"City of Stairs"

[fiefoe]

Robert Jackson Bennett's earlier work is more ambitious in its world building than "The Tainted Cup", which necessitated some slightly clumsy exposition passages. The central character is smart and strong but leaves me a bit cold.

• (Though can we really call ourselves occupiers, thinks Mulaghesh, if we’ve been here for nearly seventy-five years? When do we graduate to residents?)
• * In fact, Mulaghesh believes she has acquitted only three people in her two decades as polis governor. And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life...
• “But … But this isn’t fair!” says Yaroslav. “Why do you get to bandy about our sigils, our holy signs, but we can’t?”
  “The polis governor’s quarters”—Jindash waves a hand at the walls—“are technically Saypuri soil. We are not under the jurisdiction of the Worldly Regulations, which apply only to the Continent.”
• Mulaghesh is sensitive to the fact that, in the full scope of history, Saypur’s global hegemony is minutes old. For many hundreds of years before the Great War, Saypur was the Continent’s colony—established and enforced, naturally, by the Continent’s Divinities—and few have forgotten this in Bulikov
• so far it has mostly consisted of waiting. As an assistant to the associate ambassadorial administrator, Pitry has learned how to wait on new and unexciting things in new and unexciting ways, becoming an expert at watching the second hand of a clock slowly crank out the hours. The purpose of an assistant, he has decided, is to have someone upon whom you can unload all the deadly little nothings that fill the bureaucratic day.
• * The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished.
• “Well … Hm.” He smears on his nicest smile.
• Shara often does illegal things in her trade. But it’s one thing to violate a country’s law when you’re actively working against that country, and it’s another to do what Shara is doing right now, which is so horrendously dreaded in Saypur and so fervently outlawed and regulated and monitored on the Continent, the birthplace of this particular act.
  Because right now, in CD Troonyi’s office, Shara is about to perform a miracle.
  As always, the change is quite imperceptible: there is a shift in the air, a coolness on the skin, as if someone has cracked a door somewhere; as she writes, the tip of her finger begins to feel that the glass’s surface is softer and softer, until it is like she is writing on water.
• But Auntie Vinya’s allure, Shara feels, has always gone beyond her beauty: it is something in her eyes, which are both wide and widely set, and deep brown. It is like Auntie Vinya is always half remembering a long life most people would have killed to lead.
• * And though Vinya may be her aunt, there never was a relationship between a commander and their operative that wasn’t somewhat adversarial.
• And as Shara and any other student of the history before the Great War knows, the Continent was practically swimming in such things. Before the Kaj invaded, the daily life of people on the Continent was propelled, maintained, and supported by countless miraculous items: teapots that never went empty, locks that responded only to a drop of a certain person’s blood,
• But she remembers how Efrem lay on the cot in the embassy vault, his skull wearing the crude mask of his small, delicate face.…
• And she’d answered: What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that. And the cocksure grin had melted off his face, his blue eyes crackling with brittleness like ice dunked in warm water, and she’d known then that she’d hurt him, really, genuinely hurt him, found someplace deep inside him no one knew about and burned it into ash.
• But Sigrud knows that crowds are much like individual people: they have their own psychology, their own habits, their own natures. They unthinkingly assume specific structures—channels and corridors of traffic, bends around blockades—and break apart these structures in a manner that almost seems choreographed when you watch it. It’s simply a matter of placing yourself within these structures, like hovering in the still side of a school of fish as it twists and darts across the ocean floor. Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.
• The man plunges ahead into a part of Bulikov that was obviously much more ravaged by the Blink, the War, and whichever other catastrophes happened to get wedged within that rocky period of world history. The number of staircases practically triples, or quadruples—it’s a little hard for Sigrud’s eye to count them. Spiral staircases rise up to halt completely in midair, some only ten feet off the ground, some twenty or thirty. There is something faintly osseous about them, resembling the rippled horns of some massive, exotic ruminant.
• It was to be a four-hour slugfest: a game of endless beginnings, of defensive positions, of recombinations and rearrangements. It was, one teacher said, the most conservative game of Batlan he had ever seen played: but, of course, they were not really playing Batlan at all, but a different game altogether, a mix of Batlan and Tovos Va they were inventing as they fought.
