Then something dances into view.… Something gauzy and white, moving in drifting sweeps—the hem of a long white dress? Shara jumps, startled, but does not take her eye away: she sees a head of hair at the top of the cloth, thick black locks that shine in the candlelight, before the white thing trots away.
“There’s someone in there,” Shara says softly.
Again, the childish laugh. Yet something is wrong.…
“A child,” she says. “Maybe …”
“Step back,” says Sigrud.
“But … I’m not sure …”
“Step back.”
Shara moves away. He tests the knob: it’s unlocked. He squats down low, knife in hand, and eases the door open.
Immediately the laughter turns to shrieks of pain. Shara is positioned so she cannot see what’s inside—yet Sigrud can, and he drops any suggestion of threat: he glances at her, concerned, confused, and walks in.
“Wait,” says Shara. “Wait!”
Shara bolts around the open door and inside.
* * *
Things move so fast that it’s difficult for Shara to see: there is a blaze of light from the candelabras, which are so densely crowded she has to dance around them; a wide circle of white crystals on the floor—salt, probably; and sitting in the center of the ring, dressed in a huge, shining white dress, is a little girl of about four, with dark black locks and bright red lips. She sits in the ring of salt, rubbing at her knee … or Shara thinks she rubs her knee, for almost all of the little girl is hidden below her white dress. Shara cannot even see her hands, only the kneading motion under the white cloth.
“It hurts!” cries the little girl. “It hurts!”
The scent of dust is overwhelming. It seems to coat the back of Shara’s throat.
Sigrud walks forward, uncertain. “Should we … do something?” he asks.
The salt.
“Wait!” says Shara again. She reaches out to grab his sleeve and hold him back; Sigrud is so much larger than her that he almost knocks her over.
The little girl spasms in pain. “Help me!”
“You don’t want me to do anything?” asks Sigrud.
“No! Stop! And look.” Shara points down. Two feet away is the outer edge of the circle of salt.
“What is that?” asks Sigrud.
“The salt, it’s like a—”
“Please help me!” begs the little girl. “Please! Please, you must!” Shara looks closer. The dress is far too big for such a small girl, and there is a lump under it, as if her body is swollen and malformed.…
I know this, thinks Shara.
“Just stop, Sigrud. Let me try and …” She clears her throat. “If you could, please,” she says to the little girl, “show us your feet.” Sigrud is bewildered. “What?”
“Please!” cries the little girl. “Please, do something!”
“We will help you,” says Shara, “if you show us your feet.”
The little girl groans. “Why do you care? Why do you … It hurts so bad!”
“We will help you quite quickly,” says Shara. “We are experienced in medicine. Just, please—show us your feet!”
The little girl starts rocking back and forth on the ground. “I’m dying!” she howls. “I’m bleeding! Please, help me!”
“Show them to us. Now!”
“I take it,” says Sigrud, “that you do not think that’s a little girl.”
The girl lets out of a long, tortured shriek. Shara grimly shakes her head. “Look. Think. The salt on the ground, ringing her in … Torskeny’s clothes, which look to have been dropped on the ground just where she crossed the salt …” The little girl, still shrieking in pain, tries to crawl over to them. Yet her movements are so odd: she doesn’t use her hands or arms at all (Shara thinks, Does she even have any?), but the girl appears to kick over to them, crawling on her knees. It’s like she’s a cloth puppet with a hard little head on top, yet her cheeks and her tears and her hair all look so real.…
But she never shows her feet. Not once throughout this strange rolling motion.
The taste of dust thickens: Shara’s throat is clay; her eyes, sand.
There is something under the dress. Not a little girl’s body—something much larger …
Oh, by the seas, thinks Shara. It couldn’t be …
“Help me, please!” cries the girl. “I’m in so much pain!”
“Step back, Sigrud. Don’t let it get close to you.”
Sigrud does so. “No!” shouts the girl. Worm-like, the girl crawls to the very edge of the salt ring, mere inches away from them. “No! Please … Please don’t leave me!”
