City of Stairs (4 page)

Something. Perhaps a person: a huge person, rendered in shadow. It is difficult to see, or perhaps the painter was not quite sure what this figure looked like.

Shara stares at the Saypuri general. She knows that the painting is historically inaccurate: the Kaj was actually stationed at the
front
of his army during the Night of the Red Sands, and did not personally fire the fatal shot, nor was he near the weaponry at all. Some historians, she recalls, claim this was due to his bravery as a leader; others contend that the Kaj, who after all had never used his experimental weaponry on this scale and had no idea if it would be a success or a disaster, chose to be far away if it proved to be the latter. But regardless of where he stood, that fatal shot was the exact moment when everything started.

Enough politeness.

“Do you meet with the City Fathers of Bulikov in this office, Ambassador?” asks Shara.

“Hm? Oh, yes. Of course.”

“And have they never … commented upon that painting?”

“Not that I can recall. They are sometimes struck quiet at the sight of it. A magnificent work, if I do say so myself.”

She smiles. “Chief Diplomat Troonyi, you are aware of what the professor’s purpose was in this city?”

“Mm? Of course I am. It kicked up quite a fuss. Digging through all their old museums, looking at all their old writings. … I got a lot of letters about it. I have some of them here.” He shoves around some papers in a drawer.

“And you are aware that it was Minister of Foreign Affairs Vinya Komayd who approved his mission?”

“Yes?”

“So you must be aware that the jurisdiction of his death falls under neither the embassy, nor the polis governor, nor the regional governor, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
itself
?”

Troonyi’s birdshit-colored eyes dance as he thinks through the tiers. “I believe … that makes sense. …”

“Then perhaps what you do not know,” says Shara, “is that I am given the title of cultural ambassador mostly as a
formality
.”

His mustache twitches. His eyes flick to Sigrud as if to confirm this, but Sigrud simply sits with his fingers threaded together in his lap. “A formality?”

“Yes. Because while I do think you believe my appearance in Bulikov to
also
be a formality, you should be aware that I am here for other reasons.” She reaches into her robe, produces a small leather shield, and slides it across the table for him to see the small, dry, neat insignia of Saypur in its center, and, written just below it, the small words:
ministry of foreign affairs
.

It takes a while for this to fall into place within Troonyi’s head. He manages a, “Wha … Hm.”

“So yes,” says Shara. “You are no longer the most senior official at this embassy.” She reaches forward, grabs the bell on his desk, and rings it. The tea girl enters, and is a little confused when Shara addresses her: “Please fetch the maintenance staff to take down that painting.”

Troonyi practically begins to froth. “What! What do you mean by—?”

“What I mean to do,” says Shara, “is to make this office look like a responsible representative of Saypur works here. And a good way to start is to take down
that
painting, which romanticizes the
exact
moment when this Continent’s history started to take a very, very bloody turn.”

“I say! It is a great moment for our people, Miss—”

“Yes, for
our
people. Not for
theirs
. I will hazard a guess, Mr. Troonyi, and say that the reason the City Fathers of Bulikov do not listen to you and do not
respect
you, and the reason your career has not been upwardly mobile for the past
five years,
is that you are willing to hang a painting on your office wall that must insult and
incense
the very people you were sent here to work with! Sigrud!” The giant man stands. “Since the maintenance staff responds so slowly to voices other than CD Troonyi’s, please remove that painting and
break
it over your knee. And Troonyi—please sit down. We need to discuss the conditions of your retirement.”

* * *

Afterward, when Troonyi is bustled away and gone, Shara returns to the desk, pours herself a generous cup of tea, and downs it. She is happy to see the painting gone, unpatriotic as these feelings may be: more and more in her service for the Ministry, vainglorious displays of jingoism put a bad taste in her mouth.

She looks over to Sigrud, who sits in the corner with his feet up on the desk, holding a scrap of the now-demolished canvas. “Well?” she says. “Too much?”

He looks up at her:
What do you think?

“Good,” says Shara. “I’m pleased to hear it. It was quite enjoyable, I admit.”

Sigrud clears his throat, and says in a voice made of smoke and mud, and an accent thicker than roofing tar, “Who is Shara Thivani?”

“A mildly unimportant CA stationed in Jukoshtan about six years ago. She died in a boating accident, but she was rather surreally good at filing paperwork—everyone had records of her, and what she’d done. When it came time for her clearance to expire, and to purge her from the rolls, I opted to suspend her, and held onto her myself.”

