City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I-I think so,” says Taty.

  “Good,” says Sigrud. “I will draw the seneschal away from the stairs and lead it on a chase. Shara, I will need you and Taty to take up a position in the window on the third floor in the building across from the gates. Taty, once it starts chasing me, I need you to shoot it and keep shooting it. It is much faster than I am. I will need you to slow it down as much as you can.”

  “Hold on,” asks Ivanya. “Shouldn’t I be the one doing the shooting? I’ve already tangled with the thing.”

  “Which brings me to my next question,” says Sigrud, turning to her. “It is not your skill with firearms that I’m thinking about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said fencing was a time-honored ladies’ sport in Bulikov,” he says. “You said your mother drilled you mercilessly. Do you think you remember what she taught you?”

  After checking their gear, they all troop back out into the street in single file, with Sigrud and Ivanya in the lead. Their procession is silent and solemn, warriors young and old trying to come to grips with their situation. Sigrud has seen it before. True fights, real fights, are rarely calculated, choreographed things: they are chaotic, ugly, unpredictable, and quick—lives saved and spent in a handful of screaming seconds. The inexperienced fall first, unprepared for the flurry of action. Today, he knows, will be no different.

  Battle never changes, he thinks. Always about territory and terrain. And now, if we are lucky, to take some from our enemy.

  Taty and Shara split off from them as they approach the apartment building on the corner. Taty pauses in the empty street, looking back at Sigrud uncertainly.

  “Remember to breathe,” says Sigrud. “Remember it is a machine. Remember it does but one thing.”

  She nods. Shara, wheezing, locks eyes with Sigrud. “Did you really teach my daughter to shoot, Sigrud?”

  “It seemed the right thing to do. I knew nothing else worth teaching.”

  Shara smiles. “I don’t think that’s true.” Then she turns and limps toward the apartment building. Sigrud watches as Taty helps her mother into the door and up the stairs.

  How much she’s grown up already, he thinks, in what feels like but a handful of days.

  Sigrud, Ivanya, and the Divine children wait as they get into position. “Have you had much success fighting that thing before?” asks Malwina.

  “Some,” says Sigrud. “But mostly luck.” He glances down at his left hand, looking at the scars there. I wonder, he thinks, will you save me again? Yet he remembers what Olvos said—he is not immortal. If he takes that spear through the throat, no miracle in the world can keep all his blood inside him.

  “That thing has the most powerful Divinity in existence behind it,” says Malwina. “Do you know what that means for you?”

  Neither Sigrud nor Ivanya say anything.

  Malwina looks up, narrowing her eyes as she tries to find Nokov climbing the stairs. “It means the same thing for you as it does for us,” she says softly. “It means we’re dying here today, friends.”

  Sigrud shrugs.

  “Do you know what I thought when I first met you at the slaughterhouse?” asks Malwina. “I thought you looked like a suicidal person. Throwing yourself into danger with a mad gleam in your eye. I guess you’re getting what you want today.”

  “No,” he says. “That day I was fighting because that was all I knew to do. But now I have a reason to fight.”

  “Oh, do you?”

  Sigrud looks up and sees Taty set up the rifling in the window above, her small, pale face serious and grave. “I have failed so many in my life,” he says. “So many people I was not there for, so many missed opportunities, and so much lost because of it…I will not miss another chance. Not now. Not today.”

  “Even if it kills you?” says Malwina.

  “We are not dead yet,” says Sigrud. He holds out a hand, concentrates, and finds Flame, its yellow-gold light leaping forth in his hands. “We spend every second fighting, until we have none left.”

  He looks at Malwina. She looks back, her eyes fierce. Then she nods. “Okay,” she says quietly. “Okay.”

  He squints back up at the windows above. A hand waves out the third-floor window. “Let’s get in position,” he says.

  Tatyana Komayd fights a brief thrill of guilt as she clears the floor around the window in the empty apartment on the third floor, shoving aside a desk and knocking over a vase. She opens the window and peers out on the group assembling in the street below, gray and tiny in the queer, faint light. Then she looks at her mother. “I need something to kneel on.”

