City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He shivers, swallows, and pulls harder, until…

  His eyes streaming tears, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson slides the black blade of the spear out of his right breast. Then he collapses to the ground, vomiting blood, his right arm growing both cold and warm at once as blood leaves his body and floods out of his wound.

  He lies there on the street, coughing, his breath crackling and bubbling.

  He hears waves. He hears the ocean. And he catches the distant, salty fragrance of the sea….

  He blinks lazily. Lying here on the ground, he can see the figure above him: a woman glowing bright white like a firework, floating in the air before the stairs along the tower wall.

  His body is shuddering. Everything feels very cold now.

  Then the building on his right vanishes.

  Sigrud, trembling and faint, lifts his head to look. It’s not just that the building is gone: where it stood is now a black hole in…well, not space, but everything. It’s difficult for his mind, as fatigued as it is, to make sense of this sight.

  He slowly understands. It is not just that the building is gone. It’s that it never was. Its time in this existence has been erased.

  He looks to his left and sees Ivanya disappear as well. More and more buildings disappear behind her.

  Sigrud looks up at the bright white figure, then eyes the stairs leading up to her.

  It’s a long way. He lifts his left hand and stares at his palm. Will you keep me alive until then? Shall I persist?

  The scar says nothing, as it always has.

  Sigrud shuts his eyes. He feels colder and colder. His arms won’t stop shaking.

  I who have waited so long in the halls of death. He looks up. Yet now, of all times, I wish only for a few seconds more.

  He summons his strength, shifts his weight, and rolls over onto his face. He coughs madly, his wound bright and hot with each convulsion. Blood leaks out of his mouth and nose. His left hand flails until he manages to press it flat against the street. Then he slowly, slowly pushes himself up until he’s on his knees.

  He grasps the black spear. Then he places its butt against the street and, grunting in misery, leans against it until he lifts himself to his feet.

  He leans against the spear like a drunk against a lamppost, gasping and panting. His lungs beg for oxygen, but only one of them seems to be working properly.

  Sigrud takes a step forward. His foot holds fast.

  He chokes, spits out a mouthful of blood, and takes a breath.

  Slowly, slowly, using the big spear as a crutch, Sigrud hobbles to the foot of the giant black staircase, and begins to climb.

  Each inch is a struggle, every step a war. His breath is shallow and ragged. Each time he hauls himself up one step, he’s convinced he won’t be able to do so for the next.

  Yet he does. Leaving a trail of blood behind him, Sigrud climbs the endless staircase, lifting one foot after another.

  And as he does so, he begins to see things.

  The first is his father, sitting atop the stairs ahead, nonchalantly chewing a piece of bread and cheese, young and fresh and clear-faced—far younger than Sigrud is now. His clever eyes are bright with joy, and he looks at Sigrud and smiles. “If you want a bite of what I’m eating,” he says, “you’ll have to stand and walk to me. Come on! No crawling!”

  Sigrud walks on past his father, staggering up the stairs. He’s sure he’s hallucinating, that this is a sign of his brain failing—yet then he realizes what this was.

  My first steps, he thinks. How is it possible for me to remember this? How young was I?

  Sigrud keeps climbing.

  At the next twist of stairs, things shift, and change—and he sees Slondheim, dark and dingy and miserable, and the face of his chief tormentor, Jarvun, leering at him from rusted bars, his teeth brown as old coffee. “You’re a plum, ain’t you?” the man says, cackling. “A plum, I say. Soft, soft. Just as I likes them.”

  Sigrud staggers on. The vision fades.

  More stairs. More and more.

  Things grow soft and strange around him again—another vision.

  This one of the burned hillside where his house once sat, where he lived with Hild and raised his children. He sees, of all things, himself, young and clean and slender, kneeling in the ashy mud and weeping, holding a handful of charred bones. This younger Sigrud tips forward until his forehead touches the black, sodden earth, and he howls, a cry of unspeakable grief.

  He knows what this young man believes—that his family is dead and slaughtered, and he is too late to do anything about it. He doesn’t know that his family has been secreted away. Doesn’t know that his suicidal wrath will win him nothing but woe, and set himself upon the path that the elder Sigrud walks now, wounded and bleeding as he climbs the stairs.

