City of Stairs

SALVATION

“No breaks,” says the doctor. “Probably some fractures. Definitely bruising, to the point that I would expect some bone bruising as well. I would be able to tell, of course, if the patient would permit me to examine him more closely.…”

Sigrud, leaning back in the bed with a pot of potato wine in his lap, allows a grunt. One half of his face is a brilliant red; the other is black and gray, like molded fruit. In the light of the weak embassy gas lamps, he looks positively ghoulish. So far he has only allowed the doctor to prod his stomach and witness that he can move his head, arms, and legs; beyond this, Sigrud only answers the doctor’s requests with sullen grunts.

“He reports no abdominal pain,” says the doctor. “Which is, I must say, unbelievable. And I also see no signs of frostbite—also fairly unbelievable.”

“What is frostbite?” asks Sigrud. “I have never heard of this frostbite.”

“Are you implying,” says the doctor, “that Dreylings never get frostbite?”

“There is cold”—Sigrud takes a massive swig of wine—“and less cold.”

The doctor, flustered, frustrated, says to Shara, “I would say that if he survives the night, then he will survive entirely. I would also say that if he wants to survive in general, he should allow medical professionals to do their job, and not treat us as if we are … molesters.” Sigrud laughs nastily.

Shara smiles. “Thank you, Doctor. That will be all.”

The doctor, grumbling, bows, and Shara leads him outside. A crowd is milling in front of the embassy gates, having followed them here from the river. “If you could,” says Shara, “we would appreciate your discretion. If you could avoid discussing any details of what you saw here …”

“It would be against my profession,” says the doctor, “and more so this examination was conducted so poorly that I would prefer no one ever know about it.” He claps a hat on his head and marches away. Someone in the crowd shouts, “There she is!” And the gates light up with photography flashes.

Shara grimaces and shuts the door. Photography is a relatively new innovation, less than five years old, but she can already tell she will hate it: Capturing images, she thinks, carries so many complications for my work.…

She reenters and heads up the stairs; the embassy staff watches her go with black-rimmed eyes, exhausted, waiting for permission to turn in; Mulaghesh descends in a harried stomp. “Warehouse fire’s out,” she says. She lifts a bottle to her lips and drinks. “I’m locking down the embassy until we decide if this city will kill us or not for killing their god’s pet, or whatever that was. The City Fathers have elected to deal with the bridge themselves. I’m getting drunk and sleeping here. You can deal with it.”

“I shall,” says Shara lightly.

“And you had better make sure I wind up in Javrat when this is all over!”

“I shall.”

She leaves Mulaghesh behind, enters Sigrud’s room, and sits at the foot of his bed. Sigrud is running a forefinger around the mouth of the bottle, again and again.

“Here,” says Shara. She holds out Sigrud’s bracelet and places it in his big palm.

“Thank you,” he says, and fastens it around his left wrist.

“Are you really all right?” Shara asks.

“I think so,” says Sigrud. “I have survived worse.”

“Really?”

Sigrud nods, lost in thought.

“How did you survive?”

He thinks, then lifts his right hand, which is wrapped in medical gauze. He unravels it to reveal the brilliant pink-red carving of a scale in his palm. “With this.”

She looks at it. “But that … that isn’t the blessing of Kolkan.…”

“Maybe not. But I think that … being punished by Kolkan, and being blessed by him … They may be the same thing.”

Shara remembers Efrem reading from Olvos’s Book of the Red Lotus and commenting aloud, The Divine did not understand themselves in the same way we do not understand ourselves, and their unintentional effects often say more about them than their intentional ones.

Sigrud is staring into the palm of his hand. His eye glitters through its swollen lids like the soft back of a beetle between its wings. He blinks—she can tell he is drunk—and says, “Do you know how I got this?”

“Somewhat,” she says. “I know it is the mark of the Finger of Kolkan.”

He nods. Silence stretches on.

“I knew you had it,” she says. “I knew what it was. But I never felt I should ask.”

“Wise. Scars are windows to bitterness—it is best to leave them untouched.” He kneads his palm and says, “I don’t know how they got it in Slondheim. Such a rare and powerful instrument—though it looked like no more than a marble—a gray marble with a, a little sign of a scale on it. They had to carry it in a box, with a certain kind of lining in it.…”

“Gray wool, probably,” says Shara. “It held a special esteem, to Kolkashtanis.”

“If you say so. There were nine of us. They’d kept us in a cell, all together. We drank rusty water from a leaking pipe, shat in the corner, starved. Starved for so long. I don’t know how long they starved us. But one day our jailers came to us with this little stone in the box and a plate of chicken—a whole chicken—and they said, ‘If one of you can hold this little, tiny stone for a full minute, we will let you eat.’ And everyone rushed to volunteer, to do what the jailers said, but I held back because I knew these men. In Slondheim, they played with us. Tricked us into fighting each other, killing each other …” He flexes his left fist; the pink-scarred wastelands of his knuckles flare white. “So I knew this was not right. The first man tried to hold the pebble, and the second he picked it up, he started screaming. His hand bled like he had been stabbed. He dropped it—it sounded like a boulder had struck the floor when it fell—and the jailers laughed and said, ‘Pick it up, pick it up,’ and the man couldn’t. It was like it weighed a thousand tons. The jailers could only pick it up with the gray cloth. We didn’t understand what it was, but we knew we were starving, so we wanted to try again, to eat, just a little.… And none of them could. Some got to twenty seconds. Some to thirty. Bleeding rivers from their hands. It wounded them so horribly. And they all dropped this little stone. This tiny little Finger of Kolkan.” He takes another sip of wine. “And then … I tried. But before I picked it up, I thought … I thought about all I had lost. The thing in my heart that made me wish to keep living, that fire, it had gone out. It is still out, even now. And … and I wished this stone to crush me. Do you see? I wished for this pain. So I picked it up. And I held it.” He turns over his scarred hand as if the stone is still there. “I feel it still. I feel like I am holding it now. I held it not to eat, but to die.” The hand turns into a fist. “But eat I did. I bore the Finger of Kolkan for not one, but three minutes. And then they took the stone from me, unhappy, and said, ‘You can eat, for you have won. But before you do, you must decide—will you eat all the chicken, or will you share it with your fellow inmates?’ And they all stared at me … ghosts of men, thin and pale and starving, like they were fading before my eyes.…”

Sigrud begins rewrapping his hand. “I didn’t think about it,” he says softly, “for even a second. The jailers put me in a different cell from the rest of them, and I ate it all, and I slept. And it was not even a week before they started dragging out the bodies from my old jail cell.” He ties the bandage, massaging his palm. “The Divine may have created many hells,” he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.”

Shara shuts the door to Sigrud’s room and pauses in the hall. Her legs tremble, and it takes her a moment to realize she is about to collapse. She sits down in the hallway and takes a deep breath.

Shara has run many operatives in her career, and she has lost her fair share. And in that time she has come to think she is an immaculate professional: efficient yet personally removed from the details of her work, preserving her conscience and her sanity in a tiny hermetic little bubble buried far away from her grisly reality.

