City of Stairs

UNMENTIONABLES

Bulikov University is a sprawling, many-chambered structure, a dense network of stone and atriums and passageways hidden behind towering walls on the west side of Bulikov. The university’s stonework is stained with rain and dark blooms of mold; its floors and sidewalks are worn smooth, as if trodden on for many years; and its fat, swollen chimneys, which resemble wasp nests more than any functional architectural feature, are of a make not used in several centuries at least.

But, Shara notes as she enters, the university plumbing is nothing short of immaculate. As with most buildings, only pieces of it can be seen: connections to water mains, sprinklers in the ceiling, along with the usual taps and sinks. But what she sees is fairly advanced.

She tries not to smile. Because Shara knows that despite the university’s ancient appearance, the structure itself is little more than twenty years old.

“Which wing are we in now?” she asks.

“The Linguistics wing,” says Nidayin. “And they prefer to call them ‘chambers.’ ”

Shara blinks slowly at such a prompt correction. Nidayin, she finds, is not an unusual embassy officer, in that he is snotty, dismissive, and self-important. However, he is also the embassy’s public affairs representative, which means he is the person who formally gets ambassadors and diplomats into important places—like the university.

“Very long chambers,” says Pitry, looking around. “It’s a hallway, really.”

“The term ‘chambers,’ ” says Nidayin severely, “has a very symbolic meaning.”

“Which is what?”

Nidayin, who evidently has not expected to be quizzed in such a manner, says, “I am sure it has no bearing on the investigation. It doesn’t matter.”

Their footsteps echo on the stone. The university is empty after the death of Dr. Pangyui. Perhaps it is the way the blue light of the lamps (the gas lamps, Shara notes) plays on the stone walls, but she cannot help but feel this is a profoundly organic structure, as if they are within some insect’s hive, or the belly of some titanic creature. But that, she thinks, is probably exactly what the architects intended.

She wonders what Efrem thought of this place. She has already seen his rooms at the embassy, and, as expected, found them completely barren, shorn of any detail at all: Efrem was a man who lived for work, especially this kind of work, in this historied place. She has no doubt that stuffed in some drawer in his office in the university are hundreds of charcoal sketches of the university cornices, gates, and, almost certainly, dozens and dozens of doorknobs, for Efrem was always fascinated by what people did with their hands: It is how people interact with the world, he told her once. The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behavior, that is in the hands. Watch a man’s hands, and you watch his heart. And perhaps he was right, for Efrem was always touching things when he encountered some new discovery: he stroked tabletops, tapped on walls, kneaded up earth, caressed ripe fruit.… For Efrem Pangyui, there was never enough of the world to experience.

“Well, now I’m curious,” says Pitry.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Nidayin again.

“You don’t know,” says Pitry.

“I do know,” says Nidayin. “I merely do not have the appropriate resources in front of me. I would not wish to give incorrect information.”

“What rot,” says Pitry.

Sigrud sighs softly, which for him constitutes an exasperated outburst.

Shara clears her throat. “The university has six chambers,” she says, “because the Continentals conceived of the world as a heart with six chambers, each chamber housing one of the original Divinities. The flow between each of the Divinities formed the flow of time, of fate, of all events: the very blood of the world. The university was conceived as a microcosm of this relationship. To come here was to learn everything of everything, or so they wished to suggest.”

“Really?” says Pitry.

“Yes,” says Shara. “But this is not the original university. The original was lost during the War.”

“After the Blink, you mean,” says Nidayin. “It vanished with most of Bulikov. Right?”

Shara ignores him. “The university has been rebuilt based on sketches and art made before the War. Bulikov was very insistent it be re-created exactly as it was: they tore down a great deal of the surviving ancient architecture so the university could be rebuilt with genuine ancient stone. They wanted it to be authentic—or at least,” she says, gently touching a gas lamp, “as authentic as one could make it while still allowing certain modern conveniences.”

“How do you know all that?” asks Pitry.

Shara adjusts her glasses. “What sort of classes do they teach here?”

“Erm, these days, mostly economics,” says Nidayin. “Commerce. Basic job training, as well. Chiefly because the polis has made a concerted effort to become a financial player in the world. Part of the New Bulikov movement, which has had a bit of backlash lately since some people are interpreting it as modernization. Which it is, really. There’re sporadic protests around the university campus, most of the time. Either about New Bulikov, or, well …”

“About Dr. Pangyui,” says Shara.

“Yes.”

“I suppose,” says Pitry as he absently examines the doors, “that they can’t teach history.”

“Not much, no,” says Nidayin. “What history they teach is strictly regulated, due to the WR. The Regulations sort of cripple everything they do here. And they have trouble teaching science and basic physics, since for so long things here didn’t function by basic physics. And in some places, they still don’t.”

Of course, thinks Shara. How do you teach people science when the local sunrise refutes science every morning?

Sigrud stops. He sniffs twice, then looks toward one door on the right. Like most of the doors at the university, it is thick wood with a thick glass window in the center. Otherwise, it is bereft of markings.

“Is that Dr. Pangyui’s office?” asks Shara.

“Yes,” says Nidayin. “How did he—?”

“And has anyone besides the police been inside?”

“I don’t believe so.”

