“Then what is it?”
“It’s an…unorthodox method I picked up in Qivos. It’s useful when you’re crunched for time, though I’d prefer it if we had even more for this….Four, five hours at least. But it’s cheap. And it’s easy. You just need a dark room, some sound effects…and a philosopher’s stone.”
“A what?”
“Don’t pretend to be such an innocent lily, Governor,” says Shara. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“You drugged him?”
“Yes. It’s a powerful hallucinogenic, and it’s actually common here, though it’s not used for recreational purposes, really. Which is understandable, as it has some history on the Continent.”
Mulaghesh is still too aghast for words.
“There are dozens of stories of people using it to communicate more closely with the Divine,” Shara continues absently. “Breaking down barriers, merging with the infinite, that kind of thing. It even amplified the performance of certain miracles: acolytes of the Divine used to ingest it before performing astounding miraculous feats. Powerful substance—but still just a drug.”
“You just walk around with that kind of thing?”
“I had Pitry run and get it from the embassy. What I usually like to do is make them feel like they’re at home, suffering a fever, with their family members nearby, or at least people claiming to be their family members, and most of the time they get so agitated they wind up telling us everything. I’m not sure if that’ll be the case here, however, as the jail cell may induce a delirium of a much more…”
The boy gasps, looks at his arm, then up at the ceiling. Then he grabs the sides of his head and sobs a little.
“…nightmarish sort.”
“Isn’t this torture?”
“No,” says Shara quietly. “I’ve seen torture. This is nowhere close. And besides, this gets somewhat accurate answers. Torture usually gets you whatever you want to hear. And people are usually much more forgiving of this method. Mostly because they’re never quite sure any of it really happened.”
“I am so happy I chose to remain a soldier,” says Mulaghesh, “and never went into your line of work. This puts a bad taste in my mouth.”
“The taste would be much worse if we did not get the information, which often saves lives.”
“And this means we shed our morals at the door?”
“Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”
“Probably true. But I’m still surprised you’d do something like this.”
“Why?”
“Well…I wasn’t in Ghaladesh during the National Party scandal. But no one needed to be, to hear all about it. Everyone talked about it. The man everyone assumed would be prime minister going down in utter flames…Not to mention the party treasurer attempting suicide—nothing more ignoble than a failed noble exit. But most of all, I remember hearing about this girl who caused it all, who rocked the boat so much.”
Shara blinks slowly. Down the hall, a conversation between three policemen grows into outraged bickering.
“Not really her fault, they said,” Mulaghesh says. “Just passionate, and very young. Twenty at most, they said. She didn’t know that there were just some corruptions you don’t try and drive out, some rocks you don’t turn over.”
A furious secretary stomps out of her office and shushes the three policemen, who cast ugly looks at one another before separating.
“She let her heart guide her,” says Mulaghesh, “rather than her head. And mistakes were made.”
Shara stares into the room at the twitching boy, who now seems torn between laughing and crying.
“I always imagined,” says Mulaghesh, “that that girl just happened to be a good sort in a rotten line of work. That’s all.”
The boy leans back and rests his head against the stone wall, staring forward with blank, glassy eyes. Shara shuts the viewing slot in the door.
Enough.
“If you will excuse me,” says Shara, and she opens the door, slips in, and shuts it behind her.
Never has she been so happy to walk into a jail cell.
* * *
—
The boy tries to focus on her, and asks, “Who’s there?”
Shara shushes him. “Don’t worry. It’s me. You’re fine.”
“Who? Who is it?” He licks his lips. He’s drenched with sweat by now.
“You need to relax, please. You’re in recovery now.”
“I am?”
“Yes. You had a bad fall. Don’t you remember?”
He squints as he thinks about it. “Maybe. I think I…I fell during that party….”
“Yes. We had to put you in a cool, dark place, for you to relax. You were very agitated, but you’re going to be fine.”
“You’re sure? You’re sure I’ll be fine?”
“We’re sure. You’re at the hospital. We just have to keep you here for a little bit longer, to make sure.”
“No! No, I need to go! I have to…to…” He fumbles with his seat, trying to stand.
“What do you have to do?”
“I have to make it back to everyone.”
“To who? To your friends?”
He swallows and nods. He’s almost panting now. Shara imagines he is seeing blinding bursts of color, rippling shadows, cold fires….
“Where would you need to go?” she asks.
He struggles with this question. “N-no…I have to…to go.”
“You can’t, I’m afraid,” she says soothingly. “We have to take care of you. But we can send word to your friends. Where are they?”
“Where?” he says, confused.
“Yes. Where are your friends?”
“They’re…they’re in another place. It’s a place from another place. I think.”
“All right. And where is this place?”
He rubs his eyes. When he looks back at her, she sees he has burst several blood vessels in them.
