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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She isn’t the only one here: all along the narrow path she spies lovers, grumbling drunks, and tiny campsites crowded with silent, hollow-eyed men. She passes one old man leaning on a walking stick and staring out at the evening sky, and asks him what all these people are doing out here. He simply makes a wide gesture indicating the sea and the hills and returns to his silent watching.

  Lonely places draw lonely people, she thinks as she walks farther north, the fort on her right. They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.

  Mulaghesh keeps walking, past the tiny camps, past the couples lounging on their furs, past one man quietly sobbing in the shade of a tiny, leafless tree. She takes a deep sip of wine, tries to convince herself that it makes her feel warm, and keeps walking.

  Perhaps I am still plodding on in the Yellow March, she thinks. Me and Biswal, wearily holding the banner…

  She takes another sip of wine. Almost gone now. She doesn’t know where it came from, but she wishes she’d brought more.

  She almost speaks aloud the familiar refrain: Woresk, Moatar, Utusk, Tambovohar, Sarashtov, Shoveyn, Dzermir, and finally…

  “…finally Kauzir,” she finishes. The little town just outside the gates of Bulikov.

  She remembers the names of the towns still. She always will, she knows. They’re written on the inside of her skull. She’ll go to her grave still knowing them, even though the towns themselves no longer exist. For Yellow Company visited each one of them during the Summer of Black Rivers. And every home, every building, every farm, every single sign of civilization in each of these villages was put to the torch.

  She stares out to sea, remembering.

  * * *

  —

  Biswal told them over and over again it was to be a civilized, strategic procession. “We’re here to eliminate resources,” he told them. “No more. Burn the farms and the Continental front lines will grow weaker and weaker.”

  But it quickly became such a hard thing, executing a civilized war. The people in these villages did not evacuate quietly, no matter how much Yellow Company ordered them to. They did not simply watch as Yellow Company burned every last remnant of their lives. Rather, they fought: men, women, and children. And Yellow Company fought back.

  She remembers waiting, crouched in a wheatfield, the sights of her bolt-shot trained on a window in the second story of a farmhouse. Just below, on the ground, one of her soldiers lay bleeding, a small arrow sticking from his collarbone, one hand pawing at it, trying to pull it out. She waited, waited, and then in the window a figure appeared with a short bow.

  A girl. Maybe thirteen. Mulaghesh didn’t see, because her finger was already pulling the trigger, already sending eight inches of steel hurtling at the girl, who just…

  Dropped. As if she never were.

  She can’t remember what happened to the wounded soldier. Died, probably. A lot of them died, at first. Until somewhere around the town of Sarashtov, when Yellow Company stopped asking the Continentals to surrender and evacuate, stopped giving them warning at all. Too many of their own soldiers had been lost to a lucky farmer with an axe or a child with a bow and arrow. Yellow Company began simply sneaking in during the night, setting the thatched roofs alight, and rounding up the livestock in the ensuing chaos.

  Mulaghesh remembers the sight of a four-year-old child standing alone in a field at night, his face alight with firelight and glistening with tears, screaming for his mother. They marched on and left him there, perhaps to live, perhaps to die. Such a thing did not matter to them.

  Figures staggering from burning homes, their nightgowns ablaze, stumbling through the smoke like ravaged puppets. The screams of livestock as Yellow Company herded them through the streets to be slaughtered for their next meal. She remembers the monotonous butchery, killing those they couldn’t keep and leaving them to rot, the air so thick with flies. Better to rot than feed Continentals.

  An errant memory skitters through her mind: a terrified horse charging into a child’s chain swing and hanging itself. This huge, graceful creature thrashing helplessly in the mud. She and the rest of Yellow Company walked on as if this occurrence were nothing of note.

  In three weeks they destroyed eight villages, and once word got out that a rogue band of Saypuris was speeding through the heart of the Continent’s farmland, all the other villages quickly became abandoned.

