City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(127)
ANYTHING STOP
MOVING FIVE HUNDRED ARMED TROOPS TO AN URBAN AREA NOT LIKE BACKING UP A WAGON FULL OF POTATOES STOP
GHS512
CD KOMAYD TO GHS512
RESTORATIONISTS CONFIRMED TO POSSESS 30 PLUS SIX INCH CANNONS NORMALLY SUITED FOR DREADNOUGHTS STOP
TARGETS CURRENTLY UNKNOWN STOP
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PG MULAGHESH TO CES512
IF I COMPLY WILL YOU TAKE THE HEAT FOR THIS STOP
ALSO WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JAVRAT STOP
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CD KOMAYD TO GHS512
IF MILITARY REACTION IS NOT IMMEDIATE THEN LIKELIHOOD OF THERE BEING A MINISTRY TO APPLY HEAT VERY LOW STOP
LET ALONE A JAVRAT STOP
CES512
PG MULAGHESH TO CES512
WILL BEGIN MOBILIZATION IMMEDIATELY STOP
IF YOU MAKE ME START ANOTHER WAR WILL NEVER FORGIVE STOP
GHS512
CD KOMAYD TO GHS512
WAR ALREADY STARTED STOP
CES512
*
Just once I would like to get eight hours of sleep, thinks Shara. I would pay for them. Steal them. Something.
But Shara cannot sleep. She is working on a deadline—Mulaghesh’s forces will arrive in a matter of hours—but knows she is missing something. Yet she feels she is drowning in information: Efrem’s journal, the lists from the Warehouse, financial transactions, Continental history, forbidden lists, Votrov subsidiaries, possessors of loomworks—all of it dances before her eyes until she cannot hold a single thought besides, Please, just calm down, stop thinking and calm down, just stop, stop, stop. …
A tap at the door. Shara shouts, “No!”
A pause. Pitry’s voice: “Well, I think you—”
“No! No appointments. None! I told you that!”
“I know, but—”
“All meetings are off! All of them. Tell them I’m … Tell them I’m sick! Tell them I’m dying, I don’t care.”
“All right, but … but this is a little different.” He slowly enters the room. “It’s a letter.”
“Oh, Pitry …” She rubs her eyes. “Why do you do this to me? Is it from Mulaghesh?”
“No. It’s from Votrov. A boy brought it on a silver plate. And it’s … very odd.”
Shara takes the message. It reads:
IN A GAME OF TOVOS VA, ONE PLAY CAN END THE GAME, BUT IT CAN TAKE YOUR OPPONENT SOME TIME TO REALIZE IT’S ALREADY OVER.
I KNOW WHEN I’VE LOST.
COME TO THE NEW SOLDA BRIDGE, BUT PLEASE COME ALONE.
I DON’T WISH THE PRESS TO KNOW. I DON’T WISH TO HARM ALL THE GOOD I TRIED TO DO.
V.
Shara reads this several times. “He can’t be serious.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“To be honest, I’ve no earthly idea,” says Shara. Could Votrov actually be involved with the Restorationists? It seems absurd, but, if so, could calling in the military have cut their plans off at the knees? And, even more, how could he have heard?
None of this makes any sense. Either Vohannes has gone insane—something she isn’t ready to rule out yet—or she’s missing a very big piece of the puzzle.
“What are you going to do?” asks Pitry.
“Well,” she says, “if he asked me to meet him at his home, somewhere private, I’d never go. But the New Solda Bridge site is both public and terribly popular. I think he’d be mad to try something there.”
But that still doesn’t answer the question: what is she going to do? An operative takes care of their sources personally, she tells herself. And though he’s not a source, he is mine. But deep down, she does not want any other Ministry official to deal with Vo. So many insurgents and enemy agents wind up disappearing to meet horrible ends.
If someone needs to talk Vo down off of whatever ledge he’s climbed up on, she thinks, it should be me.
“If you could, Pitry, please get my coat and a bottle of tea,” says Shara. “And if I’m not back in two hours, I want you to tell Mulaghesh the moment she gets here to raid Votrov’s estate. There is something terribly strange going on with that man.”
As Pitry hurries away, Shara rereads the note. I could never really tell exactly which game I was ever playing with Vo.
But perhaps now she will find out.
*
The walk does good things for Shara’s mind: the screaming, jabbering questions fade, scraped away by each turning staircase or twisting street, until she is just another person walking along the Solda.
Just imagine, she tells herself. Behind this crumbling city is a hidden, mythic paradise, and one only has to scrape at reality with one’s fingernail to find it.
Gulls and ducks wheel and honk, chasing one another for scraps of bread.
But whatever beautiful miracles the Divinities made, she reminds herself, they might have been slaves to the Continent almost in the same way Saypur was.
A crowd of homeless fry fish in makeshift skillets on the riverbanks; one, quite obviously drunk, claims each of his fish is a piece of Urav and is met with loud calls to sit down.
Shara suddenly decides that when all this business with Wiclov and Votrov is finished—and how this will wind up, she has no idea—she’ll quit the Ministry, return to Old Bulikov, and continue Efrem’s work. Two months ago she would have thought the idea of quitting insane, but with Auntie Vinya at the wheel for what might as well be forever, Ghaladesh and all its powers are now bitter ground to her, and all her discoveries have rejuvenated her interest in the Continental past. The entirety of her Ministry career pales beside her handful of minutes in Old Bulikov, like escaping choking fumes to capture one lungful of mountain air.