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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  —DR. EFREM PANGYUI, “THE SUDDEN HEGEMONY”

  Wha…What?” says Mulaghesh. “Shot you?”

  “Yes, by all damned things, shot me!” snarls Thinadeshi. Her voice and accent are unusual: Mulaghesh realizes she’s speaking with a dialect and manner that hasn’t been used in over fifty years. “I go out of my way and nearly kill myself trying to avoid unspeakable catastrophe, only to have some wild woman on a hilltop take out her little cannon and shoot me! Of all the madness! Of all the ridiculous nonsense! And what are you here for now? Are you here to finish the job? You’re a committed assassin, I’ll grant you that! What in damned creation could have happened in the Saypuri Isles to send someone like you after me?”

  Mulaghesh feels dizzy. It’s taking up a lot of her brainpower to accept the idea that not only is she standing here talking to one of the founding figures of Saypur, but this particular founding figure is yelling at her with a lot of vitriol. Eventually Mulaghesh’s brain kicks in and she manages to process what Thinadeshi is saying: Wild woman on a hilltop…Does she mean when the mines collapsed?

  “But, uh, I didn’t shoot you, ma’am,” says Mulaghesh. “If I’m understanding what you’re describing, ma’am—and I’m not at all convinced that I am—I shot at Voortya. The, uh, Divinity.”

  Thinadeshi’s stare could punch a hole in the side of a battleship. She holds her arms out—well, one of them, at least, as her left isn’t particularly mobile. “Do you not see how I am attired? Does it not look familiar to you? I can tell by your egregious accent that it is deeply unlikely that you have had much education, but is putting two and two together so far beyond your grasp?”

  “Are you…Are you saying that you’re Voortya? The Divinity?”

  Thinadeshi sighs and rolls her eyes. “Oh, by all that is…No. I am saying that when I exercise the powers of this place, it projects an image thaaaah!” She trails off as she’s racked with pain. Another dribble of blood comes leaking out from under her plate mail. “Damn you!” cries Thinadeshi. “Perhaps you’ve murdered me already! Am I poisoned?”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” says Mulaghesh. She undoes the clasp on her rifling and sets it aside. “And listen, I don’t understand a thing about what’s going on, but I know how to treat a bullet wound. I’ve brought a med kit, and I can be decent enough with it, even one-handed.”

  Thinadeshi frowns at her, suspicious. “You’re quite sure you’re not here to kill me?”

  “No. I’m here to stop that from happening.” She points out the tower window to the sea of Voortyashtani sentinels beyond. “By any means necessary. I had no idea you were even here.”

  Thinadeshi’s face softens a bit at that. She swallows. Mulaghesh can tell she’s quite weak. “W-Well. You’ve got quite a task ahead of you, now don’t you.” Then her eyes dim and she begins to topple over. Mulaghesh darts forward and grabs her before she strikes the ground.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes later Mulaghesh has the left arm of Thinadeshi’s armor pried off and has cut away her leather sleeve below. “It’ll reappear within a few hours,” Thinadeshi mutters. “All my vestments return to me, over time. I’ve tried taking them off, trust me.” Mulaghesh ignores her. There’s no bed in these chambers, just a giant marble chair about three times too big for a human being, so she has propped her up in that while she goes to work on her shoulder.

  There were three opiate shots in her med kit, tiny little syringes not much bigger than your thumbnail, and Mulaghesh dosed Thinadeshi up with one. Thinadeshi hardly makes a peep as Mulaghesh digs in the wound with a pair of tweezers. Mulaghesh can feel the bullet lodged up against Thinadeshi’s upper humerus, and it doesn’t seem to have shattered or split any, which is good. So maybe I won’t have to go back, she thinks, and tell everyone this grand historical figure has died again, and this time I killed her.

  “Who are you?” asks Thinadeshi groggily. “What’s your name? You never told me.”

  Mulaghesh chews her lip as she delicately explores Thinadeshi’s wound. “I’m Turyin Mulaghesh, General Fourth Class of the Saypuri Military.”

  “Military? So the Saypuri Isles still exist as a nation? It’s still solvent?” She sounds surprised, but then she would be: her stretch of history was incredibly rocky, with the global economy still in a nascent state.

