City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Volka steps aside. Two thickset men in Kolkashtani wraps join him at the doorway. There’s a very faint pop as Volka’s Butterfly’s Bell dissolves. The two men walk to Shara and Vohannes, violently thrust both of them onto the ground, and tightly bind their hands. Shara is still too sluggish to resist much, and Vohannes is obviously quite injured.

  “Oh, Volka?” Shara asks as she is hauled to her feet. “In regards to your previous comments about me … You do know the original Continentals were almost as brown as any Saypuri? The Continentals today are fairer simply because the climate’s changed, and you no longer get as much sun. So while you may admire fairness yourself, it is not, I suppose one could say, a godly trait. But you would have known that, if you read any Divinity’s texts besides Kolkan’s. He preferred not to mention flesh at all, let alone skin tone.”

  Volka attempts a regal pose. “Shallies speak nothing but lies,” he whispers, and walks away.

  * * *

  Captain Mivsk Ashkovsky of the good ship Mornvieva stares through the green lenses of his goggles and into the wild riot of the dawn. Clouds cling to the horizon like newspaper headlines. Down below—miles below, possibly, Mivsk isn’t sure—the gray, dark countryside of the Continent speeds by.

  Mivsk rummages in his jumper pocket, takes out his pocket watch, and does some estimations. “Two hours!” he bellows over the raging winds. “Two hours until the coast!”

  The crew cheers. All of them are wrapped in thick thermal clothing, all of them wear goggles and masks, and all of them are tied to the deck of the Mornvieva by stout cables; Jakoby already fell victim to a sharp starboard wind and went tumbling off the side, only to be hauled back on deck by his comrades, swearing and spitting and purple in the face.

  Two hours, thinks Mivsk. Two hours until he finds out what the good ship Mornvieva—and its twenty-three souls, six cannons, and three hundred six-inch shells—can really do, besides fly very fast in a straight line very high above the ground. He was not even sure it would get off the ground, for the experiments with the Carpet of Kolkan had not always gone well: on their first effort they used only one thread of it, and when Volka’s priest read the rites to activate it, the thread rose up so fast the priest was unprepared and lost much of his face. “The miraculous,” Volka observed as the man shrieked, “requires great caution.” It took months to create the design to stabilize the threads—in the case of Mornvieva, five threads, each lifting eight hundred tons—and months after that to acquire the steel the designs required. And all that time, Mivsk—though he was, he felt, quite faithful—never quite believed it would work.

  But now here they are, higher than the highest building in Ahanashtan, hurtling through the atmosphere, pulled along by sword-like sails and giant wings.

  Forget not, he reminds himself, that you have a mission, and a duty. We fly not for your glory, Mivsk Ashkovsky, nor for the crew’s, but for the glory of Father Kolkan. And secretly Mivsk cannot wait to see what Kolkan will think of the destruction the cannons will wreak upon the wretched Saypuris, who, for once, will be outmatched. To imagine reducing the great, monstrous shipyards of Ghaladesh to flaming rubble … It makes his heart sing.

  Mivsk goes belowdecks for what must be the seventh time to review the cannonry. No Continental has ever possessed firepower on such a level, and seeing the giant, massive cannons and their huge shells, longer and thicker than Mivsk’s forearm, gives him a sense of power he has never felt before. It is all mechanized, as well: one needs only pull a lever to fire any cannon.

  Mivsk checks the three port cannons: Saint Kivrey, Saint Oshko, Saint Vasily, all in fine shape. Then he checks the three starboard cannons: Saint Shovska, Saint Ghovros, and then Saint—

  Mivsk stops before Saint Toshkey. There is a tall man in a ripped Kolkashtani wrap leaning against the cannon, staring out the gunport toward where the good ships Usina and Ukma, the starboard portion of their small armada, cut through the clouds.

  Captain Mivsk stares at him, bewildered. “Who …? Who …?”

  “I have never sailed upon a ship of the air,” the man remarks. “Many things I have sailed upon, but never a ship of the air.”

