City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  The shadows begin to twirl at his feet.

  “Oh, no,” whispers the boy.

  He looks up to see an odd sight, but it’s one that he was expecting, even dreading: the clear summer skies directly above him are flooding with darkness, as if evening is being injected into the atmosphere, hues of indigo and dark purple and black swirling amidst the pale blue. He watches, wide-eyed, as the darkness curls around the face of the sun, choking it out and painting over it until it’s as if the sun had never been there at all.

  There are stars in the new darkness, which hangs directly above him: cold, distant, glimmering white stars. The boy knows if he waits longer the skies above him will turn pitch-black, and those glinting stars will be the only luminescence remaining.

  The boy turns and sprints down the alley. The skies above him clear up as if he were directly under a thundercloud: the sun returns, and the bright blue sky is visible once more.

  But too close, thinks the boy. Much too close, much too close…

  He’s getting desperate. He knows he has to use one of his tricks. He doesn’t like trying this while running, but he doesn’t have a choice….

  He shuts his eyes, envisioning the city around him, seeking them out.

  It takes him a while to spot them—he’s not near one of the entertainment districts, so there are very few theaters or restaurants or bars around here—but then he sees one burst into being somewhat close to him, a tangle of something bright and silvery and quivering, quaking merrily amidst all the gloom and sobriety of the city in day.

  He reaches out to it. Grasps it.

  Becomes it.

  The world shifts around him.

  He hears the final line in his mind: “…and the shepherdess, of course, says, ‘Well, it ain’t look too much like his father, neither!’ ”

  Suddenly the boy’s ears are inundated with a glorious, wonderful, happy sound: the sound of men laughing, cackling, real tears-in-your-eyes laughing, absolutely bent-double laughing, and the boy is there with them, giggling merrily.

  He has to force himself to remember what’s going on. He opens his eyes and sees he’s in a fish shanty down by the Solda River, surrounded by filthy fishermen all sipping from bottles of plum wine. None of them have noticed the sudden appearance of this young, pale Continental boy, who has, it seems, popped out of thin air. They act as if he’s always been in the crowd with them. One of the drunken fishermen even offers him a sip of wine, which the boy, still snickering, politely refuses.

  It’s far too early in the day for such celebration. But he’s grateful for it. Wine creates merriment, merriment creates laughter, and laughter gives him…

  The boy looks out the window of the fish shanty. He’s about three miles away from the alley where he was.

  He sighs, relieved. “…a way out,” he says.

  But then his brow crinkles. Is it his imagination, or is the sky darkening above him? Just above the fish shanty?

  And are those stars shining so coldly and cleanly up above?

  He stares as the sky above him floods with solid darkness, like blood leaking through a bandage.

  The boy thinks desperately. Another trick, another turn. He doesn’t have a choice.

  He shuts his eyes, and searches.

  Another tangle of silvery joy. This one isn’t quite so thick, quite so bawdy, but it should still…

  The world shifts around him.

  …work.

  He hears a voice: “Where is Mischa? Where is…Mischa!”

  Giggles fill the air. He opens his eyes and sees he’s in a small apartment. A curly-haired infant is lying on a sofa, laughing hysterically as his mother hides behind the sofa’s back and pops out, crying, “Where is my Mischa? Where could my darling boy have gone? Could he be—here?”

  Another explosion of delighted squeals. Neither seems to have noticed the boy’s sudden appearance, but perhaps it’s because they’re too involved in their game. The child’s laughter is infectious: the mother begins laughing, which makes the infant laugh even harder.

  Remember where you are. Remember what’s going on.

  The boy walks to the windows of the apartment. He’s about seven miles from the fish shanty, he guesses. He can still feel that other tangle of laughter out there, the fishermen sharing their bawdy jokes, and he can tell the distance between them. It should be far enough. No one can move that fast that far. And how could his pursuer even know where he’s go—

  He freezes.

  The shadows on the street outside begin to shift. Darkness floods the skies, as if night itself is manifesting right above him.

  “No!” he says. “No, it can’t be!”

