City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It stares at her with muddled, mad eyes, a tottering, tortured wreck of a human form. Then its faces wrinkle, and it begins to weep. Its two mouths scream in two voices, “I am everything! I am nothing! I am the beginning and I am the end! I am the fire and I am the water! I am of the light and I am of the dark! I am chaos and I am order! I am life and I am death!” It turns to the ruined buildings of Bulikov: “Listen to me! Will you listen to me? I have listened to you! Will you listen to me? Just tell me what I should be for you! Tell me! Please, just tell me! Tell me, please!”

  “I see now,” says Shara. “The prison cell was meant only for Kolkan, wasn’t it?”

  “For Jukov to hide there, he had to become Kolkan,” says the Divinity. It puts its hands over its ears, as if hearing a roaring cacophony. “Too many things, too many, all in one. Too many things I needed to be. Too many people I needed to serve. Too much, too much … The world is too much.” It looks at Shara pleadingly. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Shara looks down at the tiny black blade in her fingers.

  The Divinity follows her gaze, nods, and says through its two mouths, “Do it.”

  Despite everything, Shara hesitates.

  “Do it,” the Divinity says again. “I never really knew what they wanted. I never really knew what they needed me to be.” The Divinity kneels. “Do it. Please.”

  Shara walks around behind the Divinity, bends low, and places the black blade at its throat.

  As she says, “I’m sorry,” the Divinity whispers, “Thank you.”

  Shara grasps its forehead and pulls the blade across.

  Instantly, the Divinity is gone, as if it never was.

  The air fills with crashes and groans as hundreds of white skyscrapers come tumbling down, and screams as innumerable starlings take flight.

  Good historians keep the past in their head and the future in their heart.

  —EFREM PANGYUI, “ON HISTORY LOST”

  WHAT IS SOWN

  Shara lies in the tub of warm water in the dark room, trying not to think. Sheer white undergarments cling and suck to her flesh. Her eyes are wrapped with bandages to keep the light out, yet still she sees bursts of colored light and colorful words, and her head still thrums and bangs with a monstrous migraine. She is not so sure she wouldn’t have preferred simply dying from the philosopher’s stones: to deal with a hangover this hellish and psychedelic is something she did not anticipate.

  She knows she is lucky to receive any care at all. The hospitals of Bulikov are overwhelmed with the injured and the maimed. It is only here, in the hospital at the governor’s quarters, that Shara and her comrades could be looked after.

  She hears a door open, and someone enters in soft shoes.

  Shara sits up and hoarsely asks, “How many?”

  The person slowly sits in the chair beside the tub.

  “How many?” she says again.

  Pitry’s voice says, “We’re over two thousand now.”

  Shara shuts her eyes behind the bandages. She feels hot tears on her cheeks.

  “General Noor informs us that this is, despite everything, actually a good thing. So much of Bulikov was destroyed—well, the amount of Bulikov that was there before all the buildings from Old Bulikov appeared, I mean. But then, well, almost all of those new buildings were destroyed when you killed Kolkan.”

  “It wasn’t Kolkan,” says Shara hoarsely. “But kindly get to the point.”

  “Well, erm, General Noor says that two thousand casualties is a low figure, considering the amount of destruction. He thinks you distracted Kolk— Ah, he thinks you distracted the Divinity, slowed it down, which gave the city time to evacuate. And many of the people, as I understand it, had been transformed into some kind of birds. And a few hours after the Divinity died, they all started turning back into people—confused, cold, and, erm, totally nude.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yes. The hills around Bulikov were suddenly filled with hundreds of naked people. Hypothermia became a concern, though we’ve gathered and clothed and treated them as best they could. Noor has asked if you could possibly explain this.”

  “It was a trick that Jukov used to do, worked on a mass scale,” says Shara. “When he wanted to hide someone, he turned them into a flock of starlings. I expect that, in order to save people from the fate Kolkan had forced them into, Jukov simply extended this protection to them: rather than see harm, they took to the skies as flocks of birds. How did so many die?”

