City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  A small Saypuri official stands in the doorway, looking nervous and alarmed. Mulaghesh recognizes him: Pitry something or other, from the embassy, one of Troonyi’s lackeys.

  Pitry swallows and totters down the aisle toward the bench.

  “Yes?” says Mulaghesh. “Is there a reason for this intrusion?”

  Pitry extends a hand, holding a paper message. Mulaghesh takes it, unfolds it, and reads:

  THE BODY OF EFREM PANGYUI HAS BEEN DISCOVERED IN HIS OFFICE AT BULIKOV UNIVERSITY. MURDER IS SUSPECTED.

  Mulaghesh looks up and realizes everyone in the room is watching her.

  This damned trial, she thinks, is now even less important than it was before.

  She clears her throat. “Mr. Yaroslav … In light of recent events, I am forced to reconsider the priority of your case.”

  Jindash and Troonyi both say, “What?”

  Yaroslav frowns. “What?”

  “Would you say, Mr. Yaroslav, that you have learned your lesson?” asks Mulaghesh.

  Two Continentals creep in through the courtroom doors. They find friends in the crowd, and whisper in their ears. Soon word is spreading throughout the courtroom audience. “… murdered?” someone says loudly.

  “My … lesson?” says Yaroslav.

  “To put it bluntly, Mr. Yaroslav,” says Mulaghesh, “will you be stupid enough in the future to publicly display what is obviously a Divinity’s sigil in hopes of drumming up more business?”

  “What are you doing?” says Jindash. Mulaghesh hands him the message; he scans it and goes white. “Oh, no … Oh, by the seas …”

  “… beaten to death!” someone says out in the audience.

  The whole of Bulikov must know by now, thinks Mulaghesh.

  “I … No,” says Yaroslav. “No, I would … I would not?”

  Troonyi has read the message. He gasps and stares at Dr. Pangyui’s empty chair as if expecting to find it occupied by his dead body.

  “Good answer,” says Mulaghesh. She taps her gavel. “Then, as the authority in this courtroom, I will set aside CD Troonyi’s estimable opinions, and dismiss your case. You are free to leave.”

  “I am? Really?” says Yaroslav.

  “Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “And I would advise you exercise your freedom to leave with all due haste.”

  The crowd has devolved into shouts and cries. A voice bellows, “He’s dead! He’s really dead! Victory, oh, glorious victory!”

  Jindash slumps in his chair as if his spine has been pulled out.

  “What are we going to do?” says Troonyi.

  Someone in the crowd is crying, “No. No! Now who will they send?”

  Someone shouts back, “Who cares who they send?”

  “Don’t you see?” cries the voice in the crowd. “They will reinvade us, reoccupy! Now they will send someone even worse!”

  Mulaghesh sets her gavel aside and gratefully lights a cigarillo.

  * * *

  How do they do it? Pitry wonders. How can anyone in Bulikov sit next to the city walls or even live with them in sight, peeking through the blinds and drapes of high windows, and feel in any way normal? Pitry tries to look at anything else: his watch, which is five minutes too slow, and getting slower; his fingernails, which are quite fine except for the pinky, which remains irritatingly rippled; he even looks to the train station porter, who keeps glaring at him. Yet eventually Pitry cannot resist, and he sneaks a glance to his left, to the east, where the walls wait.

  It is not the size of the walls he finds disturbing, though this would normally disturb him plenty. Rather, as Pitry tries to look up their vast expanse, it gets a little harder and harder for his eye to find the walls. Instead he begins to see distant hills and stars, the flicker of trees caressed by wind: suggestions of the nightscape on the opposite side, as if the walls are transparent, like muddy glass. Where he expects to see the tops of the walls he sees only the night sky and the fat, placid face of the moon. But if he looks along the walls, staring down their curve, they slowly calcify beside the houses and ram-shackle buildings a hundred yards away, the city lights glinting off their smooth facade.

  And yet if I were on the other side, he thinks, or if I were to walk close to them, I’d see nothing but white stone. A creature comfort, in a way: the beings that made the walls wished to protect the city, but did not wish to deny its residents the sight of sunrises and sunsets. Pitry reflects on how any miracle, no matter how subtle, always feels tremendously unsettling to a Saypuri.

