“YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THE WAY YOU SHOULD BE,” says the voice.
A pause.
“I WILL RESTORE YOU.”
Ocher sunlight washes over Bulikov. The citizens shield their eyes, look away from windows.…
And when they look back they see the view has changed: it is as if all the city blocks have been rearranged, shoved out of the way to make room for …
An old woman at the corner of Saint Ghoshtok and Saint Gyieli falls to her knees in awe and says, “By the gods … By the gods.”
… splendid, beautiful white skyscrapers, lined and tipped with gold. They look like giant white herons wading among the low, gray swamp of modern Bulikov.
“YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN ALL I TAUGHT YOU,” says the voice. “I HAVE RETURNED TO REMIND YOU. YOU WILL BE SCOURGED OF SIN. YOU WILL BE PURIFIED OF TEMPTATION.”
A wind stirs along Saint Vasily Lane. As if in a dream, dozens of pedestrians suddenly walk to the center of the street, stand together shoulder to shoulder, and face the north. They are mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters; none respond to plaintive cries from friends and family asking what’s wrong.
The wind increases. Citizens of Bulikov are forced to raise their hands and turn their faces away. There is a clinking and clanking, as if the wind has somehow blown thousands of metal plates down the street. When the people lower their hands and look back, they are shocked by what they see:
In place of the pedestrians, five hundred armored soldiers now stand in the streets. The armor they wear is huge and thick and gleaming, protecting every inch of their bodies: it is so thick they might not even be soldiers, but animated suits of armor. Their helmets depict the glinting visages of shrieking demons; their swords are immense, nearly six feet in length, and flicker with a cold fire.
Only Shara Komayd, who glances at the soldiers as she sprints to the embassy, recognizes them from somewhere: had she not asked Sigrud to tear that painting off of CD Troonyi’s wall mere weeks ago?
Kolkan’s voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, AND THROUGH IT YOU WILL KNOW RIGHTEOUSNESS.”
The soldiers turn to the people on the sidewalk and raise their swords.
* * *
Mulaghesh sees Shara running toward the fortifications and bellows to her, “What in hells is that voice talking about?”
“It’s Kolkan!” Shara says, panting.
“The god?”
“Yes! He’s talking about his edicts!”
“White stone floors? Eating bright fruits?”
Soldiers help Shara scramble over the fortifications. “Those are his edicts, yes!”
“And where the hells did these white buildings come from?”
“It’s Old Bulikov,” says Shara. “Parts of Bulikov as it was. He must have pulled it all back in and tossed the buildings in with the normal Bulikov!”
“I have …” Mulaghesh searches for words. “I have no fucking idea what you are talking about! Forget all that—what’s he going to do now? What do we do now?”
The sound of tinny screams echoes through the streets. Mulaghesh shades her eyes to look. “There are people running toward us,” she says. “What’s going on?”
“Have you ever seen the painting The Night of the Red Sands? By Rishna?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the Continental army the Kaj faces in that painting?”
“Yeah, I—” Mulaghesh lowers her hand from her eyes, and turns to stare at Shara in horror.
“Yes,” says Shara. “It seems Rishna was quite accurate in her depiction.”
“How …? How many?”
“Hundreds,” says Shara. “And Kolkan can make more if he chooses. He is a Divinity, after all. But I may have a weapon he doesn’t know about.”
Shara races upstairs to her office with Mulaghesh. She opens a drawer in her desk and takes out the piece of black lead she had reworked into the point of a bolt. “This,” she says softly.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“It’s the metal the Kaj used to kill the Divinities,” says Shara. “It’s immune to any Divine influence. He fired this very shot through the skull of Jukov, executing him. All we have to do is lure Kolkan out, and then someone, maybe, can use it to take a shot at him, just like during the Great War.”
“Okay.… Assuming everything you’re saying is true,” says Mulaghesh, “during the Great War, wouldn’t the Kaj have had hundreds or thousands of those little shots?”
“Well … Yes.”
“And you’ve only got the one?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. And how do we lure him out?”
“Well …”
“And what if that shot misses?”
