City of Stairs

A MEMORY ENGRAVED

The officers’ mess hall of the Bulikov Police Department is a unique vantage point for the unfolding panic. There are windows that allow the mess hall attendees to see into the front offices, where a full-scale riot is building—composed of politicians, reporters, outraged citizens, and family members of the hostages—and one can also see back into the halls of the interview rooms, where the Bulikov police are still confused as to who exactly is a suspect, who should get to go to the hospital, and what in the world to do with Sigrud.

“This is a new experience for me,” says Shara.

“Really?” says Mulaghesh. “I would have thought you’d been arrested at least a couple of times.”

“No, no. I never get arrested. One of the perks of being a handler.”

“It must be nice. You seem very calm for someone who’s just been through an assassination attempt. How do you feel?”

Shara shrugs. The truth is she feels ridiculous, sitting here sipping tea with Mulaghesh while chaos surges around them. Their status immediately set them apart from the other rescued hostages, mostly due to Mulaghesh, whom all the police officers seem acquainted with. Mulaghesh holds a pack of ice to her eye and occasionally mutters curses about being “too shitting slow” or, alternately, “too shitting old.” She’s already sent her orders to the local outpost, and a small squad of Saypuri veterans should be here shortly to take watch over the both of them. Though Shara has not said so, she privately dreads this: one’s own security often makes it hard to penetrate that of one’s opponents. And Sigrud often provides enough security, anyway. Sigrud, however, is currently cooling off in a holding cell. The captured attacker has gone totally untouched, stuck in a tiny cell normally reserved for the most violent offenders.

An officer refreshes their teapot, which Shara promptly drains. “That’s your fourth pot,” notes Mulaghesh.

“So?”

“So, do you normally drink tea like that?”

“Only when I’m at work.”

“You seem like the type who is always at work.”

Shara shrugs mid-sip.

“If you continue at that pace, Ambassador, I would advise you familiarize yourself with a urologist.”

“How’s your eye?”

“Humiliating. But I’ve had worse.”

“It can’t be too humiliating. He did wind up the loser of your scrap, beyond a doubt.”

“There was once a day,” sighs Mulaghesh, “when I could dispatch such little cretins without bothering to breathe. No more, I suppose. What I would give”—she winces, prodding her eye—“for the vigor of youth. Though I doubt I could ever match what your man did in that house, even in my prime. Where did you find him?”

“Someplace quite bad,” says Shara simply.

Then she slowly retreats back inside herself. The susurrus of faraway shouting fades, and internally she begins to compose a list.

In Shara’s estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it: who belongs to which group, and why; where are they now, and how are we so sure, and do we have someone else in the region; and now that we have cataloged those groups, what threat level should they be categorized under; and so on, and so on, and so on.

So whenever Shara is really puzzled by something, she takes her thoughts and sorts them, threshing them out like chaff from wheat, tunneling down and through her mind as she tries to wring truth from everything she knows, a frequently endless list of annotations, qualifications, categorizations, and exceptions all collected as she interrogates herself:

Fact: I have been attacked less than one week after Efrem Pangyui.

I. I don’t know for sure if it was me they were attacking.

A. Then who?

1. Vo wants to make munitions for Saypur. So that’s ample reason to kill him there.

a. Then why not simply kill Vo when they had the chance?

They could have shot him the moment they walked in the room.

b. His deal is not official, and also not publicly known yet.

1) Doesn’t mean anything—there could always be leaks.

II. Efrem was beaten to death with a blunt instrument in his office.

These men were far more professional.

A. You think. Whoever attacked Efrem has not been captured, a mark of professionalism if ever there was one.

1. Professionalism and the incompetence of the local authorities are very different things.

B. Efrem may have been attacked in connection with the Warehouse. Neither Vo nor I has any such connection.

1. I know it exists.

a. Unlikely that that’s enough to get me killed, though.

2. All three of us are heretical to common Continental sensibilities by nature.

a. Not an efficient qualifier. What isn’t heretical to common Continental sensibilities?

Fact: Efrem Pangyui was conducting research at the Unmentionable Warehouse.

