City of Stairs

RE-CREATIONS

Shara strides across the room. As her feet cross the salt, she braces for some terrible misfortune—perhaps the thing will resurrect itself and fall upon her—but there is nothing.

She feels the crack in the wall, pries at it with her fingers, but it does not budge. “Come and look,” she says. “Do you see a handle? Or a button? Or maybe a lever …”

Sigrud gently pushes her aside with the back of one hand. Then he takes a step back and soundly kicks the door in the wall.

The crack sounds deafening in this silent place. Half of the door caves in. The remainder, suddenly powdery, shatters and falls to pieces like a mirror. White, acrid clouds come pluming up.

Shara touches the broken door, which leaves a chalky residue on her fingers. “Ah,” she says. “Plaster.” She cranes her head forward to look into the dark.

Earthen stairs, going straight down in a steep angle.

Sigrud picks up one of the sputtering candelabras. “I think,” he says, “we may need one of these.”

The stairs do not end: they stretch on and on, soft and moist, formed of dark, black clay and loam. Neither she nor Sigrud talks as they descend. They do not discuss the horror they just encountered, nor does he ask her how she knew how to dispatch it in such an able fashion: eight or nine years ago, they would have, but not now. Both of them have been at this strange sort of work for so long that there are few surprises left: you encounter the miraculous, do as you need with it, and go back to work. Though that, Shara reflects, was the worst in a long while.

“What direction do you think we’re going?” asks Shara.

“West.”

“Toward the belfry?”

Sigrud considers it and nods.

“So, soon we will be … underneath it.”

“More or less, yes.”

Shara remembers how the gas company gave up this quarter, choosing to leave what was buried below Bulikov alone.

“A question comes to me,” says Sigrud. “How could someone make this without anyone noticing?”

Shara inspects the walls of the tunnel. “It looks like it’s been in use for a while. Much of it’s been worn away. But it almost looks like, when this tunnel was first made, they made it by burning it.”

“What?”

She points to the char marks, and the sandier places that are molten, like glass.

“Someone burned a hole this deep?” asks Sigrud.

“That’s how it appears,” says Shara. “Like a blowtorch flame through a stack of metal.”

“Have you seen such a thing before?”

“Actually … no. Which I find quite troubling, frankly.”

The white candlelight prances on the earthen walls. A strange breeze caresses her cheek. Shara adjusts her glasses.

The stairs seem to melt away below her. The walls fall back, then become stone—no, a stone mural, carved in a marvelously intricate pattern. Though the fluttering light makes it hard to see, Shara is sure she spots the slimsy form of Ahanas and the hand point of Taalhavras among the patterns.

The walls keep falling back. Then they aren’t there at all.

“Oh my word,” says Shara.

The candlelight beats back the dark. The shadows withdraw like a curtain to reveal a vast chamber.…

Shara catches glimpses, flashes, flickers of distant stone.…

“Oh, my word.”

She looks out. The chamber is huge and oddly uterine, from what she can see: both the ceiling and roof are huge and concave, and both come to a point in the exact center, connecting to form something similar to a stalagnate. The chamber has six atria, joining in the center like the petals and stigma of a fabulously complicated orchid bloom. And every single inch of the walls, ceiling, and floors are engraved with glyphs and sigils and pictograms of strange and bewildering events: a man pulls a thorned flower from a skull and ties its stem around his tongue; three vivisected women bathe in a rocky stream, their eyes like glass beads, while a stag watches from the shore; a woman stitches up an incision in her armpit, with the blank face of a man bulging out of the slit, as if he is being stitched up inside of her; four crows circle in the sky, and below them, a man draws water from the ground with a spear.… On and on and on—images of great and terrible meaning that are incomprehensible to her.

“What—” Sigrud snorts, hawks, swallows it with a gulp. “What is this place?”

Around the center, where the “stalagnate” forms, Shara sees soft earth has collected on the ground. But, she wonders, where did it come from? She paces forward, taking halting steps as she crosses the sloping floors.

The stalagnate, she sees, is actually a curling stairway, with five columns holding it up: it originally had six; but one, she sees, has been removed.

Six atria, she thinks, six columns, and six Divinities.…

The stairway ends in a blocked gap in the ceiling, filled with loose stone and crumbling loam, as if whatever was above caved in.

“Of course,” she says. “Of course!”

“What?” asks Sigrud.

