“Sigrud,” she says. “Give me your flask.”
Sigrud lifts his head and frowns.
“I know you have one. I don’t care about that. Just give it to me. And a knife.”
Sparks as Mulaghesh taps her cigarillo against the wall. “I don’t think I like where this is going.”
Sigrud clambers to his feet, rustles in his coat—there is the tinkling of metal: unpleasant instruments, surely—and produces a flask of dark brown glass.
“What is it?” asks Shara.
“They said it was plum wine,” he says. “But from the fumes…I think the salesman, he might not have been so honest.”
“And…have you tried it?”
“Yes. And I have not gone blind. So.” He holds out a small blade.
This will either work, thinks Shara, or be very embarrassing. Sigrud uncorks the flask—the fumes are enough to make her gag—and she tugs off her free hand’s glove with her teeth. Then she steels herself and slashes the inside of her palm.
Mulaghesh is appalled. “What in the—?”
Shara puts her mouth to the wound and sucks at it. It is bleeding freely: the taste of salt and copper suffuses her mouth, almost chokes her. Then she rips her hand away and hurriedly takes a pull from the flask.
It is not—most certainly not—any sort of alcohol she has ever tasted before. Vomit curdles in her stomach, washes up her esophagus; she chokes it back down. She faces the door frame, gags once, and spews the mixture of alcohol and blood over it.
She is not in control of herself enough to even see if it works. She hands the flask and knife back to Sigrud, drops to all fours, and begins to violently dry heave, but as she lost most of the contents of her stomach when she first saw the mhovost, there is nothing to expel.
She hears Mulaghesh say, “Um. Uhh…”
There is a soft scrape as Sigrud’s black knife escapes from its sheath.
“What?” croaks Shara. She wipes away tears. “What is it? Did it work?”
She looks, and finds it is difficult to say.
The interior of the door frame is completely, impenetrably black, as if someone inserted a sheet of black graphite in it while she wasn’t looking. One of Mulaghesh’s soldiers, curious, steps behind the doorway: none of them are able to see through to her. The soldier sticks her head around the other side and asks, “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” says Mulaghesh. “Was it supposed to do”—she struggles for words—“that?”
“It’s a reaction, at least,” says Shara. She grabs the candelabra and approaches the door frame.
“Be careful!” says Mulaghesh. “Something could…I don’t know, come out of it.”
The black inside the doorway, Shara sees, is not as solid as she thought: as she nears it, the shadow recedes until she spots the hint of tall, square metal frames on either side of the doorway, and a rickety wooden floor.
Shelves, she realizes. I’m seeing rows and rows of shelves.
“Oh, my seas and stars,” whispers Mulaghesh. “What is that?”
Would this—Shara’s heart is trembling—be the view from shelf C5-162, where the other Ear of Jukov sits?
Shara reaches down and picks up a clod of earth. She gauges the distance and tosses it into the doorway.
The clod flies through the door frame, into the shadows, and lands with a thunk on the wooden floor.
“It passes through,” remarks Sigrud.
And so, she muses, Lord Jukov allows us in his shadow.
This deeply concerns her, though she does not say so: not only has she just found that one of Jukov’s Divine creatures was still alive, now one of his miraculous devices appears to still function. Who actually witnessed Jukov’s death, she thinks, besides the Kaj himself?
She returns to the task at hand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
* * *
—
There is a passing shadow—the candle flames in her candelabra shrink to near nothing—an unsettling breeze, then the creak of wood below her feet.
Shara is through.
She takes a breath and immediately starts coughing.
The interior of the Unmentionable Warehouse is musty beyond belief, much more so than the Seat of the World: it is like entering the home of a hugely ancient, hoarding old couple. Shara hacks miserably against the bloody handkerchief around her hand. “Is there no ventilation here?”
Mulaghesh has tied a bandanna around her head before stepping through. “Why the hells would there be?” she says, irritated.
Sigrud enters behind her. If the air bothers him, he doesn’t show it.
Mulaghesh turns around to look at the second stone door frame, sitting comfortably in the lowest spot on shelf C5. Shara can see Mulaghesh’s two soldiers watching them from the other side of the door, anxious.
“Could we really be here?” Mulaghesh asks aloud. “Could we really have been transported miles outside of Bulikov, just like that?”
Shara holds up the candelabra: the shelves tower above them nearly three or four stories tall. Shara thinks she can make out a tin roof somewhere far overhead. The skeletal form of an ancient rolling ladder lurks a dozen feet away. “I would say we are here,” she says, “yes.”
The three of them stand in the Unmentionable Warehouse and listen.
The dark air is filled with sighs and squeaks and low hums. The rattle of pennies, the scrape of wood. The air pressure in the room feels like it is constantly changing: either something in the Warehouse has confused Shara’s skin, inner ear, and sinuses, or there are countless forces applying themselves to her, then fading, like ocean currents.
How many miracles are in here with us, Shara wonders, functioning away in the dark? How many of the words of the Divinities still echo in this place?
Sigrud points down. “Look.”
The wooden floor is covered in sediments of dust, yet this aisle has been marred by recent footprints.