But to imagine losing Sigrud … She thought she knew horror, but when she saw him disappear into the dark waters of the Solda …

He’s alive, she tells herself. He’s alive, and he’s going to be fine. At least, as fine as such a man can be, battered and bruised in his tiny, stinking room.

Shara shakes her head. How the present mimics the past, she thinks. Ten years ago, but today it seems like a lifetime.

Shara remembers how small the cabin door had been. Tiny, hardly a trapdoor, the tiniest cabin in the Saypuri dreadnought, probably. She knocked at the door, the tap tap echoing down the ship’s hallway, but received no answer. Then she opened it and the reek hit her, and her legs, already uncertain with seasickness as the dreadnought tipped beneath her, quivered even more at the smell. Then there was the Saypuri lieutenant coughing, advising her, “Please be careful ma’am,” and likely wondering if this girl, hardly twenty-five years old at the time, was looking to get killed.

She stepped in. There was no light in the room, but she could see the giant man sitting cross-legged in the corner. He had the air of a beaten dog about him: his hair matted and patchy, his skin covered in welts and infections. His head was bowed, so she could not see his eyes—or eye, she kept reminding herself—but he recoiled at the interruption of light.

She shut the door and sat in the corner opposite him, and waited. He hardly moved at all.

“We are leaving Dreyling waters,” Shara asked him. “Do you not wish to see your country one last time?”

He did not answer.

“You haven’t even been outside your room,” she said. “You are free. Don’t you wish to move about for the first time in what must be years?”

No answer.

“Don’t you at least want to bathe? We do have hot water.”

The giant man grunted slightly, as if he was about to speak but thought better of it.

“Yes?”

His accent was so thick he was almost unintelligible: “This … is not real.”

“What?”

He waved a hand. “Any of it.”

“It is. I promise you, it is. Your door is unlocked. You are free.”

He shook his head. “No. It can’t be. They are … My family …”

Shara waited, but he said no more.

“They are alive, as I told you they were,” she said softly.

“I buried them. I held their bones in my hands.”

“I cannot testify to whose bones those were, but they were not your family’s.”

“You are lying to me.”

“I am not. Your wife, Hild, was smuggled out of the country with your two daughters by a servant of yours before the coup. They crossed the border into Voortyashtan merely two days before the coup was complete. There they lived for the past six years, claiming to be relations of your servant. They had been working as farmers—poor ones, I suspect, as I doubt if someone of your wife’s background ever tilled earth, but they had made do.”

A long silence. Then: “What … What proof do you have of this?”

“Your family was not totally safe when I found them. They were, and are, being searched for—there are still many agents seeking any remnant of your family. We have removed your family from Voortyashtan, as I have no longer deemed that location safe. It has not been totally easy—your wife is, how shall I put this, a somewhat strong-willed woman.”

He smiled slightly.

“But, we got it done. When we did, your wife gave one of our officers a gift, as a gesture of thanks.” Shara reached into her pocket and pulled out a small burlap sack. She opened it and took out a gleaming, woven gold bracelet etched to resemble harsh, choppy waves.

She passed it to him. “Does this mean anything to you?”

He stared at it, the metal so bright and so clean in his filthy, scarred hands. His fingers began to tremble.

“Why don’t you come up to the deck with me?” she asked gently.

He stood up slowly, still staring at the bracelet. She opened the door, and he followed her out and up the stairs with the air of a sleepy child being herded to bed.

The slap of the cold wind was enough to make Shara pause, and she bent double and staggered out onto the deck of the dreadnought. The giant man took no notice: he crossed the threshold of the door and stared up at the sky in awed silence. He had avoided looking up when they brought him on board, and she had wondered about that. Of course, she thought. How long has it been since he’s been outside? The sight of it must terrify him.

“Come,” she said, and she led him to the railing. The dark cliffs of the Dreyling shores lurked far across the waves. “I am told it is not quite so far away as it looks. Though you may know more about that than I do.”

He looked down at the golden bracelet, snapped it around his wrist, and held up his arm, studying it. “I cannot see them. Can I?”

She shook her head. “It would not be safe, for you or for them. Not now. But maybe someday.”

“What do you want of me?” he asked.

“Want of you? Nothing, for now.”

“You have saved my family. You have freed me from prison. Why?”

“I believe that your information on the Dreyling countries will almost certainly be quite valuable,” says Shara. “And it will likely destabilize any relationships the Dreyling Republics have with the Continent.” A hint of smugness crept into her voice: this was the first major intelligence victory of her career, and she was not yet experienced enough to bother to mask her pride.

“That is not enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“For what you have done for me.”

Shara paused, unsure what to say.

“Ask something of me,” he said.

“What?”

“Ask something of me. Anything.”

“I don’t need anything from you.”

He laughed. “Yes, you do.”

“I am a Saypuri intelligence officer,” she said, nettled. “I have no need of anything you co—”

“You are a young girl,” said the man, “who cannot sail, who cannot fight, and who has never shed blood in her life. You may be clever, but you need much from me, I think. But you have too much pride to ask for it.”

Shara glared at him. “What are you proposing to be? My batsman? My secretary? Would you degrade yourself in such a manner?”

“Degrade?” He looked back across the sea. “Degrade … You do not know the meaning of the word. You do not know what they did to me in there. It is unspeakable. Now, to carry water, to serve food, to fight, to kill—whatever my future holds, I am numb to it. I am numb.” He said it again like he was trying to convince himself, and he turned to stare at her, pale and haunted. “Ask something of me. Ask.”

Though his face was scarred and filthy, Shara felt she could see through to him, and she understood that in some twisted manner he was asking for her permission to die, because he could no longer imagine doing anything else.

Shara looked back at the shrinking Dreyling cliffs. And she then did something she would never do now: she bared her heart, and told him the truth, and made a promise she did not know if she could keep. “I ask you, then,” she said slowly, “to know that this is not good-bye for you. One day I will help you come back to your home. I will help you put together what has been broken. I promise I will bring you back.”

He looked out at sea, his one eye shining. And then, to her complete shock, he knelt to the ground, gripped the railing, and burst into tears.

“You’re positive you won’t reconsider?” says a voice.

“I’m positive I haven’t been allowed to consider it,” Mulaghesh’s voice says back. “Your damn council didn’t even give me the chance.”

“They can’t even vote, though!” says the voice. “The assembly was incomplete! You only have to exert some influence, Turyin!”

“Oh, for the seas’ sakes,” mutters Mulaghesh, weary, intoxicated. “Have I not exerted enough tonight? I will do as I am told, thank you, and they told me very clearly to fuck off.”

Shara enters the kitchen to see Vohannes Votrov, now clad in his usual white fur coat, standing before Mulaghesh, who eyes him sourly over a brimming glass of whiskey. Votrov’s cane beats an impatient tap-tap against the heel of his boot.

“I thought we were locking down the embassy and admitting no visitors,” says Shara. “Especially this one.”

Vohannes turns and grins at her. “So! Here is the triumphant warrior, fresh off of her conquest. What an epic night you’ve had!”

