City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He stoops down beside a large stone and sets the rifling’s sights on the gate. Then he lets out a loud groan and calls out, using a rough approximation of a Saypuri accent: “Are you there? We’re hurt! He’s dead, but we’re hurt!”

  Nothing.

  Sigrud cries, “Please! Please!”

  Still nothing for a bit.

  Then a man’s head pokes around the corner.

  Sigrud puts his finger on the trigger and fires. There’s a spray of blood and the man falls to the ground.

  He waits for a good five minutes, not moving a muscle. There’s silence except for the roaring fire behind him. Then he stands, sweeps to the left, crossing before the half-open gate and scanning the drive out front for any movement.

  He knows he’ll be vulnerable as he exits, if there’s anyone left out there—which he doubts, but you can never be sure. Slip through the gate, he thinks, take cover next to the guard’s corpse, and watch for any other assailants.

  He creeps up, walking along the wall toward the open gate. He keeps his rifling trained on the husk of an auto, which is where he’d be hunkered down if it were him out there.

  He creeps forward, taking one step, then another, then another…Then finally he wheels out, rifling ready—only to find the driveway empty, the scene totally still. Just corpses in the auto, and nothing else.

  But then he realizes something. The intense blaze from the burning home has been so consistent he’s almost stopped noticing it for the past ten minutes. Yet now as he crosses the gate, the heat fades behind him, the stupefying, broiling warmth abruptly dwindling as if a giant had come along and blown out the fire much as one would a candle flame.

  Sigrud pauses. He stays close to the gate. Then he looks behind him.

  The fire is gone. No, more than that—the house is gone. The landscape of the estate has faded into darkness behind him, like a cloud passed before the moon and darkened out all light above.

  No, it’s even more than that: the world simply stops thirty feet south of where he stands.

  Sigrud whirls around, wondering what in hells is going on now, and tries to seek shelter against the wall—but the wall isn’t there. There’s nothing around him but darkness—except for the gates, bizarrely enough. The gates appear to hang on nothing, big rib cages of iron dangling in the air, one half in an open position, the other half closed. There’s nothing beyond them. Just a wall of black.

  Then the closed half of the gate opens, its hinges whining softly, as if pushed from behind.

  Sigrud whips the rifling up. He keeps it trained on the entryway, unsure what to look for.

  Then he sees them. Eyes in the darkness. Eyes like those of a cat, just barely caught by the light. Or perhaps they’re like tiny, distant white stars….

  He fires. He fires the rifling at the eyes once, twice, three times, four, five….Then he stops, conscious of his ammunition.

  He waits.

  The eyes blink, very slowly. Then they begin to advance, one step at a time.

  And as they approach they seem to pass some kind of barrier, and a face appears around the eyes: a young man’s face, pale and starved, with ink-black hair and a skinny neck. At first it seems like the young man’s head is hanging in the air just as the iron gates are, but then Sigrud sees that he’s wearing what appear to be black robes, which ripple despite the lack of any wind. And as the young man approaches, Sigrud begins hearing many strange things….

  Chirrups and distant rustlings and a curious, arrhythmic tap-tapping. Small stones falling down a slope; the shiver of leaves; the groan of trees; the slow drip of water. Sigrud suppresses a shiver as he hears them: they make him feel like he’s alone in the woods at night, listening to countless invisible watchers circling him.

  A thought strikes him as he realizes this.

  Circling me…

  He looks down. The gates are not quite the only thing persisting in this vast darkness: there’s a wide patch of earth at his feet, the mulch he saw earlier.

  “Continental soil,” says the young man, and his high, cold voice is instantly familiar to Sigrud. “It helps me assert myself across the South Seas, you see.”

  Sigrud looks at him. “Nokov.”

  The young man smiles slightly and nods. “Few would dare to say that word aloud. Were I not here already with you…”

  Sigrud smiles back. Then he starts shooting again.

  There are only two rounds left in the rifling. They don’t seem to do anything to Nokov: it’s like Sigrud’s firing blanks, or like the bullets vanish the instant they leave the barrel.

  Sigrud looks at the empty rifling, grimaces, and hurls it at Nokov. The rifling passes right through him like he’s made of smoke.

