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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “What happened to him after you located him?”

  “Oh, that….Well, that’s trickier. I don’t quite know. The boy vanished, apparently. But I know little Gregorov’s parents met an untimely end. Just before his disappearance. Auto accident, it seems. Plowed them over in the street. And then suddenly no one knew where little Gregorov had gotten to. It was about then, Harkvaldsson, that I decided that this new employer of mine was not one to fuck about with.”

  “What then? What did he have you do next?”

  “Many, many nasty things,” says Khadse. “Which all came to an end when Komayd moved into the Golden. That put a scare in him. Or he acted like it did, I don’t know.”

  “Then he sent you out against Shara,” says Sigrud quietly.

  “Yeah. Maybe he got tired of her. Or maybe he got something out of her, stole it from her operation. That list in your damn hand, perhaps.”

  Sigrud glances at the piece of black paper. He remembers the line from the message to Shara: This city has always been a trap. Now he has our lists of possible recruits. We have to act immediately.

  Khadse’s controller steals a list of possible recruits from Shara, thinks Sigrud, then tells Khadse to target all of them…But why is Tatyana on this list?

  He thinks for a long time. “And your controller,” he says. “That is who gave you this coat.”

  “For the Komayd job, yeah. And the shoes.”

  “The shoes?” Sigrud looks down at the pile of Khadse’s clothing on the floor. He picks up one shoe, turns it over in his hands. There doesn’t seem to be anything odd about it. Then he picks up his black knife, wedges it into the sole of the shoe, and pries off the heel. Underneath, nailed into the very sole, is a thin piece of tin, and engraved in the tin is a very curious glyph of some kind, complicated and…shifting, perhaps. It’s a little hard for his eye to make sense of it.

  “Huh,” says Khadse. “I didn’t know that was there either.”

  Sigrud holds the piece of tin up to the light. “I know this….I’ve seen this before, when we were tracking black marketers outside of Jukoshtan….This is one of Olvos’s miracles. A blinding light in the snow, or something. It prevents people from following you, throws obstacles into their way, keeps them from seeing you properly.”

  “Then how did you find me?”

  “I didn’t track you. I knew where you would be. You came to me. These things follow strict rules.” Sigrud thinks back, remembering the miracles at the doors of the Golden, on the streets outside….He knows from their fight tonight that Khadse’s coat acts as protection. But what if Khadse’s coat could protect against more than knives and bullets? What if Khadse’s employer had given him the coat so that he could slip past all of Shara’s wards and defenses and place a bomb as close to her as possible?

  But that’s the least of his questions right now.

  “Why is Komayd’s own daughter on this list?” asks Sigrud. “Why does your employer wish you to locate Tatyana Komayd?”

  “That’s above my pay grade,” says Khadse. “Maybe you should ask Komayd’s people. She was doing the same thing.”

  “Same what?”

  “Finding children. That damn charity she had, the orphanage thing or whatever?” He cackles. “It was a load of shit. Had to be. She was finding recruits. Putting together networks. Training Continentals.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a private army. And maybe little Tatyana was going to be her colonel. Who knows?”

  “Except your employer wanted to get to these people first.”

  “Again. Above my pay grade.”

  Sigrud is silent for a long time. “Have you ever met your controller, Khadse?”

  “I told you, no.”

  “Ever talk to him, perhaps on a telephone?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you make contact?”

  “I receive telegrams indicating where contact will be made. Then I go to that location, doing exactly what the controller says, and once I’m there I…” He shuts his eyes. “I perform a ritual.”

  Khadse then describes a miracle Sigrud’s never heard of before: a hole of perfect darkness, awaiting Khadse’s blood, and something sleeping at the bottom—something that releases a letter to him.

  Sigrud looks at the letter in his hand. “This letter…was belched up from a miracle?”

  “Yes. Maybe. Whatever. You and Komayd always knew a sight more about the Divine than we ever did.”

