City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(150)

“He spoke to me,” says Shara. “He told me he had depended on you, in a way.”

“Yes,” says Olvos sadly. “Kolkan and I were the first two Divinities. We were the first to really figure out how it all worked, I suppose. But Kolkan always had a little more trouble running his show. He tended to let his people tell him what to do, and I watched from afar as he sat down and listened to them. … Like I told them all when I left, it just wasn’t going to end up well.”

“So you don’t think Kolkan was wholly responsible for what he did?”

Olvos sniffs. “Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all. Just look at the Kolkashtanis—they think the whole world was set up to shame and humiliate and punish and tempt them. … It’s all about them, them, them, them! The world is full of bad things, hurtful things, but it’s still all about them! And Kolkan just gave them what they wanted.”

“That’s … madness.”

“No, it’s vanity. And I have watched from the sidelines as this same vanity guided the Divinities onto paths that would bring ruin upon them and their people—vanity I predicted, and warned them about, but that they chose to ignore. This vanity is not new, Miss Komayd. And it has not stopped because we Divinities are gone. It has simply migrated.”

“Migrated to Saypur, you mean?”

Olvos bobs her head from side to side—not quite a yes, not quite a no. “But we now find ourselves at a turning point in history, when we can either listen to our vanity, and continue down the path we’re on … or choose a new path altogether.”

“So you have come to me to try and change this?” asks Shara.

“Well,” says Olvos, “you weren’t exactly my first choice. …”

Something in the fire pops; sparks go dancing to hiss in the mud.

“You approached Efrem, didn’t you,” says Shara.

“I did,” says Olvos.

“You met him on the river while he was sketching, and spoke to him.”

“I did a lot more than that,” admits Olvos. “I do intervene now and again, Shara Komayd. Well, maybe not intervene—‘nudge’ might be a better term for it. For Efrem, I helped guide his research, prod him in the directions he would find most useful, checked in on him now and again.”

“He would have loved to talk to you as I am now.”

“I’ve no doubt. He was such a bright, compassionate creature, I hoped he would find a way to divert all the discontent that was building. But it seems I was wrong. Such old rage can only be exorcised through violence, perhaps. Though I still hope we can disprove this, eventually.”

Shara drinks the rest of her tea and remembers something that troubled her when she first read his journal. “Was it you who placed the journal from the Kaj’s soldier on his desk? Because I knew Efrem, and he would never overlook or miss something so important.”

Olvos nods, her face distressed. “I did. And that might have been my biggest oversight. I had hoped he would understand the grave sensitivity of those letters. But he did not. He felt that information should be shared with everyone. … He did not keep any one specific truth—just the truth as he saw it. It was his greatest virtue, and it was his undoing.”

“But … but what could have been so important in those letters?” asks Shara. “The black lead?”

Olvos sets her pipe down. “No, no. Well, a little … Let me ask you—do you not wonder, Miss Shara Komayd, how your great-grandfather managed to produce the black lead?”

“He experimented on his household’s djinnifrit—didn’t he?”

“He did,” Olvos says grimly. “That is true. But even so, the odds that he would ever produce such a material are extremely unlikely, are they not?”

Shara’s brain rifles through everything she has memorized, but finds nothing.

“Would you not say,” Olvos asks slowly, “that the creation of the black lead was nothing short of miraculous?”

The word dislodges a stone in her mind that tumbles into her sea of thoughts.

Efrem’s writings: We do not know much about the Kaj. We do not even know who his mother was.

“And not everyone was capable of the miraculous,” says Olvos.

A soft wind dances through the copse of trees, and coals flare bright.

Efrem’s journal: Djinnifrit servants prepared their master’s beds, served them food, wine. … I cannot imagine what everyone would say if it was revealed that the Kaj had been pampered in such a way.

A log lazily rolls over in the fire like a whale in the sea.

And when she saw Jukov: My own progeny, my own Blessed child rises up against us and slaughters us like sheep!

Snowflakes twirl down and die silently as they near the fire.

“The Blessed were legends and heroes, Shara Komayd,” says Olvos quietly. “Offspring of the Divine and mortals whom the world went out of its way to accommodate.”

Shara’s head spins. “You … You aren’t saying that …”

“I suppose no one guessed who his mother was,” remarks Olvos thoughtfully, “because no one would have ever believed it.”