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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Usina, traveler and wanderer, window-creeper and ash-woman. Beware the poor wretch you mistreat, for it may be Usina, and her vengeance is long and painful.

  And for those who cannot be purified, who will not repent, who will not know the shame that lives in all our hearts, there is Urav, sea-beast and river-swimmer, he of many teeth and the one bright eye, dweller of dark places. For those sinners who are blind to light, they will spend eternity within his belly, burning under his scornful gaze, until they understand and know my righteousness, my forgiveness, and my love.

  —THE KOLKASHTAVA, BOOK THREE

  YOU WILL KNOW PAIN

  Vod Drinsky sits on the banks of the Solda and tries to convince himself he is not as drunk as he feels. He has had most of a jug of plum wine, and he tells himself that if he was quite drunk then the wine would start to taste thick and sour, but so far the wine continues to taste quite terribly beautiful and sweet to his tongue. And he needs the wine to survive in the cold—why, look at how his breath frosts! Look at the huge ice floes in the Solda, the way the black water bubbles against the spots as thin and clear as glass! A cold night this is, so he thinks he should be forgiven his indulgence, yes?

  He looks east, toward the walls of Bulikov, huge white cliffs glimmering in the moonlight. He glowers at them and says, “I should!” A belch. “I should be forgiven.”

  As he watches, he realizes there is a queer, flickering orange light up the hill behind him.

  A fire. One of the warehouses in the complex up there is burning, it seems.

  “Oh, dear.” He scratches his head. Should he call someone? That seems, at the moment, to be a difficult prospect, so he takes another swig of wine, and sighs and says again, “Oh, dear.”

  A dark shadow appears at the chain-link fence around the warehouse complex. Something low and huge.

  A long, stridulous shriek. The dark shape surges against the chain link fence; the woven wires stretch and snap like harp strings.

  Something big comes rushing down the hillside. Vod assumes it is a bear. It must be a bear, because only a bear could be so big, so loud, panting and growling….Yet it sounds much, much larger than a bear.

  It comes to the tree line and leaps.

  Vod’s drunken eyes only see it for an instant. It is smoking—perhaps an escapee of the fire above. But through the smoke, he thinks he sees something thick and bulbous, something with many claws and tendrils gleaming in the moonlight.

  It strikes the river ice with a huge crack and plummets through into the dark waters below. Vod sees something shifting under the ice: now the thing looks long and flowing, like a beautiful, mossy flower blossom. With a graceful pump, it propels itself against the river current and toward the white walls of Bulikov. As it turns over, he sees a soft yellow light burning on its surface, a gentle phosphorescence that deeply disturbs him.

  The creature disappears downriver. He looks at the broken ice: it is at least two feet thick. Suggesting, then, that whatever leaped in was quite, quite heavy….

  Vod lifts his jug, sniffs at it, and peers into its mouth, unsure if he wishes to buy this brand again.

  * * *

  —

  Fivrei and Sohvrena sit under the Solda Bridge in a tiny shanty, nursing a weak lamp. It is an unusual time to fish on the Solda, but the two men know a secret few do: directly under the bridge, where the Solda is widest and deepest, dozens of trout congregate, presumably, as Fivrei claims, seeking food and warmth. “As far away from the wind as they can get,” he says each time he drops his black line into his tiny hole.

  “And they,” grumbles Sohvrena, “are wise.”

  “Do you complain? How many did you catch last night?”

  Sohvrena holds his mittened hands closer to the fire in the suspended brazier. “Six,” he admits.

  “And the night before that?”

  “Eight. But I must weigh the amount of fish I catch against the toes I lose.”

  “Pah,” says Fivrei. “A real fisherman must be made of sterner stuff. This is man’s work. It calls for a man.”

  But a man’s other work, thinks Sohvrena, lies in the soft, warm arms of a woman. Could he be unmanly for wishing he were there, rather than here?

  A soft tapping fills the shanty.