“I presume,” says Mulaghesh, “that that would be the passage of our mysterious opponent.”
Shara fights to concentrate: there are many paths of footprints, none of them completely clear. Their trespasser must have paced the aisles many times. “We need to look for any sign of tampering,” she says. “Then, after that, we need to look and see if anything’s missing. I would expect that if there’s anything missing, it’d be something from these pages, since these are the records that interested the Restorationists. So”—she flips through the pages—“we’ll want to look at shelves C4, C5, and C6.”
“Or he could have just randomly stolen something,” says Mulaghesh.
“Yes. Or that.” Thank you, she thinks, for highlighting the futility of our search. “We all have a light, don’t we? Then let’s spread out, and keep an eye on each other…and we’ll get out of here as fast as we can. And I don’t think I need to say this, but do not touch anything. And if something asks for your attention, or for your interference…ignore it.”
“Would these…items really have minds of their own?” asks Sigrud.
Shara’s memory supplies her with a litany of miraculous items that were either alive or claimed to be. “Just don’t touch anything,” she says. “Stay clear of all the shelves.”
Shara takes shelf C4, Mulaghesh C5, Sigrud C6. As she walks down her aisle, Shara reflects on the age of this place. These shelves are nearly eighty years old, she thinks, listening to the creaking. And they look it. “The Kaj never intended for this to be a permanent fix, did he?” she whispers as she looks down the aisle. “We just kept ignoring it, hoping this was a problem that would go away.”
Each space on the shelves is marked by a tiny metal tag with a number. Beyond this, there is no explanation for the contents, which are beyond random.
One shelf is occupied by most of a huge, disassembled statue. Its face is blank, featureless, save for a wriggling, fractal-
like design marching across the whole of its head. Taalhavras, thinks Shara, or one of his incarnations.
A wooden box covered in locks and chains wriggles; a scuttering noise comes from within, like many small, clawed creatures scrabbling at the wood. Shara quickly steps past this.
A golden sword shines with a queer light above her. Beside it sit twelve short, thick, unremarkable glass columns. Beside these, a large silver cup with many jewels. Then mountains and mountains of books and scrolls.
She walks on. Next she sees sixty panes of glass. A foot made of brass. A corpse wrapped in a blanket, tied with silver twine.
Shara cannot see the end of the aisle. Over fifteen hundred years, she thinks, of miraculous items.
The historian in her says, How fortuitous the Kaj thought to store them all.
The operative in her says, He should have destroyed every single one of them when he had the chance.
“Ambassador?” calls Mulaghesh’s voice.
“Yes?”
“Did…you say something?”
“No.” Shara pauses. “At least, I don’t think I did.”
A long silence. Shara surveys a collection of silver thumbs.
“Is it possible for these things to talk in your head?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Anything is possible here,” says Shara. “Ignore it.”
A bucket full of children’s shoes.
A walking stick made of horsehair.
A cabinet spilling ancient parchments.
A cloth mask, made to look like the face of an old man.
A wooden carving of a man with seven erect members of varying length.
She tries to focus, but her mind keeps searching through all the stories she’s memorized, trying to place these items in the thousands of Continental legends. Is that the knot that held a thunderstorm in its tangle, and when untied brought endless rain? Could that be the harp of a hovtarik from the court of Taalhavras, which made the tapestries come alive? And is that the red arrow made by Voortya, that pierced the belly of a tidal wave and turned it to a gentle current?
“No,” says Sigrud’s voice. “No. That is not so.”
“Sigrud?” says Shara. “Are you all right?”
A low hum from a few yards away.
“No!” says Sigrud. “That is a lie!”
Shara walks quickly down the aisle until she sees Sigrud standing on the opposite side of a shelf, staring at a small, polished black orb sitting in a velvet-lined box.
“Sigrud?”
“No,” he says to the orb. “I left that place. I am…I am not there anymore.”
“Is he all right?” calls Mulaghesh.
“Sigrud, listen to me,” says Shara.
“They died because”—he searches for an explanation—“because they tried to hurt me.”
“Sigrud…”
“No. No! No, I will not!”
In the velvet box, the glassy black orb rotates slightly to the left; Shara is reminded of a dog cocking its head: Why not?
“Because I,” Sigrud says forcefully, “am not. A king!”
“Sigrud!” shouts Shara.
He blinks, startled. The black orb sinks a little lower in the velvet, like it’s disappointed to lose its playmate.
Sigrud slowly turns to look at her. “What…? What has happened?”
“You’re here,” she says. “You’re here in the Warehouse, with me.”
He rubs his temple, shaken.
“The things here are…They’re very old,” she explains. “I think they’re bored. And they’ve been…feeding off one another. Like fish trapped in a shrinking pond.”
“I have found nothing missing,” he grumbles. “The shelves are quite full. Over full, even.”
“Me neither,” says Mulaghesh’s voice from the next aisle. “You don’t want us to climb the ladders, do you?”
“Does it look like the ladders have been moved?” asks Shara. “Look at the dust.”
A pause. “No.”
“Then it would have been something on the first few shelves.”
Shara directs her own attention to the lowest shelves of her remaining aisles and continues her search.
