City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(156)

Vinya blinks. Teardrops spill down her cheeks.

“Efrem Pangyui deduced the Kaj’s parentage in Bulikov,” says Shara. “And he, being the dutiful and honorable historian of Saypur, sent back a report without realizing he was signing his own death warrant—for him, the truth was the truth, and hiding it never occurred to him.”

Vinya, who has resisted upper-middle age for nearly fifteen years, sits in her chair with the slow movements of an old woman.

“And you hated hearing this, of course,” says Shara. “Just as the Kaj hated it when he learned it himself. Efrem, obviously, had no plans to keep quiet about it—he was a historian, not a spy. So you reacted as you would to any national threat, and had him, as you say, eliminated.”

Vinya swallows.

“That’s right, isn’t it, Auntie Vinya?”

Vinya struggles for nearly half a minute. Then, a quiet, “I … I just wanted it to be gone. I wanted to believe … to believe I had never heard it.”

Sea spray spackles the hull outside. Someone on the deck above makes a joke, which is followed by wicked laughter.

“Why?” says Shara. “Why did you let me stay in Bulikov at all? You knew there was a chance I’d find out. Why didn’t you pull rank and reassign me straightaway?”

“Because … I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of you,” Vinya confesses.

“Of me?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’ve always been afraid of you, Shara. Ever since you were a child. Saypur has always been inclined to like you more than me, because of who your parents were. And I have many enemies. It would be an easy thing, to oust me simply by supporting you.”

“And that is why you let me stay in Bulikov?”

“I knew that if I made you leave, you would become suspicious!” says Vinya. “You get attached to people so. If I denied you what you wanted, I feared you’d become more determined. And I thought we had destroyed all of Efrem’s notes. One week to mourn your friend, then you’d leave Bulikov, move on to the next little case, and all of this would go away.”

“But then Volka’s men attacked the Votrov estate,” says Shara, “and everything changed.”

Vinya shakes her head. “You don’t know what it was like, hearing his report,” she says. “Hearing that not only am I descended from … from monsters, but that everything I had ever accomplished was suddenly just … suddenly illegitimate! Like I’d been given everything, rather than earning it! It was sickening, infuriating, insulting. … Don’t you understand what that’s like? That I—that we—have some trace of the Divine in us?”

Shara shrugs. “I was raised to think of the Kaj more or less as a god,” she says. “A savior whose memory I spent years trying to please. Honestly, it changes little for me, personally.”

“But nothing that has been made is real! There is nothing but lies. The Kaj is a lie. Saypur is a lie. The Ministry …”

“Yes,” says Shara. “The Ministry as well.”

Vinya wipes her eyes. “How I detest weeping. There is nothing so undignified.” She glares at Shara through the porthole. “What will you do?”

Shara wonders how to phrase this. “The Blessed do seem to meet such tragic ends,” she says. “The Kaj killed almost all of them during the Great War. Then the Kaj himself died alone and miserable on the Continent. And now you …”

“You wouldn’t,” whispers Vinya.

“I wouldn’t,” admits Shara. “And I can’t. You possess much more lethal force than I do, Auntie. Killing me, of course, during the height of my public profile, would naturally earn much scrutiny—scrutiny I doubt even you could afford. So I will give you a choice: step down, and give the reins to me.”

“To … to you?”

“Yes.”

“Give … Give you control over all the generals across all the nations? Give you control to all our intelligence, all of our operations!”

“Yes,” says Shara mildly. “I will have it, or neither of us will. Because if you do not step down, Auntie, I will leak our awful family secret.”

Vinya looks like she is about to be sick.

“I understand my stock has risen in Ghaladesh these days,” Shara says, with a quaint pout of modesty. “I am, after all, the only person since the Kaj to have killed a Divinity—two Divinities, technically, to the Kaj’s three. This, after Urav. They haven’t ever crowned another Kaj since Avshakta, but I don’t doubt that a few people in Saypur are discussing it. I believe that when I speak, I will be listened to. And as such, I believe your time in the Ministry is over, Auntie.”

Vinya is rubbing her face and rocking back and forth in her chair. “Why … ?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?”

“I do not do it to you, Auntie Vinya. You flatter yourself by imagining so. Things are changing. History itself was resurrected in Bulikov four days ago, and it rejected the present just as the present rejected it in turn. And we now have a new path we could take. We can keep the world as it is—unbalanced, with one nation holding all power …”