If someone needs to talk Vo down off of whatever ledge he’s climbed up on, she thinks, it should be me.
“If you could, Pitry, please get my coat and a bottle of tea,” says Shara. “And if I’m not back in two hours, I want you to tell Mulaghesh the moment she gets here to raid Votrov’s estate. There is something terribly strange going on with that man.”
As Pitry hurries away, Shara rereads the note. I could never really tell exactly which game I was ever playing with Vo.
But perhaps now she will find out.
*
The walk does good things for Shara’s mind: the screaming, jabbering questions fade, scraped away by each turning staircase or twisting street, until she is just another person walking along the Solda.
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.
Gulls and ducks wheel and honk, chasing one another for scraps of bread.
But whatever beautiful miracles the Divinities made, she reminds herself, they might have been slaves to the Continent almost in the same way Saypur was.
A crowd of homeless fry fish in makeshift skillets on the riverbanks; one, quite obviously drunk, claims each of his fish is a piece of Urav and is met with loud calls to sit down.
Shara suddenly decides that when all this business with Wiclov and Votrov is finished—and how this will wind up, she has no idea—she’ll quit the Ministry, return to Old Bulikov, and continue Efrem’s work. Two months ago she would have thought the idea of quitting insane, but with Auntie Vinya at the wheel for what might as well be forever, Ghaladesh and all its powers are now bitter ground to her, and all her discoveries have rejuvenated her interest in the Continental past. The entirety of her Ministry career pales beside her handful of minutes in Old Bulikov, like escaping choking fumes to capture one lungful of mountain air.
And, secretly, she looks forward to the wicked glee of performing another miracle. She wonders what other miracles will work in Old Bulikov: could one walk through walls, or summon food from the sky or earth, or even fly, or …
Or even …
Shara slows to a stop.
Two gulls dip and snap at another in midair for a peel of a potato.
“Fly,” she whispers.
She remembers an entry in the list from the Unmentionable Warehouse:
Kolkan’s carpet: Small rug that MOST DEFINITELY possesses the ability to fly. VERY difficult to control. Records indicate Kolkan blessed each thread of the rug with the miracle of flight, so theoretically each thread could lift several tons into the air.
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.
“Oh, my goodness,” whispers Shara.
*
Sigrud lifts his head when he hears the clanking. He turns his attention from the roads in and out of the valley to the six ships still marooned on the ground. The sails are being raised on the masts, and something is being extended from their port and starboard sides.
The sails being raised on the steel masts are unusual: Sigrud has seen many types of sails, but these look to be made for unbelievably brutal winds. But the objects being extended on the sides of each ship are something he has never, ever seen before in his life. These adornments are long, wide, and thin, with many pivoting parts to them. They remind Sigrud of fins on a fish, and if he didn’t know any better he’d suspect they were …
“Wings,” he says quietly.
He watches the men ready the ships.
Don’t do something, Shara said, unless they do something.
This definitely counts as something.
He checks that his knife is still in its sheath and begins to creep down the hill.
*
The New Solda Bridge is a tangle of scaffolding and framing. Huge cement plinths are being laid in the cold waters, guided into place by Saypuri cranes and Saypuri engineers. Continentals watch from the banks or the roofs of homes, grudgingly awed by this show of force.
Shara’s brain is still rattling with her last realization: You can build the ships anywhere, moor them anywhere, and no one could ever, ever be prepared for an assault from the sky.
Yet another niggling question comes worming out of her mind: But if Vohannes is behind it, why would the Restorationists attack his house?
She sees she’ll have the chance to ask him: he sits on a park bench just ahead, legs dandily crossed, hands in his lap as he stares down the river walk, away from her. He is not wearing his usual flamboyant clothing: he has returned, Shara sees, to the dark brown coat and black shirt buttoned up to the neck, like he was the night of Urav.
She remembers Sigrud saying, He wasn’t even dressed the same He was dressed like a sad little monk.