City of Stairs

SURVIVORS

Mulaghesh runs.

She runs over the frozen hills, through muddy roads, around dank forests. She runs though her breath burns in her chest and her legs protest with each step.

At forty-eight, she knows she is about to be beyond the age when she can do this to herself. So I had better get my licks in now, she thinks, if I really want to do this. She likes running because it is the purest combat sport possible—the only thing you’re fighting is yourself, with every step. And it’s been so long since she really fought anyone (her still-dark eye aches a little with each footfall) that maybe this is the only kind of fighting she can do anymore.

It has been nearly a week since she last saw Shara Komayd, but Mulaghesh cannot stop thinking about what the “ambassador” told her. By the seas, I hope that girl’s wrong, she thinks. The thought saps her of her strength—the next hill feels so much harder than the last—yet she cannot stop thinking about it.

One of the gods is alive. Maybe they never really left at all.

Mulaghesh, like everyone in the military—everyone in Saypur—grew up wanting to be the Kaj. Yet now that she just might get her opportunity, the idea terrifies her. Every child of Saypur grew up with the Divinities pacing just past the border of their nightmares: huge, dark unmentionables swimming in the deeps of history.… Shara talks about them as if they were politicians or generals, but to Mulaghesh and the rest of Saypur, they will always be the bogeyman’s bogeyman, beings so dreaded that merely mentioning their names feels like an illicit and terrible act.

Give me a real war any day, she thinks. Something with trenches and bolts. Something human. Something that bleeds. As a veteran of the Summer of Black Rivers, Mulaghesh must see the irony in wishing for those awful days of mud and thunder, and the struggle in the dark. A glorious war, as all Saypuris agree, but one Mulaghesh hopes she’ll never see again.

Still. Better that than this.

How confident that young girl is. Has she read so much? Or is that what it’s like to be a descendant of the Kaj?

Yet Mulaghesh remembers how the day after, young Shara Komayd trembled under her blanket, trying to concentrate on holding a cup of tea.…

By the seas, she thinks, I hope that girl’s wrong.

She trots back into her quarters to find a small stack of papers on her desk. There is a note in the seat of her chair from one of her lieutenants:

She examines the papers: it is twenty pages from the list of items in the Unmentionable Warehouse.

Mulaghesh has never looked at this list—she never wanted to—but she casts an eye over a page now, reviewing notes written decades ago by the now-dead Saypuri soldiers who locked all these things away:

Twenty pages. Nearly two hundred items of a miraculous nature, many of them terribly dangerous.

“Oh, boy,” says Mulaghesh. She sits down, suddenly feeling quite terribly old.

Shara’s bag clinks and clanks, rattles and thumps as she walks down the alley. It took her most of the day to assemble the bag—pieces of silver, pearl, bags of daisy petals, pieces of blown glass—and though she packed it quite well, there’s so much in it that she sounds like a one-man band seeking a corner to play at. She’s grateful when she comes to the alley so she can stop.

She gauges the alley carefully. It is, like most alleys, a forgotten little strip of interstitial stone, but this one bends around the rounded wall of the west building, which is not more than three blocks from the House of Votrov.

She looks at the ground, where a twisting trail of tire marks on the stone takes on the look of sloppy brushwork. They turned here, at the corner, thinks Shara, and went down the alley. She paces a few steps down, over an exposed pipe, around a pile of refuse. The black rubber is fainter here, but some streaks can still be seen. Over this bump, over the pipe—she looks up, spots a demolished waste bin and a smattering of broken glass—tipped over the trash cans, and …

The tire marks end.

“He stopped,” she murmurs, “got out, and …”

And what? How does a man simply disappear into thin air?

Shara does not bother, as Sigrud did on the night of Vohannes’s party, to check the stones and walls of this place. Instead, she takes out a piece of yellow chalk and draws a line across the alley floor. Somewhere at this line, she thinks, there is a door. But how to find it?

She sets her bag down. Her first trick is an old and simple one: she takes out a jar, fills it with daisy petals—Sacred to Ahanas, thinks Shara, for their willful recurrence—shakes the jar, and dumps out the petals. Then she takes a bit of graveyard mud, smears it across the glass bottom of the jar, wipes it clean, and applies the mouth of the jar to her eye, like a telescope.

The alley looks the exact same through the lens of the jar. However, she can see a bit of the walls of Bulikov in the distance—and these glow with a blue-green phosphorescence bright enough to light up the evening sky.

She takes the jar away. Of course, now the walls do not glow: they are transparent as always. But viewed through a lens that discerns works of the Divine, they naturally stand out.

Yet this means that whatever door the attackers disappeared through, it was not made by the Divine, unlike the walls of Bulikov.

