City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

The tram car apparently rides along a belt of some kind before gliding onto the main transport cables. Sigrud can’t see it, but he can feel it when this happens, the entire car shuddering with a heavy clunk. Some people in the passenger areas ahead squeal or laugh. Sigrud stays focused on the Saypuri woman, who, as if on cue, strides forward, pulls out some kind of badge, and begins to talk to the conductor.

  “She’s commandeering the tram car behind us,” says Sigrud.

  “What?” says Ivanya. “She can do that?”

  “Apparently.” He glances sideways at Taty. “They must want us very bad. Because what she is doing now will quickly get back to Ghaladesh, and that woman’s career in the Ministry will almost certainly be over.”

  He watches as the Saypuri woman argues with the conductor, but it’s clear she’s going to be the victor. Sigrud waits to see if Taty plans to make any other predictions—perhaps they’ll meet the same fate on the aero-tram as they would have on the express—but she just trembles, pale and terrified, as any young girl would.

  “So,” says Ivanya. “Now what?”

  Sigrud looks out the aft-facing porthole in their quarters. It’s a terrifically odd view to him: the hills of the southern Tarsils curdle and coil about four hundred feet below him, the rich green growing brown as they enter the steppes. The whole view is vivisected by the huge cables running both above and below them. About every half mile or so they come to another cable support tower, and the car jumps and jostles a little as it goes up the cables, through the towers, and then back down the next section of cable, which seems to arc from tower to tower like drapes of bunting on a mantel. There’s another set of cables and towers about a hundred feet to the east, and sometimes he sees another tram car crawling along them heading south to Ahanashtan. Farther to the southeast he can see dark storm clouds churning, heading their way.

  Ivanya is pacing back and forth while Taty sits on her bunk, pale and anxious.“Of all the things that could happen,” says Ivanya. “I never thought…” She stops and looks down. “Wait. Where did you get this bag of tools?”

  Sigrud ignores her, squinting as he peers down the cables. He can see the next car a ways behind them, though it’s getting a bit misty and difficult to see. “They have controls in the cars,” he says. “Don’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” says Ivanya. “Taty?”

  Taty blinks, distracted. “What?”

  “How do these damn cars work?” Ivanya asks. “Do they have controls?”

  “What? Well, of course,” says Taty. She sounds dazed. “It’s not automatic. If…If a car in front breaks down, the one behind has to slow to a stop.”

  “And the cars can speed up as well?” asks Sigrud.

  “Well…certainly?”

  “Then that’s what she plans to do,” he says. “She’s commandeered her own tram car. Then she will speed up, plant her bomb on our car, slow down so she’s no longer in danger, and detonate it.”

  Ivanya’s mouth opens in terror. “Are you…Are you serious?”

  “Very.” He kneels in front of Taty and looks into her face. “But she hasn’t done it yet. Nor will she do it soon. And you know why, don’t you Taty?”

  Taty cocks an eyebrow. “I…I do?”

  “You said we’d be killed on the train,” he says. “But you said she had to wait two days, because of a storm. Very soon we will be in that same storm of which you spoke. Won’t we?”

  Taty looks away, disturbed. “How should I know?”

  “Didn’t you know what would happen if we took the train?” he asks.

  “Well…I…”

  “So is this any different? Or were you wrong?”

  “I don’t know!” she says. She stands and walks to the window. “I don’t…I don’t understand anything about it! It was like…You know the shell games you see people playing, on the street? Where you have to guess which cup has the ball? It was like watching that, and realizing at the end that you tracked it all along and knew where it would be. But you hadn’t known you were watching.”

  Sigrud and Ivanya exchange a glance. None of this metaphor, of course, explains how she knew a woman she had never met was watching them from behind a mirror three floors above them.

  “Let’s get back to our possibly imminent deaths,” says Ivanya. “So you think we have two days? Before she blows us and everyone on this tram car to smithereens?”

  “I think so,” says Sigrud. He joins Taty at the window. “Those storm clouds will hit us before evening, or I never sailed a day in my life. I think she will wait.”

