City of Stairs Read online

  “No, and I don’t want them to. I want them worried. I want them to wonder if I am what I actually am.” She goes to the window and stares out at the smoke-smeared night sky. “If you stir up a hornet’s nest, all the hornets might come out and chase you, that’s true—but at least then you can get a good, proper look at them.”

  “If you really wanted to stir them up,” he says, “you could just use your real name.”

  “I want to stir them up, yes, but I don’t want to die.”

  Sigrud smiles wickedly and returns to the scrap of canvas in his hands.

  “What are you looking at?” she asks.

  He turns the scrap of canvas around for her to see. It is the piece of the painting with the Kaj on it, standing in profile, his stern, patrician face lit by the burst of light from his weaponry.

  Sigrud turns it back around and holds it up so that Shara’s face and the tiny painted face of the Kaj appear side by side from his perspective.

  Sigrud says, “I can definitely see the family resemblance.”

  “Oh, be quiet,” snaps Shara. “And put that away!”

  Sigrud smiles, wads up the canvas, and tosses it in a trash can.

  “All right,” Shara says. She drinks the second cup of tea, and her body rejoices. “I suppose we ought to move along, then. Please fetch Pitry for me.” Then, softer: “We have a body to examine.”

  * * *

  The room is small, hot, bare, and unventilated. Decay has not yet set in, so the tiny room is mercifully bereft of scent. Shara stares at the thing sitting on the cot, one of its small, slender legs dangling over the side. It’s as if he simply lay down for a nap.

  She does not see her hero. Not the gentle little man she met. She sees only curled and crusted flesh with the barest hint of a human visage. It is connected, of course, to something quite familiar: the birdy little neck, the linen suit, the long, elegant arms and fingers, and, yes, his ridiculous colored socks.… But it is not Efrem Pangyui. It cannot be.

  She touches the lapels of his coat. They have been shredded like ribbons. “What happened to his clothes?”

  Pitry, Sigrud, and the vault guard lean in to look. “Sorry?” asks the vault guard. Since the embassy has no funerary facilities, the mortal coil of Dr. Efrem Pangyui has been stored in the embassy vault on a cot, like a precious heirloom waiting for the red tape to clear so it can return home. Which it is, a bit, thinks Shara.

  “Look at his clothes,” she says. “All the seams and cuffs have been slit. Even the pant cuffs. Everything.”

  “So?”

  “Did you receive the body in this state?”

  The guard favors the body with a leery eye. “Well, we didn’t do that.”

  “So would you say it was the Bulikov police?”

  “I guess? I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t quite know.”

  Shara is still. She has seen this before, of course, and even performed this procedure herself, once or twice—the more clothing one wears, with more pockets and linings and cuffs, the more places to hide highly sensitive material.

  Which begs the question, she thinks, why would anyone think a historian on a diplomatic mission would have something to hide?

  “You can go,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You can leave us.”

  “Well … You’re in the vault, ma’am. I can’t just leave you in the—”

  Shara looks up at him. Perhaps it is the fatigue from the trip or the grief now trickling into her face, or perhaps it is the generations of command reverberating through her bloodline, but the guard coughs, scratches his head, and finds something to busy himself with in the hall.

  Pitry moves to follow, but she says, “No, Pitry—not you. Please stay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’d like to have some embassy input, however limited.” She looks to Sigrud. “What do you think?”

  Sigrud bends over the tiny body. He examines the skull quite carefully, like a painter trying to identify a forgery. To Pitry’s evident disgust, he lifts one flap of skin and examines the indentations on the bone underneath. “Tool,” he says. “Wrench, probably. Something with teeth.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He nods.

  “So nothing useful there?”

  He shrugs. Maybe—maybe not. “Was first hit on the front.” He points to just above what was once the professor’s left eyebrow. “The marks are deep there. Others … not so deep.”

  Any tool, thinks Shara. Any weapon. Anybody could have done this.

