The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  This appeal to his vanity appears to appease him some. “How long?”

  “Hopefully not long at all. The sooner I can get this done, the sooner you can return to your work, without your guards.”

  “I…Wait, what guards?”

  Shara stirs her tea. “Bodyguards. The Saypuri detail I’m going to assign to you.”

  Vohannes stares at her and laughs. “You…You can’t put me under guard. That’s ridiculous!”

  “I can. You’ll still be perfectly free to do as you like, to an extent. They’ll just be watching over you.”

  “Do you know how terrible this will look? Me going about town with a bunch of armed Saypuris in tow?”

  “I thought we just discussed that you shouldn’t be going about town at all,” says Shara. “You will be a moderately private citizen, for a period of time, and a safe one, if I have my way. But you can shorten that period of time…if you do something for me.”

  “Oh my goodness…” Vohannes rubs his eyes. “Something you need doing? Is this how the Ministry always manages to get what it wants?”

  “Sixteen people are dead, Vo. Including some of your household staff. I’m taking this seriously. And so should you.”

  “I am taking this seriously. You’re the one telling me to do nothing!”

  “Not nothing. There’s something being stored in a safety deposit box at a bank. I’m not sure what it is, but I know I need it.”

  “And you want me to get it?”

  She nods.

  “How do you expect me to do that? Am I to don all black and infiltrate this place in the middle of the night? I would have thought you’d have people for this.”

  “I expected you’d come up with an easier way than that. Primarily because you own the bank.”

  Vohannes blinks. “I…I do?”

  “Yes.” Shara hands him a copy of Pangyui’s decoded message.

  He examines it. “Are you sure I own it? Its name doesn’t ring a bell….”

  “It must be so nice,” says Shara, “to be so wealthy one is uncertain of which institutions one does and does not own. But yes. I have confirmed that you personally own this bank. If you could find some manner or excuse to retrieve the contents of that box, and deliver it to me, then it may help us figure this all out. Which means I would no longer have to have you under guard, and you could return to business as normal.”

  Vohannes grumbles something about a violation of his rights, then folds up the address and angrily stuffs it in his pocket. He stands up and says, “If you’re my ally, I expect you to act like it.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “You said yourself, we want the same thing: a peaceful, prosperous Bulikov. Don’t we?”

  Shara instantly regrets this—for she knows the Ministry of Foreign Affairs desires no such thing.

  “Work with me,” he says. “Help me.”

  “Is this about how you want to start making munitions?”

  “I am talking about increased Saypuri engagement with Bulikov,” he says. “Real engagement. Real aid. Not this subterfuge. Right now, we are given but a trickle of water, when we need a flood to wash all this stagnancy away. Flex your muscles, Shara. Give me genuine political support.”

  “We can’t possibly voice support for a local politician. Maybe one day, but not right now. The circumstances—”

  “The circumstances will never be right,” says Vohannes, “because this will always be hard.”

  “Vo…”

  “Shara, my city and my country are desperately, desperately poor, and I genuinely think they are on a path that can only end in violence. I am offering you an opportunity to try and help us, and put us on a different path.”

  “I cannot accept it,” says Shara. “Not now, Vo. I’m sorry. Maybe one day soon.”

  “No. You don’t believe that. You’re not an agent of change, Shara. You don’t make the world better—you work to keep things how they are. The Restorationists look to the past, Saypur wishes to maintain the present, but no one considers the future.”

  “I am sorry,” she says. “But I cannot help you.”

  “No, you aren’t sorry. You are a representative of your country. And countries do not feel sorrow.” He turns and limps away.

  * * *

  —

  Shara stands in front of the window again. Dawn is now in full riot across the roofs of Bulikov, giving a golden streak to all the wandering columns of chimney smoke. She takes a deep sip of tea. An import, she thinks. Maybe made in Ghaladesh. She wonders, briefly, if she is not addicted to the tea’s caffeine so much as the taste and scent of home, so far away.

  She opens the window—wincing at the blast of cold air—shuts the shutters outside, then shuts the window.

  She licks her finger, hesitates, and begins to write on the glass.

  Why do I always do this, she thinks, when I’m at my most vulnerable?

  Slowly, the shadows shift. The air gains a curious new current. Somewhere in the room, in some invisible manner, a door opens to somewhere else. And there in the glass, she sees…

  An empty office.

  Shara sits to wait.

  Twenty minutes later Vinya Komayd arrives, holding many papers and clad in what she personally refers to as her “battle armor”: a bright red, highly expensive dress that is both attractive and tremendously imposing. It has always possessed the odd property of making Vinya the undeniable center of any room. When Vinya spotted the dress in a store, she purchased five of them, then arranged it so the entire line was permanently removed from shelves. I could never trust such a dress to anyone else, she remarked when she told Shara. It’s much too dangerous.

  “Important meeting?” asks Shara.

  Auntie Vinya looks up and frowns. “No,” she says, slightly irritated. “But important people were there. Why are you calling on the emergency line? If you’ve found something, send it through the normal channels.”

