City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  A voice behind him: “You’re late, asshole.”

  He turns. Malwina Gogacz stands behind him, arms crossed. She’s dressed like a boy, wearing an oversized brown coat, her mane of brown hair stuffed up under a small black cap. Her expression is familiar: impatience and acidic contempt.

  “You said evening,” he says.

  “Yeah, evening.” She points up at the night sky. “It’s fucking dark! That’s way past evening. How did you ever get anything done with Shara?”

  “I’m here,” he says. “And it was not easy to get here. Many people could have died along the way.”

  “Yeah, the aero-tram. I heard. It’s all over the papers. So that was you? Were you followed here?”

  “I do not think so.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “I dropped a tram car on our attacker’s head,” says Sigrud. “She might have survived, but I do not think she was happy about it.”

  “So…” Her mouth works as if chewing on this news. “She was Divine, eh? Your attacker?”

  “She wasn’t at first; at first she was just human. But after I put a few holes in her guts, she panicked and she…ate something. And changed.” He describes the metamorphosis to her.

  Malwina spits on the ground. “Shit. That’s bad news. Sounds like he fed her a piece of himself. Dangerous business, that. He’s either desperate or insane.” She turns to look south. “And there’s something…out there. Something new.”

  “What is it?” He looks south, but he can’t see a thing. But of course he wouldn’t, as the walls are invisible.

  “I don’t know. There’s always pressure on the walls…perhaps his pressure, I suppose. But there’s more of it now. A lot more. It’s bad, whatever it is. And the walls are testy.”

  “As in, the walls of Bulikov?”

  “What other walls might I mean? There’re miracles in them, bouncing through them, keeping them standing. A big, bright chain of agreements and strictures, all of them as flustered and nervous as a bunch of larks in a cage. It’s bad news, whatever it is. I don’t like it. But it’s out of my hands. What about Restroyka and Tatyana? You didn’t think to bring them?”

  “I bring them to places that are safe,” says Sigrud. “The last times I’ve seen you, I’ve been nearly set on fire or fallen to my death in an old shipwreck. So, the precise opposite of safe.”

  “But they are somewhere secure?”

  “For now. They have instructions if I do not return by morning.”

  “Good. Your presence has been requested.”

  “Where? By whom?”

  She rolls her eyes.

  “You cannot say,” says Sigrud.

  “I can’t speak of the place,” she says, “or anything in it, unless I’m inside it. It’s part of going to ground.”

  “Fine. So how do we get there?”

  Grumbling, Malwina pulls out a grimy pocket watch. “We’ve got…Four hours to do this. I wanted more, but you were late. After four hours, the window closes, and we have to wait another period for it to open, which is time I don’t want to spend in here with the walls chattering away. Can you still spot a tail in a crowd?”

  “Some things,” he says, “you don’t ever forget.”

  “Good.” She turns and starts pacing away. “Then come on! Follow me. And watch the streets.”

  Sigrud catches up to her. “Four hours to do what?”

  “To walk the walls of Bulikov,” she says, “and unlock all the locks.”

  What follows is a mad dash through the darkened warrens of Bulikov, keeping to the shadows, the gullies, the forgotten, peripheral parts of the world, the places denizens aren’t supposed to see anymore. Sigrud and Malwina dart across alleys and ditches, slink through streets and gardens, dance along stretches of rusty piping, and, once, climb the supports of the elevated train and sprint a block down the line before climbing back down.

  Finally Malwina points at a vacant lot ahead. “There,” she says. She hardly seems winded at all.

  They creep to the edge of the vacant lot. Sigrud goes first to check for assailants. Thorny weeds and broken glass litter the mud. Someone made their nest in the corner once, sleeping under an old bed frame that’s been crudely converted into a tent. But they seem to be long gone.

  Sigrud waves to Malwina. She hops up, trots across the lot, and walks down the far line of fence boards, all broken and splintered like a mouthful of ill-kept teeth.

