City of Stairs (18 page)

“This is bigger than votes.”

“It’s not about
votes
. It’s about the city, the Continent!”

“So is what I’m doing.”

“People depend on me!”

“People depend on me, too,” says Shara. “They just don’t know it.”

“Oh, you can justify almost anything by saying
that
.”

“I am not your enemy,” she says. “I am your ally. I have been honest with you, Vo—dangerously honest. Now you must trust me. I want you to withdraw from the public eye, just for a little bit. If your movement is as successful as you claimed, stepping away can’t be that damaging.”

This appeal to his vanity appears to appease him some. “How long?”

“Hopefully not long at all. The sooner I can get this done, the sooner you can return to your work, without your guards.”

“I … Wait, what guards?”

Shara stirs her tea. “Bodyguards. The Saypuri detail I’m going to assign to you.”

Vohannes stares at her and laughs. “You … You can’t put me under guard. That’s ridiculous!”

“I can. You’ll still be perfectly free to do as you like, to an extent. They’ll just be watching over you.”

“Do you know how terrible this will look? Me going about town with a bunch of armed Saypuris in tow?”

“I thought we just discussed that you shouldn’t be going about town at all,” says Shara. “You will be a moderately private citizen, for a period of time, and a
safe
one, if I have my way. But you can shorten that period of time … if you do something for me.”

“Oh my goodness …” Vohannes rubs his eyes. “Something you need doing? Is this how the Ministry always manages to get what it wants?”

“Sixteen people are dead, Vo. Including some of your household staff. I’m taking this seriously. And so should you.”

“I
am
taking this seriously. You’re the one telling me to do nothing!”

“Not nothing. There’s something being stored in a safety deposit box at a bank. I’m not sure what it is, but I know I need it.”

“And you want me to get it?”

She nods.

“How do you expect me to do that? Am I to don all black and infiltrate this place in the middle of the night? I would have thought you’d have people for this.”

“I expected you’d come up with an easier way than that. Primarily because you own the bank.”

Vohannes blinks. “I … I do?”

“Yes.” Shara hands him a copy of Pangyui’s decoded message.

He examines it. “Are you
sure
I own it? Its name doesn’t ring a bell. …”

“It must be so nice,” says Shara, “to be so wealthy one is uncertain of which institutions one does and does not own. But yes. I have confirmed that you personally own this bank. If you could find some manner or excuse to retrieve the contents of that box, and deliver it to me, then it may help us figure this all out. Which means I would no longer have to have you under guard, and you could return to business as normal.”

Vohannes grumbles something about a violation of his rights, then folds up the address and angrily stuffs it in his pocket. He stands up and says, “If you’re my ally, I expect you to act like it.”

“And what does that mean?”

“You said yourself, we want the same thing: a peaceful, prosperous Bulikov. Don’t we?”

Shara instantly regrets this—for she knows the Ministry of Foreign Affairs desires no such thing.

“Work with me,” he says. “Help me.”

“Is this about how you want to start making munitions?”

“I am talking about increased Saypuri engagement with Bulikov,” he says. “
Real
engagement.
Real
aid. Not this subterfuge. Right now, we are given but a trickle of water, when we need a flood to wash all this stagnancy away. Flex your muscles, Shara. Give me genuine political support.”

“We can’t possibly voice support for a local politician. Maybe one day, but not right now. The circumstances—”

“The circumstances will never be right,” says Vohannes, “because this will always be hard.”

“Vo …”

“Shara, my city and my country are desperately, desperately poor, and I genuinely think they are on a path that can only end in violence. I am offering you an opportunity to try and help us, and put us on a different path.”

“I cannot accept it,” says Shara. “Not now, Vo. I’m sorry. Maybe one day soon.”

“No. You don’t believe that. You’re not an agent of change, Shara. You don’t make the world better—you work to keep things how they are. The Restorationists look to the past, Saypur wishes to maintain the present, but no one considers the future.”

“I am sorry,” she says. “But I cannot help you.”

“No, you aren’t sorry. You are a representative of your country. And countries do not feel sorrow.” He turns and limps away.

* * *

Shara stands in front of the window again. Dawn is now in full riot across the roofs of Bulikov, giving a golden streak to all the wandering columns of chimney smoke. She takes a deep sip of tea.
An import,
she thinks.
Maybe made in Ghaladesh.
She wonders, briefly, if she is not addicted to the tea’s caffeine so much as the taste and scent of home, so far away.

She opens the window—wincing at the blast of cold air—shuts the shutters outside, then shuts the window.

She licks her finger, hesitates, and begins to write on the glass.

Why do I always do this,
she thinks,
when I’m at my most vulnerable?

Slowly, the shadows shift. The air gains a curious new current. Somewhere in the room, in some invisible manner, a door opens to somewhere else. And there in the glass, she sees …

An empty office.

Shara sits to wait.

Twenty minutes later, Vinya Komayd arrives, holding many papers and clad in what she personally refers to as her “battle armor”: a bright red, highly expensive dress that is both attractive and tremendously imposing. It has always possessed the odd property of making Vinya the undeniable center of any room. When Vinya spotted the dress in a store, she purchased five of them, then arranged it so the entire line was permanently removed from shelves.
I could never trust such a dress to anyone else,
she remarked when she told Shara.
It’s much too dangerous.

“Important meeting?” asks Shara.

Auntie Vinya looks up and frowns. “No,” she says, slightly irritated. “But important people were there. Why are you calling on the emergency line? If you’ve found something, send it through the normal channels.”

“We have sixteen dead,” says Shara. “Continentals. They were killed in an attack on a Bulikovian political figure—a City Father. Who survived.”

Vinya pauses. She looks at the piece of paper in her hand—work that obviously needs to get done, and soon—and sighs and lays it aside. She walks over to sit before the pane of glass and asks, “How?”

