City of Stairs (12 page)

He looks up at the crowd. The firelight washes over his face.

Shara’s heart goes cold: she assumed the man was old, but he is not. In fact, he’s hardly aged a day.

His hair is longer, and though it is streaked with gray at the temples it still has that odd reddish hue to it. His beard is bright copper-red, but it is short and closely cropped, rather than the mountainous ball of fluff popular among wealthy Continentals. Shara can still see the strong jaw, the ever-present smirk, and though his eyes have lost a bit of their wild gleam, they are still the same bright, penetrating blue she remembers so well.

The dilettantes and socialites gently descend on him. “Oh, goodness,” he says. “Such a crush. I hope you brought your pocketbooks. …” He laughs as he greets them. Though he could only know a handful of them, he treats them as his oldest friends.

Shara watches, fascinated, horrified, terrified.
How little he has changed, really,
she thinks.

And she is surprised to find that she hates him for this. It is so terribly, unbearably rude for him to pass through all these years and come out the same person on the other side.

“Have you seen the pieces?” Ivanya asks him. “You must see them when you can, darling. They’re so delightfully
abominable.
I adore them. I can’t
wait
to hear what the papers will say.”

“Probably many impolite things,” he says.

“Oh, of course, naturally. Huffing and puffing. As one should hope. Rivegny from the foundry is here—you wanted him to attend for some time, didn’t you? Well, he
finally
showed up. I thought he’d be a rough sort of fellow, being a fellow captain of industry, but he’s quite svelte, I think. You must talk to him. I will get you an envelope for the check. Oh, and we have the new cultural ambassador here, and do you know she has a North-man as her
assistant
? As in a
secretary
? And he’s
here
, darling. He reached into the fire with his
hands
and it was just
absurd!
I can’t stop laughing, I mean, the night is going
so
well.”

He looks up again, glances around the room, amused. And, at first, he looks past her. Shara reels from this slight as one would a sound blow.

But then a light goes on in his eyes, and he slowly drags his gaze back to her.

Within a matter of seconds, his face does many things: first she sees confusion, then recognition, then disbelief, and anger. But after this medley of expressions, his delicate features settle into an expression she finds quite familiar: a smirk of the most cocksure, arrogant sort.

“New ambassador?” he says.

Shara adjusts her glasses. “Oh, dear.”

* * *

Sigrud stares into the fire, massaging the palm of his gloved hand with one thumb. He recalls a saying from his homeland:
Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.

It took Sigrud several years to understand this saying, but it took many more for him to learn to be like the fire: merely alive, and no more.

He watches Shara and the man with the cane circle one another in the crowd. See how they stand, faces almost averted, but never quite completely: always they can watch one another, peering over someone’s shoulder or glancing to the side to catch the other’s feigned ignorance.

They watch without watching. It is, he thinks, a clumsy dance.

The man with the cane keeps checking his watch: perhaps, Sigrud thinks, to avoid appearing too eager. After he’s made a good show of pumping the crowd, he grabs a footman and whispers into his ear. The footman orbits the crowd a handful of times before closing in on Shara, to whom he delivers a small white card. Shara, smiling, tucks it away, and after severing herself from the talkative young girl in the furs, slinks upstairs.

Sigrud turns back to the fire. Lovers, certainly. Their movements sing of past caresses. He is amused: though small and quiet, Shara Komayd is as much a weapon as he is. But he realizes this surprise is silly. All creatures in this world have a little love in their lives, however short.

He remembers the whaling ship
Svordyaaling.
The deck slick with blood and fat as the crew peeled away the skin of a dead whale as one peels an apple. The reeking, bleeding thing clutched to the side of the ship, trailed by churning clouds of gulls. On the days after a kill, after the chase, after the foreman hacked at the beast’s lungs with a halberd until its blowhole sprayed blood, after they dragged it back to the ship across the ocean … On those days down belowdecks Sigrud would pull a locket from his jacket, and he would hold it in his hands, and open it and peer at it by candlelight. …

Sigrud looks at his gloved, aching hand. He cannot recall what the locket looks like, nor can he recall the portrait inside. He thinks he remembers at least the feel of the locket in his hand. But perhaps he is imagining things.