She examines one column: it is beautifully wrought, engraved to resemble the trunk of a pine tree, with a line of flame crawling up its bark. The next column is straight and rigid and features a complicated repetitious design, like the visual expression of many mathematical formulas. The next column is carved to resemble a pillar of teeth or knives, thousands of blades melted together and pointing up, like the trunk of a palm tree. The next looks like a twisted loop of old vines, with many woody stems curled around one another: there is a slight bend in the column, artfully suggesting some flex. And the final of the five remaining columns is a twisting, chaotic tornado of blossoms, fur, leaves, sand, anything and everything.

Shara bunches her fists and trembles like a schoolgirl. “This was it!” she cries. “This had to be it! Really it! Down here, all along!”

“It being what?” says Sigrud, who remains unimpressed.

“Don’t you see? Everyone says the bell tower of the Seat of the World shrank during the Blink! But that’s not true! Because that’s the base of the bell tower!” She points at the columns around the staircase. “Those stairs are the way up!”

“So …”

“So the tower never shrank! The whole temple must have sunk into the mud! That shabby little clay shack up in the park was never the true Seat of the World! Which is what everyone, even everyone in Bulikov, still thinks. This is it! This is the Seat of the World! This is where the Divinities met!”

As Shara has devoted most of her adult life to history, she can’t help but be overwhelmed with giddiness, as unpatriotic as it may be; but one unmoved part of her mind speaks up:

This can’t all be coincidence. The most sacred structure in Bulikov just happened to sink so it remained hidden for nearly eighty years? And Ernst Wiclov was the one to tunnel underground to reach it? You don’t do something like that unless you know about it—and you wouldn’t know about it unless someone told you.

Shara plucks one candle out of Sigrud’s candelabra. “Go and send word to Mulaghesh. Now. If word gets out to the general populace of Bulikov that this is still here, and we have to publicly seize this place, it’ll be the Summer of Black Rivers all over again. And have her throw up a net for Wiclov. All checkpoints around and inside Bulikov will need to be on the lookout for him. We’ve got enough to at least bring him in for questioning.”

“What will you do?” asks Sigrud.

“Stay down here, and inspect.”

“Will that candle be enough for you?”

“This is actually for you.” She holds the lone candle out to him and points to the candelabra. “I’ll be needing that, please.”

Sigrud cocks an eyebrow, shrugs, and hands her the candelabra. He retreats up the earthen tunnel. The faint white light comes bouncing down the stairs, then dims, leaving Shara alone in the vast chamber.

The candles fizz and spit. Somewhere, the limp plink of dripping water. And a thousand stone eyes watch her silently.

It takes some time to recalibrate her manner of thought: the chamber was not an underground cave, she reminds herself, but a temple meant to be aboveground. This explains the huge, gaping holes in the walls of each bulging atrium: they were once giant windows, and though it’s difficult to tell from where she stands on the staircase, all but one of them is now broken. So this is what happens to the storied stained glass of the Seat of the World, she thinks. Broken and buried in the mud of Bulikov.…

She looks out at the six atria. Each atrium has a different style, presumably aligning with each Divinity, just like the columns holding up the staircase. Shara sees the sigils of Olvos, Taalhavras, Ahanas, Voortya, Jukov, and then …

“Hm,” says Shara.

Despite its burial, it seems the Seat of the World is not in perfect condition: one atrium is utterly blank of any engravings at all, as if someone came in and sanded down the floor, ceiling, and walls.

But Shara sees someone has very recently attempted to restore the floor of this blank chamber, laying out engraved stones of a much darker make than the rest of the temple. The restoration isn’t complete yet, leaving a jumbled and distorted mess of images, words, and sigils on the floor, telling half-stories and partial myths, and leaving huge swaths of the chamber blank.

Over and over again, these dark new stones show the same image: a human-like figure seated in the center of a room, listening to someone. The accompanying sigil is familiar to her: a scale, represented by two dashes supported by a square fork.

Kolkan’s hands, she remembers. Waiting to weigh and judge …

She looks behind her. The pillar corresponding with the blank atrium is missing.

Shara gets the powerfully absurd feeling that she is staring at edited history.

This was once as decorated as the other five sections, thinks Shara. But I’m willing to bet it all went blank in 1442, right when Kolkan disappeared from the world. She looks out at the jigsaw collection of new pictograms. But now someone’s come back to correct the record.

She smirks. Perhaps they’re taking the term “Restorationists” a bit too seriously.

