City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “It seems unlikely Vo would have known,” says Taty, “since those things disappeared decades earlier, during the Blink.”

  “What happened to those buildings over there?” says Sigrud, pointing. “I remember there was some sort of big temple thing there….”

  “It was destroyed during the Battle,” says Ivanya softly. “I know. I watched it happen from this very balcony. The streets filled up with silver soldiers…and the very sky spoke words of wrath.”

  Tatyana asks Sigrud about the Battle, about Pangyui, about Vohannes and Shara and all their work here. He does his best to stumble through an explanation, but he suddenly feels like he knows very little. Perhaps he forgot it all, or perhaps he never really understood it to begin with.

  He remembers Shara walking alongside him through the snowy streets of Bulikov, pointing out all the relics and historical sites. He’d been so bored, grimacing as she talked, yet his heart aches at the idea of her beside him now, saying her mad things about history or politics, pushing her glasses up her nose, her hair tied back in its messy bun, her movements redolent with the aromas of tea and ink.

  What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.

  Taty chatters on about all the fabulous things she’s read about Bulikov: all the plans, all the changes, all the developments, a brand-new world blossoming here on the banks of the Solda, things Sigrud and Ivanya barely understand.

  “Could it all have been better?” asks Taty. “Could Mother have done a…a better job?”

  “I am not one to say,” says Sigrud.

  “I wonder if she was too tolerant,” says Taty. “Too indulgent. You have power but for a few brief seconds, and then…”

  Sigrud frowns, remembering Taty’s words on the aero-tram—Perhaps the only way to clean a slate is with blood! He understands these were the words of a furious adolescent, but still—they disturb him.

  “Things could have been better,” says Ivanya. “But things could also have been much, much worse.”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud.

  Taty looks out at the cityscape in silence for a moment. “Will I ever stop hating them? For what they did to Mother?”

  “To live with hatred,” says Sigrud, “is like grabbing hot embers to throw them at someone you think an enemy. Who gets burned the worst?”

  “Quoting Olvos,” says Taty.

  “Oh. I thought Shara had come up with that one.”

  “No. It was Olvos.”

  “Well. Regardless. When will you lay down your embers, Taty?”

  The girl stares out at the city. “I don’t know. Sometimes they’re the only things keeping me warm.”

  She falls silent again. Sigrud glances at her sideways, and sees she’s passed out in her chair.

  “She’s asleep,” he says, startled.

  “It’s been a busy damned day,” says Ivanya. “Come on. Let’s take her to bed.”

  Sigrud picks her up and carries her to a bedroom, then lays her on the sheets. She barely stirs. He realizes she must have been terrifically exhausted.

  Sigrud and Ivanya return to the balcony in silence. They drink plum wine and watch the dark cityscape, not saying a word, staring out at the faint, shimmering suggestion of the walls of Bulikov.

  “The world is no longer for us, is it,” says Ivanya.

  “No,” says Sigrud.

  “I turned my back on it for a handful of years, and suddenly it belongs to her now.”

  “Yes. Perhaps her generation will do a better job with it. If she can learn to forgive.”

  “Perhaps. I thought we would do a better job, me and Vo, back before the Battle. We thought we’d change everything. A joyous revolution.”

  “So did Shara, I think,” says Sigrud, “when she returned to Ghaladesh.”

  “A better world comes not in a flood,” sighs Ivanya, “but with a steady drip, drip, drip. Yet it feels at times that every drop is bought with sorrow and grief. It ruins us.”

  “You are not ruined, Ivanya Restroyka,” he says.

  She looks at him, first questioning, then half-smiling. “No?”

  “No. I think you were asleep. But now you are awake.”

  She turns back to the cityscape, bright and fiery in the sunset. “I forgot about the walls….How odd they are. How impossible. How impossible all of it is.”

