The decoy house has Strongback sentries like the other one, some guarding the basement entrance and some actually in the house upstairs, keeping watch on the road outside. When the upstairs sentries give you the all clear, you head out into the late-evening ashfall.
After, what, less than a day in Castrima’s geode? It’s amazing how strange the surface seems to you. For the first time in weeks you notice the sulfur stench of the air, the silvery haze, the incessant soft patter of fat ash flakes on the ground and dead leaves. The silence, which makes you realize just how noisy Castrima-under is, with people talking and pulleys squeaking and smithies clanking, and the omnipresent hum of the geode’s strange hidden machinery. Up here there’s nothing. The trees have dropped their leaves; nothing moves through the curl-edged, desiccated detritus. No birdsong can be heard through the branches; most birds stop marking territory and mating during a Season, and song only attracts predators. No other animal sounds. There are no travelers on the road, though you can tell that the ash is thinner there. People have been by recently. Aside from that, though, even the wind is still. The sun has set, though there’s still plenty of light in the sky. The clouds, even this far south, still reflect the Rifting.
“Traffic?” Ykka asks one of the sentries.
“Family-looking bunch about forty minutes ago,” he says. He keeps his voice appropriately low. “Well equipped. Maybe twenty people, all ages, all Sanzeds. Traveling north.”
That makes everyone look at him. Ykka repeats: “North?”
“North.” The sentry, who has the most beautiful long-lashed eyes, looks back at Ykka and shrugs. “Looked like they had a destination in mind.”
“Huh.” She folds her arms, shivering a little, though it’s not particularly cold outside; the cold of a Fifth Season takes months to set in fully. Castrima-under’s just so warm that to someone used to that, Castrima-over’s chilly. Or maybe Ykka’s just reacting to the starkness of the comm around her. So many silent houses, dead gardens, and ash-occluded pathways where people once walked. You’d been thinking of the surface level of the comm as bait—and it is, a honeypot meant to draw in the desirable and distract the hostile. Yet it was also a real comm once, alive and bright and anything but still.
“Well?” Ykka takes a deep breath and smiles, but you think her smile is strained. She nods toward the low-hanging ash clouds. “If you need to see this thing, I don’t think you’re going to have much luck anytime soon.”
She’s right; the air is a haze of ash, and past the beaded, red-tinted clouds you can’t see a damned thing. You step off the porch and look up at the sky anyway, unsure of how to begin. You also aren’t sure if you should begin. After all, the first and second times you tried to interact with an obelisk, you almost died. Then there’s the fact that Alabaster wants this, when he’s the man who destroyed the world. Maybe you shouldn’t do anything he asks.
He’s never hurt you, though. The world has, but not him. Maybe the world deserved to be destroyed. And maybe he’s earned a little of your trust, after all these years.
So you close your eyes and try to still your thoughts. There are sounds to be heard around you, you notice at last. Faint creaks and pops as the wooden parts of Castrima-over react to the weight of ash, or the changing warmth of the air. Several things scuttling among the dried-out stalks of a housegreen nearby: rodents or something else small, nothing to worry about. One of the Castrimans is breathing really loudly for some reason.
Warm jitter of the earth beneath your feet. No. Wrong direction.
There’s actually enough ash in the sky that you can sort of grasp the clouds with your awareness. Ash is powdered rock, after all. But it’s not the clouds you want. You grope along them as you would earth strata, not quite sure what you’re looking for—
“Will this take much longer?” sighs one of the Castrimans.
“Why, got a hot date?” Ykka drawls.
He is insignificant. He is—
He is—
Something pulls you sharply west. You jerk and turn to face it, inhaling as you remember a night long ago in a comm called Allia, and another obelisk. The amethyst. He didn’t need to see it, he needed to face it. Lines of sight, lines of force. Yes. And there, far along the line of your attention, you sess your awareness being drawn toward something heavy and… dark.
Dark, so dark. Alabaster said it would be the topaz, didn’t he? This isn’t that. It feels familiar, sort of, reminds you of the garnet. Not the amethyst. Why? The garnet was broken, mad (you’re not sure why this word occurs to you), but beyond that it was also more powerful, somehow, though power is too simple a word for what these things contain. Richness. Strangeness. Darker colors, deeper potential? But if that’s the case…
“Onyx,” you say aloud, opening your eyes.
Other obelisks buzz along the periphery of your line of sight, closer, possible, but they don’t respond to this near-instinctive call of yours. The dark obelisk is so far away, well past the Western Coastals, somewhere over the Unknown Sea. Even flying, it might take months to arrive. But.
But. The onyx hears you. You know this the way you once knew your children had heard you, even if they pretended to ignore you. Ponderously it turns, arcane processes awakening for the first time in an age of the earth, as it does uttering an assault of sound and vibration that shakes the sea for miles underneath. (How do you know this? You’re not sessing this. You just know.)
Then it begins to come. Evil, eating Earth.
You flinch back along the line that leads to yourself. Along the way something snags your attention, and almost as an afterthought you call it, too: the topaz. It is lighter, livelier, much closer, and somehow more responsive, perhaps because you perceive a hint of Alabaster in its interstices like a curl of citrus rind added to a savory dish. He’s prepped it for you.
Then you snap back into yourself and turn to Ykka, who’s frowning at you. “You follow that?”
She shakes her head slowly, but not in negation. She caught some of it, somehow. You can see that in the look on her face. “I… that was… something. I’m not sure what.”
“Don’t reach for either one, when they get here.” Because you’re sure they’re coming. “Don’t reach for any of them. Ever.” You’re reluctant to say obelisk. Too many stills around, and even if they haven’t killed you yet, stills never need to hear that something can make orogenes even more of a danger than they already are.
“What would happen if I did?” It’s a question of honest curiosity, not challenge, but some questions are dangerous.
You decide to be honest. “You would die. I’m not sure how.” Actually you’re pretty sure she would spontaneously ignite into a white-hot screaming column of fire and force, possibly taking all of Castrima with her. But you’re not a hundred percent sure, so you stick to what you know. “The—those things are like the batteries some Equatorial comms use.” Shit. “Used. You’ve heard of those? A battery stores energy so you can have electricity even if the hydro’s not flowing or the geo has—”
Ykka looks affronted. Well, she is Sanzed; they invented batteries. “I know what a rusting battery is! First hint of a shake and you’ve got acid burns on top of everything else, all for the sake of a bit of stored juice.” She shakes her head. “What you’re talking about isn’t a battery.”
“They were making sugar batteries when I left Yumenes,” you say. She’s not saying obelisk, either. Good; she gets it. “Safer than acid and metal. Batteries can be made more than one way. But if a battery is too powerful for the circuit you attach it to…” You figure that’s enough to get the idea across.
She shakes her head again, but you think she believes you. As she turns and starts to pace in thought, you notice Lerna. He’s been quiet all this time, listening to you and Ykka talk. Now he seems deep in thought, and that bothers you. You don’t like that a still is thinking so hard about this.