  She keeps looking back over her shoulder at the walls of Bulikov. They’re quite close to the walls now, so the curve of the huge facades is a little visible, but just barely.

  Finally Malwina stops, says, “Ah!” and kneels at the wooden fence.

  He watches carefully. She reaches out with her index finger and carefully strokes one insignificant-looking fence board. But her finger leaves a faint dark streak, like her very touch burns it, yet the burn fades quickly.

  As she finishes, something…changes. Shifts. Moves. It’s as if the entire city block has been jacked up one quarter inch: the tiniest change to the world, but noticeable.

  Sigrud looks around, but whatever the change was, it doesn’t seem to be visible. Yet he’s been around miracles before, so he knows that felt like a very big one. “What was that?”

  Malwina stands and walks away. “Come on. We’ve got four more to do.”

  “Four?” he says. “What, across the entire city?”

  “What other city did you plan on visiting tonight?”

  “Why not just get an auto?”

  “What? I can’t get an auto. I don’t have a damned automotive permit, or money.”

  “I mean steal an auto.”

  “I don’t know how to steal an auto.”

  Sigrud throws up his hands in frustration and walks away down the street toward a seedy-looking office building.

  “Hey!” cries Malwina. “Hey, where are you going? We need to get moving.”

  She peers down a dark alley, looking for him among the shadows. She frowns as there’s a clink, then a clank, followed by a loud clunk.

  “Sigrud?” she calls.

  Then there’s a roar of an engine, headlights blare to life, and a rattling, clattering, ill-maintained automobile comes shooting out of the alley. It screeches to a halt before her. Sigrud sits hunched up in the front seat, almost too big to fit.

  He cranks down the driver’s-side window. “Get in. And please tell me where we are going.”

  Malwina tenses up as Sigrud wheels the auto around a corner. “How many autos have you stolen before?”

  “A lot. They are the lifeblood of an operation. Steal a car, drive it somewhere, kill a man, drive it into the river, and so on, and so on.”

  “Uh, how many times have you done that before?”

  “What’s this place we’re going to?”

  “The opera house. Three blocks ahead.”

  Sigrud turns the corner and wheels the auto to a stop a few feet down from the opera house, its alabaster walls gleaming in the mist. The doorman at the front peers at them, wondering what such a junked-up vehicle could be doing coming to the opera, but Sigrud hasn’t parked close enough for him to really care.

  Malwina hops out, sprints across a splash of golden light from the opera house’s windows, and examines the gray brick wall with the air of someone reading a newspaper. Then she finds one brick—one that seems no different from the rest—and carefully draws a symbol on it, some kind of loop with a streak through it.

  Again, the brick turns dark at her touch. Again, the faint, distant feeling of things…shifting.

  Sigrud glances out the window at the nearby walls of Bulikov, which again are hardly visible…except they seem to gleam or glisten very, very slightly.

  Malwina hops back in the car. “Let’s go. Old Quarter next. Northwest.”

  Sigrud pulls out and starts driving, careful to mind the speed limit. Malwina peers out the back window, watching the traffic behind her.

  “There are no tails,” says Sigr
ud.

  “Says you.”

  “The streets of Bulikov were not built for autos. If someone was following us in an auto, it would be terribly obvious. We have no tails.”

  “You worry about the physical realm,” says Malwina. She narrows her eyes. “I’ll worry about all the other ones.”

  Sigrud glances sideways at her, trying not to feel too concerned about that comment.

  “It is like tumblers in a lock, is it not?” he asks after a while.

  “What?” says Malwina.

  “Like tumblers in a lock, or a combination in a lock…A gesture you must make at the specific time and the specific place, using a specific device. And once you’ve done them all, then somewhere a door opens. Is that it?”

  Malwina turns away, looking out the window. He expected that she couldn’t discuss this—whatever the Divine strictures were placed on her are, they’d certainly prohibit discussing whatever mechanism she’s manipulating—but it’s still fun to needle her.

