City of Stairs (44 page)

TARGETS CURRENTLY UNKNOWN STOP

GHS512

PG MULAGHESH TO CES512

IF I COMPLY WILL YOU TAKE THE HEAT FOR THIS STOP

ALSO WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JAVRAT STOP

GHS512

CD KOMAYD TO GHS512

IF MILITARY REACTION IS NOT IMMEDIATE THEN LIKELIHOOD OF THERE BEING A MINISTRY TO APPLY HEAT VERY LOW STOP

LET ALONE A JAVRAT STOP

CES512

PG MULAGHESH TO CES512

WILL BEGIN MOBILIZATION IMMEDIATELY STOP

IF YOU MAKE ME START ANOTHER WAR WILL NEVER FORGIVE STOP

GHS512

CD KOMAYD TO GHS512

WAR ALREADY STARTED STOP

CES512

* * *

Just once I would like to get eight hours of sleep,
thinks Shara.
I would pay for them. Steal them. Something.

But Shara cannot sleep. She is working on a deadline—Mulaghesh’s forces will arrive in a matter of hours—but knows she is missing something. Yet she feels she is drowning in information: Efrem’s journal, the lists from the Warehouse, financial transactions, Continental history, forbidden lists, Votrov subsidiaries, possessors of loomworks—all of it dances before her eyes until she cannot hold a single thought besides,
Please, just calm down, stop thinking and calm down, just stop, stop, stop. …

A tap at the door. Shara shouts, “No!”

A pause. Pitry’s voice: “Well, I think you—”

“No! No appointments. None! I told you that!”

“I know, but—”

“All meetings are off!
All
of them. Tell them I’m … Tell them I’m sick! Tell them I’m
dying
, I don’t care.”

“All right, but … but this is a little different.” He slowly enters the room. “It’s a letter.”

“Oh, Pitry …” She rubs her eyes. “Why do you do this to me? Is it from Mulaghesh?”

“No. It’s from Votrov. A boy brought it on a silver plate. And it’s … very odd.”

Shara takes the message. It reads:

IN A GAME OF TOVOS VA, ONE PLAY CAN END THE GAME, BUT IT CAN TAKE YOUR OPPONENT SOME TIME TO REALIZE IT’S ALREADY OVER.

I KNOW WHEN I’VE LOST.

COME TO THE NEW SOLDA BRIDGE, BUT PLEASE COME ALONE.

I DON’T WISH THE PRESS TO KNOW. I DON’T WISH TO HARM ALL THE GOOD I TRIED TO DO.

V.

Shara reads this several times. “He can’t be serious.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“To be honest, I’ve no earthly idea,” says Shara. Could Votrov actually be involved with the Restorationists? It seems absurd, but, if so, could calling in the military have cut their plans off at the knees? And, even more, how could he have heard?

None of this makes any sense. Either Vohannes has gone insane—something she isn’t ready to rule out yet—or she’s missing a very big piece of the puzzle.

“What are you going to do?” asks Pitry.

“Well,” she says, “if he asked me to meet him at his home, somewhere private, I’d never go. But the New Solda Bridge site is both public and terribly popular. I think he’d be mad to try something there.”

But that still doesn’t answer the question: what is she going to do?
An operative takes care of their sources personally,
she tells herself.
And though he’s not a source, he is mine.
But deep down, she does not want any other Ministry official to deal with Vo. So many insurgents and enemy agents wind up disappearing to meet horrible ends.

If someone needs to talk Vo down off of whatever ledge he’s climbed up on,
she thinks,
it should be me.

“If you could, Pitry, please get my coat and a bottle of tea,” says Shara. “And if I’m not back in two hours, I want you to tell Mulaghesh the
moment
she gets here to raid Votrov’s estate. There is something terribly strange going on with that man.”

As Pitry hurries away, Shara rereads the note.
I could never really tell
exactly which game I was ever playing with Vo.

But perhaps now she will find out.

* * *

The walk does good things for Shara’s mind: the screaming, jabbering questions fade, scraped away by each turning staircase or twisting street, until she is just another person walking along the Solda.

Just imagine,
she tells herself.
Behind this crumbling city is a hidden, mythic paradise, and one only has to scrape at reality with one’s fingernail to find it.

