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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

“She’s just a girl, Sigrud,” says Ivanya softly. “Just a hurt, scared girl. You can’t be right. You can’t be.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t. You just met her. She’s hardly older than I was when…” Ivanya shuts her eyes, swallows, and shakes her head. “It’s not fair, damn it. Not to me. Or to her.”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud. “But ‘fair’ is but a word.”

  Ivanya sighs. “What are we going to do?”

  “Do you have a telegraph office here?”

  “Yes. There’s one in town.”

  “I need you to send a telegram,” says Sigrud. He finds a scrap of paper in the armory and writes down the information. “For Mulaghesh. So she knows where to contact me.”

  “I’m sending telegrams to ministers now? What can she know?”

  “She’s doing me a favor,” says Sigrud, “looking for the location of a ship.”

  “And what’s so special about this ship?”

  “I think it can tell me what our enemy really is—how he thinks, how he works—and perhaps where the Divine children came from. All of these will be crucial to staying alive.”

  Ivanya takes the scrap of paper and, grimacing, shoves it in her pocket. “Do you want a weapon or not?”

  Sigrud raises his eyebrows and nods.

  “Go on, then.” She gestures at the armory. “I don’t want to be out here past dark, not after what you told me.”

  Sigrud selects a nice handheld revolving pistol with decent stopping power, and a semiautomatic Kamal rifling—a reliable, efficient service weapon he’s had some experience with.

  “I thought you’d go for one of those giant machine guns,” says Ivanya.

  “If I were running from house to house in street warfare, maybe,” says Sigrud. “But out here, in the wilderness…When I shoot at someone, I want to hit them.”

  Ivanya shuts the armory and locks it. Then she leans against the door and sighs again.

  Sigrud looks her over as she tries to struggle through this. “Thank you,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “For saving my life.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says. She starts off back to the house. “I hope you can return the favor, and soon.”

  Youths are such a danger, I find. You must watch them carefully: if unemployment or the poverty rate ticks up too high among a nation’s youths, that’s when the trouble starts.

  Young people congregate too much, feel too much, and know so little of life, so they don’t know what they have to lose. It’s wisest to distract them, keep them engaged with something else, until they grow old and lose that wild fire in their hearts.

  Or use them, if you can. The young are eager to find a cause, and nobly die for it—it’s just a matter of finding the cause that works in your favor.

  And before you point it out: yes, this is something I have personally learned within my own family.

  —MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1708

  Sigrud spends over a week staying with Ivanya and Taty. He spends almost all of his time indoors, since that’s where Taty stays. It’s time he desperately needs to heal and rest, but it’s also nice to simply not move for a while. He knows they will need to move soon.

  Yet Taty avoids him like the plague. The girl is a ghost to him, finding ways to evade him in a ranch house that should feel at least somewhat confined. It troubles him.

  “She doesn’t like me,” he says to Ivanya one evening.

  “Should she?” says Ivanya.

  “Well. Yes? I risked my life to come here for her.”

  “You’re a specter out of her mother’s past,” she says. “You remind her of her mother and you remind her she didn’t really know her mother. Of course she hates you. You knew Shara better than she ever did. Or ever will, now.”

  The revelation is striking and dispiriting for Sigrud. To lose someone you loved is one thing. To lose someone you loved but never truly knew is another.

  “I’ll be going into town tomorrow to buy more damned books for Taty,” says Ivanya. “I swear, the girl goes through door-stopper tomes in a day….I’ll check the telegraph office again, of course. Do you know when we should hear back from Mother Mulaghesh?”

  “No. I do not.”

  Ivanya feeds another log into the fire in the kitchen. “Have you given any thought to where we’re going next?”

  “I’ve given thought, yes,” says Sigrud.

  “But?”

  “But I’ve had few ideas.”

  After Ivanya leaves for town in the morning, Sigrud is not sure exactly what to do, so he sits on the back porch and disassembles and cleans the Kamal rifling he chose. It’s a meditative practice for Sigrud: to disassemble and clean one’s weapon is like disassembling and cleaning and reassembling one’s mind by proxy. He does it again and again and again, listening to the cries of the sheep and the wind in the hills and the click of each rifling assembly slotting into place.

  “I think it’s clean by now,” says a voice.

  He turns and sees Taty watching him through a window. He nods to her, then resumes what he was doing.

  She opens the door, walks out without a word, and sits in one of the wooden chairs on the porch. She watches him in silence for nearly ten minutes.

  “Why are you doing that?” she asks.

  He snaps the clip latch pin back into place. “ ‘There is no such thing as a bad situation,’ ” he recites. “ ‘Only bad gear.’ I must know this weapon, every piece and every part, better than I know myself, if I am to use it wisely.”

  “Did my mother teach you that?” she asks.

  Sigrud pauses. Then he shakes his head. “No. Your mother was not an eager hand at firearms.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he says firmly.

  Taty turns the chair a little to face him more. “What was she an eager hand at, then?”

  He slides the firing pin back into the bolt housing. He thinks for a moment, then says, “Papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean, ‘papers’?”