Which should be impossible, thinks Shara. Anything capable of making someone disappear should be Divine in nature.

She begins to pace the alley. For the past four nights, Shara has been visiting this place and the one other spot where Sigrud witnessed a disappearance; in these spots she performs select tests and experiments, mostly in vain. She has nothing else to do: Sigrud watches Mrs. Torskeny in her apartment. Pitry, Nidayin, and a select few other embassy staff members are combing through the year’s worth of investments Wiclov has made. Shara wishes she were there, overseeing them, but her knowledge of the Divine makes her more suited to this task.

And, strangely, Wiclov has not been seen in Bulikov since spiriting away Mrs. Torskeny. “He is in his country estate near Jukoshtan,” his office informed them, “on family business.”

So many disappearances, thinks Shara as she returns to her bag. And so precious few answers.… Though she does have what could be a treasure trove of answers waiting in Vohannes’s white suitcase in her office—yet she is not willing to risk Vinya’s wrath just yet. At least not when another tantalizing puzzle lies before her.

Shara tries a multitude of other tricks: she casts poppy seeds on the ground, but they fail to align in any one direction, indicating a Divine breach in the world. She writes a third of a hymn of Voortya on a parchment and carries it down the alley: were it to pass through a holy domain of Voortya, the hymn would be instantly completed, in Voortya’s savage handwriting. (This failure does not surprise her: none of Voortya’s miracles, however slight, have worked since the Night of the Red Sands.)

Another trick.

How did you disappear?

Another.

How did you do it?

And another.

How?

She performs one final test, rolling a silver coin down the alley—if it encounters some Divine obstacle, placed here intentionally or not, it should stop and fall flat, as if magnetically drawn to the ground—but it does not, and plinks ahead before spinning round and tottering to a stop.

She sighs, reaches back into her bag, and takes out her bottle of tea. She sips it. It is stale and musky, having been stored for too long in a place too damp.

She sighs again, clears some space on the ground, and sits in the alley with her back against the wall, remembering the last day of her training, the last hour she spent on Saypur’s soil, the last time she had really good tea.

“How did you do it?” asked Auntie Vinya. “Tell me. How?”

Young Shara Komayd—exhausted, dehydrated, and starving—gave her aunt a puzzled look as she stuffed food into her mouth. The rest of the mess hall at the training facility was empty, causing the sounds of her chewing to echo.

“You stuck to your story, no matter how they badgered and questioned you,” said Vinya. “Every answer right. Every single one, for all six days. Do you know how often that’s happened? Why, I think you might be only the second or third in the Ministry’s history.” She peered at her nineteen-year-old niece over her half-moon glasses, obviously pleased. “Most of them break down on the third day, you know, after no sleep. The music gets to them—the same bass line, over and over. It shakes something loose. And when they get asked a question, they finally give the wrong answer. But you sat through it as if you heard nothing at all.”

“Did you?” asked Shara around a mouthful of potato.

“Did I what?”

“Did you break?”

Vinya laughed. “I created this process, dear. I’ve never had to sit through it. So tell me—how did you do it?”

Shara sloshed down tea. “Do what, Auntie?”

“Why, keep going. You didn’t break down after six days of psychological torture.”

Shara paused, the tines of her fork stuck in a chicken breast.

“You don’t want to tell me?” asked Vinya.

“It’s … embarrassing.”

“I’m your aunt, dearest.”

“You’re also my commanding officer.”

“Oh …” She waved a hand. “Not tonight. Tonight’s our last night together for a long while.”

“A long while?”

“Well. Not that long, dear. So—how?”

“I thought …” Shara swallowed. “I thought about my parents.” Vinya’s mouth flexed. “Ah.”

“I thought about what they must have gone through when they died. I’ve read the stories; I know that the Plague is an … a hard way to go.” Vinya nodded sadly. “Yes. It is. I saw.”

“And I thought about them, and about what all of Saypur must have gone through under the Continent … All the slavery, and the abuse, and the misery. And suddenly it was so easy to sit through it. The music, no sleep, no water, no food, the questions, over and over … Nothing they could ever do to me would be like that. Nothing.”

Vinya smiled and took off her glasses. “You are, I think, the most ferocious patriot I have ever seen. I am so proud of you, my dear. Especially because, well … We were worried, for a bit.”

“About what?”

“Well, my dear … I always knew you had a fancy for history. That was always your forte at Fadhuri. Especially Continental history. And then when you came to us, and we gave you access to the classified material, where we keep the things we don’t even allow them to teach at Fadhuri … Why, you spent hours in there memorizing all those moldy old texts! This fascination, in government, is considered a little … unhealthy.”

