City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  But she still cannot quite bring herself to open the suitcase.

  Just remember, she tells herself, it’s not like you have any more of a career to throw away.

  The latches click open with a snap, and the top lifts up.

  Inside is a stack of papers bound together with string. The papers are covered in spidery handwriting, and she does not need to look for the slumping T or jagged M to identify the hand as Efrem’s. The first page is different from the ones below, written hastily and slapped on the top of the stack.

  She will have only today to read it, she thinks. Vinya’s people will definitely be at the embassy soon, after Urav.

  Shara nestles down in her chair and unties the string.

  Hello.

  If you are reading this, then you have found the safety deposit box belonging to, through a chain of aliases, Dr. Efrem Pangyui of Ghaladesh.

  It seems unlikely that you would not know this already, & since the only indication of this deposit box’s existence is a message encoded in a mixture of old Gheshati, Chotokan, Dreyling, & Avranti, then the probabilities suggest that only a person with great experience in ancient translation would be able to find this box at all.

  I suppose what I am saying is—Hello, Shara.

  If you are reading this, then I am either dead, missing, or safely in your protection. I hope it is the latter: I hope, as you read this, I am across from you, & we laugh over this histrionic letter, & how needless it was.

  But as of right now, I am not at all convinced it is needless.

  What follows is my personal journal (or at least what I was able to snatch from my offices) recorded over my time in Bulikov, from the 12th of the Month of the Scorpion to the 4th of the Month of the Rat.

  I hope what I am giving you is enough to complete my research. I have touched upon a truth in Bulikov perilous enough that I feel my life is in danger—but I am not certain which truth. Yet you are, in many ways, wiser & worldlier than I ever wished to be, & I hope that you may succeed where I have failed.

  I hope to see you again. & if I do not, then I wish you safe studies.

  Yours,

  Efrem Pangyui

  16th of the Month of the Rat

  JOURNAL OF EFREM PANGYUI

  12TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SCORPION

  BULIKOV

  This is ridiculous.

  I am looking at my notes in my office (a dingier & darker place could never be found) as well as the list from Minister Komayd’s warehouse, & I am struck by the marvel of what we have saved, what we have stored, & the enormity of the task before me.

  So far I am about three-quarters of the way through just compiling a list strictly of documents: issuance of edicts from Continental priests, Divinities, or Divine agents, anything recording significant “policy changes” (I am obliged to use this execrable term for what I seek). The stack of paper now comes up to about knee height. I once jokingly predicted I would die entombed in documents, yet now that prediction seems much more possible. It is fascinating material, to be sure—I would have killed to grasp but a fraction of it months ago—yet now I feel I shall drown in treasures.

  Sketches, sketches … I hope I shall find a place to keep all of these sketches.…

  27TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SCORPION

  Already, a pattern emerges.

  I must allow that I could be biased. I have looked at the most obvious opportunity for correlation—the Night of Convening, & the founding of Bulikov—& though I do perceive much correlation, that doesn’t mean I’m right.

  But the facts remain:

  In 717, while the Divinities & their peoples were still squabbling & fighting for territory, a Taalvashtani priest wrote a series of essays expounding the benefits of allying with Jukoshtan. These became exceedingly popular throughout all of Taalvashtan, being read aloud in numerous gathering places.

  In 720, on the other side of the Continent, a phalanx of Voortyashtani precepts helped a wandering Olvoshtani monk return to his home, & reflected at length upon how much they had in common with their warring neighbors. This was recorded in several letters sent to the foremost Voortyashtani acolyte, who noted that he approved of the sentiment.

  That same year, in Ahanashtan, a county magistrate wrote letters to his sister, describing a town meeting in which much sympathy with the Kolkashtanis was expressed, despite the ongoing six-way war.

  So on, & so on … I can cite nearly thirty more instances of naked sympathy for other Divine factions, & more continue to creep out of the pile, despite the Divine war being waged at this exact same time.

  Then—“abruptly”—in 723, all six Divinities felt compelled to sit down in the Night of the Convening, in the future spot of Bulikov, hash out their differences, & form what was, more or less, a pantheon of equal Divinities.… Yet all religious texts I have reviewed indicate this was decided with no consultation with their mortal followers whatsoever! This was, reportedly, a “unilateral” decision among Divinities, as one would expect, for why would a god consult with his or her followers, like a politician among constituents? Yet obviously the shift had been brewing for years, among their mortal flock!

  The two groups—mortal & Divine—were not as divided as history would have us believe.

  This is an absurdly large example, akin to deciphering the destination of a ship by which way the seabirds are buffeted by the winds … yet it sketches the outline of what I expected to see.

  I wish I could mail Shara about it. But I am not entirely sure how genuine her interest in me was—how can you ever tell what is & is not an act with such people?

  There is a café I find myself frequenting, just adjacent to the Seat of the World. Bulikov is a mixed-up jumble of a city, there—the Blink still reverberates in the city’s bones—& there I watch children play & fight, wives gossip & laugh, men smoke & drink & play cards &, often ineffectually, court the women.

