City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  And yet to look at her…

  “Something on my face?” asks Tatyana.

  Sigrud stares at her for a second more. She has no idea. No idea who she looks like. Or what she might be.

  He coughs awkwardly. “Restroyka is…your aunt?”

  “She’s a family friend.” A frosty smile. “Bowls are in the top-right shelf. Spoons in the drawer below.”

  Sigrud opens the cabinet and sees there are indeed bowls on the middle shelf, but on the bottom shelf sits something far more alarming: a big, black revolving pistol.

  “She also left that,” says Tatyana from the corner. “I think she left it for me…but you might have more use for it.”

  Sigrud stares at it for a moment longer before filling his bowl with porridge. “Why would she leave you a gun?”

  “In case anyone leapt in here and threatened my life, I suppose. I sort of think I’d welcome it. Nothing else has happened since Mother brought me here.”

  “Your mother brought you here?” asks Sigrud.

  “Who else?”

  He looks around. “Where is Restroyka?”

  “Feeding the sheep and the pigs. I think. I can’t confirm it, because I’m not allowed out of the house. I’m a person of some importance, you see.”

  Sigrud sits at the table. He’s about to take a giant bite of porridge when Tatyana rises and sits opposite him. She fixes him with a steely look, as if he were some bizarre animal and she’s not quite sure how to categorize him.

  “So,” she says. “You knew my mother.”

  “Uh,” says Sigrud. “Yes.”

  “Do you know how to use a pistol?”

  He glances at the cupboard. “I do.”

  She nods. “And were you a spy as well?”

  Sigrud pauses. It’s naturally a hard rule of espionage that one should avoid running around confessing one is a spy. But you don’t get to be a decent operative without being able to read people—and he senses that Tatyana Komayd already knows the truth, and expects it from him.

  “Something like that,” he says.

  She nods again. “I see,” she says, just a little too pertly. Then she stands, grabs her book, and marches out of the room.

  Sigrud stares at her as she goes, wondering what just happened. Then the back door opens and Restroyka strides in, wearing a thick leather coat and muddy boots, the scoped rifling slung over her back.

  “You’re up, I see,” she says. “And eating. Perhaps you’ll live yet.” She frowns when she hears a door slam from far back in the house. “What’s going on?”

  Sigrud gestures helplessly at the empty chair across from him. “Tatyana was here, and…”

  “And?”

  “And she asked if I knew her mother.”

  Restroyka narrows her eyes. “And what did you tell her?”

  “I told her I did. Then she asked if I was a spy.”

  “And then what did you tell her?”

  “I told her…Well. Yes? Though that is a poor word for it. Then she just walked away.”

  Restroyka sighs and blows a stray thread of hair away from her face. “Oh, dear. Well. That’s how it’s been out here. Can you walk?”

  “I would prefer not to,” says Sigrud, thinking of his injured side.

  “And I would prefer not to play babysitter to a pissed-off girl and a half-dead Dreyling, but here we are. When you’re done with your breakfast, come outside. I wish for you to see something, please.”

  “Will Tatyana be all right?”

  “Taty? Hells, certainly not! Not only is she still grieving, but worse….Well. Apparently Shara didn’t tell her the truth. About anything.”

  “The…truth?”

  Restroyka smiles acidly. “I liked Shara, believe it or not. She was something of a friend of mine in later years. But I do question some of her parenting decisions. Especially hiding from your only child that you were one of the most accomplished espionage agents in Saypuri history, and that you personally killed two gods.”

  Sigrud’s mouth falls open. “She…She never told her?”

  “Not a word of it. Apparently Taty grew up thinking her mother’s tenure as prime minister was little more than another stage in the career of a milquetoast high-level bureaucrat. How Shara managed that, I’ve no idea. And now that she’s dead, all the truths have come out. I couldn’t keep the news from her when her mother’s life is international news. So trust me, after all the crying and screaming and weeping that I’ve put up with in the past month, Mr. Sigrud, a bedridden man who can barely talk is an absolute vacation.”

