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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “This is not fine dining. I can only taste tobacco, for the gods’ sakes….”

  Silence. A throaty laugh from the next room contorts into emphysematous coughing.

  “Bringing me back won’t make us happy,” says Shara.

  Vohannes, stung, sits back in his chair and stares into his glass.

  “I’m not who I was,” she says, “and you aren’t who you were.”

  “Why must everything be so awkward,” he says, sulky.

  “You’re engaged.”

  “Oh, yes, engaged.” He raises his hands, drops them: And what does that mean? “We’re a very merry couple. We carouse a lot. Make the papers.”

  “But you don’t love her?”

  “Some people need love in their lives. Others, not so much. It’s like buying a house: ‘Do you want a central fireplace? Do you want windows in your bedroom? Do you want love?’ It’s not part of my necessary package.”

  “I don’t think that’s true of you.”

  “Well, it’s not like I have a choice,” he snarls. “Have…Have you seen those men in the booths when you walked in? Can you imagine what they would…?” Again, he fights for composure. “I’m dirtier than you know, Shara.”

  “You don’t know dirty.”

  “You don’t know me.” He stares at her. His cheeks tremble. One tear quivers at the inner corner of his right eye. “I can give you Wiclov. He deserves it. Take him. Take him and burn him.”

  “I’m sad to see you so happy to persecute Kolkashtanis.”

  He laughs blackly. “Don’t they deserve it? I mean, my own damn family…You want to talk about persecution, why don’t you talk to the people who did so with zeal for hundreds of years, even without their damn”—he glances around, lowers his voice—“god?”

  “Aren’t they still your people, the very ones you want to help? Do you really want to reform Bulikov, Vo, or burn it to the ground?”

  Vohannes is so struck by this he cannot speak for a moment.

  “Your family was Kolkashtani?” asks Shara quietly.

  He nods.

  “You never told me.”

  His skin grows pale and papery again. His brow wrinkles as he considers it. “No,” he says. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t feel like I needed to—most of Bulikov was Kolkashtani back then. Still is. Lots of the Continent still is. They got used, I suppose, to living without a Divinity. After the Kaj and the War, the transition was just so much easier for Kolkashtanis than anyone else….” He pours off the rest of one bottle of wine, one of his rings making a chipper tink tink tink as he taps out the last drops. “My father was a rich Kolkashtani, so that was even worse. To most Kolkashtanis, you show up to the world with plenty to be ashamed of—born in shame—but to the rich ones, you show up poor, too. Just one more thing to be ashamed of, y’see. Strict man. If we did anything wrong, we had to go and cut a switch”—he extends his index—“the size of our finger for him to beat us with. If we picked one too small, then he got to choose for us. And though he was a stingy man in life, he was never so stingy with his switches….” A glug of wine. “My brother loved him. They loved each other, I suppose I should say. Maybe it was just because Volka was older—father always had a grudge against children for having the insolence to not act like reasonable adults. And when my father died, my brother never forgave…Well. Everything. The world. Saypur, especially—since we Continentals assumed the Plague was a Saypuri invention. Turned into something like a monk, he joined up with a group of pilgrims when he was fifteen and went on a trek to the icy north to try and find some damn temple. Left me with a bunch of nannies and servants when I was nine years old. And Volka never came back. I got news years later that the whole bunch of them died. Froze to death. Expecting a miracle”—Vohannes lifts his wineglass to his lips—“that never came. Maybe I want to ruin Wiclov, sure. Perhaps he’s an obstacle to the future of the Continent—for I don’t see him ever wishing to see a bright new future, but rather the dead, dull, dusty past. Either way, I wouldn’t shed a tear to see him go.”

  Shara shuts her eyes. How easily, she thinks, my corruption spreads. “If you offer me it again, I’ll have to take it.”

  “Do it, Shara. If this is what you do for a living, I’d love to see you do it to him.”

