City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Standing in his place is a short, young Continental man, with dark skin, a bald head, and bright brown eyes. His fingers are long and dexterous, and there’s a curious cleverness to his face, as if he’s permanently been struck by a wondrous idea.

  “Oh,” says Sigrud.

  “Sigrud, this is Voshem,” says Malwina. “The embodiment of possibility.”

  Voshem bows before him, again a strangely courtly gesture. “How do you do.”

  “Of possibility?” asks Sigrud.

  “Yes,” says Malwina. “Voshem’s domain is not over things that are, but rather as they could be. The hallway ahead,” she says, gesturing forward, “isn’t really there, but it could be there. And as long as Voshem is with us, then it’s as if it is there. Do you see?”

  “No,” says Sigrud honestly.

  Voshem smiles gently. “It is a bit tricky. The touchstones awaken the door, and I connect the door to the sanctuary. A two-step security system. I’ll take you as far as the stairs, and then I will leave you. Not wise to leave the key so close to the lock, one might say.”

  The three of them continue on. The hallway doesn’t seem to get any narrower, but suddenly he and Malwina are forced to walk in single file, as if the walls had closed in without their noticing. He had feet of clearance when they first walked in, but now he has mere inches on either side of his shoulders. He worries he’ll have to start walking sideways to get through.

  They keep walking. The hallway stretches on and on. He feels like they’ve been walking for ten minutes, maybe longer. Yet when he looks back over his shoulder he sees the door’s still there, a mere fifteen feet behind them.

  Yet they are moving, he knows that. Moving through something, under something…

  “This is all in the realm of possibility?” asks Sigrud. “So to speak.”

  “We are passing through barriers,” says Voshem. “Divine barriers. Barriers that are almost impossible to pass through…”

  “Except we have you,” says Sigrud.

  “Correct. Much can be done with the slightest shred of possibility.”

  Sigrud shuts his eyes and continues walking forward at the same pace, listening to the fall of his footsteps and trying to focus on what this feels like rather than what it looks like. It feels as if he’s walking through a sea of shifting sand, as if the material world is but an idea that hops into place when he looks at it, yet with his eyes shut there’s actually…

  He opens his eyes and sees only the hallway.

  I am deep in the belly of something Divine, he thinks, and I like it not at all.

  “We’re close,” says Malwina.

  Sigrud looks ahead and sees only the darkened end of the hallway. Then he looks back and sees they’re still no more than fifteen feet from the door they walked in through. “Are we.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  Something begins to emerge from the darkness ahead: a metal spiral staircase, which loops up past the ceiling into a blank concrete shaft.

  The three of them stop at the foot of the stairs. “I will let you continue on alone now,” says Voshem. “I can’t stay still for long. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Go, then,” says Malwina. She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “There’s something strange in the breeze tonight. Move quickly, find your safe places, and do not look back.”

  Voshem nods, grim-faced, and turns and trots down the hallway. Malwina watches him until he slips out the door. Then the walls and floor of the hallway begin to quake and tremble….

  “You’ll want to step back now,” she says.

  Sigrud does so. Then the hallway seems to collapse inward, the long, narrow passageway flooding with dark stone, as if the granite and loam were a liquid, and then…

  There’s nothing. Just a blank, dark wall where once there was a way out.

  Malwina sighs heavily. She looks up the staircase. “Now we go up.”

  The staircase feels a lot more physical and tangible than the hallway did, but this is of little comfort to Sigrud. Mostly because, if he’s gauging distance correctly, by now they’ve climbed enough stairs that they should be several feet above the Solda Bridge. But they’re still in the tall, blank shaft, climbing and climbing. The staircase just keeps going.

  Their steps echo on and on. Sigrud’s calves start aching. He wonders if this place would deter Nokov just by how long it takes to get anywhere.

  “You seem to be dealing with this all rather well,” says Malwina.

  “It is not my first interaction with the Divine,” says Sigrud. “And it is comparably better than what I am used to.”

  “Jukov and Kolkan probably don’t make the best impression of us, no.”

  “He was the boy’s father, correct?”