Gulls and ducks wheel and honk, chasing one another for scraps of bread.

But whatever beautiful miracles the Divinities made,
she reminds herself,
they might have been slaves to the Continent almost in the same way Saypur was.

A crowd of homeless fry fish in makeshift skillets on the riverbanks; one, quite obviously drunk, claims each of his fish is a piece of Urav and is met with loud calls to sit down.

Shara suddenly decides that when all this business with Wiclov and Votrov is finished—and how this will wind up, she has no idea—she’ll quit the Ministry, return to Old Bulikov, and continue Efrem’s work. Two months ago she would have thought the idea of quitting insane, but with Auntie Vinya at the wheel for what might as well be forever, Ghaladesh and all its powers are now bitter ground to her, and all her discoveries have rejuvenated her interest in the Continental past. The entirety of her Ministry career pales beside her handful of minutes in Old Bulikov, like escaping choking fumes to capture one lungful of mountain air.

And, secretly, she looks forward to the wicked glee of performing another miracle. She wonders what other miracles will work in Old Bulikov: could one walk through walls, or summon food from the sky or earth, or even fly, or …

Or even …

Shara slows to a stop.

Two gulls dip and snap at another in midair for a peel of a potato.

“Fly,” she whispers.

She remembers an entry in the list from the Unmentionable Warehouse:

Kolkan’s carpet: Small rug that MOST DEFINITELY possesses the ability to fly. VERY difficult to control. Records indicate Kolkan blessed each thread of the rug with the miracle of flight, so theoretically each thread could lift several tons into the air.

A carpet, with every thread blessed.

A loomworks that could take the carpet apart with great ease.

And a small armada of steel ships in the hills, with no ocean.

The boy in the police cell, whispering,
We can’t fly through the air on ships of wood.

Perhaps they wouldn’t need the ocean at all.

“Oh, my goodness,” whispers Shara.

* * *

Sigrud lifts his head when he hears the clanking. He turns his attention from the roads in and out of the valley to the six ships still marooned on the ground. The sails are being raised on the masts, and something is being extended from their port and starboard sides.

The sails being raised on the steel masts are unusual: Sigrud has seen many types of sails, but these look to be made for unbelievably brutal winds. But the objects being extended on the
sides
of each ship are something he has never, ever seen before in his life. These adornments are long, wide, and thin, with many pivoting parts to them. They remind Sigrud of fins on a fish, and if he didn’t know any better he’d suspect they were …

“Wings,” he says quietly.

He watches the men ready the ships.

Don’t do something,
Shara said,
unless
they
do something.

This definitely counts as something.

He checks that his knife is still in its sheath and begins to creep down the hill.

* * *

The New Solda Bridge is a tangle of scaffolding and framing. Huge cement plinths are being laid in the cold waters, guided into place by Saypuri cranes and Saypuri engineers. Continentals watch from the banks or the roofs of homes, grudgingly awed by this show of force.

Shara’s brain is still rattling with her last realization:
You can build the ships anywhere, moor them anywhere, and no one could ever,
ever
be prepared for an assault from the sky.

Yet another niggling question comes worming out of her mind:
But if Vohannes is behind it, why would the Restorationists attack his house?

She sees she’ll have the chance to ask him: he sits on a park bench just ahead, legs dandily crossed, hands in his lap as he stares down the river walk, away from her. He is not wearing his usual flamboyant clothing: he has returned, Shara sees, to the dark brown coat and black shirt buttoned up to the neck, like he was the night of Urav.

She remembers Sigrud saying,
He wasn’t even dressed the same He was dressed like a sad little monk.

She surveys the crowd. Vohannes is very much alone. Yet he seems to see her and look away, so she can only see the back of his head. …

“What’s the matter with you, Vo?” she asks as she nears. “Are you sick? Are you
insane
? Or have you really been working at this all along?”

He turns to her and smiles. She sees he carries no cane. “The latter, I’m quite happy to say,” he says cheerily.

Shara freezes, and immediately sees why he kept his face turned from her until now.

It’s the same as the face she knows, almost: the same strong, square jaw, the same glittering smile. But this man’s eyes are darker, and they are sunken deep in the back of his head.

