City of Stairs (27 page)

Another trick.

How did you disappear?

Another.

How did you do it?

And another.

How?

She performs one final test, rolling a silver coin down the alley—if it encounters some Divine obstacle, placed here intentionally or not, it should stop and fall flat, as if magnetically drawn to the ground—but it does not, and plinks ahead before spinning round and tottering to a stop.

She sighs, reaches back into her bag, and takes out her bottle of tea. She sips it. It is stale and musky, having been stored for too long in a place too damp.

She sighs again, clears some space on the ground, and sits in the alley with her back against the wall, remembering the last day of her training, the last hour she spent on Saypur’s soil, the last time she had really good tea.

* * *

“How did you do it?” asked Auntie Vinya. “Tell me. How?”

Young Shara Komayd—exhausted, dehydrated, and starving—gave her aunt a puzzled look as she stuffed food into her mouth. The rest of the mess hall at the training facility was empty, causing the sounds of her chewing to echo.

“You stuck to your story, no matter how they badgered and questioned you,” said Vinya. “Every answer right. Every single one, for all six days. Do you know how often that’s happened? Why, I think you might be only the second or third in the Ministry’s history.” She peered at her nineteen-year-old niece over her half-moon glasses, obviously pleased. “Most of them break down on the third day, you know, after no sleep. The music gets to them—the same bass line, over and over. It shakes something loose. And when they get asked a question, they finally give the wrong answer. But you sat through it as if you heard nothing at all.”

“Did you?” asked Shara around a mouthful of potato.

“Did I what?”

“Did you break?”

Vinya laughed. “I
created
this process, dear. I’ve never had to sit through it. So tell me—how did you do it?”

Shara sloshed down tea. “Do
what
, Auntie?”

“Why, keep going. You didn’t break down after
six days
of psychological torture.”

Shara paused, the tines of her fork stuck in a chicken breast.

“You don’t want to tell me?” asked Vinya.

“It’s … embarrassing.”

“I’m your
aunt
, dearest.”

“You’re also my commanding officer.”

“Oh …” She waved a hand. “Not tonight. Tonight’s our last night together for a long while.”

“A
long
while?”

“Well. Not
that
long, dear. So—how?”

“I thought …” Shara swallowed. “I thought about my parents.”

Vinya’s mouth flexes. “Ah.”

“I thought about what they must have gone through when they died. I’ve read the stories; I know that the Plague is an … a hard way to go.”

Vinya nodded sadly. “Yes. It is. I saw.”

“And I thought about them, and about what all of Saypur must have gone through under the Continent … All the slavery, and the abuse, and the misery. And suddenly it was so easy to sit through it. The music, no sleep, no water, no food, the questions, over and over … Nothing they could ever do to me would be like that. Nothing.”

Vinya smiled and took off her glasses. “You are, I think, the most ferocious patriot I have ever seen. I am so
proud
of you, my dear. Especially because, well … We were worried, for a bit.”

“About what?”

“Well, my dear … I always knew you had a fancy for history. That was always your forte at Fadhuri. Especially
Continental
history. And then when you came to us, and we gave you access to the
classified
material, where we keep the things we don’t even allow them to teach at Fadhuri … Why, you spent
hours
in there memorizing all those moldy old texts! This fascination, in government, is considered a little … unhealthy.”

“But they explained so much!” said Shara. “I had only been taught pieces of things at Fadhuri. So much had been missing, but then there it all was, right on the shelves!”

“What we should concern ourselves with,” said Vinya, “is the
present
. But more so, Shara, I admit I was worried that you were tainted by that boy you used to dally about with at school.”

Shara’s face soured. “Don’t talk to me about him,” she snapped. “He’s dead to me. He was worthless and deceitful, as is the rest of the damnable Continent, I bet.”

“I know, I know,” said Vinya. “You have gone through a lot. I knew when you came out of school you wanted to change the world, for it to live up to all your dreams of how Saypur should be.” She smiles sadly. “And I know that that is probably why you investigated Rajandra in the first place.”