“Vo, I honestly do not have time for your supposed charms. How did you get in?”

“By liberally applying my supposed charms, of course,” says Vohannes. “Please, help me—we must convince Governor Mulaghesh here to get up. You’re all letting a phenomenal opportunity float by!”

“I will not,” says Mulaghesh, “lift my ass one inch off of this chair. Not tonight.”

“But the city’s in mad shambles!” says Vohannes. “One half can only get to the other by walking all the way around the walls! I know that Bulikov does not have the resources to begin to reconstruct the Solda Bridge with any speed.”

“Don’t you own most of the construction companies in the city?” asks Shara.

“Well, true … But while my own companies could begin to make headway, it’d be nothing compared to the exertion of the polis governor’s office … or the regional governor’s office.…”

“And why would we want to do this?”

“Do you think you’d have nothing to gain,” asks Vohannes, “by rendering all of Bulikov dependent on your planners and developers?”

“And we’d have to work with all of his companies, too,” says Mulaghesh.

“Merely a pleasant bonus,” says Vohannes.

“Literally, a bonus,” says Mulaghesh.

“Dozens of people are dead tonight, Vo,” says Shara. “I know you have your mission, your agenda, but can’t you show some modicum of decency? Shouldn’t you be mourning for your people?”

Vohannes’s grin sours until it’s a vicious rictus. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Ambassador,” he says acidly, “but this is far from the first disaster to befall Bulikov. What about when Oshkev Street, destabilized by a random cavity from the Blink, abruptly collapsed, bringing down two apartment buildings and a school with it? We wept and mourned then, but what good did that do us? What about when the Continental Gas Company fumblingly tried to install a line in the Solda Quarter and started a fire that couldn’t be put out for six days? We wept and mourned then, but what good did that do us?”

Shara glances at Mulaghesh, who reluctantly shrugs: No, he’s not making this up.

“Disaster is our constant companion in Bulikov, Ambassador,” says Vohannes. “Grief and decency are mere decorations that hang upon the real problem: Bulikov desperately needs help and reconstruction. Real reconstruction, which we cannot do ourselves!”

“I’m sorry,” says Shara. “I should not have said that.” She sits—her legs sing out in praise—and rubs her eyes again. “But the bridge has just fallen,” she moans, “and already we must begin scheming again.… What is this about a council?”

“The City Fathers called an emergency meeting to discuss what to do,” says Vohannes. “After deciding basic search-and-rescue matters, I wanted them to ask Saypur for help in recovery. They eventually voted against me, though they offered no alternate plan. But the vote isn’t really legitimate, as Wiclov was nowhere to be found.”

Shara’s fingers drum against the tabletop. “Is that so?”

“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? No one’s seen him for nearly a week, not since he stood at the embassy gates and hurled invective at you, in fact.”

Though Sigrud saw him deliver Torskeny to the mhovost, thinks Shara, before disappearing down an alley.… She thinks, then blearily looks at Mulaghesh for help.

“Please don’t make me stand up,” Mulaghesh begs.

“I won’t,” says Shara. “Not tonight. This … Vo, this must wait until the morning.”

“You must strike,” says Vohannes, “while the iron is hot!”

“I don’t decide public policy!”

“But you must have many friends in high places, don’t you?”

“Whose friendship is already tested, or will be, by what’s happened tonight.” She sighs. “Vo, you’ve no idea what’s happened in the past few hours. I say this in strictest confidence, but we have suffered considerable losses. And we are still nowhere on figuring out who our enemies are, or what they’re doing! This is not the time for huge plans. We will leave Bulikov to Bulikov, for tonight.”

“That policy,” says Vohannes, “is almost certainly what created the Restorationists in the first place, and it will be the father of every consequence after. This city pickles in its walls. Every disaster is an opportunity, Shara! Make the most of this one.”

“I have suffered so many disasters tonight.” She laughs hollowly. “You don’t want me in your corner, Vo. By sunup, I might not have a career.”

“I very much doubt that. Especially since right now every man, woman, and child in Bulikov thinks you all to be glorious, glorious heroes.”

Mulaghesh and Shara are both nodding in their chairs, but they blink awake at this claim.

“Wh-What?” says Mulaghesh.

“What do you mean, what?” asks Vohannes.

“I mean … what did you just say?”

“Oh? Did you really not realize? That crowd out there …” He points north, toward the door. “Did you think they’re angry? Seeking to throw down the gates? No, they’re amazed! You all slaughtered a monster in front of a terrified city! It’s the … Well, it’s the stuff legends are made of.”

Shara says, “But it was a holy creature.… There used to be a temple to Urav in the city square! This country used to worship that thing!”

“The operative word being used to. That was over three hundred years ago! It was trying to kill us all!”

“But … But it was Sigrud who did almost all of it!”

He shrugs. “The credit spreads. The City Fathers were confounded about what to do. You may just be the first Saypuri to have ever won the commendation of Bulikov in the city’s history. And if you or anyone in Ghaladesh tried, Saypur could sail into this city, rebuild the bridge, and be considered a savior ever after!”

Shara and Mulaghesh both sit dumbfounded. Vohannes produces a cigarette from a tiny silver box and fits it into his holder. “But let’s just hope,” he says, “they don’t find out who you really are. Knowing your family history, it would create some nasty parallels, would it not?”

Shara drinks. It feels appropriate to do so: she is a soldier among soldiers, celebrating their survival when so many perished. The wine mixes with the fatigue, and Vohannes joins her and Mulaghesh, and the whole evening transmutes from one of frayed nerves and horrible trauma to one of their old school nights, sitting up in their common room with their classmates, sharing gossip and determinedly ignoring the mad world outside.

What a wonderful thing it was, Shara thinks, to feel common.

Mulaghesh is snoring in her chair in the violet hours just before dawn. Vohannes has to help Shara up the stairs. She stops for breath beside the wide stairway windows. The stars rest on a blanket of soft purple clouds, supported by the cityscape of Bulikov. It is scenic to the degree that it could be the work of a sentimental, tactless painter.

Vohannes slowly limps up behind her, suddenly quite frail.

“I’m …” Shara knows she is about to say something she shouldn’t, but she’s too inebriated to stop herself. “I’m sorry about your accident, Vo.”

“It’s the way things are,” he says softly. If he knows she knows how he really got hurt, he does not show it. “I only ask your help in changing them.”

When they finally make it to her room, she sits on her bed, holding her forehead. The room spins and sways like the deck of a ship.

“It’s been a while,” says Vohannes’s voice in the dark, “since I’ve been in a woman’s bedroom.…”

“You and Ivanya …?”

He shakes his head. “It’s … not quite like that.”

She falls back onto the bed. Vohannes smirks, sits beside her, and leans back on one hand so he’s hovering just over her, the sides of their hips kissing.

Shara blinks, surprised. “I didn’t think,” she says, “that this was something you were interested in.”

“Well, it’s … not quite like that, either.”

She smiles a little sadly. Poor Vo, she thinks. Always torn between two worlds …

“Don’t I disgust you?” she asks.

“Why would you think that?”

