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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Though something has changed: he sees there is someone standing across the street from him. It’s Shara, watching him with solemn eyes.

  She limps across the street to him. “I’m so sorry, Sigrud,” she says.

  “What was that?” he asks her. He coughs. “Shara, what was that noise? Did we win?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I…I thought maybe they’d find a way. But no, we have not won. Not yet.” Her face crumples as she gets close. “Oh, Sigrud…Oh, Sigrud. Look at you.”

  “It’s…It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, trying to smile. He feels his face trembling. His legs are giving out, which means he’s leaning more and more on the spear, causing terrible pain.

  Shara is standing before him now. How old her face looks, how weary. Yet there’s a resolve there he never saw before.

  “It’s time to do my part. The last step in this long dance. But the most dangerous one by far.” Shara reaches forward and takes his black knife from his holster on his thigh. Ivanya moves forward to say something, but stops herself, hesitant.

  Sigrud coughs. Blood comes spilling from his lips. “What do you mean?”

  “I let Vohannes sacrifice himself to a god for me once here, long ago,” says Shara, “and now I stand before yet more sacrifices. It’s not right, is it?” Shara looks up, the lenses of her glasses reflecting the light of a nearby lamppost. “No. It’s not. Now it’s time for me to give.” Her head moves very slightly as she looks at the window above, where Tatyana watches them. “To give the last thing I have left.”

  “What are you doing, Shara?” he whispers.

  She kisses him on his brow. “She’ll need guidance,” she says. “She’ll need help. Don’t let her do anything too rash—if you can, Sigrud. If you can.” Then she walks to the foot of the black staircase.

  She stands there for a moment, gathering herself.

  She says, “We are all but moments.”

  Then she raises his knife and screams, “Nokov! Nokov, son of Jukov! I demand you come to me!”

  * * *

  —

  Nokov, smoking and furious, begins to fly up to Malwina, surely to crush her like a bug. Yet then he freezes, head cocked. He turns around and looks back down at Bulikov.

  “No,” he whispers. “No, no, it can’t be….I had you killed, I know I had you killed!”

  He whirls and streaks back down the city in a bolt of darkness.

  * * *

  —

  Taty goes sheet-white as her mother begins screaming to the sky. “What is she doing?” she asks faintly. “What is she doing?”

  She turns and dashes down the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  His coming is like black lightning, like all of the wrath of a thunderstorm channeled into one being. The streetlights of Bulikov flicker and blink, struggling against the sea of darkness brought by his coming. The shadows tremble, quake, and shiver—and then he is there.

  Nokov, great and terrible, standing in the streets of the city with a confused look on his face as he stares down at the small woman with snow-white hair, knife in her hand.

  Shara Komayd looks up at him, her gaze fierce and steady. “Nokov,” she says. “How long I have wished to meet you face-to-face. After all these years, I find you don’t look much like the picture I found in Vinya’s files. Not too much, at least.”

  “This…This isn’t possible,” says Nokov faintly. “I had you killed. I-I had you killed just like I did your aunt….”

  “I’ve been learning,” says Shara. She steps closer to him. Nokov glances at her black blade and steps back a little. “I’ve been learning from your father, specifically.”

  “My what?” says Nokov, stupefied.

  “Jukov was a clever creature,” says Shara. “His backup plans had backup plans.” She takes another step forward. “We thought he was dead. We thought you and all your siblings were dead. Wise to learn from him, then, and trick you into assuming the same of me.”

  Nokov takes another step back, away from Sigrud, and Ivanya and Taty’s nest. “This doesn’t change anything,” he says. “I’m…I’m still the last Divinity, I’m still going to kill the skies.”

  “And you thought my black lead was gone too,” says Shara. She holds up the knife. “You thought you’d stolen it from me.”

  “I-I did!” says Nokov. He stares at Sigrud’s black knife. “I know I did! That’s not…It’s not—”

  “But you never knew how much I had in the first place,” says Shara. She takes another step forward. “This is the problem with you and your family—Jukov was so damnably clever that he was actually quite stupid.”

  Nokov’s face twists, and suddenly he’s no longer a fearsome, powerful Divinity, but an adolescent trying to control himself after a playground insult. “Shut up!”

  “He trapped himself with Kolkan,” says Shara. “And he went mad….”

  Nokov falls back another step, but now he’s shaking with fury. “You shut up!”

  “And when they emerged, twisted together, and I faced them, seeing them broken and bitter,” says Shara, “do you know what they asked me?”

  “Leave me alone!” says Nokov.

  “They asked me,” says Shara, her voice growing, “to take my black lead, and draw it across their throats. They begged me to kill them.”

  “You and your aunt, you…I hate you so much, I hate you so much!”

  “They said they didn’t even want to be Divinities anymore.”

  “You’re lying!” cries Nokov.

  “I’m not,” says Shara. “You know I’m not.” She takes another step. “It’s fitting, then, that you’re going to die the same way.” She lifts the knife. “Just as pathetic as your father. He imprisoned himself in a box of his own making. And now, Nokov, I’ll put you in a bo—”

  Nokov roars with fury and lashes out at her in a desperate, wild strike.

