City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “If one were to protest all the injustices of life,” says Sigrud, “great and small, one would have no time for living.”

  “Using my own words against me. How cruel of you.”

  “They are good words,” he says. “I think about them a lot. More and more, recently. But I do wonder…If Taty believes you’ve died—and she does, as far as I am aware—then why has she not…remembered? Why has she not remembered her Divine power?”

  “I’ve debated this endlessly. I suspect that Taty, being Divine, has a lot of senses we don’t. And though these senses are repressed, just like all of her Divine nature, they feed her information subconsciously. And one of those senses knows or understands that…that I am not truly gone from this world. She senses that I have been extended, and stretched, far past my actual death. She knows I am still here. So she knows not to truly grieve.”

  “I think you are right,” says Sigrud. “She’s said as much to me. She feels like she’s going mad.”

  Shara sighs. “What a trial I’ve put her through….It sounds odd, to feel guilty just for being alive. Even though what I am right now is not technically alive.”

  Sigrud looks across the room and sees Malwina and Tavaan sitting side by side on the ground, facing away from them. They’re seated very close. He watches as Malwina puts an arm around Tavaan, and Tavaan leans into the embrace, resting her head on Malwina’s shoulder. Then Tavaan reaches up and grasps Malwina’s hand and holds it tight—a deeply familiar gesture, one so common that neither girl notices it happening.

  “Are they sisters as well?” asks Sigrud.

  “No,” says Shara.

  He thinks for a moment. “Oh. I see.”

  “It’s good that they have this,” she says. “Malwina, of all people, deserves a quiet moment of solace.”

  “Malwina said she remembers much of the old days…the Divine days, I mean.”

  “That she does. Malwina is one of the oldest and most powerful of all the children. She has been fleeing our enemy for some time. But out of all of the children, she is the one who poses the most threat to him.”

  “Then why does she not remember her twin sister?” he asks. “I asked her if she thought Taty was Divine, and she said she didn’t think so.”

  There’s a brief pause. “I think,” Shara says quietly, “that it is because of their nature. Their domain dictates so much of how they act, you see. Malwina is the spirit of the past, and Taty the future—and the past and the future never seem to acknowledge one another, do they? Certain Divine children and even proper Divinities repelled one another. Voortya and Ahanas certainly hated each other to bits, as one would expect of life and death.”

  Yet then Shara does something that’s deeply familiar to him: she reaches up, pushes her glasses up, and rubs her thumb and forefinger along the bridge of her nose, where the nosepiece of her glasses sits. He’s seen her do this a few times in their careers, always in difficult meetings: Shara was terribly good at lying, but when she was quite nervous that her lie would be detected, she’d perform this odd little tell.

  “Shara,” he says. “Are you holding anything back from me?”

  “Always,” she says immediately. “And for your own good.”

  “I…I have fought hard to come to you here….”

  “And I have fought hard to keep my most desperate plans at bay,” she says curtly. “There are things, Sigrud, that I would never wish to do. Yet in the future, I may have to do them. And when I do them, I cannot let you stop me. So you cannot know about them. Do you understand?”

  “Like the old days.”

  “Yes. Just like the old days. And we are in desperate need of some of your old talents.” Shara looks across at the two girls, smiling. “What riddles children are. How time changes them. That’s the real enemy, time. We race against it, then try and slow its arrival.” She sighs. “And time is against us. We can’t win against the enemy alone, not anymore. We need to call in help. And that’s where you come in, Sigrud. You’re good at getting into difficult places. And I need you for one last operation, to go somewhere very difficult indeed, and be our ambassador.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Into the Divine sanctum of the Divinity Olvos,” says Shara. “Where you will beg her to help us.”

  Voshem walks along the Solda River, disguised once again as a tattered transient, a small smile on his face and a bounce in his step. He is, of course, aware of the gravity of the situation, but it’s very difficult for him to be anything but positive. As the spirit of possibility itself, he tends to feel optimistic even in the direst of situations.

  Right now, as he walks past a street full of wine bars and cafés and salons, where women wearing trousers (a very recent development) walk arm in arm with young men in their bright blue coats and fur caps, his mind is absolutely bubbling with potential. Most of those potentials are purely sexual: the fervently wished-for possibility that this night could maybe, just maybe, go right for once, and perhaps you could convince this person to sneak away with you back to your apartments, or at the very least somewhere private and soft and dark, where your fingers could entwine, your shoulder bared and hot breath on your neck…

  There are other potentials, of course. Bad ones. The possibility of a drunken word, blurted at the wrong moment. The possibility that you might miss that person who could help you transform and know yourself more than you ever could alone.

  All of these possibilities course through Voshem like tributaries pouring into a river. There are certainties too—the certainty of death, for example, the certainty of age, the certainty of the seasons. Some people have deeper fates, events their lives can’t possibly avoid—but Voshem can’t really see any of these. Certainties are almost invisible to the spirit of possibility. They are not his realm. He focuses only on the possibilities, thrumming with their energy, watching these events burst and fade like fireworks in the night sky.

  Voshem shuts his eyes. He reviews them all, one by one, dreaming them.

