Twenty pages. Nearly two hundred items of a miraculous nature, many of them terribly dangerous.
“Oh, boy,” says Mulaghesh. She sits down, suddenly feeling quite terribly old.
*
Shara’s bag clinks and clanks, rattles and thumps as she walks down the alley. It took her most of the day to assemble the bag—pieces of silver, pearl, bags of daisy petals, pieces of blown glass—and though she packed it quite well, there’s so much in it that she sounds like a one-man band seeking a corner to play at. She’s grateful when she comes to the alley, so she can stop.
She gauges the alley carefully. It is, like most alleys, a forgotten little strip of interstitial stone, but this one bends around the rounded wall of the west building, which is not more than three blocks from the House of Votrov.
She looks at the ground, where a twisting trail of tire marks on the stone takes on the look of sloppy brushwork. They turned here, at the corner, thinks Shara, and went down the alley. She paces a few steps down, over an exposed pipe, around a pile of refuse. The black rubber is fainter here, but some streaks can still be seen. Over this bump, over the pipe—she looks up, spots a demolished waste bin and a smattering of broken glass—tipped over the trash cans, and …
The tire marks end.
“He stopped,” she murmurs, “got out, and …”
And what? How does a man simply disappear into thin air?
Shara does not bother, as Sigrud did on the night of Vohannes’s party, to check the stones and walls of this place. Instead, she takes out a piece of yellow chalk and draws a line across the alley floor. Somewhere at this line, she thinks, there is a door. But how to find it?
She sets her bag down. 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.
The alley looks the exact same through the lens of the jar. However, she can see a bit of the walls of Bulikov in the distance—and these glow with a blue-green phosphorescence bright enough to light up the evening sky.
She takes the jar away. Of course, now the walls do not glow: they are a dull gray, as always. But viewed through a lens that discerns works of the Divine, they naturally stand out.
Yet this means that whatever door the attackers disappeared through, it was not made by the Divine, unlike the walls of Bulikov.
Which should be impossible, thinks Shara. Anything capable of making someone disappear should be Divine in nature.
She begins to pace the alley. For the past four nights, Shara has been visiting this place and the one other spot where Sigrud witnessed a disappearance; in these spots she performs select tests and experiments, mostly in vain. She has nothing else to do: Sigrud watches Mrs. Torskeny in her apartment. Pitry, Nidayin, and a select few other embassy staff members are combing through the year’s worth of investments Wiclov has made. Shara wishes she were there, overseeing them, but her knowledge of the Divine makes her more suited to this task.
And, strangely, Wiclov has not been seen in Bulikov since spiriting away Mrs. Torskeny. “He is in his country estate near Jukoshtan,” his office informed them, “on family business.”
So many disappearances, thinks Shara as she returns to her bag. And so precious few answers. … Though she does have what could be a treasure trove of answers waiting in Vohannes’s white suitcase in her office—yet she is not willing to risk Vinya’s wrath just yet. At least not when another tantalizing puzzle lies before her.
Shara tries a multitude of other tricks: she casts poppy seeds on the ground, but they fail to align in any one direction, indicating a Divine breach in the world. She writes a third of a hymn of Voortya on a parchment and carries it down the alley: were it to pass through a holy domain of Voortya, the hymn would be instantly completed, in Voortya’s savage handwriting. (This failure does not surprise her: none of Voortya’s miracles, however slight, have worked since the Night of the Red Sands.)
Another trick.
How did you disappear?
Another.
How did you do it?
And another.
How?
She performs one final test, rolling a silver coin down the alley—if it encounters some Divine obstacle, placed here intentionally or not, it should stop and fall flat, as if magnetically drawn to the ground—but it does not, and plinks ahead before spinning round and tottering to a stop.
She sighs, reaches back into her bag, and takes out her bottle of tea. She sips it. It is stale and musky, having been stored for too long in a place too damp.
She sighs again, clears some space on the ground, and sits in the alley with her back against the wall, remembering the last day of her training, the last hour she spent on Saypur’s soil, the last time she had really good tea.