The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,69
but facing a blue horizon across which pleasant clouds churn and race and vanish and are reborn. The tiers around her teem with activity—though it all blurs together, and what she can discern of the few instants of stillness makes no sense. Strange vehicles like the car she saw in the tunnel run along the sides of buildings, following tracks of differently colored light. The buildings are covered in green, vines and grassy rooftops and flowers curling over lintels and walls. People, hundreds of them, go in and out of these, and walk up and down the paths in unbroken blurs of motion. She cannot see their faces, but she catches glimpses of black hair like Schaffa’s, earrings of artfully curled vine motifs, a dress swirling about ankles, fingers flicking while adorned with sheaths of colored lacquer.
And everywhere, everywhere, is the silver that lies beneath heat and motion, the stuff of the obelisks. It spiders and flows, converging not just into trickles but rivers, and when she looks down she sees that she stands in a pool of liquid silver, soaking in through her feet—
Nassun staggers a little as she comes back this time, and Schaffa’s hand lands firmly on her shoulder to steady her. “Nassun.”
“I’m all right,” she says. She isn’t sure of that, but she says it anyway because she doesn’t want him to worry. And because it is easier to say this than I think I was an obelisk for a minute.
Schaffa moves around to crouch in front of her, gripping her shoulders. The concern in his expression almost, almost, eclipses the weary lines, the hint of distraction, and the other signs of struggle that are building beneath the surface of him. His pain is worse, here underground. He hasn’t said that it is, and Nassun doesn’t know why it’s getting worse, but she can tell.
But. “Don’t trust the obelisks, little one,” he says. This does not seem nearly as strange or wrong a thing for him to say as it should. On impulse Nassun hugs Schaffa; he holds her tight, rubbing comfort into her back. “We allowed a few to progress,” he murmurs in her ear. Nassun blinks, remembering poor, mad, murderous Nida, who said the same thing once. “Back in the Fulcrum. I was permitted to remember that much because it’s important. The few who reached ninth-or tenth-ring status … they were always able to sense the obelisks, and the obelisks could sense them in turn. They would have drawn you to them one way or another. They’re missing something, incomplete somehow, and that’s what they need an orogene to provide.
“But the obelisks killed them, my Nassun.” He presses his face into her hair. She’s filthy and hasn’t truly washed since Jekity, but his words strip away such mundane thoughts. “The obelisks … I remember. They will change you, remake you, if they can. That’s what that rusting stone eater wants.”
His arms tighten for an instant, with a hint of his old strength, and it is the most beautiful feeling in the world. She knows in this moment that he will never falter, never not be there when she needs him, never devolve into a mere fallible human being. And she loves him more than life for his strength.
“Yes, Schaffa,” she promises. “I’ll be careful. I won’t let them win.”
Him, she thinks, and she knows he thinks it too. She won’t let Steel win. At least not without getting what she wants first.
So they are resolved. When Nassun pulls back, Schaffa nods before getting to his feet. They go forward again.
The innermost tier sits in the glass column’s blue, gloomy shadow. The pylons are bigger than they looked from afar—perhaps twice as tall as Schaffa, three or four times as wide, and humming faintly now that Nassun and Schaffa are close enough to hear. They’re arranged in a ring around what must have once been the resting place of an obelisk, like a buffer protecting the outer two tiers. Like a fence, separating the bustling life of the city from … this.
This: At first Nassun thinks it is a thicket of thorns. The thornvines curl and tangle along the ground and up the inner surface of the pylons, filling all the available space between them and the glass column itself. Then she sees that they aren’t thornvines: no leaves. No thorns. Just these curling, gnarling, ropelike twists of something that looks woody but smells a little like fungus.
“How odd,” Schaffa says. “Something alive at last?”