City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(124)

He looks at her as if to say, Did you really just ask that?

Shara debates splitting up, but decides against it. If we get lost in here, how will we ever get out? “We’ll follow the trail where they went,” she says. “And if we have time, we’ll examine where they came from.”

They stalk along white streetways, through courtyards, around gardens. The silence gnaws on Shara’s sense of ease until she mistakes every glimmer for a lowering bolt-shot.

All the Continentals conspire against us. I should have never allowed Vohannes into my bed.

“Why do you not dance?” asks Sigrud.

“What? Dance?”

“I would think,” he explains, “that you would be dancing to see Old Bulikov. Running back and forth, trying to sketch things …”

“Like Efrem did.” She considers it. “I do wish to. I would gladly spend the rest of my life here, if I could. But here, in Bulikov, every piece of history feels lined with razors, and the closer I try and look at it, the more I wound myself.”

A curving house, designed to resemble a volcano, perches over a babbling brook of white stones.

“I do not think that is history’s nature,” says Sigrud.

“Oh? Then what is it?”

“That,” he says, “is the nature of life.”

“You believe so? A depressing perspective, I feel.”

“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties,” says Sigrud. He stares into the sky, and the white sunlight glints off of his many scars. “They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”

Shara nods. “I suppose that’s true.”

“We think we move, we run, we push forward, but, I think, in many ways we are still running in place, trapped in a moment that happened to us long ago.”

“Then what are we to do?”

He shrugs. “We must learn to live with it.”

The wind pulls a tiny dust devil to its feet and sends it tottering along a white stone lane.

“Does this place make you contemplative?” asks Shara.

“No,” he says. “This is something I think I have believed for a long time.”

A bulging crystal window at the top of a rounded house captures the blue sky, stretches it, and makes a perfect azure bubble.

“You are not,” says Shara, “the man I freed from prison.”

He shrugs again. “Maybe not.”

“You are wiser than he was. You are wiser than I am, I feel. Do you ever think about going home?”

Sigrud briefly halts on his trail; his eye dances over the cream-white cobblestones; then, “No.”

“No? Never?”

“They do not know me anymore. It was a long time ago. They are different people now. Like I am. And they would not wish to see this thing I am.”

They follow the trail for a few moments of silence.

“I think you’re wrong,” says Shara.

Sigrud says, “Think what you like.”

*

The trail leads on and on and on. “Of course, they couldn’t bring cars, could they?” Shara muses aloud. “The reality static wouldn’t allow them through, being so modern.”

“I would have preferred if they could have brought a horse or two.”

“And they would simply leave them here for us? We should be so luck—” Shara stops and stares at a tall, rounded building on her left.

“What?” asks Sigrud

Shara’s eyes study the walls, which have windows in the pattern of eight-pointed stars, filled with bright violet glass.

“What now?” asks Sigrud.

Shara’s eyes study the facade: at its top is an abridged quote from the Jukoshtava:

those who come upon a choice, a chance, and tremble and fear—why should i allow them in my shadow?

“I have read about this place,” murmurs Shara.

“I expect you have read about every place in this city.”

“No! No, I read about this place just … just recently.”

She walks forward and touches the white walls. She remembers the line from Efrem’s journal, quoting the letters of a Saypuri soldier about the death of Jukov: We followed the Kaj to a place in the city—a temple of white and silver, its walls patterned like the stars with purple glass. I could not see the god in the temple, and worried it was a trap, but our general did not worry, and loaded his black lead within his hand-cannon, and entered.

Shara feels numb. She approaches the door of the temple—white-painted wood, carved in a pattern of stars and fur—and pushes it open.

The door opens on a large empty courtyard. The walls are high and frame a piercing bright blue sky above. In the center of the courtyard is a dry fountain, around which are four small benches.

Shara slowly walks to the benches. These she also touches, as if to confirm they are really there.

Is this, she thinks, where a god once sat?

And did my great-grandfather sit next to him, or stand over him?

She slowly sits on the bench. The wood softly creaks.

Could this really be the place where Jukov himself died? Could I have found it?

She believes so. It seems unreal to see this place, trapped in a fragment of reality long since faded from the real world: but she knows it is perfectly possible. The period after the Blink was chaotic, with pieces of reality flashing into existence, then away. …