  “Jukov? Yes. Good guess.”

  “Was he your father as well?”

  She gags at the idea. “Absolutely not. That man, that thing was madder than a burning hare. No, no. My parents were Olvos and Taalhavras. Hope and order, you see.” She smiles. There’s a touch of acrimony to it, but only the slightest touch. “The past is a harsh, undeniable thing, like Taalhavras. It is what it is. Unrelenting, uncaring, just like all of his machines and devices. So I’m a bit like that. And yet people look back at the past, and in it they see…stories. Fables. Opportunity. Hope. Like her. So I’m a bit like that too.”

  “I see.”

  They keep climbing the stairs.

  “Do you know what the worst part is?” asks Malwina.

  “About what?”

  “About being awake. About Jukov’s plan to hide us among families, and one day wake us up.”

  “No. What?”

  “It’s that…It’s that you remember,” says Malwina. “You wake up, and realize your true nature—you remember your Divine parents, the way things used to be….But you also remember your mortal parents. You remember what it was like to just…just be a kid, to be part of a family. You can’t forget that. I don’t think Jukov realized how damaging that would be.”

  “Would you prefer to forget it all?”

  Malwina sighs. “I don’t know. Sometimes.”

  They keep climbing stairs.

  “I have a question,” says Sigrud, now panting.

  “Go ahead.”

  “If Jukov died in the Battle of Bulikov,” he says, “how is it that the Divine children are still asleep? Why didn’t his miracle just vanish? Why didn’t they all wake up, all at once?”

  “Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it?” says Malwina. “I wonder about that myself.” Her footsteps have stopped. Sigrud looks up and sees the stairs have finally come to an end in an odd room.

  The room is long but narrow. One long side is dominated by two enormous wooden doors, over ten feet tall, with giant iron handles and small flaming sconces on either side. When he looks at the doors he hears a high-pitched eeeee in his ears, a note warbling at some frequency that makes it almost impossible for him to think.

  She smirks at him. “Hear the noise?”

  “Yes,” he says, wincing.

  “Yeah. They don’t want you here. You’ve never been here before. They don’t trust new people. Anyways. You want to know what I think? About why some of the children are still sleeping, even though Jukov’s dead?” She turns to the doors, then pauses, her hands on the iron handles. Her head is slightly bowed, her face concealed by shadow. “I think they like it. They don’t want to stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Being human. They like it. Subconsciously, they don’t want to wake up. So they keep dreaming, and remain children. For as long as they can.” She looks at him over her shoulder. “I wouldn’t want to forget.”

  “Forget?”

  “Everything. You asked me if I wanted to forget. The answer’s no. I want to keep it. Even if it hurts.” Then she hauls the giant doors open and steps inside. “Come in. But don’t touch anything.”

  Sigrud steps through the big wooden doors and stares.

  He’s standing in a long, low, dark roo
m, like a vast basement, perhaps six or seven hundred feet wide. The far wall is lined with windows, allowing in a soft, blue light, like the light of a distant moon. The ceiling is supported by short, fat stone columns marching in rows across the chamber. And between all the columns are beds.

  Dozens of beds. Hundreds of beds. Maybe many hundreds, all spaced out evenly so that to his eye he’s looking out at a huge grid of beds. The beds themselves are unexceptional, the sort of utilitarian cots one would find at a hospital or an orphanage, with plain white linens, plain white pillows, and next to each bed is a plain wooden table, on top of which is a small, flickering lantern.

  Lying in every bed is a person. Or, more specifically, a young adult. The youngest occupant he sees looks around eleven; the oldest looks to be about twenty. But they all slumber softly, their dozing faces lit by the soft hues of their bedside lamps. He’s so transfixed he barely notices the huge doors swinging shut behind him.

  “Is this a…a hospital?” asks Sigrud.

  “No,” says Malwina. “It’s our place of last refuge.” She lets out a breath. “Oh, it’s good to be here, to be able to talk about this now. You’ve no idea how many rules are bound up into this place, it’s like taking off a particularly brutal undergarment….”

