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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Nokov stares into Sigrud’s reddening face. His eyes are hooded in shadow, as if no matter where he stood they’d be lost in darkness. Yet Sigrud can see two very distant specks of light glimmering from somewhere deep within his skull….

  “Where are the others?” asks Nokov softly. “Where are they hiding?”

  Sigrud has no idea what he’s talking about, but he taps his throat, signaling he cannot talk.

  Nokov frowns and removes his hand. Sigrud, however, keeps dangling in the air, as if he’s hung on invisible strings.

  Sigrud stares down at himself, hanging several feet above the ground. Are you so sure, he thinks, that he is not a Divinity? He certainly seems capable of changing reality at his will….

  “Tell me,” says Nokov.

  “Tell you what?” gasps Sigrud.

  “You work with the others. That is clear. So where are they? Where are they hiding from me?”

  “W-What?”

  “What function do they use? Which wrinkle in reality do they hide behind?”

  Sigrud wonders what to say. He only got into this because of Shara’s death. But he suspects Nokov might be looking for these other Divine children. Including Tatyana Komayd, whom Nokov likely believes to be one of them—and he’ll be damned if he gives Nokov her location.

  Keep him talking.

  Sigrud wheezes and says, “You…You killed Shara, didn’t you? You paid Khadse to.”

  Nokov just watches Sigrud, his face queerly clean of emotion.

  “Why?” says Sigrud. “What threat could she have posed to you?”

  “Threat?” Nokov’s tone is politely puzzled. “I hated her, certainly. Just as I hated her aunt. But she was no threat to me.”

  “Then why kill her?”

  “She was…a requirement. A step in a process, I should say.” The distant stars in his eyes seem to flare, just ever so slightly. “It is, after all, a terribly complicated thing, to kill a god.”

  “Was it for Tatyana?” asks Sigrud. “Is that why you did it? First you kill the parents, then you target the child?”

  “Why pretend to be so foolish?” asks Nokov. “You work with them, you worked with her. You know what it is I hunger for.” He leans closer. “I will find them. And I will devour them. You know this. It is inevitable.”

  “Tatyana Komayd,” says Sigrud, “is not Divine.”

  Nokov laughs. “I almost believe you when you say it.”

  “I do believe that.”

  “Perhaps so. But have you seen her?”

  “What do y—”

  “Enough of this,” snaps Nokov. “Tell me. Tell me where the others are.”

  Sigrud tries to think. His left side throbs, yet his left hand aches even more. It’s an old pain, a familiar one, but it’s at an intensity he hasn’t felt in a long time: his hand hasn’t hurt this bad since the days when it was first maimed in prison…or, he realizes, when he was this close to a Divinity.

  “I’ll find them eventually,” says Nokov. The boy steps closer. “They can’t hide forever. Each one I find, I grow stronger and stronger.” He leans forward, his queer dark eyes like deep chasms in his face. “They will dwell within me eventually. It’s just a matter of time. And once they do, I will right all the countless wrongs that have been done in this world. I will right them, one by one. A just world. A moral world. That is what I will make.”

  Sigrud remembers what the pale Continental girl told him: When he catches you, he’ll pull out every secret you’ve got hidden away in your guts.

  Sigrud realizes that, though he’s been captured before, he’s never been captured by a Divinity.

  I’m going to die here, aren’t I?

  “I can dash you against all the stones of this world,” whispers Nokov fiercely, “and make it so that you stay alive, feeling each burst of pain, each crack of rock. And when I have broken every bone in your body, I will find some forgotten shadow deep within the world, and I will leave you there, forever. Do you hear me? I will visit every pain and every torture upon your head that was visited upon mine. Do you understand me?”

  Sigrud hears him. If I am to die, he thinks, I should at least die without telling him a thing.

  He shuts his eyes.

  He thinks of the ocean. Of the waves, alternately harsh and gentle, spreading themselves out across smooth white sands. And the smell of salt on the air…

  He opens his eyes. “Jukov.”