Shara doesn’t wait: she turns and runs.

Someone—a rather short, nonthreatening young man—ambles by, sticks his leg out, and trips her. She crashes to the ground.

The stranger stands and walks toward her with a pleasant air. “I did wonder if you’d come,” he says, “but I guessed the line about Tovos Va would seal it. After all, I taught that game to him. How pleasant to see that it worked!”

She starts to stand back up. The stranger gestures to her and mutters something. There is a sound like a whip crack. She looks down and realizes she is now totally transparent: she can see the stone cobbles through her legs, or rather where her legs
should
be.

Parnesi’s Cupboard,
thinks Shara, right before someone behind her clamps a rag over her mouth: her nostrils fill with fumes, her eyes film over, and suddenly it’s very hard to stand.

She falls back into their arms: two men, maybe three. The stranger—Vohannes, yet not Vohannes—wipes his nose. “Very good,” he says. “Come along.”

They carry her down the river walk. The fumes force their way deeper into her brain. She thinks,
Why isn’t someone helping me?
But the bystanders merely watch them curiously, wondering why these men appear to be miming carrying something heavy between them.

She gives up; the fumes coil around her; she sleeps.

Across the snowy hills

Down a frozen river

Through the copse of trees

I will wait for you.

I will always wait for you there.

My fire will be burning

A light in the cold

A light for you and me

For I love you so.

Though sometimes I may seem absent

Know that my fire will be always be ready

For those with love in their hearts

And the willingness to share it.

—Book of the Red Lotus, Part II, 9.12–9.24

S
hara wakes facing a blank gray wall. A trickle of air unwinds in her lungs before her body is overtaken with coughs.

“Oh ho!” says a merry voice. “Goodness! She’s awake.”

She rolls over, her brain fuzzy and hazy, and sees she’s in a barren, windowless room that is somehow familiar.

There are two doors to the room, one closed and the other open. The stranger stands at the open doorway, now dressed in a Kolkashtani wrap. He smiles at her, yet his eyes are like wet stones sitting in his skull.

“I really cannot tell,” he says, “what he could have seen in you.”

Shara blinks languidly.
Chloroform,
she remembers.
It’ll be nearly an hour before I’m lucid. …

“You are, as far as I can see, an unremarkable little Saypuri,” he says. “You are small, dirt brown—perhaps
clay
brown would be a fitting term, earthy,
musky,
an unsightly, not at all flesh-like darkness—with the characteristic weak chin and hooked nose. Your wrists, as is common in your sort, are terribly thin and fragile, and your arms hirsute and unlovely, as is the rest of your body, I imagine—I expect you would have to shave
quite
frequently to even
compare
to the body of any woman of the Holy Lands. Your breasts are not the dangling, ponderous piles I see so often among your breed, but neither are they particularly becoming—in fact, they hardly exist at all. And your eyes, my dear …
Look
at those glasses. Do your eyes function at all? I wonder—what must it be like to be such a runty, unintended little creature? How sad your life must be, to be a creature of the ash lands, a person made of clay. …” He shakes his head, smiling. It is a horrible perversion of Vohannes’s smile: where Vo’s is full of boundless, eager charm, this man’s smile suggests barely contained rage. “But the true nature of your crime—the true infraction you commit, as all your kind does, is that you
refuse to acknowledge it
. You refuse to acknowledge your own failings—your miserable, unsightly failings! You know no shame! You do not hide your flesh and body! You do not cower at our feet! You do not recognize that you, untouched by the Divine, bereft of blessings, deprived of enlightenment, are
unneeded
, unintended, superfluous at worst and servile at best! Your kind holds such lofty pretenses—and
that
is your true sin, if creatures such as yourself are even capable of sin.”

He is so much like Vohannes, in so many ways: many of his gestures and much of his bearing are Vo’s. Yet there is something strangely more decayed and yet delicate about this man: something in the way he cocks his hips, the way he crosses his arms. … She remembers the
mhovost
, and its effeminate walk back and forth, mimicking someone she hadn’t yet glimpsed.

Shara swallows and asks, “Who … ?”

“If I were to break you open,” says the stranger, “on the inside, you would be empty. … A clay shell of a person, remarkable only in your semblance of self. What
did
you see in her, Vohannes?”