  Nokov blinks, slightly perturbed. “That was not really necessary.”

  Sigrud ignores him, pulls out his knife with his right hand, and lunges at Nokov, slashing and stabbing at the boy. Nokov frowns—again, an expression of the slightest inconvenience—and seems to flicker away each time, evaporating before the blade even comes close to him.

  Despite this, Sigrud doesn’t give up. He’s killed Divine creatures with this blade before, so he’s determined to at least try again. Panting and wincing as his ribs creak, he dives at Nokov over and over again.

  Finally Nokov sighs. “Enough,” he says.

  A frail, white hand flicks out. His knuckles graze Sigrud’s cheek….

  It’s like he’s been hit by a stack of bricks plummeting out of the sky. Sigrud crashes to the muddy soil below him, his damaged side shrieking in pain. His knife falls from his grasp and all the air is driven from his body. He tries to roll over but he doesn’t even have the strength for it.

  “This is my place,” says Nokov calmly. “You can’t harm me here. You can’t escape from me here. I can do whatever I’d like to you.”

  Nokov stoops and grasps Sigrud under his jaw. Though Nokov appears to be a young man just barely out of adolescence, he lifts all two hundred and seventy pounds of Sigrud like he’s no more than a child’s stuffed animal. He slaps at Nokov’s wrist with his right hand, but his fingers pass right through as if the boy’s limb isn’t even there. His ribs on his left side yammer and yowl as he’s lifted up, and he’s forced to keep his left arm awkwardly pinned to his torso, which twists him and makes him gag in Nokov’s grasp.

  Nokov stares into Sigrud’s reddening face. His eyes are hooded in shadow, as if no matter where he stood they’d be lost in darkness. Yet Sigrud can see two very distant specks of light glimmering from somewhere deep within his skull….

  “Where are the others?” asks Nokov softly. “Where are they hiding?”

  Sigrud has no idea what he’s talking about, but he taps his throat, signaling he cannot talk.

  Nokov frowns and removes his hand. Sigrud, however, keeps dangling in the air, as if he’s hung on invisible strings.

  Sigrud stares down at himself, hanging several feet above the ground. Are you so sure, he thinks, that he is not a Divinity? He certainly seems capable of changing reality at his will….

  “Tell me,” says Nokov.

  “Tell you what?” gasps Sigrud.

  “You work with the others. That is clear. So where are they? Where are they hiding from me?”

  “W-What?”

  “What function do they use? Which wrinkle in reality do they hide behind?”

  Sigrud wonders what to say. He only got into this because of Shara’s death. But he suspects Nokov might be looking for these other Divine children. Including Tatyana Komayd, whom Nokov likely believes to be one of them—and he’ll be damned if he gives Nokov her location.

  Keep him talking.

  Sigrud wheezes and says, “You…You killed Shara, didn’t you? You paid Khadse to.”

  Nokov just watches Sigrud, his face queerly clean of emotion.

  “Why?” says Sigrud. “What threat could she have posed to you?”

  “Threat?” Nokov’s tone is politely puzzled. “I hated her, certainly. Just as I
hated her aunt. But she was no threat to me.”

  “Then why kill her?”

  “She was…a requirement. A step in a process, I should say.” The distant stars in his eyes seem to flare, just ever so slightly. “It is, after all, a terribly complicated thing, to kill a god.”

  “Was it for Tatyana?” asks Sigrud. “Is that why you did it? First you kill the parents, then you target the child?”

  “Why pretend to be so foolish?” asks Nokov. “You work with them, you worked with her. You know what it is I hunger for.” He leans closer. “I will find them. And I will devour them. You know this. It is inevitable.”

  “Tatyana Komayd,” says Sigrud, “is not Divine.”

  Nokov laughs. “I almost believe you when you say it.”

  “I do believe that.”

  “Perhaps so. But have you seen her?”

  “What do y—”

  “Enough of this,” snaps Nokov. “Tell me. Tell me where the others are.”

