City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  The constable ahead holds up a black-gloved hand as she approaches. “I’m sorry, miss, this is a crime scene, and I—”

  Mishra pulls out her credentials and holds them up. “Good morning,” she says.

  He reads her credentials. Then his eyes widen and he takes a step back. “I see, ma’am,” he says. “Ah. Would you like me to get the lieutenant, ma’am?”

  “If that’s who’s in charge—then yes, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He trots off. Mishra waits, casting an eye over the ruins of the slaughterhouse. She could walk into the scene if she wanted—no matter how much gold bedecks those uniforms, her position thoroughly trumps theirs—but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to do anything especially memorable beyond appear and then depart.

  The Ahanashtani lieutenant, his giant white mustache rippling with each indignant huff, strides across the pavement to her. “Yes, yes?” he asks. “How can I help you?”

  She shows him her credentials. He, like the constable before him, is cowed, but he’s a lot more resentful about it.

  “I see,” he says. “Well. How nice of you to join us, Captain Mishra. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is it? What would this have to do with military intelligence? Unless…it has something to do with Komayd?”

  The lieutenant looks uneasy at that, because the Ahanashtani authorities are under a lot of scrutiny right now. Allowing the former leader of the world’s most powerful nation to get assassinated in your backyard has that effect.

  “We’re not sure yet,” says Mishra. “We’re still assessing the situation. Do you have any reason to believe it’s connected?”

  “No,” he says, surprised. “Not yet, at least. Though I certainly hope not.”

  “You said you had another series of deaths at another location, downriver?”

  “A coal warehouse, yes. Professionally done. Very professionally done.” He looks her over. “I do hope you’re not about to tell me that Saypur had something to do with it, though. I thought the days of murderous conflict taking place at our back door without any warning were behind us.”

  “There’s little I can tell you now. But one thing I absolutely can tell you is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had absolutely nothing to do with this. Though it does worry us. Have you identified any of the bodies?”

  “Not a one. It’s early yet.”

  “And…” She nods ahead at the burned-down slaughterhouse. “No body found here?”

  “Not yet. Though it’s in a poor state. It’ll take some time to search.”

  “And nothing washed downriver?”

  “No.” He gives her a hard look. “Who exactly might I be looking for, Captain?”

  “Someone tall,” says Mishra. “Hair cut very short. A Dreyling. With a false eye.”

  He shakes his head. “We’ve found no body matching that description, ma’am. Can you give me any more?”

  “If I knew more, Lieutenant, I would give it. Just an unsavory character that has been identified at another recent incident.” She pulls out her card and hands it over. “If you happen to learn of anything, can you notify me, please? We’d like to keep abreast of this situation.”

  “I would be happy to, ma’am,” he says, though he smiles icily enough that it’s obvious he means quite the opposite.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” says Mishra. She nods to him, then turns and walks back to her auto.

  She takes a short breath of relief. She expected someone from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have already paid him a visit—someone who would have had official orders to be there—and that could have been awkward. For while Mishra did have orders to check in on the scene, they didn’t come from the Ministry.

  She drives north, away from the industrial neighborhoods, passing all the mills and the refineries and the plants belching up steam. She tools around until she comes to the traffic tunnels connecting east Ahanashtan to all the north-south thoroughfares—tiny, cramped arteries carved into the hillsides. She drives into one tunnel and pulls over about halfway through, guiding her auto onto the shoulder. Then she sits for a moment, watching the other autos. She looks in the rearview mirror, her amber-colored eyes narrow and watchful. Once she’s confirmed she wasn’t followed, she pulls out the envelope.

  The envelope is thick and very formal-looking, closed by a string tied around a brass button. Mishra checks her surroundings again, then opens the envelope and pulls out what appears to be a piece of black paper.

  She’s done this before, many times. But she still can’t help shuddering every time she touches the paper. She knows it’s not really paper, it’s something else: its surface feels as soft as sable, yet if you push on it it’s as hard as glass….Whatever it is, her skin recognizes it as something alien.