  Sigrud follows Restroyka as she strides toward a small barn in the corner of her lot. He glances back at the ranch house as they leave it. He sees that though it’s in need of repairs, security has been a priority: the windows have bars on them, and a few of them have been covered up with plates of iron.

  “So,” says Ivanya. “You’re to be our bodyguard. Yes?”

  “I believe that was the general idea,” says Sigrud. He glances at her rifling. “But you seem to be doing a very good job. You call her…Taty?”

  “Yes. She is Taty, and I am Ivanya. None of this Miss Restroyka nonsense, all right? You’re not my damn errand boy. I had one, but I fired him. Didn’t trust him. Also he seemed to be somewhat fearful of the sheep. Bad fit all around. Tell me—how did you know to come here?”

  “Shara told me, in a way.” He tells her about his journey here, though he doesn’t yet tell her about Nokov and the Divine.

  Ivanya laughs lowly. “Old Mother Mulaghesh…How she hated me. Didn’t like me interfering with Saypuri politics. Ironic, isn’t it, since Saypur has had its hand in every Continental ballot box since the Kaj’s day. Though Shara tried to fix some of that.”

  “How did you come to know Shara?”

  She stops and looks at him, her gaze bright. “How did you come to know her, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson?”

  He shrugs. “She got me out of prison.”

  “Hm. How I’d wish for such a simple story.” She continues walking. “She started sending me letters about, what, five years ago or so? Said she wanted to know if I was interested in starting a charity. Some kind of thing about providing shelter for Continental orphans. I ignored her at first, but she was persistent. Eventually I let her come to Dhorenave and pitch me in person. And she struck a chord with me. Still a lot of kids displaced from all the disasters we’ve had. These things…They linger. They linger for generations.”

  Sigrud listens carefully. “So…You were involved in her charity on the Continent?”

  “I don’t know about involved. I paid for a damned lot of it. Consulted on her board via correspondence. And sometimes I let her daughter come and stay with me, when Shara’s life got too busy, and I had more of a staff here. Little Taty thought it was fun, riding the ponies and whatnot. I got rid of all the staff when Shara died. Didn’t trust them anymore.”

  “It was Shara who brought Taty here, though—correct?”

  “Yes,” says Ivanya. “You don’t know any of this?”

  He shakes his head. “I only became involved after she died. I knew nothing.”

  “After she died, eh? Are you her self-anointed avenging angel? How very masculine of you.”

  “When did she bring Taty here?” asks Sigrud.

  “A little over three months ago,” says Ivanya, “after she moved into Ahanashtan. And then…”

  “She was murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she sent no other communications to you during this time?”

  “No. But that’s not abnormal. I do everything at a distance these days. I try not to involve too many people in my life, or what I do here.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “I manage my assets,” she says, walking up to the little barn. “I raise the sheep. And then there’s this.” She unlocks the padlocked door and throws it open.

  Sigrud stares. Inside is an armory of weaponry and munitions that would give even the most veteran op
erative pause. Dozens of pistols and riflings—both of the semiautomatic and fully automatic variety—as well as cleaning kits, ammunition belts, and boxes and boxes of bullets. There are also tins of food at the back, and boxes of things like rice and flour, all of them very carefully sealed to make them last as long as possible.

  Ivanya carefully gauges his reaction. “I’ve trained,” she says. “As much as I can, at least. But I suspect you know a lot more about such weaponry. You said you were told to come here and protect Tatyana. I wanted you to know where these were. In case anything happened.”

  “And…do you expect anything will happen?”

  “I’ve expected something will happen for a very long time now, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” says Ivanya, staring off into the hills. “Disasters, on the Continent, are more common than rain. And I want to be ready, and for you to be ready too. Come on. Let me show you the roads.”

  Ivanya Restroyka spends a good part of the next two hours showing him the territory. She starts with the one road that leads through the sheep pastures—the one he came in on—but she also shows him the two or three dozen various footpaths through the hills that are accessible from the town.

