City of Stairs

FAMILY TIES

Shara wakes facing a blank gray wall. A trickle of air unwinds in her lungs before her body is overtaken with coughs.

“Oh ho!” says a merry voice. “Goodness! She’s awake.”

She rolls over, her brain fuzzy and hazy, and sees she’s in a barren, windowless room that is somehow familiar.

There are two doors to the room, one closed and the other open. The stranger stands at the open doorway, now dressed in a Kolkashtani wrap. He smiles at her. His eyes are like wet stones sitting in his skull.

“I really cannot tell,” he says, “what he could have seen in you.”

Shara blinks languidly. Chloroform, she remembers. It’ll be nearly an hour before I’m lucid.…

“You are, as far as I can see, an unremarkable little Saypuri,” he says. “You are small, dirt brown—perhaps clay brown would be a fitting term, earthy, musky, an unsightly, not at all flesh-like darkness—with the characteristic weak chin and hooked nose. Your wrists, as is common in your sort, are terribly thin and fragile, and your arms hirsute and unlovely, as is the rest of your body, I imagine—I expect you would have to shave quite frequently to even compare to the body of any woman of the Holy Lands. Your breasts are not the dangling, ponderous piles I see so often among your breed, but neither are they particularly becoming—in fact, they hardly exist at all. And your eyes, my dear … Look at those glasses. Do your eyes function at all? I wonder—what must it be like to be such a runty, unintended little creature? How sad your life must be, to be a creature of the ash lands, a person made of clay.…” He shakes his head, smiling. It is a horrible perversion of Vohannes’s smile: where Vo’s is full of boundless, eager charm, this man’s smile suggests barely contained rage. “But the true nature of your crime—the true infraction you commit, as all your kind does, is that you refuse to acknowledge it. You refuse to acknowledge your own failings—your miserable, unsightly failings! You know no shame! You do not hide your flesh and body! You do not cower at our feet! You do not recognize that you, untouched by the Divine, bereft of blessings, deprived of enlightenment, are unneeded, unintended, superfluous at worst and servile at best! Your kind holds such lofty pretenses—and that is your true sin, if creatures such as yourself are even capable of sin.”

He is so much like Vohannes, in so many ways: many of his gestures and much of his bearing are Vo’s. Yet there is something strangely more decayed and yet delicate about this man: something in the way he cocks his hips, the way he crosses his arms.… She remembers the mhovost, and its effeminate walk back and forth, mimicking someone she hadn’t yet glimpsed.

Shara swallows and asks, “Who …?”

“If I were to break you open,” says the stranger, “on the inside, you would be empty.… A clay shell of a person, remarkable only in your semblance of self. What did you see in her, Vohannes?”

The stranger looks to the corner of the room.

Sitting on the floor in the corner, his arms wrapped around his knees, is Vohannes: his face has been horribly beaten, one eye swollen and the color of frog skin, his upper lip rusty from old blood.

“Vo …” whispers Shara.

“I had hoped that she would at least offer some temptation of the flesh,” says the stranger. “Then you could perhaps excuse your dalliance. But there is so little flesh on her to tempt you with. I honestly cannot identify any trait you found desirable in this creature. I really can’t, little brother.”

Shara blinks.

Brother?

She says, “V … V …”

The stranger slowly turns to her and cocks an eyebrow.

Vohannes’s voice echoes back to her: He joined up with a group of pilgrims when he was fifteen and went on a trek to the icy north to try and find some damn temple.

“V … Volka?” she says. “Volka Votrov?”

He smiles. “Ah! So. You know my name, little clay child.”

She tries to corral her drunken thoughts. “I … I thought you were dead.…”

He shakes his head, beaming. “Death,” he says, “is for the weak.”

“ ‘For those who wish to know me,’ ” quotes Volka, “ ‘for those who wish to be seen by my eye, and to be loved, there can be no pain too great, no trial too terrible, no punishment too small for you to pass through. For you are my children, and you must suffer to be great.’ ”

Volka smiles indulgently at Vohannes, but it’s Shara who speaks up: “The Kolkashtava.”