I. Does Vinya know? How could she not?

A. Efrem working for the Continent? A traitor?

1. Don’t be an idiot.

B. Why not tell me? What’s buried in there that I shouldn’t know about?

1. Probably a lot, of course

2. Would Continentals have killed him to get access to the Warehouse?

a. Mulaghesh has asserted no one has gotten into the Warehouse besides Efrem.

C. If Vinya knows about Efrem’s operation, why is she letting me stay?

1. Maybe she thinks I’m just too dense to figure this all out.

2. Is she protecting me? From what?

a. Don’t be ridiculous. I just got attacked—of course she’s not protecting me.

3. Does she want to get me killed?

a. She’s your aunt.

1) She’s minister first, aunt second.

a) Okay, then why would the minister want me dead?

2) If Vinya wanted me dead, I’d be dead, end of story.

4. Did Vinya want to get Efrem killed?

a. Seems quite likely Efrem was a Ministry operative. Why would you kill your own operative?

Fact: I have not slept in twenty-three hours.

I. I need more damn tea.

Shara sighs. “No sign of your Captain Nesrhev yet?”

“No,” says Mulaghesh. “Still not in. But it is four in the morning, and he doesn’t live nearby.”

“You know where he lives? How would you know that?”

“Don’t pretend to be such an innocent daisy, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh. “It doesn’t suit you.” Secretly, Shara smiles: Vigor of youth, indeed… “Anyway. Even though Nesrhev and I have … some history together, I’m not sure it’s enough to make him amenable to the idea of a foreign ambassador taking over an investigation as huge as this.”

“I’m not taking over,” says Shara. “They’ll have their investigation, and I’ll have mine. I just want to talk to the captured man first.”

How much simpler this would be in Qivos, she thinks. We could have just snatched him off the street and claimed he’d never been there in the first place.… She briefly reflects on how civilized countries increasingly pose an inconvenience to her, and for a moment she envies Vohannes for maintaining his idealism—however ineffective it may be.

An idea strikes Shara, and she grabs an old newspaper from another table. She flips through the pages until she finds an article with the headline CITY FATHER WICLOV OPPOSES IMMIGRANT QUARTERS. Below this is a picture of a man with a round face pinched in a stern expression, and a mountain of a beard. To Shara, he looks like the sort of man who must constantly debate whether he should yell or merely talk very loudly.

“Why are you reading about Wiclov?” asks Mulaghesh.

“You know him?”

“Everyone knows him. Man’s a shit.”

“It was suggested to me,” says Shara, “that he might have some connection to Pangyui’s murder.”

“Did Votrov tell you that?”

Shara nods.

“I would watch yourself, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh. “Votrov might just be giving you his personal shit list.”

Shara continues staring at the picture, but Mulaghesh has voiced one of her deepest concerns: I’m flying blind, she thinks. Usually I have six months or six weeks to prepare an operation, not six hours.…

She drinks more tea and chooses not to admit to Mulaghesh that she only inhales caffeine at this rate when her work is going very, very badly.

Captain Nesrhev—who is quite handsome, and at least ten years Mulaghesh’s junior—finally arrives at five-thirty in the morning. At first he is not amenable to much of anything, as is common among people awoken at such an hour; but Shara is skilled at the shell game of badges and paperwork, and after using the term “international incident” a few times, he reluctantly consents to “one hour, starting now.”

“That will do,” says Shara, who fully intends to ignore the time limit. “What’s happened to Votrov?”

“After he gave his statement, his little girlfriend bundled him up and took him home right away,” says Nesrhev. “That man, you could lead him around by the dick, if you got a good grasp on it.”

He seems to expect a chuckle, but Shara doesn’t even bother to try to pretend.

The captured man, as it turns out, is hardly more than a boy: Shara gauges him at around eighteen when she walks in. He sits up behind the big wooden table in the cell, glowering at her and rubbing his wrist, and says, “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

“Mostly to give you medical attention.” She holds the door open for the doctor, who is quite fatigued by now.

The doctor grows appalled as he examines the captured boy. “Did this child fall through a pane of glass?”

“He was struck repeatedly with a chandelier.”

The doctor grumbles and shakes his head: These people find such stupid ways to harm themselves. “Most of this is superficial, it looks like. The wrist is sprained pretty badly.”

