City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  The woman who made his life as he knows it now. The person who saved him from the depths of prison after he’d lost everything, and given him hope.

  “Shara,” whispers Sigrud. His mouth is dry. He looks at Malwina and swallows. “How can this be? How…How can she be alive?”

  Then Shara stirs, taking in a long, slow, rattling breath. She says in a croaking voice, “I’m not.” She opens her eyes, blinking in the light of the windows. “I’m not. I died, you see.”

  A tricky thing, to be a politician: to plan not for tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, but for a way of life ten, twenty, fifty years down the line.

  To be a politician is to plan for a reality one might not survive to see.

  —MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1709

  Sigrud stares at her. He simply can’t process this. Her death was something he’s lived with every day for the past month, something he woke up to in the morning and fell asleep to at night. To have it proven wrong, to have something he believed in so much blown apart like the head of a dandelion…

  “Turyin…Turyin said she saw your body,” he says faintly.

  “She probably did,” says Shara, soft yet amused. She sounds exhausted, though, the tone of a sick woman tolerating bedside visitors.

  “They had a giant funeral for you in Ghaladesh,” he says.

  “Yes, Malwina brought me the paper,” Shara says. “Such lovely flower displays…”

  “And they burned you,” says Sigrud, “and put your ashes in a tomb.”

  “That they did,” she says, nodding. “I am not arguing with you about any of this, Sigrud.”

  “Then…Then…Then who was cremated? Whose ashes are in that urn in that tomb?”

  “Mine,” says Shara. She smiles faintly, and her eyes grow a little wider. “Look at you, Sigrud….My goodness. You’re just as I remember you. It’s amazing, isn’t it.”

  “Shara,” says Sigrud. “Shara, please—how…How did you survive?”

  She sits up a little and gives him a level stare. “Sigrud. Listen to me. I have said this repeatedly. I did not survive. I died. And I am…I am not really Shara Komayd. I am not the woman you knew.”

  Sigrud looks at Malwina. “So it is a trick.” He reaches out for Shara’s hand—she does not withdraw—and touches it. It feels warm, though the skin is soft and loose, the hand of an old woman. “But she feels real enough….”

  “She is Shara,” says Malwina. “But just a moment of Shara.”

  “Specifically, the moment just after the bomb went off,” says Shara. She lifts the right side of her dress. He sees drops of blood along her ribs there, tiny entry wounds and perforations.

  He kneels, shocked. “Shara…You are hurt.”

  “I am quite aware of that,” says Shara.

  He reaches out to her wound. “Here, let me…Let me take a look at it, we can find some bandages and—”

  “There’s no need. I’ve been dealing with it for weeks now.” She looks at Malwina. “It has been weeks, right?”

  “Just over a month since the assassination,” says Malwina. “It’s been five days since I last woke you.”

  “Oh, good,” says Shara. “Not too long, then.” She turns back to Sigrud. “Listen, Sigrud. Sigrud?”

  He can’t stop staring at the wound in her side. He can’t understand any of this, so he keeps focusing on this one thing he could fix, maybe, just maybe. “I have a medical kit at the house, I could…I could…”

  “Sigrud,” says Shara gently. “Please look at me, and pay attention.”

  He blinks, tears himself away, and meets her gaze.

  She smiles. “There. Just listen to me. The bomb did go off in Ahanashtan, yes. And I was right beside it, yes. But Malwina got to me right as the bomb went off. She couldn’t save me from its blast, couldn’t shield me from its damage—she could not stop me from dying, in other words. But she could preserve the tiniest sliver of time right as it happened. She took that tiny sliver and kept it going, perpetuating it long past when it would normally expire. And that is what you see before you now. I am not Shara, Sigrud, not truly. I am but a moment from her past, suspended here in the present, stretched out thin among all the seconds you’re experiencing.”

  “Which is a tremendous violation,” says Malwina. “And a real pain in the ass to maintain.”