  “A catch?” asks Sohvrena.

  Fivrei inspects his tip-up, which is suspended over the six-inch hole in the ice; the white flag on the black line quivers slightly. “No,” he says. “Perhaps they play with it.”

  Then high-pitched squeaks join the tapping, like someone rubbing their hands against a pane of glass. Before Sohvrena can remark upon it, the flag on his own tip-up starts to dance. “The same here,” he says. “Not a catch, but it…moves.”

  Fivrei tugs his black line. “Maybe I am wro— Wait.” He tugs the line again. “It is caught on something.”

  Sohvrena watches the flag twitch on Fivrei’s tip-up. “Are you sure it’s not a catch?” asks Sohvrena.

  “It does not give. It’s like it’s caught on a rock. What is that intolerable squeaking?”

  “Maybe the wind?” Sohvrena, curious, tugs at his own line. It too does not give. “Mine is the same. Both of our lines are caught on something?” He shakes his head. “We had nothing on our lines a few minutes ago.”

  “Maybe flotsam is being washed downstream, and our lines are caught.”

  “Then why don’t our lines just break?” Sohvrena inspects the ice below them. Perhaps he is imagining things, but he imagines a soft yellow glow filtering through the frost in one spot.

  “What is that?” he says, pointing.

  Fivrei does a double take, and stares at the yellow light. “What is that?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  The two men look at it, then at each other.

  The fire in the brazier has melted away some snow on the ice; they stand and begin to clear away more with their feet, until the ice becomes more transparent.

  Fivrei gapes. “What on…? By the heavens, what is…?”

  Something is stuck to the opposite side of the ice, directly underneath them. Sohvrena is reminded of a starfish he once saw, brought back from the coast, but vastly huger, nearly thirty feet in diameter, and with many, many more arms, some of them wide, some of them thin and delicate. And in the center, a bright, glowing light, and a many-toothed mouth that sucks against the ice, its black gums squeaking.

  The taps and pops increase. Sohvrena looks up at the ends of the beast’s arms and sees many tiny claws scraping at the ice around them in a perfect circle.

  “Oh, no,” says Sohvrena.

  The light blinks twice. Sohvrena thinks, An eye. It’s an eye.

  With a great crack, the ice gives way below them, and a mouth ringed with a thousand teeth silently opens.

  * * *

  —

  The Vohskoveney Tea Shop always does a roaring trade whenever the weather dips; Magya Vohskoveney herself understands that it is not necessarily the quality of the tea that draws in customers—since she herself holds the opinion that her tea brewers are untalented clods—but between the endless flow of steaming water, the bubbling cauldrons, and the dozens of little gas lamps lit throughout her establishment, Magya’s tea shop is always churning with a sweltering humidity that would seem suffocating in normal weather, yet is downright inviting in the brutal dark of winter.

  The tea trade has rocketed on the Continent in the past decades: what was previously considered a distasteful Saypuri eccentricity has become much more appealing as the climate on the Continent grows colder and colder with each year. And there is the additional factor that Magya has discovered a mostly forgotten old bit of folk herbalism: teas brewed with a handful of poppy fruit tend to feel so much more…relaxing than other types of tea. And after implementing this secret recipe, Magya’s trade has quintupled.

  Magya
squints at the crowd from the kitchen door. Her customers cling to tables like refugees seeking shelter. Their hair curls and coils and glistens in the heat. The brass lamps cast prisms of ocher light on the soaking wood walls. The west windows, which normally look out on a scenic stretch of river, are so fogged over they look like toast with too much cream.

  One man at the bar paws his cup limply, blinking owlishly; Magya stops a waiter, nods at the man, says, “Too much,” and sends the boy on his way.

  “A good trade, for the hour,” says one of her servers, stopping to mop his brow.

  “Too good, in fact,” says Magya. “Everything is full but the second-floor balcony.”

  “How is that too good?”

  “We shan’t let greed overcome wisdom, my love.” Magya taps her chin, thinking. “No special batches for the next week.”