  “And you have no idea who put this…this darkness there, or placed the letter there for you to find.”

  “No. I don’t think it works like that. I think…All the times I’ve done it, it’s like the hole connects to somewhere, someplace. Only it’s like the place is under everything, or behind everything…I don’t know how to say it. And I’m not fucking sure I want to know.”

  “How odd it is,” Sigrud says softly, “that you, a man who despises the Continent so much, are willing to use Continental tricks to kill a Saypuri.”

  Khadse shrugs. “Like I said—he pays.” He spits out a mouthful of something bloody and reeking. “Maybe my controller is a nutter, sure. Maybe he’s some Continental hood who got his hands on a bunch of relics. But that’s how it is. It’s the game we’ve played since we were young pups, Harkvaldsson. The powers that be play their war games. And we pawns and grunts, we struggle among the trenches to stay alive. If things had gone but a bit differently, it could be you chained up here, and me with the knife.”

  Sigrud considers that. He finds he agrees.

  He turns and carefully stows the list of names away in his pack. Then he pries off the other tin plate from Khadse’s shoe, takes them both and Khadse’s coat, and stows them away as well.

  “Robbing me, eh?” says Khadse. He spits again. Something tinkles to the floor, possibly a tooth. “I don’t blame you. But now we come to it, don’t we? Now you decide how to end me. How to usher old Rahul Khadse off this mortal plane. You bastard.”

  “Not yet.” Sigrud looks at him. “You know more about your controller than you’re saying, Khadse.”

  “Oh, you want to go after him?” says Khadse.

  Sigrud says nothing.

  Khadse cackles. “Oh, really. Really. Take your best shot! He’ll grind you into pieces, big man!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s not the sort to be trifled with. Me, I just have a name. Along with the rumor that whoever says this name…Well. They don’t stick around.”

  “Your employer kills them? Just for saying his name?”

  “Hells if I know. No one knows what happens to them. But they don’t come back from wherever they go.”

  Sigrud cocks an eyebrow. “What you are describing,” he says, “sounds like a story created to scare children.”

  “And I just put my bloodied hand in a hole in reality!” says Khadse, laughing. “And you just shot me and saw the bullets fall to the ground! I don’t know what to believe anymore, but I believe that it’s wise to be careful.” He grins madly. “I’ll tell you the damned name if you want, Dreyling. I’ll do it gladly. And it’ll be the end of you.”

  Sigrud shakes his head. “I have never heard of any miracle or Divine creature that could hear its own name being spoken from across the world. Nothing short of a true Divinity could do that—and unless you’re about to tell me Olvos is your controller, it means you are quite wrong.”

  “I guess you’ll find out.” Khadse’s smile fades. “And after I tell you the name,” he says, “it’s the end of old Khadse. Isn’t it.”

  “You would have done the same to me.”

  “Yes. That’s so.” He looks at Sigrud, his eyes burning. “How are you going to do it?”

  “If it were twenty years ago, I would have disemboweled you. Left you here with your intestines dangling out.
It would have taken hours. For what you did to Shara.”

  “But today?”

  “Today…I am old,” says Sigrud, sighing. “I know I do not quite look it. But we are both old men, Khadse, and this is a young person’s game. I’ve no time for such things anymore.”

  “True enough.” He laughs weakly. “I thought I was going to get out. Retire. But these things don’t let you run away quite so easy, do they.”

  “No. They do not.”

  “At least it’s you. You and not one of these stupid young bastards. You didn’t just get lucky. You earned it.” Khadse stares off into space for a moment. Then he looks at Sigrud and says, “Nokov.”

  “What?”

  “His name,” says Khadse, breathing hard as if each syllable pains him, “is Nokov.”

  “Nokov? Just Nokov?”

  “Yes. Just that.” He leans forward. “You’ll die, you know. Whatever he does will be a thousand times worse than anything you’re about to do to me.”