Still, Shara grimaces. The police, she knows, will be bad enough. “Nidayin, Pitry—I would like it if you would check all the offices and rooms in this chamber of the university. We need to know which other university staff might have been nearby, as well as the nature of their relationship to Dr. Pangyui.”

“Are you sure we should be taking up such an investigation?” asks Nidayin.

Shara gives him a look that is not quite cold: perhaps the cooler side of lukewarm.

“I mean, not to speak out of turn, but … you are only the interim CD,” he says.

“Yes,” says Shara. “I am.” She produces a small pink telegram slip and hands it to Nidayin. “And I am following orders from the polis governor, as you will see.”

Nidayin opens up the telegram, and reads:

C-AMB THIVANI PRELIM INVEST POLIS FORCES ASSIST STOP GHS512

“Oh,” says Nidayin.

“Strictly the preliminary investigation,” says Shara. “But we must take advantage of evidence while it is still fresh, or so I am told. Would I be wrong?”

“No,” says Nidayin. “No, you would not.”

He and Pitry begin their rounds, checking the adjacent offices. Within twenty feet they begin bickering again. That should keep them busy for a while, she thinks.

She tucks the telegram inside her coat. She knows she’ll probably need it again.

Naturally, Polis Governor Mulaghesh sent no such telegram, but it’s useful to have friends in every Comm Department, no matter what you’re up to.

“Now,” says Shara. “Let’s see what’s left.”

The office of Dr. Efrem Pangyui is a knee-high sea of torn paper, with his desk resembling a barge lost on its yellowed waves. Shara turns on the gas lamps and surveys the damage: she sees countless tacks on the corkboard on the walls, with scraps of paper still tacked up. “The police must have torn them all down,” she says quietly. “My word.”

It is a small, dingy office, not at all befitting a man of Pangyui’s stature. There is a window, but it is of stained glass so dark it might as well be brick.

“We shall have to bag this all up and take it back to the embassy, I suppose.” She pauses. “Tell me: how many followed us on the way here?”

Sigrud holds up two fingers.

“Professionals?”

“Doubt it.”

“Did Nidayin or Pitry see them?”

Sigrud gives her a look: What do you think?

Shara smiles. “I told you. Stir up the hornets’ nest … But back to the matter at hand. What do you think?”

He sniffs and rubs his nose. “Well … Obviously someone was looking for something. But I think they did not find it.” Shara nods, pleased to see her own conclusions were correct. Sigrud’s one gray eye dances along the tides of paper. “If they were looking for one thing, and found it, they would have stopped. But I see no sign of stopping.”

“Good. I see the same.”

Which leaves the question—what were they looking for? The message in Pangyui’s tie? She isn’t yet sure, but more and more, Shara doubts if Pangyui was murdered simply for committing heresy in Bulikov.

Assume nothing, Shara reminds herself. You do not know until you know.

“All right,” says Shara. “Where?”

Sigrud sniffs again, shuffles through the paper to the desk, and uses his foot to clear away the floor on the side of the desk opposite from where the professor would normally work. A large, dark stain still lies on the stone floor. She has to get very near before she catches the coppery smell of old blood.

“So he wasn’t at his desk,” says Shara.

“I doubt it, yes.”

She wishes she knew where he lay when they found him, what was next to him, what was on his person.… There were notes in the police report, of course, but the police report did not mention Pangyui’s shredded clothing at all, so it’s not exactly trustworthy. She supposes she’ll have to work with what she has.

“If you could fetch me a bag for this paper, please,” she says softly.

Sigrud nods and stalks off down the hallway.

Shara surveys the room. She walks forward gingerly, and stoops and picks up a scrap of paper:

… but the contention is that the Kaj’s history as an unusually entitled Saypuri does not undermine his actions. His father was a collaborator with the Continent, yes, and we know nothing of his mother. We know the Kaj was a scholar and something of a scientist, performing experiments in his home, and though he did not lose any of his own in the massacre, he …

She picks up another.

… one wonders what the chamber of Olvos was used for in the original university, for it is suggested she disapproved of the actions of the Continent, and indeed the other Divinities. Considered a Divinity of hope, light, and resilience, Olvos’s withdrawal from the world in 775 at the onset of the Continental Golden Age was considered a great tragedy. Exactly why she withdrew was hotly debated: some texts surfaced claiming Olvos predicted nothing but woe for the path the other Divinities had chosen, yet many of these texts were quickly destroyed, probably by the other Divinities …

And another:

… by all indications, the Kaj’s time on Continental shores was spent very sparsely before he died of an infection in 1646. He slept, ate, and lived alone, and only spoke to give orders. Sagresha, his lieutenant, records in her letters, “It was as if he was so disappointed in the homelands of those who had conquered and ruled over his people for so long that it wounded him. Though he never said so, I could hear him thinking it: ‘Should not the land of the gods be fit for gods?’ ” Though of course the Kaj could not know that he was almost directly responsible for the devastation of the Continent, for it was the Kaj’s successful assassination of the Divinity Taalhavras that brought about the Blink …

Shara recognizes a lot of this as Efrem’s older writings, already published. He must have brought his old volumes here, and the police shredded them during their “search.” Perhaps they enjoyed destroying so much celebrated Saypuri writing, she thinks. That is, if it was really the police who did this.

