City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She puts down the brandy. “If that’s not you, Sigrud,” she says, “I’m going to turn around and start shooting.”

  “It is,” he says, emerging from the shadows. “How could you tell I was here?”

  “Because you smell,” she says. “Very bad. Smells like you’ve been stuck in the hold of some ship for weeks. Which you probably have. Turnabout’s fair play, isn’t it? You smelled me out in Voortyasht—”

  General Turyin Mulaghesh trails off as she turns around and looks up at him. Her face goes slack with shock. “By the seas, Sigrud,” she whispers. “Look at you. Just look at you.”

  Sigrud looks down at her from the balcony, unsure what to do.

  “You haven’t aged a day, Sigrud,” she says softly. “Not a single, solitary day.”

  Sigrud waits in the reading room, the spacious bay windows framing the rambling spill of downtown Ghaladesh beyond. He can’t stop staring out the window at them.

  “Ah,” says Mulaghesh, returning with a bottle of wine and two glasses. “First time in Ghaladesh?”

  He nods.

  “Very nice city,” says Mulaghesh. “If you can afford to live here. Most can’t. This damn house they have here for me, I’d have to live my life ten fucking times over to be able to ever afford it.”

  He smiles politely, not sure what to say.

  “So has anyone told you yet,” says Mulaghesh casually, pulling the cork out of the bottle of wine with her teeth and spitting it out on the floor, “how absolutely fucking stupid you are to come here?”

  “Yes. Including myself.”

  “But it didn’t work.”

  “No. Circumstances.”

  “Those must have been some fucking circumstances. You’re still a wanted man, Sigrud. Lots of military brass want to see your head on a platter for what you did.” She glances at him as she pours him a glass. “And I’d be hard pressed to blame them.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Where have you been for the past decade or so?” she asks, pouring her own.

  “Nowhere good.”

  She laughs sullenly. “Doubt it was any better than where I was. Sitting in the Parliament chambers for over a decade, dealing with these little-minded fools…”

  “It was probably better,” he says. “You probably had a toilet.”

  “Ah. Well, yes. That certainly puts things in perspective. Now how, exactly, did you get in here without alerting any of my security team?”

  He shrugs. “Quietly.”

  She grunts and hands him a glass. “Well. You were always one creepy spook, Sigrud. It’s nice to see at least one thing hasn’t changed. But I suspect I know why you’re here.”

  He picks up the glass and smells it. He won’t drink tonight. He needs to be on his toes. “Yes. Shara.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

  Mulaghesh eases herself into a chair beside him, groaning as she does. He watches her movements, watches her give her left hip a little more time to adjust than her right—arthritis, probably.

  “Ah,” she says, seeing his face. “Has time not been kind to me? Or is it kind to anyone, really?”

  Sigrud isn’t sure what to say. He’d imagined so much of how this would go, but now that he’s here, words fail him.

  “It certainly seems to have been kind to you,” she says, sipping her wine. “You look exactly—exactly—as I remember you, Sigrud. And if you got in here without anyone noticing, you must be moving pretty good too.”

  “My mother aged very well,” he says. “Or so I am told.”

  “If anyone ages as well as you have,” says Mulaghesh, “It’d be a medical fucking miracle.”

  The mention of the word “miracle” makes him cringe. His left hand throbs. To be so close to the woman who was there when his daughter died…It all comes rushing back to him, too much, too fast.

  “How are you doing, Turyin?” he asks, wishing to think about anything else.

  “Good, or so I’m told. Now that Shara’s policies have really kicked in during the past, what, five or six years, I’m hearing a lot less ‘no’ and a lot more ‘how may we assist you, Minister.’ Quite an about-face. Turns out people like opening up borders, if it makes them money. Maybe they’ll thank Shara, now that she’s dead. If it doesn’t put their seat at risk, that is. That’s politicians for you.”

  “You are…the minority leader?”

