City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Can you remove the miracle?” he asks.

  She glances at him. “I could.”

  “Then…will you?”

  She lifts her pot of tea and takes a long slurp. “I just said why I would not. Because my interference is not prudent.”

  “Not…Not prudent?” says Sigrud. “Not prudent? This, this curse is ruining my life, destroying me! Will you not give me aid, will you not save me?”

  “No,” she says firmly. “No, I will not. You are asking a very dangerous thing of me, Sigrud. For me to flex my Divine will is no small thing. It would make me vulnerable to a number of mortal influences. When I intrude into the world, when people notice me, pay attention to me, believe in me, I…change. Shift. Conform to their beliefs. That is extraordinarily, extraordinarily dangerous, especially right now. One sole Divinity on the Continent, with nothing to keep me in check? I won’t allow that. That is why I left the mortal world in the first place.”

  “But it is just one little miracle,” says Sigrud. “Surely it would be no more than swatting a fly?”

  “To destroy the work of another Divinity takes great effort,” says Olvos. “Almost as much work as it would take to harm or even destroy another Divinity. And the greater the effort, the more vulnerable I become.” She slowly looks up at him. “And that is partly why I will not intervene to help Shara and Malwina.”

  It takes him a moment to process what she said. “What?” he asks.

  Olvos sips at her cup of tea again.

  “You will not help?” he asks. “You won’t fight him?”

  “No,” she says. “No. I will not.”

  “But…But he’s killing them,” says Sigrud. “Nokov wishes to destroy them. He wishes to, to bring final night to all the world!”

  “I know that,” says Olvos softly. “He’s done horrible things. Many, many horrible things. And I’ve told you one reason why I will not intervene. But you of all people should understand the other.” Her orange-red eyes are wide and sad. “You’ve lost a child. Even if they had done horrible things—could you bear to take your child in your own hands, and destroy them yourself?”

  Sigrud stares at her. “You…You mean…”

  She sighs deeply, and suddenly she looks very old and tired. “Yes,” she says. “He is my son. Nokov is my son.”

  Ivanya tries to focus as she pilots her auto through the streets of Bulikov. She hasn’t driven in the city in years, so she jumps the occasional curb. Taty sits beside her in the passenger seat, grimly staring ahead.

  Every block or so, Ivanya asks the same question—“You’re sure?”

  Every time, Taty gives the same answer—“No. But I know it’s true.”

  Finally they come to the Seat of the World. It’s a mostly empty space, as the original temple was completely destroyed in the Battle of Bulikov, and the remaining park stands as a monument to the tragedy.

  Taty and Ivanya park and climb out. “Where?” asks Ivanya. “What do we do now?”

  “This is it,” Taty says, staring around herself. “This is what I saw, just for a moment. But I’m looking at it from the wrong angle. It was…” She spies something, some landmark, and her eyes light up. “There! Over there! To the right of that tree, I’m sure of it!”

  They sprint off, running through the park, dashing over the concrete paths until finally, just ahead, they see a small, shabby, abandoned tollbooth. Someone is standing outside it, hands and face buried deep in their coat, and they keep glancing over their shoulder at the two women running over.

  As they get closer, Ivanya’s mouth drops open. Because the person standing outside the tollbooth is Taty.

  Well, not quite—this girl isn’t as well fed and her hair is longer, though it’s stuffed up under a boyish cap, and she has an angry look on her face that looks somewhat permanent. But her face, her mouth, her size…all of it is so much like Tatyana it’s dumbfounding.

  Ivanya stops walking. “What in hells,” she gasps.

  “What?” says Taty. “What is it?” Then she looks up and sees. “Oh…Oh. Ohhh, my goodness…”

  The girl glances sideways at them suspiciously, then turns away, as if trying to avoid attention. Taty simply stares at her, thunderstruck by the sight of this girl.

  “Hey!” shouts Ivanya. “You! Hey, you!” She struggles in vain to recall the girl’s name, then blurts, “Malwina Gogacz!”