  People fall in love & bicker over silly things, even in a place as mad as this. Life goes on, & I must smile.

  15TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SLOTH

  It is saying something that I, veteran of libraries, begin to tire of my task. I look forward to finishing this so I can continue on to my next task: researching the Kaj. How ridiculous it is that, though the man’s profile emblazons coins, flags, & so on, we know almost as little about him as we do the Divinities. Especially in regards to how he actually managed to assassinate them. I can understand why the minister wished me to research this subject first, but I, stupidly, convinced her that the Continentals still derive a sense of legitimacy from the Divinities, so researching their nature would offer more definite geopolitical benefits.

  Listen to me. I sound like Shara.

  The grass is always greener on the next task, surely, but the Kaj has always been a fascination of mine. He just seems to suddenly appear, the son of a wealthy, Continental-collaborator family, poking his head up in history & surging forward. I have reviewed numerous family trees, & have found almost nothing about the man. Some list his father as never even having married! Was the Kaj, possibly, the product of an illegitimate relationship? Was he even the man’s son at all?

  I no longer sound like Shara. Now I sound like a gossipy midwife.

  I sometimes go to the sections of the city most disrupted by the Blink. The stairs there look like fields of giant cornstalks, rising into the sky, ending suddenly. The children play a funny game: they run up the stairs, see who is bravest to go the highest, then run back down.

  Up the stairs & down the stairs they run, over & over, always hurrying, yet never quite going anywhere.

  I sympathize.

  I must focus.… I must examine the threads of history, the calendars & timelines, & see if they align.

  If they do not, as I expect, what does this mean for the Continent? What does it mean for Saypur?

  29TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SLOTH

  Yesterday I met something I am not sure is legally permitted: an Olvoshtani monk.

  I think it was a monk
… I am not sure. I was taking a break from my work, reveling in sunlight on the Solda, sketching the bridge (it is so much narrower than nearly every bridge I’ve seen—I forget, of course, that it was meant solely for foot & horse traffic) & the walls behind it when she approached: a short, bald woman in orange robes.

  She asked me what I was doing, & I told her. I showed her my work, & she was very appreciative. “You have captured its essence exactly,” she said. “And they say there are no more miracles!”

  I asked her her name. She said she had none. I asked her the name of her order. She said she had none, only a “disorder.” (A joke, I presume.) I asked her what she thought of Bulikov these days. She shrugged. “It is being reinvented.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “Forgetting.” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.”

  I was so struck by this I fell into deep thought for some time. She skipped two stones across the Solda, bowed to me, & walked away.

  2ND OF THE MONTH OF THE TURTLE

  Amazing discoveries, & terrifying ones. The discussions I have found taking place just before the Great Expansion have shed so much more light on the strange relationship between Divinities & mortals.

  In 768 through 769:

  In Ahanashtan, a priest stood on the shore & daily preached his reflections of foreign lands; in Voortyashtan, a sparring master pointed to mountain canyons headed east, below (then) the Dreyling lands, & commented on the way the rain must fall on the other side of the mountains, inspiring numerous exploration parties; later, in Jukoshtan, a starling-singer (must research this term later) sang a three-day poem of the currents in the ocean, & how they carry one so far away to distant places, & perhaps distant peoples … & so on, & so on.

  One can see, then, that the Continentals were thinking about lands besides theirs. I have discovered a wealth of text that noses at the boundaries of their geographic knowledge.

  Yet I have trudged through Divine decrees of all kinds during this same period, & have found no Divine mention of anything beyond the Continent’s boundaries & shores!

  It is odd that the Divinities remained silent on a conversation surging through their mortal flock.

  But look how the discourse changes among the Continentals between 771 & 774:

  In Kolkashtan, a town magistrate claimed that, since the Continent is blessed by the Divinities, there is nothing they do not own—they own the stars, the clouds, & the waves in the ocean; in Voortyashtan, a “gallows-priestess” asked why they make blades that will shed no blood, for there are no more wars to fight in, & debated whether this was a sin; in Ahanashtan, a “mossling” (some kind of nun?) wrote a poetic epic about what will happen when Ahanashtan grows so large (was the city alive? I must research further) that it begins to harm itself, bringing disharmony, starvation, & exhaustion. This epic was terribly successful, & caused many debates & much anxiety, with some even demanding the mossling’s imprisonment.

  The Continentals were thinking, however peripherally, about expansion. It is patently obvious to anyone that they feared exhaustion, starvation, & moreover they began to feel that they deserved to expand, & take ownership of new places.

  The Divinities, however, were not thinking about expansion—Kolkan was starting down the train of thought that would begin with his period of open judgment, & Taalhavras, always the most distant of Divinities, was adding onto the walls of Bulikov—and, I believe, altering the nature of Bulikov in many more profound, invisible ways.… All of them were off on their own concerns, while the people of the Continent fretted over the future.

  Yet then, in 772, all six Divinities met in Bulikov, & elected—in what we previously thought to be an inscrutable, spontaneous gesture—to begin the Great Expansion, the invasion & domination of all nearby nations & countries, including Saypur.

