You shift down from the cot to the floor, leaning against the cot’s frame. “Tell me about the Obelisk Gate.”
“Yes. I thought that would get you interested.” Alabaster’s voice has gone soft again, but there is a look on his face that makes you think, This is what he looked like on the day he made the Rift. “You remember the basic principle. Parallel scaling. Yoking two oxen together instead of one. Two roggas together can do more than each individually. It works for obelisks, too, just… exponential. A matrix, not a yoke. Dynamic.”
Okay, you’re following so far. “So I need to figure out how to chain all of them together.”
He nods back minutely. “And you’ll need a buffer, at least initially. When I opened the Gate at Yumenes, I used several dozen node maintainers.”
Several dozen stunted, twisted roggas turned into mindless weapons… and Alabaster somehow turned them against their owners. How like him, and how perfect. “Buffer?”
“To cushion the impact. To… smooth out the connection flow…” He falters, sighs. “I don’t know how to explain it. You’ll know when you try it.”
When. He assumes so much. “What you did killed the node maintainers?”
“Not precisely. I used them to open the Gate and create the Rift… and then they tried to do what they were made to do: Stop the shake. Stabilize the land.” You grimace, understanding. Even you, in your extremity, weren’t foolish enough to try to stop the shockwave, when it reached Tirimo. The only safe thing to do was divert its force elsewhere. But node maintainers lack the mind or control to do the safe thing.
“I didn’t use all of them,” Alabaster says thoughtfully. “The ones far to the west and in the Arctics and Antarctics were out of my reach. Most have died since. No one to keep them alive. But I can still sess active nodes in a few places. Remnants of the network: south, near the Antarctic Fulcrum, and north, near Rennanis.”
Of course he can sess active nodes all the way in the Antarctics. You can barely sess a hundred miles from Castrima, and you have to work to stretch that far. And maybe the roggas of the Antarctic Fulcrum have survived somehow, and chosen to care for their less fortunate brethren in the nodes, but… “Rennanis?” That can’t be. It’s an Equatorial city. More southerly and westerly than most; people in Yumenes thought it was only a step above any other Somidlats backwater. But Rennanis was Equatorial enough that it should be gone.
“The Rift wends northwesterly, along an ancient fault line that I found. It swung a few hundred miles wide of Rennanis… I suppose that was enough to let the node maintainers actually do something. Should’ve killed most of them, and the rest should’ve died of neglect when their staffs abandoned them, but I don’t know.”
He falls silent, perhaps weary. His voice is hoarse today, and his eyes are bloodshot. Another infection. He keeps getting them because some of the burned patches on his body aren’t healing, Lerna says. The lack of pain meds isn’t helping.
You try to digest what he’s told you, what Antimony has told you, what you’ve learned through trial and suffering. Maybe the numbers matter. Two hundred and sixteen obelisks, some incalculable number of other orogenes as a buffer, and you. Magic to tie the three together… somehow. All of it together forging a net, to catch the Earthfires-damned Moon.
Alabaster says nothing while you ponder, and eventually you glance at him to see if he’s fallen asleep. But he’s awake, his eyes slits, watching you. “What?” You frown, defensive as always.
He quarter-smiles with the half of his mouth that hasn’t been burned. “You never change. If I ask you for help, you tell me to flake off and die. If I don’t say a rusting word, you work miracles for me.” He sighs. “Evil Earth, how I’ve missed you.”
This… hurts, unexpectedly. You realize why at once: because it’s been so long since anyone said anything like this to you. Jija could be affectionate, but he wasn’t much given to sentimentality. Innon used sex and jokes to show his tenderness. But Alabaster… this has always been his way. The surprise gesture, the backhanded compliment that you could choose to take for teasing or an insult. You’ve hardened so much without this. Without him. You seem strong, healthy, but inside you feel like he looks: nothing but brittle stone and scars, prone to cracking if you bend too much.
You try to smile, and fail. He doesn’t try. You just look at each other. It’s nothing and everything at once.
Of course it doesn’t last. Someone walks into the infirmary and comes over and surprises you by being Ykka. Hjarka’s behind her, slouching along and looking very Sanzedly bored: picking her sharp-filed teeth with a bit of polished wood, one hand on her well-curved hip, her ashblow hair a worse mess than usual and noticeably flatter on one side where she’s just woken up.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Ykka says, not sounding especially sorry, “but we’ve got a problem.”
You’re beginning to hate those words. Still, it’s time to end the lesson, so you nod to Alabaster and get up. “What now?”
“Your friend. The slacker.” Tonkee, who hasn’t joined the Innovators’ work crews, doesn’t bother to pick up your household share when it’s her turn, and who conveniently disappears whenever it’s time for a caste meeting. In another comm they’d have already kicked her out for that kind of thing, but she gets extra leeway for being one of the companions of the second-most-powerful orogene in Castrima. It only goes so far, though, and Ykka looks especially pissed off.
“She’s found the control room,” Ykka says. “Locked herself inside.”
“The—” What. “The control room for what?”
“Castrima.” Ykka looks annoyed to have to explain. “I told you when you got here: There are mechanisms that make this place function, the light and the air and so on. We keep the room secret because if somebody loses it and wants to smash things, they could kill us all. But your ’mest is in there doing Evil Earth knows what, and I’m basically asking you if it’s okay to kill her, because that’s about where I am right now.”
“She won’t be able to affect anything important,” Alabaster says. It startles you both, you because you aren’t used to seeing him interact with anyone else, and Ykka because she probably thinks of him as a waste of medicines and not a person. He doesn’t think much of her, either; his eyes are closed again. “More likely to hurt herself than anything else.”
“Good to know,” Ykka says, though she looks at him skeptically. “I’d be reassured if you weren’t talking out of your ass, seeing as you couldn’t possibly know what’s happening beyond this infirmary, but it’s a nice thought, anyway.”
He lets out a soft snort of amusement. “I knew everything I needed to know about this relic the instant I came here. And if any of you other than Essun had a chance of making it do what it’s really capable of, I wouldn’t stay here a moment longer.” As you and Ykka stare, he lets out a heavy sigh. There’s a little bit of a rattle in it, which troubles you, and you make a note to ask Lerna about it. But he says nothing more, and finally Ykka glances at you with a palpable I am really sick of your friends look, and beckons for you to follow her out.
It’s a long way up to wherever this control room is. Hjarka’s breathing hard after the first ladder, but she acclimates after that and settles into a rhythm. Ykka does better, though she’s still sweating in ten minutes. You’ve still got your road conditioning, so you handle the climb well enough, but after the first three flights of stairs, a ladder, and a spiraling balcony built round one of the fatter crystals of the comm, you’re even willing to start small talk to take your mind off the ground falling farther and farther below. “What’s your usual disciplinary process for people who shirk their caste duties?”