When he is finished, the doctor bows and excuses himself. Shara sits across from the boy and puts her satchel down beside her. It is quite cold in the room: the walls here are made of thick stone, and whoever designed the building opted not to place any heating in here.

“How are you feeling?” says Shara.

The boy does not answer, content to sulk.

“I suppose I could simply be direct,” says Shara, “and ask you why you attacked me.”

His eyes flick up, hold her gaze for a moment, then flick away.

“Was that what you were sent there to do? Your colleagues did have ample opportunity.”

He blinks.

“What’s your name?”

“We don’t have names,” says the boy.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He considers answering, but is reluctant.

“Why not?”

“Because we are the silenced,” says the boy.

“What does that mean?”

“We do not have a past. We do not have a history. We do not have a country.” His words have the beat of highly rehearsed lines. “These things are denied to us. But we do not need them. We do not need these things, to know who we are.”

“And what are you?”

“We are the past come to life. We are what cannot be forgotten or ignored. A memory engraved.”

“You are Restorationists, then,” says Shara.

The boy is silent.

“Are you?”

He looks away.

“Your weapons, your dress, your car,” says Shara. “All very expensive. Money like that getting moved around, people notice. We are looking now. Who will we find? Wiclov? Ernst Wiclov?” No reaction. “He’s a well-funded supporter of the Restoration, isn’t he? His political posters tend to feature a lot of weapon-oriented imagery, I understand. Will we find him at the back end of this, child?”

The boy stares into the table.

“You do not seem to me,” says Shara, “a hardened, violent criminal. Then why act like one? Don’t you have a home to go to? This is all just unpleasant politics. I can make it stop. I can get you out.”

“I will not talk,” says the boy. “I cannot talk. I am silenced, by you and your people.”

“I’m afraid you are quite wrong there.”

“I am not wrong, woman,” says the boy. He glares at her, and as he looks away his eyes trail over her exposed neck and collarbone.

Ah. Old-fashioned, is he? “I do hope I’m not breaking any rules,” says Shara. “Will you receive some kind of punishment for being alone in a room with an unwed woman?”

“You are not a woman,” says the boy. “You have to be human first. Shallies don’t count.”

Shara smiles pleasantly. “If that’s true, then why are you so nervous?”

The boy does not answer.

Shara does not consider herself excessively attractive, but she is always willing to try anything. “I find it quite hot in here,” she says. “Don’t you? My hands sweat when I get hot.” She pulls off her gloves, finger by finger, delicately folds them, and places them on the table. “Do your hands sweat?” She reaches out to his injured hand.

He pulls away as if she’s made of fire. “Do not touch me, woman! And do not try to ply me with your … your secret femininity!”

It takes a lot of effort for Shara not to laugh. She has not heard that term spoken aloud outside of her history classes, and she’s never heard it spoken with such sincerity. “For someone who refuses to talk, you’re talking quite a bit now. But, I admit, you’re still talking less than your friend.” She pulls a file out of her satchel and consults it.

“Who?” says the boy suspiciously.

“The other one we captured,” says Shara. “He wouldn’t give us his name, either. Even though he was close to death. But he talked about many other things.” Of course, none of this is true—Sigrud very much killed all of the other attackers, except for the one who vanished—but she smiles at the boy, radiating cheer, and asks, “How does the disappearing trick work?”

The boy flinches.

“I know that’s how you get across the city,” says Shara. “Cars. People. They find some street or alley, head down it, and then poof. They’re gone. It’s quite … miraculous.”

There is a gleam of sweat next to the boy’s ears.

“He was rambling,” says Shara. “Weak from blood loss, you see. I wasn’t quite sure what was true and what wasn’t, but … I’m tempted to think almost all of it is. Which would be quite remarkable, really.”

“That … that can’t be true,” says the boy. “None of us would ever talk. Even when dying. Throw us in Slondheim, and we still wouldn’t talk.”

“I could make that happen, actually,” says Shara. “I’ve been to that prison. It’s worse than you can imagine.”

“We would never talk.”

“Yes, but if you don’t possess full control of your faculties … It’s perfectly understandable. What else will he tell us? If you tell us now, and tell it to us honestly, we’ll be lenient on you. We will make sure you get home. We can put all of this behind us. But if you don’t …”

“No,” says the boy. “No. We could never … We will be rewarded.”