  Mivsk wants to ask him why he is not wearing his goggles, why he is not in uniform, why he does not have on his safety cable; but all these questions are absurd, for Mivsk knows there is no one in his crew of this size … right?

  The man looks at Mivsk; one eye in his Kolkashtani wrap is dark. “Does it sail,” he asks, “like a regular ship?”

  “Well …” Mivsk looks behind him, wondering how to deal with this bizarre occurrence. “Why aren’t you abovedeck, sailor? Why aren’t you cabled to the mast? You could fall off i—”

  “And the cannons? Could they also function as air-to-air cannons?”

  “I … Why?”

  “I believe so. Yes. Yes, I thought so.” The man tilts his head and thinks aloud: “Six cannons onboard, and five other ships … One shot a ship … Then this should be no trouble.” He nods. “Thank you. That is very good to know.”

  Then there is a blur, and Captain Mivsk suddenly feels as if he’s swallowed a large chunk of ice.

  He looks down and sees the handle of a very large knife sticking out from between his ribs. The ship begins to spin around him.

  “It is good for a captain to die,” says the man’s voice, “before seeing the death of his crew. Go quietly, and with gratitude.”

  The last thing Mivsk sees is the giant man standing behind Saint Toshkey, using the blade of his hand to imagine lining up the cannon with the good ship Usina far away.

  * * *

  They’re forced in a familiar path, to Shara: down the little blank hallways, back to the room that held the mhovost—the ring of salt still sitting on the floor—and back to the tunnel leading down to the Seat of the World, which, she now sees, is completely restored.

  “You caved in this tunnel, but it was easily fixed,” says Volka. “I doubt if you can guess at which miracle I used to make it.”

  Shara had not imagined that the tunnel’s creation was miraculous, but now that she considers it, she jumps to the obvious conclusion. “Ovski’s Candlelight,” she says.

  Volka’s face tightens, and he waves a hand and leads them down the tunnel, holding his invisible flame. Vohannes chuckles.

  He hasn’t freed Kolkan yet, thinks Shara. Maybe Mulaghesh … Maybe she can … If anything, Shara realizes, Mulaghesh is raiding the Votrov estate right now. That, or fortifying the embassy. Neither of which could possibly save either of them. And Sigrud is miles and miles and miles away, outside of Jukoshtan. They are alone.

  The tunnel stretches down. Shara imagines Kolkan waiting for them at the bottom, the man of clay seated in the back of a cave, his eyes gray and blank.

  “I’m sorry, Vo,” whispers Shara in the dark.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” says Vo. “I’m embarrassed you had to meet the little shi—”

  “Quiet,” says one of their captors, and he jabs Vohannes in the kidney. Vohannes, whimpering, struggles to keep walking.

  They enter the Seat of the World. Vohannes gasps in shock. “My word …” Shara wishes she could feel as amazed as she did when she first discovered this place, but now the temple feels dark and twisted to her, full of black corners and whispers.

  Over two dozen Restorationists, all in Kolkashtani wraps, stand in Kolkan’s atrium before the blank window. Beside it, Shara sees, is a ladder.

  This is really happening.

  Volka walks to the stairs leading up to the Seat’s defunct bell tower. He raises his hand, which glitters with orange light. “First to restore the temple to its glory,” he says. He points at Shara and Vohannes, mutters something. There is a squeaking sound, like fingers being rubbed against glass. Shara’s hands are still bound, but she sticks a toe out, testing, and feels an invisible wall. The Butterfly’s Bell again.

  “Don’t breathe too much,” says Volka, smiling. “That one’s much smaller.” Grinning like a pomp
ous head boy, he mounts the stairs to the bell tower. Soon he is out of sight.

  “He must have found a way to restore the bell tower, too,” says Shara.

  “Quiet,” says one of the Restorationists.

  “That was just filled with earth a few days ago.”

  “Quiet!”

  “What are you going to do, punch us through the barrier?” says Vohannes.

  The Restorationist makes a threatening pose at him, then abandons it, as if he has better things to do.

  “I should have seen this coming,” says Shara. “I should have seen this all coming.”