“But they explained so much!” said Shara. “I had only been taught pieces of things at Fadhuri. So much had been missing, but then there it all was, right on the shelves!”

“What we should concern ourselves with,” said Vinya, “is the present. But more so, Shara, I admit I was worried that you were tainted by that boy you used to dally about with at school.”

Shara’s face soured. “Don’t talk to me about him,” she snapped. “He’s dead to me. He was worthless and deceitful, as is the rest of the damnable Continent, I bet.”

“I know, I know,” said Vinya. “You have gone through a lot. I knew when you came out of school you wanted to change the world, for it to live up to all your dreams of how Saypur should be.” She smiles sadly. “And I know that that is probably why you investigated Rajandra in the first place.”

Shara looked at her, startled. “Auntie … I—I don’t want to ta—”

“Don’t fear the past, darling. You must accept what you did. You suspected Rajandra Adesh of wrongdoing. You thought he was misusing funds from the National Party. And you were right. He was misusing party funds. He was wildly, wildly corrupt. That’s true. And I think by exposing him, you wished to impress me, impress us all. But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law. Such was the case here. Do you understand?”

Shara bowed her head.

“You have ruined the career of the man everyone thought would inherit the prime minister’s seat. You have destroyed a ruling party’s leadership. Your investigation even pushed the party treasurer to attempt suicide. The poor bastard couldn’t even competently pull off his own suicide—he tried to hang himself in his office, but wound up ripping the water pipes clear out of the ceiling.” Vinya tuts. “You are a Komayd, dear, and that will protect us, some. But this will have repercussions for years.”

“I’m so sorry, Auntie,” says Shara.

“I know. Listen—the world is full of corruption and inequality,” says Vinya. “You were raised a patriot, to love Saypur and to believe that its virtues must be extended to all the world—but this is not your job. Your job in the Ministry is not to stop corruption and inequality: rather, these are tools in your bag to be used to aid Saypur in every way possible. Your job is to make sure the past never happens again, that we never see such poverty and powerlessness again. Corruption and inequality are useful things: if they benefit us, we must own them fully. Do you see?”

Shara thought of Vohannes then: You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.…

“Do you see?” asked Vinya again.

“I see,” said Shara.

“I know you love Saypur,” said Vinya. “I know you love this country like you loved your parents, and you wish to honor their memory, and the memory of every other Saypuri who died in struggle. But you will serve Saypur in the shadows, and Saypur will ask you to betray its virtues in order to keep it safe.”

“And then …”

“Then what?”

“Then, when I’m done … I can come home?”

Vinya smiled. “Of course you can. I’m sure your service will only last a handful of months! We’ll see each other again very soon. Now eat up, and get some rest. Your ship leaves in the morning. Oh. It is so good to see my niece working for me!”

How she smiled when she said that.

In the morning, thinks Shara. Nearly sixteen years ago …

In those sixteen years, Shara has taken more cases and done more work than nearly any operative in the world, let alone on the Continent. But though Shara Komayd was once a vigorous patriot, her fervor has leached out of her with each death and each betrayal, until her passion to feed Saypur shrank to a passion to merely protect Saypur, which then shrank further into the mere longing to see her home country once more before she dies: a prospect she sometimes thinks very unlikely.

Repetition, conditioning, fervor, and faith, she muses as she sips tea in the alleyway. All come to so little. Perhaps this is what it’s like to lose one’s religion.

And, more, she has begun to question whether she is really in exile. She wonders: as disastrous as it was, could the National Party scandal still be on everyone’s minds? Is that really why she is being kept away? She wishes she had been smart enough to establish a few connections to Parliament while she was still in Saypur. (Though it’s true, she remembers, that all her experiences with the Divine make her about as dangerous and illicit as the Unmentionable Warehouse itself. There are many reasons, it feels, why her homeland could reject her.)

“Ambassador Thivani?”

She looks over her shoulder. Pitry stands at the mouth of the alley with the car parked just beyond; she must have been so lost in her memories that she didn’t even hear him arrive. “Pitry? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you working on Wiclov’s finances?”

“Message from Sigrud,” he says. “Mrs. Torskeny’s been moved. He says Wiclov and one other man have escorted her from her home. He’s given me an address, not much more.”

There is a clanking flurry as Shara packs all of her materials. She walks down the alley, grabs the silver coin, and jumps in the backseat.

They’ve already driven a quarter of a mile before she notices the silver coin has lost some of its luster. She holds it up to the windows to catch some light.

Her eyes open in surprise. Then she smiles.

The coin is no longer silver at all: it has been completely transmuted into lead.

