Bulikov. The Divine City.
She stares out the car window. Once the greatest city in the world, yet now one of the most ravaged places known to man. Yet still the population clings to it: it remains the third or fourth most populated city in the world, though once it was much, much larger. Why do they stay here? What keeps these people in this half-city, vivisected and shadowy and cold?
“Do your eyes hurt?” asks Pitry.
“Pardon?” says Shara.
“Your eyes. Mine would swim sometimes, when I first came here. When you look at the city, in certain places, things aren’t quite … right. They make you sick. It used to happen a lot more, I’m told, and it happens less and less these days.”
“What is it like, Pitry?” asks Shara, though she knows the answer: she has read and heard about this phenomenon for years.
“It’s like … I don’t know. Like looking into glass.”
“Glass?”
“Well, no, not glass. Like a window. But the window looks out on a place that isn’t there anymore. It’s hard to explain. You’ll know it when you see it.”
The historian in her fights with her operative’s instincts: Look at the arched doorways, the street names, the ripples and dents in the city walls! says one. Look at the people, watch where they walk, see how they look over their shoulders, says the other. There are only a few people on the streets: it is, after all, well past midnight. But those she sees are like most of the Continental sort: stocky, with heavy limbs and heavy features. The buildings all seem very small to her: when the car crests a hill, she looks out and sees fields of low, flat structures, all the way across to the other side of the city walls. She is not used to such a barren skyline.
They did have greater things, she reminds herself, before the War. But the curious emptiness of the skyline makes her wonder, Could so much have suddenly vanished, in a matter of minutes?
“You probably know this,” says Pitry. “But it’s good to have a car in the neighborhoods around the embassy. It’s not quite in … a reputable part of town. When we established the embassy, they say, a lot of the good sorts moved out. Didn’t want to be near the shallies.”
“Ah, yes,” says Shara. “I’d forgotten they call us that here.” Shally, she remembers, inspired by the quantity of shallots Saypuris use in their food. Which is incorrect, as any sensible Saypuri prefers garlic.
She glances at Sigrud. He stares straight ahead—maybe. It is always difficult to tell what Sigrud is paying attention to. He sits so still, and seems so blithely indifferent to all around him, that you almost treat him like a statue. Either way, he seems neither impressed nor interested in the city: it is simply another event, neither threatening violence nor requiring it, and thus not worth attention.
She tries to save her thoughts for what is sure to be a difficult and tricky next few hours. And she tries to avoid the one thought that has been eating into her since yesterday, when the telegraph in Ahanashtan unspooled into her hands. But she cannot.
Oh, poor Efrem. How could this happen to you?
*
CD Troonyi’s office is a perfect re-creation of a stately office in Saypur, albeit a gaudy one: the dark wooden blinds, the red floral carpet, the soft blue walls, the copper lamps with beaded chimneys above the desk. An elephant’s ear fern, indigenous to Saypur, blooms off of one wall, its fragile, undulating leaves unfurling from its base of moss in a green-gray wave; below it, a small pot of water bubbles on a tiny candle; a trickle of steam rises up, allowing the fern the humidity it needs to survive. None of this is at all, Shara notes, a melding of cultures, a show of learning and communication and postregionalism unity, as all the ministerial committees claim back in Saypur.
But the décor does not even come close to the level of transgression of what hangs on the wall behind the desk chair.
Shara stares at it, incensed and morbidly fascinated. How could he be such a fool?
Troonyi bursts into his office with a face so theatrically grave it’s like he’s died rather than Efrem. “Cultural Ambassador Thivani,” he says. He plants his left heel forward, hitches up his right shoulder, and assumes the courtliest of courtly bows. “It is an honor to have you here, even if it is under such sad circumstances.”
Immediately Shara wonders which preparatory school he attended in Saypur. She read his file before she came, of course, and it reinforced her conviction that the chaff of powerful families is all too often dumped into Saypur’s embassies across the world. And he thinks me to be from exactly such a family, she reminds herself, hence the show. “It is an honor to be here.”
“And for us, we …” Troonyi looks up and sees Sigrud slouched in a chair in the corner, idly stuffing his pipe. “Ehm. Wh-who is that?”
“That is Sigrud,” says Shara. “My secretary.”
“Must you have him here?”