  “Malwina bends the past around me, and through me.” Shara groans slightly, as if sensing such a bend. “Certain parts of me progress at different rates—specifically the wounded parts of me, which go very slow. It is not a state I would ever recommend to another person.” She takes a rattling breath. “Not to disparage Malwina’s efforts, but dying is probably preferable. But she protects me, and wakes me at times for counsel. They’ve been kind enough to give me safe harbor.”

  “Safe harbor,” scoffs Malwina. “It was your idea to build this little pocket reality within Tavaan in the first place. We’d all be dead if you hadn’t come up with it.”

  “How much credit is owed to someone who says, ‘Do this,’ and does very little themselves is debatable,” says Shara.

  “So…you can keep it going forever?” says Sigrud.

  Malwina and Shara exchange a glance. “Malwina—leave us for a moment, please,” says Shara. “Sigrud and I have a lot to discuss. And much to do.”

  Shara pulls her sweater tight around her shoulders. Sigrud drinks in how she sits, how she moves: she rubs her right wrist, which is slightly swollen with arthritis. Her legs are positioned awkwardly in the chair, placed as if to avoid putting further pressure on her back. And her eyes are so terribly sunken and tired, as if she hasn’t slept since he last saw her, in the window aboard his tiny ship outside Voortyashtan thirteen years ago.

  She smiles wearily at him. “It is not all the effects of Malwina’s miracle.”

  “What?”

  “How I look. What Malwina’s done to me is taxing, yes, but…So was my life. I put my body through more than anyone ought to. I am old, Sigrud. Or perhaps I should say I was old. Who knows, with all this Divine trickery. But you…You are…” She searches his face, but unlike Mulaghesh, she doesn’t seem surprised by what she finds. Rather, all the pleasant bemusement evaporates from her face, leaving behind an expression he knows well—Time for business.

  “Malwina mentioned you found the Salim,” says Shara. “Which means you must have talked to Turyin. So you must have received my message. Yes?”

  Sigrud sits at the foot of her chair, feeling like a child listening to his grandmother tell a tale. “Yes.”

  She sits back, looking pained but pleased. “Ah. Good. So satisfying when plans go right—even if you are making plans about your death.”

  “You planned to die?”

  “Oh, I’ve always planned to die,” says Shara. “That’s always been rather unavoidable. It’s just which death I would meet—that required some thinking. How odd it is, to know what end I found. It seems deserving, doesn’t it? After all our skullduggery, it’s a Saypuri agent who topples Komayd. I’m surprised Khadse was able to get through.”

  “Through the wards around the Golden?”

  “Yes. How did he manage to do it? Did you ever find out?”

  “Miracles in his coat, and shoes. I used them to help Malwina get out.”

  “Ah. Well. There it is.” She looks at him, and her face is no longer half so humorous: she looks hungry, and worried. “And…And Taty. You found her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you and Ivanya kept her safe?” she asks quickly.

  “Yes. The enemy has not been close to her yet. She’s safe in the Votrov mansion now, here in Bulikov.”

  Shara lets out a long, slow sigh. “That I would not have preferred….Just like in the past, all things gather to Bulikov, friend and foe alike. But there are so few safe places in this world anymore. We must all cling to our oases. How is she doing?”

  “She is…grieving,” he says. “Fo
r you, Shara.”

  She sighs slowly. “Yes. As she should. The things I have put her through…”

  “She is strong,” says Sigrud. “Or she is learning to be strong. But…Shara…Why did you not tell me who she was?”

  “Who she was?” says Shara.

  “Yes. That Taty was…” He looks at her. “That she is Divine.”

  Shara is silent. Her face is grave, and she suddenly seems terribly frail.

  “She is related to Malwina, isn’t she,” says Sigrud. “She looks so much like her….Taty is her sister. Isn’t she?”

  Shara’s mouth works, as if disliking the taste of the words she is about to say. “Yes,” she says softly. “Yes, clever Sigrud, you are right. They are twins, in fact. Not identical, but twins.”

  There’s a long, long silence.

  “Malwina is the child of the past,” says Sigrud. “And Taty…Taty is the Divine child of the future. Isn’t she?”

  Something in Shara’s face seems to crumple at these words.