Shara looked at her, startled. “Auntie … I—I don’t want to ta—”

“Don’t fear the past, darling. You must accept what you did. You suspected Rajandra Adesh of wrongdoing. You thought he was misusing funds from the National Party. And you were right. He
was
misusing party funds. He was wildly,
wildly
corrupt. That’s true. And I think by exposing him, you wished to impress me, impress us all. But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s
law
. Unspoken, unwritten, but law. Such was the case here. Do you understand?”

Shara bowed her head.

“You have ruined the career of the man everyone thought would inherit the prime minister’s seat. You have destroyed a ruling party’s leadership. Your investigation even pushed the party treasurer to attempt suicide. The poor bastard couldn’t even competently pull off his own suicide—he tried to
hang
himself in his office, but wound up ripping the water pipes clear out of the ceiling.” Vinya tuts. “You are a Komayd, dear, and that will protect us, some. But this will have repercussions for
years
.”

“I’m so sorry, Auntie,” says Shara.

“I know. Listen—the world is full of corruption and inequality,” says Vinya. “You were raised a patriot, to love Saypur and to believe that its virtues must be extended to all the world—but this is not your job. Your job in the Ministry is not to
stop
corruption and inequality: rather, these are tools in your bag to be used to aid Saypur in every way possible. Your job is to make sure the past never happens again, that we never see such poverty and powerlessness again. Corruption and inequality are useful things: if they benefit us, we must own them fully. Do you see?”

Shara thought of Vohannes then:
You paint your world in such drab cynicisms. …

“Do you see?” asked Vinya again.

“I see,” said Shara.

“I know you love Saypur,” said Vinya. “I know you love this country like you loved your parents, and you wish to honor their memory, and the memory of every other Saypuri who died in struggle. But you will serve Saypur in the shadows, and Saypur
will
ask you to betray its virtues in order to keep it safe.”

“And then …”

“Then what?”

“Then, when I’m done … I can come home?”

Vinya smiled. “Of
course
you can. I’m sure your service will only last a handful of months! We’ll see each other again very soon. Now eat up, and get some rest. Your ship leaves in the morning. Oh. It is so
good
to see my niece working for me!”

How she smiled when she said that.

* * *

In the morning,
thinks Shara.
Nearly sixteen years ago. …

In those sixteen years, Shara has taken more cases and done more work than nearly any operative in the world, let alone on the Continent. But though Shara Komayd was once a vigorous patriot, her fervor leached out of her with each death and each betrayal, until her passion to feed Saypur shrank to a passion to merely protect Saypur, which then shrank further into the mere longing to see her home country once more before she dies: a prospect she sometimes thinks very unlikely.

Repetition, conditioning, fervor, and faith,
she muses as she sips tea in the alleyway.
All come to so little. Perhaps this is what it’s like to lose one’s religion.

And, more, she has begun to question whether she is really in exile. She wonders: as disastrous as it was, could the National Party scandal
still
be on everyone’s minds? Is that
really
why she is being kept away? She wishes she had been smart enough to establish a few connections to Parliament while she was still in Saypur. (Though it’s true, she remembers, that all her experiences with the Divine make her about as dangerous and illicit as the Unmentionable Warehouse itself. There are many reasons, it feels, why her homeland could reject her.)

“Ambassador Thivani?”

She looks over her shoulder. Pitry stands at the mouth of the alley with the car parked just beyond; she must have been so lost in her memories that she didn’t even hear him arrive. “Pitry? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you working on Wiclov’s finances?”

“Message from Sigrud,” he says. “Mrs. Torskeny’s been moved. He says Wiclov and one other man have escorted her from her home. He’s given me an address, not much more.”

There is a clanking flurry as Shara packs all of her materials. She walks down the alley, grabs the silver coin, and jumps in the backseat.

They’ve already driven a quarter of a mile before she notices the coin has lost some of its luster. She holds it up to the windows to catch some light.