  “Everything Shara read,” says Sigrud, “she remembered. Or so it seemed.” He fits the extractor spring and plunger into the bolt. “Papers about history. Papers about people. Papers about papers. They were all in her brain, whenever she needed them. Perhaps she only ever learned the basics of firearms because she had too much paper in her head.”

  For a while she says nothing. Sigrud works in contented quiet. He’s not sure what has made her come and talk to him now, but he chooses to only speak when spoken to. It’s like she’s a nervous deer, and he must make no sudden movements.

  “What did you both do?” she asks eventually.

  “What we were told to do,” he says. “Mostly.”

  “That’s it?”

  He slots in the ejector spring. “That’s it.”

  “From what the newspapers said,” says Taty, “I would have thought that it was…grander. More adventurous.”

  “Nothing is more romanticized than war,” says Sigrud. “But war is mostly waiting. Waiting for orders, waiting for movement, waiting for information.” He sits back, thinking. “I could measure my life by sleepless nights spent in empty rooms, staring out of windows.”

  He goes back to work. After a while he says, “You seem to be very good at reading.”

  Taty tucks her knees up against her chest and stares at the rifling components on the porch. “Yes. Economics.” She sighs. “It’s what I’m good at.”

  “You don’t seem to be very happy about what you’re good at.”

  “It’s been…It was, I guess, a disagreement I had with Mother. She said I have a talent for it. Hired a lot of tutors. More than the ones I had already, that is. I
had plenty to begin with. It’s just forecasting, really. Trying to paint pictures of what things might look like.” She plays with a piece of loose binding on the corner of the chair. “The tiniest tremble of an interest rate or a commodity price—what does that change? That’s all it is.”

  “Do you miss your friends?”

  “Some. There was really only Miss Goshal’s girls, Sumitra and Lakshi. She was our housekeeper, she lived on the property for a while. I see them in the summers or on holidays. Or I did.” She gives Sigrud a hard stare. “They go to the regular school. I didn’t. Mother has tutors for me. Had, I guess. How weird it is, to talk in past tense about someone you still think is there.”

  Sigrud slides the ejector assembly into the hole on the bolt face. He can suddenly imagine a lot of Taty’s life: a child raised by adults, with adult friends, and only the barest concept of childhood. He can tell by the way she talks, using mature phrasing and words, but it’s as if she’s trying to do a dance based solely on instructions she saw in a booklet.

  “Did you like her?” Taty asks suddenly. “My mother, I mean.”

  Sigrud pauses and slowly looks up at her, staring into her large, dark eyes. “She was the best person I ever knew,” he says.

  Taty blinks, surprised. “Oh.”

  He thinks for a moment, staring off into the dour forests. “I am jealous of you,” he says.

  “What?” says Taty, even more surprised.

  “You got to know her during peacetime,” he says. “When she wasn’t scared, or worried, or following orders. A time when she could just be herself. I did not see this Shara. And I am sad to have missed it.” He looks back at her. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  “Thank you.” Taty swallows. She’s breathing rapidly. “Are you going to kill the people who killed her?”

  Sigrud looks at her for a second. Then he returns to his work, fitting the extractor back into the bolt. “I have already done that.”

  “You…You what?”

  Sigrud says nothing, placing the rear of the bolt on the soft wood of the porch as he orients the ejector.

  “You killed someone?” asks Taty, aghast.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Did you really?”

  “Yes.”

  She stares at him as he completes the Kamal’s bolt, which takes some time.

  “Do you feel bad about it?” she asks.

  “I…do not know.” He places the bolt aside, then looks at her. “Somewhat.”

  She meets his gaze, then looks down at the wood of the porch, breathing harder and harder. “I hope it hurt. What you did to them.”

  Sigrud frowns and looks away.

  “What?” says Taty. “Is it wrong to want that?”

  “Perhaps not. If I were you, I might want the same.”

  “Then what?”

  He remembers Shara once saying to him: Violence is a part of our trade, yes. It is one tool of many. But violence is a tool that, if you use it but once, it begs you to use it again and again. And soon you will find yourself using it against someone undeserving of it.

  In a flash, he remembers her: the soldier from Fort Thinadeshi, not much older than Taty is now. He remembers her wide, terrified eyes, and how he, blind with fury, slashed at her belly….

  He returns to the rifling. “One should not seek ugliness in this world. There is no lack of it. You will find it soon enough, or it will find you.”

  Taty is quiet for a while. Then she says, “But wait…If you killed them…If you’ve already killed the man who killed Mother…” She sits forward. “Then can I go home now? Is this all over?”

  “If it was over,” says Sigrud, “don’t you think I would have told you all so?”

  “But who else is there? Who else could there b—”

  “I killed the killer,” he says. “But he was not alone. We must be cautious.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until there is no need to be cautious.”

  “Gods,” says Taty, sighing. “Don’t you understand how frustrating that is? It’s so…so damned galling to have you and Mother and Auntie leading me around like a damned mule!” She looks at him every time she swears—he can tell she’s not sure if he’ll let her get away with it. “First Mother dumps me off here, where there isn’t even a flushing toilet, then she dies and Auntie stops letting me leave the house! It feels like purgatory, but I’m not even sure what we’re all waiting for, because nobody ever tells me!”