  “We have sixteen dead,” says Shara. “Continentals. They were killed in an attack on a Bulikovian political figure—a City Father. Who survived.”

  Vinya pauses. She looks at the piece of paper in her hand—work that obviously needs to get done, and soon—and sighs and lays it aside. She walks over to sit before the pane of glass and asks, “How?”

  “They opted to attack during a social occasion. At which I was present.”

  Vinya rolls her eyes. “Ah. You and…what’s his name…”

  “Sigrud.”

  “Yes. How many dead?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “So he’s clocking in his normal rate, then. By all the damned seas, Shara, I’ve…I’ve no idea why you keep such a man on! We have trouble with the Dreylings every day! They’re pirates, my dear!”

  “They weren’t always. Not while their king was still alive.”

  “Ah, yes, their dead king they do so love to sing about…Him and their little lost prince, who’ll one day sail back to them. I expect they also sing all day while burning half the northern Continental coastline! I mean, you must admit, my dear, these people are savages!”

  “I think he’s proved his worth, last night and many other nights.”

  “Intelligence work is meant to avoid bloodshed, not generate it by the quart!”

  “And yet intelligence work is as susceptible to its environs as anything else,” says Shara. “We operate within a set of variables that we often cannot influence.”

  “I hate it when you quote me,” says Vinya. “All right. So what? So some bumpkins took a shot at an alderman, or whatever he is. That’s not news. That’s just your average day of the week. Why would you contact me?”

  “Because I am convinced,” says Shara, “that there is some connection to Pangyui.”

  Vinya freezes. She looks away, then slowly looks back. “What?”r />
  “I suspect,” says Shara, “that Pangyui’s death was probably part of a reactionary movement here, meant to rebuke Saypur’s influence and return the Continent—or at least Bulikov—to its former glory.”

  Vinya sits in silence. Then: “And how would you have determined that?”

  “He was being watched,” says Shara. “And I suspect that he was being watched by agents of this reactionary movement.”

  “You suspect?”

  “I would say I deem it terribly likely. Specifically—though I cannot confirm yet—I think his death is probably related to their discovery of exactly what he was doing here. Which was not a mission of cultural understanding, as they were told.”

  Vinya sighs and massages the sides of her neck. “Ah. So.”

  Shara nods. “So.”

  “You found out about his little…historical expedition.”

  “So you do know about the Warehouse?”

  “Of course I know about the Warehouse!” Vinya snaps. “It’s why he went there, of course!”

  “You signed off on this?”

  Vinya rolls her eyes.

  “Oh. So you planned this.”

  “Of course I planned this, darling. But it was Efrem’s idea. It was just one I had a very specific interest in.”

  “And what was this idea?”

  “Oh, well, I’m sure that you being the Divine expert that you are, you probably know all about it….Or you would, if Efrem had been allowed to publish it. His idea was not, as one says in the parlance of our era, approved. And it is still a highly dangerous idea.”

  “And what idea was this?”

  “We don’t talk much about the Divine over here—we like for such things to stay dead, naturally—but when we do, we, like the Continent itself, assume that it was a top-down relationship: the Divinities stood at the top of the chain, and they told the Continentals and, well, the world, what to do, and everything obeyed. Reality obeyed.”

  “So?”

  “So,” she says slowly, “over the course of his career, Efrem quietly became less convinced this was the case. He believed there was a lot more subtle give-and-take going on in the relationship than anyone imagined. The Divinities projected their own worlds, their own realities, which our historians have more or less surmised from all the conflicting creation stories, and afterlife stories, and static and whatnot.” She waves her hand, eager to cycle through all the minutiae.

  “Of course,” says Shara—for this is a topic well-known to her.

  One of the Continent’s biggest problems with having six Divinities were the many, many conflicting mythologies: for example, how could the world be a burning, golden coal pulled from the fires of Olvos’s own heart while also being a stone hacked by Kolkan from a mountain behind the setting sun? And how could one’s soul, after death, flit away to join Jukov’s flock of brown starlings, while also flowing down the river of death to wash ashore in Ahanas’s garden, where it would grow into an orchid? All Divinities were very clear about such things, but none of them agreed with one another.

  It took Saypuri historians a long while to figure out how all this had worked for the Continent. They made no progress until someone pointed out that the discordant mythologies mostly appeared to be geographical: people physically near a Divinity recorded history in strict agreement with that Divinity’s mythology. Once historians started mapping out the recorded histories, they found the borders were shockingly distinct: you could see almost exactly where one Divinity’s influence stopped and another’s began. And, the historians were forced to assume, if you were within that sphere or penumbra of influence, you essentially existed in a different reality where everything that specific Divinity claimed was true was indisputably true.

  So, were you within Voortya’s territory, then the world was made from the bones of an army she slew in a field of ice in the sky.

  Yet if you traveled to be near Ahanas, then the world was a seed she’d rescued from the river mud, and watered with her tears.

  And still if you traveled to be near Taalhavras, then the world was a machine he had built from the celestial fundament, designed and crafted over thousands of years. And so on and so forth.

