“I think I was right,” says Shara. “This alley is damaged by the Blink in a very deep way. Not just the alley. Reality.” She brushes off her hands and turns to face the chalk line. “That is the first spot of reality static witnessed since the end of the Great War.”
* * *
“After the War, after the Divinities were killed, it took a long time for reality to figure out what it was supposed to be,” says Shara. “In one city, one tenet was absolutely and completely true; then, in another, the opposite. When the Divinities were killed, these two areas had to reconcile with one another and decide what their true state was. While that was getting resolved, you had—”
“Static,” says Sigrud.
“Exactly. Places where the rules were suspended. A deep marring to the fundamental nature of reality, caused by the Blink.”
“How could reality still be broken here and no one ever noticed?”
“I think part of it”—Shara waves at the street—“is that it blends in so well.” The area is like much of Bulikov: twisted, warped, pockmarked; buildings trapped inside of buildings; streets ending in tangles of stairs. “As anyone can plainly see, Bulikov has never really recovered from the Blink.”
“And on the other side of that”—he points at the invisible spot in space, wondering what to call it—“that static, is another reality?”
“I believe so,” says Shara. “Specifically, it’s a reality that pays attention to what sort of Divinity you worship, whose markings and sigils and signs you bear.”
“I suppose it’s true, then—the clothes make the man.…”
“How many more wraps do you have?”
He looks in his satchel. “Three.”
“Then please give me your smallest one, if you can. We’re going over.”
Shara and Sigrud each pull on a set of clothes: for Shara, the clothes are absurdly large, and for Sigrud, absurdly small. “I really do wish you’d washed these,” says Shara. “This one is still stiff on the inside.”
“You’re sure this will work?” asks Sigrud.
“Yes. Because once, you almost went there.”
Sigrud frowns. “I did?”
“Yes. When you saw the first disappearance, the man jumping down into the alley, you said you glimpsed, just for a moment, tall, thin buildings of white and gold.… And I believe the only reason you did see that”—she points at his right hand in its gray glove—“is because of that.”
“Because I had been touched,” says Sigrud, “by the Finger of Kolkan.”
“You bore a Divinity’s mark, so it was willing to accept you. Halfway, at least.”
Shara pulls on the Kolkashtani hood and steps toward the chalk line.
“You should let me go first,” says Sigrud. “Over there, it is enemy territory. Only our attackers have ever gone there.”
Shara grins for the first time in what feels like weeks. “I have spent half my life reading about other realities. I’d never refuse the opportunity of being the first to enter one, even with my life at stake.”
She walks forward.
* * *
There is no change, unlike when she passed through to the Unmentionable Warehouse. She is not even sure if anything has happened at all: she is still in the alley, standing on the stone floor, facing a street that looks almost exactly like it did before.
She looks down. At her feet is a Kolkashtani wrap, tied up in a tight bundle.
She turns around to see Sigrud manifest—there is no other word for it—in the middle of the alleyway. His one eye blinks behind the Kolkashtani hood, and he asks, “Are we through?”
“I think so,” says Shara. “But where we are doesn’t seem that diff—”
She trails off and stares over Sigrud’s shoulder.
“What?” he says. He turns to look, and says only, “Oh.”
The first real noticeable difference is that, beyond the next building, it is day. Not just day, but a beautiful day—a day with a cloudless, piercingly beautiful blue sky. Shara looks back in the other direction and sees that over those buildings the sky is an inky, smoky purple: the night sky she just came from. Even time is in disagreement, in this place.…
But that doesn’t come close to the other real difference: beyond the end of the alley, where the beautiful day begins, are huge, splendid, beautiful white skyscrapers, lined and tipped with gold, covered in ribbons of scrolling and interlacing vegetal ceramics, penetrated with fragile white arches and decorative window shafts, layered with pearl and glass.
“What,” says Sigrud, “is that?”
Shara, breathless, totters out to the street and finds that the entire block is lined with gorgeous lily-white buildings, each bearing its own frieze. The walls are covered in calligraphic facades resembling twisting vines or lines of text: one building, she sees, is covered in giant lines from the Voortyashtani Book of Spears. Shara’s brain begins overheating as it tries to identify their many depictions: Saint Varchek’s loss at the Green Dawn.… Taalhavras repairs the arch under the world.… Ahanas recovers the seed of the sun.…
“Oh, my goodness.” She is trembling. She falls to her knees. “Oh, oh my goodness …”
“Where are we?” asks Sigrud as he walks out.
She remembers what Saint Kivrey said: It was like living in a city made of flower petals.
“Bulikov,” says Shara. “But the Bulikov of old. The Divine City.”
* * *
“I thought all this was destroyed,” says Sigrud.
“No—it vanished!” says Shara. “Bulikov shrank by huge amounts during the Blink—whole sections of the city just abruptly disappeared. Some of it was destroyed, certainly—but not all of it, it seems. This … This section of Bulikov must have been saved but cut adrift, tethered to our reality by a handful of connections.”
Moths caper and twirl in sunbeams. A courtyard’s crystal windows send golden prisms dancing in the street.