• “Perhaps so. Perhaps I’ve traveled solely to find backtalk somewhere. But I wonder—what could have beaten you so badly that it’s honed such a sharp edge, my little battle-ax?” He swooped back around, redoubled his defenses. (Some student nearby grumbled, “When are they actually going to start playing?”) <> “You are mistaken, sir,” said Shara. “You are merely sensitive. In fact, I would expect that to sit upon an uncushioned chair would surely score your princely buttocks.”
• Names, she thinks. Names are always such a problem. After all, the South Seas are actually northeast of Saypur—they’re only called such because it was the Continent that named them first, and any name, as Saypur has learned over and over again, dies hard and slowly.
• They started meeting in the library nearly every day, and their relationship felt like a continuation of their Batlan game: a long, exhausting conflict in which little ground was ever ceded or gained. Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the money to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?
• Vohannes laughed. “My dear Shara, do you not see that what makes your country so great is that it allows its people to be human in a way the Continent never did?”
• We do not protest because we have no voice to protest with. To have a voice is a crime.
  We cannot think to protest. To think these things is a crime. These words—these words you hear—they are stolen from myself.
  We are not chosen. We are not the children of the gods. We are the soulless, we are ash-children, we are as mud and dirt.
• He recalls a saying from his homeland: Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.
• “And the Restorationists hate you for it.” “Like I said, they’re fighting history. And everyone loses that fight.”
• I’d not weep to see you sic your dogs on him. The man is a reeking bag of goat shit with a beard.”
• And it’s not a speech, Shara! I have tried to involve Saypur and her trading partners before, but Saypur does not lend us its favor—it wants to keep things the way they are, with Saypur completely in control of everything. It doesn’t want to see wealth in Bulikov any more than it wants us chanting the rites of the Divinities. If I must nakedly prostitute myself to bring aid to my city, to my country, I will gladly do so.” <> He hasn’t changed any at all, really, she thinks, torn between amusement and shock. He’s still the noble idealist, in his own perverse way.…
• she privately dreads this: one’s own security often makes it hard to penetrate that of one’s opponents.
• In Shara’s estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it:
• * “And this means we shed our morals at the door?” “Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”
• He opens his mouth to scream again. Shara watches as flames flood into his mouth, down his throat. She can see his tongue bubbling.
• * Saypur, however, being a colony that only peripherally benefited from miraculous intervention, had better knowledge of nonmiraculous sanitation. They quarantined the infected, and when soldiers arrived home, they promptly quarantined them as well—a decision that caused much outrage in Saypur at the time. Overall, though the Plague Years were far from easy, Saypur lost less than ten thousand lives to the sudden, massive influx of disease... It is this self-sufficiency that also came to Saypur’s aid in terms of technology... Having been forced to generate such technological innovation under threat, and now suddenly finding itself sitting upon a wealth of resources that could now be called its own, Saypur underwent a phenomenal technological transformation overnight.
• One of the Continent’s biggest problems with having six Divinities were the many, many conflicting mythologies: for example, how could the world be a burning, golden coal pulled from the fires of Olvos’s own heart while also being a stone hacked by Kolkan from a mountain behind the setting sun? And how could one’s soul, after death, flit away to join Jukov’s flock of brown starlings, while also flowing down the river of death to wash ashore in Ahanas’s garden, where it would grow into an orchid? All Divinities were very clear about such things, but none of them agreed with one another.
• The final piece of evidence supporting this theory was the “reality static” that appeared directly after the Kaj successfully killed four of the six original Divinities: the world apparently “remembered” that parts of it once existed in different realities, and had trouble reassembling itself. Saypuri soldiers recorded seeing rivers that flowed into the sky, silver that would turn to lead if you carried it through a certain place, trees that would bloom and die several times over in one day,
• She knows she should discount her own paranoia, of course—Paranoia of one’s case officers and commanders, as she’s told her own sources, is a perfectly natural feeling 
• after all, your most preferred method of dead drops. You tend to like the finance people. They are so process-oriented, not unlike yourself.”
• “I don’t have the time or the energy to hate,” says Shara. “I only wish to understand. People are what they are.” She smiles weakly and shrugs: What can one do?