  “So what’s your plan?” she asks. “Exactly how do you plan on preventing our deaths?”

  Sigrud watches the cable below as the tram car clanks and cranks up one section of cable to the next cable support tower. The support towers themselves are tall, thin metal frames with a box at the top. Running around the interior of the box is a very small ledge, and on one side is a small platform with a spiral staircase leading down. A place to stop in an emergency and disembark, it seems.

  Sigrud thinks.

  Within an hour the storm’s upon them. They’ve moved high enough into the mountains that the precipitation is snow rather than rain, the fat white flakes striking the windows and walls, wet, crunchy smacks echoing through the vessel. The visibility outside the tram car grows limited, though Sigrud can see the faint halo of lights behind them as their pursuers trundle down the cables.

  “It will get worse tomorrow,” he says, listening to the wind.

  “How do you know?” asks Ivanya.

  “I just know.”

  He listens as they trundle along and pass through each cable support tower. He pulls out his pocket watch and starts timing them. They come to a tower about every twenty minutes, it seems, though it’s a little variable.

  Their lunch is sandwiches, served on silver trays. “Very few soups get served,” remarks Ivanya, “in a craft that sways with the wind.”

  Taty is grave and silent as she eats. She barely eats. After ten minutes of nibbling, she says, “They’re Saypuris.”

  “What, dear?” says Ivanya.

  “The people after us. They’re Saypuris. From the Ministry.” She looks at Sigrud. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “It is,” says Sigrud.

  “So…correct me if I’m wrong, but…These people are against Mother? Or were against her, I suppose.”

  Sigrud finishes his sandwich half, then brushes off his fingers. “Yes.”

  “But…why?” asks Taty, perplexed. “I mean, they’re from the same country. Right? She was their prime minister.”

  “People often don’t love their rulers, dear,” says Ivanya, sniffing.

  “And they loved Shara even less than most,” says Sigrud. He says it thoughtlessly, speaking the plain truth, but he pauses when he sees Taty’s face.

  “What do you mean?” she asks, hurt.

  “Your mother…Your mother tried to change a lot of things when she was in office,” explains Ivanya. “She thought Saypur was doing many things it shouldn’t, and not doing many things it should. She tried to change that. But this made her the enemy of those in power.”

  “But…But couldn’t she just have thrown them out?” asks Taty. “Exiled them? Jailed them? I mean, she was the prime minister!”

  “She could have,” admits Sigrud. “Probably. But I think in her early days, Shara thought she could convince people to come to her side. She had just defeated two Divinities, and unseated Vinya Komayd. It looked like things were different. And I think she wanted her government to be different. Vinya was all too happy to persecute those who disagreed with her. Shara did not wish to go down that road. She hoped things would change with her.”

  “But change is slow,” says Ivanya. “And painful. And incremental.”

  “And those people in the train car behind us,” says Taty slowly. “The yellow-eyed woman, and her friends, and the man who killed Mother…They didn’t change at all. Did they?”

  “No,”
says Sigrud. “They did not.”

  Taty slowly sets her sandwich down. “If she had been more…more like Vinya…If she had been willing to jail or exile the people who opposed her—would my mother still be alive?”

  “Who can say, dear?” asks Ivanya sadly. “What’s done is done.”

  “But it isn’t done!” says Taty. “It’s still happening! Those people are still trying to undo everything Mother did!”

  “That is so,” says Sigrud. “But if your mother had been the sort of person who would have persecuted and oppressed those who opposed her—if she had been the sort of prime minister to root out the very people who pursue us right now, and ruin them—then I very much doubt if she would have also been the sort of person to adopt you, Taty.”

  Taty bows her head. “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying, I think,” says Sigrud slowly, “that what happened to Shara happened not because she was weak, or lenient. I think it happened because she was Shara. And it could not have gone another way.”

  She looks at him, her dark eyes burning. “But you won’t be lenient with them—will you?”

  “No,” he says. “I will not.”