  And it is simply too black. Far too black.

  She takes out a pencil and begins to write on the paper. She can’t read what she’s writing—gray on black is too tricky for her eyes, in any light—but she knows it won’t matter to him. The controller, as he prefers to be called in casual conversation, can see in any darkness.

  She writes:

  BODIES NOT YET IDENTIFIED. NO CONNECTION TO KHADSE OR KOMAYD HAS BEEN MADE. I HAVE CONFIRMED THAT KHADSE’S OPERATIONAL HOUSE HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY CLEANED.

  PROVIDED AHANASHTANI POLICE WITH THE DESCRIPTION YOU GAVE. NO SIGN OF THE SUSPECT YET. PLEASE ADVISE AS TO WHETHER OR NOT I SHOULD NOTIFY THE MINISTRY THROUGH OFFICIAL CHANNELS.

  —KM

  She folds up the paper and steps out of her car, wincing as a large, rattling truck goes cruising by, spewing exhaust. Though Mishra’s a Saypuri, she’s a country girl at heart, and much prefers a horse and cart over all these new autos.

  She walks to a small service door on the side of the tunnel, checks her surroundings again, and opens it.

  Inside is a small cement closet, just four bare walls and a floor. There’s a broken broomstick standing in the corner, along with an old dusty glass bottle. Besides that, there’s nothing.

  She places the paper in the middle of the closet floor, then shuts the door, watching as the door’s shadow falls across the paper.

  Mishra checks her watch—Five minutes to go—leans up against the tunnel wall, and lights a cigarette.

  She doesn’t wonder if it will work. She knows it will work. All the bits of shadow paper find him quick enough, if placed in deep enough darkness. No matter where that darkness happens to be, for all darkness is one to him.

  She watches the traffic, making note of the models of cars, the colors, the faces of the drivers. He’s protected her, blessed her, given her defenses—but after last night, who knows if they’ll work. What mad risks I take, she thinks, for a creature I can barely understand.

  But she knows that’s wrong. She does understand him. And he understands her.

  She remembers when he first came to her—1729, she thinks it was, almost ten years ago. Four years after Voortyashtan. Four years after her brother Sanjay had died in combat there, stabbed by a shtani girl hardly older than fifteen. He’d been battling insurgents, trying to save the girl, but the girl didn’t understand that—or perhaps she did, but didn’t care. Who knows what these degenerates think?

  And what did Saypur get for her brother’s sacrifice? What was earned by his death? After Komayd left power, Mishra couldn’t tell. The Ministry and the military were in tatters. Public trust in the national forces was at an all-time low. The merchants were spilling into government and treating generals and commanders as if they were simple bureaucratic officials, pencil pushers and seat-fillers. Mishra, like a lot of other loyalists, found herself disgusted with her nation.

  She thought she kept her disgust a secret. But it soon became clear that she hadn’t. Because one day, while she was stationed here in Ahanashtan, someone slipped a letter under her apartment door.

  This disturbed her. Mishra’s residential address was a carefully kept Ministry secret. Direct correspondence was strictly forbidden.

  But another
thing that disturbed her about this letter was the color of its paper.

  It was black. Not dyed black, like a shirt—but black, as if someone had taken the idea of blackness and cut a perfect square from it.

  Mishra opened the letter. And though she couldn’t understand how, she could see writing on it, letters in black, but it was in different shades of black.

  …or perhaps the letter did something else. Perhaps when you looked at it, rather than seeing the words there, the paper wrote words upon your mind.

  The letter said:

  DO YOU FEEL THAT THE CONTINENT HAS FAILED?

  DO YOU FEEL THAT SAYPUR HAS FAILED?

  DO YOU WISH TO DO AWAY WITH BOTH?

  DO YOU WISH TO START ALL OVER AGAIN?

  IF YOU DO, I CAN HELP YOU. AND YOU CAN HELP ME.

