City of Stairs (2 page)

Mulaghesh can see two City Fathers of Bulikov—their version of elected councilmen—staring at Jindash with cold rage.

“Yes!” says Yaroslav. “I was never allowed such a thing! And she was
our
god! Ours!”

The crowd looks back at the court guards, expecting them to charge forward and hack down Yaroslav where he stands.

“This is not exactly a rebuttal, is it?” asks Troonyi.

“And you … you let
that
man”—Yaroslav points a finger at Dr. Efrem Pangyui’s empty seat—“come in to our country, and read all of our histories, all of our stories, all of our legends that we ourselves do
not
know! That we ourselves are not
allowed
to know!”

Mulaghesh winces. She knew this would come up eventually.

Mulaghesh is sensitive to the fact that, in the full scope of history, Saypur’s global hegemony is minutes old. For many hundreds of years before the Great War, Saypur was the Continent’s colony—established and enforced, naturally, by the Continent’s Divinities—and few have forgotten this in Bulikov: why else would the City Fathers call the current arrangement “the masters serving the servants”? In private only, of course.

So it was a show of enormous negligence and stupidity on the part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ignore these tensions and allow the esteemed Dr. Pangyui to travel here, to Bulikov, to study all the history of the Continent: history that the Continentals are legally prevented from studying themselves. Mulaghesh warned the Ministry it’d wreak havoc in Bulikov, and as she predicted, Dr. Pangyui’s time in Bulikov has not exemplified the mission of peace and understanding he supposedly arrived under: she has had to deal with protests, threats, and once, assault, when someone threw a stone at Dr. Pangyui but accidentally struck a police officer on the chin.

“That man,” says Yaroslav, still pointing at the empty chair, “is an insult to Bulikov and the entire Continent! That man is … is the manifestation of the utter contempt Saypur holds for the Continent!”

“Oh, now,” says Troonyi, “that’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“He gets to read the things no one else can read!” says Yaroslav. “He gets to read things written by our fathers, our grandfathers!”

“He is allowed to do so,” says Jindash, “by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His mission here is of an ambassadorial nature. And this is not part of your tria—”

“Just because you won the War doesn’t mean you can do whatever you like!” says Yaroslav. “And just because we lost it doesn’t mean you can strip us of everything we value!”

“You tell them, Vasily!” shouts someone at the back of the room.

Mulaghesh taps her gavel against her desk; immediately, the room falls silent.

“Would I be correct in thinking, Mr. Yaroslav,” she says wearily, “that your rebuttal is finished?”

“I … I reject the legitimacy of this court!” he says hoarsely.

“Duly noted. Chief Diplomat Troonyi—your verdict?”

“Oh, guilty,” says Troonyi. “Very much guilty. Incredibly guilty.”

Eyes in the room shift to Mulaghesh. Yaroslav is shaking his head, mouthing
no
at her.

I need a smoke,
thinks Mulaghesh.

“Mr. Yaroslav,” she says. “If you had pleaded no contest when initially charged with the infraction, your fine would have been more lenient. However, against the recommendation of this court—and against my
personal advice
—you chose instead to bring it to trial. I believe you can understand that the evidence Prosecutor Jindash has brought against you is highly incriminating. As Prosecutor Jindash said, we do not debate history here: we merely deal with its effects. As such, it is with regret that I am forced to—”

The courtroom door bangs open. Seventy-two heads turn at once.

A small Saypuri official stands in the doorway, looking nervous and alarmed. Mulaghesh recognizes him: Pitry something or other, from the embassy, one of Troonyi’s lackeys.

Pitry swallows and totters down the aisle toward the bench.

“Yes?” says Mulaghesh. “Is there a reason for this intrusion?”

Pitry extends a hand, holding a paper message. Mulaghesh takes it, unfolds it, and reads:

the body of efrem pangyui has been discovered in his office at bulikov university. murder is suspected.

Mulaghesh looks up and realizes everyone in the room is watching her.

This damned trial,
she thinks,
is now even less important than it was before.

She clears her throat. “Mr. Yaroslav … In light of recent events, I am forced to reconsider the priority of your case.”