Shara and Pitry enter a quarter of Bulikov decimated by the Blink: she watches, fascinated, as truncated buildings and tapering streets pass by. As they drive down one block, a laundry on one corner stretches, twists, and contorts itself until it is half of a bank on the next corner. One set of quaint home fronts feature unusually large and warped front doors that would not, one would imagine, have ever been fashioned with humans in mind. They must have simply appeared overnight, thinks Shara.

“Any progress with Wiclov’s history?” she asks.

“We think so,” says Pitry. “You were right about the loomworks. He is the confirmed owner of three of them in eastern Bulikov. But we noticed that at the same time Wiclov started buying the loomworks, he also started purchasing materials from a Saypuri company: Vidashi Incorporated.”

“Vidashi …” The name is only vaguely familiar to her. “Wait.… The ore refinery?”

“Yep,” says Pitry. He wheels the car around a winding curve. “It seems Wiclov has been buying very small increments of steel from them. Every month, like clockwork. Very arbitrary amounts, too—within one thousand five hundred pounds and one thousand nine hundred pounds every time. We’re not sure wh—”

Shara sits forward. “It’s the weight check.”

“What?”

“The weight check! The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has automatic background checks on purchasers of large quantities of materials! Oil, wood, stone, metal … We want to know who we’re selling to, if they buy large enough amounts. And for steel, the weight check amount must be—”

“Two thousand pounds,” realizes Pitry. “So the Ministry has never checked on him.”

The drugged boy in the jail cell confessed that they’d gone after Vohannes for his “metal.” Which leads Shara to wonder—why try to kidnap Vohannes if you’re already purchasing steel through legitimate means?

Unless I spooked them, she thinks. I wanted to stir up the hornets’ nest, didn’t I? They must not have acquired enough steel for whatever it is that they’re making.… So when Pangyui was killed, and a Ministry operative arrived, they got nervous, and desperate.

She stares out the window, her mind racing. What could they possibly be building? What use could someone have for so much steel?

She keeps thinking on it until she sees something peeking over the rooftops at her: a huge, black tower, a ten-story stripe of ebony against the gray night sky.

Her heart twitches.

Oh, no, thinks Shara. They can’t be taking her there. Not there …

She has not been to see this place yet. It seems unreal to believe it still exists.

Of all the things the Kaj threw down, why did he leave that still standing?

Pitry parks in an alley. The darkness in an old doorway trembles; Sigrud emerges from the shadows and paces across the street.

“Please do not tell me they went in there,” says Shara as she climbs out.

“Into where?” asks Sigrud.

“The bell tower.”

Sigrud stops, bemused. “Why do you ask?”

Shara sighs and readjusts her glasses. “Show me,” she says.

The streets of Bulikov are almost impenetrably dark at night in quarters most affected by the Blink: no one has been able to lay gas lines here, as the disturbances reach deep down into the earth. One construction company made a valiant attempt, only to discover a sheet of iron three feet thick, forty feet tall, and (they estimated) a quarter-mile long simply suspended in the loam below the streets. No one could logically explain its existence: eventually, like so many aberrations, they assumed it was one of the unintended and inexplicable consequences of the Blink. Though the iron sheet could be dealt with, the company withdrew its bid, perhaps out of concern about what else might be buried below Bulikov.

At the center of this damaged neighborhood is a wide, empty park. Sapling firs grow in the damp soil: recent transplants, as all the natural vegetation in Bulikov died when the climate abruptly changed. Behind these is a long building with one huge tower at the north end, a belfry with a very curious, skeletal structure at the top: a metal globe-like frame that appears to have once held a carillon, but is now empty. The base of the structure is rambling clay walls with a flat roof to which time has not been kind: the roof dips and curves like a field marred by a glacier.

“They went in there?” asks Shara.

“No,” says Sigrud. He points to a long, dismal-looking municipal structure at the edge of the park. “Wiclov and one other man took her in there. Just adjacent to it. Why do you worry so?”

“Because that”—Shara nods at the bell tower—“is the oldest structure in Bulikov, after the walls. It was at the center of Bulikov, originally, though the lopsided effects of the Blink considerably changed that. The Center of the Seat of the World. Normally just called the Seat of the World, though outsiders called Bulikov the same.”

“A temple?”

“Something like that. Supposedly it was like Saypur’s Parliament House, but for the Divinities. Though I always imagined it would look much grander—it is quite shabby, I must say, and I remember reading it had amazing stained glass—but I’m told the Blink did not leave it unscathed. Apparently the tower was originally much, much taller. Each Divinity had a bell housed there, and the ringing of each bell had different … effects.”

“Such as?”

