“I don’t know,” says Sigrud. “But I think Shara’s enemy, this person of darkness…I think he’s wiping out his siblings one by one. He said something about devouring them, about hungering, making them reside inside him….”
“He sounds loony as fuck-all.”
“Well. Yes. But I think he…eats them, in a way. Absorbs them. And gets more powerful each time.”
“And the mirrors you mentioned…”
“Yes. Turyin…You cannot trust the Ministry. There are eyes and ears everywhere. Who knows who is on their side? Who knows what all they’ve heard?” He stops. “Wait. Where are you calling from now?”
“A secure line,” says Mulaghesh. “And by that I mean the phone bank behind my favorite bar in the wrong part of town. If Ghaladesh even has a wrong part of town. I don’t really think they would have put a mirror up here.”
“Assume nothing,” says Sigrud. “Be as cautious as possible in everything you do. In searching for the Salim…or in helping me find where Restroyka is right now.”
“Ah, shit,” says Mulaghesh. She grumbles for a moment, then sighs. “Well. You may be in luck. Restroyka throws around a lot of money, enough that people notice.”
“Such people including yourself?”
“Yeah. She donated to a few parliamentary campaigns a couple of years ago. Caused a minor scandal, what with her being, you know, not actually a resident or a Saypuri or anything, which then brought up the whole ‘sovereignty of the Continental states’ subject, which is just a giant ongoing clusterfuck, as you are well aware.”
“Yes.”
“Anyways, I had to handle it. Had to do a bit of research on Miss Restroyka, not to mention send her a couple trees’ worth of correspondence. She’s got some kind of sheep ranch in a little town just west of Ahanashtan—last I heard, that’s where she operates out of. Apparently she’s a total recluse. Never leaves the town, barely leaves the ranch. Sends a shitload of letters, though. Now—if I give you the name of the town, are you going to blow up her damn house too?”
“I guarantee nothing.”
“You know, you don’t exactly inspire confidence, Sigrud.”
“I am just being honest. But I will try.”
Mulaghesh sighs again. “Dhorenave. The name of the town is Dhorenave. Population of about two hundred. You’ll stick out like a red turnip there, so be careful.”
“Thank you,” says Sigrud. He touches his brow and sees his fingertips are glistening with sweat. “Thank you, Turyin.”
“You need to get some help, Sigrud,” says Mulaghesh. “You sound terrible. Find a doctor. You talked about forgettable ends—seems like falling over dead in a phone bank would be mighty forgettable.”
Sigrud thanks her again and hangs up.
* * *
—
Stealing automobiles is second nature to Sigrud. So many operations required improvised or untraceable transportation that it became standard practice for Ministry officers to steal an auto, do their part of the operation, and then promptly drive the automobile into the nearest river. Sigrud suspects that he alone is probably the cause of hundreds of thousands of drekels of lost property.
Enough damage, he thinks as he cracks open the door of an old jalopy, that one more won’t make a difference.
He climbs in, starts it, and pilots the coughing old wreck northwest, out of the city. Driving proves to be surprisingly difficult. His hands shake and tremble enough that he has to grasp the wheel hard, so hard his wrists ache. More than once he thinks he’s going to drive the auto off the road.
He glances at himself in the mirror. He’s pale, and his eye sockets are blue. He looks like a man who’s just been hauled out of an icy stream. Which is also what he feels like.
He focuses. Just a little farther. Just half a day’s drive to Dhorenave, and from there to Restroyka.
The trip feels impossibly long. He uses every ounce of energy to stay focused on the road. He realizes he needs to eat, yet he doesn’t feel hungry. He needs to drink, yet he doesn’t feel thirsty.
What happened to me when I fell into Nokov’s realm? He pulls over once, to rest and to check his body for puncture wounds, certain that Nokov or someone poisoned him somehow. He finds nothing, though his left side is an ugly, mottled blue-black. That cold infected me, worked its way into me. He starts the auto again. Will it pass? Or is this how I am to be from now on?
