He climbs to the fourth floor. The wind is stronger now, bearing with it the smell of chimney smoke and burned fabric. He walks down the hallway, his boots sending up plumes of dust from the soiled carpet.
He pauses at one corner and sniffs.
A familiar, coppery smell.
He kneels and touches the carpet at his feet. He pulls out his torch and flicks it on, allowing a narrow beam of light to dance across the fabric.
Blood. A lot of it.
Someone killed the guard on station, he thinks. Then slipped down the hall to plant the explosives.
He stands back up and looks down the hallway. He can see streetlight and faint moonlight spackling the walls outside the ruined rooms. After a few steps, there will be nothing more to explore. Just shattered walls and burned-out rooms.
I must look, he thinks, though he is not sure why. Perhaps it is because he was denied his chance to hold vigil. I must look and see.
He comes to the edge of the devastation and looks out. Shara’s room is completely gone. Nothing left of it, not even a stick of wood. He can see straight through to the city street below. He read in the papers that her two guards died with her, along with a young couple vacationing in the room below. All dead and gone in but a second.
He thinks about Shara. How she moved, how she laughed, how she hunched over a cup of tea. And though he never really knew the girl, he thinks of her daughter—a Continental, adopted. Tatyana, he thinks her name was. Sigrud only saw her for an instant after Voortyashtan. He’d read in the papers—when he could get them in the mountains, that is—that Shara and her daughter had retired to the countryside to live in peaceful seclusion.
Wherever that girl is, she will now go forward in life without a mother.
He remembers Signe, cold and still on that table in the dark. Leaves in her hair and her collar askew.
What a crime it is that creatures of hope and justice fade from this world, he thinks, while those like me live on.
Sigrud stares out at the Ahanashtani cityscape beyond, cheery and glittering with light. He blinks, feeling suddenly very empty, very powerless, very small. There is nothing here for him. But what did he expect from this place? A record, a note, a file, a message? Did he think she would think of him in her last moments? Yet there’s only ash and blood.
He takes a deep breath. Time for a last resort, he thinks.
He sets down his satchel and begins unpacking its contents. He takes out a glass jar, a bag of daisy petals, and a small tin of gray earth.
I saw you do this enough times, Shara, he thinks, working away, that I could do it in my sleep.
He fills the jar with daisy petals, shakes it, then dumps them out. Daisies. Sacred to Ahanas for their willful recurrence.
Then he takes a bit of the gray earth—still moist—and smears it across the bottom of the jar. Grave dust, the final state of all things. He waits a moment, then wipes the earth away. Then he picks up the jar and applies its open end to his eye, as if it were a telescope.
He looks through the jar at the ruined rooms before him, and his heart drops. Nothing looks different. This is an old miracle, of course, an old ritual from back before the fall of the Continent. Shara used to perform it all the time: amplify the glass with the right reagents, then look through it, and any Divine alterations to the world would glow with a bright, blue-green phosphorescence. He remembers her saying that it was almost useless in Bulikov, since the walls there glowed so bright that they hurt her eyes and drowned everything else out.
Yet the shattered rooms before him are as dark and shadowed as they were before. If something miraculous was once here in these rooms, the bomb wiped it away as surely as the lives of the people within them.
He sighs, turns away, and drops the jar.
Then he pauses. He thinks for a moment.
He slowly turns back, and applies the jar to his eye again.
Nothing glows in the ruined rooms before him. It’s all still shadows and ash. But there is something glowing in the streets outside the hotel. He can’t see much of it—just a sliver of the streetscape is visible from this angle—but he can tell that someone has drawn some kind of line or barrier in the concrete.
A line or barrier that must be miraculous, or Divine—for it glows as bright as a lighthouse at sea.
Sigrud slowly lowers the jar. “By the seas,” he whispers. “Someone did something to the streets?”
Though this makes him wonder—was it Shara? Or someone else?
His hands are shaking, partly with excitement, partly with shock. He never encountered such a thing once, not even when he worked with Shara in this very city. He turns to go back downstairs and outside, but pauses again, just as he’s about to take the jar away from his eye.
He didn’t think to look through the jar down the hallway. He didn’t think there’d be anything inside the rest of the hotel. But he sees he was wrong.
Sigrud stares through the little glass jar. There are more miraculous barriers here, more designs, more glowing wards placed in the walls and the floors and the ceilings of the hallway. He walks down the hallway and takes the jar away from his eye, and the wards vanish immediately. He touches one panel in the wall, a spot that glowed bright a mere second ago, but he can’t see anything there, no device or symbol or totem of any kind. Whatever these miracles are, they must be alterations of a kind so faint and so immaterial that they don’t even register to the naked eye.
Which is strange. There is only one Divinity still alive, and that’s Olvos. Her miracles all still work—that would be why the miraculous walls of Bulikov still stand—but they should be the only ones.
Yet Sigrud doesn’t recognize these Divine alterations to the world. He was no expert on the Divine—that was always Shara’s area—but he’s fairly sure that, like altering the streets themselves, he’s never seen miracles or works of this kind.
He stares at the miracles through the glass jar. It’s clear that they’re barriers of a sort, running across the threshold of a hallway, or the top of the stairs, or even in the lobby.
This was not just a hotel, thinks Sigrud, lowering the glass jar. It was a fortress.
He looks back down the hallway, toward the ruined room where Shara died.
Were you waging a war, Shara? And if so—against whom?
Then he hears it: a cough, a shuffle, and the click of a heel from downstairs. Someone’s inside the hotel, someone very nearby.
Sigrud shrinks up behind the corner next to the stairs and slowly slides out his knife. He listens carefully, standing perfectly still.
He can hear them mount the stairs, hear the carpet being crushed under the soles of their shoes. A light springs on downstairs—a torch—and the beam goes bobbing and dancing among the white paneled walls of the Golden.
They’re almost at the top of the stairs, just a few feet away. He crouches, ready to jump, to stab them in between the ribs or slash their neck open—whichever is quieter or quicker.
They come to the top of the stairs and stand there for a moment, shining their torch around, just barely missing Sigrud crouched in the corner beside them. It’s a man, he can tell by the way the person carries himself.
“Huh,” says the man. “Thought I saw…Hm.” He turns around, shaking his head, and walks back downstairs. Sigrud allows himself a quick glance around the corner, and sees the golden epaulets and badge on their chest—an Ahanashtani policeman.