  “It was something Malwina mentioned,” Sigrud says. “About domains. That is how Taty can sometimes know what is about to happen.”

  Shara is silent for a long time. When she finally speaks, her voice is again but a croak: “I found her in Bulikov, you know. Just before Voortyashtan. I toured the Continent, seeing how my policies were being implemented. The press raved and ranted about it. Thought I was defecting from Saypur, going to the country I truly loved. Such mad stuff…But did you know, I found that things were not much better? Not really, I mean. Refugees everywhere. Starvation. Corruption. And the orphanages…By the seas, so many orphans. I went to one orphanage, and these little creatures were hardly more than skeletons. I could see the bones in their faces, in their shoulders. And then there was this one little girl, coughing….”

  She bows her head. “I was drawn to her. I didn’t know why. We talked. She said she liked math a lot. She talked on about it for a while, the way children do. And then she asked if she could come home with me. I said no, because I had to, of course—I was on a damned diplomatic tour, you see, one can’t just swing by and pick up an orphan. But her request stuck with me. The way she looked at me, the way she pleaded to come home with me…It echoed in my head. So when I returned to Ghaladesh, I found myself compelled to put things in motion, and set up an adoption.” She looks at him, her dark eyes sharp and watchful. “Malwina told you, didn’t she? About Jukov’s miracle?”

  “Yes. Somewhat.”

  “About how it puts the children in some kind of sleepwalking limbo? Drifting from one adoptive family to another?”

  “Yes.”

  She sits back in the chair. “I worry…I worry if those actions I took, if those were truly mine. Perhaps I was miraculously compelled to adopt Taty, with neither of us knowing. What a dispiriting thought that is…That all your love could be founded on lies.”

  “She worries the same of you,” says Sigrud.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “She figured out that you have not…not been totally honest with her about your past.”

  Shara’s eyes grow wide. “Ah. Ah.” She laughs lowly. “You know, I hadn’t thought about that. It seems obvious now that, when Taty fled Ghaladesh and went out into the wide world, she’d find out who I’d been in my past life….Was she angry?”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud.

  “Very angry?”

  “Yes.”

  “She has that right, I suppose,” says Shara quietly. “It was…It was so pleasant, being a civilian. Being a mother. Being just a mother. I just…I just wanted that to keep going. I didn’t want to spoil it.”

  “But it did not last,” says Sigrud. “Did it?”

  “No,” says Shara. “No. It didn’t.” She licks her lips. “Taty started…predicting things. She told the groundskeeper to go home one day, and it turned out the groundskeeper’s husband was terribly sick, and if she hadn’t made it home she couldn’t have saved him. There were other incidents. She delayed the postman at the house once, just long enough for him to avoid a horrid automobile accident. And then there was her obsession with the markets….That was when I started getting worried. She was good. Too good. She wanted to start investing herself, but I put a stop to that. If people started getting suspicious…”

  She shakes her head. “Thank the seas I had her in Saypur. The powers of the Divine children don’t work as well outside of the Continent. Who knows what could have happened if I hadn’t taken her away. But it was around then that I started looking into the orphanages on the Continent, trying to understand if she’d been blessed or charmed somehow by some errant miracle…And that was when I discovered that Taty had been adopted before. Years before. By another family. And when I saw the picture from that adoption, she hadn’t seemed to have aged at all since then.

  “I was frightened. Terrified. I reviewed everything I knew about this girl. I asked her questions about her life on the Continent. She had no memory of another family, of another life. So I went looking…and I found more.

  “More children. More children who had been drifting from place to place, being taken in by countless families. I resorted to a few Ministry contacts. And that was when I found I was not the only Ministry person who’d been looking into these Continental orphans.”

  “Vinya,” says Sigrud.

  Shara nods, her eyes steely. “Yes. Vinya had stumbled across one of them before Bulikov. I found her paper trail. And that led me—very windingly—to the Salim. And what she had done there.” She sighs. “He hates me, you know. Our enemy. I can’t blame him. What my aunt did to him…It’s a war crime, is what it is. But he is dreadfully driven, and dreadfully clever. You’ve met him?”

  He nods.

