The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside
Page 39
“So…is Jukoshtan behind this in any way?”
“I genuinely have no idea,” says Shara. She turns around and examines the spot they just passed through: it bears some minor effects from the Blink—the sand is molten together, and many of the trees appear bent and mutated—but otherwise you’d never be able to tell this spot had any trace of reality static to it.
She breaks off a branch from a nearby tree, peels back the bark so its green inner core is revealed in a slender stripe, and stabs it into the ground. “To mark our entry point,” she says. “Now—lead on.”
The trail leads down a valley, then up the hills, up and up, until they come to the crest, and then…
“Down,” whispers Sigrud. “Down!” He grabs her shoulder and rips her forward, crashing into the soft sand hills.
Shara lies still and listens. Then she hears it: voices, and hammers.
Sigrud peers through the undergrowth.
“Have we been spotted?” Shara whispers.
He shakes his head. “No. But I am not sure what I am looking at.”
“Is it safe for me to move?”
“I think so,” he says. “They are very far down in the valley….And they are very busy.”
She lifts her head and crawls to a spot where she can see. The bottom of the valley is dotted with fires, as if the people there are preparing to work well into the night. But what they are working on is hard to discern: there are six long, wide shapes of gleaming metal that Shara first thinks are giant shoes, pointed at the front and square in the back like the clogs they wear in Voortyashtan, but there are doors and windows in the giant metal shoes, and stairs and trapdoors…and in the middle is something that looks like a mast with no sail.
Shara says, “They almost look like—”
“Ships,” says Sigrud. “Boats. Giant boats of metal, with no ocean, and no sails.”
She squints to see the figures scurrying around the ships, screwing in screws, welding plates together. All the workers are dressed in traditional Kolkashtani wraps.
“They’re definitely Restorationists,” she murmurs. “But why the hells would they build boats of metal out here in the country? We’re hundreds of miles from the ocean! I suppose that’s what they needed the steel for….”
“That is not a terribly large fleet,” says Sigrud with some contempt. “Only six ships? If they were going to sail anywhere, there’s not much you could do with that.”
Shara considers it. “Almost two thousand pounds of steel a month, for a little over a year—that doesn’t make very many ships. But this must have been what they were using the steel for!”
“And then what?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps they found something in the Warehouse that could create an ocean wherever you wanted it.”
Eight men are pushing something up a ramp into one of the metal boats. Even though the light is faint, Shara’s heart almost stops at the sight of it.
“Oh my,” she says.
“Is that what I think it is?” says Sigrud.
“Yes,” she says. “A six-inch cannon. I’ve only ever seen those on a Saypuri dreadnought.” She glances at the cannon shutters on the other ships. “And it looks like they have, or expect to have, thirty-six of the damn things.”
“And they plan to do what with them? Bombard the hills? Fight a war with the squirrels?”
“I don’t know,” says Shara. “But you’re going to find out.”
A pause.
Sigrud says, “What?”
“I’m going back to Bulikov”—Shara looks over her shoulder and is discomfited to see that the actual Bulikov is nowhere in sight—“to the actual Bulikov, to telegraph Mulaghesh. But we can’t just leave the Restorationists here to do…well…whatever it is they’re going to do.”
“So your plan,” says Sigrud, “is to leave me here to fight six metal ships loaded with cannons?”
“I’m asking you to watch. Only do something if they do something.”
“This something I should do being…”
“Infiltration, if you can. You must have dealt with a few stowaways in your time, right? Hopefully you learned something from them. If I get back to Bulikov in time, we can return with a small army within days.”
“Days plural?”
Shara squeezes his shoulder, says, “Good luck,” and crawls back down the hillside.
* * *
—
The journey back through the white city of Old Bulikov is a strange and heavy one for Shara. She tries to put her mind to the dozens of mysteries before her—landlocked ships preparing an invasion; Vohannes collaborating with Wiclov, and, possibly, arranging passage for the Restorationists in and out of Old Bulikov; yet her thoughts keep returning to the lump in her pocket, which jostles with each step.
I have on my person something that has tasted the blood of the Divine.
It takes her a moment to realize that this grants her a profound technological advantage: no matter what Wiclov, Vohannes, and the Restorationists are plotting, none of them could imagine she possesses a piece of the Kaj’s weaponry, however small. But how to use something that’s hardly bigger than a marble?
When she returns to Bulikov—the real, current Bulikov—she sheds the Kolkashtani wrap right away and goes straight to a metalworker’s shop.
“Can I help—?” The clerk does a double take as he realizes he faces the famed Conqueror of Urav.
“I need you to make something for me,” she says before he can comment.
“Oh, ah…Certainly. What would it be?”
She places the little ball of metal on the counter. “A bolt tip,” she says. “Or a small knife.”
“Well…which would you like? A bolt tip or a knife?”
“Something that could be both, if needed. I will need this to be quite versatile.”
The clerk picks up the ball of black metal. “And what would you be hunting, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Shara smiles and says, “Deer?”
* * *
—
CD KOMAYD TO GHS512
EMERGENCY SITUATION STOP
RESTORATIONISTS PLAN FULL SCALE ASSAULT STOP
REQUEST RELOCATION AND FORTIFICATION OF ALL
POLIS TROOPS IN BULIKOV STOP
CES512
PG MULAGHESH TO CES512
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DAMN MIND STOP
ARE YOU EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE INVESTIGATING THIS
ANYMORE STOP
MUST PROVIDE MORE DETAILS STOP
GHS512
CD KOMAYD TO GHS512
CANNOT PROVIDE DETAILS STOP
NOT DUE TO UNCERTAINTY DUE TO LENGTH STOP
QUESTION OF JURISDICTION IMMATERIAL DUE TO
THREAT LEVEL STOP
PLEASE MOBILIZE FORCES IMMEDIATELY STOP
CES512
PG MULAGHESH TO CES512
PLEASE PROVIDE SOME INDICATION OF THREAT LEVEL STOP
ANYTHING STOP
MOVING FIVE HUNDRED ARMED TROOPS TO AN
URBAN AREA NOT LIKE BACKING UP A WAGON FULL OF
POTATOES STOP
GHS512
CD KOMAYD TO GHS512
RESTORATIONISTS CONFIRMED TO POSSESS 30
PLUS SIX INCH CANNONS NORMALLY SUITED FOR
DREADNOUGHTS STOP
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
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 niggli
ng 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 almost the same as the face she knows: 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.