  “Mm,” she says, sipping her wine. “Of the Upper House of Parliament. But next year, they say, I’ll be the majority leader. Won’t that be fun? I expect I’ll have to talk to a lot more foreign delegates then.” She glances at him. “Speaking of which…Do you want to know how Hild is doing?”

  Sigrud blinks, startled at the mention of his wife. “You’ve been in contact with her?”

  “She was the trade chancellor for the United Dreyling States. I couldn’t avoid talking to her.”

  “I…suppose.”

  “She just stepped down, actually. They’re doing quite well up there, so they don’t need her on the watch anymore, or so she said.” She glances at him. “She’s remarried. I suppose you should know that.”

  “I see. I had wondered.” He rubs his mouth, his face slightly puzzled. How odd it is to hear of the lives of your loved ones in a briefing. “Is she…I don’t know. Happy?”

  “I think so. There are more grandbabies now.”

  Sigrud swallows. “Carin’s?”

  “I would assume so. You only had her and…and Signe, right?”

  He nods, feeling strangely alien, as if someone else is wearing his body.

  “Carin has had five now,” says Mulaghesh. “Four girls and one boy.”

  He lets out a breath. “That’s…that’s quite a brood.”

  “Yes. It would be.” She pauses, then asks kindly, “Would you like to see if I could get their pictures for you?”

  He thinks about it for a long time. Then he shakes his head.

  “No?”

  “No. It would make what I am about to do much harder.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Saypur will not let me go back,” he said. “So there is no need for me to know of such things. Because I will never have them.”

  There’s an awkward silence. Mulaghesh sips her wine. She says, “Did she ever contact you, Sigrud?”

  “Who? Hild?”

  “No. Shara, of course.”

  “No,” he says. “I only learned she was dead secondhand.”

  Mulaghesh nods slowly. “So…You don’t know what she was doing on the Continent.”

  “No.” He sits up. “Why? Do you?”

  She smiles mirthlessly. “No. Not a whit. Wish I did. And I did ask. She wouldn’t tell me. Seemed to think it’d put my life in jeopardy. Which, considering what happened to her, might have been true. The only thing she told me was that it was…how did she put it…Ah, yes. She said it was, quote, ‘increasingly likely that Sigrud will visit you one day.’ ”

  Sigrud blinks, surprised. “She told you I would come to you?”

  “Correct. I didn’t understand it. You were a gods damned criminal. But she said that, if you were to come to me, I was to give you a message—but I assume you have no knowledge of this message, do you, Sigrud?”

  He shakes his head, stunned. He hadn’t anticipated this at all.

  Mulaghesh stares into space, thinking. “She must have known,” she says. “Must have known there was a chance she’d be killed. Must have known you’d find out. And that you’d come to me. Eventually.” She laughs hollowly. “Clever little woman. She finds such delightful ways to make us all do her dirty work for her, even beyond the grave.”

  “What is the message?”

  “It was very simple,” says Mulaghesh, “and very confusing. She said that if you ever came to me, I was to tell you to protect her daughter. At all costs.”

  Sigrud is still for a moment. Then he shakes his head, exasperated. “But…But that’s what I’m already here to do,” he says. “I cam
e to you to find out where Tatyana Komayd is!”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” snaps Mulaghesh. “Because no one knows where Tatyana Komayd is. And apparently no one has for months.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. After the assassination, finding Tatyana was a national priority—and yet the Komayd estate was utterly empty. Apparently Shara had been circulating the idea that her daughter was staying behind at the Komayd estate…yet that was far from the truth. But now is where it gets confusing,” says Mulaghesh, sitting forward with a pained grunt. “Fucking arthritis…It’s just bullshit, how your body rebels against you. Anyways. Shara told me to tell you to protect her daughter—but she also told me that her daughter could be found with the only woman who ever shared her love.”

  Sigrud stares at her, bug-eyed. “What?”

  “That’s what I thought too,” says Mulaghesh. “I never really thought she was, you know, that kind of a person. I try not to assume anything, since lots of people have assumed things about me over the years, none of which I’ve exactly appreciated, and I—”

  Sigrud holds up a hand. “No. I don’t think this is right.”

