* * *
The stairs do not end: they stretch on and on, soft and moist, formed of dark, black clay and loam. Neither she nor Sigrud talks as they descend. They do not discuss the horror they just encountered, nor does he ask her how she knew how to dispatch it in such an able fashion: eight or nine years ago, they would have, but not now. Both of them have been at this strange sort of work for so long that there are few surprises left: you encounter the miraculous, do as you need with it, and go back to work. Though that, Shara reflects, was the worst in a long while.
“What direction do you think we’re going?” asks Shara.
“West.”
“Toward the belfry?”
Sigrud considers it and nods.
“So, soon we will be … underneath it.”
“More or less, yes.”
Shara remembers how the gas company gave up this quarter, choosing to leave what was buried below Bulikov alone.
“A question comes to me,” says Sigrud. “How could someone make this without anyone noticing?”
Shara inspects the walls of the tunnel. “It looks like it’s been in use for a while. Much of it’s been worn away. But it almost looks like, when this tunnel was first made, they made it by burning it.”
“What?”
She points to the char marks, and the sandier places that are molten, like glass.
“Someone burned a hole this deep?” asks Sigrud.
“That’s how it appears,” says Shara. “Like a blowtorch flame through a stack of metal.”
“Have you seen such a thing before?”
“Actually … no. Which I find quite troubling, frankly.”
The white candlelight prances on the earthen walls. A strange breeze caresses her cheek. Shara adjusts her glasses.
The stairs seem to melt away below her. The walls fall back, then become stone—no, a stone mural, carved in a marvelously intricate pattern. Though the fluttering light makes it hard to see, Shara is sure she spots the slimsy form of Ahanas and the hand point of Taalhavras among the patterns.
The walls keep falling back. Then they aren’t there at all.
“Oh my word,” says Shara.
The candlelight beats back the dark. The shadows withdraw like a curtain to reveal a vast chamber.…
Shara catches glimpses, flashes, flickers of distant stone.…
“Oh, my word.”
She looks out. The chamber is huge and oddly uterine, from what she can see: both the ceiling and roof are huge and concave, and both come to a point in the exact center, connecting to form something similar to a stalagnate. The chamber has six atria, joining in the center like the petals and stigma of a fabulously complicated orchid bloom. And every single inch of the walls, ceiling, and floors are engraved with glyphs and sigils and pictograms of strange and bewildering events: a man pulls a thorned flower from a skull and ties its stem around his tongue; three vivisected women bathe in a rocky stream, their eyes like glass beads, while a stag watches from the shore; a woman stitches up an incision in her armpit, with the blank face of a man bulging out of the slit, as if he is being stitched up inside of her; four crows circle in the sky, and below them, a man draws water from the ground with a spear.… On and on and on—images of great and terrible meaning that are incomprehensible to her.
“What—” Sigrud snorts, hawks, swallows it with a gulp. “What is this place?”
Around the center, where the “stalagnate” forms, Shara sees soft earth has collected on the ground. But, she wonders, where did it come from? She paces forward, taking halting steps as she crosses the sloping floors.
The stalagnate, she sees, is actually a curling stairway, with five columns holding it up: it originally had six; but one, she sees, has been removed.
Six atria, she thinks, six columns, and six Divinities.…
The stairway ends in a blocked gap in the ceiling, filled with loose stone and crumbling loam, as if whatever was above caved in.
“Of course,” she says. “Of course!”
“What?” asks Sigrud.
She examines one column: it is beautifully wrought, engraved to resemble the trunk of a pine tree, with a line of flame crawling up its bark. The next column is straight and rigid and features a complicated repetitious design, like the visual expression of many mathematical formulas. The next column is carved to resemble a pillar of teeth or knives, thousands of blades melted together and pointing up, like the trunk of a palm tree. The next looks like a twisted loop of old vines, with many woody stems curled around one another: there is a slight bend in the column, artfully suggesting some flex. And the final of the five remaining columns is a twisting, chaotic tornado of blossoms, fur, leaves, sand, anything and everything.
Shara bunches her fists and trembles like a schoolgirl. “This was it!” she cries. “This had to be it! Really it! Down here, all along!”
“It being what?” says Sigrud, who remains unimpressed.
“Don’t you see? Everyone says the bell tower of the Seat of the World shrank during the Blink! But that’s not true! Because that’s the base of the bell tower!” She points at the columns around the staircase. “Those stairs are the way up!”
“So …”
“So the tower never shrank! The whole temple must have sunk into the mud! That shabby little clay shack up in the park was never the true Seat of the World! Which is what everyone, even everyone in Bulikov, still thinks. This is it! This is the Seat of the World! This is where the Divinities met!”
As Shara has devoted most of her adult life to history, she can’t help but be overwhelmed with giddiness, as unpatriotic as it may be; but one unmoved part of her mind speaks up:
This can’t all be coincidence. The most sacred structure in Bulikov just happened to sink so it remained hidden for nearly eighty years? And Ernst Wiclov was the one to tunnel underground to reach it? You don’t do something like that unless you know about it—and you wouldn’t know about it unless someone told you.
