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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It should burn him, he knows. It should be like touching metal that’s been submerged in the frozen depths of the ocean. It should rip his skin away, sloughing off the flesh of his hand like it’s made of wet tissue paper.

  But it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt at all. His left hand holds the spear tight, and hard—and painlessly.

  He feels a flicker of confusion from the black creature.

  The point of the blade hovers just above his heart.

  The creature quivers with rage, and tries its hardest to push through his grasp.

  Sigrud clenches his jaw, turning his left shoulder into his hold on the spear, pushing it away from his heart. The point inches closer, and closer….

  The tip pierces his sweater, nicks the flesh behind it on his right breast, close to the shoulder. The wound is like being shot through with ice.

  He roars silently, leans forward, and pushes hard.

  The creature’s stance on the floor slips, and it falls back, surprised.

  Sigrud—still operating completely off of instinct—shifts the spear in the creature’s grasp so that the butt of it is pointed at its head, and shoves forward again, hard.

  The butt of the spear slams into the creature’s face—and this impact makes noise, a thick, loud clunk.

  With that, all sound returns—the roar of the wind, the groan of the engines, and the creak of the metal as the tram car trundles forward along the wires.

  Sigrud drops the spear and the rifling, climbs up onto a chair, and vaults up through the broken viewing dome in the roof.

  The snow is even more intense now. The wheels grind and moan above him, and when he looks forward, he can see why: their tram car has slammed into the back of Ivanya and Taty’s car, shoving it forward up the cables.

  I hope this works, thinks Sigrud. He clambers forward, bear-crawling along the icy top of the tram car. He feels his grip slip once, twice, and then he’s sliding face-first down toward Ivanya’s car, down to the broken nose of his car and its shattered windows…

  He can see Ivanya’s face in the window ahead. She must have climbed back up through the shaft to their room. She’s watching him, and he can see her mouth the words—Oh, shit.

  Don’t worry, he mentally tells her. This was intended. Sort of.

  He keeps sliding down, down, faster and faster toward the nose of his tram car. Ordinarily either he’d go tumbling off the front of the tram car to be cut in half by the wheels as they zip along the lower cable, or he’d miss the cable entirely and go plummeting to his death. But as the front of the tram car has been opened up by the explosion, he instead falls headfirst into the open cockpit.

  His landing is not graceful. The window frames are jagged and scratch at his chest, and though he breaks his fall somewhat his head still slams into the cockpit controls. It’s enough to dizzy him, but he keeps his wits and crawls to the back of the cockpit.

  Then things go silent again.

  The creature must have done that…that thing it did earlier, casting that spell to kill all sound. But he can tell it’s following his progress across the top of the tram car, because he can see Ivanya’s face in the back window ahead of him: her eyes get huge and round, watching something above him, and she starts silently screaming.

  Then there’s another face beside hers—Taty’s. The girl, he sees, has defied his orders, and come to watch. Her face goes blank with horror—Sigrud thinks, What must I do to get this damned fool girl to listen to me?—but she doesn’t scream like Ivanya. She just stares.

  He can feel the vibrations in the tram car, feel the creature progressing across the top of the hull. It must be stabbing its spear down as it walks across the tram car, using it to hold on steady….

  Sigrud narrows his eye. I am ready. I am ready for you.

  The creature leaps down into the cockpit and swings the blade of its spear around it, slashing the walls in a 180-degree arc.

  But Sigrud’s not there. He’s standing down the aisle just outside the door—with the mine-thrower ready and waiting.

  Sigrud pulls the trigger.

  The sticky bomb hurtles forward and smacks the creature in the face—hard. And sticks.

  The creature stumbles back with the impact. Then it whirls around, clawing at its face. Though it doesn’t seem to have any eyes, having a giant, adhesive glob stuck to its face appears to have blinded it.

  Sound returns again—the gears, the crunch of metal, Ivanya’s tinny screams ahead.

  Sigrud lowers his shoulder, mine-thrower still in his hands, and charges forward.

  His left palm hits the thing dead in the back. Once again, the contact causes no harm. He keeps shoving forward, pushing the creature up and out….

  The creature flips forward out of the broken hull, bounces off the back of Ivanya’s car, and falls, spear still clutched in its hands.

  Sigrud almost breathes a sigh of relief. Then the spear stabs in through the bottom floor of the tram car, narrowly missing his crotch.

  Sigrud leaps aside, looking down. The creature must have jammed its spear up into the undercarriage of the tram car—and is probably still hanging on to its end, somewhere down below him.

  Sigrud looks ahead at Ivanya’s tram car, which sits on the cables just beyond the ruptured cockpit of his own. The latrine hatch he originally climbed out of is still open.

  He mounts the ruined control board, gauges the distance, and carefully steps across the gap into the open hatch on the back of Ivanya’s tram car. He sets down the mine-thrower, grabs onto the top of the hatch for support, and reaches across into the open cockpit of the damaged tram.

  He starts pushing levers until one of them works: the tram car stops advancing and instead begins reversing, crawling back down the cable away from him while Ivanya’s car keeps moving forward.

