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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  But Olvos does not do this. She just sits at the edge of the fire, lights her pipe, and puffs at it.

  “Hello, Nokov,” she says absently, as if he just walked in. “I see you’re still struggling with the idea of doors.”

  Nokov’s smile turns into a scowl. He walks closer to his mother, his footfalls heavy on the earth. He walks over to the fire to show her what he can do, to show her how the light means nothing to him anymore—but she still doesn’t look at him, doesn’t behold the wonder of his presence. She just keeps fiddling with her pipe.

  “Look at me,” he says.

  She glances up at him. She meets his dark gaze for but a second, her fiery eye blazing bright.

  “Look at me!” he snarls.

  She sighs slightly, then sits up straight and faces him. Her face does not fill with awe and horror as he wished; instead there is only a contemptuous resignation.

  “Do you see me?” he asks. He tries to smile. “Do you see?”

  “I see you full well, Nokov,” says Olvos.

  “Do you see how strong I am? Do you see how I have conquered? Do you see how I have grown mighty?”

  Olvos says nothing.

  “I did this without you,” he says. “Just as I have lived my whole life—without you. I found a way to survive, to grow strong, to prosper, all without you.”

  “It seems sad to live one’s life,” says Olvos, “defined by the absence of another.”

  Nokov is speechless for a moment. “Sad?” he says, furious. “Sad?”

  “Yes,” says Olvos. “I think so.”

  “How sad it was when they captured me,” he snarls. “How sad it was when they tortured me! For days, for months, for years! I don’t even know how long it was. And you, a Divinity, a god who could hold the whole of the world in her hand if she wished—you did nothing to help me. Nothing. If I were to choose a word for this, it would not be ‘sad,’ oh, no.”

  “If I said I was sorry,” says Olvos softly, “would that mean anything?”

  Nokov pauses. “W-What?”

  “If I said I was sorry. Would that mean anything?”

  “Sorry? Could…Could that mean anything to what?”

  She shrugs. “To you. To everything, I suppose.”

  Something hisses on the ground at her feet. It takes Nokov a moment to realize they’re tears.

  Olvos, to his disbelief, is weeping.

  The sight of his mother crying fills him with confusion. He wished for his mother to be haughty and proud, or perhaps cowardly and quailing, but…but, perversely, he did not wish her to weep so.

  “Your…Your tears mean nothing to me,” he says. His voice shakes. “You were gone from my life well before the Kaj. You were gone from all our lives, long before then. You left us.”

  “I had to,” says Olvos. “I knew how this would end.”

  “You could have taken us with you!”

  “Could I have?” she says. The pipe is trembling in her hands. “Could I? I wasn’t sure…”

  “You should have tried!” says Nokov. “You could have at least tried.”

  “Do you know what I was trying to avoid, Nokov?” asks Olvos. “Do you know what I feared most, my child?”

  “The Kaj,” says Nokov. “The purge. The Blink.”

  “No. I feared what power would do to me. I feared it would change me. I feared it would make me dangerous.” She looks up at him. “I feared, my son, that I would become what you are now.”

  Nokov hesitates, confused. “Mighty,” he says. “You feared strength.”

  “No,” says Olvos. “I feared being alone. To be the one Divine thing, with all the beliefs of all mortals leaning upon me…I knew that would be unbalanced, and unwise. A lone celestial body, spinning out of its orbit…The damage would be catastrophic. But I know a way out. For you. And for me.”

  “Do you.”

  “Yes. So now I ask you, Nokov—will you let me give you what you’ve wanted most of all for these long years?”

  He is silent.

  “I will give you myself,” says Olvos. “I will be here with you, mother and son, forever. We will be together forever. But you must stay here with me. You and I, the two strongest Divine creatures in this world, we must stay here, alone, isolated. We must not allow ourselves to spill into the world. We must not.”

  She looks at him, her eyes wet with tears. But her words echo in his ears, and he begins trembling with fury.

  “You…” he whispers. “You want to trap me.”

  “No!” she says, alarmed.

  “You want to put me in a box,” he says. “To stuff me in a box out here, all alone!”

  “No, I don’t! Nokov, Nokov, I don’t!”

  His face twists in anguish. “You’re just like her….Why are you people like this? What did I do to you?”

  “I am trying to help you!”

  “That’s what she said!” He rises up, a vast, dark spike shooting into the sky. “That’s what she said to me before she trapped me! And look at me now, look at me now!”

  Olvos pauses, stunned, then bows her head in defeat.

  Nokov looks down at her. “To be alone,” he says. “That is a thing I have always known. Whatever madness this world could do to me, Mother—it won’t be anything I haven’t already seen.”

  “It breaks my heart,” says Olvos, “to see what all this has come to.”

  “A chance to begin again,” says Nokov. “A chance to start over bright and fresh and anew.”

  “No,” says Olvos. “No, it will not be that. You are doing nothing new here, my child.”

