City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(39)

“Yes. And …” She looks around.

“What? What is it?”

“The one in the red coat … I don’t see him anymore.”

“Who?” When she does not answer, he grabs a fistful of her hair and shakes her head. “Who do you mean?” he bellows.

She begins sobbing now, pushed beyond answering.

Their leader lets her go. He points at three of them, says, “Stay here. Watch them. Kill anyone who moves.” Then he points to Cheyschek and the other four. “The rest of you, upstairs with me.”

They mount the stairs silently, rushing up like wolves through mountain forests. Cheyschek is trembling with joy, excitement, rage. Such a righteous thing, to bring pain shrieking down on them out of the cold night, on the traitors and sinners and the filthy ignorant. He had expected to find them, perhaps, in the throes of some pornographic rite, their blood polluted by foreign liquors, the air stinking with incense as they shamed themselves willingly. Cheyschek has heard, for example, of places near Qivos where—with the full allowance of Saypur, of course—women walk the streets in dresses cut so short so that you can see their … their …

He colors just to think of it.

To imagine such a thing is sinful. It must be excised from the mind and the spirit.

Their leader raises a gloved hand when they hit the second floor. They stop. He swings his masked face around, peering through the tiny black eyeholes. Then he signals to them, pointing, and Cheyschek and two others fan out to search the floor while their leader and the others go upstairs.

Cheyschek sweeps the hallways, checks the rooms, but finds nothing. For such a large house, Votrov keeps it terribly empty. Another damning indication of the man’s excesses, thinks Cheyschek. He even misuses his country’s stone!

He comes to a corner, knocks twice on the wall. He listens, and hears a second knock-knock, then a third from farther in the house. He nods, satisfied that his compatriots are close, and keeps patrolling.

He looks out the windows. Nothing. Looks in the rooms. Nothing but empty beds. Perhaps Votrov keeps his lovers here, one in each room, Cheyschek thinks, feeling scandalized and unclean.

Focus. Check in again. He knocks once more. He hears one knock-knock from somewhere else in the house, and then …

Nothing.

He pauses. Listens. Knocks again. Once more, there’s a second echoing knock, but no third.

Perhaps he is too far away to hear me. But Cheyschek knows his instructions, and he begins to backtrack, following the halls back to the stairs.

Once he reaches the stairs, he knocks twice on the walls again, and listens.

This time, nothing—no second or third knock.

He fights the growing panic in his chest and knocks again.

Nothing. He stares around, wondering what could be going on, and it is then that he sees:

There is someone sitting in the darkened second-floor foyer, sprawled back in a white overstuffed chair.

Cheyschek raises his bolt-shot. The person does not move. They do not seem to have noticed him. Cheyschek retreats to the wall, paces along the edge of the shadows with the sight of the bolt-shot on the person at all times …

Yet when he nears, he sees they are dressed in gray cloth, and there is a gray mask in their lap.

Cheyschek lowers the bolt-shot.

It is one of his comrades. Yet the man’s mask is removed, and they were ordered to never remove their masks.

Cheyschek takes two more steps forward, and stops. There is a stripe of red and purple flesh running across the man’s exposed neck, and he stares up at the ceiling with what can only be the eyes of the dead.

Cheyschek feels sick. He looks around for help, wishing to knock, to call for someone, but there is someone or something in the halls with them, and he does not want to give away his location.

This can’t be happening. They were all supposed to be socialites, artists. …

Then he freezes. He listens carefully.

Is there a gagging sound coming from the northern hallway?

He readies his bolt-shot. His pulse pounds upon his ears. He stalks forward, rounds the corner, and sees …

One of his compatriots is standing in a doorway along the side of the hall, almost out of sight. His compatriot trembles slightly, jerking his shoulders with his hands at his sides, and there is something on his mask, something large and white-pink and rippled that extends outward, into the doorway, where Cheyschek cannot see.

As Cheyschek nears, he sees that the something on his compatriot’s face is actually somethings: a pair of huge hands grasps the sides of the man’s head, yet the thumbs have been shoved deep into the man’s eye sockets, all the way up to the second knuckle.

His compatriot gags, gurgles. Blood spurts around the thumbs, painting the wrists, the walls, the floor.

Cheyschek sees now.

There is a giant man standing in the shadows of the doorway, and he is murdering Cheyschek’s compatriot with his bare hands.

The giant looks up, his one eye burning with a pale fire.

Cheyschek screams, and blindly fires the bolt-shot. The giant man recoils, drops Cheyschek’s compatriot, and falls backward. Then the giant lies in the hallway, completely still.

Cheyschek, weeping freely, runs to his compatriot and rips his mask off. When he sees what is below, his screams turn to howls.

He holds his dead compatriot in his arms. See what befalls the honored sons of my country, he wishes to say. See what happens to the righteous in such sullied times. But he does not have the control for the words.