“Well, thanks for the warn-off.” You’re beginning to understand, though. It’s the same problem you keep having with Alabaster’s lessons; heat and pressure and motion are not the only forces in play here. “You’re saying the earth churns out magic, too? And if I push that magic into an obelisk…” You blink, recalling her words. “Obelisk Gate?”
Antimony’s gaze has been focused on Alabaster. Now her flat black eyes slide to finally meet yours. “The two hundred and sixteen individual obelisks, networked together via the control cabochon.” While you stand there wondering what the rust a control cabochon is, and marveling that there are more than two hundred of the damned things, she adds, “Using that to channel the power of the Rift should be enough.”
“To do what?”
For the first time, you hear a note of emotion in her voice: annoyance. “To impose equilibrium on the Earth-Moon system.”
What. “Alabaster said the Moon was flung away.”
“Into a degrading long-ellipsis orbit.” When you stare blankly, she speaks your language again. “It’s coming back.”
Oh, Earth. Oh, rust. Oh, no. “You want me to catch the fucking Moon?”
She just stares at you, and belatedly you realize you’re practically shouting. You throw a guilty look at Alabaster, but he hasn’t woken. Neither has the nurse on the far cot. When she sees that you’re quiet, Antimony says, “That is an option.” Almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Alabaster made the first of two necessary course corrections to the Moon, slowing it and altering the trajectory that would have taken it past the planet again. Someone else must make the second correction, bringing it back into stable orbit and magical alignment. Should equilibrium be reestablished, it’s likely the Seasons will end, or diminish to such infrequency as to mean the same thing to your kind.”
You inhale, but you get it now. Give Father Earth back his lost child and perhaps his wrath will be appeased. That’s the third faction, then: those who want a truce, people and Father Earth agreeing to tolerate one another, even if it means creating the Rift and killing millions in the process. Peaceful coexistence by any means necessary.
The end of the Seasons. It sounds… unimaginable. There have always been Seasons. Except now you know that isn’t true.
“Then it isn’t an option,” you say finally. “End the Seasons or watch everything die as this Season burns on forever? I’ll—” Catch the Moon sounds ridiculous. “I’ll do what you stone eaters want, then.”
“There are always options.” Her gaze, alien as it is, abruptly shifts in a subtle way—or maybe you’re just reading her better. Suddenly she looks human, and very, very bitter. “And not all of my kind want the same thing.”
You frown at her, but she says nothing more.
You want to ask more questions, try harder to understand, but she was right: You weren’t ready for this. Your head’s spinning, and the words stuffed into it are starting to blur and jumble together. It’s too much to deal with.
Wants and needs. You swallow. “Can I stay here?”
She does not respond. You suppose it wasn’t really necessary to ask. You get up and move to the nearest cot. Its head is against the wall, which would put your head behind Alabaster and Antimony, and you don’t feel like staring at the back of the stone eater’s head. You grab the pillow and curl up with your head at the foot of the bed instead, so you can see Alabaster’s face. Once, you slept better when you could see him, across the expanse of Innon’s shoulders. This is not the same reassurance… but it’s something.
After a while, Antimony begins to sing again. It’s strangely relaxing. You sleep better than you have in months.
Seek the retrograde [obscured] in the southern sky. When it grows larger, [obscured]
—Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse six
11
Schaffa, lying down
HIM AGAIN. I WISH HE hadn’t done so much to you. You don’t like being him to any degree. You will like less knowing that he is part of Nassun… but don’t think about that right now.
The man who still carries the name of Schaffa even though he hardly qualifies as the same person, dreams fragments of himself.
Guardians don’t dream easily. The object embedded deep within the left lobe of Schaffa’s sessapinae interferes with the sleep-wake cycle. He does not often need sleep, and when he does, his body does not often enter the deeper sleep that enables dreaming. (Ordinary people go mad if they are deprived of dreaming-sleep. Guardians are immune to that sort of madness… or perhaps they’re just mad all the time.) He knows it’s a bad sign that he dreams more often these days, but it cannot be helped. He chose to pay the price.
So he lies on a bed in a cabin and groans, twitching fitfully, while his mind flails through images. It’s poor dreaming because his mind is out of practice, and because so little remains of the material that might have been used to construct the dreams. Later he will speak of this aloud, to himself, as he clutches his head and tries to pull the scattering bits of his identity closer together, and that’s how I’ll know what torments him. I will know that as he thrashes, he dreams…
… Of two people, their features surprisingly sharp in his memory though all else has been stripped away: their names, their relationship to him, his reason for remembering them. He can guess, seeing that the woman of the pair has icewhite eyes rimmed with thick black eyelashes, that she is his mother. The man is more ordinary. Too ordinary—carefully so, in a way that immediately stirs a suspicion in Schaffa’s Guardian mind. Ferals work hard to seem so ordinary. How they came to produce him, and how he came to leave them, is lost to the Earth, but their faces are interesting, at least.
… Of Warrant, and black-walled rooms carved into layered volcanic rock. Gentle hands, pitying voices. Schaffa doesn’t remember the hands’ or voices’ owners. He is helped into a wire chair. (No, the nodes were not the first to use these.) This chair is sophisticated, automated, working smoothly even though something about it seems old to Schaffa’s eye. It whirs and reconfigures and turns him until he is suspended facedown beneath bright artificial lights, with his face trapped between unyielding bars and the nape of his neck bared to the world. His hair is short. Behind and above him he hears the descent of ancient mechanisms, things so esoteric and bizarre that their names and original purposes have long been lost. (He remembers learning, around this time, that original purposes can be perverted easily.) Around him he can hear the snuffling and pleading of the others brought with him to this place—children’s snuffling and pleading. He is a child in this memory, he realizes. Then he hears the other children’s screams, followed by and mingling into whirring, cutting sounds. There is also a low watery hum that he will never hear again (yet it will be very familiar to you and any other orogene who has ever been near an obelisk), because from this moment forth his own sessapinae will be repurposed, made sensitive to orogeny and not to the perturbations of the earth.