City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I don’t know. It sounded as if Shara’s enemy had just gotten that list of Continentals. So there might still be time.” He pokes at his false eye, trying to get it into a better position.

  “Can you please not do that?” says Mulaghesh. “It’s creepy.”

  “Sorry. Tell me. I only saw her the one time. What do you know of Tatyana?”

  “Not much,” says Mulaghesh. “Shara zealously guarded their privacy after she left office. I suppose she put her Ministry skills to good use there. People barely even knew she’d adopted a daughter, let alone a Continental. I met her only once. She was young. And she was obsessed with the stock markets.”

  “The…the what? The stock markets?”

  “Yeah. She was a weird kid, I’ll be honest. Read a lot of economics books. But being around Shara probably makes anyone weird.”

  Sigrud sits back in his chair, thinking. “Where did Shara live? Before she died, I mean.”

  “Her ancestral estate. Eastern Ghaladesh.” She gives him the specific address. “It’s a huge place, belonged to her aunt. Why?”

  “Because I think, yet again, that there is something I need to remember,” he says, “and I need something to jog my memory.”

  Mulaghesh frowns at him. Then her mouth falls open. “Whoa. Wait. Are you saying you’re thinking of breaking into Shara’s estate? Just to jog your memory?”

  Sigrud shrugs. “That is where I was going originally. I don’t know where to go otherwise. Shara was trying to make me think of someone, but we knew so many people….If I can see her records, see what she was doing, it would help me understand.”

  “Are you mad? Sigrud, that place is part of an international investigation! A Ministry investigation! It’ll be watched!”

  “Then I will have to be careful.”

  “Shara’s house won’t be like mine,” says Mulaghesh. “She was beloved, hated, and now she’s dead. They’re taking this fucking seriously, Harkvaldsson! It’s not something for you to go gallivanting into. They’ll have soldiers and guards!”

  “I will not do any gallivanting,” says Sigrud. “I will be very good.”

  “Are you even listening to me?” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t want you killing any more innocent people, people who are just trying to do their jobs!”

  There’s a long, awkward silence.

  “You know,” Sigrud says quietly, “that I did not mean to do any of that.”

  “I know those soldiers in Voortyashtan are dead. I know that people who tangle with you tend to wind up that way. And I don’t like the idea of pointing you toward any other dumb kids who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “It was thirteen years ago,” says Sigrud. His voice shakes with a cold fury. “And my daughter had just died.”

  “Does that justify it? Some other parents are still mourning their kids, because of you. You’re a hard operator, Sigrud, that’s the truth. Are you willing to play hard for this operation? Are you willing to react lethally if you need, to get what you want?”

  Sigrud doesn’t meet her eyes.

  “That’s what I thought,” says Mulaghesh. “We trained you to do one thing, Sigrud. And you’re good at it. But I think maybe it’s all you know how to do anymore. Looking at you now, it’s downright disturbing—because you don’t seem worried about this at all.”

  “I am worried,” says Sigrud, confused.

  “Yes, but not about yourself,” snaps Mulaghesh. “When most people talk about going up against what sure sounds like a Divinity, they at least mention that they’re anxious. But I’ve heard not a peep of that from you, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson. You don’t seem to care about whether that thing can kill you.”

  Sigrud sits in silence for a moment. “She was all I had left,” he says suddenly.

  “What?” says Mulaghesh.

  “She was all I had left. Shara was. For thirteen years, for thirteen miserable years, I waited for her, Turyin. I waited for word from her, waited for her to tell me that…that things were going to go back to normal. But it never came, and now it never will. It has been thirteen years and I am still here, still alive, my hand still hurts, and I…I am still exactly that wretched fool that Shara dug out of prison so many years ago. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Except now I have no hope that things could ever change.”

  Mulaghesh glances at his left hand. “Your hand still hurts?”

