City of Stairs (31 page)

Wine,
thinks Shara,
and the flesh
.

“Sigrud,” she says. “Give me your flask.”

Sigrud lifts his head and frowns.

“I know you have one. I don’t care about that. Just give it to me. And a knife.”

Sparks as Mulaghesh taps her cigarillo against the wall. “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

Sigrud clambers to his feet, rustles in his coat—there is the tinkling of metal: unpleasant instruments, surely—and produces a flask of dark brown glass.

“What is it?” asks Shara.

“They said it was plum wine,” he says. “But from the fumes … I think the salesman, he might not have been so honest.”

“And … have you tried it?”

“Yes. And I have not gone blind. So.” He holds out a small blade.

This will either work,
thinks Shara,
or be very embarrassing.
Sigrud uncorks the flask—the fumes are enough to make her gag—and she tugs off her free hand’s glove with her teeth. Then she steels herself and slashes the inside of her palm.

Mulaghesh is appalled. “What in the—?”

Shara puts her mouth to the wound and sucks at it. It is bleeding freely: the taste of salt and copper suffuses her mouth, almost chokes her. Then she rips her hand away and hurriedly takes a pull from the flask.

It is not—most
certainly
not—any sort of alcohol she has ever tasted before. Vomit curdles in her stomach, washes up her esophagus; she chokes it back down. She faces the door frame, gags once, and spews the mixture of alcohol and blood over it.

She is not in control of herself enough to even see if it works. She hands the flask and knife back to Sigrud, drops to all fours, and begins to violently dry heave, but as she lost most of the contents of her stomach when she first saw the
mhovost
, there is nothing to expel.

She hears Mulaghesh say, “Um.
Uhh
 …”

There is a soft scrape as Sigrud’s black knife escapes from its sheath.

“What?” croaks Shara. She wipes away tears. “What is it? Did it work?”

She looks, and finds it is difficult to say.

The interior of the door frame is completely, impenetrably black, as if someone inserted a sheet of black graphite in it while she wasn’t looking. One of Mulaghesh’s soldiers, curious, steps behind the doorway: none of them are able to see through to her. The soldier sticks her head out the other side and asks, “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” says Mulaghesh. “Was it supposed to do”—she struggles for words—“
that
?”

“It’s a reaction, at least,” says Shara. She grabs the candelabra and approaches the door frame.

“Be careful!” says Mulaghesh. “Something could … I don’t know, come
out
of it.”

The black inside the doorway, Shara sees, is not as solid as she thought: as she nears it, the shadow recedes until she spots the hint of tall, square metal frames on either side of the doorway, and a rickety wooden floor.

Shelves,
she realizes.
I’m seeing rows and rows of shelves.

“Oh, my seas and stars,” whispers Mulaghesh. “What is that?”

Would this
—Shara’s heart is trembling—
be the view from shelf C5-162, where the other Ear of Jukov sits?

Shara reaches down and picks up a clod of earth. She gauges the distance and tosses it into the doorway.

The clod flies through the door frame, into the shadows, and lands with a
thunk
on the wooden floor.

“It passes through,” remarks Sigrud.

“That,” says Shara, “would be a major security breach.”

And so,
she muses,
Lord Jukov allows us in his shadow.

This deeply concerns her, though she does not say so: not only has she just found that one of Jukov’s Divine creatures was still alive, now one of his miraculous devices appears to still function.
Who actually witnessed Jukov’s death,
she thinks,
besides the Kaj himself?

She returns to the task at hand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

* * *

There is a passing shadow—the candle flames in her candelabra shrink to near nothing—an unsettling breeze, then the creak of wood below her feet.

Shara is through.

She takes a breath and immediately starts coughing.

The interior of the Unmentionable Warehouse is musty beyond belief, much more so than the Seat of the World: it is like entering the home of a hugely ancient, hoarding old couple. Shara hacks miserably against the bloody handkerchief around her hand. “Is there no ventilation here?”