  He looks back at his watch and does some math. Is the train late? Are such unusual trains late? Perhaps they come on their own time. Perhaps its engineer, whoever it might be, was never told of the telegram stating, quite clearly, “3:00 in the morning,” and does not know that very official people are taking this secret appointment quite seriously. Or perhaps no one cares that the person waiting for this train might be cold, hungry, unnerved by these walls, and practically death-threatened by the milky blue gaze of the train station porter.

  Pitry sighs. If he were to die and see all of his life flash before his eyes in his final moment, he is fairly sure it would be a boring show. For though he thought a position in the Saypuri embassies would be an interesting and exotic job, taking him to new and exotic lands (and exposing him to new and exotic women), so far it has mostly consisted of waiting. As an assistant to the associate ambassadorial administrator, Pitry has learned how to wait on new and unexciting things in new and unexciting ways, becoming an expert at watching the second hand of a clock slowly crank out the hours. The purpose of an assistant, he has decided, is to have someone upon whom you can unload all the deadly little nothings that fill the bureaucratic day.

  He checks his watch. Twenty minutes, maybe. His breath roils with steam. By all the seas, what an awful job.

  Perhaps he can transfer out, he thinks. There are actually many opportunities for a Saypuri here: the Continent is divided into four regions, each of which has its own regional governor; in the next tier below, there are the polis governors, who regulate each major metropolitan area on the Continent; and in the next tier below that are the embassies, which regulate … well, to be honest, Pitry has never been quite sure what the embassies regulate. Something to do with culture, which seems to involve a lot of parties.

  The station porter strolls from his offices and stands at the edge of the platform. He glances backward at Pitry, who nods and smiles. The porter looks at Pitry’s headcloth and his short, dark beard; sniffs twice—I smell a shally; and then, with a lingering glare, turns and walks back to his office, as if saying, I know you’re there, so don’t try and steal anything. As if there is anything to steal in a deserted train station.

  They hate us, thinks Pitry. But of course they do. It is something he has come to terms with during his short period at the embassy. We tell them to forget, but can they? Can we? Can anyone?

  Yet Pitry underestimated the nature of their hatred. He had no understanding of it until he came here and saw the empty places on the walls and in the shop windows, the frames and facades shorn clean of any images or carvings; he saw how the people of Bulikov behaved at certain hours of the day, as if they knew this time was designated for some show of deference, yet they could not act, and instead simply milled about; and, in his walks throughout the city, he came upon the roundabouts and cul-de-sacs that had obviously once played host to something—some marvelous sculpture, or a shrine fogged with incense—but were now paved over, or held nothing more marvelous than a street lamp, or a bland municipal garden, or a lonely bench.

  In Saypur, the overwhelming feeling is that the Worldly Regulations have been a wild success, curbing and correcting the behaviors of the Continent over the course of seventy-five years. But in his time in Bulikov, Pitry has begun to feel that though the Regulations appear to have had some superficial success—for, true, no one in Bulikov praises, mentions, or acknowledges any aspect of the Divine, at least in public—in reality, the Regulations have failed.

 
The city knows. It remembers. Its past is written in its bones, though the past now speaks in silences.

  Pitry shivers in the cold.

  He is not sure if he would rather be at the office, so alight with concern and chaos in the wake of Dr. Efrem Pangyui’s murder. Telegraphs spitting out papers like drunks vomiting at closing time. The endless cranking of phones. Secretaries sprinting into offices, staking papers onto spikes with the viciousness of shrikes.

  Yet then came the one telegraph that silenced everyone:

  C-AMB THIVANI TO BULIKOV MOROV STATION 3:00 STOP VTS512

  And from the coding on the end it was clear this had come not from the polis governor’s office, but the regional governor’s office, which is the only place on the Continent that has direct, immediate connection with Saypur. And so, the Comm Department secretary announced with terrible dread, the telegram might have been rerouted across the South Seas from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself.