  The mother and infant laugh hysterically behind him. He can feel the joy in her, feel the pain in her stomach from laughing too hard, all her senses flooded over with merriment.

  He wants to stay here. This is what he is, what he does, what he loves. But he has to move on yet again.

  Farther this time, he thinks. Go and keep going.

  He shuts his eyes. Finds the next laughter, the next bright spark of joy.

  The world shifts.

  He’s in a house on the outskirts of Bulikov. A man sits on the kitchen floor with a giant pot of pasta spilled all across the tiles, the yellow sauce bright against the white surfaces. His face is red with laughter, and his wife stands at the doorway, howling in amusement.

  “I told you it was too heavy!” she says, gasping for air. “I told you it was!”

  The boy laughs too, the laughter tasting of shameful glee. Then he shuts his eyes and searches again.

  The world shifts.

  He’s in a dormitory room beside the university. A young woman sits on the bed, nude and convulsing with laughter. Were you to glance at her it’d be difficult to see what’s so funny—until you saw the young man’s head buried between her thighs, the rest of his body concealed by blankets.

  The boy cackles with her. Her laughter is like sunlight and flower petals raining down in his mind. But he knows he must move on.

  He shuts his eyes. Reaches out.

  The world shifts.

  A ball game in an alley, with one young man lying on the ground, clutching his crotch and gasping after a pitch went awry. The other children laugh uproariously, unable to contain themselves, while the young man says, “It’s not funny….It’s really not funny!” but this makes them laugh all the harder.

  He smirks. This laughter has a crueler edge to it, the taste of copper and blood. But he knows he must move on.

  He shuts his eyes. Searches.

  Again, things shift.

  He’s in a courtyard. An elderly man and woman sit in wooden wheelchairs in the sun, their legs covered with blankets. They chuckle weakly as they remember some ancient story from days long, long gone.

  “She really told me that!” says the woman. “ ‘Hotter than a stiff cock,’ that’s what she said, right in front of everyone. I swear it!”

  “I know, I know!” the man says, wheezing but smiling. “But who could ever believe it?”

  Laughter of wistful incredulity, basking in the joy of two lives well lived. His heart sings to hear it, to taste it in his mouth. But he must move on.

  I am laughter, he says, shutting his eyes. I am wherever there is glee. So he can never catch me….

  He reaches out. Another tangle, this one sloppy and drunken and warped, the silvery laughter of someone well sotted.

  Any port in a storm, thinks the boy, and he grasps it, pulling himself to it.

  The world shifts…

  He opens his eyes. He expected to be in a bar or someone’s room, but…this appears to be a basement. A dingy basement with one table and one chair.

  In the chair is a cackling Saypuri man, but it’s clear he’s not laughing of his own volition: his eyes have a glazed look to them, and there’s a smear of drool on his chin. Despite this, he has the look of a soldier to him, as does the Saypuri woman standing over his shoulder, who’s holding an empty
syringe. They both wear headcloths, for one, which is common to the military, but they’re also trim, muscular creatures, people who have made weapons out of their bodies, especially the woman: there’s something to her hard, dark face and amber-gold eyes that suggests a history of command and lethality to her.

  The boy stares at them. But then the woman with the syringe does something very strange: she looks right at the boy, her expression somewhat apologetic. This should be impossible—when the boy shifts he becomes laughter incarnate, the spirit of merriment, invisible to mortal eyes—yet the Saypuri woman just smiles at him with a touch of regret and says, “Hello there.”

  “Wh-what?” says the boy.

  “He figured that if he kept you jumping you’d come here eventually,” says the woman. “Just had to keep someone laughing long enough.”

  The boy then senses something riddling the clothing of the two people, forces and designs and structures woven into the fabric.

  The boy blinks. The two soldiers are wearing protective miracles, Divine miracles—but they’re of a type he’s never seen before. So who could have made them?

  The Saypuri woman looks at something behind the boy. “Ah. Well. Here we are, then.”

  The boy turns around.

