City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Sigrud walks over to the desk and pulls out the drawers, which scream and squawk. The bottom one has a bunch of moldering files in it, stained beyond legibility. The second one has a revolving pistol and a box of ammunition, though he doubts if the bullets are any good after the flood. The top drawer is locked.

  Sigrud looks around and finds a piece of iron plating that has fallen off the wall. He picks it up, shoves it into the gap above the drawer, and gives it a kick.

  The drawer pops open with a crunch. Inside is a leather-bound journal. It seems to have escaped most of the water.

  He pulls it out and flips through the pages. Some have sustained water damage, causing the ink to run, but a few at the middle are readable. He holds it up to the light and reads:

  …n and blast if I cannot wait for this to be over. Today is the worst day in recent memory. I had to cut down a member of the crew this morning. Kudal, his name was, Petty Officer 3rd Class. He hung himself in the lower decks last night. And though no one said so I know very few could blame him for it.

  As cowardly and unpatriotic as it might seem, this is one duty I desperately wish to end. It is a waste of our time, a waste of our resources, and though we are not in any physical danger, I sincerely believe that this duty is causing psychological harm to my crew. I hope we have no more like Kudal. But I doubt we shall be so lucky.

  Worst of all, I cannot personally imagine how that thing belowdecks could help military intelligence in any way. I want to tell her to just be done with it and slaughter the thing—but to be honest I am not sure if such a thing can be slain.

  I will distribute ear guards to the crew tonight. The pounding and the screaming could be heard even up in the depths of the fo’c’s’le, and none can sleep. I can even hear it myself on the nights when the thing gets ornery. And it does tend to get angrier at night, or at least louder.

  I do not like the nights out here. They taste wrong to me. There is too much night, and not enough moon, if that makes any sense.

  —LIEUTENANT COMMANDER BABURAO VERMA, 17TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SNAKE, 1717

  Another visit from Ghaladesh today. She comes boating in on that damned yacht looking like an industry heiress—which I suppose she is. If politics could be an industry, Vinya Komayd would most certainly be its most lauded scion.

  Once again the crew and I stayed above deck while she and her toadies interviewed it. I much prefer it when the other toadies do the interviewing, as they are not half so severe about dictating our duties to us.

  I could tell they hit the thing with the lights again because it howled and howled like the most monstrous of squalls. I am sure you could have heard its howling up in the Mashevs. Some of the men grew sick and I had to find a place for them to be seen to as I could not send them to their quarters or to the medical bay, for that of course was belowdecks. We eventually simply treated them on the bridge. It is not like we shall ever sail this ship anywhere, anyway. We are a floating prison, not a proud vessel of our nation.

  They recorded the transcripts again and made us leave the bridge while they encrypted them. This is, of course, not protocol. Perhaps they do not wish to have any element of what they are doing here discovered. Such behavior could cause a less devoted sailor than I to wonder precisely how official this all is.

  I do not know what we are intended to Rebirth, but I do not wish to see it be reborn.

  —LIEUTENANT COMMANDER BABURAO VERMA, 21ST OF THE MONTH OF THE DOLPHIN, 1717

  I went down to see it tonight. I know I shouldn’t have. It’s against my orders. But I did it anyway, to ask it to stop crying. It was too much, too loud.

  The glass was thick and I could not see it in the darkness, so I spoke to it through the microphones they set up. Again, I know this is a breach of my orders. But I asked it to quiet. I asked it to please stop its weeping.

  It would not listen. I have gathered from what she’s said that it is in pain. They put the lights on it so often.

  I did not turn on the lights. I left the chamber dark, as I am told it prefers it. But it did not answer me.

  I wish it did not cry like a child. I wish it did not cry with the voice of a young boy.

  I am a commander in the Saypuri Navy, and I am proud of my duty and my service and my country. But I did not sign up to become a jailer. Especially not a jailer of children, even if the children are quite strange.