  Shara opens her eyes. “Fine. I will. I presume the contents of the safety deposit box are in the other suitcase?”

  “You presume correctly.” He picks it up, slams it down on the table, and starts to open it.

  “No, no,” says Shara. “Don’t.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I…made an unfortunate promise.” And Aunt Vinya remembers what promises are made to her…and which ones are broken. She wonders if she is willing to disobey her aunt and crack the suitcase open. To do so, she feels, could bring hells shrieking down on her, especially after Vinya’s threat. A last resort, then, she thinks, wondering if this is how fools rationalize their poor choices. “If you can just give me the suitcase, the Ministry would be more than happy to reimburse you.”

  “You want me to just give you the suitcase?” Vohannes is agog at the idea. “But this luggage is worth a fortune!”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know….I didn’t buy them. I have people for that.” He grumbles and inspects the suitcases. “It ought to be worth a fortune….”

  “Send us an invoice, and we’ll compensate you accordingly.” She slides one suitcase off the table. It is only mildly heavy. Paper? she thinks feverishly. Books? Some artifact? Then she takes the other suitcase from Vo. She stands, a suitcase in either hand, and feels quite absurd, like she is about to depart for a relaxing vacation at the beach.

  “Why is it,” says Vohannes as he walks her to the door, “that whenever we finish our business, it feels like neither of us got what we wanted?”

  “Perhaps we conduct the wrong sort of business.”

  * * *

  —

  Escaping the air of the club is like swimming up from the depths of the sea. I shall have to throw these clothes away, she thinks. The very fabric has been poisoned….

  “Oh,” says a voice. “Is it…Miss Thivani?”

  Shara looks up, and her heart plummets. Sitting in the back of a long, expensive white car is Ivanya Restroyka, face as pale as snow, lips painted bright, bloody red. She looks somehow more colorless than when Shara saw her last, at Vohannes’s party. One curl of black hair escapes her fur hat to curl across her brow and behind her ear. Yet despite these carefully cultivated features, she stares at Shara with a look of unabashed shock.

  “Oh,” says Shara. “Hello, Miss Restroyka.”

  Ivanya’s dark eyes slide to the club door and dim with disappointment. “So. You were the one he was meeting tonight.”

  “Yes.” Think quickly now. “He was making some business introductions for me.” Shara slowly walks to the car window. “He has a lot of business he wishes to drum up with Saypur. It was very good of him to do.” A good lie: serviceable, sound, maybe one-sixth true.

  “At this club. The most old guard of any club in Bulikov.”

  “I suppose, as they say, times are changing.”

  Ivanya glances at the white suitcases and nods, obviously disbelieving. “You knew him once, didn’t you?”

  Shara pauses. “Not really, no.”

  “Mm. Might I ask you something of you, Miss Thivani?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Please…be careful with him.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “For all his bravado, for all his bluster, he’s so much more fragile than you think.”

  “What do you…?”

  “Did he tell you he broke his hip falling down the stairs?” She shakes her head. “He was at a club. But not a club quite like this. It was a club where men went to meet men, I suppose you could say, but…there the sim
ilarities end.”

  Shara feels her heart beat faster. I knew all this already. But why does it surprise me so?

  “The police raided the club the night he was there,” says Ivanya. “Bulikov, as you probably know, has never really given up many of its Kolkashtani inclinations. Such…practices are terribly illegal. And they were quite brutal with the people they caught. He almost died. Hips are quite difficult things to fix, you see.” She smiles sadly. “But he never learns. That’s why he got into politics. He wanted to change things. It was, after all, Ernst Wiclov who ordered the raid.”

  A flock of drunken men exit the club, laughing. Smoke clings to their collars in a lover’s embrace.

  “Why are you with him?” asks Shara.

  “Because I love him,” says Ivanya. She sighs sadly. “I love him, and I love what he is, and what he wants to do. And I wish to look out for him. I hope you want to do the same.”

