City of Stairs (15 page)

Shara, dragging Vohannes, follows and looks in, though she already knows what she will see.

The ballroom is quite spacious and ornate, or at least it was. One masked attacker is kneeling on the floor, clutching his wrist and shrieking: his hand has been completely amputated, and blood spurts out to fan across the wooden floor. Another masked attacker sits in the corner, quite dead, with the handle of a short, black-bladed knife buried in his neck. In the center of the room the dining table has been kicked over, and behind this barricade stands Sigrud, covered in sweat and blood, with one frantic and miserable masked attacker in a headlock under his left arm. With his right hand Sigrud holds the remains of the ballroom chandelier—which has apparently been ripped out of the ceiling—and he is using it to fend off another attacker, who attempts to engage him with a sword. But though it is hard to tell through all the glimmering crystals flying through the air, the attacker appears to be steadily losing, stumbling back with every blow, in between which Sigrud, using the fist holding the chandelier, manages to pummel the face of the unhappy man in his headlock.

The leader of the attackers stands agog at this sight for a moment, before holding his sword high, screaming at the top of his lungs, and rushing in, bounding over the table.

Sigrud gives him an irritated glance—
What now?—
and lifts up the headlocked man just in time for the man’s back to receive the point of the leader’s sword.

Both masked men gag in shock. Sigrud swings the chandelier around so that it hooks the blade of the free attacker, shoves the man to the floor, and releases the chandelier.

The leader lets go of the hilt of his sword, pulls out a short knife, and with an anguished scream, dives at Sigrud.

Sigrud releases the headlock on the dead (or dying) man, grabs the leader’s wrist before the knife can strike home, head-butts the leader soundly, and then—to the vocal horror of Vohannes—opens his mouth wide, lunges forward, and tears out most of the man’s throat with his teeth.

The gush of blood is positively tidal. Shara feels a little disgusted at herself for thinking only,
This will definitely make the papers.

Sigrud, now totally anointed with crimson, drops the leader, grabs the sword sticking out of the dead man’s back, and seemingly without a thought hurls it like a javelin at the shrieking attacker with the severed wrist. The point of the blade catches the man just under the joint of his jawbone. He collapses immediately. The sword wobbles, and though it is buried deep enough in the man’s skull that it does not fall out, the wobbling is accompanied by an unpleasant cracking noise.

Sigrud turns to the groaning man trapped under the remains of the chandelier.

“No,” says Shara.

He turns to look at her. His one eye is alight with a cold rage.

“We need one alive.”

“They shot me,” he says, and holds up a bleeding palm. “With an arrow.”

“We need
one
alive, Sigrud.”

“They
shot
me,” he says again, incensed, “with an
arrow
.”

“There must be more downstairs,” says Shara. “The hostages, Sigrud. Think. Take care of them—carefully
.
”

Sigrud makes a face like a child who has just been given onerous chores. He walks to the man with the knife in his neck, pulls it out, and stalks out of the room.

Vohannes stares around his ruined ballroom. “
This?
” he says. “
This
is what your man does best?”

Shara approaches the masked man struggling to lift the chandelier and begins to disarm him. “We all have our talents.”

* * *

Sigrud spots no masked attackers guarding the hostages when he runs down the stairs. “Oh, thank goodness you came, we—,” says one woman, before seeing fully seeing him. Then she begins shrieking.

Mulaghesh is not half so fazed. She clears her throat from beside a pillar in the foyer: the polis governor is hunched over a robed figure and appears to be calmly garroting him with a festively colored ribbon. Mulaghesh looks at him, her left eye blooming dark from what must have been a terrific blow, and says, “Two more. Out the door.”

When Sigrud makes it outside the car is already trundling away, but is not gaining much speed yet. His boots thud as he sprints across the cobblestones. He hears one of the men inside it cry, “Go! Go! Hurry!”

The answer: “I am! I’m trying!”

The car shifts into a higher gear, but just before it can pull away, Sigrud leaps forward and grabs onto the back door.

“Shit!” shrieks one of the men. “Oh, gods!”

Sigrud’s hands are so slick with blood that he almost loses his hold. He wedges a foot into the running board, then reaches up with his right hand and stabs his black knife into the roof of the car.

“Shoot him, damn you!” cries a voice.

