City of Stairs (14 page)

When the hostages are cowed, Cheyschek’s leader (none of them know each other’s name—they
need
no names, for they are all
one
) paces among the partygoers, grabbing them by the hair to pull up their heads and view their faces.

After some seconds, he says, “Not here.”

“Are you sure?” Cheyschek asks.

“I
know
who I am looking for.” He looks among the crowd of hostages, picks one elderly woman, and lowers his bolt-shot until the bolt point hovers just before her left eye. “Where?”

She begins to weep.

“
Where?
”

“I don’t know what you mean!”

“Someone special is missing from here, yes?” he asks sardonically. “And where could that person be?”

The old woman, ashamed, points at the stairs.

“You wouldn’t be lying to me?” he says.

“No!” she cries. “Votrov and the woman, they went upstairs!”

“The woman?” He pauses. “So he’s not alone? You’re sure?”

“Yes. And …” She looks around.

“What? What is it?”

“The one in the red coat … I don’t see him anymore.”

“Who?” When she does not answer, he grabs a fistful of her hair and shakes her head. “Who do you
mean
?” he bellows.

She begins sobbing now, pushed beyond answering.

Their leader lets her go. He points at three of them, says, “Stay here. Watch them. Kill anyone who moves.” Then he points to Cheyschek and the other four. “The rest of you, upstairs with me.”

They mount the stairs silently, rushing up like wolves through mountain forests. Cheyschek is trembling with joy, excitement, rage. Such a righteous thing, to bring pain shrieking down on them out of the cold night, on the traitors and sinners and the filthy ignorant. He had expected to find them, perhaps, in the throes of some pornographic rite, their blood polluted by foreign liquors, the air stinking with incense as they shamed themselves willingly. Cheyschek has heard, for example, of places near Qivos where—with the full allowance of Saypur, of course—women walk the streets in dresses cut so short so that you can see their … their …

He colors just to think of it.

To imagine such a thing is sinful. It must be excised from the mind and the spirit.

Their leader raises a gloved hand when they hit the second floor. They stop. He swings his masked face around, peering through the tiny black eyeholes. Then he signals to them, pointing, and Cheyschek and two others fan out to search the floor while their leader and the others go upstairs.

Cheyschek sweeps the hallways, checks the rooms, but finds nothing. For such a large house, Votrov keeps it terribly empty.
Another damning indication of the man’s excesses
, thinks Cheyschek.
He even misuses his country’s
stone!

He comes to a corner, knocks twice on the wall. He listens, and hears a second
knock-knock
, then a third from farther in the house. He nods, satisfied that his compatriots are close, and keeps patrolling.

He looks out the windows. Nothing. Looks in the rooms. Nothing but empty beds.
Perhaps Votrov keeps his lovers here, one in each room,
Cheyschek thinks, feeling scandalized and unclean.

Focus. Check in again.
He knocks once more. He hears one
knock-knock
from somewhere else in the house, and then …

Nothing.

He pauses. Listens. Knocks again. Once more, there’s a second echoing knock, but no third.

Perhaps he is too far away to hear me
. But Cheyschek knows his instructions, and he begins to backtrack, following the halls back to the stairs.

Once he reaches the stairs, he knocks twice on the walls again, and listens.

This time, nothing—no second
or
third knock.

He fights the growing panic in his chest and knocks again.

Nothing. He stares around, wondering what could be going on, and it is then that he sees:

There is someone sitting in the darkened second-floor foyer, sprawled back in a white overstuffed chair.

Cheyschek raises his bolt-shot. The person does not move. They do not seem to have noticed him. Cheyschek retreats to the wall, paces along the edge of the shadows with the sight of the bolt-shot on the person at all times …

Yet when he nears, he sees they are dressed in gray cloth, and there is a gray mask in their lap.

Cheyschek lowers the bolt-shot.

It is one of his comrades. Yet the man’s mask is removed, and they were ordered to
never
remove their masks.

Cheyschek takes two more steps forward, and stops. There is a stripe of red and purple flesh running across the man’s exposed neck, and he stares up at the ceiling with what can only be the eyes of the dead.

