Shara smiled a little, and reluctantly nodded.
“Ghonjesh and Ashadra—they were your parents?”
She stiffened, but nodded again.
He reflected on this a moment. “I knew them, you know. Very distantly. Back in the reformist days. Did you know that?”
In what sounded like a very small voice, Shara said, “Yes.”
“They were much more active than I was. I stayed behind my desk and wrote my letters and my articles, but they actually went to the slums, to the Plague areas, setting up medical tents and hospitals….I suppose they knew the danger—the Plague was so infectious—but they did it anyway. I sometimes think I was a coward, in light of what they did. A cloistered academic to the core.”
“I don’t think so,” Shara said.
“No?”
“I think you…you changed history. You changed history when we needed it changed.”
He grew a little stern at this. “Change? No, I did not change anything, Miss Komayd. I told what I thought was the truth. Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are—honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do. And as a Ministry servant, you must ask yourself—what truth do you wish to keep?”
And after that, Shara felt he held back a little, as if he’d sniffed her out, sensed she was a creature with different values than his, maintaining an agenda and a story he knew he’d one day refute. And Shara had wished to say, No, no, please don’t spurn me—I am a historian, just as you. I seek the truth, just as you do.
But she could not say this, for she knew in her heart that this would be a lie.
I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences.
States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.
Regrettably, people often allow prejudice, grudges, and superstitions to dictate the denial of these privileges—when really it’s much more efficient for it all to be a rather cold-blooded affair.
—MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD,
LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER, 1707
Another wintry morning. As Shara opens the embassy front door the courtyard guard, up to his nose in furs, turns and says, “He’s at the front gate. We didn’t let him in, because…”
“I understand,” says Shara. She crosses the embassy courtyard. The trees bow with what looks like layers of black glass; the embassy’s numerous corrosions and cracks are filled with pearly white, as if given fresh spackling overnight. The mug of coffee in her hand leaves a river of steam behind like a ship leaves bubbles in its wake. She reflects that it feels so much different in the day, clean and cold and glittering, than it did the night before, when Wiclov bayed through the bars like a guard dog.
The gates rattle open. The boy stands in the embassy drive holding a silver plate aloft. He is dressed in what she recognizes as manservant clothing, but it seems he has walked some way: his upper lip is frosted with icy snot. If he were not shivering so fiercely, the expression he makes at her could almost be a smile. “Ambassador Thivani?”
“Who are you?” she asks.
“I…have a m-message for you.” He holds the silver plate out to her. In its center is a small white card.
Shara fumbles at it with her cold hands and squints to read.
HIS EMINENCE VOHANNES VOTROV
CITY FATHER OF THE 14TH, 15TH, AND 16TH WARDS OF
THE POLIS OF BULIKOV
INVITES YOU TO A SPLENDID EVENING
TO BE HELD AT 7:30 PM TONIGHT
AT THE GHOSHTOK-SOLDA DINNER CLUB
SHOULD BE A LOT OF FUN
Shara crushes the card. “Thank you,” she says, and tosses it away. Of all the luck, she thinks. The one thing to break is the one thing I told Vinya I wouldn’t look at.
“Pardon, miss,” says the boy. “I hate to interrupt, but…c-can I go?”
Shara glowers at him for a moment, then shoves the cup of coffee into his hand. “Here. This’ll do you more good than it will me.”
The boy trudges away. Shara turns and swiftly paces back to the embassy front door.
A child begins crying in the street beyond the embassy. A snowball fight has taken a bad turn: one salvo contained an excessive quotient of ice, and the sidewalks fill up with pointed fingers and the persistent cries of Not fair, not fair!
* * *
—
Upon the opening of the door, the interior of the Ghoshtok-Solda Dinner Club appears to be a solid wall of smoke. Shara is perplexed by this sight, but the attendants do not seem to notice: they gesture as if this dense block of fog is a perfectly welcoming sight. The outside wind comes sweeping through, turning the smoke to swirling striae and slashing it thin, and Shara can just barely see the wink of candlelight, the sheen of greasy forks, and faces of laughing men.
Then the overwhelming reek of tobacco hits her, and she is almost blown backward.
As she enters, her eyes begin to adjust. The smoke is not quite so thick as she initially imagined, yet the ceiling remains all but invisible: chandeliers and lamps seem to be suspended from the heavens. The desk attendant looks at her—surprised, slightly outraged—and requests a name, as if he could not expect a Saypuri to provide anything more. “Votrov,” says Shara. The man nods stiffly—I should have known—and extends a sweeping arm.
Shara is led through a labyrinth of booths and private rooms and bars, each stuffed with men in suits and robes, all gleaming gray teeth and gleaming bald heads and gleaming black boots. Cigar ashes dance in the fug like red-orange fireflies. It’s as if the whole place is smeared over with oil and smoke, and she can feel the smoke snuffling bemusedly at the hem of her skirt, wondering, What is this? What alien creature has infiltrated this place? What could this be?