  Sigrud furrows his brow. Never in my life, he thinks, have I heard of a Nokov—neither in the world of tradecraft or the Divine.

  Sigrud stands, unsheathes his knife, and gently lifts Khadse’s chin, exposing the thread of white scar running across his throat. He places the blade of his black knife to the scar, as if following the cutting instructions on a child’s piece of paper.

  “And you’ll deserve it,” says Khadse, staring into Sigrud’s eyes. “For all you’ve done. You deserve it too.”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud. “I know.” Then he whips the blade across Khadse’s throat.

  The splash of blood is huge and hot and wet. Sigrud steps back and watches as Khadse chokes, coughs, and gags, his chest and stomach flooded over with his own blood.

  It doesn’t take him long to die. No matter how many times he’s seen it, Sigrud is always struck by how only a few seconds separate life from death.

  How many seconds, he wonders, watching Khadse’s body quake, did it take for Shara to die?

  Khadse’s head slumps forward.

  Or Signe?

  He stops moving.

  The room is silent now except for the patter of blood. Sigrud, wiping his hands on a rag, sits down on the floor and pulls back out the list of Khadse’s targets.

  He stares at the last name on the list: Tatyana Komayd. A girl he’s seen only once in his life, and perhaps the only piece of his friend that still persists in this world.

  * * *

  —

  The pale Continental girl watches the slaughterhouse from the reeds by the canal. She slowly starts creeping up to the edge of the property, mindful of any movement in the windows. Thankfully the big man didn’t take Khadse far, just a few miles downriver. As no one watches this stretch of the river, it was easy enough for her to follow, though she’s now soaking up to her knees.

  She doesn’t know who this big man is, but she knows she doesn’t like him much. It took months of work to track down Khadse’s movements, months of work to tap into Khadse’s communications, months of work to get this close to figuring everything out. It was especially hard since Khadse often had some kind of miracles on his person, something that made him hard to see, hard to follow—yet she’d figured out how to get around them.

  And then this big, stupid man with his guns and his knife has to go in and ruin everything, swooping in at the last minute to haul Khadse off like he was a sack of damned potatoes.

  She crept in after and saw the bodies. Saw what he’d done to them. Whoever he is, she doesn’t want someone like that near her plans.

  Dawn is slowly breaking, but it does nothing to lighten her mood. She looks around at the ruins of the slaughterhouse. She doesn’t like this place. It’s ugly and decrepit, sure, but mostly it’s because she doesn’t like its past.

  And for her, the past is a thing she can see at any given moment.

  She shudders. This was once a place of tremendous death. If she’s not careful its past leaks through to her, and she glimpses giant herds of cattle or goats milling about in the fences, anxious and fretting, wondering what will happen to them. Sometimes she can hear them bleating and bellowing and screaming, smelling blood up ahead and knowing what’s coming. She can hear them now, hear them shrieking in the slaughterhouse….

  She shakes her head, banishes such sounds from her mind. She considers her options. The big man took Khadse somewhere deep within the slaughterhouse, and she’s not willing to exercise her abilities to locate him, not yet. It could put her at risk. But she must get something out of this. She can’t have watched Khadse for days and weeks for nothing.

  Then the light begins to shift. She looks around, confused. The orange rays of dawning light filtering through the slaughterhouse yards stutter, flicker, and finally fade.

  “Oh, no,” she whispers.

  She looks up. The sky is darkening directly above, black hues bleeding through the pale blue, bringing cold, glittering stars in their wake. The patch of darkness intensifies and spreads, a curious, dark dawn in the center of the sky.

  How could he have found me? How could he be here?

  Then she realizes that the patch of night in the sky is not really above her: it’s above the slaughterhouse, and presumably above the two men within.

  She realizes that, whoever the big man is and whatever he wants, he likely has no idea what’s coming for him.

  She debates what to do.

  “Fucking hells,” she mutters. Then she stands.