The stranger looks to the corner of the room.

Sitting on the floor in the corner, his arms wrapped around his knees, is Vohannes: his face has been horribly beaten, one eye swollen and the color of frog skin, his upper lip rusty from old blood.

“Vo … ,” whispers Shara.

“I had hoped that she would at least offer some temptation of the flesh,” says the stranger. “Then you could perhaps excuse your dalliance. But there is so little flesh on her to tempt you with. I honestly cannot identify any trait you found desirable in this creature. I really can’t, little brother.”

Shara blinks.

Brother?

She says, “V … V …”

The stranger slowly turns to her and cocks an eyebrow.

Vohannes’s voice echoes back to her:
He joined up with a group of pilgrims when he was fifteen and went on a trek to the icy north to try and find some damn temple.

“V …
Volka
?” she says. “Volka
Votrov
?”

He smiles. “Ah! So. You know my name, little clay child.”

She tries to corral her drunken thoughts. “I … I thought you were dead. …”

He shakes his head, beaming. “Death,” he says, “is for the weak.”

* * *

“ ‘For those who wish to know me,’ ” quotes Volka, “ ‘for those who wish to be seen by my eye, and to be loved, there can be no pain too great, no trial too terrible, no punishment too small for you to pass through. For you are my children, and you must suffer to be great.’ ”

Volka smiles indulgently at Vohannes, but it’s Shara who speaks up: “The Kolkashtava.”

Volka’s smile dims, and he watches her coldly.

“Book Two, I believe,” says Shara. “His writs to Saint Mornvieva, upon why Mornvieva’s nephew was crushed in an avalanche.”

“And Mornvieva was so shamed,” says Volka, “that he had asked Father Kolkan why this had happened, and questioned him in such a manner—”

“—that he struck off his own right hand,” says Shara, “and his right foot, blinded his right eye, and removed his right testicle.”

Volka grins. “It is so strange to hear a creature like you say such things! It’s like seeing a bird talk.”

“Are you suggesting,” Shara asks, “that by torturing us, you will better us?”

“I will not torture you. At least, not any more than I’ve had done to my little brother here. But it would better you, yes. You would know shame. It would remove that prideful gleam from your eye. Do you even know what you speak of?”

“I am willing to bet you think Kolkan is alive,” says Shara.

Volka’s smile is completely gone now.

“Where have you been, Mr. Votrov?” she asks. “How did you survive? I was told you died.”

“Oh, but I
did
die, little ash girl,” says Volka. “I died upon a mountain, far to the north. And was reborn anew.”

He turns his hand over: the inside of his palm flickers with candlelight, though Shara can see no flame. “The old miracles still live, in me.” He clutches the invisible flame, and the light dies. “It was a trial of spirit. Yet that is why we went to the monastery of Kovashta in the first place: to try ourselves. Everyone else died during our pilgrimage. All the men, much older than me. More experienced. Stronger. They starved to death or froze to death or fell ill and perished. Only
I
trudged on. Only
I
was worthy. Only
I
fought through the wind and the snow and the teeth of the mountains to find that place, Kovashta, the last monastery, the forgotten dwelling place of our Father Kolkan, where he dreamt up his holy edicts and set the world to rights. I spent almost three decades of my life there, alone in those walls, living off of scraps, drinking melting snow … and reading. I learned many things.” He reaches out with his index finger and touches something: it is as if there’s a pane of glass in the doorway, and he runs his finger down its middle, the tip of his index white and flat, pressed against an invisible barrier. “The Butterfly’s Bell. One of Kolkan’s oldest miracles. It was originally used to force people to confess their sins—air, you see, cannot get in or out, and only on the brink of death are we ever really truthful. … But don’t be concerned. That is not your fate.” He looks at Shara. “You failed, do you know? You and your people.”

Shara is silent.

“Do you
know
?”