“Well, we’d … we’d have to go and get it, I suppose.”
Mulaghesh gapes at Shara with an expression equal parts disbelief and exasperation.
“I didn’t have time to plan this out!” says Shara.
“I couldn’t tell!”
“I had no idea this’d be happening now!”
“Well, it is! And I must admit, Chief Diplomat, I do not have much faith that that plan will work!”
The floor rumbles. Soldiers begin shouting outside. Shara and Mulaghesh reach the window just in time to see a four-story building ten blocks down collapsing as if it’s been demolished. Glimmering steel shapes come marching out of the dust and debris, holding their giant swords straight up.
“They’re strong enough to destroy buildings?” says Shara aloud in disbelief.
“And what is your plan,” asks Mulaghesh, “for dealing with those?”
She adjusts her glasses. “How much weaponry do you have?”
“We have the typical bolt-shots, plus five repeat-shot small cannons.” She makes a small “O” with her forefinger and thumb. “You crank them and they fire rounds about this big twice every second.”
“No other large cannonry?”
She shakes her head. “None. The treaties outlawed mobile heavy cannonry on the Continent.”
“And do you think those rounds could pierce the armor of those … things?”
“Well, it’s Divine armor, right?”
“But perhaps Kolkan,” Shara wonders aloud, “does not yet know about gunpowder.”
“I’m not really willing to take that chance. My suggestion would be to retreat.… But those things appear to move very fast.”
“And even if we did retreat, that’d still leave the flying warships,” says Shara.
Mulaghesh stares at her, incredulous. “What flying warships?”
“No time to explain now. Do we have a working telegraph?”
Mulaghesh shakes her head. “Line went dead just minutes ago. Everything electrical has stopped working, actually.”
“It must be Kolkan’s influence. But I don’t think we can retreat, and I don’t think we can stay, and we can’t signal ahead to Ghaladesh.…” Shara rubs her temples. I always wondered if I’d die for my country, she thinks, but I never thought it’d be like this.
She glances back at her open drawer, wishing—stupidly—that she might find a second plug of black lead to use.
She sees a small leather bag sitting in her drawer, inside of which, she knows, are a dozen or so little white pills.
“Hm,” says Shara. She picks up the bag and peers into it.
“If you’re starting to think of something,” says Mulaghesh, “I advise you think fast.”
She picks out a pill and holds it up. “Philosopher’s stones.”
“The drug you used on the kid in the jail?”
“Yes. They help one commune with the Divine, but they also … They also amplify the effects of many miracles.”
“So?”
This is suicide, thinks Shara.
“So?” says Mulaghesh again.
To not do it is also suicide.
She reluctantly says, “I know a lot of miracles.”
* * *
“All right!” shouts Mulaghesh. “Listen up!” Another building collapses several blocks
away; the Saypuri soldiers glance at one another uneasily, but Mulaghesh continues: “Ever since you were kiddos you all wanted to be the Kaj, didn’t you? You wanted to fight those wars, to win those victories, to feel that glory? Well, I will remind you, boys and girls, of a history lesson.…” Something explodes beside the Solda; a fireball twenty feet across rises into the air between two tall white skyscrapers. “Do you remember how the Night of the Red Sands got its name? It’s because when the Kaj brought his scrawny army of about a hundred freed slaves to the desert of Hadesh, they wound up facing not only the Divinity Voortya, but also five thousand armored Continental warriors. Warriors a hell of a lot like those.” She points down the street, where silver shapes hack and slash at crowds and wagons and cars and buildings—anything. “They were outnumbered ten to one, on flat terrain, with absolutely no strategic advantage! Any decent strategist would have decided they were done for! Hells, I would have decided they were done for! But they weren’t, because the Kaj brought up a cannon, loaded it with a special shot, and fired it directly through Voortya’s damned face!” She taps the center of her forehead. “And the second Voortya died, all the armor those Continentals were wearing—which was so thick, so heavy, so impenetrable, and so miraculously light—suddenly became as heavy as it would normally be. And the army collapsed underneath it. These terrifying soldiers, without their Divinity, were helpless, trapped beneath hundreds and hundreds of pounds of iron and steel! And the Kaj’s army, a bunch of untrained slaves and farmers who had lived their whole lives being punished and abused by those soldiers, waded among them and used knives, and rocks, and fucking gardening tools to finish them off!” One of the cranes working on the New Solda Bridge tips back and forth like a metronome, then topples into the icy water. Flocks of brown starlings wheel above the city, shrieking and cheeping. “They slaughtered five thousand men in one night! They slaughtered them as a winemaker prunes grapes from the vine! The blood was so deep it went up to their ankles! And that, boys and girls, is why they call it the Night of the Red Sands!”