  He cranes his head down to look at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I think this is not the first time this has happened,” she says. “Not by far. Imagine this, child—a world is born, and mortals and Divinities are born into it. Some mortals get access to the gods, others don’t. Conquest begins, enslavement, until there is a great war, and someone finds a way to slay the gods. The old Divinities are overthrown, and their children inherit the world—and rewrite it. They erase reality and rewrite it, birthing a new world, with new mortals, new gods, new origins, new conquests, and new wars. The old ways and the old gods are forgotten, as if they’d never happened. The world doesn’t even remember they were ever alive. And it all starts all over again.”

  Nokov is grave and silent for a moment. “I don’t believe you.”

  She shrugs. “It is what I believe. Believe what you like.”

  “You’re saying you…That you had…”

  “Do you know what they say of Olvos?” she says softly. “They say she was born when all the dark of the world became too heavy, and scraped against itself, and made a spark—and that spark was she. She was here from the beginning of this world.” She shuts her eyes. “She and her siblings, perhaps. And then the mortals changed what they believed, and she listened and overwrote her own reality, and forgot it.” She looks up at Nokov. “You are here to do, my son, what I suspect I myself once did long, long ago. To overthrow your parents. To take power from them and make your own world. You and I are just separate incarnations of this long dance, child. There have always been Divinities. Always been mortals. Always been slavery and war and revolution. There is blood upon your hands, just as there is on mine—the only difference is that you will remember it.”

  Nokov strides forward through the fire, the flames licking his black skin. “I will be different.”

  “How many tragedies follow those words,” says Olvos quietly.

  “Shut up. Shut up! Shut up! You’re using me, you’re just tricking me, just like she did! You’re just like her. Just like her.”

  Olvos takes a deep breath and sets her pipe down beside her on the log. “Perhaps you’re right, dear,” she says wearily. “But now you must ask yourself the hardest question.”

 
Nokov is breathing hard. “And what is that?” he says.

  She smiles at him, tears upon her cheeks. “Will that make what you’re about to do any easier?”

  Nokov shuts his eyes, twists up his face. He doesn’t want to cry now, not during his greatest triumph.

  He desperately shouts, “Yes!” and springs on her.

  * * *

  —

  When he’s finished, when she’s still and cold and he’s dragged her into the first night, he realizes that though she looked like a small woman by her campfire, she was much, much, much more powerful than he ever realized. More powerful than he could have ever understood.

  She could have struck him down where he stood. She could have killed him in an instant. Yet she didn’t.

  He wonders why she didn’t. He can’t understand why she didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Ivanya Restroyka feels a little ridiculous as she makes four pots of tea for her guests. It’s not that she’s unused to making a lot of tea for company. It’s just that she never expected to be entertaining a bunch of godly children and a dead woman—or at least, not all at once.

  The Divine children sit in stunned and despairing silence, especially Malwina. The consequences of what’s just happened haven’t truly sunken in, Ivanya can tell. She’s been through this before, after the Battle of Bulikov, when people sat dumb and dreamlike in the streets, babbling about inconsequential things. If they live to see tomorrow, she knows, the morning will bring countless horrors as they try to force a normal life on the shattered remnants around them.

  But that day is tomorrow. And right now, today, there is at least a hot cup of tea.

  She sets the first tray down before them. “Drink up,” she says gently. “Get something warm in you.”

  The only people who don’t seem to be crushed with despair are Taty and Shara. And though Ivanya feels it’s Taty who has a right to have countless questions, it’s Shara who’s doing the interrogation, asking about her daughter’s travels, how she’s been sleeping, any rashes or cuts or bruises, and so on, and so on, and so on. Taty gives her answers in a tone that seems both bored and familiar to her, and Ivanya can’t help but feel a little heartened to see that mother and daughter have, impossibly, resumed their relationship with barely a hiccup.

  Though one thing has changed: Shara’s eyes, which seemed so tired at first, are drinking in her daughter’s every movement, every word, every gesture, every sound. It’s as if she’s trying to record all of this, to capture everything, and keep it locked somewhere safe deep within her.

  “Now what?” asks one of the Divine children.

  “What do you mean, now what?” asks Malwina.

  “Now…what do we do?” a boy asks. “Do we run? Regroup?”

  “Regroup?” asks Malwina. She laughs caustically. “And if we were to regroup—let’s see here—the Divine spirits of glassblowing, clocks, hearths, elderly maiden aunts, the Ahanashtani spring, and the rest of us—exactly what could we then do?”

  There’s a long silence.

  “I don’t know,” one of the girls says. “Something.”

  “Something,” grumbles Malwina. “But not enough.”

  Ivanya’s bringing the third tea tray over when Taty glances at Malwina, and whispers to Shara, “Is…Is that my…sister? Could it be?”

  Shara thinks for a long time. “Yes,” she says finally. “She is.”

  “And she’s…she’s…”

  “Divine,” says Shara. “Yes.”

  “And I…I…”

  Shara looks at her daughter levelly. “You are.”

  Taty’s face flushes bright. “I’m D-D…”

  “You are lucky, Tatyana,” says Shara. “The main difference between you and that girl across the room is a great deal of sorrow.”