  As the car retreats, he sees he was right: the creature is holding on to the butt of its long, black spear, which is jammed into the tram’s undercarriage. The creature twists in the wintry breezes as the tram car zips away, trying and failing to pull the sticky bomb off its face. It vanishes into the snow flurries.

  Sigrud, groaning with pain, pulls out his pocket watch. Within a few seconds they should begin climbing to the next tower and the next set of cables. He snaps his pocket watch shut and waits calmly until they finally do so, proceeding safely and surely onto the next segment of the aero-tram line.

  Then he picks up the mine-thrower and examines it. There’s a small latch on the side, like a little door. He opens it up.

  Inside the little door is a small red button.

  Sigrud looks back down the cable. He pushes the button.

  There’s a boom from somewhere out in the storm as the radio-controlled mine detonates. He watches as the cables on the section they just left suddenly go slack and begin to fall, as if severed somewhere in the middle. Then there’s a second sound, a loud crash like a hundred tons of metal have slammed into something hard, but this time it’s from far below them.

  Sigrud smiles wickedly, tosses the mine-thrower out into the wintry air, shuts the hatch, and climbs back up the shaft.

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud lies on the loose pile of plumbing in the bathroom, trying to find a comfortable position. It seems impossible: all the pipes and the plates and the tools feel arranged to poke every bruise or scrape or pulled muscle on his body.

  He hears a door open in the cabin beyond, and freezes. He can hear someone dart in, ask a panicked question. Ivanya’s voice answers, along with Taty’s. Sigrud stays perfectly still: it’s likely a service crewman, and if he were to walk in and find Sigrud battered, bloody, and lying on a disassembled toilet with a lot of guns on his person, it would raise some questions.

  But the door doesn’t open. The crewman departs. Then, finally, the motor in the aero-tram springs back to life. He feels the world shi
ft, and then slowly, slowly, they begin moving forward again.

  Sigrud wants to exhale with relief, but he doesn’t risk it. He must stay hidden. He waits for a few minutes longer, and then…

  He awakes with a snort as the door begins to open. Apparently despite the uncomfortable plumbing in the very cramped bathroom, he fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

  Ivanya’s face peers in at him. The room is dark beyond—apparently hours must have passed. “I thought you said you were going to put the toilet back together,” she says.

  “I was,” he says, groaning as he sits up. “But I did not realize how injured I was. She gave me quite a beating.”

  “She? That thing was a she?”

  “It is. Or was.”

  “Is it dead?”

  Sigrud pats his arm, feels the fabric on the sleeve of his sweater. It’s crusty and sticky with blood. He’s not sure where he got that laceration, but he supposes he had plenty of chances. “I doubt it. It hardly minded getting shot in the face and chest many times,” he says. “I am not convinced that having a mine detonated on its face and then dumping a tram on it finished it off. It is likely in a better state than I am, actually.”

  “We have some time to clean you up,” says Ivanya. “I told the crewman you were ill in here. Apparently they never planned for this sort of attack on an aero-tram—engineers are so brilliant, up until they aren’t. They asked if the passengers wished to disembark at the next tram base, but as it’s a frozen-over maintenance facility way up in the teeth of the Tarsils, very few passengers have agreed. So we just continue on our merry way—to Bulikov.”

  Sigrud sits on the pile of plumbing, breathing hard and trying not to move too much.

  “You look like shit,” she says.

  “I look like shit,” he agrees.

  “I know first aid.”

  “You do?”

  “Some. I had to learn medicine when taking care of the sheep.”

  “I am not a sheep.”

  “No. You smell worse.” She nods at his arm. “You’re still bleeding. You need stitches.”

  “I need brandy,” he sighs. Wincing with pain, he begins taking off his boots, then his shirt. There’s a black, unpleasant-looking nick on his right breast, where the spear stabbed him. The wound isn’t open—it appears to have been fused shut, as if the spear blade was burning hot—but the blackness lies below his skin, like a bubble of oil suspended in his flesh just beside his shoulder. His right hand, however, simply looks burned—it’s as if the tip of the spear did something…else.

  He pushes on the black mark. It doesn’t hurt any—but it doesn’t go away, either. That’s concerning, he thinks.

  Ivanya fetches a bag from her trunk. Inside are needles, scissors, and bandages—almost a full kit.

  “You are prepared,” says Sigrud, impressed.

  She kneels and begins cleaning off the gash on his arm. “We have forty-seven rounds left for the pistols,” she says, dabbing the wound with alcohol. “And nineteen shells for the scatter-gun, and fifty-five rounds for the riflings. Though I have yet to count what you’ve returned with. I’ve already disassembled the scatter-gun and hid it away. Let me know when you want to surrender your pistols. I’ll clean them and do the same.”

  Sigrud watches her as she works, threading the needle through his flesh. He suddenly feels terribly sad for Ivanya: he imagines her as she was, glittering and laughing, compared to this person she is now, stark and paranoid, casually discussing ammunition as she tends to ghastly wounds. She is still lovely, but there’s a harrowed sense to it now, the fierce, fragile beauty of a wary hind on the slopes, ready to spring away at the snap of a branch.

  She catches him looking. “What?”