Mulaghesh had tied a bandana around her head before she stepped through. “Why the hells would there be?” she says, irritated.

Sigrud enters behind her. If the air bothers him, he doesn’t show it.

Mulaghesh turns around to look at the second stone door frame, sitting comfortably in the lowest spot on shelf C5. Shara can see Mulaghesh’s two soldiers watching them from the other side of the door, anxious.

“Could we really be here?” Mulaghesh asks aloud. “Could we really have been transported miles outside of Bulikov, just like that?”

Shara holds up the candelabra: the shelves tower above them nearly three or four stories tall. Shara thinks she can make out a tin roof somewhere far overhead. The skeletal form of an ancient rolling ladder lurks a dozen feet away. “I would say we are here,” she says, “yes.”

The three of them stand in the Unmentionable Warehouse and listen.

The dark air is filled with sighs and squeaks and low hums. The rattle of pennies, the scrape of wood. The air pressure in the room feels like it is constantly changing: either something in the Warehouse has confused Shara’s skin, inner ear, and sinuses, or there are countless forces applying themselves to her, then fading, like ocean currents.

How many miracles are down here with us,
Shara wonders,
functioning away in the dark? How many of the words of the Divinities still echo in this place?

Sigrud points down. “Look.”

The wooden floor is covered in sediments of dust, yet this aisle has been marred by recent footprints.

“I presume,” says Mulaghesh, “that that would be the passage of our mysterious opponent.”

Shara fights to concentrate: there are many paths of footprints, none of them completely clear. Their trespasser must have paced the aisles many times. “We need to look for any sign of tampering,” she says. “Then, after that, we need to look and see if anything’s
missing
. I would expect that if there’s anything missing, it’d be something from these pages, since these are the records that interested the Restorationists. So”—she flips through the pages—“we’ll want to look at shelves C4, C5, and C6.”

“Or he could have just randomly stolen something,” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes. Or that.”
Thank you,
she thinks,
for highlighting the futility of our search.
“We all have a light, don’t we? Then let’s spread out, and keep an eye on each other … and we’ll get out of here as fast as we can. And I don’t think I need to say this, but do
not
touch
any
thing. And if something asks for your attention, or for your interference … ignore it.”

“Would these …
items
really have minds of their own?” asks —Sigrud.

Shara’s memory supplies her with a litany of miraculous items that were either alive, or claimed to be. “Just don’t touch anything,” she says. “Stay clear of all the shelves.”

Shara takes shelf C4, Mulaghesh C5, Sigrud C6. As she walks down her aisle, Shara reflects on the age of this place.
These shelves are nearly eighty years old,
she thinks, listening to the creaking.
And they look it.
“The Kaj never intended for this to be a permanent fix, did he?” she whispers as she looks down the aisle. “We just kept ignoring it, hoping this was a problem that would go away.”

Each space on the shelves is marked by a tiny metal tag with a number. Beyond this, there is no explanation for the contents, which are beyond random.

One shelf is occupied by most of a huge, disassembled statue. Its face is blank, featureless, save for a wriggling, fractal-like design marching across the whole of its head.
Taalhavras,
thinks Shara,
or one of his incarnations.

A wooden box covered in locks and chains wriggles; a scuttering noise comes from within, like many small, clawed creatures scrabbling at the wood. Shara quickly steps past this.

A golden sword shines with a queer light above her. Beside it sit twelve short, thick, unremarkable glass columns. Beside these, a large silver cup with many jewels. Then mountains and mountains of books and scrolls.

She walks on. Next she sees sixty panes of glass. A foot made of brass. A corpse wrapped in a blanket, tied with silver twine.

Shara cannot see the end of the aisle.
Over fifteen hundred years,
she thinks,
of miraculous items.

The historian in her says,
How fortuitous the Kaj thought to store them all.

The operative in her says,
He should have destroyed every single one of them when he had the chance.

“Ambassador?” calls Mulaghesh’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Did … you say something?”

“No.” Shara pauses. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

A long silence. Shara surveys a collection of silver thumbs.