  The girl freezes. Ivanya can tell she’s debating whether or not to run.

  “You’re in danger!” says Ivanya. She glances at Taty, wishing she would say something, but she’s still staring at the other girl, openmouthed.

  The girl turns around, eyeing them suspiciously as they stagger up. “What? Who in hells are you? What are you talking ab—” Then she sees Taty. Her jaw drops. “What the fuck?” she says softly.

  The two girls stare at each other with expressions of faint horror for a very long time.

  “It’s…It’s like looking in a carnival mirror,” says Taty softly.

  “Enough,” says Ivanya. “Tell her what you told me.”

  Taty licks her lips. “He’s…He’s going to get in,” she says. “He’s going to get into your place you made, and kill all of you, all of you. And Mother.”

  Malwina goes pale. “How did you…You can’t be serious….”

  “We are,” says Ivanya.

  “That can’t be right, that can’t be,” says Malwina. “He can’t…Wait. ‘Mother’? Who?”

  “Komayd,” says Ivanya. “This is Tatyana Komayd.”

  Malwina’s eyes couldn’t possibly go any wider. She steps back and rubs her temples as she tries to take all this in. “This is…This is all too much….How do you know that? How do you look like me?” She keeps rubbing the sides of her head as if the sight of Taty has stupefied her.

  “What do we do?” asks Ivanya.

  Malwina keeps rubbing her head. She looks like she’s about to be ill.

  “Well?” says Ivanya.

  Nothing still.

  Ivanya stamps her foot. “Listen, you,” she snaps. “I’ve got no idea what in hells is going on here, but I know you. You were a patron of my organizations for years. I’ve probably personally paid for your trousers and your bed and your meals and your damned toilet paper dozens of times over. So as bewildering as all this is, you owe me. Why don’t you return the favor and focus a bit, and do whatever it is we need to do to start saving some damned lives, eh?”

  Malwina shakes herself. “How can she know that we’re all in danger? I mean, how?”

  “She just does,” says Ivanya. “Apparently. Trust us on this.”

  Malwina’s eyes dance around as she thinks. “We could go in the back way. It’s dangerous, I don’t want to draw attention to it, but…There’s no other choice.” She sighs. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” says Taty.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Not…not really…”

  Malwina points at the tollbooth. “In there. Come on. Are you with Sigrud? Is that what this is?”

  “Something like that,” says Ivanya.

  “Well. I hope you have some experience with the Divine. If not, this is going to be really weird for you.”

  “This is already pretty weird for us,” mutters Ivanya as they walk into the tollbooth.

  They keep walking. It takes Ivanya a moment to realize they seem to be walking far farther than they ought to be—the tollbooth was only six or so feet wide, wasn’t it?

  Then she sees it ahead. A small square of blue light, not the right size for a door. But beyond it are…

  Beds. And windows. A huge, grand room that just seems to be hanging there, suspended in the darkness.

  “Okay,” Ivanya says. “That’s weird.”

  Tavaan feels it before it happens. With her eyes shut and her hand on the door, she feels it flying up the stairs outside, hurtling through the air, rocketing toward the doors with all its strength…

  The boom is like a crack of thunder. The f
orce of the blow reverberates all the way up Tavaan’s arms and into her shoulders. She doesn’t need to see the doors to know they were nearly blown off their hinges.

  “Shit,” she says quietly. She opens her eyes. “Shit.”

  She can hear the sleepers muttering behind her, the ones farthest from the door sitting up and rubbing their eyes. Being lifted from such deep sleep is no easy thing, and she could help them return to full consciousness—but she knows she won’t have the energy to spare, not now.

  She summons up all of her strength and presses against the doors, holding them in place. She does it just in time, as the second blow comes hurtling at her even stronger than the first.

  The doors crack and splinter, very slightly. Tavaan focuses, using all of her mind to keep them whole. But she knows it won’t last.

  It’s him. He’s here. And he’s stronger than I ever imagined.

