City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It’s like they’ve been drawn on with some kind of glowing paint, forming giant rings of phosphorescence surrounding the ranch house, rings and rings and rings. The muddy road back to Dhorenave has received the most attention, it seems: the path looks like a huge, glowing stripe cutting through the hills, and it shines so bright it hurts his eye.

  “Well?” says Ivanya.

  He hands it to her without a word. She looks at it suspiciously, then back up at him. Then she makes a face, lifts the jar to her eye, and peers through.

  She gasps. She stares into the jar, leaning forward as if the Divine designs were right in front of her, and then slowly, slowly turns about. “What in the world…? It’s a trick, isn’t it? You’re fooling me, aren’t you?”

  He shakes his head. “This is what I saw outside the Golden Hotel in Ahanashtan. I think someone did this to protect you. Just as they did for Shara.”

  Ivanya takes the jar away, blinks at the hills, then puts it back to her eye again. “But…Who…”

  “Shara’s helpers,” he says softly. He peers at the sun-dappled landscape. “Perhaps other children she saved. I don’t quite know. I have no doubt that she would ensure her daughter had as much protection as she had—if not more.”

  She goes pale. “You’re…You’re saying that Divine children came here, crept through the forest, and built invisible, miraculous walls around my house?”

  “It would explain why you haven’t been found yet. Shara did her work. I don’t know what these protections do. Perhaps they ward away people or agents who mean well. Wipe the memories of those looking for Taty. Or perhaps these wards just kill trespassers outright.”

  “I’m fine with any of those results.”

  “Yes. But Shara’s enemies found a way past the barriers at the Golden. And worse, it means more people—if they can be called people—know where Taty is than we realized. If Shara’s enemy gets a hold of whichever children made these protections—and it sounds like he would dearly love to do that—then he will know where we are as well.”

  Ivanya slowly puts down the jar. She turns to look at Sigrud, her face wan with horror. “You mean that…You mean Taty could really be…”

  “What’s going on?” says a voice.

  Sigrud and Ivanya turn to look, and see Taty standing on the back porch of the house, watching them. “What…what are you doing with that jar?” she calls. “Are you playing some kind of game or somethi—”

  Ivanya turns and hurls the jar away, smashing it against the wall of the barn, which makes both Sigrud and Taty jump. She whirls back around and stabs out a finger. “Get back in the house!” she snaps.

  Taty gapes at her, shocked. “Auntie, I—”

  “Now! Back inside! Now!” Her face is bright red, her mouth tight with fury.

  Taty watches her a second more. Then she glares at Ivanya and Sigrud, walks back in the house, and slams the door behind her.

  Ivanya stands there without saying anything, just breathing hard.

  “That,” says Sigrud, “was probably an overreaction.”

  “Oh, was it?” snarls Ivanya. “You’ve just told me that not only am I probably targeted for Divine assassination, but so is the girl entrusted to my care, and you’ve shown me that my property has been infiltrated by Divine agents! Agents working for Shara, perhaps, but still people who took away the…the one thing I had out here. The chance to be lost, to be forgotten, to keep all that away from me.” She looks at the back porch. “But now here it is, right next door to me….In my home. In my home.”

  Sigrud watches her as she tries to regain control of herself. He’s not sure if Ivanya’s going to have a panic attack or burst into tears. But to his surprise, she does neither: she shuts her eyes, clenches her jaw, turns to him, and growls, “What do we do?”

  “I am not sure yet,” he says.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Not forever, no.”

  She laughs miserably. “Can we even stay here tonight?”

  “I think so,” says Sigrud. “We can risk a few more days. I injured our enemy. Maybe for the first time ever. He will avoid being where I am, for a time. But I need rest as well.”

  “And we’re supposed to just go back into the house with”—she looks toward the porch—“with her? A girl you think might be Divine?”

  “I…Yes. I think so.”