It’s a futile task. By her estimation, there are thousands of square feet of floor, ceiling, and wall needing to be completely restored. And whoever was attempting to do so obviously had no idea what decorated Kolkan’s chamber. And where did these stones come from, anyway?

Shara hops down and begins inspecting the new pieces of stone on the floor. The stones themselves are fascinating—a dark, smooth ore of a like she’s never seen before—and their pictograms are of deeds and events Shara has never heard of: Kolkan, depicted as a robed, hooded figure, splits open a naked human form, and a pure, bright light comes spilling out to rain upon the rounded hills.

It’s from another temple, maybe. She traces one carving with her finger. Someone actually took the stone from one of Kolkan’s surviving temples and tried to rebuild it here, to restore Kolkan in the Seat of the World.

Could Ernst Wiclov really do something like this?

She sees movement ahead and slowly looks up. Something is twitching on the wall.

After a moment’s inspection, she sees there is a large, empty frame of some kind standing upright just a few yards of ahead of her; the quivering candle flames must have caused its shadow to dance on the stone wall behind it.

She looks around at the other chambers. None of them have a frame of any kind. Whoever tried to restore Kolkan’s chamber—presumably the same person who made the earthen stairway down and also thought to trap the mhovost before it as a revolting sort of watchdog—must have brought it here.

She walks over to it. It’s a stone door frame, about nine feet tall. But then, she recalls, Continentals generally were much taller in the years before the Blink: they were less malnourished in those days. Like so many things originating during the Divine era, the frame features exquisite stonework that gives it the likeness of thick fur, dry wood, chalky stone, and starlings. Yet none of this artistry has any real relation to Kolkan, at least as far as Shara’s aware: Kolkan generally disdained ornamentation of any kind.

She touches the carven starlings in the door frame: “And weren’t you a favorite of Jukov?”

As she touches it, the door slides back. She looks down at its base. The door frame is mounted on four small wheels made of iron. Shara gives it another push—with a squeak, it slides back farther. Why in the world would anyone want a mobile door frame?

She looks at the window frame in the wall of Kolkan’s atrium. Each atrium had its own window, originally, a stained glass for each Divinity. Shara has read scores of letters describing the beauty of the Divine glass of the Seat of the World—blues and reds the eye could not properly interpret but still feel—and while she is sorry to see it all broken, she’s a bit puzzled to see that Kolkan’s glass remains whole, but is perfectly blank and clear. She slowly waves the candelabra back and forth, watching the reflection: it’s a big, transparent, but otherwise utterly ordinary window. Perhaps it simply went blank, she concludes, when Kolkan vanished. But if so—why is it still whole, and all the others broken?

She lifts the candelabra and gazes at the other round chambers.

Once, when she was very young, Aunt Vinya took her to the National Library in Ghaladesh. Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.… Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.

She felt overwhelmed. It was—she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library—a lot like being in love for the first time.

And to find this here under the earth, as if all the experiences and words and histories of the Continent could be washed away by the rain to leach through the soil and drip, drip, drip into a hollow in the loam, like the slow calcification of crystal …

In the dark, under Bulikov, Shara Komayd paces over ancient stones and falls in love again.

The rumble of footsteps. Shara looks up from a pictogram of Olvos to see the staircase glowing bright with candlelight.

Mulaghesh enters, flanked by Sigrud and two soldiers with candelabras. She takes one glance at the vast temple; her shoulders droop—Oh, what a mess this is—and she sighs: “Ah, shit.”

“It’s quite a discovery, isn’t it?” calls Shara as she walks across the atria.

“You could say that,” Mulaghesh says, “yes.”

“You have men posted to guard the entrance?”

“I have five soldiers outside, yes.”

“This is”—Shara steps around a puddle of mud—“enormous. Enormous! I’d imagine this is the most significant Divine discovery since the War, since the Blink! The greatest historical discovery in … well, history. To discover any piece of this place, any fragment of these pictograms, would be borderline revolutionary in Ghaladesh, but to have found the entire building, whole, and more or less unharmed, is, is …” Shara, breathless, inhales. “It boggles the mind.” Mulaghesh stares at the curving ceiling. She strokes the scars on her jaw with her knuckles. “It sure does.”

“Here! Look here, at this section!” Shara stoops. “These few yards of carvings offer more knowledge about Ahanas than anyone’s found in years. We know almost nothing about her! Ahanashtan, as you probably know, is one of the places most deeply affected by the Blink—almost all the city seemed to vanish, you see. Almost everything that’s there now was built by Saypur.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But this mural proves why it vanished! It corroborates the theory that Ahanas actually grew the city, sowing miraculous seeds that grew into living buildings, homes, streets, lights.… Peaches that glowed at night, like streetlights, vines that funneled in water and away waste … It’s fascinating.”

