City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Vinya’s righteous fury evaporates. Her shoulders sink as if her spine has vanished. “Wh-what?”

  “You may wish,” says Shara, “to take a seat.”

  But Vinya is too shocked to move.

  “As you wish,” says Shara. “I will keep this short. Let’s say I have a feeling that somewhere in all the cables and transmissions and orders that have come out of the Ministry—in all the inscrutable, impenetrable, classified, technically nonexistent communications—there is a message to some unquestioning thug on the Continent informing him or her of a national threat, that threat being Dr. Efrem Pangyui at Bulikov University, and that he or she is authorized to eliminate this threat with utmost discretion, and to search for and destroy any sensitive material in his office and library.” Shara adjusts her glasses. “Would that be right?”

  Vinya has gone terribly pale.

  “You want to shut down this conversation altogether, don’t you, Auntie?” says Shara. “But you want to know what I know and how I know it. You want to know if I know, for example, that the reason Dr. Efrem Pangyui was labeled a threat was one very personal to you.”

  Shara waits, but Vinya does not move or speak. Shara thinks she can see something trembling in her aunt’s cheek.

  “I do,” says Shara. “I do know, Auntie. I know that you are Blessed, Vinya. I know that you are a descendant of the very thing that haunts Saypur’s nightmares.”

  Vinya blinks. Teardrops spill down her cheeks.

  “Efrem Pangyui deduced the Kaj’s parentage in Bulikov,” says Shara. “And he, being the dutiful and honorable historian of Saypur, sent back a report without realizing he was signing his own death warrant—for him, the truth was the truth, and hiding it never occurred to him.”

  Vinya, who has resisted upper-middle age for nearly fifteen years, sits in her chair with the slow movements of an old woman.

  “And you hated hearing this, of course,” says Shara. “Just as the Kaj hated it when he learned it himself. Efrem, obviously, had no plans to keep quiet about it—he was a historian, not a spy. So you reacted as you would to any national threat, and had him, as you say, eliminated.”

  Vinya swallows.

  “That’s right, isn’t it, Auntie Vinya?”

  Vinya struggles for nearly half a minute. Then, a quiet, “I … I just wanted it to be gone. I wanted to believe … to believe I had never heard it.”

  Sea spray spackles the hull outside. Someone on the deck above makes a joke, which is followed by wicked laughter.

  “Why?” says Shara. “Why did you let me stay in Bulikov at all? You knew there was a chance I’d find out. Why didn’t you pull rank and reassign me straightaway?”

  “Because … I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of you,” Vinya confesses.

  “Of me?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’ve always been afraid of you, Shara. Ever since you were a child. Saypur has always been inclined to like you more than me, because of who your parents were. And I have many enemies. It would be an easy thing, to oust me simply by supporting you.”

  “And that is why you let me stay in Bulikov?”

  “I knew that if I made you leave, you would become suspicious!” says Vinya. “You get attached to people so. If I denied you what you wanted, I feared you’d become more determined. And I thought we had destroyed all of Efrem’s notes. One week to mourn your friend, then you’d leave Bulikov, move on to the next little case, and all of this would go away.”

  “But then Volka’s men attacked the Votrov estate,” says Shara, “and everything changed.”

  Vinya shakes her head. “You don’t know what it was like, hearing his report,” she says. “Hearing that not only am I descended from … from monsters, but that everything I had ever accomplished was suddenly just … suddenly illegitimate! Like I’d been given everything, rather than earning it! It was sickening, infuriating, insulting.… Don’t you understand what that’s like? That I—that we—have some trace of the Divine in us?”

  Shara shrugs. “I was raised to think of the Kaj more or less as a god,” she says. “A savior whose memory I spent years trying to please. Honestly, it changes little for me, personally.”

  “But nothing that has been made is real! There is nothing but lies. The Kaj is a lie. Saypur is a lie. The Ministry …”

  “Yes,” says Shara. “The Ministry as well.”

  Vinya wipes her eyes. “How I detest weeping. There is nothing so undignified.” She glares at Shara through the porthole. “What will you do?”

  Shara wonders how to phrase this. “The Blessed do seem to meet such tragic ends,” she says. “The Kaj killed almost all of them during the Great War. Then the Kaj himself died alone and miserable on the Continent. And now you …”

  “You wouldn’t,” whispers Vinya.

  “I wouldn’t,” admits Shara. “And I can’t. You possess much more lethal force than I do, Auntie. Killing me, of course, during the height of my public profile, would naturally earn much scrutiny—scrutiny I doubt even you could afford. So I will give you a choice: step down, and give the reins to me.”

  “To … to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give … Give you control over all the generals across all the nations? Give you control of all our intelligence, all of our operations!”

  “Yes,” says Shara mildly. “I will have it, or neither of us will. Because if you do not step down, Auntie, I will leak our awful family secret.”

  Vinya looks like she is about to be sick.

  “I understand my stock has risen in Ghaladesh these days,” Shara says, with a quaint pout of modesty. “I am, after all, the only person since the Kaj to have killed a Divinity—two Divinities, technically, to the Kaj’s three. This, after Urav. They haven’t ever crowned another Kaj since Avshakta, but I don’t doubt that a few people in Saypur are discussing it. I believe that when I speak, I will be listened to. And as such, I believe your time in the Ministry is over, Auntie.”