  There was a flurry of discussion as to who should meet this Thivani person, because he had doubtless been sent here in reaction to the professor’s death, bringing swift and terrible retribution; for had not Dr. Efrem Pangyui been one of Saypur’s brightest and most favored sons? Had his ambassadorial mission not been one of the greatest scholarly endeavors in history? Thus it was quickly decided that Pitry—being young, cheerful, and not in the room at the time—would be the best man for the job.

  But they did wonder at the coding, C-AMB, for “Cultural Ambassador.” Why would they send one of those? Weren’t CAs the lowest caste of the Ministry? Most of them were fresh-faced students, and often harbored a rather unhealthy interest in foreign cultures and histories, something metropolitan Saypuris found distasteful. Usually CAs served as ornamentation to receptions and galas, and little more. So why send a simple CA into the middle of one of the greatest diplomatic debacles of the past decade?

  “Unless,” Pitry wondered aloud back at the embassy, “it’s not related at all. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

  “Oh, it’s related,” said Nidayin, who was assistant manager of the embassy Comm Department. “The telegram came through just hours after we sent out the news. This is their reaction.”

  “So why send a CA? They might as well have sent a plumber, or a harpist.”

  “Unless,” said Nidayin, “Mr. Thivani is not a cultural ambassador. He might be something else entirely.”

  “Are you saying,” Pitry asked, fingers reaching up into his headcloth to scratch his scalp, “that the telegram lied?”

  Nidayin simply shook his head. “Oh, Pitry. How did you get yourself into the Ministry?”

  Nidayin, thinks Pitry in the cold. How I hate you. One day I will dance with your beautiful girlfriend, and she will fall helplessly in love with me, and you shall walk in upon us mussing your sheets, and ice will pierce your muddy heart.…

  But Pitry now sees he was a fool. Nidayin was suggesting this Thivani might be traveling as a CA, but he could in truth be some high-ranking, secret operative, infiltrating enemy territories and toppling resistance to Saypur. Pitry imagines a burly, bearded man with bandoliers of explosives and a glimmering knife clutched in his teeth, a knife that’s tasted blood in many shadows.… The more he thinks on it, the more Pitry grows a little afraid of this Thivani person. Perhaps he will emerge from the train car like a djinnifrit, he thinks, spouting flames from his eyes and black poison from his mouth.

  There is a rumbling in the east. Pitry looks to the city walls and the tiny aperture in the bottom. From here it looks like a hole gnawed by vermin, but if he were closer it’d be nearly thirty feet tall.

  The dark little hole fills with light. There is a flash, a screech, and the train pounds through.

  It is not really a train: just a beaten, stained engine and a single sad little passenger car. It looks like something from coal country, a car the workers would ride in while being carted from mine to mine. Certainly nothing for an ambassador—even a cultural ambassador.

  The train thuds up to the platform. Pitry scurries over and stands before the doors, hands clasped behind him and chest thrown gallantly forward. Are his buttons set? Is his headcloth straight? Did he shine his epaulets? He cannot remember. He frantically licks a thumb and begins rubbing at one. Then the doors scream open, and there is …

  Red. No, not red—burgundy. A lot of burgundy, as if a drape has been hung across the door. Yet then the drape shifts, and Pitry sees it is split in the middle by a stripe of white cloth with buttons down the middle.

  It is not a drape. It is the chest of a man in a dark burgundy coat. The biggest man Pitry has ever seen—a giant.

  The giant unfolds himself and steps out of the car. His feet fall on the boards like millstones. Pitry stumbles back to allow him room. The giant’s long red coat kisses the tops of immense black boots, his shirt is open-throated with no scarf, and he wears a wide-brimmed gray hat at a piratical angle. On his right hand is a soft gray glove; his left is bare except for a woven gold bracelet—a curiously feminine affectation. He is well over six and a half feet tall, incredibly broad in the shoulders and back, but there is not an ounce of fat on him: his face has a lean, starved look. It is a face Pitry never expected to see on a Saypuri ambassador: the man’s skin is pale with many pink scars, his beard and hair are blond-white, and his eyes—or rather eye, for one eye is but a dark, hooded cavity—are so pale it is a whitish gray.

