City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(141)

“Very good,” says Shara. “You ought to do this for a living.”

“Funny,” says Mulaghesh. She peers through the gates. “Those things know we’re here. It looks like they break off about a dozen for each building, and we’re about to get our fair share. Are you ready?”

Shara hesitates. “This is five times the dosage I gave the boy in the jail.”

“And?”

“So I have absolutely no idea if potency correlates with quantity.”

“And?”

“So I mean that even if this does work, there is a very good chance I may overdose, and die.”

Mulaghesh shrugs. “Yeah, probably. Welcome to war. Let’s see if you can do something before you actually die, though, okay?”

“How can you … ? How can you be so calm about this?”

Mulaghesh watches the advancing armored soldiers. “It’s like swimming,” she says. “You think you’ve forgotten how to do it, but then you jump in, and suddenly it’s like you never stopped doing it at all. If you’re going to do it, Chief Diplomat”—she points at the pills in Shara’s hand—“do it. Because we’re about to find out if our guns are worth a damn against those things.”

*

The armored soldiers line up and begin to march toward the embassy with metronomic precision. Teeth-rattling clanks echo across the streets and over the walls. Mulaghesh mounts the foremost gun battery and shouts, “Focus on the one on the right!” The repeat shooters slowly swivel to aim at the rightmost armored soldier, who does not react at all.

Mulaghesh waits for the armored soldiers to come in range, then drops her hand and bellows, “Fire!”

The repeat shooters do not sound at all like cannons, Shara finds, but rather like huge saws in a sawmill. Rainbows of bronze casings tumble over the edge of the gun batteries and tinkle on the embassy courtyard. Shara watches, hoping the armored soldier will simply explode: rather, the soldier slows down, small holes and dents appearing in its breastplate and face and legs. It makes a sound like a kitchen cabinet overflowing with an endless stream of pots and pans.

The repeat shooters maintain the stream of bullets; the armored soldier begins wobbling on its ragged legs; after nearly a full half minute of shooting, the soldier falls over. Instantly, a flock of brown starlings come fluttering out of the many gaps in the armor, which falls apart as if it had been held together by strings. Brown starlings, thinks Shara, surprised. But that’s one of Jukov’s tricks. The soldier behind it implacably steps over the tattered armor, as if the death of its comrade means nothing.

Mulaghesh looks back at Shara and grimly shakes her head: No good. “Keep firing!” she shouts to her men, and they pour a stream of fire into the advancing soldiers, which slows them but does not come close to stopping them.

Ten of them, thinks Shara. It’ll take five whole minutes to kill them all.

The soldiers are a hundred yards away now. Their feet clank and rattle with each step.

“Do it, Shara!” shouts Mulaghesh. “We can’t hold them off!”

Shara looks down at the tiny white pills in her hand.

Seventy yards.

“Do it!”

I damn my fate, thinks Shara, with all my heart.

She stuffs the pills in her mouth and swallows.

*

Shara waits. Nothing happens.

The armored soldiers are fifty yards away.

“Oh dear,” says Shara. “Oh, no. It’s not working at all! It’s not—”

Shara gags. Then she jerks forward slightly, gripping her stomach, and touches her mouth.

“I don’t feel …” She swallows. “Mm, I don’t feel exactly …”

She falls to her knees, coughs, and begins to vomit, but what she vomits is rivers and rivers of white snow, as if inside of her is a frozen mountain sloughing off an avalanche, and it all comes pouring out of her mouth, complete with stones and sticks and flecks of dark mud.

One of the soldiers turns away in disgust. “By the seas …”

The world ripples around her. Color bursts in the corners of her eyes. The sky is parchment; the earth is tar; the white skyscrapers of Bulikov burn as if lit by torches.

Ohmygoodnessohmygoodnessohmygoodness …

Her skin is fire and ice. Her eyes burn in their sockets. Her tongue is too big for her mouth. She screams for five seconds before getting control of herself.

“Ambassador?” says Mulaghesh. “Are you all right?”

These are just the psychedelic effects, she tries to tell herself.

Words appear written in the stones before her: these are just the psychedelic effects.

Shara says, “What a curious drug this is,” but the words come from tiny mouths that have appeared on the backs of her hands. “How marvelous!”

“If you’re going to do something”—Mulaghesh’s screamed words make coils of fire in the air—“then do it now!”

Shara looks up at the advancing soldiers. She counts them and shouts, “Nine!” for reasons that immediately escape her. She immediately sees that they are walking tangles of many complicated miracles, but inside there are real human beings, people who have been forcefully conscripted into Kolkan’s service. Yet the second the armor is too damaged, she sees, the miracle turns them into starlings, and sends them away. … Which is definitely something Jukov would do.