  Sigrud isn’t sure when they start holding hands. It simply happens, a movement as premeditated as a leaf falling from a tree. Her fingers are long and cold and wiry, yet they feel very hard, and real. He can’t remember the last time he held someone’s hand.

  He’s also not sure when she kisses him—and it’s she that kisses him, very clearly so. It’s a passionate kiss, yet also a desperate one, as if they were two refugees scrambling across disputed lands, uncertain what tomorrow might bring.

  He does not protest as she leads him to a guestroom. Not the master bedroom, he notes—she avoids that space. But as she leads him into the darkened room, he’s suddenly wracked with uncertainty: for so long, Sigrud has felt that his presence has brought nothing but woe to those he’s loved. His efforts at civilization, at domesticity, at intimacy, have all yielded the same result: tragedy and loss, followed by a retreat to the wilderness, to isolation and savagery, wishing that he’d never even tried.

  But he doesn’t fight her. He recognizes that she wants to feel something, anything, besides what she’s feeling. And he does not blame her. He feels the same.

  Afterward they lie in bed together, looking at the moonlight filtering through the slats in the shutters.

  “Today was a good day,” she says. “I wouldn’t have ever thought coming back here would be. Yet here we are.”

  “Yes.”

  She shifts closer beside him. “We don’t get to choose many things. What happens to us, if we live or die, or who we love. But we can at least choose to admit, sometimes, that things are good. And sometimes, that is enough.”

  “Sometimes.”

  He lies there, listening to her as she falls asleep, her breaths like the slowing ticks of a metronome.

  Then Sigrud hears a tap-tap from downstairs—perhaps footsteps. He tenses, listening more, then rises.

  “Oh, what a surprise,” says Ivanya, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Leaving already.”

  “I heard something,” he says.

  “Sure you did.”

  He puts on his trousers and shirt. “I really did.”

  “Hmph.”

  “I will be back,” says Sigrud, opening the door. “Stay here. And stay quiet.”

  He pads outside, across the huge carpets, dancing from shadow to shadow until he comes to the top of the stairs. Then he peers out, and sees her.

  Tatyana Komayd sits on the floor of the giant entry hall, wearing her white nightgown. Moonlight spills through the giant window above her, making her form indistinct in the soft illumination, a tiny, white splotch floating in a puddle of gray-blue.

  Sigrud walks down the stairs. “Taty?” he asks.

  “Hello,” she says softly. Her eyes are open, but her voice is dreamy.

  “What are you doing up?”

  “I…I had a dream,” she says. “About my mother.”

  Sigrud cocks his head.

  “Not my birth mother,” says Taty. “Shara, I mean.”

  “A nightmare? It woke you?”

  “No, not really a nightmare. It was the strangest thing….” Taty sighs deeply. “I dreamed of her here. In Bulikov. She was standing in the street, holding a black blade, and she used it to threaten a god that stood before her. It was all so real….”

  Sigrud recognizes it immediately. “You dreamed of the Battle of Bulikov?”

  “Mm. No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so. Because her hair was as I knew it, white as snow. And the god was not Kolkan.” She rubs her temple slowly, as if suffering a headache. “A battle of Bulikov, maybe
. But not the Battle of Bulikov.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What can one possibly say about such a dream?” She climbs to her feet, then stands there, thinking. “I think my mother is dead, Sigrud,” she says. She rises and begins to climb the staircase on the other side of the entry hall. “But I also think she’s still here. It makes no sense. I know it makes no sense. I know it is impossible. Yet in what place could two totally opposite, impossible things be true, besides Bulikov?” She pauses at the top of the stairs. “Maybe Auntie Ivanya was right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Maybe we should have never come here. Maybe history weighs a little heavier here.” She looks over her shoulder at Sigrud. “I hope Malwina has something good for you tomorrow night, Sigrud. I hope this all was worth it.” Then she slips away into the shadows, and is gone.

