City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(59)

“We’re a warming shelter, of course.”

“Well, all right, but what are you?”

“A person, I suppose. A person who wishes to help other persons.”

She tries another tack: “Why do you not warm yourself against the cold?”

“Cold?”

“It is freezing outside. I can see men hacking holes in the ice to fish from here.”

“That is the water’s affair,” he says. “The temperature of the wind, that is the wind’s affair. The temperature of my feet, my hands … that is my affair.”

“Because,” says Shara, remembering the old texts, “you have captured a secret flame in your heart.”

The man stops and appears to struggle between trying to close off his face and looking positively delighted with what she has said.

“Are you Olvoshtani?” says Shara.

“How can I be Olvoshtani,” says the robed man, “if there is no Olvos?”

Then it comes to her. “Oh,” says Shara. “Oh, I remember this. You are … Dispersed.”

The robed man makes a face: If you wish to say so.

When the Divinity Olvos abandoned the Continent, her people did not—not completely, anyway. Jukoshtan and Voortyashtan were the first cities to record sightings of people resembling Olvoshtani priests, wearing yellow or orange robes and sporting no other adornments, not shoes or gloves or even hair, only too happy to expose themselves to the elements. These people appeared nomadic, traveling through villages and cities, walking the world with apparently no other agenda than to help people when they most desperately needed it. Yet they did not claim to be Olvoshtani, or priests, or part of any higher order: though some called them “the Abandoned” or “the Dispersed,” they themselves did not declare to be anything at all. “We are here,” they were known to say. “What more is there to be?”

“I am afraid you are mistaken,” says the robed man. “We do not claim that name.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” says Shara. “You reject names, don’t you?”

“There is nothing to reject. Names are other people’s affairs. They are things to help people identify the things that they themselves are not.”

“So what are you doing, here in Bulikov? By what reason are you here?”

He gestures to the throngs of miserable people huddling by the fire. Some are families, with young children: a father pulls off his infant’s tiny boots to bare her bluish feet to the warmth. “This,” says the robed man, now without a trace of joy, “seems reason enough.”

“So you live to offer hope, as the old texts say. To be a light in dark places.”

“Old texts say many things. You say these things as though they are special—as if it is unusual for one person to see another in pain, and wish to help. As if,” he says quietly, “to do the extraordinary—or what you think is extraordinary—a person must be told to do so, by the Divine.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Do you? You have not donated yet, but if you did—would it be because you were told to?” He picks up a lump of black bread.

“No.”

“Do you—a Saypuri, obviously—need a Divinity to live your life?”

“That’s different. We’re from different countries.”

“I never saw a country before,” says the robed man. “All I saw was the earth under my feet.”

“You do these things,” says Shara, insistent, “because Olvos told you to.”

“I have never met Olvos,” he says. He spears the black bread with a thick wire and holds it over the coals. “Have you?”

“You would not be here without Olvos,” says Shara. “Olvos started your order. Without her, this shelter would not exist.”

“If this Olvos—whom, if I recall, I am not legally allowed to acknowledge ever existed …”

Shara, irritated, impatient, waves her hand.

“… if Olvos was ever here, then the greatest thing she ever gave us was the knowledge that we did not need her to do good things. That good can be done at anytime, anywhere, to anyone, by anyone. We live our lives thinking up so many rules …” He twists off some of the bread. As the crust splits, a tiny bloom of steam rises up. “… when often things can be so simple.”He offers the piece of steaming bread to her and smiles. “A bite? You look cold.”

Before she can answer, Pitry comes running down the street, calling for her. Shara flips the robed man a ten-drekel piece—he snatches it out of the air with shocking speed, smiling—and she hurries out.

He still follows his god, in his own way, she thinks. Which begs the question: who else in Bulikov is doing the same thing, but with far less benevolent intentions?

*

The old woman sits in the embassy hallway, eyes beet-red from weeping. Her upper lip glistens with snot in the lamplight. Her knuckles are purple from ages of soaking in soap and water.

“That’s her?” Shara asks quietly.

“That’s her,” says Sigrud. “I am sure.”

Shara watches her closely. So, this is one of the two “expert” agents who were watching them at the university just yesterday: Irina Torskeny, university maid from Pangyui’s offices, who perhaps moonlights as a Restorationist. Could this sad old creature somehow be complicit in Efrem’s death?