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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He wanders the darkened streets around the Golden for nearly two hours, the glass jar stuck to his eye. He shies away from any early-morning pedestrians, especially police officers, even though he appears fairly harmless—he cannot risk having a common stop escalate into something nasty.

  Then, finally, he spies it: it’s just a dot, a distant blot on a brick wall nearly two blocks away. But it’s there, glowing bright, that same, curious blue-green phosphorescence of the Divine.

  He puts the jar away and approaches the brick wall slowly, conscious of any surveillance. If this was part of Shara’s communication methods, it might be compromised.

  He takes his time, spending two, three hours circling through the streets surrounding the blue-green blot. He sees nothing, but since he now seems to be dealing with something Divine, not seeing things doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The Divinity Jukov once stowed the body of his lover in a glass bead or something, if he recalls. An assassin could pop out of the walls and cut him down if they had enough miracles at their disposal.

  Yet this does not happen. The closer Sigrud gets, the more confident he grows that this site—whatever it is—remains secure.

  Sigrud walks toward the wall and casually holds the jar up to his eye, or at least as casually as one could possibly do such a thing.

  One brick in the wall glows bright blue-green. Five bricks up from the ground.

  Sigrud walks up to it, then scans the streets. There’s no one.

  He looks at the brick. Throwing lots of caution to the wind, he touches it.

  His fingers pass through it as if it were made of fog, and the instant this happens, it vanishes, leaving a hole in the wall.

  Sigrud peers into the hole. There are two objects inside: one is a candle, burning with a strange intensity. The other is an envelope, sealed but unmarked.

  He picks up the candle and quickly blows it out, for it’s not wise to be lit up like a firework when you’re trying to go unnoticed. He thinks, then flips the candle over.

  Inscribed on the bottom is a symbol of a flame between two parallel lines—the insignia of Olvos, the flame in the woods.

  Sigrud grunts, surprised. He’s seen such miraculous candles before, with Shara, in Bulikov—they never burn out, and give off an intense, bright light. But why put one here? Why light up a dead drop?

  He drops the candle and picks up the envelope. On its front is a single letter—an S.

  He pockets the envelope, turns, and takes a long, circuitous walk back to his rooms. He’s fairly confident he has no tails, no surveillance. One person happens to walk alongside him for a little bit—a pale, young, Continental girl with odd eyes and a queerly upturned nose—but their paths quickly diverge, and he never sees her again.

  * * *

  —

  Once he’s back in his rooms, Sigrud watches the streets for another hour. When he’s satisfied he’s gone unnoticed, he shuts the curtains and opens the envelope.

  It contains two letters, both handwritten, though one is in code. Sigrud reads the uncoded one first.

  Shara,

  Spotted him again on Neitorov Street, then again on Ghorenski Square. This was on the 9th and 12th. I am almost positive it’s the same man we sighted around the hotel two weeks ago. Small, upper middle-aged, Saypuri, scar on his neck. Clearly a hood of some kind, but not Ministry. And he has a team working for him, I think. Too many familiar faces.

  I suspect he’s working for our opponent. He’s difficult to track—I believe he has been given tools to hide his movements. Highly recommend leaving Ahanashtan with all due haste.

  We were drawn here, I think. This city has always been a trap. Now he has our list of possible recruits. We have to act immediately.

  As for the little Saypuri hood, and his team—I managed to steal a communication of theirs. I pilfered it from a dead drop of theirs, copied it, and replaced the original before anyone noticed. It’s enclosed, but it’s in code. Yet codes have always been your kind of thing.

  Stay vigilant. He’s not the poor child we thought he was. He’s broken in more awful ways than we could have ever imagined.

  —M

  Sigrud rereads the letter. Then he reads it a third, fourth, and fifth time. Then he sits back and lets out a long, slow sigh.

  It’s clear now that Shara was working a big operation—especially if she was putting together lists of possible recruits. It’s not at all clear what they were recruiting agents for, but it must have been something specialized, something sought-after—otherwise, their opponent stealing a list of those recruits wouldn’t be such a devastating blow, which this letter makes it sound like it was.