Cheyschek feels sick. He looks around for help, wishing to knock, to call for someone, but there is someone or some
thing
in the halls with them, and he does not want to give away his location.

This can’t be happening
.
They were all supposed to be socialites, artists. …

Then he freezes. He listens carefully.

Is there a gagging sound coming from the northern hallway?

He readies his bolt-shot. His pulse pounds upon his ears. He stalks forward, rounds the corner, and sees …

One of his compatriots is standing in a doorway along the side of the hall, almost out of sight. His compatriot trembles slightly, jerking his shoulders with his hands at his sides, and there is something on his mask, something large and white-pink and rippled that extends outward, into the doorway, where Cheyschek cannot see.

As Cheyschek nears, he sees that the something on his compatriot’s face is actually some
things
: a pair of huge hands grasps the sides of the man’s head, yet the thumbs have been shoved deep into the man’s eye sockets, all the way up to the second knuckle.

His compatriot gags, gurgles. Blood spurts around the thumbs, painting the wrists, the walls, the floor.

Cheyschek sees now.

There is a giant man standing in the shadows of the doorway, and he is murdering Cheyschek’s compatriot with his bare hands.

The giant looks up, his one eye burning with a pale fire.

Cheyschek screams, and blindly fires the bolt-shot. The giant man recoils, drops Cheyschek’s compatriot, and falls backward. Then the giant lies in the hallway, completely still.

Cheyschek, weeping freely, runs to his compatriot and rips his mask off. When he sees what is below, his screams turn to howls.

He holds his dead compatriot in his arms.
See what befalls the honored sons of my country,
he wishes to say.
See what happens to the righteous in such sullied times.
But he does not have the control for the words.

“At least I killed him,” he says to his dead friend, sobbing. “Please let that be enough. Please. At least I killed the man who did this to yo—”

There is an irritated grunt. Cheyschek, startled, stops and looks around.

With a curious determination, the big man slowly sits up and looks down at his hands in his lap.

He opens his left hand. Inside it, glimmering in the light of the gas lamps, is Cheyschek’s bolt—which was apparently snatched out of midair before it could ever find its mark.

The big man looks at the bolt with bemusement, as one would the strange toy of a child. Then he looks up at Cheyschek, and his one eye is filled with a cold, gray-blue calm, like the heart of an iceberg.

Cheyschek fumbles to reload the bolt-shot. There is a flurry of movement. Cheyschek feels fingers around his throat, blood battering the backs of his eyes, the floor lifting away, and the last thing he sees is a glass window flying at him, breaking around him, before he is embraced by the cold night and, almost directly after, the street below.

* * *

Shara is ready when the two men burst into the room: she is sitting perfectly still on the bed, hands raised. Vohannes, however, does not follow the advice she just gave him, but leaps to his feet, cane thrust forward like a rapier, damning them for this and that.

“Hands in the air!” shouts one of the men.

“Clearly I have done that,” says Shara.

“Get down on the ground!” bellows the other. They are dressed, she notes, in gray robes that have been tied tight around the joints and neck: it has the look of ceremonial wear, and they have strange, flat gray masks upon their faces.

“We will all sit down,” says Shara.

Vohannes is nothing so placid: “I will fuck the mouths of all your ancestors before I listen to one word you vandals have to say!”

“Vo,” says Shara calmly.

“Get down! Down!” the second attacker shouts. “Do it! Now!”

“Grab him!” says the first.

“Listen,” says Shara.

“Get fucked!” shouts Vohannes. He stabs at one of the men with his cane.

The man grunts. “Stop that!”

“Get
down
, damn you!” shouts the other attacker.

But Vohannes is already moving for another strike. One of the masked men grabs his cane: there is a brief struggle, Vohannes lets go of his cane, and both of them stumble back.

The attacker’s bolt-shot
clicks
, and Shara ducks slightly to the left as the bolt soars out, parting the air just where her neck was, before burying itself deep in the headboard of the bed.

