“What do you mean?”
“They stored things in them, hid in them. All Divine priests knew many Release miracles—they’d be sent a simple glass bead, perform the appropriate miracle, break the glass, and then”— she waggles her fingers—“mountains of gold, a mansion, a castle, a bride, or . … whatever.” She trails off as she reads, struggling between fascination and horror as she flips through the rest of the entries. She’s barely aware when they emerge from the tunnel, registering only the bright light from the candelabras in the mhovost’s room.
Mulaghesh nods to two young soldiers with axes and sledgehammers. “Go on,” she says.
The soldiers enter the tunnel.
Shara reads the last pages.
Her hands clench: she nearly rips the paper in half.
“Wait!” she says. “Wait, stop!”
“Wait?” asks Mulaghesh. “For what?”
“Look,” says Shara. She points at one entry:
372. Shelf C5-162. Ear of Jukov: an engraved, stone door frame that contains no door. Iron wheels on the base. Speculated that it has a twin, and no matter where the other Ear is, if the doors are operated in the correct manner one can pass through one and come out the other. We speculate that the twin has been destroyed. No longer miraculous.
“Do you remember,” Shara asks, “the stone door in the Kolkashtani atrium we just saw?”
“Yeah …” Mulaghesh’s face does not change as she lifts her eyes from the page to Shara. “You … You think …”
“Yes.”
Mulaghesh has to think for a moment. “So if that’s the other Ear down there …”
“And if its twin is still in the Warehouse …”
The two stare at each other for one second longer. Then they dash back down the stairway.
Sigrud and the other two soldiers watch, bewildered, before following.
*
“Taking everything into account, it still seems wisest,” Mulaghesh intones from the shadows, “to just destroy the damn thing.”
Shara holds the candelabra higher to inspect the door frame. “Would you prefer that we leave not knowing if someone used the door to access the Warehouse?”
A click as Mulaghesh sucks on her cigarillo. “They could have gone in there, touched something they shouldn’t have, and died.”
“Then I, personally, would like to have a body.” She studies the sculpted door, looking for a word, a letter, a switch, or a button. Though they wouldn’t need anything mechanical, she reminds herself. All mechanics of the miraculous operate in a much more abstract manner.
Sigrud lies on the temple floor, staring up as if it’s a sunny hillside with a blue sky above. “Maybe,” he says, “you must do something to the other door.”
“I would prefer that, yes,” says Shara. She mutters a few lines from the Jukoshtava: the door remains indifferent. “Then this door would be more or less useless. Provided security is firm at the Warehouse.”
“And it is,” snaps Mulaghesh.
Shara tries praising the names of a few key Jukoshtani saints. The door is unmoved. This must be what it’s like, she thinks, to be a lecher trying out lines on a girl at a party.
“I rather think,” she says finally, “that I am going about this wrong.”
Mulaghesh suppresses a ferocious yawn. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Shara’s eye strays across a distant pictogram in Jukov’s atrium depicting an orgy of stupendous complexity. “Jukov did not respect words, or shows of fealty. He was always much more about action, wildness, with nothing planned.” At the head of the orgy, a figure in a pointed hat holds aloft a jug of wine and a knife. “Sacrifice through blood, sweat, tears, emotion …”
She remembers a famous passage from the Jukoshtava: “Those who are unwilling to part with their blood and fear; who refuse wine and wildness; who come upon a choice, a chance, and tremble and fear—why should I allow them in my shadow?”
Wine, thinks Shara, and the flesh.
“Sigrud,” she says. “Give me your flask.”
Sigrud lifts his head and frowns.
“I know you have one. I don’t care about that. Just give it to me. And a knife.”
Sparks as Mulaghesh taps her cigarillo against the wall. “I don’t think I like where this is going.”
Sigrud clambers to his feet, rustles in his coat—there is the tinkling of metal: unpleasant instruments, surely—and produces a flask of dark brown glass.
“What is it?” asks Shara.
“They said it was plum wine,” he says. “But from the fumes … I think the salesman, he might not have been so honest.”
“And … have you tried it?”
“Yes. And I have not gone blind. So.” He holds out a small blade.
This will either work, thinks Shara, or be very embarrassing. Sigrud uncorks the flask—the fumes are enough to make her gag—and she tugs off her free hand’s glove with her teeth. Then she steels herself and slashes the inside of her palm.