“Why?” snorts Tavaan. “To try something damned desperate.”
“That’s because we’re damned desperate,” says Malwina. “Tavaan, listen to me—he tried to make a seneschal.”
Tavaan’s eyes widen. “He what?”
“You heard me. It sounds like it didn’t go right, but the fact that he even tried…”
“He thinks he’s as powerful as a Divinity,” says Tavaan.
“And he almost is. It almost worked. We’re not winning this fight alone.”
“Is that why you asked for me to come?” Sigrud says to Tavaan. “To help you plan a strategy?”
Tavaan looks surprised. “Me? I didn’t ask you to come here.”
Sigrud turns to Malwina, frowning. “You said…You said she wants to talk to me. Who is this ‘she’?”
Tavaan’s expression softens. “Ah. He doesn’t know.”
“No,” says Malwina darkly. “He doesn’t.” She sighs a little, then says, “The Divine children…they’re not the only people we’ve hidden here. Follow me. Just a bit farther.”
Sigrud follows her, still feeling bewildered. Between their strange journey to unlock the door under the Solda Bridge, then to travel through it to this bizarre sub-reality, and then to meet this mad-looking girl who claims to be slumber incarnate…He can’t fathom what he’s doing here or how they expect him to help, especially when he can hardly understand what’s going on at any given moment.
He sees Malwina is leading him to the far wall, where the windows are. The windows look out on a navy-blue night sky, alight with stars, but situated before the largest one in the middle is a large overstuffed chair, facing away from him.
There is someone sitting in the chair: he can see a hand on the armrest, small and brown, with ink-stained fingers.
They get closer. And then he smells something…familiar.
Tea. Pochot tea, powerful and acrid.
Ink, lots of it, thick and dark.
And then there’s the smell of very old parchment, and books, and dust, the scents of a library and all its musty tomes….
Sigrud stops walking.
“No,” he says. “No. It cannot be.”
Malwina rounds the chair, then looks over its top at him. “Come on, Sigrud,” she says gently. “Come here.”
“I can’t believe it,” he says. His face is trembling. “I…I can’t, I can’t. It is a trick.”
Malwina shakes her head. “No trick. Just come here. I’ll only be able to wake her up for a short period. So hurry.”
Wobbling, Sigrud walks over to the overstuffed chair and slowly steps around it. And he sees her.
Though she has aged, she is still very much the woman he once knew: small, unassuming, with a closed face and large eyes, magnified even larger behind her thick glasses. Her eyes are closed, as if dozing. Her face has many, many more lines than he remembers, and her hair, done up in a haphazard bun, is the sort of white one can only get prematurely, a sort of snowy mane that contrasts brilliantly with her dark skin. She wears a plain blue dress and a white button-up sweater, and she leans against the side of the chair with her temple resting against the left wing, face pinched as if the position is slightly uncomfortable to her.
The woman who made his life as he knows it now. The person who saved him from the depths of prison after he’d lost everything, and given him hope.
“Shara,” whispers Sigrud. His mouth is dry. He looks at Malwina and swallows. “How can this be? How…How can she be alive?”
Then Shara stirs, taking in a long, slow, rattling breath. She says in a croaking voice, “I’m not.” She opens her eyes, blinking in the light of the windows. “I’m not. I died, you see.”
A tricky thing, to be a politician: to plan not for tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, but for a way of life ten, twenty, fifty years down the line.
To be a politician is to plan for a reality one might not survive to see.
—MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1709
Sigrud stares at her. He simply can’t process this. Her death was something he’s lived with every day for the past month, something he woke up to in the morning and fell asleep to at night. To have it proven wrong, to have something he believed in so much blown apart like the head of a dandelion…
“Turyin…Turyin said she saw your body,” he says faintly.
“She probably did,” says Shara, soft yet amused. She sounds exhausted, though, the tone of a sick woman tolerating bedside visitors.
“They had a giant funeral for you in Ghaladesh,” he says.