“I’m not doing anything you want. I’m not helping you, or Bulikov, or the Continent. I’m your enemy, your obstacle.”

“Your policies are my enemy.” He sighs. “One day I will change your mind. Maybe I will tonight.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Do tycoons such as yourself often take advantage of drunken women?”

“Mm. Do you know,” says Vohannes, “that when I returned, there had been rumors that I’d found myself a Saypuri mistress? I was reviled, you know. And, I think, envied as well … But none of it meant anything to me.” His eyes seem lacquered: could he be crying? “I was not drawn to you for some exotic fling—I was drawn to you because you were you.”

What right does he have, thinks Shara, to be so pretty?

“If you don’t want me here,” he says, “say ‘no,’ and I’ll leave.”

She thinks on it and sighs dramatically. “You always do cause such difficult conundrums.…”

He kisses her neck. His beard tickles the corner of her jaw. “Hm,” she says. “Well … Well.” She reaches up, grabs the corner of the bedspread, and flips it back. “I suppose”—she suppresses a laugh as he kisses her collarbone—“you had better get in.”

“Who am I to deny an ambassador what she wants?” He shrugs off his white fur coat.

Was his council meeting so important, Shara wonders, that he had to change?

She must have said it aloud, because Vohannes looks back and says, “I didn’t change. I’ve been wearing this all night.”

Shara tries to hold on to a thought—That’s not right—but then he starts unbuttoning his shirt, and she begins to think about many different things at once.

“How would you like me to lie?”

“How would you like to?”

“Well, I mean … because of your hip …”

“Oh. Oh, yes … Right.”

“Here … Is here good?”

“There is good. There is very good. Mmm.”

This is a bad idea, Shara thinks, but she tries to ignore it, and lose herself in this small joy.…

But she can’t. “Vo …”

“Yes?”

“Are … Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I only ask because …”

“I know! I know … It’s … Too much wine …”

“Are you sure I’m not hurting you?”

“No! You’re fine! You’re absolutely … You’re fine.”

“Well … Maybe let me shift to … There. Is that better?”

“It is.” He sounds more determined than amorous. “This is …”

“Yes?”

“This …”

“… yes?”

“This should not be so … so difficult.…”

“Vo … If you don’t want to …”

“I do want to!”

“I know, but … but you shouldn’t feel like you have to—”

“I’m just … I’m just … Gods.” He collapses next to her.

Seconds tick away in the dark room. She wonders if he’s asleep.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly.

“Don’t be.”

“I suppose I am not,” he whispers, “the man I was.”

“No one’s asking you to be.”

He breathes heavily for a moment; she suspects he is weeping. “ ‘The world is our crucible,’ ” he murmurs. “ ‘And with each burn, we are shaped.’ ”

Shara knows the line. “The Kolkashtava?”

He laughs bitterly. “Maybe Volka was right. Once a Kolkashtani …”

Then he is silent.

Shara wonders what kind of man thinks of his brother when naked in a woman’s bed. Then they both find troubled sleep.

Shara’s consciousness churns awake, kicking against the dark, oily waters of a hangover. The pillowcase against her face is sandpaper; her arms, exposed, are frigidly cold; while her feet, deep in the comforter, are sweltering.

A voice barks, “Get up. Get up.”

The pillow on her head rises up, and cruel daylight stabs in.

“Roll over,” says Mulaghesh’s voice, “and get up!”

Shara turns in the sheets. Mulaghesh is standing at her bed, holding up the morning paper like it’s the severed head of an enemy.

“What?” says Shara. “What?” She is, thankfully, still wearing her slip; Vohannes, however, is long gone. She wonders if he fled in shame, and feels hurt that he might think so poorly of her.

“Read this,” says Mulaghesh. She points to a blurry article.

“You want me to wh—”

“Read! Just read.”

Shara digs in the pillows for her glasses. Shoving them on her nose, she encounters her own face, rendered in black and white on the front page of the newspaper. The picture shows her standing by the Solda: behind her is the dead form of Urav, and at her feet, covered in blood, is Sigrud, whose face is hidden by a veil of oily hair. It is, she thinks, the best photo of her she has ever seen in her life: she is caught in regal profile, the wind catching her hair just so, making it a soft river of ebony trailing out from behind her head.

Her bemusement is dashed when she reads the article below:

As of the time of this paper’s publication, the embassy has yet to make an official comment.

Shara stares at the paper, feverishly hoping that the words will dance and rearrange themselves until it tells another story entirely.

“Oh, no,” she whispers.

To have one’s cover blown … To be known to an enemy, to have a dossier on you compiled in some distant and lethal department, that is one thing: all operatives are prepared for that.

But to have your name and story splashed across the newspaper, to be known not in the secret annals of government but in the front rooms and dining rooms and public houses across the world … That is horror beyond horror.

“No,” says Shara again. “No. That … That can’t be.”

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh.

“And this is the … the …”

“The Continental Herald.”

“So it doesn’t just go to Bulikov, but …”

“To the entire Continent,” says Mulaghesh. “Yeah.”

The reality of it all comes crashing down on her. “Ohh … Oh no, oh no, oh no!”

“Who all knew who you are?” asks Mulaghesh.

“You,” says Shara. “Sigrud, Vo … A few employees here I’m more than I say I am, but there’s a leap between that and being …”

“Being the great-granddaughter of the Kaj,” says Mulaghesh. “Yeah. No shit. I know I didn’t say anything. I never talk to the press.”

“And Sigrud wouldn’t,” says Shara. “So …”

She parses down the ideas, the possibilities.

Vinya, maybe? Shara is no longer sure what to think of her aunt; she feels almost certain Vinya has been compromised somehow, but for Vinya, it seems overwhelmingly likely that her compromise would be political, ceding power only for the opportunity to gain more. And this would be very, very damaging, politically.

She keeps boiling down her options, down and down, hoping to avoid what she increasingly feels is an inevitable conclusion.

“It could only be Vohannes,” she says finally.

“Okay, but … why?”

Would this be some petty revenge over last night? she wonders. It seems unlikely. Or could he be punishing her for her refusal to intervene in Bulikov? Or … “Could … Could he be trying to use me to get the attention of Ghaladesh?” she asks aloud.

“How would blowing your cover possibly do that?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Well … It makes for a great story, doesn’t it? The great-granddaughter of the Kaj, swooping in and saving Bulikov. It gets people talking.… And talk is as good as action in the geopolitical realm. It would focus the world’s attentions all on Bulikov—and then he could make his pitch. I mean, you’ve met him. All Vo ever needs is a spotlight.”

“Yeah, but … but that has got to be,” says Mulaghesh, “the stupidest possible way to spur Ghaladesh into doing anything! Right?”

Shara doesn’t entirely disagree, but she doesn’t entirely agree, either. And she remembers what Vo mumbled last night: Once a Kolkashtani …

She can’t help but feel that she’s missing something. But whatever the cause, she knows she cannot trust Vo any longer, and she thinks it was foolish to have done so in the first place: to collaborate with such a passionate, broken, divided creature was always a poor decision.

