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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “So,” says Ivanya. “You’re to be our bodyguard. Yes?”

  “I believe that was the general idea,” says Sigrud. He glances at her rifling. “But you seem to be doing a very good job. You call her…Taty?”

  “Yes. She is Taty, and I am Ivanya. None of this Miss Restroyka nonsense, all right? You’re not my damn errand boy. I had one, but I fired him. Didn’t trust him. Also he seemed to be somewhat fearful of the sheep. Bad fit all around. Tell me—how did you know to come here?”

  “Shara told me, in a way.” He tells her about his journey here, though he doesn’t yet tell her about Nokov and the Divine.

  Ivanya laughs lowly. “Old Mother Mulaghesh…How she hated me. Didn’t like me interfering with Saypuri politics. Ironic, isn’t it, since Saypur has had its hand in every Continental ballot box since the Kaj’s day. Though Shara tried to fix some of that.”

  “How did you come to know Shara?”

  She stops and looks at him, her gaze bright. “How did you come to know her, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson?”

  He shrugs. “She got me out of prison.”

  “Hm. How I’d wish for such a simple story.” She continues walking. “She started sending me letters about, what, five years ago or so? Said she wanted to know if I was interested in starting a charity. Some kind of thing about providing shelter for Continental orphans. I ignored her at first, but she was persistent. Eventually I let her come to Dhorenave and pitch me in person. And she struck a chord with me. Still a lot of kids displaced from all the disasters we’ve had. These things…They linger. They linger for generations.”

  Sigrud listens carefully. “So…You were involved in her charity on the Continent?”

  “I don’t know about involved. I paid for a damned lot of it. Consulted on her board via correspondence. And sometimes I let her daughter come and stay with me, when Shara’s life got too busy, and I had more of a staff here. Little Taty thought it was fun, riding the ponies and whatnot. I got rid of all the staff when Shara died. Didn’t trust them anymore.”

  “It was Shara who brought Taty here, though—correct?”

  “Yes,” says Ivanya. “You don’t know any of this?”

  He shakes his head. “I only became involved after she died. I knew nothing.”

  “After she died, eh? Are you her self-anointed avenging angel? How very masculine of you.”

  “When did she bring Taty here?” asks Sigrud.

  “A little over three months ago,” says Ivanya, “after she moved into Ahanashtan. And then…”

  “She was murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she sent no other communications to you during this time?”

  “No. But that’s not abnormal. I do everything at a distance these days. I try not to involve too many people in my life, or what I do here.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “I manage my assets,” she says, walking up to the little barn. “I raise the sheep. And then there’s this.” She unlocks the padlocked door and throws it open.

  Sigrud stares. Inside is an armory of weaponry and munitions that would give even the most veteran operative pause. Dozens of pistols and riflings—both of the semiautomatic and fully automatic variety—as well as cleaning kits, ammunition belts, and boxes and boxes of bullets. There are also tins of food at the back, and boxes of things like rice and flour, all of them very carefully sealed to make them last as long as possible.

  Ivanya carefully gauges his reaction. “I’ve trained,” she says. “As much as I can, at least. But I suspect you know a lot more about such weaponry. You said you were told to come here and protect Tatyana. I wanted you to know where these were. In case anything happened.”

  “And…do you expect anything will happen?”

  “I’ve expected something will happen for a very long time now, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” says Ivanya, staring off into the hills. “Disasters, on the Continent, are more common than rain. And I want to be ready, and for you to be ready too. Come on. Let me show you the roads.”

  * * *

  —

  Ivanya Restroyka spends a good part of the next two hours showing him the territory. She starts with the one road that leads through the sheep pastures—the one he came in on—but she also shows him the two or three dozen various footpaths through the hills that are accessible from the town.

  Or from the river. Or from the forest. Or from the lowlands. Or from the neighboring sheep ranches.

  Sigrud listens as Ivanya points out all the various routes and methods someone could use to attack them. He watches as her hand never leaves her rifling—always a very tight grip on it. He nods thoughtfully as she tells him how the fences are alarmed. And he understands immediately that Ivanya Restroyka has not been preparing an attack just in the month or so since Shara died—she’s been preparing for an attack for years. Maybe even a decade. Or more.

  “…could float up the river,” says Ivanya, pointing. “If they brought inflatables of some kind. Rafts, perhaps. That’s another possibility.” She glances at him, then stops. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Sigrud thinks for a moment. “I remember you too, you know. From the party.”

  “Do you.”

  “Yes. You were very young.”

  “Younger than young, it feels. I was twenty-one.”

  “Yes. But you were also very…unconcerned. Very social. Very talkative. You talked to everyone.”

  “So?”

  “So…I am trying to reconcile that memory with the person before me. Someone who has no company on her property except sheep and quite a lot of guns.”

  She laughs bitterly. “You want to know how I got to be here?”

  “I would be curious why a millionaire does not appear to enjoy any creature comforts, yes.”