Her eye catches a bulky form in the corner. Upon examination, it is a dense, impressive safe, and what’s more its door is ajar. She inspects the lock, which is terribly complicated: Shara is not a skilled lockpick, but she’s met a few in her time, and she knows they’d blanch at this. Yet the lock shows no sign of damage, nor does the door or the rest of the safe, nor is there any scrap or sign of what the safe once held.

As she sits back to think, she notices one corner of paper jutting up from the wreckage that is starkly different: it is not a page from an academic publication, but an official form with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seal in the upper left corner, and in the upper right, the seal of the polis governor’s office.

She fishes it out. It’s a request form filled out by Efrem. Exactly what it is requesting is hard to tell: the request itself is reduced down to a code, ACCWHS14-347. Efrem has signed the bottom, but there’s another signature needed, and underneath the blank are the words: TURYIN MULAGHESH, POLIS GOVERNOR, BULIKOV.

“Found something?” says Sigrud’s voice from the door.

“I’m not sure yet,” says Shara.

As they bag up all the material, Shara finds that this is not the only document of the polis governor’s that’s found its way into Efrem’s possession: among the scraps of paper is a hefty number of entry permission stubs, probably handed to him by a guard when he was approved to enter … somewhere.

Shara counts them when they’re done: there are a total of nineteen permission stubs here in the office. Shara knows Efrem probably didn’t keep them intentionally: they’d likely be worthless once his visit was over. He must have just emptied his pockets once he came back to his office.

Shara glances back at the safe in the corner. And perhaps he brought back more than ticket stubs.

Nidayin and Pitry both stumble in looking quite harassed. Nidayin holds a long, smudged piece of paper in his hands. “Well,” he says. “We’ve finished. We have a sum of sixty-three names, and we’ve recorded their departments, tenure, relation to the professor, and—”

“Good work,” says Shara. “Sigrud, if you could please add that to our collection. I believe we’ve done what we need to here. We’ll be back to the embassy now. And then, Pitry, you will probably need to fill up the car again. I believe a short excursion beyond Bulikov is in order.”

“Where are we going?” asks Pitry.

Shara fingers the permission stubs in her pocket. “To be frank,” she says, “I don’t quite know.”

When they exit the university and begin to cross to the car, Shara slows down.

Sigrud walks behind her. There is a soft hiss as he exhales through his nose.

She glances down and to the side, at his hands.

He makes a tiny gesture with his right index and middle finger, no more than a tap against his thigh. She glances to the right.

They look like ordinary people sitting at the café, but then of course they would: a man buried in a thick gray coat, with oily hair and two days’ worth of beard, who is slowly peeling back the packaging on a cigar; the other, a woman of about fifty or fifty-five, with skinny, bitter features, purplish, worn hands, and gray hair pulled back in a severe bun. The woman refuses to look up from her sewing, yet Shara can see her hands are trembling.

No. Not professionals.

“We’ll drop you around the corner,” says Shara. “Then, follow them.”

Sigrud nods and climbs into the car.

To get out of Bulikov by road involves a parade of admittance papers, of checkpoints, of bottlenecks and choked traffic, red-and-white striped gates and crossing guards and page after page of lists. All of the attendants—dressed in black or purple uniforms with dozens of brass buttons—are Continental. Have we so deeply regulated this city, thinks Shara, that its very citizens are willing to choke it? Her papers act as a magic ward, eliciting frenzied hand-waves, sometimes even a salute, and she and Pitry navigate the network of checkpoints within a half an hour—something a citizen of Bulikov accomplishes only if they wake up very, very early.

A polis governor’s “quarters” are always a tricky subject on the Continent. Shara knows that the official stance of Saypur on governors’ quarters, both of the regional and polis variety, is that they are only temporary: it’s practically part of her script, as a Saypuri official. The official stance goes on to state that the governor’s quarters are monitoring stations established by Saypur solely to keep the peace until the peace is self-sustainable. But, as everyone on the Continent asks every day: when exactly will that be?

Judging by the twenty-foot concrete walls, fixed cannonry, iron gates, and soldiers’ shouts echoing over the walls (which are less than two miles from the walls of Bulikov), the impression given by Polis Governor Mulaghesh’s quarters is that the peace will not be self-sustainable for some time. The facility is imposing, stately, mostly barren, and definitely, definitely permanent. Upon entering, floor-to-ceiling windows stand behind the governor’s desk, and through them Shara sees green, rolling hills encircled by the concrete wall. She can also watch soldiers drilling on the parade grounds, dozens of soft blue headcloths bobbing up and down as the commandant barks out orders.

“Governor Mulaghesh will be with you shortly,” says the attendant, a chiseled-faced young man with a starved, mean look to him. “She’s currently taking a constitutional.”

“I’m sorry, she’s what?” asks Shara.

He smiles in a manner he apparently believes to be polite. “Exercise.”

“Oh. I see. Then I’m happy to wait.”

He smiles again, as if to say, How charming to think you had another option.

Shara looks around the office. It has all the soul and ornamentation of an ax: everything is clean gray surfaces, strictly designed to function and function well.