She shrugs. “No one knows. Which is why I’m reluctant to be here. So it was Wiclov who came?”

“Wiclov and one attendant. They came and took Torskeny to that little building. Then, forty minutes ago, Wiclov and his attendant departed. No sign of Torskeny.”

“That’s rather bold of them to operate in the open. Where did they go afterward?”

Sigrud’s face darkens.

“Let me guess,” says Shara. “They took a series of turns throughout the streets, and then they suddenly—”

“Vanished,” says Sigrud. “Yes. This is the third time. Yet I have remembered”—he taps the side of his head hard enough for it to make a noise—“each place where these people have disappeared. The only pattern I see is that they are all within this quarter, and the one to the west.”

“The ones most damaged by the Blink,” says Shara. “Which supports a theory I’ve just now halfway confirmed.” She runs a hand over the scarred brick wall behind them. “They are exploiting some damage or effect of the Blink for their own ends.”

“How are you so sure?”

“A piece of silver,” says Shara, “changed into lead not more than an hour ago as it passed through the alley where the surviving attacker disappeared. This sort of thing was only ever witnessed immediately after the Blink.”

“How are you so sure it wasn’t a miracle?”

“Because I used all the tricks I knew of to look for miracles,” says Shara, “and found none. No Divine workings at all, leaving only the Blink as a possible cause. It is worth noting, though, that no one has ever been able to adequately study the Blink. The Continent protects its damages like a bitter old woman does grudges. I plan to do so, when we have time—for now, let’s investigate what we have.”

When they near the municipal building, Shara hangs back to allow Sigrud to inspect. He stalks around it, then shakes his head and gestures to her to come. “Nothing,” he says as she joins him. “Door is unlocked. No one in the windows, from what I can see. But much of the building has no windows.”

“What is this place?”

“Something the city had built. Think it might have been intended for development—make the neighborhood into something better. But then they gave up, maybe.”

I would have, too, thinks Shara.

Sigrud goes to the door and pulls out his black knife. He peers inside, then silently enters. Shara waits a beat and follows.

The interior of the building is almost completely devoid of furniture and ornamentation. The rooms continue on through the building’s length, connected by a series of small doors. The building’s most remarkable attribute is that unlike nearly every structure nearby, this one has gas: little blue jets flick along the ceiling, allowing the barest illumination. “They left the lights on,” mutters Shara, but Sigrud holds a finger to his lips. He cocks his head, listening, and makes a queer face, like he’s hearing an upsetting noise.

“Someone’s here?” asks Shara softly.

“Cannot quite say.”

Sigrud stalks forward into the building, peering into each room before Shara follows. Each room is like the one before it: small, bland, empty. Mrs. Torskeny is nowhere to be found. The doorways, Shara notes, all line up, more or less: look through one door, and you look through all.…

Except the door at the very end, which is shut, and its keyhole flickers with a faint yellow light.

I like this less and less, thinks Shara.

Again, Sigrud stops. “I hear it again. It is … laughing,” he says finally.

“Laughing?”

“Yes. A child. Very … quiet.”

“From where?”

He points at the closed door.

“And you can hear nothing more?”

He shakes his head.

“Well,” says Shara. “Let’s proceed.”

As she expects, all the rooms leading up to the closed door are empty. And as they near, she hears it, too: laughter, faint and soft, as if behind that door a child is having a merry game.

“I smell something,” says Sigrud. “Salt, and dust …”

“How is that remarkable?”

“I smell them in remarkable quantities.” He points at the door again, then squats to peer through the keyhole. His squinted eye is spotlit; his eyelid trembles as he strains to see.

“Do you see anything?”

“I see … a ring, on the floor. Made of white powder. Many candles. Many. And clothes.”

“Clothes?”

“A pile of clothes on the floor.” He adds: “Women’s clothes.”

Shara taps him on the shoulder, and she takes his place at the keyhole. The light pouring through the keyhole is staggering: candelabras line the walls in a circle, each holding five, ten, twenty candles. The very room is alive with fire: she can feel the heat on her cheek in a concentrated beam. As her eye adjusts, she sees there is a wide circle of something white on the floor—Salt? Dust?—and at the edge of her vision she thinks she can see a pile of clothes, just on the opposite side of the white circle.

Her heart sinks when she sees that the dark blue cloth is almost the exact shade Mrs. Torskeny was wearing when she last saw her.

Then something dances into view.… Something gauzy and white, moving in drifting sweeps—the hem of a long white dress? Shara jumps, startled, but does not take her eye away: she sees a head of hair at the top of the cloth, thick black locks that shine in the candlelight, before the white thing trots away.

“There’s someone in there,” Shara says softly.