  What the Divinities felt was true was true in these places. And when the Kaj killed them, all those things stopped being true.

  The final piece of evidence supporting this theory was the “reality static” that appeared directly after the Kaj successfully killed four of the six original Divinities: the world apparently “remembered” that parts of it once existed in different realities, and had trouble reassembling itself. Saypuri soldiers recorded seeing rivers that flowed into the sky, silver that would turn to lead if you carried it through a certain place, trees that would bloom and die several times over in one day, and fertile lands that turned into cracked wastelands if you stood in one exact spot, yet instantly restore themselves once you’d left it. Eventually, however, the world more or less sorted itself out, and instances of reality static all but vanished from the Continent—leaving the world not ruined, but not quite whole, either.

  Vinya continues: “Efrem believed that the mortal agents and followers of these Divinities had possessed some hand in shaping these realities. He was never sure how, though, because he never had access to the correct historical resources. Dangerous historical resources.”

  “Which were all in the Warehouse.”

  “Exactly. He actually wrote and submitted a paper about this theory, which promptly got sent to me, as this sort of thing is very much looked down upon. I think they expected I’d imprison him, or exile him, or something.”

  “But instead you gave him exactly what he wanted. Why?”

  “Well, think about it, Shara,” says Vinya. “Saypur is now the strongest nation in the world. Our might is undeniable. Nothing in the world even feigns to threaten us. Except…we know that Divinities once existed. And though they were killed, we do not understand what they were, or how they did what they did, where they came from, or even how the Kaj killed them.”

  “You’re thinking of them as weapons.”

  Vinya shrugs. “Maybe so. Imagine it—if a Divinity wished a land to be bathed in fire, it would be bathed in fire. They would be, in a way, a weapon that would end modern warfare as we know it. No more armies. No more navies. No more soldiers of any kind—just casualties.”

  Shara feels a cold horror growing in her belly. “And you wished…to produce one of these for Saypur?”

  Vinya laughs. “Oh, my goodness, no. No, no, no. I am quite happy where I am. I would be insane to invite in something that would wield—how shall I put this?—a greater authority than my own. What I would wish would be to prevent anyone else from getting one. That…That is something that has kept me and many a Saypuri up at night. If Efrem could answer exactly where the gods came from, and how they worked, then we could actively prevent them from recurring. And if he just happened to find some information about the Kaj’s weaponry—about which we to this day still know absolutely nothing—that would help me sleep a little better, too.”

  “Knowing how to kill a god would help you sleep better?”

  A flippant shrug. “Such are the burdens of power,” says Vinya. “Efrem was a little less eager to explore this avenue—I think it bored him, to be frank—but anything would be better than what we know now.”

  “And we would…Well. We would know why we were denied, too,” says Shara.

  Vinya pauses, and slowly nods. “Yes. We would finally know.” Neither of them says any more on the topic, but they do not need to: while no Saypuri can go a day without thinking of how their ancestors lived in abysmal slavery, neither can they go an hour without wondering why. Why were they denied a god? Why was the Continent blessed with protectors, with power, with tools and privileges that were never extended to Saypur? How could such a tremendous inequality be allowed? And while Sa
ypuris may seem to the world to be a small, curious people of education and wealth, anyone who spends any time in Saypur soon comes to understand that in their hearts lives a cold rage that lends them a cruelty one would never expect. They call us godless, Saypuris occasionally say to one another, as if we had a choice.

  “So we dressed it up as an act of diplomacy,” says Vinya. “An effort to heal the gulf between our nation and theirs. We only wanted to peruse the books in the Warehouse. That’s all. I…I honestly never thought Efrem was in any danger. We assumed Bulikov would continue being Bulikov—all squalor and filth—and he could simply go about his business.”

  Shara pauses, wondering how to broach the most obvious question. “And…I’m curious,” she says slowly. “Why did you not tell me about this when I first came to Bulikov?”

  Vinya sniffs and sits up. But for one second her dark eyes skitter and dance as she considers how to answer.

  Shara leans forward slightly and watches her aunt carefully.

  “This was a highly, highly restricted project,” pronounces Vinya. Still her eyes search the bottom of the pane before wandering up to find Shara’s face. “If you had caught someone, good on you. If not, we would have pursued the matter through different channels.”

  Vinya smiles haughtily.

  Lying, screams Shara’s mind. She’s lying! Lying, lying, lying, lying!

  In that instant, Shara decides not to tell her aunt what she witnessed in the jail cell. It goes against every line of reasoning she can imagine—Vinya wishes to know how to destroy any new Divinity, so of course she’d want to know Shara has actually encountered such a being—but Shara feels something is very, very, very wrong. She knows she should discount her own paranoia, of course—Paranoia of one’s case officers and commanders, as she’s told her own sources, is a perfectly natural feeling—but her aunt has not been her normal shrewd self recently, and now every instinct Shara has is shouting that Vinya is lying. And after nearly seventeen years of interviews and interrogations, she’s learned to trust her instincts.