From nearby, there’s the sound of a throat being cleared.

Mulaghesh looks to the window and asks, “What was that?”

But Shara knows that sound quite well, having heard it throughout her childhood: two parts impatience, one part condescension.…

“Nothing outside,” Mulaghesh says, peeking through the draped window, “except for the crowd, of course. I didn’t imagine that sound, did I?”

Shara glances at the shuttered window next to her desk. The bottom left pane is shimmering strangely, and the reflection in the glass is slightly warped.

“Governor,” Shara says, “could you please … excuse me for a moment?”

“Are you going to be sick?”

“Possibly. I just need to … to gather myself.”

“I’ll be downstairs,” Mulaghesh says, “but I won’t have long to wait around. There’s so much to clean up, I’ll have to return to my quarters very shortly.”

“I understand.”

The office door clicks closed. Shara arrives at the window just as her aunt’s face appears.

“I believe … that I am almost as much to blame as you,” says Vinya.

Shara says nothing. She does not move. She does not speak. She only watches. Vinya, for her part, is just as reserved and removed as Shara. The two look at one another through the glass with expressions slightly suspicious, slightly hurt, and slightly aggrieved all at once.

“I should have stopped you when you were younger,” says Vinya. “Your interest in the Continent was always quite unhealthy. And I have trusted you more and more, letting you go out on your own without my supervision.… But now I regret that. Perhaps I should have brought you home more. Maybe you were right. I wish you could have come here and seen exactly how things are changing here in Parliament, shifting, and … and how delicate and precarious everything is.”

Ah. I have endangered her political career. Having faced fire and Urav last night, Shara finds it difficult to muster sympathy for someone grappling with parliamentary squabbles. In fact, Shara finds it difficult to bother to do anything in this conversation. She is content to let her aunt keep talking, allowing Shara to watch as Vinya’s intents and motives crystallize in the glass pane like fall’s first frost.

“The discourse has changed considerably, almost overnight. For so long, no one ever even thought of engaging the Continent, but now … Now we are open to the idea. Now, suddenly, we are curious. Despite all my efforts of the past decade, the ministers are now reconsidering their stance on the Continent. And all their aides, all their assistants, are reviewing all their personal correspondence from the Continent, and they are finding one name on hundreds and hundreds of petitions: Votrov, Votrov, Votrov.…”

A tremor in her stomach. This Shara did not expect. Could she have been right? Could blowing her cover really be a wild gambit on Vo’s part? And—even more insane—could it have worked? Right before the City Father elections, too …

“I suppose you are waiting,” says Vinya, “for me to get to the part where I tell you what action I will be taking.”

Shara purses her lips, blinks; beyond that, she gives Vinya nothing.

Vinya shakes her head. “I should have told you to never enter the Warehouse,” she says. “I should have known right away that you, as obsessed with the Continent as you are, would have found the Warehouse totally irresistible.”

Shara cocks an eyebrow. “Wait.… What are you—?”

“But of course, the second you learned it existed, you’d try and find a way in,” continues Vinya. “You’d break in, poke your nose in it, and rifle its shelves one way or another.”

“What! Aunt Vinya, I didn’t want to go into the Warehouse! I had to!”

“Oh? Oh, really? Last I heard, you were interviewing a university maid about the death of Dr. Pangyui. Next, you’ve penetrated the Warehouse, the most classified building currently in existence in this world, burned it down, and then you’re battling Divine river monsters on the front of the paper! With your cover blown! I struggle to understand exactly how all that could have evolved organically, Shara! It seems much more likely that you, as obsessed with the musty dead gods as you are, simply broke in to see what was there for yourself like it was a damn museum, and you wound up getting quite literally burned and freeing some abysmal Divine creature!”

Shara’s mouth falls open. She is utterly and completely aghast: of all the mad things she’s experienced in the past forty-eight hours, all of them are minuscule in comparison to this. “I … The Warehouse was mined!”

“Oh, by the Restorationists?” Vinya pronounces the name as if describing a group of illiterate potato farmers.

“Yes!”

“And how did they get in?”

“They … They used a miracle!”

“Ah,” says Vinya. “A miracle. Very convenient, those. Especially when, theoretically, most of them shouldn’t work anymore. So why would they mine the Warehouse, which was full of things they themselves held sacred?”

“To cover their tracks!”

“And where did their tracks lead, dear?”

“There … There was something they wanted to steal!”

“Which was?”

“I don’t know! It was mined!”

“So you set off the mine.”

Shara is so outraged she can hardly speak. “They had been accessing the Warehouse using an ancient Divine miracle! They had been for months!”

“And what intent would they have for whatever it is they stole from the Warehouse?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know.”

“No! Not yet! I know it … it has something to do with steel!” This sounds pathetic even to Shara’s ears. “I am currently investigating the situation!”

Vinya nods and slowly sits back in her chair, thinking.

“Talk to Mulaghesh! Talk to Sigrud! Talk to anyone here!” shouts Shara.

“Mulaghesh’s reputation is not quite as sterling as it used to be,” says Vinya, “as the Warehouse was her jurisdiction, and is now a pile of ashes. And I would no sooner listen to your Dreyling’s word than I would consult with a rabid dog. But most of all, Shara, my dear, no other operative on the whole of the Continent has reported any hint of such a plot.”

“That’s because these people are damn good! Unlike us! I arrived in Bulikov to find the walls swarming with rats! These machinations were well under way before I ever got here!”

Vinya rolls her eyes and shakes her head, concerned, dismayed, as if listening to a demented relative at dinner.

“You don’t believe me,” says Shara desperately.

“Shara, you went to Bulikov on your own to investigate a disastrous international scandal. And now, you have caused one much, much larger. Thank the seas that the Continent doesn’t know about the Warehouse. If they knew you’d burned down hundreds of years of history, they’d want your head, and mine! Can you imagine the consequences? And apparently somewhere in the midst of all this, you somehow blew your own cover, which really does not surprise me, at this point. You are either vain and stupid, or reckless and stupid, I am not sure which one I prefer. And I notice that you haven’t mentioned Pangyui’s murder yet. Unless I am mistaken, that was the primary reason I allowed you your time in Bulikov—wasn’t it? Has your investigation into these grand, dark plots shed any light on who might have killed him, and why?”

Shara glances at Vohannes’s white suitcase, which sits underneath her desk. “Perhaps I would have something,” she says savagely, “if you would allow me to review his dead drop material!”

Vinya snaps forward. “And if you did that, then you would be directly disobeying a Ministry order! That material is be reviewed by me first! And if I think it could be of use to you, then I will allow you access to it! That’s how the chain of command works! It’s what our entire intelligence agency is predicated on! And I will not allow my arrogant niece to buck the system solely because she feels like reading enough dusty old books gives her more insight than any other intelligence officer! Your fascination with the Divine has always been a fault, not a virtue! And I will tell you right now, right now, that my first instinct is to rip you out of Bulikov and put you on a ship back here right away!”