  Nokov blinks. “What?”

  “Jukov,” says Sigrud. His voice is hoarse and raspy. “He was your father, wasn’t he? You are a child of Divinities, aren’t you?”

  Nokov’s face darkens.

  “Jukov could bear a grudge,” says Sigrud. “And like you he was a wild, dark thing….I know. Because I saw him. I was there when the last shred of him died.” He grins. “I was the one who piloted a ship full of explosives right into his face. Did you know that?”

  Nokov’s lip curls. “Enough,” he says. “Tell me. Tell me everything you know!”

  “I destroyed his army,” says Sigrud. “It was me. He and Kolkan made their army, but I dashed it all to pieces with but a single broadside.”

  “Shut up,” says Nokov.

  “They were mad,” says Sigrud. “But even mad gods couldn’t hold a candle to the modern world…”

  “Shut up!” cries Nokov. He snatches Sigrud out of the air and slams him to the ground, both hands around his throat. The impact is like being run over by a train. “You shut your mouth!”

  Do it, thinks Sigrud. Kill me. Kill me before you torture me into telling you a thing.

  He can barely speak, but he manages to laugh and gasp, “He was barely Jukov anymore by then….He made such a mistake, you see. Imprisoning himself with Kolkan, he was crushed into him, the two smashed together over decades….”

  “Shut up!” says Nokov. He picks Sigrud up by the throat and slams him down again.

  Sigrud coughs and says. “Your father was barely recognizable….It was almost all Kolkan, at the end….”

  “You shut up!” cries Nokov. His face twisted in adolescent fury, he raises his right hand to bring it down on Sigrud’s skull with a devastating blow.

  Sigrud thinks of the ocean.

  He thinks of Signe’s face, bathed in the dawning sun, the day when he and she swore to rebuild Voortyashtan. How proud he was of her, and she of him.

  Do it, he thinks. Just do it.

  Yet as Nokov’s hand comes hurtling down at him, Sigrud can’t resist his training: even though it’s sure to do nothing, he reaches out with his left hand, his side screaming in pain, and tries to block the boy’s blow.

  Nokov’s hand flies down at him with all the speed of a lightning bolt.

  Sigrud’s left hand rises…

  And catches the boy’s fist.

  Nokov blinks, startled, and stares at his hand, which is now held in Sigrud’s grasp.

  Sigrud frowns, confused. Previously when Nokov touched him it was either like being struck by a falling tree or trying to grab smoke. But now Sigrud’s left hand holds Nokov’s right fist, and it definitely feels…

  Well, human. It feels like the fist of a very young man. And, he notes, it didn’t feel like some superhuman punch when he grabbed Nokov’s fist: rather, it felt like a teenager’s awkward, ungainly swing.

  Nokov looks positively alarmed. “What…How did you do that?” He tugs at his hand. Sigrud’s grip holds fast. “How…What’s going on?”

  Sigrud doesn’t know. But he knows that it feels like he’s holding a flesh-and-blood hand in his.

  So he squeezes it. Hard.

  Nokov gags, shocked, and releases his hold on Sigrud’s neck, trying to use his free hand to pull away.

  But Sigrud holds fast. He keeps squeezing, his big, hard fingers crushing Nokov’s skinny, frail fist.

&n
bsp; Nokov cries out in pain. He falls to his knees. “Stop!” he pleads. The cry is so plaintive, so pathetic, Sigrud is almost taken aback by it.

  Hold on to your rage, thinks Sigrud. Remember what he did to you.

  “Stop!”

  Shara, thinks Sigrud. A black rage begins to fill him, a familiar one. You killed Shara, boy….

  He feels his teeth grinding in fury, feels blood beginning to flood out of his nose. He thinks of Shara’s house aflame, of Mulaghesh old and stooped and tired, of Khadse’s neck, slashed open and pouring blood….

  “Let me go!” screams Nokov. “Let me go, let me go!”

  Sigrud squeezes harder.

