City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Nokov is grave and silent for a moment. “I don’t believe you.”

  She shrugs. “It is what I believe. Believe what you like.”

  “You’re saying you…That you had…”

  “Do you know what they say of Olvos?” she says softly. “They say she was born when all the dark of the world became too heavy, and scraped against itself, and made a spark—and that spark was she. She was here from the beginning of this world.” She shuts her eyes. “She and her siblings, perhaps. And then the mortals changed what they believed, and she listened and overwrote her own reality, and forgot it.” She looks up at Nokov. “You are here to do, my son, what I suspect I myself once did long, long ago. To overthrow your parents. To take power from them and make your own world. You and I are just separate incarnations of this long dance, child. There have always been Divinities. Always been mortals. Always been slavery and war and revolution. There is blood upon your hands, just as there is on mine—the only difference is that you will remember it.”

  Nokov strides forward through the fire, the flames licking his black skin. “I will be different.”

  “How many tragedies follow those words,” says Olvos quietly.

  “Shut up. Shut up! Shut up! You’re using me, you’re just tricking me, just like she did! You’re just like her. Just like her.”

  Olvos takes a deep breath and sets her pipe down beside her on the log. “Perhaps you’re right, dear,” she says wearily. “But now you must ask yourself the hardest question.”

  Nokov is breathing hard. “And what is that?” he says.

  She smiles at him, tears upon her cheeks. “Will that make what you’re about to do any easier?”

  Nokov shuts his eyes, twists up his face. He doesn’t want to cry now, not during his greatest triumph.

  He desperately shouts, “Yes!” and springs on her.

  When he’s finished, when she’s still and cold and he’s dragged her into the first night, he realizes that though she looked like a small woman by her campfire, she was much, much, much more powerful than he ever realized. More powerful than he could have ever understood.

  She could have struck him down where he stood. She could have killed him in an instant. Yet she didn’t.

  He wonders why she didn’t. He can’t understand why she didn’t.

  Ivanya Restroyka feels a little ridiculous as she makes four pots of tea for her guests. It’s not that she’s unused to making a lot of tea for company. It’s just that she never expected to be entertaining a bunch of godly children and a dead woman—or at least, not all at once.

  The Divine children sit in stunned and despairing silence, especially Malwina. The consequences of what’s just happened haven’t truly sunken in, Ivanya can tell. She’s been through this before, after the Battle of Bulikov, when people sat dumb and dreamlike in the streets, babbling about inconsequential things. If they live to see tomorrow, she knows, the morning will bring countless horrors as they try to force a normal life on the shattered remnants around them.

  But that day is tomorrow. And right now, today, there is at least a hot cup of tea.

  She sets the first tray down before them. “Drink up,” she says gently. “Get something warm in you.”

  The only people who don’t seem to be crushed with despair are Taty and Shara. And though Ivanya feels it’s Taty who has a right to have countless questions, it’s Shara who’s doing the interrogation, asking about her daughter’s travels, how she’s been sleeping, any rashes or cuts or bruises, and so on, and so on, and so on. Taty gives her answers in a tone that seems both bored and familiar to her, and Ivanya can’t help but feel a little heartened to see that mother and daughter have, impossibly, resumed their relationship with barely a hiccup.

  Though one thing has changed: Shara’s eyes, which seemed so tired at first, are drinking in her daughter’s every movement, every word, every gesture, every sound. It’s as if she’s trying to record all of this, to capture everything, and keep it locked somewhere safe deep within her.

  “Now what?” asks one of the Divine children.

  “What do you mean, now what?” asks Malwina.

  “Now…what do we do?” a boy asks. “Do we run? Regroup?”

  “Regroup?” asks Malwina. She laughs caustically. “And if we were to regroup—let’s see here—the Divine spirits of glassblowing, clocks, hearths, elderly maiden aunts, the Ahanashtani spring, and the rest of us—exactly what could we then do?”

  There’s a long silence.

  “I don’t know,” one of the girls says. “Something.”

  “Something,” grumbles Malwina. “But not enough.”

