City of Stairs (43 page)

“Then what are we to do?”

He shrugs. “We must learn to live with it.”

The wind pulls a tiny dust devil to its feet and sends it tottering along a white stone lane.

“Does this place make you contemplative?” asks Shara.

“No,” he says. “This is something I think I have believed for a long time.”

A bulging crystal window at the top of a rounded house captures the blue sky, stretches it, and makes a perfect azure bubble.

“You are not,” says Shara, “the man I freed from prison.”

He shrugs again. “Maybe not.”

“You are wiser than he was. You are wiser than
I
am, I feel. Do you ever think about going home?”

Sigrud briefly halts on his trail; his eye dances over the cream-white cobblestones; then, “No.”

“No? Never?”

“They do not know me anymore. It was a long time ago. They are different people now. Like I am. And they would not wish to see this thing I am.”

They follow the trail for a few moments of silence.

“I think you’re wrong,” says Shara.

Sigrud says, “Think what you like.”

* * *

The trail leads on and on and on. “Of course, they couldn’t bring cars, could they?” Shara muses aloud. “The reality static wouldn’t allow them through, being so modern.”

“I would have preferred if they could have brought a horse or two.”

“And they would simply leave them here for us? We should be so luck—” Shara stops and stares at a tall, rounded building on her left.

“What?” asks Sigrud

Shara’s eyes study the walls, which have windows in the pattern of eight-pointed stars, filled with bright violet glass.

“What now?” asks Sigrud.

Shara’s eyes study the facade: at its top is an abridged quote from the
Jukoshtava
:

those who come upon a choice, a chance, and tremble and fear—why should i allow them in my shadow?

“I have read about this place,” murmurs Shara.

“I expect you have read about every place in this city.”

“No! No, I read about this place just … just recently.”

She walks forward and touches the white walls. She remembers the line from Efrem’s journal, quoting the letters of a Saypuri soldier about the death of Jukov:
We followed the Kaj to a place in the city—a temple of white and silver, its walls patterned like the stars with purple glass. I could not see the god in the temple, and worried it was a trap, but our general did not worry, and loaded his black lead within his hand-cannon, and entered.

Shara feels numb. She approaches the door of the temple—white-painted wood, carved in a pattern of stars and fur—and pushes it open.

The door opens on a large empty courtyard. The walls are high and frame a piercing bright blue sky above. In the center of the courtyard is a dry fountain, around which are four small benches.

Shara slowly walks to the benches. These she also touches, as if to confirm they are really there.

Is this,
she thinks,
where a god once sat?

And did my great-grandfather sit next to him, or stand over him?

She slowly sits on the bench. The wood softly creaks.

Could this really be the place where Jukov himself died? Could I have found it?

She believes so. It seems unreal to see this place, trapped in a fragment of reality long since faded from the real world: but she knows it is perfectly possible. The period after the Blink was chaotic, with pieces of reality flashing into existence, then away. …

She looks to the right. A low gallery circles the courtyard, heavy square roofs supported by white wood columns.

In one column there is a small black hole. It is just at shoulder height, if you are seated.

Seated and, perhaps, holding out a pistol, perhaps to someone’s head.

She walks to it and gets the uncanny sense that something is inside it, watching her.
I have been waiting here for you,
the little hole seems to say,
for so long!

“Sigrud,” she says hoarsely. “Bring me your knife.”

He places the handle of the heavy black knife in her palm. She takes a breath and shoves the blade into the hole in the wood.

A
tink
as it strikes something metal. She begins hacking at the column, carving the wood away, until the thing inside begins to shake loose.

Something small and black clatters to the floor of the courtyard. Shara stoops and picks it up.

A piece of dark, dark metal, half-flattened from where it struck the wood, about the size of a fat fig.

She rolls it around in the palm of her hand, feeling its weight.

Jukov
must
be dead,
thinks Shara.
He must be. Otherwise, how could this be here?

“What is that?” asks Sigrud.

“This little thing,” says Shara softly, “is what brought down the gods.”

* * *

They continue following the trail, which twists and turns across the streets until it unexpectedly ends in the middle of what seems to have been someone’s living room.

