City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Enough of this,” says the foreman. “Dreyling, quit your damn foolery and help us unpack the cart.”

  The other loggers scurry into action, but Sigrud remains still.

  “Bjorn?” says the foreman. “Bjorn! Damn you, get your ass into gear!”

  “No,” he says softly.

  “What? No? No to what?”

  “No to this,” says Sigrud. “I am not this, not anymore.”

  The foreman strides over to him and grabs his arm. “You’ll be whatever I damned well say you a—”

  Sigrud turns, and suddenly the foreman’s head snaps back sharply. Then Sigrud twists him, turns him, and slams the man down on the ground. The foreman lies on the ground clawing at his neck, choking and coughing, and it takes the other loggers a moment to realize the Dreyling struck him in the windpipe, a single, quick blow that was so fast the eye could hardly perceive it.

  Sigrud walks to the cart, grabs an ax, and walks back to the sprawling foreman. He holds the ax out with one hand until the tip of its blade hovers before the foreman’s nose. The foreman stops coughing and stares at it, eyes wide.

  The ax hangs in place for a long time. Then Sigrud seems to deflate a little, shoulders slumping. He tosses the ax away and strides into the night.

  He packs up his tent and belongings before they gather enough sense to come after him. He makes one final stop on the way out of camp, filching a spade from the camp’s wares. He can already hear his foreman’s shouts echoing over the campfires, his voice crackling like wax paper: “Where is the bastard? Where is the bastard?”

  He sprints across the clear-cut fields to the lower forests, a scarred moonscape of ravaged trees, pale and gray in the bright moonlight. He slows down only when he falls into the shadows of the firs. He knows these grounds, knows this terrain. He knows how to fight in these conditions far more than the loggers do.

  He stops briefly at the top of a gully, boots perched on a coiled root. His heart is hammering. Everything feels faint and distant and horribly wrong.

  Dead. Dead.

  He shakes himself, trying to compartmentalize it. He feels tears on his cheeks and shakes himself again.

  She can’t be dead. She simply can’t be.

  He cocks his head and listens: the loggers aren’t following him, or at least not yet.

  He looks up at the moon and gauges his location. He skulks through the forest, all the old tradecraft returning to him: his toes find soft needles rather than brittle, snapping twigs; he keeps to highways of crisscrossing shadows, mindful of any glinting metals on his person; and when the wind rises, which it rarely does, he is careful to sniff the air, searching for any foreign scents that might betray a pursuer.

  He spies scarred trees, amputated branches—landmarks he left behind to guide him back to what he left here. To lead him back to the man he buried, or tried to.

  He comes to one leaning, dead pine tree, a long, sloping scar on its face. He sets down his pack and starts to dig. He’s in shock, he can tell, and he digs faster than he means to, using up precious energy that he should be saving. Still he digs.

  Finally the tip of his spade makes a quiet clunk. He kneels and scrapes the rest of the soil away. Inside the hole is a leather-wrapped box, about a foot and a half wide and a half a foot deep. He pulls it out, hands trembling, and tries to unwrap the leather, but his ax gloves are too unwieldy. Glancing over his shoulder, he removes them.

  The bright, shining scar on his left hand seems to glow in the moonlight. He winces at the sight of the scar, which almost has the look of a brand, a sigil seared into his flesh, representing two hands, waiting to weigh and judge. It’s been months since he’s seen it, since he’s revealed it to the waking world. An odd thing, it suddenly seems, to conceal a part of one’s own body for days on end.

  He unwraps the leather. The box is dark wood, its clasp still bright and clean. He’s moved this package several times, whenever he had to move to a new job, but never opened it.

  The trembling in his hands grows as he unclasps the box and lifts the lid.

  Inside the box are many things, any one of which would cause his fellow loggers’ eyes to pop clean out of their heads—most notably, probably, the seven thousand drekel marks wrapped into tight little bands, probably three times what a logger makes in a year. These he goes about stuffing into various hidden places in his clothing: the cuffs of his shirt, his coat, his pants, the false bottom of his pack that he personally stitched into place.