Her eyes open in surprise. Then she smiles.

The coin is no longer silver at all: it has been completely transmuted into lead.

* * *

Shara and Pitry enter a quarter of Bulikov decimated by the Blink: she watches, fascinated, as truncated buildings and tapering streets pass by. As they drive down one block, a laundry on one corner stretches, twists, and contorts itself until it is half of a bank on the next corner. One set of quaint home fronts feature unusually large and warped front doors that would not, one would imagine, have ever been fashioned with humans in mind.
They must have simply appeared overnight,
thinks Shara.

“Any progress with Wiclov’s history?” she asks.

“We think so,” says Pitry. “You were right about the loomworks. He is the confirmed owner of three of them in eastern Bulikov. But we noticed that at the same time Wiclov started buying the loomworks, he also started purchasing materials from a
Saypuri
company: Vidashi Incorporated.”

“Vidashi …” The name is only vaguely familiar to her. “Wait. … The ore refinery?”

“Yep,” says Pitry. He wheels the car around a winding curve. “It seems Wiclov has been buying very small increments of steel from them. Every month, like clockwork. Very arbitrary amounts, too—within one thousand fifteen hundred pounds and one thousand nine hundred pounds every time. We’re not sure wh—”

Shara sits forward. “It’s the weight check,” she blurts.

“What?”

“The weight check! The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has automatic background checks on purchasers of large quantities of materials! Oil, wood, stone, metal … We want to know who we’re selling to, if they buy large enough amounts. And for steel, the weight check amount must be—”

“Two thousand pounds,” realizes Pitry. “So the Ministry has never checked on him.”

The drugged boy in the jail cell confessed that they’d gone after Vohannes for his “metal.” Which leads Shara to wonder—why try to kidnap Vohannes if you’re already purchasing steel through legitimate means?

Unless I spooked them,
she thinks.
I wanted to stir up the hornets’ nest, didn’t I? They must not have acquired enough steel for whatever it is that they’re making. … So when Pangyui was killed, and a Ministry operative arrived, they got nervous, and desperate.

She stares out the window, her mind racing.
What could they possibly be building? What use could someone have for so much steel?

She keeps thinking on it until she sees something peeking over the rooftops at her: a huge, black tower, a ten-story stripe of ebony against the gray night sky.

Her heart twitches.

Oh, no,
thinks Shara.
They can’t be taking her
there
. Not there …

She has not been to see this place yet. It seems unreal to believe it still exists.

Of all the things the Kaj threw down, why did he leave
that
still standing?

* * *

Pitry parks in an alley. The darkness in an old doorway trembles; Sigrud emerges from the shadows and paces across the street.

“Please do not tell me they went in there,” says Shara as she climbs out.

“Into where?” asks Sigrud.

“The bell tower.”

Sigrud stops, bemused. “Why do you ask?”

Shara sighs and readjusts her glasses. “Show me,” she says.

The streets of Bulikov are almost impenetrably dark at night in quarters most affected by the Blink: no one has been able to lay gas lines, as the disturbances reach deep down into the earth. One construction company made a valiant attempt, only to discover a sheet of iron three feet thick, forty feet tall, and (they estimated) a quarter-mile long simply suspended in the loam below the streets. No one could logically explain its existence: eventually, like so many aberrations, they assumed it was one of the unintended and inexplicable consequences of the Blink. Though the iron sheet
could
be dealt with, the company withdrew its bid, perhaps out of concern about what else might be buried below Bulikov.

At the center of this damaged neighborhood is a wide, empty park. Sapling firs grow in the damp soil: recent transplants, as all the natural vegetation in Bulikov died when the climate abruptly changed. Behind these is a long building with one huge tower at the north end, a belfry with a very curious, skeletal structure at the top: a metal globe-like frame that appears to have once held a carillon, but is now empty. The base of the structure is rambling clay walls with a flat roof to which time has not been kind: the roof dips and curves like a field marred by a glacier.