  Even the Continentals themselves recorded some surprise at this decision—but why, if they were already thinking about it themselves?

  The argument I pose may be tenuous, but it compensates in quantity of evidence—in my studies, I have found nearly six hundred other instances of similar phenomena, on a much smaller scale: edicts that were proclaimed well after public opinion had been formed, laws that were prescribed after everyone was already following them, persecutions & prejudices that were in place well before the Divine, or their institutions, announced them.…

  The list goes on & on.

  The pattern is undeniable: the Continentals made their decisions, formed their attitudes … & the Divinities followed, making them official.

  Who was leading whom? Is this evidence of some kind of unconscious vote, which the Divinities then enacted?

  I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like schools offish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course.

  And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises by millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts—giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers?

  This knowledge, I think, is incredibly dangerous. The Continentals derive so much pride & so much power from having Divine approval.… But were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?

  And if I am right, then it means that the Continentals were never ordered to invade Saypur, never ordered to enslave us, never ordered to force their brutal regime onto the known world: the gods merely enforced it, because the Continentals wished it.

  Everything we know is a lie.

  Where did the gods come from? What were they?

  I find it hard to sleep, knowing this. I relax at night with a game of cards, played on the embassy rooftop. You can see the scarring in the city. It is like a roadmap of clashing realities.…

  So much forgotten. If this city is a chrysalis, it is an ugly one.

  24TH OF THE MONTH OF THE TURTLE

  The minister is pleased with my progress, but asks for more verification. I have compiled a tower of contradictions in Continental history—& this, for me, would suffice—yet I will find more for her.

  Yet something absurd has happened: I have discovered among the piles in my office some crumbling letters written by a soldier close to Lieutenant Sagresha … & thus close to the Kaj himself! How could I have forgotten or missed this? Perhaps I never even looked at them … Though sometimes I worry my office at the university is being tampered with. Yet this may be silly paranoia.

  But what the soldier writes is eye-opening to say the least:

  We have suspected for some time that the Kaj used some sort of projectile weapon: a cannon, gun, or bolt that fired a special kind of fire or lightning against which the Divinities had no defense.

  Yet I believe we have been thinking about this the wrong way: we think about the gun, the cannon itself, rather than what it fired. But this soldier records stories of a “hard metal” or a “black lead” that the Kaj produced & stored & protected! Here, upon the Kaj’s execution of the Divinity Jukov:

  “We followed the Kaj to a place in the city—a temple of white & silver, its walls patterned like the stars with purple glass. I could not see the god in the temple, & worried it was a trap, but our general did not worry, & loaded his black lead within his hand-cannon, & entered. Time passed, & we grew concerned, yet then there was a shot, & our general—weeping!—slowly came out.”

  A valuable piece of history, certainly, but also a revolutionary one!

  What if it was not the cannon at all that was important? What if it was simply the metal that was used
in the shot? We know the Kaj was something of an alchemist: we have records of his experiments. What if he produced a material that the Divine could not affect, just as we cannot affect an arrow through our hearts?

  Even stranger, the soldier writes of the Kaj mentioning a “djinnifrit” that was kept in his father’s manor house back in Saypur. We do know that certain Continental collaborators were given Divine servants as a reward, but it would be scandalous for anyone to discover that the Kaj had such close contact with any agent of the Divine! Djinnifrit servants prepared their masters’ beds, served them food, wine.… I cannot imagine what everyone would say if it was revealed that the Kaj had been pampered in such a way.

  I will wait to send this information back to the minister until I know more.

  20TH OF THE MONTH OF THE CAT

  I am not sure if what I have found helps the case of the Kaj.… I have discovered more letters from the Kaj’s inner circle during his time on the Continent, immediately after the capture of Bulikov, when he sank into a depression so severe he spoke to no one at all.

  I have confirmed that the Kaj’s mysterious weapon was, indeed, “black lead” or “hard metal”—a metal whose reality could not be altered by Divine means. Both the Divinities & their servants were helpless against it: the Kaj merely needed to decipher a way to propel it forward, much as one would a common firearm.

  But how he created it … That I did not anticipate.

  After the brutal Massacre of Mahlideshi, when Saypuris revolted after the horrific execution of that simple girl, it seems the Kaj was so horrified & so furious that he did conduct experiments, as we thought … but he conducted them on his family’s djinnifrit servant! From what I have read, it sounds very much like torture, even monstrous torture: the djinnifrit was bound to serve the Komayd family’s will, so the Kaj forced it to comply with his efforts, burning & wounding the djinnifrit until he had created a material that worked not only on the djinnifrit, but on all Divine creatures, including the Divinities themselves … & upon succeeding, he executed his childhood servant.

  Will this endear him to the more nationalistic factions in Saypur? Or will they, like myself, be horrified by what I have learned? I have still not found any account of the Kaj’s maternal lineage.… Did he, like the Divinities, simply manifest, with no explanation, coughed up on the shore of Saypur from the seas of history?