  “Yes.” He opens it up, shows her the grisly scar there. The sigil of Kolkan: two hands, waiting to weigh and judge. “Every day. Sometimes more than others. I thought it would stop, after Shara killed Kolkan. But it never did.” He laughs weakly. “It is the one thing I still have. Everything else has been taken from me. Everyone else. This is all I am now. I am scrabbling for memories and pieces of the people I have lost. Trying to save the fragments that are left. If I can keep Shara’s daughter alive, keep a bit of her burning in this world with me, then maybe…Maybe I can…”

  He trails off, and bows his head.

  “Sigrud…Sigrud, listen to me. Signe…” She grabs his shoulder and squeezes it. “Signe’s death was not your fault. You know that. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Even if I believed that,” says Sigrud, “it would not make me any more whole, Turyin. So much has been taken from us. I must do something about that.”

  They sit in quiet for a long time. The scar on his left palm aches and throbs. Mulaghesh shifts in her chair, her metal prosthetic clicking softly.

  Sigrud softly asks, “Can I see your hand?”

  “My hand?”

  “Yes. Your prosthetic.”

  “I…Sure, I guess.”

  She holds it out to him. Sigrud gently takes it, holding it as if it were some holy relic, and adjusts its fingers, feeling the movements of its thumb, touching every dent and scrape and scar in its metal surface.

  “Still holds up,” he whispers.

  “Signe did a good job making it,” says Mulaghesh. “She did a good job on everything she made.”

  Sigrud holds the index and middle fingers of the prosthetic a little longer, perhaps imagining the grasp of the young woman who once created it.

  “It’s not the only thing left of her in this world, Sigrud,” says Mulaghesh.

  He looks at her, brow creased.

  “She changed Voortyashtan,” says Mulaghesh. “She changed Bulikov. She changed your country. Those things are all still here. And all those things are worth saving. As are you.”

  He shuts his eyes and lets her fingers go. “Thank you for your help,” he whispers. “I’ll leave now.”

  They walk back downstairs to the sliding glass door. “It was good to see you again, Turyin,” he says.

  “It was good to see you too,” says Mulaghesh. “Listen…I suspect you don’t have too many friends in this world now, Sigrud. But if you need anything—anything—you tell me. I owe you that much. Send a telegram to this address with a telephone number on it.” She writes a note and hands it to him. “I’ll call the number you give me from a secure line.”

  “But what if I’m very far away?”

  She smiles gently. “Oh, Sigrud. How long have you been in the wilderness? Telephones can call very distant places now.”

  “Oh.” He looks at her. “There is one thing you can do.”

  “What?”

  “Find the SS Salim.”

  Mulaghesh sighs. “I was wondering when it’d come to that. I didn’t find much the first time, you know.”

  “There’s more. There has to be more. Hidden in nasty places.”

  “You’re asking me to turn over a bunch of very classified stones, Sigrud.”

  “Shara must have found it, or something about it. If you find that, it can help me understand what her war was about. I would not ask if I did not think you could do it.”

  “I’ll try. I promise nothing. But I’ll try.” She looks into his face, exploring its scars, its bruises, its wrinkles. “Be safe, Sigrud.”

  “I promise noth
ing,” he says. “But I’ll try.”

  He slips out the door. When he reaches the wall, he readies himself to jump it, but looks back. He thought she’d still be there, watching him, but she isn’t. Instead, Turyin Mulaghesh has sunk to the ground and now sits, one hand still absently resting on the handle of the sliding door, her eyes staring into space, as if she’s just heard the news about the death of a very dear friend.

  He watches her for a moment longer. Then he leaps over the fence and slinks into the night.

  You and I have confirmed that Olvos’s Frost of Bolshoni—the miracle that allows us to converse through panes of glass—was originally intended to operate within frozen lakes. It was not intended to work in glass, nor was it intended to work in mirrored surfaces, as we have both seen that it can do, with the right guidance.