“Because you share the same first name?”

“Perhaps. But we have other similarities—do I not look the part of a drab, unimpressive little bureaucrat?”

Sigrud smirks. “No one will believe you are just a CA, though. Not after firing Troonyi.”

“No, and I don’t
want
them to. I want them worried. I want them upset. I want them to wonder if I am what I actually am.” She goes to the window and stares out at the smoke-smeared night sky. “If you stir up a hornet’s nest, all the hornets might come out and chase you, that’s true—but at least then you can get a good, proper look at them.”

“If you
really
wanted to stir them up,” he says. “You could just use your
real
name.”

“I want to stir them up, yes, but I don’t want to
die
.”

Sigrud smiles wickedly and returns to the scrap of canvas in his hands.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

He turns the scrap of canvas around for her to see. It is the piece of the painting with the Kaj on it, standing in profile, his stern, patrician face lit by the burst of light from his weaponry.

Sigrud turns it back around and holds it up so that Shara’s face and the tiny painted face of the Kaj appear side by side from his perspective.

Sigrud says, “I can definitely see the family resemblance.”

“Oh, be quiet,” snaps Shara. “And put that away!”

Sigrud smiles, wads up the canvas, and tosses it in a trash can.

“All right,” Shara says. She drinks the second cup of tea, and her body rejoices. “I suppose we ought to move along, then. Please fetch Pitry for me.” Then, softer: “We have a body to examine.”

* * *

The room is small, hot, bare, and unventilated. Decay has not yet set in, so the tiny room is mercifully bereft of scent. Shara stares at the thing sitting on the cot with one small, slender leg dangling over the side.
It’s as if he simply lay down for a nap
.

She does not see her hero. Not the gentle little man she met. She sees only curled and crusted flesh with the barest hint of a human visage. It is connected, of course, to something quite familiar: the birdy little neck, the linen suit, the long, elegant arms and fingers, and, yes, his ridiculous colored socks. … But it is not Efrem Pangyui. It cannot be.

She touches the lapels of his coat. They have been shredded like ribbons. “What happened to his clothes?”

Pitry, Sigrud, and the vault guard lean in to look. “Sorry?” asks the vault guard. Since the embassy has no funerary facilities, the mortal coil of Dr. Efrem Pangyui has been stored in the embassy vault on a cot, like a precious heirloom waiting for the red tape to clear so it can return home.
Which it is, a bit,
thinks Shara.

“Look at his clothes,” she says. “All the seams and cuffs have been slit. Even the pant cuffs. Everything.”

“So?”

“Did you receive the body in this state?”

The guard favors the body with a leery eye. “Well,
we
didn’t do that.”

“So would you say it was the Bulikov police?”

“I guess? I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t quite know.”

Shara is still. She has seen this before, of course, and even performed this procedure herself, once or twice—the more clothing one wears, with more pockets and linings and cuffs, the more places to hide highly sensitive material.

Which begs the question,
she thinks,
why would anyone think a historian on a diplomatic mission would have something to hide?

“You can go,” she says.

“What?”

“You can leave us.”

“Well … You’re in the vault, ma’am. I can’t just leave you in the—”

Shara looks up at him. Perhaps it is the fatigue from the trip or the grief now trickling into her face, or perhaps it is the generations of command reverberating through her bloodline, but the guard coughs, scratches his head, and finds something to busy himself in the hall.

Pitry moves to follow, but she says, “No, Pitry—not you. Please stay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’d like to have some embassy input, however limited.” She looks to Sigrud. “What do you think?”

Sigrud bends over the tiny body. He examines the skull quite carefully, like a painter trying to identify a forgery. To Pitry’s evident disgust, he lifts one flap of skin and examines the indentations on the bone underneath. “Tool,” he says. “Wrench, probably. Something with teeth.”

“You’re sure?”

He nods.

“So nothing useful there?”

He shrugs.
Maybe—maybe not.
“Was first hit on the front.” He points to just above what was once the professor’s left eyebrow. “The marks are deep there. Others … not so deep.”

Any tool,
thinks Shara.
Any weapon. Anybody could have done this.

Shara keeps looking at the body. She tells herself for the second time this night,
Ignore the ornamentations.
But it is the ruined visage of her hero, his hands and neck and shirt and tie—can she dismiss all these familiar sights as mere ornamentation?