A bolt-shot appears in the window. Sigrud leans to the side. The bolt slices through the glass of the window, missing him by inches, but does not shatter the window. Sigrud punches through the window with his left hand, grabs the man who fired at him by the collar, and repeatedly slams him against the door and roof of the car.

The driver, now totally panicked, begins swerving throughout the street. Sigrud can see coffeehouse patrons, restaurant attendees, and horse-and-cart drivers stare in amazement as they fly by. A small child points and laughs, delighted. Sigrud focuses on battering the man into submission.

Sigrud can feel it when the man goes unconscious, and he begins to haul the man out of the broken window with one arm, intending to hurl him from the car. But then the car makes a hard turn. …

He looks up. The corner of a building flies at them. Sigrud immediately sees that the driver intends to scrape the car along the building’s side, scraping off Sigrud as well.

Sigrud considers climbing onto the roof of the car, judges that he doesn’t have enough time, pulls his knife free, and dives away.

It is a painful landing, but not as painful as what happens to the unconscious man dangling out the broken window of the car: there is a wet
smack
, and something goes tumbling across the stony streets. Sigrud can hear the driver begin to scream in horror, and what’s left of the passenger slips out the window to roll into the gutter.

The car makes a wide turn and roars down an alley. Sigrud, now quite frustrated, gets to his feet and sprints after it.

He turns down the alley. The car has come to a stop several yards down. He runs to the car and flings open the driver’s side door to see …

Nothing. The car is empty.

He looks around. The alley ends in the blank side of a building, yet before that there is nothing: no windows, no ladders, no sluice gates or manhole covers or doors.

Sigrud grunts, sticks his knife back in its sheath, and slowly walks the alley, feeling the walls. None of them give. It’s like the driver simply disappeared.

He sighs and scratches his cheek. “Not again.”

I am the stone beneath the tree.

I am the mountain under the sun.

I am the river below the earth.

I dwell in the caves in the hills.

I dwell in the caves in your heart.

I have seen what lies there.

I know what lives in your minds.

I know right. I know justice.

I am Kolkan, and you will listen.

—The Kolkashtava, Book Two

T
he officers’ mess hall of the Bulikov Police Department is a unique vantage point for the unfolding panic. There are windows that allow the mess hall attendees to see into the front offices, where a full-scale riot is building—composed of politicians, reporters, outraged citizens, and family members of the hostages—and one can also see back into the halls of the interview rooms, where the Bulikov policemen are still confused as to who exactly is a suspect, who should get to go to the hospital, and what in the world to do with Sigrud.

“This is a new experience for me,” says Shara.

“Really?” says Mulaghesh. “I would have thought you’d been arrested at least a couple of times.”

“No, no.
I
never get arrested. One of the perks of being a handler.”

“It must be nice. You seem very calm, for someone who’s just been through an assassination attempt. How do you feel?”

Shara shrugs. The truth is she feels ridiculous, sitting here sipping tea with Mulaghesh while chaos surges around them. Their status immediately set them apart from the other rescued hostages, mostly due to Mulaghesh, whom all the police officers seem acquainted with. Mulaghesh holds a pack of ice to her eye and occasionally mutters curses about being “too shitting slow” or, alternately, “too shitting old.” She’s already sent her orders to the local outpost, and a small squad of Saypuri veterans should be here shortly to take watch over the both of them. Though Shara has not said so, she privately dreads this: one’s own security often makes it hard to penetrate that of one’s opponents. And Sigrud often provides enough security, anyway. Sigrud, however, is currently cooling off in a holding cell. The captured attacker has gone totally untouched, stuck in a tiny cell normally reserved for the most violent offenders.

An officer refreshes their teapot, which Shara promptly drains. “That’s your fourth pot,” notes Mulaghesh.

“So?”

“So, do you normally drink tea like that?”

“Only when I’m at work.”

“You seem like the type who is always at work.”

Shara shrugs mid-sip.

“If you continue at that pace, Ambassador, I would advise you familiarize yourself with a urologist.”

“How’s your eye?”

“Humiliating. But I’ve had worse.”

“It can’t be too humiliating. He did wind up the loser of your scrap, beyond a doubt.”

