City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  A light in the dark.

  No, thinks Shara. No. No, it can’t be.

  “Olvos?” she whispers.

  “Such a wise girl,” the monk says, and sits.

  * * *

  “How …?” says Shara. “How …?”

  “You still have not drunk,” says Olvos. “You should try it. It’s good.”

  Shara, mystified, drinks from the stone cup and finds the Divinity is correct: the concoction is warm and spicy and feels like it puts a small, soft ember in her belly. Then she realizes it’s familiar: “Wait.… Is this tea?”

  “Yes. Sirlang, from Saypur. I’ve come to be rather fond of it, myself. Though it can be an utter bitch to get the good stuff.”

  Shara gapes at her, the cup, the fire, the woods behind her. She manages, “But I … I thought you were gone.”

  “I am gone,” says Olvos. “Look behind you again, around you. Do you see Bulikov? No. I am gone, and happy to be gone. It’s pretty pleasant to be here, alone with my thoughts, away from all that noise.” Shara is silent as she thinks, After all this, have I walked right into a trap?

  “You’re now wondering,” says Olvos, “if I have brought you here to exact revenge on you.”

  Shara cannot hide her alarm.

  “Well, I am gone, but I am still a Divinity. And this is my place.” Olvos pats the log she sits on. “I can never lose this. And those who join me here, their hearts cannot be hidden from me. You wonder, Shara Komayd, great-granddaughter of Avshakta si Komayd, the last Kaj of Saypur, if I have lured you away from the Continent to get you on your own and destroy you—to destroy you for your family’s crimes, for your crimes, for the countless destruction your wars and laws have incurred.” Olvos’s eyes gleam bright, like rings of fire half hidden below her lids; then the fire in her eyes dims. “But that, as they say, would be stupid. A very stupid, silly, useless thing to do. And I am a bit disappointed you would expect such things from me. After all, I left the world when the Continent chose to begin its empire. Not just because it was wrong, but because it was a very shortsighted decision: time has a way of returning all heedlessness to those who commit it … even if they are Divine.”

  Shara is still trying to come to grips with the reality of what is happening, yet Olvos is so profoundly unlike anything she expected a god to be that she is not sure what to think: Olvos’s manner is like that of a fishwife or a seamstress rather than a Divinity. “That’s why you left the Continent? Because you disagreed with the Great Expansion?”

  Olvos produces a long, skinny pipe. She holds its bowl directly into the fire, puffs at it, and watches Shara as if wondering what sort of company she’ll be. “You read Mr. Pangyui’s notes, didn’t you?”

  “Y-yes? How did y—”

  “Then you know he suspected that the minds of the Divine were not always their own, one could say.”

  “He thought that … that there was some kind of subconscious vote taking place.”

  “A crude term for it,” says Olvos. “But not wholly inaccurate. We are—or were—Divinities, Shara Komayd: we draw power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.” Olvos uses the end of her pipe to draw a half-circle in the mud. “A people believe in a god”—she completes the circle—“and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.” Olvos stares into the fire, rubbing the mud off of her pipe with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Ideas like what?” asks Shara.

  “I first noticed it during the Night of the Convening. I felt ideas and thoughts and compulsions in me that were not my own. I did things not because I wanted to do them, but because I felt I had to—like I was a character in a story someone else was writing. That night I chose, like all the other Divinities, to unite, form Bulikov, and live in what we thought was peace.… But I was profoundly troubled by this experience.”

  “Then how could you leave?” asks Shara. “If you were tied or tethered to the wishes of your people, how could they let you abandon the world?”

  Olvos gives Shara a scornful look: Can’t you put this together yourself?

  “Unless,” Shara says, “your people asked you to leave.…”

  “That they did.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Well, I thought I had done a pretty good job with them,” says Olvos, with a touch of pride. She glances at Shara’s cup. “Did you drink all of that already?”

  “Erm … Yes?”

  “My goodness.” She shakes her head, tutting, and pours Shara another cup. “That should have been enough to bring a horse back from the dead. Anyway … If you do these things well—and you, as a bit of a politician, probably understand—they sort of start to perpetuate themselves. I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn’t need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action. But when I started to feel this … this momentum inside of me—these ideas that pushed and pulled at me, threatening to pull me with them and pull everyone else with me—I consulted with my closest followers, and they just”—Olvos is grinning with gleeful incredulity—“they just said they didn’t really need me anymore.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No,” says Olvos. “Humanity’s relationship with the Divine is one of mutual give and take, and we mutually opted to part ways. But this perpetuation—setting up a way of thinking, and just letting it run—it doesn’t always yield good results.” She shakes her head. “Poor Kolkan … He never really understood himself, or his people.”

  “He spoke to me,” says Shara. “He told me he had depended on you, in a way.”

  “Yes,” says Olvos sadly. “Kolkan and I were the first two Divinities. We were the first to really figure out how it all worked, I suppose. But Kolkan always had a little more trouble running his show. He tended to let his people tell him what to do, and I watched from afar as he sat down and listened to them.… Like I told them all when I left, it just wasn’t going to end up well.”