  “You never stop, do you?” he asks.

  “I can’t afford to stop,” she says, looping her stitches back around. “Neither can you. We’re going to Bulikov, after all. That city is fraught with harm. I remember.”

  “You walked away from civilization, Ivanya Restroyka,” says Sigrud. “I wonder if one day you can walk away from what happened to you as well.”

  “Can I?” she says, tying off the stitches. “Can you? You had, what, ten years to do something else with your life? You could have done anything else. Started over. But you didn’t. You held on to it. You didn’t let it go.”

  Sigrud is silent.

  “Perhaps I’m a fool,” says Ivanya. “All I think of now is what will happen to Taty after all this. Maybe you’re right, maybe she’s Divine. But one can be Divine and also be a young, terrified, innocent girl.” She snips off the thread. “And as we take her back to Bulikov, all I can think is—I will not let what happened to me happen to her.”

  * * *

  —

  After Ivanya’s done her work, Sigrud goes in search of Taty. Night has fallen, and the main cabin of the aero-tram is dark, but people are still awake, blinking owlishly in their berths as they wait to see if yet another explosion will come. Sigrud walks past them and climbs the stairs up to the viewing dome.

  The viewing area is empty except for her. She sits at the far end, hugging her knees, staring up at the night sky. The moon is trying to free itself from a tangle of thin clouds, its pale luminescence stretched and distorted by the layers of ice on the glass.

  Sigrud walks over and sits on the floor in the aisle. For a moment neither of them says anything.

  “Are you all right?” asks Sigrud.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Oh. Good.”

  “Our tram didn’t experience anything beyond a few bumps. It looked like you got the worst of it. Were you hurt?”

  “I was. But I will manage.”

  There’s a moment of silence.

  “So,” Taty says. “That was the Divine.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was what you and Mother fought.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s what the god you’re fighting thinks I am.”

  “Ah. Something like that.”

  There’s another long silence, punctured only by the clunk of the tram engine and the crackle of snowflakes on the glass above.

  “It’s not right, is it,” she says.

  “What isn’t? he asks.

  “It’s not right that…that I could do what I did at the train station,” she says.“That I could see something that…that was going to happen, or could have happened. I mean…” She laughs desperately. “Of course it isn’t right! How could it be?”

  “No,” Sigrud says. “It is not.”

  “How am I supposed to live like this? How are you supposed to, to live with me beside you? I feel so afraid of…”

  “Of what?”

  “Of being someone else,” she says. “Of changing. I don’t want to lose me.” She blinks, and tears fall into her lap. “If that happens, then…then I really lose Mother. I lose what she taught me. Who she raised me to be.”

  Sigrud thinks for a moment. “What do you remember of your time before Shara, Taty? Before the orphanage? Anything?”

  “Little,” she says. “I remember a lot about the orphanage, as I was four when Mother adopted me. But before that…I remember a woman. In the snow. We were in the woods. She was crying. And she was saying she was sorry. She was sorry she was going to have to give me over to these people, but she had no choice. And then a man walked out of the woods, and took me by the hand. And the woman ran over, crying, and kissed me on the cheek. And her lips felt so hot. It was so warm, that kiss.”

  “Who was this man?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I don’t remember. I remember the orphanage, after that. But I dream about her, sometimes. This crying woman, her tears shining in the light of a fire. I think she is my mother. My birth mother, I mean. And in my memory, at le
ast, she looks human. When I dream about her, I always wake up and feel a warmth on my cheek. It’s as if her kiss is still there. It’s as if that moment is still going on.” She sighs. “It’s unfair that the dead leave us,” she says. “But it’s worse that they never really go away.”

  “Yes,” Sigrud says quietly. “Yes, it is.”

  “What can I do? What can you do, knowing I might be something…different?”

  He takes a long, slow breath. “In my operational days, there were three ways of thinking about things. There were things you knew. Then there were things you knew you didn’t know. And then there were the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.”

  “No wonder we keep having so many international crises,” she says, “if you lot are running around talking like that.”

  “The rule was,” says Sigrud, ignoring her, “that you only worried about the first and second things. The things you didn’t know that you didn’t know, you pushed out of your brain.”

  “What do you mean?” she says. “That doesn’t help me at all!”

  “It is about accepting a lack of control,” says Sigrud. “Understanding that the situation you are in is complex and—how did Vinya used to put it?—fluid.”

  “It’s a little harder to accept this as a…a fluid situation when I might be Divine!”

  Sigrud thinks for a moment. Then he pulls off the black glove on his left hand. He lifts the palm and shows it to her.

  “Ugh,” says Taty, horrified. “What is that? Did that thing you fought do that?”

  “No. This was done a long, long time ago.”

  “Who did that to you?” asks Taty.

  “No one exceptional,” says Sigrud. “Some ordinary sadists, though they used an extraordinary instrument.” He looks at his palm, feeling the lines of the scar with his thumb. “A Divine instrument. But…ever since they did this to me, I have survived things I should not have survived. Urav, and our enemy, and Malwina’s manipulations…And I could touch that strange, black creature aboard the aero-tram with this hand, and it would not burn me. It is…unnatural.”