Despite the argument, despite the promise of punishment, despite everything, Shara’s heart leaps at this idea. To return home to Ghaladesh … Yet she gets the creeping sense that Vinya’s disappointment in her is a little too complete: Is Vinya actively discrediting me? She is astounded at the thought of it, yet Shara realizes she herself has done this to her own enemies many times: after all, why kill someone when you can make them out to be an incompetent fool?

“But,” Vinya continues, “I cannot. Because of what you did. You are a glorious hero here in Saypur, Shara. The champion of Bulikov. Hail the conquering hero, grand victor over a threat she herself created! So much talk is swirling throughout the halls of power here right now, and I have no idea what the final resolution will be. I wish I could tell them exactly how terribly you’ve botched everything, but that would require telling them about the Warehouse—which I expressly cannot do. So, rather than endanger any of my functioning, productive policies, I will do nothing. I will do nothing but give them all what they want—you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I am promoting you, dear. I am fully recognizing your status as chief diplomat to Bulikov. And I am putting you somewhere where you cannot damage any more operations.”

Shara blanches. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. You will be a public creature. I am, for the moment, suspending all your intelligence credentials. You will lose all clearance to all sensitive materials, to all operations. Any requests you make to any other Ministry operatives will not be answered. You will be, in effect, the very prominent and very accessible face of Saypur in Bulikov. And I am sure you will be applauded and celebrated for it,” she says acidly.

Shara feels sick. There is nothing—nothing—that could ever be more terrifying to intelligence operatives than being installed in public office, exposed and vulnerable to all the pleas and restrictions they could previously simply sidestep in their shadow life.

“You will, I think, be very busy,” says Vinya. “Bulikov and Saypur very much wish to talk to one another, it seems. And they will talk through you. I don’t know if you and that man, Votrov, concocted this scheme together, but if so, you must be so proud that it worked—so I am going to make sure you shoulder the majority of the burden, for now.”

So this is her punishment, Shara thinks. I almost would prefer to be indicted and imprisoned. But Vinya never has had a taste for mercy.

Shara clears her throat. Increasingly, she feels like she is in a game of Batlan where her opponent is secretly playing another game, but she is willing to try anything at this point. “Auntie Vinya … Listen.”

“Yes?”

“If … if I was to tell you that there is a real, credible threat in Bulikov … that I have witnessed, firsthand, evidence indicating one of the original Divinities, in some form or fashion, has survived … What would you do?”

Vinya looks at her pityingly. “Is that your great secret? Your terrible suspicion? That’s why you went into the Warehouse?”

“Yes. I’m sure of it. I really am, Aunt Vinya.”

“Oh, Shara … I would do the same thing I did when I heard it the last time, two months ago. And the time before that, seven months ago. And the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that.… I receive, on average, nearly ten reports a year telling me that the gods aren’t dead, that they’re still kicking around somewhere, planning their return. We have received a steady stream of these since the War. If we stacked them, the pile of reports would be three stories tall! And all of them are always completely convinced this will happen—because the Continent is convinced this will happen. It’s their silly fable, their desperate dream, like the Dreylings and their Dauvkind. Lost kings and queens that will one day sail back … It’s nonsense, Shara.”

“But … I am the most experienced expert on everything Divine. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“You are the operative most obsessed with everything Divine,” Vinya says gently. “And that is something very different. You may have your interests and pet curiosities, Shara—but you are a servant of Saypur first and foremost.”

Shara nearly shouts, Like you? Who owns you, Auntie? Who’s gotten to you? Why is it that you’re suddenly so much more secretive, and so much more irrational, than you’ve ever been before? But she does not, of course: to tip one’s hand in such a manner would be unwise.

“Perhaps this will be good for you,” says Vinya. “Maybe you will finally, finally learn something from this.”

Shara nods, looking crestfallen, but thinking, I believe I’ve already learned a lot, Auntie.

“I hate to say this, but please don’t contact me like this again, dear,” says Vinya. “Not until everything’s settled. We must be so careful in the wake of everything that’s happened. We are all being watched very carefully now. And miracles, as you know, are so terribly dangerous.” She smiles sadly. “Good-bye, my dear.”

With a wipe of her fingers, she’s gone.

Shara stands in the empty room, feeling suddenly more alone than she ever has in her life.

Shara slowly closes the window shutters. Her hands are trembling with rage. Never has she felt so utterly and completely victimized: it’s as if she watched her own character assassination take place right before her eyes, helpless to stop it. It’s too perfect, she tells herself. Vinya took me apart too perfectly. That’s why I’m so angry—she knew just what to say. This does not, however, make her any less angry.

Shara wishes she had someone to talk to about this. But the only person she’s ever really honestly talked to about the Divine was Efrem Pangyui, for the handful of days they had together.

She looks back at the white suitcase under her desk.

She walks over, pulls out the suitcase, puts it on her desk, and thinks.

Shara Komayd graduated from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs training academy with a record low number of demerits. She graduated from Fadhuri with full marks. And she has always been one of the few high-level operatives in the Ministry to actually, personally, do all of her paperwork herself—a virtue she takes pride in.

Always the good soldier. Never a toe out of line. And look at what it’s gotten me.

But she still cannot quite bring herself to open the suitcase.

Just remember, she tells herself, it’s not like you have any more of a career to throw away.

The latches click open with a snap, and the top lifts up.

Inside is a stack of papers bound together with string. The papers are covered in spidery handwriting, and she does not need to look for the slumping T or jagged M to identify the hand as Efrem’s. The first page is different from the ones below, written hastily and slapped on the top of the stack.

She will have only today to read it, she thinks. Vinya’s people will definitely be at the embassy soon, after Urav.

Shara nestles down in her chair and unties the string.

12TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SCORPION

BULIKOV

This is ridiculous.

I am looking at my notes in my office (a dingier & darker place could never be found) as well as the list from Minister Komayd’s warehouse, & I am struck by the marvel of what we have saved, what we have stored, & the enormity of the task before me.

So far I am about three-quarters of the way through just compiling a list strictly of documents: issuance of edicts from Continental priests, Divinities, or Divine agents, anything recording significant “policy changes” (I am obliged to use this execrable term for what I seek). The stack of paper now comes up to about knee height. I once jokingly predicted I would die entombed in documents, yet now that prediction seems much more possible. It is fascinating material, to be sure—I would have killed to grasp but a fraction of it months ago—yet now I feel I shall drown in treasures.

Sketches, sketches … I hope I shall find a place to keep all of these sketches.…

27TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SCORPION

Already, a pattern emerges.

I must allow that I could be biased. I have looked at the most obvious opportunity for correlation—the Night of Convening, & the founding of Bulikov—& though I do perceive much correlation, that doesn’t mean I’m right.

But the facts remain:

In 717, while the Divinities & their peoples were still squabbling & fighting for territory, a Taalvashtani priest wrote a series of essays expounding the benefits of allying with Jukoshtan. These became exceedingly popular throughout all of Taalvashtan, being read aloud in numerous gathering places.

In 720, on the other side of the Continent, a phalanx of Voortyashtani precepts helped a wandering Olvoshtani monk return to his home, & reflected at length upon how much they had in common with their warring neighbors. This was recorded in several letters sent to the foremost Voortyashtani acolyte, who noted that he approved of the sentiment.