  “She’s just a girl, Sigrud,” says Ivanya softly. “Just a hurt, scared girl. You can’t be right. You can’t be.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t. You just met her. She’s hardly older than I was when…” Ivanya shuts her eyes, swallows, and shakes her head. “It’s not fair, damn it. Not to me. Or to her.”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud. “But ‘fair’ is but a word.”

  Ivanya sighs. “What are we going to do?”

  “Do you have a telegraph office here?”

  “Yes. There’s one in town.”

  “I need you to send a telegram,” says Sigrud. He finds a scrap of paper in the armory and writes down the information. “For Mulaghesh. So she knows where to contact me.”

  “I’m sending telegrams to ministers now? What can she know?”

  “She’s doing me a favor,” says Sigrud, “looking for the location of a ship.”

  “And what’s so special about this ship?”

  “I think it can tell me what our enemy really is—how he thinks, how he works—and perhaps where the Divine children came from. All of these will be crucial to staying alive.”

  Ivanya takes the scrap of paper and, grimacing, shoves it in her pocket. “Do you want a weapon or not?”

  Sigrud raises his eyebrows and nods.

  “Go on, then.” She gestures at the armory. “I don’t want to be out here past dark, not after what you told me.”

  Sigrud selects a nice handheld revolving pistol with decent stopping power, and a semiautomatic Kamal rifling—a reliable, efficient service weapon he’s had some experience with.

  “I thought you’d go for one of those giant machine guns,” says Ivanya.

  “If I were running from house to house in street warfare, maybe,” says Sigrud. “But out here, in the wilderness…When I shoot at someone, I want to hit them.”

  Ivanya shuts the armory and locks it. Then she leans against the door and sighs again.

  Sigrud looks her over as she tries to struggle through this. “Thank you,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “For saving my life.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says. She starts off back to the house. “I hope you can return the favor, and soon.”

  Youths are such a danger, I find. You must watch them carefully: if unemployment or the poverty rate ticks up too high among a nation’s youths, that’s when the trouble starts.

  Young people congregate too much, feel too much, and know so little of life, so they don’t know what they have to lose. It’s wisest to distract them, keep them engaged with something else, until they grow old and lose that wild fire in their hearts.

  Or use them, if you can. The young are eager to find a cause, and nobly die for it—it’s just a matter of finding the cause that works in your favor.

  And before you point it out: yes, this is something I have personally learned within my own family.

  —MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1708

  Sigrud spends over a week staying with Ivanya and Taty. He spends almost all of his time indoors, since that’s where Taty stays. It’s time he desperately needs to heal and rest, but it’s also nice to simply not move for a while. He knows they will need to move soon.

  Yet Taty avoids him like the plague. The girl is a ghost to him, finding ways to evade him in a ranch house that should feel at least somewhat confined. It troubles him.

  “She doesn’t like me,” he says to Ivanya one evening.

  “Should she?” says Ivanya.

  “Well. Yes? I risked my life to come here for her.�
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  “You’re a specter out of her mother’s past,” she says. “You remind her of her mother and you remind her she didn’t really know her mother. Of course she hates you. You knew Shara better than she ever did. Or ever will, now.”

  The revelation is striking and dispiriting for Sigrud. To lose someone you loved is one thing. To lose someone you loved but never truly knew is another.

  “I’ll be going into town tomorrow to buy more damned books for Taty,” says Ivanya. “I swear, the girl goes through door-stopper tomes in a day….I’ll check the telegraph office again, of course. Do you know when we should hear back from Mother Mulaghesh?”

  “No. I do not.”

  Ivanya feeds another log into the fire in the kitchen. “Have you given any thought to where we’re going next?”

  “I’ve given thought, yes,” says Sigrud.

  “But?”

  “But I’ve had few ideas.”