• Shara salts the goat meat, then tosses it in with the simmering vegetables. “Yes. The Plague Years came just after, the last bit of Divine protection falling away, so we know for sure that he is gone from this world.” <> Mulaghesh thinks. “It feels damn odd,” she says, “to list Divinities as you would suspects for a robbery. As if we could go out and line them up on a wall and have the victim come in and point the criminal out.
• Shara coughs. “You get the idea,” she says. “These punishments were carried out with almost no objection. The people did not fight. They welcomed these punishments with the sober obsequiousness of the condemned. <> “Over time, Kolkan’s punishments and rules became more and more severe, and odder and odder. He became fixated on flesh and desire, on sexuality and lust. He wished to wholly censor these subjects. His first method of repression may be ironically resonant to any Saypuri. For he banned any public acknowledgment of the female sex or anatomy. Much like how some of our own laws censor discussion.”
• I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. <> States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.
• “Come work for me. It’d be a change of pace. We’re not the old guard. None of my companies are. We’re doing big new things. And also I can pay you perfectly despicable amounts of money.”
• * “I’m sad to see you so happy to persecute Kolkashtanis.”
  He laughs blackly. “Don’t they deserve it? I mean, my own damn family … You want to talk about persecution, why don’t you talk to the people who did so with zeal for hundreds of years, even without their damn”—he glances around, lowers his voice—“god?”
  “Aren’t they still your people, the very ones you want to help? Do you really want to reform Bulikov, Vo, or burn it to the ground?”
• Perhaps he’s an obstacle to the future of the Continent—for I don’t see him ever wishing to see a bright new future, but rather the dead, dull, dusty past.
• Her first trick is an old and simple one: she takes out a jar, fills it with daisy petals—Sacred to Ahanas, thinks Shara, for their willful recurrence—shakes the jar, and dumps out the petals. Then she takes a bit of graveyard mud, smears it across the glass bottom of the jar, wipes it clean, and applies the mouth of the jar to her eye, like a telescope.
• * And I think by exposing him, you wished to impress me, impress us all. But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law. Such was the case here.
• Your job in the Ministry is not to stop corruption and inequality: rather, these are tools in your bag to be used to aid Saypur in every way possible. Your job is to make sure the past never happens again, that we never see such poverty and powerlessness again. Corruption and inequality are useful things: if they benefit us, we must own them fully... Shara thought of Vohannes then: You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.…
• Very arbitrary amounts, too—within one thousand five hundred pounds and one thousand nine hundred pounds every time. We’re not sure wh—”
  Shara sits forward. “It’s the weight check.”
  “What?”
  “The weight check! The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has automatic background checks on purchasers of large quantities of materials! Oil, wood, stone, metal … We want to know who we’re selling to, if they buy large enough amounts. And for steel, the weight check amount must be—”
  “Two thousand pounds,”
• No Divine workings at all, leaving only the Blink as a possible cause. It is worth noting, though, that no one has ever been able to adequately study the Blink. The Continent protects its damages like a bitter old woman does grudges.
• Yet its head is by far the worst part: the back is roughly like the head of a balding man, sporting a ring of long, gray scraggly hair around its skull; but instead of a face or jaw, the head stretches forward to form what looks like a wide, long, flat bill—like, again, that of a goose, though it has no eyes. Yet rather than the tough keratin normally seen in ducks or geese, the bill is made of knuckled human flesh, as if a man’s fingers were fused together, and he brought both hands together to form a joint at the heel of his palms.
• “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?
• “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.”... “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!
• 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.
• The dark air is filled with sighs and squeaks and low hums. The rattle of pennies, the scrape of wood. The air pressure in the room feels like it is constantly changing: either something in the Warehouse has confused Shara’s skin, inner ear, and sinuses, or there are countless forces applying themselves to her, then fading, like ocean currents. <> How many miracles are in here with us, Shara wonders, functioning away in the dark? How many of the words of the Divinities still echo in this place?
• “Well, despite all the Regulations, that thing under the ice is considered holy by most of the Continent,” says Shara. “It is, after all, a creature of stories and myths valued by your culture. It’s part of your heritage. If you wish us to kill it—to kill what is, in effect, a living legend—we would want to have your express permission to do so.”
