City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Sigrud slips out of the doorway, satchel over his shoulder. He pads down a back road, ducks through a torn chain-link fence, and weaves down a filthy alley until he approaches the eastern side of the Golden.

  He dodges under the police rope and waits in the darkness, head cocked, listening carefully. Nothing. If he’s been seen, they aren’t doing anything about it yet.

  He walks along the hotel’s brick wall until he finds a service door. He tries the knob—locked, of course. But after a moment’s work with his torsion wrench and his hook picks, the lock springs open, and he slips inside.

  Sigrud stands in the darkness of the hotel, listening once more. He can tell right away that the building is broken: there is a curious way that the wind blows through bombed-out structures, one you only hear when segments of the walls have been torn apart.

  He winds through the spacious lobby, then climbs the stairs. He has a torch, but chooses not to use it. The luminescence from the streetlights spills through the Golden’s many windows, and is more than enough to see by.

  He climbs to the fourth floor. The wind is stronger now, bearing with it the smell of chimney smoke and burned fabric. He walks down the hallway, his boots sending up plumes of dust from the soiled carpet.

  He pauses at one corner and sniffs.

  A familiar, coppery smell.

  He kneels and touches the carpet at his feet. He pulls out his torch and flicks it on, allowing a narrow beam of light to dance across the fabric.

  Blood. A lot of it.

  Someone killed the guard on station, he thinks. Then slipped down the hall to plant the explosives.

  He stands back up and looks down the hallway. He can see streetlight and faint moonlight spackling the walls outside the ruined rooms. After a few steps, there will be nothing more to explore. Just shattered walls and burned-out rooms.

  I must look, he thinks, though he is not sure why. Perhaps it is because he was denied his chance to hold vigil. I must look and see.

  He comes to the edge of the devastation and looks out. Shara’s room is completely gone. Nothing left of it, not even a stick of wood. He can see straight through to the city street below. He read in the papers that her two guards died with her, along with a young couple vacationing in the room below. All dead and gone in but a second.

  He thinks about Shara. How she moved, how she laughed, how she hunched over a cup of tea. And though he never really knew the girl, he thinks of her daughter—a Continental, adopted. Tatyana, he thinks her name was. Sigrud only saw her for an instant after Voortyashtan. He’d read in the papers—when he could get them in the mountains, that is—that Shara and her daughter had retired to the countryside to live in peaceful seclusion.

  Wherever that girl is, she will now go forward in life without a mother.

  He remembers Signe, cold and still on that table in the dark. Leaves in her hair and her collar askew.

  What a crime it is that creatures of hope and justice fade from this world, he thinks, while those like me live on.

  Sigrud stares out at the Ahanashtani cityscape beyond, cheery and glittering with light. He blinks, feeling suddenly very empty, very powerless, very small. There is nothing here for him. But what did he expect from this place? A record, a note, a file, a message? Did he think she would think of him in her last moments? Yet there’s only ash and blood.

  He takes a deep breath. Time for a last resort, he thinks.

  He sets down his satchel and begins unpacking its contents. He takes out a glass jar, a bag of daisy petals, and a small tin of gray earth.

  I saw you do this enough times, Shara, he thinks, working away, that I could do it in my sleep.

  He fills the jar with daisy petals, shakes it, then dumps them out. Daisies. Sacred to Ahanas for their willful recurrence.

  Then he takes a bit of the gray earth—still moist—and smears it across the bottom of the jar. Grave dust, the final state of all things. He waits a moment, then wipes the earth away. Then he picks up the jar and applies its open end to his eye, as if it were a telescope.

  He looks through the jar at the ruined rooms before him, and his heart drops. Nothing looks different. This is an old miracle, of course, an old ritual from back before the fall of the Continent. Shara used to perform it all the time: amplify the glass with the right reagents, then look through it, and any Divine alterations to the world would glow with a bright, blue-green phosphorescence. He remembers her saying that it was almost useless in Bulikov, since the walls there glowed so bright that they hurt her eyes and drowned everything else out.