  Ivanya’s bringing the third tea tray over when Taty glances at Malwina, and whispers to Shara, “Is…Is that my…sister? Could it be?”

  Shara thinks for a long time. “Yes,” she says finally. “She is.”

  “And she’s…she’s…”

  “Divine,” says Shara. “Yes.”

  “And I…I…”

  Shara looks at her daughter levelly. “You are.”

  Taty’s face flushes bright. “I’m D-D…”

  “You are lucky, Tatyana,” says Shara. “The main difference between you and that girl across the room is a great deal of sorrow.”

  “That’s not an answer!” says Taty, frustrated. “And you know it!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No! You…You should have told me, you should have helped me understand this, about…about what I am, or what I’m going to be!”

  “Are you so sure,” says Shara, quietly sipping tea, “that I didn’t, my love?”

  Then the sound hits them. It’s a deep, terrible, reverberating sound like someone has just struck an impossibly large bell, a bell the size of the moon. It’s so loud that, despite her efforts, Ivanya can’t help but drop the tea tray, sending it clattering to the floor.

  “What in the hells is that?” says Ivanya.

  Shara sits forward. “Could someone help me over to a window?”

  Ivanya obliges her, helping her to the big bay windows that look out the east side of the mansion.

  “Ah,” says Shara, peering out the window. “Then it’s as I thought.”

  “What is it?” asks Ivanya.

  Shara nods ahead. “The walls. They’re there. Don’t you see them?”

  Ivanya looks and does a double-take. As a former citizen of Bulikov she’s often forgotten that the walls are even there, since they’re invisible from the inside. But now they most certainly are there—and they’ve changed color. They aren’t the slate-gray color that the outside walls so commonly are.

  Rather, these walls are black as jet.

  There’s another deep gong. It’s so loud it sends curls of dust swirling up in the streets. As the gong keeps going, the walls seem to get darker and darker, until they’re a shade of black so deep they almost hurt the eye.

  “What in the world is going on?” gasps Ivanya.

  “It’s him,” says a voice behind them.

  They turn to look. Malwina is standing there, her face pale and her eyes bloodshot from tears.

  “It’s the enemy,” she says. “He’s taking over the miracles in the walls.”

  “What?” says Ivanya, shocked. “But…But that means…”

  “Yes,” says Malwina. “She’s dead.” She goes back to her seat and sits staring into space. “It means Olvos is dead.”

  Nokov stands in the forest outside Bulikov.

  Dawn is near. He can feel it. Ordinarily he would shrink from the world, his power waning as light floods the countryside. But not now. Not with so much Divine power thrumming inside him.

  He feels Olvos’s countless miracles, all the ones she built thousands of years ago, the ones still working away in the background of reality…and the thousands of potent, churning creations working mere miles away from him, in the walls of Bulikov.

  Old miracles, real miracles. The stuff of legends. The sorts of things he ordinarily wouldn’t ever be able to
make. Yet now they are his.

  Nokov breathes and takes a step.

  In an instant he’s inside Bulikov, standing at the gate before the sheer black walls, which curve around him in a huge embrace. Silence is there with him, standing at his side, staring around in total confusion, unable to comprehend how she got here. The few mortals awake at this hour stare at the two of them for a moment before running away, screaming incoherently.

  He gazes up at the walls. “The gates of Bulikov,” he says quietly. His voice is like the voice of the stars in the sky and all the bones of the earth were whispering at once. “Once the gates were so tall, so mighty, so glorious…A monument to the old Divinities, to their power, to their ordering of the world. Yet I shall dash it all aside shortly.” He looks at Silence. “I’m going to start it now.”

  Silence is about to speak, but she doesn’t need to: he can see into her mind, see what she’s about to ask.

  “Dawn is coming,” says Nokov. “But I will not let it come. I will ascend to the skies and kill them, kill the heavens above. I will slay the light before it falls. This is what I will, this is what I wish. And then the whole of reality will be but a blackboard for you and I to write upon.”

  Silence nods, awed and dazed.