  “I’ll get some pillows,” Shara says.

  They set up her nest silently and carefully, like maids arranging the table before everyone comes down to breakfast.

  “Is this normal for you, Mother?” asks Taty.

  “Normal?” says Shara. “How could it be?”

  “Urban warfare,” says Taty, inserting a clip into the rifling. “Fighting street by street from people’s homes. You never did this?”

  “I…would say I did this very, very rarely, my dear,” says Shara.

  “Very rarely,” says Taty bitterly. She shakes her head as she loads the rifling. “You hid all this from me. You lied to me.”

  “You are right to be angry with me,” says her mother, loading an extra clip. “But I would hardly be the first parent to present themselves to their children as they wished themselves to be, rather than as they are.”

  “But why?” says Taty. “Why not tell me the truth? Why not be honest with me?”

  “Because…” Shara hesitates.

  “Tell me now,” says Taty, “because soon we won’t have another chance.”

  “Because I grew up in the shadow of hard truths,” says Shara. “I was a child who was raised for war and governing. And I did not like it much. And even though I knew the stakes, I thought…Is it so much to ask that my daughter have a normal life? I just…I just wanted a moment alone, a moment apart for you. A moment when we didn’t have to worry about the outside world, all that history and sorrow waiting for us.” She looks at her daughter, and her eyes are full of tears. “I just wanted you to be what you are now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You,” says Shara. “You. A thousand times you. I’m prouder of you than anything I’ve ever done before, Taty. I’m so, so happy that I’ve had the opportunity to say so.”

  “I…What?” Taty frowns in confusion. “But…But you killed gods.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “And saved the world.”

  “That is debatable.”

  “And…And opened the Solda River.”

  “That was the effort of many,” says Shara. “But it was all as forgettable as teatime to me, in comparison to having you in my life.”

  Tatyana Komayd looks at her mother, frail and old and injured. Then, feeling slightly absurd, she places the rifling on the dusty bed beside her. “I’m…I’m sorry for being angry at you.”

  “You don’t need to say you’re sorry,” says Shara. “Not ever.”

  The two embrace, Taty squeezing her mother very, very lightly.

  “Oh, Mother,” says Taty. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well,” says Shara. “You’re going to shoot. And I’m going to reload. All right?”

  In the street below, Sigrud begins to move.

  He sprints across one lane, pistol in his hand, then leaps behind a short brick wall. He waits, rises carefully, peeks over the top, and surveys the scene.

  The foot of the black staircase is about three hundred feet away. The seneschal crouches before it like a huge, black beetle laying eggs. Just before the seneschal is a short complex of tenement apartments, low and rambling and disorganized, lots of alleys and passageways. Decent cover, then, and it seems to be evacuated, which is good but expected—waking up and seeing the seneschal out your window would make anyone abandon their property.

  He looks b
ack in the direction he came from. Malwina and the other Divine children are slipping through a back alley, sneaking toward the black wall. Once he’s drawn the seneschal away—if he draws the seneschal away, as that thing isn’t stupid—Malwina should be able to get to the gates, and do whatever Divine trickery they need to transport themselves several thousand feet up the wall to face Nokov.

  He looks up and sees Taty hunkered down in the window of the apartment building. She’s got the rifling aimed at the seneschal and ready, with Shara crouched beside her with a fresh clip.

  He watches her, thinking. Taty, he knows, is an unknown variable. If Malwina dies—which sounds extremely likely, considering what she’s about to do—then she won’t support Shara anymore, and Shara will, as far as he understands it, blink out of existence. And then Taty might “elevate,” ascending to her Divine state—and he has no idea what in the hells that could mean for everyone. Nothing good, probably.

  He focuses back on the job. He can’t see Ivanya anymore, which is good. She seemed to accept his task without hesitation. Hopefully she’s ready.

  Hopefully they all are.

