City of Stairs (3 page)

“Oh, it’s related,” said Nidayin, who was assistant manager of the embassy Comm Department. “The telegram came through just hours after we sent out the news. This is their reaction.”

“So why send a CA? They might as well have sent a plumber, or a harpist.”

“Unless,” said Nidayin, “Mr. Thivani is
not
a cultural ambassador. He might be something else entirely.”

“Are you saying,” Pitry asked, fingers reaching up into his headcloth to scratch his scalp, “that the telegram
lied
?”

Nidayin simply shook his head. “Oh, Pitry. How
did
you get yourself into the Ministry?”

Nidayin,
thinks Pitry in the cold.
How I hate you.
One day I will dance with your beautiful girlfriend, and she will fall helplessly in love with me, and you shall walk in upon us mussing your sheets, and ice will pierce your muddy heart. …

But Pitry now sees he was a fool. Nidayin was suggesting this Thivani might be
traveling
as a CA, but he could in truth be some high-ranking, secret operative, infiltrating enemy territories and toppling resistance to Saypur. Pitry imagines a burly, bearded man with bandoliers of explosives and a glimmering knife clutched in his teeth, a knife that’s tasted blood in many shadows. … The more he thinks on it, the more Pitry grows a little afraid of this Thivani person.
Perhaps he will emerge from the train car like a djinnifrit,
he thinks,
spouting flames from his eyes and black poison from his mouth.

There is a rumbling in the east. Pitry looks to the city walls, and the tiny aperture in the bottom. From here it looks like a hole gnawed by vermin, but if he were closer it’d be nearly thirty feet tall.

The dark little hole fills with light. There is a flash, a screech, and the train pounds through.

It is not really a train: just a beaten, stained engine and a single sad little passenger car. It looks like something from coal country, a car the workers would ride in while being carted from mine to mine. Certainly nothing for an ambassador—even a cultural ambassador.

The train thuds up to the platform. Pitry scurries over and stands before the doors, hands clasped behind him and chest thrown gallantly forward. Are his buttons set? Is his headcloth straight? Did he shine his epaulets? He cannot remember. He frantically licks a thumb and begins rubbing at one. Then the doors scream open, and there is …

Red. No, not red—burgundy. A lot of burgundy, as if a drape has been hung across the door. Yet then the drape shifts, and Pitry sees it is split in the middle by a stripe of white cloth with buttons down the middle.

It is not a drape. It is the chest of a man in a dark burgundy coat. The biggest man Pitry has ever seen—a giant.

The giant unfolds himself and steps out of the car. His feet fall on the boards like millstones. Pitry stumbles back to allow him room. The giant’s long red coat kisses the tops of immense black boots, his shirt is open-throated with no scarf, and he wears a wide-brimmed gray hat at a piratical angle. On his right hand is a soft gray glove; his left is bare except for a woven gold bracelet—a curiously feminine affectation. He is well over six and a half feet tall, incredibly broad in the shoulders and back, but there is not an ounce of fat on him: his face has a lean, starved look. It is a face Pitry never expected to see on a Saypuri ambassador: the man’s skin is pale with many pink scars, his beard and hair are blond-white, and his eyes—or rather
eye
, for one eye is but a dark, hooded cavity—are so pale they are a whitish gray.

He is a Dreyling, a North-man. The ambassador, however impossible it seems, is one of the mountain savages, a foreigner to both the Continent and Saypur.

If this is their response,
thinks Pitry,
then what an awful and terrible response it is. …

The giant stares at Pitry with a flat, passive gaze, as if wondering if this runty little Saypuri is worth stomping on.

Pitry attempts a bow. “Greetings, Ambassador Thivani, to the w-wondrous city of B-Bulikov. I am Pitry Suturashni. I hope your journey was well?”

Silence.

Pitry, still bowed, tilts his head up. The giant is staring down at him, though one eyebrow rises just slightly in what could be a look of contemptuous bemusement.

Somewhere behind the giant comes the sound of a throat being cleared. The giant, without a word of greeting or good-bye, turns and walks toward the station manager’s desk.

Pitry scratches his head and watches him go. The little cough sounds again, and he realizes there is someone else standing in the doorway.

It is a small Saypuri woman, dark-skinned and even smaller than Pitry. She is dressed rather plainly—a blue coat and robe that is noticeable only in its Saypuri cut—and she watches him from behind enormously thick eyeglasses. She wears a light gray trenchcoat, and a short-brimmed blue hat with a paper orchid in its band. Pitry finds there is something off about her eyes. … The giant’s gaze was incredibly, lifelessly still, but this woman’s eyes are the precise opposite: huge and soft and dark, like deep wells with many fish swimming in them.