“No,” says Shara. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Primitive thing … Because there, you see, I found
him
.” He reaches into his wrap and holds out a charm around his neck: the scale of Kolkan. “I meditated for years, hearing nothing. And finally, one day, I decided to meditate until I
died
, until I heard his whispering, for death was better than that bitter silence. … I almost starved to death. Maybe I
did
starve to death. But then I heard him, whispering in Bulikov. I heard Father Kolkan! He had never died! He had never been gone from this world! He had never been … been
touched
by your Kaj!” This last word is a savage growl: Shara glimpses yellow-and-brown teeth. “I had a vision: there was a whole part of Bulikov—the true Bulikov, the Divine City—that was free of your influence! Hidden from you, from everyone! And
that
was when I knew there was still hope for my people. There was light amidst the storm, salvation waiting for the holy and the dutiful. I could return, and free us all from captivity. It was just a matter of getting to him, of finding him, and freeing him. … Our father. Our lost father.”

“Just like old times,” says Vohannes. “Running to Daddy …”

Volka’s beatific joy vanishes. “Shut up!” he snarls. “Shut up! Shut your filthy traitor mouth!”

Vohannes is silent.

Volka watches him, trembling. “Your … Your
tainted
mouth! What has your mouth touched, you filthy whelp? What flesh has it touched? Women’s? Men’s?
Children’s?
”

Vohannes rolls his eyes. “How distasteful.”

“You knew you were malformed,” says Volka. “You always were, little Vo. There was always something wrong with you—a strain of imperfection that should have been weeded out.”

Vohannes, disinterested, sniffs and wipes his nose.

“Have you no excuse for yourself?”

“I was not aware,” says Vohannes, “that I needed any.”

“Father agreed with me. Did you know that? He once told me he wished you and Mother had
died
in your birth! He said it would have unburdened him of a weak-hearted wife and a weakling son.”

Vohannes swallows impassively. “This revelation,” he says, “does not surprise me in the least. Such a tender man, Daddy was.”

“You slight our father’s name just to make me hate you more, as if that could be possible.”

“I
shit
,” snaps Vohannes, “upon Father’s name, upon the Votrov name, and upon
Kolkan’s
name! And I am glad the Kaj never killed Kolkan, for now when the Saypuris slaughter him like all the other gods, I shall have a chance to climb up on his chin and shit inside his mouth!”

Volka stares at him, briefly taken aback. “You will not get that chance,” he whispers. “I will keep you alive, you and her, so Kolkan himself can come and judge you both, and lay down his edicts. You don’t even know, do you? He has been here, in Bulikov, tallying the sins of this place. He has been watching you. He has been waiting. He knows what you have done. I will raise the Seat of the World from its tomb. And when he emerges, you will know pain, little brother.”

Shara has decided she definitely knows this room, bereft of furniture and adornment: she remembers how the
mhovost
laughed at her, and how she flicked the candle into its chest, and the stairs of earth leading down. …

I know exactly where we are,
she thinks,
and where Kolkan is.

“He’s down in the Seat of the World, isn’t he?” she says aloud.

Volka looks at her like she just slapped him.

Vohannes frowns. “In
that
rotten old place?”

“No, no. Down underneath, where the real Seat is hidden, yards below us, where we are right now.” She shuts her eyes. The fumes from the rag have wrapped her brain in a fog, but she cannot stop the thought from thrashing up to her. “And the Divine were fond of using glass as storage space. … Ahanas hid prisoners in a windowpane, and even kept a small vacation spot in a glass sphere. Jukov stored the body of St. Kivrey in a glass bead. And when I was down there, in the Seat of the World, I looked for the famous stained glass I have always heard of … but all the windows were broken. All except one, in the Kolkashtani atrium. And I thought it was so curious, at the time, that it was whole, unbroken, yet blank.”

She opens her eyes. “That’s where the other gods jailed him, didn’t they? That’s where Kolkan has been imprisoned for the past three hundred years. A living god, chained within a pane of glass.”

* * *

“I don’t quite know everything that’s going on,” says Vohannes chipperly, “but this is pretty entertaining, isn’t it, Volka?”

“How do you mean to free him?” asks Shara.

Volka stares at her furiously, breath whistling in his nostrils.

“Unless,” says Shara, “it’s a simple Release miracle … one any priest would know.”

“Not any priest,” says Volka hoarsely.

“So it must be much more potent. Perhaps … ,” says Shara slowly. “Perhaps something from a monk from the Kovashta? Something you found written down in their vaults?”