  “Yeah, but they dropped the ‘Isles’ part a while ago,” says Mulaghesh. “Mostly because Saypur kept folding in regions that weren’t islands. Or maybe they just wanted a cleaner-looking letterhead.”

  “I see.”

  Mulaghesh can feel her tense up, and knows what question she’s about to ask.

  “So,” says Thinadeshi. “What…year is it there?”

  Mulaghesh glances at her. “Why?”

  “Don’t humor me, General. When I saw the men in the mines I could tell things were different. I’ve been gone far longer than I thought, haven’t I?”

  Men in the mines? “Yeah. Yeah, I’d say so. Hold still.”

  Then, faintly: “Tell me, and be honest…are my children dead?”

  Mulaghesh pauses as she works. She can feel the bullet coming loose, but she still feels obligated to answer this question. “I know one of them is still in government. Padwal.”

  “Padwal?” says Thinadeshi, sounding surprised. “In government?”

  “Yeah. He’s an MP.”

  “A what?”

  “A minister of Parliament.”

  “Parliament…,” says Thinadeshi. “We’ve kept that? Did no one read my plans to select a proportionate amount of representatives from each region to vote on each issue?”

  “Uh…I don’t know, ma’am,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m a soldier, not a scholar.”

  “It was a very thorough treatise, I thought,” says Thinadeshi, gritting her teeth as Mulaghesh wriggles the bullet. “What about Kristappa? And Rodmal? What about them?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “You don’t know if they’re alive?” she asks, heartbroken.

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “But how old would they be today? If they are alive, I mean.”

  Mulaghesh pauses, uncertain how to word this. “You’ve been gone over sixty years.”

  Thinadeshi sits up. “Over sixty?”

  “Um. Yeah. I think the exact number is sixty-four.”

  “Sixty-four years?” She stares out the window, aghast. “Oh, my word…I…I suppose it’s…it’s fairly unlikely that they are alive, then.” Her voice is frail and crushed. “After all, Padwal was one of the youngest. What a curiously dispiriting thing it is, to outlive one’s children. If this strange state could even be called living. And I didn’t even get to know they died.”

  Mulaghesh readjusts the tweezers. “Can you hold still? I’m about to get this thing out of you.”

  “Ah…Ah! Please hurry!”

  “I’m going!” says Mulaghesh. “I got it, I got it…” Then, finally, the chunk of metal comes loose, sliding out of the wound. “There.” She flicks it out the window without a thought, then applies bandages to the wound. “I’m going to need your help to stitch this up, though. I can’t manage that one-handed. Think you can assist?”

  Thinadeshi’s face is wan. “You ask much of an old woman.”

  “We can wait a bit and then try again.”

  She sighs. “Oh, no. Don’t bother. My shoulder is not the most important thing right now. And besides, I shall be gone quite soon, I imagine.”

  There’s an awkward pause.

  “Huh?” says Mulaghesh. “This isn’t a fatal wound by any means. Unless you’ve got a condition or something.”

  “A condition…yes. I have exactly that.” She sighs again and shuts her eyes. “I won’t perish from any wound to my body, my mortal self. They’re killing me out there, don’t you see? All those s
ouls out there. They’re pulling me apart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Here. Look. Help me take off my right glove.”

  Mulaghesh does so. Then Thinadeshi holds her hand up to the window. “Watch.”

  “Okay…” Mulaghesh crouches beside her, not sure what she’s watching: Thinadeshi’s hand is small, well-manicured, but otherwise unremarkable.

  But then…

  Mulaghesh sees it, very faintly: the outline of the window frame through Thinadeshi’s hand, as if her flesh is very slightly translucent.

  Mulaghesh says, “What in all the hells…?”

  “You see it, then,” says Thinadeshi grimly. “My…I don’t know, my corporeal essence is fading. I’m not supposed to be here, so this place is steadily asserting that I’m not here. No mortal was ever intended to shoulder the burdens of a Divinity.” She puts back on her glove. “I am being rejected, slowly but surely. But I’ve known I’ve been losing this battle for some time.”

  Mulaghesh holds down the bandages on Thinadeshi’s shoulder, which is still seeping blood. “Can I ask how you came to be here? Or, really…what’s going on?”