  Something crackles unpleasantly in Nokov’s right hand. The boy screams in agony. The shadows begin trembling all around them.

  Nokov, howling, brings his free hand down on the ground.

  The shadows break apart.

  It’s as if Sigrud were standing on top of a black glass surface and it just shattered underneath him. He lets go of Nokov and the boy seems to vanish, sinking back into an errant shard of shadow.

  Sigrud falls.

  That’s what he thinks is happening, at least. It’s hard to tell if you’re falling when there are no air molecules hitting you. He realizes he’s falling through some kind of shadowy sub-space, probably not the reality he knows but the reality Nokov occupies and moves through. He knows this because he heard Shara talk about such things during his time with her—but though she described these facets of reality, she neglected to mention how to get out of them.

  And he feels terribly cold. Terribly, terribly cold.

  I am not supposed to be here, he thinks. Mortals were never supposed to be in such a place….

  He looks down. Shards of broken shadow spin around him, different shades of black flittering across a deep darkness.

  He shifts and twists, and tries to dive toward one big shard, as if he’s aiming for a deep pool of water to break his fall.

  He shuts his eyes, and…

  He starts shooting up.

  The temperature changes around him: it’s no longer that queer, frigid void, but a chilly, clammy night. And Sigrud can tell he’s flying up because the second he passes through that shard of darkness, gravity violently reasserts itself. He starts spinning around, catching glimpses of his surroundings—dark trees, leafy undergrowth, the moon above—before he starts falling down again, finally crashing to the cold, wet earth.

  Sigrud lies on the ground, groaning. His left side feels like it is made of barbed wire. Then something shoots up out of a shadow beside him.

  He can see it spinning and twirling in the air, moonlight gleaming on its black blade. He recognizes it right away.

  His eyes widen as his black knife rises high, and then starts falling back down—specifically, back down at him. He tries to move, but he’s too weak.

  The knife thumps into the soil about three feet to the left of Sigrud’s head. He slowly turns his head to stare at it, and lets out a huge sigh.

  Groaning and whimpering, Sigrud forces himself to sit up and look around.

  He appears to be in a dark forest—and if he understands everything that just happened to him, it seems he got here by being ejected out of the shadow of a tall tree cast on the forest floor.

  He remembers what the woman in the mirror said: He’s everywhere. He’s in everything. Wherever there’s darkness, wherever light doesn’t reach…That’s where he is.

  He rubs his aching face. His understanding of all this is rudimentary at best: but he suspects that Nokov resides in some shadowy sub-reality, one connected to all shadows everywhere. That would explain how he could hear his name being mentioned across the Continent, and how he could arrive instantaneously. It would also explain how Sigrud and his knife were just spat out of a shadow on the ground like a farmer spitting out pumpkin seeds.

  He crawls over on all fours to pick up his knife. At least this isn’t the strangest thing that happened to me today.

  He shivers as he sheathes his knife. He feels cold and weak, as if his heart has dropped a few degrees while the rest of his body has stayed the same temperature. He tries to tell himself it’s just shock, or perhaps a side effect of the injury done to his left side, where he is now certain that he’s broken a rib or two.

  It will pass, he thinks, shivering again. He flexes his fingers, listening to the knuckles crackle. And it’s a cold night. It will pass.

  He fashions a walking stick out of a sapling and uses it to stagger out of the forest. He can see he’s on the Continent somewhere by the way his breath is frosting, but there’s no telling exactly where on the Continent.

  The forest ends and he comes to a stretch of farmland. Bales of hay glow silver and spectral under the moon. He looks at the sky, still shivering a little. He’s heading west, if he’s reading his stars right.

  Before he starts off across the pasture, he pauses, pulls off the glove on his left hand, and looks at his palm.

  The scar there shines in the moonlight. He can still remember that day in prison as if it was yesterday: the guards, cackling wickedly, goading the starving inmates to pick up what they claimed was just a little pebble, saying that whoever could hold it would be rewarded with food. Neither Sigrud nor the other prisoners knew it was the Divine tool of punishment known as the Finger of Kolkan, causing unbearable pain when touched to flesh. None of them knew how horribly it could harm them.

