It has been nearly a week since she last saw Shara Komayd, but Mulaghesh cannot stop thinking about what the “ambassador” told her. By the seas, I hope that girl’s wrong, she thinks. The thought saps her of her strength—the next hill feels so much harder than the last—yet she cannot stop thinking about it.
One of the gods is alive. Maybe they never really left at all.
Mulaghesh, like everyone in the military—everyone in Saypur—grew up wanting to be the Kaj. Yet now that she just might get her opportunity, the idea terrifies her. Every child of Saypur grew up with the Divinities pacing just past the border of their nightmares: huge, dark unmentionables swimming in the deeps of history….Shara talks about them as if they were politicians or generals, but to Mulaghesh and the rest of Saypur, they will always be the bogeyman’s bogeyman, beings so dreaded that merely mentioning their names feels like an illicit and terrible act.
Give me a real war any day, she thinks. Something with trenches and bolts. Something human. Something that bleeds. As a veteran of the Summer of Black Rivers, Mulaghesh must see the irony in wishing for those awful days of mud and thunder, and the struggle in the dark. A glorious war, as all Saypuris agree, but one Mulaghesh hopes she’ll never see again.
Still. Better that than this.
How confident that young girl is. Has she read so much? Or is that what it’s like to be a descendant of the Kaj?
Yet Mulaghesh remembers how the day after, young Shara Komayd trembled under her blanket, trying to concentrate on holding a cup of tea….
By the seas, she thinks, I hope that girl’s wrong.
She trots back into her quarters to find a small stack of papers on her desk. There is a note in the seat of her chair from one of her lieutenants:
PULLED THE RECORDS. HERE ARE THE PAGES CHECKED OUT THAT MONTH. TOOK A WHILE. MIGHT WANT TO GIVE THE KIDS A DAY OFF…ONLY A SUGGESTION.
She examines the papers: it is twenty pages from the list of items in the Unmentionable Warehouse.
Mulaghesh has never looked at this list—she never wanted to—but she casts an eye over a page now, reviewing notes written decades ago by the now-dead Saypuri soldiers who locked all these things away:
368. Shelf C5-158. Glass of Kivrey: Small marble bead that supposedly contains the sleeping body of Saint Kivrey, a Jukoshtani priest who changed gender every night as part of one of Jukov’s miracles. Miraculous nature—undetermined.
369. Shelf C5-159. Small iron key: Name is unknown, but when used on any door the door sometimes opens onto an unidentified tropical forest. Pattern has yet to be determined. Still miraculous.
370. Shelf C5-160. Bust of Ahanas: Once cried tears that possessed some healing properties. Users of the tears also had a tendency to levitate. No longer miraculous.
371. Shelf C5-161. Nine stone cups: if left in a place where they receive sun, these cups would refill with goat’s milk every dawn. No longer miraculous.
372. Shelf C5-162. Ear of Jukov: an engraved, stone door frame that contains no door. Iron wheels on the base. Speculated that it has a twin, and no matter where the other Ear is, if the doors are operated in the correct manner one can pass through one door and come out the other. We speculate that the twin has been destroyed. No longer miraculous.
373. Shelf C5-163. Edicts of Kolkan, books 783 to 797: fifteen tomes mostly dictating Kolkan’s attitudes on dancing. Total weight: 378 pounds. Not miraculous, but content is definitely dangerous.
374. Shelf C5-164. Glass sphere. Contained a small pond and overhanging tree Ahanas was fond of visiting when she felt troubled. No longer miraculous.
Twenty pages. Nearly two hundred items of a miraculous nature, many of them terribly dangerous.
“Oh, boy,” says Mulaghesh. She sits down, suddenly feeling quite terribly old.
* * *
—
Shara’s bag clinks and clanks, rattles and thumps as she walks down the alley. It took her most of the day to assemble the bag—pieces of silver, pearl, bags of daisy petals, pieces of blown glass—and though she packed it quite well, there’s so much in it that she sounds like a one-man band seeking a corner to play at. She’s grateful when she comes to the alley so she can stop.
