City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you do it right!

  “What is she shouting about?” says Mulaghesh.

  “Something about filling out forms?” says a soldier, bewildered.

  Shara points at the leftmost armored soldier. You’re a person wearing armor, she thinks at it, but it’s just made of spoons!

  The armored soldier appears to dissolve like a child’s sandcastle struck with a wave, collapsing into a cloud of thousands of tumbling metal spoons that go clanking to the cement. Another burst of starlings, which wheel away into the darkening sky.

  Shara bursts out laughing and claps like a child at a magic show. “What the hells?” says Mulaghesh. Shara points at the next two and shouts, “Spoons! Spoons!” and both of them dissolve as well. More starlings come fluttering out, as if their roosts have collapsed beneath them.

  “It’s easy!” shouts Shara. “It’s easy once you think about it! I just never thought about it the right way! There are so many muscles you can flex, you just don’t know about them!”

  Then the sky flickers: it’s like the sky is a paper backdrop, and someone behind it—someone very big—just touched it.

  There is a pulse in the air that only Shara seems to feel.

  She hears Kolkan’s voice softly whisper in her ear, Olvos? Is that you?

  Shara stops smiling.

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, dear.”

  “What is it?” asks Mulaghesh.

  The voice inside Shara’s head says, Olvos? What are you doing? Why did you not help us?

  “What’s going on?” asks Mulaghesh, impatient.

  “He knows I’m here,” says Shara. “Kolkan knows I’m here.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure you aren’t just hallucinating?” asks Mulaghesh.

  The voice says, Olvos? Sister-wife? Why do you hide from me, from us?

  “I’m positive,” says Shara. “I don’t think I could hallucinate something this strange.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Shara rubs her chin. “I will have to make my own fortifications against this particular assault.” She turns to face the city. But why does he think, she wonders, that I am Olvos?

  She feels something like a hand reach into her mind to try to grasp this thought. Olvos? says the voice. Is it really you? Are you hurt like we are?

  She must clear her mind. She has to clear her mind.

  She begins on the physical reality around her: the soldiers are purely physical creations, so she unrolls the street running along the embassy walls (the Saypuri soldiers stare as the stone and asphalt vanish), and fills it up with freezing water: Water so cold it will shatter metal.…

  A thick ribbon of fog now lies in front of the embassy. Two armored soldiers advance out of the ruin of a shop; the repeat shooters fire, briefly, before the soldiers step into the lake of swirling, freezing mist; there is the hissing sound of rapidly contracting metal, and the soldiers glaze over with frost. The next burst of shot from the repeat shooters causes them to explode like crashing mirrors, and hundreds of brown starlings take to the sky.

  The voice—or is it two voices?—inside her mind asks, Why do you fight us? Have you done something wrong?

  I must construct barriers, thinks Shara. I must keep it out.…

  Information, Shara realizes, can be received by so many different channels, and so few channels speak to one another: just as an antenna cannot receive a telegram, a radio transmitter cannot make sense of a simple document, even though it is all just information, really. The human brain has such a limited number of channels in—so few antennae, so few receivers.… Yet Shara’s own brain, she now realizes, has just had an untold number of antennae and receivers added, so that all the information she thought was hidden can now course directly into her mind.

  Shara looks out at Bulikov and sees the machinery behind the reality, the many wheels and gears and supports, and she sees how ruined and broken it all is. How phenomenally complicated this city was before the Blink—more than anyone could have guessed! This is what Taalhavras made, she thinks, before he died.… A chain of miracles upon miracles forever operating behind the scenes.

  She sets to work building a shelter out of the ruins of the sub-reality around her. To Mulaghesh and the soldiers, it looks as if Shara is conducting an invisible orchestra, but they cannot see the impossibly heavy pieces she is moving into place, the Divine structures hidden to their eyes. It’s like making a lean-to, thinks Shara, out of the ruins of a bridge.

  The voice in her head says, Why do you run from us? Why did you abandon us, Olvos?

  Shara wonders, What in the world is going on?