  “So you don’t think Kolkan was wholly responsible for what he did?”

  Olvos sniffs. “Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all. Just look at the Kolkashtanis—they think the whole world was set up to shame and humiliate and punish and tempt them.… It’s all about them, them, them, them! The world is full of bad things, hurtful things, but it’s still all about them! And Kolkan just gave them what they wanted.”

  “That’s … madness.”

  “No, it’s vanity. And I have watched from the sidelines as this same vanity guided the Divinities onto paths that would bring ruin upon them and their people—vanity I predicted, and warned them about, but that they chose to ignore. This vanity is not new, Miss Komayd. And it has not stopped because we Divinities are gone. It has simply migrated.”

  “Migrated to Saypur, you mean?”

  Olvos bobs her head from side to side—not quite a yes, not quite a no. “But we now find ourselves at a turning point in history, when we can either listen to our vanity, and continue down the path we’re on … or choose a new path altogether.”

  “So you have come to me to try and change this?” asks Shara.

  “Well,” says Olvos, “you weren’t exactly my first choice.…”

  Something in the fire pops; sparks go dancing to hiss in the mud.

  “You approached Efrem, didn’t you?” says Shara.

  “I did,” says Ol
vos.

  “You met him on the river while he was sketching, and spoke to him.”

  “I did a lot more than that,” admits Olvos. “I do intervene now and again, Shara Komayd. Well, maybe not intervene—‘nudge’ might be a better term for it. For Efrem, I helped guide his research, prod him in the directions he would find most useful, checked in on him now and again.”

  “He would have loved to talk to you as I am now.”

  “I’ve no doubt. He was such a bright, compassionate creature, I hoped he would find a way to divert all the discontent that was building. But it seems I was wrong. Such old rage can only be exorcised through violence, perhaps. Though I still hope we can disprove this, eventually.”

  Shara drinks the rest of her tea and remembers something that troubled her when she first read his journal. “Was it you who placed the journal from the Kaj’s soldier on his desk? Because I knew Efrem, and he would never overlook or miss something so important.”

  Olvos nods, her face distressed. “I did. And that might have been my biggest oversight. I had hoped he would understand the grave sensitivity of those letters. But he did not. He felt that information should be shared with everyone.… He did not keep any one specific truth—just the truth as he saw it. It was his greatest virtue, and it was his undoing.”

  “But … but what could have been so important in those letters?” asks Shara. “The black lead?”

  Olvos sets her pipe down. “No, no. Well, a little … Let me ask you—do you not wonder, Miss Shara Komayd, how your great-grandfather managed to produce the black lead?”

  “He experimented on his household’s djinnifrit—didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Olvos says grimly. “That is true. But even so, the odds that he would ever produce such a material are extremely unlikely, are they not?”

  Shara’s brain rifles through everything she has memorized, but finds nothing.

  “Would you not say,” Olvos asks slowly, “that the creation of the black lead was nothing short of miraculous?”

  The word dislodges a stone in her mind that tumbles into her sea of thoughts.

  Efrem’s writings: We do not know much about the Kaj. We do not even know who his mother was.

  “And not everyone was capable of the miraculous,” says Olvos.

  A soft wind dances through the copse of trees, and the coals flare bright.

  Efrem’s journal: 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.

  A log lazily rolls over in the fire like a whale in the sea.

  And when she saw Jukov: My own progeny, my own Blessed child rises up against us and slaughters us like sheep!

  Snowflakes twirl down and die silently as they near the fire.

  “The Blessed were legends and heroes, Shara Komayd,” says Olvos quietly. “Offspring of the Divine and mortals whom the world went out of its way to accommodate.”

  Shara’s head spins. “You … You aren’t saying that …”

  “I suppose no one guessed who his mother was,” remarks Olvos thoughtfully, “because no one would have ever believed it.”

  * * *

  “Her name was Lisha,” says Olvos quietly. “As the offspring of a Divinity, she was moderately powerful in her own right. But she was a sweet creature: softhearted, quiet, not too terribly bright but eager to help … and also very eager to help her father.” She sucks at her pipe. “Jukov’s priests wanted to shore up support among Saypur, for it was Saypur’s corn and grapes that kept Jukoshtan afloat. So he offered to rent”—the word makes her face wrinkle in disgust—“his daughter to the Saypuri who would best facilitate their needs, for a time. It was not meant to be anything sexual: it was meant to be purely servitude. But then, something happened that Jukov did not expect: she and the man who eventually won her servitude fell in love.

  “They kept it a secret. She stayed on as his … his maid.” Shara senses a cold rage surfacing in Olvos. “And when she bore a child, the nature of its parentage was so dangerous and so terrible that even the child could not know.”

  Shara feels ill. “The Kaj,” she whispers.

