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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He looks at his reflection in the window. The only thing I know how to do anymore.

  Sigrud je Harkvaldsson stares at his reflection. He takes in the scars, the wrinkles, the bags under his eyes. He wonders if he has it in him to do this. It’s been years since he worked as an operative—over a decade.

  Perhaps this is foolish. Perhaps he’s an old dog insisting he can still perform old tricks.

  Yet there’s something curious in his face, something that’s concerned him for a while, something he’s tried to dismiss. But now that he’s faced with mirrored surfaces time and time again—for mirrors were rare in the logging camps—he can tell something is wrong with his appearance.

  The face in the reflection is not the face of an aging man. He is much how he remembered himself before he went into hiding: middle-aged, scarred, and bitter—but still middle-aged. Which Sigrud certainly no longer is.

  Perhaps it is simply the blessing of good lineage. Perhaps that’s it.

  Then Ahanashtan emerges on the horizon. And instantly, he forgets his worries.

  “Oh,” he whispers, “by the seas…”

  When Sigrud first came to Ahanashtan, over thirty years ago, he regarded it as one of the most impressive metropolises the world had yet produced (behind Bulikov and Ghaladesh, of course). Yet at that time it was still mostly a sea port, devoted to industry and the military—in other words, it was dirty, dank, and dangerous. It had a few skyscrapers then, buildings fourteen, fifteen, even sixteen stories tall, monumental achievements for architects in those days, and everyone agreed that the future had truly dawned on the Continent.

  But as Sigrud’s train grows closer to the colossal clutch of towers on the ocean, he sees that the architects and industry magnates of thirty years ago had no idea what was coming.

  He tries to count their height. Maybe thirty, forty, or even sixty stories tall? He can’t believe it, can’t fathom the massive stone-and-glass structures that stand so still and perfect against the sea, the sun dappling their crenellated surfaces. Some are tall and straight and square, others are like vast wedges, like a cut of cheese made of granite and glass, and still others look like nothing more than gigantic metal poles, silvery and shimmering, with rows and rows of tiny windows riddled in their sides. Running across the countryside to this cluster of structures is what at first seems to be countless rivers or tiny, shining tributaries, but Sigrud slowly realizes that these are rails: what must be a hundred or more railroads weave and merge until they all, eventually, join together in Ahanashtan.

  To the northwest is something even stranger: a glittering metal construction that looks almost like utility lines, huge wires mounted on poles, except they’re far too tall…and it looks like little pods are crawling along the wires. He can’t figure it out from this distance.

  Sigrud turns back to the metropolis ahead. And I, he thinks, am supposed to find Shara’s killer in there?

  He packs up this emotion and shoves it away somewhere in the back of his mind. He has no time for self-doubt.

  There is where Shara met her end, he thinks. There is where she was murdered. And there is where I will shed the blood and break the bones of those who cast her down.

  The gleaming towers of Ahanashtan swell up before him. He remembers something Shara said when they first came here, she seated at a table, encoding a message; Sigrud on the bed, sewing up a rent in his coat. She said, No one knows what the original Ahanashtan really looked like, back in the Divine days. The historians theorize it was a giant, organic tangle of trees and vines, all of which merged together to create homes and structures. Glowing mushrooms and peaches acting as lights, vines flowing forth with healing waters, that kind of thing. Records suggest it was beautiful. But it all vanished when Ahanas died. Then she paused, and added, And good riddance too.

  He looked up from his work. Good riddance? If it was so beautiful?

  It was certainly beautiful. But Ahanashtan was also the port where the Continent brought in Saypuri slaves. All these beautiful structures, overlooking a bay teeming with human misery…Even the most beautiful creations cannot wipe away such corruption.

  Sigrud watches as the giant towers loom over him. Maybe the change, he thinks, is only superficial.

  * * *

  —

  First, logistics.

  A room at the edge of town, close to the docks but not too close. He knows the waterfront, knows its crannies and its smoke and the tang of diesel. He wants to have his back pushed up against known territory.