Finally he makes it to Dhorenave, part of the rural southern coasts of the Continent that share the moisture of Saypur’s climate, but not the heat. But while the climate of the Continent continues to go through massive shifts as the weather sorts itself out following the death of the Divinities, people have been forced to figure out how to survive.
Which, for a lot of the southern coasts outside of Ahanashtan, means sheep. And a lot of them.
Sigrud peers out the window at the muddy green hills, dotted with muddy, off-white sheep. The housing he sees is rudimentary, mostly stone, with no heating that he can see. So when Mulaghesh said “ranch,” he thinks, she really meant ranch.
He’s worried he’ll have to get out and ask one of the locals where he can find Restroyka, which he knows won’t go well: a big, ill-looking Dreyling wandering around town asking where the wealthiest resident lives would certainly raise eyebrows. But there is just the one main road, and he drives a little farther than he should—and to his surprise, he gets rewarded for it: he spots a pair of huge, elaborate, white stone gates set in the hills to the west of the town.
He pulls over and stares at the gates. They’re at least two or three stories tall.
“That’s it,” he says, wiping sweat from his brow. “That’s got to be her.”
Sigrud climbs out of the automobile and nearly falls over. I hope Shara told Restroyka I’d come, he thinks. And I hope I can make it up the hill.
He does, though it’s not easy. He slows as he approaches. The gates are huge and intimidating. A single name is carved at their top: VOTROV.
Inherited, then, he thinks. And she hasn’t even taken time to change the name.
He looks closer. The old Worldly Regulations from twenty years back must have missed this place, because the gates are covered in Divine references, most of them Kolkashtani. Sigrud identifies the bent, veiled, dour-looking figure in the center of most of the bas-reliefs as Kolkan himself, and each carving of him is paired with his sigil: the hands of Kolkan, forming a scale, ready to weigh and to judge.
Sigrud flexes his left hand. It doesn’t hurt today. But perhaps that’s just because he feels so cold.
He walks through the gates. For the next forty minutes he limps along the muddy road—the only path or road of any kind that he can spot—and sees only hills and streams and shrunken little shrubs, and lots and lots of sheep.
Finally he crests a hill and sees the ranch house ahead, sitting atop a small ridge. It’s big, but nothing like Shara’s mansion. It’s a low, rambling, stone structure that has obviously aged and not aged well. What really attracts his attention, though, is the extensive steel fence running around the perimeter of the house, topped with barbed wire.
“Gates within gates,” says Sigrud with a sigh. In some ways, the Continent never changes.
He staggers down the muddy road to the fence. It has a big set of steel gates that stand locked, though the lock doesn’t look too complex to Sigrud. He looks for some kind of way to signal to the house that he’s here, but there is none. He certainly doesn’t have the voice to shout right now. He considers cutting through the barbed wire atop the fence, but he doesn’t trust himself to be able to scale the fence in his state.
He kneels before the lock and takes out his lockpicks. I’ll knock on the front door, he thinks, and just apologize later.
The lock clicks open after twenty minutes of work—unusually long for him, but then his hands are shaking like mad now. He pulls t
he gate open, the hinges whining slightly, then shuts it behind him and continues up the road.
He wonders what to say. He hasn’t seen this woman in twenty years, and they met only briefly. He hopes that “Shara sent me” will suffice.
And he hopes she has a fire. It feels as if his very bones are freezing over.
Then he hears the gunshot.
He immediately identifies it as a rifling, very high-powered. Then the muddy road six feet in front of him suddenly pops, spattering him with wet earth.
Sigrud instinctively leaps away. He lands on his left side and nearly screams in pain as his broken ribs creak and crackle. He manages to stifle the sound, then lies in the ditch facedown, not moving.
What in hells, he thinks. What in the hells was that?
He waits. There’s nothing, no other shot, no shout to stand up. He begins to crawl away, back to the gates.
Another shot, this one striking the earth about four feet to his right. Then a second one, three feet to his left.
