You come into Ykka’s meeting room just as she begins to cut open the knot, even as Cutter stands over her and says in a tight voice, “This is completely unsafe, you have no idea—”
“I don’t care,” Ykka murmurs, concentrating on the knot. She’s being very careful, avoiding the thickest part of the knot, which clearly contains something; you can’t tell what, but it’s lumpy and seems light. The room is more crowded than usual because one of the Hunters is here, too, grimy with ash and blood and visibly determined to know what her companions died for. Ykka glances up in acknowledgment as you arrive, but then resumes work. She says, “Something blows up in my face, Cuts, you’re the new headman.”
That flusters and shuts Cutter up enough that she’s able to finish the knot undistracted. The loops and strands of once-white cloth are lace, and if you don’t miss your guess, it was of a quality that would once have made your grandmother lament her poverty. When the strands snap apart, what sits amid them is a small balled-up scrap of leather hide. It’s a note.
WELCOME TO RENNANIS, it reads in charcoal.
Hjarka curses. You sit down on a divan, because it’s better than the floor and you need to sit somewhere. Cutter looks disbelieving. “Rennanis is Equatorial,” he says. And therefore it should be gone; same reaction you had when Alabaster told you.
“May not be Rennanis proper,” Ykka says. She’s still examining the scrap of leather, turning it over, scraping at the charcoal with the edge of the knife as if to test its authenticity. “A band of survivors from that city, commless now and little better than bandits, naming themselves after home. Or maybe just Equatorial wannabes, taking the chance to claim something they couldn’t before the actual city got torched.”
“Doesn’t matter,” snaps Hjarka. “This is a threat, whoever it’s coming from. What are we going to do about it?”
They devolve into speculations and argument, all with a rising edge of panic. Without really planning to, you lean back against the wall of Ykka’s meeting room. Against the wall of the crystal that her apartment inhabits. Against the rind of the geode, in which the crystal shaft is rooted. It is not an obelisk. Not even the flickering portions of crystal in the control room feel of power as they should; even if they are in an obelisk-like state of unreality, that is the only point of similarity they share with real obelisks.
But you’ve also remembered something that Alabaster told you a long time ago, on a garnet-hued afternoon in a seaside comm that is now smoldering ruins. Alabaster murmuring of conspiracies, watchers, nowhere was safe. You’re saying someone could hear us through the walls? Through the stone itself? you remember asking him. Once upon a time, you thought the things he did were just miracles.
And now you’re a nine-ringer, Alabaster says. Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic. Castrima exists amid ancient sedimentary rock laced through with veins of long-dead forests turned to crumbly coal, all of it balanced precariously over a crisscross of ancient fault-scars that have all but healed. The geode has been here long enough, however awkwardly jammed amid the strata, that its outermost layers are thoroughly fused with local minerals. This makes it easy for you to push your awareness beyond Castrima in a fine, gradually attenuating extrusion. This is not the same thing as extending your torus; a torus is your power, this is you. It’s harder. You can sense what your power cannot, though, and—
“Hey, wake up,” Hjarka says, shoving you in the shoulder, and you snap back to glare at her.
Ykka groans. “Remind me, Hjar, to someday tell you what usually happens when someone interrupts high-level orogeny. I mean, you can probably guess, but remind me to describe it in gory detail, so that maybe it can have some actual deterrent value.”
“She was just sitting there.” Hjarka sits back, looking disgruntled. “And the rest of you were just looking at her.”
“I was trying to hear the north,” you snap. They all look at you like you’re crazy. Evil Earth, if only someone else here were Fulcrum-trained. Though this isn’t something anyone but a senior would understand, anyway.
Lerna ventures, “Hear… the earth? Do you mean sess?”
It’s so hard to explain with words. You rub your eyes. “No, I mean hear. Vibrations. All sound is vibrations, I mean, but…” Their expressions grow more confused. You’re going to have to contextualize. “The node network is still there,” you say. “Alabaster was right. I can sess it if I try, a zone of stillness where the rest of the Equatorials are a seething disaster. Someone is keeping them, the node maintainers around Rennanis, alive, so—”
“So this is really them,” Cutter says, sounding troubled. “An Equatorial city really has decided to induct us.”
“Equatorials don’t induct,” Ykka says. Her jaw is tight as she speaks, gazing at the scrap of leather in her hand. “They’re Old Sanze, or what’s left of it. When Sanze wanted something back in the day, Sanze took it.”
After a tense silence, they start quietly panicking again. Too many words. You sigh and rub your temples and wish you were alone so you could try again. Or…
You blink. Or. You sess the hovering potentiality of the topaz, which drifts in the sky above Castrima-over, where it has been for the past six months, half-hidden amid the ash clouds. Evil Earth. Alabaster isn’t just sessing half the continent; he’s using the spinel to do it. You haven’t even thought about using an obelisk to extend your reach, but he does it like breathing.
“No one touch me,” you say softly. “No one speak to me.” Without waiting to see if they understand, you plunge into the obelisk.
(Because, well, some part of you wants to do this. Has dreamt of upward-falling water and torrential power for months. You are only human, whatever they say about your kind. It’s good to feel powerful.)
Then you’re in the topaz and through it and stretching yourself across the world in a breath. No need to be in the ground when the topaz is in air, is the air; it exists in states of being that transcend solidity, and thus you are capable of transcending, too; you become air. You drift amid the ash clouds and see the Stillness track beneath you in humps of topography and patches of dying forest and threads of roads, all of it grayed over after the long months of the Season. The continent seems tiny and you think, I can make the equator in the blink of an eye, but this thought scares you a little. You don’t know why. You try not to think—how far of a leap is it from thrilling in such power to using it to destroy the world? (Did Alabaster feel this, when he…?) But you are committed; you have connected; the resonance is complete. You launch yourself northward anyhow.
And then you stutter to a halt. Because there is something much closer than the equator that draws your attention. It is so shocking that you fall out of alignment with the topaz at once, and you are very lucky. There is a struck-glass instant in which you feel the shivering immensity of the obelisk’s power and know that you survive only because of fortunate resonances and careful long-dead designers who obviously planned for mistakes like yours, and then you are gasping and back within yourself and babbling before you quite remember what words mean.
“Camp, fire,” you say, panting a little. Lerna comes over and crouches in front of you, taking your hands and checking your pulse; you ignore him. This is important. “Basin.”