  Behind him is a wall of darkness—not just shadow but the night itself, a wall of vast, endless black shot through with coldly glittering stars….

  A voice echoes out of the darkness, a voice as cold as the light of those stars. “WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?”

  The boy screams.

  A rattle, a roar, and the train emerges from the tunnel.

  Sigrud wakes. It takes longer than it ought for him to remember where he is, what’s happening. He rubs at his eye and glances around at the other passengers on the train, all relaxed or bored. They ignore him, thinking him to be another shiftless Dreyling dockworker, dressed in his blue peacoat and knit cap.

  What an odd thing it is, he thinks, to don civilization again as if it were an old jacket, lying unused for years at the back of a closet. Perhaps civilization never truly suited Sigrud, but he must feign it now, after so many years in the wilderness. And after what happened in Voortyashtan, over thirteen years ago now, he is still very much a wanted man. As someone who once worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one thing he knows full well is that the Ministry does not forget.

  Nor should they. He remembers that moment as a blur of shadows and screams—he’d been raving mad with grief and fury after the murder of his daughter—but fragments of what happened in Fort Thinadeshi still sear bright and hot in his mind.

  Grabbing a soldier’s sword, using it to cleave off the man’s arm below the elbow. Ripping a bayoneted rifling away from another and thrusting it deep into her abdomen.

  I didn’t even know their names, he thinks, huddled low. I still don’t even know their names.

  The train rushes on.

  Back when Sigrud worked as an operative on the Continent, it would have taken two to three weeks to travel from the outskirts of Bulikov to Ahanashtan. Today it seems you can simply buy a ticket, go to a train station, and all the world will shift around you until you find yourself where you wish to be in but a handful of days.

  He focuses on his goal. Ahanashtan, he thinks, remembering what he read in the papers. The Golden Hotel.

  And then what? he wonders. What will he do there?

  He looks at his reflection in the window. The only thing I know how to do anymore.

  Sigrud je Harkvaldsson stares at his reflection. He takes in the scars, the wrinkles, the bags under his eyes. He wonders if he has it in him to do this. It’s been years since he worked as an operative—over a decade.

  Perhaps this is foolish. Perhaps he’s an old dog insisting he can still perform old tricks.

  Yet there’s something curious in his face, something that’s concerned him for a while, something he’s tried to dismiss. But now that he’s faced with mirrored surfaces time and time again—for mirrors were rare in the logging camps—he can tell something is wrong with his appearance.

  The face in the reflection is not the face of an aging man. He is much how he remembered himself before he went into hiding: middle-aged, scarred, and bitter—but still middle-aged. Which Sigrud certainly no longer is.

  Perhaps it is simply the blessing of good lineage. Perhaps that’s it.

  Then Ahanashtan emerges on the horizon. And instantly, he forgets his worries.

  “Oh,” he whispers, “by the seas…”

  When Sigrud first came to Ahanashtan, over thirty years ago, he regarded it as one of the most impressive metropolises the world had yet produced (behind Bulikov and Ghaladesh, of course). Yet at that time it was still mostly a sea port, devoted to industry and the military—in other words, it was dirty, dank, and dangerous. It had a few skyscrapers then, buildings fourteen, fifteen, even sixteen stories tall, monumental achievements for architects in those days, and everyone agreed that the future had truly dawned on the Continent.

  But as Sigrud’s train grows closer to the colossal clutch of towers on the ocean, he sees that the architects and industry magnates of thirty years ago had no idea what was coming.

  He tries to count their height. Maybe thirty, forty, or even sixty stories tall? He can’t believe it, can’t fathom the massive stone-and-glass structures that stand so still and perfect against the sea, the sun dappling their crenellated surfaces. Some are tall and straight and square, others are like vast wedges, like a cut of cheese made of granite and glass, and still others look like nothing more than gigantic metal poles, silvery and shimmering, with rows and rows of tiny windows riddled in their sides. Running across the countryside to this cluster of structures is what at first seems to be countless rivers or tiny, shining tributaries, but Sigrud slowly realizes that these are rails: what must be a hundred or more railroads weave and merge until they all, eventually, join together in Ahanashtan.