  He is a Dreyling, a North-man. The ambassador, however impossible it seems, is one of the mountain savages, a foreigner to both the Continent and Saypur.

  If this is their response, thinks Pitry, then what an awful and terrible response it is.…

  The giant stares at Pitry with a flat, passive gaze, as if wondering if this runty little Saypuri is worth stomping on.

  Pitry attempts a bow. “Greetings, Ambassador Thivani, to the w-wondrous city of B-Bulikov. I am Pitry Suturashni. I hope your journey was well?”

  Silence.

  Pitry, still bowed, tilts his head up. The giant is staring down at him, though one eyebrow rises just slightly in what could be a look of contemptuous bemusement.

  Somewhere behind the giant comes the sound of a throat being cleared. The giant, without a word of greeting or good-bye, turns and walks toward the station manager’s desk.

  Pitry scratches his head and watches him go. The little cough sounds again, and he realizes there is someone else standing in the doorway.

  It is a small Saypuri woman, dark-skinned and even smaller than Pitry. She is dressed rather plainly—a blue coat and robe that is noticeable only in its Saypuri cut—and she watches him from behind enormously thick eyeglasses. She wears a light gray trench coat and a short-brimmed blue hat with a paper orchid in its band. Pitry finds there is something off about her eyes.… The giant’s gaze was incredibly, lifelessly still, but this woman’s eyes are the precise opposite: huge and soft and dark, like deep wells with many fish swimming in them.

  The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished. “I thank you for coming to meet us at such a late hour,” she says.

  Pitry looks at her, then back at the giant, who is cramming his way into the station porter’s office, much to the porter’s concern. “Am-Ambassador Thivani?”

  She nods and steps off the train.

  A woman? Thivani is a woman? Why didn’t they …?

  Oh, damn the Comm Department! Damn their gossip and their lies!

  “I trust that Chief Diplomat Troonyi,” she says, “is busy with the consequences of the murder. Otherwise he would be here himself?”

  “Uh …” Pitry does not wish to admit that he knows no more of CD Troonyi’s intentions than he does the movements of the stars of the sky.

  She blinks at him from behind her eyeglasses. Silence swells to engulf Pitry like the tide. He scrambles for something to say, anything. He lands on: “It’s very nice to have you here in Bulikov.�
� No, no, absolutely wrong. Yet he continues: “I hope your journey was … pleasant.” Wrong! Worse!

  She looks at him a moment longer. “Pitry, you said your name was?”

  “Y-yes.” There is a shout from behind them. Pitry looks, but Thivani does not—she keeps watching Pitry as one would an interesting bug. Pitry sees that the giant is prying something from the station porter’s hands—some kind of clipboard—which makes the porter none too pleased. The giant stoops, removes the gray glove from his right hand, and opens his fingers to show … something. The porter, whose face previously had been the color of old beets, goes quite white. The giant tears out a sheet of paper from the clipboard, gives the clipboard back to the porter, and exits.

  “Who is …?”

  “That is my secretary,” says Thivani. “Sigrud.”

  The giant takes out a match, lights it on a thumbnail, and sets fire to the piece of paper.

  “S-secretary?” says Pitry.

  Flames lick the giant’s fingers. If this pains him, he does not show it. After he deems the paper has sufficiently burned, he blows on it—puff—and embers dance across the station platform. He tugs the gray glove back on and surveys the station coldly.

  “Yes,” she says. “Now, if it does not trouble you, I believe I would like to go straight to the embassy. Has the embassy informed any of the officials of Bulikov about my arrival?”

  “Well. Uh …”

  “I see. Do we have possession of the professor’s body?”

  Pitry’s mind whirls. He wonders, perhaps for the first time, what happens to a body after it dies—this suddenly seems much more perplexing than the whereabouts of its spirit.

  “I see,” she says. “Do you have a car with you?”

  Pitry nods.

  “If you would, please lead me to it.”

  He nods again, perplexed, and takes her across the shadow-laden station to the car in the alleyway. He cannot stop glancing over his shoulder at her.

  This is who they send? This tiny, plain girl with the too-high voice? What could she possibly hope to accomplish in this endlessly hostile, endlessly suspicious place? Could she even last the night?