  But as to who wrote this letter, and who their enemy is, Sigrud has no idea. Who is “M”? Could that be Mulaghesh, Shara’s longtime military ally? He doesn’t think so. Last he heard, Mulaghesh was still serving in Parliament in Ghaladesh, and was enjoying a surprising burst of popularity—he knows her supporters fondly call her “Mother Mulaghesh,” which amuses him, as Mulaghesh was about as motherly as a dreadnought.

  Whoever their enemy is, they penetrated not only Shara’s tradecraft practices, but also the Divine barriers she’d put up around herself in the Golden. Not someone to trifle with, then.

  And whoever wrote this message was trying to warn Shara, trying to tell her the sharks were closing in. But it never got to her.

  Yet the little Saypuri hood…That rings a bell.

  He rereads that line again and again. Sigrud worked with all kinds of Saypuri hoods and operatives and hardliners in his time in the Ministry.

  An aging Saypuri hood with a scar on his neck…

  The blood on the floor. Dirty work, silent and close—knife work.

  The memory of a face comes swimming up in his mind: a thin, wiry, short Saypuri man, with high, sharp cheekbones, a starved face, and burning eyes. And just below his chin, nearly hidden in his collar, a bright, lurid, white scar, running across his throat.

  He remembers the man tapping that scar once and saying, I got this in Jukoshtan. Fucking Kolkashtani took exception to the way I was walking. Too much pride for a Saypuri, he said. But I survived. Found him later. Gutted him like a pig. Never forgot that he tried to do that to me. Whenever I get a contract for a Continental…Why, I grab my knife, and remember…

  “Ah,” he says. “Khadse. Of course.”

  Lieutenant Rahul Khadse of the Saypuri Navy. Sigrud remembers him. Nasty little man, one of Vinya’s pets. When Shara took the prime minister’s seat, he’d been one of the first to go. But if it’s him—and Sigrud only has this mysterious testimony suggesting so—then it seems he found a home here in Ahanashtan, practicing his grisly trade.

  Sigrud puts down the handwritten note and looks at the copy of the coded message. It appears to be a copy of a telegram, which would have been sent through the normal channels—so the date is there in plain text at the top. It looks like it was sent the week before Shara’s death.

  He sighs and scratches his head. I thought I’d never have to decrypt anything again, he thinks, yet here I am once more. He rummages around in his room for a pencil and paper. How I hate codes.

  * * *

  —

  It takes him the whole morning to decrypt it. He tries some standard methods, but none make any headway. He tries some systems Shara devised, but those don’t work either.

  I should sleep, he thinks, rubbing his eyes. I must sleep….

  But whenever he thinks of sleep, he remembers the sight of the Golden, its walls ruined and torn, and he has no appetite for rest.

  It’s only when he starts really thinking about who this message was intended for—Khadse, likely—that he has any ideas.

  If Khadse was the hood that Shara’s enemy was working with, then he probably would not have his own encryption team. Maybe he would have twenty years ago, when he was still
in the folds of the Ministry and had access to resources—but not now. So he’d need something familiar. And what sort of code would be familiar to Khadse?

  After one more hour, he stops, thunderstruck.

  He knows this. He’s used this code before.

  He tries out one key.

  The first few lines of the original order begin to materialize:

  ONCE CONFIRMED KOMAYD HAS BEEN ELIMINATED…

  “Shit,” says Sigrud. He can’t believe it. It’s a code that was used by Bulikovian partisans twenty-five years ago, when the capital of the Continent occasionally resisted Saypuri rule. He can’t blame Khadse for using it—it’s an obscure one, one broken by the Ministry long ago, and used in a region fairly far from here. It’s likely any contemporary Ministry operatives would be stumped by it. But Khadse likely didn’t think there’d be any aging operatives like Sigrud on his tail.