“They opted to attack during a social occasion. At which I was present.”

Vinya rolls her eyes. “Ah. You and … what’s his name …”

“Sigrud.”

“Yes.
How
many dead?”

“Sixteen.”

“So he’s clocking in his normal rate, then. By all the damned seas, Shara, I’ve … I’ve no idea why you keep such a man
on
! We have trouble with the Dreylings every day! They’re
pirates
, my dear!”

“They weren’t always. Not while their king was still alive.”

“Ah, yes, their dead king they do so love to sing about … Him and their little lost prince, who’ll one day sail back to them. I expect they also sing all day while burning half the northern Continental coastline! I mean, you must admit, my dear, these people are
savages
!”

“I think he’s proved his worth, last night and many other nights.”

“Intelligence work is meant to avoid bloodshed, not generate it by the quart!”

“And yet intelligence work is as susceptible to its environs as anything else,” says Shara. “We ‘operate within a set of variables that we often cannot influence’.”

“I
hate
it when you quote me,” says Vinya. “All right. So what? So some bumpkins took a shot at an alderman, or whatever he is. That’s not news. That’s just your average day of the week. Why would you contact me?”

“Because I am convinced,” says Shara, “that there is some connection to Pangyui.”

Vinya freezes. She looks away, then slowly looks back. “
What?
”

“I suspect,” says Shara, “that Pangyui’s death was probably part of a reactionary movement here, meant to rebuke Saypur’s influence and return the Continent—or at least Bulikov—to its former glory.”

Vinya sits in silence. Then: “And
how
would you have determined that?”

“He was being watched,” says Shara. “And I suspect that he was being watched by agents of this reactionary movement.”

“You
suspect
?”

“I would say I deem it terribly likely. Specifically—though I cannot confirm yet—I think his death is probably related to their discovery of exactly
what
he was doing here. Which was
not
a mission of cultural understanding, as they were told.”

Vinya sighs and massages the sides of her neck. “Ah. So.”

Shara nods. “So.”

“You found out about his little … historical expedition.”

“So you
do
know about the Warehouse?”

“Of
course
I know about the Warehouse!” Vinya snaps. “It’s why he went there, of course!”

“You signed off on this?”

Vinya rolls her eyes.

“Oh. So you
planned
this.”

“Of
course
I planned this, darling. But it
was
Efrem’s idea. It was just one I had a very specific interest in.”

“And what was this idea?”

“Oh, well, I’m sure that you being the Divine expert that you are, you probably know all about it. … Or you would, if Efrem would have been allowed to publish it. His idea was not, as one says in the parlance of our era,
approved
. And it is still a highly dangerous idea.”

“And what idea was this?”

“We don’t talk much about the Divine over here—we like for such things to stay dead, naturally—but when we do, we, like the Continent itself, assume that it was a top-down relationship: the Divinities stood at the top of the chain, and they told the Continentals and, well, the world, what to do, and everything obeyed.
Reality
obeyed.”

“So?”

“So,” she says slowly, “over the course of his career, Efrem quietly became less convinced this was the case. He believed there was a lot more subtle give and take going on in the relationship than anyone imagined. The Divinities projected their own worlds, their own
realities
, which our historians have more or less surmised from all the conflicting creation stories, and afterlife stories, and static and whatnot.” She waves her hand, eager to cycle through all the minutiae.

“Of course,” says Shara—for this is a topic well-known to her.

One of the Continent’s biggest problems with having six Divinities were the many, many conflicting mythologies: for example, how could the world be a burning, golden coal pulled from the fires of Olvos’s own heart while
also
being a stone hacked by Kolkan from a mountain behind the setting sun? And how could one’s soul, after death, flit away to join Jukov’s flock of brown starlings, while
also
flowing down the river of death to wash ashore in Ahanas’s garden, where it would grow into an orchid? All Divinities were very clear about such things, but none of them agreed with one another.

It took Saypuri historians a long while to figure how all this had worked for the Continent. They made no progress until someone pointed out that the discordant mythologies appeared to mostly be
geographical
: people physically near a Divinity recorded history in strict agreement with that Divinity’s mythology. Once historians started mapping out the recorded histories, they found the borders were shockingly distinct: you could see almost
exactly
where one Divinity’s influence stopped and another’s began. And, the historians were forced to assume, if you were within that sphere or penumbra of influence, you essentially existed in a different reality where everything that specific Divinity claimed was true
was
indisputably true.

So, were you within Voortya’s territory, then the world was made from the bones of an army she slew in a field of ice in the sky.

Yet if you traveled to be near Ahanas, then the world was a seed she’d rescued from the river mud, and watered with her tears.

And still if you traveled to be near Taalhavras, then the world was a machine he had built from the celestial fundament, designed and crafted over thousands of years. And so on and so forth.

What the Divinities felt was true
was
true in these places. And when the Kaj killed them, all those things stopped being true.

The final piece of evidence supporting this theory was the “reality static” that appeared directly after the Kaj successfully killed four of the six original Divinities: the world apparently “remembered” that parts of it once existed in different realities, and had trouble reassembling itself. Saypuri soldiers recorded seeing rivers that flowed into the sky, silver that would turn to lead if you carried it through a certain place, trees that would bloom and die several times over in one day, and fertile lands that turned into cracked wastelands if you stood in one exact spot, yet instantly restore themselves once you’d left it. Eventually, however, the world more or less sorted itself out, and instances of reality static all but vanished from the Continent—leaving the world not quite ruined, but not quite whole, either.

Vinya continues: “Efrem believed that the mortal agents and followers of these Divinities had possessed some hand in
shaping
these realities. He was never sure how, though, because he never had access to the correct historical resources.
Dangerous
historical resources.”