  She maneuvers one giant piece to block a gap, and just as she does the world goes black, and she sees …

  … Kolkan standing before her on a sea of darkness, his gray robes rippling. They imprisoned me, he whispers. They locked me away, stuffed me in a tiny corner of the universe, just for trying to help my people.… And then Jukov came to me. He visited me in my cell, and he hurt me. He hurt me so much.…

  Kolkan vanishes, and in his place is a skinny man dressed in a tricorn hat tipped with bells, and a jester’s outfit made of furs. I had to! snarls the man. His voice is like a thousand starlings screaming. They were killing us! They killed our children! They piled the bodies of our children to rot in giant graves! I had to do something! I had to hide myself away!

  The vision fades. Shara is dripping with cold sweat and trembling.

  I must block them out, she says to herself. I must block them out.

  In the corner of her eyes, she sees another handful of armored soldiers approach, touch the mist, and freeze. “Fire,” says Mulaghesh. The repeat shooters eat them alive, and the street swirls with starlings.

  Shara probes her invisible barrier with her mind. She can almost see the holes, for through the gaps the sky is the color of yellow parchment. Outside, she thinks, Kolkan is turning the real world into his own—his Divine influence is remaking Bulikov’s reality. She pulls more Divine struts down and uses them to cover the openings, but as she does …

  … Kolkan appears and says, You were older than me, the only one older than me. I listened to you, Olvos. When you were gone, I grew frightened, and I asked my flock to tell me what to do.… I think I made so many mistakes, Olvos.…

  Kolkan vanishes again. The skinny man in the tricorn hat appears and angrily shouts, I looked for you! I searched for you, Olvos! You were the only survivor, besides me! I needed your help! I was forced to resort to faking my own death, pulling down my creations, letting my children die! I was forced to hide with Kolkan in his miserable little jail cell for years and years!

  Shara tries to focus.

  Jukov is alive too, she thinks in shock as she fills this gap. But why did only Kolkan appear when the glass broke?

  So many little gaps … So many tiny places he or they or it or whatever it is could slip in.

  I am not stopping him, thinks Shara. This is just defending, delaying everything, while Bulikov burns and people die.

  Fifteen more armored soldiers touch the icy mist and freeze. Mulaghesh’s repeaters tear them apart. Starlings take flight like a cloud of flies.

  Kolkan appears before her: What am I to do? What are we to do? Then he is gone.

  Jukov appears, spitting and snarling: Kill them all! Kill them for what they did to us! Incest and matricide and bitterness and horrors! My own progeny, my own Blessed kin rises up against us and slaughters us like sheep! Let them burn! Let them burn!

  Then she understands: No … No, it’s not possible. I saw only one Divinity standing in the Seat of the World, heard only one voice—didn’t I?

  The clink and clank of the armored soldiers’ footsteps. The scream of the repeat shooters. The screech of millions of starlin
gs …

  Then the skies ripple like the surface of a dark lake.

  Kolkan’s voice rings out through Bulikov: “STOP.”

  Instantly, the armies of clanking armored soldiers halt.

  Shara feels a giant eye swivel to look at her.

  She looks down the street before the embassy. A tall, robed figure stands watching her, six blocks down.

  Kolkan cocks his head. “YOU,” says his voice, “ARE NOT OLVOS.”

  Shara frantically fumbles with the Divine machinery surrounding her, trying to pull it together, trying to protect her people, her countrymen.

  Kolkan shakes his head. “TRICKS AND GAMES,” he says.

  The air quivers. Rivers of armored soldiers march out of the alleys, and all line up on the street leading up to the embassy.

  “IT IS ALL JUST TRICKS AND GAMES.”

  The sea of armored soldiers turns to face the embassy and starts marching.

  “No,” whispers Shara. “No, no, no …”

  Instantly she feels a huge, terrible pressure on all the defenses she’s constructed: her river of freezing water begins unraveling; her Divine shelter creaks and groans; her very mind trembles. Madness spills into her skull like water on a sinking ship. She tries to push back. But it is like an insect, she thinks, trying to push back against the lowering foot of a man.

