City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception.

“So yes,” says Shara. “You are no longer the most senior official at this embassy.” She reaches forward, grabs the bell on his desk, and rings it. The tea girl enters, and is a little confused when Shara addresses her: “Please fetch the maintenance staff to take down that painting.” Troonyi practically begins to froth. “What! What do you mean by—?” “What I mean to do,” says Shara, “is to make this office look like a responsible representative of Saypur works here.

The soul might be within the eyes, but the subconscious, the matter of their behavior, that is in the hands. Watch a man’s hands, and you watch his heart.

The political instinct might wear different clothes in different nations, but underneath the pomp and ceremony it’s the same ugliness.

Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.

But since Taalhavras was the builder god, all that he had built vanished the moment he vanished; and judging by the enormous devastation of the Blink, he had built much more than anyone knew.

“We all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present—do we not?”

Both of them hated the other’s ideas, and gleefully expressed that hatred with unchecked vitriol. In retrospect, they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.

How stupid are the young, Shara would later think, that they cannot see what is right in front of them.

Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.

lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience.

She briefly reflects on how civilized countries increasingly pose an inconvenience to her, and for a moment she envies Vohannes for maintaining his idealism—however ineffective it may be.

“Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”

(Exactly why the Divinities needed Saypur to produce resources at all, rather than simply producing them with any number of miracles, is a favorite, and often rather infamous, question among Saypuri historians.)

Vallaicha Thinadeshi herself, who is generally acknowledged to be the greatest of the iconic engineers of this period before her disappearance in Voortyashtan, said that for two decades “you could toss a stone out any window in Ghaladesh and strike four geniuses on the way down.”

You’re not an agent of change, Shara. You don’t make the world better—you work to keep things how they are. The Restorationists look to the past, Saypur wishes to maintain the present, but no one considers the future.”

“No, you aren’t sorry. You are a representative of your country. And countries do not feel sorrow.”

Lying, screams Shara’s mind. She’s lying! Lying, lying, lying, lying! In that instant, Shara decides not to tell her aunt what she witnessed in the jail cell.

When in doubt, be patient, and watch.

“Old texts say many things. You say these things as though they are special—as if it is unusual for one person to see another in pain, and wish to help. As if,” he says quietly, “to do the extraordinary—or what you think is extraordinary—a person must be told to do so, by the Divine.”

“I never saw a country before,” says the robed man. “All I saw was the earth under my feet.”

“… if Olvos was ever here, then the greatest thing she ever gave us was the knowledge that we did not need her to do good things. That good can be done at anytime, anywhere, to anyone, by anyone. We live our lives thinking up so many rules …”

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

“Voortya he killed in Saypur, in the Night of the Red Sands. Taalhavras and Ahanas he killed when his army first landed on the Continent’s shore. And Jukov he killed in Bulikov. When, exactly, have you been told the definitive account of the assassination of Olvos? Or Kolkan, for that matter?”

Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are—honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.

I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.

Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.

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

Repetition, conditioning, fervor, and faith, she muses as she sips tea in the alleyway. All come to so little. Perhaps this is what it’s like to lose one’s religion.

“The more you are at sea,” Sigrud explains, “the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more help and assistance is a troublesome bother.”

“Why?” she asks again. “Because it is all I know,” he says with a shrug. “And I am good at it. I could save lives tonight. And the only life risked would be my own.”

I curse the world not for what was stolen from me, he thinks, but for revealing it was never stolen long after the world had made me a different man.

history, after all, is a story, one that is sometimes wonderful. But one must remember it in full—as things really were—and avoid selective amnesia.

An avalanche dislodges a tiny stone into the ocean; and, through the mysteries of fate, this tiny stone creates a tsunami. I wish I did not know some parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.

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

“Grief and decency are mere decorations that hang upon the real problem:

“Forgetting.” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.”

What a brittle, tiny thing the world is.

“It is good for a captain to die,” says the man’s voice, “before seeing the death of his crew. Go quietly, and with gratitude.”

Good historians keep the past in their head and the future in their heart.

It is so good of you come unasked-for.” “But we were asked,” says the monk. “Suffering asks for us. We have to come. Please, don’t cry so.”

“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.

“I don’t think we can build much of a future,” says Shara, “without knowing the truth of the past. It’s time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.”