Shara plucks one candle out of Sigrud’s candelabra. “Go and send word to Mulaghesh. Now. If word gets out to the general populace of Bulikov that this is still here, and we have to publicly seize this place, it’ll be the Summer of Black Rivers all over again. And have her throw up a net for Wiclov. All checkpoints around and inside Bulikov will need to be on the lookout for him. We’ve got enough to at least bring him in for questioning.”
“What will you do?” asks Sigrud.
“Stay down here, and inspect.”
“Will that candle be enough for you?”
“This is actually for you.” She holds the lone candle out to him and points to the candelabra. “I’ll be needing that, please.”
Sigrud cocks an eyebrow, shrugs, and hands her the candelabra. He retreats up the earthen tunnel. The faint white light comes bouncing down the stairs, then dims, leaving Shara alone in the vast chamber.
The candles fizz and spit. Somewhere, the limp plink of dripping water. And a thousand stone eyes watch her silently.
* * *
It takes some time to recalibrate her manner of thought: the chamber was not an underground cave, she reminds herself, but a temple meant to be aboveground. This explains the huge, gaping holes in the walls of each bulging atrium: they were once giant windows, and though it’s difficult to tell from where she stands on the staircase, all but one of them is now broken. So this is what happens to the storied stained glass of the Seat of the World, she thinks. Broken and buried in the mud of Bulikov.…
She looks out at the six atria. Each atrium has a different style, presumably aligning with each Divinity, just like the columns holding up the staircase. Shara sees the sigils of Olvos, Taalhavras, Ahanas, Voortya, Jukov, and then …
“Hm,” says Shara.
Despite its burial, it seems the Seat of the World is not in perfect condition: one atrium is utterly blank of any engravings at all, as if someone came in and sanded down the floor, ceiling, and walls.
But Shara sees someone h
as very recently attempted to restore the floor of this blank chamber, laying out engraved stones of a much darker make than the rest of the temple. The restoration isn’t complete yet, leaving a jumbled and distorted mess of images, words, and sigils on the floor, telling half-stories and partial myths, and leaving huge swaths of the chamber blank.
Over and over again, these dark new stones show the same image: a human-like figure seated in the center of a room, listening to someone. The accompanying sigil is familiar to her: a scale, represented by two dashes supported by a square fork.
Kolkan’s hands, she remembers. Waiting to weigh and judge …
She looks behind her. The pillar corresponding with the blank atrium is missing.
Shara gets the powerfully absurd feeling that she is staring at edited history.
This was once as decorated as the other five sections, thinks Shara. But I’m willing to bet it all went blank in 1442, right when Kolkan disappeared from the world. She looks out at the jigsaw collection of new pictograms. But now someone’s come back to correct the record.
She smirks. Perhaps they’re taking the term “Restorationists” a bit too seriously.
It’s a futile task. By her estimation, there are thousands of square feet of floor, ceiling, and wall needing to be completely restored. And whoever was attempting to do so obviously had no idea what decorated Kolkan’s chamber. And where did these stones come from, anyway?
Shara hops down and begins inspecting the new pieces of stone on the floor. The stones themselves are fascinating—a dark, smooth ore of a like she’s never seen before—and their pictograms are of deeds and events Shara has never heard of: Kolkan, depicted as a robed, hooded figure, splits open a naked human form, and a pure, bright light comes spilling out to rain upon the rounded hills.
It’s from another temple, maybe. She traces one carving with her finger. Someone actually took the stone from one of Kolkan’s surviving temples and tried to rebuild it here, to restore Kolkan in the Seat of the World.
Could Ernst Wiclov really do something like this?
She sees movement ahead and slowly looks up. Something is twitching on the wall.
After a moment’s inspection, she sees there is a large, empty frame of some kind standing upright just a few yards of ahead of her; the quivering candle flames must have caused its shadow to dance on the stone wall behind it.
She looks around at the other chambers. None of them have a frame of any kind. Whoever tried to restore Kolkan’s chamber—presumably the same person who made the earthen stairway down and also thought to trap the mhovost before it as a revolting sort of watchdog—must have brought it here.
She walks over to it. It’s a stone door frame, about nine feet tall. But then, she recalls, Continentals generally were much taller in the years before the Blink: they were less malnourished in those days. Like so many things originating during the Divine era, the frame features exquisite stonework that gives it the likeness of thick fur, dry wood, chalky stone, and starlings. Yet none of this artistry has any real relation to Kolkan, at least as far as Shara’s aware: Kolkan generally disdained ornamentation of any kind.
She touches the carven starlings in the door frame: “And weren’t you a favorite of Jukov?”
As she touches it, the door slides back. She looks down at its base. The door frame is mounted on four small wheels made of iron. Shara gives it another push—with a squeak, it slides back farther. Why in the world would anyone want a mobile door frame?
