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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I see,” says Nokov quietly.

  “Might I ask, ah, why you asked, sir?”

  “It’s complicated. Have you ever heard of a seneschal, Mishra?”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “A seneschal. It was something the old Divinities used to do. A mortal who bears the miracles and blessings of a Divinity, and speaks and acts for them. A representative or a champion, in a way. It was considered a tremendous honor among the old Continentals. But it comes at a price. A seneschal bears the miracles of a Divinity—but a miracle is a piece of that Divinity. To be a seneschal is to consume and be merged with a god—and that is no small thing.”

  “What are you saying, sir?”

  He looks at her, his eyes glimmering. “I am saying,” he says, “that if you were to become my seneschal, Mishra, you might not be you anymore. You would be something new. And I am not quite a Divinity yet. I am close to it. With each victory we have, I grow closer. But I know that I am not yet there. So I do not know how this exchange could go.”

  “I…I see, sir.”

  He thinks for a while, then sighs. “I will not ask this of you, not yet. But we face hard choices ahead, Mishra.” He stands. “Notify me the moment you know anything.”

  “Yes, sir. We will listen carefully for any whisper of the dauvkind.”

  “Good.” He steps farther back into the shadows. “Sleep well, Mishra.” He flickers, as if a nearby candle flame is being buffeted by a breeze. Then he’s gone. The darkness disappears with him, soft moonlight returns, and Mishra stares around at her empty apartments.

  * * *

  —

  In the dark, Sigrud dreams.

  He dreams of a memory, of things as they once were.

  His father, small and weary, waiting in a dark hallway as Sigrud walks out of a door. Torchlight quakes on the stone walls. The air is moist and cold.

  His father smiles at him, looking at something in his arms. Sigrud looks down. He holds an infant girl in his arms: Signe, mere minutes old.

  “Look at you,” says his father to the child. Then, to Sigrud: “And look at you.”

  Sigrud frowns at the look in his father’s eyes. “You don’t look happy.”

  His father smiles. “I am happy. But I am also not happy.”

  “Why? Why are you sad?”

  “I’m not sad, Sigrud. You will learn many beautiful things about life now. But also many sad ones.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, to start with…” He looks down at his granddaughter, still sleeping, still beautiful. “Now that she is in this world, your life will never truly be your own.”

  Sigrud looks down at Signe, this tiny, perfect, frowning thing.

  The infant opens her mouth. A scream comes out, loud and pained, an adult scream of genuine terror.

  The scream continues, but the scene changes. He’s in Voortyashtan, in Fort Thinadeshi, screaming madly, one hand around the throat of a Saypuri soldier, the other thrusting his knife up into her belly again and again and again, slashing her open until her intestines begin spilling out….

  Her eyes are wide as they stare up into his. Her face, though blood-spattered and pale, is smooth and soft—the face of a girl hardly older than eighteen.

  She was a child, he thinks. She was just a child.

  Sigrud opens his eyes, terrified. The dream is gone, and he thinks he’s awake—but he’s not sure. He’s wrapped in blankets and lying on something wooden. There’s a fire beside him and the moon in the distance, huge and bright. And standing over him is…

  Someone familiar. Someone small, skinny, with slumping shoulders, their thick glasses flickering in the firelight.

  “Shara?” Sigrud whispers. “Are you there?”

  He sleeps.

  * * *

  —

  He feels air moving out of his open mouth. His tongue is dry, his head aching, and his back feels scored for some reason he can’t fathom. But he’s alive.

  He cracks open his eye. He appears to be lying on the porch of Restroyka’s ranch house. It’s night now, and he’s wrapped in a pile of woolen blankets, and there’s a fire in some kind of stone chimney next to him, built up to a roaring height. He can feel the heat, but just barely.

  The fragments of his dream are still flittering through his head. He tries to look around. There’s someone in a chair beside him, looking out at the stark hills, a rifling in her hand. She hears him move and turns to look at him. It’s Restroyka.