  Sigrud watches the streets. Everything is silent. Everything is still.

  He raises a hand. Then he drops it.

  Taty opens fire, letting off six quick shots at the seneschal, emptying the rifling. She does a good job, with three shots striking the creature in the chest and shoulders, and one in the head. The seneschal recoils, surprised and irritated: he suspects that, for the seneschal, being hit with rifling rounds is a bit like being stung by a wasp.

  As she fires, Sigrud sprints up the street, firing his pistol up at the seneschal, which infuriates it further—but he makes a point of running around it, toward the stairs, as if trying to take advantage of its confusion.

  The seneschal, however, is having none of it: it shakes off its pain and frustration, dives to block his path, and lashes out at Sigrud, forcing him to leap back and roll away.

  The creature then does what he expected it to do: it hesitates, assuming he’ll summon Flame to force it into a duel again.

  But he doesn’t. He keeps rolling, then stands up, fires a haphazard shot at the seneschal, and runs.

  Now to see, he thinks, if it will do what I hope it will do.

  He tries not to look over his shoulder to check—to do so would give the game away—but he can’t help but sense that the seneschal is keeping its position by the stairs, not at all willing to pursue this irritating man who’s just attacked it even though the man doesn’t appear to have his sword with him anymore….

  Then the world goes silent.

  I knew you couldn’t resist, he thinks, smiling. You hate me so….

  He feels the reverberations in the soil behind him as the creature pursues him, and turns into the warren of tenements just as the seneschal’s spear licks out at him, its point slashing through the wooden walls behind him.

  The chase is on, he thinks, sprinting down the alley. Now for Malwina to make it count.

  Malwina waits, watching the seneschal. At first she’s sure it won’t take the bait—it’s fairly obvious bait, in her opinion—but the thing apparently hates Sigrud that much, because it springs after him with a silent roar.

  Its aura of silence fades as it gives chase. Malwina waves a hand to the other children. “Come on! Now!”

  They run down the black walls toward the staircase. It’s a motley crew, that she knows. Malwina doesn’t understand exactly what these Divine children could hope to do against Nokov, but they have to do something—don’t they?

  Her eyes cloud over as she reviews the past. She can see the huge towers that once stood at the gates in the old days, and the giant, moving chamber set in the interior of the closest one—a splendid, gorgeous, white-and-gold structure that makes her think of swans in winter.

  “Stand right here,” she says to the other children, pointing at the ground. “Are we ready?”

  No one says yes, but no one says no either.

  “Hold tight,” she says.

  She builds a bubble of the past around them, and pushes them back….

  Suddenly they’re standing in the chamber, surrounded by tall, broad men in flowing, golden robes, their faces hale and hearty, their teeth white and clean—not at all the Bulikovians Malwina grew up seeing. They talk amongst themselves in hushed tones, debating the will of the Divine, the wend and weft of creation. They are creatures of optimism, and ignorance: ignorance of what is happening in Saypur in their era, all the misery and slaughter their luxury breeds, and ignorance of the destruction it will bring down on their heads.

  The men ignore Malwina and the other Divine children, creatures of the past blind to the chaos of the present. The white chamber begins hurtling up, up, up through the tall spire.

  The Divine days of old, she thinks. Would I wish to go back to this, and live only here, living the past over and over again?

  One thousand feet. Two thousand feet. More.

  No, she thinks. She shuts her eyes. Because then I would have never met Tavaan.

  She opens her eyes. Now. Now!

  She pops the bubble of the past around them. For a moment they all keep continuing up, just a few feet—but then they begin falling, crashing into the broad, black staircase that’s suddenly appeared below them. As they recover, Malwina looks up and takes stock of their circumstances.

  They seem to be about a mile or two above the city, whose buildings are a clutch of gray architectural anarchy below. It’s freezing cold up here—she can see ice forming on the walls.

  Then she sees Nokov.