  In addition, Pangyui’s recent work on Jukov suggests that the miracle called Sadom’s Breath was originally created to turn tree sap into wine, and was operable only during certain phases of the moon so that Jukov’s followers could turn a pine tree into a fount of wine for their wild rites. However, during the latter stages of the Divine Empire we have records of shepherds using Sadom’s Breath to turn tree sap not into wine but into water, and it could be used at any time of the month. They used this miracle to survive in the wilderness, leading their flocks across ranges that were previously impassable. But there are no records of Jukov or Olvos directly altering any one of these miracles.

  There are more instances. The conclusion I draw is not, as you suggested, that miracles fade as their existence goes on, causing fluctuations in their function. Rather, I believe that miracles changed and mutated just as any organism might: the Divine Empire was a teeming ecosystem of miracles and Divine entities, all with varying levels of agency and purpose, all shifting and altering as the years went by. Though many have gone, those changes still shaped this land.

  The Divine was not absolute, as we might prefer to think. And though it is gone, these mutations echo on. We must prepare for what happens if one miracle should change and shift enough that, improbably, it could adapt, and survive.

  —LETTER FROM FORMER PRIME MINISTER ASHARA KOMAYD TO MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, 1714

  After the soft rains comes the fog, swelling up from the countless rivers and tributaries winding through Ghaladesh. It fills the yards and county lanes of the eastern portion of the city. Sigrud can tell that this is the astronomically wealthy portion of Ghaladesh, the neighborhoods inhabited by the scions of industry: the actual houses become more and more elusive, hidden far back from the road behind walls and hedges and fences and gates, the barest hint of lit windows in the distant hills. Whereas Mulaghesh lives downtown, close to where all the action is, the people here are so powerful that they force the action to come to them, and can refuse entry to those they disdain.

  Sigrud wipes moisture from his brow as he steers the puttering little auto along the lanes. He tries to tell himself it’s just the warmth and the damp. He tries to tell himself he’s not sweating because he just stole an auto, along with a pistol and ammunition, and is now about to bring both of these stolen goods right under the nose of Ministry officers.

  Sigrud stops the auto at the top of the hill and surveys his surroundings. He glances at a nearby mailbox and confirms he’s close to Shara’s estate.

  He pulls over. Turns out the lights. Then he slips out of the auto.

  Sigrud received sparse training on wilderness tactics when he trained for the Ministry, but he’s had a lot, lot more in the past ten years, having spent so much time in the forests north of Bulikov. Those wintry, piney places are about as different from the steamy hills of Ghaladesh as one can imagine—but trees and grasses are still trees and grasses.

  He pulls a gray-green cap down low over his head, steps into the brush, takes out his spyglass, and stays low.

  For the next three hours he surveys the area. The Komayd estate isn’t the biggest one, but it’s pretty damned big, situated on a seven- or eight-acre lot, with high wooden walls and the main house clinging to a stream that runs across the grounds. His eyes widen when he actually sees the house. He thought it would be big—he recalls Shara acidly saying, Auntie’s sitting on quite the nest egg, I’m told her neighbor’s a steel baron—but not this big. The house is more of a mansion, with dark stone walls on the lower floor and a dark plaster second floor—a common style in Saypur.

  Despite its size, the estate is well guarded. Sigrud doesn’t get close, but he manages to count one car at the front gate, one guard on foot at the side gate, and a third guard in a blind set up just behind the estate in the woods. There’s also a roving car that makes runs up and down the country lanes, taking up vantage points to check the area.

  It’ll be hard to get in. The walls are watched from all angles. The grounds themselves, though, seem relatively deserted, at least from what he can see.

  So how to get in?

  He stands on one small hill below a towering teak tree and eyes the stream that runs across the Komayd grounds. It looks deep, maybe six or seven feet.

  “Hm,” he says.

  He creeps to the south of the estate, listening closely. Brightly colored birds and even the odd monkey stare down at him. The trees are nothing short of tremendous. He’s heard before that Saypur boasts the most impressive foliage in all the world, due to its wet climate, and he can’t disagree. The trees are tall, thick, and, he hopes, concealing.

  He cocks his head, listening, and then he hears it: the quiet trickle of water.