“Is it possible for these things to talk in your head?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Anything is possible here,” says Shara. “Ignore it.”

A bucket full of children’s shoes.

A walking stick made of horsehair.

A cabinet spilling ancient parchments.

A cloth mask, made to look like the face of an old man.

A wooden carving of a man with seven erect members of varying length.

She tries to focus, but her mind keeps searching through all the stories she’s memorized, trying to place these items in the thousands of Continental legends.
Is that
the knot that held a thunderstorm in its tangle, and when untied brought endless rain? Could that be the harp of a hovtarik, from the court of Taalhavras, which made the tapestries come alive? And is that the red arrow made by Voortya, that pierced the belly of a tidal wave and turned it to a gentle current?

“No,” says Sigrud’s voice. “No. That is not so.”

“Sigrud?” says Shara. “Are you all right?”

A low hum from a few yards away.

“No!” says Sigrud. “That is a lie!”

Shara walks quickly down the aisle until she sees Sigrud standing on the opposite side of a shelf, staring at a small, polished black orb sitting in a velvet-lined box.

“Sigrud?”

“No,” he says to the orb. “I left that place. I am … I am not
there
anymore.”

“Is he all right?” calls Mulaghesh.

“Sigrud, listen to me,” says Shara.

“They died because”—he searches for an explanation—“because they tried to
hurt
me.”

“Sigrud …”

“No. No! No, I will not!”

In the velvet box, the glassy black orb rotates slightly to the left; Shara is reminded of a dog cocking its head:
Why not?

“Because
I,
” Sigrud says forcefully, “am
not
. A
king
!”

“Sigrud!” shouts Shara.

He blinks, startled. The black orb sinks a little lower in the velvet, like it’s disappointed to lose its playmate.

Sigrud slowly turns to look at her. “What … ? What has happened?”

“You’re here,” she says. “You’re here in the Warehouse, with me.”

He rubs his temple, shaken.

“The things here are … They’re very old,” she explains. “I think they’re bored. And they’ve been … feeding off one another. Like fish trapped in a shrinking pond.”

“I have found nothing missing,” he grumbles. “The shelves are quite full.
Over
full, even.”

“Me neither,” says Mulaghesh’s voice from the next aisle. “You don’t want us to climb the ladders, do you?”

“Does it look like the ladders have been moved?” asks Shara. “Look at the dust.”

A pause. “No.”

“Then it would have been something on the first few shelves.”

Shara directs her own attention to the lowest shelves of her remaining aisles and continues her search.

Four brass oil lamps. A blank, polished wooden board. Children’s dolls. A spinning wheel whose wheel is slowly rotating, though there seems to be no flax, and certainly no spinner.

Then, in the final spot, just ahead …

Nothing.

Maybe
nothing. Nothing that she can see, at least.

Shara thinks,
Something missing?

She strides toward the empty space. Her eyes are so used to seeing random material in the corner of her vision that she does not pay much attention to what’s below her. But as she nears the blank space on the shelf, she thinks, briefly,
Did I see something shining on the ground?

A wire, maybe?

Something catches at her ankle; pulls; breaks—a tinny
ping!

There is a tinkle of metal from the next aisle over; a tiny steel key goes skittering across the boards.

Immediately Sigrud roars, “
Down! Now!
”

A puff of black smoke across the aisle to her right.

Then a wild blossom of orange flames, and a concussive blast.

A wave of heat batters her right side. Shara is lifted off the ground. She crashes into the shelves next to her, sending ancient treasures flying: a leather bag tumbles through the air, vomiting an endless stream of golden coins; a streamer of pale ribbon strikes the ground and turns to leaves.

Dust and metal and old wood spin around her. She falls to the ground, paws at a shelf, but cannot stand.

A fire rages to her right. Smoke coils and curls up on the ceiling, like a black cat finding sanctuary in a sunbeam.

On her left, the statue of Taalhavras crashes off the shelf. Sigrud awkwardly clambers through to kneel beside her.