City of Stairs (9 page)

“Votrov. Why?”

Shara slowly sits back in her chair. “And his name … His first name.”

“Yeah?”

“Would it happen to be Vohannes?”

Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow. “You know him?”

Shara does not answer.

The words come crashing back down on her as if it’d only been yesterday.

If you were to come with me to my home, I’d make you a princess,
he’d said to her when she saw him last. And she’d answered:
What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that.
And the cocksure grin had melted off his face, his blue eyes crackling with brittleness like ice dunked in warm water, and she’d known then that she’d hurt him, really, genuinely hurt him, found someplace deep inside him no one knew about and burned it into ash.

Shara shuts her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, dear.”

* * *

Columns pierce the gray sky again and again, stabbing it, slashing it. It bleeds soft rain that makes the crumbling building faces glisten and sweat. Though the war that littered this city with such wounds is long over, the flesh and bones of the buildings remain broken and exposed. Desiccated children clamber across the ruin of a temple, its collapsed walls dancing with the twinkles of campfires, its cavities and caves echoing with cries. The wretches make apish gestures to passersby and harangue them for coin, for food, for a smile, for a warm place to sleep; yet there is a glitter of metal in their sleeves, tiny blades hidden among the filthy cloth, waiting to repay any kind gesture with quick violence. The new generation of Bulikov.

Those few who see Sigrud pass say nothing: they make no plea, no threat. They watch silently until he is gone.

A crowd of women cross the street before him, shoulders hunched, humble and eyes averted, their figures buried under piles of dark wool. Their necks and shoulders and ankles are carefully obscured. The putter and squeak of cars. The stink of horseshit. Pipes protrude from buildings several stories up, sending waste raining down on sidewalks. A city too old and too established for proper plumbing. Colonnades stacked with faceless statues stare down at him, eyeless, watchful. Squatting, thick-walled structures with twisting loggias ring with music and laughter, homes of the powerful, the wealthy, the hidden. On their balconies men in thick black coats dotted with medals and insignias glower at Sigrud, wondering,
What is this doing here? How could a mountain savage be allowed into this neighborhood?
Next to these bulbous mansions might be a puzzle piece of building facade, half a wall with windows empty, a wooden staircase clinging to the frames. And beyond these are winding rivers of stairs, some rounded and aged, some sharp and fresh, some wide, some terribly narrow.

Sigrud walks them all, following his marks. The man and woman flee from the university and do not lead him on an especially merry chase: they are not professionals, and are quite blind to the art of the street. They bicker loudly, then softly, then loudly again. Though Sigrud keeps his distance, he hears some of it.

The man says,
This was expected. You were told this might happen.
The woman answers, first softly, then louder as she gets angry:
 … these people showing up at my place of work!
Where I spend my days, where I breakfast! Where I mopped floors for decades!
Then the man:
You knew there were dangers! You did! And you waver now? Do you not have faith?
And the woman is silent.

Sigrud rolls his one eye. The incompetence of it all is dispiriting. He’s not even sure whether he wants to bother hiding himself anymore. His burgundy coat is rolled up and stuffed under one armpit, since this of course is a conspicuous flag, but still, a six-and-a-half-foot man would normally never lend himself well to obfuscation. But Sigrud knows that crowds are much like individual people: they have their own psychology, their own habits, their own natures. They unthinkingly assume specific structures—channels and corridors of traffic, bends around blockades—and break apart these structures in a manner that almost seems choreographed when you watch it. It’s simply a matter of placing yourself within these structures, like hovering in the still side of a school of fish as it twists and darts across the ocean floor. Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.

The couple stops at one teetering, oddly rounded apartment building. The woman, gray-faced, twitching, nods as the man whispers his final orders to her. Then she enters. From the cover of a stable, Sigrud makes careful note of the address.

“Hey!” A stableboy emerges from a side door. “Who’re you? What are you—?”

Sigrud turns and looks at the stableboy.

The boy falters. “Uh. Well …”

Sigrud turns back. The woman’s companion is starting off. Sigrud stalks out of the stable and follows.

This chase is … a little different. The man plunges ahead into a part of Bulikov that was obviously much more ravaged by the Blink, the War, and whichever other catastrophes happened to get wedged within that rocky period of world history. The number of staircases practically triples, or quadruples—it’s a little hard for Sigrud’s eye to count them. Spiral staircases rise up to halt completely in midair, some only ten feet off the ground, some twenty or thirty. There is something faintly osseous about them, resembling the rippled horns of some massive, exotic ruminant. Birds and cats have nested in the top steps of some. In one ridiculous instance, a huge, basalt staircase slashes down through an entire hill, sinking a sheer forty feet into the earth in a veritable chasm that has apparently managed to undermine several small houses, whose remains totter unnervingly on the lip of the gap.