  Sigrud walks over to one bed and peers at its occupant. It’s a girl of middle teen years, her hair a dull gold, her eyebrows queerly yellow. She mutters something in her sleep and rolls over.

  “Don’t touch the bed,” says Malwina.

  “Are these children…Divine?” asks Sigrud.

  “Yes,” she says, walking over to join him. She looks out on the sea of beds and lanterns, and for the first time she looks vulnerable and uncertain. “All of them. The ones who we could save, at least. Here they live unnoticed by him.”

  Sigrud stares into the sleeping girl’s face.

  “Why do they sleep?” he asks.

  There’s a strange voice from behind him: “It was the simplest solution.”

  Sigrud whirls around, surprised. He glimpses someone standing in the darkness beside a nearby column and instinctively reaches for his knife.

  Suddenly Malwina’s on him, shoving his hand away. “No! No. Trust me, you don’t want to do that.”

  Sigrud looks closer at this new person. She steps forward, into the light. She’s a short, teenage Continental girl, with big, wide-set eyes and a crooked mouth. She has no hair: she seems to have shaved it all off. She wears loose-fitting, white linen clothing, and though normally her appearance would cause Sigrud to think of someone in a mental ward, there is a calm, steady sanity in her gaze. Unnervingly steady.

  She doesn’t do or say anything. She just watches Sigrud with her big, calm, wide-set eyes.

  “Who is this, Malwina?” asks Sigrud.

  The new girl blinks, looks at Malwina in surprise, and smiles. “Malwina?” she says, incredulous.

  “Shut up,” says Malwina. “Some of us like our mortal names.”

  “Some of the mortal names are pretty good. That one, though, is not.” She turns her unblinking stare back on Sigrud. “So this is the dauvkind?”

  “Everyone keeps asking me that,” says Malwina. “Yes. Who else would it be? Sigrud, this is Tavaan, the spirit of slumber and dreams. She has control over this place.”

  “Control?” he asks.

  “This place exists within her reality,” explains Malwina. “Within her mind, in a way.”

  “That sounds very painful,” says Sigrud. “I hope it at least has some benefits.”

  Tavaan lifts a hand and snaps once.

  Sigrud looks at her hand, curious, and sees it’s gone. Actually, now that he looks, Tavaan and Malwina are both gone. He looks around himself and sees he’s somehow been instantly transported to the other side of the chamber, far away from them, without his even noticing. Tavaan and Malwina are tiny dots in the distance, though he can see Malwina whirling around, looking for him.

  Tavaan’s voice echoes over to him: “It has a few.”

  Another snap, this one much fainter, and he’s back where he was. Again, his senses report no change in the air or sound or gravity. It’s as if the room moved around him without his being aware of it at all.

  “I…see,” says Sigrud.

  “She’s trying to intimidate you,” says Malwina, glaring at Tavaan. “Don’t let her.”

  “And yet you were the one warning him not to pull a knife on me,” says Tavaan.

  “I didn’t want you to put him in deep sleep,” says Malwina. “That’d be hazardous for his damned health! That one woman fell over and broke her jaw!”

  “But according to what you say,” says Tavaan, “it might not work on him.”

  Sigrud glances between the two young women. “You know I can hear you—yes?”

  Tavaan sighs and rolls her eyes. “Did she tell you not to sit in the beds?”

  “She said not to touch them….”

  “Good,” says Tavaan. “You’ll pass out, and it’ll be tricky for us to wake you up. They’re intended to knock out someone Divine, so a mortal like you…it might make your heart stop.”

  “So the beds are miraculous?”

  “Yes,” says Tavaan. She walks down one line of beds, gazing at the sleeping occupants. “When we use our Divine abilities, when we warp and change reality around us, our enemy senses it. He smells it. That’s how he got the jump on us in the first place. For those who were awake, we could just sit around existing and he’d pick up on it. Those who slept, unaware of what they are, they could remain hidden from him, but those of us who knew ourselves…The very world changes as we merely walk through it. And when we congregated, meeting in groups of twos and threes, we were lit up bright before him, targets painted on our foreheads.”

