City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(146)

She knows she is lucky to receive any care at all. The hospitals of Bulikov are overwhelmed with the injured and the maimed. It is only here, in the hospital at the governor’s quarters, that Shara and her comrades could be looked after.

She hears a door open, and someone enters in soft shoes.

Shara sits up and hoarsely asks, “How many?”

The person slowly sits in the chair beside the tub.

“How many?” she says again.

Pitry’s voice says, “We’re over two thousand now.”

Shara shuts her eyes behind the bandages. She feels hot tears on her cheeks.

“General Noor informs us that this is, despite everything, actually a good thing. So much of Bulikov was destroyed—well, the amount of Bulikov that was there before all the buildings from Old Bulikov appeared, I mean. But then, well, almost all of those new buildings were destroyed when you killed Kolkan.”

“It wasn’t Kolkan,” says Shara hoarsely. “But kindly get to the point.”

“Well, erm, General Noor says that two thousand casualties is a low figure, considering the amount of destruction. He thinks you distracted Kolk— Ah, he thinks you distracted the Divinity, slowed it down, which gave the city time to evacuate. And many of the people, as I understand it, had been transformed into some kind of birds. And a few hours after the Divinity died, they all started turning back into people—confused, cold, and, erm, totally nude.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes. The hills around Bulikov were suddenly filled with hundreds of naked people. Hypothermia became a concern, though we’ve gathered and clothed and treated them as best they could. Noor has asked if you could possibly explain this.”

“It was a trick that Jukov used to do, worked on a mass scale,” says Shara. “When he wanted to hide someone, he turned them into a flock of starlings. I expect that, in order to save people from the fate Kolkan had forced them into, Jukov simply extended this protection to them: rather than see harm, they took to the skies as flocks of birds. How did so many die?”

Pitry coughs. “Most perished when the buildings collapsed, but many casualties occurred during the evacuation. … Apparently it was more of a stampede.”

What a neutered word is “casualties,” thinks Shara. And how pleasant it must be, to sit behind a desk and pare a lost life down to a statistic.

“It’s all a tragedy, Pitry,” says Shara. “A horrible, monstrous tragedy.”

“Well, yes, but … it was their god, wasn’t it? Doing what they asked of it?”

“No,” says Shara. Then she adds, “And yes.”

“General Noor is aware that your recovery might be more, ah, mental than physical … but he has asked me to see if I can retrieve clarification on this.”

“You’ve been promoted, Pitry. Congratulations.”

Pitry coughs again, uncomfortable. “Somewhat, yes.” I am assisting the regional governor’s office now. Mostly because almost all of the embassy and polis governor’s staff is … indisposed.”

“You behaved quite admirably during the fight. You deserve it. How is Mulaghesh?”

“She’s stable. The arm … could not be saved. It had been quite crushed. It was, at least, not her good arm.”

Shara groans.

“Mulaghesh takes it in stride, however. She insists on smoking in the hospital, something that has upset everyone. But she will not listen. Sigrud, however …”

Shara tenses up. Please, she thinks. Not him, too.

“He has stupefied all the doctors.”

“How so?”

“Well, by being alive, first of all,” says Pitry. “And while removing the glass—a full three pounds of glass—and shrapnel from his wounds, they discovered …” The crackle of paper as he pulls out a list. “… four bolt tips, one bullet, five darts—some kind of exotic, tribal things …” From Qivos, thinks Shara. I told him to get a doctor that time. “… and six teeth that appear to be from some kind of shark. The doctors concluded that most of these were from injuries or altercations that took place, ah, well before this battle.”

“That sounds about right. But he will survive?”

“He will. He will probably need to stay in the hospital for some time, but—yes. He looks to make a full recovery, despite everything, unbelievably. And he seems quite … merry.”

“Merry? Sigrud?”

“Ahm, yes. He asked me how I was; then he gave me some money and told me to procure”—Pitry coughs once more—“uh, a woman of the evening.”

Shara shakes her head. My, my. You leave the world for a handful of days and hear rumors of everything changing.

“I am sorry to ask,” says Pitry, “but General Noor has been quite insistent with me on the matter of, erm, the issue of the Divinity, or Divinities, or …”

She does not answer. She slowly sits back in the bath.

“Even if you have no concrete conclusions … Even if you have only guesses about what happened, I’m sure he will be happy to consider those.”

Shara sighs and lets the warm water slosh into her ears. Let it wash away my memories, she thinks. Wash it all away. She summarizes her conclusions about Jukov hiding in the pane of glass with Kolkan. “I suspect it was also Jukov himself who sank the Seat of the World through Divine means, to secure his hiding place. But just before he did so, he sent out a familiar—perhaps a mhovost disguised as himself—to go to the Kaj, and surrender. This was what the Kaj executed, and when he did, Jukov essentially pulled the strings on many of his Divine creations, allowing all he built to fall to ruin … all so no one would believe he was still alive.”