  “I will be vulnerable during this,” says Nokov. “I will work behind reality, under it, over it. This is a vast act that will take all of my concentration. Do you understand?”

  She nods again.

  “Good.”

  Nokov focuses, narrowing his eyes slightly. The black walls of Bulikov tremble, shift, groan. They tremble more and more until they should fall apart, yet they do not.

  And then they begin to…unwind.

  It’s as if the walls had been just the tip of a circular, hollow tower all along, and now the tower begins to sprout up and around the city, slowly, slowly extending into the sky, adding layer upon layer upon layer. The ground quakes and rattles and rumbles, but the tower keeps growing into the sky with a powerfully dispiriting silence. Running along the inside of the growing tower is a tremendous black staircase, curling around and around its interior in a helix. The end of the staircase just happens to fall just before Nokov’s feet.

  Nokov looks up, watching as his tower keeps climbing into the sky. “Do not allow anyone upon the staircase,” he says to Silence. “I will ascend, and no one must follow.”

  Silence bows low and watches as her god departs, starting up the stairs that will soon end at the sky itself, the firmament above—which Nokov will destroy with but a touch.

  As he climbs the stairs, looking down on the vast city below, he can’t help but laugh.

  And they thought it was the City of Stairs before….

  Sigrud stomps on the brakes as the earth begins to shake. The sky is lit with faint predawn light, but he can see that something is definitely wrong with the sight ahead of him: for one thing, the walls of Bulikov have just turned black, which isn’t normal. And also they are…

  “Moving?” he says.

  The walls of Bulikov shake and tremble…and then start growing into the sky, forming a vast, black tower that shows no signs of slowing down. It’s half a mile tall now, and getting taller by the second.

  “Okay,” says Sigrud. “That is probably bad.”

  He steps on the gas pedal. The wheels of the old auto shriek, and he speeds off toward the gates of Bulikov—which, he can’t help but notice, don’t seem to exist anymore. The entry is now just a solid black wall, leaving him no way into the city.

  I will figure that out, he thinks, when I get there.

  “What in hells?” says Ivanya, staring out the window at the growing walls. “What in hells?”

  Shara looks over at Malwina. “Malwina? What’s happening? Can you tell us?”

  Malwina, still pale and red-eyed, screws up her mouth like she’s doing math in her head. “If I had to guess,” she says in a hollow voice, “he’s remaking all the miracles that hold up the walls into one big staircase. Which he’ll then climb. Up to the sky.”

  There’s a long, loud silence. The other Divine children slowly look at one another in horror.

  “And then what?” says Ivanya. “Then what happens?”

  Malwina tosses back a cup of tea. “Then he poisons the sky with darkness. And the endless night begins.”

  “Endless night?” says Taty. “What does that mean?”

  Malwina laughs. “Who the hells are you, girl? You look like me, but I don’t remember you, I don’t smell a whiff of the Divine about you—or, not yet at least—and you obviously can’t tell the Divine from a hole in the ground….”

  “She is the least of your problems,” says Shara sternly.

  Malwina looks at Shara. “She isn’t awake yet, is she?”

  “Malwina.”

  “But you know what it’s going to take to do that.”

  “Malwina.”

  Malwina smirks. “Endless night means that he dilates completely,” she says. “Nokov—I mean, let’s go ahead and say his name, since it’s obvious he’s won—once the world falls under endless night, he controls everything. All of reality becomes a plaything in his hands.”

  “How do we stop him?” asks Ivanya.

  “We don’t,” says Malwina. “He’s devoured so many of the children, and Olvos. He’s unstoppable now, or close enough that it doesn’t matter.”

  “Unstoppable?” says Taty, horrified. “Is he really?”

  “Not…Not necessarily,” says Shara. “This thing he’s doing, this grand act…He’s exposed himself. He’s bent on doing this one, massive thing. He won’t have the attention for anything else. He’s like a surgeon in the middle of an operation.”

  “We could attack him,” says one of the other children. “Gang up on him. Slow him or even stop him.”

  “Slow or even stop the most powerful Divine being in all of history?” says Malwina. She laughs again. “Sure.”

