City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It takes him the whole morning to decrypt it. He tries some standard methods, but none make any headway. He tries some systems Shara devised, but those don’t work either.

  I should sleep, he thinks, rubbing his eyes. I must sleep….

  But whenever he thinks of sleep, he remembers the sight of the Golden, its walls ruined and torn, and he has no appetite for rest.

  It’s only when he starts really thinking about who this message was intended for—Khadse, likely—that he has any ideas.

  If Khadse was the hood that Shara’s enemy was working with, then he probably would not have his own encryption team. Maybe he would have twenty years ago, when he was still in the folds of the Ministry and had access to resources—but not now. So he’d need something familiar. And what sort of code would be familiar to Khadse?

  After one more hour, he stops, thunderstruck.

  He knows this. He’s used this code before.

  He tries out one key.

  The first few lines of the original order begin to materialize:

  ONCE CONFIRMED KOMAYD HAS BEEN ELIMINATED…

  “Shit,” says Sigrud. He can’t believe it. It’s a code that was used by Bulikovian partisans twenty-five years ago, when the capital of the Continent occasionally resisted Saypuri rule. He can’t blame Khadse for using it—it’s an obscure one, one broken by the Ministry long ago, and used in a region fairly far from here. It’s likely any contemporary Ministry operatives would be stumped by it. But Khadse likely didn’t think there’d be any aging operatives like Sigrud on his tail.

  He decodes the rest of the message, and reads:

  ONCE CONFIRMED KOMAYD HAS BEEN ELIMINATED NEXT TARGET LIST WILL BE PROVIDED 12 DAYS LATER STOP

  EXCHANGE WILL TAKE PLACE 1300 HOURS 28TH OF BHOVRA STOP

  SUVIN WAREHOUSE FACILITY REMAINS MOST SECURE LOCATION STOP

  MAINTAIN HIGHEST POSSIBLE SECURITY FOR EXCHANGE STOP

  Sigrud rereads the message, then reads it a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time.

  The 28th of Bhovra…He has to do some math, since he usually thinks in Saypuri months, not Continental months—but he eventually realizes that’s in three days. So he still has time. Not much, but some.

  He has a time, a date, and he knows one half of who will be there—Khadse and his team. Likely a lot of them, judging by the last sentence—“highest possible security.”

  He looks down at his hands. Scarred, worn, ugly things—the left, especially, its palm brutally mutilated using a Divine torture method long, long ago. I was only ever meant for one thing, he thinks.He slowly makes fists. The knuckles pop and creak unpleasantly. Meant to practice one art. How just it feels that now I shall do so.

  He goes to bed, and sleeps deeply for the first time in weeks.

  The Suvin Warehouse proves to be an old coal facility, situated on a stretch of docks on the eastern end of Ahanashtan—very sketchy, very dangerous, very old and dilapidated. An odd choice for an exchange: usually they’d pick someplace more accessible.

  No simple dead drop, then, he thinks. Whoever is giving this information to Khadse, they mean to make him work for it.

  But if Khadse is being put through his paces, it means there’s much, much more to protect. Shara was just one facet of all this, and Khadse was but a tool in a larger game.

  I must meet this employer of Khadse’s, he thinks. And ask him many, many questions.

  He walks along the perimeter. Bolts, he thinks, looking at the niches and shadows. Radios…Rope…Explosives, perhaps. He looks around at the nearby crumbling lots. And I’ll need a safe house. And probably to steal an auto too.

  He has work to do, things to buy, things to make. And not much time to get them.

  He returns to the streets to find his way home. But as he does he checks his periphery, doubles back, and performs some quick maneuvers to see if he has a tail.

  He doesn’t. But he could have sworn he saw a familiar face: the pale, young Continental woman with the upturned nose and queerly colored eyes.

  He shakes himself.

  Time to go to work.

  It’s silly, but I still worry about miracles. We tell ourselves that they’re all dead, but I’m never quite reassured enough.

