City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Good,” says Shara. “I have just one more question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Me?”

  “You and the other Divinities—all of you. Where did you come from? Do you exist simply because people believe you exist? Or are you something … else?”

  Olvos considers the question, grave and sad. “That is … complicated.” She sucks her teeth. “Divinities have the very odd ability to overwrite reality. Did you know that?”

  “Of course.”

  “But not just your reality. Not just the reality of your people—but the reality of us, our own. Each time people believed I came from somewhere new, I came from that place—and it was like I’d never come from any other place, and I never knew what I was before.” She takes a breath. “I am Olvos. I pulled the burning, golden coal of the world from the fires of my own heart. I fashioned the stars from my own teardrops when I mourned for the sun during the very first night. And I was born when all the dark of the world became too heavy, and scraped against itself, and made a spark—and that spark was me. This is all I know. I do not know what I was before I knew these things. I have looked, and tried to understand my origins—but history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.”

  “But why did Saypuris never have a Divinity of their own? Were we simply unlucky?”

  “You saw what happened, Shara,” says Olvos. “And you know your history. Are you so sure Saypur was unlucky to lack a Divinity?” She stands and kisses Shara on the brow. Her lips are so warm they almost burn. “I would tell you to go with luck, my child,” she says. “But I think you will choose to make your own.”

  Shara steps away from the firelight and through the two trees.

  She turns back to say good-bye but sees only the blank wall of her bedroom over her shoulder. She turns around, confused, and is met by her bed.

  She sits down upon the bed and thinks.

  * * *

  “Turyin,” whispers Shara. “Turyin!”

  Mulaghesh grunts and cracks an eye. “By the seas,” she says croakily. “I’m happy you visited, but did it have to be at two in the morning?”

  Mulaghesh is not the hale and hearty woman Shara knew mere days ago: she has lost a lot of weight during her stay in the hospital, and both of her eyes are still blackened. Her left arm ends just below the elbow in rings of tight white bandages. She sees Shara staring. “I hope this”—she raises her wounded arm—“won’t keep me from swimming in Javrat. But at least I still have my drinking hand.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “I’m all right. How are you, girl? You look … alive. That’s good. The black glasses are, uh, interesting looking, I guess.…”

  “I am alive,” says Shara. “And, Turyin, I wish that … that for you, this had never—”

  “Save it,” says Mulaghesh. “I’ve given the very speech you’re giving. But when I gave it, it was to boys and girls I knew weren’t going to live. I’m alive. And I’m grateful for it. And you are not to blame. But it does give me a damn good excuse to transfer out.”

  Shara smiles weakly.

  “I am still getting transferred, right? Javrat’s still happening—right?”

  “There is a good chance, yes,” says Shara.

  “That sounds like the out clause of a contract. And I don’t remember signing a contract. I remember saying, ‘If I do this, I get stationed in Javrat,’ and I remember you saying, ‘Okay.’ Do you remember differently?”

  “I have called in some favors with some middle managers in the Ministry,” says Shara.

  “There’s an ‘and’ or a ‘but’ coming.…”

  “True.” Shara pushes her glasses up on her nose. “And I am taking a train to Ahanashtan in two hours, and sailing home to Ghaladesh tomorrow.”

  “Okay?” says Mulaghesh, suspicious.

  “If I disappear—I will be blunt here, and say that if I am secretly murdered—during that trip, or when I arrive in Saypur, then you will be stationed in Javrat within a matter of months.”

  “If you’re what?”

  “If, however, I survive my trip,” continues Shara, “then much about the current predicament will change.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

  “How will that change?”

  “Well, for starters, it will probably cease to exist.”

  Someone coughs somewhere in the hospital.

  “Are you sure that you didn’t catch a bump on the head during—”

  “I think you and I had the same job, Turyin,” says Shara. “You weren’t to intervene in Bulikovian affairs—things were supposed to stay the same. I intervened in Continental affairs constantly, but to keep things the way they are—with the Continent desperately poor, and all commerce directed to Saypur. ‘To leave the Continent to the Continent,’ ” Shara says from memory. “Which is to say, poor, savage, and irrelevant.”

  “You don’t have to quote the policy to me. I wasted two decades of my life enforcing it. So what are you saying you want to do?”

  “I wish to change this. And if I am to change this,” Shara says, “then I will need allies on the Continent.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “Especially here in Bulikov.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “Because if I need anyone backing me up,” says Shara, “I want it to be General Turyin Mulaghesh.”

  “I’m a governor first and foremost, but my military rank is colonel.”

  “If I survive, and do what I plan,” says Shara, “it won’t be.”

  Mulaghesh blinks and laughs hollowly. “You want me to play Sagresha to your Kaj? I told you, I’m not interested in promotion. I’m out of the game.”

  “And I’m going to change the game entirely,” says Shara.

  “Oh, by the seas … Are you serious about this?”

  Shara takes a deep breath. “I am, actually. I am not sure how many radical changes I can make—but I plan to try and make as many as I can. The Ministry failed Bulikov last week. It failed you, Turyin. It failed, and thousands are dead.”