  Or from the river. Or from the forest. Or from the lowlands. Or from the neighboring sheep ranches.

  Sigrud listens as Ivanya points out all the various routes and methods someone could use to attack them. He watches as her hand never leaves her rifling—always a very tight grip on it. He nods thoughtfully as she tells him how the fences are alarmed. And he understands immediately that Ivanya Restroyka has not been preparing an attack just in the month or so since Shara died—she’s been preparing for an attack for years. Maybe even a decade. Or more.

  “…could float up the river,” says Ivanya, pointing. “If they brought inflatables of some kind. Rafts, perhaps. That’s another possibility.” She glances at him, then stops. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Sigrud thinks for a moment. “I remember you too, you know. From the party.”

  “Do you.”

  “Yes. You were very young.”

  “Younger than young, it feels. I was twenty-one.”

  “Yes. But you were also very…unconcerned. Very social. Very talkative. You talked to everyone.”

  “So?”

  “So…I am trying to reconcile that memory with the person before me. Someone who has no company on her property except sheep and quite a lot of guns.”

  She laughs bitterly. “You want to know how I got to be here?”

  “I would be curious why a millionaire does not appear to enjoy any creature comforts, yes.”

  She shrugs. “What happened to you? What happened to Shara? What happened to any of us? I lived through the Battle of Bulikov, Mr. Sigrud, just as you did. I saw the world fall apart around me, just as you did. I saw death on a scale I could never have imagined. And I lost the one thing that felt real to me. I lost Vo. Or perhaps he was taken from me.” She looks off into the barren wilderness. “I tried to get better afterwards. We all did. But then Voortyashtan happened. And I stopped looking at cities and civilization as refuges. I started looking at them as liabilities.”

  “So you came here?”

  “Here was better than anywhere else. It used to be a horse ranch for Vo’s family, but sheep are a lot more valuable now. What was I supposed to do, go to cocktail parties? Wear a slinky dress and gossip? None of that meant anything anymore. Some new Divine horror could come along and blow away all of those quaint notions of safety and security as if they were but the seeds of a dandelion. People think me a madwoman, but I know I’m not wrong. Even the humans can’t be trusted these days, as we’ve learned. I just hope the bastards who killed Shara get tracked down fast. Then maybe we can get Taty home soon, and you can be on your way, Mr. Sigrud.”

  Sigrud glances sideways at her. “So…What did you think Shara did for your charity?”

  “Huh? What do you mean, think? You mean besides run it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Whatever was needed? I was sent all of her minutes, all of her meeting reports, her finances, all of her—”

  “Were any of the orphans she located,” asks Sigrud, “considered special?”

  “What do you mean, ‘special’?”

  “I mean things Shara would handle personally.”

  “We had escalated cases,” says Ivanya. “Cases of danger or extreme circumstances.”

  “Which were escalated to Shara.”

  “Of course. She was the head of the charity.”

  Sigrud nods absently as he stares into the fog-laden hills.

  “Why?” she asks. “Why all these questions about the charity? Surely the charity had nothing to do with Shara’s death.”

  Sigrud takes a deep breath in, then quickly regrets it, as it pains his side. “You were right, Ivanya. You are not a madwoman.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Shara did not die due to some mortal plot,” says Sigrud. “She was murdered by agents of the Divine.”

  Ivanya stares at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I will tell you,” says Sigrud. He grunts a little as he shifts his shoulders, trying to find a more comfortable position. “But I am going to need a chair. And I suggest we have this conversation…away from Taty.”

  “Could this upset her?”

  “Something like that.”

  Sigrud talks. He talks for a long time, more than three hours, seated crookedly on an old, cobwebbed chair in Ivanya’s armory, with her standing in the corner opposite him. When he finishes, Ivanya is silent for a long while.

  “You’re…You’re mad,” she says.