  Next he tends to the seven different POTs wrapped in wax paper: papers of transportation, allowing the holder free passage throughout the Continent and Saypur. He unwraps them, shuffling through the names and identities—all Dreyling, of course, as he can’t exactly hide his race, though he has shaved his head and beard in an effort to distance himself from his old life—not to mention purchasing a false eye. Wiborg, he thinks as he rifles through them, Micalesen, Bente, Jenssen…Which one of you is compromised? Which one of you will they watch for, after all these years?

  He wonders briefly why he’s doing this, what his next step is. But it is easier to just keep moving forward, hurtling through the motions like a stone rolling down a hill.

  Beside the POTs is a bolt-shot pistol: a small, crossbow-like device that falls well short of a true weapon of war, but should be capable of a single silent, lethal shot, provided it has held up in the months underground. The next item at first appears to be a bundle of lambskin, but as he slowly unwraps it, it proves to be an old, well-cared-for knife in a black leather scabbard. He carefully folds the lambskin and stores it away—one never knows what one might need—and pulls the knife out of its scabbard.

  The blade is as black as oil. It has a wicked sheen to it, the glint of metal that has tasted a great deal of blood.

  Damsleth bone, he thinks. He holds up a pine needle and swats at it with the knife, using the barest amount of force; the needle parts cleanly, splitting in half. Retains its edge, he thinks, for decades and decades.

  Though now, he knows, all the damsleth whales are surely gone: some due to whaling, which he himself pursued as a young man, and others either moved away or perished from the changing climate, the cooler waters killing off or dispersing all their food sources. He’s never seen another damsleth weapon besides his own, nor has he ever heard of one still in existence.

  He sheathes the knife and buckles it to his right thigh. The motion comes back to him in an instant, and it brings with it all the memories of those days in the field, waging silent, shadowy warfare against countless enemies.

  And memories of her, the woman who was always by his side for all of it.

  “Shara,” he whispers.

  They were closer than lovers—for love, of course, is a flighty, mercurial thing. They were comrades, fellow soldiers whose literal survival depended on one another, from the moment she dug him out of that miserable little jail cell in Slondheim to the days of reconstruction after the Battle of Bulikov.

  He wilts a little, crumpling over at the edge of the hole.

  I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.

  Sigrud had always felt that, despite his long years in fugitive exile, Ashara Komayd—or just “Shara” to her friends—would reach out to him one day; that she’d somehow ferret him out amidst all the lowlifes and roustabouts he worked alongside, and he would receive some secret message, some letter or a postcard, maybe, saying she’d done her work and cleared his name, and he could come back to her, he could go back to work on one last operation, or perhaps return to his home.

  It was a romantic idea. One she herself often warned against. He remembers her sitting at a window in a checkpoint outside Jukoshtan—thirty years ago, probably, working a dull assignment—blowing steam off her teacup and saying softly: We are neither of us essential, you and I. To what we do, who we work for…She turned to look at him, her dark eyes wide yet hard.…Or to each other. If I am forced to choose between you or the operation, I will choose the operation—and I ex
pect you to do the same for me. Our work asks us to make terrible choices. But make them we shall.

  He smirked then, for at the time he’d always thought as such, resigned to brutal pragmatism; but as the years went by he found himself softened, perhaps by her.

  He looks at the moonlight reflected in the black blade. Now what am I waiting for? Whose call do I wait for now?

  He returns to the box. Hesitates.

  I do not wish to see this, he thinks miserably. Not this.

  But he knows he must.

  He pulls out the last remaining artifact: a cutting from a newspaper, brown with age. It is a photograph, depicting a young woman standing on the deck of a ship, looking at the photographer with a mixture of amusement and measured disdain. Though the photograph is in black and white, it’s clear the woman’s hair is bright blond, and her eyes a pale blue behind the strange pair of glasses fixed on her nose. On her breast is a company crest with the letters “SDC.”