Volka’s smile dims, and he watches her coldly.

“Book Two, I believe,” says Shara. “His writs to Saint Mornvieva, upon why Mornvieva’s nephew was crushed in an avalanche.”

“And Mornvieva was so shamed,” says Volka, “that he had asked Father Kolkan why this had happened, and questioned him in such a manner—”

“—that he struck off his own right hand,” says Shara, “and his right foot, blinded his right eye, and removed his right testicle.” Volka grins. “It is so strange to hear a creature like you say such things! It’s like seeing a bird talk.”

“Are you suggesting,” Shara asks, “that by torturing us, you will better us?”

“I will not torture you. At least, not any more than I’ve had done to my little brother here. But it would better you, yes. You would know shame. It would remove that prideful gleam from your eye. Do you even know what you speak of?”

“I am willing to bet you think Kolkan is alive,” says Shara.

Volka’s smile is completely gone now.

“Where have you been, Mr. Votrov?” she asks. “How did you survive? I was told you died.”

“Oh, but I did die, little ash girl,” says Volka. “I died upon a mountain, far to the north. And was reborn anew.”

He turns his hand over: the inside of his palm flickers with candlelight, though Shara can see no flame. “The old miracles still live, in me.” He clutches the invisible flame, and the light dies. “It was a trial of spirit. Yet that is why we went to the monastery of Kovashta in the first place: to try ourselves. Everyone else died during our pilgrimage. All the men, much older than me. More experienced. Stronger. They starved to death or froze to death or fell ill and perished. Only I trudged on. Only I was worthy. Only I fought through the wind and the snow and the teeth of the mountains to find that place, Kovashta, the last monastery, the forgotten dwelling place of our Father Kolkan, where he dreamt up his holy edicts and set the world to rights. I spent almost three decades of my life there, alone in those walls, living off of scraps, drinking melting snow … and reading. I learned many things.” He reaches out with his index finger and touches something: it is as if there’s a pane of glass in the doorway, and he runs his finger down its middle, the tip of his index white and flat, pressed against an invisible barrier. “The Butterfly’s Bell. One of Kolkan’s oldest miracles. It was originally used to force people to confess their sins—air, you see, cannot get in or out, and only on the brink of death are we ever really truthful.… But don’t be concerned. That is not your fate.” He looks at Shara. “You failed, do you know? You and your people.”

Shara is silent.

“Do you know?”

“No,” says Shara. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Primitive thing … Because there, you see, I found him.” He reaches into his wrap and holds out a charm around his neck: the scale of Kolkan. “I meditated for years, hearing nothing. And finally, one day, I decided to meditate until I died, until I heard his whispering, for death was better than that bitter silence.… I almost starved to death. Maybe I did starve to death. But then I heard him, whispering in Bulikov. I heard Father Kolkan! He had never died! He had never been gone from this world! He had never been … been touched by your Kaj!” This last word is a savage growl: Shara glimpses yellow-and-brown teeth. “I had a vision: there was a whole part of Bulikov—the true Bulikov, the Divine City—that was free of your influence! Hidden from you, from everyone! And that was when I knew there was still hope for my people. There was light amidst the storm, salvation waiting for the holy and the dutiful. I could return, and free us all from captivity. It was just a matter of getting to him, of finding him, and freeing him.… Our father. Our lost father.”

“Just like old times,” says Vohannes. “Running to Daddy …”

Volka’s beatific joy vanishes. “Shut up!” he snarls. “Shut up! Shut your filthy traitor mouth!”

Vohannes is silent.

Volka watches him, trembling. “Your … Your tainted mouth! What has your mouth touched, you filthy whelp? What flesh has it touched? Women’s? Men’s? Children’s?”

