City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He shivers as he sheathes his knife. He feels cold and weak, as if his heart has dropped a few degrees while the rest of his body has stayed the same temperature. He tries to tell himself it’s just shock, or perhaps a side effect of the injury done to his left side, where he is now certain that he’s broken a rib or two.

  It will pass, he thinks, shivering again. He flexes his fingers, listening to the knuckles crackle. And it’s a cold night. It will pass.

  He fashions a walking stick out of a sapling and uses it to stagger out of the forest. He can see he’s on the Continent somewhere by the way his breath is frosting, but there’s no telling exactly where on the Continent.

  The forest ends and he comes to a stretch of farmland. Bales of hay glow silver and spectral under the moon. He looks at the sky, still shivering a little. He’s heading west, if he’s reading his stars right.

  Before he starts off across the pasture, he pauses, pulls off the glove on his left hand, and looks at his palm.

  The scar there shines in the moonlight. He can still remember that day in prison as if it was yesterday: the guards, cackling wickedly, goading the starving inmates to pick up what they claimed was just a little pebble, saying that whoever could hold it would be rewarded with food. Neither Sigrud nor the other prisoners knew it was the Divine tool of punishment known as the Finger of Kolkan, causing unbearable pain when touched to flesh. None of them knew how horribly it could harm them.

  And yet he had done it. He’d succeeded. Sigrud had held the pebble, blood streaming through his fingers, for three minutes. It had scarred him forever, and its damage has never truly faded: though the pain has sometimes receded, it’s never wholly gone.

  He thinks about how it was his left hand that was able to grab Nokov and hurt him, not his right. And this isn’t the first time his injury aided him: before the Battle of Bulikov, the touch of the Finger of Kolkan helped him carve his way out of the belly of a Divine monstrosity named Urav.

  He stares at his palm. What else was done to you in that prison? What else changed?

  He thinks on it, troubled. Then he pulls back on the glove and starts across the pasture. He shivers again and rubs his arms, trying to beat back the cold. Eventually he comes to a wooden fence and beyond it a road, running north-south. He walks south, since that’s often where civilization lies on the Continent. It’s not too long before he sees a city in the distance, an orange halo of artificial light brightening the horizon.

  He comes to a tiny intersection, finds a rickety wooden road sign, and reads the sign pointing south: AHANASHTAN.

  He groans. I did not want to come back here, he thinks, limping in its direction. I did not like approaching this town with money in my pocket and a pistol in my belt. I like it even less now that I’m injured, penniless, and almost completely unarmed.

  He glances back at the forest and thinks of the queer, dark sub-reality of Nokov.

  But it’s better than the alternative.

  He limps ahead. With each step, Nokov’s words echo in his mind: Where are the others? Where are they hiding?

  He trembles again. It’s as if he has snowmelt in his veins. Shara, he thinks, what were you doing here?

  It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing.

  This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible.

  —DREYLING PROVERB, ORIGIN UNKNOWN

  It takes him most of the next day to hike back to Ahanashtan. He can’t stop shivering, and by this point, he knows it’s more than just the cold and his injury. Sigrud’s swum through freezing water before and was raised within spitting distance of glaciers. He remembers having to crack through the ice at the top of his washing basin every morning as a child.

  Cold he knows. And this isn’t cold.

  I really do not think, he says to himself as he limps onto a trolley, that I was supposed to go to Nokov’s…place. If it can even be called a place.

  He gets off at a telegram office. There he sends a message to Mulaghesh, using the instructions she provided, and awaits her call in a nearby phone bank.

  He almost falls asleep as he waits. Then the phone blares to life, ringing so loudly that Sigrud nearly reaches for his knife. He takes the earpiece off the hook, then waits a moment, unsure what to do.

  “Sigrud?” says Mulaghesh’s voice. “Are you there? Answer me, damn it!”

  “I am here,” says Sigrud into the mouthpiece. “Turyin, I—”

  “ ‘Am a fucking idiot’? Is that what you’re going to say? I tell you Shara’s address, and the next day you trot out there and detonate her house like it was a damn firewo—”

  “Ivanya Restroyka,” says Sigrud. The words are little more than a gasp. He can’t stop shaking, and suddenly it’s very hard to talk.