Sigrud’s quarry, thankfully, never mounts or starts down any of these truncated steps, but trots through the alleys and the streets, which are often just as schizophrenic as the stairs. Sigrud casts a bemused eye on the buildings that have seemingly been blended into other buildings, like toys shoved together by a child: what appears to be a rather stodgy law firm has one-quarter of a bathhouse sticking out of its side like some kind of unseemly growth. In some places these invasive buildings have been messily excised: a chunk of a shoe store has obviously just been tugged out from where it was previously lodged inside of a bank.

The pace of the hunt quickens. Sigrud’s quarry zags left. Sigrud follows. His quarry ducks through the crumbling remains of a large wall. Sigrud stalks through a different gap, but maintains visual contact. His quarry—whom Sigrud is almost positive remains ignorant to his surveillance—sprints up a wobbly staircase to mount the roof of an old church. Sigrud—with some strategic, ginger steps—hops up after him, closing the gap.

Sigrud crests the top and peers out over the roof. He sees his quarry running toward the edge, but the man shows no sign of stopping. Not when he is thirty feet away from the edge, or twenty, or five, and then he …

Jumps.

The last thing Sigrud sees of the man is the flutter of his gray coat as he plummets to the street below, arms outstretched and fingers spread.

Sigrud frowns, climbs onto the roof, and walks to the edge.

The street is nearly forty feet below. Yet there is no body, nor any mark of one ever being there. There is nothing the man could have jumped to: all the walls near this spot are blank and sheer. It is as if he fell, and then simply …

Vanished.

Sigrud grunts. This is inconvenient.

He considers trying to scale the wall and decides this would be unwarranted. So he returns down the stairs and out to the street.

There is no one, nothing. This part of Bulikov appears powerfully deserted.

Sigrud touches each cobblestone. None of them are warm; all of them are solid.

He sighs.

Working with Shara Komayd has introduced Sigrud to many confounding events, and dozens of things wondrous and terrifying and strange. However, he has never found any of them particularly awe-inspiring or moving: he chiefly finds them to be irritating.

He turns around to start back to the embassy. But as he does, he gets the queerest feeling.

Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.

It is virtually impossible to gauge the amount of damage caused by the Blink.

This is not just a measure of the Blink’s destruction, which was huge: rather, the nature of the Blink’s destruction is of a sort so bizarre and so complex that we—Saypuri, Continental, or anyone who lived through it or came after it—cannot understand what was lost.

The facts, however, are simple, though perhaps superficially so:

In 1639, after having successfully completed the first assassination of a Divinity and overthrowing the Continental outposts in Saypur, Avshakta si Komayd, freshly crowned as Kaj, assembled a small, ragged fleet of ships and sailed for the Continent—then called the Holy Lands, of course.

The Holy Lands were utterly unprepared for such an action: having lived under the protection of the Divinities for nearly a thousand years, it was inconceivable that anyone, let alone a Saypuri, could invade the Holy Lands, or—much more inconceivable—actually kill a Divinity. The Holy Lands and the remaining three Divinities (as Olvos and Kolkan had departed long ago) had grown quite concerned about the long absence of the Divinity Voortya, not aware that Voortya and her forces had been slaughtered in the Night of the Red Sands in 1638. So when a fleet was spotted off the south shore of Ahanashtan, the Divinities reacted quickly, thinking it to be their missing friends.

Such was their downfall. The Kaj had anticipated a coastal battle, and had outfitted several ships with the same machinery he’d used to assassinate Voortya. And the Divinities’ concern was so great that it was Taalhavras himself, the leader of the Divinities, who met the fleet in the port of Ahanashtan.

The recorded impressions of the Kaj’s sailors vary widely on exactly what happened. Some reported seeing “a man-like figure, twelve feet high, with the head of an eagle, standing on the port.” Others reported “an enormous statue, vaguely mannish, covered in scaffolding, yet it somehow managed to move.” And others reported only seeing a “beam of blue light stretching up to the heavens.”

However Taalhavras presented himself, the Kaj directed his machinery at him and immediately struck him down, just as he had Voortya.

