City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(86)
Sigrud cocks an eyebrow, shrugs, and hands her the candelabra. He retreats up the earthen tunnel. The faint white light comes bouncing down the stairs, then dims, leaving Shara alone in the vast chamber.
The candles fizz and spit. Somewhere, the limp plink of dripping water. And a thousand stone eyes watch her silently.
*
It takes some time to recalibrate her manner of thought: the chamber was not an underground cave, she reminds herself, but a temple meant to be aboveground. This explains the huge, gaping holes in the walls of each bulging atrium: they were once giant windows, and though it’s difficult to tell from where she stands on the staircase, all but one of them is now broken. So this is what happens to the storied stained glass of the Seat of the World, she thinks. Broken and buried in the mud of Bulikov. …
She looks out at the six atria. Each atrium has a different style, presumably aligning with each Divinity, just like the columns holding up the staircase. Shara sees the sigils of Olvos, Taalhavras, Ahanas, Voortya, Jukov, and then …
“Hm,” says Shara.
Despite its burial, it seems the Seat of the World is not in perfect condition: one atrium is utterly blank of any engravings at all, as if someone came in and sanded down the floor, ceiling, and wall.
But Shara sees someone has very recently attempted to restore the floor of this blank chamber, laying out engraved stones of a much darker make than the rest of the temple. The restoration isn’t complete yet, leaving a jumbled and distorted mess of images, words, and sigils on the floor, telling half-stories and partial myths, and leaving huge swaths of the chamber blank.
Over and over again, these dark new stones show the same image: a human-like figure seated in the center of a room, listening to someone. The accompanying sigil is familiar to her: a scale, represented by two dashes supported by a square fork.
Kolkan’s hands, she remembers. Waiting to weigh and judge …
She looks behind her. The pillar corresponding with the blank atrium is missing.
Shara gets the powerfully absurd feeling that she is staring at edited history.
This was once as decorated as the other five sections, thinks Shara. But I’m willing to bet it all went blank in 1442, right when Kolkan disappeared from the world. She looks out at the jigsaw collection of new pictograms. But now someone’s come back to correct the record.
She smirks. Perhaps they’re taking the term ‘Restorationists’ a bit too seriously.
It’s a futile task. By her estimation, there are thousands of square feet of floor, ceiling, and wall needing to be completely restored. And whoever was attempting to do so obviously had no idea what originally decorated Kolkan’s chamber. And where did these stones come from, anyway?
Shara hops down and begins inspecting the new pieces of stone on the floor. The stones themselves are fascinating—a dark, smooth ore of a like she’s never seen before—and their pictograms are of deeds and events Shara has never heard of: Kolkan, depicted as a robed, hooded figure, splits open a naked human form, and a pure, bright light comes spilling out to rain upon the rounded hills.
It’s from another temple, maybe. She traces one carving with her finger. Someone actually took the stone from one of Kolkan’s surviving temples and tried to rebuild it here, to restore Kolkan in the Seat of the World..
Could Ernst Wiclov really do something like this?
She sees movement ahead and slowly looks up. Something is twitching on the wall.
After a moment’s inspection, she sees there is a large, empty frame of some kind standing upright just a few yards of ahead of her; the quivering candle flames must have caused its shadow to dance on the stone wall behind it.
She looks around at the other chambers. None of them have a frame of any kind. Whoever tried to restore Kolkan’s chamber—presumably the same person who made the earthen stairway down and also thought to trap the mhovost before it as a revolting sort of watchdog—must have brought it here.
She walks over to it. It’s a stone door frame, about nine feet tall. But then, she recalls, Continentals generally were much taller in the years before the Blink: they were less malnourished in those days. Like so many things originating during the Divine era, the frame features exquisite stonework that gives it the likeness of thick fur, dry wood, chalky stone, and starlings. Yet none of this artistry has any real relation to Kolkan, at least as far as Shara’s aware: Kolkan generally disdained ornamentation of any kind.
She touches the carven starlings in the door frame: “And weren’t you a favorite of Jukov?”
As she touches it, the door slides back. She looks down at its base. The door frame is mounted on four small wheels made of iron. Shara gives it another push—with a squeak, it slides back farther. Why in the world would anyone want a mobile door frame?
She looks at the window frame in the wall of Kolkan’s atrium. Each atrium had its own window, originally, a stained glass for each Divinity. Shara has read scores of letters describing the beauty of the Divine glass of the Seat of the World—blues and reds the eye could not properly interpret but still feel—and while she is sorry to see it all broken, she’s a bit puzzled to see that Kolkan’s glass remains whole, but is perfectly blank and clear. She slowly waves the candelabra back and forth, watching the reflection: it’s a big, transparent, but otherwise utterly ordinary window. Perhaps it simply went blank, she concludes, when Kolkan vanished. But if so—why is it still whole, and all the others are broken?