  She shrugs. “What happened to you? What happened to Shara? What happened to any of us? I lived through the Battle of Bulikov, Mr. Sigrud, just as you did. I saw the world fall apart around me, just as you did. I saw death on a scale I could never have imagined. And I lost the one thing that felt real to me. I lost Vo. Or perhaps he was taken from me.” She looks off into the barren wilderness. “I tried to get better afterwards. We all did. But then Voortyashtan happened. And I stopped looking at cities and civilization as refuges. I started looking at them as liabilities.”

  “So you came here?”

  “Here was better than anywhere else. It used to be a horse ranch for Vo’s family, but sheep are a lot more valuable now. What was I supposed to do, go to cocktail parties? Wear a slinky dress and gossip? None of that meant anything anymore. Some new Divine horror could come along and blow away all of those quaint notions of safety and security as if they were but the seeds of a dandelion. People think me a madwoman, but I know I’m not wrong. Even the humans can’t be trusted these days, as we’ve learned. I just hope the bastards who killed Shara get tracked down fast. Then maybe we can get Taty home soon, and you can be on your way, Mr. Sigrud.”

  Sigrud glances sideways at her. “So…What did you think Shara did for your charity?”

  “Huh? What do you mean, think? You mean besides run it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Whatever was needed? I was sent all of her minutes, all of her meeting reports, her finances, all of her—”

  “Were any of the orphans she located,” asks Sigrud, “considered special?”

  “What do you mean, ‘special’?”

  “I mean things Shara would handle personally.”

  “We had escalated cases,” says Ivanya. “Cases of danger or extreme circumstances.”

  “Which were escalated to Shara.”

  “Of course. She was the head of the charity.”

  Sigrud nods absently as he stares into the fog-laden hills.

  “Why?” she asks. “Why all these questions
about the charity? Surely the charity had nothing to do with Shara’s death.”

  Sigrud takes a deep breath in, then quickly regrets it, as it pains his side. “You were right, Ivanya. You are not a madwoman.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Shara did not die due to some mortal plot,” says Sigrud. “She was murdered by agents of the Divine.”

  Ivanya stares at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I will tell you,” says Sigrud. He grunts a little as he shifts his shoulders, trying to find a more comfortable position. “But I am going to need a chair. And I suggest we have this conversation…away from Taty.”

  “Could this upset her?”

  “Something like that.”

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud talks. He talks for a long time, more than three hours, seated crookedly on an old, cobwebbed chair in Ivanya’s armory, with her standing in the corner opposite him. When he finishes, Ivanya is silent for a long while.

  “You’re…You’re mad,” she says.

  Sigrud nods, for this is the natural response. He stands and walks among Ivanya’s armaments, lightly touching a pistol or rifling or knife, leaning this way and that to confirm the make or model or the integrity of the weapon.

  “You’re mad,” says Ivanya again. “You’re absolutely mad!”

  He nods again, then picks up a carousel pistol. He smiles a little, remembering Turyin running around Voortyashtan with one of these monstrosities on her hip.

  “Quit nodding!” snaps Ivanya. “It’s patronizing!”

  “Your reaction is completely reasonable,” says Sigrud. He puts down the carousel and picks up a revolving pistol. He flicks open the cylinder and examines the chambers. “What I am telling you is mad. But also true. On the Continent, as you know, things can be both.” He shuts the revolving pistol with a snap.

  “You are telling me that Shara Komayd was using her damned charity to…to locate Divine children?”

  “Yes. From what I have gathered.”

  “Because there’s some Divine child tyrant out there trying to gobble them up?”

  “Yes.”

  “And…And you think Tatyana might be one of them?”

  “I think her name is on a list I have,” says Sigrud. “And she looks almost exactly like the girl who saved me from the slaughterhouse. There is too much similarity for any doubt, to me.” He pauses and looks over the many barrels of riflings at Ivanya. “Has she done anything odd?”

  “Her mother was assassinated!” says Ivanya, exasperated. “And now she’s stuck out here in the hills, with me, and I know I’m no storybook ladies’ maid! All she’s done is cry!”

  Sigrud sucks his teeth. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense! All the rest of the shit you just told me, yes, that’s perfectly logical.”

  “She must do something strange. Be something more than what she is.”

  “Or you’re dead wrong, and Shara’s murder was just some, I don’t know, Continental separatist plot!”

  “Are you not curious,” says Sigrud, walking over to the fully automatic section of weaponry, “as to why Ministry agents haven’t been pounding on your door, asking where Taty is?”

  “I do a good job controlling my connections to the world out there! We don’t even have a telephone here.”

  “But nobody’s that good,” he says, “unless Shara did such a good job slipping Tatyana out of Saypur that they still don’t even know she left the country. The Ministry is not here, Ivanya Restroyka, because Shara did not trust the Ministry. She knew it had been compromised. That was why she chose to do all this herself.”

  “If what you’re saying is true,” says Ivanya, “then why isn’t her Divine enemy knocking on our door either? Why haven’t Taty and I been murdered in our beds?”

  Sigrud pauses to think, for this has troubled him too. Nokov seems capable, competent, and preternaturally dangerous. How could they have survived on the Continent for three months without his notice?

  Then he gets an idea.

  “Do you have a jar?” he asks.

  “A what?” says Ivanya.

