City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(89)

Sigrud and the other two soldiers watch, bewildered, before following.

*

“Taking everything into account, it still seems wisest,” Mulaghesh intones from the shadows, “to just destroy the damn thing.”

Shara holds the candelabra higher to inspect the door frame. “Would you prefer that we leave not knowing if someone used the door to access the Warehouse?”

A click as Mulaghesh sucks on her cigarillo. “They could have gone in there, touched something they shouldn’t have, and died.”

“Then I, personally, would like to have a body.” She studies the sculpted door, looking for a word, a letter, a switch, or a button. Though they wouldn’t need anything mechanical, she reminds herself. All mechanics of the miraculous operate in a much more abstract manner.

Sigrud lies on the temple floor, staring up as if it’s a sunny hillside with a blue sky above. “Maybe,” he says, “you must do something to the other door.”

“I would prefer that, yes,” says Shara. She mutters a few lines from the Jukoshtava: the door remains indifferent. “Then this door would be more or less useless. Provided security is firm at the Warehouse.”

“And it is,” snaps Mulaghesh.

Shara tries praising the names of a few key Jukoshtani saints. The door is unmoved. This must be what it’s like, she thinks, to be a lecher trying out lines on a girl at a party.

“I rather think,” she says finally, “that I am going about this wrong.”

Mulaghesh suppresses a ferocious yawn. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

Shara’s eye strays across a distant pictogram in Jukov’s atrium depicting an orgy of stupendous complexity. “Jukov did not respect words, or shows of fealty. He was always much more about action, wildness, with nothing planned.” At the head of the orgy, a figure in a pointed hat holds aloft a jug of wine and a knife. “Sacrifice through blood, sweat, tears, emotion …”

She remembers a famous passage from the Jukoshtava: “Those who are unwilling to part with their blood and fear; who refuse wine and wildness; who come upon a choice, a chance, and tremble and fear—why should I allow them in my shadow?”

Wine, thinks Shara, and the flesh.

“Sigrud,” she says. “Give me your flask.”

Sigrud lifts his head and frowns.

“I know you have one. I don’t care about that. Just give it to me. And a knife.”

Sparks as Mulaghesh taps her cigarillo against the wall. “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

Sigrud clambers to his feet, rustles in his coat—there is the tinkling of metal: unpleasant instruments, surely—and produces a flask of dark brown glass.

“What is it?” asks Shara.

“They said it was plum wine,” he says. “But from the fumes … I think the salesman, he might not have been so honest.”

“And … have you tried it?”

“Yes. And I have not gone blind. So.” He holds out a small blade.

This will either work, thinks Shara, or be very embarrassing. Sigrud uncorks the flask—the fumes are enough to make her gag—and she tugs off her free hand’s glove with her teeth. Then she steels herself and slashes the inside of her palm.

Mulaghesh is appalled. “What in the—?”

Shara puts her mouth to the wound and sucks at it. It is bleeding freely: the taste of salt and copper suffuses her mouth, almost chokes her. Then she rips her hand away and hurriedly takes a pull from the flask.

It is not—most certainly not—any sort of alcohol she has ever tasted before. Vomit curdles in her stomach, washes up her esophagus; she chokes it back down. She faces the door frame, gags once, and spews the mixture of alcohol and blood over it.

She is not in control of herself enough to even see if it works. She hands the flask and knife back to Sigrud, drops to all fours, and begins to violently dry heave, but as she lost most of the contents of her stomach when she first saw the mhovost, there is nothing to expel.

She hears Mulaghesh say, “Um. Uhh …”

There is a soft scrape as Sigrud’s black knife escapes from its sheath.

“What?” croaks Shara. She wipes away tears. “What is it? Did it work?”

She looks, and finds it is difficult to say.

The interior of the door frame is completely, impenetrably black, as if someone inserted a sheet of black graphite in it while she wasn’t looking. One of Mulaghesh’s soldiers, curious, steps behind the doorway: none of them are able to see through to her. The soldier sticks her head out the other side and asks, “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” says Mulaghesh. “Was it supposed to do”—she struggles for words—“that?”

“It’s a reaction, at least,” says Shara. She grabs the candelabra and approaches the door frame.

“Be careful!” says Mulaghesh. “Something could … I don’t know, come out of it.”

The black inside the doorway, Shara sees, is not as solid as she thought: as she nears it, the shadow recedes until she spots the hint of tall, square metal frames on either side of the doorway, and a rickety wooden floor.

Shelves, she realizes. I’m seeing rows and rows of shelves.

“Oh, my seas and stars,” whispers Mulaghesh. “What is that?”