City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(12)
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 babysitting 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 feeling the sun but never exactly seeing it through the walls). 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 there’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 or perhaps thousands 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.