  The freezing water fades. The streets are flooded with gleaming soldiers. Three of them hurl their massive blades at the walls. The swords hack through the white stone, and Saypuri soldiers tumble back shrieking from a gun post. To Shara’s surprise, little Pitry Suturashni, screaming a tinny war cry, mans the abandoned cannon and opens fire. Shara tries to use Ovski’s Candlelight, but it’s like the oxygen is sucked out of the air, and she cannot even make a spark.

  Everything pushes on her, pushes and pushes and pushes, flood-waters piling up against a dam.…

  I will die as countless Saypuris died, she thinks.

  A thousand Divine soldiers push upon her invisible walls.

  Crushed under the machinery of the Divine.

  Then one of the soldiers beside her screams, “Look! In the sky! Ships! There are ships sailing in the sky!”

  Shara feels the pressure immediately release. She falls to the ground, gasping and half-dead.

  She looks over the wall and sees Kolkan staring up: apparently this turn of events is a surprise even to him.

  Shara, choking and coughing, thinks, No, no! Have they already destroyed Ghaladesh? After all this, is everything already lost?

  She tries to peer through the tears in her eyes … and sees, to her confusion, that there is only one ship in the sky.

  Then she hears another soldier’s voice: “Is that a Dreyling flag that ship is flying?”

  Mulaghesh says, “I know that. That’s the flag of King Harkvald. What the hells is going on?”

  Shara says, “Sigrud.”

  * * *

  The good ship Mornvieva, once occupied by twenty-three souls, now occupied by one sole stowaway, cuts through the clouds and the wind like a dream. Sigrud stands at the wheel, puffing at his pipe, and makes a slight adjustment south-southwest.

  Sigrud laughs. He can’t remember the last time he laughed. Ship-borne for the first time in years and smoking his pipe.… It is a blessing he never thought he’d have again.

  There is no greater pleasure, he thinks, than to sail once more.

  On the mast before him is a large steel plate sporting a very large ring; and once, twenty-three cables were tied to this ring, anchoring all the crew to the ship. However, now there are only twenty-three severed ends of cables hanging from the ring, and they click and clack in the brutal winds.

  To be frank, it might be the easiest time Sigrud has ever had taking a ship: if you just aim a cannon at every other ship in the armada, fire once (in retrospect, Sigrud reflects that this ship was not designed to fire that many guns at once, so he is lucky the thing didn’t fall apart under the stress), run up to the deck in the confusion, cut all the cables, and grab the wheel and tip the ship over ever so slightly …

  Sigrud grins wickedly as he remembers all the little black figures tumbling through the clouds, rushing down to the embrace of the world.

  The Restorationists bet everything on Saypur never expecting air-to-ground combat; but they, similarly, never considered air-to-air.

  Sigrud sees the embassy below, and the river of silver soldiers before it, and the giant robed figure standing at its back.

  He sets the course and trots belowdecks. He had no idea what to expect—certainly not this—but he had all the cannons ready, though some require minor adjustments.

  Straight ahead, he reminds himself. Start at the beginning of that stripe of silver, and work down.

  “Fire,” says Sigrud.

  * * *

  The retort of the first six-incher is like hearing a whole mountain cave in.

  “Down!” screams Mulaghesh, but Shara does not listen.

  Shara turns to the street and pulls up a thick, thick wall of soft snow, and she tells it to hang in space.

  The first block of armored soldiers explodes. Evidently, though Divine armor was designed to protect many things, the Divinities never expected six-inch cannons.

  Shara and everyone else on the fortifications are blown backward. Metal goes clanging off of building fronts. Shrapnel flies into the veil of snow, slows, and tumbles softly to the ground. The sky is black with starlings.

  The next retort sounds in the skies, and another, and another, as if an immense thunderstorm is breaking open above them. Huge explosions march down the street toward Kolkan, who stands with his head at an angle, as if thinking, This is very unusual. This is all very unusual.

