The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,50

because the tree leaves keep pulling some of her hair loose from its twin buns, and sweat has made the curls lengthen and dangle into her eyes. She wants desperately to rest for an hour or so. Drink some water. Eat something. The clouds overhead get grayer as the hours pass, however, and it becomes increasingly hard to tell how much daylight is left.

“I can,” Nassun tries at one point, while trying to think of how she can use orogeny, or the silver, or something, to clear the way.

“No,” Schaffa says, somehow intuiting what she would have said. He’s produced a black glass poniard from somewhere. It’s not a useful knife for this situation, although somehow he has made it so by stabbing each of the grass-tree trunks before kicking them down. That helps them break more easily. “Freezing these plants would only make them more difficult to get through, and a shake could cause the magma chamber below us to collapse.”

“The s-silver, then—”

“No.” He stops for only a moment and turns to fix a hard gaze on her. He’s not breathing harder, she notes with great chagrin, although a faint sheen of sweat does glisten on his forehead. His iron shard punishes him, but still grudgingly grants him greater strength. “Other Guardians may be near, Nassun. It’s unlikely at this point, but still a possibility.”

All Nassun can do is grope for another question, because this momentary pause is giving her time to catch her breath. “Other Guardians?” Ah, but then he has said that they all go somewhere during a Season, and that this station that Steel told them about is the means by which they do it. “Do you remember something?”

“Nothing more, sadly.” He smiles a little, knowingly, as if he can tell what she’s doing. “Only that this is how we get there.”

“Get where?”

His smile fades, expression settling into that familiar, disturbing blankness for the briefest of instants. “Warrant.”

She remembers, belatedly, that his full name is Schaffa Guardian Warrant. It has never occurred to her to wonder where the comm of Warrant is. But what does it mean that the way to Warrant is through a buried dead city? “Wh-why—”

He shakes his head then, expression hardening. “Stop stalling. In this low light, not every nocturnal hunter will wait for night.” He glances up at the sky with a look that is only mildly annoyed, as if it does not threaten their lives.

It’s pointless to complain that she is ready to drop. It’s a Season. If she drops, she dies. So she forces herself through the gap he has broken, and starts questing again for the best route.

In the end they make it, which is good because otherwise this would become the rather straightforward tale of you learning that your daughter is dead, and letting the world wither in your grief.

It isn’t even a near thing. Abruptly the last patch of thick grass-trees thins out, revealing a smooth-cut pass through the inner caldera ring. The walls of the pass loom high overhead, though they did not look so tall from far away, and the pass itself is wide enough for two horse-drawn carriages to travel side by side without crowding. The walls of these passages are covered in tenacious mosses and some sort of woody vine, the latter of which is fortunately dead because otherwise it might entangle them and slow their progress more. Instead they hurry forward, cracking the dead branches aside, and then abruptly Nassun and Schaffa stumble out of the pass onto a wide, round slab of perfectly white material that is neither metal nor stone. Nassun’s seen something like it before, near other deadciv ruins; sometimes the stuff glows faintly at night. This particular slab fills the entirety of the space within the inner caldera.

Steel has told them that the deadciv ruin is here, at the center—but all Nassun sees ahead of them is a dainty, rising curl of metal, seemingly set directly into the white material. She tenses, as wary of something new as any Seasoned survivor. Schaffa, however, walks over to it without hesitation. He stops beside it, and for an instant there is an odd expression on his face that Nassun suspects is caused by the momentary conflict between what his body has done out of habit and what his mind cannot remember—but then he puts a hand on the curlicue at the tip of the metal.

Flat shapes and lines of light suddenly appear out of nothingness on the stone around