  The room is bare-bones. Walls and a bed and a tiny closet with all the soul and allure of a soiled bar of soap. Not a great place to hide things. So he doesn’t.

  He finds an abandoned restaurant down the block. It’s suffered water damage from some past storm, and clearly won’t be occupied anytime soon. He picks the lock on the back door and skulks inside. He assembles a cache in the oven ventilation shaft, the dilapidated kitchen ringing with little clinks and clanks as he works.

  Inside he places his handheld bolt-shot, a pistol and ammunition—acquired along the way—and a second, shoulder-mounted bolt-shot, this one much more high-powered than the little handheld one. He stores away his backup POTs, as well: he’s Mr. Jenssen here in Ahanashtan, here to look for work, but he might need to be someone else if the situation calls for it. He also stores away some but not all of his money. He knows to seed that throughout his terrain like a squirrel does nuts. But he’s been without money before. He knows it’s easier to live hand to mouth in the city than in the wilds. Provided you don’t mind what you’re putting in your mouth.

  He slips out the window of the restaurant, then stands in the shadows for a moment, watching the streets. No movement, no watchers. In and out and done.

  Now to wait for nightfall. And then to visit the Golden.

  * * *

  —

  Midnight in Ahanashtan. The city is largely electrified now, so the streets are never fully dark. It’s a strange feeling for Sigrud, who knows the shadows better than he knows his own skin. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like how the steam and clouds obscure the moon and stars, yet the moisture traps the artificial light of this modern place, smearing the world above with a muddy orange color.

  Or perhaps he just doesn’t like being here, being on this street, on this block. Where she was. Where she died.

  Sigrud stares at the Golden from a darkened doorway. It is a husk of a building, a corpse, its facade broken and dark. Police ropes, dyed bright red, festoon the streets outside, warning people to keep out.

  His eye lingers on the massive rent in the top corner, lined with splintered wood, like broken teeth in a gaping maw.

  That was her. That’s where she was.

  A few patrolmen lurk in the doorways, Ahanashtani officers keeping watch over the site. Sigrud’s already spotted them, even the ones trying to remain hidden. The Ahanashtani police know as well as anyone that the death of Ashara Komayd is an international incident, so they must deploy their forces as much as possible to stave off any criticism—even if they aren’t quite sure what to do with those forces.

  Sigrud slips out of the doorway, satchel over his shoulder. He pads down a back road, ducks through a torn chain-link fence, and weaves down a filthy alley until he approaches the eastern side of the Golden.

  He dodges under the police rope and waits in the darkness, head cocked, listening carefully. Nothing. If he’s been seen, they aren’t doing anything about it yet.

  He walks along the hotel’s brick wall until he finds a service door. He tries the knob—locked, of course. But after a moment’s work with his torsion wrench and his hook picks, the lock springs open, and he slips inside.

  Sigrud stands in the darkness of the hotel, listening once more. He can tell right away that the building is broken: there is a curious way that the wind blows through bombed-out structures, one you only hear w
hen segments of the walls have been torn apart.

  He winds through the spacious lobby, then climbs the stairs. He has a torch, but chooses not to use it. The luminescence from the streetlights spills through the Golden’s many windows, and is more than enough to see by.

  He climbs to the fourth floor. The wind is stronger now, bearing with it the smell of chimney smoke and burned fabric. He walks down the hallway, his boots sending up plumes of dust from the soiled carpet.

  He pauses at one corner and sniffs.

  A familiar, coppery smell.

  He kneels and touches the carpet at his feet. He pulls out his torch and flicks it on, allowing a narrow beam of light to dance across the fabric.

  Blood. A lot of it.

  Someone killed the guard on station, he thinks. Then slipped down the hall to plant the explosives.

  He stands back up and looks down the hallway. He can see streetlight and faint moonlight spackling the walls outside the ruined rooms. After a few steps, there will be nothing more to explore. Just shattered walls and burned-out rooms.