“Yes, Malwina brought me the paper,” Shara says. “Such lovely flower displays…”
“And they burned you,” says Sigrud, “and put your ashes in a tomb.”
“That they did,” she says, nodding. “I am not arguing with you about any of this, Sigrud.”
“Then…Then…Then who was cremated? Whose ashes are in that urn in that tomb?”
“Mine,” says Shara. She smiles faintly, and her eyes grow a little wider. “Look at you, Sigrud….My goodness. You’re just as I remember you. It’s amazing, isn’t it.”
“Shara,” says Sigrud. “Shara, please—how…How did you survive?”
She sits up a little and gives him a level stare. “Sigrud. Listen to me. I have said this repeatedly. I did not survive. I died. And I am…I am not really Shara Komayd. I am not the woman you knew.”
Sigrud looks at Malwina. “So it is a trick.” He reaches out for Shara’s hand—she does not withdraw—and touches it. It feels warm, though the skin is soft and loose, the hand of an old woman. “But she feels real enough….”
“She is Shara,” says Malwina. “But just a moment of Shara.”
“Specifically, the moment just after the bomb went off,” says Shara. She lifts the right side of her dress. He sees drops of blood along her ribs there, tiny entry wounds and perforations.
He kneels, shocked. “Shara…You are hurt.”
“I am quite aware of that,” says Shara.
He reaches out to her wound. “Here, let me…Let me take a look at it, we can find some bandages and—”
“There’s no need. I’ve been dealing with it for weeks now.” She looks at Malwina. “It has been weeks, right?”
“Just over a month since the assassination,” says Malwina. “It’s been five days since I last woke you.”
“Oh, good,” says Shara. “Not too long, then.” She turns back to Sigrud. “Listen, Sigrud. Sigrud?”
He can’t stop staring at the wound in her side. He can’t understand any of this, so he keeps focusing on this one thing he could fix, maybe, just maybe. “I have a medical kit at the house, I could…I could…”
“Sigrud,” says Shara gently. “Please look at me, and pay attention.”
He blinks, tears himself away, and meets her gaze.
She smiles. “There. Just listen to me. The bomb did go off in Ahanashtan, yes. And I was right beside it, yes. But Malwina got to me right as the bomb went off. She couldn’t save me from its blast, couldn’t shield me from its damage—she could not stop me from dying, in other words. But she could preserve the tiniest sliver of time right as it happened. She took that tiny sliver and kept it going, perpetuating it long past when it would normally expire. And that is what you see before you now. I am not Shara, Sigrud, not truly. I am but a moment from her past, suspended here in the present, stretched out thin among all the seconds you’re experiencing.”
“Which is a tremendous violation,” says Malwina. “And a real pain in the ass to maintain.”
“Malwina bends the past around me, and through me.” Shara groans slightly, as if sensing such a bend. “Certain parts of me progress at different rates—specifically the wounded parts of me, which go very slow. It is not a state I would ever recommend
to another person.” She takes a rattling breath. “Not to disparage Malwina’s efforts, but dying is probably preferable. But she protects me, and wakes me at times for counsel. They’ve been kind enough to give me safe harbor.”
“Safe harbor,” scoffs Malwina. “It was your idea to build this little pocket reality within Tavaan in the first place. We’d all be dead if you hadn’t come up with it.”
“How much credit is owed to someone who says, ‘Do this,’ and does very little themselves is debatable,” says Shara.
“So…you can keep it going forever?” says Sigrud.
Malwina and Shara exchange a glance. “Malwina—leave us for a moment, please,” says Shara. “Sigrud and I have a lot to discuss. And much to do.”
* * *
—
Shara pulls her sweater tight around her shoulders. Sigrud drinks in how she sits, how she moves: she rubs her right wrist, which is slightly swollen with arthritis. Her legs are positioned awkwardly in the chair, placed as if to avoid putting further pressure on her back. And her eyes are so terribly sunken and tired, as if she hasn’t slept since he last saw her, in the window aboard his tiny ship outside Voortyashtan thirteen years ago.