“With what?”

The boy takes a breath, disturbed, and begins to chant.

“What’s that?” says Shara. She leans in to listen.

The boy is chanting, “On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies. On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies.”

“Rewarded with jail, death …,” says Shara. “So many of you died already. I saw it. I know you did, too. Are they rewarded? Did they get what they wished?”

“On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies,” says the boy, louder. “On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies.”

“Are their families rewarded? Their friends? Or do they not even have these?”

But the boy simply keeps chanting, over and over again. Shara sighs, thinks, and excuses herself from the room.

“I have need of you, soldier,” says Shara.

Sigrud cracks an eye. He is slumped in the corner of his cell. His hand is wrapped in bandages, and he has been scrubbed somewhat clean of blood. Shara can tell he is awake, though: his pipe is still smoking.

“They will be releasing you in just a short while,” she says. “I’ve managed to get all that arranged despite the … casualties. Hostages corroborate that you acted like a hero.”

Sigrud shrugs, indifferent, contemptuous.

“Right. Now. I asked you to send feelers out and look at hiring a few contractors. Did you have any luck?”

He nods.

“Good. We’ll need some thuggish assistance, if you please. When you’re released, I want you to snatch up that maid from the university. The one who worked alongside Pangyui, the one who was tailing us the other day. We should have done it immediately, but we were … occupied. Grab her, and get her to the embassy. I want to question her myself. I want your contractors to stay back and watch her apartment, and see if anyone comes or goes. I will need this done by …” She consults her watch. “… six in the evening. And you must be discreet. Assume both you and her are being watched. Understand?”

Sigrud sighs. Then he pulls a face, as if mulling over his options and realizing he really had nothing better to do tonight. “Six in the evening.”

“Good.”

“The survivor,” he asks. “Is he talking?”

“No. And I can tell he’s not the talking type.”

“Then what?”

Shara adjusts her glasses. “I’ve stalled for more time, but not nearly enough to crack him via the normal means.”

“Then what?”

“Well.” She stares off into the corner of his cell in thought. “I think I’m going to have to dose him.”

Sigrud grows much more awake. He looks at her, disbelieving. Then he smiles. “Well, then. At least you will have entertainment.”

Shara stands at the cell door, watching the captured boy through the viewing slot. She checks her watch—forty minutes. The boy shakes his head as if shaking off a chill, then takes his cup of water and sips it. Seven sips so far, thinks Shara. If only he were utterly parched …

The boy slowly droops forward more and more, as if deflating. She checks her watch again: it’s not going unusually slowly, but she wouldn’t mind if it were quicker.

“This couldn’t possibly be all that riveting,” says Mulaghesh, joining her.

“It isn’t,” says Shara.

“Mm. I’d heard our survivor wasn’t talking.”

“No. He’s a fanatic—unfortunate, but expected. I don’t think he’s the sort who’s afraid of death. He’s more worried about what happens after.”

The boy in the cell raises his head to stare into the wall. His face is awed, horrified, fascinated. He starts to tremble a little.

“What’s wrong with him?” says Mulaghesh. “Is he mad?”

“No, no. Well, maybe, considering what he did. But that’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s an … unorthodox method I picked up in Qivos. It’s useful when you’re crunched for time, though I’d prefer it if we had even more for this.… Four, five hours at least. But it’s cheap. And it’s easy. You just need a dark room, some sound effects … and a philosopher’s stone.”

“A what?”

“Don’t pretend to be such an innocent lily, Governor,” says Shara. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“You drugged him?”

“Yes. It’s a powerful hallucinogenic, and it’s actually common here, though it’s not used for recreational purposes, really. Which is understandable, as it has some history on the Continent.”

Mulaghesh is still too aghast for words.

“There are dozens of stories of people using it to communicate more closely with the Divine,” Shara continues absently. “Breaking down barriers, merging with the infinite, that kind of thing. It even amplified the performance of certain miracles: acolytes of the Divine used to ingest it before performing astounding miraculous feats. Powerful substance—but still just a drug.”

“You just walk around with that kind of thing?”

