City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(27)

The boy’s mouth fell open. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. I see.”

“Yes,” said Shara.

“Hm. Well. No, no. Let’s do the honorable thing and play it out, shall we?”

It was a formality, one extended by a few lucky rolls of the dice, but soon Shara was picking his pieces off the board. Yet to her irritation, the boy didn’t seem shamed or abashed: he just kept smiling at her.

She made what she knew to be the second-to-last play. “I must ask—how does it feel to be beaten by a Saypuri girl?”

“You,” he said as he laid his game’s neck below her blade, “are not a girl.”

She faltered as she made her play—what could he mean by that?

Shara picked off his final piece. The students around them erupted in a cheer, but she barely heard them. Another of his mind games. “Before you ask, I’ll play you again anytime.”

“Well, honestly,” he said cheerfully, “I’d much prefer a f*ck.”

She stared at him, astonished.

He winked, stood up, and walked away to be joined by his friends. She watched him go, then gazed around at the cheering students.

Had anyone else heard that? Had he actually meant that? Could he really?

“Who was that?” she asked aloud.

“Do you really not know?” said a student.

“No.”

“Really? You really didn’t know you were playing Vohannes Votrov, the richest prick on the whole of the damnable Continent?”

Shara stared at the empty board and wondered if the boy had been playing yet another, different game all along: neither Batlan nor Tovos Va, but a game with which she was totally unfamiliar.

*

The numbers are going to shave years off of Shara’s life.

She has translated much of the professor’s code. It now reads: h_gh st _t, sa_nt m _v va bank, b_x , gh_v_ny ta _kan .

A security box, in a bank. A bank that bears the name of some saint. Ordinarily this would narrow her choices down quite a bit, but High Street is a very long street in Bulikov, and nearly every bank is named after a saint of some sort.

Actually, Shara knows almost everything on the Continent is named after some saint or another. Saypuri historians gauge there were an estimated 70,000 saints before the Great War: apparently the Divinities considered granting sainthood an irritating formality to be signed off on without thought. When the WR were enacted, the idea of trying to remove sainted names from polis structures—as well as attempting to completely rename entire cities and regions, each named after some Divinity or Divine creature—proved overwhelming, and in what was considered to be a very big concession, and a very big shrug, Saypur simply gave up trying. Shara wishes they hadn’t. It would make her job much easier now.

Names, she thinks. Names are always such a problem. After all, the South Seas are actually northeast of Saypur—they’re only called such because it was the Continent that named them first, and any name, as Saypur has learned over and over again, dies hard and slowly.

And the numbers … Shara has not gotten to them yet, but she has glanced at them. Numerals and digits of any kind are always incredibly difficult in ancient languages: one particularly fervent cult of the Divinity Jukov refused to acknowledge the number 17, for example, though no historian has been able to figure out why.

She remembers a conversation she had with Dr. Pangyui in their safe house in Ahanashtan:

“The amount of dead languages,” he said, “are like the stars.”

“That many?” she asked.

“The ancient Continentals were not stupid—they knew the best way to control what other nations thought was to control how they talked. And when those languages died, so did those ways of thinking, those ways of looking at the world. They are dead, and we cannot get them back.”

“Are you one of those academics who keeps trying to revive the Saypuri mother tongue?” Shara asked.

“No. Because Saypur was a big place, and had many mother tongues. Such vain, jingoistic missions do not interest me.”

“Then why waste your time looking at all?”

He lit his pipe. “Oh, well, we all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present—do we not?”

And yet Pangyui had lied to her. He had used her to further his own secret ends.

She returns to work, knowing she has many hours ahead, and also, perhaps, to try to keep herself from remembering more.

*

It was two months into term when she met him again. She was in the library, reading about the political exploits of Sagresha, lieutenant to the Kaj and celebrated war hero, when she noticed someone had sat down at the table by the window.

His head was bowed, his curly, red-gold hair eclipsing his brow. He never seemed to sit in a chair right: he was sideways and almost on his back, with a tome in his lap about Thinadeshi, the engineer who had introduced the railways to the Continent.

Shara glared at him. She thought for a second, then stood up, gathered her books, sat down opposite him, and simply watched.

He did not look up. He turned a page and after a moment said, “And what would you want?”

“Why did you say that to me?” she asked.

He looked up at her through his curtain of messy hair. Though Shara was no drinker, she could tell by his puffy lids that he had what the masters at Fadhuri called a “morning head.” “What?” he asked. “From the tournament?”