  “Shara, shut up,” whispers Vohannes. “Listen, you.… You’ve got something hidden up your sleeve, right? You always do?”

  “Well … No. No, actually, I don’t.”

  “But you’ve got the army coming in, right? They’ll notice you missing—right?”

  “They might, but they definitely won’t look here.”

  “Okay, but … Shara, please. Please think!” he hisses. “You’ve got to think of something! You’ve got to, because I definitely won’t. I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on! So please—is there anything?”

  Shara thinks hard, but she has no idea how to penetrate the Butterfly’s Bell, a miracle she never even knew existed until now. And even if they got out, what could they do? A wounded, limping man and a drugged ninety-pound woman against twenty-five Restorationists? I could blast our way out of here with Ovski’s Candlelight … if I actually knew Ovski’s Candlelight. But I don’t. I just know of it, which is not the same thing. If only there was some other way to hide, or maybe tunnel into the ground, or …

  … or disappear.

  “Parnesi’s Cupboard,” she says quietly.

  “What?” whispers Vohannes.

  “Parnesi’s Cupboard—it’s what your brother used to kidnap me. It puts people into an invisible pocket of air—one that can’t be seen through by either mortal or Divinity.” Because it was made by Jukov, she remembers, so one of his priests could sneak into Kolkan’s nunnery. So it would work excellently here.

  “So even if Kolkan himself shows up …”

  “We’d be hidden. We’d be safe.”

  “Great! Well … Why don’t you use one of those, then?”

  “Because my hands are bound,” whispers Shara. “There’s a line from the Jukoshtava I have to say, and a gesture I have to make.”

  “Shit,” says Vohannes. He looks up at the Restorationists. “Here. Here, let’s see if we can shift around.…”

  Slowly, they rotate so they’re facing away from one another. With their hands tied behind one another’s backs, Vohannes begins to clumsily fumble at her bonds.

  “Good luck,” mutters Shara. “But I think they actually knew what they were doing when they tied these.”

  One of the Restorationists laughs. “My, what an excellent deception! Untie your hands if you want, you depraved little pervert. The only person getting you out of that Bell is Father Kolkan himself.”

  “And when he does,” says another, “you’ll wish you’d suffocated to death in there.”

  Another: “Is that the first time you’ve ever touched a woman, Votrov? I would imagine so.…”

  Vohannes ignores them and whispers, “Do you really think my brother can bring back Kolkan?”

  Shara glances at the clear glass pane in Kolkan’s atrium. “Well. I will say that I now think some Divinity is in there.”

  “But … not Kolkan?”

  “I actually conversed with the Divinity, I think,” says Shara. “On the night they attacked your house. I saw many scenes from many different Divine texts.… But none of them were coherent. Moreover, I have seen that many of Jukov’s miracles still work—Parnesi’s Cupboard being one of them—so I am no longer quite sure that Jukov is truly gone, either.”

  Vohannes grunts as he plucks at a knot, which refuses to budge. “So what you’re saying is … you don’t know.”

  “Correct.”

  “Great.”

  He keeps tugging at her ropes. With some morbid amusement, Shara realizes this is the most intimate contact they’ve had since the night after Urav.

  “I’m glad I’m here with you,” says Vohannes. “Here at the end of all this.”

  “When we’re free, stay close,” says Shara. “Parnesi’s Cupboard is not large.”

  “All right, but I want you to listen.… I’m glad, Shara. Do you understand?”

  Shara is silent. Then she says, “You shouldn’t be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when my cover was blown … I thought it was you who did it.”

  He stops trying to untie her. “Me?”

  “Yes. You … You suddenly got everything you wanted, Vo. Everything. And you were the only other one who knew who I was. And we thought we saw you at the loomworks, but it wasn’t really you. It had to be—”

  “Volka.” She cannot see him, but Vohannes is quite still. “But … Shara, I would … I would never do that to you. Never. I couldn’t.”