“So this is what they fight to return to?” He casts his one eye over a half-mile-high tower tipped with a wide, golden bell dome. “I can see why.”
“This is just a piece of what it was like,” says Shara. “Much more was genuinely lost, along with anyone else in the buildings.”
A fountain carved to resemble stacks of jasmine blossoms percolates happily. Dragonflies flit from edge to edge, their green eyes sparkling.
“Thousands, then,” says Sigrud.
She shakes her head. “Millions.” Then she thinks. “Here. I want to try something.…”
She holds her hands out and begins murmuring things. Her first three attempts fail—“What are you doing?” asks Sigrud—but on the fourth …
A glass sphere the size of an apple appears in her hands. She laughs gaily. “It works! It works! Let me see if I can …” She maneuvers it so it catches a ray of sunlight: instantly, the sphere lights up, glowing a clear, bright gold. Shara cackles again, puts the sphere on the ground, and rolls it toward Sigrud. He stops it with his boot: its glow persists, lighting him from below.
“A miracle,” says Shara. “From the Book of the Red Lotus, of Olvos. One that never works on … well, in our Bulikov, I suppose. But here …”
“It works quite well.”
“Because this reality obeys different rules. Watch—roll it back to me.” Shara picks it up, tosses it high, and cries, “Stay and show!” The glowing sphere hangs ten feet over them, bathing the streets around them in soft light. “They had these throughout Bulikov, rather than streetlights. Much more convenient.”
“And a good way to tell people where we are,” says Sigrud disapprovingly. “Take it down, please.”
“Well … Actually, I don’t know how to do that, exactly.”
Sigrud, grumbling, picks up a stone and hurls it at the sphere. Shara shouts and covers her head. The shot is dead-on, and the sphere pops and bursts into a cloud of dust, which blows away down the street.
“At least stones still work here,” says Sigrud.
* * *
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They wander Old Bulikov—as Shara has termed it—not sure what they are looking for. The city is completely abandoned: the gardens are barren, the courtyards empty. Everything is quite clean and white, though: Shara is happy to have the Kolkashtani wrap, as it helps reduce the glare. But though the city is beautiful, she cannot absorb it without thinking of Efrem’s theory: Did the gods make this place, she wonders, or did they simply make what the Continentals wished them to make?
Sometimes when they glance into windows of alleys in this empty city they do not see what they expect: instead of more alleys, or the inside of a building, they see muddled, filthy streetways packed with frowning Continentals, or a drainage ditch leading to the Solda, or just a blank brick wall.
“More reality static,” says Shara. “A connection to New Bulikov—our Bulikov.”
Sigrud stops and looks into one window, which gazes in on an old woman’s kitchen. He watches as she cuts the head off of four trout. “They do not see us at all?”
“Excuse me,” says Shara into the window. “Excuse me!”
The old woman mutters, “How I hate trout. By the gods, how I hate trout.…”
“I suppose not,” says Shara. “Come on.”
After a few blocks they come to a sprawling estate with a white-walled mansion, horseshoe arches, grass-floored courtyards (which are now clotted up with weeds), and dozens of reflecting pools, each of which is positioned to reflect the flower-shaped citadel.
“I wonder what esteemed person lived here,” says Shara. “A high priest, or perhaps one of the Blessed.…”
Sigrud points to one of the horseshoe arches: “Someone we know, actually.”
On the top of the arch are the words: THE HOUSE OF VOTROV.
“Ah,” says Shara softly. “I should have guessed.… Vohannes did say the original house vanished during the Blink. But I did not realize it was quite this nice.”
“What did you mean, one of the Blessed?” asks Sigrud.
“People who had interbred with the Divine,” says Shara. “Their progeny were heroes, saints … unusually fortunate and legendary sorts of people. The world rearranged itself around the Blessed to give them what they want.”
Shara remembers one of the last entries in Efrem’s journal, and the single word: Blessed.
“That must be nice,” says Sigrud. “And you think the Votrov family was one of these?”
“Oh, no, not at all. Those sorts of lineages were always well documented. If he was, I’m sure his family would have never let anyone forget about it. Wait.… Look.” She points at where the weeds of one courtyard have been parted. “Someone’s been here. Quite recently.”
Sigrud walks to the disturbance, squats, and reviews the markings on the ground. “Many people. Many. Men, I think. And recent, as you said.” He carefully steps forward into the weeds. “Most of them burdened. Carrying … heavy things.” He points ahead, toward another horseshoe arch that exits onto a descending hillside. “There is where they went.” He points to the citadel of the house of Votrov. “And there is where they came from.”
“Can you follow the trail?”
He looks at her as if to say, Did you really just ask that?
Shara debates splitting up, but decides against it. If we get lost in here, how will we ever get out? “We’ll follow the trail where they went,” she says. “And if we have time, we’ll examine where they came from.” They stalk along white streetways, through courtyards, around gardens. The silence gnaws on Shara’s sense of ease until she mistakes every glimmer for a lowering bolt-shot.
All the Continentals conspire against us. I should have never allowed Vohannes into my bed.
“Why do you not dance?” asks Sigrud.
“What? Dance?”