  Nesrhev’s face sours. “You,” he says, “are trying to cover your ass.”
  “Perhaps. But Urav is an integral part to some of your treasured myths. We are not Continentals. To some Continentals, if we are successful in killing Urav, it would be tantamount to destroying a historic work of art.”
  “In this case, though,” says Mulaghesh, “it’s a work of art that’s running around killing people.”
• “Because it is all I know,” he says with a shrug. “And I am good at it. I could save lives tonight. And the only life risked would be my own.”
• The ice crackles underneath Sigrud’s feet. The world is a coward, he thinks. It does not change before your face; it waits until your back is turned, and pounces.…
  The voice says, “PAIN IS YOUR FUTURE. PAIN IS YOUR PURITY.” <> Sigrud says, “But you cannot teach me pain”—he begins to tug at the fingers of the glove—“because I already know it.”
• * She looks at it. “But that … that isn’t the blessing of Kolkan.…”
  “Maybe not. But I think that … being punished by Kolkan, and being blessed by him … They may be the same thing.”
  Shara remembers Efrem reading from Olvos’s Book of the Red Lotus and commenting aloud, The Divine did not understand themselves in the same way we do not understand ourselves, and their unintentional effects often say more about them than their intentional ones.
• *“Disaster is our constant companion in Bulikov, Ambassador,” says Vohannes. “Grief and decency are mere decorations that hang upon the real problem: Bulikov desperately needs help and reconstruction. Real reconstruction, which we cannot do ourselves!”
• He breathes heavily for a moment; she suspects he is weeping. “ ‘The world is our crucible,’ ” he murmurs. “ ‘And with each burn, we are shaped.’ ”
  Shara knows the line. “The Kolkashtava?”
  He laughs bitterly. “Maybe Volka was right. Once a Kolkashtani …”
  Then he is silent.
  Shara wonders what kind of man thinks of his brother when naked in a woman’s bed. Then they both find troubled sleep.
• Shara’s consciousness churns awake, kicking against the dark, oily waters of a hangover.
• Shara feels sick. There is nothing—nothing—that could ever be more terrifying to intelligence operatives than being installed in public office, exposed and vulnerable to all the pleas and restrictions they could previously simply sidestep in their shadow life.
• It seems unlikely that you would not know this already, & since the only indication of this deposit box’s existence is a message encoded in a mixture of old Gheshati, Chotokan, Dreyling, & Avranti, then the probabilities suggest that only a person with great experience in ancient translation would be able to find this box at all. <> I suppose what I am saying is—Hello, Shara.
• I have touched upon a truth in Bulikov perilous enough that I feel my life is in danger—but I am not certain which truth. Yet you are, in many ways, wiser & worldlier than I ever wished to be, & I hope that you may succeed where I have failed.
• * Then—“abruptly”—in 723, all six Divinities felt compelled to sit down in the Night of the Convening, in the future spot of Bulikov, hash out their differences, & form what was, more or less, a pantheon of equal Divinities.… Yet all religious texts I have reviewed indicate this was decided with no consultation with their mortal followers whatsoever! This was, reportedly, a “unilateral” decision among Divinities, as one would expect, for why would a god consult with his or her followers, like a politician among constituents? Yet obviously the shift had been brewing for years, among their mortal flock!
• * “Forgetting.” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.”
• The pattern is undeniable: the Continentals made their decisions, formed their attitudes … & the Divinities followed, making them official.
  Who was leading whom? Is this evidence of some kind of unconscious vote, which the Divinities then enacted?
  I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like schools offish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course.
  And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises by millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts—giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers?...
  But were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?
• She lives on a diet of agendas, each stuffed in her hand as she walks through the door, and a parade of bland and vapid names: “Today is the Legislative Co-Action Association of the Kivrey Quarters”
• *Sigrud: “Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties,” says Sigrud. He stares into the sky, and the white sunlight glints off of his many scars. “They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”.. “We think we move, we run, we push forward, but, I think, in many ways we are still running in place, trapped in a moment that happened to us long ago.”
• Yet she feels she is drowning in information: Efrem’s journal, the lists from the Warehouse, financial transactions, Continental history, forbidden lists, Votrov subsidiaries, possessors of loomworks—all of it dances before her eyes until she cannot hold a single thought besides,
• Just imagine, she tells herself. Behind this crumbling city is a hidden, mythic paradise, and one only has to scrape at reality with one’s fingernail to find it.