The three men, startled, stare at her and the quivering bolt behind her.

Shara clears her throat. “Listen,” she says to the two attackers. “Listen to me now. You have made a terrible mistake.”

“Shut up and get down on the ground!” shouts one of them.

“You need to lay down your weapons,” says Shara, voice as smooth as fresh milk. “And surrender quietly.”

“Filthy shally,” growls one of them. “Shut up, and get
down
.”

“Why you—” Vohannes struggles to stand.

“Stop, Vo,” she says.

“
Why?
”

“We aren’t in danger.”

“Shut
up
!” shouts one of the attackers.

“They almost shot you in the face!” says Vohannes.

“Well, we are in
some
danger,” she admits. “But we just … We just need to wait.”

The two attackers, she notes, are growing increasingly uncertain, so when Vohannes says, “For what?” they look a little relieved he asked.

“For Sigrud.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“We just have to wait,” says Shara, “for him to do what he does best.” She says to the attackers, “I will help my friend up now. I am unarmed. Please do not hurt me.” She reaches down and helps Vohannes up to sit on the bed.

“Who is … Sigrud?” asks Vohannes.

There is a horrific scream from nearby, and a burst of breaking glass. Then silence.

“That is Sigrud,” says Shara.

The two masked men look at each other. Though she cannot see their faces, she can tell they are disturbed.

“You need to put down your weapons,” says Shara. “And wait here with us. If you do, you might survive. Be reasonable about this.”

One of the masked men, apparently the leader, says, “It’s a mind game. A filthy shally mind game. Don’t listen to her. It’s the butler making noises. Go check it out. And if you see anyone, kill them, and do so with a clean conscience.” The second masked man, still shaken, nods and begins to walk out the door. The leader grabs his shoulder, says, “Only a mind game. We will be rewarded,” and pats him on the back before sending him on the way.

“You just sent him to his death,” says Shara.

“Shut up,” snaps the leader. He’s breathing hard now.

“The rest of your men are dead, or dying. You need to surrender.”

“That’s what you all always say, isn’t it? Surrender, surrender, always surrender. We’re
done
surrendering. We can’t
give
you any more.”

“I ask nothing of you,” says Shara.

“If you ask me to lay down my weapon, to lay down my freedom, then you ask everything of me.”

“This is not war. This is a time of peace.”

“Your peace. Peace for things like
him
,” he says with disgust, gesturing to Vohannes.

“Hey … ,” says Vohannes.

“You embrace sinners, cowards, blasphemers,” says the leader. “People who have turned their backs on their history, on everything that we are. This is how you wage your war on us.”

“We,” says Shara forcefully. “Are not. At war.”

The leader leans in and whispers, “The
minute
a shally steps within the Divine City, I am at war with them.”

Shara is silent. The leader stands up, listens. There is nothing to hear.

“Your friend is dead,” says Shara.

“Shut up,” says the leader. He reaches over his shoulder and pulls out a short, thin sword. “Stand up. I’ll get you out of here myself.”

Shara, supporting Vohannes’s limping weight, walks out of the guest room and down the hall while the leader stalks behind them.

After a few seconds, she stops.

“Keep going,” barks the leader.

“Can you not see ahead of you?” asks Shara.

He steps around them and sees there is something lying in the hallway.

“No,” he whispers, and walks to it.

It is a crumpled, masked body lying in a copious pool of blood. Though it is hard to see through the soaking gray cloth, his neck appears to be slashed wide open. The leader kneels and gently reaches up behind the mask to touch the man’s brow. He whispers something. After a moment, he stands back up, and the hand holding the sword is trembling.

“Keep moving,” he says hoarsely, and Shara can tell he is weeping.

They walk on. At first, the house seems terribly silent. But before they reach the stairs they hear the sounds of a struggle—wood snapping, the tinkle of breaking china, and a rough shout—before seeing an open door to a large room on their left, with many shadows dancing on the threshold.

“The ballroom,” mutters Vohannes.

The leader walks forward quickly, sword held out front; then he braces himself and wheels into the room.