  But then one possibility drips into his mind….

  He opens his eyes. He watches as the walls of Bulikov ahead turn black—absolutely, perfectly black—and then they begin to…unscroll. They blossom, like a flower petal reaching for the light, but the walls keep reaching up and up, twisting around him until they form a tower, huge and black, rising into the sky….

  Voshem blinks. The possibility is gone. The tower vanishes. The walls of Bulikov remain distant and translucent as always. He keeps walking.

  Voshem knows of a lot of very strange possibilities floating around out there. This being the Continent, anything is possible.

  But that one…That one felt like it just got a little more possible.

  It disturbs him. It almost makes him forget that odd feeling he’s had since he walked away from the Solda Bridge: the feeling that he was being watched. He’s looked, of course, and stayed careful, and he’s even searched the possibilities before him. In all cases, he’s found nothing. So he should be safe. Right?

  Right?

  Voshem keeps walking.

  Sigrud walks Shara back to her overstuffed chair. “How can I possibly talk to a Divinity?” he asks.

  “I went there once,” says Shara. “Long ago. Toward the tail end of the events in Bulikov. She reached out to me, contacted me, asked me to come. And I did.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” he says, resentful.

  She waves a hand. “It was when I was setting up Vinya’s coup, and then your coup in the Dreyling Republics. There was little time for idle chat.”

  “Being whisked away by a god sounds like it is well more than idle chat!”

  “Suffice it to say,” she says forcefully, “it would have been a complicated subject to broach at the time. But there is a place in the physical world that is connected to her sanctum—just like how this room connects to the physical world beneath the Solda Bridge. But she has set up defenses—Malwina and others have tried to penetrate them, but have had no l
uck. She is far, far more powerful than they are.”

  Sigrud helps ease her down into her chair. “And how will I be any different?”

  “That’s a good question. And one that worries me quite a bit.” She groans as she adjusts her side, then sits back. “You are no fool, Sigrud,” she says. “You know you don’t look…wait, how old are you? Fifty? Sixty?”

  “Sixty-three,” he says.

  “By the seas…” She adjusts her glasses and blinks at him. “Well. You know that you have not aged appropriately—don’t you?”

  Sigrud hesitates, then nods.

  “And you are of course aware that you have successfully defied the effects of the Divine an extremely unusual number of times? And each time…Each time it was your left hand, wasn’t it? It played some part in your survival?”

  Sigrud nods again. To hear his fears and anxieties spoken aloud is deeply alarming to him.

  “Let me see it,” she says. She holds out her own hands, small and brown and wrinkled.

  He rests his left hand in her palms. She looks at it, taking in the scars that haven’t changed in decades: the scale of the Divinity Kolkan, waiting to weigh and judge.

  “I don’t understand it,” says Shara quietly. “And I’ve no idea how it works. It shouldn’t do anything at all, with Kolkan dead. But…something changed when you were tortured in Slondheim, Sigrud. It’s not that you are immune to the effects of the Divine—otherwise Malwina and the others couldn’t transport you or protect you—but it’s like you can survive them, defy them, dampen them.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Sigrud.

  “I don’t either,” says Shara. “I’ve never encountered anything like this in the literature before.”

  “But you think…you think I could use this to penetrate Olvos’s defenses?”

  “Perhaps. It’s a chance we have to take. Our enemy wishes to become a Divinity in his own right. To have our own Divinity on our side…”

  “Another Divine war,” says Sigrud darkly.

  “I hope to cut it off before that,” says Shara. She sighs. “Perhaps this was unavoidable. Perhaps I should not have been so careful, so cautious. Perhaps I should have made open war upon our enemy immediately. But how many times have we seen children march to war in the garb of soldiers? I look back through the years, and all I see…all I see are maimed children striking out blindly, trying to avenge past misdeeds. I can’t bring myself to perpetuate this, Sigrud. I won’t be a part of that history I know so well. I’ll do whatever I can to avoid it.” She adjusts her glasses. “I hope this is the last battle. One big push.”

  Sigrud’s face clouds over. He looks away.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Shara.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s clearly not nothing.”

  “It’s…That was something Signe said to me once.” He looks at her. “One big push.”

  She smiles sadly. “Ah. Quoting Thinadeshi, I expect. I wish I could have met her. She sounds like my kind of person.”

  “She was.”

  Malwina and Tavaan, perhaps sensing the direction of their discussion, stand and walk over, holding hands. “Are we getting to the desperate part?” asks Tavaan.

  “Yes, dear,” says Shara kindly.

  “You know I’m several times your age, right?” says Tavaan. “You don’t have to talk to me like you’re my grandmother.”

  “Age is just a number, dear,” says Shara in the same maternal tone. “I’ve informed Sigrud of what we need of him.”

  “But I still don’t know what I’m doing,” says Sigrud. “You want me to go to this place where Olvos is, and overcome her wards using—what? This thing in my hand that I hardly understand? And what am I even supposed to use it on, exactly?”

  “The tethering point is in the woods,” says Malwina. “Just outside of the polis governor’s quarters.”

  “A place you know well, Sigrud,” says Shara. “Since you recuperated there after Bulikov.”

