City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(142)

She runs up the fortifications and cries to the soldiers, “What armor is it you wear? That of Kolkan, or that of Jukov? Which Divinity do you pay fealty to?” But, of course, they don’t answer. Then she laughs madly. “Oh, wait. Wait! I forgot! I forgot, I forgot, I forgot!”

Twenty yards away.

“Forgot what!” screams Mulaghesh.

“I forgot I do know Ovski’s Candlelight!” cries Shara happily. “I read that one long ago!”

She faces the platoon of armored soldiers—Scarecrows, she thinks—and remembers the nature of this miracle: All hearts are like candles. Focus the light of yours, and it will remove all barriers.

Shara imagines the soldiers as a metal wall before her.

The soldiers flicker with a golden honey light. Then …

It’s as if an immense column of burning wind blows through them: the soldiers glow red hot, blur …

… and suddenly there is an enormous flock of starlings in the street, screeching and cheeping. They flutter up through the canyon of buildings and into the sky, a dark thundercloud raining brown feathers.

The armored soldiers have collapsed into a sloshing lake of molten metal. Only the bottom part of their legs remain, sticking up out of the bright yellow-red tide like nine pairs of forgotten metal boots.

Shara stares at her hands. Written on the inside of her palms in large type is: i don’t f*cking believe it.

“I don’t f*cking believe it!” screams Mulaghesh. The soldiers shout in triumph and disbelief, banging their bolt-shots on the embassy wall.

Three more armored soldiers turn and march down the street toward them. The repeat shooters turn and begin to fire, and the metal soldiers quiver as if cold, but do not stop.

Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you do it right!

“What is she shouting about?” says Mulaghesh.

“Something about filling out forms?” says a soldier, bewildered.

Shara points at the leftmost armored soldier. You’re a person wearing armor, she thinks at it, but it’s just made of spoons!

The armored soldier appears to dissolve like a child’s sandcastle struck with a wave, collapsing into a cloud of thousands of tumbling metal spoons that go clanking to the cement. Another burst of starlings, which wheel away into the darkening sky.

Shara bursts out laughing and claps like a child at a magic show. “What the hells?” says Mulaghesh. Shara points at the next two and shouts, “Spoons! Spoons!” and both of them dissolve as well. More starlings come fluttering out, as if their roosts have collapsed beneath them.

“It’s easy!” shouts Shara. “It’s easy once you think about it! I just never thought about it the right way! There are so many muscles you can flex, you just don’t know about them!”

Then the sky flickers: it’s like the sky is a paper backdrop, and someone behind it—someone very big—just touched it.

There is a pulse in the air that only Shara seems to feel.

She hears Kolkan’s voice softly whisper in her ear, Olvos? Is that you?

Shara stops smiling.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, dear.”

“What is it?” asks Mulaghesh.

The voice inside Shara’s head says, Olvos? What are you doing? Why did you not help us?

“What’s going on?” asks Mulaghesh, impatient.

“He knows I’m here,” says Shara. “Kolkan knows I’m here.”

*

“Are you sure you aren’t just hallucinating?” asks Mulaghesh.

The voice says, Olvos? Sister-wife? Why do you hide from me, from us?

“I’m positive,” says Shara. “I don’t think I could hallucinate something this strange.”

“What are you going to do?”

Shara rubs her chin. “I will have to make my own fortifications against this particular assault.” She turns to face the city. But why does he think, she wonders, that I am Olvos?

She feels something like a hand reach into her mind to try to grasp this thought. Olvos? says the voice. Is it really you? Are you hurt like we are?

She must clear her mind. She has to clear her mind.

She begins on the physical reality around her: the soldiers are purely physical creations, so she unrolls the street running along the embassy walls (the Saypuri soldiers stare as the stone and asphalt vanish), and fills it up with freezing water: Water so cold it will shatter metal. …

A thick ribbon of fog now lies in front of the embassy. Two armored soldiers advance out of the ruin of a shop; the repeat shooters fire, briefly, before the soldiers step into the lake of swirling, freezing mist; there is the hissing sound of rapidly contracting metal, and the soldiers glaze over with frost. The next burst of shot from the repeat shooters causes them to explode like crashing mirrors, and hundreds of brown starlings take to the sky.

The voice—or is it two voices?—inside her mind asks, Why do you fight us? Have you done something wrong?

I must construct barriers, thinks Shara. I must keep it out. …

Information, Shara realizes, can be received by so many different channels, and so few channels speak to one another: just as an antennae cannot receive a telegram, a radio transmitter cannot make sense of a simple document, even though it is all just information, really. The human brain has such a limited number of channels in—so few antennae, so few receivers. … Yet Shara’s own brain, she now realizes, has just had an untold number of antennae and receivers added, so that all the information she thought was hidden can now course directly into her mind.