  Shara whirls around. She stands still for a moment.

  There’s a dim tink as Sigrud’s knife falls to the ground. Shara follows, falling to her knees.

  The top of her dress grows a dark, dark red, stained by the blood flowing from her throat.

  She looks up, smiling faintly, looking first at Sigrud, then down the street, beyond him. It’s a curious expression, both apologetic and encouraging, regretful but hopeful, wistful and yet full of sorrow.

  She collapses—and then she’s gone. She vanishes as if she’d never been there at all.

  Nokov stares down at where she was, bewildered. “What?” he says. “What…What was that?”

  Then comes the sound of screaming down the street, the high, tinny shrieks of a young woman in horror.

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud looks up as he hears Taty screaming. He can see her, he thinks, standing in the street just a block down from him. Even though he feels faint, he can’t help but feel the urge to go to her, to run to her, to comfort her in her moment of grief.

  But then her shrieks…change. They grow deeper. Older.

  Stranger.

  As if it weren’t one girl screaming, but hundreds of them, thousands of them, all overlaid on top of one another.

  Then the streets fill up with a bright, bright white light, as if a star has burst into life right there in the middle of the road.

  He hears Ivanya screaming nearby, shouting, “What in hells is going on?”

  The screaming continues, but the light fades. He opens his eye to see Taty floating there, hanging above the street, arms and legs splayed out and her face lifted to the sky. Even Nokov seems astonished by this turn of events, looking on with a confused expression.

  The screaming stops. Taty slowly, slowly floats down to the ground. She crouches there for a moment, head bowed, hair falling in front of her face.

  Then she speak
s, whispering, “I…I…remember.”

  And for some reason her words hurt Sigrud’s ears, or perhaps his mind. At first he thinks they seem to come all at once, but that’s not quite right—rather, it’s as if the words he’s hearing haven’t been spoken yet, like he’s hearing words that will be spoken, perhaps in the next second, or the second after that, and this queer, schizophrenic feeling is breaking him.

  Ivanya leans toward her. “Taty?” she asks nervously. “Taty, is that you?”

  The girl stands, her face still obscured by her hair. “No,” she says. “No, it’s not.” Then she raises her head and screams up at the tower above, “Tulvos! Tulvos, daughter of the past, do you remember? I remember! I remember everything now!”

  Nokov’s jaw drops. Then he snarls and springs at her, “I know you now! I know who you are, I know who you’ve been all along!”

  He’s too late, too far away. Taty—or whomever she is now—springs up into the air and shoots up, flying straight for the far wall, right for where the Divine battle was taking place just a few seconds ago.

  And as she nears it, things…slow down.

  Nokov, who was a shadowy streak mere feet behind Taty, slows until he hangs in the sky, a black insect trapped in amber.

  Ivanya, who was turning to look up, slows until she’s stationary, her hair frozen in a peculiar position, like the hair of a woman swimming underwater.

  Sigrud looks around, panting. It’s very hard to stay conscious now, but he can see specks of dust hanging in the air, distant Bulikovians frozen in mid-stride as they sprint away, even a nearby moth suspended below a streetlight, its delicate white wings caught in mid-flap.

  “Ivanya,” he whispers, choking. “Ivanya, what…what is going on?”

  She doesn’t answer. She hangs in space, suspended and still.

  Taty’s voice rings out above him, as loud and furious as thunder, “Daughter of the past, do you know me? Do you know me, Tulvos, do you know me? Do you remember when we were one? Do you remember what they did to us? Do you remember who we were?”

  And instantly, Sigrud understands.

  He understands why Shara was lying to him in the sanctum. He understands why she wished to stay alive, why she wanted to delay her daughter’s elevation.

  He understands who the maimed Divine child was, the one whose domain was so vast it threatened all the original Divinities.

  He remembers Olvos saying to him: Soon the walls will grow and the dawn will be threatened. And time, as always, will remain our deadliest foe.

  Sigrud’s mind whirls. What if the maimed Divine child wasn’t just maimed? He twists his head up, ignoring the brutal, horrible pain, and tries to look at Taty as she grows close to Malwina. What if it was split in two? Split into two different people, who were never permitted to be close to each other, forced to forget about each other, otherwise all of creation would be threatened…

  “They’re time,” he says weakly. He blinks, growing faint. “Past and future, each halves of a whole. They’re time itself.”

  His head is too heavy. He lets it fall. Then he shuts his eye, and things grow dark.

  I keep waking up in the night, panicked, and thinking only—what if they’re just like us?

  What if our children aren’t any better? What if they’re just like us?

  —FORMER PRIME MINISTER ASHARA KOMAYD, LETTER TO UPPER PARLIAMENT HOUSE MINORITY LEADER TURYIN MULAGHESH, 1734

  Malwina recoils as the figure comes shooting up to her, thinking it to be Nokov—but it isn’t. The way this new arrival moves is…strange. They flick across the skies like a bat, and it takes Malwina a moment to realize they’re dancing across the seconds, gracefully hopping from moment to moment—but they’re moments that haven’t happened yet. Which Malwina always thought was impossible. It’s antithetical to her very being.