“There was once a day,” sighs Mulaghesh, “when I could dispatch such little cretins without bothering to breathe. No more, I suppose. What I would give”—she winces, prodding her eye—“for the vigor of youth. Though I doubt I could
ever
match what your man did in that house, even in my prime. Where did you find him?”

“Someplace quite bad,” says Shara simply.

Then she slowly retreats back inside herself. The susurrus of faraway shouting fades, and internally she begins to compose a list.

In Shara’s estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it: who belongs to which group, and why; where are they now, and how are we so sure, and do we have someone else in the region; and now that we have catalogued those groups, what threat level should they be categorized under; and so on, and so on, and so on.

So whenever Shara is really puzzled by something, she takes her thoughts and sorts them, threshing them out like chaff from wheat, tunneling down and through her mind as she tries to wring truth from everything she knows, a frequently endless list of annotations, qualifications, categorizations, and exceptions all collected as she interrogates herself:

Fact: I have been attacked less than one week after Efrem Pangyui.

I. I don’t know for sure if it was me they were attacking.

A. Then who?

1. Vo wants to make munitions for Saypur. So that’s ample reason to kill him there.

a. Then why not simply kill Vo when they had the chance? They could have shot him the moment they walked in the room.

b. His deal is not official, and also not publicly known yet.

1) Doesn’t mean anything—there could always be leaks.

II. Efrem was beaten to death with a blunt instrument in his office. These men were far more professional.

A. You think. Whoever attacked Efrem has not been captured, a mark of professionalism if ever there was one.

1. Professionalism and the incompetence of the local authorities are very different things.

B. Efrem may have been attacked in connection with the Warehouse. Neither Vo nor I has any such connection.

1. I know it exists.

a. Unlikely that that’s enough to get me killed, though.

2. All three of us are heretical to common Continental sensibilities by nature.

a. Not an efficient qualifier. What
isn’t
heretical to common Continental sensibilities?

Fact: Efrem Pangyui was conducting research at the Unmentionable Warehouse.

I. Does Vinya know? How could she not?

A. Efrem working for the Continent? A traitor?

1. Don’t be an idiot.

B. Why not tell me? What’s buried in there that I shouldn’t know about?

1. Probably a lot, of course

2. Would Continentals have killed him to get access to the Warehouse?

a. Mulaghesh has asserted no one has gotten into the Warehouse besides Efrem.

C. If Vinya knows about Efrem’s operation, why is she letting me stay?

1. Maybe she thinks I’m just too dense to figure this all out.

2. Is she protecting me? From what?

a. Don’t be ridiculous. I just got attacked—of course she’s not protecting me.

3. Does she want to get me killed?

a. She’s your aunt.

1) She’s minister first, aunt second.

a) Okay, then why would the
minister
want me dead?

2) If Vinya wanted me dead, I’d be dead, end of story.

4. Did Vinya want to get Efrem killed?

a. Seems quite likely Efrem was a Ministry operative. Why would you kill your own operative?

Fact: I have not slept in twenty-three hours.

I. I need more damn tea.

Shara sighs. “No sign of your Captain Nesrhev yet?”

“No,” says Mulaghesh. “Still not in. But it is four in the morning, and he doesn’t live nearby.”

“You know where he lives? How would you know that?”

“Don’t pretend to be such an innocent daisy, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh. “It doesn’t suit you.” Secretly, Shara smiles:
Vigor of youth, indeed …
“Anyway. Even though Nesrhev and I have …
some
history together, I’m not sure it’s enough to make him amenable to the idea of a foreign ambassador taking over an investigation as huge as this.”

“I’m not taking over,” says Shara. “They’ll have their investigation, and I’ll have mine. I just want to talk to the captured man first.”

How much simpler this would be in Qivos
, she thinks.
We could have just snatched him off the street and claimed he’d never been there in the first place. …
She briefly reflects on how civilized countries increasingly pose an inconvenience to her, and for a moment she envies Vohannes for maintaining his idealism—however ineffective it may be.

An idea strikes Shara, and she grabs an old newspaper from another table. She flips through the pages until she finds an article with the headline
city father wiclov opposes immigrant quarters.
Below this is a picture of a man with a round face pinched in a stern expression, and a mountain of a beard. To Shara, he looks like the sort of man who must constantly debate whether he should yell or merely talk very loudly.