  “Awake,” she says. “Are you thirsty?”

  Sigrud nods. It feels like he hasn’t had a drink in years.

  Restroyka rises and goes inside, rifling slung over her shoulder. She brings back a wooden cup, brimming with ice-cold water. He slurps it down greedily, but chokes on it, which makes him cough violently.

  Restroyka watches him closely, her thin, hard face still and inscrutable. “What happened to you?”

  Sigrud considers telling her that he was injured and poisoned after struggling with a near-Divinity, but decides such a claim would not be the best way to start off their relationship.

  “What do you know?” he asks, though his voice can’t rise above a whisper.

  “I know you broke onto my property, unannounced,” says Restroyka. “And I know you look like you’re dying. Though I haven’t dug the grave quite yet. I apologize if your back hurts. You were too heavy for me to carry, so I had Nina drag you up to the porch.”

  “N-Nina?”

  “My mule. Getting you into the house was impossible. So we improvised,” she says, waving to the fire. She looks at him, and he sees a hardness to her gaze he didn’t expect. “I remember you, you know.”

  “What?”

  “From the party. In Bulikov.” She sits back down. “I don’t forget a social acquaintance. There was you, with your big red coat and your hat and your pipe. And then there was her. Little Shara. And the second Vo saw her, I…” A bitter smile. “I felt the world falling apart. Even before the Battle of Bulikov.” She looks back at him, her eyes flicking over his face. “You—you’ve held up marvelously well, haven’t you? You look almost exactly as I recall you. Except not quite as alive, of course. That can’t be right, can it? I must be misremembering how you looked….”

  Sigrud watches her as she talks. She keeps one hand on her rifling at all times. There’s an easy familiarity to how she holds it that suggests this weapon might be her constant companion out here—if not her only companion.

  He tries to take a breath to ask about Tatyana, but his side hurts too much. “Don’t bother talking,” says Restroyka. “You’ve slept all day, and it looks like you needed it. Someone has worked you over like a cheap piece of mutton, and you still seem terribly sick. But you won’t find any more harm coming from me. Shara told me to check the eye, and the hand. She said you might come. And you are who she said you’d be.” She taps her left eye. “I like the false eye, though. It’s very pretty.”

  She and Sigrud look at each other for a moment, his breath shallow and ragged.

  “Did anyone follow you?” she asks quietly.

  He shakes his head.

  “Are we in danger?”

  He nods.

  “But is our location known?”

  Sigrud tries to shrug, but he’s not sure if she can see it.

  “I told her it wouldn’t last,” says Restroyka to herself. “I told her these things always fall apart….”

  There’s a clunk from down the porch. Sigrud can’t lift his head to see, but Restroyka sits up, alarmed. “Dear, I thought I told you to go back in and stay in the house!”

  “You also told me to fetch another cord of wood,” says a voice, low and sullen. “Those are two contradictory orders, Auntie.”

  Sigrud frowns. Auntie?

  “I don’t like you being out of the house,”
says Restroyka. “If someone skulking around in the trees out there took some potshot at you and got lucky, I’d never forgive myself!”

  “Unless the sheep have rebelled and taken up sharpshooting, I suspect we’re quite safe here.”

  Someone steps into view, though they’re still in the shadows. Someone small and thin, their glasses glinting in the firelight, someone familiar.

  Sigrud blinks in shock. “Sh-Shara?”

  His vision focuses more. He sees he was wrong: though this new girl carries herself like Shara, dresses like Shara, and even talks a bit like her, she’s clearly a Continental, short and pale with curly, inky black hair.

  “No,” she says quietly. “Not Shara.” She looks at Restroyka. “Why does he keep saying that?”

  Then the girl draws closer, toward the light, and he sees her fully. He sees her wide, pale face, her upturned nose, her small, thin-lipped mouth.

  It’s a face he recognizes instantly. Not from the photograph he saw in Shara’s house, though, not the laughing six-year-old girl he saw there.