A small door on the side of the room opens. A shortish woman of about forty-five marches in wearing a standard-issue gray tank top, light blue breeches, and boots. She is drenched in sweat, which runs in beads down her immensely large and immensely brown shoulders. She stops and examines Shara with a cold eye, then smiles in a manner just as cold and marches over to the desk. She grabs hold of the corner, kicks her right foot up, and grasps the ankle with her right hand, stretching out her quadriceps.

“Well, hi,” she says.

Shara smiles and stands. Turyin Mulaghesh is, much like her offices, cold, spare, brutal, and efficient, a creature so born and bred for battle and order that she cannot tolerate another manner of living. She is one of the most muscular women Shara has ever seen, sporting wiry biceps and a sinewy neck and shoulders. Shara has heard stories of the feats Mulaghesh performed during the minor rebellions in the aftermath of the Summer of Black Rivers, and she finds herself believing all of them when she studies the immense scarring along Mulaghesh’s left jawline, not to mention her ravaged knuckles. She is, needless to say, a very unusual sort of person to occupy what’s fundamentally a bureaucratic position.

“Good afternoon, Governor Mulaghesh,” says Shara. “I am—”

“I know who you are,” says Mulaghesh. She releases the stretch, opens a drawer, and takes out a cigarillo. “You’re the new girl. The, what is it. Chief Ambassador.”

“Yes. Ashara Thivani, formally Cultural—”

“Yes, yes. Cultural Ambassador. Came in last night, right?”

“That’s correct.”

Mulaghesh dumps herself down in her chair and puts her feet up. “Seems like only two weeks ago they swept Troonyi in here. I’m surprised I still have a job. I thought the man’d burn down all the city in my time here. Just, honestly, a fucking oaf.” She looks up at Shara. Her eyes are steel gray. “But maybe he got the fire started. After all, I mean, Pangyui died under his watch.” She points to Shara with the butt end of the cigarillo. “That’s why you’re here, right?”

“That’s one reason, yes.”

“And another reason, I’m sure,” says Mulaghesh as she lights the cigarillo, “would be for the Ministry to determine whether my actions—or inactions—could have contributed to their cultural emissary’s death. Because it also, in a way, happened under my watch. Right?”

“That is not my priority,” says Shara.

“I commend you,” she says. “You have evidently got the diplomat thing down to an art.”

“It’s the truth,” says Shara.

“I believe it’s the truth for you. Just probably not for the Ministry.” Mulaghesh sighs, wrapping her head in a wreath of smoke. “Listen, I’m glad you’re here, because if you tell them what I’ve been saying for the past year, maybe they’ll listen. Because ever since I first got wind of this cultural expedition bullshit, I knew, I just knew, that this was all going to end in tears. Bulikov’s like an elephant, see? It’s got a long memory. Ahanashtan, Taalvashtan, those places—they’ve got their act together. They’re modernizing. Getting train tracks in, doctors … shit, letting women vote.” She snorts, hawks, and spits into a trash can at her desk. “This place”—she gestures out the windows, toward the walls of Bulikov—“this place still thinks it’s in its Golden Ages. Or that it should be. Every once in a while it forgets, and we get some peace, but then someone stirs up the nest again, and I have another crisis on my hands. A crisis I can’t really intervene in, because the policy is ‘Hands off.’ Policy, as always, sounds solid as shit in Ghaladesh, a whole damn ocean away, but when you’ve got those walls only a day’s walk from you, it’s all just words.”

Shara opts to interrupt. “Governor Mulaghesh, before we continue …”

“Yeah?”

“Who do you think killed Dr. Pangyui?”

Mulaghesh looks slightly taken aback. “Me? Hells. I don’t know. It could have been anyone. The whole city wanted him dead. Besides, I haven’t been given the go-ahead to investigate.”

“But surely you must have some ideas.”

“Yeah. I do.” She studies Shara for a long while. “Why do you care? You’re a diplomat. You’re just here for the parties. Right?”

Shara reaches into her robes and produces her Ministry of Foreign Affairs badge.

Mulaghesh sits forward and, to her credit, examines it without a reaction.

After a long while, she reads from the name at the bottom, “Komayd.”

“Yes,” says Shara.

“Not, I take it, Thivani.”

“No,” says Shara.

“Komayd. As in Vinya Komayd?”

Shara stares back at her, unblinking.

Mulaghesh sits back. She looks at Shara for some time, then asks, “How old are you?”

“I am thirty-five.”

“So … That thing, sixteen years ago. The Nationalist Party. Was that …?”

With a great deal of effort, Shara’s face shows no emotion.

Mulaghesh nods. Shara thinks she can see a sly gleam in her eye. “Huh. Why didn’t you say so at the start?”

“I’m afraid you started talking before I could say anything.”

“I guess that’s true,” Mulaghesh says. “I get mouthy after a run.” She sticks her cigarillo back between her teeth. “So. You are here to investigate the professor’s murder.”

“I am here,” says Shara as she puts away her badge, “to see if anything in Bulikov poses a threat to Saypur.”

“In Bulikov? Shit. It’s only crawled out of total squalor in the past fifteen years or so. When I got here it was probably no different than when the Kaj captured it. People were still shitting in buckets. It’s hard to imagine how it could pose a threat.”

“They thought the same before the Summer of Black Rivers, when we introduced the Regulations and Bulikov rebelled, and the city was in an even worse state then. The passion of Bulikov far outweighs its limitations, it seems.”