Jindash and Troonyi both say, “What?”

Yaroslav frowns. “What?”

“Would you say, Mr. Yaroslav, that you have learned your lesson?” asks Mulaghesh.

Two Continentals creep in through the courtroom doors. They find friends in the crowd, and whisper in their ears. Soon word is spreading throughout the courtroom audience. “… 
murdered
?” someone says loudly.

“My … lesson?” says Yaroslav.

“To put it bluntly, Mr. Yaroslav,” says Mulaghesh, “will you be stupid enough in the future to publicly display what is obviously a Divinity’s sigil in hopes of drumming up more business?”

“What are you
doing
?” says Jindash. Mulaghesh hands him the message; he scans it and goes white. “Oh, no … Oh, by the seas …”

“… beaten to death!” someone says out in the audience.

The whole of Bulikov must know by now,
thinks Mulaghesh.

“I … No,” says Yaroslav. “No, I would … I would not?”

Troonyi has now read the message. He gasps and stares at Dr. Pangyui’s empty chair as if expecting to find it occupied by his dead body.

“Good answer,” says Mulaghesh. She taps her gavel. “Then, as the authority in this courtroom, I will set aside CD Troonyi’s estimable opinions, and dismiss your case. You are free to leave.”

“I am? Really?” says Yaroslav.

“Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “And I would advise you exercise your freedom to leave with all due haste.”

The crowd has devolved into shouts and cries. A voice bellows, “He’s dead! He’s really dead! Victory, oh, glorious victory!”

Jindash slumps in his chair as if his spine has been pulled out.

“What are we going to
do
?” says Troonyi.

Someone in the crowd is crying, “No. No!
Now
who will they send?”

Someone shouts back, “Who cares who they send?”

“Don’t you see?” cries the voice in the crowd. “They will reinvade us, reoccupy! Now they will send someone even
worse
!”

Mulaghesh sets her gavel aside and gratefully lights a cigarillo.

* * *

How do they do it?
Pitry wonders.
How can anyone in Bulikov sit next to the city walls or even live with them in sight, peeking through the blinds and drapes of high windows, and feel in any way normal?
Pitry tries to look at anything else: his watch, which is five minutes too slow, and getting slower; his fingernails, which are quite fine except for the pinky, which remains irritatingly rippled; he even looks to the train station porter, who keeps glaring at him. Yet eventually Pitry cannot resist, and he sneaks a glance to his left, to the east, where the walls wait.

It is not size of the walls he finds disturbing, though this would normally disturb him plenty. Rather, as Pitry tries to look up their vast expanse, it gets a little harder and harder for his eye to
find
the walls. Instead, he begins to see distant hills and stars, the flicker of trees caressed by wind: suggestions of the nightscape on the opposite side, as if the walls are transparent, like muddy glass. Where he expects to see the tops of the walls he sees only the night sky and the fat, placid face of the moon. But if he looks
along
the walls, staring down their curve, they slowly calcify beside the houses and ramshackle buildings a hundred yards away, the city lights glinting off their smooth facade.

And yet if I were on the other side,
he thinks,
or if I were to walk close to them, I’d see nothing but white stone.
A creature comfort, in a way: the beings that made the walls wished to protect the city, but did not wish to deny its residents the sight of sunrises and sunsets. Pitry reflects on how any miracle, no matter how subtle, always feels tremendously unsettling to a Saypuri.

He looks back at his watch and does some math. Is the train late? Are such unusual trains late? Perhaps they come on their own time. Perhaps its engineer, whoever it might be, was never told of the telegram stating, quite clearly, “3:00 AM,” and does not know that very official people are taking this secret appointment quite seriously. Or perhaps no one cares that the person waiting for this train might be cold, hungry, unnerved by these white walls, and practically death-threatened by the milky blue gaze of the train station porter.

Pitry sighs. If he were to die and see all of his life flash before his eyes in his final moment, he is fairly sure it would be a boring show. For though he thought a position in the Saypuri embassies would be an interesting and exotic job, taking him to new and exotic lands (and exposing him to new and exotic women), so far it has mostly consisted of waiting. As an assistant to the associate ambassadorial administrator, Pitry has learned how to wait on new and unexciting things in new and unexciting ways, becoming an expert at watching the second hand of a clock slowly crank out the hours. The purpose of an assistant, he has decided, is to have someone upon whom you can unload all the deadly little nothings that fill the bureaucratic day.