  The figure leaps up and lands on the steps before her. It’s a girl, she sees, about her own age, and she looks…familiar.

  Malwina sits up. “T-Tatyana?”

  “No,” says the girl. She looks at Malwina, and Malwina sees her eyes have changed. They’re now queerly colorless, yet as she stares into them Malwina gets the strangest feeling: she can’t help but imagine that in this girl’s eyes she’s seeing all the things that will happen in the next few moments.

  Malwina watches what she sees in the girl’s eyes. Then she gasps and looks away, horrified.

  “You know me, Tulvos,” says the girl slowly. “You know me, daughter of the past. Don’t you?”

  “I…Yes,” says Malwina reluctantly. “Yes. I…I think I do.”

  The girl’s face is fierce and terrible. “Say it. Say my name.”

  “You’re…You’re the future, aren’t you?” says Malwina. “I am the daughter of the things that have been. And you are the daughter of the things that will be.” Malwina shuts her eyes, and slowly understands she knows this girl’s name. “You…You’re Alvos, aren’t you?”

  The girl nods. “You remember now. So do I, finally. That was what they named me. But I am more than that. As are you.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember yet, Tulvos? They made us so that each would always repel the other, and we could never be in the same place at the same time….And now I know why. Because they knew that if we got too close, we would remember. Now that I am myself, now that I am close to you, I remember everything.”

  “Remember…what?” asks Malwina.

  Alvos steps closer. “You don’t remember because you don’t want to remember. Do you recall the last time you saw your mother? Your true mother—Olvos. Do you remember?”

  “What in hells does it matter to you?”

  “You were young,” says Alvos. “Very young, in the forest, at night…Olvos was there. She was weeping. And the other Divinities were there, all six in one place. And they took you, and led you away from her, to the darkness….”

  Malwina’s eyes widen. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I have this same memory,” says Alvos. “Because it is the same memory.” She crouches to look into her face. “Because at that time we were not two people, but one.”

  Malwina stares at her for a long time. Then she whispers, “No…”

  “Do you remember our name?” asks Alvos. “The name of the person we used to be?”

  Malwina shuts her eyes. “Stop. Please stop talking.”

  “I do,” says Alvos quietly. “We were Sempros. Past and future melded together. Time itself. All things that have been, all things that will be, and all things that are, in one being, one mind.”

  “No.”

  “Listen to me, Tulvos. Haven’t you always felt a curious hollowness in you, as if some part of you was empty, or incomplete?”

  “No!”

  “Do you remember what they did to us? How they split us, tore us apart? Maimed us and remade us in the darkness as we wept and struggled?”

  “Stop it!”

  “They changed our memories,” says Alvos. “Broke us open and reshaped our personalities….Do you remember our father, Taalhavras, saying that it had to be done, and it had to be done while we were young, and weak? How if we grew up and grew too strong, none of them could resist us?”

  Malwina buries her face in her hands, weeping.

  “Taalhavras,” says Alvos. “And Kolkan. And Ahanas. And Jukov, and Voortya. And Olvos, our mother…She just wept. Wept and watched. Watched as they brutalized her child, all so that they could rule unthreatened….”

  “What do you want?” shouts Malwina. “What do you want from me?”

  Alvos sticks out her hand, her face grim. Malwina stares at it for a moment before she realizes what she’s suggesting.

  “No,” says Malwina softly.

  Alvos’s stare is fierce, but her cheeks are wet with tears. “You know you must.”
/>   “No, I won’t….I won’t do that, not that.”

  “It wasn’t right, what they did to us,” says Alvos. “It wasn’t right, what Jukov did to us. Wasn’t right that we lived and loved as mortals, and then lost those that we loved so dearly. Me, my mother, Shara…And you, Tavaan. None of this was right. These people, they keep hurting us, taking things from us…And now we can do something. Take my hand. Take my hand, and become one again with me.”

  “And then do what?”

  “Fix this,” says Alvos. Her face is a mask of grief and despair. “Fix what has been done to us.”

  “You sound like Nokov.”

  “Take my hand,” says Alvos, “and we can defeat him. No one else can. That’s why they cut us in two, because together we could grow stronger than all the gods combined. Don’t you remember why they feared us so?”

  Malwina bows her head. “Because…Because all things are subservient to time.”

  “Yes,” whispers Alvos. “Yes. All these plots, all these schemes. See what sort of world the powerful few have built. See how they fought to retain that world. So much pain, so much sorrow, all so they could rule for a handful more years.”

  “And what would you do about that?” asks Malwina.

  Alvos leans close. “I would wipe it clean,” she says savagely. “Wipe away all that sorrow, all that pain, all that history, and start over again.”

  Malwina sits in silence.

  “The only way to truly clean a slate,” Alvos says, “is with blood. Many have tried to convince me otherwise. But now I know it is true.”

  Malwina slowly turns to look out at Bulikov below. She sees that the world has recognized the two of them coming together: as the past and future grow close, the present is unsure how to advance, and simply waits. She can see Nokov suspended in the air below them, his face twisted in fear and fury.