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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Shara is a bit taken aback by this. The polis of Ahanashtan contains the only functioning international port on the Continent, and as trade has become more and more naval since the War, that makes Ahanashtan one of the few Continental polises with any wealth. In addition, since Saypur’s military strength lies almost exclusively in its ships, Ahanashtan is also the city with the closest connection to Saypur, making its polis governor one of the more powerful figures in the world. Presumably every Saypuri official on the Continent would love to get the job…but requesting the tiny island of Javrat would mean Mulaghesh wants essentially to step out of the political game altogether, and Shara has never really met any Saypuri whose ambition didn’t keep them in the game in perpetuity.

  “So do you think,” says Mulaghesh, “that that’s possible?”

  “It’s…possible, certainly,” says Shara. “But I expect the Ministry will be a little confused.”

  “I don’t want a promotion,” says Mulaghesh. “I’ve got, what, two decades left of my life? Less? I want to take my bones someplace warm, Ambassador. And all this gamesmanship…I find it sickening nowadays.”

  “I will most certainly see what I can do to get that arranged.”

  Mulaghesh gives her a grin that would not look out of place on a shark. “Excellent. Then let’s get started.”

  * * *

  —

  “I’ll tell you that this New Bulikov movement in the city has stirred up a big bucket of shit,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s been brewing for a while. People see there’s money to be made in modernization—in cooperation with Saypur, in other words—and they mean to make it. The rich folk in Bulikov, they don’t want to cooperate at all, and they make enough noise that the poor ones listen.”

  “What would this have to do with Dr. Pangyui?”

  “Well, the big argument in the anti–New Bulikov movements is that they’re ‘straying from the path.’ ” To this statement Mulaghesh applies an eyeroll, a sneer, a contemptuous hand wave—the works. “This is not as things were; thus this is not how things should be. The most extreme of them call themselves, rather boldly, the Restorationists. Self-appointed keepers of Bulikov’s national identity, cultural identity…You know the kind of assholes I’m talking about. So when Pangyui showed up, dissecting the Continent’s history, culture, well, it gave them a pretty big target to talk about.”

  “Ah,” says Shara.

  “Yeah. The Restorationists were losing the debate, because, shit, no one’s going to vote against prosperity. So if you’re losing the debate, you change the conversation.”

  “He was a good distraction, in other words.”

  “Right. Point at this filthy Saypuri, showing up with the blessing of this foreign power they’re supposed to get in bed with, and scream and howl and bitch and whine about this horrific sacrilege. I don’t think they actually cared much about Pangyui and his ‘mission of cultural understanding’—well, maybe some did—they just used him as a political chip. And now they’ve all denied having had anything to do with the murder, and their official position is that this was just honest political debate. You know, basic, good ol’-fashioned, disgusting, slanderous political debate. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Shara finds none of this surprising. The political instinct might wear different clothes in different nations, but underneath the pomp and ceremony it’s the same ugliness. “But does this have any bearing on Dr. Pangyui’s murder?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Could it have stirred some nut into beating the professor to death? Could have. Does that mean the political factions in Bulikov are responsible? Maybe. Can we do anything about that? Probably not.”

  “But what if the powers in Bulikov,” says Shara, “are complicit?”

  Mulaghesh stops chewing her cigarillo. “And what would you mean by that?”

  “We’ve inspected the professor’s offices. They were ransacked. I suspect this could not have happened without someone in the Bulikov police knowing. Much of his material has been shredded, destroyed. Someone was looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why come to me about it?”

  “Well…It may depend on exactly what he was researching.” Shara reaches into her coat and takes out the entry permission stubs, puts them on Mulaghesh’s desk, and slides them over.

  Mulaghesh’s face drops. She takes the cigarillo out, sits frozen with it in one hand, then lays it on the table. “Ah, shit.”

  “What would this be, Governor?” asks Shara.

  Mulaghesh grunts, frustrated.

  “What are those, Governor?”

  “Visitor badges,” says Mulaghesh reluctantly. “You clip them to your shirtfront, so we can see you have access. They expire every week, because, well, the access is so restricted. I guess he must have taken the expired ones home—though he had strict orders to destroy them. This is what you get for giving this sort of work to civilians.”

  “Access to…what?”

  Mulaghesh puts the cigarillo out on the tabletop. “I thought you’d know. I mean, everyone sort of knows about the Warehouses.”

  When Shara hears this, her mouth falls open. “The Warehouses? As in…the Unmentionable Warehouses?”

  Mulaghesh nods reluctantly.

