City of Stairs (51 page)

The hills beyond the walls of the governor’s quarters are given soft shape by the stars above. The moon is a white smudge behind the clouds; the road, a bone-colored ribbon.

There is a footfall from the darkness. Shara looks up and confirms no guards are posted. “Are you there?” she asks.

An answering whisper: “This way.” At the edge of the forest, a gleam of candlelight flickers and is quickly hidden.

Shara walks toward where she saw the candlelight. Someone throws back a hood, revealing the sheen of a bald pate. As she nears she can make out the face of the female monk from the clinic.

“Who are you?” asks Shara.

“A friend,” the monk says. She gestures to Shara to come closer. “Thank you for coming. Are you alone?”

“I am.”

“Good. I will take you the rest of the way. Please, follow me closely. Very few have taken this road; it can be somewhat dangerous.”

“Who are you taking me to?”

“To another friend. There are still many questions you have—I could see it in you. I know someone who might be able to answer some of them.” She turns and leads Shara into the forest.

Spokes of moonlight slide over the monk’s shoulders as they walk. “Can you tell me anything more?”

“I could tell you
much
more,” says the monk. “But it would do you no good.”

Shara, irritated, contents herself to follow.

The road bends and winds and turns. She questions the wisdom of meeting outside the governor’s quarters; then she notes that she never noticed the forest here was quite so large. …

The terrain slopes up. Shara and the monk make a careful passage across rocky trenches, white stone creek beds, through copses of pines.

Shara thinks,
When did they plant pines out here?

Her labored breath creates huge clouds of frost. They crest a stony hill, and she looks out on a snow-laden, ivory landscape.
But I thought it was getting warmer. …
“What is this place?”

The monk gestures forward without looking back. Her bare feet make tiny tracks in the snow.

They tread down over the frozen hills, across a frozen river. The world is alabaster, colorless, curls and slashes of moonlight and ice on a background of black. But ahead, a bright red fire flickers in a copse of pine trees.

I know this,
Shara thinks.
I’ve read about this.

They enter the copse of trees. Logs are laid by the bonfire to serve as seats, and a stone shelf leans against the trunk of a tree, bearing small stone cups and a crude tin kettle. Shara expects someone to greet them, perhaps stepping out from behind a tree, but there is no one.

“Where are they?” asks Shara. “Where is the friend you brought me to meet?”

The monk walks to the stone shelf and pours two cups.

“Are they not here yet?” asks Shara.

“They are here,” says the monk. She takes off her robe. Her back is naked: below her robe she wears nothing but a skirt of furs.

She turns and hands Shara one of the cups: it is warm, as if it has been sitting on an open flame.
But it was only ever held in her hand,
thinks Shara.

“Drink,” says the monk. “Warm yourself.”

Shara does not. She stares at the woman suspiciously.

“Do you not trust me?” asks the monk.

“I don’t know you.”

The monk smiles. “Are you so sure?” The firelight catches her eyes, which glint like bright orange jewels. Even when she steps away from the fire, her face appears lit by a warm, fluttering light.

A light in the dark.

No,
thinks Shara.
No. No, it can’t be.

“Olvos?” she whispers.

“Such a wise girl,” the monk says, and sits.

* * *

“How … ?” says Shara. “How … ?”

“You still have not drunk,” says Olvos. “You should try it. It’s good.”

Shara, mystified, drinks from the stone cup and finds the Divinity is correct: the concoction is warm and spicy and feels like it puts a small, soft ember in her belly. Then she realizes it’s familiar: “Wait. … Is this
tea
?”

“Yes. Sirlang, from Saypur. I’ve come to be rather fond of it, myself. Though it can be an utter bitch to get the good stuff.”

Shara gapes at her, the cup, the fire, the woods behind her. She manages, “But I … I thought you were gone.”

“I
am
gone,” says Olvos. “Look behind you again, around you. Do you see Bulikov? No. I am gone, and happy to
be
gone. It’s pretty pleasant to be here, alone with my thoughts, away from all that noise.”

Shara is silent as she thinks,
After all this, have I walked right into a trap?

“You’re now wondering,” says Olvos, “if I have brought you here to exact revenge on you.”

Shara cannot hide her alarm.

“Well, I am
gone
, but I am still a Divinity. And this is
my
place.” Olvos pats the log she sits on. “I can never lose this. And those who join me here, their hearts cannot be hidden from me. You wonder, Shara Komayd, great-granddaughter of Avshakta si Komayd, the last Kaj of Saypur, if I have lured you away from the Continent to get you on your own and destroy you—to destroy you for your family’s crimes, for your crimes, for the countless destruction your wars and laws have incurred.” Olvos’s eyes gleam bright, like rings of fire half hidden below her lids; then the fire in her eyes dims. “But that, as they say, would be stupid. A very stupid, silly, useless thing to do. And I am a bit disappointed you would expect such things from me. After all, I left the world when the Continent chose to begin its empire. Not just because it was
wrong
, but because it was a very shortsighted decision: time has a way of returning all heedlessness to those who commit it … even if they are Divine.”

Shara is still trying to come to grips with the reality of what is happening, yet Olvos is so profoundly unlike
anything
she expected a god to be that she is not sure what to think: Olvos’s manner is like that of a fishwife or a seamstress rather than a Divinity. “That’s why you left the Continent? Because you disagreed with the Great Expansion?”

Olvos produces a long, skinny pipe. She holds its bowl directly into the fire, puffs at it, and watches Shara as if wondering what sort of company she’ll be. “You read Mr. Pangyui’s notes, didn’t you?”

“Y-Yes? How did y—”

“Then you know he suspected that the minds of the Divine were not always their own, one could say.”