  It’s hard not to see him. Tall as a tree, eyes like holes in space, a broad, swaying, shadow-flecked figure slowly advancing up the stairs toward them, his every movement thrumming with power.

  “Oh, man,” whispers one of the children next to Malwina.

  “Quiet,” she snaps. “Stand up. And get ready for him.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” asks another.

  “He’s distracted by building the tower,” says Malwina. “He won’t be as strong as he could be, in other words. Knock his ass off these stairs. Anything we can do to keep him from taking another step is a victory.”

  A nervous silence falls over them as they take their positions. Malwina’s hands won’t stop making fists, her knuckles white with strain.

  Nokov slows as he sees them, his black, glittering brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh,” he says quietly. His voice doesn’t seem to come from his mouth, Malwina notes, but rather from the walls, as if the entire tower is speaking.

  “We’re not going to let you do this, Nokov!” says Malwina.

  He takes another step. “There’s little you can do against me.”

  “Little it may be,” says Malwina. “But we’re going to do it anyway.”

  “Do you wish it to end this way?”

  “If it has to, yes.”

  He cocks his head. “Were your lives just? Content? Happy? I will remake reality now. I will make it better. I will fix it. All the wrongs we lived under will be righted. I promise you this.” He extends a hand. “You can join me, you know. Be a part of me. Come into the night, and I will show you greatness.”

  “You’re not some savior, Nokov,” says Malwina. “And you’re not some justified rebel, avenging past wrongs.”

  “No?” says Nokov.

  “No. You’re just some fucking selfish kid who thinks his misfortunes are bigger than everyone else’s, and you’re taking it out on everyone around you. You’re not special. If I lined all the people like you up, you’d go around the world twice. We’re just unlucky enough that you happened to be able to actually do something about it, and unluckier still that you were stupid enough to try!”

  Nokov blinks, outraged. Then he begins to tremble. “I’ll kill you last,” he hisses. “I’ll kill you last.”

  Malwina smiles. “Try it.”

  He leaps at them.

  As Sigrud sprints through the alleys the sky above e
rupts with thunder, or something a lot like thunder—it sounds a little louder and sharper than the thunder he’s used to hearing, and it doesn’t seem to echo as much. But the really odd thing is that with the seneschal chasing him, everything should be silent—yet that particular sound breaks through.

  He knows he should be focused on trying to avoid the seneschal, but he takes a moment to glance up….

  The space at the top of the tower is flashing with light. Light of many colors—reds, blues, greens, and some other colors that his eye can’t quite interpret correctly.

  So that’s what a Divine battle looks like, he thinks. He’s glad he’s several thousand feet below it—though he does hope nothing comes raining down on them.

  He can feel the seneschal behind him, feel its feet pounding the concrete alleys. Sigrud takes a gamble and dives through a window in one of the tenement homes, breaking through the glass and the frame. He crouches next to the wall, waiting. He can feel the seneschal’s footsteps; he knows it’s close. His right shoulder starts hurting again, aching powerfully….

  The spear smashes through the wall of the home. Sigrud drops to the floor, but it’s not fast enough: the spear comes hurtling at his chest, and stops only a few feet away. He sees that the seneschal happened to break through a tenement wall with a lot of plumbing in it, and has been slowed down by the pipes. If it had completely broken through, it would have managed to extend its thrust a handful of feet farther, and probably run him through.

  Sigrud doesn’t wait to see more. He rolls over, scrambles through the bedroom door, and flies out the front window, turning east down the street toward the trap they laid.

  But this is bad. It’s bad because it seems like the seneschal can track him, somehow, like it can sense where he is, which means eluding it will be impossible. And he’s starting to think that he knows how it’s tracking him: the spear point was speeding toward a certain spot on his right breast, the spot that aches terribly whenever the seneschal is near….

  The distant skies echo with crashes, bangs, cries, and shouts.

  Whatever Malwina is doing up there, he thinks, I hope she wins, and soon. He turns down the next alley, hopefully leading the seneschal onto the final leg of their trap. Because I am less and less certain this will work.