  I must look, he thinks, though he is not sure why. Perhaps it is because he was denied his chance to hold vigil. I must look and see.

  He comes to the edge of the devastation and looks out. Shara’s room is completely gone. Nothing left of it, not even a stick of wood. He can see straight through to the city street below. He read in the papers that her two guards died with her, along with a young couple vacationing in the room below. All dead and gone in but a second.

  He thinks about Shara. How she moved, how she laughed, how she hunched over a cup of tea. And though he never really knew the girl, he thinks of her daughter—a Continental, adopted. Tatyana, he thinks her name was. Sigrud only saw her for an instant after Voortyashtan. He’d read in the papers—when he could get them in the mountains, that is—that Shara and her daughter had retired to the countryside to live in peaceful seclusion.

  Wherever that girl is, she will now go forward in life without a mother.

  He remembers Signe, cold and still on that table in the dark. Leaves in her hair and her collar askew.

  What a crime it is that creatures of hope and justice fade from this world, he thinks, while those like me live on.

  Sigrud stares out at the Ahanashtani cityscape beyond, cheery and glittering with light. He blinks, feeling suddenly very empty, very powerless, very small. There is nothing here for him. But what did he expect from this place? A record, a note, a file, a message? Did he think she would think of him in her last moments? Yet there’s only ash and blood.

  He takes a deep breath. Time for a last resort, he thinks.

  He sets down his satchel and begins unpacking its contents. He takes out a glass jar, a bag of daisy petals, and a small tin of gray earth.

  I saw you do this enough times, Shara, he thinks, working away, that I could do it in my sleep.

  He fills the jar with daisy petals, shakes it, then dumps them out. Daisies. Sacred to Ahanas for their willful recurrence.

  Then he takes a bit of the gray earth—still moist—and smears it across the bottom of the jar. Grave dust, the final state of all things. He waits a moment, then wipes the earth away. Then he picks up the jar and applies its open end to his eye, as if it were a telescope.

  He looks through the jar at the ruined rooms before him, and his heart drops. Nothing looks different. This is an old miracle, of course, an old ritual from back before the fall of the Continent. Shara used to perform it all the time: amplify the glass with the right reagents, then look through it, and any Divine alterations to the world would glow with a bright, blue-green phosphorescence. He remembers her saying that it was almost useless in Bulikov, since the walls there glowed so bright that they hurt her eyes and drowned everything else out.

  Yet the shattered rooms before him are as dark and shadowed as they were before. If something miraculous was once here in these rooms, the bomb wiped it away as surely as the lives of the people within them.

  He sighs, turns away, and drops the jar.

  Then he pauses. He thinks for a moment.

  He slowly turns back, and applies the jar to his eye again.

  Nothing glows in the ruined rooms before him. It’s all still shadows and ash. But there is something glowing in the streets outside the hotel. He can’t see much of it—just a sliver of the streetscape is visible from this angle—but he can tell that someone has drawn some kind of line or barrier in the concrete.

  A line or barrier that must be miraculous, or Divine—for it glows as bright as a lighthouse at sea.

  Sigrud slowly lowers the jar. “By the seas,” he whispers. “Someone did something to the streets?”

  Though this makes him wonder—was it Shara? Or someone else?

  His hands are shaking, partly with excitement, partly with shock. He never encountered such a thing once, not even when he worked with Shara in this very city. He turns to go back downstairs and outside, but pauses again, just as he’s about to take the jar away from his eye.

  He didn’t think to look through the jar down the hallway. He didn’t think there’d be anything inside the rest of the hotel. But he sees he was wrong.

  Sigrud stares through the little glass jar. There are more miraculous barriers here, more designs, more glowing wards placed in the walls and the floors and the ceilings of the hallway. He walks down the hallway and takes the jar away from his eye, and the wards vanish immediately. He touches one panel in the wall, a spot that glowed bright a mere second ago, but he can’t see anything there, no device or symbol or totem of any kind. Whatever these miracles are, they must be alterations of a kind so faint and so immaterial that they don’t even register to the naked eye.