Wait a minute. A tie?

“Pitry—did you see the professor much during his time here?” she asks.

“I
saw
him, yes, but we weren’t friends.”

“Then you don’t remember,” she asks softly, “if he developed the habit of wearing a tie?”

“A tie? I don’t know, ma’am.”

Shara reaches over and plucks up the tie. It is striped, red and creamy white, made of exquisite silk. A northern affectation, and a recent one. “The Efrem Pangyui
I
knew,” she says, “always preferred scarves. It’s a very academic look, I understand—scarves, usually orange or pink or red. School colors. But one thing I don’t ever recall him wearing is a tie. Do you know much about ties, Pitry?”

“A little, I suppose. They’re common here.”

“Yes. And not at all at home. And wouldn’t you say that this tie is of an unusually fine make?” She turns it over to show him. “Very fine, and very … thin?”

“Ahm. Yes?”

Without taking her eyes off the tie, she holds an open hand out to Sigrud. “Knife, please.”

Instantly there is a tiny fragment of glittering metal—a scalpel of some kind—in the big man’s hand. He hands it to Shara. She pushes her glasses up on her nose and leans in low over his body. The faint smell of putrefaction comes leaking up out of his shirt. She tries to ignore it—another unpleasant ornamentation.

She looks closely at the white silk.
No, he wouldn’t do it with white,
she thinks.
It’d be too noticeable. …

She spots a line of incredibly fine red threads going against the grain. She nicks each one with the scalpel. The threads form a little window to the inside of the tie, which she sees is like a pocket.

There is a strip of white cloth inside. Not the cloth of the tie—something else. She slides it out and holds it up to the light.

There are writings on one side of the white cloth done in charcoal—a code of some kind.

“They would have never thought to look in the tie,” she says softly. “Not if it was an especially
nice
tie. They wouldn’t have expected that from a Saypuri, would they? And he would have known that.”

Pitry stares at the gutted tie. “Wherever did he learn a trick like that?”

Shara hands the scalpel back to Sigrud. “That,” she says, “is a very good question.”

* * *

Dawn light crawls through her office window, creeping across the bare desk and the rug, which is riddled with indentations from the furniture she had them remove. She goes to the window. It is so strange: the city walls should prevent any light from entering the city unless the sun is directly above, yet she can see the sun cresting the horizon, though it is rendered somewhat foggy by the strange transparency of the walls …

What was the man’s name,
Shara thinks,
who wrote about this?
She snaps her fingers, trying to remember. “Vochek,” she says. “Anton Vochek. That’s right.” A professor at Bulikov University. He’d theorized, however many dozens of years ago, that the fact that the Miracle of the Walls still functioned—one of Bulikov’s oldest and most famous miraculous characteristics—was proof that one or several of the original Divinities still existed in some manner. Such an open violation of the WR meant he had to go into hiding immediately, but regardless the Continental populace did not much appreciate his theory: for if any of the Divinities still existed, where were they, and why did they not help their people?

This is the problem with the miraculous,
she recalls Efrem saying.
It is so matter-of-fact. What it says it does, it does.

It seems like only yesterday when she last spoke to him, when actually it was just over a year ago. When he first arrived on the Continent, Shara trained Efrem Pangyui in very basic tradecraft: simple things like exfiltration, evasion, how to work the various labyrinthine offices of authorities, and, though she thought it’d be unlikely he’d ever use it, the creation and maintenance of dead drop sites. Mostly just safety precautions, for no place on the Continent is completely safe for Saypuris. As the most experienced active Continental operative, Shara was ridiculously overqualified for what any operative would normally consider babysitting duty, but she fought for the job, because there was no Saypuri she revered and respected more than Efrem Pangyui, reformist, lecturer, and vaunted historian. He was the man who had single-handedly changed Saypur’s concept of the past, the man who had resurrected the entire Saypuri judicial system, the man who had pried Saypuri schools from the hands of the wealthy and brought education to the slums. … It had been so strange to have this great man sitting across the table from her in Ahanashtan, nodding patiently as she explained (hoping she did not sound too awed) that when a Bulikovian border agent asks for your papers, what they’re
really
asking for are twenty-drekel notes. A surreal experience, to be sure, but one of Shara’s most treasured memories.