  Sigrud tries to think. His left side throbs, yet his left hand aches even more. It’s an old pain, a familiar one, but it’s at an intensity he hasn’t felt in a long time: his hand hasn’t hurt this bad since the days when it was first maimed in prison…or, he realizes, when he was this close to a Divinity.

  “I’ll find them eventually,” says Nokov. The boy steps closer. “They can’t hide forever. Each one I find, I grow stronger and stronger.” He leans forward, his queer dark eyes like deep chasms in his face. “They will dwell within me eventually. It’s just a matter of time. And once they do, I will right all the countless wrongs that have been done in this world. I will right them, one by one. A just world. A moral world. That is what I will make.”

  Sigrud remembers what the pale Continental girl told him: When he catches you, he’ll pull out every secret you’ve got hidden away in your guts.

  Sigrud realizes that, though he’s been captured before, he’s never been captured by a Divinity.

  I’m going to die here, aren’t I?

  “I can dash you against all the stones of this world,” whispers Nokov fiercely, “and make it so that you stay alive, feeling each burst of pain, each crack of rock. And when I have broken every bone in your body, I will find some forgotten shadow deep within the world, and I will leave you there, forever. Do you hear me? I will visit every pain and every torture upon your head that was visited upon mine. Do you understand me?”

  Sigrud hears him. If I am to die, he thinks, I should at least die without telling him a thing.

  He shuts his eyes.

  He thinks of the ocean. Of the waves, alternately harsh and gentle, spreading themselves out across smooth white sands. And the smell of salt on the air…

  He opens his eyes. “Jukov.”

  Nokov blinks. “What?”

  “Jukov,” says Sigrud. His voice is hoarse and raspy. “He was your father, wasn’t he? You are a child of Divinities, aren’t you?”

  Nokov’s face darkens.

  “Jukov could bear a grudge,” says Sigrud. “And like you he was a wild, dark thing….I know. Because I saw him. I was there when the last shred of him died.” He grins. “I was the one who piloted a ship full of explosives right into his face. Did you know that?”

  Nokov’s lip curls. “Enough,” he says. “Tell me. Tell me everything you know!”

  “I destroyed his army,” says Sigrud. “It was me. He and Kolkan made their army, but I dashed it all to pieces with but a single broadside.”

  “Shut up,” says Nokov.

  “They were mad,” says Sigrud. “But even mad gods couldn’t hold a candle to the modern world…”

  “Shut up!” cries Nokov. He snatches Sigrud out of the air and slams him to the ground, both hands around his throat. The impact is like being run over by a train. “You shut your mouth!”

  Do it, thinks Sigrud. Kill me. Kill me before you torture me into telling you a thing.

  He can barely speak, but he manages to laugh and gasp, “He was barely Jukov anymore by then….He made such a mistake, you see. Imprisoning himself with Kolkan, he was crushed into him, the two smashed together over decades….”

  “Shut up!” says Nokov. He picks Sigrud up by the throat and slams him down again.

  Sigrud coughs and says. “Your father was barely recognizable….It was almost all Kolkan, at the end….”

  “You shut up!” cries Nokov. His face twisted in adolescent fury, he raises his right hand to bring it down on Sigrud’s skull with a devastating blow.

  Sigrud thinks of the ocean.

  He thinks of Signe’s face, bathed in the dawning sun, the day when he and she swore to rebuild Voortyashtan. How proud he was of her, and she of him.

  Do it, he thinks. Just do it.

  Yet as Nokov’s hand comes hurtling down at him, Sigrud can’t resist his training: even though it’s sure to do nothing, he reaches out with his left hand, his side screaming in pain, and tries to block the boy’s blow.

  Nokov’s hand flies down at him with all the speed of a lightning bolt.

  Sigrud’s left hand rises…

  And catches the boy’s fist.

  Nokov blinks, startled, and stares at his hand, which is now held in Sigrud’s grasp.

  Sigrud frowns, confused. Previously when Nokov touched him it was either like being struck by a falling tree or trying to grab smoke. But now Sigrud’s left hand holds Nokov’s right fist, and it definitely feels…

  Well, human. It feels like the fist of a very young man. And, he notes, it didn’t feel like some superhuman punch when he grabbed Nokov’s fist: rather, it felt like a teenager’s awkward, ungainly swing.