  “Well, hells, Sigrud. What right do you have t—”

  “No. I mean, that sort of message, Turyin. I think it is intended to be confusing, to anyone but me. Perhaps she is referring to someone both she and I knew, once.” He sighs and grips the sides of his skull. “But…I don’t know who that could be.”

  “Why wouldn’t she just tell me who it was?” asks Mulaghesh. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  He remembers the pale Continental girl saying that Nokov would pull every secret out of his guts. “Your address is publicly listed,” he says. “And your security is not very good, as I have proven. I think she believed she could take no chances. Even with you, Turyin. But wait…When she told you this, did you not do anything? Did this not alarm you?”

  “It alarmed me plenty,” says Mulaghesh. “But by then I was already pretty alarmed.”

  “By what? What had Shara done?”

  Mulaghesh sighs, sits back down, and drinks the rest of her wine in one giant gulp. “Now, that is a very interesting question.”

  “It was early 1733,” says Mulaghesh. “I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Shara in, what, two years? She left office in 1726, and though we’d stayed in touch it’d been a damned while, I’ll say that. But then one day my assistant lets me know that a woman left a message for me, and this woman was quite insistent—said she was a friend of Captain Nesrhev, from Bulikov.”

  Sigrud smiles. “The police captain you were involved with.”

  “Right. But it was only a few times,” says Mulaghesh defensively. “At least, by my standards it was only a few. Anyways. So I’m damned curious to find out who this woman is, and I show up at the restaurant mentioned in the message, and who is it but Shara. I was surprised. I mean, the former prime minister can get a meeting with anyone she wants, right? But she wanted to keep all of it a secret. She couldn’t be seen meeting with me, couldn’t be seen asking me what she was about to ask.”

  “Which was what?”

  “It was about an intelligence compartment, an operation. One she didn’t have access to, had never had access to throughout her career in the Ministry, even when she was prime gods damned minister. One called Operation Rebirth. You know it?”

  “I have been forced to do a lot of remembering in the past few days, Turyin, but this I do not know.”

  “I’d never heard of it either. She asked me to look into it. She looked shaken too. Paranoid. It was odd—she’d been living on the outskirts of Ghaladesh with her daughter, just…keeping quiet. But then there she was, coming out of nowhere with this. Said it’d be a pretty old operation—back when Vinya was running the show, maybe during the 1710s, while you and she were just young pups and barely knew how to slit a throat.”

  Sigrud was actually very much aware of how to slit a throat by 1710, but refrains from correcting her.

  “So I did some checking. Reached out to some trusted sources in the Ministry, in the archives. And all they came back with was a file with one piece of paper in it. Just one. A report on a Saypuri dreadnought, the SS Salim. Know it?”

  Sigrud shakes his head.

  “Me neither. It was lost in a typhoon in 1716. That was all I had to give her. But it seemed to excite her plenty. She suggested she’d discovered something ratty, and it smelled pretty ratty to me too. ‘I see Vinya’s fingerprints all over this,’ I told her, and she…suggested that was right but said she wouldn’t tell me more. Again, for my own safety.”

  “What happened then?”

  “After I gave her that file she stopped living so quietly. Threw herself into her charity work, started visiting the Continent more and more, arranging shelter and foster homes for orphans. Seemed like the usual charity shit. But I wondered—was it really a charity? It couldn’t have been a coincidence that I’d told her about this operation and then suddenly she starts practically living on the Continent. And then, three months ago, she makes a surprise visit to me, tells me the bit about you and Tatyana—and then…” She trails off. “I had to identify the body, you know.”

  Sigrud sits up and looks at her, alarmed.

  “They found parts of it,” she says. “Of…her, I suppose. And it was odd to ask me to see her. She was the fucking prime minister, everyone knew what she looked like. But I guess you have to be formal in such situations. I thought maybe she’d faked it all, up until that moment. But maybe that’s just what one does in reaction to such things. The unreality of death. Hoping it was a dream. You know?”

