Alabaster pauses, suddenly, for a long and pent moment. You want to ask what will happen if a war so ancient doesn’t end soon. You want to ask what happened to him down there at the core of the Earth, what he saw or experienced that has so plainly shaken him. You don’t ask. You’re a brave woman, but you know what you can take, and what you can’t.
He whispers: “When I die, don’t bury me.”
“Wh—”
“Give me to Antimony.”
As if she has heard her name, suddenly, Antimony reappears, standing before you both. You glare at her, realizing that this means Alabaster has reached the end of his strength and that the conversation must end. It makes you resent his weakness, and hate that he is dying. It makes you seek a scapegoat for that hatred.
“No,” you say, looking at her. “She took you from me. She doesn’t get to keep you.”
He chuckles. It’s so weary that your anger breaks. “It’s either her or the Evil Earth, Essun. Please.”
He begins to list to one side, and maybe you’re not as much of a monster as you think, because you give up and get up. Antimony blurs in that stone-eaterish way, slow except when they aren’t, and then she is crouched beside him, using both hands now to hold and support him as he slips into sleep.
You gaze at Antimony. You’ve thought of her as an enemy all this time, but if what Alabaster says is true…
“No,” you snap. You’re not really saying it to her, but it works either way. “I’m not ready to think of you as an ally yet.” Maybe not ever.
“Even if you were,” says the voice from within the stone eater’s chest, “I’m his ally. Not yours.”
People like us, with wants and needs. You want to reject this, too, but oddly it comforts you to know that she doesn’t like you, either. “Alabaster said he understood why you did what you did. But I don’t understand why he did what he did, or what he wants now. He said this was a three-sided war; what’s the third side? Which side is he on? How does the Rift… help?”
No matter how you try, you cannot imagine Antimony as having once been human. Too many things work against it: the stillness of her face, the dislocation of her voice. The fact that you hate her. “The Obelisk Gate amplifies energies both physical and arcane. No single point of surface venting produces these energies in sufficient quantity. The Rift is a reliable, high-volume source.”
Meaning… You tense. “You’re saying that if I use the Rift as my ambient source, channel it through my torus—”
“No. That would simply kill you.”
“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]
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.