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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  This was such a damned stupid way to get cornered, she thought as she withdrew. And I’ve barely even started the job.

  She had to get to the carriage fairways, which were probably only about two hundred feet away, behind the far wall. And she needed to get to them sooner rather than later.

  She considered her options. She could dart the man, she supposed, for Sancia did have a little bamboo pipe and a set of small but expensive darts that were soaked in the poison of dolorspina fish—a lethal pest found in the deeper parts of the ocean. Diluted enough, the venom should only knock its victim into a deep sleep, with an absolute horror of a hangover a few hours later.

  But the guard was sporting pretty decent armor. Sancia would have to make the shot perfect, perhaps aiming for his armpit. The risk of missing was far too high.

  She could try to kill him, she supposed. She did have her stiletto, and she was an able sneak, and though she was small, she was strong for her size.

  But Sancia was a lot better at thieving than she was killing, and this was a trained merchant house guard. She did not like her chances there.

  Moreover, Sancia had not come to the Michiel foundry to slit throats, break faces, or crack skulls. She was here to do a job.

  A voice echoed down the passageway: “Ahoy, Nicolo! What are you doing away from your post?”

  “I think something died in the drains again. It smells like death down here!”

  “Ohh, hang on,” said the voice. There came the sound of footsteps.

  Ah, hell, thought Sancia. Now there are two of them…

  She needed a way out of this, and fast.

  She looked back at the stone wall behind her, thinking. Then she sighed, crawled over to it, and hesitated.

  She did not want to spend her strength so soon. But she had no choice.

  Sancia pulled off her left glove, pressed her bare palm to the dark stones, shut her eyes, and used her talent.

  The wall spoke to her.

  The wall told her of foundry smoke, of hot rains, of creeping moss, of the tiny footfalls of the thousands of ants that had traversed its mottled face over the decades. The surface of the wall bloomed in her mind, and she felt every crack and every crevice, every dollop of mortar and every stained stone.

  All of this information coursed into Sancia’s thoughts the second she touched the wall. And among this sudden eruption of knowledge was what she had really been hoping for.

  Loose stones. Four of them, big ones, just a few feet away from her. And on the other side, some kind of closed, dark space, about four feet wide and tall. She instantly knew where to find it like she’d built the wall herself.

  There’s a building on the other side, she thought. An old one. Good.

  Sancia took her hand away. To her dismay, the huge scar on the right side of her scalp was starting to hurt.

  A bad sign. She’d have to use her talent a lot more than this tonight.

  She replaced her glove and crawled over to the loose stones. It looked like there had been a small hatch here once, but it’d been bricked up years ago. She paused and listened—the two guards now seemed to be loudly sniffing the breeze.

  “I swear to God, Pietro,” said one, “it was like the devil’s shit!” They began pacing the passageway together.

  Sancia gripped the topmost loose stone and carefully, carefully tugged at it.

  It gave way, inching out slightly. She looked back at the guards, who were still bickering.

  Quickly and quietly, Sancia hauled the heavy stones out and placed them in the mud, one after the other. Then she peered into the musty space.

  It was dark within, but she now let in a little light—and she saw many tiny eyes staring at her from the shadows, and piles of tiny turds on the stone floor.

  Rats, she thought. Lots of them.

  Still, nothing to do about it. Without another thought, she crawled into the tiny, dark space.

  The rats panicked and began crawling up the walls, fleeing into gaps in the stones. Several of them scampered over Sancia, and a few tried to bite her—but Sancia was wearing what she called her “thieving rig,” a homemade, hooded, improvised outfit made of thick, gray woolen cloth and old black leather that covered all of her skin and was quite difficult to tear through.

  As she got her shoulders through, she shook the rats off or swatted them away—but then a large rat, easily weighing two pounds, rose up on its hind legs and hissed at her threateningly.

  Sancia’s fist flashed out and smashed the big rat, crushing its skull against the stone floor. She paused, listening to see if the guards had heard her—and, satisfied that they had not, she hit the big rat again for good measure. Then she finished crawling inside, and carefully reached out and bricked up the hatch behind her.

  There, she thought, shaking off another rat and brushing away the turds. That wasn’t so bad.

