But then he surprises you. “Ykka. How old do you think this comm really is?”
She stops and frowns at him. The other Castrimans shift as if uncomfortable. Maybe it bothers them, being reminded that they live in a deadciv ruin. “No clue. Why?”
He shrugs. “I’m just thinking of similarities.”
You understand then. Crystals in Castrima-under that glow through some means you can’t fathom. Crystals that float in the sky by some means you can’t fathom. Both mechanisms meant to be used by orogenes and no one else.
Stone eaters showing an inordinate interest in orogenes who use either. You glance at Hoa.
But Hoa isn’t looking at the sky, or at you. He’s stepped off the porch and has crouched on the ashy ground just off the walkway, staring at something. You follow his gaze and see a small mound in what was once the front yard of the house next door. It looks like just another pile of ash, maybe three feet high, but then you notice a tiny desiccated animal foot poking out of one end. Cat, maybe, or rabbit. There are probably dozens of small carcasses around here, buried under the ash; the beginning of the Season likely caused a huge die-off. Odd that this carcass seems to have accumulated so much more ash than the ground around it, though.
“Too long gone to eat, kid,” says one of the men, who’s also noticed Hoa and clearly has no idea what the “kid” is. Hoa blinks at him and bites his lip with just the perfect degree of unease. He plays the child so well. Then he gets up and comes over to you, and you realize he’s not playacting. Something really has unnerved him.
“Other things will eat it,” he says to you, very softly. “We should go.”
What. “You’re not afraid of anything.”
His jaw tightens. Jaw full of diamond teeth. Muscles over diamond bones? No wonder he’s never let you try to lift him; he must be heavy as marble. But he says, “I’m afraid of things that will hurt you.”
And… you believe him. Because, you suddenly realize, that’s been the commonality of all his strange behavior so far. His willingness to face the kirkhusa, which might have been too fast even for your orogeny. His ferocity toward other stone eaters. He’s protecting you. So few have ever tried to protect you, in your life. It’s impulse that makes you lift a hand and stroke it over his weird white hair. He blinks. Something comes into his eyes that is anything but inhuman. You don’t know what to think. This, though, is why you listen to him.
“Let’s go,” you say to Ykka and the others. You’ve done what Alabaster asked. You suspect he won’t be displeased by the extra obelisk when you tell him—if he doesn’t already know. Now, maybe, finally, he’ll tell you what the rust is going on.
Before, gather into stable rock for each citizen one year’s supply: ten rullets of grain, five of legume, a quarter-tradet dry fruit, and a half storet in tallow, cheese, or preserved flesh. Multiply by each year of life desired. After, guard upon stable rock with at least three strong-backed souls per cache: one to guard the cache, two to guard the guard.
—Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse four
3
Schaffa, forgotten
YES. YOU ARE HIM, TOO, or you were until after Meov. But now he is someone else.
The force that shatters the Clalsu is orogeny applied to air. Orogeny isn’t meant to be applied to air, but there’s no real reason for it not to work. Syenite has had practice already using orogeny on water, at and since Allia. There are minerals in water, and likewise there are dust particles in air. Air has heat and friction and mass and kinetic potential, same as earth; the molecules of air are simply farther apart, the atoms shaped differently. Anyhow, the involvement of an obelisk makes all of these details academic.
Schaffa knows what’s coming the instant he feels the obelisk’s pulse. He is old, old, Syenite’s Guardian. So old. He knows what stone eaters do to powerful orogenes whenever they get the chance, and he knows why it is crucial to keep orogenes’ eyes on the ground and not the sky. He has seen what happens when a four-ringer—that’s how he still thinks of Syenite—connects to an obelisk. He does genuinely care about her, you realize (she does not realize). It isn’t all about control. She’s his little one, and he has protected her in more ways than she knows. The thought of her agonizing death is unbearable to him. This is ironic, considering what happens next.
In the moment when Syenite stiffens and her frame becomes suffused with light, and the air within the Clalsu’s tiny forward compartment shivers and turns into a nearly solid wall of unstoppable force, Schaffa happens to be standing to one side of a hanging bulkhead rather than in front of it. His companion, the Guardian who has just killed Syenite’s feral lover, is not so lucky: When the force slams him backward, the bulkhead juts out from the wall at just the right height and angle to shear his head off before giving way itself. Schaffa, however, flies backward unobstructed through the Clalsu’s capacious hold, which is empty because the ship hasn’t been out on a piracy run in a while. There’s room enough for his velocity to slow a little, and for the greatest force of Syenite’s blow to move past him. When he finally does hit a bulkhead, it is with merely bone-breaking force and not bone-pulverizing force. And the bulkhead is buckling, crumbling along with the rest of the ship, when he hits it. That helps, too.
Then when jagged, knifelike spikes of bedrock from the ocean floor begin spearing through the explosion of debris, Schaffa is lucky again: None of them pierce his body. Syenite is lost in the obelisk by this point, and lost in the first throes of a grief that will send aftershakes through even Essun’s life. (Schaffa saw her hand on the child’s face, covering mouth and nose, pressing. Incomprehensible. Did she not know that Schaffa would love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair.) She is part of something vast and globally powerful now, and Schaffa, once the most important person in her world, is beneath her notice. On some level he is aware of this even as he flies through the storm, and the knowledge leaves a deep burn of hurt in his heart. Then he is in the water and dying.
It is difficult to kill a Guardian. The many broken bones Schaffa has suffered and the damage to his organs would not be enough to do the job, in and of themselves. Even drowning wouldn’t be a problem under ordinary circumstances. Guardians are different. But they do have limits, and drowning plus organ failure plus blunt force trauma is enough to breach them. He realizes this as he tumbles through the water, bouncing off shards of stone and debris from the destroyed ship. He can’t tell which way is up, except that one direction seems faintly brighter than the other, but he is being dragged away from this by the swiftly sinking aft end of the ship. He uncurls, hits a rock, recovers, and tries to paddle against the downward current even though one of his arms is now broken. There’s nothing in his lungs. The air’s been beaten out of him, and he’s trying not to inhale water because then he will surely die. He cannot die. He has so much left to do.
But he is only human, mostly, and as the terrible pressure grows and spots of blackness encroach on his vision and his whole body grows numb with the weight of the water, he cannot help sucking in a mighty lungful. It hurts: salt acid in his chest, fire in his throat, and still no air. On top of everything else—he can bear the rest, has borne worse in his long awful life—it is suddenly too much for the ordered, careful rationality that has guided and guarded Schaffa’s mind up to this point.
He panics.