Mulaghesh scratches the corner of her mouth. “Yeah.”

“And when Ahanas died, all of that vanished. What’s more, it provides a second explanation for the gap in knowledge: if what this says is true, Ahanashtanis thought all life and all parts of the body were sacred—they never used medicine, never cut their hair, never shaved, never trimmed their fingernails, never brushed their teeth, never … well … cleaned their nether parts.”

“Yeesh.”

“But that was because they didn’t have to! Ahanas was able to meet every single one of their needs! They lived in complete harmony with this massive, organic city! But after the Blink, when disease started rampaging through the Continent, they must have refused every medicine, every ministration.… So nearly every Ahanashtani on the Continent must have died out! Can you imagine! Can you imagine that?”

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. Then, amiably: “So, you know we’re going to have to cave in that tunnel, right?”

“And this section here,” says Shara, “it … it …” She bows her head and lets out a slow breath. Then she looks up at Mulaghesh.

Mulaghesh smiles grimly and nods. “Yeah. You know. You know we can’t possibly keep something like this secret. Not something this big. We’d post guards. Then someone would ask questions about those guards, what they’re guarding, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Or we’d try and excavate it, study it, document it, and someone would see all the equipment, all the personnel, and they’d ask questions, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Trouble”—Mulaghesh files a rough nail away on the edge of one engraving—“is unavoidable. And worse, Wiclov knows about it, so if we try and stay here and do anything, it’s putting a knife in his hands: ‘Look at Saypur, keeping our most sacred temple secret in the earth, getting their dirty foreign fingers all over it.’ Can you imagine that fallout? Can you imagine what would happen, Ambassador? Not just to your investigation, but to the Continent, to Saypur?”

Shara sighs. This is an argument she expected, but she’d hoped the solution wouldn’t be quite so drastic. “You really want to … to just cave it in? You think that’s our best option?”

“I’d prefer to fill the damn tunnel up with cement, but the equipment would attract too many eyes. There are some wooden struts at the door that are definitely load-bearing. It wouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“There’s evidence, though. Someone’s been here, restoring the Kolkashtani atrium. They even put a stone door frame in here, though I’ve no idea why. It … It must be whoever’s working with Wiclov!”

“Are you certain of it to the extent that you would risk Continentals discovering this place?”

Shara rubs her eyes, then sits back and stares out at the Seat of the World. “Looking at it, I just know,” she says, “that I could spend a lifetime studying this.”

“If you were a historian,” says Mulaghesh. “But you’re not.”

Shara flinches, stung.

“You’re a servant, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh softly. “We both have a duty. Neither of us will be doing it down here.”

In Shara’s head, Efrem Pangyui is saying, What truth do you wish to keep?

The candelabras stutter. A thousand shadows dance. Ancient faces glower, vanish.

“Do it,” says Shara.

The trudge back up the stairway feels interminable. Shara commits herself to memorizing everything she saw, everything she read. By all the seas, she tells herself, we won’t lose this, too.

“So there was nothing miraculous down there?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Not that I saw,” says Shara absently.

“That’s a relief,” Mulaghesh says. She pulls an envelope from her coat pocket and holds it out to Shara. “We’ve been reviewing the stolen pages of the list from the Warehouse. The idea of finding any more of this, out in the open, gives me nightmares. These twenty pages are what we think got the Restorationists so excited—or something in them, at least. But they probably got much, much more.”

If there is one thing that can break Shara’s concentration, it’s this. She snatches the envelope from Mulaghesh’s hand, tears it open, and reads:

“Oh,” says Shara softly. “Oh my word.”

Mulaghesh stops briefly to light a match on a stone protruding from the tunnel wall. “Yeah.”

“This is what’s in the Warehouse?”

“They just had to get ahold of a part of the list with an unusually large amount of active, miraculous items. A lot of glass pieces, though.”

“The Divinities were fond of using glass as a safe place,” Shara murmurs.

“What do you mean?”

“They stored things in them, hid in them. All Divine priests knew many Release miracles—they’d be sent a simple glass bead, perform the appropriate miracle, break the glass, and then”—she waggles her fingers—“mountains of gold, a mansion, a castle, a bride, or.… whatever.” She trails off as she reads, struggling between fascination and horror as she flips through the rest of the entries. She’s barely aware when they emerge from the tunnel, registering only the bright light from the candelabras in the mhovost’s room.