“I had Pitry run and get it from the embassy. What I usually like to do is make them feel like they’re at home, suffering a fever, with their family members nearby, or at least people claiming to be their family members, and most of the time they get so agitated they wind up telling us everything. I’m not sure if that’ll be the case here, however, as the jail cell may induce a delirium of a much more …”

The boy gasps, looks at his arm, then up at the ceiling. Then he grabs the sides of his head and sobs a little.

“… nightmarish sort.”

“Isn’t this torture?”

“No,” says Shara quietly. “I’ve seen torture. This is nowhere close. And besides, this gets somewhat accurate answers. Torture usually gets you whatever you want to hear. And people are usually much more forgiving of this method. Mostly because they’re never quite sure any of it really happened.”

“I am so happy I chose to remain a soldier,” says Mulaghesh, “and never went into your line of work. This puts a bad taste in my mouth.”

“The taste would be much worse if we did not get the information, which often saves lives.”

“And this means we shed our morals at the door?”

“Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”

“Probably true. But I’m still surprised you’d do something like this.”

“Why?”

“Well … I wasn’t in Ghaladesh during the National Party scandal. But no one needed to be, to hear all about it. Everyone talked about it. The man everyone assumed would be prime minister going down in utter flames … Not to mention the party treasurer attempting suicide—nothing more ignoble than a failed noble exit. But most of all, I remember hearing about this girl who caused it all, who rocked the boat so much.”

Shara blinks slowly. Down the hall, a conversation between three policemen grows into outraged bickering.

“Not really her fault, they said,” Mulaghesh says. “Just passionate, and very young. Twenty at most, they said. She didn’t know that there were just some corruptions you don’t try and drive out, some rocks you don’t turn over.”

A furious secretary stomps out of her office and shushes the three policemen, who cast ugly looks at one another before separating.

“She let her heart guide her,” says Mulaghesh, “rather than her head. And mistakes were made.”

Shara stares into the room at the twitching boy, who now seems torn between laughing and crying.

“I always imagined,” says Mulaghesh, “that that girl just happened to be a good sort in a rotten line of work. That’s all.”

The boy leans back and rests his head against the stone wall, staring forward with blank, glassy eyes. Shara shuts the viewing slot in the door.

Enough.

“If you will excuse me,” says Shara, and she opens the door, slips in, and shuts it behind her.

Never has she been so happy to walk into a jail cell.

The boy tries to focus on her, and asks, “Who’s there?”

Shara shushes him. “Don’t worry. It’s me. You’re fine.”

“Who? Who is it?” He licks his lips. He’s drenched with sweat by now.

“You need to relax, please. You’re in recovery now.”

“I am?”

“Yes. You had a bad fall. Don’t you remember?”

He squints as he thinks about it. “Maybe. I think I … I fell during that party.…”

“Yes. We had to put you in a cool, dark place, for you to relax. You were very agitated, but you’re going to be fine.”

“You’re sure? You’re sure I’ll be fine?”

“We’re sure. You’re at the hospital. We just have to keep you here for a little bit longer, to make sure.”

“No! No, I need to go! I have to … to …” He fumbles with his seat, trying to stand.

“What do you have to do?”

“I have to make it back to everyone.”

“To who? To your friends?”

He swallows and nods. He’s almost panting now. Shara imagines he is seeing blinding bursts of color, rippling shadows, cold fires.…

“Where would you need to go?” she asks.

He struggles with this question. “N-no … I have to … to go.”

“You can’t, I’m afraid,” she says soothingly. “We have to take care of you. But we can send word to your friends. Where are they?”

“Where?” he says, confused.

“Yes. Where are your friends?”

“They’re … they’re in another place. It’s a place from another place. I think.”

“All right. And where is this place?”

He rubs his eyes. When he looks back at her, she sees he has burst several blood vessels in them.

“Where?” she says again.

“It’s not … not like that. It’s an … older place. Where things ought to be.”

“Ought to be?”

“How things ought to be.”

“But how do you get to this place to see your friends?”

“It’s hard.” He stares at the light in the ceiling. He looks away, like the sight of it pains him. Then he says, “The world is … thread-barren. Threadbare.”

“All right?”