  “Are you not vulnerable here?” asks Sigrud.

  “This place exists inside my domain,” says Tavaan. She taps the side of her head. “Inside of me. It’s not quite so attached to reality. So it’s much harder for him to feel us here.”

  “So it’s like her domain,” says Sigrud. “Like the shadow place the enemy pulled me into.”

  “Not quite that intense,” says Tavaan. “But close to it.”

  “It’s a dangerous play,” says Malwina, “maybe a desperate one, but we’ve kept them alive for years doing it. The ones who didn’t opt in to Tavaan’s sanctuary…they didn’t last long. He got to them quick. We take what victories we can get.”

  “Yes, such a grand victory,” says Tavaan. “You get to run around and make a mess of things out there, while I’m stuck in here all alone.”

  “I did visit you,” says Malwina.

  “Three times,” says Tavaan. “Three times in the past year!”

  “I brought you hot chocolate!”

  “Yes, but no hot water to make it with.”

  “I said I was sorry about that.”

  “Sorries,” says Tavaan, “don’t taste nearly as good as hot chocolate.”

  Sigrud loudly clears his throat. “Why am I here?”

  “Why?” snorts Tavaan. “To try something damned desperate.”

  “That’s because we’re damned desperate,” says Malwina. “Tavaan, listen to me—he tried to make a seneschal.”

  Tavaan’s eyes widen. “He what?”

  “You heard me. It sounds like it didn’t go right, but the fact that he even tried…”

  “He thinks he’s as powerful as a Divinity,” says Tavaan.

  “And he almost is. It almost worked. We’re not winning this fight alone.”

  “Is that why you asked for me to come?” Sigrud says to Tavaan. “To help you plan a strategy?”

  Tavaan looks surprised. “Me? I didn’t ask you to come here.”

  Sigrud turns to Malwina, frowning. “You said…You said she wants to talk to me. Who is this ‘she’?”

  Tavaan’s expression softens. “Ah. He doesn’t know.”

  “No,” says Malwina darkly. “He doesn’t.” She sighs a little, then says, “The Divine c
hildren…they’re not the only people we’ve hidden here. Follow me. Just a bit farther.”

  Sigrud follows her, still feeling bewildered. Between their strange journey to unlock the door under the Solda Bridge, then to travel through it to this bizarre sub-reality, and then to meet this mad-looking girl who claims to be slumber incarnate…He can’t fathom what he’s doing here or how they expect him to help, especially when he can hardly understand what’s going on at any given moment.

  He sees Malwina is leading him to the far wall, where the windows are. The windows look out on a navy-blue night sky, alight with stars, but situated before the largest one in the middle is a large overstuffed chair, facing away from him.

  There is someone sitting in the chair: he can see a hand on the armrest, small and brown, with ink-stained fingers.

  They get closer. And then he smells something…familiar.

  Tea. Pochot tea, powerful and acrid.

  Ink, lots of it, thick and dark.

  And then there’s the smell of very old parchment, and books, and dust, the scents of a library and all its musty tomes….

  Sigrud stops walking.

  “No,” he says. “No. It cannot be.”

  Malwina rounds the chair, then looks over its top at him. “Come on, Sigrud,” she says gently. “Come here.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he says. His face is trembling. “I…I can’t, I can’t. It is a trick.”

  Malwina shakes her head. “No trick. Just come here. I’ll only be able to wake her up for a short period. So hurry.”

  Wobbling, Sigrud walks over to the overstuffed chair and slowly steps around it. And he sees her.

  Though she has aged, she is still very much the woman he once knew: small, unassuming, with a closed face and large eyes, magnified even larger behind her thick glasses. Her eyes are closed, as if dozing. Her face has many, many more lines than he remembers, and her hair, done up in a haphazard bun, is the sort of white one can only get prematurely, a sort of snowy mane that contrasts brilliantly with her dark skin. She wears a plain blue dress and a white button-up sweater, and she leans against the side of the chair with her temple resting against the left wing, face pinched as if the position is slightly uncomfortable to her.