City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

the best way to control what other nations thought was to control how they talked. And when those languages died, so did those ways of thinking, those ways of looking at the world.

But if this is so, why did the gods make us at all? And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?

To acknowledge things have changed, thinks Shara as her car approaches, is akin to death for these people

Olvos, the light-bearer. Kolkan, the judge. Voortya, the warrior. Ahanas, the seed-sower. Jukov, the trickster, the starling shepherd. And Taalhavras, the builder.”

Shara taps the side of her teacup. Sit on your leads, the saying goes, until they crack under your weight.

“Coffee refreshes the body,” says Shara. “Tea refreshes the soul.”

But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law.

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.

Scars are windows to bitterness—it is best to leave them untouched.”

“The Divine may have created many hells,” he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.”

The pattern is undeniable: the Continentals made their decisions, formed their attitudes … & the Divinities followed, making them official.

We are—or were—Divinities, Shara Komayd: we draw power from the hearts and minds and beliefs of a people. But that which you draw power from, you are also powerless before.”

learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn’t need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action.

“Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.