Vohannes rolls his eyes. “How distasteful.”

“You knew you were malformed,” says Volka. “You always were, little Vo. There was always something wrong with you—a strain of imperfection that should have been weeded out.”

Vohannes, disinterested, sniffs and wipes his nose.

“Have you no excuse for yourself?”

“I was not aware,” says Vohannes, “that I needed any.”

“Father agreed with me. Did you know that? He once told me he wished you and Mother had died in your birth! He said it would have unburdened him of a weak-hearted wife and a weakling son.”

Vohannes swallows impassively. “This revelation,” he says, “does not surprise me in the least. Such a tender man, Daddy was.”

“You slight our father’s name just to make me hate you more, as if that could be possible.”

“I shit,” snaps Vohannes, “upon Father’s name, upon the Votrov name, and upon Kolkan’s name! And I am glad the Kaj never killed Kolkan, for now when the Saypuris slaughter him like all the other gods, I shall have a chance to climb up on his chin and shit inside his mouth!”

Volka stares at him, briefly taken aback. “You will not get that chance,” he whispers. “I will keep you alive, you and her, so Kolkan himself can come and judge you both, and lay down his edicts. You don’t even know, do you? He has been here, in Bulikov, tallying the sins of this place. He has been watching you. He has been waiting. He knows what you have done. I will raise the Seat of the World from its tomb. And when he emerges, you will know pain, little brother.” Shara has decided she definitely knows this room, bereft of furniture and adornment: she remembers how the mhovost laughed at her, and how she flicked the candle into its chest, and the stairs of earth leading down.…

I know exactly where we are, she thinks, and where Kolkan is.

“He’s down in the Seat of the World, isn’t he?” she says aloud.

Volka looks at her like she just slapped him.

Vohannes frowns. “In that rotten old place?”

“No, no. Down underneath, where the real Seat is hidden, yards below us, where we are right now.” She shuts her eyes. The fumes from the rag have wrapped her brain in a fog, but she cannot stop the thought from thrashing up to her. “And the Divine were fond of using glass as storage space.… Ahanas hid prisoners in a windowpane, and even kept a small vacation spot in a glass sphere. Jukov stored the body of St. Kivrey in a glass bead. And when I was down there, in the Seat of the World, I looked for the famous stained glass I have always heard of … but all the windows were broken. All except one, in the Kolkashtani atrium. And I thought it was so curious, at the time, that it was whole, unbroken, yet blank.”

She opens her eyes. “That’s where the other gods jailed him, didn’t they? That’s where Kolkan has been imprisoned for the past three hundred years. A living god, chained within a pane of glass.”

“I don’t quite know everything that’s going on,” says Vohannes chipperly, “but this is pretty entertaining, isn’t it, Volka?”

“How do you mean to free him?” asks Shara.

Volka stares at her furiously, breath whistling in his nostrils. “Unless,” says Shara, “it’s a simple Release miracle … one any priest would know.”

“Not any priest,” says Volka hoarsely.

“So it must be much more potent. Perhaps …,” says Shara slowly. “Perhaps something from a monk from the Kovashta? Something you found written down in their vaults?”

Volka growls like he’s been struck.

“Are you so sure, Brother,” asks Vohannes, “that she’s your inferior?”

“And Wiclov?” asks Shara. “Will he participate? It was you who was running him, wasn’t it? You were the man who trapped the mhovost here and set it up as a guard dog.”

“What happened to Wiclov will seem like a blessing in comparison to what happens to you,” snaps Volka. “Wiclov, he was … He was a believer. A true Kolkashtani. But once he led you to the Seat of the World, and once you realized how I had found the Warehouse of stolen items, I could not forgive him.”

“What did you do?” asks Shara.

Volka shrugs. “I had to find out if the Butterfly’s Bell really worked somehow. I had never seen it performed. Wiclov made … a tolerable subject. I reminded myself—we are but instruments in the hands of the Divine. I did not mind you chasing after Wiclov. You obviously had no idea I was even here, for I’d laid all my plans years before you ever arrived.”