“Poetic,” says Mulaghesh. She runs a thumb along the scar on her jaw. “But probably true.” She slouches back farther in her chair, a feat Shara hadn’t realized was possible, and appears to think.

Shara knows she is wondering if it’s wise to extend a hand to this new, mysterious official: so often in the Ministry good deeds and charitable actions win only woe, when someone loses their footing and all those who supported them get punished.

“I need your help, Governor,” says Shara. “I cannot depend on the embassy.”

Mulaghesh snorts. “Who can?”

“Quite right. And I am willing to do what is necessary to win your support.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. I wish to put this all to bed as quickly as possible. And I’d need your help to do so.”

Mulaghesh chews the end of her cigar. “I don’t know if you can give me what I want.”

“You may be surprised.”

“Maybe. I don’t mind being a servant, Ambassador Komayd. And that’s what we are, civil servants. But I’ve served enough. I want to go someplace a lot better than this backward ruin.”

Shara thinks she already knows where she’s going. “Ahanashtan?”

Mulaghesh laughs. “Ahanashtan? You think I want more responsibility? By the seas, no. What I want, Ambassador, is to get stationed in Javrat.”

“Javrat?” says Shara, surprised.

“Yes. Way out in the South Seas. I want to go someplace with palm trees. Sun. With beaches. Someplace with good wine, and men whose skin doesn’t look like beef fat. I want to get far away from the Continent, Ambassador. I don’t want anything to do with this anymore.”

Shara is a bit taken aback by this. The polis of Ahanashtan contains the only functioning international port on the Continent, and as trade has become more and more naval since the War, that makes Ahanashtan one of the few Continental polises with any wealth. In addition, since Saypur’s military strength lies almost exclusively in its ships, Ahanashtan is also the city with the closest connection to Saypur, making its polis governor one of the more powerful figures in the world. Presumably every Saypuri official on the Continent would love to get the job … but requesting the tiny island of Javrat would mean Mulaghesh wants essentially to step out of the political game altogether, and Shara has never really met any Saypuri whose ambition didn’t keep them in the game in perpetuity.

“So do you think,” says Mulaghesh, “that that’s possible?”

“It’s … possible, certainly,” says Shara. “But I expect the Ministry will be a little confused.”

“I don’t want a promotion,” says Mulaghesh. “I’ve got, what, two decades left of my life? Less? I want to take my bones someplace warm, Ambassador. And all this gamesmanship … I find it sickening nowadays.”

“I will most certainly see what I can do to get that arranged.”

Mulaghesh gives her a grin that would not look out of place on a shark. “Excellent. Then let’s get started.”

“I’ll tell you that this New Bulikov movement in the city has stirred up a big bucket of shit,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s been brewing for a while. People see there’s money to be made in modernization—in cooperation with Saypur, in other words—and they mean to make it. The rich folk in Bulikov, they don’t want to cooperate at all, and they make enough noise that the poor ones listen.”

“What would this have to do with Dr. Pangyui?”

“Well, the big argument in the anti–New Bulikov movements is that they’re ‘straying from the path.’ ” To this statement Mulaghesh applies an eyeroll, a sneer, a contemptuous hand wave—the works. “This is not as things were; thus this is not how things should be. The most extreme of them call themselves, rather boldly, the Restorationists. Self-appointed keepers of Bulikov’s national identity, cultural identity … You know the kind of assholes I’m talking about. So when Pangyui showed up, dissecting the Continent’s history, culture, well, it gave them a pretty big target to talk about.”

“Ah,” says Shara.

“Yeah. The Restorationists were losing the debate, because, shit, no one’s going to vote against prosperity. So if you’re losing the debate, you change the conversation.”

“He was a good distraction, in other words.”

“Right. Point at this filthy Saypuri, showing up with the blessing of this foreign power they’re supposed to get in bed with, and scream and howl and bitch and whine about this horrific sacrilege. I don’t think they actually cared much about Pangyui and his ‘mission of cultural understanding’—well, maybe some did—they just used him as a political chip. And now they’ve all denied having had anything to do with the murder, and their official position is that this was just honest political debate. You know, basic, good ol’-fashioned, disgusting, slanderous political debate. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Shara finds none of this surprising. The political instinct might wear different clothes in different nations, but underneath the pomp and ceremony it’s the same ugliness. “But does this have any bearing on Dr. Pangyui’s murder?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Could it have stirred some nut into beating the professor to death? Could have. Does that mean the political factions in Bulikov are responsible? Maybe. Can we do anything about that? Probably not.”

“But what if the powers in Bulikov,” says Shara, “are complicit?”

Mulaghesh stops chewing her cigarillo. “And what would you mean by that?”

“We’ve inspected the professor’s offices. They were ransacked. I suspect this could not have happened without someone in the Bulikov police knowing. Much of his material has been shredded, destroyed. Someone was looking for something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why come to me about it?”

“Well … It may depend on exactly what he was researching.” Shara reaches into her coat and takes out the entry permission stubs, puts them on Mulaghesh’s desk, and slides them over.

Mulaghesh’s face drops. She takes the cigarillo out, sits frozen with it in one hand, then lays it on the table. “Ah, shit.”