Warning shots, he thinks. I’d be dead if they wanted me to be dead. Though he isn’t sure if this counts as a comfort.
Sigrud stays still, facedown, right hand on his head—his left, of course, he can’t lift. He can’t stop shaking now.
He hears footsteps on the hills above. He considers lifting his head, but decides not to bother. This proves to be the wise decision when a woman’s voice barks, “Don’t move! Don’t you think about moving!”
He waits, listening as they approach. He wonders how he got himself into this, then realizes: Electrical alarm system in the gates. They must have known I broke through. Stupid. Stupid and sloppy.
“Are you armed?” the woman’s voice asks.
“Yes,” says Sigrud.
“Take it out and throw it away, please.”
Sigrud complies, throwing away his knife—though he does wonder what sort of person says “please” when giving orders from behind a gun.
“Good. Stand up, please. Slowly.”
Sigrud, groaning and whimpering as his left side screams in pain, clambers to his feet.
There’s a woman standing up the hill from him. He wipes mud from his eyes and peers at her.
She doesn’t look like a millionaire. She’s dressed in appropriately rural clothing, wearing a sheepskin vest and leather boots, and the high-powered rifling—one that even has a telescopic sight—is an uncommon accessory for the wealthy.
Yet the face that looks down the rifling at him…It’s clearly Ivanya Restroyka, clearly the girl he met all those years ago, laughing in delight as he lit his pipe with a coal from the fire. But she’s aged in the time since, and toughened. She is not at all the glittering socialite he remembers from Bulikov, but a thin, weathered, stone-faced creature with her long, black hair pinned back behind her head.
“And who,” she says, “might you be?”
“Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” Sigrud says. He tries not to tremble as he speaks, but it’s a lost cause. “Sh…Shara…She—”
Restroyka laughs. It’s a cold, brittle sound. “Sigrud je Harkvaldsson! The fearsome Dreyling from Bulikov! So here’s the top man Shara said she’d send to us!” She looks him over. “You’ll pardon my saying so…but I’m not quite sure how much help you can offer.”
Sigrud tries to say that he’s not sure what he can do either, but then he shivers again. And this time it doesn’t stop. He keeps trembling, keeps shaking, keeps shivering until his sight fails, until he can’t see or speak or even breathe.
The next thing he knows, the muddy road is rising up to him. He hits the ground and he’s conscious enough for it to hurt. But not for long.
The last thing he hears is Restroyka sighing and saying, “Oh, for the love of—”
Then things go dark.
* * *
—
Kavitha Mishra awakens in the night.
She’s not disturbed by how dark it is. Though that is disturbing, certainly—she left a candle burning by her bedside when she fell asleep, so it shouldn’t be dark, or not impenetrably dark, like it is now—what’s most disturbing is that her apartments are filled with the sounds of cheeping and rustling and creaking, as if she’s not sleeping in her bed but in some giant, vast, ancient forest, a forest so thick no moonlight could ever penetrate it.
Then a voice: “Mishra.”
Ah, she thinks. She asks aloud, “Yes, sir?”
“He hurt me, Mishra. The man hurt me.”
She sits up. “Nokov? Sir? How did you…How did you find me? I didn’t say your name.”
“I remembered where you once called me,” says his voice. “I remembered. I remembered where it was. I’m getting stronger, Mishra. I can go to places uninvited, if I’ve been there before. But still, he…Still, despite this, he hurt me, Mishra.”
“Who do you mean, sir? The dauvkind?” She knew that the operation in Ghaladesh had gone wildly south. The decimation of Komayd’s house was all over the news. She’d received one message from Nokov—a letter, made of black paper, which mysteriously manifested itself in her dresser drawer the morning after—saying to distribute a sketch of the dauvkind to all Ministry sources, which she’d done. But she hadn’t seen Nokov himself—and she certainly didn’t know he’d been hurt.
Or even been capable of being hurt, really. That’s disturbing.