  Headlights splash over the long white car. Shara hears Pitry’s voice calling her name from the embassy car. The door of the club opens, and Vohannes emerges, his white fur coat gleaming in the light of the lampposts.

  Ivanya smiles. “Farewell, Miss Thivani. I wish you a good evening.”

  * * *

  —

  Shara still remembers the day: long ago, toward the end of the second semester of her second year at Fadhuri, when she was walking up his building’s stairs and Rooshni Sidthuri came rushing down them. She said hello, but Rooshni—mussed, sweating—said nothing back. And when she went into Vo’s room, and saw him sitting shirtless in his desk chair, feet up on the windowsill and hands behind his head, for some reason warning bells went off in her mind—for he only ever seemed to do that after making love.

  As they talked—innocuously enough—she sidled over to the bed. Felt the sheets.

  How damp they’d been, and in one spot—right where the hips and waist would be, were you to lie upon it—just positively drenched.

  How young Rooshni had hurried, as if the building were burning down….

  She did not confront him then. But she began to watch. (This is what I’ve always been, she’d think, much later. Someone who does not intervene in her own life, but only watches, and works behind the scenes.) She watched how Vo seemed to spend so much time with young men, the way he embraced them. She watched the way he watched them, the way his posture grew more languid, relaxed around them.

  Does he even know it? she wondered then. Do I?

  And one day she could bear it no more, and she quietly walked into his apartments while he and—she cannot even remember the boy’s name now, Roy something or other—moved so slowly and so gently against one another in the very bed where Vo had whispered how much he loved her in her ear not more than two days before.

  The look on their faces when she cleared her throat. The boy, hustling out the door. Vo, screaming in rage at her, while she stood silent.

  He’d wanted her to scream back at him. She could tell. But she would not give him that. This was not a fight. She was not complicit in what he’d done. She could not imagine a purer betrayal.

  The worst of it was how much the boy had looked like her. Shara had never and would never possess a particularly feminine form: she had, she thought, a boy’s body, all shoulders and no hips, and certainly no breasts. Was I just a substitute? she thought afterward. A way to fabricate forbidden love without ever doing anything forbidden? And if so, she was still inadequate, unable to capture the essence of the real thing.

  He begged her to say something, to respond to him, to fight back. But she did not. She walked out of his apartment and, more or less, out of his life for the remainder of their school careers.

  (She is still somewhat proud of this: how tranquil she was, how cold, how maintained. And yet she is also ashamed: Was she so shocked, so cowardly, so withdrawn that she could not even allow herself to shout at him?)

  She threw herself into schoolwork, suddenly inflamed with a sense of patriotic discipline. He approached her after his graduation, months later, packed and ready for the train trip to the docks, and on to Bulikov. He begged her to come with him, begged her to help him be the man he so dearly wished to be. He tried to bribe her, spin a storybook lie, told her she could be a princess back in his home, if she wished. And Shara, all ice, all cold steel, had hurt him as best she could—What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that—before she shut the door in his face.

  One day you’ll know, her Auntie Vinya told her. And understand. You’ll figure yourself out. And things will be all right.

  One of the few times, Shara often reflects, that Auntie Vinya was quite terribly and completely wrong.

  When I entered the hills near Jukoshtan I felt quite terribly afraid. The moon was yellow-brown, like a tea stain. The hills were stark and white, with short, twisted trees. And the ground was so uneven that it always forced you down, walking the floors of the valleys, lost in darkness. Or so it felt.

  Sometimes I saw firelight flickering on the trunks of the twisted trees. There were cries in the dark: animals, or people pretending to be animals, or animals pretending to be people. Sometimes there were voices. “Come with us!” they whispered. “Come join our dance!”

  “No,” I said. “I am on an errand. I have a Burden. I must deliver my Burden to Jukov himself, and no one else.” And they laughed.