“He thought that … that there was some kind of subconscious vote taking place.”

“A crude term for it,” says Olvos. “But not wholly inaccurate. We are—or
were—
Divinities, Shara Komayd: we draw power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.” Olvos uses the end of her pipe to draw a half-circle in the mud. “A people believe in a god”—she completes the circle—“and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have
weight
. They have
momentum
. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.” Olvos stares into the fire, rubbing the mud off of her pipe with her thumb and forefinger.

“Ideas like what?” asks Shara.

“I first noticed it during the Night of the Convening. I felt ideas and thoughts and compulsions in me that were not my own. I did things not because I wanted to do them, but because I felt I
had
to—like I was a character in a story someone else was writing. That night I chose, like all the other Divinities, to unite, form Bulikov, and live in what we thought was peace. … But I was profoundly troubled by this experience.”

“Then how could you leave?” asks Shara. “If you were tied or tethered to the wishes of your people, how could they let you abandon the world?”

Olvos gives Shara a scornful look:
Can’t you put this together yourself?

“Unless,” Shara says, “your people
asked
you to leave. …”

“That they did.”

“Why would they do
that
?”

“Well, I thought I had done a pretty good job with them,” says Olvos, with a touch of pride. She glances at Shara’s cup. “Did you drink all of that
already
?”

“Erm … Yes?”

“My goodness.” She shakes her head, tutting, and pours Shara another cup. “That should have been enough to bring a horse back from the dead. Anyway … If you do these things well—and you, as a bit of a politician, probably understand—they sort of start to perpetuate themselves. I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn’t need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action. But when I started to feel this … this
momentum
inside of me—these ideas that pushed and pulled at me, threatening to pull me with them and pull everyone else with me—I consulted with my closest followers, and they just”—Olvos is grinning with gleeful incredulity—“they just said they didn’t really need me anymore.”

“You’re
joking
.”

“No,” says Olvos. “Humanity’s relationship with the Divine is one of mutual give and take, and we mutually opted to part ways. But this perpetuation—setting up a way of thinking, and just letting it run—it doesn’t always yield
good
results.” She shakes her head. “Poor Kolkan … He never really understood himself, or his people.”

“He spoke to me,” says Shara. “He told me he had depended on you, in a way.”

“Yes,” says Olvos sadly. “Kolkan and I were the first two Divinities. We were the first to really figure out how it all worked, I suppose. But Kolkan always had a little more trouble running his show. He tended to let his people tell him what to do, and I watched from afar as he sat down and listened to them. … Like I told them all when I left, it just wasn’t going to end up well.”

“So you don’t think Kolkan was wholly responsible for what he did?”

Olvos sniffs. “Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that
they
are important. You don’t get punished for doing something
un
important, after all. Just look at the Kolkashtanis—they think the whole world was set up to shame and humiliate and punish and tempt them. … It’s all about them, them, them, them! The world is full of
bad
things,
hurtful
things, but it’s still all about them! And Kolkan just gave them what they wanted.”

“That’s … madness.”

“No, it’s
vanity
. And I have watched from the sidelines as this same vanity guided the Divinities onto paths that would bring ruin upon them and their people—vanity I predicted, and warned them about, but that they chose to ignore. This vanity is
not
new, Miss Komayd. And it has not stopped because we Divinities are gone. It has simply migrated.”

“Migrated to Saypur, you mean?”

Olvos bobs her head from side to side—not quite a yes, not quite a no. “But we now find ourselves at a turning point in history, when we can either listen to our vanity, and continue down the path we’re on … or choose a new path altogether.”

“So you have come to
me
to try and change this?” asks Shara.

“Well,” says Olvos, “you weren’t exactly my
first
choice. …”

Something in the fire pops; sparks go dancing to hiss in the mud.

“You approached Efrem, didn’t you,” says Shara.

“I did,” says Olvos.

“You met him on the river while he was sketching, and spoke to him.”

“I did a lot more than
that
,” admits Olvos. “I do intervene now and again, Shara Komayd. Well, maybe not intervene
—
‘nudge’ might be a better term for it. For Efrem, I helped guide his research, prod him in the directions he would find most useful, checked in on him now and again.”

“He would have loved to talk to you as I am now.”

“I’ve no doubt. He was such a bright, compassionate creature, I hoped he would find a way to divert all the discontent that was building. But it seems I was wrong. Such old rage can only be exorcised through violence, perhaps. Though I still hope we can disprove this, eventually.”

Shara drinks the rest of her tea and remembers something that troubled her when she first read his journal. “Was it you who placed the journal from the Kaj’s soldier on his desk? Because I knew Efrem, and he would never overlook or miss something so important.”

Olvos nods, her face distressed. “I did. And that might have been my biggest oversight. I had hoped he would understand the grave sensitivity of those letters. But he did not. He felt that information should be shared with
everyone.
 … He did not keep any one specific truth—just the truth as he saw it. It was his greatest virtue, and it was his undoing.”

“But … but what could have been so important in those letters?” asks Shara. “The black lead?”

Olvos sets her pipe down. “No, no. Well, a little … Let me ask you—do you not wonder, Miss Shara Komayd, how your great-grandfather managed to
produce
the black lead?”

“He experimented on his household’s
djinnifrit
—didn’t he?”

“He did,” Olvos says grimly. “That is true. But even so, the odds that he would ever produce such a material are extremely unlikely, are they not?”

Shara’s brain rifles through everything she has memorized, but finds nothing.

“Would you not say,” Olvos asks slowly, “that the creation of the black lead was nothing short of
miraculous
?”

The word dislodges a stone in her mind that tumbles into her sea of thoughts.

Efrem’s writings:
We do not know much about the Kaj. We do not even know who his mother was.