  The caption reads: SIGNE HARKVALDSSON, NEWLY APPOINTED CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER OF THE SOUTHERN DREYLING COMPANY.

  His one eye grows wide as Sigrud takes in the face of his daughter, rendered in the crude stippling of newspaper print.

  He remembers the way she looked when he last saw her, thirteen years ago: cold and pale and still, her face frozen in a look of slight dissatisfaction, as if the exit wound in her chest were a source of only minor discomfort.

  He remembers her. Her, and what he did to the soldiers afterward in a fit of wild rage.

  I was not there to save you, he says to the photograph. I was not there to save Shara. I was never there for any of it.

  He stows the newspaper clipping away in his pocket, then gives the pocket a reassuring pat, as if ushering the memory back to sleep.

  He grips his knife in his other hand. His grip is tight, his knuckles a bright white.

  Sigrud lunges forward and stabs the dead pine, his knife sinking in almost to the hilt. A sob nearly escapes his mouth, but he retains the sense to strangle it before it can give away his position.

  Wretched is the creature, he thinks, that is not even allowed to weep!

  He flexes his entire body, trying to push the knife in deeper and deeper, his fingers crying out in pain. Then he relents and hangs there, gripping the tree, breathing deep.

  His instincts take over. It was bad, what you did back there in the camp, he tells himself. Cover blown. Again. What a stupid creature he is, driven by rage and emotion.

  Focus. Nothing to do but move on. Move on and keep moving.

  He pulls his knife out, sheathes it, and picks up his pack. Then he starts up the hill into the darkness.

  Hours of silent stalking, of careful movement through the midnight darkness of the deep forest. When the trees break he looks up, measures the stars, adjusts his course, and moves on.

  Somewhere close to daybreak he remembers.

  It was in Jukoshtan, he thinks, back in 1712. Someone in the Ministry had been blown and blown quite badly, all of their assets and networks thoroughly compromised by Continental agents, and no one could gauge just how bad it was.

  He and Shara were forced to part, for the Ministry suspected a mole within their ranks—and Sigrud, as a foreigner, was high on the list of suspects. I’ve made all your arrangements for transportation out of the city, Shara told him on the last day together during that rocky stretch, and from there on out you’ll be left to your own devices. Which I think should be quite sufficient.

  He grunted.

  I’ll go back and tell them it wasn’t you, Sigrud, she said. I’ll go back and tell them everything they want to know. I don’t know if they’ll listen, but I’ll try. And I’ll find you and reach out to you the second everything’s clear.

  He listened to this coldly, for he assumed she thought of him as little more than a tool in her armory. And if that does not work, he said, and if they lock you up or cut you down?

  Then a rare gleam of passion flared in her eyes. If that happens…Then, Sigrud, I want you to walk away. I want you to run away from all of this, run away from this life and go live your own. Go find your family if you can, go start all over again if you wish, but just…Go. You’ve paid enough, you’ve done enough. Forget about me and just go.

  This surprised him. They had spent so much time together, two lonely people waging a solitary, lonely war, and he assumed she never thought about a life beyond tradecraft—especially for him, her grim enforcer, the one down in the weeds with a knife clutched in his teeth. Yet she was not content to let him go on being her thug.

  She cared for you even then, he thinks, standing still in the darkness. She wanted you to be something better.

  He looks down at his hands. Rough and scarred and filthy. Most of those scars came not from lumber work, but from nasty, brutal battles in the dark.

  He thinks of Shara. His daughter. His family. All of them lost, all of them separated or dead.

  He stares at his scarred hands. What an ugly thing I am, he thinks. Why did I ever believe I could wreak anything but ugliness in this world? Why did I ever think that those near me would meet anything but pain and death?

  He stands alone in the forest, then looks up at the pale moon above.

  What else is there to be? What else is there to do?

  He bows his head, and knows what is left.

  The fawn is easily tracked, easily caught, easily killed with a single bolt from his bolt-shot. Sigrud was not sure his hunting skills would hold up, but these deer are truly wild creatures up here in the Tarsils, unaware of men or their tricks and traps.