  * * *

  Sigrud watches, pleased, as the Divine army is progressively decimated by the cannon fire. He adjusts the Mornvieva and aims her bow at the robed figure. Couple hundred shells going off, he thinks, should make quite a pop.

  He spots a white structure with a crystal roof from Old Bulikov—What are all these white buildings doing here? he wonders—walks to the side of the ship, and readies himself.

  “Probably won’t survive this,” he says aloud. Then he shrugs. Ah, well. I always thought I would die sailing.

  Sigrud jumps; the crystal roof flies at him much too quickly; he sees the sky in its glittering reflection.

  My hand, he realizes. It no longer aches.

  The sky breaks apart.

  * * *

  Shara sits up just in time to see the belly of the steel ship part the smoke above them. A tiny dark shape flies from its side and plummets into one of the white buildings.

  Kolkan watches, curious, as the metal ship sails down, down, speeding toward him, the wings cutting through the street facades and raining stone on the sidewalks.

  Shara realizes what is about to happen. She throws up another layer of snow, then a second, then a third, and screams, “Off the wall! Everyone off the wall!”

  Kolkan watches with a slight air of disbelief as the bow of the ship flies at him, crumples on his brow …

  The world is turned to fire.

  * * *

  Shara is deaf, dumb, blind.… The world is clanging, ringing, smashing, crashing, cheeping, fluttering, and she is sure the massive amount of psychedelics she took is not helping. She hears Mulaghesh groan from nearby: “My arm, my arm. My fucking arm …”

  Shara sits up and looks through the gates, which are bent and torn. At first all she can see is smoke and flame. Then the wind slowly, gently scrapes the smoke away.

  The building, shops, and homes all down the street leading up to the embassy have been halved. Wooden teeth and partial living rooms droop over the exposed foundations. The street itself has been pulverized into a rocky, smoking ditch. Starlings sit on the windowsills, on the streetlights, on the sidewalks, silently watching … something.

  Kolkan stands in the middle of the street, slightly hunched over, his robes and rags fluttering in the smoke.
>
  No, she thinks. Not Kolkan.

  Shara stands, takes the bolt point of black lead from her pocket, and limps down the street to the silent Divinity.

  “That hurt, didn’t it?” she calls.

  The Divinity does not answer.

  “You’ve never experienced the destructive capabilities of our modern age,” she says. “Perhaps the modern rejects you as much as you reject it.”

  The Divinity raises its head to look at her, but otherwise does nothing.

  “Maybe you can keep fighting. But I don’t think you have it in you. This world doesn’t want you anymore. And even more, you don’t want it.”

  The Divinity angrily says, “I AM PAIN.”

  Shara stands before it and says, “And you are pleasure.”

  The Divinity hesitates, and says, “I AM JUDGMENT.”

  “You are corruption.”

  Then, defiantly: “I AM ORDER!”

  “You are chaos.”

  “I AM SERENITY!”

  “You are madness.”

  “I AM DISCIPLINE!”

  “You are rebellion.”

  Trembling with fury, the Divinity says, “I AM KOLKAN!”

  Shara shakes her head. “You are Jukov.”

  The Divinity is silent. Though she cannot see its eyes, she knows it is staring at her.

  “Jukov faked his death, didn’t he?” says Shara. “He saw what was happening to the Continent, so he faked his death, and hid, and sent a copy of himself in his place. He was the Divinity of trickery, after all. The old texts said he hid in a pane of glass, but we never knew what that meant—or I didn’t, until today. When I saw Kolkan’s jail cell—a single pane of clear glass …”

  The Divinity bows its head. It seems to tremble slightly. Then it lifts a hand and pulls off its robes.

  It is Kolkan: the stern man made of clay and stone.

  It is Jukov: the skinny, laughing man of fur and bells.

  It is both of them: both Divinities twisted together, shoved together, melded into one person. Kolkan’s head, with Jukov’s warped face appearing at Kolkan’s neck; one arm on one side, a forked arm with two clenched fists on the other; two legs, but one leg has two feet.…