“I would think,” he explains, “that you would be dancing to see Old Bulikov. Running back and forth, trying to sketch things …”
“Like Efrem did.” She considers it. “I do wish to. I would gladly spend the rest of my life here, if I could. But here, in Bulikov, every piece of history feels lined with razors, and the closer I try and look at it, the more I wound myself.”
A curving house, designed to resemble a volcano, perches over a babbling brook of white stones.
“I do not think that is history’s nature,” says Sigrud.
“Oh? Then what is it?”
“That,” he says, “is the nature of life.”
“You believe so? A depressing perspective, I feel.”
“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties,” says Sigrud. He stares into the sky, and the white sunlight glints off of his many scars. “They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“We think we move, we run, we push forward, but, I think, in many ways we are still running in place, trapped in a moment that happened to us long ago.”
“Then what are we to do?”
He shrugs. “We must learn to live with it.”
The wind pulls a tiny dust devil to its feet and sends it tottering along a white stone lane.
“Does this place make you contemplative?” asks Shara.
“No,” he says. “This is something I think I have believed for a long time.”
A bulging crystal window at the top of a rounded house captures the blue sky, stretches it, and makes a perfect azure bubble.
“You are not,” says Shara, “the man I freed from prison.”
He shrugs again. “Maybe not.”
“You are wiser than he was. You are wiser than I am, I feel. Do you ever think about going home?”
Sigrud briefly halts on his trail; his eye dances over the cream-white cobblestones; then, “No.”
“No? Never?”
“They do not know me anymore. It was a long time ago. They are different people now. Like I am. And they would not wish to see this thing I am.”
They follow the trail for a few moments of silence.
“I think you’re wrong,” says Shara.
Sigrud says, “Think what you like.”
* * *
The trail leads on and on and on. “Of course, they couldn’t bring cars, could they?” Shara muses aloud. “The reality static wouldn’t allow them through, being so modern.”
“I would have preferred if they could have brought a horse or two.”
“And they would simply leave them here for us? We should be so luck—” Shara stops and stares at a tall, rounded building on her left.
“What?” asks Sigrud.
Shara’s eyes study the walls, which have windows in the pattern of eight-pointed stars, filled with bright violet glass.
“What now?” asks Sigrud.
Shara’s eyes study the facade: at its top is an abridged quote from the Jukoshtava:
THOSE WHO COME UPON A CHOICE, A CHANCE, AND TREMBLE AND FEAR—WHY SHOULD I ALLOW THEM IN MY SHADOW?
“I have read about this place,” murmurs Shara.
“I expect you have read about every place in this city.”
“No! No, I read about this place just … just recently.”
She walks forward and touches the white walls. She remembers the line from Efrem’s journal, quoting the letters of a Saypuri soldier about the death of Jukov: We followed the Kaj to a place in the city—a temple of white and silver, its walls patterned like the stars with purple glass. I could not see the god in the temple, and worried it was a trap, but our general did not worry, and loaded his black lead within his hand-cannon, and entered.
Shara feels numb. She approaches the door of the temple—white-painted wood, carved in a pattern of stars and fur—and pushes it open.
The door opens on a large empty courtyard. The walls are high and frame a piercing bright blue sky above. In the center of the courtyard is a dry fountain, around which are four small benches.
Shara slowly walks to the benches. These she also touches, as if to confirm they
are really there.
Is this, she thinks, where a god once sat?
And did my great-grandfather sit next to him, or stand over him?
She slowly sits on the bench. The wood softly creaks.
Could this really be the place where Jukov himself died? Could I have found it?
She believes so. It seems unreal to see this place, trapped in a fragment of reality long since faded from the real world: but she knows it is perfectly possible. The period after the Blink was chaotic, with pieces of reality flashing into existence, then away.…
She looks to the right. A low gallery circles the courtyard, heavy square roofs supported by white wood columns.
In one column there is a small black hole. It is just at shoulder height, if you are seated.
Seated and, perhaps, holding out a pistol, perhaps to someone’s head.
She walks to it and gets the uncanny sense that something is inside it, watching her. I have been waiting here for you, the little hole seems to say, for so long!
“Sigrud,” she says hoarsely. “Bring me your knife.”
He places the handle of the heavy black knife in her palm. She takes a breath and shoves the blade into the hole in the wood.
A tink as it strikes something metal. She begins hacking at the column, carving the wood away, until the thing inside begins to shake loose.
Something small and black clatters to the floor of the courtyard. Shara stoops and picks it up.
A piece of dark, dark metal, half-flattened from where it struck the wood, about the size of a fat fig.
She rolls it around in the palm of her hand, feeling its weight.
Jukov must be dead, thinks Shara. He must be. Otherwise, how could this be here?
“What is that?” asks Sigrud.
“This little thing,” says Shara softly, “is what brought down the gods.”
* * *
They continue following the trail, which twists and turns across the streets until it unexpectedly ends in the middle of what seems to have been someone’s living room.
“Where are they?” asks Sigrud. “The footsteps end here.”
Shara kneels and examines the floor, but she can see nothing. “I can never figure out exactly what you are using to track people. Where do the footsteps end?”
City of Stairs Page 37