Shara is standing in the middle of the courtyard, counting out pills and guessing the right dosage. Will I go mad? Will Kolkan swoop into my mind and destroy me? Will I simply topple over, dead, and leave my soldiers and my people here to die? Or perhaps it will just be like having too much tea.…
“Now let me remind you of our current predicament!” says Mulaghesh. “We face ridiculous odds, yes! Absurd odds! But we are trained soldiers! And we have on our side the great-granddaughter of the Kaj, who just a month ago brought down a Divine horror that was ravaging this very city! You wish to relive history? Are your standards so low? You will make it this day! You are heroes that will be sung about for centuries to come! You are legends! And you will be victorious!”
To Shara’s utter surprise, a bloodthirsty cheer rises up among the soldiers. They begin to chant: Komayd! Komayd! Komayd!
Shara turns a furious beet red and mutters, “Ohmygoodness.”
“Now man these fortifications,” says Mulaghesh, “and I want you to aim for those things’ fucking eyes, do you hear me? They might be armored, but they’re not perfect!”
The soldiers cheer and rush to the fortifications behind the embassy walls. Mulaghesh saunters over to where Shara stands. “How’d I do?”
“Very good,” says Shara. “You ought to do this for a living.”
“Funny,” says Mulaghesh. She peers through the gates. “Those things know we’re here. It looks like they break off about a dozen for each building, and we’re about to get our fair share. Are you ready?” Shara hesitates. “This is five times the dosage I gave the boy in the jail.”
“And?”
“So I have absolutely no idea if potency correlates with quantity.”
“And?”
“So I mean that even if this does work, there is a very good chance I may overdose, and die.”
Mulaghesh shrugs. “Yeah, probably. Welcome to war. Let’s see if you can do something before you actually die, though, okay?”
“How can you …? How can you be so calm about this?”
Mulaghesh watches the advancing armored soldiers. “It’s like swimming,” she says. “You think you’ve forgotten how to do it, but then you jump in, and suddenly it’s like you never stopped doing it at all. If you’re going to do this, Chief Diplomat”—she points at the pills in Shara’s hand—“do it. Because we’re about to find out if our guns are worth a damn against those things.”
* * *
The armored soldiers line up and begin to march toward the embassy with metronomic precision. Teeth-rattling clanks echo across the streets and over the walls. Mulaghesh mounts the foremost gun battery and shouts, “Focus on the one on the right!” The repeat shooters slowly swivel to aim at the rightmost armored soldier, who does not react at all.
Mulaghesh waits for the armored soldiers to come in range, then drops her hand and bellows, “Fire!”
The repeat shooters do not sound at all like cannons, Shara finds, but rather like huge saws in a sawmill. Rainbows of bronze casings tumble over the edge of the gun batteries and tinkle on the embassy courtyard. Shara watches, hoping the armored soldier will simply explode: rather, the soldier slows down, small holes and dents appearing in its breastplate and face and legs. It makes a sound like a kitchen cabinet overflowing with an endless stream of pots and pans.
The repeat shooters maintain the stream of bullets; the armored soldier begins wobbling on its ragged legs; after nearly a full half minute of shooting, the soldier falls over. Instantly, a flock of brown starlings come fluttering out of the many gaps in the armor, which falls apart as if it had been held together by strings. Brown starlings, thinks Shara, surprised. But that’s one of Jukov’s tricks. The soldier behind it implacably steps over the tattered armor, as if the death of its comrade means nothing.
