City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(6)

There is a rumbling in the east. Pitry looks to the city walls, and the tiny aperture in the bottom. From here it looks like a hole gnawed by vermin, but if he were closer it’d be nearly thirty feet tall.

The dark little hole fills with light. There is a flash, a screech, and the train pounds through.

It is not really a train: just a beaten, stained engine and a single sad little passenger car. It looks like something from coal country, a car the workers would ride in while being carted from mine to mine. Certainly nothing for an ambassador—even a cultural ambassador.

The train thuds up to the platform. Pitry scurries over and stands before the doors, hands clasped behind him and chest thrown gallantly forward. Are his buttons set? Is his headcloth straight? Did he shine his epaulets? He cannot remember. He frantically licks a thumb and begins rubbing at one. Then the doors scream open, and there is …

Red. No, not red—burgundy. A lot of burgundy, as if a drape has been hung across the door. Yet then the drape shifts, and Pitry sees it is split in the middle by a stripe of white cloth with buttons down the middle.

It is not a drape. It is the chest of a man in a dark burgundy coat. The biggest man Pitry has ever seen—a giant.

The giant unfolds himself and steps out of the car. His feet fall on the boards like millstones. Pitry stumbles back to allow him room. The giant’s long red coat kisses the tops of immense black boots, his shirt is open-throated with no scarf, and he wears a wide-brimmed gray hat at a piratical angle. On his right hand is a soft gray glove; his left is bare except for a woven gold bracelet—a curiously feminine affectation. He is well over six and a half feet tall, incredibly broad in the shoulders and back, but there is not an ounce of fat on him: his face has a lean, starved look. It is a face Pitry never expected to see on a Saypuri ambassador: the man’s skin is pale with many pink scars, his beard and hair are blond-white, and his eyes—or rather eye, for one eye is but a dark, hooded cavity—are so pale they are a whitish gray.

He is a Dreyling, a North-man. The ambassador, however impossible it seems, is one of the mountain savages, a foreigner to both the Continent and Saypur.

If this is their response, thinks Pitry, then what an awful and terrible response it is. …

The giant stares at Pitry with a flat, passive gaze, as if wondering if this runty little Saypuri is worth stomping on.

Pitry attempts a bow. “Greetings, Ambassador Thivani, to the w-wondrous city of B-Bulikov. I am Pitry Suturashni. I hope your journey was well?”

Silence.

Pitry, still bowed, tilts his head up. The giant is staring down at him, though one eyebrow rises just slightly in what could be a look of contemptuous bemusement.

Somewhere behind the giant comes the sound of a throat being cleared. The giant, without a word of greeting or good-bye, turns and walks toward the station manager’s desk.

Pitry scratches his head and watches him go. The little cough sounds again, and he realizes there is someone else standing in the doorway.

It is a small Saypuri woman, dark-skinned and even smaller than Pitry. She is dressed rather plainly—a blue coat and robe that is noticeable only in its Saypuri cut—and she watches him from behind enormously thick eyeglasses. She wears a light gray trenchcoat, and a short-brimmed blue hat with a paper orchid in its band. Pitry finds there is something off about her eyes. … The giant’s gaze was incredibly, lifelessly still, but this woman’s eyes are the precise opposite: huge and soft and dark, like deep wells with many fish swimming in them.

The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished. “I thank you for coming to meet us at such a late hour,” she says.

Pitry looks at her, then back at the giant, who is cramming his way into the station porter’s office, much to the porter’s concern. “Am-Ambassador Thivani?”

She nods and steps off the train.

A woman? Thivani is a woman? Why didn’t they… ?

Oh, damn the Comm Department! Damn their gossip and their lies!

“I trust that Chief Diplomat Troonyi,” she says, “is busy with the consequences of the murder. Otherwise he would be here himself?”

“Uh …” Pitry does not wish to admit that he knows no more of CD Troonyi’s intentions than he does the movements of the stars of the sky.

She blinks at him from behind her eyeglasses. Silence swells to engulf Pitry like the tide. He scrambles for something to say, anything. He lands on: “It’s very nice to have you here in Bulikov.” No, no, absolutely wrong. Yet he continues: “I hope your journey was … pleasant.” Wrong! Worse!

She looks at him a moment longer. “Pitry, you said your name was?”

“Y-yes.” There is a shout from behind them. Pitry looks, but Thivani does not—she keeps watching Pitry as one would an interesting bug. Pitry sees that the giant is prying something from the station porter’s hands—some kind of clipboard—which makes the porter none too pleased. The giant stoops, removes the gray glove from his right hand, and opens his fingers to show … something. The porter, whose face previously had been the color of old beets, goes quite white. The giant tears out a sheet of paper from the clipboard, gives the clipboard back to the porter, and exits.

“Who is … ?”

“That is my secretary,” says Thivani. “Sigrud.”