  “There are layers there,” says Malwina. “Worlds within worlds within worlds. Bands and striae of varying realities. Whatever charm or glamour or miracle you carry with you, you must try to use it to break through them.”

  “This is just like the plans you’ve always made, Shara,” says Sigrud, frustrated. “Always lacking the most important part.”

  “And yet, in the past, we’ve been triumphant,” she says. Then she adds, “Mostly.”

  “We must act now,” says Malwina. “Tonight. I think…I think he is aware of us, somehow. The air outside, in the city, it’s all wrong. We must act before he has time to prepare.”

  “Will you do it?” asks Tavaan. “We have no other option.”

  “And you are quite talented at improvising,” says Shara.

  “Improvising with knives, guns, bombs, yes,” says Sigrud. “But improvising with a god…That is much less certain.” He hesitates, then says, “There is one question you have not answered yet, though.”

  “Which is?” asks Shara.

  He looks at Shara. “Can Malwina keep this going…Can she keep you going…indefinitely?”

  Tavaan and Malwina glance at each other uncomfortably.

  Shara smiles at him, her eyes sad. “No, Sigrud. Of course not.”

  “But…then what will happen?” he says.

  “Then this will end.” She waves at her body. “And it will be as if this thing before you had never been at all.”

  “You’ll just be gone?”

  “Yes. Gone.”

  He bows his head. “But…But that’s not fair.”

  She smiles desperately. “I know.”

  “It’s not right. It’s not right to lose you and get you back and then lose you again.”

  “I know, Sigrud. I know. But it will happen. It will happen.” She reaches out and grasps his hand. “All things must end. You knew that. Even the gods must end eventually. And so I will as well.”

  He wipes tears from his eye, ashamed of his weeping. “After you, and Mulaghesh, and Hild and Signe…I…I don’t want to be alone again.”

  “I know. I know, Sigrud. And I am so sorry. But listen to me. We are all of us but the sum of our moments, our deeds. I died, Sigrud, and I died doing something I believed in. I will die doing it again. But if I lived my life rightly, what I did during it will echo on. Those I helped, those I protected—they will carry my moments forward with them. And that is no small thing.”

  “You say this to me,” says Sigrud, “a man whose moments are little more than slit throats, and sorrow, and skulking in the dark.”

  “And if you had not been there to do the things you did,” says Shara, “I certainly would not have lived as long as I did. And I, personally, would not have liked it that much.”

  He sniffs. “I hate arguing with you. You always win.”

  “Well, console yourself with the fact that this is probably the very last request I make of you,” says Shara.

  He nods, sniffs once more, and straightens up. “So. Olvos. She’s at the polis governor’s quarters—yes?”

  “Something like that,” says Malwina.

  He shakes his head. “How absurd it is to go lurking at a Divinity’s doorstep, as if she were hiding from creditors. How will I get there? Are there any magic doors or stairs that can take me?”

  “There’s a secret back exit there,” says Malwina, pointing at a distant, dark fireplace along the far wall. “One only I use and know about.”

  “Only you?” says Sigrud. “Not…what was his name…Voshem?”

  She shakes her head. “No. Wouldn’t be smart to put so much power into one person’s hands. The exit only leads to a tollbooth in the park next to the Seat of the World, nowhere fancier than that. We’ll use it, as we can’t leave by the Solda Bridge door again—too much traffic there might give watching eyes ideas.”

  “And what shall I do once we’re out?” asks Sigrud.

  “Well,” says Malwina. “You said you were good at stealing cars, yes?” />
  “Steal a car and drive it through all those checkpoints to the polis governor’s office…? I will be shot before I get outside the walls.”

  “Bulikov isn’t as you remember it anymore, Sigrud,” says Shara. “Those checkpoints are gone, mostly.”

  “I’ll get you through the exit,” says Malwina, “and then I’ll stay at the tollbooth in the park, waiting for you.”

  “How will I get word back to you if I succeed?” asks Sigrud.

  “If you succeed, you’ll have a damned Divinity on your side,” says Tavaan. “She’ll probably drive you across the sky in a chariot pulled by swans.”

  “And if I fail?” he asks.

  “If you fail…” says Malwina. “If you knock on the door, and there’s no answer…then you just come back, I suppose. And we try and think of something else.”

  Sigrud rubs his face. “And do we have any other backup plans?”

  Tavaan looks to Malwina. Malwina looks to Shara.

  Shara sits very still, staring into space, as if deciding something. And then she does it again: she raises her right hand, lifts her glasses, and wipes the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

  She looks at Sigrud. Her eyes are hard and cold. “No,” she says firmly.

  He knows she’s lying. He can see she knows that he knows. She has some other trump card she’s holding back. But he can see that she desperately, desperately does not wish to play it.

  “All right,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good.” Shara turns to Tavaan. “Then we need one final thing.”

  “What’s that?” asks Sigrud.

  “This is war,” says Tavaan. “A poor war, yes, a lopsided one with the odds against us. But this will be the one real strike against our enemy. So if it’s to be war, it’s best to outfit you appropriately.”

  Sigrud waits for more. “Meaning we need…”