  “Really,” says Shara softly. “I never have. He’s always eluded me, that bright little boy….What was he like?”

  “Young,” says Sigrud. “He was like a teenager. An angry one. A furious child, lashing out. He was especially sensitive about his father—when I mentioned how you had killed him, he lost all control.”

  “Did he,” she says. She cocks her head, as if making a mental note of this. “Interesting.”

  “Is he…Is he the maimed Divine child you were reading about in your books?”

  She fixes him with a keen stare. “How do you know about that?”

  “I…I went to your house,” says Sigrud. “I saw your books in your room.”

  “Oh. Right.” She relaxes. “Yes, I saw in the papers that my estate had burned down. You’ve lost none of your subtlety, Sigrud. But to answer your question…I’m not sure. I thought he was the maimed child, seeking to reconnect with all the pieces of him that were stolen away by the primary Divinities—yet I could find no evidence of such a thing. I think the primary Divinities resorted to one of their favorite tricks—they edited the past, edited the memory of the maimed child, so he would never remember what he was. So if he is this child, he himself may not know it.”

  “But if trauma can make a child remember they are Divine,” says Sigrud, “perhaps the torture in the Salim made him remember much, much more.”

  Shara nods slightly. “Perhaps so. I’ve done my hardest to find out more about him, with no success. And he was prepared. After the Salim, I started searching for him. I suppose he must have figured me out, because he staged a minor incident—a minor manifestation of the Divine that was reported back to me through my own channels. I should have known it was a ruse, since only my people heard about it, and no one else noticed. But I investigated, worried it had something to do with him. And I made one critical mistake—I brought my black lead with me.”

  Sigrud nods, suddenly understanding. “Which he then stole. Didn’t he? That’s why you never used it on him. I had wondered about it so much.”

  She smiles bitterly. “Yes. I hadn’t realized the extent of his powers by then. Anything that is eclipsed in darkness, he controls. And I was hardly going to keep the black lead sitting on the top of the cupboard in total dayl
ight, was I? When I realized it was gone, I discovered the danger we were in—myself and the rest of the Divine children. That was when I tracked down Malwina. And then we really started to organize. But then, unfortunately…”—she smiles sadly—“I died. Which rather complicates things.”

  “And…now what do we do?” asks Sigrud.

  She thinks for a moment. Then she says, “Here. Help me up.”

  “You can stand?”

  “With help, yes. I’d like to do something I haven’t done in a long time.” She smiles brightly at him. “I’d like to go on a walk with you, Sigrud.”

  They walk along the wall of windows, Shara clutching his right arm, her steps tottering and uneven. Yet there is a queer peacefulness to it all, as if they are a long-married couple in their later years, strolling through a park. Though he can’t quite match it, he senses Shara is…content.

  The beds stretch out on their left, the dark room shimmering with soft snores and sighs.

  “There are so many,” he says.

  “Yes,” says Shara. “Three hundred and thirty-seven, specifically. Only four of the six Divinities were procreative, but…they did get up to rather a lot. Got to do something to fill the time during those thousand or so years, I suppose.”

  “Why did you take up their cause?” asks Sigrud. “Why them, of all the wretched people who need help right now?”

  “Because they had no one to speak for them,” she says. “No ally, no protector. People either want to control them or kill them. And I suppose living with Taty for so long…I saw what she could have become, had I not been there for her. What if it had been her that Vinya had captured, so many years ago? Though I’m not always sure I’ve done a better job with her…Lying to her, about myself, about the world…Perhaps we Komayds are simply poison for the Divine.”

  “She loves you, Shara,” says Sigrud.

  Shara looks away. “Does she?” she says.

  “Yes. She asked me many questions about you. About who you had been. It was as if I’d done a magic trick for her.”

  Shara smiles weakly. “All parents are dull to their children, I suspect. I suppose I was no different from any other parent. I’d watch her sleep, and I’d just wonder—Who’s in there? Who will you be one day? Will you remember me? Or will I be no more than a pleasant shadow, faint and indeterminate, skulking at the borders of your memories as the years stretch on before you?”