Again, the childish laugh. Yet something is wrong.…

“A child,” she says. “Maybe …”

“Step back,” says Sigrud.

“But … I’m not sure …”

“Step back.”

Shara moves away. He tests the knob: it’s unlocked. He squats down low, knife in hand, and eases the door open.

Immediately the laughter turns to shrieks of pain. Shara is positioned so she cannot see what’s inside—yet Sigrud can, and he drops any suggestion of threat: he glances at her, concerned, confused, and walks in.

“Wait,” says Shara. “Wait!”

Shara bolts around the open door and inside.

Things move so fast that it’s difficult for Shara to see: there is a blaze of light from the candelabras, which are so densely crowded she has to dance around them; a wide circle of white crystals on the floor—salt, probably; and sitting in the center of the ring, dressed in a huge, shining white dress, is a little girl of about four, with dark black locks and bright red lips. She sits in the ring of salt, rubbing at her knee … or Shara thinks she rubs her knee, for almost all of the little girl is hidden below her white dress. Shara cannot even see her hands, only the kneading motion under the white cloth.

“It hurts!” cries the little girl. “It hurts!”

The scent of dust is overwhelming. It seems to coat the back of Shara’s throat.

Sigrud walks forward, uncertain. “Should we … do something?” he asks.

The salt.

“Wait!” says Shara again. She reaches out to grab his sleeve and hold him back; Sigrud is so much larger than her that he almost knocks her over.

The little girl spasms in pain. “Help me!”

“You don’t want me to do anything?” asks Sigrud.

“No! Stop! And look.” Shara points down. Two feet away is the outer edge of the circle of salt.

“What is that?” asks Sigrud.

“The salt, it’s like a—”

“Please help me!” begs the little girl. “Please! Please, you must!” Shara looks closer. The dress is far too big for such a small girl, and there is a lump under it, as if her body is swollen and malformed.…

I know this, thinks Shara.

“Just stop, Sigrud. Let me try and …” She clears her throat. “If you could, please,” she says to the little girl, “show us your feet.” Sigrud is bewildered. “What?”

“Please!” cries the little girl. “Please, do something!”

“We will help you,” says Shara, “if you show us your feet.”

The little girl groans. “Why do you care? Why do you … It hurts so bad!”

“We will help you quite quickly,” says Shara. “We are experienced in medicine. Just, please—show us your feet!”

The little girl starts rocking back and forth on the ground. “I’m dying!” she howls. “I’m bleeding! Please, help me!”

“Show them to us. Now!”

“I take it,” says Sigrud, “that you do not think that’s a little girl.”

The girl lets out of a long, tortured shriek. Shara grimly shakes her head. “Look. Think. The salt on the ground, ringing her in … Torskeny’s clothes, which look to have been dropped on the ground just where she crossed the salt …” The little girl, still shrieking in pain, tries to crawl over to them. Yet her movements are so odd: she doesn’t use her hands or arms at all (Shara thinks, Does she even have any?), but the girl appears to kick over to them, crawling on her knees. It’s like she’s a cloth puppet with a hard little head on top, yet her cheeks and her tears and her hair all look so real.…

But she never shows her feet. Not once throughout this strange rolling motion.

The taste of dust thickens: Shara’s throat is clay; her eyes, sand.

There is something under the dress. Not a little girl’s body—something much larger …

Oh, by the seas, thinks Shara. It couldn’t be …

“Help me, please!” cries the girl. “I’m in so much pain!”

“Step back, Sigrud. Don’t let it get close to you.”

Sigrud does so. “No!” shouts the girl. Worm-like, the girl crawls to the very edge of the salt ring, mere inches away from them. “No! Please … Please don’t leave me!”

“You’re not real,” Shara says to the little girl. “You’re bait.”

“Bait?” says Sigrud. “For what?”

“For you and me.”

The little girl bursts into tears and huddles at the edge. “Please,” she says. “Please just pick me up. I haven’t been held in so long.…”

“Drop the act,” says Shara angrily. “I know what you are.”

The little girl shrieks; the sound is razors on their ears.

“Stop!” shouts Shara. “Stop your nonsense! We’re no fools!”

The screams stop immediately. The abrupt cessation of sound is startling.

The girl does not look up: she sits bent in half, frozen and lifelessly still.

“I don’t know how you’re still alive,” says Shara. “I thought all of you died in the Great Purge.…”

The thick locks quiver as the girl’s head twitches to one side.

“You’re a mhovost, aren’t you? One of Jukov’s pets.”

The little girl sits up, but there is something disturbingly mechanical about the motion, as if she’s being pulled by strings. Her face, which was once contorted into a look of such heart-piercing agony, is now utterly blank, like that of a doll.

