City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(129)

For I love you so.

Though sometimes I may seem absent

Know that my fire will be always be ready

For those with love in their hearts

And the willingness to share it.

—Book of the Red Lotus, Part II, 9.12–9.24





Family Ties


Shara wakes facing a blank gray wall. A trickle of air unwinds in her lungs before her body is overtaken with coughs.

“Oh ho!” says a merry voice. “Goodness! She’s awake.”

She rolls over, her brain fuzzy and hazy, and sees she’s in a barren, windowless room that is somehow familiar.

There are two doors to the room, one closed and the other open. The stranger stands at the open doorway, now dressed in a Kolkashtani wrap. He smiles at her, yet his eyes are like wet stones sitting in his skull.

“I really cannot tell,” he says, “what he could have seen in you.”

Shara blinks languidly. Chloroform, she remembers. It’ll be nearly an hour before I’m lucid. …

“You are, as far as I can see, an unremarkable little Saypuri,” he says. “You are small, dirt brown—perhaps clay brown would be a fitting term, earthy, musky, an unsightly, not at all flesh-like darkness—with the characteristic weak chin and hooked nose. Your wrists, as is common in your sort, are terribly thin and fragile, and your arms hirsute and unlovely, as is the rest of your body, I imagine—I expect you would have to shave quite frequently to even compare to the body of any woman of the Holy Lands. Your breasts are not the dangling, ponderous piles I see so often among your breed, but neither are they particularly becoming—in fact, they hardly exist at all. And your eyes, my dear … Look at those glasses. Do your eyes function at all? I wonder—what must it be like to be such a runty, unintended little creature? How sad your life must be, to be a creature of the ash lands, a person made of clay. …” He shakes his head, smiling. It is a horrible perversion of Vohannes’s smile: where Vo’s is full of boundless, eager charm, this man’s smile suggests barely contained rage. “But the true nature of your crime—the true infraction you commit, as all your kind does, is that you refuse to acknowledge it. You refuse to acknowledge your own failings—your miserable, unsightly failings! You know no shame! You do not hide your flesh and body! You do not cower at our feet! You do not recognize that you, untouched by the Divine, bereft of blessings, deprived of enlightenment, are unneeded, unintended, superfluous at worst and servile at best! Your kind holds such lofty pretenses—and that is your true sin, if creatures such as yourself are even capable of sin.”

He is so much like Vohannes, in so many ways: many of his gestures and much of his bearing are Vo’s. Yet there is something strangely more decayed and yet delicate about this man: something in the way he cocks his hips, the way he crosses his arms. … She remembers the mhovost, and its effeminate walk back and forth, mimicking someone she hadn’t yet glimpsed.

Shara swallows and asks, “Who … ?”

“If I were to break you open,” says the stranger, “on the inside, you would be empty. … A clay shell of a person, remarkable only in your semblance of self. What did you see in her, Vohannes?”

The stranger looks to the corner of the room.

Sitting on the floor in the corner, his arms wrapped around his knees, is Vohannes: his face has been horribly beaten, one eye swollen and the color of frog skin, his upper lip rusty from old blood.

“Vo … ,” whispers Shara.

“I had hoped that she would at least offer some temptation of the flesh,” says the stranger. “Then you could perhaps excuse your dalliance. But there is so little flesh on her to tempt you with. I honestly cannot identify any trait you found desirable in this creature. I really can’t, little brother.”

Shara blinks.

Brother?

She says, “V … V …”

The stranger slowly turns to her and cocks an eyebrow.

Vohannes’s voice echoes back to her: He joined up with a group of pilgrims when he was fifteen and went on a trek to the icy north to try and find some damn temple.

“V … Volka?” she says. “Volka Votrov?”

He smiles. “Ah! So. You know my name, little clay child.”

She tries to corral her drunken thoughts. “I … I thought you were dead. …”

He shakes his head, beaming. “Death,” he says, “is for the weak.”

*

“ ‘For those who wish to know me,’ ” quotes Volka, “ ‘for those who wish to be seen by my eye, and to be loved, there can be no pain too great, no trial too terrible, no punishment too small for you to pass through. For you are my children, and you must suffer to be great.’ ”

Volka smiles indulgently at Vohannes, but it’s Shara who speaks up: “The Kolkashtava.”

Volka’s smile dims, and he watches her coldly.

“Book Two, I believe,” says Shara. “His writs to Saint Mornvieva, upon why Mornvieva’s nephew was crushed in an avalanche.”

“And Mornvieva was so shamed,” says Volka, “that he had asked Father Kolkan why this had happened, and questioned him in such a manner—”

“—that he struck off his own right hand,” says Shara, “and his right foot, blinded his right eye, and removed his right testicle.”