  Which is strange. There is only one Divinity still alive, and that’s Olvos. Her miracles all still work—that would be why the miraculous walls of Bulikov still stand—but they should be the only ones.

  Yet Sigrud doesn’t recognize these Divine alterations to the world. He was no expert on the Divine—that was always Shara’s area—but he’s fairly sure that, like altering the streets themselves, he’s never seen miracles or works of this kind.

  He stares at the miracles through the glass jar. It’s clear that they’re barriers of a sort, running across the threshold of a hallway, or the top of the stairs, or even in the lobby.

  This was not just a hotel, thinks Sigrud, lowering the glass jar. It was a fortress.

  He looks back down the hallway, toward the ruined room where Shara died.

  Were you waging a war, Shara? And if so—against whom?

  Then he hears it: a cough, a shuffle, and the click of a heel from downstairs. Someone’s inside the hotel, someone very nearby.

  Sigrud shrinks up behind the corner next to the stairs and slowly slides out his knife. He listens carefully, standing perfectly still.

  He can hear them mount the stairs, hear the carpet being crushed under the soles of their shoes. A light springs on downstairs—a torch—and the beam goes bobbing and dancing among the white paneled walls of the Golden.

  They’re almost at the top of the stairs, just a few feet away. He crouches, ready to jump, to stab them in between the ribs or slash their neck open—whichever is quieter or quicker.

  They come to the top of the stairs and stand there for a moment, shining their torch around, just barely missing Sigrud crouched in the corner beside them. It’s a man, he can tell by the way the person carries himself.

  “Huh,” says the man. “Thought I saw…Hm.” He turns around, shaking his head, and walks back downstairs. Sigrud allows himself a quick glance around the corner, and sees the golden epaulets and badge on their chest—an Ahanashtani policeman.

  He waits, listening, until he’s sure the policeman’s gone. Then he waits more, another ten minutes, just to be sure. Then he finally lets out a breath.

  He looks down at the
knife in his hand and sees it’s shaking.

  Just a policeman. No one of consequence, no one of note. An innocent bystander, really.

  Sigrud sheathes his knife. He wonders—how many innocent lives is he responsible for? How many have fallen simply because they happened to be close to him while he did his work?

  He walks back downstairs, trying to ignore the trembling in his hands.

  * * *

  —

  Once he’s outside the hotel and back in the safety of the shadows, Sigrud explores the alterations done to the streets around the Golden. He must look like a madman, standing there with a glass jar stuck to his eye, but there’s no one around to see him at this hour.

  Whoever made the miracles in the Golden clearly did far more work to the streets outside. There are barriers and lines and invisible barricades everywhere—some hanging in the air, ghostly modifications to what must be reality itself—and it doesn’t take long for Sigrud to understand what this is.

  If the Golden was Shara’s fortress, he thinks, then these must be its moats, its drawbridges, its outer walls and gatehouses. He has no idea what would trigger these miraculous traps. They certainly didn’t do anything to keep him out, or to harm him. But perhaps they were attuned to a specific opponent. The Divinities could change reality as they wished, so they were certainly capable of creating a miraculous defense that would respond to a single, precise enemy.

  But it’s still concerning that he’s never seen these miracles before in the whole of his career. Then again, he really only knew what Shara knew—and it’s possible Shara learned a lot of new things during their time apart.

  Who was she when she died? Perhaps she was no longer the woman you knew.

  The thought troubles him. Yet Sigrud doesn’t think Shara would act too differently. He knew Shara perhaps better than anyone in this world—and an operative is an operative until the day they die.

  She must have had some method of communication, he thinks, scanning the streets. Some way of sending messages to clandestine agents and allies. And he has no doubt that if she had access to Divine defenses, she would have used some of those same methods to prepare a communications system.