  And yet he had done it. He’d succeeded. Sigrud had held the pebble, blood streaming through his fingers, for three minutes. It had scarred him forever, and its damage has never truly faded: though the pain has sometimes receded, it’s never wholly gone.

  He thinks about how it was his left hand that was able to grab Nokov and hurt him, not his right. And this isn’t the first time his injury aided him: before the Battle of Bulikov, the touch of the Finger of Kolkan helped him carve his way out of the belly of a Divine monstrosity named Urav.

  He stares at his palm. What else was done to you in that prison? What else changed?

  He thinks on it, troubled. Then he pulls back on the glove and starts across the pasture. He shivers again and rubs his arms, trying to beat back the cold. Eventually he comes to a wooden fence and beyond it a road, running north-south. He walks south, since that’s often where civilization lies on the Continent. It’s not too long before he sees a city in the distance, an orange halo of artificial light brightening the horizon.

  He comes to a tiny intersection, finds a rickety wooden road sign, and reads the sign pointing south: AHANASHTAN.

  He groans. I did not want to come back here, he thinks, limping in its direction. I did not like approaching this town with money in my pocket and a pistol in my belt. I like it even less now that I’m injured, penniless, and almost completely unarmed.

  He glances back at the forest and thinks of the queer, dark sub-reality of Nokov.

  But it’s better than the alternative.

  He limps ahead. With each step, Nokov’s words echo in his mind: Where are the others? Where are they hiding?

  He trembles again. It’s as if he has snowmelt in his veins. Shara, he thinks, what were you doing here?

  It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing.

  This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible.

  —DREYLING PROVERB, ORIGIN UNKNOWN

  It takes him most of the next day to hike back to Ahanashtan. He can’t stop shivering, and by this point, he knows it’s more than just the cold and his injury. Sigrud’s swum through freezing water before and was raised within spitting distance of glaciers. He remembers having to crack through the ice at the top of his washing basin every morning as a child.

  Cold he knows. And this isn’t cold.

  I really do not think, he says to himself a
s he limps onto a trolley, that I was supposed to go to Nokov’s…place. If it can even be called a place.

  He gets off at a telegram office. There he sends a message to Mulaghesh, using the instructions she provided, and awaits her call in a nearby phone bank.

  He almost falls asleep as he waits. Then the phone blares to life, ringing so loudly that Sigrud nearly reaches for his knife. He takes the earpiece off the hook, then waits a moment, unsure what to do.

  “Sigrud?” says Mulaghesh’s voice. “Are you there? Answer me, damn it!”

  “I am here,” says Sigrud into the mouthpiece. “Turyin, I—”

  “ ‘Am a fucking idiot’? Is that what you’re going to say? I tell you Shara’s address, and the next day you trot out there and detonate her house like it was a damn firewo—”

  “Ivanya Restroyka,” says Sigrud. The words are little more than a gasp. He can’t stop shaking, and suddenly it’s very hard to talk.

  “What?” says Mulaghesh. “Huh? What in hells are you talking about?”

  “The only woman to share Shara’s love.” He swallows. “That love being Vohannes Votrov.”

  “You…Wait. You think Tatyana is with Restroyka? The richest damn woman alive?”

  “If you were to hide your child with someone,” says Sigrud, “wouldn’t it be with a person of means?”

  “Yeah, but, Sigrud…You sound like shit.”

  “I know.” He swallows again. His teeth chatter a little. “I saw him there. He surprised me. Attacked me.”

  “He? He who?”

  “Shara’s enemy.”

  “Wait. Wait. So you fought a god?”

  “Yes. No. Sort of. I don’t know.” He tries to explain what he put together about the Divine children, hiding away among the population of the Continent, as well as the woman with the golden eyes in the mirror.

  “That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense!” says Mulaghesh. “How could they have survived? I thought the Kaj killed anything and everything Divine, children or not!”