As she touches it, the door slides back. She looks down at its base. The door frame is mounted on four small wheels made of iron. Shara gives it another push—with a squeak, it slides back farther. Why in the world would anyone want a mobile door frame?
She looks at the window frame in the wall of Kolkan’s atrium. Each atrium had its own window, originally, a stained glass for each Divinity. Shara has read scores of letters describing the beauty of the Divine glass of the Seat of the World—blues and reds the eye could not properly interpret but still feel—and while she is sorry to see it all broken, she’s a bit puzzled to see that Kolkan’s glass remains whole, but is perfectly blank and clear. She slowly waves the candelabra back and forth, watching the reflection: it’s a big, transparent, but otherwise utterly ordinary window. Perhaps it simply went blank, she concludes, when Kolkan vanished. But if so—why is it still whole, and all the others are broken?
She lifts the candelabra and gazes at the other round chambers.
Once, when she was very young, Aunt Vinya took her to the National Library in Ghaladesh. Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves. … Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was—she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library—a lot like being in love for the first time.
And to find this here under the earth, as if all the experiences and words and histories of the Continent could be washed away by the rain to leach through the soil and drip, drip, drip into a hollow in the loam, like the slow calcification of crystal …
In the dark, under Bulikov, Shara Komayd paces over ancient stones and falls in love again.
*
The rumble of footsteps. Shara looks up from a pictogram of Olvos to see the staircase glowing bright with candlelight.
Mulaghesh enters, flanked by Sigrud and two soldiers with candelabras. She takes one glance at the vast temple; her shoulders droop—Oh, what a mess this is—and she sighs: “Ah, shit.”
“It’s quite a discovery, isn’t it?” calls Shara as she walks across the atria.
“You could say that,” Mulaghesh says, “yes.”
“You have men posted to guard the entrance?”
“I have five soldiers outside, yes.”
“This is”—Shara steps around a puddle of mud—“enormous. Enormous! I’d imagine this is the most significant Divine discovery since the War, since the Blink! The greatest historical discovery in … well, history. To discover any piece of this place, any fragment of these pictograms, would be borderline revolutionary in Ghaladesh, but to have found the entire building, whole, and more or less unharmed, is, is …” Shara, breathless, inhales. “It boggles the mind.”
Mulaghesh stares at the curving ceiling. She strokes the scars on her jaw with her knuckles. “It sure does.”
“Here! Look here, at this section!” Shara stoops. “These few yards of carvings offer more knowledge about Ahanas than anyone’s found in years. We know almost nothing about her! Ahanashtan, as you probably know, is one of the places most deeply affected by the Blink—almost all the city seemed to vanish, you see. Almost everything that’s there now was built by Saypur.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But this mural proves why it vanished! It corroborates the theory that Ahanas actually grew the city, sowing miraculous seeds that grew into living buildings, homes, streets, lights . … Peaches that glowed at night, like streetlights, vines that funneled in water and away waste … It’s fascinating.”
Mulaghesh scratches the corner of her mouth. “Yeah.”
“And when Ahanas died, all of that vanished. What’s more, it provides a second explanation for the gap in knowledge: if what this says is true, Ahanashtanis thought all life and all parts of the body were sacred—they never used medicine, never cut their hair, never shaved, never trimmed their fingernails, never brushed their teeth, never … well … cleaned their nether parts.”
“Yeesh.”
“But that was because they didn’t have to! Ahanas was able to meet every single one of their needs! They lived in complete harmony with this massive, organic city! But after the Blink, when disease started rampaging through the Continent, they must have refused every medicine, every ministration. … So nearly every Ahanashtani on the Continent must have died out! Can you imagine! Can you imagine that?”
“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. Then, amiably: “So, you know we’re going to have to cave in that tunnel, right?”