  By the time Yellow Company reached the gates of Bulikov, the city was slowly realizing that Biswal and Yellow Company had single-handedly destroyed two-thirds of their future food stores in a span of weeks. If a siege began now they could only last a handful of days. Their only hope was that the Continental army would return and crush Yellow Company.

  Bulikov’s hopes rose when they saw the Continental army on the horizon. But the Continental forces were not returning to deal with Yellow Company: rather, the Continentals were in full flight, General Prandah at their heels. Over the past weeks the Continental troops had seen the columns of smoke north of them and understood that their homes were being destroyed. They’d begun to desert in droves, morale decaying with each passing day. Then General Prandah had pressed the advantage and pushed the wavering forces into a complete rout.

  Sandwiched between General Prandah and Yellow Company, the Continental army was utterly destroyed. Within hours, Biswal stood before the gates of Bulikov and demanded that they open. And open they did, creaking and crackling.

  But before he could take a single step in, Colonel Adhi Noor arrived, leapt off his horse, and struck Biswal on the chin.

  Mulaghesh remembers it like it was only last week: Noor, sweating, stained with smoke and blood, standing over her fallen commanding officer and crying, “What have you done? By all the seas and stars, Biswal, what in all the hells have you done?”

  * * *

  —

  Like all officers under Biswal, commissioned or otherwise, Mulaghesh was brought before General Prandah himself and questioned extensively.

  “What was Biswal’s goal in his expedition?”

  “To destroy the Continent’s resources, sir.”

  “And is that why you killed the Continental villagers? Were they a resource too?”

  “They were the enemy, sir.”

  “They were civilians, Sergeant.” Prandah, of course, did not accept Biswal’s promotion of her to lieutenant.

  “We felt it made no difference, sir.”

  “Why do you say that? When was this decided? Who decided this?”

  She was silent.

  “Who decided this, Sergeant?”

  She struggled to recall. The days were a blur, and she could no longer remember which decisions were hers and which ones were an unspoken choice by the whole of the Company.

  “What do you mean, it made no difference, Sergeant?”

  “I…I think I meant that there was no difference between the soldier and the civilian keeping that soldier on their feet, sir.”

  “There is a difference, Sergeant. It is the same difference between a soldier and a raider, a murderer. And neither you nor Biswal have any right to decide otherwise.”

  She was quiet.

  “Did all of the soldiers agree to the March?” asked Prandah. “Did no one resist?”

  She was aware of her face trembling. “N-No…”

  “No? No what?”

  “Some…some objected.”

  “And they wouldn’t participate?”

  She shook her head.

  “What did they do, these soldiers who would not participate?”

  She did not speak.

  “What did they do, Sergeant?”

  And suddenly she remembered, as if it’d all been a dream or something that had happened so long ago: Sankhar and Bansa, standing before Biswal and saying they would do no more, no more of this, and Biswal slowly looking them up and down, and suddenly calling
her name.

  And this realization, this bright, brittle memory, formed a tiny crack inside her, and suddenly she understood what she’d done, what they’d all done, and she burst into tears and sank to the ground.

  From somewhere she heard Prandah’s voice, speaking in horror, “By the seas, she’s just a girl, isn’t she? This soldier is just a child.”

  * * *

  —

  The Saypuri Military chose complete disavowal. Perhaps taking a page from the Worldly Regulations, the Saypuri commanders decided to simply never admit that the March had happened. Yellow Company was far too large to lock up and throw away the key, and Saypur desperately needed manpower to maintain their control of the Continent. In addition, some commanders commended Biswal’s accomplishments: he’d won the war, had he not? He’d ended nearly three years of bloody conflict in hardly more than a month.

  Biswal was reassigned on the Continent to other, less-glamorous duties. Mulaghesh had no such privilege. She wondered what they would do with her when her service ended. Dishonorably discharge her? Abandon her on the Continent? But in the end their verdict, most likely inadvertently, was the cruelest one possible: they sent her home, with modest honors.