  After Ivanya leaves for town in the morning, Sigrud is not sure exactly what to do, so he sits on the back porch and disassembles and cleans the Kamal rifling he chose. It’s a meditative practice for Sigrud: to disassemble and clean one’s weapon is like disassembling and cleaning and reassembling one’s mind by proxy. He does it again and again and again, listening to the cries of the sheep and the wind in the hills and the click of each rifling assembly slotting into place.

  “I think it’s clean by now,” says a voice.

  He turns and sees Taty watching him through a window. He nods to her, then resumes what he was doing.

  She opens the door, walks out without a word, and sits in one of the wooden chairs on the porch. She watches him in silence for nearly ten minutes.

  “Why are you doing that?” she asks.

  He snaps the clip latch pin back into place. “ ‘There is no such thing as a bad situation,’ ” he recites. “ ‘Only bad gear.’ I must know this weapon, every piece and every part, better than I know myself, if I am to use it wisely.”

  “Did my mother teach you that?” she asks.

  Sigrud pauses. Then he shakes his head. “No. Your mother was not an eager hand at firearms.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he says firmly.

  Taty turns the chair a little to face him more. “What was she an eager hand at, then?”

  He slides the firing pin back into the bolt housing. He thinks for a moment, then says, “Papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean, ‘papers’?”

  “Everything Shara read,” says Sigrud, “she remembered. Or so it seemed.” He fits the extractor spring and plunger into the bolt. “Papers about history. Papers about people. Papers about papers. They were all in her brain, whenever she needed them. Perhaps she only ever learned the basics of firearms because she had too much paper in her head.”

  For a while she says nothing. Sigrud works in contented quiet. He’s not sure what has made her come and talk to him now, but he chooses to only speak when spoken to. It’s like she’s a nervous deer, and he must make no sudden movements.

  “What did you both do?” she asks eventually.

  “What we were told to do,” he says. “Mostly.”

  “That’s it?”

  He slots in the ejector spring. “That’s it.”

  “From what the newspapers said,” says Taty, “I would have thought that it was…grander. More adventurous.”

  “Nothing is more romanticized than war,” says Sigrud. “But war is mostly waiting. Waiting for orders, waiting for movement, waiting for information.” He sits back, thinking. “I could measure my life by sleepless nights spent in empty rooms, staring out of windows.”

  He goes back to work. After a while he says, “You seem to be very good at reading.”

  Taty tucks her knees up against her chest and stares at the rifling components on the porch. “Yes. Economics.” She sighs. “It’s what I’m good at.”

  “You don’t seem to be very happy about what you’re good at.”

  “It’s been…It was, I guess, a disagreement I had with Mother. She said I have a talent for it. Hired a lot of tutors. More than the ones I had already, that is. I had plenty to begin with. It’s just forecasting, really. Trying to paint pictures of what things might look like.” She plays with a piece of loose binding on the corner of the chair. “The tiniest tremble of an interest rate or a commodity price—what does that change? That’s all it is.”

  “Do you miss your friends?”

  “Some. There was really only Miss Goshal’s girls, Sumitra and Lakshi. She was our housekeeper, she lived on the property for a while. I see them in the summers or on holidays. Or I did.” She gives Sigrud a hard stare. “They go to the regular school. I didn’t. Mother has tutors for me. Had, I guess. How weird it is, to talk in past tense about someone you still think is there.”

  Sigrud slides the ejector assembly into the hole on the bolt face. He can suddenly imagine a lot of Taty’s life: a child raised by adults, with adult friends, and only the barest concept of childhood. He can tell by the way she talks, using mature phrasing and words, but it’s as if she’s trying to do a dance based solely on instructions she saw in a booklet.

  “Did you like her?” Taty asks suddenly. “My mother, I mean.”

  Sigrud pauses and slowly looks up at her, staring into her large, dark eyes. “She was the best person I ever knew,” he says.

  Taty blinks, surprised. “Oh.”

  He thinks for a moment, staring off into the dour forests. “I am jealous of you,” he says.