  “That’s not an answer!” says Taty, frustrated. “And you know it!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No! You…You should have told me, you should have helped me understand this, about…about what I am, or what I’m going to be!”

  “Are you so sure,” says Shara, quietly sipping tea, “that I didn’t, my love?”

  Then the sound hits them. It’s a deep, terrible, reverberating sound like someone has just struck an impossibly large bell, a bell the size of the moon. It’s so loud that, despite her efforts, Ivanya can’t help but drop the tea tray, sending it clattering to the floor.

  “What in the hells is that?” says Ivanya.

  Shara sits forward. “Could someone help me over to a window?”

  Ivanya obliges her, helping her to the big bay windows that look out the east side of the mansion.

  “Ah,” says Shara, peering out the window. “Then it’s as I thought.”

  “What is it?” asks Ivanya.

  Shara nods ahead. “The walls. They’re there. Don’t you see them?”

  Ivanya looks and does a double-take. As a former citizen of Bulikov she’s often forgotten that the walls are even there, since they’re invisible from the inside. But now they most certainly are there—and they’ve changed color. They aren’t the slate-gray color that the outside walls so commonly are.

  Rather, these walls are black as jet.

  There’s another deep gong. It’s so loud it sends curls of dust swirling up in the streets. As the gong keeps going, the walls seem to get darker and darker, until they’re a shade of black so deep they almost hurt the eye.

  “What in the world is going on?” gasps Ivanya.

  “It’s him,” says a voice behind them.

  They turn to look. Malwina is standing there, her face pale and her eyes bloodshot from tears.

  “It’s the enemy,” she says. “He’s taking over the miracles in the walls.”

  “What?” says Ivanya, shocked. “But…But that means…”

  “Yes,” says Malwina. “She’s dead.” She goes back to her seat and sits staring into space. “It means Olvos is dead.”

  * * *

  —

  Nokov stands in the forest outside Bulikov.

  Dawn is near. He can feel it. Ordinarily he would shrink from the world, his power waning as light floods the countryside. But not now. Not with so much Divine power thrumming inside him.

  He feels Olvos’s countless miracles, all the ones she built thousands of years ago, the ones still working away in the background of reality…and the thousands of potent, churning creations working mere miles away from him, in the walls of Bulikov.

  Old miracles, real miracles. The stuff of legends. The sorts of things he ordinarily wouldn’t ever be able to make. Yet now they are his.

  Nokov breathes and takes a step.

  In an instant he’s inside Bulikov, standing at the gate before the sheer black walls, which curve around him in a huge embrace. Silence is there with him, standing at his side, staring around in total confusion, unable to comprehend how she got here. The few mortals awake at this hour stare at the two of them for a moment before running away, screaming incoherently.

  He gazes up at the walls. “The gates of Bulikov,” he says quietly. His voice is like the voice of the stars in the sky and all the bones of the earth were whispering at once. “Once the gates were so tall, so mighty, so glorious…A monument to the old Divinities, to their power, to their ordering of the world. Yet I shall dash it all aside shortly.” He looks at Silence. “I’m going to start it now.”

  Silence is about to speak, but she doesn’t need to: he can see into her mind, see what she’s about to ask.

  “Dawn is coming,” says Nokov. “But I will not let it come. I will ascend to the skies and kill them, kill the heavens above. I will slay the light before it falls. This is what I will, this is what I wish. And then the whole of reality will be but a blackboard for you and I to write upon.”

  Silence nods,
awed and dazed.

  “I will be vulnerable during this,” says Nokov. “I will work behind reality, under it, over it. This is a vast act that will take all of my concentration. Do you understand?”

  She nods again.

  “Good.”

  Nokov focuses, narrowing his eyes slightly. The black walls of Bulikov tremble, shift, groan. They tremble more and more until they should fall apart, yet they do not.

  And then they begin to…unwind.

  It’s as if the walls had been just the tip of a circular, hollow tower all along, and now the tower begins to sprout up and around the city, slowly, slowly extending into the sky, adding layer upon layer upon layer. The ground quakes and rattles and rumbles, but the tower keeps growing into the sky with a powerfully dispiriting silence. Running along the inside of the growing tower is a tremendous black staircase, curling around and around its interior in a helix. The end of the staircase just happens to fall just before Nokov’s feet.

  Nokov looks up, watching as his tower keeps climbing into the sky. “Do not allow anyone upon the staircase,” he says to Silence. “I will ascend, and no one must follow.”

  Silence bows low and watches as her god departs, starting up the stairs that will soon end at the sky itself, the firmament above—which Nokov will destroy with but a touch.

  As he climbs the stairs, looking down on the vast city below, he can’t help but laugh.

  And they thought it was the City of Stairs before….

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud stomps on the brakes as the earth begins to shake. The sky is lit with faint predawn light, but he can see that something is definitely wrong with the sight ahead of him: for one thing, the walls of Bulikov have just turned black, which isn’t normal. And also they are…

  “Moving?” he says.

  The walls of Bulikov shake and tremble…and then start growing into the sky, forming a vast, black tower that shows no signs of slowing down. It’s half a mile tall now, and getting taller by the second.