“It’s incomplete. The city is. It has spots where a thing was, but there’s nothing there now. It got taken away. Connective …” He furrows his brow. “… tissue. But you can still get to them. To the places. If you belong. The gold is … smudged, but it still shines. The pearl has cracked. Yet it is still the city. Still what I feel”—he taps his heart—“here.”

“Is this how people disappear?”

He starts laughing. “Disappear? What a … what a ridiculous idea.” The idea tickles him so much he almost falls out of his seat.

She tries another tactic: “Why did you come to the party tonight?”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He holds his head. “Are you sure it was tonight? It seems so long ago.…”

“It wasn’t. It was just a few hours ago.”

“But I felt years pass through my fingers,” he whispers. “Like the wind.” He reflects on it. “We came for … metal.”

“For metal?”

“Yes. We were trying to buy some, but it was too slow. We didn’t like him.… We hate him. But we had to have him.”

“Votrov?”

“Yes. Him.”

Shara nods. “And did the woman have anything to do with it?”

“Who?”

“The …” She thinks. “… the shally.”

“Oh. Oh, her.” He starts laughing again. “Do you know, we had no idea she’d be there at all?”

“I see,” says Shara quietly. “What do you need the metal for?”

“We can’t fly through the air on boats of wood,” says the boy. “That’s what they said. They’d all fall apart. Wood’s too weak.” His eyes trace the passage of something invisible through the air. “Oh, my goodness.… How beautiful.”

Shara wonders if she perhaps overdosed him. “Did you and your friends kill Dr. Pangyui?”

“Who?”

“The shally professor.”

“Shallies don’t have professors. They haven’t the minds for it.”

“The little foreign professor who was … committing blasphemy.”

“All foreigners are blasphemous. Being alive is blasphemous, for them. There is only us. We are the children of the gods. All others are people of ash and clay. For them to live and not pay us fealty is the greatest of blasphemies.” He frowns and leans forward like his stomach hurts. “Oh. Oh, dear.”

“There was a man here, studying at the university,” says Shara slowly and clearly. “You didn’t want him here. The city didn’t, I mean. There was much outcry about it.”

The boy rubs his eyes. “My head. There’s … There’s something in my head.…”

“He died, just a few days ago. Do you remember?”

He whimpers. “There’s someone in there.…” He raps the side of his head with his knuckles hard enough to make a noise. “Please … Please help me get him out.…”

“Someone attacked him at the university. They beat him to death.”

“Please. Please!”

“Tell me what you know about the professor.”

“He’s inside my head!” shrieks the boy. “He’s inside my head! He’s been jailed for so long! Let me see light, oh, let me see light!”

“Damn it,” says Shara. She walks to the cell door and places her hand on the viewing slot. “You want light?”

“Yes!” screams the boy. “By all the mercy of the gods, yes!”

“Fine.” Shara opens the slot. A trickle of light pokes through. “There,” she says. She turns back to him. “Now will you tell me—?”

The boy is gone.

Not just the boy: half the room is gone. It is like half the room is cut off by a standing wall of black water, only now in the center of it there is a little hole of yellow light, yellow like the sky before a storm.

“Oh,” says Shara.

The hole of yellow light widens. Shara feels like someone is reaching into her head with thick, massive hands, and opening a tiny door.…

Shara just has time for one thought—I thought I dosed him—before she begins to see many things.

There is a tree, old and twisted.

It stands at the top of a lonely hill. Its branches form a dark dome against the yellow sky.

There is a rock below the tree. It is dark and polished, polished so deeply it looks like it is perpetually wet.

There is a face carved into the center of the stone. Shara can just barely see it.…

Then comes a voice, booming like thunder:

WHO ARE YOU?

They all vanish—the hill, tree, and stone—and things shift.

The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.

This land is lit by an ancient fire. Yet who started it?

Below the sun is a lone, strange mountain. It rises from the earth in a straight, rigid shaft. Its top is smooth and rounded—not unlike the stone she just saw—and its sides are straight and rippled. There is something fiercely, disturbingly organic about the mountain, though it might simply be how its smooth form looks in the shuddering light of the sun.

Then the voice again:

HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?

Again, the scene vanishes.

A hillside swells before her, lit with firelight. It is night. Shadows leap about her: faces, hands, all feral, all twisted. Above her is the moon, huge and swollen like a spider’s egg. The moon appears to balance on the top of the hill, and she thinks she can make out a figure with a tricorn hat dancing before it, thrusting something up to the sky—a jug?—as if asking the moon itself to partake.