Four brass oil lamps. A blank, polished wooden board. Children’s dolls. A spinning wheel whose wheel is slowly rotating, though there seems to be no flax, and certainly no spinner.
Then, in the final spot, just ahead…
Nothing.
Maybe nothing. Nothing that she can see, at least.
Shara thinks, Something missing?
She strides toward the empty space. Her eyes are so used to seeing random material in the corner of her vision that she does not pay much attention to what’s below her. But as she nears the blank space on the shelf, she thinks, briefly, Did I see something shining on the ground?
A wire, maybe?
Something catches at her ankle; pulls, breaks—a tinny ping!
There is a tinkle of metal from the next aisle over; a tiny steel key goes skittering across the boards.
Immediately Sigrud roars, “Down! Now!”
A puff of black smoke across the aisle to her right.
Then a wild blossom of orange flames, and a concussive blast.
A wave of heat batters her right side. Shara is lifted off the ground. She crashes into the shelves next to her, sending ancient treasures flying: a leather bag tumbles through the air, vomiting an endless stream of golden coins; a streamer of pale ribbon strikes the ground and turns to leaves.
Dust and metal and old wood spin around her. She falls to the ground, paws at a shelf, but cannot stand.
A fire rages to her right. Smoke coils and curls up on the ceiling, like a black cat finding sanctuary in a sunbeam.
On her left, the statue of Taalhavras crashes off the shelf. Sigrud awkwardly clambers through to kneel beside her.
“Are you all right?” he asks. He touches the side of her head. “You have lost some hair….”
“What damned miracle,” she pants, “was that?”
“No miracle,” he says. He looks back at the spreading fire. “A mine. Incendiary, I think, or it did not ignite properly.”
“What the hells is going on over there?” shouts Mulaghesh’s voice.
Somewhere in the darkness many tiny voices chitter.
Flames rush across the dust on the floor, hop onto one shelf, burrow into the blanket-wrapped corpse.
“We need to leave,” says Sigrud. “This place, so dry and old—it will burn down in moments.”
Shara looks out at the growing flames. The top of the shelf on her right is almost completely ablaze. “There was a blank space,” she murmurs, “on that shelf ahead. Something has been stolen.” She tries to point; her finger drunkenly wanders to the ground.
“We need to leave,” says Sigrud again.
There are pops out in the darkness. Something screeches in the fire.
“What in shitting hells is going on over there?” bellows Mulaghesh.
Shara looks at Sigrud. She nods.
He effortlessly hauls her up onto one of his shoulders. “We are leaving!” he shouts to Mulaghesh.
Sigrud sprints down the aisle, turns right, and makes a beeline for the stone door frame.
A ruby-red glow filters through the forest of towering shelves.
Decades, thinks Shara. Centuries. More.
Gone. All gone.
* * *
—
Sigrud sets Shara down when they’re back in the Seat of the World.
She coughs, then weakly asks, “How bad am I?”
He asks her to wiggle her fingers and toes. She does so. “Good,” he says. “Mostly. Lost a lot of an eyebrow. Some hair. And your face is red. But not burned—not seriously. You are lucky.” He looks up at the inferno raging on the
other side of the stone door frame. “I do not think whoever set that trap knew what they were doing. But when I heard it…” He shakes his head. “Only one thing in the world sounds like that.”
Mulaghesh leans on one of her soldiers and, in between hacks, attempts to light another cigarillo. “So the sons of bitches mined the Warehouse? Just in case we followed?”
A broiling heat comes pouring through the stone door frame.
At every moment, thinks Shara, they’ve been one step ahead of me.
“Let’s cave that damn tunnel in,” says Shara, “and be done with this damned place.”
* * *
—
In the darkness of the Warehouse, legends and treasures wither and die in the flames. Thousands of books turn to curling ash. Paintings are eaten by flame from the inside out. Wax pools on the floor, running down from the many candles stacked across the shelves, and makes a twisted rainbow across the wooden slats. In some of the deeper shadows, invisible voices sob in grief.
Yet not all the items meet destruction.
A large clay jug sits on a shelf, bathing in heat. Upon its glazed surface are many delicate black brushstrokes: sigils of power, of containment, of tethering.
In the raging heat, the ink bubbles, cracks, and fades. The wax seal around its cork runs and drips down its side.
Something within the bottle begins growling, slowly realizing its prison is fading away.
The jug begins to tip back and forth. It plummets off its shelf to shatter on the ground.
The jug erupts in darkness. Its contents expand rapidly, sending shelves toppling like dominoes. The jug’s prisoner keeps growing until its top nearly touches the ceiling of the Warehouse.
One yellow eye takes in the flames, the smoke, the burning shelves.
A high-pitched voice shrieks in victorious rage: Free! Free at last! Free at last!
I am gentle with you, my children, for I love you.
But love and gentleness do not breed purity: purity is earned through hardship and punishment and edification. So I have made these holy beings to help you find your way, and teach you the lessons I cannot bear to:
Ukma, sky-strider and wall-walker, watcher and whisperer. He will see the weaknesses in you that you cannot, and he will make you fight them until you rise above yourself.
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 28