  Pangyui writes that, in some ancient texts, miracles were described not as rules or devices but as organisms, as if Saint So-and-So’s Magic Feet or whatever they called it was just a fish in a vast sea of them. As if some miracles had minds of their own.

  This bothers me. It bothers me because organisms focus on one thing: survival. By any means necessary.

  —MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1709

  Rahul Khadse glowers out the auto’s window at the night sky. He shivers. Just nerves, he tells himself. That’s all it is. But he can’t help but admit that the evening has a bad taste to it.

  He sighs. How he hates this particular job.

  His team clutches their coats tight around their shoulders as they sit in the idling auto, as if they could seal out the creeping, chilling damp. It’s a hopeless cause. “How is it,” mutters Zdenic, “that this damned city gets both the hot summers and the cold winters?”

  “Not as bad as a few years back,” says Emil, their driver. “That was wh—”

  “Shut up,” snaps Khadse. “And watch for the other team!”

  Silence. Some uncomfortable shifting.

  Khadse shivers again as they sit in the idling auto, but not due to the cold: he knows what’s waiting for him at the coal warehouse tonight. Just like his coat and shoes—the ones he wore to the Komayd job, and the ones he’s wearing now—the coal warehouse has its own strange, specific instructions.

  He still remembers his bafflement the first time his employer arranged an “exchange.” In his day if someone wanted to pass along information, Khadse would just arrange a dead drop, or a precisely timed, fleeting encounter somewhere public. But his employer, of course, was different. Khadse was sent a small silver knife, and an old wooden matchbox filled with matches that had yellow heads. With these came instructions to take the items to a certain room in a certain warehouse, utilizing the utmost precaution in doing so, and then he was to…

  Khadse shivers again at the very thought of it. Will tonight be the last time I do this? Or will I be doing this for the rest of my life—however long it lasts?

  Finally the second auto arrives. They watch as it pulls up to the alley exit across the street from them. The lights blink on, then off.

  “Site’s clear,” says Emil. “Proceed?”

  Khadse nods. Emil puts the car in drive, pulls out, and starts off toward the eastern end of Ahanashtan, taking a predetermined series of alleys, back roads, and, once, cutting across a vacant lot.

  The old coal warehouse emerges from the fog. It looks like some ancient, spectral castle, and reminds him of the ruins he saw when he was stationed in Bulikov, long ago, fragments of a civilization long since faded.

  They park. He sits in silence, surveying the area.

  “Matrusk’s been here all day,” says Zdenic. “No one’s come in or out or even close.”

  “If this fucker didn’t have the strangest damned exchange system in all the world,” mutters Khadse, “this wouldn’t be an issue.” He grunts to himself. “The hells with it. Let’s go.”

  He steps out of the auto. There’s a symphony of clunks as the rest of his team does the same, their auto doors opening all at once. He approaches the warehouse, walking with the air of a man coming to collect a debt, his dark coat fluttering, his wood-soled shoes clicking and clacking against the asphalt.

  His crew follows him. Stupid to have so many for just a dead drop, but his employer did say to use the utmost precaution. He’s never liked how his employer is so paranoid, making requests as if they’re being watched all the time. It does give one ideas.

  When they near the entry he makes a motion with his hand. His team members pull out pistols and begin moving ahead, sweeping from room to
room. Khadse knows which room matters, the one at the very top, where the site manager’s office once was. A long way up.

  They enter the warehouse bays. The rooms are huge and looming, giant seas of shadows. Khadse’s team switches on torches and sweeps the rooms with light, revealing giant concrete walls and ceilings, some corners awash in piles of coal and coke.

  The torchlights dance over the piles of coal. Such filthy work, thinks Khadse.

  No one. Nothing.

  “Clear,” says Zdenic.

  They leave two guards at the entrance, then proceed up the rickety wooden stairs to the next floor. They cross the entirety of the warehouse, then go up a winding metal staircase to the third floor. Everything is dark and dank, sooty and ashen, as if this place was built of the jetsam from some horrific fire.

  Up to the fourth. They leave three more guards behind on the third, making it just Zdenic, Alzbeta, and Khadse on the fourth floor, where the site manager’s office awaits.