  Vinya is rubbing her face and rocking back and forth in her chair. “Why …?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I do not do it to you, Auntie Vinya. You flatter yourself by imagining so. Things are changing. History itself was resurrected in Bulikov four days ago, and it rejected the present just as the present rejected it in turn. And we now have a new path we could take. We can keep the world as it is—unbalanced, with one nation holding all power …”

  “Or?”

  “Or we can begin to work with the Continent,” says Shara, “and create an equal to keep us in check.”

  Vinya is aghast. “You wish to … to elevate the Continent?”

  “Yes.” Shara adjusts her glasses. “In fact, I plan to spend billions on rebuilding their nation.”

  “But … but they are Continentals!”

  “They are people,” says Shara. “They have asked me for help. And I will give it.”

  Vinya massages her temples. “You … you …”

  “I also intend,” Shara continues, “to dissolve the WR, and declassify all the Continent’s history.”

  Auntie Vinya slumps forward and goes white as custard.

  “I don’t think we can build much of a future,” says Shara, “without knowing the truth of the past. It’s time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.”

  “I am going to be sick,” says Vinya. “You would give them back the knowledge of their gods?”

  “Their gods are dead,” says Shara. “Those days are gone. That I know. It is time for all of us to move forward. In time, I hope to even reveal the nature of the Kaj’s parentage—though that might be decades away.”

  “Shara … Dear …”

  “Here is how the narrative will go, Auntie,” says Shara. “It will be said that things are different now—true enough—and that the old ways and the old warriors who keep to them must adapt, or go. Y
ou can go graciously and quietly: ceding authority to the new generation, after I’m just coming off of an incomparable victory. You might even be lauded for your foresight, as you chose to keep me in Bulikov—that would be a nice touch. And I can make sure that you land on your feet, winding up the head of a research institute or prominent school that can take good care of you. Or, I can dislodge you. You’ve said before you have enemies in Ghaladesh, Auntie. I now have a very big dagger I can give them, which they will then promptly plant in your back.”

  Vinya gapes at her. “You … You really …”

  “I will arrive in two days, Auntie,” says Shara. “Think about it.”

  She wipes the porthole glass with two fingers, and her aunt vanishes.

  * * *

  Sunlight bounds out of the clouds, across the waves, ripples over the deck. Far above the ship, gulls float and dip gracefully from current to current, dodging through the air. Shara grips the ceramic canister a little tighter as the ship bobs to the port side: she has never been an accomplished sailor—something the crew members quickly deduced, and are wary of—and she is thankful the sea is calm today.

  “Anytime soon, Captain?” she asks.

  The captain breaks away from a conversation with his midshipman. “I could give you an exact time,” he says, “if you were to give me an exact point.”

  “I have given you that, Captain.”

  “The, quote, ‘point equidistant between Saypur and the Continent’ ain’t exactly as exact as you think, if you pardon my saying so, Chief Diplomat.”

  “I don’t need for it to be too exact,” Shara says. “Just how long until we’re close?”

  The captain tips his head from side to side. “A half-hour or so. On such calm waters, and with such a benevolent wind, maybe less. Why do you want to know, anyway?”

  Shara turns away and walks to the stern of the ship with the canister under her arm. She watches the churning ocean behind them and the wake of their passage. The stripe of curiously smooth water stretches out for miles: after that, the rise and bob of the waves devour it until it is gone.

  She stares at the sea for a long time. The wind caresses her hair and her coat. Her glasses are bedecked with crystalline jewels of sea spray. The air alternates between a pleasant warmth and a pleasant coolness.

  “It has been a very long journey, hasn’t it, Vo?” she says to the ceramic canister. “But looking back, it seems like it was all over in only a moment.”

  A gull dips low and calls to her, perhaps asking for something.

  They did not want to cremate him, of course: cremation was heretical on the Continent. But she refused to let him be buried in the Votrov tomb, to lie among the people who had made his life a hell, so she took him with her, the contents of his self baked and boiled down and funneled into a little canister, freed of all pain, of all memory, of all the tortures his country and his god had put him through.

  She will not cry. She has decided this. There is nothing to cry over: there is simply what happened.

  “Birthing pains,” she says aloud. “That’s what our lives were, weren’t they? The wheels of time shift and clank against one another, and birth a new age.”

  Cold wind slaps against her cheeks.

  “But there are pains before, violent contractions. Unfortunate that it had to be us, but …”

  The captain calls that they are near, or near enough.

  “… a butterfly must emerge from its chrysalis sometime …”

  She begins to unscrew the top of the canister. Her heart beats faster.

  “… and forget it ever was a caterpillar.”

  Another plaintive cry from the gulls.

  She turns over the canister; a cloud of delicate ash comes twisting out, twirling through the winds to settle over the stripe of calm seas behind the ship.

  She drops the canister overboard. It sinks almost instantly beneath the dark waves.

  She watches the waves, wondering what they know, what they remember.

  Time renders all people and all things silent, she thinks. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time I have.

  Then she turns and walks to the bow of the ship, to look ahead into the sun and the wind and the bright new waves, and to wait for sight of home.