City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “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.

  They 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?”

  “Hells, I don’t know. Then he just … burst into flames. I didn’t see him activate anything, push any button, light any match. He didn’t even seem to move. Whatever he used, I want to know what it was. They might use more of them.”

  “And … And did you hear a voice in the room?”

  “A what?”

  “A voice? While we stared at one another?”

  Mulaghesh takes her eyes off the street to look Shara over. “You’re in shock. You need to lie back and rest. Let me take over today. This is what I do. This is what I know. Okay?”

  He spoke to me from the heart of the world.

  No—he was the heart of the world.

  “You don’t need,” says Shara softly, “to order your men about so.”

  “Shara, just lie back—”

  “No,” says Shara. “Listen. That was not a planned, coordinated attack. And it was most certainly not an assassination attempt.”

  “Then what was it?”

  Shara debates not telling her. Some secrets, she tells herself, can’t be borne alone.

  She sits up and says to Pitry, “Pardon, Pitry, but could you pull over briefly? And when you do, could you roll up the partition back here?”

  “What?” says Mulaghesh. “Why?”

  “Because I’m afraid your soldiers will have to join Pitry in the front seat,” she says. “This conversation will have to be private, you see.”

  * * *

  The broken buildings are like savage landscapes as they speed by, gray glaciers creeping down a mountain. A pale face appears at a window; a young girl heaves out a prodigious amount of what can only be human waste. The passersby stop only briefly: not an unusual occurrence for them.

  “I have read more about the history of the Continent than nearly anyone else alive in the world,” Shara says. “Before me, the only person who knew more was Efrem Pangyui. He’s now passed, of course. Which means it is only me.”

  “What’s your point?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “I have read of instances of spontaneous combustion on the Continent. It hasn’t happened in decades, but once, long ago, it happened occasionally. The cause of these episodes of spontaneous combustion was widely known here, back then: they were the result of Divine possession.”

  “Of what?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “Divine possession. A Divine being could project his or her intelligence into a mortal agent to commune with them directly—almost using them as a puppet, essentially. This was quite common among some of the lesser Divine beings—sprites, spirits, familiars, and so on.”

  “All of which the Kaj killed in the Great Purge,” says Mulaghesh. “Right?”

  “Presumably. But the primary Divinities could not possess a mortal agent to the same degree. Their very beings were too large, too powerful, too intense. The mortal body could not bear it. Sort of like spiritual friction, I suppose, resulting in combustion.”

  Mulaghesh is silent for a long, long time. “And … you’re saying you think this is what happened.”

  “I’m positive of it.”

  “How so?”

  “Because”—she takes a breath—“whatever possessed that boy spoke to me. To you, outside the cell, it looked like we were simply standing still. But to me, something … took me somewhere. I was there for some time. It pulled me in. It wanted to see me. And it wanted me to let it out of … wherever it was.”

  “It spoke to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Mulaghesh swallows. “Are you … quite sure of this?”

  “Yes.”

  “This wasn’t a side effect of the drug you used on that boy? Maybe you absorbed it through your skin?”

  “I’m sure the drug contributed, but not in the way you mean. Like I said, a philosopher’s stone was often used to commune with the Divinities. Records indicate it acted like lubrication, in a way. I believe I might have unintentionally opened that boy up for … whatever it was, to possess him.”

  “Whatever it was,” echoes Mulaghesh.

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s … It’s not a ‘whatever it was.’ Because you sound like you know what it was.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because if what you’re saying is correct, then the only thing that … made people combust was …”

  “Yes. A primary Divinity.”

  “And … if you’re saying that was what you saw, what took control of that boy, then that would mean …”

  “Yes,” says Shara. “It would mean at least one of the gods has survived.”

  Winning the War is most certainly the single greatest shift in Saypur’s history. However, both the Kaj and the War often overshadow the handful of years directly after the downfall of the Continent—which were just as crucial for Saypur as the death of the Divinities. But this per
iod is almost completely forgotten.

  This is likely because the events following the War are so unpleasant to remember.

  After the Kaj had killed the last Divinity, it became evident that the Divinities had been protecting the Continent—and Saypur, to a certain extent—not only from outside attackers, but also from a number of viruses and diseases. And for the twenty years after the death of Jukov, the last Divinity, horrific plague and rampant outbreak became as seasonally predictable as rain and snow.

  The estimated worldwide loss during the official Plague Years is innumerable. The Continent, being so dependent on the Divinities, was especially vulnerable: immediately after the Blink, nearly one-third of all its population died of various ailments. Saypuri soldiers—who were just as vulnerable, being on the Continent—wrote letters home describing streets stuffed with rotting corpses, rivers of the dead piled twice as high as any man, endless trains of litters bearing bodies to pyres outside each polis. Every polis suffered an explosion of insects, rats, cats, wolves—nearly any pest one can imagine. Everywhere one went in the Continent, one was met with the overpowering scent of rotting flesh.

  Saypur, however, being a colony that only peripherally benefited from miraculous intervention, had better knowledge of nonmiraculous sanitation. They quarantined the infected, and when soldiers arrived home, they promptly quarantined them as well—a decision that caused much outrage in Saypur at the time. Overall, though the Plague Years were far from easy, Saypur lost less than ten thousand lives to the sudden, massive influx of disease.

  It is this self-sufficiency that also came to Saypur’s aid in terms of technology. For the 867 years of its subservience, Saypur was forced to provide resources to the Continent chiefly by its own means—without Divine support. (Exactly why the Divinities needed Saypur to produce resources at all, rather than simply producing them with any number of miracles, is a favorite, and often rather infamous, question among Saypuri historians.) Having been forced to generate such technological innovation under threat, and now suddenly finding itself sitting upon a wealth of resources that could now be called its own, Saypur underwent a phenomenal technological transformation overnight. Vallaicha Thinadeshi herself, who is generally acknowledged to be the greatest of the iconic engineers of this period before her disappearance in Voortyashtan, said that for two decades “you could toss a stone out any window in Ghaladesh and strike four geniuses on the way down.” (It is perhaps noteworthy that the Kaj himself was an amateur scientist, performing many experiments on his estate.)