  He decodes the rest of the message, and reads:

  ONCE CONFIRMED KOMAYD HAS BEEN ELIMINATED NEXT TARGET LIST WILL BE PROVIDED 12 DAYS LATER STOP

  EXCHANGE WILL TAKE PLACE 1300 HOURS 28TH OF BHOVRA STOP

  SUVIN WAREHOUSE FACILITY REMAINS MOST SECURE LOCATION STOP

  MAINTAIN HIGHEST POSSIBLE SECURITY FOR EXCHANGE STOP

  Sigrud rereads the message, then reads it a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time.

  The 28th of Bhovra…He has to do some math, since he usually thinks in Saypuri months, not Continental months—but he eventually realizes that’s in three days. So he still has time. Not much, but some.

  He has a time, a date, and he knows one half of who will be there—Khadse and his team. Likely a lot of them, judging by the last sentence—“highest possible security.”

  He looks down at his hands. Scarred, worn, ugly things—the left, especially, its palm brutally mutilated using a Divine torture method long, long ago. I was only ever meant for one thing, he thinks.He slowly makes fists. The knuckles pop and creak unpleasantly. Meant to practice one art. How just it feels that now I shall do so.

  He goes to bed, and sleeps deeply for the first time in weeks.

  * * *

  —

  The Suvin Warehouse proves to be an old coal facility, situated on a stretch of docks on the eastern end of Ahanashtan—very sketchy, very dangerous, very old and dilapidated. An odd choice for an exchange: usually they’d pick someplace more accessible.

  No simple dead drop, then, he thinks. Whoever is giving this information to Khadse, they mean to make him work for it.

  But if Khadse is being put through his paces, it means there’s much, much more to protect. Shara was just one facet of all this, and Khadse was but a tool in a larger game.

  I must meet this employer of Khadse’s, he thinks. And ask him many, many questions.

  He walks along the perimeter. Bolts, he thinks, looking at the niches and shadows. Radios…Rope…Explosives, perhaps. He looks around at the nearby crumbling lots. And I’ll need a safe house. And probably to steal an auto too.

  He has work to do, things to buy, things to make. And not much time to get them.

  He returns to the streets to find his way home. But as he does he checks his periphery, doubles back, and performs some quick maneuvers to see if he has a tail.

  He doesn’t. But he could have sworn he saw a familiar face: the pale, young Continental woman with the upturned nose and queerly colored eyes.

  He shakes himself.

  Time to go to work.

  It’s silly, but I still worry about miracles. We tell ourselves that they’re all dead, but I’m never quite reassured enough.

  Pangyui writes that, in some ancient texts, miracles were described not as rules or devices but as organisms, as if Saint So-and-So’s Magic Feet or whatever they called it was just a fish in a vast sea of them. As if some miracles had minds of their own.

  This bothers me. It bothers me because organisms focus on one thing: survival. By any means necessary.

  —MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1709

  Rahul Khadse glowers out the auto’s window at the night sky. He shivers. Just nerves, he tells himself. That’s all it is. But he can’t help but admit that the evening has a bad taste to it.

  He sighs. How he hates this particular job.

  His team clutches their coats tight around their shoulders as they sit in the idling auto, as if they could seal out the creeping, chilling damp. It’s a hopeless cause. “How is it,” mutters Zdenic, “that this damned city gets both the hot summers and the cold winters?”

  “Not as bad as a few years back,” says Emil, their driver. “That was wh—”

  “Shut up,” snaps Khadse. “And watch for the other team!”

  Silence. Some uncomfortable shifting.

  Khadse shivers again as they sit in the idling auto, but not due to the cold: he knows what’s waiting for him at the coal warehouse tonight. Just like his coat and shoes—the ones he wore to the Komayd job, and the ones he’s wearing now—the coal warehouse has its own strange, specific instructions.