  Yet the shattered rooms before him are as dark and shadowed as they were before. If something miraculous was once here in these rooms, the bomb wiped it away as surely as the lives of the people within them.

  He sighs, turns away, and drops the jar.

  Then he pauses. He thinks for a moment.

  He slowly turns back, and applies the jar to his eye again.

  Nothing glows in the ruined rooms before him. It’s all still shadows and ash. But there is something glowing in the streets outside the hotel. He can’t see much of it—just a sliver of the streetscape is visible from this angle—but he can tell that someone has drawn some kind of line or barrier in the concrete.

  A line or barrier that must be miraculous, or Divine—for it glows as bright as a lighthouse at sea.

  Sigrud slowly lowers the jar. “By the seas,” he whispers. “Someone did something to the streets?”

  Though this makes him wonder—was it Shara? Or someone else?

  His hands are shaking, partly with excitement, partly with shock. He never encountered such a thing once, not even when he worked with Shara in this very city. He turns to go back downstairs and outside, but pauses again, just as he’s about to take the jar away from his eye.

  He didn’t think to look through the jar down the hallway. He didn’t think there’d be anything inside the rest of the hotel. But he sees he was wrong.

  Sigrud stares through the little glass jar. There are more miraculous barriers here, more designs, more glowing wards placed in the walls and the floors and the ceilings of the hallway. He walks down the hallway and takes the jar away from his eye, and the wards vanish immediately. He touches one panel in the wall, a spot that glowed bright a mere second ago, but he can’t see anything there, no device or symbol or totem of any kind. Whatever these miracles are, they must be alterations of a kind so faint and so immaterial that they don’t even register to the naked eye.

  Which is strange. There is only one Divinity still alive, and that’s Olvos. Her miracles all still work—that would be why the miraculous walls of Bulikov still stand—but they should be the only ones.

  Yet Sigrud doesn’t recognize these Divine alterations to the world. He was no expert on the Divine—that was always Shara’s area—but he’s fairly sure that, like altering the streets themselves, he’s never seen miracles or works of this kind.

  He stares at the miracles through the glass jar. It’s clear that they’re barriers of a sort, running across the threshold of a hallway, or the top of the stairs, or even in the lobby.

  This was not just a hotel, thinks Sigrud, lowering the glass jar. It was a fortress.

  He looks back down the hallway, toward the ruined room where Shara died.

  Were you waging a war, Shara? And if so—against whom?

  Then he hears it: a cough, a shuffle, and the click of a heel from downstairs. Someone’s inside the hotel, someone very nearby.

  Sigrud shrinks up behind the corner next to the stairs and slowly slides out his knife. He listens carefully, standing perfectly still.

  He can hear them mount the stairs, hear the carpet being crushed under the soles of their shoes. A light springs on downstairs—a torch—and the beam goes bobbing and dancing among the white paneled walls of the Golden.

  They’re almost at the top of the stairs, just a few feet away. He crouches, ready to jump, to stab them in between the ribs or slash their neck open—whicheve
r is quieter or quicker.

  They come to the top of the stairs and stand there for a moment, shining their torch around, just barely missing Sigrud crouched in the corner beside them. It’s a man, he can tell by the way the person carries himself.

  “Huh,” says the man. “Thought I saw…Hm.” He turns around, shaking his head, and walks back downstairs. Sigrud allows himself a quick glance around the corner, and sees the golden epaulets and badge on their chest—an Ahanashtani policeman.

  He waits, listening, until he’s sure the policeman’s gone. Then he waits more, another ten minutes, just to be sure. Then he finally lets out a breath.

  He looks down at the knife in his hand and sees it’s shaking.

  Just a policeman. No one of consequence, no one of note. An innocent bystander, really.

  Sigrud sheathes his knife. He wonders—how many innocent lives is he responsible for? How many have fallen simply because they happened to be close to him while he did his work?

  He walks back downstairs, trying to ignore the trembling in his hands.