  Sigrud shuts his eyes. He sees Signe standing on a pier, staring out to sea, watching all her astonishing contraptions going to work, forging a new age.

  “Yes,” he says softly. “I know.”

  “Did you come straight here once you heard about her?”

  “No,” he says. “And I am here to tell you that you were right, Turyin. Shara was not just involved in some charity. I think when she went to the Continent, she was going to war.”

  Mulaghesh listens as he tells her about the past month of his life. When he tells her what happened in Ahanashtan, she drops all pretense of polite attention and instead grabs the bottle of wine.

  By the time he finishes talking the bottle of wine is almost gone. Mulaghesh, rolling her eyes in dismay and sighing heavily, keeps pouring glass after glass of it, tossing each one down her throat with a weary resignation. The one piece of information he withholds is Nokov’s name: he’s not willing to take the chance that she could repeat it and bring that creature down on her head.

  When he’s done, Mulaghesh takes a deep breath and says, “Okay, first off—you are the stupid asshole who left seven bodies in a coal warehouse in Ahanashtan last week?”

  “Oh. You heard about that?”

  “Gods damn it, Sigrud, a former prime minister got assassinated in Ahanashtan a month ago! If so much as one body hits the ground in the whole of that province, I get briefed about it, let alone seven!”

  “Well. If it is any consolation, things mostly went to plan….”

  “Except for the part where it sure sounds like a gods damned Divinity showed up and nearly killed you!” says Mulaghesh, furious. “Not to mention you telling me that the streets of Ahanashtan are apparently riddled with what sounds like some damned Divine booby traps. And fuck knows if I can understand what that’s all about!”

  “You will need to keep your voice down,” says Sigrud. “Your guards have ears.”

  Mulaghesh rolls her eyes again and tosses herself back in her chair.

  “I do not think,” he says, “that the things I met were Divinities.”

  “Oh? And what makes you say that?”

  “In…In Voortyashtan…When you held the Sword of Voortya. What did it feel like?”

  “What are you digging up that awful memory for…?”

  “Turyin. Please.”

  She stares out the window, her eyes w
ide and haunted. “Like I could have…could have done anything. Anything. Cut the world in two if I wanted to.”

  “Yes. Even a shred of a true Divinity’s power is incomprehensible to the human mind. They can warp reality without even thinking. But the two beings I encountered…They struggled. They had limitations. The world was filled with boundaries and limits for them.”

  “So, what are they? Divine creatures? Living miracles?”

  “I’ve no idea,” says Sigrud. “But I think Shara knew. They both knew Shara, I suspect. Though one fought against her, and the other with her. And it sounds as if all of what she did on the Continent was started by the file you found….”

  “Operation Rebirth.”

  “Right.” Sigrud breathes deep. “So. This is…a lot to take in.”

  “You’re telling me, asshole. What I can’t figure is, if Shara was tangling with these things that sure as hells acted like Divinities, why not use her black lead on them, just as she did Kolkan? Why not use the one thing she knew could kill them?”

  “I don’t know,” says Sigrud. “I assume she still had it. She did not even trust it with the Ministry, after Bulikov. Such weapons, she said to me, should not be trusted with governments.”

  “As someone who’s been trying to lead one for a while, I can understand that.”

  “I think she trusted nothing and no one,” says Sigrud darkly. “The Shara I knew would have at least written a message for me. Something encoded, something secret. But a spoken word, passed along verbally…Such methods speak of desperation.”

  “I don’t like the idea of Shara desperate.”

  “Nor I,” he says. “Especially when her enemy, whoever he is, seems to be after her daughter.”

  “I don’t understand that at all. She’s just a kid.”

  “Khadse said his employer was targeting Continental youths,” says Sigrud, thinking. “Children. Adolescents. First their parents were killed, then the children vanished.”

  Mulaghesh’s face grows grave. “Then you…You think Tatyana might already be…”