  “This next stop,” says Sigrud, “in the Old Quarter. Is it close to the walls?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does this mechanism you’re activating use the walls somehow?”

  She glares at him.

  “Like you said,” he tells her, “there are lots of miracles bouncing around in them. Maybe if one was clever enough, one could create other miracles to ride off their energy, just a little, to power something secret? Like resting a teapot upon a steamship’s boiler. Not nearly as complicated as powering a whole boat, but it heats the water well enough.”

  Malwina clenches her teeth. “You’re not stupid. I can see why she wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?” says Sigrud.

  She sulks in silence as they drive on into the night.

  The auto jumps and quakes as its narrow wheels attempt to navigate the cobblestoned, pockmarked streets of Bulikov. In some places, the city’s worked on the roads; in others, it’s not quite there yet. Though I hope, thinks Sigrud as they hit another pothole, that our vehicle survives the journey.

  Malwina sits hunched in the front seat, her pale face almost hidden behind the collar of her oversized coat. “You know about our domains?” she asks.

  “Domains?”

  “The domains of us, the siblings. The children of the Divine. Our jurisdictions over reality.”

  “Somewhat.”

  Her queerly colorless eyes stare out at the road ahead, strobed by the lights of oncoming autos. “It’s like this. Some domains are inelastic. They are what they are. They aren’t changing. They can’t be interpreted to be other things, to contain other things. But other domains are elastic. They’re expansive. They can grow. Like a sinkhole in the earth. You know what a sinkhole is? When a salt dome way underground gets penetrated by the tiniest bit of water, and then it just starts eating away at it? The sinkhole grows, and grows, swallowing up anything, everything. Cars. Houses. Whole trees. You name it.” Her face is grim and closed. “That’s what some of those domains are. We are our domains. And some of us are just hungrier than others.”

  Sigrud wonders what sort of domain Taty might be. Perhaps something to do with math, or commerce, since she’s so good at economics—or predictions, maybe. “And are you such a domain?”

  She scoffs. “Hells no. I’m the past, remember? The past is the past. It’s fixed, unchangeable, unattainable. But our enemy…He’s elastic. Very expansive, so to speak. His domain represents something primitive, something primal. The long night, the first night. That fear you feel when you’re all alone in your house, and all the rooms feel so dark? That’s him. That’s him leaking into your frail little bit of civilization, that first, dangerous night mankind spent out under the skies. You think you’ve walled him out, evolved past such savage peril—but you worry sometimes you haven’t. That’s what that fear is. He’s still out there, circling your walls, trying to find a way in.”

  “So how is he so expansive?”

  “Because other domains fail before such a thing,” says Malwina. “He’s devoured the siblings that represent innovation, laughter, deep conversation, and many others. Because you don’t laugh or think or talk when in such darkness. He’s even devoured the siblings representing physical phenomena, like Mozshi, who was the Child of the Green Hill Grasses, or Vokayen, the Child of the Icy Mountain Streams. Because these concepts, these meanings stop mattering when eclipsed by the first night. The grass is still there, the streams are still there, sure—but what they mean to people doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters when you’re inside him. Not during the long night. Do you see?”

  Sigrud grunts. He’s always had a poor head for such abstractions—and these abstractions are about as abstract as an abstraction could get—but he understands the premise. “He has an edge on all of you. And he is expanding, like an invader.”

  “Yes. And with each one of us that he devours, each domain that is merged into his, he grows stronger. He is…” She looks out the window, thinking. “He is reinterpreting himself. Reimagining his domain.”

  “Into the last night,” says Sigrud. “As you said.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And what will he do, once he has you all?”

  She sits in silence for a lone time. “I worry the very skies will fail,” she says. “All light will perish. And he will become creation incarnate.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, Mr. Sigrud, there will be no more then.”