  Once he’s outside the hotel and back in the safety of the shadows, Sigrud explores the alterations done to the streets around the Golden. He must look like a madman, standing there with a glass jar stuck to his eye, but there’s no one around to see him at this hour.

  Whoever made the miracles in the Golden clearly did far more work to the streets outside. There are barriers and lines and invisible barricades everywhere—some hanging in the air, ghostly modifications to what must be reality itself—and it doesn’t take long for Sigrud to understand what this is.

  If the Golden was Shara’s fortress, he thinks, then these must be its moats, its drawbridges, its outer walls and gatehouses. He has no idea what would trigger these miraculous traps. They certainly didn’t do anything to keep him out, or to harm him. But perhaps they were attuned to a specific opponent. The Divinities could change reality as they wished, so they were certainly capable of creating a miraculous defense that would respond to a single, precise enemy.

  But it’s still concerning that he’s never seen these miracles before in the whole of his career. Then again, he really only knew what Shara knew—and it’s possible Shara learned a lot of new things during their time apart.

  Who was she when she died? Perhaps she was no longer the woman you knew.

  The thought troubles him. Yet Sigrud doesn’t think Shara would act too differently. He knew Shara perhaps better than anyone in this world—and an operative is an operative until the day they die.

  She must have had some method of communication, he thinks, scanning the streets. Some way of sending messages to clandestine agents and allies. And he has no doubt that if she had access to Divine defenses, she would have used some of those same methods to prepare a communications system.

  He wanders the darkened streets around the Golden for nearly two hours, the glass jar stuck to his eye. He shies away from any early-morning pedestrians, especially police officers, even though he appears fairly harmless—he cannot risk having a common stop escalate into something nasty.

  Then, finally, he spies it: it’s just a dot, a distant blot on a brick wall nearly two blocks away. But it’s there, glowing bright, that same, curious blue-green phosphorescence of the Divine.

  He puts the jar away and approaches the brick wall slowly, conscious of any surveillance. If this was part of Shara’s communication methods, it might be compromised.

  He takes his time, spending two, three hours circling through the streets surrounding the blue-green blot. He sees nothing, but since he now seems to be dealing with something Divine, not seeing things doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The Divinity Jukov once stowed the body of his lover in a glass bead or something, if he recalls. An assassin could pop out of the walls and cut him down if they had enough miracles at their disposal.

  Yet this does not happen. The closer Sigrud gets, the more confident he grows that this site—whatever it is—remains secure.

  Sigrud walks toward the wall and casually holds the jar up to his eye, or at least as casually as one could possibly do such a thing.

  One brick in the wall glows bright blue-green. Five bricks up from the ground.

  Sigrud walks up to it, then scans the streets. There’s no one.

  He looks at the brick. Throwing lots of caution to the wind, he touches it.

  His fingers pass through it as if it were made of fog, and the instant this happens, it vanishes, leaving a hole in the wall.

  Sigrud peers into the hole. There are two objects inside: one is a candle, burning with a strange intensity. The other is an envelope, sealed but unmarked.

  He picks up the candle and quickly blows it out, for it’s not wise to be lit up like a firework when you’re trying to go unnoticed. He thinks, then flips the candle over.

  Inscribed on the bottom is a symbol of a flame between two parallel lines—the insignia of Olvos, the flame in the woods.

  Sigrud grunts, surprised. He’s seen such miraculous candles before, with Shara, in Bulikov—they never burn out, and give off an intense, bright light. But why put one here? Why light up a dead drop?

  He drops the candle and picks up the envelope. On its front is a single letter—an S.

  He pockets the envelope, turns, and takes a long, circuitous walk back to his rooms. He’s fairly confident he has no tails, no surveillance. One person happens to walk alongside him for a little bit—a pale, young, Continental girl with odd eyes and a queerly upturned nose—but their paths quickly diverge, and he never sees her again.

  Once he’s back in his rooms, Sigrud watches the streets for another hour. When he’s satisfied he’s gone unnoticed, he shuts the curtains and opens the envelope.