  Pitry coughs. “Most perished when the buildings collapsed, but many casualties occurred during the evacuation.… Apparently it was more of a stampede.”

  What a neutered word is “casualties,” thinks Shara. And how pleasant it must be, to sit behind a desk and pare a lost life down to a statistic.

  “It’s all a tragedy, Pitry,” says Shara. “A horrible, monstrous tragedy.”

  “Well, yes, but … it was their god, wasn’t it? Doing what they asked of it?”

  “No,” says Shara. Then she adds, “And yes.”

  “General Noor is aware that your recovery might be more, ah, mental than physical … but he has asked me to see if I can retrieve clarification on this.”

  “You’ve been promoted, Pitry. Congratulations.”

  Pitry coughs again, uncomfortable. “Somewhat, yes. I am assisting the regional governor’s office now. Mostly because almost all of the embassy and polis governor’s staff is … indisposed.”

  “You behaved quite admirably during the fight. You deserve it. How is Mulaghesh?”

  “She’s stable. The arm … could not be saved. It had been quite crushed. It was, at least, not her good arm.”

  Shara groans.

  “Mulaghesh takes it in stride, however. She insists on smoking in the hospital, something that has upset everyone. But she will not listen. Sigrud, however …”

  Shara tenses up. Please, she thinks. Not him, too.

  “He has stupefied all the doctors.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, by being alive, first of all,” says Pitry. “And while removing the glass—a full three pounds of glass—and shrapnel from his wounds, they discovered …” The crackle of paper as he pulls out a list. “… four bolt tips, one bullet, five darts—some kind of exotic, tribal things …” From Qivos, thinks Shara. I told him to get a doctor that time. “… and six teeth that appear to be from some kind of shark. The doctors concluded that most of these were from injuries or altercations that took place, ah, well before this battle.”

  “That sounds about right. But he will survive?”

  “He will. He will probably need to stay in the hospital for some time, but—yes. He looks to make a full recovery, despite everything, unbelievably. And he seems quite … merry.”

  “Merry? Sigrud?”

  “Ahm, yes. He asked me how I was; then he gave me some money and told me to procure”—Pitry coughs once more—“uh, a woman of the evening.”

  Shara shakes her head. My, my. You leave the world for a handful of days and hear rumors of everything changing.

  “I am sorry to ask,” says Pitry, “but General Noor has been quite insistent with me on the matter of, erm, the issue of the Divinity, or Divinities, or …”

  She does not answer. She slowly sits back in the bath.

  “Even if you have no concrete conclusions … Even if you have only guesses about what happened, I’m sure he will be happy to consider those.”

  Shara sighs and lets the warm water slosh into her ears. Let it wash away my memories, she thinks. Wash it all away. She summarizes her conclusions about Jukov hiding in the pane of glass with Kolkan. “I suspect it was also Jukov himself who sank the Seat of the World through Divine means, to secure his hiding place. But just before he did so, he sent out a familiar—perhaps a mhovost disguised as himself—to go to the Kaj, and surrender. This was what the Kaj executed, and when he did, Jukov essentially pulled the strings on many of his Divine creations, allowing all he built t
o fall to ruin … all so no one would believe he was still alive.”

  “Why would he do all this?”

  “Revenge, I expect,” says Shara. “He could be a very merry Divinity, unless you crossed him. Then he was wildly vindictive. Jukov knew that the Kaj had a weapon against which he had no power, so I believe he opted to wait and return once the threat had passed. I am not sure how he planned to do that. Perhaps he arranged some sort of method of contacting anyone who looked for a Divinity hard enough—that would explain how he reached Volka Votrov, at least. That is just a guess, as I said. But I doubt if Jukov expected the side effects of submitting to imprisonment with Kolkan.”

  “Being fused together?”

  “Yes. The warped thing I met told me the prison was made for only Kolkan. To stay there, Jukov was slowly but surely melded with Kolkan, perhaps absorbed by him. They were two diametrically opposed Divinities—chaos and order, lust and discipline.… It was Jukov, after all, who convinced the other Divinities to imprison Kolkan in the first place. The end result was the mad, confused thing that begged me to kill it.”