  They walk down the hallway, then through the offices to the break rooms, where a sink must have burst long ago, leaving plumes of mold running across the walls and floor. They turn and approach the office at the very, very back. Khadse makes a gesture, and his two remaining team members take up positions: Zdenic at the site manager’s door, and Alzbeta at the hall entry.

  “Won’t be a minute,” says Khadse. Then he opens the site manager’s door and walks in.

  He turns on his own torch, sending shadows dancing around him. The room is drab and empty, its walls and floors tattooed with scars and scrapes, impressions of absent objects that once spent years here.

  Grimacing, Khadse turns off his torch. Darkness swallows him. He fumbles in his pocket, takes out the matchbox containing the match with the yellow head. He places the match head on the sandpaper bit, and strikes it….

  A low blue flame blossoms in the dark. Khadse wrinkles his nose at it. It is not a natural flame, not one that a normal match should make. It casts light, certainly, but its light somehow seems to make the shadows harder, more concrete, rather than dispersing them. He’s never seen a light that made a room feel darker—and yet this is exactly what he feels this match does, even in such a dark room.

  He blows out the match. Waits. Then he flicks back on his torch.

  He looks down. “Hells,” he mutters. “Here I am again.”

  At his feet, on the floor, is a perfect circle of total darkness that was definitely not there before.

  Khadse wrinkles his nose again, sighs, and pulls out the silver knife. “Well. Let’s get to it.”

  In the darkness, Sigrud begins to move.

  He keeps his lips clamped around the steel tube running up through the six inches of coal covering his form, taking deep breaths before he starts to shift the coal off of him. He picked particularly dusty coal, small particulates, so it creates little more than a soft hush as he rises.

  He removes the tube and the cloth from his face, and blinks. He’s been lying hidden in the coal for nearly twenty hours now, having sat totally still as Khadse’s team searched the warehouse. His head is light with hunger, his crotch damp with urine—unfortunate, but a necessity. He swallows, shakes himself, and goes over what he heard.

  Two at the bay door. Six more upstairs. Probably guarding the stairs. Eight total, then, including Khadse.

  He listens closely, hears a quiet cough from the bay door around the corner. He slinks off the coal pile and creeps to the edge of the wall. His entire form is shrouded in black and his boots are wrapped in cloth, masking the sounds of their soles against the concrete. He darts his head out and back.

  Two, yes. Both with pistols and torches.

  Sigrud picks up his handheld radio, turns it on, checks the frequency. He readies himself—bolt-shot at his belt, knife on his thigh—holds up one finger, and taps the receiver, hard.

  Three bays over, the radio’s mate—which is turned up very, very loud—makes a sharp tok sound, which echoes through the darkness.

  “What in hells was that?” says one of the guards.

  A long silence.

  “Maybe some coal fell,” says the other. “Or rats, probably.”

  More silence.

  “Khadse would want us to check it out,” says the first guard.

  “He also wouldn’t want us to leave the door unguarded. If you want to go look at your damned rats, I’ll stay here.”

  “Fine.”

  Footfalls. Not heavy. Light. A small man?

  The guard rounds the corner, his torchlight bobbing ahead. He doesn’t see Sigrud standing in the shadows. The man is small, maybe five and a half feet. Sigrud takes full measure of him, estimating the way his body will move. Then he slinks after the guard, slipping through the darkness to hide behind the walls of the second coal bay.

  The guard walks to the entry to the third bay, where Sigrud’s hidden his radio. The guard stops, the torchlight slowly crawling across the piles of coal.

  This won’t do, thinks Sigrud. I need you to turn the corner….

  He turns his radio back on and taps it again, softer. Another tok, but not quite as loud.

  “What?” says the guard. “What is that?”

  The guard turns the corner and walks behind the wall, out of sight from his partner.

  Sigrud slips around the corner behind him, knife in his right hand. When the guard has gone far enough, Sigrud springs.