“You’re not real,” Shara says to the little girl. “You’re bait.”
“Bait?” says Sigrud. “For what?”
“For you and me.”
The little girl bursts into tears and huddles at the edge. “Please,” she says. “Please just pick me up. I haven’t been held in so long.…”
“Drop the act,” says Shara angrily. “I know what you are.”
The little girl shrieks; the sound is razors on their ears.
“Stop!” shouts Shara. “Stop your nonsense! We’re no fools!”
The screams stop immediately. The abrupt cessation of sound is startling.
The girl does not look up: she sits bent in half, frozen and lifelessly still.
“I don’t know how you’re still alive,” says Shara. “I thought all of you died in the Great Purge.…”
The thick locks quiver as the girl’s head twitches to one side.
“You’re a mhovost, aren’t you? One of Jukov’s pets.”
The little girl sits up, but there is something disturbingly mechanical about the motion, as if she’s being pulled by strings. Her face, which was once contorted into a look of such heart-piercing agony, is now utterly blank, like that of a doll.
Something shifts under the dress. The little girl appears to drop into the cloth. There is a sudden rush of dust.
Cloth swirling around it, it stands up slowly.
Shara looks at it, and immediately begins to vomit.
* * *
It is man-like, in a way: it has a torso, arms, and legs. Yet all are queerly long, distended, and many-jointed, as if its body is nothing but knuckles, hard bulbs of bone shifting under smooth skin. Its limbs are wrapped in white cloth stained gray with dust, and its feet are like a blend between a human’s and a goose’s: huge and syndactyly and webbed, with three fat toes, each with tiny perfect toenails on them. Yet its head is by far the worst part: the back is roughly like the head of a balding man, sporting a ring of long, gray scraggly hair around its skull; but instead of a face or jaw, the head stretches forward to form what looks like a wide, long, flat bill—like, again, that of a goose, though it has no eyes. Yet rather than the tough keratin normally seen in ducks or geese, the bill is made of knuckled human flesh, as if a man’s fingers were fused together, and he brought both hands together to form a joint at the heel of his palms.
The mhovost flaps its bill at Shara, making a wet fapfapfap. Somewhere in her mind she hears echoes of children laughing, screaming, crying. As its fleshy bill wags Shara can see it has no esophagus, no teeth: just more bony, hairy flesh in the inner recesses of the bill.
She spews vomit onto the floor again, but is careful to avoid the salt on the floor.
Sigrud stares blankly at this abomination, pacing in front of him like a bantam cock, daring him to attack it. “Is this,” he asks slowly, “a thing I should be killing?”
“No,” gasps Shara. More vomit burbles out of her. The mhovost flaps its bill at her—again, the echoes of ghostly children. She thinks, It’s laughing at me. “Don’t break the ring of salt! That’s the only thing keeping us alive!”
“And the little girl?”
“She was never there.… This creature is miraculous by nature, though darkly so.”
She spits bile on the floor. The mhovost gestures to her belligerently. The human nature of its
movements is revolting: she imagines it saying, Come on! Come on!
“You killed Mrs. Torskeny, didn’t you?” asks Shara. “They led her here and she broke the salt barrier.”
The mhovost, in a bizarrely effective pantomime, looks at the pile of clothes and shrugs indifferently: That old thing? It waves dismissively: It was nothing. Then, again, it flaps its bill at them.
“I so wish”—Sigrud is turning his knife over and over in his hand—“that it would stop doing that.”
“It wants you to break the circle. If it can get at you, it’ll swallow you whole.”
Fapfapfapfap.
Sigrud gives her a skeptical look.
“It’s a creature of skin and bone,” says Shara. “But not its own skin and bone. Somewhere in it, I fear, is the repurposed remains of Mrs. Torskeny.”
The mhovost prods its belly with its many-jointed fingers, as if probing for her.
A joker. But it would be, of course, considering who made it.
