, to give him time to recover in between. What she learns is little more than she has already guessed about her mother and the Fulcrum and life before the Season. It helps to hear it, nevertheless.
The miles pass like this, in memory and edged-around pain.
Conditions in the Antarctics grow worse by the day. The ashfall is no longer intermittent, and the landscape has begun to turn into a still life of hills and ridges and dying plants chiseled in gray-white. Nassun starts to miss the sight of the sun. One night they hear the squeals of what must be a large kirkhusa romp out hunting, though fortunately the sound is distant. One day they pass a pond whose surface is mirror-gray from floating ash; the water underneath is disturbingly still, given that the pond is fed by a rapid stream. Although their canteens are low, Nassun looks at Schaffa, and Schaffa nods in silent, wary agreement. There’s nothing overtly wrong, but … well. Surviving a Season is as much a matter of having the right instincts as having the right tools. They avoid the still water, and live.
On the evening of the twenty-ninth day, they reach a place where the Imperial Road abruptly plateaus and veers southward. Nassun sesses that the road edges along something that feels a bit like a crater rim. They have crested the ridge that surrounds this circular, unusually flat region, and the road follows the ridge in an arc around the zone of old damage, resuming its westward track on the other side. In the middle, though, Nassun at last beholds a wonder.
The Old Man’s Pucker is a sommian—a caldera inside a caldera. This one is unusual in being so perfectly formed; from what Nassun has read, usually the outer, older caldera is badly damaged by the eruption that creates the inner, newer caldera. In this case the outer one is an intact, nearly perfect circle, though heavily eroded by time and forested over; Nassun can’t really see it under the greenery, though she can sess it clearly. The inner caldera is a little more oblong, and it gleams so brightly from a distance that Nassun can guess what happened without even sessing it. The eruption must have been so hot, at least at one point, that the whole geological formation nearly destroyed itself. What remains has gone to glass, naturally tempered enough that not even centuries of weathering has damaged it much. The volcano that created this sommian is extinct now, its ancient magma chamber long since emptied, not even a whiff of leftover heat lingering. Once upon a time, though, the Pucker was the site of a truly awesome—and horrific—puncturing of the world’s crust.
As Steel instructed, they camp for the night a mile or two back from the Pucker. In the small hours before dawn, Nassun wakes, hearing a distant screech, but Schaffa soothes her. “I’ve heard that now and again,” he says softly, over the crackling of the fire. He insisted on a watch this time, so Nassun took the earlier shift. “Something in the Pucker forest. It doesn’t seem to be coming this way.”