“But here? In Bulikov?”
“Not in Bulikov, no. Nearby. After the Kaj died, his lieutenants took all the miraculous things he found and locked them up. They locked up so many that no one could ever move them without anyone on the Continent finding out where they were. So they had to keep them here, and build around them.”
“How many?”
“Thousands. I think.”
“You think?”
“Well, I sure never wanted to go inside it. Who knows what’s in there? It’s all filed, organized, locked away, sure, but … I never wanted to know. Things like that are supposed to be dead. I wanted them to stay that way.”
Shara, with a great deal of effort, manages to return to the issue at hand. “But Pangyui didn’t?”
“He was here to study the past in a way no one ever had before,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m willing to bet that the Warehouse is probably the real reason he came. We’ve been sitting on top of a stockpile of history, and I guess someone at the Ministry got impatient. They wanted to open the box.”
Shara feels more than a little betrayed to hear this news. Efrem never mentioned anything like this. No wonder he was such an apt student in tradecraft, she thinks. He had already been hiding many secrets of his own.
It feels quite impossible that Vinya would have no knowledge of any of this. Do I really want, Shara wonders, to keep turning over these rocks? This is not the first time she’s gotten accidentally involved in one of her aunt’s projects—and each time she’s done so, it’s been a wise career move to turn a blind eye.
But she remembers how Efrem lay on the cot in the embassy vault, his skull wearing the crude mask of his small, delicate face. …
Something cold blooms in Shara’s belly. Efrem … did Auntie Vinya get you killed?
“Do you know which artifacts he was studying?” asks Shara.
“He said he wished to study only the books in there, and a few inactive items.”
Shara nods. She knows the term: “active” items referred to often-mundane things—a box, a pen, a painting—that possess miraculous properties, obvious or concealed. The paintings of Saint Varchek, for example, were obviously miraculous, as the figures in them would move on the canvas, shuffling about or sharing gossip; whereas the sheets of the Divinity Jukov had less obvious miraculous qualities, until one actually climbed into the bed they were on and instantly found oneself nude on a moonlit beach several miles away.
But once the Divine power that bestowed the miracle on these items passed—once the god died, in other words—the miraculous properties usually faded quite quickly. These items were considered “inactive”: no longer miraculous, but certainly not trustworthy.
“I don’t know which ones he looked at,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know much about those things, and I don’t want to know. All that was established back in the Kaj’s age. And nobody’s really been in it, until Pangyui.
“He understood the dangers. He was remarkably well informed about all of it. I guess he’d read and studied enough of the old stories that he already knew all about them before he walked in the door. He was careful. The ones he took out, he stored and watched safely.”
“He took some out?”
Mulaghesh shrugs. “Some. From what he described, a lot of the Warehouse is just junk, really. There are piles and piles and piles of books down there, too. That was what the professor was primarily looking for, he said. He made some careful selections, and he studied them beyond the … circumstances of the Warehouse. Which I guess were pretty oppressive.”
The safe, thinks Shara. “And do you think his murder had anything to do with the Warehouse?”
“You might think so,” says Mulaghesh. “But I doubt it. Like I said, no one knows much about the Warehouse. The bunkers it’s part of are monitored very closely. There haven’t been any disturbances. To me, there are a lot more public reasons to have killed him.”
“But a danger as significant as the Warehouse …”
“Listen, I can’t do much in Bulikov, but I can watch. And no one’s been tampering with the Warehouse. I’m sure of that. You asked for my advice, and my advice would be to look at the Restorationists.”
Shara considers it reluctantly. “And I suppose,” she says, “that it wouldn’t be possible to allow me access to this Wa—”
“No,” says Mulaghesh sharply. “It would not.”
“I know I do not have approval, but if such a thing were to go unnoti—”
“Don’t even finish that. It’s treason to suggest it.”
Shara glares at her. “I am nearly as well informed as Pangyui in such historical matters.”