But since Taalhavras was the builder god, all that he had built vanished the moment he vanished; and judging by the enormous devastation of the Blink, he had built much more than anyone knew. Taalhavras had, in fact, made significant alterations to the very fundaments of the Continent’s reality. The nature of these alterations probably cannot be understood by mortal minds; however, once these alterations vanished—one imagines supports, struts, bolts and nuts and so on falling out of place—the very reality of the Holy Lands abruptly changed.

The Kaj’s sailors did not witness the Blink: they recorded only experiencing a terrible storm that kept them from landing for two days and three nights. They assumed that it was a Divine defense, and they only persisted through the determination of the Kaj himself. They could not know the cosmic collapse occurring mere miles away.

Whole countries disappeared. Streets turned to chasms. Temples turned to ash. Stars vanished. The sky clouded over, marking the permanent change to the Continent’s climate—what was once a dry, sandy, sunny place would soon be cloudy, wet, and bitterly cold, much like the Dreyling lands to the north. Buildings of Divine nature imploded into a single stone, taking all their occupants with them to what one can only assume was a terrible fate. And Bulikov, being the holiest of cities, and a recipient of much of Taalhavras’s attentions, contracted inward by miles in one brutal moment, disrupting the very nature of the city, and losing hundreds of thousands of people, if not much more, to ends best left unimagined. The Seat of the World itself, the temple and meeting place of the Divinities, completely disappeared, leaving behind only its bell tower, which shrank to only a few stories tall.

In short, a whole way of life—and the history and knowledge of it—died in the blink of an eye.

—“Upon History Lost,” Dr. Efrem Pangyui, 1682

T
he tiny graphite strokes blend together in the light of the lamps. Shara
tsks,
lights another lamp, sets it at her desk, and tries to read again.
Damn this city,
she thinks.
How backward must they be that our own embassy can’t get enough gas to light a room?

She’s transcribed the professor’s code on a number of papers, trying to render truth from the twisted characters like squeezing water from a stone. A cup of noonyan tea cools beside the documents. (Shara has decided to ease up on the sirlang: if she keeps going at this rate, she’ll exhaust the embassy’s stores in a week.) She bends so close to the documents that the heat from the lamps is insufferable.

It is an address, she thinks. She can tell just by how the characters are arranged. She has broken a bit of the code already, but she suspects it is not really a code in any conventional sense: rather, the message has been translated into a mash-up of foreign alphabets. What she believes to be the consonants all have the top half of Gheshati, a dead alphabet from Western Saypur. And though it took her hours to figure out, the bottom halves, she thinks, are all in Chotokan, an incredibly rare and borderline impenetrable language from the mountains east of the Dreyling Republics.

Now she just has to figure out the vowels.

And then the numbers.

Oh, the numbers …

Her admiration for the professor has dimmed, somewhat:
Pangyui, you cryptic old lizard. …

She tosses back tea and sits back in her chair. She tries to believe that this is taking her so long because the code itself is difficult. She does not want to entertain the notion that she might, in truth, be deeply distracted.

He’s here. He’s here in the city, with me. Maybe blocks away. Why didn’t I consider this? How could I have been so stupid?

* * *

It had started, like so many of Shara’s lifelong pursuits, with a game.

The first days of any term at Fadhuri Academy in Ghaladesh were always the tensest. The bright young stars of every county and island in Saypur found themselves crowded together into Fadhuri’s hallowed halls and quickly discovered that, despite everything their upbringings told them, they might not actually be special: every student here was a genius back at home, so every student arrived wondering if they would prove to be exceptional among the truly exceptional.

As a way to relieve the tension, the school tradition was to hold a Batlan tournament on the weekend before term really started. It became such a popular event that parents encouraged their children to drown themselves in strategies and plays before arriving, perhaps assuming, erroneously, that a high place in the tournament would ensure better grades and a brighter future.

Shara Komayd, then sixteen, was no such student. Not only was she unshakably confident that she was the most brilliant child on the grounds, but she had always held Batlan in some contempt, thinking it a showy game where chance was far too much of a factor: the roll of the dice at each turn determined each player’s capabilities, and it
did
make the game more spontaneous, but it removed a lot of the players’ control. She had always preferred Tovos Va, a somewhat similar game that was far more cerebral and much more slow-paced, rewarding plans that thought several plays ahead. However, she rarely got the chance to play it: Tovos Va was a Continental game, and was unheard-of in Saypur.

But the lessons she’d learned in Tovos Va
did
translate to Batlan, to an extent—though to mitigate the factor of chance, you had to plan very, very far ahead. If you did so early enough, and played with enough foresight, decimating any normal Batlan player was child’s play.

