City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(29)

She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.

How stupid are the young, Shara would later think, that they cannot see what is right in front of them.

*

Shara sits back in her chair and studies her work:

3411 HIGH STREET, SAINT MORNVIEVA BANK,

BOX 0813, GHIVENY TAORSKAN 63611

She wipes sweat from her brow, checks her watch. It is three in the morning. And once she realizes it, she finds it feels like it.

Now the real difficulty, thinks Shara. How to get at whatever is in this box.

There’s a knock at her door. “Come in,” she says.

The door swings open. Sigrud lumbers in, sits down before her desk, and begins to fill his pipe.

“How did it go?”

He pulls an odd face: confusion, dismay, slight fascination.

“Bad?”

“Bad,” he says. “Good, some. Also … odd.”

“What happened?”

He stuffs his pipe in his mouth with some hostility. “Well, the woman of the two, she works at the university. She is a maid … Irina Torskeny. Unmarried. No family. Nothing besides her work. I checked her rotation—she cleaned the professor’s office, quarters. All of it. She has been assigned to Dr. Pangyui’s offices since he got here.”

“Good,” says Shara. “We’ll look into her, then.”

“The other one … the man, though …” Sigrud recounts his confusing exploits in the ravaged neighborhoods of Bulikov.

“So the man just … vanished?” asks Shara.

Sigrud nods.

“Was there a sound of any kind? Like a whip crack?”

Sigrud shakes his head.

“Hm,” says Shara. “If it had been a whip crack, I would have thought it—”

“Paresi’s Cupboard.”

“Parnesi.”

“Whatever.”

Shara rubs her temple, thinking. Although Saint Parnesi has been dead for hundreds of years, his works continue to bother her: he’d been a priest of the Divinity Jukov who fell passionately in love with a Kolkashtani nun. As the Divinity Kolkan held very dour views on the appeal of sex, Parnesi found it difficult to visit his lover in her nunnery. Jukov—being a mercurial, clever Divinity—created a miracle that would allow Parnesi to hide in plain sight from enemies both mortal and Divine: a “cupboard” or pocket of air, which he could step inside at any moment, which allowed him to infiltrate the nunnery easily.

But, of course, one could use the miracle for less jovial purposes. Just two years ago it took Shara the better parts of three months to figure out the source of a documents leak in Ahanashtan. The culprits turned out to be three trade attachés who had, somehow, discovered the miracle, and if one of them had not been so liberal with his cologne—for Parnesi’s Cupboard does nothing to mask scent—Sigrud might have never caught him. But caught him he did, and things had turned quite grisly … Though the man did quickly surrender the names of his associates.

“I feared the miracle had become popularized, after Ahanashtan,” says Shara. “Something like that … It could be catastrophic. But if it’s not Parnesi … And you’re sure he vanished?”

“I can find people,” says Sigrud with implacable, indifferent confidence. “I could not find this man.”

“Did you see him pull out a sheet of silver cloth? Jukov’s Scalp supposedly did something similar. … But no one’s seen a piece of it in forty years. It would look like a silver sheet.”

“Your suggestions ignore a bigger problem,” says Sigrud. “Even if this man was invisible, he would have fallen several stories to his death.”

“Oh. Good point.”

“I saw nothing. I scoured the streets. I scoured the area. I asked questions. I found nothing. But …”

“But what?”

“There was a moment … when I did not feel like I was where I was.”

“What does that mean?”

“I do not quite know,” admits Sigrud. “It was as if I was somewhere … older. I saw buildings that were not really there.”

“What sort of buildings?”

Sigrud shrugs. “There are no words for what I saw.”

Shara adjusts her glasses. This is troubling.

“Progress?” asks Sigrud, looking at the clutch of lamps and mounds of paper. “I see you have drunk what looks like three pots of tea. … So the news will be either very good or very bad.”

“Like you, the news is both. The message is a safety deposit box, in a bank. The only question is, how to get to it?”

“You are not sending me to rob a bank, are you?”

“Good gracious, no,” says Shara. “I can only imagine the headlines …” And, she thinks, the body count. …

“Are there no strings you can pull?”

“Strings?”

“You are a diplomat,” says Sigrud. “The City Fathers, they are puppets, more or less—right? Can’t you use them?”