“What would this be, Governor?” asks Shara.

Mulaghesh grunts, frustrated.

“What are those, Governor?”

“Visitor badges,” says Mulaghesh reluctantly. “You clip them to your shirtfront, so we can see you have access. They expire every week, because, well, the access is so restricted. I guess he must have taken the expired ones home—though he had strict orders to destroy them. This is what you get for giving this sort of work to civilians.”

“Access to … what?”

Mulaghesh puts the cigarillo out on the tabletop. “I thought you’d know. I mean, everyone sort of knows about the Warehouses.”

When Shara hears this, her mouth falls open. “The Warehouses? As in … the Unmentionable Warehouses?”

Mulaghesh nods reluctantly.

“They’re real?”

She sighs again. “Yeah. Yeah, they’re real.” She scratches her head, and again says, “Ah, shit.”

“They showed it to me in my first week as governor,” says Mulaghesh. “Years ago. Drove me out in the countryside. Wouldn’t tell me where we were going. And then we came across this huge section of bunkers. Dozens of them. I asked what was in them. They shrugged. ‘Nothing special. Nothing extraordinary.’ Grain, tires, wire, things like that. Except in one. One was different, but it looked just like all the others. Camouflage, you see. Hiding it in plain sight. Very clever people, us Saypuris. They didn’t open the doors, though. They just said, ‘Here it is. It’s real. And the safest thing you can do about this is never talk about it or think about it again.’ Which I did. Until the professor came, of course.”

Shara gapes at her. “And … this is where Dr. Pangyui was going?”

“He was here to study history,” says Mulaghesh with a shrug. “Where is there more history than in the Unmentionable? That’s, well … That’s why it’s so dangerous.”

Shara sits in stunned silence. The Unmentionable Warehouses have always been a somewhat ridiculous fairytale to everyone in the Ministry. The only suggestion of their existence lies in a line in a tiny subsection of the Worldly Regulations:

Any and all items, art, artifacts, or devices treasured by the peoples of the Continent shall not be removed from the territory of the Continent, but they shall be protected and restricted should the nature of these items, art, artifacts, or devices directly violate these Regulations.

And as Shara and any other student of the history before the Great War knows, the Continent was practically swimming in such things. Before the Kaj invaded, the daily life of people on the Continent was propelled, maintained, and supported by countless miraculous items: teapots that never went empty, locks that responded only to a drop of a certain person’s blood, blankets that provided warmth and protection regardless of the weather.… Dozens upon dozens were cited in the texts recovered by Saypur after the Great War. And some miraculous items, of course, were not so benign.

Which begged the question: where are such items now? If the Divinities had created so many, and if the WR did not allow Saypur (in what many felt was an unusual and unwisely diplomatic decision) to remove them from the Continent altogether or destroy them, then where could they be?

And some felt the only answer could be—well, they’re all still there. Somewhere on the Continent, but hidden. Stored somewhere safely, in warehouses so secret they were unmentionable.

But this had to be impossible. In the Ministry, where everyone was tangled up in everyone else’s work, how could they hide storage structures of such size, of such importance? Shara herself had never seen anything indicating they existed in her career, and Shara saw quite a lot.

“How is that …? How could that be?” asks Shara. “How could something that huge be kept secret?”

“I think,” says Mulaghesh, “because it’s so old. People think there’s a lot of them, but there’s only the one, really. It predates all intelligence networks in operation today. Hells, it’s older than the Continental Governances for sure, way before we started communicating so closely with the Continent. The Ministry lets you know if you need to know, and you never did.”

“But here? In Bulikov?”

“Not in Bulikov, no. Nearby. After the Kaj died, his lieutenants took all the miraculous things he found and locked them up. They locked up so many that no one could ever move them without anyone on the Continent finding out where they were. So they had to keep them here, and build around them.”

“How many?”

“Thousands. I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, I sure never wanted to go inside it. Who knows what’s in there? It’s all filed, organized, locked away, sure, but … I never wanted to know. Things like that are supposed to be dead. I wanted them to stay that way.”

Shara, with a great deal of effort, manages to return to the issue at hand. “But Pangyui didn’t?”

“He was here to study the past in a way no one ever had before,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m willing to bet that the Warehouse is probably the real reason he came. We’ve been sitting on top of a stockpile of history, and I guess someone at the Ministry got impatient. They wanted to open the box.”

Shara feels more than a little betrayed to hear this news. Efrem never mentioned anything like this. No wonder he was such an apt student in tradecraft, she thinks. He had already been hiding many secrets of his own.

It feels quite impossible that Vinya would have no knowledge of any of this. Do I really want, Shara wonders, to keep turning over these rocks? This is not the first time she’s gotten accidentally involved in one of her aunt’s projects—and each time she’s done so, it’s been a wise career move to turn a blind eye.

But she remembers how Efrem lay on the cot in the embassy vault, his skull wearing the crude mask of his small, delicate face.…

Something cold blooms in Shara’s belly. Efrem … did Auntie Vinya get you killed?

“Do you know which artifacts he was studying?” asks Shara.

“He said he wished to study only the books in there, and a few inactive items.”