That same year, in Ahanashtan, a county magistrate wrote letters to his sister, describing a town meeting in which much sympathy with the Kolkashtanis was expressed, despite the ongoing six-way war.

So on, & so on … I can cite nearly thirty more instances of naked sympathy for other Divine factions, & more continue to creep out of the pile, despite the Divine war being waged at this exact same time.

Then—“abruptly”—in 723, all six Divinities felt compelled to sit down in the Night of the Convening, in the future spot of Bulikov, hash out their differences, & form what was, more or less, a pantheon of equal Divinities.… Yet all religious texts I have reviewed indicate this was decided with no consultation with their mortal followers whatsoever! This was, reportedly, a “unilateral” decision among Divinities, as one would expect, for why would a god consult with his or her followers, like a politician among constituents? Yet obviously the shift had been brewing for years, among their mortal flock!

The two groups—mortal & Divine—were not as divided as history would have us believe.

This is an absurdly large example, akin to deciphering the destination of a ship by which way the seabirds are buffeted by the winds … yet it sketches the outline of what I expected to see.

I wish I could mail Shara about it. But I am not entirely sure how genuine her interest in me was—how can you ever tell what is & is not an act with such people?

There is a café I find myself frequenting, just adjacent to the Seat of the World. Bulikov is a mixed-up jumble of a city, there—the Blink still reverberates in the city’s bones—& there I watch children play & fight, wives gossip & laugh, men smoke & drink & play cards &, often ineffectually, court the women.

People fall in love & bicker over silly things, even in a place as mad as this. Life goes on, & I must smile.

15TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SLOTH

It is saying something that I, veteran of libraries, begin to tire of my task. I look forward to finishing this so I can continue on to my next task: researching the Kaj. How ridiculous it is that, though the man’s profile emblazons coins, flags, & so on, we know almost as little about him as we do the Divinities. Especially in regards to how he actually managed to assassinate them. I can understand why the minister wished me to research this subject first, but I, stupidly, convinced her that the Continentals still derive a sense of legitimacy from the Divinities, so researching their nature would offer more definite geopolitical benefits.

Listen to me. I sound like Shara.

The grass is always greener on the next task, surely, but the Kaj has always been a fascination of mine. He just seems to suddenly appear, the son of a wealthy, Continental-collaborator family, poking his head up in history & surging forward. I have reviewed numerous family trees, & have found almost nothing about the man. Some list his father as never even having married! Was the Kaj, possibly, the product of an illegitimate relationship? Was he even the man’s son at all?

I no longer sound like Shara. Now I sound like a gossipy midwife.

I sometimes go to the sections of the city most disrupted by the Blink. The stairs there look like fields of giant cornstalks, rising into the sky, ending suddenly. The children play a funny game: they run up the stairs, see who is bravest to go the highest, then run back down.

Up the stairs & down the stairs they run, over & over, always hurrying, yet never quite going anywhere.

I sympathize.

I must focus.… I must examine the threads of history, the calendars & timelines, & see if they align.

If they do not, as I expect, what does this mean for the Continent? What does it mean for Saypur?

29TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SLOTH

Yesterday I met something I am not sure is legally permitted: an Olvoshtani monk.

I think it was a monk … I am not sure. I was taking a break from my work, reveling in sunlight on the Solda, sketching the bridge (it is so much narrower than nearly every bridge I’ve seen—I forget, of course, that it was meant solely for foot & horse traffic) & the walls behind it when she approached: a short, bald woman in orange robes.

She asked me what I was doing, & I told her. I showed her my work, & she was very appreciative. “You have captured its essence exactly,” she said. “And they say there are no more miracles!”

I asked her her name. She said she had none. I asked her the name of her order. She said she had none, only a “disorder.” (A joke, I presume.) I asked her what she thought of Bulikov these days. She shrugged. “It is being reinvented.”

I asked her what she meant.

“Forgetting.” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.”

I was so struck by this I fell into deep thought for some time. She skipped two stones across the Solda, bowed to me, & walked away.

2ND OF THE MONTH OF THE TURTLE

Amazing discoveries, & terrifying ones. The discussions I have found taking place just before the Great Expansion have shed so much more light on the strange relationship between Divinities & mortals.

In 768 through 769:

In Ahanashtan, a priest stood on the shore & daily preached his reflections of foreign lands; in Voortyashtan, a sparring master pointed to mountain canyons headed east, below (then) the Dreyling lands, & commented on the way the rain must fall on the other side of the mountains, inspiring numerous exploration parties; later, in Jukoshtan, a starling-singer (must research this term later) sang a three-day poem of the currents in the ocean, & how they carry one so far away to distant places, & perhaps distant peoples … & so on, & so on.

One can see, then, that the Continentals were thinking about lands besides theirs. I have discovered a wealth of text that noses at the boundaries of their geographic knowledge.

Yet I have trudged through Divine decrees of all kinds during this same period, & have found no Divine mention of anything beyond the Continent’s boundaries & shores!

It is odd that the Divinities remained silent on a conversation surging through their mortal flock.

But look how the discourse changes among the Continentals between 771 & 774:

In Kolkashtan, a town magistrate claimed that, since the Continent is blessed by the Divinities, there is nothing they do not own—they own the stars, the clouds, & the waves in the ocean; in Voortyashtan, a “gallows-priestess” asked why they make blades that will shed no blood, for there are no more wars to fight in, & debated whether this was a sin; in Ahanashtan, a “mossling” (some kind of nun?) wrote a poetic epic about what will happen when Ahanashtan grows so large (was the city alive? I must research further) that it begins to harm itself, bringing disharmony, starvation, & exhaustion. This epic was terribly successful, & caused many debates & much anxiety, with some even demanding the mossling’s imprisonment.

The Continentals were thinking, however peripherally, about expansion. It is patently obvious to anyone that they feared exhaustion, starvation, & moreover they began to feel that they deserved to expand, & take ownership of new places.

The Divinities, however, were not thinking about expansion—Kolkan was starting down the train of thought that would begin with his period of open judgment, & Taalhavras, always the most distant of Divinities, was adding onto the walls of Bulikov—and, I believe, altering the nature of Bulikov in many more profound, invisible ways.… All of them were off on their own concerns, while the people of the Continent fretted over the future.

Yet then, in 772, all six Divinities met in Bulikov, & elected—in what we previously thought to be an inscrutable, spontaneous gesture—to begin the Great Expansion, the invasion & domination of all nearby nations & countries, including Saypur.

Even the Continentals themselves recorded some surprise at this decision—but why, if they were already thinking about it themselves?

The argument I pose may be tenuous, but it compensates in quantity of evidence—in my studies, I have found nearly six hundred other instances of similar phenomena, on a much smaller scale: edicts that were proclaimed well after public opinion had been formed, laws that were prescribed after everyone was already following them, persecutions & prejudices that were in place well before the Divine, or their institutions, announced them.…

The list goes on & on.

The pattern is undeniable: the Continentals made their decisions, formed their attitudes … & the Divinities followed, making them official.