  Nokov looks positively alarmed. “What…How did you do that?” He tugs at his hand. Sigrud’s grip holds fast. “How…What’s going on?”

  Sigrud doesn’t know. But he knows that it feels like he’s holding a flesh-and-blood hand in his.

  So he squeezes it. Hard.

  Nokov gags, shocked, and releases his hold on Sigrud’s neck, trying to use his free hand to pull away.

  But Sigrud holds fast. He keeps squeezing, his big, hard fingers crushing Nokov’s skinny, frail fist.

  Nokov cries out in pain. He falls to his knees. “Stop!” he pleads. The cry is so plaintive, so pathetic, Sigrud is almost taken aback by it.

  Hold on to your rage, thinks Sigrud. Remember what he did to you.

  “Stop!”

  Shara, thinks Sigrud. A black rage begins to fill him, a familiar one. You killed Shara, boy….

  He feels his teeth grinding in fury, feels blood beginning to flood out of his nose. He thinks of Shara’s house aflame, of Mulaghesh old and stooped and tired, of Khadse’s neck, slashed open and pouring blood….

  “Let me go!” screams Nokov. “Let me go, let me go!”

  Sigrud squeezes harder.

  Something crackles unpleasantly in Nokov’s right hand. The boy screams in agony. The shadows begin trembling all around them.

  Nokov, howling, brings his free hand down on the ground.

  The shadows break apart.

  It’s as if Sigrud were standing on top of a black glass surface and it just shattered underneath him. He lets go of Nokov and the boy seems to vanish, sinking back into an errant shard of shadow.

  Sigrud falls.

  That’s what he thinks is happening, at least. It’s hard to tell if you’re falling when there are no air molecules hitting you. He realizes he’s falling through some kind of shadowy sub-space, probably not the reality he knows but the reality Nokov occupies and moves through. He knows this because he heard Shara talk about such things during his time with her—but though she described these facets of reality, she neglected to mention how to get out of them.

  And he feels terribly cold. Terribly, terribly cold.

  I am not supposed to be here, he thinks. Mortals were never supposed to be in such a place….

  He looks down. Shards of broken shadow spin around him, different shades of black flittering across a deep darkness.
r />   He shifts and twists, and tries to dive toward one big shard, as if he’s aiming for a deep pool of water to break his fall.

  He shuts his eyes, and…

  He starts shooting up.

  The temperature changes around him: it’s no longer that queer, frigid void, but a chilly, clammy night. And Sigrud can tell he’s flying up because the second he passes through that shard of darkness, gravity violently reasserts itself. He starts spinning around, catching glimpses of his surroundings—dark trees, leafy undergrowth, the moon above—before he starts falling down again, finally crashing to the cold, wet earth.

  Sigrud lies on the ground, groaning. His left side feels like it is made of barbed wire. Then something shoots up out of a shadow beside him.

  He can see it spinning and twirling in the air, moonlight gleaming on its black blade. He recognizes it right away.

  His eyes widen as his black knife rises high, and then starts falling back down—specifically, back down at him. He tries to move, but he’s too weak.

  The knife thumps into the soil about three feet to the left of Sigrud’s head. He slowly turns his head to stare at it, and lets out a huge sigh.

  Groaning and whimpering, Sigrud forces himself to sit up and look around.

  He appears to be in a dark forest—and if he understands everything that just happened to him, it seems he got here by being ejected out of the shadow of a tall tree cast on the forest floor.

  He remembers what the woman in the mirror said: He’s everywhere. He’s in everything. Wherever there’s darkness, wherever light doesn’t reach…That’s where he is.

  He rubs his aching face. His understanding of all this is rudimentary at best: but he suspects that Nokov resides in some shadowy sub-reality, one connected to all shadows everywhere. That would explain how he could hear his name being mentioned across the Continent, and how he could arrive instantaneously. It would also explain how Sigrud and his knife were just spat out of a shadow on the ground like a farmer spitting out pumpkin seeds.

  He crawls over on all fours to pick up his knife. At least this isn’t the strangest thing that happened to me today.