  She looked around. Though it was terribly dark, her eyes were adjusting. It looked like this space had once been a fireplace where the foundry workers cooked their food, long ago. The fireplace had been boarded up, but the chimney was open above her—though she could see now that someone had tried to board up the very top as well.

  She examined it. The space within the chimney was quite small. But then, so was Sancia. And she was good at getting into tight places.

  With a grunt, Sancia leapt up, wedged herself in the gap, and began climbing up the chimney, inch by inch. She was about halfway up when she heard a clanking sound below.

  She froze and looked down. There was a bump, and then a crack, and light spilled into the fireplace below her.

  The steel cap of a guard poked into the fireplace. The guard looked down at the abandoned rat’s nest and cried, “Ugh! Seems the rats have built themselves a merry tenement here. That must have been the smell.”

  Sancia stared down at the guard. If he but glanced up, he’d spy her instantly.

  The guard looked at the big rat she’d killed. She tried to will herself not to sweat so no drops would fall on his helmet.

  “Filthy things,” muttered the guard. Then his head withdrew.

  Sancia waited, still frozen—she could still hear them talking below. Then, slowly, their voices withdrew.

  She let out a sigh. This is a lot of risk to get to one damned carriage.

  She finished climbing and came to the top of the chimney. The boards there easily gave way to her push. Then she clambered out onto the roof of the building, lay flat, and looked around.

  To her surprise, she was right above the carriage fairway—exactly where she needed to be. She watched as one carriage charged down the muddy lane to the loading dock, which was a bright, busy blotch of light in the darkened foundry yards. The foundry proper loomed above the loading dock, a huge, near-windowless brick structure with six fat smokestacks pouring smoke into the night sky.

  She crawled to the edge of the roof, took off her glove, and felt the lip of the wall below with a bare hand. The wall blossomed in her mind, every crooked stone and clump of moss—and every good handhold to help her find her way down.

  She lowered herself over the edge of the roof and started to descend. Her head was pounding, her hands hurt, and she was covered in all manner of filthy things. I haven’t even done step one yet, and I’ve already nearly got myself killed.

  “Twenty thousand,” she whispered to herself as she climbed. “Twenty thousand duvots.”

  A king’s ransom, really. Sancia was willing to eat a lot of shit and bleed a decent amount of blood for twenty thousand duvots. More than she had so far, at least.

  The soles of her boots touched earth, and she started to run.

  * * *

  The carriage fairway was poorly lit, but the foundry loading dock was ahead, bright with firebaskets and scrived lanterns. Even at this hour it was swarming with activity as laborers sprinted back
and forth, unloading the carriages lined up before it. A handful of guards watched them, bored.

  Sancia hugged the wall and crept closer. Then there was a rumbling sound, and she froze and turned her head away, pressing her body to the wall.

  Another enormous carriage came thundering down the fairway, splashing her with gray mud. After it passed, she blinked mud out of her eyes and watched it as it rolled away. The carriage appeared to be rolling along of its own accord: it wasn’t pulled by a horse, or a donkey, or any kind of animal at all.

  Unfazed, Sancia looked back up the fairway. It’d be a pity, she thought, if I crawled through a river of sewage and a pile of rats, just to get crushed by a scrived carriage like a stray dog.

  She continued on, and watched the carriages closely as she neared. Some were horse-drawn, but most weren’t. They came from all over the city of Tevanne—from the canals, from other foundries, or from the waterfront. And it was this last location that Sancia was most interested in.

  She sunk down below the lip of the loading dock and crept up to the line of carriages. And as she approached, she heard them whisper in her mind.

  Murmurings. Chatterings. Hushed voices. Not from the horse-drawn carriages—those were silent to her—but from the scrived ones.

  Then she looked at the wheels of the closest carriage, and saw it.

  The interiors of the huge wooden wheels had writing upon them, a sort of languid, joined-up script that looked to be made of silvery, gleaming metal: “sigillums” or “sigils,” as the Tevanni elite called them. But most just called them scrivings.

  Sancia had no training in scriving, but the way scrived carriages worked was common knowledge in Tevanne: the commands written upon the wheels convinced them that they were on an incline, and so the wheels, absolutely believing this, would feel obliged to roll downhill—even if there was actually no hill at all, and the carriage was actually just rolling along, say, a perfectly flat (if particularly muddy) canal fairway. The pilot sat in the hatch of the carriage, adjusting the controls, which would tell the wheels something like, “Oh, we’re on a steep hill now, better hurry up,” or, “Wait, no, the hill’s flattening out, let’s slow down,” or, “There’s no hill at all now, actually, so let’s just stop.” And the wheels, thoroughly duped by the scrivings, would happily comply, thus eliminating the need for any horses, or mules, or goats, or whichever other dull creature could be coaxed into hauling people around.