Starlings pour across the night sky in a dark, cheeping flood.

I CANNOT SEE YOU. COME CLOSER TO ME.

The darkness vanishes. She feels herself pulled away.

A road on a plain. Again, the yellow sky lit by a sun with the light of a dying torch. Besides this, there is nothing but the dusty road and the plain.

She is pulled along the road, like she is flying mere inches above the earth.

Hills swell in the distance, lumpen and yellow and barren. She is ripped toward them as if pulled by a string, and she flies up their smooth sides until she sees a crack between two of the hills, a small aperture, a stab wound, a cave.

There is something in the cave, pulling her in.

She enters. The light dies around her.

They are hollow, these hills.

No, not hills—statues.

Yet whose likeness do they mimic?

There is someone at the back of the cave. She cannot see them. She thinks she can make out a tall form, draped in gray cloth, like that of a thick robe.

She sees no face, but she feels eyes all over her.

THERE YOU ARE.

She sees no hands, but she feels like she is in someone’s grasp.

HOW DID YOU GET IN? NO, IT DOES NOT MATTER.

LET ME OUT.

She sees no movement, but she feels like the walls close in around her.

LET ME OUT. YOU MUST LET ME OUT.

A flutter of gray cloth. It grows nearer, but she still cannot see.

THEY HAD NO RIGHT. THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO DO THIS TO ME.

Shara struggles. She reaches out, tries to push away. No! No!

YOU MUST LET ME OUT.

In the darkness comes a bright flame.

It takes Shara a moment to realize she is standing in the jail cell. There is a blazing fire in the center of the cell, and the firelight on the stone walls gives the cell a primeval look, not unlike the visions she just saw. But when she hears Mulaghesh’s voice shouting, “Get out of there! Shara! What are you just standing there for? Get the hells out of there!” she realizes where she is.

There is another voice. Someone is screaming, she realizes.

Then the fire in the jail cell stands, looks at her, and reaches out.

She sees a face through the flames, blistering and cracking.

It is the boy, yet he burns as if doused in kerosene.

He opens his mouth to scream again. Shara watches as flames flood into his mouth, down his throat. She can see his tongue bubbling.

The door behind her flies open. Mulaghesh grabs her and jerks her into the hallway.

The cell door slams shut, its edges and cracks illumed with bright firelight. There is a pounding from the other side, and screaming. Policemen come running, but they are unsure what to do.

“Oh,” says Mulaghesh. “Oh, by the seas. What in the fucking world. Someone get some blankets! We need to put that man out! Come on, everyone, move!”

The pounding on the door weakens, softens. A smell pervades the air, bubbling lipids like a chandler’s shop. By the time the officers finally manage to bring blankets and a doctor, there is a dark smoke seeping through the top crack of the door.

They prepare themselves and rip the door open. Its opposite side is black, charred. Beyond is a wall of smoke, streaming plumes like black water.

“No,” says Mulaghesh. “No. Far too late. Far too late.”

A dark, crinkled shape surfaces among the sea of black. Shara moves to look, but Mulaghesh pushes her away.

Wild havoc. Hallways of people screaming and shouting, fighting to get out. Shara wishes to ask, What’s all the commotion about? but she feels too stunned and slow to ask.

She sees Saypuri soldiers fighting through the crowd to get to her, feels Mulaghesh shove her into their arms, feels herself being ripped out of the stampeding throng.

She feels these things, but they do not register. I suppose this is what shock feels like, she thinks, rather curious.

She is stuffed into a car along with Mulaghesh and two soldiers. Pitry looks back at them from the driver’s seat, alarmed. Mulaghesh tells him, “The embassy. Now.” When they pull away, an armored car bearing the polis governor’s insignia on its side coughs to life and follows closely.

“Look up,” Mulaghesh tells the soldiers. “On the rooftops. And keep an eye on the alleys.”

“What are you telling them to look for?” Shara asks softly.

“Are you insane? For any more assassins! That’s, what, twice in six hours? By the seas, I don’t even know how he did it.… He must have had a device on him, some flask with oil, or something.… I don’t know how the police missed it, unless one of them snuck it to him while he was imprisoned. Which I wouldn’t put past them.”

