City of Stairs (48 page)

Shara is standing in the middle of the courtyard, counting out pills and guessing the right dosage.
Will I go mad? Will Kolkan swoop into my mind and destroy me? Will I simply topple over, dead, and leave my soldiers and my people here to die? Or perhaps it will just be like having too much tea. …

“Now let me remind you of our
current
predicament!” says Mulaghesh. “We face ridiculous odds, yes! Absurd odds! But we are
trained
soldiers! And we have on our side the great-granddaughter of the Kaj, who just a month ago brought down a Divine horror that was ravaging this very city! You wish to relive history? Are your standards so low? You will
make
it this day! You are heroes that will be sung about for centuries to come! You are legends! And you will be victorious!”

To Shara’s utter surprise, a bloodthirsty cheer rises up among the soldiers. They begin to chant:
Komayd! Komayd! Komayd!

Shara turns a furious beet red and mutters, “Ohmygoodness.”

“Now man these fortifications,” says Mulaghesh, “and I want you to aim for those things’ fucking
eyes
, do you hear me? They might be armored, but they’re not perfect!”

The soldiers cheer and rush to the fortifications behind the embassy walls. Mulaghesh saunters over to where Shara stands. “How’d I do?”

“Very good,” says Shara. “You ought to do this for a living.”

“Funny,” says Mulaghesh. She peers through the gates. “Those things know we’re here. It looks like they break off about a dozen for each building, and we’re about to get our fair share. Are you ready?”

Shara hesitates. “This is five times the dosage I gave the boy in the jail.”

“And?”

“So I have absolutely no idea if potency correlates with quantity.”

“And?”

“So I mean that even if this
does
work, there is a very good chance I may overdose, and die.”

Mulaghesh shrugs. “Yeah, probably. Welcome to war. Let’s see if you can do something before you actually die, though, okay?”

“How can you … ? How can you be so calm about this?”

Mulaghesh watches the advancing armored soldiers. “It’s like swimming,” she says. “You think you’ve forgotten how to do it, but then you jump in, and suddenly it’s like you never stopped doing it at all. If you’re going to do it, Chief Diplomat”—she points at the pills in Shara’s hand—“do it. Because we’re about to find out if our guns are worth a damn against those things.”

* * *

The armored soldiers line up and begin to march toward the embassy with metronomic precision. Teeth-rattling clanks echo across the streets and over the walls. Mulaghesh mounts the foremost gun battery and shouts, “Focus on the one on the right!” The repeat shooters slowly swivel to aim at the rightmost armored soldier, who does not react at all.

Mulaghesh waits for the armored soldiers to come in range, then drops her hand and bellows, “Fire!”

The repeat shooters do not sound at all like cannons, Shara finds, but rather like huge saws in a sawmill. Rainbows of bronze casings tumble over the edge of the gun batteries and tinkle on the embassy courtyard. Shara watches, hoping the armored soldier will simply explode: rather, the soldier slows down, small holes and dents appearing in its breastplate and face and legs. It makes a sound like a kitchen cabinet overflowing with an endless stream of pots and pans.

The repeat shooters maintain the stream of bullets; the armored soldier begins wobbling on its ragged legs; after nearly a full half minute of shooting, the soldier falls over. Instantly, a flock of brown starlings come fluttering out of the many gaps in the armor, which falls apart as if it had been held together by strings.
Brown starlings,
thinks Shara, surprised.
But that’s one of Jukov’s tricks.
The soldier behind it implacably steps over the tattered armor, as if the death of its comrade means nothing.

Mulaghesh looks back at Shara and grimly shakes her head:
No good
. “Keep firing!” she shouts to her men, and they pour a stream of fire into the advancing soldiers, which slows them but does not come close to stopping them.

Ten of them,
thinks Shara.
It’ll take five whole minutes to kill them all.

The soldiers are a hundred yards away now. Their feet clank and rattle with each step.

“Do it, Shara!” shouts Mulaghesh. “We can’t hold them off!”

Shara looks down at the tiny white pills in her hand.