• A carpet, with every thread blessed.
  A loomworks that could take the carpet apart with great ease.
  And a small armada of steel ships in the hills, with no ocean.
  The boy in the police cell, whispering, We can’t fly through the air on ships of wood.
  Perhaps they wouldn’t need the ocean at all.
• He is so much like Vohannes, in so many ways: many of his gestures and much of his bearing are Vo’s. Yet there is something strangely more decayed and yet delicate about this man: something in the way he cocks his hips, the way he crosses his arms.… She remembers the mhovost, and its effeminate walk back and forth, mimicking someone she hadn’t yet glimpsed.
• And when I was down there, in the Seat of the World, I looked for the famous stained glass I have always heard of … but all the windows were broken. All except one, in the Kolkashtani atrium. And I thought it was so curious, at the time, that it was whole, unbroken, yet blank.” <> She opens her eyes. “That’s where the other gods jailed him, didn’t they? That’s where Kolkan has been imprisoned for the past three hundred years. A living god, chained within a pane of glass.”


• * Captain Mivsk Ashkovsky of the good ship Mornvieva stares through the green lenses of his goggles and into the wild riot of the dawn. Clouds cling to the horizon like newspaper headlines.
• Another bell tolls. And another. And another. They all have different tones, as if some are very large and others are very small, but more than that, each bell has a resonance that seems like it can only be perceived by different parts of the mind, pouring in alien experiences: when one bell tolls, she imagines she sees hot, murky swamps, tangles of vines, and clutches of flowering orchids; when another bell tolls, she smells flaming pitch, and sawdust, and mortar; .. One bell for each Divinity, thinks Shara. I don’t know how he did it, or even what he’s doing, but Volka’s found a way to ring all the bells of the Seat of the World.
• “YOU ARE UNWORTHY.”
  Volka is mute with shock.
  The voice says, “YOU HAVE BATHED FRUITS IN THE WATERS OF THE OCEAN. YOU HAVE MIXED LINENS AND COTTONS WITH YOUR GARMENTS. YOU HAVE CREATED GLASS WITH MANY FLAWS. YOU HAVE TASTED THE FLESH OF SONGBIRDS. I SEE THESE WRONGS IN YOU. YOU ARE UNREPENTANT OF THEM. AND NOW, AS I EMERGE, YOU DO NOT MEET ME WITH THE FLAME AND THE SPARROW.”
• “I am sorrowful. I am sorrowful that I happened to be born into a world where being disgusted with yourself was what you were supposed to be. I am sorrowful that my fellow countrymen feel that being human is something to repress, something ugly, something nasty. It’s … It’s just a fucking shame. It really is.”
• Children at play stop where they are and listen.
  “YOU HAVE LAIN WITH ONE ANOTHER IN JOY.”
  A street sweeper, still holding his broom, slowly turns to look up into the sky.
  “YOU HAVE BUILT FLOORS OF WHITE STONE.”
  The elderly men at the Ghoshtok-Solda Dinner Club stare at one another, then at their bottles of wine and whiskey.
  “YOU HAVE EATEN BRIGHT FRUITS,” says the voice, “AND ALLOWED THEIR SEEDS TO ROT IN DITCHES.”
  In a barbershop beside the Solda, the barber, stunned, has removed most of an old man’s mustache; the old man, just as stunned, has yet to realize.
• “So I mean that even if this does work, there is a very good chance I may overdose, and die.” <> Mulaghesh shrugs. “Yeah, probably. Welcome to war. Let’s see if you can do something before you actually die, though, okay?”
• * Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you do it right!
• The good ship Mornvieva, once occupied by twenty-three souls, now occupied by one sole stowaway, cuts through the clouds and the wind like a dream. Sigrud stands at the wheel, puffing at his pipe, and makes a slight adjustment south-southwest. Sigrud laughs. He can’t remember the last time he laughed. Ship-borne for the first time in years and smoking his pipe.… It is a blessing he never thought he’d have again.
• The Restorationists bet everything on Saypur never expecting air-to-ground combat; but they, similarly, never considered air-to-air.