“Where are they?” asks Sigrud. “The footsteps end here.”

Shara kneels and examines the floor, but she can see nothing. “I can never figure out exactly
what
you are using to track people. Where do the footsteps end?”

Sigrud points at a spot on the floor not quite in the corner, nor quite in the center of the room.

“More static, I would imagine,” says Shara. “Just a very subtle spot, one that’s very hard to notice.”

“And you think we can pass back through?”

“I don’t think our reality—the
actual
reality—rejects anyone. Unlike this one. The question is,
where
will we come back through?”

“I think it would be wise to allow me to go first this time,” says Sigrud. “We know our enemies are over there, somewhere, doing … something. It would be stupid to allow you through. All right?”

“All right.”

Sigrud steps toward the spot. He gradually disappears, his leading foot dissolving, followed by his waist and shoulders, but it all happens too quickly for her eyes to really understand.

She waits. Then she is treated to the bizarre sight of Sigrud’s head and hand appearing in midair.

He gestures to her to follow, but holds a finger to his lips.

She walks toward the spot, bracing herself.

Last time her surroundings did not seem to change at all, but this time the change is absolute: the white city fades away, and a blue-purple dawn sky comes spilling in above, framed by harsh, sandy mountains. Short, scraggly trees rise out of the chalky soil around them and bend back down to graze the earth.

“So,” says Sigrud, “where are we
now
?”

Shara’s mind races. “Not in Bulikov, that’s for sure. Interesting. … It seems there is no fixed geographical relationship between Old Bulikov and the
real
Bulikov.”

Sigrud impatiently rolls his index finger:
Get on with it.

“I
think
 … that we are outside of Jukoshtan.” Shara reaches up, grabs the slender branch of a tree, and examines its leaves. “I think so. This sort of juniper only grows near Jukoshtan. They used to perfume wine with the berries.”

“So … is Jukoshtan behind this in any way?”

“I genuinely have no idea,” says Shara. She turns around and examines the spot they just passed through: it bears some minor effects from the Blink—the sand is molten together, and many of the trees appear bent and mutated—but otherwise you’d never be able to tell this spot had any trace of reality static to it.

She breaks off a branch from a nearby tree, peels back the bark so its green inner core is revealed in a slender stripe, and stabs it into the ground. “To mark our entry point,” she says. “Now—lead on.”

The trail leads down a valley, then up the hills, up and up, until they come to the crest, and then …

“Down,” whispers Sigrud. “
Down!
” He grabs her shoulder and rips her forward, crashing into the soft sand hills.

Shara lies still and listens. Then she hears it: voices, and hammers.

Sigrud peers through the undergrowth.

“Have we been spotted?” Shara whispers.

He shakes his head. “No. But I am not sure what I am looking at.”

“Is it safe for me to move?”

“I think so,” he says. “They are very far down in the valley. … And they are very busy.”

She lifts her head and crawls to a spot where she can see. The bottom of the valley is dotted with fires, as if the people there are preparing to work well into the night. But what they are working on is hard to discern: there are six long, wide shapes of gleaming metal that Shara first thinks are giant shoes, pointed at the front and square in the back like the clogs they wear in Voortyashtan, but there are doors and windows in the giant metal shoes, and stairs and trapdoors … and in the middle is something that looks like a mast with no sail.

Shara says, “They almost look like—”

“Ships,” says Sigrud. “Boats. Giant boats of metal, with no ocean, and no sails.”

She squints to see the figures scurrying around the ships, screwing in screws, welding plates together. All the workers are dressed in traditional Kolkashtani wraps.

“They’re definitely Restorationists,” she murmurs. “But why the hells would they build boats of metal out here in the country? We’re hundreds of miles from the ocean! I suppose that’s what they needed the steel for. …”

“That is not a terribly large fleet,” says Sigrud with some contempt. “Only six ships? If they
were
going to sail anywhere, there’s not much you could do with that.”

Shara considers it. “Almost two thousand pounds of steel a month, for a little over a year—that doesn’t make very many ships. But this must have been what they were using the steel for!”

“And then what?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps they found something in the Warehouse that could create ocean wherever you wanted it.”