Something shifts under the dress. The little girl appears to drop into the cloth. There is a sudden rush of dust.

Cloth swirling around it, it stands up slowly.

Shara looks at it, and immediately begins to vomit.

It is man-like, in a way: it has a torso, arms, and legs. Yet all are queerly long, distended, and many-jointed, as if its body is nothing but knuckles, hard bulbs of bone shifting under smooth skin. Its limbs are wrapped in white cloth stained gray with dust, and its feet are like a blend between a human’s and a goose’s: huge and syndactyly and webbed, with three fat toes, each with tiny perfect toenails on them. Yet its head is by far the worst part: the back is roughly like the head of a balding man, sporting a ring of long, gray scraggly hair around its skull; but instead of a face or jaw, the head stretches forward to form what looks like a wide, long, flat bill—like, again, that of a goose, though it has no eyes. Yet rather than the tough keratin normally seen in ducks or geese, the bill is made of knuckled human flesh, as if a man’s fingers were fused together, and he brought both hands together to form a joint at the heel of his palms.

The mhovost flaps its bill at Shara, making a wet fapfapfap. Somewhere in her mind she hears echoes of children laughing, screaming, crying. As its fleshy bill wags Shara can see it has no esophagus, no teeth: just more bony, hairy flesh in the inner recesses of the bill.

She spews vomit onto the floor again, but is careful to avoid the salt on the floor.

Sigrud stares blankly at this abomination, pacing in front of him like a bantam cock, daring him to attack it. “Is this,” he asks slowly, “a thing I should be killing?”

“No,” gasps Shara. More vomit burbles out of her. The mhovost flaps its bill at her—again, the echoes of ghostly children. She thinks, It’s laughing at me. “Don’t break the ring of salt! That’s the only thing keeping us alive!”

“And the little girl?”

“She was never there.… This creature is miraculous by nature, though darkly so.”

She spits bile on the floor. The mhovost gestures to her belligerently. The human nature of its movements is revolting: she imagines it saying, Come on! Come on!

“You killed Mrs. Torskeny, didn’t you?” asks Shara. “They led her here and she broke the salt barrier.”

The mhovost, in a bizarrely effective pantomime, looks at the pile of clothes and shrugs indifferently: That old thing? It waves dismissively: It was nothing. Then, again, it flaps its bill at them.

“I so wish”—Sigrud is turning his knife over and over in his hand—“that it would stop doing that.”

“It wants you to break the circle. If it can get at you, it’ll swallow you whole.”

Fapfapfapfap.

Sigrud gives her a skeptical look.

“It’s a creature of skin and bone,” says Shara. “But not its own skin and bone. Somewhere in it, I fear, is the repurposed remains of Mrs. Torskeny.”

The mhovost prods its belly with its many-jointed fingers, as if probing for her.

A joker. But it would be, of course, considering who made it.

“How are you alive?” asks Shara. “Shouldn’t you have perished when Jukov died?”

It stops. Stares at her, eyelessly. Then it walks backward, forward, backward, forward, as if it’s testing the edges of the salt ring.

“What is it doing?” asks Sigrud.

“It’s mad,” says Shara. “One of the creatures made by Jukov in his darker moods—a knuckle-man, a voice under the cloth. It’s meant to mock us, to goad us—the only way to identify them is to ask to see their feet, because that’s the only thing they can never really hide. Though I’ve no idea how it’s alive … Is Jukov dead?” she asks the creature.

Still pacing back and forth, the mhovost shakes its head. Then it stops, appears to think, and shrugs.

“How are you here?”

Again, a shrug.

“I knew they could last for some time,” says Shara, “but I did not think that a Divinity’s creatures could persist so long after its death.”

The mhovost extends a repulsively long, flat hand and tilts it back and forth: Maybe. Maybe not.

“The two men who were here,” says Shara. “Did they trap you here?”

It resumes pacing back and forth—Shara presumes she’s just angered it, so she must be right.

“How long have they had you trapped in this building?”

The creature mimes a laugh—Shara again reflects on what an astonishing pantomime it is—and waves a hand at her: What a silly question!

“A long time, then.”

It shrugs.

“You don’t look underfed. How many others have you killed?”

It shakes its head, waggles a finger: No no no no. Then it lovingly, thoughtfully caresses its stomach: What makes you think they’re dead?

Children laugh in the empty chambers of Shara’s mind. She resists the urge to retch again. “How … How many have they pushed within this circle?”

It flaps its bill. Shrugs.

“A lot.”

Another shrug.

Shara whispers, “How are you alive?”

The mhovost begins waltzing across the circle, twirling gracefully.