“Why are you reading about Wiclov?” asks Mulaghesh.

“You know him?”

“Everyone knows him. Man’s a shit.”

“It was suggested to me,” says Shara, “that he might have some connection to Pangyui’s murder.”

“Did Votrov tell you that?”

Shara nods.

“I would watch yourself, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh. “Votrov might just be giving you his personal shit list.”

Shara continues staring at the picture, but Mulaghesh has voiced one of her deepest concerns:
I’m flying blind,
she thinks.
Usually I have six months or six weeks to prepare an operation, not six hours. …

She drinks more tea and chooses not to admit to Mulaghesh that she only inhales caffeine at this rate when her work is going very, very badly.

Captain Nesrhev—who is quite handsome, and at least ten years Mulaghesh’s junior—finally arrives at five-thirty in the morning. At first he is not amenable to much of anything, as is common among people awoken at such an hour; but Shara is skilled at the shell game of badges and paperwork, and after using the term “international incident” a few times, he reluctantly consents to “one hour, starting now.”

“That will do,” says Shara, who fully intends to ignore the time limit. “What’s happened to Votrov?”

“After he gave his statement, his little girlfriend bundled him up and took him home right away,” says Nesrhev. “That man, you could lead him around by the dick, if you got a good grasp on it.”

He seems to expect a chuckle, but Shara doesn’t even bother to try to pretend.

* * *

The captured man, as it turns out, is hardly more than a boy: Shara gauges him at around eighteen when she walks in. He sits up behind the big wooden table in the cell, glowering at her and rubbing his wrist, and says, “Oh, it’s you. What do
you
want?”

“Mostly to give you medical attention.” She holds the door open for the doctor, who is quite fatigued by now.

The doctor grows appalled as he examines the captured boy. “Did this child fall through a pane of glass?”

“He was struck repeatedly with a chandelier.”

The doctor grumbles and shakes his head:
These people find such stupid ways to harm themselves
. “Most of this is superficial, it looks like. The wrist is sprained pretty badly.”

When he is finished, the doctor bows and excuses himself. Shara sits across from the boy and puts her satchel down beside her. It is quite cold in the room: the walls here are made of thick stone, and whoever designed the building opted not to place any heating in here.

“How are you feeling?” says Shara.

The boy does not answer, content to sulk.

“I suppose I could simply be direct,” says Shara, “and ask you why you attacked me.”

His eyes flick up, hold her gaze for a moment, then flick away.

“
Was
that what you were sent there to do? Your colleagues did have ample opportunity.”

He blinks.

“What’s your name?”

“We don’t have names,” says the boy.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He considers answering, but is reluctant.

“Why not?”

“Because we are the silenced,” says the boy.

“What does that mean?”

“We do not have a past. We do not have a history. We do not have a country.” His words have the beat of highly rehearsed lines. “These things are denied to us. But we do not need them. We do not need these things, to know who we are.”

“And what are you?”

“We are the past come to life. We are what cannot be forgotten or ignored. A memory engraved.”

“You are Restorationists, then,” says Shara.

The boy is silent.

“Are you?”

He looks away.

“Your weapons, your dress, your car,” says Shara. “All very expensive. Money like that getting moved around, people notice. We are looking now. Who will we find? Wiclov? Ernst Wiclov?” No reaction. “He’s a well-funded supporter of the Restoration, isn’t he? His political posters tend to feature a lot of weapon-oriented imagery, I understand. Will we find him at the back end of this, child?”

The boy stares into the table.

“You do not seem to me,” says Shara, “a hardened, violent criminal. Then why act like one? Don’t you have a home to go to? This is all just unpleasant politics. I can make it stop. I can get you out.”

“I will not talk,” says the boy. “I cannot talk. I am silenced, by you and your people.”

“I’m afraid you are quite wrong there.”

“I am
not
wrong, woman,” says the boy. He glares at her, and as he looks away his eyes trail over her exposed neck and collarbone.

Ah. Old-fashioned, is he?
“I do hope I’m not breaking any rules,” says Shara. “Will you receive some kind of punishment for being alone in a room with an unwed woman?”

“You are not a woman,” says the boy. “You have to be human first. Shallies don’t count.”

Shara smiles pleasantly. “If that’s true, then why are you so nervous?”

The boy does not answer.