Shara thinks, She thinks he attacked me.

But he didn’t. I know exactly what that was.

But I only ever read about it.…

“I was turned away,” says Shara. “What did you see?”

“No, you weren’t,” says Mulaghesh. “You were looking right at him. I thought it was some kind of mind game you were playing with him. You went to the door, opened the slot so I could see in. Then you said something about light and turned around, and you both just … stared at one another.”

“For how long?”

“Hells, I don’t know. Then he just … burst into flames. I didn’t see him activate anything, push any button, light any match. He didn’t even seem to move. Whatever he used, I want to know what it was. They might use more of them.”

“And … And did you hear a voice in the room?”

“A what?”

“A voice? While we stared at one another?”

Mulaghesh takes her eyes off the street to look Shara over. “You’re in shock. You need to lie back and rest. Let me take over today. This is what I do. This is what I know. Okay?”

He spoke to me from the heart of the world.

No—he was the heart of the world.

“You don’t need,” says Shara softly, “to order your men about so.”

“Shara, just lie back—”

“No,” says Shara. “Listen. That was not a planned, coordinated attack. And it was most certainly not an assassination attempt.”

“Then what was it?”

Shara debates not telling her. Some secrets, she tells herself, can’t be borne alone.

She sits up and says to Pitry, “Pardon, Pitry, but could you pull over briefly? And when you do, could you roll up the partition back here?”

“What?” says Mulaghesh. “Why?”

“Because I’m afraid your soldiers will have to join Pitry in the front seat,” she says. “This conversation will have to be private, you see.”

The broken buildings are like savage landscapes as they speed by, gray glaciers creeping down a mountain. A pale face appears at a window; a young girl heaves out a prodigious amount of what can only be human waste. The passersby stop only briefly: not an unusual occurrence for them.

“I have read more about the history of the Continent than nearly anyone else alive in the world,” Shara says. “Before me, the only person who knew more was Efrem Pangyui. He’s now passed, of course. Which means it is only me.”

“What’s your point?” asks Mulaghesh.

“I have read of instances of spontaneous combustion on the Continent. It hasn’t happened in decades, but once, long ago, it happened occasionally. The cause of these episodes of spontaneous combustion was widely known here, back then: they were the result of Divine possession.”

“Of what?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Divine possession. A Divine being could project his or her intelligence into a mortal agent to commune with them directly—almost using them as a puppet, essentially. This was quite common among some of the lesser Divine beings—sprites, spirits, familiars, and so on.”

“All of which the Kaj killed in the Great Purge,” says Mulaghesh. “Right?”

“Presumably. But the primary Divinities could not possess a mortal agent to the same degree. Their very beings were too large, too powerful, too intense. The mortal body could not bear it. Sort of like spiritual friction, I suppose, resulting in combustion.”

Mulaghesh is silent for a long, long time. “And … you’re saying you think this is what happened.”

“I’m positive of it.”

“How so?”

“Because”—she takes a breath—“whatever possessed that boy spoke to me. To you, outside the cell, it looked like we were simply standing still. But to me, something … took me somewhere. I was there for some time. It pulled me in. It wanted to see me. And it wanted me to let it out of … wherever it was.”

“It spoke to you?”

“Yes.”

Mulaghesh swallows. “Are you … quite sure of this?”

“Yes.”

“This wasn’t a side effect of the drug you used on that boy? Maybe you absorbed it through your skin?”

“I’m sure the drug contributed, but not in the way you mean. Like I said, a philosopher’s stone was often used to commune with the Divinities. Records indicate it acted like lubrication, in a way. I believe I might have unintentionally opened that boy up for … whatever it was, to possess him.”

“Whatever it was,” echoes Mulaghesh.

“Yes.”

“But it’s … It’s not a ‘whatever it was.’ Because you sound like you know what it was.”

“Yes.”

“Because if what you’re saying is correct, then the only thing that … made people combust was …”

“Yes. A primary Divinity.”

“And … if you’re saying that was what you saw, what took control of that boy, then that would mean …”

“Yes,” says Shara. “It would mean at least one of the gods has survived.”