  “I suppose in the normal world everyone assumes I just disappeared.”

  “That’s about the cut of it.”

  “But I didn’t, obviously. I have chosen to remain here, in this place, since I left the world I knew.”

  “You chose to come here?”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t choose to come. But I chose to stay once I realized the consequences if I left.” She sighs and rubs her eyes, exhausted. “What’s the last you know about me?”

  “I know you vanished in Voortyashtan. That’s all anyone knows.”

  “Yes…I was on an exploratory mission, trying to find a rail passage out to the wildernesses, along the Solda to the coast, so we could try to bring it under control. We saw bandit kings and pestilence and warfare and mass rape. There was no leadership, no control after the Blink. And the Blink struck this place quite hard. I remember coming here, seeing the squalor and the vandals, fighting off attackers nearly every day and night. I was brazen, you see. And…reckless. I had just lost Shomal.”

  Mulaghesh remembers this from her history books: Thinadeshi’s four-year-old son, lost to plague during her travels on the Continent. “I see.”

  “I was willing to fight everyone and everything, after that,” says Thinadeshi quietly. “I was going to win or die trying, and…and I didn’t prefer which, honestly. But then one day we made it. We passed through the ranges and came to the ocean. But the question was, what was the easiest route? What was the best way to link the North Seas to Saypur? So we had to survey. And one morning I was walking along the coast, taking measurements of possible passages back through the ranges…and then I came upon it.”

  Thinadeshi’s words are growing slurred now: the opiates must be sloshing around in her system. “The Blink did a lot of damage to the Voortyashtani coast. So much of what they built was on the sea, so many miracles worked into the cliffs and the shore, and the Blink was so recent then. It was like chaos, unimaginable devastation. Homes and bridges and rubble all piled up on the bottom of the cliffs. And some of the cliffs had cracked open, like an egg. And I came to one of these cracks, and I looked in”—her face fills with an awful dread—“and they saw me, and they called up to me.”

  Thinadeshi’s horrified expression sets a chill in Mulaghesh’s belly. “Who? Who did?”

  “The soldiers,” says Thinadeshi softly. “All the Voortyashtani soldiers. Ever. They were waiting for me in that cliff. It was a tomb, you see. A massive tomb, bigger than anything I’d ever seen. But the Voortyashtanis had a very strange way of memorializing their dead.” She looks at Mulaghesh, wild-eyed. “You know about their swords? That the two bond, with each becoming a vessel for the other, the body carrying the sword and the sword carrying the soul?”

  “I’m familiar with it,” says Mulaghesh.

  “That’s what was down there,” says Thinadeshi. Her eyes are wide with awe. “All those swords. Thousands of them. Millions of them. All with minds in them, all with agency, memories of lives and inconceivable bloodshed, and all of them crying out to me.”

  Mulaghesh remembers the reports of Choudhry searching the hills for a mythical tomb…but she never imagined that it was like this. “So the tomb wasn’t full of bodies, but full of swords?”

  “Yes. Voortyashtanis didn’t consider there to be a difference between the two. Sentinels fashioned their lives to be weapons, their bodies and minds to be instruments of warfare—their swords were a part of that, perhaps the heart of what they became. That’s why they call this place the City of Blades, after all. And when I found them, there were so many of them, exposed to the sky, spilling out into the sea, all of them screaming out to someone to find them, to help them.”

  “But how were they still alive? How did they still exist? They were Divine, right? How could they exist without Voortya?”

  “Because Voortya had made a pact with them,” says Thinadeshi wearily. “It was an agreement: they would make themselves into weapons, be her warriors and go to war for her, and she would give them eternal life. And this contract was so binding that it had to be executed—even if Voortya wasn’t there! Her death did not, to use the terminology, render anything null and void! The dead were still supposed to get their afterlife. They were still supposed to reside with Voortya in the City of Blades. And one day, they were still supposed to return to where their swords lay in the mortal world and begin the last war, the final war that would consume all of creation. This is what was promised them, and the dead, in essence, intend to see that the bargain is fulfilled. If it was only one or two departed souls, their power might be negligible—but there are millions here with me in the City of Blades. With their strength pooled they’re able to make sure reality holds up its part of the bargain. They are insisting that they be remembered, and any Divine construction created to remember them is therefore forced to persist.” Suddenly she looks terribly, terribly weary. “But they needed Voortya herself in order for the agreement to be executed. Some part of her had to reside with them in the City of Blades. Or someone quite similar, I should say.”