  I have neve…

  The words begin bleeding again there. The rest of the pages are legible only in spots.

  Sigrud stands there, thinking. Then he tosses the book aside and walks back out.

  This is all Vinya’s doing, he thinks. All of it, all of it. Before Bulikov, before Voortyashtan, before everything.

  He finds the ladder belowdecks and starts down.

  This was her project, her plot, off the books and far out in disputed waters.

  Belowdecks is a reeking warren, dark corners flooded with sediment and teeming with sea creatures.

  What did she trap here?

  Sometimes a splinter of bone with gleam in the dark mud, or a button or piece of brass will shine bright in the light of his torch.

  What did she torture and question?

  Yet he thinks he knows what. Or, more likely, whom.

  He feels as if he’s in the innards of a great sleeping creature, the dark surfaces dripping or creaking, the wind whipping through the rents in the hull.

  Down, down. Down, down, down.

  And as he climbs down, Sigrud remembers.

  He remembers Slondheim, the prison he was held in for more than seven years. A monstrous fortification built into a gash in the tall cliffsides, a black crack swirling with sea. The dark walls of rock, riddled with cellblocks and chambers, the lapping waters below. The jail boats trundling from side to side, lanterns swinging, their iron cages filled with screaming, filthy people.

  He remembers his first journey in such a cage. The creaking, ancient boat. The cliffs stretching above him, echoing with howls, glimmering with torchlight. And how he bellowed for freedom.

  Sigrud slips down another deck, flexing his knuckles. Passionate is the love, he thinks, that a nation has for its prisons.

  Finally he comes to it, the massive chamber he glimpsed as he scaled the hull. From this angle there is no doubt at all that its primary purpose was a prison.

  The tremendous metal door, covered in locks. The thick glass portholes, like staring eyes. And mounted in the sides, huge electrical lights, lights bright enough to illuminate a city square.

  The port side of the chamber sports a magnificent hole, a tangled, blooming flower of torn metal, petals of steel unfolding out like some strange sculpture. Sigrud walks over to it and shines the light inside the chamber.

  Bare metal interior. Almost airtight. But every surface of the metal is riddled with dents in the same pattern, over and over and over again, four small divots, all in a line.

  The knuckles of a hand, a small one. A boy’s hand.

  How long did they keep you here? How long did they keep you down here in the dark?

  He shines his torch on the tangled metal around the hole in the chamber’s side. Like the door to the bridge above, like the skulls he found on the beach, there are finger marks in the metal, as if someone unfathomably strong took it and warped it as though it were no more than soft sand.

  And how did you break out?

  He steps back from the chamber and looks up. He can see it from this angle: he can see the tunnel carved upward through the layers of steel, a passage made as whatever was held in that chamber clawed its way to freedom.

  Do we ever truly escape? Am I still battering against the walls of Slondheim, somewhere in my mind?

  For a moment, he feels a glimmer of sympathy for the creature that was once bound here. He does his best to smother it.

  Do not pity him. Remember what he took from you. Remember Shara. Remember what you’ve lost.

  Down in the dark, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson tries to rekindle his many grieva
nces, hoping they will keep him warm enough to keep moving—a mental exercise he is deeply familiar with.

  He sighs. The ship creaks around him with the wind.

  But one creak seems to last…a little too long. Longer than the breeze lasted, surely. As if something besides the wind was pushing at the metal.

  Sigrud pauses. Listens.

  Another creak.

  He whirls and snaps the beam of the torch up into the tattered decks behind him.

  He sees her only briefly, half-hidden behind a girder: the pale face, the upturned nose, the mouth twisted in distrust.

  The girl from the slaughterhouse. Malwina Gogacz.

  His jaw drops. “What?”

  She makes a gesture with one hand. And then things…blur.

  The wind beats against him. Sigrud bends low, trudges up across the sand, and lashes the inflatable raft to the little tree, taking care to avoid the jagged, rusted shards of metal on the ground. He’s surprised the little raft survived so well, he’s never tried an inflatable vessel before. Then he steps back to review his work.