  Home. She had never expected to ever see it during the Yellow March. But returning to Ghaladesh proved to be no different than walking the ruined countryside of the Continent: it was strange, intolerable, distant, and muted. She could not adjust to the easy, thoughtless way of living. Her mouth took issue with spices, with salt, with properly cooked food. It took her more than a year to learn to sleep in a bed again, or how to live in rooms with windows.

  She tried her hand at jobs, at marriage. She proved to be a miserable failure at all of them. She began to understand, bit by bit, that the devastation she’d wrought did not end on the Continent: perhaps there was some secret place inside her that she’d never known was there, but she’d put it to the torch, too, and only now in civilian life did she realize what she’d lost.

  And then one day, drunk in a wine bar in Ghaladesh, she was staring into her cup and thinking about how bitter the idea of tomorrow had become when a voice said over her shoulder, “I was told I’d find you here.”

  She looked up and saw a Saypuri Military officer standing behind her, dressed in fatigues. She found she recognized him: he was the one who’d punched Biswal, who’d been there when Prandah had interrogated her. Noor, she thought his name was. Colonel Noor.

  He sat down next to her and ordered a drink. She asked why he’d found her.

  “Because,” he said slowly, “I think you, like a lot of veterans, are having trouble adjusting. And I wanted to see if you’d like to reenlist.”

  “No,” she said violently. “No.”

  “Why not?” he asked, though it seemed he’d expected the question.

  “I don’t…I don’t ever want to go back. To go through that again.”

  “To what? To fight? To kill?”

  She nodded.

  He smiled sympathetically. He was an unusual soldier, she thought: though there was a sternness in his face, there was something inviting there, too, something often lacking in the commanding officers she’d had. “Soldiers don’t just kill, Mulaghesh. Most don’t, in fact, these days. We support and maintain and build, and keep the peace.”

  “So?”

  “So…I believe you might jump at the opportunity to do some good. You’re not even twenty yet, Mulaghesh. You’ve a lot of years left. I suspect you can find better uses for them than filling your belly with cheap wine.”

  Mulaghesh was silent.

  “Well, if you’re interested, we’re implementing a new program, a…sort of governing system for the Continent. Military stations designed to provide support and keep the peace.”

  “Like cops, sir?”

  “Somewhat. Colonel Malini will be overseeing Bulikov, but he will need assistance. Would you be interested in perhaps returning to the Continent and assisting him? You know a lot about the region. But maybe this time you can put it to some good.”

  * * *

  —

  Mulaghesh stares over the cliffs of Voortyashtan. Gulls nest in the rocks below, and they flit back and forth over the waves, snapping up moths, ghostly, porcelain flickers in the moonlight. Besides them, she is alone. There’s not a single soul for nearly half a mile around her.

  The horizon flickers with roiling clouds and lightning. A storm coming—unwise to be out here now.

  She wishes she’d grown, that she’d put the March behind her. But seeing those memories in the thinadeskite mine—young Bansa, hardly yet a man, knocking on the wall of the ruined farmhouse, not knowing what would happen to him mere days later—it was as if all the years since the March were just condensation on a pane of glass, wiped away with the flick of a hand, and on the other side was that ruined, scarred countryside, and she could not shut her eyes or look away.

  She looks at the label on the bottle of wine. Some putrid Voortyashtani concoction. She drains it, walks to the edge of the cliff, and drops it over the side.

  She watches it plummet, a glittering green teardrop falling to the dark ocean. It turns to dust against the face of the cliff. She never hears the crash.

  She stares at the moon’s reflection on the face of the waves. She imagines that it’s a hole in the world, that perhaps she could dive out and fall through it and find a place where she could rest.

  But then it changes, and suddenly the moon’s reflection looks like a skull to her.

  She blinks. To her bafflement, she watches as the moon’s reflection changes, shifts: it’s not a giant skull, but a face, a woman’s face, still and blank, lying just below the waves.