She gauges the alley carefully. It is, like most alleys, a forgotten little strip of interstitial stone, but this one bends around the rounded wall of the west building, which is not more than three blocks from the House of Votrov.
She looks at the ground, where a twisting trail of tire marks on the stone takes on the look of sloppy brushwork. They turned here, at the corner, thinks Shara, and went down the alley. She paces a few steps down, over an exposed pipe, around a pile of refuse. The black rubber is fainter here, but some streaks can still be seen. Over this bump, over the pipe—she looks up, spots a demolished waste bin and a smattering of broken glass—tipped over the trash cans, and…
The tire marks end.
“He stopped,” she murmurs, “got out, and…”
And what? How does a man simply disappear into thin air?
Shara does not bother, as Sigrud did on the night of Vohannes’s party, to check the stones and walls of this place. Instead, she takes out a piece of yellow chalk and draws a line across the alley floor. Somewhere at this line, she thinks, there is a door. But how to find it?
She sets her bag down. Her first trick is an old and simple one: she takes out a jar, fills it with daisy petals—Sacred to Ahanas, thinks Shara, for their willful recurrence—shakes the jar, and dumps out the petals. Then she takes a bit of graveyard mud, smears it across the glass bottom of the jar, wipes it clean, and applies the mouth of the jar to her eye, like a telescope.
The alley looks the exact same through the lens of the jar. However, she can see a bit of the walls of Bulikov in the distance—and these glow with a blue-green phosphorescence bright enough to light up the evening sky.
She takes the jar away. Of course, now the walls do not glow: they are transparent as always. But viewed through a lens that discerns works of the Divine, they naturally stand out.
Yet this means that whatever door the attackers disappeared through, it was not made by the Divine, unlike the walls of Bulikov.
Which should be impossible, thinks Shara. Anything capable of making someone disappear should be Divine in nature.
She begins to pace the alley. For the past four nights, Shara has been visiting this place and the one other spot where Sigrud witnessed a disappearance; in these spots she performs select tests and experiments, mostly in vain. She has nothing else to do: Sigrud watches Mrs. Torskeny in her apartment. Pitry, Nidayin, and a select few other embassy staff members are combing through the year’s worth of investments Wiclov has made. Shara wishes she were there, overseeing them, but her knowledge of the Divine makes her more suited to this task.
And, strangely, Wiclov has not been seen in Bulikov since spiriting away Mrs. Torskeny. “He is in his country estate near Jukoshtan,” his office informed them, “on family business.”
So many disappearances, thinks Shara as she returns to her bag. And so precious few answers….Though she does have what could be a treasure trove of answers waiting in Vohannes’s white suitcase in her office—yet she is not willing to risk Vinya’s wrath just yet. At least not when another tantalizing puzzle lies before her.
Shara tries a multitude of other tricks: she casts poppy seeds on the ground, but they fail to align in any one direction, indicating a Divine breach in the world. She writes a third of a hymn of Voortya on a parchment and carries it down the alley: were it to pass through a holy domain of Voortya, the hymn would be instantly completed, in Voortya’s savage handwriting. (This failure does not surprise her: none of Voortya’s miracles, however slight, have worked since the Night of the Red Sands.)
Another trick.
How did you disappear?
Another.
How did you do it?
And another.
How?
She performs one final test, rolling a silver coin down the alley—if it encounters some Divine obstacle, placed here intentionally or not, it should stop and fall flat, as if magnetically drawn to the ground—but it does not, and plinks ahead before spinning round and tottering to a stop.
She sighs, reaches back into her bag, and takes out her bottle of tea. She sips it. It is stale and musky, having been stored for too long in a place too damp.