  He carries it over his shoulder to the hilltop. He will not eat this creature, for to eat it would be to make use of it. The point of this ritual—one he has not performed himself in over forty years—is desecration and violation, the creation of a terrible wrong.

  In the dawning light Sigrud strips to the waist. Then he carefully beheads the fawn, disembowels it, and props its carcass upright so that it appears to be pleading to the sky, begging the heavens for…something. Perhaps mercy, perhaps vengeance. His hands are strong and ruthless, breaking open the delicate bones, tearing the tendons, the ligaments. He places the fawn’s organs in a pile before its open body cavity with its tiny, beautiful heart on the top.

  Then he places twigs and sticks around the organs and body. He lights the kindling with a match and watches as flames slowly crawl across the bloodstained earth around the grotesque scene, the heat scorching the bloody hide of the once-beautiful, fragile creature.

  He thinks back to when he last did this, when his father was murdered. The Oath of Ashes. Do they even know such a thing in the Dreyling Shores anymore? Or am I such a relic of the cruel, ancient days that only I remember?

  The flames begin to die as the sun dawns. The remnants of the fawn are black, twisted fragments. Sigrud leans forward and pierces the moist, hot soil with his fingertips. He takes a clump of the earth there, soaked with blood and hot with cinder, and smears it on his face, on his chest, on his shoulders and arms.

  A desecration has been done, he thinks. And I am touched by it.

  Then he reaches into what’s left of the pile of organs and plucks out the charred remains of the fawn’s heart. He holds it in his hands, brushing off the ash. It queerly reminds him of the feeling of a child’s hand in his palm.

  Weeping, he takes a bite of the fawn’s heart.

  And I shall do more desecrations yet, he thinks. Until justice is done, or I am spent.

  Of the six original Continental Divinities, only four ever bore children—Taalhavras, the Divinity of order and knowledge; Jukov, the Divinity of merriment; Olvos, the Divinity of hope; and Ahanas, the Divinity of fecundity. Despite this limited number, they had quite the constant mess of interactions and relationships, producing dozens if not hundreds of Divine offspring: Divine sprites, spirits, and beings that peppered the whole of the Continent. These offspring were produced in a manner that mortals cannot truly understand—the genders of the Divine par
ents did not particularly matter, nor did inbreeding seem to have an effect—but we must consider them, for all intents and purposes, to be the children of the Divine.

  One of the favorite questions historians toy with in modern times is exactly what happened to all of those offspring. Did they vanish when the Kaj invaded the Continent and killed the Divinities? Divine creatures—beings created by a singular Divinity, much as a Divinity would create a miracle—definitely did not survive the death of their creator. But some Divine children seemed to survive the deaths of their parents, though those who were found were promptly executed.

  Did they have some Divine agency of their own, like miniature versions of their parents? Did the Kaj succeed in executing them all? Or did they find some way to hide themselves? We are not sure. But if they persist within this world, they have not announced themselves yet.

  —DR. EFREM PANGYUI, “ON THE LIVES OF THE DIVINE”

  The boy’s feet pound on the pavement, his breath burning in his lungs. He ducks under an awning, swings around a lamppost, skids across a cobblestoned street. An old woman carrying her groceries glares at him as he sprints past a display of apples. A shopkeep cries, “Watch it!” But the boy ignores them, paying mind only to the next turn, the next street ahead, his face dripping sweat as the sun beats down on him.

  Faster and faster, as fast as he can go. He’s got to lose him, got to.

  And he should be losing him: the streets of the city of Bulikov are so tangled and labyrinthine that one could get lost just walking home. Yet so far it’s proven shockingly difficult to lose this particular pursuer.

  A turn, a turn again. Then down the stairs, across the vacant lots, and down another side street…

  The boy stops, gasping, and staggers into the mouth of an alley. He waits, breathing hard, and pokes his head around the corner.

  Nothing. The street is empty.

  Perhaps he’s lost him. Perhaps he’s really gone.

  “Finally,” he says.

  Then the light…shifts. Twists. Changes.