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?”
Would this—Shara’s heart is trembling—be the view from shelf C5-162, where the other Ear of Jukov sits?
Shara reaches down and picks up a clod of earth. She gauges the distance and tosses it into the doorway.
The clod flies through the door frame, into the shadows, and lands with a thunk on the wooden floor.
“It passes through,” remarks Sigrud.
“That,” says Shara, “would be a major security breach.”
And so, she muses, Lord Jukov allows us in his shadow.
This deeply concerns her, though she does not say so: not only has she just found that one of Jukov’s Divine creatures was still alive, now one of his miraculous devices appears to still function. Who actually witnessed Jukov’s death, she thinks, besides the Kaj himself?
She returns to the task at hand. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
*
There is a passing shadow—the candle flames in her candelabra shrink to near nothing—an unsettling breeze, then the creak of wood below her feet.
Shara is through.
She takes a breath and immediately starts coughing.
The interior of the Unmentionable Warehouse is musty beyond belief, much more so than the Seat of the World: it is like entering the home of a hugely ancient, hoarding old couple. Shara hacks miserably against the bloody handkerchief around her hand. “Is there no ventilation here?”
Mulaghesh had tied a bandana around her head before she stepped through. “Why the hells would there be?” she says, irritated.
Sigrud enters behind her. If the air bothers him, he doesn’t show it.
Mulaghesh turns around to look at the second stone door frame, sitting comfortably in the lowest spot on shelf C5. Shara can see Mulaghesh’s two soldiers watching them from the other side of the door, anxious.
“Could we really be here?” Mulaghesh asks aloud. “Could we really have been transported miles outside of Bulikov, just like that?”
Shara holds up the candelabra: the shelves tower above them nearly three or four stories tall. Shara thinks she can make out a tin roof somewhere far overhead. The skeletal form of an ancient rolling ladder lurks a dozen feet away. “I would say we are here,” she says, “yes.”
The three of them stand in the Unmentionable Warehouse and listen.
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 down here with us, Shara wonders, functioning away in the dark? How many of the words of the Divinities still echo in this place?
Sigrud points down. “Look.”
The wooden floor is covered in sediments of dust, yet this aisle has been marred by recent footprints.