“How are you alive?” asks Shara. “Shouldn’t you have perished when Jukov died?”
It stops. Stares at her, eyelessly. Then it walks backward, forward, backward, forward, as if it’s testing the edges of the salt ring.
“What is it doing?” asks Sigrud.
“It’s mad,” says Shara. “One of the creatures made by Jukov in his darker moods—a knuckle-man, a voice under the cloth. It’s meant to mock us, to goad us—the only way to identify them is to ask to see their feet, because that’s the only thing they can never really hide. Though I’ve no idea how it’s alive … Is Jukov dead?” she asks the creature.
Still pacing back and forth, the mhovost shakes its head. Then it stops, appears to think, and shrugs.
“How are you here?”
Again, a shrug.
“I knew they could last for some time,” says Shara, “but I did not think that a Divinity’s creatures could persist so long after its death.”
The mhovost extends a repulsively long, flat hand and tilts it back and forth: Maybe. Maybe not.
“The two men who were here,” says Shara. “Did they trap you here?”
It resumes pacing back and forth—Shara presumes she’s just angered it, so she must be right.
“How long have they had you trapped in this building?”
The creature mimes a laugh—Shara again reflects on what an astonishing pantomime it is—and waves a hand at her: What a silly question!
“A long time, then.”
It shrugs.
“You don’t look underfed. How many others have you killed?”
It shakes its head, waggles a finger: No no no no. Then it lovingly, thoughtfully caresses its stomach: What makes you think they’re dead?
Children laugh in the empty chambers of Shara’s mind. She resists the urge to retch again. “How … How many have they pushed within this circle?”
It flaps its bill. Shrugs.
“A lot.”
Another shrug.
Shara whispers, “How are you alive?”
The mhovost begins waltzing across the circle, twirling gracefully.
“I very much wish to kill this thing,” says Sigrud. The mhovost spins around and waggles its bony behind at Sigrud. “Much more than I do most things,” he adds. “And we have killed Divine creatures before.…”
“Listen to me, abomination,” says Shara coldly. “I am descended from the man who killed your race, who pulled your Divinities down and laid them low, who ruined and ravaged this land within weeks. My forebear buried dozens, hundreds of your brothers and sisters in the mud, and there they rot, even to this day. I have no qualms doing the same to you. Now, tell me—is your creator, the Divinity Jukov, truly gone from this world, never to return?”
The mhovost slowly stands. It appears to reflect on something—for a moment, it almost appears sad. Then it turns around, looks at Shara, and shakes its head.
“Then where is he?”
A shrug, but not half so malicious and gleeful as its others: this gesture is doleful, confused, a child wondering why it was abandoned.
“These two men who were here. One of them was fat and bald, yes?”
It starts pacing the edge of the ring, walking in a frantic circle.
A yes, Shara assumes. “And the other one—what did he look like?”
The mhovost adds a decidedly swishy step to its pace; it puts one hand on its hip, bends the other hand effeminately at the wrist; as it pivots across the ring, it strokes the bottom of its bill as if luxuriating in its gorgeous features.…
That, thinks Shara, does not sound like the sort of person Wiclov would normally dally about with.
“How did Wiclov trap you here?” she asks.
The mhovost stops, looks at her, and bends double in silent laughter. It waves at her as if appreciating a merry joke: What a ridiculous idea!
“So it wasn’t Wiclov,” says Shara. “Then who?”
It bends its wrist, affects a feminine posture, and shakes its head in a manner that could only be called “bitchy.”
“The other man trapped you here. Who is this other man?”
It performs an agile flip, assumes a handstand, and begins trotting around on its palms.
“Who was he?”
The light in the room flickers as the candelabra flames dance. And all the flames bend, Shara notices, at the exact same angle.…
A breeze?
She examines the walls. In the far corner, deep in amber shadows, she thinks she spies a crack in the stone—perhaps a panel, or a door.