  “Can you imagine what it’s like?” asks Olvos. “To watch from a distance as your son drifts from family to family. To watch him get captured, tortured, driven mad. To watch him escape through murder and bloodshed, and go on to do terrible, awful things…?”

  “But you could have stopped him,” says Sigrud. “You could ha—”

  She turns to him, eyes burning and fierce. “Look at me. Look at me now. Look upon the burdens of power. Imagine what it’s like to know that if you flexed your will and saved your child, then the belief of this Continent might drive you mad, and so much more would be lost. Power corrupts, Sigrud. It has its own gravity. The only thing you can do is disperse it or isolate it. That’s what I’ve tried to do for so many years. If things go right tonight you will know this full well. But oh, you mortal man…” Olvos shakes her head. “You cannot know how I despise myself. Both for what I am, and for what I’m forced to do.” She wipes her eyes. “It’ll be over soon, though. For me at least.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Sigrud.

  She keeps talking as if she didn’t hear him. “The last night of hope. It’s been long coming, and long deserved. But such a thought is no solace to me, though, not really.” She shuts her eyes. “Not since I know what Nokov is about to do.”

  When Ivanya, Taty, and Malwina all walk into the giant room of beds through what appears to be a large fireplace, Ivanya notices two things right away.

  The first thing she notices is the tremendous rumbling and clanging coming from one side of the room, where there are two large wooden doors that seem to be trembling like they’re in an earthquake. There’s a small girl standing before them, dressed in sleeping clothes and with a shaved head, her hands pressed against the doors like she’s desperately trying to keep them shut—but it’s clear it’s a losing battle.

  The second thing Ivanya notices is that there are people in all the beds in the room, all very young people, and several are stirring and sitting up with an air of a drugged person trying to remember where all their limbs are.

  Malwina looks to the doors. Her face goes from pale to a light green color. “Tavaan!” she cries. “What’s wrong? What’s going o—”

  The girl at the door shouts over her shoulder, “Malwina! Get them out, get them out, get them out! He’s here, he’s coming through!”

  “What!” screams Malwina. “He’s here? I’ll help you!” She starts running over to the doors, but she halts in midair, as if she just slammed into an invisible wall.

  “No!” cries the girl at the doors. “I won’t let you closer! I can’t hold him for long, just get them out, get them out of here!”

  “Tavaan!” cries Malwina. “Please, I can help y—”

  There’s another blow to the doors, which almost seem to shatter, though some invisible force shoves them back together. “Do as I say, damn you!” bellows the girl at the door. Her voice seems to come from everywhere in this place, from the stones and the beds. “Get them out!”

  Malwina falls to the floor, shaken. She begins blinking rapidly. Her face stays stoic, but tears start falling from her eyes. She stands and turns to Ivanya and Taty. “You, and you,” she says, her voice shaking. “Get these kids up and get them over to the door. Now.”

  Ivanya sprints over to the closest bed, where a young boy of about twelve with curiously scaly skin is rubbing his eyes in a stupor. She doesn’t bother introducing herself: she just grabs his arms, drags him out of bed—muttering as she does, “You are a lot heavier than a sheep”—and trots over to the fireplace, where she dumps him down like a sack of flour. She looks to Taty, who’s still dumbfounded by the sight before her. “Taty! Focus and help me, now!”

  Taty shakes herself and goes to the next bed with Ivanya, while Malwina hauls one of the drowsy children out of bed like someone trying to get drunken friends home from the bar.

  Another crash, another bang. The doors tremble. There’s an awful sound coming from the other side, the sound of creaking trees and cheeping insects and a high, cold wind. Ivanya’s not sure why, but she begins to feel like she’s lost somewhere deep and dark, waiting for morning….

  It’s him, isn’t it, she realizes. The thing Sigrud’s been fighting all this time.

  She shakes herself as they haul another child out of bed. As they carry the child away they walk by a chair, which is strangely out of place in this odd room: it’s tattered and overstuffed, and it sits with its back to them, facing the windows, like a chair at a convalescent home.