  “Good,” she says darkly. “They don’t deserve it. If I could, I would…I would…”

  There’s a moment of silence. Sigrud watches out of the side of his eye as Taty picks at her sandwich. The girl is grieving, he thinks. Such sentiments are not unusual.

  “Before I forget to say this,” says Sigrud. “Eat well, but please do not use the head.”

  “I’m sorry—what? The head?” asks Ivanya.

  He nods, chewing. “Use the communal one,” he says. “Out in the main cabin. If you have to, that is.”

  “Am I allowed to ask why you can dictate which latrine we utilize?” asks Ivanya.

  He takes another huge bite. “Do you ever notice where roaches and rats get into your house?”

  Taty wrinkles her nose. “I think Mother had people for that….”

  “Doors,” says Sigrud. “Windows. But also plumbing. You’ve got to make a lot of room for all the pipes, all the repairs, and so on, and so on. It is a strange thing, pumping pressurized water into a structure. It takes room, which lets lots of unexpected things in or out.”

  “So what?” asks Ivanya. “What will be going in or out of our toilet that shouldn’t?”

  Another bite. “Me.”

  Taty stares at him. “You’re going to flush yourself down our commode.”

  “No. I am going to remove the toilet. Then I will open up the hatch they use to vent or pump out the waste tank. Then I will get out of this tram car, onto one of the cable towers, wait, and jump on”—he points southward, in the direction of their pursuers—“that.”

  Taty’s mouth is hanging open, agog. “And then you’ll do what?”

  He finishes his sandwich and pulls out his pipe. “What I do best.”

  Ivanya sets her sandwich down. “You’re going to take out our toilet, climb through the hole onto a tower—however many hundreds of feet above the ground—and just wait for the tram car full of assassins to come your way?”

  He lights a match and puffs at his pipe. “Yes.” Then he thinks about it. “I would prefer the toilet go unused, but it is not totally necessary.”

  “Could…Could that possibly work?” asks Taty.

  “The snowstorm will be intense tomorrow,” he says. “They will not be able to see me there. Nor will they expect someone to try it.”

  “Well, I must say that I certainly fucking wouldn’t!” Ivanya says. “Why not just, I don’t know, tell the crew that we’re being pursued by assailants?”

  “They’d likely stop at the next available platform tower and pull us off to investigate,” says Sigrud, “and then see that the car behind us is full of Ministry agents—who would then override them, arrest us, and take us somewhere bad, where they would do very bad things to us.”

  “How will you get back on?” asks Taty.

  He frowns, considering it. “That is not the priority right now. The priority is us and everyone else on this car not dying.”

  Ivanya rubs her eyes. “And what are we to do while you’re off in the snowstorm, boarding enemy vessels like some kind of ridiculous aerial pirate?”

  “Taty, I would wish to have her hide somewhere safe. For you, Ivanya, well…” He glances at the trunk.

  “Well, what?” asks Ivanya.

  “What Taty said…She said that the Saypuri woman has a device used to throw bombs.”

  “So?” Ivanya says.

  “I think I know what kind she’s talking about. I think it throws sticky bombs, adhesive grenades. We used them once to sink ships. You’d float by on a rowing craft and throw the bombs onto the weak parts of the hull, and they’d stick on. They used timers back then, but now they probably use radio transmitters. I expect it’s a device that shoots them forward several hundred feet. Very nasty, very convenient, and very quiet—up until the detonation, of course.”

  “Again—so?” asks Ivanya.

  “So…You said you had practiced with long riflings.” He puffs at his pipe. “But have you ever practiced clay shooting? Or duck hunting?”

  Ivanya pales. “Oh, dear.”

  The next day, they get ready.

  The snow persists. Great white chunks of it go tumbling off the top of the tram car like lumps of icing. It’s impossible to see it fall very far, though: the flakes are so fat and come so fast that neither of them can see much farther than forty or fifty feet below.

