City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(121)

Shara sighs. “Well. Anything for the job, I suppose. Now … Hm. Yes. Here.” She feels something hard in the collar of the wrap, turns the collar inside out, and pulls apart the wool strands. It’s a small copper necklace engraved with the symbol of Kolkan. She feels the rest of the clothing and finds lumps in the wrists, the ankles, the waist … all of them trinkets and jewelry bearing Kolkan’s scale.

She laughs. “Yes,” she says. “Finally! It’s what I expected! They’re not coins, per se, but they definitely have similar sigils and markings. This is a breakthrough! It was so obvious! I don’t know why I didn’t …” She looks up at Sigrud, grinning, but she sees he’s dolefully watching her. “What’s wrong?”

“I am wondering … how to tell you something,” he says.

“How to tell me something? Plainly and quickly, I would hope.”

He rubs his chin. “Well. The loomworks … the ones you have had me watching …”

“Yes?”

“For a long while, it has been business as usual. Just … Wool. Thread. Workers. Rugs. Boring.”

“Yes, and?”

“But today, and yesterday, at two of the loomworks … I saw someone. The same person at both places. Visiting.”

Shara slowly lowers the wrap. “Who?”

Sigrud rubs his chin a little harder. “Votrov.”

“What?”

“I know.”

Shara stares at him. “Vohannes Votrov is visiting these loomworks?”

He nods, wincing. “Yes.”

“But … why would he do that?”

“I have no idea. But I saw him. Vohannes Votrov himself. It was a very … secretive visit. He was trying to sneak in the back way. But I caught him. I thought, ‘Maybe he wants to buy these loomworks,’ you know, maybe to rub salt in Wiclov’s wounds, but no, I checked—all are owned by Wiclov, and so far there is no record of anyone trying to change that. That is why I was late.”

“You’re … You’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Vohannes Votrov. As plain as day. He did not look well, though. He looked quite sickly. And not at all happy. He looked, I thought, like a dying man. He wasn’t even dressed the same. He was dressed like a sad little monk.”

This confuses Shara so much that she stops thinking about the alley entirely. “Are you suggesting that Vohannes Votrov is acting like he’s complicit with the Restorationists?”

Sigrud raises his hands as if defending himself. “I am telling you what I saw. He snuck into a factory owned by Wiclov, did business, then moved on to the next factory. The people there seemed to recognize him. Were I to guess, those were far from his first visits.”

“Then why … ? Why would he tell us about the loomworks, and make us suspicious of them, if he’s doing … whatever it is he’s doing there himself?”

Sigrud shrugged. “He looked sick. I think he is a sick man, frankly.”

And with those words, he cuts straight to the heart of a suspicion Shara has harbored for a while: that Vohannes Votrov is not himself. His actions are too inexplicable. Why would he leak her identity? Why would he, having now gotten exactly what he wanted out of the Saypuri government, not talk to her, now the figurehead of Saypur’s presence in Bulikov? Why would he, a man whose whole life was marred and damaged by his Kolkashtani upbringing, mutter lines from the Kolkashtava in the drunken depths of sleep?

The only answer is that Vohannes, a man already divided, is even more divided than she imagined. Perhaps divided enough that he is unwell, that he does not truly know what he is doing.

“There’s nothing we can do about that here,” says Shara finally. “We … We have to soldier on.”

“Fine,” says Sigrud. “Then what were you saying?”

Shara tries to refocus. “These wraps: they’re seeded with tiny charms. Little medallions and bracelets and pieces of metal bearing the mark of Kolkan—just like the coins were, in a way. So these wraps, whenever they encounter that space in the alley, will evoke a reaction of some kind, just like the coins.”

“Meaning …”

“Meaning …” Shara wads up the wrap until it’s a tight ball, turns, and throws it toward the chalked line in the alley.

Yet it never crosses.

Sigrud blinks.

The ball of gray cloth is gone.

“Good,” says Shara. “To be completely honest, I was not entirely sure that would work.”

“What … ?”

“I do feel a bit bad, I suppose—I hope you have more than one or two of those. …”

“What just … ? What just happened?”

“I think I was right,” says Shara. “This alley is damaged by the Blink in a very deep way. Not just the alley. Reality.” She brushes off her hands and turns to face the chalk line. “That is the first spot of reality static witnessed since the end of the Great War.”

*

“After the War, after the Divinities were killed, it took a long time for reality to figure out what it was supposed to be,” says Shara. “In one city, one tenet was absolutely and completely true; then, in another, the opposite. When the Divinities were killed, these two areas had to reconcile with one another and decide what their true state was. While that was getting resolved, you had—”