  To the northwest is something even stranger: a glittering metal construction that looks almost like utility lines, huge wires mounted on poles, except they’re far too tall…and it looks like little pods are crawling along the wires. He can’t figure it out from this distance.

  Sigrud turns back to the metropolis ahead. And I, he thinks, am supposed to find Shara’s killer in there?

  He packs up this emotion and shoves it away somewhere in the back of his mind. He has no time for self-doubt.

  There is where Shara met her end, he thinks. There is where she was murdered. And there is where I will shed the blood and break the bones of those who cast her down.

  The gleaming towers of Ahanashtan swell up before him. He remembers something Shara said when they first came here, she seated at a table, encoding a message; Sigrud on the bed, sewing up a rent in his coat. She said, No one knows what the original Ahanashtan really looked like, back in the Divine days. The historians theorize it was a giant, organic tangle of trees and vines, all of which merged together to create homes and structures. Glowing mushrooms and peaches acting as lights, vines flowing forth with healing waters, that kind of thing. Records suggest it was beautiful. But it all vanished when Ahanas died. Then she paused, and added, And good riddance too.

  He looked up from his work. Good riddance? If it was so beautiful?

  It was certainly beautiful. But Ahanashtan was also the port where the Continent brought in Saypuri slaves. All these beautiful structures, overlooking a bay teeming with human misery…Even the most beautiful creations cannot wipe away such corruption.

  Sigrud watches as the giant towers loom over him. Maybe the change, he thinks, is only superficial.

  First, logistics.

  A room at the edge of town, close to the docks but not too close. He knows the waterfront, knows its crannies and its smoke and the tang of diesel. He wants to have his back pushed up against known territory.

  The room is bare-bones. Walls and a bed and a tiny closet with all the soul and allure of a soiled bar of soap. Not a great place to hide things. So
he doesn’t.

  He finds an abandoned restaurant down the block. It’s suffered water damage from some past storm, and clearly won’t be occupied anytime soon. He picks the lock on the back door and skulks inside. He assembles a cache in the oven ventilation shaft, the dilapidated kitchen ringing with little clinks and clanks as he works.

  Inside he places his handheld bolt-shot, a pistol and ammunition—acquired along the way—and a second, shoulder-mounted bolt-shot, this one much more high-powered than the little handheld one. He stores away his backup POTs, as well: he’s Mr. Jenssen here in Ahanashtan, here to look for work, but he might need to be someone else if the situation calls for it. He also stores away some but not all of his money. He knows to seed that throughout his terrain like a squirrel does nuts. But he’s been without money before. He knows it’s easier to live hand to mouth in the city than in the wilds. Provided you don’t mind what you’re putting in your mouth.

  He slips out the window of the restaurant, then stands in the shadows for a moment, watching the streets. No movement, no watchers. In and out and done.

  Now to wait for nightfall. And then to visit the Golden.

  Midnight in Ahanashtan. The city is largely electrified now, so the streets are never fully dark. It’s a strange feeling for Sigrud, who knows the shadows better than he knows his own skin. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like how the steam and clouds obscure the moon and stars, yet the moisture traps the artificial light of this modern place, smearing the world above with a muddy orange color.

  Or perhaps he just doesn’t like being here, being on this street, on this block. Where she was. Where she died.

  Sigrud stares at the Golden from a darkened doorway. It is a husk of a building, a corpse, its facade broken and dark. Police ropes, dyed bright red, festoon the streets outside, warning people to keep out.

  His eye lingers on the massive rent in the top corner, lined with splintered wood, like broken teeth in a gaping maw.

  That was her. That’s where she was.

  A few patrolmen lurk in the doorways, Ahanashtani officers keeping watch over the site. Sigrud’s already spotted them, even the ones trying to remain hidden. The Ahanashtani police know as well as anyone that the death of Ashara Komayd is an international incident, so they must deploy their forces as much as possible to stave off any criticism—even if they aren’t quite sure what to do with those forces.