She sighs again, clears some space on the ground, and sits in the alley with her back against the wall, remembering the last day of her training, the last hour she spent on Saypur’s soil, the last time she had really good tea.
* * *
—
“How did you do it?” asked Auntie Vinya. “Tell me. How?”
Young Shara Komayd—exhausted, dehydrated, and starving—gave her aunt a puzzled look as she stuffed food into her mouth. The rest of the mess hall at the training facility was empty, causing the sounds of her chewing to echo.
“You stuck to your story, no matter how they badgered and questioned you,” said Vinya. “Every answer right. Every single one, for all six days. Do you know how often that’s happened? Why, I think you might be only the second or third in the Ministry’s history.” She peered at her nineteen-year-old niece over her half-moon glasses, obviously pleased. “Most of them break down on the third day, you know, after no sleep. The music gets to them—the same bass line, over and over. It shakes something loose. And when they get asked a question, they finally give the wrong answer. But you sat through it as if you heard nothing at all.”
“Did you?” asked Shara around a mouthful of potato.
“Did I what?”
“Did you break?”
Vinya laughed. “I created this process, dear. I’ve never had to sit through it. So tell me—how did you do it?”
Shara sloshed down tea. “Do what, Auntie?”
“Why, keep going. You didn’t break down after six days of psychological torture.”
Shara paused, the tines of her fork stuck in a chicken breast.
“You don’t want to tell me?” asked Vinya.
“It’s…embarrassing.”
“I’m your aunt, dearest.”
“You’re also my commanding officer.”
“Oh…” She waved a hand. “Not tonight. Tonight’s our last night together for a long while.”
“A long while?”
“Well. Not that long, dear. So—how?”
“I thought…” Shara swallowed. “I thought about my parents.” Vinya’s mouth flexed. “Ah.”
“I thought about what they must have gone through when they died. I’ve read the stories; I know that the Plague is an…a hard way to go.” Vinya nodded sadly. “Yes. It is. I saw.”
“And I thought about them, and about what all of Saypur must have gone through under the Continent…All the slavery, and the abuse, and the misery. And suddenly it was so easy to sit through it. The music, no sleep, no water, no food, the questions, over and over…Nothing they could ever do to me would be like that. Nothing.”
Vinya smiled and took off her glasses. “You are, I think, the most ferocious patriot I have ever seen. I am so proud of you, my dear. Especially because, well…We were worried, for a bit.”
“About what?”
“Well, my dear…I always knew you had a fancy for history. That was always your forte at Fadhuri. Especially Continental history. And then when you came to us, and we gave you access to the classified material, where we keep the things we don’t even allow them to teach at Fadhuri…Why, you spent hours in there memorizing all those moldy old texts! This fascination, in government, is considered a little…unhealthy.”
“But they explained so much!” said Shara. “I had only been taught pieces of things at Fadhuri. So much had been missing, but then there it all was, right on the shelves!”
“What we should concern ourselves with,” said Vinya, “is the present. But more so, Shara, I admit I was worried that you were tainted by that boy you used to dally about with at school.”
Shara’s face soured. “Don’t talk to me about him,” she snapped. “He’s dead to me. He was worthless and deceitful, as is the rest of the damnable Continent, I bet.”
“I know, I know,” said Vinya. “You have gone through a lot. I knew when you came out of school you wanted to change the world, for it to live up to all your dreams of how Saypur should be.” She smiles sadly. “And I know that that is probably why you investigated Rajandra in the first place.”
Shara looked at her, startled. “Auntie…I—I don’t want to ta—”
“Don’t fear the past, darling. You must accept what you did. You suspected Rajandra Adesh of wrongdoing. You thought he was misusing funds from the National Party. And you were right. He was misusing party funds. He was wildly, wildly corrupt. That’s true. And I think by exposing him, you wished to impress me, impress us all. But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law. Such was the case here. Do you understand?”
Shara bowed her head.