  Her server attempts to control his astonishment. “None?”

  “None. I’d prefer not to arouse any suspicion.”

  “But what will we say when people complain about the…the quality of the tea?”

  “We will say,” Magya answers, “that we have been forced to use a new type of barrel that’s affected the flavor. I don’t know, some Saypuri trade rule. They’ll believe that. And we’ll tell them we shall be rectifying the situation shortly.”

  Her server is rudely hailed by a couple at the bar, a middle-aged man with an arm thrown around a very giddy and curvy young woman. In my grandmother’s day, thinks Magya, such a public display would get you flogged. How times have changed….“Go on,” she says. “Give them something to fill their mouths, and shut them up.”

  Her server departs. Magya’s eye, always seeking trouble, finds something concerning on the upper balcony: one of the lights in her lamps has begun to flicker.

  She grunts, climbs the steps, and sees she is wrong: the lamp is not flickering, but it is jumping on its chain, hopping up and swishing about like a fish on a line.

  “What in the world…?” Magya looks up the chain to the beam it is attached to.

  She watches, awed, as the beam actually buckles up, as if something on the roof is pulling at it. There are even cracks in the plaster of the roof, which spread like fractures in ice bearing too much weight.

  Magya’s first instinct is to look to the window, but she remembers that the windows are opaque with condensation….Yet she sees she is mistaken again: something has partially wiped the condensation away from the outside of the west windows.

  But what could do that, thinks Magya, as we’re on the river, thirty feet up?

  She goes to the window, wipes away the inside moisture, and peers through the blurry glass.

  The first thing she sees is a single yellow light at the river shore below.

  The second thing she sees is something large, black, and glistening stuck to the wall of the shop, like a tree root covered in tar, yet it is uncoiling, adhering itself to more and more of the wall.

  And the third thing she sees is right in front of her: what appears to be a long, slender black finger rises up on the other side of the window, and the dark claw at its end reaches forward and delicately taps the glass once.

  “What…?” says Magya.

  Then a burst of thunder, a rain of plaster dust and wood shards, and the treasured humidity of the Vohskoveney Tea Shop goes ballooning up into the winter night sky in a roiling rush as its ceiling and upper wall are completely torn off.

  Magya blinks as the wind assails her. Most of her patrons are too stunned to scream, but some manage to find their throats. The lower wall follows suit, crumbing out onto the frozen river, pulling the second-floor balcony—and Magya Vohskoveney—with it.

  As Magya falls, she sees the same fate has befallen many of her customers. We shall be dashed on the ice, she thinks madly, like a handful of eggs. But in those unending seconds as she tumbles over and over, she sees the ice is not there: there is only the yellow light, the churning of many tentacles, and a quivering, many-toothed mouth juddering open.

  * * *

  —

  “I said I want every soldier available working to help those fire teams!” bellows Mulaghesh downstairs. “Make sure to stress that as much as you can in the telegram! And let the corporal know that if there is any reluctance on his part to put his soldiers to such work, then there will be dire consequences!”

  Shara winces in her office. Mulaghesh has completely taken over the embassy offices downstairs, commandeering every telegraph machine and posting troops at all entrances. Normally she would be doing this from her quarters, but the embassy was much closer. “Contact General Noor at Fort Sagresha,” Mulaghesh shouts. “He needs to be notified of this, and tell him we need all the support he can offer. Interrupt me as soon as you hear, even if I specifically say not to interrupt me!”

  Shara rubs her temples. “By the seas,” she mutters, “can the woman speak no other volume?” Shara is content to let Mulaghesh handle this disaster, and since this is technically Mulaghesh’s jurisdiction, Shara has plenty of reasons to stay out. But privately she wishes Mulaghesh and the rest of them would just leave.

  Sigrud sits in the corner of her office and sharpens his black knife. The skritch-skritch seems to grow until Shara’s head echoes with it.