The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished. “I thank you for coming to meet us at such a late hour,” she says.

Pitry looks at her, then back at the giant, who is cramming his way into the station porter’s office, much to the porter’s concern. “Am-Ambassador Thivani?”

She nods and steps off the train.

A woman? Thivani is a
woman
? Why didn’t they… ?

Oh, damn the Comm Department! Damn their gossip and their lies!

“I trust that Chief Diplomat Troonyi,” she says, “is busy with the consequences of the murder. Otherwise he would be here himself?”

“Uh …” Pitry does not wish to admit that he knows no more of CD Troonyi’s intentions than he does the movements of the stars of the sky.

She blinks at him from behind her eyeglasses. Silence swells to engulf Pitry like the tide. He scrambles for something to say, anything. He lands on: “It’s very nice to have you here in Bulikov.” No, no, absolutely
wrong
. Yet he continues: “I hope your journey was … pleasant.” Wrong! Worse!

She looks at him a moment longer. “Pitry, you said your name was?”

“Y-yes.” There is a shout from behind them. Pitry looks, but Thivani does not—she keeps watching Pitry as one would an interesting bug. Pitry sees that the giant is prying something from the station porter’s hands—some kind of clipboard—which makes the porter none too pleased. The giant stoops, removes the gray glove from his right hand, and opens his fingers to show … something. The porter, whose face previously had been the color of old beets, goes quite white. The giant tears out a sheet of paper from the clipboard, gives the clipboard back to the porter, and exits.

“Who is … ?”

“That is my secretary,” says Thivani. “Sigrud.”

The giant takes out a match, lights it on a thumbnail, and sets fire to the piece of paper.

“S-secretary?” says Pitry.

Flames lick the giant’s fingers. If this pains him, he does not show it. After he deems the paper has sufficiently burned, he blows on it—
puff—
and embers dance across the station platform. He tugs the gray glove back on and surveys the station coldly.

“Yes,” she says. “Now, if it does not trouble you, I believe I would like to go straight to the embassy. Has the embassy informed any of the officials of Bulikov about my arrival?”

“Well. Uh …”

“I see. Do we have possession of the professor’s body?”

Pitry’s mind whirls. He wonders, perhaps for the first time, what happens to a body after it dies—this suddenly seems much more perplexing than the whereabouts of its spirit.

“I see,” she says. “Do you have a car with you?”

Pitry nods.

“If you would, please lead me to it.”

He nods again, perplexed, and takes her across the shadow-laden station to the car in the alleyway. He cannot stop glancing over his shoulder at her.

This
is who they send? This tiny, plain girl with the too-high voice? What could she possibly hope to accomplish in this endlessly hostile, endlessly suspicious place? Could she even last the night?

Even today, after we have attempted so much research and recovered so many artifacts, we still have no visual concept of what they looked like. All the sculptures, paintings, murals, bas-reliefs, and carvings render the figures either indistinct or incoherently. For in one depiction Kolkan appears as a smooth stone beneath a tree; and in another, a dark mountain against the bright sun; and in yet another, a man made of clay seated on a mountain. And these inconsistent portrayals are still a great improvement over others, which render their subjects as a vague pattern or color hanging in the air, no more than the stroke of a brush: for example, if we are to take the Continent’s ancient art at its word, the Divinity Jukov mostly appeared as a storm of starlings.

As in so many of these studies, it is difficult to conclude anything from such disparate scraps. One must wonder if the subjects of these works of art actually chose to present themselves this way. Or, perhaps, the subjects were experienced in a manner that was impossible to translate in conventional art.

Perhaps no one on the Continent ever quite knew what they were seeing. And now that the Divinities are gone, we might never know.

Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception.

—“The Nature of Continental Art,”
Dr. Efrem Pangyui

S
he watches.

She watches the crumbling arches, the leaning, bulky vaults, the tattered spires and the winding streets. She watches the faded tracery on the building facades, the patchwork of tiles on the sagging domes, the soot-stained lunettes, and the warped, cracked windows. She watches the people—short, rag-wrapped, malnourished—stumbling through oblong portals and porticos, beggars in a city of spectral wonders. She sees everything she expected to see, yet all these dreary ruins set her mind alight, wondering what they could have been like seventy, eighty, ninety years ago.

Bulikov. City of Walls. Most Holy Mount. Seat of the World. The City of Stairs.

She’d never figured that last one out. Walls and mounts and seats of the world—that’s something to brag about. But stairs? Why stairs?

