City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(48)

“There was a man here, studying at the university,” says Shara slowly and clearly. “You didn’t want him here. The city didn’t, I mean. There was much outcry about it.”

The boy rubs his eyes. “My head. There’s … There’s something in my head. …”

“He died, just a few days ago. Do you remember?”

He whimpers. “There’s someone in there …” He raps the side of his head with his knuckles hard enough to make a noise. “Please … Please help me get him out. …”

“Someone attacked him at the university. They beat him to death.”

“Please. Please!”

“Tell me what you know about the professor.”

“He’s inside my head!” shrieks the boy. “He’s inside my head! He’s been jailed for so long! Let me see light, oh, let me see light!”

“Damn it,” says Shara. She walks to the cell door and places her hand on the viewing slot. “You want light?”

“Yes!” screams the boy. “By all the mercy of the gods, yes!”

“Fine.” Shara opens the slot. A trickle of light pokes through. “There,” she says. She turns back to him. “Now will you tell me—?”

The boy is gone.

Not just the boy: half the room is gone. It is like half the room is cut off by a standing wall of black water, only now in the center of it there is a little hole of yellow light, yellow like the sky before a storm.

“Oh,” says Shara.

The hole of yellow light widens. Shara feels like someone is reaching into her head with thick, massive hands, and opening a tiny door. …

Shara just has time for one thought—I thought I dosed him—before she begins to see many things.

*

There is a tree, old and twisted.

It stands at the top of a lonely hill. Its branches form a dark dome against the yellow sky.

There is a rock below the tree. It is dark and polished, polished so deeply it looks like it is perpetually wet.

There is a face carved into the center of the stone. Shara can just barely see it. …

Then comes a voice, booming like thunder:

WHO ARE YOU?

They all vanish—the hill, tree, and stone—and things shift.

*

The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.

This land is lit by an ancient fire. Yet who started it?

Below the sun is a lone, strange mountain. It rises from the earth in a straight, rigid shaft. Its top is smooth and rounded—not unlike the stone she just saw—and its sides are straight and rippled. There is something fiercely, disturbingly organic about the mountain, though it might simply be how its smooth form looks in the shuddering light of the sun.

Then the voice again:

HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?

Again, the scene vanishes.

*

A hillside swells before her, lit with firelight. It is night. Shadows leap about her: faces, hands, all feral, all twisted. Above her is the moon, huge and swollen like a spider’s egg. The moon appears to balance on the top of the hill, and she thinks she can make out a figure with a tricorn hat dancing before it, thrusting something up to the sky—a jug?—as if asking the moon itself to partake.

Starlings pour across the night sky in a dark, cheeping flood.

I CANNOT SEE YOU. COME CLOSER TO ME.

The darkness vanishes. She feels herself pulled away.

*

A road on a plain. Again, the yellow sky lit by a sun with the light of a dying torch. Besides this, there is nothing but the dusty road and the plain.

She is pulled along the road, like she is flying mere inches above the earth.

Hills swell in the distance, lumpen and yellow and barren. She is ripped toward them as if pulled by a string, and she flies up their smooth sides until she sees a crack between two of the hills, a small aperture, a stab wound, a cave.

There is something in the cave, pulling her in.

She enters. The light dies around her.

They are hollow, these hills.

No, not hills—statues.

Yet whose likeness do they mimic?

There is someone at the back of the cave. She cannot see them. She thinks she can make out a tall form, draped in gray cloth, like that of a thick robe.

She sees no face, but she feels eyes all over her.

THERE YOU ARE.

She sees no hands, but she feels like she is in someone’s grasp.

HOW DID YOU GET IN? NO, IT DOES NOT MATTER. LET ME OUT.

She sees no movement, but she feels like the walls close in around her.

LET ME OUT. YOU MUST LET ME OUT.

A flutter of gray cloth. It grows nearer, but she still cannot see.

THEY HAD NO RIGHT. THEY HAD NO RIGHT, TO DO THIS TO ME.

Shara struggles. She reaches out, tries to push away. No! No!

YOU MUST LET ME OUT.

In the darkness comes a bright flame.

*

It takes Shara a moment to realize she is standing in the jail cell. There is a blazing fire in the center of the cell, and the firelight on the stone walls gives the cell a primeval look, not unlike the visions she just saw. But when she hears Mulaghesh’s voice shouting, “Get out of there! Shara! What are you just standing there for? Get the hells out of there!” she realizes where she is.