Seventy yards.

“Do it!”

I damn my fate,
thinks Shara,
with all my heart
.

She stuffs the pills in her mouth and swallows.

* * *

Shara waits. Nothing happens.

The armored soldiers are fifty yards away.

“Oh dear,” says Shara. “Oh, no. It’s not working at all! It’s not—”

Shara gags. Then she jerks forward slightly, gripping her stomach, and touches her mouth.

“I don’t feel …” She swallows. “Mm, I don’t feel exactly …”

She falls to her knees, coughs, and begins to vomit, but what she vomits is rivers and rivers of white snow, as if inside of her is a frozen mountain sloughing off an avalanche, and it all comes pouring out of her mouth, complete with stones and sticks and flecks of dark mud.

One of the soldiers turns away in disgust. “By the seas …”

The world ripples around her. Color bursts in the corners of her eyes. The sky is parchment; the earth is tar; the white skyscrapers of Bulikov burn as if lit by torches.

Ohmygoodnessohmygoodnessohmygoodness …

Her skin is fire and ice. Her eyes burn in their sockets. Her tongue is too big for her mouth. She screams for five seconds before getting control of herself.

“Ambassador?” says Mulaghesh. “Are you all right?”

These are just the psychedelic effects,
she tries to tell herself.

Words appear written in the stones before her:
these are just the psychedelic effects.

Shara says, “What a curious drug this is,” but the words come from tiny mouths that have appeared on the backs of her hands. “How marvelous!”

“
If you’re going to do something
”—Mulaghesh’s screamed words make coils of fire in the air—“
then do it now!
”

Shara looks up at the advancing soldiers. She counts them and shouts, “Nine!” for reasons that immediately escape her. She immediately sees that they are walking tangles of many complicated miracles, but inside there are real human beings, people who have been forcefully conscripted into Kolkan’s service.
Yet the second the armor is too damaged,
she sees,
the miracle turns them into starlings, and sends them away. … Which is definitely something Jukov would do.

She runs up the fortifications and cries to the soldiers, “What armor is it you wear? That of Kolkan, or that of Jukov? Which Divinity do you pay fealty to?” But, of course, they don’t answer. Then she laughs madly. “Oh, wait. Wait! I forgot! I forgot, I forgot, I forgot!”

Twenty yards away.

“Forgot what!” screams Mulaghesh.

“I forgot I
do
know Ovski’s Candlelight!” cries Shara happily. “I read that one long ago!”

She faces the platoon of armored soldiers—
Scarecrows,
she thinks—and remembers the nature of this miracle:
All hearts are like candles. Focus the light of yours, and it will remove all barriers.

Shara imagines the soldiers as a metal wall before her.

The soldiers flicker with a golden honey light. Then …

It’s as if an immense column of burning wind blows through them: the soldiers glow red hot, blur …

… and suddenly there is an enormous flock of starlings in the street, screeching and cheeping. They flutter up through the canyon of buildings and into the sky, a dark thundercloud raining brown feathers.

The armored soldiers have collapsed into a sloshing lake of molten metal. Only the bottom part of their legs remain, sticking up out of the bright yellow-red tide like nine pairs of forgotten metal boots.

Shara stares at her hands. Written on the inside of her palms in large type is:
i don’t fucking believe it.

“I don’t fucking believe it!” screams Mulaghesh. The soldiers shout in triumph and disbelief, banging their bolt-shots on the embassy wall.

Three more armored soldiers turn and march down the street toward them. The repeat shooters turn and begin to fire, and the metal soldiers quiver as if cold, but do not stop.

Miracles are just formal requests,
Shara thinks wildly.
It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you do it right!

“What is she shouting about?” says Mulaghesh.

“Something about filling out forms?” says a soldier, bewildered.

Shara points at the leftmost armored soldier.
You’re a person wearing armor,
she thinks at it,
but it’s just made of spoons!

The armored soldier appears to dissolve like a child’s sandcastle struck with a wave, collapsing into a cloud of thousands of tumbling metal spoons that go clanking to the cement. Another burst of starlings, which wheel away into the darkening sky.