Yet now Ashara—or just Shara, usually—finally sees. The stairs lead everywhere, nowhere: there are huge mountains of stairs, suddenly rising out of the curb to slash up the hillsides; then there will be sets of uneven stairs that wind down the slope like trickling creeks; and sometimes the stairs materialize before you like falls on whitewater rapids, and you see a huge vista crack open mere yards ahead . …

The name must be a new one. This could have only happened after the War. When everything … broke.

So this is what the Blink looks like,
she thinks.
Or, rather, this is what it did . …

She wonders where the stairs went before the War. Not to where they go now, that’s for sure. She struggles with the reality of where she is, of how she came here, of how this could possibly really be happening …

Bulikov. The Divine City.

She stares out the car window. Once the greatest city in the world, yet now one of the most ravaged places known to man. Yet still the population clings to it: it remains the third or fourth most populated city in the world, though once it was much, much larger. Why do they stay here? What keeps these people in this half-city, vivisected and shadowy and cold?

“Do your eyes hurt?” asks Pitry.

“Pardon?” says Shara.

“Your eyes. Mine would swim sometimes, when I first came here. When you look at the city, in certain places, things aren’t quite … right. They make you sick. It used to happen a lot more, I’m told, and it happens less and less these days.”

“What is it like, Pitry?” asks Shara, though she knows the answer: she has read and heard about this phenomenon for years.

“It’s like … I don’t know. Like looking into glass.”

“Glass?”

“Well, no, not glass. Like a window. But the window looks out on a place that isn’t there anymore. It’s hard to explain. You’ll know it when you see it.”

The historian in her fights with her operative’s instincts:
Look at the arched doorways, the street names, the ripples and dents in the city walls!
says one.
Look at the people, watch where they walk, see how they look over their shoulders,
says the other. There are only a few people on the streets: it is, after all, well past midnight. But those she sees are like most of the Continental sort: stocky, with heavy limbs and heavy features. The buildings all seem very small to her: when the car crests a hill, she looks out and sees fields of low, flat structures, all the way across to the other side of the city walls. She is not used to such a barren skyline.

They did have greater things,
she reminds herself,
before the War.
But the curious emptiness of the skyline makes her wonder,
Could so much have suddenly vanished, in a matter of minutes?

“You probably know this,” says Pitry. “But it’s good to have a car in the neighborhoods around the embassy. It’s not quite in … a reputable part of town. When we established the embassy, they say, a lot of the good sorts moved out. Didn’t want to be near the shallies.”

“Ah, yes,” says Shara. “I’d forgotten they call us that here.”
Shally,
she remembers, inspired by the quantity of shallots Saypuris use in their food. Which is incorrect, as any sensible Saypuri prefers garlic.

She glances at Sigrud. He stares straight ahead—maybe. It is always difficult to tell what Sigrud is paying attention to. He sits so still, and seems so blithely indifferent to all around him, that you almost treat him like a statue. Either way, he seems neither impressed nor interested in the city: it is simply another event, neither threatening violence nor requiring it, and thus not worth attention.

She tries to save her thoughts for what is sure to be a difficult and tricky next few hours. And she tries to avoid the one thought that has been eating into her since yesterday, when the telegraph in Ahanashtan unspooled into her hands. But she cannot.

Oh, poor Efrem. How could this happen to you?

* * *

CD Troonyi’s office is a perfect re-creation of a stately office in Saypur, albeit a gaudy one: the dark wooden blinds, the red floral carpet, the soft blue walls, the copper lamps with beaded chimneys above the desk. An elephant’s ear fern, indigenous to Saypur, blooms off of one wall, its fragile, undulating leaves unfurling from its base of moss in a green-gray wave; below it, a small pot of water bubbles on a tiny candle; a trickle of steam rises up, allowing the fern the humidity it needs to survive. None of this is at all, Shara notes, a melding of cultures, a show of learning and communication and postregionalism unity, as all the ministerial committees claim back in Saypur.

But the décor does not even come
close
to the level of transgression of what hangs on the wall behind the desk chair.

Shara stares at it, incensed and morbidly fascinated.
How could he be such a fool?

Troonyi bursts into his office with a face so theatrically grave it’s like he’s died rather than Efrem. “Cultural Ambassador Thivani,” he says. He plants his left heel forward, hitches up his right shoulder, and assumes the courtliest of courtly bows. “It is an honor to have you here, even if it is under such sad circumstances.”

Immediately Shara wonders which preparatory school he attended in Saypur. She read his file before she came, of course, and it reinforced her conviction that the chaff of powerful families is all too often dumped into Saypur’s embassies across the world.
And he thinks me to be from exactly such a family,
she reminds herself,
hence the show.
“It is an honor to be here.”

“And for us, we …” Troonyi looks up and sees Sigrud slouched in a chair in the corner, idly stuffing his pipe. “Ehm. Wh-who is that?”