  “Noor wishes me to confirm that no more Divinities will be appearing.”

  “I can confirm only that no one knows the whereabouts of Olvos, who is now the last surviving Divinity. But no one has seen her for nearly a thousand years, and I doubt if she’d ever be a threat. Olvos has shown no interest in worldly matters since her disappearance, which was well before the Kaj was ever born.”

  “And … we also wish to confirm that the powers you experienced using the philosopher’s stones cannot be duplicated.”

  “That I cannot say for sure.… But probably. More and more, the Continent is less Divine, which means that the philosopher’s stones allow access to less and less power.”

  “Is that all it took back in the Continent’s heyday? Take a handful of those pills, and attain godlike powers?”

  Shara smirks. “In case you have forgotten, the Divinity almost crushed me like a bug once I got its attention. My powers were definitely not godlike. But that is how things used to work here: there are records of priests and acolytes taking copious quantities of philosopher’s stones and performing astounding miracles—and frequently dying shortly thereafter.” She rubs her head. “Frankly, I almost envy them.”

  Pitry is silent for a few moments. Then: “The papers in Ghaladesh … They think you are a h—”

  “Don’t,” says Shara.

  “But you are being cele—”

  “I don’t want to hear it. They don’t know what it means. They should be mourning. It might have been mostly Continentals who died, yes. It might have been Continentals who—confused, misled—freed their Continental god and asked it to attack us. But I was asked many times if we could help the Continent in any way before this catastrophe. I think it was already too late when I heard those pleas. But I was warned that this would happen, and I chose to listen to policy instead.”

  “Noor is committed to helping the survivors, Chief Diplomat. Saypur will help Bulikov survive.”

  “Survive,” says Shara, sinking down. “Survive and do what?”

  Water fills her ears and washes over her face, yet among the sloshing and bubbles she imagines she hears the voice of Efrem Pangyui—one death among thousands, yes, but one she feels will plague her until her last days.

  * * *

  Three days later Shara tours the recovery efforts with General Noor’s executive committee. The armored car bustles and bangs over the broken roads of the city, not helping Shara’s headache, which has only faintly receded. She is forced to wear dark glasses, as the sight of sunlight still pains her—doctors have informed her that this damage may be permanent. She finds this somehow quite easy to accept: I have looked upon things not meant to be seen, and I have not escaped unscathed.

  “I assure you, this is not necessary,” says General Noor, bristling with disapproval. “We have matters well in hand. And you should be in recovery, Chief Diplomat Komayd.”

  “It is my duty as chief diplomat of Bulikov,” she says, “to concern myself with the welfare of my assigned city. I will go where I wish. And I have some personal matters to attend to.”

  What she sees wounds her heart: parents and children covered in bandages, field clinics packed to bursting with patients, shanty houses, rows and rows of wooden coffins, some of them very small.…

  And Vo, lost amidst the carnage.

  If I had discovered Volka sooner, thinks Shara, this might have never happened.

  “It’s like the Blink,” she says. “It’s like how things were after the Blink.”

  “We did tell you,” says Noor quietly at one field tent, “that you would not like what you saw.”

  “I knew I would not like what I saw,” says Shara. “But it is my responsibility to see it.”

  “It is not all gloom. We have had some local help,” Noor gestures to a section of a field clinic staffed by bald, barefoot Continentals in pale orange robes. “These people have swarmed our offices, and more or less taken over in some cases. They are an invaluable gift, I must say. They relieve us as we await more aid from Ghaladesh.”

  One of the Olvoshtani monks—a short, thickset woman—turns to Shara and bows deeply.

  Shara bows back. She finds that she is weeping.

  “Chief Diplomat,” says Noor, startled. “Are you …? Would you like us to take you back?”

  “No, no,” says Shara. “No, it’s quite all right.” She walks to the Olvoshtani monk, bows again, and says, “Thank you so much for all you do.”

  “It is nothing,” says the monk. She smiles kindly. Her eyes are wide and strangely red-brown, the color of an ember. “Please don’t weep. Why do you weep so?”