  Sigrud spends a lot of his time examining and preparing the head. Using the stolen tools, he unscrews the plates around the base of the toilet and studies the piping underneath. “Should be easy to turn the water off,” he says. “And then disconnect the toilet, and remove it. But the way out through the hull is the hard part….”

  “I feel like we’re breaking out of prison,” says Ivanya.

  “No,” says Sigrud. “This is easier.” Then he pauses, remembering the altitude. “I think.”

  He puts everything back as the crewman brings their lunch—this time, some kind of flat, cheesy bread he likes not at all. Once the man’s gone they shut the door, lock it, and move the trunk in front of it, along with one of the few chairs in the private quarters.

  “Ready?” says Sigrud.

  “I…suppose so,” says Ivanya.

  “Then prep the weapons,” says Sigrud, “while I tend to the toilet.”

  It takes less than an hour to completely remove the commode, placing it in the middle of their quarters, but figuring out how to get to the hatch is harder. He lowers himself down into the guts of the tram car, deep in the dark with all the pipes and wiring and clanking machinery. If he turns the wrong screw too much or sits on the wrong plate in the hull, there’s a very good chance he could get dumped out and go tumbling through the air until he smashes into the hills below. He makes an improvised harness out of one of Ivanya’s belts, and lashes himself to one of the sturdier pipes, but that’s no sure thing either.

  He feels it first: one back panel of the tram car is burningly cold, as if exposed to the air. He finds the latch for it and realizes it will only open if pulled from the exterior. Grimacing, he pulls out his knife and tears the latch off.

  The entire back panel lifts up. Flurries of snowflakes come swirling in at him, and he smells exhaust and the cold sting of winter air. It’s big enough for him to fit through, but only just.

  “Success?” shouts Ivanya from above.

  He cranes his head down and sees the thick cable streaming along not more than five feet below the hatch. This close, the cable looks about as thick as a tree trunk. The metal appears to have crushed sugar stuck to it, and he realizes it’s actually ice: the cable must be covered in a quarter inch of ice, which gets pulverized and crushed by the wheels of the tram car—but likely not so much that it’s no longer slick and slippery.

  He groans. Excellent.

  “I said—any success?” shouts Ivanya agai
n.

  He looks up through the shaft. “Somewhat.” Then he pats the space next to him. “Here is where you’ll be sitting.”

  Her face drops. “Oh, no.”

  Sigrud clambers up and out of the shaft where the toilet once was. “I’ll take the pistols,” he said. “And I’ll leave the riflings and the scatter-gun to you. Hopefully you won’t need to use either.”

  She looks down into the shaft. “I did not really train on shooting from such confined spaces….”

  “Well, if it helps any, just remember that your aim will determine if every man, woman, and child on this tram car lives or dies.”

  “It…It certainly doesn’t!” says Ivanya, horrified.

  “I’d also suggest putting on some trousers,” says Sigrud. “I do not think you want to wear your evening apparel down there.”

  Sigrud goes into the gutted washroom and puts on a number of holsters—two for the pistols, one for his knife—as well as thick leather gloves. Usually he prefers to do any climbing with his bare hands, but then he’s usually handling rock or wood, not ice-slick steel.

  Once he steps out of the washroom, Ivanya glances out the window at the cabling. “Would it be rude to say that I am now losing faith in this plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Well then, I will reconcile myself with just thinking it very loudly.”

  “If this is actually happening right now,” asks Taty, sitting in the corner, “should I go?”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud. “Get as close to the other end of the car as possible. Do whatever it takes to stay there. Pretend to sleep, if that helps.”

  Taty hesitates, fingers gripping the doorknob behind her.

  “Taty?” asks Sigrud.

  She says nothing.

  “What are you waiting for?” asks Sigrud.

  She lowers her eyes. Then she clenches her jaw and says quietly, “You taught me how to shoot.”

  “I what?” he says.

  “You taught me how to shoot. How to do this, how t—”

  “How to do this?” says Sigrud. “No. I do not recall that. What are you asking me, Taty?”

  “I can help you,” she says, defiant. “You know I can. I can give you support, just like Auntie.”