  Shara keeps looking at the body. She tells herself for the second time this night, Ignore the ornamentations. But it is the ruined visage of her hero, his hands and neck and shirt and tie—can she dismiss all these familiar sights as mere ornamentation?

  Wait a minute. A tie?

  “Pitry—did you see the professor much during his time here?” she asks.

  “I saw him, yes, but we weren’t friends.”

  “Then you don’t remember,” she asks softly, “if he developed the habit of wearing a tie?”

  “A tie? I don’t know, ma’am.”

  Shara reaches over and plucks up the tie. It is striped, red and creamy white, made of exquisite silk. A northern affectation, and a recent one. “The Efrem Pangyui I knew,” she says, “always preferred scarves. It’s a very academic look, I understand—scarves, usually orange or pink or red. School colors. But one thing I don’t ever recall him wearing is a tie. Do you know much about ties, Pitry?”

  “A little, I suppose. They’re common here.”

  “Yes. And not at all at home. And wouldn’t you say that this tie is of an unusually fine make?” She turns it over to show him. “Very fine, and very … thin?”

  “Ahm. Yes?”

  Without taking her eyes off the tie, she holds an open hand out to Sigrud. “Knife, please.”

  Instantly there is a tiny fragment of glittering metal—a scalpel of some kind—in the big man’s hand. He hands it to Shara. She pushes her glasses up on her nose and leans in low over his body. The faint smell of putrefaction comes leaking up out of his shirt. She tries to ignore it—another unpleasant ornamentation.

  She looks closely at the white silk. No, he wouldn’t do it with white, she thinks. It’d be too noticeable.…

  She spots a line of incredibly fine red threads going against the grain. She nicks each one with the scalpel. The threads form a little window to the inside of the tie, which she sees is like a pocket.

  There is a strip of white cloth inside. Not the cloth of the tie—something else. She slides it out and holds it up to the light.

  There are writings on one side of the white cloth done in charcoal—a code of some kind.

  “They would have never thought to look in the tie,” she says softly. “Not if it was an especially nice tie. They wouldn’t have expected that from a Saypuri, would they? And he would have known that.”

  Pitry stares at the gutted tie. “Wherever did he learn a trick like that?”

  Shara hands the scalpel back to Sigrud. “That,” she says, “is a very good question.”

  * * *

  Dawn light crawls through her office window, creeping across the bare desk and the rug, which is riddled with indentations from the furniture she had them remove. She goes to the window. It is so strange: the city walls should prevent any light from entering the city unless the sun is directly above, yet she can see the sun cresting the horizon, though it is rendered somewhat foggy by the strange transparency of the walls …

  What was the man’s name, Shara thinks, who wrote about this? She snaps her fingers, trying to remember. “Vochek,” she says. “Anton Vochek. That’s right.” A professor at Bulikov University. He’d theorized, however many dozens of years ago, that the fact that the Miracle of the Walls still functioned—one of Bulikov’s oldest and most famous miraculous characteristics—was proof that one or several of the original Divinities still existed in some manner. Such an open violation of the WR meant
he had to go into hiding immediately, but regardless the Continental populace did not much appreciate his theory: for if any of the Divinities still existed, where were they, and why did they not help their people?

  This is the problem with the miraculous, she recalls Efrem saying. It is so matter-of-fact. What it says it does, it does.

  It seems like only yesterday when she last spoke to him, when actually it was just over a year ago. When he first arrived on the Continent, Shara trained Efrem Pangyui in very basic tradecraft: simple things like exfiltration, evasion, how to work the various labyrinthine offices of authorities, and, though she thought it’d be unlikely he’d ever use it, the creation and maintenance of dead drop sites. Mostly just safety precautions, for no place on the Continent is completely safe for Saypuris. As the most experienced active Continental operative, Shara was ridiculously overqualified for what any operative would normally consider baby-sitting duty, but she fought for the job, because there was no Saypuri she revered and respected more than Efrem Pangyui, reformist, lecturer, and vaunted historian. He was the man who had single-handedly changed Saypur’s concept of the past, the man who had resurrected the entire Saypuri judicial system, the man who had pried Saypuri schools from the hands of the wealthy and brought education to the slums.… It had been so strange to have this great man sitting across the table from her in Ahanashtan, nodding patiently as she explained (hoping she did not sound too awed) that when a Bulikovian border agent asks for your papers, what they’re really asking for are twenty-drekel notes. A surreal experience, to be sure, but one of Shara’s most treasured memories.