He checks his watch. Twenty minutes, maybe. His breath roils with steam.
By all the seas, what an awful job.

Perhaps he can transfer out, he thinks. There are actually many opportunities for a Saypuri here: the Continent is divided into four regions, each of which has its own regional governor; in the next tier below, there are the polis governors, who regulate each major metropolitan area on the Continent; and in the next tier below that are the embassies, which regulate … well, to be honest, Pitry has never been quite sure what the embassies regulate. Something to do with culture, which seems to involve a lot of parties.

The station porter strolls from his offices and stands at the edge of the platform. He glances backward at Pitry, who nods and smiles. The porter looks at Pitry’s headcloth and his short, dark beard; sniffs twice—
I smell a shally;
and then, with a lingering glare, turns and walks back to his office, as if saying,
I know you’re there, so don’t try and steal anything.
As if there is anything to steal in a deserted train station.

They hate us,
thinks Pitry. But of course they do. It is something he has come to terms with during his short period at the embassy.
We tell them to forget, but can they? Can we? Can anyone?

Yet Pitry underestimated the nature of their hatred. He had no understanding of it until he came here and saw the empty places on the walls and in the shop windows, the frames and facades shorn clean of any images or carvings; he saw how the people of Bulikov behaved at certain hours of the day, as if they knew this time was designated for some show of deference, yet they could not act, and instead simply milled about; and, in his walks throughout the city, he came upon the roundabouts and cul-de-sacs that had obviously once played host to something—some marvelous sculpture, or a shrine fogged with incense—but were now paved over, or held nothing more marvelous than a streetlamp, or a bland municipal garden, or a lonely bench.

In Saypur, the overwhelming feeling is that the Worldly Regulations have been a wild success, curbing and correcting the behaviors of the Continent over the course of seventy-five years. But in his time in Bulikov, Pitry has begun to feel that though the Regulations appear to have had some superficial success—for, true, no one in Bulikov praises, mentions, or acknowledges any aspect of the Divine, at least in public—in reality, the Regulations have failed.

The city knows. It remembers. Its past is written in its bones, though now the past speaks in silences.

Pitry shivers in the cold.

He is not sure if he would rather be at the office, so alight with concern and chaos in the wake of Dr. Efrem Pangyui’s murder. Telegraphs spitting out papers like drunks vomiting at closing time. The endless cranking of phones. Secretaries sprinting into offices, staking papers onto spikes with the viciousness of shrikes.

Yet then came the one telegraph that silenced everyone:

C-AMB THIVANI TO BULIKOV MOROV STATION 3:00 STOP VTS512

And from the coding on the end it was clear this had come not from the polis governor’s office, but the
regional
governor’s office, which is the only place on the Continent that has direct, immediate connection with Saypur. And so, the Comm Department secretary announced with terrible dread, the telegram might have been rerouted across the South Seas from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself.

There was a flurry of discussion as to who should meet this Thivani person, because he had doubtlessly been sent here in reaction to the professor’s death, bringing swift and terrible retribution; for had not Dr. Efrem Pangyui been one of Saypur’s brightest and most favored sons? Had his ambassadorial mission not been one of the greatest scholarly endeavors in history? Thus it was quickly decided that Pitry—being young, cheerful, and not in the room at the time—would be the best man for the job.

But they did wonder at the coding, C-AMB, for “Cultural Ambassador.” Why would they send one of
those
? Weren’t CAs the lowest caste of the Ministry? Most of them were fresh-faced students, and often harbored a rather unhealthy interest in foreign cultures and histories, something metropolitan Saypuris found distasteful. Usually CAs served as ornamentation to receptions and galas, and little more. So why send a simple CA into the middle of one of the greatest diplomatic debacles of the past decade?

“Unless,” Pitry wondered aloud back at the embassy, “it’s not related at all. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”