“Though I startled you, didn’t I?” says Shara. “When I arrived, you thought you had to hurry—so you attacked Vohannes’s house to try and force him to give you what you needed.”

“The arrival of the great-granddaughter of the Kaj would upset any true Continental,” says Volka. “And I knew who you were.” Another flash of teeth as brown as old wood. “I had stared at portraits of the Kaj for hours, days, thinking of him, hating him, wishing I could have been there to end his life, stop history from bringing us here.… And the second I saw you—saw your eyes, your nose, your mouth—I saw the past come to life. I knew you were his kin. From there, it was easy to find out who you were, and a simple thing to tell my countrymen.”

“Wait.… You blew my cover?” She glances at Vohannes, who stares at the two of them, uncomprehending.

“Yet they did not rise up against you, nor did they hang you in the streets as I expected,” says Volka. “They praised you for killing Urav, one of Kolkan’s sacred children. I honestly cannot tell if you are actually talented, or if your inopportune appearances are all coincidence. Like today. Did you actually follow us to the real Votrov estate, or did you simply stumble into it?”

“Oh,” says Shara. “You were in the house, weren’t you? When Sigrud and I traveled to Old Bulikov. You saw us.”

“I wouldn’t even be performing this rite now if things had gone as I intended,” says Volka. “But again, your intrusion forces us to make haste. You went to the true Bulikov. You saw the waiting ships. So, rather arbitrarily, unfortunately, the new age will have to begin today.”

“Will you destroy the city now, with your warships?” asks Shara. “Why do you need flying warships at all, if you’re freeing a Divinity? Can’t Kolkan just point a finger at us and turn us into stone?”

“Why would we bother with the city?” Volka says. “It’s wiser to divide and conquer. Saypur is wed to the sea—its strength lies in ships. Our vessels of the air will race directly to Saypur itself and shell its harbors and shipyards before your blasphemous nation ever realizes what is happening. We wished for more ships, but I’ve no doubt that even with only six vessels, we’ll still outmatch any Saypuri weaponry. For all its might, Saypur could never expect an attack from the air. We will rain down fire from the clouds. We will shower destruction from the sky like angels. We will castrate your vile country, as it deserves.”

Irrationally, this revelation horrifies her more than the resurgence of any Divinity. Six six-inchers a ship, probably, she thinks rapidly. Thirty-six cannons total. They could shred our infrastructure and cripple Saypur’s navy for months, even years, in a single day. We’d be fighting with both hands tied behind our backs.

“This is good, you know,” says Volka. “This is right. The world is our crucible. And with each burn, we are shaped. You will know pain. Both of you will know pain. You must. And scourged of flesh, stripped of sin, some part of you, some shred of bone, might just be saved, and found worthy in his eyes.” He takes a breath. “And he will see you both. How pleased with me he’ll be—handing over not only one of the most monstrous betrayers of the old ways, but also the very child of the man who killed the gods.”

Volka steps aside. Two thickset men in Kolkashtani wraps join him at the doorway. There’s a very faint pop as Volka’s Butterfly’s Bell dissolves. The two men walk to Shara and Vohannes, violently thrust both of them onto the ground, and tightly bind their hands. Shara is still too sluggish to resist much, and Vohannes is obviously quite injured.

“Oh, Volka?” Shara asks as she is hauled to her feet. “In regards to your previous comments about me … You do know the original Continentals were almost as brown as any Saypuri? The Continentals today are fairer simply because the climate’s changed, and you no longer get as much sun. So while you may admire fairness yourself, it is not, I suppose one could say, a godly trait. But you would have known that, if you read any Divinity’s texts besides Kolkan’s. He preferred not to mention flesh at all, let alone skin tone.”

Volka attempts a regal pose. “Shallies speak nothing but lies,” he whispers, and walks away.