“Where?” she says again.
“It’s not…not like that. It’s an…older place. Where things ought to be.”
“Ought to be?”
“How things ought to be.”
“But how do you get to this place to see your friends?”
“It’s hard.” He stares at the light in the ceiling. He looks away, like the sight of it pains him. Then he says, “The world is…thread-barren. Threadbare.”
“All right?”
“It’s incomplete. The city is. It has spots where a thing was, but there’s nothing there now. It got taken away. Connective…” He furrows his brow. “…tissue. But you can still get to them. To the places. If you belong. The gold is…smudged, but it still shines. The pearl has cracked. Yet it is still the city. Still what I feel”—he taps his heart—“here.”
“Is this how people disappear?”
He starts laughing. “Disappear? What a…what a ridiculous idea.” The idea tickles him so much he almost falls out of his seat.
She tries another tactic: “Why did you come to the party tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” He holds his head. “Are you sure it was tonight? It seems so long ago….”
“It wasn’t. It was just a few hours ago.”
“But I felt years pass through my fingers,” he whispers. “Like the wind.” He reflects on it. “We came for…metal.”
“For metal?”
“Yes. We were trying to buy some, but it was too slow. We didn’t like him….We hate him. But we had to have him.”
“Votrov?”
“Yes. Him.”
Shara nods. “And did the woman have anything to do with it?”
“Who?”
“The…” She thinks. “…the shally.”
“Oh. Oh, her.” He starts laughing again. “Do you know, we had no idea she’d be there at all?”
“I see,” says Shara quietly. “What do you need the metal for?”
“We can’t fly through the air on boats of wood,” says the boy. “That’s what they said. They’d all fall apart. Wood’s too weak.” His eyes trace the passage of something invisible through the air. “Oh, my goodness….How beautiful.”
Shara wonders if she perhaps overdosed him. “Did you and your friends kill Dr. Pangyui?”
“Who?”
“The shally professor.”
“Shallies don’t have professors. They haven’t the minds for it.”
“The little foreign professor who was…committing blasphemy.”
“All foreigners are blasphemous. Being alive is blasphemous, for them. There is only us. We are the children of the gods. All others are people of ash and clay. For them to live and not pay us fealty is the greatest of blasphemies.” He frowns and leans forward like his stomach hurts. “Oh. Oh, dear.”
“There was a man here, studying at the university,” says Shara slowly and clearly. “You didn’t want him here. The city didn’t, I mean. There was much outcry about it.”
The boy rubs his eyes. “My head. There’s…There’s something in my head….”
“He died, just a few days ago. Do you remember?”
He whimpers. “There’s someone in there….” He raps the side of his head with his knuckles hard enough to make a noise. “Please…Please help me get him out….”
“Someone attacked him at the university. They beat him to death.”
“Please. Please!”
“Tell me what you know about the professor.”
“He’s inside my head!” shrieks the boy. “He’s inside my head! He’s been jailed for so long! Let me see light, oh, let me see light!”
“Damn it,” says Shara. She walks to the cell door and places her hand on the viewing slot. “You want light?”
“Yes!” screams the boy. “By all the mercy of the gods, yes!”
“Fine.” Shara opens the slot. A trickle of light pokes through. “There,” she says. She turns back to him. “Now will you tell me—?”
The boy is gone.
Not just the boy: half the room is gone. It is like half the room is cut off by a standing wall of black water, only now in the center of it there is a little hole of yellow light, yellow like the sky before a storm.
“Oh,” says Shara.
The hole of yellow light widens. Shara feels like someone is reaching into her head with thick, massive hands, and opening a tiny door….
Shara just has time for one thought—I thought I dosed him—before she begins to see many things.
* * *
—
There is a tree, old and twisted.
It stands at the top of a lonely hill. Its branches form a dark dome against the yellow sky.
There is a rock below the tree. It is dark and polished, polished so deeply it looks like it is perpetually wet.
There is a face carved into the center of the stone. Shara can just barely see it….
Then comes a voice, booming like thunder:
WHO ARE YOU?
They all vanish—the hill, tree, and stone—and things shift.
* * *
—
The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.
This land is lit by an ancient fire. Yet who started it?
Below the sun is a lone, strange mountain. It rises from the earth in a straight, rigid shaft. Its top is smooth and rounded—not unlike the stone she just saw—and its sides are straight and rippled. There is something fiercely, disturbingly organic about the mountain, though it might simply be how its smooth form looks in the shuddering light of the sun.
Then the voice again:
HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?
Again, the scene vanishes.
* * *
—
A hillside swells before her, lit with firelight. It is night. Shadows leap about her: faces, hands, all feral, all twisted. Above her is the moon, huge and swollen like a spider’s egg. The moon appears to balance on the top of the hill, and she thinks she can make out a figure with a tricorn hat dancing before it, thrusting something up to the sky—a jug?—as if asking the moon itself to partake.