  “What?” says Mulaghesh. “Huh? What in hells are you talking about?”

  “The only woman to share Shara’s love.” He swallows. “That love being Vohannes Votrov.”

  “You…Wait. You think Tatyana is with Restroyka? The richest damn woman alive?”

  “If you were to hide your child with someone,” says Sigrud, “wouldn’t it be with a person of means?”

  “Yeah, but, Sigrud…You sound like shit.”

  “I know.” He swallows again. His teeth chatter a little. “I saw him there. He surprised me. Attacked me.”

  “He? He who?”

  “Shara’s enemy.”

  “Wait. Wait. So you fought a god?”

  “Yes. No. Sort of. I don’t know.” He tries to explain what he put together about the Divine children, hiding away among the population of the Continent, as well as the woman with the golden eyes in the mirror.

  “That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense!” says Mulaghesh. “How could they have survived? I thought the Kaj killed anything and everything Divine, children or not!”

  “I don’t know,” says Sigrud. “But I think Shara’s enemy, this person of darkness…I think he’s wiping out his siblings one by one. He said something about devouring them, about hungering, making them reside inside him….”

  “He sounds loony as fuck-all.”

  “Well. Yes. But I think he…eats them, in a way. Absorbs them. And gets more powerful each time.”

  “And the mirrors you mentioned…”

  “Yes. Turyin…You cannot trust the Ministry. There are eyes and ears everywhere. Who knows who is on their side? Who knows what all they’ve heard?” He stops. “Wait. Where are you calling from now?”

  “A secure line,” says Mulaghesh. “And by that I mean the phone bank behind my favorite bar in the wrong part of town. If Ghaladesh even has a wrong part of town. I don’t really think they would have put a mirror up here.”

  “Assume nothing,” says Sigrud. “Be as cautious as possible in everything you do. In searching for the Salim…or in helping me find where Restroyka is right now.”

  “Ah, shit,” says Mulaghesh. She grumbles for a moment, then sighs. “Well. You may be in luck. Restroyka throws around a lot of money, enough that people notice.”

  “Such people including yourself?”

  “Yeah. She donated to a few parliamentary campaigns a couple of years ago. Caused a minor scandal, what with her being, you know, not actually a resident or a Saypuri or anything, which then brought up the whole ‘sovereignty of the Continental states’ subject, which is just a giant ongoing clusterfuck, as you are well aware.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyways, I had to handle it. Had to do a bit of research on Miss Restroyka, not to mention send her a couple trees’ worth of correspondence. She’s got some kind of sheep ranch in a little town just west of Ahanashtan—last I heard, that’s where she operates out of. Apparently she’s a total recluse. Never leaves the town, barely leaves the ranch. Sends a shitload of letters, though. Now—if I give you the name of the town, are you going to blow up her damn house too?”

  “I guarantee nothing.”

  “You know,
you don’t exactly inspire confidence, Sigrud.”

  “I am just being honest. But I will try.”

  Mulaghesh sighs again. “Dhorenave. The name of the town is Dhorenave. Population of about two hundred. You’ll stick out like a red turnip there, so be careful.”

  “Thank you,” says Sigrud. He touches his brow and sees his fingertips are glistening with sweat. “Thank you, Turyin.”

  “You need to get some help, Sigrud,” says Mulaghesh. “You sound terrible. Find a doctor. You talked about forgettable ends—seems like falling over dead in a phone bank would be mighty forgettable.”

  Sigrud thanks her again and hangs up.

  Stealing automobiles is second nature to Sigrud. So many operations required improvised or untraceable transportation that it became standard practice for Ministry officers to steal an auto, do their part of the operation, and then promptly drive the automobile into the nearest river. Sigrud suspects that he alone is probably the cause of hundreds of thousands of drekels of lost property.

  Enough damage, he thinks as he cracks open the door of an old jalopy, that one more won’t make a difference.