  It’s the girl from the slaughterhouse, he thinks, astonished. The one who saved me. She looks exactly like her! But…that’s impossible….

  “I suppose I should ask you to introduce yourself, Tatyana,” says Restroyka, rising to stand beside her. “But then, I never properly introduced myself to our guest either.”

  “We’ve met,” says Tatyana, her eyes a little wide with awe.

  “You have?” says Restroyka, surprised.

  “Yes. Once. I thought I dreamed it.” She stares into Sigrud’s face. “I was a little girl, and I walked into Mother’s room, and she was talking to a man in a mirror. The man was on a ship, and he was weeping. He was so sad, that man. And I never learned why.” She cocks her head. “She said it was a dream. But it was real. It was you. Wasn’t it?”

  Sigrud is still so surprised that he’s hardly listening to her. He can’t stop looking at her face, watching her every movement. He can’t believe that Tatyana Komayd, Shara’s adopted daughter, could possibly look so much like the girl from the slaughterhouse.

  He remembers Nokov, laughing at him in the dark: But have you seen her?

  Sigrud swallows. “How are you…How are you…”

  “How am I what?” Tatyana asks.

  His strength fails. He lets his head fall back, and he blinks once, twice, then a third time. He can’t keep awake any longer. Consciousness slips out of his grasp, and he sleeps.

  * * *

  —

  He awakens to the smell of something cooking, something thick and starchy. It’s not something he would ordinarily find appetizing, yet his stomach feels so totally empty that it growls at the merest whiff of it. He realizes he hasn’t felt hungry in hours, if not days—which means he must be getting better.

  He opens his eye. It’s morning, and he’s still on the porch. There’s an awful taste in his mouth, and everything feels moist. He realizes he’s been sweating pints and gallons all night.

  And sweat means…that I feel warm.

  And he does feel warm, he finds. He feels very, very warm. He needs to get these blankets off of him, and now.

  He shoves them off, which releases a cloud of saline stench that’s almost overpowering. His left side is still in terrible pain, but his skin delights in the feel of the cold morning air.

  Slowly, slowly, he stands. His sweat-drenched clothes steam slightly in the cold air, as if his pockets were full of candles. He limps to the front door of the ranch house.

  He looks inside. Everything is quite rudimentary, all candles and torches and spindly wooden chairs, not at all the trappings of a millionaire. He can smell a wood fire somewhere, and the creamy, starchy smell is stronger. He limps down the hallway.

  The hallway ends in the kitchen. There’s a small kitchen stove in the corner with a little wood fire flickering below an iron cauldron. A thread of steam unscrolls from the edge of the cauldron, where something white and lumpy has calcified.

  “It’s porridge,” says a voice.

  He turns and sees Tatyana Komayd sitting in the corner, reading a tremendous book whose spine says: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONTINENTAL COPPER INDUSTRY. She peers over the top with an expression of measured disdain, as if remembering some personal slight he did to her.

  “Oh,” says Sigrud. He scratches his arm, feeling awkward. “Is it.”

  “Yes. It is. It’s all Auntie Ivanya eats. That and mutton, and carrots, and potatoes.”

  For a moment they just look at each other. Sigrud can’t stop looking at her arms, her legs, her feet, as if to verify that every visible piece of her is human and normal—which they all seem to be.

  She is just a girl. Just a teenage girl, watching him with an air of resentment. It’s so surreal to think that this is who he risked his life to save, who he fretted over in the dark, the person who vexed and concerned him as he sailed across the South Seas to Ghaladesh.

  And yet to look at her…

  “Something on my face?” asks Tatyana.

  Sigrud stares at her for a second more. She has no idea. No idea who she looks like. Or what she might be.

  He coughs awkwardly. “Restroyka is…your aunt?”

  “She’s a family friend.” A frosty smile. “Bowls are in the top-right shelf. Spoons in the drawer below.”

