His gray-on-gray eyes shift over to her. “You’ll see what to do inside.”
Nassun chews on the inside of her cheek, looking into the archway. It’s really dark in there.
Schaffa’s hand touches her shoulder. “I’ll go with you, of course.”
Of course. Nassun swallows and nods, grateful. Then she and Schaffa walk into the dark.
It doesn’t stay dark for long. Like on the white stair, small panels of light begin glowing along the sides of the tunnel as they progress. The lights are dim, and yellowy in a way that suggests age, weathering, or … well, or weariness. That’s the word that pops into Nassun’s head for some reason. The light is enough to glimmer off the edges of the tiles beneath their feet. There are doors and alcoves along the tunnel walls, and at one point Nassun spots a strange contraption jutting out about ten feet up. It looks like … a wagon bed? Without wheels or a yoke, and as if that wagon bed was made of the same smooth material as the stair, and as if that wagon bed ran along some kind of track set into the wall. It seems obviously made to transport people; maybe it’s how people who couldn’t or wouldn’t walk got around? Now it is still and dark, locked to the wall forever where its last driver left it.
They notice the peculiar bluish light illuminating the tunnel up ahead, but that still isn’t adequate warning enough to prepare them for when the path suddenly curves left, and they find themselves in a new cavern. This much smaller cavern isn’t full of dust, or at least not much of it. What it does contain, instead, is a titanic column of solid blue-black volcanic glass.
The column is huge, and irregular, and impossible. Nassun just stares, openmouthed, at this thing that fills nearly the whole cavern, ground to ceiling and beyond. That it is the solidified, rapidly cooled product of what must have been a titanic explosion is immediately obvious. That it is somehow the source of the lava canopy which flowed into the adjoining cavern is equally indisputable.
“I see,” Schaffa says. Even he sounds overwhelmed, his voice softened by awe. “Look.” He points down. This is what finally provides Nassun the focal point to establish perspective, and size, and distance. The thing is huge, because now she can see tiers that descend toward its base, ringing it in concentric octagons. Three of them. On the outermost tier are buildings, she thinks. They’re badly damaged, half fallen in, just shells, but she sesses at once why they still exist where the ones in the cavern beyond have crumbled. The heat that must have filled this cavern has metamorphized something in the buildings’ construction, hardening and preserving them. Some sort of concussion has done damage, too: All the buildings are torn open on the same side, facing the great glass column. Looking from what she guesses is a three-story building to the glass column, she guesstimates that the column is not as far away as it looks; it’s just much bigger than she initially guessed. The size of … oh.
“An obelisk,” she whispers. And then she can sess and guess what happened, as clearly as if she were there.
Long ago, an obelisk sat here, at the bottom of this cavern, one of its points jammed into the ground like some kind of bizarre plant. At some point, the obelisk lifted free of the pit, to float 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?”