Captain Mivsk Ashkovsky of the good ship Mornvieva stares through the green lenses of his goggles and into the wild riot of the dawn. Clouds cling to the horizon like newspaper headlines. Down below—miles below, possibly, Mivsk isn’t sure—the gray, dark countryside of the Continent speeds by.

Mivsk rummages in his jumper pocket, takes out his pocket watch, and does some estimations. “Two hours!” he bellows over the raging winds. “Two hours until the coast!”

The crew cheers. All of them are wrapped in thick thermal clothing, all of them wear goggles and masks, and all of them are tied to the deck of the Mornvieva by stout cables; Jakoby already fell victim to a sharp starboard wind and went tumbling off the side, only to be hauled back on deck by his comrades, swearing and spitting and purple in the face.

Two hours, thinks Mivsk. Two hours until he finds out what the good ship Mornvieva—and its twenty-three souls, six cannons, and three hundred six-inch shells—can really do, besides fly very fast in a straight line very high above the ground. He was not even sure it would get off the ground, for the experiments with the Carpet of Kolkan had not always gone well: on their first effort they used only one thread of it, and when Volka’s priest read the rites to activate it, the thread rose up so fast the priest was unprepared and lost much of his face. “The miraculous,” Volka observed as the man shrieked, “requires great caution.” It took months to create the design to stabilize the threads—in the case of Mornvieva, five threads, each lifting eight hundred tons—and months after that to acquire the steel the designs required. And all that time, Mivsk—though he was, he felt, quite faithful—never quite believed it would work.

But now here they are, higher than the highest building in Ahanashtan, hurtling through the atmosphere, pulled along by sword-like sails and giant wings.

Forget not, he reminds himself, that you have a mission, and a duty. We fly not for your glory, Mivsk Ashkovsky, nor for the crew’s, but for the glory of Father Kolkan. And secretly Mivsk cannot wait to see what Kolkan will think of the destruction the cannons will wreak upon the wretched Saypuris, who, for once, will be outmatched. To imagine reducing the great, monstrous shipyards of Ghaladesh to flaming rubble … It makes his heart sing.

Mivsk goes belowdecks for what must be the seventh time to review the cannonry. No Continental has ever possessed firepower on such a level, and seeing the giant, massive cannons and their huge shells, longer and thicker than Mivsk’s forearm, gives him a sense of power he has never felt before. It is all mechanized, as well: one needs only pull a lever to fire any cannon.

Mivsk checks the three port cannons: Saint Kivrey, Saint Oshko, Saint Vasily, all in fine shape. Then he checks the three starboard cannons: Saint Shovska, Saint Ghovros, and then Saint—

Mivsk stops before Saint Toshkey. There is a tall man in a ripped Kolkashtani wrap leaning against the cannon, staring out the gunport toward where the good ships Usina and Ukma, the starboard portion of their small armada, cut through the clouds.

Captain Mivsk stares at him, bewildered. “Who …? Who …?”

“I have never sailed upon a ship of the air,” the man remarks. “Many things I have sailed upon, but never a ship of the air.”

Mivsk wants to ask him why he is not wearing his goggles, why he is not in uniform, why he does not have on his safety cable; but all these questions are absurd, for Mivsk knows there is no one in his crew of this size … right?

The man looks at Mivsk; one eye in his Kolkashtani wrap is dark. “Does it sail,” he asks, “like a regular ship?”

“Well …” Mivsk looks behind him, wondering how to deal with this bizarre occurrence. “Why aren’t you abovedeck, sailor? Why aren’t you cabled to the mast? You could fall off i—”

“And the cannons? Could they also function as air-to-air cannons?”

“I … Why?”

“I believe so. Yes. Yes, I thought so.” The man tilts his head and thinks aloud: “Six cannons onboard, and five other ships … One shot a ship … Then this should be no trouble.” He nods. “Thank you. That is very good to know.”