“You seem occupied,” says a voice. A middle-aged woman, obviously wealthy and established, sits next to him by the fire. “Perhaps a drink?” She holds out a goblet of wine.

Sigrud shrugs, takes it, downs it in one gulp. The gold bracelet on his left wrist tinkles as it falls against the buttons on his sleeve. She watches, excited, curious.

“What a remarkable guest you are,” says the woman. “I doubt if Votrov has ever had someone like you under his roof.”

Sigrud puffs at his pipe and watches the fire.

“So what would you be here for?” she asks.

He takes another long puff of his pipe. He considers it. “Trouble,” he says.

Someone has made a ribald joke: a cross-section of the crowd bursts into laughter, and some of the more delicate members turn away, offended.

* * *

The clink of glassware, the mutter of laughter. Cheers ring out in some distant cavity of this warped house.
How hollow and horrible the wild noise of a party sounds,
thinks Shara,
when filtering through yards of stone.

The spiral staircase keeps going up. She wonders if she will find him waiting at the top; if he is, she feels it would be wise to tip backward, and tumble down these steps, rather than try to speak to him.

She gets control of herself and climbs the stairs to what is ostensibly the library, but it is far too large to be one room. One wall boasts a massive family portrait. Not once in their two-year relationship did Vohannes ever mention his parents—which now strikes her as odd—yet they look much like she imagined: proud, regal, stern. Father Votrov is dressed in an almost militaristic uniform, with lots of medals and ribbons; Mama Votrov wears a plush, pink ballroom gown.
The sort of people who intermittently review their children,
she thinks,
rather than raise them.
But what surprises her more is that standing next to what looks like an eleven-year-old Vohannes is a second boy, slightly older, with darker eyes and paler skin. The two look so alike they could only be brothers, but Vohannes never mentioned him.

The wind rises; the candle flames dance. She licks her fingers, tests the air, and finds the source of the draft in a nearby window. She walks to it.

The lights of Bulikov stretch out below her like a sea of blue-white stars. The moon is weak tonight, but she can see strange, alien forms out among the rooftops: a half-collapsed temple, the ruined skeleton of an estate, the curlicue twist of tottering stairs.

She looks down. Three tin-hatted guards patrol the walls of the house of Votrov, with bolt-shots in their hands. This is interesting: she didn’t see any guards when they arrived out front.

The click of a door handle. She turns and watches as someone fumbles the two side doors open, and the tip of a white cane pokes through.

Now is your last chance to run!
says a voice in her mind. She is ashamed that she doesn’t wholly dismiss it outright.

He enters, limping. His white furs are honey-golden in the light of the lamps. He half looks at her—he avoids eye contact—and walks to a drink trolley and pours himself something. Then he begins to hobble over.

“This room,” he says, “is far too large. Do you not agree?”

“That would depend on what it’s being used for.” She is not sure what to do with her hands, her body: how many dignitaries she has met before, how many nobles, yet now such awkwardness comes plummeting down on her? “I’m sorry to take you away from your party.”

“Oh, that. I’ve seen it before. Know how it ends.” He grins at her. It is still a blinding smile. “I am not, as they say, on tenterhooks about the whole thing. Enjoying the view?”

“It’s quite … splendid.”

“That’s one word for it.” He joins her at the window. “My father would talk endlessly about the view around here. About what
used
to be there, I mean. He’d point and say, ‘There, at that corner, that was where we had the Talon of Kivrey! And there, across the park, that was Ahanas’s Well, and the line of people would stretch down the street!’ I was impressed, enamored, until I figured out the timeline and realized dear Papa had not been alive to see any of this. That was all long before his time. He hadn’t really known. He’d just been guessing. And now, I don’t really care to know what he meant, or what all those old things were.”

Shara nods stiffly.

Vohannes glances sidelong at her. “Well, go on.”