  Nokov walks along the walls of Bulikov, alone and troubled. It’s night now, true night, the moon pale and lonely above, wreathed with mist. He could make it night whenever he wished—to do such a thing is no more than a flexing of a muscle to him now—but he’s at his most powerful when true night has fallen, when the shadows lengthen and the forests flood with darkness, and the brightest of bonfires is reduced to a miserable little pinprick. That’s when he feels most at home, if he could be said to even have such a thing.

  Winter will be here soon, he can feel it in the air. Winter, when the days grow short and the nights long. When he waxes strong, and encroaches steadily on the day like lines of infantry driving an enemy across a battlefield.

  Yet when I succeed, he thinks (and he does not say if he succeeds, for there are no ifs to Nokov), day will be but a memory, and the world will be something bold and new.

  But though he feels much at home now, in the depths of true night, he’s not here for comfort: such darkness grants him power, and with such power he can walk the walls of Bulikov, and feel…

  Miracles. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, all quaking and whispering within the walls. Miracles of a sort one doesn’t see anymore, ones far beyond his means. The true Divinities wrought these walls long ago, when the world was still hot and fresh and young, as bright and bendable as metal at the forge. Nokov does not know if such miracles, such grand shiftings and warpings of the world, could even be possible nowadays.

  He comes here often. Nearly every night, in fact, to walk the walls, and see, and sulk.

  I could do it if I knew how, he thinks. If they had taught me how. If they had given me the power that I ought to have.

  But he doesn’t know these things. He himself cannot fashion miracles like this. So instead he walks the walls of Bulikov, fingers grazing the surface of these mammoth constructs, and listens to the whispering miracles trapped in their depths….

  One day, he thinks to them, you will be part of my domain.

  If the miracles hear him, they do not answer.

  It’s only because he’s listening so hard that he senses her approach, speeding north out of the mountains. At first he’s startled, even nervous, for her coming is furious and powerful and unmistakably Divine.

  He wonders—Is this another child? A sibling? Why would one dare to approach me?

  Yet then he realizes what this is, why this feels familiar. It’s a part of himself come to greet him.

  She leaps down the mountaintops to him, dark and frantic. He waits at the bottom for her, and watches her approach, trying to understand what’s going on. Finally she stops and stands before him, this tall, oily, faceless figure of a woman, and he slowly understands.

  “Mishra?” he whispers, horrified. “Is that you?”

  The world stutters around him. Silence fills his ears. Yet in that silence are words:

 

  He stares at her, anguished and disgusted. He reaches out with one trembling hand, and she kneels before him. His fingers touch her smooth, featureless face.

  “Oh, no,” he moans. “Oh, no, no, no…This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I wanted at all….”

  A stutter of silence. Then:

 

  He reaches out to her, senses her mind, her spirit, and sees she is not truly Mishra anymore. Some thread of her intelligence remains, some piece of her that he knew and grew close to. But only a fragment. No more than that.

  He shuts his eyes. He’d been waiting on her call, having heard about the disaster aboard the aero-tram. He assumed she’d been triumphant. Yet here she is, empty-handed, and so horribly malformed…

  He gave her too much, he realizes. Too much of himself, too much for any one mortal to bear. She is now Silence, an aspect of the true night, the dreadful silence in the blackest of nights. Yet she is not completely Silence, for some piece of Mishra is ground into this creature’s being, so it exists in a warped half-state—not quite human, not quite Divine.

  “I am so sorry, Mishra,” he says. “I am so, so sorry.”

  She bows her head before him. Although she says nothing, he senses that she knows something is wrong, but cannot identify or articulate what it is.

  Another stutter of silence:

 

  The same words, over and over again. He moans once more, filled with loathing for this marred creature, and himself for making her.

  A flash of a memory: Vinya Komayd, standing in the window, smiling at him, gloating. You aren’t a true Divinity, child. Nor will you ever be. You can’t do the things they did. Give it up.

  Nokov trembles with fury. His fingers clench into fists.