• “You’ve never experienced the destructive capabilities of our modern age,” she says. “Perhaps the modern rejects you as much as you reject it.”
  The Divinity raises its head to look at her, but otherwise does nothing.
  “Maybe you can keep fighting. But I don’t think you have it in you. This world doesn’t want you anymore. And even more, you don’t want it.”
  The Divinity angrily says, “I AM PAIN.”
  Shara stands before it and says, “And you are pleasure.”
• It is Kolkan: the stern man made of clay and stone.
  It is Jukov: the skinny, laughing man of fur and bells.
  It is both of them: both Divinities twisted together, shoved together, melded into one person. Kolkan’s head, with Jukov’s warped face appearing at Kolkan’s neck; one arm on one side, a forked arm with two clenched fists on the other; two legs, but one leg has two feet.…
• Shara is still trying to come to grips with the reality of what is happening, yet Olvos is so profoundly unlike anything she expected a god to be that she is not sure what to think: Olvos’s manner is like that of a fishwife or a seamstress rather than a Divinity. “That’s why you left the Continent? Because you disagreed with the Great Expansion?”
• *“A people believe in a god”—she completes the circle—“and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.”
• That night I chose, like all the other Divinities, to unite, form Bulikov, and live in what we thought was peace.… But I was profoundly troubled by this experience.”
  “Then how could you leave?” asks Shara. “If you were tied or tethered to the wishes of your people, how could they let you abandon the world?”
  Olvos gives Shara a scornful look: Can’t you put this together yourself?
  “Unless,” Shara says, “your people asked you to leave.…”
• * “Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all. Just look at the Kolkashtanis—they think the whole world was set up to shame and humiliate and punish and tempt them.… It’s all about them, them, them, them! The world is full of bad things, hurtful things, but it’s still all about them!
• “Clever Jukov figured it all out when the Kaj invaded. He understood that he had, through his own pride and arrogance, fathered the death of the Continent and the other Divinities. Before he hid himself with Kolkan, his last bitter act was to use a familiar to tell this fearsome invader the truth of his parentage.”
  “I see,” says Shara. “The Kaj fell into a deep depression after killing Jukov, and practically drank himself to death.”
  “Bitterness begets bitterness,” Olvos says. “Shame begets shame.”
  “ ‘What is reaped is what is sown,’ ” Shara says, “ ‘and what is sown is what is reaped.’ ”
• And for all those years, I knew that the balance of power in this world, this brave new land of politics and machinery, was predicated purely on lies. Saypur and the Continent hate one another, completely oblivious that each is now the product of the other. They are not separate—they are intertwined.
• * Each time people believed I came from somewhere new, I came from that place—and it was like I’d never come from any other place, and I never knew what I was before.” She takes a breath. “I am Olvos. I pulled the burning, golden coal of the world from the fires of my own heart. I fashioned the stars from my own teardrops when I mourned for the sun during the very first night. And I was born when all the dark of the world became too heavy, and scraped against itself, and made a spark—and that spark was me. This is all I know. I do not know what I was before I knew these things. I have looked, and tried to understand my origins—but history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.”
• Mulaghesh blinks and laughs hollowly. “You want me to play Sagresha to your Kaj? I told you, I’m not interested in promotion. I’m out of the game.” “And I’m going to change the game entirely,” says Shara.
• “Efrem Pangyui deduced the Kaj’s parentage in Bulikov,” says Shara. “And he, being the dutiful and honorable historian of Saypur, sent back a report without realizing he was signing his own death warrant—for him, the truth was the truth, and hiding it never occurred to him.” <> Vinya, who has resisted upper-middle age for nearly fifteen years, sits in her chair with the slow movements of an old woman.
• “I understand my stock has risen in Ghaladesh these days,” Shara says, with a quaint pout of modesty. “I am, after all, the only person since the Kaj to have killed a Divinity—two Divinities, technically, to the Kaj’s three. This, after Urav. They haven’t ever crowned another Kaj since Avshakta, but I don’t doubt that a few people in Saypur are discussing it. I believe that when I speak, I will be listened to. And as such, I believe your time in the Ministry is over, Auntie.”
• Time renders all people and all things silent, she thinks. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time I have.