Mulaghesh nods to two young soldiers with axes and sledgehammers. “Go on,” she says.

The soldiers enter the tunnel.

Shara reads the last pages.

Her hands clench: she nearly rips the paper in half.

“Wait!” she says. “Wait, stop!”

“Wait?” asks Mulaghesh. “For what?”

“Look,” says Shara. She points at one entry:

“Do you remember,” Shara asks, “the stone door in the Kolkashtani atrium we just saw?”

“Yeah …” Mulaghesh’s face does not change as she lifts her eyes from the page to Shara. “You … You think …”

“Yes.”

Mulaghesh has to think for a moment. “So if that’s the other Ear down there …”

“And if its twin is still in the Warehouse …”

The two stare at each other for one second longer. Then they dash back down the stairway.

Sigrud and the other two soldiers watch, bewildered, before following.

“Taking everything into account, it still seems wisest,” Mulaghesh intones from the shadows, “to just destroy the damn thing.”

Shara holds the candelabra higher to inspect the door frame. “Would you prefer that we leave not knowing if someone used the door to access the Warehouse?”

A click as Mulaghesh sucks on her cigarillo. “They could have gone in there, touched something they shouldn’t have, and died.”

“Then I, personally, would like to have a body.” She studies the sculpted door, looking for a word, a letter, a switch, or a button. Though they wouldn’t need anything mechanical, she reminds herself. All mechanics of the miraculous operate in a much more abstract manner …

Sigrud lies on the temple floor, staring up as if it’s a sunny hillside with a blue sky above. “Maybe,” he says, “you must do something to the other door.”

“I would prefer that, yes,” says Shara. She mutters a few lines from the Jukoshtava: the door remains indifferent. “Then this door would be more or less useless. Provided security is firm at the Warehouse.”

“And it is,” snaps Mulaghesh.

Shara tries praising the names of a few key Jukoshtani saints. The door is unmoved. This must be what it’s like, she thinks, to be a lecher trying out lines on a girl at a party.

“I rather think,” she says finally, “that I am going about this wrong.”

Mulaghesh suppresses a ferocious yawn. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

Shara’s eye strays across a distant pictogram in Jukov’s atrium depicting an orgy of stupendous complexity. “Jukov did not respect words, or shows of fealty. He was always much more about action, wildness, with nothing planned.” At the head of the orgy, a figure in a pointed hat holds aloft a jug of wine and a knife. “Sacrifice through blood, sweat, tears, emotion …”

She remembers a famous passage from the Jukoshtava: “Those who are unwilling to part with their blood and fear; who refuse wine and wildness; who come upon a choice, a chance, and tremble and fear—why should I allow them in my shadow?”

Wine, thinks Shara, and the flesh.

“Sigrud,” she says. “Give me your flask.”

Sigrud lifts his head and frowns.

“I know you have one. I don’t care about that. Just give it to me. And a knife.”

Sparks as Mulaghesh taps her cigarillo against the wall. “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

Sigrud clambers to his feet, rustles in his coat—there is the tinkling of metal: unpleasant instruments, surely—and produces a flask of dark brown glass.

“What is it?” asks Shara.

“They said it was plum wine,” he says. “But from the fumes … I think the salesman, he might not have been so honest.”

“And … have you tried it?”

“Yes. And I have not gone blind. So.” He holds out a small blade.

This will either work, thinks Shara, or be very embarrassing. Sigrud uncorks the flask—the fumes are enough to make her gag—and she tugs off her free hand’s glove with her teeth. Then she steels herself and slashes the inside of her palm.

Mulaghesh is appalled. “What in the—?”

Shara puts her mouth to the wound and sucks at it. It is bleeding freely: the taste of salt and copper suffuses her mouth, almost chokes her. Then she rips her hand away and hurriedly takes a pull from the flask.

It is not—most certainly not—any sort of alcohol she has ever tasted before. Vomit curdles in her stomach, washes up her esophagus; she chokes it back down. She faces the door frame, gags once, and spews the mixture of alcohol and blood over it.

She is not in control of herself enough to even see if it works. She hands the flask and knife back to Sigrud, drops to all fours, and begins to violently dry heave, but as she lost most of the contents of her stomach when she first saw the mhovost, there is nothing to expel.