  How I wished I was back in Taalvashtan. How I wished I was home. I wished I had never taken this Burden from Saint Threvski. And yet, I was also curious—I do not know if it was the voices on the winds, or the sniggers from the trembling trees, or the light of the yellow moon, but Jukoshtan was a place of hidden things, of constant mystery, and I secretly wished to see more.

  I turned a corner and came to a valley filled with small skin huts. A bonfire roared in their center. People danced around the fire, shrieking and singing. I shrank up against a tree and watched, horrified, as people copulated frenziedly on the sandy ground.

  I heard someone step behind me. I turned, and saw an old man was standing on the path behind me, dressed in regal robes. His hair was braided and tied up to stand upon his head, as many respectful Taalvashtani gentlemen did then.

  He apologized for startling me. I asked him his business, and he said he was a trader from Bulikov. I could tell he thought me the same, from my Burden.

  “A savage bunch, are they not?” he asked.

  I told him I could not understand how they lived this way.

  “They believe themselves free,” he said. “But in truth, they are enslaved to their desires.”

  He told me his tent was nearby, and well hidden, and he offered me shelter in this strange place. He seemed a kind old thing, and I accepted, and followed him through the bent trees.

  As he walked he said, “I sometimes wish I was younger. For I am old, and not only am I frail of flesh, but I am bound by the many things I have been taught over the years. Sometimes I wish I had the courage to be so young, so loud, so unfettered and so unburdened.”

  I told him he should be proud of himself to have lived to such an age without indulging in corrupt impulses.

  “I am surprised,” he said. “A creature as young as you, and you are wholly uninterested in such forbidden wildness?”

  I told him I was repulsed by it—a lie, I knew.

  “Do you not wonder if slavery to one’s desires could, just a little, make you free?”

  I felt myself sweating. My Burden felt so heavy around my neck. I admitted that my thoughts sometimes strayed to forbidden places. And that tonight, they seemed to stray to such places more frequently.

  He turned sharply below the dark canopy of trees. I could no longer see him, but I followed his voice.

  “Jukoshtan, the city itself, is also a forbidden place, in a way,” said his voice from
ahead. “Did you know that?”

  I passed the old man’s robes, lying on the sandy ground—discarded, it seemed, as he walked.

  A flock of brown starlings took flight from the trees ahead, soaring up into the night sky.

  “It moves, shifts,” said his voice. “It dances through the hills.”

  I passed a wig, hanging from a tree—the old man’s braided hair.

  “It is never where one expects it to be,” said his voice.

  I passed a flap of cloth hanging from a bush. Yet it was not cloth, but a mask—a mask of the old man’s face.

  His voice floated through the trees: “Much like Jukov himself.”

  I entered a clearing. In the center was a low, long tent of animal skins. On the branch of every tree in the clearing sat a small brown starling, and each watched me with dark, cold eyes.

  I could see footprints leading up to the tent’s entrance. I followed them and stood before it.

  “Come inside,” whispered a voice, excited, “and lay down your Burden!”

  I hesitated. Temptation spoke to me. And I listened.

  As the starlings watched, I took off my robes and stepped out of my sandals. I shivered, naked, as I felt the cool wind on my skin. Then I stepped inside.

  This was how I came to know Jukov, Sky-Dancer, Face-Peddler, Lord of Song, Shepherd of Starlings. And before he ever touched me, I think I already loved him.

  —MEMOIRS OF SAINT KIVREY, PRIEST AND 78TH WIFE-HUSBAND OF JUKOV, C. 982

  SURVIVORS

  Mulaghesh runs.

  She runs over the frozen hills, through muddy roads, around dank forests. She runs though her breath burns in her chest and her legs protest with each step.

  At forty-eight, she knows she is about to be beyond the age when she can do this to herself. So I had better get my licks in now, she thinks, if I really want to do this. She likes running because it is the purest combat sport possible—the only thing you’re fighting is yourself, with every step. And it’s been so long since she really fought anyone (her still-dark eye aches a little with each footfall) that maybe this is the only kind of fighting she can do anymore.