The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,68

and shimmer like its fellows above the strange immensity of the city—and then something went very, very wrong. The obelisk … fell. Where it struck the earth, Nassun imagines she can hear the echo of the concussion; it did not merely fall, it drove its way in, punching through and churning down and down and down, powered by all the force of concentrated silver within its core. Nassun can’t track its path for more than a mile or so down, but there’s no reason to think it didn’t just keep going. To where, she cannot guess.

And in its wake, channeled straight up from the most molten part of the earth, came a literal fountain of earthfire to bury this city.

There’s still nothing around that looks like a way to supply power to the station. Nassun notices, though, that the cavern’s illumination comes from enormous pylons of blue light near the base of the glass column. These make up the lower-and innermost tier of the chamber. Something is making that light.

Schaffa, too, has come to the same conclusion. “The tunnel ends here,” he says, gesturing toward the blue pylons and the column’s base. “There’s nowhere else to go but to the foot of this monstrosity. But are you certain you want to follow in the footsteps of whoever did this?”

Nassun bites her bottom lip. She does not. Here is the wrongness that she sessed from the stair, though she cannot tell its source yet. Still … “Steel wants me to see whatever is down there.”

“Are you certain you want to do what he wishes, Nassun?”

She isn’t. Steel cannot be trusted. But she’s already committed herself to the path of destroying the world; whatever Steel wants cannot be worse than this. So when Nassun nods, Schaffa simply inclines his head in acquiescence, and offers her his hand so that they can walk down the road to the pylons together.

Walking past the tiers feels like moving through a graveyard, and Nassun feels compelled to a respectful silence for that reason. Between the buildings, she can make out carbonized walkways, melted-glass troughs that must have once held plants, strange posts and structures whose purpose she isn’t sure she’d be able to fathom even if they weren’t half-melted. She decides that this post is for tying horses, and that frame is where the tanners racked drying hides. Remapping the familiar onto the strange doesn’t work very well, of course, because nothing about this city is normal. If the people who lived here rode mounts, they were not horses. If they made pottery or tools, those were not shaped from clay or obsidian, and the crafters who made such things were not merely knappers. These are people who built, and then lost control of, an obelisk. There is no telling what wonders and horrors filled their streets.

In her anxiety, Nassun reaches up to touch the sapphire, mostly just to reassure herself that she can do so through tons of cooled lava and petrifying decayed city. It is as easy to connect to here as it was up there, which is a relief. It tugs at her gently—or as gently as any obelisk does—and for a moment she lets herself be drawn into its flowing, watery light. It does not frighten her to be so drawn in; to the degree that one can trust an inanimate object, Nassun trusts the sapphire obelisk. It is the thing that told her about Corepoint, after all, and now she senses another message in the shimmering interstices of its tight-packed lines—

“Up ahead,” she blurts, startling herself.

Schaffa stops and looks at her. “What?”

Nassun has to shake her head, drawing her mind back into itself and out of all that blue. “The … the place to put in power. Is up ahead, like Steel said. Past the track.”

“Track?” Schaffa turns, gazing down the sloping walkway. Up ahead is the second tier—a smooth, featureless plane of more of that not-stone white stuff. The people who built the obelisks seem to have used that stuff in all their oldest and most enduring ruins.

“The sapphire … knows this place,” she tries to explain. It’s a fumbling sort of explanation, as hard as trying to describe orogeny to a still. “Not this place specifically, but somewhere like it …” She reaches for it again, asking for more without words, and is nearly overwhelmed with a blue flicker of images, sensations, beliefs. Her perspective changes. She stands at the center of three tiers, no longer in a cavern