  That was how scrivings worked: they were instructions written upon mindless objects that convinced them to disobey reality in select ways. Scrivings had to be carefully thought out, though, and carefully wrought. Sancia had heard stories about how the first scrived carriages didn’t have their wheels calibrated properly, so on one occasion the front wheels thought they were rolling downhill, but the wheels in the back thought they were rolling uphill, which quickly tore the carriage apart, sending the wheels hurtling through the streets of Tevanne at phenomenal speeds, with much mayhem and destruction and death ensuing.

  All of which meant that, despite their being highly advanced creations, hanging around a carriage’s wheels was not exactly the brightest of things to do with one’s evening.

  Sancia crawled to one wheel. She cringed as the scrivings whispered in her ears, growing louder. This was perhaps the oddest aspect of her talents—she’d certainly never met anyone else who could hear scrivings—but it was tolerable. She ignored the sound and poked her index and middle finger through two slits in the glove on her right hand, baring her fingertips to the moist air. She touched the wheel of the carriage with her fingers, and asked it what it knew.

  And, much like the wall in the passageway, the wheel answered.

  The wheel told her of ash, of stone, of broiling flame, of sparks and iron.

  Sancia thought, Nope. The carriage had probably come from a foundry—and she was not interested in foundries tonight.

  She leaned around the back of the carriage, confirmed the guards hadn’t seen her, and slipped down the line to the next one.

  She touched the carriage’s wheel with her fingertips, and asked it what it knew.

  The wheel knew soft, loamy soil, the acrid smell of dung, the aroma of crushed greenery and vegetation.

  A farm, probably. Nope. Not this one either.

  She slipped down to the next carriage—this one your average, horse-drawn carriage—touched a wheel, and asked it what it knew.

  The wheel knew of ash, and fire, and hot, and the hissing sparks of smelting ore…

  This one came from another foundry, she thought. Same as the first. I hope Sark’s source was right. If all of these came from foundries or farmland, the whole plan’s over before it began.

  She slipped down to the next carriage, the horse snuffling disapprovingly as she moved. This was the penultimate one in line, so she was running out of options.

  She reached out, touched a wheel, and asked it what it knew.

  This one spoke of gravel, of salt, of seaweed, of the tang of ocean spray, and wooden beams soaking above the waves…

  Sancia nodded, relieved. That’s the one.

  She reached into a pouch on her rig and pulled out a curious-looking object: a small bronze plate inscribed with many sigils. She took out a pot of tar, painted the back of the plate with it, and reached up into the carriage and stuck the little bronze plate to the bottom.

  She paused, remembering what her black-market contacts had told her.

  Stick the guiding plate to the thing you want to go to, and make sure it’s stuck hard. You don’t want it falling off.

  So…what happens if it falls off in the street or something? Sancia had then asked.

  Well. Then you’ll die. Pretty gruesomely, I expect.

  Sancia pressed on the bronze plate harder. Don’t you scrumming get me killed, she thought, glaring at it. This job’s offering enough damned opportunities as it is. Then she slid out, slipped through the other carriages, and returned to the fairway and the foundry yards.

  She was more careful this time, and made sure to stay upwind of any guards. She made it to the drainage tunnel quickly. Now she’d have to trudge back through those fetid waters and make straight for the waterfront.

  Which was, of course, where the carriage she’d tampered with was also bound, since its wheels had spoken to her of sea spray and gravel and salty air—things a carriage would only encounter at the waterfront. Hopefully the carriage would help her get into that highly controlled site.

  Because somewhere on the waterfront was a safe. And someone incomprehensibly wealthy had hired Sancia to steal one specific item inside it in exchange for a simply inconceivable amount of money.

  Sancia liked stealing. She was good at it. But after tonight, she might never need to steal again.

  “Twenty thousand,” she chanted softly. “Twenty thousand. Twenty thousand lovely, lovely duvots…”

  She dropped down into the sewers.

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