“You have ruined the career of the man everyone thought would inherit the prime minister’s seat. You have destroyed a ruling party’s leadership. Your investigation even pushed the party treasurer to attempt suicide. The poor bastard couldn’t even competently pull off his own suicide—he tried to hang himself in his office, but wound up ripping the water pipes clear out of the ceiling.” Vinya tuts. “You are a Komayd, dear, and that will protect us, some. But this will have repercussions for years.”
“I’m so sorry, Auntie,” says Shara.
“I know. Listen—the world is full of corruption and inequality,” says Vinya. “You were raised a patriot, to love Saypur and to believe that its virtues must be extended to all the world—but this is not your job. Your job in the Ministry is not to stop corruption and inequality: rather, these are tools in your bag to be used to aid Saypur in every way possible. Your job is to make sure the past never happens again, that we never see such poverty and powerlessness again. Corruption and inequality are useful things: if they benefit us, we must own them fully. Do you see?”
Shara thought of Vohannes then: You paint your world in such drab cynicisms….
“Do you see?” asked Vinya again.
“I see,” said Shara.
“I know you love Saypur,” said Vinya. “I know you love this country like you loved your parents, and you wish to honor their memory, and the memory of every other Saypuri who died in struggle. But you will serve Saypur in the shadows, and Saypur will ask you to betray its virtues in order to keep it safe.”
“And then…”
“Then what?”
“Then, when I’m done…I can come home?”
Vinya smiled. “Of course you can. I’m sure your service will only last a handful of months! We’ll see each other again very soon. Now eat up, and get some rest. Your ship leaves in the morning. Oh. It is so good to see my niece working for me!”
How she smiled when she said that.
* * *
—
In the morning, thinks Shara. Nearly sixteen years ago…
In those sixteen years, Shara has taken more cases and done more work than nearly any operative in the world, let alone on the Continent. But though Shara Komayd was once a vigorous patriot, her fervor has leached out of her with each death and each betrayal, until her passion to feed Saypur shrank to a passion to merely protect Saypur, which then shrank further into the mere longing to see her home country once more before she dies: a prospect she sometimes thinks very unlikely.
Repetition, conditioning, fervor, and faith, she muses as she sips tea in the alleyway. All come to so little. Perhaps this is what it’s like to lose on
e’s religion.
And, more, she has begun to question whether she is really in exile. She wonders: as disastrous as it was, could the National Party scandal still be on everyone’s minds? Is that really why she is being kept away? She wishes she had been smart enough to establish a few connections to Parliament while she was still in Saypur. (Though it’s true, she remembers, that all her experiences with the Divine make her about as dangerous and illicit as the Unmentionable Warehouse itself. There are many reasons, it feels, why her homeland could reject her.)
“Ambassador Thivani?”
She looks over her shoulder. Pitry stands at the mouth of the alley with the car parked just beyond; she must have been so lost in her memories that she didn’t even hear him arrive. “Pitry? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you working on Wiclov’s finances?”
“Message from Sigrud,” he says. “Mrs. Torskeny’s been moved. He says Wiclov and one other man have escorted her from her home. He’s given me an address, not much more.”
There is a clanking flurry as Shara packs all of her materials. She walks down the alley, grabs the silver coin, and jumps in the backseat.
They’ve already driven a quarter of a mile before she notices the silver coin has lost some of its luster. She holds it up to the windows to catch some light.
Her eyes open in surprise. Then she smiles.
The coin is no longer silver at all: it has been completely transmuted into lead.
* * *
—
Shara and Pitry enter a quarter of Bulikov decimated by the Blink: she watches, fascinated, as truncated buildings and tapering streets pass by. As they drive down one block, a laundry on one corner stretches, twists, and contorts itself until it is half of a bank on the next corner. One set of quaint home fronts feature unusually large and warped front doors that would not, one would imagine, have ever been fashioned with humans in mind. They must have simply appeared overnight, thinks Shara.
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 24