City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(7)

The giant takes out a match, lights it on a thumbnail, and sets fire to the piece of paper.

“S-secretary?” says Pitry.

Flames lick the giant’s fingers. If this pains him, he does not show it. After he deems the paper has sufficiently burned, he blows on it—puff—and embers dance across the station platform. He tugs the gray glove back on and surveys the station coldly.

“Yes,” she says. “Now, if it does not trouble you, I believe I would like to go straight to the embassy. Has the embassy informed any of the officials of Bulikov about my arrival?”

“Well. Uh …”

“I see. Do we have possession of the professor’s body?”

Pitry’s mind whirls. He wonders, perhaps for the first time, what happens to a body after it dies—this suddenly seems much more perplexing than the whereabouts of its spirit.

“I see,” she says. “Do you have a car with you?”

Pitry nods.

“If you would, please lead me to it.”

He nods again, perplexed, and takes her across the shadow-laden station to the car in the alleyway. He cannot stop glancing over his shoulder at her.

This is who they send? This tiny, plain girl with the too-high voice? What could she possibly hope to accomplish in this endlessly hostile, endlessly suspicious place? Could she even last the night?





Even today, after we have attempted so much research and recovered so many artifacts, we still have no visual concept of what they looked like. All the sculptures, paintings, murals, bas-reliefs, and carvings render the figures either indistinct or incoherently. For in one depiction Kolkan appears as a smooth stone beneath a tree; and in another, a dark mountain against the bright sun; and in yet another, a man made of clay seated on a mountain. And these inconsistent portrayals are still a great improvement over others, which render their subjects as a vague pattern or color hanging in the air, no more than the stroke of a brush: for example, if we are to take the Continent’s ancient art at its word, the Divinity Jukov mostly appeared as a storm of starlings.

As in so many of these studies, it is difficult to conclude anything from such disparate scraps. One must wonder if the subjects of these works of art actually chose to present themselves this way. Or, perhaps, the subjects were experienced in a manner that was impossible to translate in conventional art.

Perhaps no one on the Continent ever quite knew what they were seeing. And now that the Divinities are gone, we might never know.

Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception.

—“The Nature of Continental Art,”

Dr. Efrem Pangyui





We Must Civilize Them


She watches.

She watches the crumbling arches, the leaning, bulky vaults, the tattered spires and the winding streets. She watches the faded tracery on the building facades, the patchwork of tiles on the sagging domes, the soot-stained lunettes, and the warped, cracked windows. She watches the people—short, rag-wrapped, malnourished—stumbling through oblong portals and porticos, beggars in a city of spectral wonders. She sees everything she expected to see, yet all these dreary ruins set her mind alight, wondering what they could have been like seventy, eighty, ninety years ago.

Bulikov. City of Walls. Most Holy Mount. Seat of the World. The City of Stairs.

She’d never figured that last one out. Walls and mounts and seats of the world—that’s something to brag about. But stairs? Why stairs?

Yet now Ashara—or just Shara, usually—finally sees. The stairs lead everywhere, nowhere: there are huge mountains of stairs, suddenly rising out of the curb to slash up the hillsides; then there will be sets of uneven stairs that wind down the slope like trickling creeks; and sometimes the stairs materialize before you like falls on whitewater rapids, and you see a huge vista crack open mere yards ahead . …

The name must be a new one. This could have only happened after the War. When everything … broke.

So this is what the Blink looks like, she thinks. Or, rather, this is what it did . …

She wonders where the stairs went before the War. Not to where they go now, that’s for sure. She struggles with the reality of where she is, of how she came here, of how this could possibly really be happening …

Bulikov. The Divine City.

She stares out the car window. Once the greatest city in the world, yet now one of the most ravaged places known to man. Yet still the population clings to it: it remains the third or fourth most populated city in the world, though once it was much, much larger. Why do they stay here? What keeps these people in this half-city, vivisected and shadowy and cold?

“Do your eyes hurt?” asks Pitry.

“Pardon?” says Shara.

“Your eyes. Mine would swim sometimes, when I first came here. When you look at the city, in certain places, things aren’t quite … right. They make you sick. It used to happen a lot more, I’m told, and it happens less and less these days.”

“What is it like, Pitry?” asks Shara, though she knows the answer: she has read and heard about this phenomenon for years.

“It’s like … I don’t know. Like looking into glass.”

“Glass?”

“Well, no, not glass. Like a window. But the window looks out on a place that isn’t there anymore. It’s hard to explain. You’ll know it when you see it.”