“I very much wish to kill this thing,” says Sigrud. The mhovost spins around and waggles its bony behind at Sigrud. “Much more than I do most things,” he adds. “And we have killed Divine creatures before.…”

“Listen to me, abomination,” says Shara coldly. “I am descended from the man who killed your race, who pulled your Divinities down and laid them low, who ruined and ravaged this land within weeks. My forebear buried dozens, hundreds of your brothers and sisters in the mud, and there they rot, even to this day. I have no qualms doing the same to you. Now, tell me—is your creator, the Divinity Jukov, truly gone from this world, never to return?”

The mhovost slowly stands. It appears to reflect on something—for a moment, it almost appears sad. Then it turns around, looks at Shara, and shakes its head.

“Then where is he?”

A shrug, but not half so malicious and gleeful as its others: this gesture is doleful, confused, a child wondering why it was abandoned.

“These two men who were here. One of them was fat and bald, yes?”

It starts pacing the edge of the ring, walking in a frantic circle.

A yes, Shara assumes. “And the other one—what did he look like?”

The mhovost adds a decidedly swishy step to its pace; it puts one hand on its hip, bends the other hand effeminately at the wrist; as it pivots across the ring, it strokes the bottom of its bill as if luxuriating in its gorgeous features.…

That, thinks Shara, does not sound like the sort of person Wiclov would normally dally about with.

“How did Wiclov trap you here?” she asks.

The mhovost stops, looks at her, and bends double in silent laughter. It waves at her as if appreciating a merry joke: What a ridiculous idea!

“So it wasn’t Wiclov,” says Shara. “Then who?”

It bends its wrist, affects a feminine posture, and shakes its head in a manner that could only be called “bitchy.”

“The other man trapped you here. Who is this other man?”

It performs an agile flip, assumes a handstand, and begins trotting around on its palms.

“Who was he?”

The light in the room flickers as the candelabra flames dance. And all the flames bend, Shara notices, at the exact same angle.…

A breeze?

She examines the walls. In the far corner, deep in amber shadows, she thinks she spies a crack in the stone—perhaps a panel, or a door.

She looks down at the floor. The salt ring fills the room almost perfectly: it’s impossible to reach the door without going through the mhovost’s little enclosure. Like a guard dog …

“What’s through that door?” asks Shara.

The mhovost looks up at her, does yet another flip, and lands on its feet. It cocks its head, canine-like, and theatrically scratches its bald head with one quadruple-jointed finger.

The Divinities, she remembers, could only be killed with the Kaj’s weaponry. But their minor creatures were more vulnerable, and all had their own weaknesses.

Shara comes to a decision. “How many have you devoured during your imprisonment here?”

Again, it doubles over in mock laughter. It dances over to where Sigrud stands and mimes inspecting him, pretending to squeeze his thighs, test his belly.…

“I believe it was many,” says Shara. “And I believe you enjoyed it.”

In one swoop, the mhovost slides over to her. It runs one finger along the sides of its mouth: a disturbingly sexual gesture.

Shara looks at a candelabra beside her. “These are very illegal, of course.” She picks up one candle, flips it over. Inscribed on the bottom, as she expected, is a symbol of a flame between two parallel lines—the insignia of Olvos, the flame in the woods. “These candles never go out, and give off such a bright white light.” She holds a hand to its flame. “But the heat they give … That is quite real, and no illusion.”

The mhovost stops, and slowly withdraws its finger from its mouth.

“There’s a reason all these candelabras are here, isn’t there?” asks Shara. “Because if by chance you got out of your cage, a dusty, dry creature like you would have to step very carefully to avoid catching alight.”

The mhovost drops its hand and takes a step back.

“I bet Mrs. Torskeny ran to you, didn’t she?” says Shara softly. “Seeing a little girl in need.”

Shara remembers the old woman bent over her coffee: I tried to learn. I wanted to learn to be righteous. I wanted to know. But I could only ever pretend.

Angry, the mhovost flaps its bill at her: fapfapfapfa-

With a flick, Shara tosses the candle at it.

The creature catches afire instantly: there is a whump sound, and an orange blaze erupts from its chest. Within seconds it is a dark man-figure flailing in a billowing cloud of orange-white.

Somewhere in the back of her head, Shara hears children screaming.

She remembers, again, the boy in the jail cell. How I repeat myself.

The flaming creature veers across the salt ring, seeming to bounce off of invisible walls. Scraps of flickering cloth float away from it like glowing orange cherry blossoms. It grasps its head, its monstrous mouth open in a silent cry.

Its form fades; the flames die away; a gust of ash dances around the candelabras. Then it is gone, leaving only scorch marks on the floor.