  “A jar. And…When livestock dies. Where do you bury it? Or their ashes, if you burn them.”

  “What are you—”

  “And if there are any star lilies that grow near here,” he says, “I would appreciate if you would point them out to me.”

  An hour later, Sigrud stands next to the armory barn and tries to ignore Ivanya’s bug-eyed stare as he smears the bottom of the muddy little glass jar with grave dirt. I hope it counts as grave dirt, he thinks, if it’s sheep that occupy the grave. He also hopes that onion lilies—apparently the most predominant wildflower around here—count as lilies, for he has a handful of them at his feet. It could really go either way: they smell like onions, but look like lilies.

  “So this is a miracle,” says Ivanya flatly.

  “Not yet.” He picks up the lilies, shreds their petals, puts them into the jar, and gives it a good shake. “Now it’s a miracle,” he says, dumping them out and scraping off the grave dirt.

  “Oh, obviously. Obviously. I didn’t check your temperature, Mr. Sigrud, but I’m increasingly worried you boiled your brain.”

  Sigrud smiles politely and looks around. It’s late afternoon now, so the hills are dappled with the gold-yellow light of sunset. It’d be prettier if it weren’t for the hot ball of dread churning in his stomach.

  Sigrud lifts the jar to his eye. And, as he expected, the hills light up.

  It’s like they’ve been drawn on with some kind of glowing paint, forming giant rings of phosphorescence surrounding the ranch house, rings and rings and rings. The muddy road back to Dhorenave has received the most attention, it seems: the path looks like a huge, glowing stripe cutting through the hills, and it shines so bright it hurts his eye.

  “Well?” says Ivanya.

  He hands it to her without a word. She looks at it suspiciously, then back up at him. Then she makes a face, lifts the jar to her eye, and peers through.

  She gasps. She stares into the jar, leaning forward as if the Divine designs were right in front of her, and then slowly, slowly turns about. “What in the world…? It’s a trick, isn’t it? You’re fooling me, aren’t you?”

  He shakes his head. “This is what I saw outside the Golden Hotel in Ahanashtan. I think someone did this to protect you. Just as they did for Shara.”

  Ivanya takes the jar away, blinks at the hills, then puts it back to her eye again. “But…Who…”

  “Shara’s helpers,” he says softly. He peers at the sun-dappled landscape. “Perhaps other children she saved. I don’t quite know. I have no doubt that she would ensure her daughter had as much protection as she had—if not more.”

  She goes pale. “You’re…You’re saying that Divine children came here, crept through the forest, and built invisible, miraculous walls around my house?”

  “It would explain why you haven’t been found yet. Shara did her work. I don’t know what these protections do. Perhaps they ward away people or agents who mean well. Wipe the memories of those looking for Taty. Or perhaps these wards just kill trespassers outright.”

  “I’m fine with any of those results.”

  “Yes. But Shara’s enemies found a way past the barriers at the Golden. And worse, it means more people—if they can be called people—know where Taty is than we realized. If Shara’s enemy gets a hold of whichever children made these protections—and it sounds like he would dearly love to do that—then he will know where we are as well.”

  Ivanya slowly puts down the jar. She turns to look at Sigrud, her face wan with horror. “You mean that…You mean Taty could really be…”

  “What’s going on?” says a voice.

&nbs
p; Sigrud and Ivanya turn to look, and see Taty standing on the back porch of the house, watching them. “What…what are you doing with that jar?” she calls. “Are you playing some kind of game or somethi—”

  Ivanya turns and hurls the jar away, smashing it against the wall of the barn, which makes both Sigrud and Taty jump. She whirls back around and stabs out a finger. “Get back in the house!” she snaps.

  Taty gapes at her, shocked. “Auntie, I—”

  “Now! Back inside! Now!” Her face is bright red, her mouth tight with fury.

  Taty watches her a second more. Then she glares at Ivanya and Sigrud, walks back in the house, and slams the door behind her.

  Ivanya stands there without saying anything, just breathing hard.

  “That,” says Sigrud, “was probably an overreaction.”

  “Oh, was it?” snarls Ivanya. “You’ve just told me that not only am I probably targeted for Divine assassination, but so is the girl entrusted to my care, and you’ve shown me that my property has been infiltrated by Divine agents! Agents working for Shara, perhaps, but still people who took away the…the one thing I had out here. The chance to be lost, to be forgotten, to keep all that away from me.” She looks at the back porch. “But now here it is, right next door to me….In my home. In my home.”

  Sigrud watches her as she tries to regain control of herself. He’s not sure if Ivanya’s going to have a panic attack or burst into tears. But to his surprise, she does neither: she shuts her eyes, clenches her jaw, turns to him, and growls, “What do we do?”

  “I am not sure yet,” he says.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Not forever, no.”

  She laughs miserably. “Can we even stay here tonight?”

  “I think so,” says Sigrud. “We can risk a few more days. I injured our enemy. Maybe for the first time ever. He will avoid being where I am, for a time. But I need rest as well.”

  “And we’re supposed to just go back into the house with”—she looks toward the porch—“with her? A girl you think might be Divine?”

  “I…Yes. I think so.”