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 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?”
“M-maybe they aren’t alive?” They do look dead, though they stand out by being still recognizably plants and not crumbled bits of decay on the ground. Nassun does not like it here, amid these ugly vines and in the shadow of the glass column. Is that what the pylons are for, to cut off sight of the vines’ grotesquerie from the rest of the city? “And maybe they grew here after … the rest.”
Then she blinks, noticing something new about the vine nearest her. It’s different from the others around it. Those are obviously dead, withered and blackened and broken off in places. This one, however, looks as though it might be alive. It is ropy and knotted in places, with a wood-like surface that looks old and rough, but whole. Debris litters the floor beneath it—grayish lumps and dust, scraps of dry-rotted cloth, and even a moldering length of frayed rope.
There is a thing Nassun has resisted doing since entering the cavern of the glass column; some things she doesn’t quite want to know. Now, however, she closes her eyes and reaches inside the vine with her sense of the silver.
At first it’s hard. The cells of the thing—because it is alive, more like a fungus than a plant, but there is also something artificial and mechanical about the way it has been made to function—press together so tightly that she doesn’t expect to see any silver between them. More dense than the stuff in people’s bodies. The arrangement of its substance is almost crystalline, in fact, cells lined up in neat little matrices, which she’s never seen in a living thing before.