  “You … You really think you can? Do you really think you aren’t being, like”—Mulaghesh laughs—“well, wildly fucking naïve about this?”

  Shara shrugs. “I killed a god last week. A ministry should be a small task, shouldn’t it?”

  “That’s a pretty good point, I suppose.”

  “Will you help me, Turyin? You and I were meant to be servants, and for years we chiefly served policy. I am offering what I think is our first real chance to serve.”

  “Aw, shit …” Mulaghesh strokes the scars on her jaw with her right hand and contemplates it. “Well. I must admit all this is somewhat interesting.”

  “I hoped you would think so.”

  “And last I checked, the pay grade for a general is almost twice that of a colonel.…”

  Shara smiles. “Enough to afford frequent vacations in Javrat.”

  * * *

  Shara creeps down the hospital hall toward Sigrud’s room.

  Is this how governments are made? Forcing decisions on wounded people in the middle of the night?

  She halts when she enters the ward, and looks out on the sea of beds—each with a pale white burden, some with arms and legs propped up, others eclipsed in bandages—and wonders which of her choices put them in those beds, and how things could have been different.

  Sigrud’s voice seeps through the wall beside her: “I can hear you, Shara. If you want to come in, come in.”

  Shara opens the door and steps inside. Sigrud is a mountain of stitches, bandages, tubes; liquids pour into him and out of him, draining into various sacks; a thick set of stitches marches from his left eyebrow up into his scalp; his left nostril has been split, and his left cheek is a red mass. Otherwise, he is still most definitely Sigrud.

  “How did you know it was me?”
she asks.

  “Your footfalls,” he says, “are so small, like a little cat’s.”

  “I will take that as a compliment.” She sits down beside his bed. “How are you?”

  “Why haven’t you visited?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You think I wouldn’t?”

  “The Sigrud I knew and employed for ten years was never one for caring about much. Don’t tell me your brush with death has given you a new perspective on life—you’ve brushed it many times, often right in front of me, and it never seemed to affect you before.”

  “Someone,” says Sigrud, “has been telling you tales about me.” He thinks. “You know, I’m not sure what it is. When I jumped off that ship, I didn’t think I would have a future at all. I thought I would be dead. But for the first time, I felt … good. I felt that the world I was leaving was good. Not great, but good. And now I am alive in what could be a good world.” He shrugs. “Perhaps I only wish to sail again.”

  She smiles. “How has this affected any plans for your future?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “The reason I ask is that, if my plans go accordingly, I will no longer be a ground-level operative. I will return to Ghaladesh and take up a desk job. And I will no longer need your services.”

  “Am I to be abandoned? You leave me here to rot, in this bed?”

  “No. This desk job in particular will be very, very important. There is no title for it yet—if all this works out, I shall probably have to make one for it. But I will need all the overseas support I can get. I believe I will have a strong ally in Bulikov, but I will need more.”

  “More being …”

  “If, say, the North Seas are suddenly tamed …”

  Sigrud’s look of confusion contorts to one of considerable alarm. “No.”

  “If, say, a personage most Dreylings thought to be dead suddenly returned …”

  “No!”

  “If the legitimacy of the coup that killed King Harkvald was utterly undermined, and the rampant piracy were to end …”

  Sigrud drums his fingers on his arms and fumes in silence.

  Something drains out of one of his tubes with a quiet ploink.

  “You won’t even consider it?” asks Shara.

  “Even when my father was alive,” says Sigrud, “I did not relish the idea of … governing.”

  “Well, I’m not asking you to. I have never really approved of monarchies, anyway. What I am asking,” says Shara, sternly and slowly, “is that if you, Dauvkind, lost prince of the Dreyling shores …” Sigrud rolls his eye.

  “… were to return to the pirate states of the Dreyling Republics, and had the full and total support of Saypur …” She can tell that Sigrud is now listening. “… could that not begin some kind of reform? Would that not offer some promise for the Dreyling people?”

  Sigrud is silent for a long time. “I know”—he digs deep in the bandages on his arm and scratches—“that you would never ask me such a thing in jest.”

  “I’m not. It may never even happen. I am returning to Saypur, but … there is a chance I might not survive.”

  “Then you will need me with you, of course!”

  “No,” says Shara. “I won’t. Partially because I am confident I will succeed. But I also wish for your life to be your own, Sigrud. I want you to wait here, and get healthy, no matter what happens. And if nothing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs changes, then you should know that I am dead.”

  “Shara—”

  “And if that is the case”—she takes out a small slip of paper and places it in his hand—“then here is the village where your wife and daughters are hidden.”

  Sigrud blinks, astonished.

  “If I am dead, I want you to go home to them, Sigrud,” says Shara. “You said the father and the husband they knew was dead, that the fire of life in you had gone out. But I think that is a foolish and vain thing to think. I think that you, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, are afraid. You are afraid that your children have grown, that your family will not know you, or want you.”

  “Shara …”

  “If there was anything I’ve wanted throughout my life, Sigrud, it was to know my parents. It was to know the people I wished so hard to live up to. I will not ever have that chance, but your children might. And I think they will be overjoyed with who comes home.” Sigrud stares at the slip of paper in his hands. “I was not at all prepared,” he grumbles, “for such an assault.”