  As they round the side of the chair, she sees it’s occupied.

  And it appears to be occupied by a dead woman. Or, at least a woman who should be dead.

  Ivanya gasps and nearly drops the sleeping child. In the chair sits an ill-looking Shara Komayd, craning her head around the other side of the chair so she can see the doors better. She seems wholly unaware that there are two people in front of her, and only turns around when Ivanya gasps. She blinks owlishly at the two of them. Then her mouth drops open.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “Taty?”

  Tatyana Komayd stares at her. “Mother? Mother! You…You…You’re alive? You’re really alive?” She drops the child’s feet and almost bursts into laughter. “I knew it! I don’t know how but I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!”

  Shara tries to stand, but she doesn’t seem to have much strength. She swallows, panicked. “You can’t be here, dear, you can’t! Not here, not now! He’s coming through, he’ll kill you! You’re not safe here!”

  Ivanya looks up at the doors, which shudder again with another fierce blow. “I’m starting to think,” she says, “that we might have gotten here too late.”

  Tavaan’s arms and legs scream in pain as she tries to hold the doors up. How many more blows can I withstand? she thinks. One? Two? No more than that, certainly.

  Her ears are filled with the sounds of night: the crackle of leaves under invisible feet, the soft cry of distant birds, the shifting of tall grasses. It’s hard to focus now. She uses all of her power to survey the sleeping children behind her.

  Twelve awake, only twelve. The rest still struggle to rise from their slumber, the one she herself placed them in.

  How did it go so wrong? How did he get in? How did we let it all come to this?

  Another blow. Tavaan is knocked back from the doors and sent sprawling onto the stones. The doors break open the slightest bit.

  “No!” she screams. She makes the floor come rising up, shooting her back at the doors, slamming them shut and forcing all the pieces to stay where they are.

  Twelve awake. And Malwina, Komayd, and the newcomers.

  She grits her teeth in rage and despair. Tears fall from her eyes and patter onto the stones.

  What a damnable choice to make, she thinks, and what a damnable end this is.

  Tavaan focuses her energy, takes a breath, and screams.

  Ivanya, Shara, and Taty all jump when the girl at the doors begins screaming. “What in the world?” says Ivanya, but she doesn’t have time for another thought, because then Shara’s chair begins moving of its own accord, sliding toward the fireplace and
scooping up Ivanya and Taty with it, who both fall on Shara with a thump.

  Ivanya cries out in surprise, but she sees the chair isn’t the only thing moving in the room: all the beds bearing children near the fireplace are drifting toward the exit as well, as if the whole room has been tilted up, dumping the furniture to that one corner, and taking Malwina with it.

  As they slide toward the exit, Ivanya can’t help but notice that many beds are staying still. These seem to contain children who are still asleep—so it’s only the ones who are awake who are moving.

  Ivanya thinks, But what will happen to the others?

  She doesn’t have time to wonder, because the next thing she knows, the chair is dumping her and Taty and Shara out through the fireplace, sending them tumbling down the strange passageway, back through to the tollbooth, until…

  Ivanya lands on the grass outside the tollbooth, followed by Taty and Shara, who each land on top of her, knocking the breath from her. They roll to the side just as a handful of children come tumbling out, all of them ones they managed to waken.

  Malwina refuses to stay down. The instant she strikes the ground she rises back up and staggers back toward the passageway, seeming to fight against an invisible wind. “No!” she cries down the passageway. “I won’t let you! Not like this, not like this!”

  Ivanya can still see the distant blue square of the fireplace entrance down the passageway. The light within seems to quiver, like a candle flame brushed by the breeze. Ivanya isn’t sure how she knows this, but she can tell that something is leaking into the distant room, flooding into it like poisonous gas through the frame of a door, something invisible and terrible….

  A screaming voice comes echoing down the passageway: “Tulvos! I love y—”

  There’s a tremendous crash. The distant room floods with shadow. Then comes a horrible sound, a sound that carves itself into Ivanya’s mind: the sound of dozens of children all crying out at once.