Then there is a blur, and Captain Mivsk suddenly feels as if he’s swallowed a large chunk of ice.

He looks down and sees the handle of a very large knife sticking out from between his ribs. The ship begins to spin around him.

“It is good for a captain to die,” says the man’s voice, “before seeing the death of his crew. Go quietly, and with gratitude.”

The last thing Mivsk sees is the giant man standing behind Saint Toshkey, using the blade of his hand to imagine lining up the cannon with the good ship Usina far away.

They’re forced in a familiar path, to Shara: down the little blank hallways, back to the room that held the mhovost—the ring of salt still sitting on the floor—and back to the tunnel leading down to the Seat of the World, which, she now sees, is completely restored.

“You caved in this tunnel, but it was easily fixed,” says Volka. “I doubt if you can guess at which miracle I used to make it.”

Shara had not imagined that the tunnel’s creation was miraculous, but now that she considers it, she jumps to the obvious conclusion. “Ovski’s Candlelight,” she says.

Volka’s face tightens, and he waves a hand and leads them down the tunnel, holding his invisible flame. Vohannes chuckles.

He hasn’t freed Kolkan yet, thinks Shara. Maybe Mulaghesh … Maybe she can … If anything, Shara realizes, Mulaghesh is raiding the Votrov estate right now. That, or fortifying the embassy. Neither of which could possibly save either of them. And Sigrud is miles and miles and miles away, outside of Jukoshtan. They are alone.

The tunnel stretches down. Shara imagines Kolkan waiting for them at the bottom, the man of clay seated in the back of a cave, his eyes gray and blank.

“I’m sorry, Vo,” whispers Shara in the dark.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” says Vo. “I’m embarrassed you had to meet the little shi—”

“Quiet,” says one of their captors, and he jabs Vohannes in the kidney. Vohannes, whimpering, struggles to keep walking.

They enter the Seat of the World. Vohannes gasps in shock. “My word …” Shara wishes she could feel as amazed as she did when she first discovered this place, but now the temple feels dark and twisted to her, full of black corners and whispers.

Over two dozen Restorationists, all in Kolkashtani wraps, stand in Kolkan’s atrium before the blank window. Beside it, Shara sees, is a ladder.

This is really happening.

Volka walks to the stairs leading up to the Seat’s defunct bell tower. He raises his hand, which glitters with orange light. “First to restore the temple to its glory,” he says. He points at Shara and Vohannes, mutters something. There is a squeaking sound, like fingers being rubbed against glass. Shara’s hands are still bound, but she sticks a toe out, testing, and feels an invisible wall. The Butterfly’s Bell again.

“Don’t breathe too much,” says Volka, smiling. “That one’s much smaller.” Grinning like a pompous head boy, he mounts the stairs to the bell tower. Soon he is out of sight.

“He must have found a way to restore the bell tower, too,” says Shara.

“Quiet,” says one of the Restorationists.

“That was just filled with earth a few days ago.”

“Quiet!”

“What are you going to do, punch us through the barrier?” says Vohannes.

The Restorationist makes a threatening pose at him, then abandons it, as if he has better things to do.

“I should have seen this coming,” says Shara. “I should have seen this all coming.”

“Shara, shut up,” whispers Vohannes. “Listen, you.… You’ve got something hidden up your sleeve, right? You always do?”

“Well … No. No, actually, I don’t.”

“But you’ve got the army coming in, right? They’ll notice you missing—right?”

“They might, but they definitely won’t look here.”

“Okay, but … Shara, please. Please think!” he hisses. “You’ve got to think of something! You’ve got to, because I definitely won’t. I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on! So please—is there anything?”

Shara thinks hard, but she has no idea how to penetrate the Butterfly’s Bell, a miracle she never even knew existed until now. And even if they got out, what could they do? A wounded, limping man and a drugged ninety-pound woman against twenty-five Restorationists? I could blast our way out of here with Ovski’s Candlelight … if I actually knew Ovski’s Candlelight. But I don’t. I just know of it, which is not the same thing. If only there was some other way to hide, or maybe tunnel into the ground, or …

… or disappear.