Starlings pour across the night sky in a dark, cheeping flood.
I CANNOT SEE YOU. COME CLOSER TO ME.
The darkness vanishes. She feels herself pulled away.
* * *
—
A road on a plain. Again, the yellow sky lit by a sun with the light of a dying torch. Besides this, there is nothing but the dusty road and the plain.
She is pulled along the road, like she is flying mere inches above the earth.
Hills swell in the distance, lumpen and yellow and barren. She is ripped toward them as if pulled by a string, and she flies up their smooth sides until she sees a crack between two of the hills, a small aperture, a stab wound, a cave.
There is something in the cave, pulling her in.
She enters. The light dies around her.
They are hollow, these hills.
No, not hills—statues.
Yet whose likeness do they mimic?
There is someone at the back of the cave. She cannot see them. She thinks she can make out a tall form, draped in gray cloth, like that of a thick robe.
She sees no face, but she feels eyes all over her.
THERE YOU ARE.
She sees no hands, but she feels like she is in someone’s grasp.
HOW DID YOU GET IN? NO, IT DOES NOT MATTER.
LET ME OUT.
She sees no movement, but she feels like the walls close in around her.
LET ME OUT. YOU MUST LET ME OUT.
A flutter of gray cloth. It grows nearer, but she still cannot see.
THEY HAD NO RIGHT. THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO DO THIS TO ME.
Shara struggles. She reaches out, tries to push away. No! No!
YOU MUST LET ME OUT.
In the darkness comes a bright flame.
* * *
—
It takes Shara a moment to realize she is standing in the jail cell. There is a blazing fire in the center of the cell, and the firelight on the stone walls gives the cell a primeval look, not unlike the visions she just saw. But when she hears Mulaghesh’s voice shouting, “Get out of there! Shara! What are you just standing there for? Get the hells out of there!” she realizes where she is.
There is another voice. Someone is screaming, she realizes.
Then the fire in the jail cell stands, looks at her, and reaches out.
She sees a face through the flames, blistering and cracking.
It is the boy, yet he burns as if doused in kerosene.
He opens his mouth to scream again. Shara watches as flames flood into his mouth, down his throat. She can see his tongue bubbling.
The door behind her flies open. Mulaghesh grabs her and jerks her into the hallway.
The cell door slams shut, its edges and cracks illumed with bright firelight. There is a pounding from the other side, and screaming. Policemen come running, but they are unsure what to do.
“Oh,” says Mulaghesh. “Oh, by the seas. What in the fucking world. Someone get some blankets! We need to put that man out! Come on, everyone, move!”
The pounding on the door weakens, softens. A smell pervades the air, bubbling lipids like a chandler’s shop. By the time the officers finally manage to bring blankets and a doctor, there is a dark smoke seeping through the top crack of the door.
T
hey prepare themselves and rip the door open. Its opposite side is black, charred. Beyond is a wall of smoke, streaming plumes like black water.
“No,” says Mulaghesh. “No. Far too late. Far too late.”
A dark, crinkled shape surfaces among the sea of black. Shara moves to look, but Mulaghesh pushes her away.
* * *
—
Wild havoc. Hallways of people screaming and shouting, fighting to get out. Shara wishes to ask, What’s all the commotion about? but she feels too stunned and slow to ask.
She sees Saypuri soldiers fighting through the crowd to get to her, feels Mulaghesh shove her into their arms, feels herself being ripped out of the stampeding throng.
She feels these things, but they do not register. I suppose this is what shock feels like, she thinks, rather curious.
She is stuffed into a car along with Mulaghesh and two soldiers. Pitry looks back at them from the driver’s seat, alarmed. Mulaghesh tells him, “The embassy. Now.” When they pull away, an armored car bearing the polis governor’s insignia on its side coughs to life and follows closely.
“Look up,” Mulaghesh tells the soldiers. “On the rooftops. And keep an eye on the alleys.”
“What are you telling them to look for?” Shara asks softly.
“Are you insane? For any more assassins! That’s, what, twice in six hours? By the seas, I don’t even know how he did it….He must have had a device on him, some flask with oil, or something….I don’t know how the police missed it, unless one of them snuck it to him while he was imprisoned. Which I wouldn’t put past them.”
Shara thinks, She thinks he attacked me.
But he didn’t. I know exactly what that was.
But I only ever read about it….
“I was turned away,” says Shara. “What did you see?”
“No, you weren’t,” says Mulaghesh. “You were looking right at him. I thought it was some kind of mind game you were playing with him. You went to the door, opened the slot so I could see in. Then you said something about light and turned around, and you both just…stared at one another.”
“For how long?”
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 15