She smiles wearily at him. “It is not all the effects of Malwina’s miracle.”
“What?”
“How I look. What Malwina’s done to me is taxing, yes, but…So was my life. I put my body through more than anyone ought to. I am old, Sigrud. Or perhaps I should say I was old. Who knows, with all this Divine trickery. But you…You are…” She searches his face, but unlike Mulaghesh, she doesn’t seem surprised by what she finds. Rather, all the pleasant bemusement evaporates from her face, leaving behind an expression he knows well—Time for business.
“Malwina mentioned you found the Salim,” says Shara. “Which means you must have talked to Turyin. So you must have received my message. Yes?”
Sigrud sits at the foot of her chair, feeling like a child listening to his grandmother tell a tale. “Yes.”
She sits back, looking pained but pleased. “Ah. Good. So satisfying when plans go right—even if you are making plans about your death.”
“You planned to die?”
“Oh, I’ve always planned to die,” says Shara. “That’s always been rather unavoidable. It’s just which death I would meet—that required some thinking. How odd it is, to know what end I found. It seems deserving, doesn’t it? After all our skullduggery, it’s a Saypuri agent who topples Komayd. I’m surprised Khadse was able to get through.”
“Through the wards around the Golden?”
“Yes. How did he manage to do it? Did you ever find out?”
“Miracles in his coat, and shoes. I used them to help Malwina get out.”
“Ah. Well. There it is.” She looks at him, and her face is no longer half so humorous: she looks hungry, and worried. “And…And Taty. You found her?”
“Yes.”
“And you and Ivanya kept her safe?” she asks quickly.
“Yes. The enemy has not been close to her yet. She’s safe in the Votrov mansion now, here in Bulikov.”
Shara lets out a long, slow sigh. “That I would not have preferred….Just like in the past, all things gather to Bulikov, friend and foe alike. But there are so few safe places in this world anymore. We must all cling to our oases. How is she doing?”
“She is…grieving,” he says. “For you, Shara.”
She sighs slowly. “Yes. As she should. The things I have put her through…”
“She is strong,” says Sigrud. “Or she is learning to be strong. But…Shara…Why did you not tell me who she was?”
“Who she was?” says Shara.
“Yes. That Taty was…” He looks at her. “That she is Divine.”
Shara is silent. Her face is grave, and she suddenly seems terribly frail.
“She is related to Malwina, isn’t she,” says Sigrud. “She looks so much like her….Taty is her sister. Isn’t she?”
Shara’s mouth works, as if disliking the taste of the words she is about to say. “Yes,” she says softly. “Yes, clever Sigrud, you are right. They are twins, in fact. Not identical, but twins.”
There’s a long, long silence.
“Malwina is the child of the past,” says Sigrud. “And Taty…Taty is the Divine child of the future. Isn’t she?”
Something in Shara’s face seems to crumple at these words.
“It was something Malwina mentioned,” Sigrud says. “About domains. That is how Taty can sometimes know what is about to happen.”
Shara is silent for a long time. When she finally speaks, her voice is again but a croak: “I found her in Bulikov, you know. Just before Voortyashtan. I toured the Continent, seeing how my policies were being implemented. The press raved and ranted about it. Thought I was defecting from Saypur, going to the country I truly loved. Such mad stuff…But did you know, I found that things were not much better? Not really, I mean. Refugees everywhere. Starvation. Corruption. And the orphanages…By the seas, so many orphans. I went to one orphanage, and these little creatures were hardly more than skeletons. I could see the bones in their faces, in their shoulders. And then there was this one little girl, coughing….”
She bows her head. “I was drawn to her. I didn’t know why. We talked. She said she liked math a lot. She talked on about it for a while, the way children do. And then she asked if she could come home with me. I said no, because I had to, of course—I was on a damned diplomatic tour, you see, one can’t just swing by and pick up an orphan. But her request stuck with me. The way she looked at me, the way she pleaded to come home with me…It echoed in my head. So when I returned to Ghaladesh, I found myself compelled to put things in motion, and set up an adoption.” She looks at him, her dark eyes sharp and watchful. “Malwina told you, didn’t she? About Jukov’s miracle?”
