City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(128)

And, secretly, she looks forward to the wicked glee of performing another miracle. She wonders what other miracles will work in Old Bulikov: could one walk through walls, or summon food from the sky or earth, or even fly, or …

Or even …

Shara slows to a stop.

Two gulls dip and snap at another in midair for a peel of a potato.

“Fly,” she whispers.

She remembers an entry in the list from the Unmentionable Warehouse:

Kolkan’s carpet: Small rug that MOST DEFINITELY possesses the ability to fly. VERY difficult to control. Records indicate Kolkan blessed each thread of the rug with the miracle of flight, so theoretically each thread could lift several tons into the air.

A carpet, with every thread blessed.

A loomworks that could take the carpet apart with great ease.

And a small armada of steel ships in the hills, with no ocean.

The boy in the police cell, whispering, We can’t fly through the air on ships of wood.

Perhaps they wouldn’t need the ocean at all.

“Oh, my goodness,” whispers Shara.

*

Sigrud lifts his head when he hears the clanking. He turns his attention from the roads in and out of the valley to the six ships still marooned on the ground. The sails are being raised on the masts, and something is being extended from their port and starboard sides.

The sails being raised on the steel masts are unusual: Sigrud has seen many types of sails, but these look to be made for unbelievably brutal winds. But the objects being extended on the sides of each ship are something he has never, ever seen before in his life. These adornments are long, wide, and thin, with many pivoting parts to them. They remind Sigrud of fins on a fish, and if he didn’t know any better he’d suspect they were …

“Wings,” he says quietly.

He watches the men ready the ships.

Don’t do something, Shara said, unless they do something.

This definitely counts as something.

He checks that his knife is still in its sheath and begins to creep down the hill.

*

The New Solda Bridge is a tangle of scaffolding and framing. Huge cement plinths are being laid in the cold waters, guided into place by Saypuri cranes and Saypuri engineers. Continentals watch from the banks or the roofs of homes, grudgingly awed by this show of force.

Shara’s brain is still rattling with her last realization: You can build the ships anywhere, moor them anywhere, and no one could ever, ever be prepared for an assault from the sky.

Yet another niggling question comes worming out of her mind: But if Vohannes is behind it, why would the Restorationists attack his house?

She sees she’ll have the chance to ask him: he sits on a park bench just ahead, legs dandily crossed, hands in his lap as he stares down the river walk, away from her. He is not wearing his usual flamboyant clothing: he has returned, Shara sees, to the dark brown coat and black shirt buttoned up to the neck, like he was the night of Urav.

She remembers Sigrud saying, He wasn’t even dressed the same He was dressed like a sad little monk.

She surveys the crowd. Vohannes is very much alone. Yet he seems to see her and look away, so she can only see the back of his head. …

“What’s the matter with you, Vo?” she asks as she nears. “Are you sick? Are you insane? Or have you really been working at this all along?”

He turns to her and smiles. She sees he carries no cane. “The latter, I’m quite happy to say,” he says cheerily.

Shara freezes, and immediately sees why he kept his face turned from her until now.

It’s the same as the face she knows, almost: the same strong, square jaw, the same glittering smile. But this man’s eyes are darker, and they are sunken deep in the back of his head.

Shara doesn’t wait: she turns and runs.

Someone—a rather short, nonthreatening young man—ambles by, sticks his leg out, and trips her. She crashes to the ground.

The stranger stands and walks toward her with a pleasant air. “I did wonder if you’d come,” he says, “but I guessed the line about Tovos Va would seal it. After all, I taught that game to him. How pleasant to see that it worked!”

She starts to stand back up. The stranger gestures to her and mutters something. There is a sound like a whip crack. She looks down and realizes she is now totally transparent: she can see the stone cobbles through her legs, or rather where her legs should be.

Parnesi’s Cupboard, thinks Shara, right before someone behind her clamps a rag over her mouth: her nostrils fill with fumes, her eyes film over, and suddenly it’s very hard to stand.

She falls back into their arms: two men, maybe three. The stranger—Vohannes, yet not Vohannes—wipes his nose. “Very good,” he says. “Come along.”

They carry her down the river walk. The fumes force their way deeper into her brain. She thinks, Why isn’t someone helping me? But the bystanders merely watch them curiously, wondering why these men appear to be miming carrying something heavy between them.

She gives up; the fumes coil around her; she sleeps.





Across the snowy hills

Down a frozen river

Through the copse of trees

I will wait for you.

I will always wait for you there.

My fire will be burning

A light in the cold

A light for you and me