  Sigrud walks past this younger version of himself and continues up the stairs.

  She’s doing something to the past, isn’t she? he realizes. Unwinding it. Destroying it. And with each stroke, the past quakes like wheat before the scythe.

  He glances to his left, out over the edge of the stairs. He’s far up now, farther than he would have ever imagined he could make it, approaching where the tips of the taller buildings would be—but many of them are gone. Much of the world below is gone, wiped away by the Divine machinations occurring above.

  He looks up at the glittering figure above him. He’s not even halfway there yet.

  Can I make it?

  Another step.

  Can I?

  Sigrud keeps climbing.

  Things flicker and change, and he sees another vision.

  Himself, asleep with Hild on some leisurely morning, his hand thoughtlessly strewn across her naked belly. He watches her sleeping, pushes one strand of hair from her face, and gently kisses her temple.

  He and Shara, setting up an antennae atop a rail yard in Ahanashtan. She, young, laughing, delighted in their exploits. He, grim, silent, cruel.

  He and his daughter Carin, seated on the floor of his old house, she cradling a cloth doll in her arms. He listens as she explains the doll’s complicated, heroic origins in tones of tremendous gravity.

  His father, older, graver, sadder, seated at a long table. “The high-minded rhetoric men will use,” he says, “to justify the basest of their instincts…”

  Then he sees himself, in Fort Thinadeshi in Voortyashtan, sobbing and screaming as he grabs a terrified Saypuri soldier, hurls them against a wall, and plunges his knife into their neck. Blood fans out and splashes his face, his chest, his arm. Then he drops the dying soldier and charges down the hall.

  As Sigrud staggers through this memory, his eye lingers on the dying soldier. This one a young man not yet twenty-five.

  How many years did I take from people that night? he thinks. How many years have I stolen from others throughout my life?

  He sees Olvos, standing by the fire, pointing at him and saying, “This was born in blood. It always was. It was born in conquest, born in power, born in righteous vengeance. And that is how it means to end. This is a cycle, repeating itself over and over again, just as your life repeats itself over and over again. We must break that cycle. We must. Or else we doom future generations to follow in our footsteps.”

  Sigrud walks on and on, his blood sprinkling the stairs. The ground grows smaller below him. His body is cold, faint, distant.

  I have lived as a wounded animal, he thinks, seeking to inflict my pain on the world.

  He grips the spear tight in his left hand as he hobbles up the stairs.

  I thought my pain was a power of its own, he thinks. What awful foolishness this was.

  More stairs, more and more.

  Will I let the same thing happen to Taty? Will I let her make my mistakes all over again, before my very eyes?

  Then he sees it.

  Himself, not yet seventeen. And in his arms, an infant child.

  Young, tiny, perfect, frowning in discomfort.

  This younger Sigrud lowers his head
to the infant’s ear, and whispers: “Signe. That’s your name. Signe. But I wonder—who will you be?”

  Sigrud shuts his eye as he tries to move past this moment. Then his toe catches the edge of a stair, and he stumbles.

  He crashes to the stairs, the spear falling from his grasp. His breast howls with pain. Everything hurts, every piece of him is torment, and though he tries he can’t push himself back up.

  Sigrud sobs, weary and miserable. “I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t do it. I can’t.”

  He shuts his eye, knowing that he’s failed, knowing what it means. The world will not simply vanish—it will be as if it never was.

  He opens his eye to see it coming, to see the world dissolve and the abyss take him. And he sees he is not alone.

  There is someone standing on the stairs above him.

  Sigrud looks up.

  It is a woman, mid-thirties, dressed in leather boots and a sealskin coat. On the breast of this coat is an insignia—the insignia of the Southern Dreyling Company, accompanied by a small gear. The woman looks down on him, her blond hair bright in the light of the figure above her, her blue eyes passionate behind her glasses.

  She says something. Sigrud is now so faint he can’t hear what she says. But he can see it’s three words, and he knows they’re words she spoke to him long ago, when she declared her life’s purpose to him, a bold statement of grim, determined hope:

  One big push.