  He climbs in, starts it, and pilots the coughing old wreck northwest, out of the city. Driving proves to be surprisingly difficult. His hands shake and tremble enough that he has to grasp the wheel hard, so hard his wrists ache. More than once he thinks he’s going to drive the auto off the road.

  He glances at himself in the mirror. He’s pale, and his eye sockets are blue. He looks like a man who’s just been hauled out of an icy stream. Which is also what he feels like.

  He focuses. Just a little farther. Just half a day’s drive to Dhorenave, and from there to Restroyka.

  The trip feels impossibly long. He uses every ounce of energy to stay focused on the road. He realizes he needs to eat, yet he doesn’t feel hungry. He needs to drink, yet he doesn’t feel thirsty.

  What happened to me when I fell into Nokov’s realm? He pulls over once, to rest and to check his body for puncture wounds, certain that Nokov or someone poisoned him somehow. He finds nothing, though his left side is an ugly, mottled blue-black. That cold infected me, worked its way into me. He starts the auto again. Will it pass? Or is this how I am to be from now on?

  Finally he makes it to Dhorenave, part of the rural southern coasts of the Continent that share the moisture of Saypur’s climate, but not the heat. But while the climate of the Continent continues to go through massive shifts as the weather sorts itself out following the death of the Divinities, people have been forced to figure out how to survive.

  Which, for a lot of the southern coasts outside of Ahanashtan, means sheep. And a lot of them.

  Sigrud peers out the window at the muddy green hills, dotted with muddy, off-white sheep. The housing he sees is rudimentary, mostly stone, with no heating that he can see. So when Mulaghesh said “ranch,” he thinks, she really meant ranch.

  He’s worried he’ll have to get out and ask one of the locals where he can find Restroyka, which he knows won’t go well: a big, ill-looking Dreyling wandering around town asking where the wealthiest resident lives would certainly raise eyebrows. But there is just the one main road, and he drives a little farther than he should—and to his surprise, he gets rewarded for it: he spots a pair of huge, elaborate, white stone gates set in the hills to the west of the town.

  He pulls over and stares at the gates. They’re at least two or three stories tall.

  “That’s it,” he says, wiping sweat from his brow. “That’s got to be her.”

  Sigrud climbs out of the automobile and nearly falls over. I hope Shara told Restroyka I’d come, he thinks. And I hope I can make it up the hill.

  He does, though it’s not easy. He slows as he approaches. The gates are huge and intimidating. A single name is carved at their top: VOTROV.

  Inherited, then, he thinks. And she hasn’t even taken time to change the name.

  He looks closer. The old Worldly Regulations from twenty years back must have missed this place, because the gates are covered in Divine references, most of them Kolkashtani. Sigrud identifies the bent, veiled, dour-looking figure in the center of most of the bas-reliefs as Kolkan himself, and each carving of him is paired with his sigil: the hands of Kolkan, forming a scale, ready to weigh and to judge.

  Sigrud flexes his left hand. It doesn’t hurt today. But perhaps that’s just because he feels so cold.

  He walks through the gates. For the next forty minutes he limps along the muddy road—the only path or road of any kind that he can spot—and sees only hills and streams and shrunken little shrubs, and lots and lots of sheep.

  Finally he crests a hill and sees the ranch house ahead, sitting atop a small ridge. It’s big, but nothing like Shara’s mansion. It’s a low, rambling, stone structure that has obviously aged and not aged well. What really attracts his attention, though, is the extensive steel fence running around the perimeter of the house, topped with barbed wire.

  “Gates within gates,” says Sigrud with a sigh. In some ways, the Continent never changes.

  He staggers down the muddy road to the fence. It has a big set of steel gates that stand locked, though the lock doesn’t look too complex to Sigrud. He looks for some kind of way to signal to the house that he’s here, but there is none. He certainly doesn’t have the voice to shout right now. He considers cutting through the barbed wire atop the fence, but he doesn’t trust himself to be able to scale the fence in his state.

  He kneels before the lock and takes out his lockpicks. I’ll knock on the front door, he thinks, and just apologize later.