Who was leading whom? Is this evidence of some kind of unconscious vote, which the Divinities then enacted?

I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like schools of fish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course.

And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises by millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts—giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers?

This knowledge, I think, is incredibly dangerous. The Continentals derive so much pride & so much power from having Divine approval.… But were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?

And if I am right, then it means that the Continentals were never ordered to invade Saypur, never ordered to enslave us, never ordered to force their brutal regime onto the known world: the gods merely enforced it, because the Continentals wished it.

Everything we know is a lie.

Where did the gods come from? What were they?

I find it hard to sleep, knowing this. I relax at night with a game of cards, played on the embassy rooftop. You can see the scarring in the city. It is like a roadmap of clashing realities.…

So much forgotten. If this city is a chrysalis, it is an ugly one.

24TH OF THE MONTH OF THE TURTLE

The minister is pleased with my progress, but asks for more verification. I have compiled a tower of contradictions in Continental history—& this, for me, would suffice—yet I will find more for her.

Yet something absurd has happened: I have discovered among the piles in my office some crumbling letters written by a soldier close to Lieutenant Sagresha … & thus close to the Kaj himself! How could I have forgotten or missed this? Perhaps I never even looked at them … Though sometimes I worry my office at the university is being tampered with. Yet this may be silly paranoia.

But what the soldier writes is eye-opening to say the least:

We have suspected for some time that the Kaj used some sort of projectile weapon: a cannon, gun, or bolt that fired a special kind of fire or lightning against which the Divinities had no defense.

Yet I believe we have been thinking about this the wrong way: we think about the gun, the cannon itself, rather than what it fired. But this soldier records stories of a “hard metal” or a “black lead” that the Kaj produced & stored & protected! Here, upon the Kaj’s execution of the Divinity Jukov:

“We followed the Kaj to a place in the city—a temple of white & silver, its walls patterned like the stars with purple glass. I could not see the god in the temple, & worried it was a trap, but our general did not worry, & loaded his black lead within his hand-cannon, & entered. Time passed, & we grew concerned, yet then there was a shot, & our general—weeping!—slowly came out.”

A valuable piece of history, certainly, but also a revolutionary one!

What if it was not the cannon at all that was important? What if it was simply the metal that was used in the shot? We know the Kaj was something of an alchemist: we have records of his experiments. What if he produced a material that the Divine could not affect, just as we cannot affect an arrow through our hearts?

Even stranger, the soldier writes of the Kaj mentioning a “djinnifrit” that was kept in his father’s manor house back in Saypur. We do know that certain Continental collaborators were given Divine servants as a reward, but it would be scandalous for anyone to discover that the Kaj had such close contact with any agent of the Divine! Djinnifrit servants prepared their masters’ beds, served them food, wine.… I cannot imagine what everyone would say if it was revealed that the Kaj had been pampered in such a way.

I will wait to send this information back to the minister until I know more.

20TH OF THE MONTH OF THE CAT

I am not sure if what I have found helps the case of the Kaj.… I have discovered more letters from the Kaj’s inner circle during his time on the Continent, immediately after the capture of Bulikov, when he sank into a depression so severe he spoke to no one at all.

I have confirmed that the Kaj’s mysterious weapon was, indeed, “black lead” or “hard metal”—a metal whose reality could not be altered by Divine means. Both the Divinities & their servants were helpless against it: the Kaj merely needed to decipher a way to propel it forward, much as one would a common firearm.

But how he created it … That I did not anticipate.

After the brutal Massacre of Mahlideshi, when Saypuris revolted after the horrific execution of that simple girl, it seems the Kaj was so horrified & so furious that he did conduct experiments, as we thought … but he conducted them on his family’s djinnifrit servant! From what I have read, it sounds very much like torture, even monstrous torture: the djinnifrit was bound to serve the Komayd family’s will, so the Kaj forced it to comply with his efforts, burning & wounding the djinnifrit until he had created a material that worked not only on the djinnifrit, but on all Divine creatures, including the Divinities themselves … & upon succeeding, he executed his childhood servant.

Will this endear him to the more nationalistic factions in Saypur? Or will they, like myself, be horrified by what I have learned? I have still not found any account of the Kaj’s maternal lineage.… Did he, like the Divinities, simply manifest, with no explanation, coughed up on the shore of Saypur from the seas of history?

19TH OF THE MONTH OF THE BEAR

I no longer believe myself to be safe.

I am spied upon—I am sure of it. The cabdriver in the street, the maid at the university, the newspaper seller who never seems to leave my street, nor to sell any newspapers… I am being watched.

I performed a test today—I sent my report to the minister via our telecommunications device, & kept an eye on the street. The newspaper seller was still there, still watching me, yet a young man came running up, whispered something in his ear, & sprinted away.… The newspaper seller remained there for a few minutes more, then crept away.

Is he reading my reports? Are our transmissions being intercepted?

How can I tell the minister? Could I perhaps get word to Shara? The governor?

Could I even move without their knowing?

6TH OF THE MONTH OF THE LARK

I am sure of it now: some of my sketches have been stolen, & some of the governor’s Warehouse list is missing too.… Yet I am not sure if I can trust the governor. Perhaps she has informants in her staff!

The City Fathers rail against me. They wish me lynched, assassinated.… There are protests at the university, & the embassy is no help, either, as the chief diplomat is a blithering toad. What a fool I was to come here!

I have begun sending the minister messages that I hope will arouse her suspicion, if not anger: delays, excuses, etc. She must realize that something is wrong.

Yet I begin to suspect even her. I think all day about the Blessed, & what this could mean not just for Saypur, but for the Continent.…

Is everything we believe a lie?

29TH OF THE MONTH OF THE L

Should I even write in this honesltly

Honestly honestly

Can’t even spell

Blessed

Watch the windows, watch

4TH OF THE MONTH OF THE RAT

History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new & wonderful.… But it will not let us forget.

I shall die in Bulikov, I believe.

And perhaps then, the chrysalis will open.…

Shara takes the last piece of paper, gently turns it over, and places it with the others.

Someone downstairs calls for more coffee; an answering cry that it’s coming.

Pigeons coo and mutter on the embassy rooftop, sharing gossip in their own language.

Shara is faint. She nearly falls out of her chair.

A worldview is a series of assumptions, of perceived certainties, a way things must be because they have always been that way, and they cannot be otherwise: any other way, any other world, is completely inconceivable to that worldview.

Shara has always felt that certain worldviews are more flexible than others: some are myopic and strict, while others are quite broad, with permeable borders and edges, ideas and events floating through without any resistance.… And for so long, Shara thought she possessed the latter.

Yet now … Now it feels like all the assumptions and certainties that made up her world are dissolving under her feet, and she will plummet down, down, down.…

What a brittle, tiny thing the world is.

All the mysteries and murders and intrigue of the past days shrink until they are meaningless to her.

It’s a lie. All of it is a lie. Everything we’ve ever learned is a lie.

She ties up the paper with new string, replaces the papers in the white suitcase, and shuts the case.