City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(85)

“What?”

She points to the char marks, and the sandier places that are molten, like glass.

“Someone burned a hole this deep?” asks Sigrud.

“That’s how it appears,” says Shara. “Like a blowtorch flame through a stack of metal.”

“Have you seen such a thing before?”

“Actually … no. Which I find quite troubling, frankly.”

The white candlelight prances on the earthen walls. A strange breeze caresses her cheek. Shara adjusts her glasses.

The stairs seem to melt away below her. The walls fall back, then become stone—no, a stone mural, carved in a marvelously intricate pattern. Though the fluttering light makes it hard to see, Shara is sure she spots the slimsy form of Ahanas and the hand point of Taalhavras among the patterns.

The walls keep falling back. Then they aren’t there at all.

“Oh my word,” says Shara.

The candlelight beats back the dark. The shadows withdraw like a curtain to reveal a vast chamber. …

Shara catches glimpses, flashes, flickers of distant stone. …

“Oh, my word.”

She looks out. The chamber is huge and oddly uterine, from what she can see: both the ceiling and roof are huge and concave, and both come to a point in the exact center, connecting to form something similar to a stalagnate. The chamber has six atria, joining in the center like the petals and stigma of a fabulously complicated orchid bloom. And every single inch of the walls, ceiling, and floors are engraved with glyphs and sigils and pictograms of strange and bewildering events: a man pulls a thorned flower from a skull and ties its stem around his tongue; three vivisected women bathe in a rocky stream, their eyes like glass beads, while a stag watches from the shore; a woman stitches up an incision in her armpit, with the blank face of a man bulging out of the slit, as if he is being stitched up inside of her; four crows circle in the sky, and below them, a man draws water from the ground with a spear . … On and on and on—images of great and terrible meaning that are incomprehensible to her.

“What—” Sigrud snorts, hawks, swallows it with a gulp. “What is this place?”

Around the center, where the “stalagnate” forms, Shara sees soft earth has collected on the ground. But, she wonders, where did it come from? She paces forward, taking halting steps as she crosses the sloping floors.

The stalagnate, she sees, is actually a curling stairway, with five columns holding it up: it originally had six; but one, she sees, has been removed.

Six atria, she thinks, six columns, and six Divinities. …

The stairway ends in a blocked gap in the ceiling, filled with loose stone and crumbling loam, as if whatever was above caved in.

“Of course,” she says. “Of course!”

“What?” asks Sigrud.

She examines one column: it is beautifully wrought, engraved to resemble the trunk of a pine tree, with a line of flame crawling up its bark. The next column is straight and rigid and features a complicated repetitious design, like the visual expression of many mathematical formulas. The next column is carved to resemble a pillar of teeth or knives, thousands of blades melted together and pointing up, like the trunk of a palm tree. The next looks like a twisted loop of old vines, with many woody stems curled around one another: there is a slight bend in the column, artfully suggesting some flex. And the final of the five remaining columns is a twisting, chaotic tornado of blossoms, fur, leaves, sand, anything and everything.

Shara bunches her fists and trembles like a schoolgirl. “This was it!” she cries. “This had to be it! Really it! Down here, all along!”

“It being what?” says Sigrud, who remains unimpressed.

“Don’t you see? Everyone says the bell tower of the Seat of the World shrank during the Blink! But that’s not true! Because that’s the base of the bell tower!” She points at the columns around the staircase. “Those stairs are the way up!”

“So …”

“So the tower never shrank! The whole temple must have sunk into the mud! That shabby little clay shack up in the park was never the true Seat of the World! Which is what everyone, even everyone in Bulikov, still thinks. This is it! This is the Seat of the World! This is where the Divinities met!”

As Shara has devoted most of her adult life to history, she can’t help but be overwhelmed with giddiness, as unpatriotic as it may be; but one unmoved part of her mind speaks up:

This can’t all be coincidence. The most sacred structure in Bulikov just happened to sink so it remained hidden for nearly eighty years? And Ernst Wiclov was the one to tunnel underground to reach it? You don’t do something like that unless you know about it—and you wouldn’t know about it unless someone told you.

Shara plucks one candle out of Sigrud’s candelabra. “Go and send word to Mulaghesh. Now. If word gets out to the general populace of Bulikov that this is still here, and we have to publicly seize this place, it’ll be the Summer of Black Rivers all over again. And have her throw up a net for Wiclov. All checkpoints around and inside Bulikov will need to be on lookout for him. We’ve got enough to at least bring him in for questioning.”

“What will you do?” asks Sigrud.

“Stay down here, and inspect.”

“Will that candle be enough for you?”

“This is actually for you.” She holds the lone candle out to him and points to the candelabra. “I’ll be needing that, please.”