“Parnesi’s Cupboard,” she says quietly.

“What?” whispers Vohannes.

“Parnesi’s Cupboard—it’s what your brother used to kidnap me. It puts people into an invisible pocket of air—one that can’t be seen through by either mortal or Divinity.” Because it was made by Jukov, she remembers, so one of his priests could sneak into Kolkan’s nunnery. So it would work excellently here.

“So even if Kolkan himself shows up …”

“We’d be hidden. We’d be safe.”

“Great! Well … Why don’t you use one of those, then?”

“Because my hands are bound,” whispers Shara. “There’s a line from the Jukoshtava I have to say, and a gesture I have to make.”

“Shit,” says Vohannes. He looks up at the Restorationists. “Here. Here, let’s see if we can shift around.…”

Slowly, they rotate so they’re facing away from one another. With their hands tied behind one another’s backs, Vohannes begins to clumsily fumble at her bonds.

“Good luck,” mutters Shara. “But I think they actually knew what they were doing when they tied these.”

One of the Restorationists laughs. “My, what an excellent deception! Untie your hands if you want, you depraved little pervert. The only person getting you out of that Bell is Father Kolkan himself.”

“And when he does,” says another, “you’ll wish you’d suffocated to death in there.”

Another: “Is that the first time you’ve ever touched a woman, Votrov? I would imagine so.…”

Vohannes ignores them and whispers, “Do you really think my brother can bring back Kolkan?”

Shara glances at the clear glass pane in Kolkan’s atrium. “Well. I will say that I now think some Divinity is in there.”

“But … not Kolkan?”

“I actually conversed with the Divinity, I think,” says Shara. “On the night they attacked your house. I saw many scenes from many different Divine texts.… But none of them were coherent. Moreover, I have seen that many of Jukov’s miracles still work—Parnesi’s Cupboard being one of them—so I am no longer quite sure that Jukov is truly gone, either.”

Vohannes grunts as he plucks at a knot, which refuses to budge. “So what you’re saying is … you don’t know.”

“Correct.”

“Great.”

He keeps tugging at her ropes. With some morbid amusement, Shara realizes this is the most intimate contact they’ve had since the night after Urav.

“I’m glad I’m here with you,” says Vohannes. “Here at the end of all this.”

“When we’re free, stay close,” says Shara. “Parnesi’s Cupboard is not large.”

“All right, but I want you to listen.… I’m glad, Shara. Do you understand?”

Shara is silent. Then she says, “You shouldn’t be.”

“Why?”

“Because when my cover was blown … I thought it was you who did it.”

He stops trying to untie her. “Me?”

“Yes. You … You suddenly got everything you wanted, Vo. Everything. And you were the only other one who knew who I was. And we thought we saw you at the loomworks, but it wasn’t really you. It had to be—”

“Volka.” She cannot see him, but Vohannes is quite still. “But … Shara, I would … I would never do that to you. Never. I couldn’t.”

“I know! I know that now, Vo. But I, I thought you were sick! I thought something was wrong with you. You seemed so unhappy, so miserable.…”

She can feel Vohannes looking around. “Maybe you weren’t wrong there,” he says softly. “Perhaps there is something wrong with me. But maybe I could have never been right.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean … I mean, look at these people, these people I grew up with!” The Restorationists have gathered in Kolkan’s atrium, and they kneel on the floor to begin a prayer. “Look at them! They’re praying to pain, to punishment! They think that hate is holy, that every part of being human is wrong. So of course I grew up wrong! No human could grow up right in such a place!”

Somewhere, far in the distance, Shara hears a bell toll.

“What was that?” asks Vo.

“We need to hurry,” says Shara. Somewhere, softly, another bell tolls.