  He still remembers his bafflement the first time his employer arranged an “exchange.” In his day if someone wanted to pass along information, Khadse would just arrange a dead drop, or a precisely timed, fleeting encounter somewhere public. But his employer, of course, was different. Khadse was sent a small silver knife, and an old wooden matchbox filled with matches that had yellow heads. With these came instructions to take the items to a certain room in a certain warehouse, utilizing the utmost precaution in doing so, and then he was to…

  Khadse shivers again at the very thought of it. Will tonight be the last time I do this? Or will I be doing this for the rest of my life—however long it lasts?

  Finally the second auto arrives. They watch as it pulls up to the alley exit across the street from them. The lights blink on, then off.

  “Site’s clear,” says Emil. “Proceed?”

  Khadse nods. Emil puts the car in drive, pulls out, and starts off toward the eastern end of Ahanashtan, taking a predetermined series of alleys, back roads, and, once, cutting across a vacant lot.

  The old coal warehouse emerges from the fog. It looks like some ancient, spectral castle, and reminds him of the ruins he saw when he was stationed in Bulikov, long ago, fragments of a civilization long since faded.

  They park. He sits in silence, surveying the area.

  “Matrusk’s been here all day,” says Zdenic. “No one’s come in or out or even close.”

  “If this fucker didn’t have the strangest damned exchange system in all the world,” mutters Khadse, “this wouldn’t be an issue.” He grunts to himself. “The hells with it. Let’s go.”

  He steps out of the auto. There’s a symphony of clunks as the rest of his team does the same, their auto doors opening all at once. He approaches the warehouse, walking with the air of a man coming to collect a debt, his dark coat fluttering, his wood-soled shoes clicking and clacking against the asphalt.

  His crew follows him. Stupid to have so many for just a dead drop, but his employer did say to use the utmost precaution. He’s never liked how his employer is so paranoid, making requests as if they’re being watched all the time. It does give one ideas.

  When they near the entry he makes a motion with his hand. His team members pull out pistols and begin moving ahead, sweeping from room to room. Khadse knows which room matters, the one at the very top, where the site manager’s office once was. A long way up.

  They enter the warehouse bays. The rooms are huge and looming, giant seas of shadows. Khadse’s team switches on torches and sweeps the rooms with light, revealing giant concrete walls and ceilings, some corners awash in piles of coal and coke.

  The torchlights dance over the piles of coal. Such filthy work, thinks Khadse.

  No one. Nothing.


  “Clear,” says Zdenic.

  They leave two guards at the entrance, then proceed up the rickety wooden stairs to the next floor. They cross the entirety of the warehouse, then go up a winding metal staircase to the third floor. Everything is dark and dank, sooty and ashen, as if this place was built of the jetsam from some horrific fire.

  Up to the fourth. They leave three more guards behind on the third, making it just Zdenic, Alzbeta, and Khadse on the fourth floor, where the site manager’s office awaits.

  They walk down the hallway, then through the offices to the break rooms, where a sink must have burst long ago, leaving plumes of mold running across the walls and floor. They turn and approach the office at the very, very back. Khadse makes a gesture, and his two remaining team members take up positions: Zdenic at the site manager’s door, and Alzbeta at the hall entry.

  “Won’t be a minute,” says Khadse. Then he opens the site manager’s door and walks in.

  He turns on his own torch, sending shadows dancing around him. The room is drab and empty, its walls and floors tattooed with scars and scrapes, impressions of absent objects that once spent years here.

  Grimacing, Khadse turns off his torch. Darkness swallows him. He fumbles in his pocket, takes out the matchbox containing the match with the yellow head. He places the match head on the sandpaper bit, and strikes it….

  A low blue flame blossoms in the dark. Khadse wrinkles his nose at it. It is not a natural flame, not one that a normal match should make. It casts light, certainly, but its light somehow seems to make the shadows harder, more concrete, rather than dispersing them. He’s never seen a light that made a room feel darker—and yet this is exactly what he feels this match does, even in such a dark room.

  He blows out the match. Waits. Then he flicks back on his torch.