  They make three more stops, all close to the walls of Bulikov. Malwina runs her finger along the side of a lamppost by the front gates of Bulikov, the back of a bench in the park where the great Seat of the World once stood, and finally at one corner she scrambles out, lifts a manhole, and touches a single rivet in its underbelly. Each time, the world shifts. Each time, things grow a little more and more different. Until finally…

  “It’s done,” she says quietly. She looks up at the sky, and he does the same. “Do you feel it?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he says. “It’s like…like the skies are a little bit closer than they ought to be.”

  “We’ve brought the gate close. But now we need to meet the gatekeeper.”

  “Another step?”

  “I don’t know about you,” says Malwina as she climbs back into the auto, “but I take security seriously. Come on. Take us back to the Solda Bridge.”

  They ride in silence. Everything feels oppressively close, as if the air is too thick, or the streets too narrow. Even the people on the sidewalks seem to feel it, wrapping their coats tight and shivering.

  “It’s the walls,” says Malwina quietly. “They have miracles in them that help people forget that they’re there, miracles on top of the miracles that make them invisible or indestructible or what-have-you. Those miracles, the forgetting ones—they’re getting strained.”

  Sigrud pulls over and parks the car a few yards down from the Solda Bridge. “By your locking mechanism.”

  Malwina steps out and walks toward the underside of the bridge. Before she enters its shadow, though, she stops and looks up: at the streets, at the rooftops, at the windows and the alleys.

  “You see anything?” she asks as Sigrud catches up.

  “Nothing that alarms me.”

  She crinkles her nose. “Guess it’s just nerves. But I feel like…” She shakes her head. “Never mind. Let’s get to it.”

  He follows her under the bridge. There’s a small shantytown of beggars and the destitute under here, taking advantage of the expanded bridge above. They mostly ignore Malwina and Sigrud as they walk through their ranks—but one man stands and walks almost in lockstep beside Malwina, a stooped old creature with rheumy eyes.

  “Something’s up,” he says to her in a rattling croak.

  “I know,” she says. “I feel it too.”

  The old beggar looks back at Sigrud with a curiously keen stare. “This the dauvkind?”

  “Yeah. I hope he’s worth it.”

  “And you…are the gatekee
per?” says Sigrud.

  He smirks. “Something like that.”

  They approach the far back wall under the bridge, a blank, dusty concrete surface covered with cobwebs. Sigrud isn’t sure why the two seem to be heading straight for it, as there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly special about it, but then the wall seems to…shiver.

  Or quake, maybe. It’s like the wall is the skin of a drum and someone on the other side has just given it a sharp tap, the concrete quivering and shuddering until it’s no more than a blur to his eyes.

  Then the wall stops quaking. And when it stops, there’s a door in its middle—a very dull-looking wooden door with a beaten old doorknob.

  “Ah. Oh,” says Sigrud.

  Malwina lets out a long sigh. “Good. It worked.”

  “So we did all that work,” says Sigrud, “for a door?”

  “It’s a lot more than just a door,” says the beggar, opening it. “But your eyes see only what your eyes see, I suppose.” He bows low, as if they’re guests at court, and they all walk inside.

  Within is a narrow, bland concrete hallway, lit by a single electric light in the otherwise featureless ceiling above. The beggar shuts the door, mutters, “Pardon me,” as he shoulders his way between them, and leads them down the hallway.

  The hallway ends in a blank wall. Placed on the ground before the wall, though, is a solitary brick.

  The beggar kneels before the brick, then glances back down the hallway, frowning as if he’d just heard something suspicious. Then he shakes his head, reaches down, and places his hands on the brick.

  And then the brick…blossoms.

  That’s the only word for it. The brick seems to unfold from within itself, frames of brick bursting out from its depth with a chalky, clacking sound. The frames of brick fill the end of the hallway, and then they begin to expand down the hallway, extending it, floors and walls and ceiling appearing out of nowhere….

  Though into what, Sigrud can’t see. The end of the hallway is eclipsed by darkness.

  “There we go,” says the beggar. Sigrud looks at him, about to ask what in the hells is going on. But then he sees the beggar isn’t a beggar anymore.