Shara bursts out laughing and claps like a child at a magic show. “What the
hells
?” says Mulaghesh. Shara points at the next two and shouts, “Spoons! Spoons!” and both of them dissolve as well. More starlings come fluttering out, as if their roosts have collapsed beneath them.

“It’s easy!” shouts Shara. “It’s easy once you think about it! I just never thought about it the right way! There are so many muscles you can flex, you just don’t know about them!”

Then the sky flickers: it’s like the sky is a paper backdrop, and someone behind it—someone very big—just touched it.

There is a pulse in the air that only Shara seems to feel.

She hears Kolkan’s voice softly whisper in her ear,
Olvos? Is that you?

Shara stops smiling.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, dear.”

“What is it?” asks Mulaghesh.

The voice inside Shara’s head says,
Olvos? What are you doing? Why did you not help us?

“What’s going on?” asks Mulaghesh, impatient.

“He knows I’m here,” says Shara. “Kolkan knows I’m here.”

* * *

“Are you sure you aren’t just hallucinating?” asks Mulaghesh.

The voice says,
Olvos? Sister-wife? Why do you hide from me, from us?

“I’m positive,” says Shara. “I don’t think I could hallucinate something this strange.”

“What are you going to do?”

Shara rubs her chin. “I will have to make my own fortifications against this particular assault.” She turns to face the city.
But why does he think,
she wonders,
that I am Olvos?

She feels something like a hand reach into her mind to try to grasp this thought.
Olvos?
says the voice.
Is it really you? Are you hurt like we are?

She must clear her mind. She has to clear her mind.

She begins on the physical reality around her: the soldiers are purely physical creations, so she unrolls the street running along the embassy walls (the Saypuri soldiers stare as the stone and asphalt vanish), and fills it up with freezing water:
Water so cold it will shatter metal. …

A thick ribbon of fog now lies in front of the embassy. Two armored soldiers advance out of the ruin of a shop; the repeat shooters fire, briefly, before the soldiers step into the lake of swirling, freezing mist; there is the hissing sound of rapidly contracting metal, and the soldiers glaze over with frost. The next burst of shot from the repeat shooters causes them to explode like crashing mirrors, and hundreds of brown starlings take to the sky.

The voice—or is it two voices?—inside her mind asks,
Why do you fight us? Have you done something wrong?

I must construct barriers,
thinks Shara.
I must keep it out. …

Information, Shara realizes, can be received by so many different channels, and so few channels speak to one another: just as an antennae cannot receive a telegram, a radio transmitter cannot make sense of a simple document, even though it is all just information, really. The human brain has such a limited number of channels in—so few antennae, so few receivers. … Yet Shara’s own brain, she now realizes, has just had an untold number of antennae and receivers added, so that all the information she thought was hidden can now course directly into her mind.

Shara looks out at Bulikov and sees the machinery behind the reality, the many wheels and gears and supports, and she sees how ruined and broken it all is. How phenomenally complicated this city was before the Blink—more than anyone could have guessed!
This is what Taalhavras made,
she thinks,
before he died. … A chain of miracles upon miracles
forever operating behind the scenes.

She sets to work building a shelter out of the ruins of the sub-reality around her. To Mulaghesh and the soldiers, it looks as if Shara is conducting an invisible orchestra, but they cannot see the impossibly heavy pieces she is moving into place, the Divine structures hidden to their eyes.
It’s like making a lean-to,
thinks Shara,
out of the ruins of a bridge.

The voice in her head says,
Why do you run from us? Why did you abandon us, Olvos?

Shara wonders,
What in the world is going on?

She maneuvers one giant piece to block a gap, and just as she does the world goes black, and she sees …

… Kolkan standing before her on a sea of darkness, his gray robes rippling.
They imprisoned me,
he whispers.
They locked me away, stuffed me in a tiny corner of the universe, just for trying to help my people. … And then Jukov came to me. He visited me in my cell, and he hurt me. He hurt me so much. …