City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(4)
The courtroom door bangs open. Seventy-two heads turn at once.
A small Saypuri official stands in the doorway, looking nervous and alarmed. Mulaghesh recognizes him: Pitry something or other, from the embassy, one of Troonyi’s lackeys.
Pitry swallows and totters down the aisle toward the bench.
“Yes?” says Mulaghesh. “Is there a reason for this intrusion?”
Pitry extends a hand, holding a paper message. Mulaghesh takes it, unfolds it, and reads:
the body of efrem pangyui has been discovered in his office at bulikov university. murder is suspected.
Mulaghesh looks up and realizes everyone in the room is watching her.
This damned trial, she thinks, is now even less important than it was before.
She clears her throat. “Mr. Yaroslav … In light of recent events, I am forced to reconsider the priority of your case.”
Jindash and Troonyi both say, “What?”
Yaroslav frowns. “What?”
“Would you say, Mr. Yaroslav, that you have learned your lesson?” asks Mulaghesh.
Two Continentals creep in through the courtroom doors. They find friends in the crowd, and whisper in their ears. Soon word is spreading throughout the courtroom audience. “… murdered?” someone says loudly.
“My … lesson?” says Yaroslav.
“To put it bluntly, Mr. Yaroslav,” says Mulaghesh, “will you be stupid enough in the future to publicly display what is obviously a Divinity’s sigil in hopes of drumming up more business?”
“What are you doing?” says Jindash. Mulaghesh hands him the message; he scans it and goes white. “Oh, no … Oh, by the seas …”
“… beaten to death!” someone says out in the audience.
The whole of Bulikov must know by now, thinks Mulaghesh.
“I … No,” says Yaroslav. “No, I would … I would not?”
Troonyi has now read the message. He gasps and stares at Dr. Pangyui’s empty chair as if expecting to find it occupied by his dead body.
“Good answer,” says Mulaghesh. She taps her gavel. “Then, as the authority in this courtroom, I will set aside CD Troonyi’s estimable opinions, and dismiss your case. You are free to leave.”
“I am? Really?” says Yaroslav.
“Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “And I would advise you exercise your freedom to leave with all due haste.”
The crowd has devolved into shouts and cries. A voice bellows, “He’s dead! He’s really dead! Victory, oh, glorious victory!”
Jindash slumps in his chair as if his spine has been pulled out.
“What are we going to do?” says Troonyi.
Someone in the crowd is crying, “No. No! Now who will they send?”
Someone shouts back, “Who cares who they send?”
“Don’t you see?” cries the voice in the crowd. “They will reinvade us, reoccupy! Now they will send someone even worse!”
Mulaghesh sets her gavel aside and gratefully lights a cigarillo.
*
How do they do it? Pitry wonders. How can anyone in Bulikov sit next to the city walls or even live with them in sight, peeking through the blinds and drapes of high windows, and feel in any way normal? Pitry tries to look at anything else: his watch, which is five minutes too slow, and getting slower; his fingernails, which are quite fine except for the pinky, which remains irritatingly rippled; he even looks to the train station porter, who keeps glaring at him. Yet eventually Pitry cannot resist, and he sneaks a glance to his left, to the east, where the walls wait.
It is not size of the walls he finds disturbing, though this would normally disturb him plenty. Rather, as Pitry tries to look up their vast expanse, it gets a little harder and harder for his eye to find the walls. Instead, he begins to see distant hills and stars, the flicker of trees caressed by wind: suggestions of the nightscape on the opposite side, as if the walls are transparent, like muddy glass. Where he expects to see the tops of the walls he sees only the night sky and the fat, placid face of the moon. But if he looks along the walls, staring down their curve, they slowly calcify beside the houses and ramshackle buildings a hundred yards away, the city lights glinting off their smooth facade.
And yet if I were on the other side, he thinks, or if I were to walk close to them, I’d see nothing but white stone. A creature comfort, in a way: the beings that made the walls wished to protect the city, but did not wish to deny its residents the sight of sunrises and sunsets. Pitry reflects on how any miracle, no matter how subtle, always feels tremendously unsettling to a Saypuri.
He looks back at his watch and does some math. Is the train late? Are such unusual trains late? Perhaps they come on their own time. Perhaps its engineer, whoever it might be, was never told of the telegram stating, quite clearly, “3:00 AM,” and does not know that very official people are taking this secret appointment quite seriously. Or perhaps no one cares that the person waiting for this train might be cold, hungry, unnerved by these white walls, and practically death-threatened by the milky blue gaze of the train station porter.
Pitry sighs. If he were to die and see all of his life flash before his eyes in his final moment, he is fairly sure it would be a boring show. For though he thought a position in the Saypuri embassies would be an interesting and exotic job, taking him to new and exotic lands (and exposing him to new and exotic women), so far it has mostly consisted of waiting. As an assistant to the associate ambassadorial administrator, Pitry has learned how to wait on new and unexciting things in new and unexciting ways, becoming an expert at watching the second hand of a clock slowly crank out the hours. The purpose of an assistant, he has decided, is to have someone upon whom you can unload all the deadly little nothings that fill the bureaucratic day.