  “I just … It is so good of you come unasked-for.”

  “But we were asked,” says the monk. “Suffering asks for us. We have to come. Please, don’t cry so.” She takes Shara’s hand.

  Something dry and square brushes up against Shara’s palm: A note?

  “Thank you anyway,” says Shara. “Thank you so much.”

  The monk bows again, and Shara rejoins Noor’s staff in her tour. When she is alone, she quickly reaches into her pocket and takes out the note the monk gave her:

  I KNOW A FRIEND OF EFREM PANGYUI.

  MEET ME OUTSIDE THE GOVERNOR’S QUARTERS’ GATES

  TONIGHT AT 9:00, AND I WILL TAKE YOU TO THEM.

  Shara walks to a fire burning in a campsite and sets the note alight.

  * * *

  The air in the countryside outside of Bulikov is cold, but it is not as cold as it was. Shara watches as her breath makes only a small cloud of frost, and she realizes spring is coming. The seasons ignore even the death of a Divinity.

  The hills beyond the walls of the governor’s quarters are given soft shape by the stars above. The moon is a white smudge behind the clouds; the road a bone-colored ribbon.

  There is a footfall from the darkness. Shara looks up and confirms no guards are posted. “Are you there?” she asks.

  An answering whisper: “This way.” At the edge of the forest, a gleam of candlelight flickers and is quickly hidden.

  Shara walks toward where she saw the candlelight. Someone throws back a hood, revealing the sheen of a bald pate. As she nears she can make out the face of the female monk from the clinic.

  “Who are you?” asks Shara.

  “A friend,” the monk says. She gestures to Shara to come closer. “Thank you for coming. Are you alone?”

  “I am.”

  “Good. I will take you the rest of the way. Please, follow me closely. Very few have taken this road; it can be somewhat dangerous.”

  “Who are you taking me to?”

  “To another friend. There are still many questions you have—I could see it in you. I know someone who might be able to answer some of them.” She turns and leads Shara into the forest.

  Spokes of moonlight slide over the monk’s shoulders as they walk. “Can you tell me anything more?”<
br />
  “I could tell you much more,” says the monk. “But it would do you no good.”

  Shara, irritated, contents herself to follow.

  The road bends and winds and turns. She questions the wisdom of meeting outside the governor’s quarters; then she notes that she never noticed the forest here was quite so large.…

  The terrain slopes up. Shara and the monk make a careful passage across rocky trenches, white stone creek beds, through copses of pines.

  Shara thinks, When did they plant pines out here?

  Her labored breath creates huge clouds of frost. They crest a stony hill, and she looks out on a snow-laden, ivory landscape. But I thought it was getting warmer.… “What is this place?”

  The monk gestures forward without looking back. Her bare feet make tiny tracks in the snow.

  They tread down over the frozen hills, across a frozen river. The world is alabaster, colorless, curls and slashes of moonlight and ice on a background of black. But ahead, a bright red fire flickers in a copse of pine trees.

  I know this, Shara thinks. I’ve read about this.

  They enter the copse of trees. Logs are laid by the bonfire to serve as seats, and a stone shelf leans against the trunk of a tree, bearing small stone cups and a crude tin kettle. Shara expects someone to greet them, perhaps stepping out from behind a tree, but there is no one.

  “Where are they?” asks Shara. “Where is the friend you brought me to meet?”

  The monk walks to the stone shelf and pours two cups.

  “Are they not here yet?” asks Shara.

  “They are here,” says the monk. She takes off her robe. Her back is naked: below her robe she wears nothing but a skirt of furs.

  She turns and hands Shara one of the cups: it is warm, as if it has been sitting on an open flame. But it was only ever held in her hand, thinks Shara.

  “Drink,” says the monk. “Warm yourself.”

  Shara does not. She stares at the woman suspiciously.

  “Do you not trust me?” asks the monk.

  “I don’t know you.”

  The monk smiles. “Are you so sure?” The firelight catches her eyes, which glint like bright orange jewels. Even when she steps away from the fire, her face appears lit by a warm, fluttering light.