  “Must you do that now?” she asks.

  Sigrud scrapes the knife a little softer. “You seem to be in a mood.”

  “I was nearly blown up tonight.”

  He shrugs and spits on the knife. “Not the first time.”

  “And we burned down hundreds of years of priceless history!” she hisses, not daring to shout it.

  “So?”

  “So I have…I have never experienced such a failure in my professional career! And I do not enjoy failure. I am unused to it.”

  The skritch-skritch slows as he thinks. “It is true that we have never encountered a mistake such as this.”

  “A mistake? Ever since we’ve set foot in Bulikov, we’ve done nothing but stumble!” She quaffs tea with the air of a sailor drinking whiskey.

  “I suppose it is good to get all of your mistakes out in one run.”

  “Your optimism,” says Shara, “is not appreciated. I almost regret coming here.”

  “Almost?”

  “Yes, almost. Because as…as shit-bedecked as this operation is, I still wouldn’t trust it to anyone else in the Ministry. Think what would happen if Komalta was here, or Yusuf!”

  “I didn’t even know those two were still alive. I would have thought they’d have gotten themselves killed by now.”

  “Exactly!” She stands up, walks to the window, and pushes it open. “I need air. My head is filling up with noise!” She breathes for a moment, listens, and rubs her eyes in exasperation. “Even the streets outside are screaming! Is there no quiet place in this whole damnable ci…” She trails off. “Wait, what time is it?”

  Sigrud joins her at the window. “Late. Too late for such noise.” He tilts his head. “And it is screaming. You were not exaggerating.”

  Shara surveys the dark streets of Bulikov. “What’s going on?”

  Another howl in the night. Someone comes sprinting down the street outside, shrieking incoherently.

  “I’ve no idea,” says Sigrud.

  Downstairs, Mulaghesh is angrily dictating a response to General Noor specifying that this was not a direct attack, because that would be an indictment of their security, but Noor should be responding as if it was a direct attack, as they need assistance immediately.

  Shara opens the window all the way. She hears a rumble toward the river. A cloud of white dust rises above the rooftops. “Did a building just collapse?” she asks.

  More people are running through the streets. Candles are lit in windows; doors are flung open. A man cries out, asking what’s wrong, over and over. Finally someone answers: “There’s something in the wat
er! Something in the water!”

  Shara looks to Sigrud, but can only say, “What?”

  Then a shout from downstairs: “Shara!” cries Mulaghesh’s voice. “There’s some idiot here to bother you!”

  Shara and Sigrud troop downstairs. Pitry stands in the entryway with a very nervous-looking Bulikov police officer.

  “A message from the Bulikov Police Department,” says Pitry, “for Ambassador Thivani from Captain Nesrhev.”

  “Get rid of this guy,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m drowning in enough shit as it is.”

  Shara fruitlessly searches for her inner calm. “What would be the issue?”

  The officer swallows, sweats. “Ah, w-we’re evacuating all homes and buildings near the river. The embassy’s a priority”—he says this as if to suggest, And I just had to get this duty—“so we need all of you outside, immediately.”

  Mulaghesh finishes another communication, then breaks away. “Wait, what the hells are you talking about? We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Well…Captain Nesrhev—”

  “Is a fine and good officer, but he can’t tell us to do a damn thing. This is Saypuri soil.”

  “We’re…quite aware of that, Governor, but it’s…it’s emphatically suggested that you and the ambassador evacuate.”

  “Why?” Shara asks.

  The officer’s sweating quintuples. “We’re…Well, we can’t quite say just yet.”

  “Would this have to do with what’s happening outside?” asks Shara.

  The officer reluctantly nods.

  “And what is happening outside?”

  The officer appears to debate telling them; then his shoulders slump like he’s about to make an embarrassing confession. “There’s…something in the Solda River,” he says. “Something big.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s…killing people. Snatching them off the banks.”

  Mulaghesh massages the center of her forehead. “Oh, by the seas…”