  “I know! I know that now, Vo. But I, I thought you were sick! I thought something was wrong with you. You seemed so unhappy, so miserable.…”

  She can feel Vohannes looking around. “Maybe you weren’t wrong there,” he says softly. “Perhaps there is something wrong with me. But maybe I could have never been right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean … I mean, look at these people, these people I grew up with!” The Restorationists have gathered in Kolkan’s atrium, and they kneel on the floor to begin a prayer. “Look at them! They’re praying to pain, to punishment! They think that hate is holy, that every part of being human is wrong. So of course I grew up wrong! No human could grow up right in such a place!”

  Somewhere, far in the distance, Shara hears a bell toll.

  “What was that?” asks Vo.

  “We need to hurry,” says Shara. Somewhere, softly, another bell tolls.

  “Why?”

  Another bell tolls. And another. And another. They all have different tones, as if some are very large and others are very small, but more than that, each bell has a resonance that seems like it can only be perceived by different parts of the mind, pouring in alien experiences: when one bell tolls, she imagines she sees hot, murky swamps, tangles of vines, and clutches of flowering orchids; when another bell tolls, she smells flaming pitch, and sawdust, and mortar; when the next bell tolls, she can hear the crash of metal, the screaming of crows, the howls of warfare; with the next, she tastes wine, raw meat, sugar, blood, and what she suspects to be semen; on the next, she hears the crushing grind of huge stones being pushed against one another, terrible weight bearing down upon her; and then, when the final bell joins the tolling, she feels a wintry chill in her arms and a flickering fire in her feet and heart.

  One bell for each Divinity, thinks Shara. I don’t know how he did it, or even what he’s doing, but Volka’s found a way to ring all the bells of the Seat of the World.

  “What’s going on, Shara?” asks Vohannes.

  “Look at the window,” says Shara, “and you’ll see.”

  With each pulse, a faint light appears in the window. Golden sunlight, as if the sun is so bright it is penetrating all the layers of earth to shine into this dark, dreary place.

  The sun isn’t shining through the earth, she thinks. We’re rising up.

  “He’s moving it,” she says. “He’s raising it. He’s raising the Seat of the World.”

  * * *

  Mulaghesh’s soldiers are doing a halfhearted job of fortifying the embassy courtyard when the light begins to change.

  Mulaghesh herself is monitoring their work from the embassy gates: the embassy walls are tall and white with iron railing at the top, and while they’re quite pretty they’re well short of military defenses. The embassy is also very exposed, sitting on an intersection between two major roads: one road runs along the walls, and the other runs all the way through Bulikov and straight up t
o the embassy gates. Mulaghesh can peer through the bars of the gates and see clear to downtown Bulikov. If Shara’s right about those six-inch cannons, she thinks, there are about a million angles those things could take to wipe us out.

  Despite this exposed position, Mulaghesh has not prodded her soldiers along much, mostly because she privately hopes Shara is terribly, terribly wrong. But when she begins to hear the bells in the distance, and the shadows of the iron railing begin to dance on the courtyard stone, her mouth falls open enough for her cigarillo to come tumbling out.

  She turns around. The sun itself is moving: though it is rendered somewhat hazy and strange by the walls of Bulikov, it is like a drop of liquid gold, and it streaks from where it sat just above the horizon and twirls and dances to the left, twisting through the sky and growing slightly larger until it’s on the other horizon, just starting to set.

  Mulaghesh wonders: Is a whole day being lost before our eyes?

  The cacophony of the bells beats on her senses, as if with each toll they are breaking down invisible structures and rebuilding them.

  Then yellow-orange sunlight pulses over the rooftops of Bulikov. One sunbeam lances down as if shot through a veil of clouds—yet there are no clouds that she can see—and glances off the bell tower in the center of the city, which glows brightly.

  Mulaghesh and her soldiers are forced to look away; when they look back, they see the sunlight—the setting sunlight—glints off of a huge polished roof. Mulaghesh has to shade her eyes to keep from being blinded.

  A mammoth, ornate, cream white cathedral sits in the center of Bulikov, with its bell tower almost half a mile tall.

  “What is that?” says one of her lieutenants. “Where did that come from?”