She looks down at the floor. The salt ring fills the room almost perfectly: it’s impossible to reach the door without going through the mhovost’s little enclosure. Like a guard dog …
“What’s through that door?” asks Shara.
The mhovost looks up at her, does yet another flip, and lands on its feet. It cocks its head, canine-like, and theatrically scratches its bald head with one quadruple-jointed finger.
The Divinities, she remembers, could only be killed with the Kaj’s weaponry. But their minor creatures were more vulnerable, and all had their own weaknesses.
Shara comes to a decision. “How many have you devoured during your imprisonment here?”
Again, it doubles over in mock laughter. It dances over to where Sigrud stands and mimes inspecting him, pretending to squeeze his thighs, test his belly.…
“I believe it was many,” says Shara. “And I believe you enjoyed it.”
In one swoop, the mhovost slides over to her. It runs one finger along the sides of its mouth: a disturbingly sexual gesture.
Shara looks at a candelabra beside her. “These are very illegal, of course.” She picks up one candle, flips it over. Inscribed on the bottom, as she expected, is a symbol of a flame between two parallel lines—the insignia of Olvos, the flame in the woods. “These candles never go out, and give off such a bright white light.” She holds a hand to its flame. “But the heat they give … That is quite real, and no illusion.”
The mhovost stops, and slowly withdraws its finger from its mouth.
“There’s a reason all these candelabras are here, isn’t there?” asks Shara. “Because if by chance you got out of your cage, a dusty, dry creature like you would have to step very carefully to avoid catching alight.”
The mhovost drops its hand and takes a step back.
“I bet Mrs. Torskeny ran to you, didn’t she?” says Shara softly. “Seeing a little girl in need.”
Shara remembers the old woman bent over her coffee: I tried to learn. I wanted to learn to be righteous. I wanted to know. But I could only ever pretend.
Angry, the mhovost flaps its bill at her: fapfapfapfa-
With a flick, Shara tosses the candle at it.
The creature catches afire instantly: there is a whump sound, and an orange blaze erupts from its chest. Within seconds it is a dark man-figure flailing in a billowing cloud of orange-white.
Somewhere in the back of her head, Shara hears childre
n screaming.
She remembers, again, the boy in the jail cell. How I repeat myself.
The flaming creature veers across the salt ring, seeming to bounce off of invisible walls. Scraps of flickering cloth float away from it like glowing orange cherry blossoms. It grasps its head, its monstrous mouth open in a silent cry.
Its form fades; the flames die away; a gust of ash dances around the candelabras. Then it is gone, leaving only scorch marks on the floor.
And Olvos said:
“Nothing is ever truly lost
The world is like the tide
Returning, for an instant, to the place it occupied before
Or leaving that same place once more
Celebrate, then, for what you lose shall be returned
Smile, then, for all good deeds you do shall be visited upon you
Weep, then, for all ills you do shall return to you
Or your children, or your children’s children
What is reaped is what is sown.
What is sown is what is reaped.”
—BOOK OF THE RED LOTUS, PART IV, 13.51–13.61
RE-CREATIONS
Shara strides across the room. As her feet cross the salt, she braces for some terrible misfortune—perhaps the thing will resurrect itself and fall upon her—but there is nothing.
She feels the crack in the wall, pries at it with her fingers, but it does not budge. “Come and look,” she says. “Do you see a handle? Or a button? Or maybe a lever …”
Sigrud gently pushes her aside with the back of one hand. Then he takes a step back and soundly kicks the door in the wall.
The crack sounds deafening in this silent place. Half of the door caves in. The remainder, suddenly powdery, shatters and falls to pieces like a mirror. White, acrid clouds come pluming up.
Shara touches the broken door, which leaves a chalky residue on her fingers. “Ah,” she says. “Plaster.” She cranes her head forward to look into the dark.
Earthen stairs, going straight down in a steep angle.
Sigrud picks up one of the sputtering candelabras. “I think,” he says, “we may need one of these.”
City of Stairs Page 25