  “I have never really had to persuade you before,” says Shara. “Now you know why I’m good at what I do.”

  “This nonsense with the Dauvkind …” says Sigrud. “It is all just a children’s tale! They believe the son of King Harkvald to be a, a fairy prince! They say he will come riding out of the sea on a wave, playing the flute. A flute! Can you imagine? They will not expect … expect me.”

  “After all the battles you’ve fought, this one gives you pause?”

  “Killing is one thing,” says Sigrud. “Politics is another.”

  Shara pats his hand. “I will make sure you have someone to help you. And it will not all be politics. Many of the pirate kings, I expect, will be quite reluctant to leave. Despite what you may fear, Sigrud, I expect your service is far from over.” She checks her watch. “I’m late. My train leaves in an hour, and I must prepare for my final interview.”

  “Who else must you browbeat into doing your bidding?”

  “Oh, this won’t be browbeating,” says Shara grimly as she stands. “This will just be simple threats.”

  Sigrud carefully stows away the slip of paper. “Will I see you again soon?”

  “Probably.” She smiles, takes his hand, and kisses one scarred knuckle. “If we do a good job, we may meet as equals on the world stage.”

  “No matter what happens, to either of us,” says Sigrud, “you have always been a very good friend to me, Shara Komayd. I have known very few good people. But I think that you are one of them.”

  “Even if sometimes I almost got you killed?”

  “Being killed … Pah.” His one eye glitters in the gaslight. “What is that to good friends?”

  * * *

  The walls of Bulikov are peach colored with the light of the dawn. They swell before her, rising out of the violet countryside as the train speeds by. Are the walls alabaster in daylight? she thinks. Bone? What word best describes them? What shall I write? What shall I tell everyone?

  The train wheels squall and sputter. She touches the window, the ghost of her face caught in its glass.

  I must not forget. I must not forget.

  She will not go into Bulikov: the train takes a straight track from the governor’s quarters to Ahanashtan. She will not see the collapsing temple of the Seat of the World. She will not see the cranes around the Solda Bridge. She will not get to see the construction teams hauling the ancient white stone out of the rubble, the stone of the Divine City, nor will she get to see what they will do with it. She will not get to see the armadas of pigeons wheeling through the spokes of smoke as the day begins. She will not get to watch as the mats in the market are rolled out, as the wares are put on show, as merchants wade through the streets crying prices, carrying on as if nothing has happened.

  I will not see you, she tells the city, but I will remember you.

  The walls continue to swell; then, as she passes, they shrink behind her.

  When I come back to you, she thinks, if I come back to you, will I know you? Will you be the city of my memory? Or will you be a stranger?

  She could ask the same of Ghaladesh: the city of her birth, of her life, a city she has not seen in sixteen years. Will I know it? Will it know me?

  The walls have shrunk to a tiny cylinder of peach-white, a can floating on black waves.

  The past may be the past, she tells them, but I will remember.

  * * *

  Shara waits for over two hours. So far the movements of the ship are smooth and easy, but very shortly they’ll enter th
e deep sea, where the waves will be much less kind.

  Shara’s cabin is as spacious as the merchant’s vessel could allow, and she has promised a worthy fee from the Ministry when she finally returns to Ghaladesh. Penny for pound, she muses, I am probably the most profitable cargo this ship has ever carried.

  She stares into the porthole in her cabin wall. The South Seas are on the other side, but in the window’s reflection is a large, dark office, and a big teak desk.

  Aunt Vinya finally arrives, looking harried and harassed. She violently rifles through her desk, tearing open drawers, slamming cupboards. “Where is it?” she mutters. “Where is it! These questions, these damn questions!” She picks up a stack of papers, flips through them, and angrily throws them in her trash can.

  “It looks,” Shara says, “like you’ve had a few rough meetings.”

  Vinya’s head snaps up, and she stares at Shara in the window. “You …”

  “Me.”

  “What are you doing?” Vinya snaps. “I should have you arrested for this! Performing a miracle on the Continent is a treasonous act!”

  “Well, then, it’s probably a very good thing that I’m not on the Continent anymore.”

  “You what?”

  “This is obviously not my office.” She gestures to the room behind her. “You look at me in the cabin of a vessel in the South Seas, bound, of course, for Ghaladesh.”

  Vinya’s mouth opens and shuts, but no words escape.

  “I am coming home, Aunt Vinya,” says Shara. “You cannot keep me away any longer.”

  “I … I damn well can! If you come home I’ll have you imprisoned! I can have you exiled! You are disobeying the orders of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in essence you are committing treason! I don’t … I don’t care how damn famous you are now, you’ve no idea what sort of powers I’m allowed, with no questions asked!”

  “What sort of powers would those be, Auntie?”

  “Powers to eliminate threats to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, without question, without disclosure, without testimony to any damnable oversight committees!”

  “And would this be,” Shara asks slowly, “what happened to Dr. Pangyui?”