Some tables go silent as she passes. Bald heads poke out of booths and watch her. I am, of course, a double offense, she thinks as she maintains her composure. A woman, and a Saypuri…
A twitch of a velvet curtain, and a grand backroom is revealed. At the head of a table the size of a river barge sits Vohannes, half-hidden behind a tent of newspaper and slouched in a cushioned chair with his light brown (but muddy) boots propped up on the table. Behind him, in very comfortable-looking chairs, sit his Saypuri bodyguards; one looks up, and waves and shrugs apologetically: This wasn’t our idea. Vohannes’s tent of newspaper deflates slightly; Shara spots a bright blue eye peeking over the top; then the tent collapses.
Vohannes springs up as quickly as his hip allows, and bows. “Miss Thivani!”
He would make an excellent dance hall emcee. “It’s been less than two days,” she says. “There’s hardly need for such ceremony.”
“Oh, but there’s plenty of need for ceremony! Especially when one is meeting…How does the saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my…”
“What are you talking about, Vo? Do you have what I asked you to get?”
“Oh, I have it. And what a joy it was to get. But first…” Vohannes claps twice. His gloves—white, velvet—bear smudges from the newsprint. “Oh, sir—if you could, please fetch us two bottles of white plum wine, and a tray of snails.”
The attendant bows like a spring toy. “Certainly.”
“Snails?” says Shara.
“Are you fine gentlemen”—Vohannes turns to the Saypuri guards—“in need of any refreshments?”
One opens his mouth to respond, glances at Shara, rethinks his answer, and shakes his head.
“As you wish. Please.” Vohannes gestures to the chair next to him with a flourish. “Sit. So glad you could make it. You
must be terribly busy.”
“You have picked an interesting venue for our meeting. I believe a leper would have received a more cordial welcome.”
“Well, I figured that if I meet you at your place of work, you might as well meet me at mine….For though this place may look like a lecherous din of old fogies, Miss Thivani, I guarantee you, here is where Bulikovian commerce lives and dies. If one could see all the flow of finance, envisioning it as a golden river hanging above our heads, here—right here, among all this smoke and all the crass jokes, all the boiled beef and bald heads—would be where it forms its densest, most impenetrable, most inextricable knot. I invite you to look and reflect upon the rickety, shit-spattered ship that carries Bulikov’s commerce forward into the seas of prosperity.”
“I get the strangest sense,” says Shara, “that you do not enjoy working here….”
“I have no choice,” says Vohannes. “It is what it is. And though it may look like one building, it’s actually several. Any house in Bulikov is a house divided, and this house is cut to ribbons, my battle-ax. Each booth could be color-coded for its party allegiances. You could draw lines on the floor—if the warped floorboards would allow it—highlighting barriers some club members would never dare cross. But recently, this club—like Bulikov—is beginning to align itself around two main groups. My group, and, well…”
He slaps his paper in her lap. A smallish article has been circled: WICLOV TAKES STAND AGAINST EMBASSY.
“You’ve been accumulating some ink, my dear,” says Vohannes. Shara eyes the article. “Yes,” she says. “I have been notified of this. What do you care about it?”
“Well, I have been ruminating on ways I could help you.”
“Oh, dear.”
“And I can help you quite a lot with Wiclov.”
A waiter materializes out of the smog with a bottle of white plum wine. He proffers the bottle to Vohannes; Vohannes glances at the label, nods, and lazily extends a hand, which is promptly filled with a brimming crystal glass. The waiter looks doubtfully between them, as if to say, And do you really want me to serve her, as well? Vohannes nods angrily, and the waiter, exasperated, gives Shara a perfunctory version of the same ceremony.
“Cheeky shit,” says Vohannes as the waiter leaves. “Do you get a lot of that sort of thing?”
“What are you proposing, Vo?”
“What I am proposing is that I can get you somewhere on Wiclov. And I would do this out of the godly goodness of my own heart…provided you also bury that fat bastard.”
Shara sips her wine, but does nothing more. She sees there is a suitcase sitting beside Vohannes, as white and velvet and ridiculous as his gloves. By the seas. Have I honestly enlisted a clown as an operative? But, she notes, there’s a second suitcase on his opposite side. Were the contents of the safety deposit box that extensive?
“How would you get us somewhere on Wiclov?”
“Well, that’s the tricky bit….I’m not the sort for sneaky, underhanded political machinations, despite what is happening, ah, right now. My style is much more”—he twirls a slender finger, thinking—“grand idealist. I win support specifically because I don’t dirty myself.”
“But now you are willing to do so.”
“If that fly-ridden turd of a human being is genuinely, really connected to the people who attacked us, who killed Pangyui, it would not grieve my heart excessively to see him removed from the political theater, no. But while I can’t plant the dagger in his back, perhaps I could pass the dagger along to someone more talented in its use.” The waiter pounces back out of the reeking mist with a large, flat stone covered in small holes. The stone swims with butter, and the holes appear to be stuffed with tiny beige buttons.