She hears Mulaghesh say, “Um. Uhh …”

There is a soft scrape as Sigrud’s black knife escapes from its sheath.

“What?” croaks Shara. She wipes away tears. “What is it? Did it work?”

She looks, and finds it is difficult to say.

The interior of the door frame is completely, impenetrably black, as if someone inserted a sheet of black graphite in it while she wasn’t looking. One of Mulaghesh’s soldiers, curious, steps behind the doorway: none of them are able to see through to her. The soldier sticks her head around the other side and asks, “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” says Mulaghesh. “Was it supposed to do”—she struggles for words—“that?”

“It’s a reaction, at least,” says Shara. She grabs the candelabra and approaches the door frame.

“Be careful!” says Mulaghesh. “Something could … I don’t know, come out of it.”

The black inside the doorway, Shara sees, is not as solid as she thought: as she nears it, the shadow recedes until she spots the hint of tall, square metal frames on either side of the doorway, and a rickety wooden floor.

Shelves, she realizes. I’m seeing rows and rows of shelves.

“Oh, my seas and stars,” whispers Mulaghesh. “What is that?”

Would this—Shara’s heart is trembling—be the view from shelf C5-162, where the other Ear of Jukov sits?

Shara reaches down and picks up a clod of earth. She gauges the distance and tosses it into the doorway.

The clod flies through the door frame, into the shadows, and lands with a thunk on the wooden floor.

“It passes through,” remarks Sigrud.

And so, she muses, Lord Jukov allows us in his shadow.

This deeply concerns her, though she does not say so: not only has she just found that one of Jukov’s Divine creatures was still alive, now one of his miraculous devices appears to still function. Who actually witnessed Jukov’s death, she thinks, besides the Kaj himself?

She returns to the task at hand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

There is a passing shadow—the candle flames in her candelabra shrink to near nothing—an unsettling breeze, then the creak of wood below her feet.

Shara is through.

She takes a breath and immediately starts coughing.

The interior of the Unmentionable Warehouse is musty beyond belief, much more so than the Seat of the World: it is like entering the home of a hugely ancient, hoarding old couple. Shara hacks miserably against the bloody handkerchief around her hand. “Is there no ventilation here?”

Mulaghesh has tied a bandanna around her head before stepping through. “Why the hells would there be?” she says, irritated.

Sigrud enters behind her. If the air bothers him, he doesn’t show it.

Mulaghesh turns around to look at the second stone door frame, sitting comfortably in the lowest spot on shelf C5. Shara can see Mulaghesh’s two soldiers watching them from the other side of the door, anxious.

“Could we really be here?” Mulaghesh asks aloud. “Could we really have been transported miles outside of Bulikov, just like that?”

Shara holds up the candelabra: the shelves tower above them nearly three or four stories tall. Shara thinks she can make out a tin roof somewhere far overhead. The skeletal form of an ancient rolling ladder lurks a dozen feet away. “I would say we are here,” she says, “yes.”

The three of them stand in the Unmentionable Warehouse and listen.

The dark air is filled with sighs and squeaks and low hums. The rattle of pennies, the scrape of wood. The air pressure in the room feels like it is constantly changing: either something in the Warehouse has confused Shara’s skin, inner ear, and sinuses, or there are countless forces applying themselves to her, then fading, like ocean currents.

How many miracles are in here with us, Shara wonders, functioning away in the dark? How many of the words of the Divinities still echo in this place?

Sigrud points down. “Look.”

The wooden floor is covered in sediments of dust, yet this aisle has been marred by recent footprints.

“I presume,” says Mulaghesh, “that that would be the passage of our mysterious opponent.”

Shara fights to concentrate: there are many paths of footprints, none of them completely clear. Their trespasser must have paced the aisles many times. “We need to look for any sign of tampering,” she says. “Then, after that, we need to look and see if anything’s missing. I would expect that if there’s anything missing, it’d be something from these pages, since these are the records that interested the Restorationists. So”—she flips through the pages—“we’ll want to look at shelves C4, C5, and C6.”

“Or he could have just randomly stolen something,” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes. Or that.” Thank you, she thinks, for highlighting the futility of our search. “We all have a light, don’t we? Then let’s spread out, and keep an eye on each other … and we’ll get out of here as fast as we can. And I don’t think I need to say this, but do not touch anything. And if something asks for your attention, or for your interference … ignore it.”

“Would these … items really have minds of their own?” asks Sigrud.