On that first weekend before term, Shara tore through the Batlan rankings like a shark. She did not win: she
annihilated
the other players. Since she essentially won the games in the first dozen plays, and had to play out the next three dozen before taking the board, she found herself increasingly contemptuous of the other players, flailing in her traps as they thought they were playing one game when in truth they were playing another. And she let her contempt show: she sighed, rolled her eyes, sat with her chin in her hand, and groaned as her opponents made one blind, stupid move after the other.

The other students began to watch her with naked hate. When they discovered she was sixteen, two years younger than any normal Fadhuri freshman, the hate curdled to rage.

Shara became so sure that she’d utterly sweep the tournament that she barely paid attention to the standings. When she finally glanced at them, she saw another player was accomplishing nearly the same feat she was, eating through the players from the other side of the hall:
votrov
.

She leaned back in her chair and scanned the room to get a look at him. It did not take long for her to find him.

He was, to her surprise, not a Saypuri at all, but a Continental: a tall, thin, pale young man with blond-red hair, a strong jaw, and bright blue eyes.

“I’ve made my play,” said Shara’s opponent.

“Shh,” said Shara, who wished to watch this boy more.

“What?” her opponent said, incensed.

“Oh, fine,” said Shara, and she made two plays that would probably destroy him in the next round. Then she returned to looking at the Continental.

It was not uncommon for rich Continentals to send their children to Saypur for education. Saypur, after all, was now the wealthiest nation in the world, and the Continent was still quite dangerous. The boy certainly had an aristocratic look about him: he slouched in his chair with an air of bored pleasure, and he talked to his opponents constantly, merrily gibing them as though at a coffeehouse.

The boy looked up, and saw Shara watching. He grinned, and winked.

Disconcerted, Shara returned to her game.

Finally, after two hours of play, and after laying waste to half the students at Fadhuri, Shara found herself sitting down opposite the Continental. They were the only two players left; the rest of the school and faculty stood around them, watching.

Shara stared mistrustfully at the Continental boy, who sat with a cocksure grin, stretched his back, popped his knuckles, and said, “I’m quite looking forward to my first actual game, aren’t you?” He started laying out his Batlan pieces.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Shara as she did the same.

“Mm. Maybe,” he said. “Tell me. Have you ever heard of Tovos Va?”

Something inside of Shara squeaked. She hesitated very slightly before laying out the next piece.

“It’s very popular where I’m from,” said the boy brightly. “Why, back in Bulikov, we had a yearly tournament. Now, which ones did I win? There were three tournaments I won in a row. I just can’t quite remember which ones. …”

Shara finished laying out her pieces. “I suggest, sir,” she said, “that you play, rather than talk.”

He looked at her arrangements and laughed. “So nice to see my suspicions were right! That looks a little like Mischeni’s Feint,” he said. “Or it
would
be, if this was Tovos Va. Good thing this is Batlan, eh?” He finished laying out his own pieces.

Shara glanced at them. “And
that,
” she said, “is Strovsky’s Curl.”

He grinned triumphantly.

“Or you would like me to think it is,” said Shara, “though I suspect in three plays it will be a Vanguard Block, and after that, a basic flank.”

The boy blinked as if he’d been slapped. His grin vanished.

“But good thing this is
Batlan,
eh?” said Shara savagely. She leaned in. “You look so much prettier,” she said, “with your face wiped clean of smugness.”

The students around them
ooooooh
ed.

The boy stared at her. He laughed once, in disbelief. Then: “Roll the dice.”

“Gladly,” said Shara.

She dropped the ivories, and the game began.

It was to be a four-hour slugfest: a game of endless beginnings, of defensive positions, of recombinations and rearrangements. It was, one teacher said, the most conservative game of Batlan he had ever seen played: but, of course, they were not really playing Batlan at all, but a different game altogether, a mix of Batlan and Tovos Va they were inventing as they fought.

He talked to her constantly, a ceaseless burble of chatter. For three hours Shara resisted, ignoring his gibes, but finally the Continental boy asked, “Tell me—is your life so devoid of entertainment that you have enough time to study obscure, foreign games?” He made a play that appeared aggressive, but that Shara knew was a feint. “Have you no friends? No family?”

“You assume your game is difficult to learn,” said Shara, nettled. “To me, your game and your culture are childish frippery.” She ignored his feint and pressed toward a front in a manner that would look suicidal to anyone who didn’t know what was going on.

He laughed. “It talks! The little battle-ax talks!”

“I am sure that to someone of your position, anyone who doesn’t tolerate each of your whims with blind submission must seem positively inconceivable.”