City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(87)

She lifts the candelabra and gazes at the other round chambers.

Once, when she was very young, Aunt Vinya took her to the National Library in Ghaladesh. Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves. … Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.

She felt overwhelmed. It was—she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library—a lot like being in love for the first time.

And to find this here under the earth, as if all the experiences and words and histories of the Continent could be washed away by the rain to leach through the soil and drip, drip, drip into a hollow in the loam, like the slow calcification of crystal …

In the dark, under Bulikov, Shara Komayd paces over ancient stones and falls in love again.

*

The rumble of footsteps. Shara looks up from a pictogram of Olvos to see the staircase glowing bright with candlelight.

Mulaghesh enters, flanked by Sigrud and two soldiers with candelabras. She takes one glance at the vast temple; her shoulders droop—Oh, what a mess this is—and she sighs: “Ah, shit.”

“It’s quite a discovery, isn’t it?” calls Shara as she walks across the atria.

“You could say that,” Mulaghesh says, “yes.”

“You have men posted to guard the entrance?”

“I have five soldiers outside, yes.”

“This is”—Shara steps around a puddle of mud—“enormous. Enormous! I’d imagine this is the most significant Divine discovery since the War, since the Blink! The greatest historical discovery in … well, history. To discover any piece of this place, any fragment of these pictograms, would be borderline revolutionary in Ghaladesh, but to have found the entire building, whole, and more or less unharmed, is, is …” Shara, breathless, inhales. “It boggles the mind.”

Mulaghesh stares at the curving ceiling. She strokes the scars on her jaw with her knuckles. “It sure does.”

“Here! Look here, at this section!” Shara stoops. “These few yards of carvings offer more knowledge about Ahanas than anyone’s found in years. We know almost nothing about her! Ahanashtan, as you probably know, is one of the places most deeply affected by the Blink—almost all the city seemed to vanish, you see. Almost everything that’s there now was built by Saypur.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But this mural proves why it vanished! It corroborates the theory that Ahanas actually grew the city, sowing miraculous seeds that grew into living buildings, homes, streets, lights . … Peaches that glowed at night, like streetlights, vines that funneled in water and away waste … It’s fascinating.”

Mulaghesh scratches the corner of her mouth. “Yeah.”

“And when Ahanas died, all of that vanished. What’s more, it provides a second explanation for the gap in knowledge: if what this says is true, Ahanashtanis thought all life and all parts of the body were sacred—they never used medicine, never cut their hair, never shaved, never trimmed their fingernails, never brushed their teeth, never … well … cleaned their nether parts.”

“Yeesh.”

“But that was because they didn’t have to! Ahanas was able to meet every single one of their needs! They lived in complete harmony with this massive, organic city! But after the Blink, when disease started rampaging through the Continent, they must have refused every medicine, every ministration. … So nearly every Ahanashtani on the Continent must have died out! Can you imagine! Can you imagine that?”

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. Then, amiably: “So, you know we’re going to have to cave in that tunnel, right?”

“And this section here,” says Shara, “it … it …” She bows her head and lets out a slow breath. Then she looks up at Mulaghesh.

Mulaghesh smiles grimly and nods. “Yeah. You know. You know we can’t possibly keep something like this secret. Not something this big. We’d post guards. Then someone would ask questions about those guards, what they’re guarding, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Or we’d try and excavate it, study it, document it, and someone would see all the equipment, all the personnel, and they’d ask questions, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Trouble”—Mulaghesh files a rough nail away on the edge of one engraving—“is unavoidable. And worse, Wiclov knows about it, so if we try and stay here and do anything, it’s putting a knife in his hands: ‘Look at Saypur, keeping our most sacred temple secret in the earth, getting their dirty foreign fingers all over it.’ Can you imagine that fallout? Can you imagine what would happen, Ambassador? Not just to your investigation, but to the Continent, to Saypur?”

Shara sighs. This is an argument she expected, but she’d hoped the solution wouldn’t be quite so drastic. “You really want to … to just cave it in? You think that’s our best option?”

“I’d prefer to fill the damn tunnel up with cement, but the equipment would attract too many eyes. I’ve already asked our engineers about it—there are some wooden struts at the door that are definitely load-bearing. It wouldn’t take more than an hour.”