  Sigrud nods, weeping. “All right,” he says. “All right.”

  He gathers himself, rolls over once more. Then he works his left hand into position and pushes himself back up onto his knees. He reaches down and grasps the shaft of the spear, which luckily has not fallen the rest of the way down. Then he hauls himself back up to his feet, one last time.

  One step more. Then another, and another.

  In each moment, I thought of what I’d lost, he thinks.

  Another step, another.

  Of what was done to me, and how to inflict my own justice on this world.

  Another, another, another.

  But I know better now, here at the end.

  And then finally, he comes to her.

  The woman who hangs in the air has the look of Tatyana Komayd to her, and a dash of Malwina Gogacz: there is the small nose, the weak chin, the pugnacious mouth. She floats about twenty feet past the edge of the staircase, her hands lifted, her eyes turned to the heavens. Her eyes shine brightly, their pure white luminescence lancing up past the top of the tower. Yet her face is twisted in sorrow and grief, and her cheeks are wet with tears: a creature, however Divine, overwhelmed with despair.

  He knows that look. He looked the same way when he lost his father, his family, his daughter, his friend.

  And then he understands: it’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.

  He looks at the goddess, and sees only the young girl who stared up at the moon a few nights ago, and declared the dead a mystery to her.

  “Death is no place to look for meaning, Taty,” he says to her. He tosses the spear away, letting it roll down the stairs. He slowly walks back along the stairs, until he backs up to the wall of the tower. “You told me that.”

  He looks at the gap. Twenty feet from the stairs to her. Can he make it? Even in such an injured state?

  I will have to.

  He crouches down, positions his feet, readies himself.

  “I will remind you,” he whispers.

  He runs along the step, a hobbling, drunken, halting run, but still fast, still strong.

  Sigrud comes to the edge.

  He leaps.

  He soars out, arm extended, the frozen city of Bulikov below him, the endless dark tower stretching above.

  He flies to her, reaches out, touches her shoulder, grabs her and holds her close, and then…

  All the moments crash in around him.

  Sigrud sits upon a white plane.

  The plane is vast and never-ending, and though he doesn’t understand it, he knows the plane stretches in all directions, all at once. Yet still, he sits upon it, nude and cross-legged, his scarred, bruised, wounded body bared to the light that seems to come from all directions.

  Something shifts around him. He realizes that this plane, this place, exists in the palm of someone’s hand—someone inconceivably vast.

  “HOW DARE YOU,” says a voice.

  Things keep shifting. And then she raises him up to her eyes.

  Sigrud sees the goddess before him, holding him before her gaze, all of time swirling in her grasp. Her eyes are filled with dying suns and the howl of a thousand storms, with a thousand raindrops falling upon a thousand leaves, a thousand whispered words and a thousand laughs and a thousand tears.

  Her face twists in naked fury. “HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT ME,” says the goddess. “HOW DARE YOU DEFY TIME.”

  Sigrud looks at the goddess, and blinks slowly. “I do not defy it,” he says. “I am simply fulfilling a promise I made to a young girl not that long ago.”

  “I AM NO LONGER SHE,” thunders the goddess. “I AM MUCH, MUCH MORE THAN SHE EVER WAS, THAN SHE EVER COULD BE.”

  “And yet,” says Sigrud, “she was far wiser than you are now.”

  The goddess stares at him, outraged. “YOU KNOW NOTHING OF WHAT YOU SPEAK. I WILL REMAKE TIME, REMAKE THE WORLD. I WILL MAKE A JUST WORLD, A MORAL WORLD, A WORLD FREE OF VIOLATIONS AND WRONGS AND PUNISHMENTS.”

  “Tatyana,” says Sigrud softly, “Malwina…How many times have we been here before?”

  “THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. NEVER HAS TIME AWOKEN. NEVER HAS TIME ITSELF REFORGED CREATION.”

  “Perhaps not,” says Sigrud. “But how many times has one person performed an unspeakable atrocity, all in the name of making the world better? The Divinities, the Kaj, Vinya, Nokov…And now you? Will you join their ranks?”