  He worried that he’d botch it up, but muscle memory takes over. With his left hand he reaches around the guard and rips the gun from his hand, and with his right he whips his black knife up and around the guard’s throat, cleanly severing the jugular.

  The guard chokes and the torch falls to the ground, though its beam is still out of sight from the other guard. The spray of blood is terrific, painting the dark concrete wall before them. Sigrud holds the guard up, hugging the man’s body so it won’t fall and make noise. Warmth spreads throughout Sigrud’s arms, then his thighs, a tremendous surge of blood soaking over him.

  The guard struggles, his legs beating uselessly against Sigrud’s knees. Then the blows taper off, weaker and weaker, and he goes still.

  It takes less than twenty seconds. Sigrud is breathing a little too hard for his liking.

  I’m out of shape, he thinks. And slow…

  He gently lowers the guard’s body to the floor. His entire front is wet with the man’s blood. Then he creeps to the edge of the corner to peer out at the second guard.

  In the darkness, his scarred, beaten face twists into a savage grin. But one, alone—this should be easy.

  Khadse takes the silver knife, holds out his left arm, and makes a slight incision across the back webbing of his hand, grimacing as the blade cuts. At first he thinks he barely broke the skin, but then the blood comes welling up, bright red.

  He squats over the perfect circle of darkness, stuffs his torch up under his armpit, and wipes his right thumb across the blood. Then he takes his thumb and reaches down to the circle of darkness….

  I hate this part, he thinks.

  His bloody thumb penetrates the dark circle as if it were just a hole, but then he feels a gauzy membrane, as if within the circle of darkness is a layer of spiderwebs, except he can’t see them….

  Something squirms up against his thumb, like a creature running its back under his hand, eager to be petted.

  “Eugh!” cries Khadse. He pulls his hand away, shaking it as if it’d been burned. There’s no pain, but the sensation is so disturbing, so alien, as if there were some blind, wet creature asleep in the bottom of that black pit, waiting for his touch.

  Which might be the case. This being his third time here, he understands that the hole functions something like a safe, carefully guarding its package until someone can provide the right identification.

  Though there’s no visual change, he can’t help but get the sensation that the circle of black is shifting, changing, flattening, and then…

  Something rises up in the circle, like a fishing bob floa
ting to the surface in a pond: a small square, made of black paper—an envelope.

  Written on the front of the envelope, in spidery handwriting, is a word: KHADSE.

  Khadse shivers. He bends down, picks up the envelope, and stores it away in his coat.

  Well, he thinks as he turns around. I’m fucking glad that’s over.

  Even Khadse has his limits, though. After his first trip to the warehouse—the first night with the knife, the blood, and the gap of darkness—he was so disturbed he worked his own networks to find out a little bit more about his employer, trying to figure out who he was and how he had access to such…means.

  What he found out was two things.

  One was a name.

  The other was a rumor that whoever said that name out loud, no matter who or where they were, tended to disappear.

  He chose to drop his investigation there.

  Remember your retirement. Remember the light at the end of this very long tunnel….

  He walks out the office door. Zdenic looks at him, eyebrows raised. “All good?”

  Khadse is about to tell him it’s all fine, thank you very much, now let’s get a damned move on—but then they hear the gunshots and the screams from downstairs.

  They stare at each other.

  “What in the hells is that?” says Khadse.

  It’s all coming back to him now. Sigrud finishes up the second guard at the bay door pretty ably: he clocks him on the temple with the handle of his knife, rips the gun out of his grasp, and slashes his throat.

  He takes the man’s pistol. He has no intention of using it, as he wants to keep this as silent as possible: to fire a gun would give away his position, and could alert Khadse to the fact that he’s just one man, not an army. He holsters the pistol, then runs to the ropes dangling from the side of the warehouse.

  He tied these up two nights ago, a set of ropes dangling from the fourth floor all the way down to the very bottom, hidden up against one column. Much of the coal warehouse is wet and crumbling, whole floors falling away after years of so many Ahanashtani rains. Using ropes to traverse the floors not only gives him the element of surprise, it also prevents him from taking one wrong step and tumbling to his death.