“Go on? Go on with what?”

“Go on and tell me. I know you’re bursting at the seams to.”

“Well …” She coughs. “If you really want to know … The Talon of Kivrey was a tall metal monument with a small door in the front: visitors would walk in through the door and find something waiting for them, something that would change their lives. Sometimes it would change their lives for the good—a bundle of medicine to bring home to a sick relative—or sometimes it would change their lives for the worse: a bag of coins, and the address of a prostitute who would later bring them to ruin.”

“Interesting.”

“It was probably a testament to the Divinity Jukov’s strange sense of humor: a long, ongoing joke on everyone, in other words.”

“I see. And the well?”

“Oh, just healing waters. The Divinity Ahanas had them all over the Continent.”

He shakes his head, smiling. “Still an insufferable know-it-all.”

She gives him a taut, bitter grin. “And you’re still so smugly, blithely ignorant.”

“Is it ignorance if you don’t care to know it?”

“Yes. That is the definition of ignorance, actually.”

He looks her up and down. “You know, you don’t look
anything
like I expected you to.”

Shara is too affronted for words.

“I thought you’d be all in jackboots and military gray, Shara,” he says. “Like Mulaghesh down there, but louder.”

“Was I such a terror in those days?”

“You were a bright, blessed little fascist,” says Vo. “Or at least a savage little patriot, as many children of Saypur are. And I’d expect you to come in here the conquering hero, rather than slip in through the backdoor, like a little mouse.”

“Oh,
shut up,
Vo.”

He laughs. “How remarkable it is that we so quickly fall into our old patterns after so many years apart! Tell me—should I arrest you for violating the WR? I noticed you mentioned a few forbidden names. …”

“I think there’s a clause in there,” says Shara, “specifying that any ground the ambassador walks on is considered Saypuri soil. Do you know, your asinine little speech was probably the longest I’ve ever heard you talk about your family?”

“Is it?”

“You never talked about them at all while we were at school.” Shara nods toward the painting on the wall. “You definitely never told me you’ve got a brother.”

Vohannes’s grin grows fixed. “
Had
a brother,” he says. “And I probably didn’t tell you because he wasn’t a very good one. He taught me Tovos Va—so I suppose we should thank him for having brought us together.” Shara tries to scan his comment for irony, and comes up inconclusive. “He died before I ever went to school. He didn’t die with my parents, not during the Plague Years, but … after.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Really? I wasn’t, not much. Like I said, he was not a very good brother.”

“Your family did leave you a magnificent home. You never talked about that, either.”

“That’s because it didn’t exist yet.” He raps the stone floor with his cane. “I tore the old Votrov manor down the second I came back from school, and had this one built. All my various legal guardians—the old trolls followed me around like ducklings after mama, honestly—all of them were horrified, just
horrified
. But it wasn’t even the
real
Votrov manor! Not the centuries-old one everyone talked about, at least. No one knows where the hells that is anymore, just like the rest of Bulikov. We all just pretended the house had always been
the
house, and nothing ever happened—no Blink, no Great War, nothing. I regret including all these stairs, though.” He winces and touches his hip.

“That’s how you injured yourself?”

He allows a pained nod.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Is it bad?”

“When it’s wet out, yes. But be honest with me.” He spreads his arms and turns his head so light catches the side of his face. “Beyond that, how cruel has time’s blade been to me? Am I still the beauty you fell head over heels for at first sight? I am, admit it.”

Shara resists the urge to push him out the window. “You are a horrific ass, Vo.
That
hasn’t changed.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. I won’t let you pull your polite little mouse role with me, Shara. The edges on the girl I knew could
never
be sanded down.”

“Perhaps you didn’t know me as well as you thought,” says Shara. “Do you wonder if your parents would approve of the house, as well as your little party?”

He grins broadly at her. “I expect they’d approve of them just as much as they’d approve of me having a discussion with a Saypuri intelligence officer.”

Someone downstairs crows laughter. There is the tinkle of broken glass, and a sympathetic
Awww
from the crowd.