  Mulaghesh slowly realizes what she means. “You?” she asks, horrified. “They wanted you to stand in for Voortya?”

  Thinadeshi smiles weakly. “They needed the Maiden of Steel, Queen of Grief, Empress of Graves, She Who Clove the Earth in Twain, Devourer of Children. Am I not all these things, to some extent? I devoted my life to the railroads, to reconstruction, so I am the Maiden of Steel. I’ve torn apart mountains to build them, so I am She Who Clove the Earth in Twain. Hundreds of laborers died fulfilling my dangerous dream, so I am the Empress of Graves. And…my own children perished in my endeavors. My family suffered unspeakably for everything I wrought. So I am also Queen of Grief, and Devourer of Children. Perhaps it was my punishment to become this thing. Perhaps I deserve this. Whatever the case, they needed someone who matched their idea of Voortya—and I came close enough to count. There was a vacuum, and I merely filled it.”

  “But why did you consent?”

  “Because when they spoke to me,” says Thinadeshi, “when they reached out to me and begged me to take up the mantle of their mother, I understood that their true hope was that I would allow them their last war. Their final great battle, the one they’d been promised for centuries. And I could not allow that. I could not allow them to make war upon my country, not after it had just been freed.

  “So I climbed down to them. And as I did, the world…changed. The skies grew dark. The stars changed—they became older, stranger. And the farther I climbed down the broken cliff to them, the more the world shifted and churned until I was walking down a white staircase, and then I was in a grand, white courtyard with many passageways and staircases up—and the voices asked me to climb up, up, and I did. I climbed and I climbed
until I came to the top of the tower, and there was the great, awful red throne, and beside it…Beside it was this.”

  Thinadeshi closes her eyes once more, and concentrates. She reaches out with her right hand, appearing to sift through the empty air before her. Then her fingers clench around something, and she pulls out…

  Suddenly there is a sword in her hand, or rather a sword hilt, as the blade is but a faint flicker of golden light. Mulaghesh can’t tell exactly where it came from: it feels as if it’s always been in her hand, but Thinadeshi simply chose to make it visible now.

  The hilt and handle are strange to Mulaghesh’s eyes: at first it appears to be made of some dark, viscous black material, like volcanic glass. But then the light shifts, and the hilt isn’t dark stone, but a severed hand. Its blackened fingers clutch the bottom of the formless blade, its thumb and forefinger crooked in such a manner that Mulaghesh knows it was not made by any artist.

  The more she looks at the sword the more she perceives many things in it, even sensations: the sound of steel on steel, the sight of distant flames, the rumble of horses’ hooves. The sword flickers back and forth between being made of stone and fire and steel and lightning before, finally, becoming a human hand once more. And as she looks she knows that this is no mere sculpture: the hand is real, sacrificed by a man long ago to his Divinity, and through the sacrifice of his son she became exceedingly powerful, and this sacrifice was memorialized on stones and books and pieces of armor, the hand clutching the blade, the sacrifice paired with assault.

  “The sword of Voortya,” says Thinadeshi quietly. “It is with me always now. Just like the sentinels and their own weapons, it is a part of me. It whispers to me, telling me I am Voortya, telling me what I must do, playing with my thoughts. It is damnably hard to resist sometimes. For long stretches, I think I am Voortya, sometimes.”

  “That sounds dangerous,” says Mulaghesh.

  “You’ve no idea. I think it is not the true thing, or at least not as it was: like the City of Blades, like everything Divine, it is but a shadow of its former self. But that is still more dangerous and more powerful than any device any mortal has ever wielded. One day I will be rid of it. Perhaps soon.” Thinadeshi sits back as if the effort of producing the weapon exhausted her. “When I took up the sword of Voortya, in the eyes of the dead, it was as if I was her. And because she’d granted them power, they then bestowed it upon me. I was given limited abilities, both within this ghostly realm and beyond. And one of those powers was to enter the land of the living, and destroy. Which I did.