  On the second step back, something crunches unpleasantly under his bootheel. He looks down. A sliver of something gray-white has surfaced from the sands.

  It looks like bones. The bones of a person, buried here on the beach.

  He bends low to dig in the sand at his feet, but then stops as he realizes…

  “Wait a minute,” he says aloud. “I’ve done this before.”

  He looks around. He’s back on the beach outside the Salim. He looks down, bewildered. He examines his knee and sees it isn’t cut—though didn’t he snag his right knee on the jagged hull? And his boots aren’t covered with the black mud he waded through to get to the prison chamber.

  He remembers her. Malwina Gogacz, watching him from the decks above.

  He scratches his head. “What is going on?”

  He walks back to the hull of the Salim. He has no desire to try to scale it again. Instead he sticks his face into one of the gaps and bellows, “Malwina Gogacz!”

  Silence. Nothing but the wind.

  He tries again. “Malwina Gogacz! Are you in there? Can you hear me?”

  More silence.

  He takes another breath and shouts: “You saved my life in the slaughterhouse! If we were to meet again, you said you’d tell me more!”

  Silence. At least, for a bit.

  Then a voice from above, speaking with a mixture of astonishment and outrage, “How the fuck do you remember me?”

  Sigrud looks up. He can see her just barely through the crack in the hull, but she’s there, standing on the second platform above the hold.

  “Remember you?” he says.

  “I reset time!” she says. “You shouldn’t remember me! Everything should have been reset.”

  “I…don’t really know what you mean,” he says. “But why don’t you come down so we can talk about it more?”

  She refuses to come all the way out to him, and instead speaks to him through the crack in the hull, like an old woman reluctant to open her door for a salesman.

  “You survived,” she says.

  “I did.”

  “You look terrible.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I wasn’t looking for you,” he says. “I was looking for this ship.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Shara Komayd was looking for it, once.”

  Malwina’s mouth twists, as if she’s struggling not to say more.

  “You knew her, didn’t you?” asks Sigrud. “Worked with her? She caught up to you at an orphanage on the Continent and recruited you. Was she the one who told you about this ship, that it was here?”

  “Yes,” she says reluctantly.

  “And this ship started everything, didn’t it? Once she found it, it started her efforts to locate some very…special Continental orphans. But what happened here started more than that, didn’t it?”

  “You’re a damned clever creature, aren’t you.”

  “Sometimes. If I recall, you said you would tell me more if we met again. So why don’t you come outside to me?”

  “It’s safer in here.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve seen what’s chasing me,” says Malwina. “You’ve seen what’s out there, how powerful he is. I’ve survived because I’ve learned not to trust people unless I have the advantages on them. And right now, sir, you seem to have a lot of advantages on me.”

  “Yet one would think,” says Sigrud, “that the past would be more powerful than an old Dreyling.”

  Malwina’s eyes grow wide. “How…How did you…?”

  “Am I right?” he asks. “That’s your—what is the word—your domain, isn’t it? That’s where you are, or were?”

  She draws back a little from the crack in the hull.

  “You are a Divine child, are you not?” he says. “Your domain is the past, the world of things that were. That is how you were able to project a bubble of the past around yourself back in the slaughterhouse. And that’s how you just…sent me back through time? Is that what you did?”

  “I reset things,” says Malwina.

  “You…reset things?”

  “Yes. Just a bit. You can’t change the past—or at least, you shouldn’t be able to—but you can reset things before the present becomes the past. I make the past replay itself all over again, but the present of that instance—the present at which I reset the past—is different. Got me?”

  “No,” says Sigrud with total honesty.

  “Whatever. The past should have played out again as it did. You should have gone back inside the ship, dug through the files, gone to see the prison. Only this time I wouldn’t let you see me. I’d have stayed hidden. It would have been a redo.” She looks him over. “But it didn’t. How did you remember? Your memory should have been reset too.”