  She sent him off, wondering whether they’d ever meet again. And just yesterday she caught a telegram floating across her desk reporting he’d been found dead—no, not just dead, murdered. That was shock enough for Shara, but now to find secret messages sewed into his clothing, tradecraft she certainly didn’t teach him …

  I suddenly doubt, she thinks, if his mission was truly one of historical understanding after all.

  She rubs her eyes. Her back is stiff from the train ride. But she looks at the time, and thinks.

  Nearly eight in the morning in Saypur.

  Shara does not wish to do this—she is too tired, too weak—but if she doesn’t do it now, she’ll pay for it later. So many simple oversights, like failing to communicate a jaunt to Bulikov, can be mistaken for treachery.

  She opens the door to her new office and confirms there is no one outside. She shuts the door, locks it. She goes to the window and closes the shutters on the outside (which is a relief—she is tired of the queer, murky sight of the sun). Then she slides the window shut.

  She sniffs, wriggles her fingers. Then she licks the tip of her index and begins writing on the top pane of glass in the window.

  Shara often does illegal things in her trade. But it’s one thing to violate a country’s law when you’re actively working against that country, and it’s another to do what Shara is doing right now, which is so horrendously dreaded in Saypur and so fervently outlawed and regulated and monitored on the Continent, the birthplace of this particular act.

  Because right now, in CD Troonyi’s office, Shara is about to perform a miracle.

  As always, the change is quite imperceptible: there is a shift in the air, a coolness on the skin, as if someone has cracked a door somewhere; as she writes, the tip of her finger begins to feel that the glass’s surface is softer and softer, until it is like she is writing on water.

  The glass changes: it mists over, frost creeping across the pane; then the frost recedes, but the window no longer shows the shutter on the outside, as it should. Instead, it is like it’s a hole in a wall, and on the other side is an office with a big teak desk, at which is a tall, handsome woman reading a thick file.

  How odd it feels, thinks Shara, to literally change the world.…

  Shara likes to think she is above such sentiments, though it does irk her that Saypur’s considerable technological advances still have yet to catch up to most of the Divine tricks. The Divinity Olvos originally created this little miracle hundreds of years ago, specifically so she could look into one frozen lake and see and communicate out of a different frozen lake of her choosing miles away. Shara has never been quite sure why the miracle works on glass: the generally accepted theory is that the original Continental term for “glass” was very similar to “ice,” so the miracle unintentionally overlaps—though the Divine were fond of using glass for many strange purposes, storing items and even people within a hair’s breadth of glass like a sunbeam caught in a crystal.

  The woman in the glass looks up. The perspective is a little peculiar: it is like peering through a porthole. But what is really on the other side of the glass, Shara knows, is the shutter on the embassy window, and after that a one-hundred-foot drop. It is all a play of images and sound: somewhere in Ghaladesh, across the South Seas in Saypur, a single pane of glass in this woman’s office is showing Shara herself, staring out from Troonyi’s rooms.

  The woman appears quite startled, and her mouth moves. A voice accompanies the movement of her lips, yet it is soft and tinny like it is echoing up a drainpipe: “Oh! Oh.”

  “You look like you expected someone else,” says Shara.

  “No. I wondered if you’d call, but I didn’t expect the emergency line.” Despite the distortion, her voice is quite low and husky, the voice of a chain-smoker.

  “You’d prefer I didn’t use the emergency line?”