Shara nods. She knows the term: “active” items referred to often-mundane things—a box, a pen, a painting—that possessed miraculous properties, obvious or concealed. The paintings of Saint Varchek, for example, were obviously miraculous, as the figures in them would move on the canvas, shuffling about or sharing gossip; whereas the sheets of the Divinity Jukov had less obvious miraculous qualities, until one actually climbed into the bed the sheets were on and instantly found oneself nude on a moonlit beach several miles away.

But once the Divine power that bestowed the miracle on these items passed—once the god died, in other words—the miraculous properties usually faded quite quickly. These items were considered “inactive”: no longer miraculous, but certainly not trustworthy.

“I don’t know which ones he looked at,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know much about those things, and I don’t want to know. All that was established back in the Kaj’s age. And nobody’s really been in it, until Pangyui.

“He understood the dangers. He was remarkably well informed about all of it. I guess he’d read and studied enough of the old stories that he already knew all about them before he walked in the door. He was careful. The ones he took out, he stored and watched safely.”

“He took some out?”

Mulaghesh shrugs. “Some. From what he described, a lot of the Warehouse is just junk, really. There are piles and piles and piles of books down there, too. That was what the professor was primarily looking for, he said. He made some careful selections, and he studied them beyond the … circumstances of the Warehouse. Which I guess were pretty oppressive.”

The safe, thinks Shara. “And do you think his murder had anything to do with the Warehouse?”

“You might think so,” says Mulaghesh. “But I doubt it. Like I said, no one knows much about the Warehouse. The bunkers it’s part of are monitored very closely. There haven’t been any disturbances. To me, there are a lot more public reasons to have killed him.”

“But a danger as significant as the Warehouse …”

“Listen, I can’t do much in Bulikov, but I can watch. And no one’s been tampering with the Warehouse. I’m sure of that. You asked for my advice, and my advice would be to look at the Restorationists.”

Shara considers it reluctantly. “And I suppose,” she says, “that it wouldn’t be possible to allow me access to this Wa—”

“No,” says Mulaghesh sharply. “It would not.”

“I know I do not have approval, but if such a thing were to go unnoti—”

“Don’t even finish that. It’s treason to suggest it.”

Shara glares at her. “I am nearly as well informed as Pangyui in such historical matters.”

“Good for you,” says Mulaghesh. “But you weren’t sent here for this. You don’t have clearance. The way to keep these things secret is to keep people from seeing them. And that includes you, Ambassador Komayd.”

Shara readjusts her glasses. She defiantly files all this in the back of her head for later perusal. “I see,” she says finally. “So. The Restorationists.”

Mulaghesh nods approvingly. “Right.”

“Do you have any sources on them?”

“Not a single one,” says Mulaghesh. “Or at least not a trustworthy one. I don’t want to wade into that mess and have them start trumpeting that I’m watching them.”

“I suppose the New Bulikov supporters could be a help.”

“To an extent. There’s one City Father who’s a big proponent, which is unusual. But he probably doesn’t want to mix too close with Saypuris like us. Collusion, you see. There are some formal opportunities, though. He throws a monthly reception for his party, calling on the supporters of the arts. Sort of a fund-raising thing—it’s an election year. He usually invites me and the chief diplomat, as a formality. So if you wanted a chance to talk to him, that’d be it.”

“What more can you tell me about him?”

“He’s old money. Family’s really established. They broke into the brick trade years back, and bricks are useful when you’re rebuilding a whole damn city. They’re political, too. A member of the Votrov family has been a City Father for, shit, sixty years or so?”

Shara, who has been nodding along with this, freezes.

She replays what she just heard, then replays it again, and again.

Oh, she thinks, I badly hope she did not say what I think she said.…

“I’m sorry,” says Shara. “But which family is it?”

“Votrov. Why?”

Shara slowly sits back in her chair. “And his name … His first name.”

“Yeah?”

“Would it happen to be Vohannes?”

Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow. “You know him?”

Shara does not answer.

The words come crashing back down on her as if it’d only been yesterday.

If you were to come with me to my home, I’d make you a princess, he’d said to her when she saw him last. And she’d answered: What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that. And the cocksure grin had melted off his face, his blue eyes crackling with brittleness like ice dunked in warm water, and she’d known then that she’d hurt him, really, genuinely hurt him, found someplace deep inside him no one knew about and burned it into ash.

Shara shuts her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, dear.”

Columns pierce the gray sky again and again, stabbing it, slashing it. It bleeds soft rain that makes the crumbling building faces glisten and sweat. Though the war that littered this city with such wounds is long over, the flesh and bones of the buildings remain broken and exposed. Desiccated children clamber across the ruin of a temple, its collapsed walls dancing with the twinkles of campfires, its cavities and caverns echoing with cries. The wretches make apish gestures to passersby and harangue them for coin, for food, for a smile, for a warm place to sleep; yet there is a glitter of metal in their sleeves, tiny blades hidden among the filthy cloth, waiting to repay any kind gesture with quick violence. The new generation of Bulikov.

Those few who see Sigrud pass say nothing: they make no plea, no threat. They watch silently until he is gone.