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud sits on the floor, thinking.

  This isn’t good. None of it’s good, of course, but some parts are worse than others.

  For starters: how did Khadse’s employer get his hands on miraculous items? All the original Divinities—he frankly can’t believe he’s having to debate this again—are very dead, except for Olvos. But most of Olvos’s miraculous items were lost when Saypur’s secret warehouse of them burned down eighteen years ago. Sigrud knows that, because he was one of the people who burned it down. So even those should be incredibly rare.

  Was there another secret storeroom of them? He scratches his chin. Or—worse—has someone found a way to make more of them? That shouldn’t be possible without Olvos’s help. At least, he thinks that’s the case. He’s well out of his league here.

  He looks back at the list of names. He wishes there were more information, especially their locations, for one. But if they had locations of these people, he thinks, odds are they would already be dead.

  He only really knows the location of one: Tatyana Komayd, whom he read had been living in Ghaladesh with Shara.

  He folds up the list again and puts it in his pocket.

  So what’s the next move? There’s one idea he’s gravitating toward, though the concept frankly terrifies him.

  He tries to think of any alternatives. Try to track down this Nokov? Ferret out any more contacts from Khadse’s associates? Start pounding pavement and looking up these names?

  He doesn’t think any of these options will bear fruit. And none are more pressing than the task before him:

  Someone is targeting Shara’s adopted daughter. And odds are no one in the Ministry knows about it.

  He needs to go to Ghaladesh. Ghaladesh, the capital of Saypur, the richest, most well-protected city in the world. The place with perhaps the most security in the civilized nations—and thus the place that he, a fugitive from Saypur’s justice, is most likely to be caught, imprisoned, tortured, and possibly—or probably—executed.

  He’s not quite sure what he’d do if he was to find Tatyana, though. Warn her, get her somewhere safe, then get out. Yet Sigrud has seen what happens to people who fall within the shadow of his life. He has no desire to allow such a thing to happen to Tatyana.

  But he must do something. It pains him to wake each day and know that he was not t
here when Shara needed him most. To imagine allowing the same thing to happen to her child…The idea is abominable to him.

  Then Sigrud pauses. Listens.

  There’s silence, but something’s…wrong.

  He glances over his shoulder. The room stretches out behind him, the train of oil lamps dangling from the track of hooks. He cocks his head.

  He’s pretty sure he lit nine oil lamps when he first brought Khadse here. He found a giant cupboard of them in the south end of the slaughterhouse, so he figured he’d make use of them. Yet now there are only six lit, as if the three at the far end of the room have fizzled out. But there’s no breeze in here.

  Are they burning out? That’s odd….

  He watches as the farthest lamp dies. There’s no noise, no hiss, no smoke. It’s just…gone, with only five lamps remaining. And as the lamp dies, that whole end of the room fills with impenetrable darkness.

  Then he hears footsteps. Someone is walking across the long, darkened room to him. He narrows his eye, peers carefully, but he can’t see anything in the shadows. Whoever they are, they’re not trying to be stealthy: they’re walking with a quick, measured pace, like someone trying to make the next meeting.

  Sigrud stands, grabs his pack, and pulls out a pistol. “Who is there?” he says.

  The steps don’t slow.

  The fifth lamp dies. The wall of shadow grows closer.

  Sigrud throws his pack over his shoulder, raises the pistol, and points it down the long, thin room. “I’ll shoot,” he says.

  The steps don’t slow.

  The fourth lamp dies. The darkness grows closer.

  He gauges the position of the footsteps and pulls the trigger. The retort is incredibly loud in this confined space. The muzzle flash does nothing to illuminate the darkness. And though he’s firing into a small space, the bullet doesn’t seem to hit anything, or intimidate whoever’s out there—because the steps just keep coming.

  The third lamp dies. Just two left, hanging just above Sigrud. The wall of darkness is very close now, as are the footsteps.