City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(24)

The pace of the hunt quickens. Sigrud’s quarry zags left. Sigrud follows. His quarry ducks through the crumbling remains of a large wall. Sigrud stalks through a different gap, but maintains visual contact. His quarry—whom Sigrud is almost positive remains ignorant to his surveillance—sprints up a wobbly staircase to mount the roof of an old church. Sigrud—with some strategic, ginger steps—hops up after him, closing the gap.

Sigrud crests the top and peers out over the roof. He sees his quarry running toward the edge, but the man shows no sign of stopping. Not when he is thirty feet away from the edge, or twenty, or five, and then he …

Jumps.

The last thing Sigrud sees of the man is the flutter of his gray coat as he plummets to the street below, arms outstretched and fingers spread.

Sigrud frowns, climbs onto the roof, and walks to the edge.

The street is nearly forty feet below. Yet there is no body, nor any mark of one ever being there. There is nothing the man could have jumped to: all the walls near this spot are blank and sheer. It is as if he fell, and then simply …

Vanished.

Sigrud grunts. This is inconvenient.

He considers trying to scale the wall and decides this would be unwarranted. So he returns down the stairs and out to the street.

There is no one, nothing. This part of Bulikov appears powerfully deserted.

Sigrud touches each cobblestone. None of them are warm; all of them are solid.

He sighs.

Working with Shara Komayd has introduced Sigrud to many confounding events, and dozens of things wondrous and terrifying and strange. However, he has never found any of them particularly awe-inspiring or moving: he chiefly finds them to be irritating.

He turns around to start back to the embassy. But as he does, he gets the queerest feeling.

Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.





It is virtually impossible to gauge the amount of damage caused by the Blink.

This is not just a measure of the Blink’s destruction, which was huge: rather, the nature of the Blink’s destruction is of a sort so bizarre and so complex that we—Saypuri, Continental, or anyone who lived through it or came after it—cannot understand what was lost.

The facts, however, are simple, though perhaps superficially so:

In 1639, after having successfully completed the first assassination of a Divinity and overthrowing the Continental outposts in Saypur, Avshakta si Komayd, freshly crowned as Kaj, assembled a small, ragged fleet of ships and sailed for the Continent—then called the Holy Lands, of course.

The Holy Lands were utterly unprepared for such an action: having lived under the protection of the Divinities for nearly a thousand years, it was inconceivable that anyone, let alone a Saypuri, could invade the Holy Lands, or—much more inconceivable—actually kill a Divinity. The Holy Lands and the remaining three Divinities (as Olvos and Kolkan had departed long ago) had grown quite concerned about the long absence of the Divinity Voortya, not aware that Voortya and her forces had been slaughtered in the Night of the Red Sands in 1638. So when a fleet was spotted off the south shore of Ahanashtan, the Divinities reacted quickly, thinking it to be their missing friends.

Such was their downfall. The Kaj had anticipated a coastal battle, and had outfitted several ships with the same machinery he’d used to assassinate Voortya. And the Divinities’ concern was so great that it was Taalhavras himself, the leader of the Divinities, who met the fleet in the port of Ahanashtan.

The recorded impressions of the Kaj’s sailors vary widely on exactly what happened. Some reported seeing “a man-like figure, twelve feet high, with the head of an eagle, standing on the port.” Others reported “an enormous statue, vaguely mannish, covered in scaffolding, yet it somehow managed to move.” And others reported only seeing a “beam of blue light stretching up to the heavens.”

However Taalhavras presented himself, the Kaj directed his machinery at him and immediately struck him down, just as he had Voortya.

But since Taalhavras was the builder god, all that he had built vanished the moment he vanished; and judging by the enormous devastation of the Blink, he had built much more than anyone knew. Taalhavras had, in fact, made significant alterations to the very fundaments of the Continent’s reality. The nature of these alterations probably cannot be understood by mortal minds; however, once these alterations vanished—one imagines supports, struts, bolts and nuts and so on falling out of place—the very reality of the Holy Lands abruptly changed.

The Kaj’s sailors did not witness the Blink: they recorded only experiencing a terrible storm that kept them from landing for two days and three nights. They assumed that it was a Divine defense, and they only persisted through the determination of the Kaj himself. They could not know the cosmic collapse occurring mere miles away.

Whole countries disappeared. Streets turned to chasms. Temples turned to ash. Stars vanished. The sky clouded over, marking the permanent change to the Continent’s climate—what was once a dry, sandy, sunny place would soon be cloudy, wet, and bitterly cold, much like the Dreyling lands to the north. Buildings of Divine nature imploded into a single stone, taking all their occupants with them to what one can only assume was a terrible fate. And Bulikov, being the holiest of cities, and a recipient of much of Taalhavras’s attentions, contracted inward by miles in one brutal moment, disrupting the very nature of the city, and losing hundreds of thousands of people, if not much more, to ends best left unimagined. The Seat of the World itself, the temple and meeting place of the Divinities, completely disappeared, leaving behind only its bell tower, which shrank to only a few stories tall.