  “You so rarely use the tools I give you,” says the woman, and she stands and walks over, “for the purposes for which they are intended.”

  “It is true that this is not … quite an emergency,” says Shara. “I wanted to let you know that I have … I have picked up an operation in Bulikov.”

  The woman in the glass smiles. Despite her mature age, she is quite striking: her coal-black hair falls in thick locks about her shoulders, the front forelock shot through with a streak of gray, and though she is at an age when most women begin to abandon any attempt at a fetching figure, she still retains nearly every curve, many more than Shara could ever aspire to. But Auntie Vinya’s allure, Shara feels, has always gone beyond her beauty: it is something in her eyes, which are both wide and widely set, and deep brown. It is like Auntie Vinya is always half remembering a long life most people would have killed to lead.

  “Not an operation,” says Vinya. “An outright diplomatic mission.”

  Shara sighs inwardly. “What tipped you off?”

  “The Thivani identity,” says Vinya. “You’ve been sitting on it for years. I tend to notice things like that. When someone, how shall I say, walks by the buffet and tucks a biscuit or two in their sleeve. Then suddenly the name gets activated the very night we hear about poor Efrem.… There’s only one thing you could be doing, couldn’t you?”

  This was a mistake, thinks Shara. I should not have done this when I’m so tired.

  “Shara, what are you doing?” says Vinya gently. “You know I never would have approved this.”

  “Why not? I was the closest agent, and the most qualified.”

  “You are not the most qualified, because you were personally connected to Efrem. You are better used elsewhere. And you should have sent in a request first.”

  “You might wish to check your mail,” says Shara.

  A shadow of irritation crosses Vinya’s face. She walks to the mail slot in her door, flips through the waiting bundle, and takes out a small slip of paper. “Four hours ago,” she says. “Very timely.”

  “Quite. So,” says Shara, “I’ve made all the official overtures. I have violated no rules. I am the highest-ranking agent. And I am an expert in this field. No one knows more about Bulikov’s history than me.”

  “Oh yes,” says Vinya. She walks back to look into the glass. “You are our most experienced agent in Continental history. I doubt if anyone in the world knows more about their dead gods than you, now that Efrem’s gone.”

  Shara looks away.
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  “I’m … sorry,” says Vinya. “That was insensitive of me. You must understand.… It’s often a little hard for me to keep a common compassion, even in this case.”

  “I know,” says Shara. It has been a little over seven years since Auntie Vinya assumed the role of Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was always the powerhouse of the Ministry, the officer whom all the decisions wound up going through one way or another; eventually it just became a matter of making it formal. In the time since her elevation, the boundaries of the Ministry have both grown, and grown permeable: it spills over into commerce, into industry, into political parties and environmental management. And now whenever Shara gets close to Saypur—which is very rare—she hears whispers that Vinya Komayd, matriarch of the eminent Komayd family and one of the most high muck-a-mucks in Ghaladesh, is eyeing the next-highest seat, that of prime minister. It is an idea that both unnerves and thrills Shara: perhaps if her aunt occupied the highest office in Saypur, in the world, she could finally come home.… But what sort of home would she return to?

  “If it had not been you who trained Efrem,” says Vinya, “if you had not been the one to volunteer to put him through his paces, to spend so much time with him … you know I’d use you in a second, my love. But case officers are never allowed to react to the death of one of their operatives; you know that.”

  “I was not his case operative. I only trained him.”

  “True, but you have to admit, you do have a history of reckless conviction, especially with personal matters.”

  Shara sighs. “I honestly can’t even believe we’re still talking about that.”

  “I am, even if you’re not here to listen to it. It gets brought up in all the political circles whenever I try for funding.”

  “It was seventeen years ago!”

  “Sixteen, actually. I know. Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.”

  “Have I ever in my history abroad caused even a whisper of a scandal? You know me, Auntie. I am quite good at what I do.”

  “I will not deny that you’ve been a blessing to my work, darling, no.” Then Vinya sighs, and thinks.