  Sigrud opens the cabinet and sees there are indeed bowls on the middle shelf, but on the bottom shelf sits something far more alarming: a big, black revolving pistol.

  “She also left that,” says Tatyana from the corner. “I think she left it for me…but you might have more use for it.”

  Sigrud stares at it for a moment longer before filling his bowl with porridge. “Why would she leave you a gun?”

  “In case anyone leapt in here and threatened my life, I suppose. I sort of think I’d welcome it. Nothing else has happened since Mother brought me here.”

  “Your mother brought you here?” asks Sigrud.

  “Who else?”

  He looks around. “Where is Restroyka?”

  “Feeding the sheep and the pigs. I think. I can’t confirm it, because I’m not allowed out of the house. I’m a person of some importance, you see.”

  Sigrud sits at the table. He’s about to take a giant bite of porridge when Tatyana rises and sits opposite him. She fixes him with a steely look, as if he were some bizarre animal and she’s not quite sure how to categorize him.

  “So,” she says. “You knew my mother.”

  “Uh,” says Sigrud. “Yes.”

  “Do you know how to use a pistol?”

  He glances at the cupboard. “I do.”

  She nods. “And were you a spy as well?”

  Sigrud pauses. It’s naturally a hard rule of espionage that one should avoid running around confessing one is a spy. But you don’t get to be a decent operative without being able to read people—and he senses that Tatyana Komayd already knows the truth, and expects it from him.

  “Something like that,” he says.

  She nods again. “I see,” she says, just a little too pertly. Then she stands, grabs her book, and marches out of the room.

  Sigrud stares at her as she goes, wondering what just happened. Then the back door opens and Restroyka strides in, wearing a thick leather coat and muddy boots, the scoped rifling slung over her back.

  “You’re up, I see,” she says. “And eating. Perhaps you’ll live yet.” She frowns when she hears a door slam from far back in the house. “What’s going on?”

  Sigrud gestures helplessly at the empty chair across from him. “Tatyana was here, and…”

  “And?”

  “And she asked if I knew her mother.”

  Restroyka narrows her eyes. “And what did you tell her?”

  “I told her I did. Then she asked if I was a spy.”

 
; “And then what did you tell her?”

  “I told her…Well. Yes? Though that is a poor word for it. Then she just walked away.”

  Restroyka sighs and blows a stray thread of hair away from her face. “Oh, dear. Well. That’s how it’s been out here. Can you walk?”

  “I would prefer not to,” says Sigrud, thinking of his injured side.

  “And I would prefer not to play babysitter to a pissed-off girl and a half-dead Dreyling, but here we are. When you’re done with your breakfast, come outside. I wish for you to see something, please.”

  “Will Tatyana be all right?”

  “Taty? Hells, certainly not! Not only is she still grieving, but worse….Well. Apparently Shara didn’t tell her the truth. About anything.”

  “The…truth?”

  Restroyka smiles acidly. “I liked Shara, believe it or not. She was something of a friend of mine in later years. But I do question some of her parenting decisions. Especially hiding from your only child that you were one of the most accomplished espionage agents in Saypuri history, and that you personally killed two gods.”

  Sigrud’s mouth falls open. “She…She never told her?”

  “Not a word of it. Apparently Taty grew up thinking her mother’s tenure as prime minister was little more than another stage in the career of a milquetoast high-level bureaucrat. How Shara managed that, I’ve no idea. And now that she’s dead, all the truths have come out. I couldn’t keep the news from her when her mother’s life is international news. So trust me, after all the crying and screaming and weeping that I’ve put up with in the past month, Mr. Sigrud, a bedridden man who can barely talk is an absolute vacation.”

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud follows Restroyka as she strides toward a small barn in the corner of her lot. He glances back at the ranch house as they leave it. He sees that though it’s in need of repairs, security has been a priority: the windows have bars on them, and a few of them have been covered up with plates of iron.