  The lock clicks open after twenty minutes of work—unusually long for him, but then his hands are shaking like mad now. He pulls the gate open, the hinges whining slightly, then shuts it behind him and continues up the road.

  He wonders what to say. He hasn’t seen this woman in twenty years, and they met only briefly. He hopes that “Shara sent me” will suffice.

  And he hopes she has a fire. It feels as if his very bones are freezing over.

  Then he hears the gunshot.

  He immediately identifies it as a rifling, very high-powered. Then the muddy road six feet in front of him suddenly pops, spattering him with wet earth.

  Sigrud instinctively leaps away. He lands on his left side and nearly screams in pain as his broken ribs creak and crackle. He manages to stifle the sound, then lies in the ditch facedown, not moving.

  What in hells, he thinks. What in the hells was that?

  He waits. There’s nothing, no other shot, no shout to stand up. He begins to crawl away, back to the gates.

  Another shot, this one striking the earth about four feet to his right. Then a second one, three feet to his left.

  Warning shots, he thinks. I’d be dead if they wanted me to be dead. Though he isn’t sure if this counts as a comfort.

  Sigrud stays still, facedown, right hand on his head—his left, of course, he can’t lift. He can’t stop shaking now.

  He hears footsteps on the hills above. He considers lifting his head, but decides not to bother. This proves to be the wise decision when a woman’s voice barks, “Don’t move! Don’t you think about moving!”

  He waits, listening as they approach. He wonders how he got himself into this, then realizes: Electrical alarm system in the gates. They must have known I broke through. Stupid. Stupid and sloppy.

  “Are you armed?” the woman’s voice asks.

  “Yes,” says Sigrud.

  “Take it out and throw it away, please.”

  Sigrud complies, throwing away his knife—though he does wonder what sort of person says “please” when giving orders from behind a gun.

  “Good. Stand up, please. Slowly.”

  Sigrud, groaning and whimpering as his left side screams in pain, clambers to his feet.

  There’s a woman standing up the hill from him. He wipes mud from his eyes and peers at her.

  She doesn’t look like a millionaire. She’s dressed in appropr
iately rural clothing, wearing a sheepskin vest and leather boots, and the high-powered rifling—one that even has a telescopic sight—is an uncommon accessory for the wealthy.

  Yet the face that looks down the rifling at him…It’s clearly Ivanya Restroyka, clearly the girl he met all those years ago, laughing in delight as he lit his pipe with a coal from the fire. But she’s aged in the time since, and toughened. She is not at all the glittering socialite he remembers from Bulikov, but a thin, weathered, stone-faced creature with her long, black hair pinned back behind her head.

  “And who,” she says, “might you be?”

  “Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” Sigrud says. He tries not to tremble as he speaks, but it’s a lost cause. “Sh…Shara…She—”

  Restroyka laughs. It’s a cold, brittle sound. “Sigrud je Harkvaldsson! The fearsome Dreyling from Bulikov! So here’s the top man Shara said she’d send to us!” She looks him over. “You’ll pardon my saying so…but I’m not quite sure how much help you can offer.”

  Sigrud tries to say that he’s not sure what he can do either, but then he shivers again. And this time it doesn’t stop. He keeps trembling, keeps shaking, keeps shivering until his sight fails, until he can’t see or speak or even breathe.

  The next thing he knows, the muddy road is rising up to him. He hits the ground and he’s conscious enough for it to hurt. But not for long.

  The last thing he hears is Restroyka sighing and saying, “Oh, for the love of—”

  Then things go dark.

  Kavitha Mishra awakens in the night.

  She’s not disturbed by how dark it is. Though that is disturbing, certainly—she left a candle burning by her bedside when she fell asleep, so it shouldn’t be dark, or not impenetrably dark, like it is now—what’s most disturbing is that her apartments are filled with the sounds of cheeping and rustling and creaking, as if she’s not sleeping in her bed but in some giant, vast, ancient forest, a forest so thick no moonlight could ever penetrate it.

  Then a voice: “Mishra.”

  Ah, she thinks. She asks aloud, “Yes, sir?”