  “Yes. His father died when he was young. He was never told that the Divine servant in the house was his mother. Because, I think, he grew up hating the Divine; and his mother—being sweet, softhearted, and not too bright—did not wish to upset him. Then Mahlideshi happened.” Something falls into the snow and hisses: Shara sees it was a hot teardrop falling from Olvos’s cheek. “And Avshakta si Komayd decided something must be done.”

  Olvos tries to speak again, but cannot.

  “So he tortured his own mother,” Shara says, “in order to find out what could kill the Divine.”

  Olvos manages a nod.

  “And though he didn’t know it, because he was Blessed, he was able to actually produce something, and with it, overthrow the Continent.”

  “After killing his despicable little household servant, of course.”

  Shara shuts her eyes. The awfulness of it all is almost too much for her.

  “I have lived with this burden for so long,” Olvos says. “I could only ever hint and suggest it to Mr. Pangyui—I have never actually told anyone. But it’s good, I think, to speak it aloud. It’s good to tell someone what happened to my daughter.”

  “Your daughter? You mean you and Jukov …”

  “He could be a very charming man,” admits Olvos, “and though I could tell there was an awful madness in him, still I was drawn in.”

  “I sympathize,” says Shara.

  “Clever Jukov figured it all out when the Kaj invaded. He understood that he had, through his own pride and arrogance, fathered the death of the Continent and the other Divinities. Before he hid himself with Kolkan, his last bitter act was to use a familiar to tell this fearsome invader the truth of his parentage.”

  “I see,” says Shara. “The Kaj fell into a deep depression after killing Jukov, and practically drank himself to death.”

  “Bitterness begets bitterness,” Olvos says. “Shame begets shame.”

  “ ‘What is reaped is what is sown,’ ” Shara says, “ ‘and what is sown is what is reaped.’ ”

  Olvos smiles. “You flatter me with my own words.” The smile dissolves. “I have lived with this knowledge for so long.… And for all those years, I knew that the balance of power in this world, this brave new land of politics and machinery, was predicated purely on lies. Saypur and the Continent hate one another, completely oblivious that each is now the product of the other. They are not separate—they are intertwined. When Efrem came, I decided it was time this secret got out. But you do understand what this means … for you.”

  Shara is terribly aware of her breathing. She can feel her pulse in her forehead and behind her ears. “Yes,” she says weakly. “It means me, and my … my family …”

  The fire is so hot her eyes feel like they simmer.

  “… We have a trace of the Divine in us.”

  “Yes.”

  “We are … We are the very things our country fears.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why Kolkan and Jukov thought I was you.”

  “Probably, yes.”

  Shara is weeping: not in sorrow, but in rage. “And so … So is nothing I did true?”

  “True?”

  “The world shifts to accommodate the Blessed, doesn’t it? It helps them achieve great things, not because of how they are doing it, but because of who they are. Did nothing I did really … count?”

  Olvos puffs at her pipe. “You forget, of course,” she says, “that the nature of the Blessed becomes diluted through the generations. Often very, very quickly.” She looks Shara up and down, her eyes glimmering. “Do you feel that you have had an easy life, Miss Komayd?”

  Shara wipes her eyes. “N-no.”

  “Have you gotten everything you wanted?”

  She remembers Vo
falling to the ground, pale and still. “No.”

  “Do you think,” asks Olvos, “that this will change anytime soon?” Shara shakes her head. If anything, she thinks, I am willing to bet my life is about to get much, much worse.

  “You are not Blessed, Shara Komayd,” says Olvos. “Though you are distantly related to me, to Jukov, to the Divine, the world treats you as it does anyone else—with utter indifference. Consider yourself fortunate. Your other relatives, though … That might be different.”

  A cold wind tickles Shara’s neck.

  Another snap from the fire, and sparks go dancing.

  “I see,” she says.

  Olvos is watching her from behind hooded eyes, appraising her. “I have told you quite a bit, Shara Komayd, information few else know or dream of. I wonder—what do you plan to do with it?”

  Rage and pity and grief and sorrow twine around in Shara’s mind, looping and curling like fireworks, and somewhere underneath all their chaotic designs—all their frenzied, fruitless spins and chases—an idea comes bubbling up.

  Olvos nods. “Good. Perhaps I was wiser than I thought. The Divine do not always know themselves: maybe we are but tools in the hands of fate like any other mortal … and perhaps my selection of Efrem was meant solely to bring you here, to me.”

  Shara is breathing slowly. “I think,” she says, “that I would like to go back to my quarters now.”

  “Good,” says Olvos. She uses her pipe to point between two trees. “If you walk through that gap, you will find yourself in your bedroom. You may leave whenever you wish.”

  Shara stands and looks down at Olvos, feeling torn. “Will I ever see you again?”

  “Do you wish to see me again?”

  “I … I think I would enjoy that, actually.”

  “Well … I think both you and I know that if you make the choices I expect you will make, and if you are successful, your path will take you far away from these shores. I do not wish to leave this place—I don’t tell my followers what to do, but it’s nice to keep an eye on them.” She taps her pipe against her finger. “But if you were ever to return, I might make myself available for a visit.”