  It contains two letters, both handwritten, though one is in code. Sigrud reads the uncoded one first.

  Shara,

  Spotted him again on Neitorov Street, then again on Ghorenski Square. This was on the 9th and 12th. I am almost positive it’s the same man we sighted around the hotel two weeks ago. Small, upper middle-aged, Saypuri, scar on his neck. Clearly a hood of some kind, but not Ministry. And he has a team working for him, I think. Too many familiar faces.

  I suspect he’s working for our opponent. He’s difficult to track—I believe he has been given tools to hide his movements. Highly recommend leaving Ahanashtan with all due haste.

  We were drawn here, I think. This city has always been a trap. Now he has our list of possible recruits. We have to act immediately.

  As for the little Saypuri hood, and his team—I managed to steal a communication of theirs. I pilfered it from a dead drop of theirs, copied it, and replaced the original before anyone noticed. It’s enclosed, but it’s in code. Yet codes have always been your kind of thing.

  Stay vigilant. He’s not the poor child we thought he was. He’s broken in more awful ways than we could have ever imagined.

  —M

  Sigrud rereads the letter. Then he reads it a third, fourth, and fifth time. Then he sits back and lets out a long, slow sigh.

  It’s clear now that Shara was working a big operation—especially if she was putting together lists of possible recruits. It’s not at all clear what they were recruiting agents for, but it must have been something specialized, something sought-after—otherwise, their opponent stealing a list of those recruits wouldn’t be such a devastating blow, which this letter makes it sound like it was.

  But as to who wrote this letter, and who their enemy is, Sigrud has no idea. Who is “M”? Could that be Mulaghesh, Shara’s longtime military ally? He doesn’t think so. Last he heard, Mulaghesh was still serving in Parliament in Ghaladesh, and was enjoying a surprising burst of popularity—he knows her supporters fondly call her “Mother Mulaghesh,” which amuses him, as Mulaghesh was about as motherly as a dreadnought.

  Whoever their enemy is, they penetrated not only Shara’s tradecraft practices, but also the Divine barriers she’d put up around herself in the Golden. Not someone to trifle with,
then.

  And whoever wrote this message was trying to warn Shara, trying to tell her the sharks were closing in. But it never got to her.

  Yet the little Saypuri hood…That rings a bell.

  He rereads that line again and again. Sigrud worked with all kinds of Saypuri hoods and operatives and hardliners in his time in the Ministry.

  An aging Saypuri hood with a scar on his neck…

  The blood on the floor. Dirty work, silent and close—knife work.

  The memory of a face comes swimming up in his mind: a thin, wiry, short Saypuri man, with high, sharp cheekbones, a starved face, and burning eyes. And just below his chin, nearly hidden in his collar, a bright, lurid, white scar, running across his throat.

  He remembers the man tapping that scar once and saying, I got this in Jukoshtan. Fucking Kolkashtani took exception to the way I was walking. Too much pride for a Saypuri, he said. But I survived. Found him later. Gutted him like a pig. Never forgot that he tried to do that to me. Whenever I get a contract for a Continental…Why, I grab my knife, and remember…

  “Ah,” he says. “Khadse. Of course.”

  Lieutenant Rahul Khadse of the Saypuri Navy. Sigrud remembers him. Nasty little man, one of Vinya’s pets. When Shara took the prime minister’s seat, he’d been one of the first to go. But if it’s him—and Sigrud only has this mysterious testimony suggesting so—then it seems he found a home here in Ahanashtan, practicing his grisly trade.

  Sigrud puts down the handwritten note and looks at the copy of the coded message. It appears to be a copy of a telegram, which would have been sent through the normal channels—so the date is there in plain text at the top. It looks like it was sent the week before Shara’s death.

  He sighs and scratches his head. I thought I’d never have to decrypt anything again, he thinks, yet here I am once more. He rummages around in his room for a pencil and paper. How I hate codes.