  “This is their fault,” he whispers. “Their fault!” He glances at the walls. “And her fault, too. If they just…If she just…”

  Silence looks up at him, head cocked.

  “They’re here in Bulikov, aren’t they,” he says. “That’s where the tram was going. They aren’t hidden in the mountains, they aren’t in the depths of the sea, they’re here, right here, under our noses!” Nokov turns to face the walls of Bulikov, eyes burning. “I will find them. I promise, I will. And I’ll make this right.”

  Silence leans close, as if trying to say something.

 

  “What’s that?” he says gently. “What are you trying to say?”

  Silence holds her spear out and points at its very tip. Then she taps her right breast, as if indicating an injury.

 

  She holds the spear blade out to him. Curious, Nokov reaches out and holds the point between his index and thumb.

  The spear is as much a part of him as Silence herself is, wrought of his very heart and being. He feels it leap up to him, speak to him, tell him what it’s done….

  The spear tells him about how it almost ran the dauvkind through, how it poked its way through his clothing, licked just the slightest few drops of his blood, there on his right breast, and burned and blackened his flesh in turn, putting its own stain within his body…

  It hurt him. It touched him. And its taint is still upon him.

  Nokov opens his eyes. He realizes that this tiny wound is still festering in the dauvkind somewhere: the spear remembers what it tried so hard to do, and desires to finish it. It’s as if the spear has marked its territory like a dog marking a tree, and now it can catch the scent of its target on the slightest breeze.

  “We can feel him, can’t we,” says Nokov. “We can feel the wound we gave him…” He turns back to look at Bulikov. “And he’s here. But where shall he go?”

  The next night, Sigrud hunches low as he skulks along the Solda River. A few errant flakes float down to where he stands, as if the wintry clouds above are sending out scouts to enemy territory. The moisture and the cold create a heavy mist that clings to the lampposts in the warrens of Bulikov, making spectral halos among the streets.

  But I suppose, thinks Sigrud, it’s somewhat better than how dark everything used to be.

  The riverside lanes are
crowded with Bulikovians, Saypuris, and the odd Dreyling. How strange it is to see all three peoples here together, none of them attempting to throttle the others. The city facades, like the populace, are an interesting and diverse mix: sometimes there’s a scarred old relic, almost certainly from before the Blink; next, a clean, fresh, brick-and-mortar shop front; then a glass-and-steel construct, something commercial and cutthroat; and then at the end some paved-over lot with a small sign before it, telling the onlooker of what once stood here before the Blink.

  The Solda Bridge is just ahead, and what used to be a thin bone of a bridge is now a sprawling, two-hundred-foot-wide thoroughfare with thick concrete supports. He remembers the Saypuri cranes and machines setting up shop before the Battle of Bulikov—they must have done their work and done it well.

  But how shall I find Malwina on such a thing?

  He climbs the footpath up to the bridge. It’s half auto roads, half market. Clattering autos and buses and limousines buzz past, the air behind them singed with exhaust. Little paper lanterns hang from the roofs of the market stalls. He sniffs: skewers of meat sizzle over bright red coals, coils of steam unfurl from the mouths of copper teapots. A warm, lively scene of a thriving metropolis.

  Despite this, he shudders a little. The tiny cut on his chest from the spear aches curiously, burning hot or cold sometimes. He’s considered opening up the wound and trying to squeeze out the blackness like pus, but it hasn’t impeded his fitness yet, and with everything that he’s trying to do right now, it’s certainly not a priority.

  He walks to the edge of the bridge and looks out. The waters of the Solda haven’t frozen over yet. But he remembers how they were once, many nights ago, when the Divine horror slunk below the ice and terrorized Bulikov, and he, armed with but some spears and some rope, did his best to battle it.

  He lost, though. Urav the Punisher consumed him. And when it tried to subject him to the many hells that dwelled within his belly, somehow he survived, uninjured and defiant….

  He looks down at his gloved left hand. And was that luck? Or something more?