“Why?”

Another bell tolls. And another. And another. They all have different tones, as if some are very large and others are very small, but more than that, each bell has a resonance that seems like it can only be perceived by different parts of the mind, pouring in alien experiences: when one bell tolls, she imagines she sees hot, murky swamps, tangles of vines, and clutches of flowering orchids; when another bell tolls, she smells flaming pitch, and sawdust, and mortar; when the next bell tolls, she can hear the crash of metal, the screaming of crows, the howls of warfare; with the next, she tastes wine, raw meat, sugar, blood, and what she suspects to be semen; on the next, she hears the crushing grind of huge stones being pushed against one another, terrible weight bearing down upon her; and then, when the final bell joins the tolling, she feels a wintry chill in her arms and a flickering fire in her feet and heart.

One bell for each Divinity, thinks Shara. I don’t know how he did it, or even what he’s doing, but Volka’s found a way to ring all the bells of the Seat of the World.

“What’s going on, Shara?” asks Vohannes.

“Look at the window,” says Shara, “and you’ll see.”

With each pulse, a faint light appears in the window. Golden sunlight, as if the sun is so bright it is penetrating all the layers of earth to shine into this dark, dreary place.

The sun isn’t shining through the earth, she thinks. We’re rising up.

“He’s moving it,” she says. “He’s raising it. He’s raising the Seat of the World.”

Mulaghesh’s soldiers are doing a halfhearted job of fortifying the embassy courtyard when the light begins to change.

Mulaghesh herself is monitoring their work from the embassy gates: the embassy walls are tall and white with iron railing at the top, and while they’re quite pretty they’re well short of military defenses. The embassy is also very exposed, sitting on an intersection between two major roads: one road runs along the walls, and the other runs all the way through Bulikov and straight up to the embassy gates. Mulaghesh can peer through the bars of the gates and see clear to downtown Bulikov. If Shara’s right about those six-inch cannons, she thinks, there are about a million angles those things could take to wipe us out.

Despite this exposed position, Mulaghesh has not prodded her soldiers along much, mostly because she privately hopes Shara is terribly, terribly wrong. But when she begins to hear the bells in the distance, and the shadows of the iron railing begin to dance on the courtyard stone, her mouth falls open enough for her cigarillo to come tumbling out.

She turns around. The sun itself is moving: though it is rendered somewhat hazy and strange by the walls of Bulikov, it is like a drop of liquid gold, and it streaks from where it sat just above the horizon and twirls and dances to the left, twisting through the sky and growing slightly larger until it’s on the other horizon, just starting to set.

Mulaghesh wonders: Is a whole day being lost before our eyes?

The cacophony of the bells beats on her senses, as if with each toll they are breaking down invisible structures and rebuilding them.

Then yellow-orange sunlight pulses over the rooftops of Bulikov. One sunbeam lances down as if shot through a veil of clouds—yet there are no clouds that she can see—and glances off the bell tower in the center of the city, which glows brightly.

Mulaghesh and her soldiers are forced to look away; when they look back, they see the sunlight—the setting sunlight—glints off of a huge polished roof. Mulaghesh has to shade her eyes to keep from being blinded.

A mammoth, ornate, cream white cathedral sits in the center of Bulikov, with its bell tower almost half a mile tall.

“What is that?” says one of her lieutenants. “Where did that come from?”

Mulaghesh sighs. How I hate it, she thinks, when the alarmists are proven right.

“All right!” she bellows. “Kindly take your eyes off the skyline and get your asses back to work! Start installing fortifications and gun batteries behind the embassy walls, and make it quick!”

“Gun batteries?” says one of her corporals. A girl barely in her twenties, she wipes her brow, nervous. “Governor, are you sure?”

“I absolutely am. So get a move on, and if you need the toe of my boot to speed you on your way, then I will be only too happy to apply it to your dainty backsides! What are you all staring at me for? Fucking move!”