Shara’s memory supplies her with a litany of miraculous items that were either alive or claimed to be. “Just don’t touch anything,” she says. “Stay clear of all the shelves.”

Shara takes shelf C4, Mulaghesh C5, Sigrud C6. As she walks down her aisle, Shara reflects on the age of this place. These shelves are nearly eighty years old, she thinks, listening to the creaking. And they look it. “The Kaj never intended for this to be a permanent fix, did he?” she whispers as she looks down the aisle. “We just kept ignoring it, hoping this was a problem that would go away.”

Each space on the shelves is marked by a tiny metal tag with a number. Beyond this, there is no explanation for the contents, which are beyond random.

One shelf is occupied by most of a huge, disassembled statue. Its face is blank, featureless, save for a wriggling, fractal-like design marching across the whole of its head. Taalhavras, thinks Shara, or one of his incarnations.

A wooden box covered in locks and chains wriggles; a scuttering noise comes from within, like many small, clawed creatures scrabbling at the wood. Shara quickly steps past this.

A golden sword shines with a queer light above her. Beside it sit twelve short, thick, unremarkable glass columns. Beside these, a large silver cup with many jewels. Then mountains and mountains of books and scrolls.

She walks on. Next she sees sixty panes of glass. A foot made of brass. A corpse wrapped in a blanket, tied with silver twine.

Shara cannot see the end of the aisle. Over fifteen hundred years, she thinks, of miraculous items.

The historian in her says, How fortuitous the Kaj thought to store them all.

The operative in her says, He should have destroyed every single one of them when he had the chance.

“Ambassador?” calls Mulaghesh’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Did … you say something?”

“No.” Shara pauses. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

A long silence. Shara surveys a collection of silver thumbs.

“Is it possible for these things to talk in your head?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Anything is possible here,” says Shara. “Ignore it.”

A bucket full of children’s shoes.

A walking stick made of horsehair.

A cabinet spilling ancient parchments.

A cloth mask, made to look like the face of an old man.

A wooden carving of a man with seven erect members of varying length.

She tries to focus, but her mind keeps searching through all the stories she’s memorized, trying to place these items in the thousands of Continental legends. Is that the knot that held a thunderstorm in its tangle, and when untied brought endless rain? Could that be the harp of a hovtarik from the court of Taalhavras, which made the tapestries come alive? And is that the red arrow made by Voortya, that pierced the belly of a tidal wave and turned it to a gentle current?

“No,” says Sigrud’s voice. “No. That is not so.”

“Sigrud?” says Shara. “Are you all right?”

A low hum from a few yards away.

“No!” says Sigrud. “That is a lie!”

Shara walks quickly down the aisle until she sees Sigrud standing on the opposite side of a shelf, staring at a small, polished black orb sitting in a velvet-lined box.

“Sigrud?”

“No,” he says to the orb. “I left that place. I am … I am not there anymore.”

“Is he all right?” calls Mulaghesh.

“Sigrud, listen to me,” says Shara.

“They died because”—he searches for an explanation—“because they tried to hurt me.”

“Sigrud …”

“No. No! No, I will not!”

In the velvet box, the glassy black orb rotates slightly to the left; Shara is reminded of a dog cocking its head: Why not?

“Because I,” Sigrud says forcefully, “am not. A king!”

“Sigrud!” shouts Shara.

He blinks, startled. The black orb sinks a little lower in the velvet, like it’s disappointed to lose its playmate.

Sigrud slowly turns to look at her. “What …? What has happened?”

“You’re here,” she says. “You’re here in the Warehouse, with me.”

He rubs his temple, shaken.

“The things here are … They’re very old,” she explains. “I think they’re bored. And they’ve been … feeding off one another. Like fish trapped in a shrinking pond.”

“I have found nothing missing,” he grumbles. “The shelves are quite full. Over full, even.”

“Me neither,” says Mulaghesh’s voice from the next aisle. “You don’t want us to climb the ladders, do you?”

“Does it look like the ladders have been moved?” asks Shara. “Look at the dust.”

A pause. “No.”

“Then it would have been something on the first few shelves.”

Shara directs her own attention to the lowest shelves of her remaining aisles and continues her search.

Four brass oil lamps. A blank, polished wooden board. Children’s dolls. A spinning wheel whose wheel is slowly rotating, though there seems to be no flax, and certainly no spinner.

Then, in the final spot, just ahead …

Nothing.

Maybe nothing. Nothing that she can see, at least.