  “I AM FAR MORE POWERFUL THAN THEY EVER WERE!” shouts the goddess. “I WILL DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME!”

  “I am sure they said the same.”

  “YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS,” she says.

  “You are wrong,” says Sigrud. “I have done the same. I have done what you are about to do.”

  The goddess hesitates, confused.

  “When my daughter died,” Sigrud says quietly, “I was filled with fury and grief, and I killed those soldiers. It felt righteous. It felt just. But it was monstrous, beyond monstrous. For all my righteousness, I made the world worse.”

  “PERHAPS THEY DESERVED IT,” says the goddess. “OR PERHAPS THEY DIDN’T. THAT IS BUT ONE OF MANY SINS THAT I WILL RIGHT. I WILL MAKE A WORLD WHERE WE GET WHAT IS JUST, WHAT WE DESERVE.”

  “You cannot,” says Sigrud. “You are as powerless as I was. The world is written upon your heart just as it is mine. Pick up all the weapons of all realities and use them all as best you can, Taty, but you cannot inflict virtue on the world. You cannot.”

  The goddess stares at him. “YOU WHO HAVE SUFFERED. YOU WHO HAVE BEEN WRONGED AND VIOLATED. YOU WHO HAVE KILLED AND MURDERED AND MADE WAR UPON THIS WORLD. YOU SAY NOW THAT THERE IS NO JUSTICE?”

  “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this. And I should know. I lost precious things in my life. I suffered. And I thought that suffering made me righteous. But I was wrong, Taty. I tried to teach you this. But how could I teach you this if I had not learned these lessons myself?” He bows his head. “I…I saw my life laid out upon the stairs,” he whispers. “I gave so many of my own years to wrath, and I stole so many years from other people. How selfish I was. How many wonders I ignored….If only I had looked beyond my pain. If only I had laid aside my torment, and chosen to live anew. But I did not, and I lost so much. Yet you will lose so, so much more if you do this.”

  The goddess hesitates. He can see it in her face, just a flash of it—a look reminiscent of one he saw on Taty’s face, and Malwina’s: of anguish, of sorrow, and yet the desire to d
o right.

  “Tatyana, Malwina,” he says. “Let go of your embers, before you are burned too deeply.”

  “I WANT TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT,” she says.

  “Shara Komayd once had this chance,” says Sigrud. “A chance to draw from her pain, and force her will upon the world. She chose instead to give people the tools to make their own worlds better. She lived, and died, to do this. I know she taught you this, Tatyana Komayd. And I know you do not wish to lose what she taught you.”

  The goddess looks away, thinking. She trembles. “I…I JUST WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN THERE FOR HER,” she says.

  “I know,” Sigrud says.

  “I WISH I COULD HAVE SAID GOOD-BYE,” she says.

  “I know,” says Sigrud. “I know. I know, I know, I know.”

  The goddess raises her other hand, and things begin to change.

  The vast white plane begins to blur and whirl and shift, collapsing in on the point just above the palm of her hand. As it does, the goddess transforms: she is no longer the tall, towering being adorned with all moments of all things. She shrinks, she grows younger, imperfect, until finally she is a small Continental girl who is not quite Malwina Gogacz, and not quite Tatyana Komayd either.

  The white plane collapses until it is a bright, bright star in her palm. She looks at him, her eyes full of tears, and looks at the star.

  “I don’t want this,” she says quietly. “I don’t want to be this anymore.” She lifts the star to her lips and gives a tiny puff.

  The star dissolves like the seeds of a dandelion and goes dancing through the air, all these tiny, soft lights scattered to the winds.

  The girl bows her head and bursts into tears. “I miss her, Sigrud,” she says. “I miss her so much.”

  Sigrud says, “I know.”

  Everything vanishes.

  Sigrud falls.

  He’s falling, but not at the speed of someone tumbling through the air: rather, he senses he’s being carefully lowered.

  He opens his eye.

  The girl—Taty? Malwina? He’s not sure—holds him in her arms as if he were a child. Together they slowly float down to earth, and as they do the black tower unravels around them, dissipating and dissolving.