City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(23)
If you were to come with me to my home, I’d make you a princess, he’d said to her when she saw him last. And she’d answered: What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that. And the cocksure grin had melted off his face, his blue eyes crackling with brittleness like ice dunked in warm water, and she’d known then that she’d hurt him, really, genuinely hurt him, found someplace deep inside him no one knew about and burned it into ash.
Shara shuts her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, dear.”
*
Columns pierce the gray sky again and again, stabbing it, slashing it. It bleeds soft rain that makes the crumbling building faces glisten and sweat. Though the war that littered this city with such wounds is long over, the flesh and bones of the buildings remain broken and exposed. Desiccated children clamber across the ruin of a temple, its collapsed walls dancing with the twinkles of campfires, its cavities and caves echoing with cries. The wretches make apish gestures to passersby and harangue them for coin, for food, for a smile, for a warm place to sleep; yet there is a glitter of metal in their sleeves, tiny blades hidden among the filthy cloth, waiting to repay any kind gesture with quick violence. The new generation of Bulikov.
Those few who see Sigrud pass say nothing: they make no plea, no threat. They watch silently until he is gone.
A crowd of women cross the street before him, shoulders hunched, humble and eyes averted, their figures buried under piles of dark wool. Their necks and shoulders and ankles are carefully obscured. The putter and squeak of cars. The stink of horseshit. Pipes protrude from buildings several stories up, sending waste raining down on sidewalks. A city too old and too established for proper plumbing. Colonnades stacked with faceless statues stare down at him, eyeless, watchful. Squatting, thick-walled structures with twisting loggias ring with music and laughter, homes of the powerful, the wealthy, the hidden. On their balconies men in thick black coats dotted with medals and insignias glower at Sigrud, wondering, What is this doing here? How could a mountain savage be allowed into this neighborhood? Next to these bulbous mansions might be a puzzle piece of building facade, half a wall with windows empty, a wooden staircase clinging to the frames. And beyond these are winding rivers of stairs, some rounded and aged, some sharp and fresh, some wide, some terribly narrow.
Sigrud walks them all, following his marks. The man and woman flee from the university and do not lead him on an especially merry chase: they are not professionals, and are quite blind to the art of the street. They bicker loudly, then softly, then loudly again. Though Sigrud keeps his distance, he hears some of it.
The man says, This was expected. You were told this might happen. The woman answers, first softly, then louder as she gets angry: … these people showing up at my place of work! Where I spend my days, where I breakfast! Where I mopped floors for decades! Then the man: You knew there were dangers! You did! And you waver now? Do you not have faith? And the woman is silent.
Sigrud rolls his one eye. The incompetence of it all is dispiriting. He’s not even sure whether he wants to bother hiding himself anymore. His burgundy coat is rolled up and stuffed under one armpit, since this of course is a conspicuous flag, but still, a six-and-a-half-foot man would normally never lend himself well to obfuscation. But Sigrud knows that crowds are much like individual people: they have their own psychology, their own habits, their own natures. They unthinkingly assume specific structures—channels and corridors of traffic, bends around blockades—and break apart these structures in a manner that almost seems choreographed when you watch it. It’s simply a matter of placing yourself within these structures, like hovering in the still side of a school of fish as it twists and darts across the ocean floor. Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.
The couple stops at one teetering, oddly rounded apartment building. The woman, gray-faced, twitching, nods as the man whispers his final orders to her. Then she enters. From the cover of a stable, Sigrud makes careful note of the address.
“Hey!” A stableboy emerges from a side door. “Who’re you? What are you—?”
Sigrud turns and looks at the stableboy.
The boy falters. “Uh. Well …”
Sigrud turns back. The woman’s companion is starting off. Sigrud stalks out of the stable and follows.
This chase is … a little different. The man plunges ahead into a part of Bulikov that was obviously much more ravaged by the Blink, the War, and whichever other catastrophes happened to get wedged within that rocky period of world history. The number of staircases practically triples, or quadruples—it’s a little hard for Sigrud’s eye to count them. Spiral staircases rise up to halt completely in midair, some only ten feet off the ground, some twenty or thirty. There is something faintly osseous about them, resembling the rippled horns of some massive, exotic ruminant. Birds and cats have nested in the top steps of some. In one ridiculous instance, a huge, basalt staircase slashes down through an entire hill, sinking a sheer forty feet into the earth in a veritable chasm that has apparently managed to undermine several small houses, whose remains totter unnervingly on the lip of the gap.
Sigrud’s quarry, thankfully, never mounts or starts down any of these truncated steps, but trots through the alleys and the streets, which are often just as schizophrenic as the stairs. Sigrud casts a bemused eye on the buildings that have seemingly been blended into other buildings, like toys shoved together by a child: what appears to be a rather stodgy law firm has one-quarter of a bathhouse sticking out of its side like some kind of unseemly growth. In some places these invasive buildings have been messily excised: a chunk of a shoe store has obviously just been tugged out from where it was previously lodged inside of a bank.