  Sigrud finishes up with the Kamal. “Have you ever fired a gun?”

  “What?”

  “A gun. Have you ever fired one?”

  “Well…No?”

  He checks the bolt, making sure it all slides properly. “Would you like to?”

  She stares at him. “What? Fire that?”

  “It is a good gun,” says Sigrud. He places it across his knees. “I should know.”

  “I don’t think Mother or Auntie would have appro—”

  “Neither of them are here,” he says. “But I am.”

  She looks at the Kamal for a long time. He can tell she’s anxious. “I’ve never done anything like that before,” she says.

  “Then come,” says Sigrud, standing, “and I will help you.”

  * * *

  —

  He makes her dry-fire it for ten minutes first. She’s shocked at how heavy it is, which makes him doubt his choice of firearm, but when she sees his face flicker she insists she can do it.

  He has her aim it at a line of tin cans he’s stuck up on the fence, telling her to feel the weight of the thing, feel how to distribute the weight across her arms and her shoulders. “Keep it snug against your shoulder,” he says. “It will kick. It will likely kick hard.”

  He watches her, this pale, skinny thing, holding on to the rifling and blinking nervously as she stares down its sights. She pulls the trigger, wincing each time at the click.

  “It is not a magic stick,” says Sigrud. “It is a machine. It is like a little factory, with all the parts clicking along to chamber the round, fire the round, expel the round. You must listen as the factory works, understand its beat, work within its cadence. All right?”

  She dry-fires again, pulling the trigger, imagining its kick. “All right,” she says softly.

  He takes it back, double-checks the safety. Then he shows her how to lock the bolt all the way to the rear to avoid it snapping her thumb. He explains how she’s going to load it—and she is the one who will load it, he says, he won’t help her do this—how she’s going to take the clip, the brass of the bullets bright and eager, and insert it into the rifle, feeling it give her resistance, until she feels the click. Then he explains how she’s going to let go quickly, the bolt sliding to the front and automatically chambering the top round.

  “That’s it?” she says.

  “That’s it.”

  “I thought it would be harder.”

  “Wars are won by efficiency,” says Sigrud. “The easier a weapon is to operate, the easier it is to train many soldiers at once. When the safety is off, it will be ready to fire. Eight shots. When the weapon is empty, it will eject the clip.”

  She hesitates, holding the clip in her hand. “Should I be nervous?”

  “Yes. It is a firearm, after all. It is a tool designed to do one thing. Just as one might fear a mechanized saw, it is reasonable to fear a firearm. But you cannot let your fear of the thing keep you from operating it, or operating it well.”

  Taty licks her lips, then inserts the clip. She pushes, but not hard enough.

  “Push hard,” he says. “It is a machine. Like you are opening a can of soup.”

  She pushes down harder. The clip slides into the rifling with a loud click. She keeps it pressed down for a moment, then quickly draws her hand away. The bolt smoothly slides into place, cham
bering the top round. She gasps, half in astonishment, half in delight that she did it.

  “Good,” he says. “Now it is loaded. Keep the safety on. Always point it at the ground. Do not take the safety off unless your field of vision is clear and you are ready to take aim. Do not put your finger on the trigger unless you are ready to fire. All right?”

  “All right,” she says. She’s breathing quite hard.

  “I will stay behind you. Then we will shoot at the cans. From there.” He points. “Fifty yards.”

  “That seems like a long way.”

  He says nothing. He does not say that she will likely never get much closer than that in combat. He does not want her to think about combat—even if this is what he is preparing her for, however peripherally.

  He walks her out to the spot, then stands behind her. “Take your time,” he says, his tone carefully neutral. “This is not a test. I simply want you to understand this machine.”

  “All right,” she says, nervous.

  She takes a lot of time, as he suspected she would. Tatyana Komayd is every bit her mother’s child: raised indoors, to read vast truths hidden in papers and numbers. This is not at all what she was bred for.

  Yet she must learn it, he thinks. If we are to move again.

  She raises the rifling. She stares down the sights. He can tell she waits too long—her arms begin to tire. Then she fires.

  The shot is loud, powerfully loud. It’s also a wild miss, and it startles her so much she falls back and almost drops the rifling. “It hurts!” she says, astonished and outraged. “It kicks so hard!”

  “Keep it snug,” he says.

  “I did keep it snug!”

  “Then keep it more snug.”

  She glares at him for a while, scanning him for any judgment, any condescension. He gives her none. Frowning, she raises the rifling and fires again, this time too soon.

  “Argh,” she says, rotating her shoulder. “It hurts…And I missed again. Why am I missing?”

  “If you had hit one of those cans on your second or first shot, I would have been amazed,” says Sigrud. “We are not here to learn to sharpshoot, Taty. That would be like expecting a person behind the wheel of an automobile for the first time to be able to win a motor race. I want you to learn how the machine works. How it feels and what it does. Nothing more.”