  Sigrud nods, for this is the natural response. He stands and walks among Ivanya’s armaments, lightly touching a pistol or rifling or knife, leaning this way and that to confirm the make or model or the integrity of the weapon.

  “You’re mad,” says Ivanya again. “You’re absolutely mad!”

  He nods again, then picks up a carousel pistol. He smiles a little, remembering Turyin running around Voortyashtan with one of these monstrosities on her hip.

  “Quit nodding!” snaps Ivanya. “It’s patronizing!”

  “Your reaction is completely reasonable,” says Sigrud. He puts down the carousel and picks up a revolving pistol. He flicks open the cylinder and examines the chambers. “What I am telling you is mad. But also true. On the Continent, as you know, things can be both.” He shuts the revolving pistol with a snap.

  “You are telling me that Shara Komayd was using her damned charity to…to locate Divine children?”

  “Yes. From what I have gathered.”

  “Because there’s some Divine child tyrant out there trying to gobble them up?”

  “Yes.”

  “And…And you think Tatyana might be one of them?”

  “I think her name is on a list I have,” says Sigrud. “And she looks almost exactly like the girl who saved me from the slaughterhouse. There is too much similarity for any doubt, to me.” He pauses and looks over the many barrels of riflings at Ivanya. “Has she done anything odd?”

  “Her mother was assassinated!” says Ivanya, exasperated. “And now she’s stuck out here in the hills, with me, and I know I’m no storybook ladies’ maid! All she’s done is cry!”

  Sigrud sucks his teeth. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense! All the rest of the shit you just told me, yes, that’s perfectly logical.”

  “She must do something strange. Be something more than what she is.”

  “Or you’re dead wrong, and Shara’s murder was just some, I don’t know, Continental separatist plot!”

  “Are you not curious,” says Sigrud, walking over to the fully automatic section of weaponry, “as to why Ministry agents haven’t been pounding on your door, asking where Taty is?”

  “I do a good job controlling my connections to the world out there! We don’t even have
a telephone here.”

  “But nobody’s that good,” he says, “unless Shara did such a good job slipping Tatyana out of Saypur that they still don’t even know she left the country. The Ministry is not here, Ivanya Restroyka, because Shara did not trust the Ministry. She knew it had been compromised. That was why she chose to do all this herself.”

  “If what you’re saying is true,” says Ivanya, “then why isn’t her Divine enemy knocking on our door either? Why haven’t Taty and I been murdered in our beds?”

  Sigrud pauses to think, for this has troubled him too. Nokov seems capable, competent, and preternaturally dangerous. How could they have survived on the Continent for three months without his notice?

  Then he gets an idea.

  “Do you have a jar?” he asks.

  “A what?” says Ivanya.

  “A jar. And…When livestock dies. Where do you bury it? Or their ashes, if you burn them.”

  “What are you—”

  “And if there are any star lilies that grow near here,” he says, “I would appreciate if you would point them out to me.”

  An hour later, Sigrud stands next to the armory barn and tries to ignore Ivanya’s bug-eyed stare as he smears the bottom of the muddy little glass jar with grave dirt. I hope it counts as grave dirt, he thinks, if it’s sheep that occupy the grave. He also hopes that onion lilies—apparently the most predominant wildflower around here—count as lilies, for he has a handful of them at his feet. It could really go either way: they smell like onions, but look like lilies.

  “So this is a miracle,” says Ivanya flatly.

  “Not yet.” He picks up the lilies, shreds their petals, puts them into the jar, and gives it a good shake. “Now it’s a miracle,” he says, dumping them out and scraping off the grave dirt.

  “Oh, obviously. Obviously. I didn’t check your temperature, Mr. Sigrud, but I’m increasingly worried you boiled your brain.”

  Sigrud smiles politely and looks around. It’s late afternoon now, so the hills are dappled with the gold-yellow light of sunset. It’d be prettier if it weren’t for the hot ball of dread churning in his stomach.

  Sigrud lifts the jar to his eye. And, as he expected, the hills light up.