  SIMPLY SAY THIS WORD ALOUD:

  And at the bottom of the letter was a name.

  Mishra stared at the letter. Not just because all of this was so odd, but because the words spoke to a deep dread that had been metastasizing within her, this idea that perhaps no state or nation could ever truly succeed in this world. The Continent had been an abomination, and now Saypur, the world’s best chance at a fair, proud, and free democracy, was being ruined by mercantilism and vain, fruitless quests for peace. Ten years into her military career she’d found herself waking up and thinking: We’ll never get it right. We’ll always find a way to cock it all up. Every time. And as her comrades fought and suffered and died, she found herself doubting the point of it all.

  To see these thoughts written down before her, no matter how strangely they arrived, was a powerful sensation for her. It felt, for the first time in many years, like she was not alone.

  So she took a breath, and read the name aloud.

  And then the boy came—he still looked like a young boy back then—and they talked for a long, long while.

  Captain First Class Kavitha Mishra has done a lot of odd things for the controller in the years since. There are other members of the Ministry who work for him too—she knows this because she personally recruited some of them—but none of them work as closely with him as she does. He wouldn’t have picked anyone else to send to Bulikov, for example, when they needed to trap that laughing boy, the one who could seemingly appear out of thin air. And though that was her oddest job yet, she suspects he’ll have stranger ones for her in the future.

  Especially after Komayd, and Khadse, and whatever in hells happened last night.

  Standing in the tunnel, Mishra checks her watch. She takes a breath, then opens the door.

  The piece of black paper is still on the floor of the closet. She picks it up and unfolds it.

  There are new words on the letter. Just like that first time in her apartment, they seem to be written in black—or perhaps they write themselves on some deeper, hidden part of her mind:

  DO NOT ALERT THE MINISTRY YET.

  USE THE MIRRORS. WATCH THEIR ACTIONS. REPORT IMMEDIATELY IF ANY MENTION OR MOVEMENT IS SPOTTED, ESPECIALLY CONCERNING THE SUSPECT.

  HE IS WITH THEM. HE IS DANGEROUS.

  She sighs.

  Then she takes a match, lights it on the wall of the closet, and holds the flame to the corner of the paper.

  The flames slowly crawl across the black page, turning it into ash. She blows on it a little to help it spread, then stamps it out when it’s finished. Then she climbs back into her auto and drives away.

  “Shit,” she says. She hates mirror duty. But an order is an order.

  In some ways the modern world now seems very new and advanced to Sigrud. In his day, autos were a rarity, telephones even rarer than that, and pistols and riflings were expensive exoticisms.

  Yet in some ways, to his disbelief, it remains absolutely the same. For example, if you were to tell Sigrud that in this very modern, very advanced society, one could still use a forged labor visa—one of the stalwart fallbacks of the intelligence industry, when he was active—to cross the South Seas to Navashtra in Saypur, he would think you a fool. Surely the bureaucracies and authorities must have closed the various loopholes that made such forgeries possible? Surely this new generation, swimming in so much technology and innovation, must have found a way to eliminate this common deceit?

  But it appears that the wheels of government move even slower than Sigrud imagined. For he, along with dozens of other scruffy Dreylings and Continentals, is able to painlessly book passage across the South Seas and sail to Navashtra without incident. The various Saypuri officials barely even glance at him. Perhaps Saypur is so hungry for skilled labor that it doesn’t particularly care if a few of those laborers are malicious agents.

  From Navashtra, it’s a shockingly simple thing to make it down the coast to Ghaladesh. All forms of transportation, whether roads or boats or trains, inevitably curve toward Ghaladesh, second-largest city in the world, but the undisputed capital of civilization. And though the checkpoints and security measures are higher in Ghaladesh than anywhere else, they’re still not as high as what Sigrud had to go through in service to Saypur’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs—so, to his surprise, they pose no threat to him.

  Perhaps this is a world I could have never imagined, he thinks. Perhaps this is a world that is, more or less, at peace.