Eight men are pushing something up a ramp into one of the metal boats. Even though the light is faint, Shara’s heart almost stops at the sight of it.

“Oh my,” she says.

“Is that what I think it is?” says Sigrud.

“Yes,” she says. “A six-inch cannon. I’ve only ever seen those on a Saypuri dreadnought.” She glances at the cannon shutters on the other ships. “And it looks like they have, or expect to have,
thirty-six
of the damn things.”

“And they plan to do what with them? Bombard the hills? Fight a war with the squirrels?”

“I don’t know,” says Shara. “But you’re going to find out.”

A pause.

Sigrud says, “What?”

“I’m going back to Bulikov”—Shara looks over her shoulder and is discomfited to see that the actual Bulikov is nowhere in sight—“to the
actual
Bulikov, to telegraph Mulaghesh. But we can’t just leave the Restorationists here to do … well … whatever it is they’re going to do.”

“So your plan,” says Sigrud, “is to leave me here to fight six metal ships loaded with cannons?”

“I’m asking to you watch. Only do something if
they
do something.”

“This something I should do being …”

“Infiltration, if you can. You must have dealt with a few stowaways in your time, right? Hopefully you learned something from them. If I get back to Bulikov in time, we can return with a small army within days.”

“Days
plural
?”

Shara squeezes his shoulder, says, “Good luck,” and crawls back down the hillside.

* * *

The journey back through the white city of Old Bulikov is a strange and heavy one for Shara. She tries to put her mind to the dozens of mysteries before her—landlocked ships preparing an invasion; Vohannes collaborating with Wiclov, and, possibly, arranging passage for the Restorationists in and out of Old Bulikov; yet her thoughts keep returning to the lump in her pocket, which jostles with each step.

I have on my person something that has tasted the blood of the Divine.

It takes her a moment to realize that this grants her a profound technological advantage: no matter what Wiclov, Vohannes, and the Restorationists are plotting, none of them could imagine she possesses a piece of the Kaj’s weaponry, however small. But how to use something that’s hardly bigger than a marble?

When she returns to Bulikov—the real, current Bulikov—she sheds the Kolkashtani wrap right away and goes straight to a metalworker’s shop.

“Can I help—?” The clerk does a double take as he realizes he faces the famed Conqueror of Urav.

“I need you to make something for me,” she says before he can comment.

“Oh, ah … Certainly. What would it be?”

She places the little ball of metal on the counter. “A bolt tip,” she says. “Or a small knife.”

“Well … which would you like? A bolt tip or a knife?”

“Something that could be both, if needed. I will need this to be quite versatile.”

The clerk picks up the ball of black metal. “And what would you be hunting, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Shara smiles and says, “Deer?”

* * *

CD KOMAYD TO GHS512

EMERGENCY SITUATION STOP

RESTORATIONISTS PLAN FULL SCALE ASSAULT STOP

REQUEST RELOCATION AND FORTIFICATION OF ALL POLIS TROOPS IN BULIKOV STOP

CES512

PG MULAGHESH TO CES512

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DAMN MIND STOP

ARE YOU EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE INVESTIGATING THIS ANYMORE STOP

MUST PROVIDE MORE DETAILS STOP

GHS512

CD KOMAYD TO GHS512

CANNOT PROVIDE DETAILS STOP

NOT DUE TO UNCERTAINTY DUE TO LENGTH STOP

QUESTION OF JURISDICTION IMMATERIAL DUE TO THREAT LEVEL STOP

PLEASE MOBILIZE FORCES IMMEDIATELY STOP

CES512

PG MULAGHESH TO CES512

PLEASE PROVIDE SOME INDICATION OF THREAT LEVEL STOP

ANYTHING STOP

MOVING FIVE HUNDRED ARMED TROOPS TO AN URBAN AREA NOT LIKE BACKING UP A WAGON FULL OF POTATOES STOP

GHS512

CD KOMAYD TO GHS512

RESTORATIONISTS CONFIRMED TO POSSESS 30 PLUS SIX INCH CANNONS NORMALLY SUITED FOR DREADNOUGHTS STOP