  “What the hells?” she says.

  Then the ocean bursts up, something shooting up from its depths.

  It rises, rises…

  And Mulaghesh sees her.

  She rises up astonishingly fast, like a whale breaking through the surface for a leap, water pouring off her enormous shoulders, pouring off her arms, pouring off her chin: a giant formed of metals, of steel and iron and bronze and rust. When she fully stands the cliffs are just barely at her breast, a vast, glittering creature standing against the frigid moon and stars. Her face is cold and still, an emotionless steel mask, her eyes dark and blank.

  It is a helmet, Mulaghesh sees: she is not made of metal but is wearing armor—beautifully wrought, ornate armor, plate overlying mail—and depicted on this armor are a thousand terrifying images of unspeakable violence.

  She is magnificent, terrible, beautiful. She is the sea, the moon, the cliffs. Warfare incarnate, violence never-ending.

  “Voortya,” whispers Mulaghesh.

  It is impossible—utterly impossible—and yet it is so.

  One giant, mailed hand grasps the top of the cliffs, and she hauls her vast bulk up.

  No, no, thinks Mulaghesh.

  The gulls are shrieking, terrified. The ground trembles beneath Mulaghesh’s feet. Her hand fumbles for her carousel.

  Voortya towers over Mulaghesh, dark and impossible and lovely and monstrous. With a whine of metal she turns her blank eyes to stare at the fortress. In her right hand is a flicker of light: a sword blade rendered in ghostly, pale luminescence.

  I won’t let you, thinks Mulaghesh.

  Mulaghesh pulls out the carousel and points it up and fires. She sees the muzzle flash reflected on the giant steel greaves, and is vaguely aware of herself screaming: I won’t fucking let you!

  Mulaghesh feels her sanity unraveling—it is all too much, too much to see, to behold—but to her surprise, the Divinity reacts, recoiling as if in pain. Mulaghesh hears a voice in her mind, huge and terrible: “STOP, YOU FOOL! STOP!”

  Then the stars wink out and she feels herself falling, and somewhere in the distance is the sound of thunder.

  Though no Divinity, f
rom what we have recovered, was ever depicted with much coherence, the Divinity Voortya is interesting in that there was a distinct shift in how she is described in Voortyashtani texts. In the very early days she was depicted as an animal, a veritable monster, a four-armed half-person, half-beast that was wild and savage. This version of Voortya is commonly associated with bones, teeth, tusks, antlers: the natural, biological adornments of combat. These signatures were retained even in her later years.

  But somewhere in the sixth century, while the Divine Border Wars were still ongoing and all Divinities and their followers battled for domination, Voortya underwent a distinct change. She stopped presenting herself as a beast and started to commonly manifest as a four-armed woman dressed in armor. The armor is described as being highly advanced for the era: plate on mail on leather, and inscribed on the plate mail were all of her victories, all of the foes she had slaughtered, depicted with graphic detail. It is shortly after this period that she began to wield the famed Sword of Voortya, the blade wrought of moonlight whose hilt and pommel were the severed hand of the son of Saint Zhurgut, her most ardent apostle.

  It is interesting that this shift in appearance coincides with three other changes. Firstly, it is after this transformation that we begin to see coherent, consistent recordings of the nature of the Voortyashtani afterlife, as if before this point the Voortyashtani afterlife did not truly or properly exist. Secondly, though Voortya’s mostly human, four-armed appearance stayed more or less the same, her top-most left hand now appeared missing, as if severed during her transformation.

  And thirdly, and perhaps most notably, after this change, there is no recorded instance of the Divinity Voortya ever speaking again. Either to the other Divinities or her own followers.

  —DR. EFREM PANGYUI, “THE NATURE OF CONTINENTAL ART”

  Somewhere there is screaming. The cough and sputter of engines. The scent of smoke. No gunfire, though: her half-functioning brain makes a note of this, saying only, Possibly not combat.