City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(54)

“Important meeting?” asks Shara.

Auntie Vinya looks up and frowns. “No,” she says, slightly irritated. “But important people were there. Why are you calling on the emergency line? If you’ve found something, send it through the normal channels.”

“We have sixteen dead,” says Shara. “Continentals. They were killed in an attack on a Bulikovian political figure—a City Father. Who survived.”

Vinya pauses. She looks at the piece of paper in her hand—work that obviously needs to get done, and soon—and sighs and lays it aside. She walks over to sit before the pane of glass and asks, “How?”

“They opted to attack during a social occasion. At which I was present.”

Vinya rolls her eyes. “Ah. You and … what’s his name …”

“Sigrud.”

“Yes. How many dead?”

“Sixteen.”

“So he’s clocking in his normal rate, then. By all the damned seas, Shara, I’ve … I’ve no idea why you keep such a man on! We have trouble with the Dreylings every day! They’re pirates, my dear!”

“They weren’t always. Not while their king was still alive.”

“Ah, yes, their dead king they do so love to sing about … Him and their little lost prince, who’ll one day sail back to them. I expect they also sing all day while burning half the northern Continental coastline! I mean, you must admit, my dear, these people are savages!”

“I think he’s proved his worth, last night and many other nights.”

“Intelligence work is meant to avoid bloodshed, not generate it by the quart!”

“And yet intelligence work is as susceptible to its environs as anything else,” says Shara. “We ‘operate within a set of variables that we often cannot influence’.”

“I hate it when you quote me,” says Vinya. “All right. So what? So some bumpkins took a shot at an alderman, or whatever he is. That’s not news. That’s just your average day of the week. Why would you contact me?”

“Because I am convinced,” says Shara, “that there is some connection to Pangyui.”

Vinya freezes. She looks away, then slowly looks back. “What?”

“I suspect,” says Shara, “that Pangyui’s death was probably part of a reactionary movement here, meant to rebuke Saypur’s influence and return the Continent—or at least Bulikov—to its former glory.”

Vinya sits in silence. Then: “And how would you have determined that?”

“He was being watched,” says Shara. “And I suspect that he was being watched by agents of this reactionary movement.”

“You suspect?”

“I would say I deem it terribly likely. Specifically—though I cannot confirm yet—I think his death is probably related to their discovery of exactly what he was doing here. Which was not a mission of cultural understanding, as they were told.”

Vinya sighs and massages the sides of her neck. “Ah. So.”

Shara nods. “So.”

“You found out about his little … historical expedition.”

“So you do know about the Warehouse?”

“Of course I know about the Warehouse!” Vinya snaps. “It’s why he went there, of course!”

“You signed off on this?”

Vinya rolls her eyes.

“Oh. So you planned this.”

“Of course I planned this, darling. But it was Efrem’s idea. It was just one I had a very specific interest in.”

“And what was this idea?”

“Oh, well, I’m sure that you being the Divine expert that you are, you probably know all about it. … Or you would, if Efrem would have been allowed to publish it. His idea was not, as one says in the parlance of our era, approved. And it is still a highly dangerous idea.”

“And what idea was this?”

“We don’t talk much about the Divine over here—we like for such things to stay dead, naturally—but when we do, we, like the Continent itself, assume that it was a top-down relationship: the Divinities stood at the top of the chain, and they told the Continentals and, well, the world, what to do, and everything obeyed. Reality obeyed.”

“So?”

“So,” she says slowly, “over the course of his career, Efrem quietly became less convinced this was the case. He believed there was a lot more subtle give and take going on in the relationship than anyone imagined. The Divinities projected their own worlds, their own realities, which our historians have more or less surmised from all the conflicting creation stories, and afterlife stories, and static and whatnot.” She waves her hand, eager to cycle through all the minutiae.

“Of course,” says Shara—for this is a topic well-known to her.

One of the Continent’s biggest problems with having six Divinities were the many, many conflicting mythologies: for example, how could the world be a burning, golden coal pulled from the fires of Olvos’s own heart while also being a stone hacked by Kolkan from a mountain behind the setting sun? And how could one’s soul, after death, flit away to join Jukov’s flock of brown starlings, while also flowing down the river of death to wash ashore in Ahanas’s garden, where it would grow into an orchid? All Divinities were very clear about such things, but none of them agreed with one another.