“What are you saying, Vo?” she asks again.
Vohannes sniffs and picks up a fork the size of a needle. “I have a friend in Wiclov’s trading house. That’s how he made himself, you know—Wiclov is one of the few old-guard icons to actually dabble in trade. Made his living with potatoes. Seems appropriate for him, somehow. Something that grows in the mud, away from the sun…” He spears a snail, pops it in his mouth, grunts, and says around it, “Haat. Mm.” He maneuvers the little ball of flesh onto his teeth, breathes, and swallows. “Very hot. Anyways. I have convinced this contact within Wiclov’s trading house to pass along all investments and purchases Wiclov has made in the past year.” He smiles triumphantly and taps the second suitcase beside his chair. “I am sure there is something very rotten going on under his robes, let’s say. Probably nothing smutty, unfortunately—once a Kolkashtani, always a Kolkashtani, and Wiclov is about as Kolkashtani as they get—but something. And I would love for you to find out.”
Shara cuts to the point: “Is he funding the Restorationists?”
“I’ve taken a glance at the pages, and I admit that I haven’t seen that, unfortunately. Though there is some oddness that stands out.”
“Like what?”
“Like the loomworks.”
“Like…Wait, the what?”
“Loomworks,” says Vohannes again. “Wiclov has bought, outright bought, three loomworks around the city. You know, the big weaving factories they use to make rugs?”
“I understand the general idea….”
“Yes. He’s bought them. Not cheap, either—and he hasn’t changed the names.”
“So you think he doesn’t want anyone to know,” says Shara.
“Yes. But there must be something else in all his history. I just can’t see it. But then, I don’t have a massive intelligence agency behind me.”
She considers it. “Did he buy these loomworks after the month of Tuva?”
“Ah…Well, I can’t recall off the top of my head with complete accuracy, but I suppose so.”
Interesting, she thinks. “How good is your source?”
“Quite good.”
“Yes, but how good?”
Vohannes hesitates. “I know him very personally,” he says slowly. “That should be enough for you.”
Shara almost asks further, but then she understands. She coughs uncomfortably and says, “I see.” She watches him take another sip of wine. He is sweating, and pale; suddenly he seems wrinkled and soft, as delicate as finely made linen. “Listen, Vo. I…I am going to do something I don’t often do for willing sources.”
“What’s that?”
“I am going to give you the chance to reconsider.”
“You what?”
“I am going to give you the opportunity to rethink what you’re doing here,” says Shara. “Because if you offer me those papers again, I will use them. It would be unprofessional of me not to. And when someone asks where I got them from—and they will ask—then I will have to tell them. I can’t predict what will happen, but once this is all played out, there is a chance that, in the future, in some very public, very accessible forum in Saypur, someone will testify that Vohannes Votrov, City Father of Bulikov, provided valuable material to the government of Saypur with the full understanding that another City Father would be damned by it. And a thing like that…It has repercussions.”
Vohannes watches a candle flame waltz on its taper.
“I’ve seen it before,” says Shara. “I’ve lost sources this way before. I use people, Vo. That’s what I do now. It is not pretty. It has many consequences. And…And if you offer me this material again, I will take it, because I’d have to. But I want you to really think about what could happen to you if you hand over that suitcase.”
Vohannes fixes his bright blue eyes on her. They must still be, she imagines, the same blue as when he was an infant.
“Come work for me,” he says suddenly.
“What?”
“You seem unhappy where you are.” He stabs a snail and blows on it. Droplets of butter rain on the tablecloth. “Come work for me. It’d be a change of pace. We’re not t
he old guard. None of my companies are. We’re doing big new things. And also I can pay you perfectly despicable amounts of money.”
Shara stares at him, disbelieving, and laughs. “You’re not serious.”
“I am gravely serious. Serious as death itself.”
“I am…I am not going to work for you, Vo.”
“Then hells, take over.” He glugs wine, eats another snail. “It’s all just a headache for me. Run my businesses. Direct my money. I’ll just sit around, getting elected and, I don’t know, sitting on parade floats or some such.”
Shara puts her face in her hands, laughing.
“What are you laughing about?” He gallantly tries to keep sounding serious, but his smile betrays him. “What. I’m serious here. Come be with me.” The smile fades. “Come live with me.”
Shara stops laughing. She winces, groans. “Oh, Vo. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you have to say that?”
“I meant…Oh, come now, I meant live in Bulikov.”
“It didn’t sound like it. And…And that’s exactly what you asked me when you graduated.”
Vohannes, sheepish, looks at the Saypuri guards. “Could you, ah, gentlemen please excuse us for a moment?”
The guards shrug and take up stations outside the backroom door.
“That…Shara, that obviously is not what I meant,” says Vohannes. He laughs desperately.
“Is this why you invited me here? For fine dining and propositions?”
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 22