  “I don’t know.” He makes a fist with his left hand, his fingertips feeling the scar there. “But…I have some ideas.”

  “This is all a tremendous violation, you know. Right now, what’s happening right now. This is a problem for me, and a fucking big one. You shouldn’t be able to change the past. You’re running amok in my personal, Divine domain! How the hells did you do that?”

  Sigrud frowns and looks away. She is not the first Divine thing whose power you’ve defied, he thinks. That cannot be accidental. “Never mind that,” he says. “What was here? What happened here? What did Vinya Komayd trap inside this ship?”

  “Don’t you know?” she asks.

  He remembers the boy in the dark outside of Shara’s estate: I will visit every pain and every torture upon your head that was visited upon mine….

  “I suspect,” he says. “But I want you to tell me.”

  “The night,” she whispers. “They held the night itself here for years and years….That’s why I chose to hide here, after all. This is one place he’ll never, ever want to return to. It’s the one place I can be safe.”

  They sit on the beach, staring out at the gray skies hanging low over the dark ocean.

  “He is…the night?” asks Sigrud.

  “Yes,” she says. “The night itself. The purest idea of it, the first night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The first night humanity experienced. Before light, before civilization, before your kind named the stars. That’s what he is, that’s how he works. He is darkness, he is shadows, he is the primeval manifestation of what’s outside your windows, what’s beyond the fence gate, what lives under the light of the cold, distant moon….All darknesses are one to him. All shadows are one to him. That was his function, as a child of the Divine.”

  “How…How are you all alive?” asks Sigrud. “How did you survive?”

  “Most of us didn’t,” says Malwina. “Most of us the Kaj got to. He executed them as if they were no more than sickly livestock. But not all of us. What would you do if your lands were being invaded, and people were spe
cifically seeking out your heirs to kill?”

  “I’d send them away.”

  “Let’s say you can’t. You can’t leave your home, and neither can your kids. They’re bound to it. So what do you do?”

  Sigrud nods. “I hide them.”

  “Right. And which Divinity was the trickiest, cleverest one of them all?”

  He lets out a slow sigh. “Jukov.”

  “Correct.”

  “By the seas…How many plots and plans did he put in place before he hid himself away?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s not unreasonable. He’d have been a real shit to have saved himself but not his children.” She grows solemn. “Though what he did to us…I’m not sure if it counts as saving.”

  “Why? How did it work?”

  She appears to struggle with it for a moment. “You didn’t…You didn’t even really know it was happening,” she says. “That’s what it’s like, living with a Divinity. They point a finger, and reality changes.” She looks away. “He came to you. And suddenly your memories started…shifting. They grew hazy. Suddenly, you didn’t even think you were Divine. You thought you were mortal. Just a little mortal child, a little lost orphan. And then…Then you were that thing. And maybe, if you were lucky, you got adopted by a common mortal family, and they loved you, and they cared for you, and you lived with them. Grew up with them. And maybe, for a while, you were happy. Ignorant, sure, but happy.”

  She swallows. “But then…Then one day people started getting suspicious. You got older for a while, but then you just…stopped. They started wondering, when was this child going to grow up? When was this child going to become an adult? Why does this child stay adolescent? Why was this child still here? And when people started asking these questions and getting suspicious, then Jukov’s miracle took care of you.

  “It hid you away again. Made you a child again. It bent reality around you, ever so slowly, ever so slightly. And without ever being aware that you were doing so, you left that family, just walked away from it, and went back to being alone again. It reset everything. You forgot all about them, and they forgot too. It was as if you’d never come to live with the family. And to them, it was as if they’d never adopted that sweet little girl. Both of you totally forgot one another. Because you have to be kept safe, free from suspicion. And for you, a blessed child of the Divine, this happened over and over and over again. And over and over and over again. A sleepwalking child, repeating your youth over and over again, drifting from family to family. Without even leaving a memory behind.”