  He finds the stream and sees that it is deep, or at least deep enough. He wonders how far the stream will take him, how far he’ll have to go. One mile? More? And I’ll have to avoid detection throughout….

  He looks up at the sky. Evening will be here soon. He takes off his gray-green coat, then pulls out his pistol. He contemplates bringing it, but he’s had bad luck with wet ammunition before: supposedly some Saypuri-made rounds can fire underwater, but Sigrud’s always found their performance to be spotty. Maybe they’ve made advances since he was in the service, but if so he hasn’t heard of them.

  Tsking, he hides the pistol in his coat, then shoves the bundle underneath some ferns. Better to come back to it later, when I know it will work. He checks to make sure his knife is still strapped to his thigh and the waterproof electric torch is strapped to his belt. Then he takes a deep breath, dives in, and begins to swim upriver.

  It’s full dark by the time Sigrud emerges onto the Komayd grounds, just beyond the southern wall. He moved upriver agonizingly slowly, swimming and sometimes creeping through the waters. He’s fairly confident he passed under the walls undetected, swimming through the deep shadows of the stream. Now he’s more worried about who could be on the grounds.

  Dripping wet, he crawls up to one towering garden hedge and peers at the giant home beyond. He crouches there for a full twenty minutes, watching carefully. The windows of the home are dark and empty. There’s no one he can see. There must not be enough ready personnel to waste time inside the home of a dead politician.

  He takes stock of the house. The stream runs across the east grounds of the estate, and a big teak tree stands just beside one of the second-floor windows. He considers shimmying up it and jumping in—but if there’s no one guarding the interior grounds, why not just go in through the back door?

  Sigrud slowly stalks up to the Komayd mansion, listening for the errant snap of branches or rustling of leaves. Then he dashes across the back patio, hunches by the back glass doors, and listens.

  Nothing. Silence.

  He pulls out his lockpicks and goes to work. It’s a weak lock, and in seconds he’s inside, gently closing the doors behind him.

  Sigrud turns to get his bearings. Then he stares, perplexed.

  The entrance hall is huge and grandiose enough to be startling—but what’s even more startling is that it’s completely and utterly empty. Not a stick of furniture in sight and nothing on the walls, except for the
drapes on the far windows and a small round mirror hanging from one of the columns.

  Did they move out all her belongings?

  Listening for any footfalls, he creeps toward the main hallway. The floor is pink marble and the walls are wood, painted a soft green with crimson crown molding and bright gold gas sconces. The room must have played host to countless paintings, some of enormous size—he can see where the hooks once hung—but they’re gone too.

  I am going to feel very stupid indeed, he thinks, if I risked my neck to break into an empty house. He sucks his teeth. But if it is empty…then why guard it at all?

  He silently stalks down the main hallway and looks in the first few rooms, parlor rooms and game rooms and libraries and such—or at least that’s what he assumes they are, because they’re all empty as well.

  It’s confusing on two levels for him: not only is it odd to find the house empty, with no signs of furniture being here recently, but it’s odd to imagine Shara living here. She always had a deep dislike of large, wide spaces. She never said it, but he suspected it was her training: in a big room, lots of people can see you from far away, where you might not be able to see them.

  Odder still—where are her books? Shara loved books more than nearly anything else in the world. As someone who occasionally had to move her belongings, Sigrud—and especially his lower back—can attest to that.

  Then he gets an idea. He walks back where he came from, headed toward the dining area. Not in any of the big, wide rooms…But perhaps she lived in—

  He freezes as he crosses the entrance hall.

  He sinks low and looks over his shoulder. Waits. Watches. But there’s nothing.

  He could have sworn he saw movement before the columns by the door. Maybe even a face. But the only things in the room besides him are the sconces, drapes, and the mirror, which is still hanging from one of the entry columns.

  He peers at the mirror. Perhaps I glimpsed myself moving in the reflection, he thinks.

  That’s possible, he supposes. Though the angles are not at all the right ones for him to have seen himself in the mirror….