A crowd of women cross the street before him, shoulders hunched, humble and eyes averted, their figures buried under piles of dark wool. Their necks and shoulders and ankles are carefully obscured. The putter and squeak of cars. The stink of horseshit. Pipes protrude from buildings several stories up, sending waste raining down on sidewalks. A city too old and too established for proper plumbing. Colonnades stacked with faceless statues stare down at him, eyeless, indifferent. Squatting, thick-walled structures with twisting loggias ring with music and laughter, homes of the powerful, the wealthy, the hidden. On their balconies men in thick black coats dotted with medals and insignias glower at Sigrud, wondering, What is this doing here? How could a mountain savage be allowed into this neighborhood? Next to these bulbous mansions might be a puzzle piece of building facade, half a wall with windows empty, a wooden staircase clinging to the frames. And beyond these are winding rivers of stairs, some rounded and aged, some sharp and fresh, some wide, some terribly narrow.

Sigrud walks them all, following his marks. The man and woman flee from the university and do not lead him on an especially merry chase: they are not professionals, and are quite blind to the art of the street. They bicker loudly, then softly, then loudly again. Though Sigrud keeps his distance, he hears some of it.

The man says, This was expected. You were told this might happen. The woman answers, first softly, then louder as she gets angry:… these people showing up at my place of work! Where I spend my days, where I breakfast! Where I mopped floors for decades! Then the man: You knew there were dangers! You did! And you waver now? Do you not have faith? And the woman is silent.

Sigrud rolls his one eye. The incompetence of it all is dispiriting. He’s not even sure whether he wants to bother hiding himself anymore. His burgundy coat is rolled up and stuffed under one armpit, since this of course is a conspicuous flag, but still, a six-and-a-half-foot man would normally never lend himself well to obfuscation. But Sigrud knows that crowds are much like individual people: they have their own psychology, their own habits, their own natures. They unthinkingly assume specific structures—channels and corridors of traffic, bends around blockades—and break apart these structures in a manner that almost seems choreographed when you watch it. It’s simply a matter of placing yourself within these structures, like hovering in the still side of a school of fish as it twists and darts across the ocean floor. Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.

The couple stops at one teetering, oddly rounded apartment building. The woman, gray-faced, twitching, nods as the man whispers his final orders to her. Then she enters. From the cover of a stable, Sigrud makes careful note of the address.

“Hey!” A stableboy emerges from a side door. “Who’re you? What are you—?”

Sigrud turns and looks at the stableboy.

The boy falters. “Uh. Well …”

Sigrud turns back. The woman’s companion is starting off. Sigrud stalks out of the stable and follows.

This chase is … a little different. The man plunges ahead into a part of Bulikov that was obviously much more ravaged by the Blink, the War, and whichever other catastrophes happened to get wedged within that rocky period of world history. The number of staircases practically triples, or quadruples—it’s a little hard for Sigrud’s eye to count them. Spiral staircases rise up to halt completely in midair, some only ten feet off the ground, some twenty or thirty. There is something faintly osseous about them, resembling the rippled horns of some massive, exotic ruminant. Birds and cats have nested in the top steps of some. In one ridiculous instance, a huge basalt staircase slashes down through an entire hill, sinking a sheer forty feet into the earth in a veritable chasm that has apparently managed to undermine several small houses, whose remains totter unnervingly on the lip of the gap.

Sigrud’s quarry, thankfully, never mounts or starts down any of these truncated steps, but trots through the alleys and the streets, which are often just as schizophrenic as the stairs. Sigrud casts a bemused eye on the buildings that have seemingly been blended into other buildings, like toys shoved together by a child: what appears to be a rather stodgy law firm has one-quarter of a bathhouse sticking out of its side like some kind of unseemly growth. In some places these invasive buildings have been messily excised: a chunk of a shoe store has obviously just been tugged out from where it was previously lodged inside of a bank.

The pace of the hunt quickens. Sigrud’s quarry zags left. Sigrud follows. His quarry ducks through the crumbling remains of a large wall. Sigrud stalks through a different gap, but maintains visual contact. His quarry—who Sigrud is almost positive remains ignorant of his surveillance—sprints up a wobbly staircase to mount the roof of an old church. Sigrud—with some strategic, ginger steps—hops up after him, closing the gap.

Sigrud crests the top and peers out over the roof. He sees his quarry running toward the edge, but the man shows no sign of stopping. Not when he is thirty feet away from the edge, or twenty, or five, and then he …

Jumps.

The last thing Sigrud sees of the man is the flutter of his gray coat as he plummets to the street below, arms outstretched and fingers spread.

Sigrud frowns, climbs onto the roof, and walks to the edge.

The street is nearly forty feet below. Yet there is no body, nor any mark of one ever being there. There is nothing the man could have jumped to: all the walls near this spot are blank and sheer. It is as if he fell, and then simply …

Vanished.

Sigrud grunts. This is inconvenient.

He considers trying to scale the wall and decides this would be unwarranted. So he returns down the stairs and out to the street.

There is no one, nothing. This part of Bulikov appears powerfully deserted.

Sigrud touches each cobblestone. None of them are warm; all of them are solid.

He sighs.

Working with Shara Komayd has introduced Sigrud to many confounding events, and dozens of things wondrous and terrifying and strange. However, he has never found any of them particularly awe-inspiring or moving: he chiefly finds them to be irritating.

He turns around to start back to the embassy. But as he does, he gets the queerest feeling.

Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.