  “We have Sigrud’s guns, don’t we?” says Taty.

  Ivanya nods. “We do. Three pistols, two riflings, and a scatter-gun.”

  “And I can see the foot of the stairway from here,” says Shara. She points toward the gates in the walls, or where the gates used to be, at least. “That’s got to be the way up.”

  “Are you hearing yourselves?” asks Malwina. “Go after what’s now a Divinity with, what, some fucking guns? Chase him up the stairs? That’s madness!”

  The room goes quiet as they try to think.

  “Sigrud would try it,” says Taty quietly.

  There’s a long silence.

  “Sigrud,” says Malwina, “is just a man.”

  “He’s never let that stop him,” says Taty.

  “He’s just a man, and he failed,” says Malwina. “He was supposed to get Olvos on our side! And now she’s dead. There’s nothing left, nothing left!”

  “There was nothing left for him either,” says Taty softly. “He lost everything. Everyone. But he still traveled across the world to help me. I know. He told me so.”

  “So what?” snaps Malwina. “Are we supposed to launch an attack on Nokov himself with nothing more than sheer, bloody-minded stupidity in our pockets?”

  “The alternative, Malwina,” says Shara, “is doing nothing. And I know your heart is broken, my dear. I know you feel bruised and lost. But you and I have been comrades in this fight for a long time now. Tavaan fought and died to make this fight last a little longer. Will you abandon it now?”

  Malwina falls silent. The snarl fades from her face. She bows her head. “I…I didn’t ever think it’d be like this, Shara. I really didn’t.”

  “I know,” says Shara. “But it is.”

  Malwina takes a breath, then grabs another cup of tea, and tosses it back just like the first. “All right. Let’s gear up and get ready to go get ourselves killed.” She smiles a grin full of mad despair. “Maybe we’ll give him a split lip doing it.”

  Sigrud slows the auto as he approaches the solid black wall surrounding Buli
kov. He has no doubt that this has something to do with Nokov: this is the same color black as he saw in Khadse’s jacket, the same black as that odd sub-reality he tumbled through after he nearly broke Nokov’s hand. An extraordinarily dark blackness, a color that has never known light.

  He steps out of the auto, leaving it running. He looks the wall up and down. It looks solid, but…

  He stoops, picks up a rock, and throws it at the wall. It bounces off with a clack, but leaves no mark.

  He thinks, then places his bare left palm on the black wall. The wall is cool and hard, as if made of obsidian, but despite everything Olvos said, his touch appears to do nothing. But then, she said the thing living in his palm exists mostly just to beat the hells out of him and make sure he survives.

  Then he stops, and remembers.

  It’s a tool. It won’t harm the enemy, but it can destroy his works and machinations.

  Sigrud focuses and reaches into the air, concentrating….

  Suddenly Flame is in his hand. And though its blade is but a dim flicker now, he can’t help but notice that it seems to project a radiance that makes the wall look very…thin.

  Sigrud holds the sword out at the wall. As he does so the wall seems to recede, like shadow before light.

  “Hm,” he says.

  He walks toward the wall. It falls back, as if the sword is projecting a perfect bubble of light around him—much like Malwina did back at the slaughterhouse.

  “Hm,” he says again. He looks at the bubble of light around him. It looks to be ten or fifteen feet across in diameter. Large enough for his small, ramshackle auto, in other words—and who knows where he’ll need to get once he’s inside?

  Sigrud climbs back into the auto and sticks his left arm out the window, holding the sword forward like he’s leading a cavalry charge. He presses the gas pedal very, very slightly, sending it puttering forward into the wall, which draws back like a curtain, allowing the auto through.

  Sigrud smiles, delighted that at least one thing has gone right tonight, and speeds up.

  Ivanya and the others trot through the streets of Bulikov, with she and Taty supporting Shara between them. Ivanya’s happy she did so much walking about and stayed fit when she was a shepherd, because between Shara’s weight and the scatter-gun and rifling on her back, she’s sure she’d be dead otherwise.