  “What?” says Taty, even more surprised.

  “You got to know her during peacetime,” he says. “When she wasn’t scared, or worried, or following orders. A time when she could just be herself. I did not see this Shara. And I am sad to have missed it.” He looks back at her. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  “Thank you.” Taty swallows. She’s breathing rapidly. “Are you going to kill the people who killed her?”

  Sigrud looks at her for a second. Then he returns to his work, fitting the extractor back into the bolt. “I have already done that.”

  “You…You what?”

  Sigrud says nothing, placing the rear of the bolt on the soft wood of the porch as he orients the ejector.

  “You killed someone?” asks Taty, aghast.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Did you really?”

  “Yes.”

  She stares at him as he completes the Kamal’s bolt, which takes some time.

  “Do you feel bad about it?” she asks.

  “I…do not know.” He places the bolt aside, then looks at her. “Somewhat.”

  She meets his gaze, then looks down at the wood of the porch, breathing harder and harder. “I hope it hurt. What you did to them.”

  Sigrud frowns and looks away.

  “What?” says Taty. “Is it wrong to want that?”

  “Perhaps not. If I were you, I might want the same.”

  “Then what?”

  He remembers Shara once saying to him: Violence is a part of our trade, yes. It is one tool of many. But violence is a tool that, if you use it but once, it begs you to use it again and again. And soon you will find yourself using it against someone undeserving of it.

  In a flash, he remembers her: the soldier from Fort Thinadeshi, not much older than Taty is now. He remembers her wide, terrified eyes, and how he, blind with fury, slashed at her belly….

  He returns to the rifling. “One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you.”

  Taty is quiet for a while. Then she says, “But wait…If you killed them…If you’ve already killed the man who killed Mother…” She sits forward. “Then can I go home now? Is this all over?”

  “If it was over,” says Sigrud, “don’t you think I would have told you all so?”

  “But who else is there? Who else could there b—”

  “I
killed the killer,” he says. “But he was not alone. We must be cautious.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until there is no need to be cautious.”

  “Gods,” says Taty, sighing. “Don’t you understand how frustrating that is? It’s so…so damned galling to have you and Mother and Auntie leading me around like a damned mule!” She looks at him every time she swears—he can tell she’s not sure if he’ll let her get away with it. “First Mother dumps me off here, where there isn’t even a flushing toilet, then she dies and Auntie stops letting me leave the house! It feels like purgatory, but I’m not even sure what we’re all waiting for, because nobody ever tells me!”

  Sigrud finishes up with the Kamal. “Have you ever fired a gun?”

  “What?”

  “A gun. Have you ever fired one?”

  “Well…No?”

  He checks the bolt, making sure it all slides properly. “Would you like to?”

  She stares at him. “What? Fire that?”

  “It is a good gun,” says Sigrud. He places it across his knees. “I should know.”

  “I don’t think Mother or Auntie would have appro—”

  “Neither of them are here,” he says. “But I am.”

  She looks at the Kamal for a long time. He can tell she’s anxious. “I’ve never done anything like that before,” she says.

  “Then come,” says Sigrud, standing, “and I will help you.”

  He makes her dry-fire it for ten minutes first. She’s shocked at how heavy it is, which makes him doubt his choice of firearm, but when she sees his face flicker she insists she can do it.

  He has her aim it at a line of tin cans he’s stuck up on the fence, telling her to feel the weight of the thing, feel how to distribute the weight across her arms and her shoulders. “Keep it snug against your shoulder,” he says. “It will kick. It will likely kick hard.”

  He watches her, this pale, skinny thing, holding on to the rifling and blinking nervously as she stares down its sights. She pulls the trigger, wincing each time at the click.

  “It is not a magic stick,” says Sigrud. “It is a machine. It is like a little factory, with all the parts clicking along to chamber the round, fire the round, expel the round. You must listen as the factory works, understand its beat, work within its cadence. All right?”