“Yes. Somewhat.”
“About how it puts the children in some kind of sleepwalking limbo? Drifting from one adoptive family to another?”
“Yes.”
She sits back in the chair. “I worry…I worry if those actions I took, if those were truly mine. Perhaps I was miraculously compelled to adopt Taty, with neither of us knowing. What a dispiriting thought that is…That all your love could be founded on lies.”
“She worries the same of you,” says Sigrud.
“What? What do you mean?”
“She figured out that you have not…not been totally honest with her about your past.”
Shara’s eyes grow wide. “Ah. Ah.” She laughs lowly. “You know, I hadn’t thought about that. It seems obvious now that, when Taty fled Ghaladesh and went out into the wide world, she’d find out who I’d been in my past life….Was she angry?”
“Yes,” says Sigrud.
“Very angry?”
“Yes.”
“She has that right, I suppose,” says Shara quietly. “It was…It was so pleasant, being a civilian. Being a mother. Being just a mother. I just…I just wanted that to keep going. I didn’t want to spoil it.”
“But it did not last,” says Sigrud. “Did it?”
“No,” says Shara. “No. It didn’t.” She licks her lips. “Taty started…predicting things. She told the groundskeeper to go home one day, and it turned out the groundskeeper’s husband was terribly sick, and if she hadn’t made it home she couldn’t have saved him. There were other incidents. She delayed the postman at the house once, just long enough for him to avoid a horrid automobile accident. And then there was her obsession with the markets….That was when I started getting worried. She was good. Too good. She wanted to start investing herself, but I put a stop to that. If people started getting suspicious…”
She shakes her head. “Thank the seas I had her in Saypur. The powers of the Divine children don’t work as well outside of the Continent. Who knows what could have happen
ed if I hadn’t taken her away. But it was around then that I started looking into the orphanages on the Continent, trying to understand if she’d been blessed or charmed somehow by some errant miracle…And that was when I discovered that Taty had been adopted before. Years before. By another family. And when I saw the picture from that adoption, she hadn’t seemed to have aged at all since then.
“I was frightened. Terrified. I reviewed everything I knew about this girl. I asked her questions about her life on the Continent. She had no memory of another family, of another life. So I went looking…and I found more.
“More children. More children who had been drifting from place to place, being taken in by countless families. I resorted to a few Ministry contacts. And that was when I found I was not the only Ministry person who’d been looking into these Continental orphans.”
“Vinya,” says Sigrud.
Shara nods, her eyes steely. “Yes. Vinya had stumbled across one of them before Bulikov. I found her paper trail. And that led me—very windingly—to the Salim. And what she had done there.” She sighs. “He hates me, you know. Our enemy. I can’t blame him. What my aunt did to him…It’s a war crime, is what it is. But he is dreadfully driven, and dreadfully clever. You’ve met him?”
He nods.
“Really,” says Shara softly. “I never have. He’s always eluded me, that bright little boy….What was he like?”
“Young,” says Sigrud. “He was like a teenager. An angry one. A furious child, lashing out. He was especially sensitive about his father—when I mentioned how you had killed him, he lost all control.”
“Did he,” she says. She cocks her head, as if making a mental note of this. “Interesting.”
“Is he…Is he the maimed Divine child you were reading about in your books?”
She fixes him with a keen stare. “How do you know about that?”
“I…I went to your house,” says Sigrud. “I saw your books in your room.”
“Oh. Right.” She relaxes. “Yes, I saw in the papers that my estate had burned down. You’ve lost none of your subtlety, Sigrud. But to answer your question…I’m not sure. I thought he was the maimed child, seeking to reconnect with all the pieces of him that were stolen away by the primary Divinities—yet I could find no evidence of such a thing. I think the primary Divinities resorted to one of their favorite tricks—they edited the past, edited the memory of the maimed child, so he would never remember what he was. So if he is this child, he himself may not know it.”
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 137