“That is Sigrud,” says Shara. “My secretary.”

“Must you have him here?”

“Sigrud assists me on all matters, confidential or otherwise.”

Troonyi peers at him. “Is he deaf, or dumb?”

Sigrud’s one eye flicks up for a moment before returning to his pipe.

“Neither,” says Shara.

“Well,” says Troonyi. He mops his brow with a handkerchief and recovers. “Well, it is a testament to the good professor’s memory,” he says as he sits behind his desk, “that Minister Komayd sent someone so quickly to oversee the care of his remains. Have you traveled all night?”

Shara nods.

“My goodness gracious. How horrible. Tea!” he shouts suddenly, for no apparent reason.
“Tea!”
He grabs a bell on his desk and begins violently shaking it, then repeatedly slams it on the desk when it does not get the response he desires. A girl no more than fifteen swivels into the room, bearing a battleship of a tea tray. “What took you so long?” he snaps. “I have a
guest
.” The girl averts her eyes and pours. Troonyi turns back to Shara as if they are alone: “I understand you were nearby in Ahanashtan? An awful polis, or so I think it. The seagulls, they are trained thieves, and the people have learned from the seagulls.” With a twitch of two fingers, he waves the girl away, who bows low before exiting. “We must civilize them, however—the people, I mean, not the birds.” He laughs. “Would you care for a cup? It’s our best sirlang. …”

Shara shakes her head with the slightest of smiles. In truth Shara, a thorough caffeine addict, is in desperate need of a cup, but she’ll be damned if she takes one thing from CD Troonyi.

“Suit yourself. But Bulikov, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is quite different. It has structures that remain in place, inflexible to our influence. And I don’t just mean the walls. Why, just three months ago the polis governor had to stop them from hanging a woman for taking up with another man—I am sorry to discuss such a thing before a young woman, but—for taking up with another man after her husband died. And the man had died
years
ago! The City Fathers would not listen to me, of course, but Mulaghesh …” He trails off. “How odd it is that the city most decimated by the past is the also the city most dead-set against reform, don’t you think?”

Shara smiles and nods. “I agree entirely.” She tries very hard to avoid looking at the painting hanging over his shoulder. “So you do possess Dr. Pangyui’s remains?”

“What? Oh, yes,” he says around a mouthful of biscuit. “I apologize—yes, yes, we do have the body. Terrible thing. Tragedy.”

“Might I examine it before its transport?”

“You wish to see his
remains
? They are not … I am so sorry, but the man is
not
in a presentable state.”

“I am aware of how he died.”

“Are you? He died violently.
Violently.
It is abominable, my girl.”

My girl,
thinks Shara. “That has been communicated to me. But I must still ask to see them.”

“Are you so sure?”

“I am.”

“Well … Hm.” He smears on his nicest smile. “Let me give you a bit of advice, my girl. I once was in your shoes—a young CA, patriotic, going through the motions, all the dog-and-pony shows. You know, anything to make a bit of name for myself. But, trust me, you can send all the messages you want, but there’s no one on the other line. No one’s
listening
. The Ministry simply doesn’t pay attention to cultural ambassadors. It’s like hazing, my dear—you do your time until you can get out. But don’t work up a sweat. Enjoy yourself. I’m sure they’ll send someone serious on to handle it soon enough.”

Shara is not angry: her irritation has long since ebbed away into bemusement. As she thinks of a way to answer him, her eye wanders back up to the painting on the wall.

Troonyi catches her looking. “Ah. I see you’re taken with my beauty.” He gestures to the painting. “
The Night of the Red Sands,
by Rishna. One of the great patriotic works. It’s not an original, I’m sad to say, but a very old copy of the original. But it’s close enough.”

Even though Shara has seen it many times before—it’s quite popular in schools and city halls in Saypur—it still strikes her as a curious, disturbing painting. It depicts a battle taking place in a vast, sandy desert at night: on the closest wave of dunes stands a small, threadbare army of Saypuris, staring across the desert at an immense opposing force of armored swordsmen. The armor they wear is huge and thick and gleaming, protecting every inch of their bodies; their helmets depict the glinting visages of shrieking demons; their swords are utterly immense, nearly six feet in length, and flicker with a cold fire. The painting makes it plain that these terrifying men of steel and blade will cleave the poor, ragged Saypuris in two. Yet the swordsmen are standing in a state of some shock: they stare at one Saypuri, who stands on the top of one tall dune at the back of his army, brave and resplendent in a fluttering coat—the general of this tattered force, surely. He is manipulating a strange weapon: a long, thin cannon, delicate as a horsefly, which is firing a flaming wad up over his army, over the heads of the opposing force, where it strikes …