Mulaghesh looks back at Shara and grimly shakes her head: No good. “Keep firing!” she shouts to her men, and they pour a stream of fire into the advancing soldiers, which slows them but does not come close to stopping them.
Ten of them, thinks Shara. It’ll take five whole minutes to kill them all.
The soldiers are a hundred yards away now. Their feet clank and rattle with each step.
“Do it, Shara!” shouts Mulaghesh. “We can’t hold them off!”
Shara looks down at the tiny white pills in her hand.
Seventy yards.
“Do it!”
I damn my fate, thinks Shara, with all my heart.
She stuffs the pills in her mouth and swallows.
* * *
Shara waits. Nothing happens.
The armored soldiers are fifty yards away.
“Oh dear,” says Shara. “Oh, no. It’s not working at all! It’s not—”
Shara gags. Then she jerks forward slightly, gripping her stomach, and touches her mouth.
“I don’t feel …” She swallows. “Mm, I don’t feel exactly …”
She falls to her knees, coughs, and begins to vomit, but what she vomits is rivers and rivers of white snow, as if inside of her is a frozen mountain sloughing off an avalanche, and it all comes pouring out of her mouth, complete with stones and sticks and flecks of dark mud.
One of the soldiers turns away in disgust. “By the seas …”
The world ripples around her. Color bursts in the corners of her eyes. The sky is parchment; the earth is tar; the white skyscrapers of Bulikov burn as if lit by torches.
Ohmygoodnessohmygoodnessohmygoodness …
Her skin is fire and ice. Her eyes burn in their sockets. Her tongue is too big for her mouth. She screams for five seconds before getting control of herself.
“Ambassador?” says Mulaghesh. “Are you all right?”
These are just the psychedelic effects, she tries to tell herself.
Words appear written in the stones before her: THESE ARE JUST THE PSYCHEDELIC EFFECTS.
Shara says, “What a curious drug this is,” b
ut the words come from tiny mouths that have appeared on the backs of her hands. “How marvelous!”
“If you’re going to do something”—Mulaghesh’s screamed words make coils of fire in the air—“then do it now!”
Shara looks up at the advancing soldiers. She counts them and shouts, “Nine!” for reasons that immediately escape her. She immediately sees that they are walking tangles of many complicated miracles, but inside there are real human beings, people who have been forcefully conscripted into Kolkan’s service. Yet the second the armor is too damaged, she sees, the miracle turns them into starlings, and sends them away.… Which is definitely something Jukov would do.
She runs up the fortifications and cries to the soldiers, “What armor is it you wear? That of Kolkan, or that of Jukov? Which Divinity do you pay fealty to?” But, of course, they don’t answer. Then she laughs madly. “Oh, wait. Wait! I forgot! I forgot, I forgot, I forgot!”
Twenty yards away.
“Forgot what!” screams Mulaghesh.
“I forgot I do know Ovski’s Candlelight!” cries Shara happily. “I read that one long ago!”
She faces the platoon of armored soldiers—Scarecrows, she thinks—and remembers the nature of this miracle: All hearts are like candles. Focus the light of yours, and it will remove all barriers.
Shara imagines the soldiers as a metal wall before her.
The soldiers flicker with a golden honey light. Then …
It’s as if an immense column of burning wind blows through them: the soldiers glow red hot, blur …
… and suddenly there is an enormous flock of starlings in the street, screeching and cheeping. They flutter up through the canyon of buildings and into the sky, a dark thundercloud raining brown feathers.
The armored soldiers have collapsed into a sloshing lake of molten metal. Only the bottom parts of their legs remain, sticking up out of the bright yellow-red tide like nine pairs of forgotten metal boots.
Shara stares at her hands. Written on the inside of her palms in large type is: I DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE IT.
“I don’t fucking believe it!” screams Mulaghesh. The soldiers shout in triumph and disbelief, banging their bolt-shots on the embassy wall.
Three more armored soldiers turn and march down the street toward them. The repeat shooters turn and begin to fire, and the metal soldiers quiver as if cold, but do not stop.
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