Shara thinks, Something missing?

She strides toward the empty space. Her eyes are so used to seeing random material in the corner of her vision that she does not pay much attention to what’s below her. But as she nears the blank space on the shelf, she thinks, briefly, Did I see something shining on the ground?

A wire, maybe?

Something catches at her ankle; pulls, breaks—a tinny ping!

There is a tinkle of metal from the next aisle over; a tiny steel key goes skittering across the boards.

Immediately Sigrud roars, “Down! Now!”

A puff of black smoke across the aisle to her right.

Then a wild blossom of orange flames, and a concussive blast.

A wave of heat batters her right side. Shara is lifted off the ground. She crashes into the shelves next to her, sending ancient treasures flying: a leather bag tumbles through the air, vomiting an endless stream of golden coins; a streamer of pale ribbon strikes the ground and turns to leaves.

Dust and metal and old wood spin around her. She falls to the ground, paws at a shelf, but cannot stand.

A fire rages to her right. Smoke coils and curls up on the ceiling, like a black cat finding sanctuary in a sunbeam.

On her left, the statue of Taalhavras crashes off the shelf. Sigrud awkwardly clambers through to kneel beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asks. He touches the side of her head. “You have lost some hair.…”

“What damned miracle,” she pants, “was that?”

“No miracle,” he says. He looks back at the spreading fire. “A mine. Incendiary, I think, or it did not ignite properly.”

“What the hells is going on over there?” shouts Mulaghesh’s voice.

Somewhere in the darkness many tiny voices chitter.

Flames rush across the dust on the floor, hop onto one shelf, burrow into the blanket-wrapped corpse.

“We need to leave,” says Sigrud. “This place, so dry and old—it will burn down in moments.”

Shara looks out at the growing flames. The top of the shelf on her right is almost completely ablaze. “There was a blank space,” she murmurs, “on that shelf ahead. Something has been stolen.” She tries to point; her finger drunkenly wanders to the ground.

“We need to leave,” says Sigrud again.

There are pops out in the darkness. Something screeches in the fire.

“What in shitting hells is going on over there?” bellows Mulaghesh.

Shara looks at Sigrud. She nods.

He effortlessly hauls her up onto one of his shoulders. “We are leaving!” he shouts to Mulaghesh.

Sigrud sprints down the aisle, turns right, and makes a beeline for the stone door frame.

A ruby-red glow filters through the forest of towering shelves.

Decades, thinks Shara. Centuries. More.

Gone. All gone.

Sigrud sets Shara down when they’re back in the Seat of the World.

She coughs, then weakly asks, “How bad am I?”

He asks her to wiggle her fingers and toes. She does so. “Good,” he says. “Mostly. Lost a lot of an eyebrow. Some hair. And your face is red. But not burned—not seriously. You are lucky.” He looks up at the inferno raging on the other side of the stone door frame. “I do not think whoever set that trap knew what they were doing. But when I heard it …” He shakes his head. “Only one thing in the world sounds like that.”

Mulaghesh leans on one of her soldiers and, in between hacks, attempts to light another cigarillo. “So the sons of bitches mined the Warehouse? Just in case we followed?”

A broiling heat comes pouring through the stone door frame.

At every moment, thinks Shara, they’ve been one step ahead of me.

“Let’s cave that damn tunnel in,” says Shara, “and be done with this damned place.”

In the darkness of the Warehouse, legends and treasures wither and die in the flames. Thousands of books turn to curling ash. Paintings are eaten by flame from the inside out. Wax pools on the floor, running down from the many candles stacked across the shelves, and makes a twisted rainbow across the wooden slats. In some of the deeper shadows, invisible voices sob in grief.

Yet not all the items meet destruction.

A large clay jug sits on a shelf, bathing in heat. Upon its glazed surface are many delicate black brushstrokes: sigils of power, of containment, of tethering.

In the raging heat, the ink bubbles, cracks, and fades. The wax seal around its cork runs and drips down its side.

Something within the bottle begins growling, slowly realizing its prison is fading away.

The jug begins to tip back and forth. It plummets off its shelf to shatter on the ground.

The jug erupts in darkness. Its contents expand rapidly, sending shelves toppling like dominoes. The jug’s prisoner keeps growing until its top nearly touches the ceiling of the Warehouse.

One yellow eye takes in the flames, the smoke, the burning shelves.

A high-pitched voice shrieks in victorious rage: Free! Free at last! Free at last!