City of Stairs

[sawyl]

Just before Christmas, on the strength of an enthusiastic endorsement by Kameron Hurley, I decided to prioritise Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs. The titular city, Bulikov, was one the heart of a vast empire backed by the living presence of six gods, only to be cast down and destroyed in a revolution seventy five years before when the Saypuri, previously enslaved by the Continentals, rose up and slew the four remaining gods with a powerful new weapon.

In the years following the revolution the Saypuri ruled the Continent with an iron fist, outlawing all references to the old gods, securing all their artefacts in secret warehouses, and keeping order with troops and military governors. Despite the illegality of the studying the old world, some people have been granted special dispensations to dig into the history, including Professor Efrem Pangyui in Bulikov to investigate relics and miracles on behalf of the Saypuri government. When Pangyui is murdered another student of the history and miracles of the old world, the unprepossessing spy Shara Thivani, arrives in city to investigate the demise of the friend she trained in the trade-craft he needed to negotiate the hostile environment of Bulikov and its conservative political factions.

The introduction we get to the world of the city and the oppression of the Continentals — even the name is an imposition intended to obscure their previous name of the Holy Lands — comes via a court case in which the Saypuri governor is attempting to determine the guilt of a citizen who seems to have appropriated one of the symbols of the old gods for us on his shop sign. The court is clearly divided, not merely because the judges are entirely Saypuri, but because the Continentals are both physically distinct and kept penned up in their own sections. It is also clear from Governor Turyin Mulaghesh's impatience with her fellow functionaries, not least the Chief Diplomat, that Bulikov is used as something of a dumping ground by the Foreign Ministry; a convenient place to put people too influential to dismiss but too embarrassing to keep closer to home.

Following Shara's introduction, we also come to learn a great deal about the history of the Continent. Prior to the revolution, Saypur had been a peripheral island state which, lacking its own gods, had been enslaved by the Continents. By the time of the war, the six original Divines had been reduced to four following the voluntary departure of the goddess Olvos and the disappearance of the oppressive god Kolkan. When each of these four was slain by the Kai, the Saypuri war-leader, their magical miracles and protections also failed leading, in the most dramatic case, to the Blink — the complete reshaping and random warping of Bulikov as it fell in upon itself — following the destruction Taalhavras the Builder. Oddly, despite the Blink and the deaths of the gods, some minor miracles continue to work, both in the city and elsewhere, allowing scholars like Shara, sufficiently well connected to have access forbidden literature, to employ minor acts of magic.

While searching Pangyui's office at the university, Shara and her hulking secretary Sigrud find a document which appears to have given the Professor access to the Unmentionables Warehouse, a series of secret archives used to hold relics and artefacts left over from the time of the gods. Realising that Pangyui was being spied upon by members of a conservative political faction, some of whom seem to be sufficiently gifted to escape a tracker of Sigrud's abilities, Shara realises that her best ally is probably a liberal city father by the name of Vohannes Votrov, who, awkwardly, happens to an ex-boyfriend from Shara's university days. When one of Votrov's fashionable parties is attacked by fantastics, forcing Sigrud to take direct and extremely violent action, Shara's interrogation of one of the survivors uncovers evidence that perhaps the Divine aren't quite as dead as everyone had assumed.

There's so much to like about City of Stairs its hard to know where to start. The world is a fascinating mix of fantasy and science fiction, with its central city forever changed from the sunny and pleasant place it was under the reign of the gods to a warped ruin set in a newly dank, cold, and unpleasant climate. The gods, for all that they helped the Continentals dominate the world for centuries, were clearly a mixed blessing: Taalhavraas was remote and distant; Jukov was closely to his people but wildly capricious and just as likely to harm as help; Kolkan, meanwhile, started out as a god of judgement and, after spending many years hearing the complaints of his people, descended into a strange madness that parodies the most capricious choices of the God of the Old Testament, insisting on death for those who broke any of the twelve hundred rulings he produced in two years.

The political situation too, is well drawn. The Saypuri, having started out as the oppressed, have become the very worst of colonial rulers, insisting on a set of laws intended to completely erase the ideas and identities of their former masters. They have kept themselves almost completely separate — the opening scene in the court room shows segregation at work and makes it very clear that the Saypuri see the Continent as an occupied territory to be ruled by the Foreign Ministry with the help of the military — and this has stoked the resentment of the conservative factions, most of whom are traditional follows of the edits of Kolkan. The situation back in the Saypuri capital is obviously equally murky. Although Shara enjoys powerful political connections, she was forced into exile by a scandal that took place a decade or more which her masters have subsequently used to keep someone who might become a dangerous rival away from Ghaladesh and firmly under control, despite her continued unthinking loyalty those back home.

As if all that wasn't enough, the plot is exciting and engaging with one sharp twist after another. There's plenty of violence mostly courtesy of the savage Sigrud, who at one point takes on a Lovecraftian sea monster armed with not much more than a harpoon and dressed only in animal fat, and plenty of clever puzzles and problem solving on the part of Shara. Governor Mulaghesh is an enjoyable minor character, a veteran soldier whose principal aim is to get herself moved from her relatively prestigious current posting to a quiet backwater on a tropical island, while the bisexual Vohannes Votrov provides a thoughtful contrast to the generally oppressive and conservative atmosphere of Bulikov.

I very highly recommended City of Stairs; it's definitely one of my favourite books of 2014 and must for anyone who enjoyed Hurley's The Mirror Empire...