  And then, suddenly, he’s there. He’s walking free and unthreatened in Ghaladesh, the city that, in many ways, has decided his life and the lives of countless others. Because the choices made here, whether about war or commerce, have surely had millions of consequences and casualties apiece.

  Sigrud tries not to stare around himself as he walks through Ghaladesh. He is mostly struck by how clean the city is, how organized. Bulikov was a schizophrenic, crumbling mess, Voortyashtan was hardly more than a savage outpost, and Ahanashtan was built specifically to serve the shipping channel, creating a half-industrial, half-urbane hybrid of a city.

  But Ghaladesh is different. Ghaladesh, unlike all the other cities he’s ever seen, is intentional.

  You can see it when you walk from block to block. From the graceful wooden posts that so many houses sit on to the drains in the street to the curves of the elevated train, you can see how this was not just done well but done just—so. Ghaladesh, he sees, is a city of engineers, a city of thinkers, a city of people who do not act rashly.

  Or at least act rashly within their own territory. The rest of the world, well, that he knows is a different story.

  He can’t help but marvel at how it flows, how it breathes. How the old stone, commercial buildings downtown flow into the graceful residential sections, where all the houses sit on poles or posts in case of flooding—for Ghaladesh is a city built on the sea, and thus is at constant war with the waters. Perhaps that’s why so much of the city feels planned and designed to a fault. Or perhaps Saypuris, who after all served as slaves to the Continent for centuries, are incredibly, intensely sensitive to the possibility of ever infringing on the life of another. After glancing at the papers, it seems that if someone ever proposes constructing a new building of apartments, Ghaladeshis immediately hold a giant debate about the ramifications and effects of such a building, and whether such effects are acceptable. It is a little too civilized for Sigrud, who was raised in a culture where the person who yelled the loudest was usually considered to be in the right.

  He goes to work right away. In this highly organized metropolis, it takes no time at all to find the address. It’s close to the heart of Ghaladesh, in one of the richest and most exclusive areas available. When he gets there he can’t see the house behind the tall wooden walls, but he can tell he’s come to the right place by the Saypuri guards out front—plainclothes, certainly, but he knows soldiers when he sees them.

  Sigrud waits for evening, then skulks through the yards of the adjoining houses. No one sees him, no one raises an eyebrow. These are civilized people. They have no need to be watchful of their properties.

  He waits on the other side of the walls, listening for a footfall or a sigh. He hears none. The
y must only put security out front, he thinks. Which is…remarkably stupid. He readies himself, then hops the fence.

  He lands in a very austere garden in the back of the house. Mostly just grass and rock and the odd shrub, pruned within an inch of its life. There’s a sliding glass door in the back, and he finds nothing remarkable about the lock on it. He picks it in less than a minute and a half, then slips inside.

  He checks his pocket watch. It’s late evening now. She should be getting home soon.

  He pads through the house, finds a deep bit of shadow on the balcony above the foyer, and waits.

  After about an hour, there’s the clink of keys. The door opens. Then the old woman walks in.

  She is slightly bent, her hair gray and white, her skin lined with years of sun and stress. She has a cane now, which she uses with a great air of reluctance, as if someone glued it to her hand and she’s not sure how to get it off. He watches as she walks to the coat rack and sticks the cane in the bottom, muttering, “Fucking thing,” as she does, and then she begins the long, slow, complicated process of removing her coat. Such a thing takes time, for not only are her joints clearly paining her, but her left arm is a prosthetic, shining metal from the elbow down.

  Sigrud goes totally still at the sight of her, not even breathing. Not because he fears her, but because he never could have expected how old she’s gotten. She is not at all the striding, powerful creature he once knew, the person who seemed like she could punch through the hull of a battleship if she but willed it. In thirteen years, she’s become someone else.

  He watches as she limps over to the kitchen, where she pours herself a glass of brandy. She stands there at the sink, sipping it. But he can tell something’s different about the way she moves. It’s too stiff, too careful…