She looks at the window frame in the wall of Kolkan’s atrium. Each atrium had its own window, originally, a stained glass for each Divinity. Shara has read scores of letters describing the beauty of the Divine glass of the Seat of the World—blues and reds the eye could not properly interpret but still feel—and while she is sorry to see it all broken, she’s a bit puzzled to see that Kolkan’s glass remains whole, but is perfectly blank and clear. She slowly waves the candelabra back and forth, watching the reflection: it’s a big, transparent, but otherwise utterly ordinary window. Perhaps it simply went blank, she concludes, when Kolkan vanished. But if so—why is it still whole, and all the others broken?
She lifts the candelabra and gazes at the other round chambers.
Once, when she was very young, Aunt Vinya took her to the National Library in Ghaladesh. Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.… Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was—she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library—a lot like being in love for the first time.
And to find this here under the earth, as if all the experiences and words and histories of the Continent could be washed away by the rain to leach through the soil and drip, drip, drip into a hollow in the loam, like the slow calcification of crystal …
In the dark, under Bulikov, Shara Komayd paces over ancient stones and falls in love again.
* * *
The rumble of footsteps. Shara looks up from a pictogram of Olvos to see the staircase glowing bright with candlelight.
Mulaghesh enters, flanked by Sigrud and two soldiers with candelabras. She takes one glance at the vast temple; her shoulders droop—Oh, what a mess this is—and she sighs: “Ah, shit.”
“It’s quite a discovery, isn’t it?” calls Shara as she walks across the atria.
“You could say that,” Mulaghesh says, “yes.”
“You have men posted to guard the entrance?”
“I have five soldiers outside, yes.”
“This is”—Shara steps around a puddle of mud—“enormous. Enormous! I’d imagine this is the most significant Divine discovery since the War, since the Blink! The greatest historical discovery in … well, history. To discover any piece of this place, any fragment of these pictograms, would be borderline revolutionary in Ghaladesh, but to have found the entire building, whole, and more or less unharmed, is, is …” Shara, breathless, inhales. “It boggles the mind.” Mulaghesh stares at the curving ceiling. She strokes the scars on her jaw with her knuckles. “It sure does.”
“Here! Look here, at this section!” Shara stoops. “These few yards of carvings offer more knowledge about Ahanas than anyone’s found in years. We know almost nothing about her! Ahanashtan, as you probably know, is one of the places most deeply affected by the Blink—almost all the city seemed to vanish, you see. Almost everything that’s there now was built by Saypur.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But this mural proves why it vanished! It corroborates the theory that Ahanas actually grew the city, sowing miraculous seeds that grew into living buildings, homes, streets, lights.… Peaches that glowed at night, like streetlights, vines that funneled in water and away waste … It’s fascinating.”
Mulaghesh scratches the corner of her mouth. “Yeah.”
“And when Ahanas died, all of that vanished. What’s more, it provides a second explanation for the gap in knowledge: if what this says is true, Ahanashtanis thought all life and all parts of the body were sacred—they never used medicine, never cut their hair, never shaved, never trimmed their fingernails, never brushed their teeth, never … well … cleaned their nether parts.”
“Yeesh.”
“But that was because they didn’t have to! Ahanas was able to meet every single one of their needs! They lived in complete harmony with this massive, organic city! But after the Blink, when disease started rampaging through the Continent, they must have refused every medicine, every ministration.… So nearly every Ahanashtani on the Continent must have died out! Can you imagine! Can you imagine that?”
“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. Then, amiably: “So, you know we’re going to have to cave in that tunnel, rig
ht?”
“And this section here,” says Shara, “it … it …” She bows her head and lets out a slow breath. Then she looks up at Mulaghesh.
Mulaghesh smiles grimly and nods. “Yeah. You know. You know we can’t possibly keep something like this secret. Not something this big. We’d post guards. Then someone would ask questions about those guards, what they’re guarding, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Or we’d try and excavate it, study it, document it, and someone would see all the equipment, all the personnel, and they’d ask questions, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Trouble”—Mulaghesh files a rough nail away on the edge of one engraving—“is unavoidable. And worse, Wiclov knows about it, so if we try and stay here and do anything, it’s putting a knife in his hands: ‘Look at Saypur, keeping our most sacred temple secret in the earth, getting their dirty foreign fingers all over it.’ Can you imagine that fallout? Can you imagine what would happen, Ambassador? Not just to your investigation, but to the Continent, to Saypur?”
Shara sighs. This is an argument she expected, but she’d hoped the solution wouldn’t be quite so drastic. “You really want to … to just cave it in? You think that’s our best option?”
“I’d prefer to fill the damn tunnel up with cement, but the equipment would attract too many eyes. There are some wooden struts at the door that are definitely load-bearing. It wouldn’t take more than an hour.”
“There’s evidence, though. Someone’s been here, restoring the Kolkashtani atrium. They even put a stone door frame in here, though I’ve no idea why. It … It must be whoever’s working with Wiclov!”
“Are you certain of it to the extent that you would risk Continentals discovering this place?”
Shara rubs her eyes, then sits back and stares out at the Seat of the World. “Looking at it, I just know,” she says, “that I could spend a lifetime studying this.”
“If you were a historian,” says Mulaghesh. “But you’re not.”
Shara flinches, stung.
“You’re a servant, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh softly. “We both have a duty. Neither of us will be doing it down here.”
City of Stairs Page 26