There’s a grunt to her right. Then something in the shadows…shifts.
And she sees him. Or, perhaps, he allows her to see him.
When she first saw him that day nine years ago, when he left her the letter asking if she would join him, he looked like an ordinary Continental boy—though his eyes had been a little dark, as if difficult to see, and he’d been able to slip in and out of shadows unusually well. Yet as time went by and their mission progressed, he changed.
Nokov stares down at her. He’s still a young man, certainly, appearing to be not yet twenty, but his bearing and his eyes have changed, faint stars flickering in endless darkness, capable of seeing…more.
He’s stronger now. A prince arrayed in his vestments of power.
Yet then he holds up his hand, and she sees his fingers are bruised and swollen.
“He hurt me,” says Nokov. “How is this possible? How could he have done this? Do you know?”
“I…No. I didn’t know that you could be hurt.”
“I can’t! I’m stronger than any of my siblings now!” His voice comes from all around her, as if all the shadows are vibrating at once. “I know that, you and I both know that. If I could just find them I’d…I’d…” He struggles for a moment, and then says, “It’s not fair, damn it. It’s not fair! I shouldn’t…I shouldn’t be able to be hurt anymore. Not anymore.” He looks at her, troubled. “How strong do I have to be to stop them from hurting me?”
Her mouth opens. Though she finds it hard to believe, she suspects he’s looking to her for comfort. But what’s odder still is that there’s an unspoken again in that comment, as if he’s suffered once and has since been running from it.
“Are you all right, sir?” she asks him.
He lowers his hand. His face hardens. “No. I am not. A mortal man, who can physically hurt me? That makes it much harder for me to personally intervene! Because wherever I approach, he could be there. And now he knows what he can do to me. As do my siblings, I have no doubt.” He shakes his head. “This is bad, Mishra, this is very bad.”
“How did he escape, sir?” asks Mishra.
“He…Well. I accidentally pulled him into my domain.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“It is…quite difficult to put this in simple terms,” says Nokov. “There is a place where I am purely me. In that place, I touch every shadow, every bit of darkness. I pulled him into this place, and he…I think he slipped through another shadow. Entered and promptly exited.” Nokov narrows his e
yes. “I think. Which might have killed him.”
“Why would it kill him, sir?”
“Because that place was made for me,” says Nokov. “It is where I am I. Mortals were not meant to be there, even for one second. But this mortal is…concerning. He might have survived. He might have.”
“Where would the shadow have exited, sir?”
Nokov makes a face as if trying to balance a complicated budget in his head. “I suspect it would be…to here. To Ahanashtan. The place I visit the most. They are like doors….And I’ve left more doors open around Ahanashtan than any other place.”
Mishra slowly exhales. “Ahanashtan is where we have the most resources. But there are also lots of exits. We’ll watch the train station, and the docks—as much as we can. Which might not be enough, sir.”
Nokov is silent for a long while.
“But…But what do we do besides that, sir?” asks Mishra.
Nokov says, “Did you know, Mishra, that you were my first?”
“The first what, sir?”
“The first mortal that…that I showed myself to. That I approached and spoke to. I’d been watching you before then, I thought you might help me. But I wasn’t sure. Yet I chose to show myself to you anyway.”
“I didn’t know, sir.”
“I have never asked you this—you have always done what I asked, and you have every right to refuse to answer—but…why did you join with me? Why did you say yes that first time, so many years ago?”
“I…I’m not sure, sir.” She thinks about it. “I suppose that when I first said your name, it was to see if what you were offering could possibly be real. And you came, and it was real. And we talked, but…But when I saw you, you…reminded me of someone.”
“I did?” he says, surprised.
“Yes.” She bows her head. “My brother, Sanjay. He was killed in Voortyashtan.”
“Oh.”
“I know you’re not the same age, sir, but you both look sort of the same age, and…Well. You both…” She struggles to search for the term. “You both believed. In something. Anything. Which, at the time, I couldn’t.”
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 118