  “They’re real?”

  She sighs again. “Yeah. Yeah, they’re real.” She scratches her head, and again says, “Ah, shit.”

  * * *

  —

  “They showed it to me in my first week as governor,” says Mulaghesh. “Years ago. Drove me out in the countryside. Wouldn’t tell me where we were going. And then we came across this huge section of bunkers. Dozens of them. I asked what was in them. They shrugged. ‘Nothing special. Nothing extraordinary.’ Grain, tires, wire, things like that. Except in one. One was different, but it looked just like all the others. Camouflage, you see. Hiding it in plain sight. Very clever people, us Saypuris. They didn’t open the doors, though. They just said, ‘Here it is. It’s real. And the safest thing you can do about this is never talk about it or think about it again.’ Which I did. Until the professor came, of course.”

  Shara gapes at her. “And…this is where Dr. Pangyui was going?”

  “He was here to study history,” says Mulaghesh with a shrug. “Where is there more history than in the Unmentionable? That’s, well…That’s why it’s so dangerous.”

  Shara sits in stunned silence. The Unmentionable Warehouses have always been a somewhat ridiculous fairytale to everyone in the Ministry. The only suggestion of their existence lies in a line in a tiny subsection of the Worldly Regulations:

  Any and all items, art, artifacts, or devices treasured by the peoples of the Continent shall not be removed from the territory of the Continent, but they shall be protected and restricted should the nature of these items, art, artifacts, or devices directly violate these Regulations.

  And as Shara and any other student of the history before the Great War knows, the Continent was practically swimming in such things. Before the Kaj invaded, the daily life of people on the Continent was propelled, maintained, and supported by countless miraculous items: teapots that never went empty, locks that responded only to a drop of a certain person’s blood, blankets that provided warmth and protection regardless of the weather….Dozens upon dozens were cited in the texts recovered by Saypur after the Great War. And some miraculous items, of course, were not so benign.

  Which begged the question: where are such items now? If the Divinities had created so many, and if the WR did not allow Saypur (in what many felt was an unusual and unwisely diplomatic decision) to remove them from the Continent altogether or destroy them, then where could they be?

  And some felt the only answer could be—well, they’re all still there. Somewhere on the Continent, but hidden. Stored somewhere safely, in warehouses so sec
ret they were unmentionable.

  But this had to be impossible. In the Ministry, where everyone was tangled up in everyone else’s work, how could they hide storage structures of such size, of such importance? Shara herself had never seen anything indicating they existed in her career, and Shara saw quite a lot.

  “How is that…? How could that be?” asks Shara. “How could something that huge be kept secret?”

  “I think,” says Mulaghesh, “because it’s so old. People think there’s a lot of them, but there’s only the one, really. It predates all intelligence networks in operation today. Hells, it’s older than the Continental Governances for sure, way before we started communicating so closely with the Continent. The Ministry lets you know if you need to know, and you never did.”

  “But here? In Bulikov?”

  “Not in Bulikov, no. Nearby. After the Kaj died, his lieutenants took all the miraculous things he found and locked them up. They locked up so many that no one could ever move them without anyone on the Continent finding out where they were. So they had to keep them here, and build around them.”

  “How many?”

  “Thousands. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, I sure never wanted to go inside it. Who knows what’s in there? It’s all filed, organized, locked away, sure, but…I never wanted to know. Things like that are supposed to be dead. I wanted them to stay that way.”

  Shara, with a great deal of effort, manages to return to the issue at hand. “But Pangyui didn’t?”

  “He was here to study the past in a way no one ever had before,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m willing to bet that the Warehouse is probably the real reason he came. We’ve been sitting on top of a stockpile of history, and I guess someone at the Ministry got impatient. They wanted to open the box.”

  Shara feels more than a little betrayed to hear this news. Efrem never mentioned anything like this. No wonder he was such an apt student in tradecraft, she thinks. He had already been hiding many secrets of his own.

  It feels quite impossible that Vinya would have no knowledge of any of this. Do I really want, Shara wonders, to keep turning over these rocks? This is not the first time she’s gotten accidentally involved in one of her aunt’s projects—and each time she’s done so, it’s been a wise career move to turn a blind eye.

  But she remembers how Efrem lay on the cot in the embassy vault, his skull wearing the crude mask of his small, delicate face….

  Something cold blooms in Shara’s belly. Efrem…did Auntie Vinya get you killed?

  “Do you know which artifacts he was studying?” asks Shara.

  “He said he wished to study only the books in there, and a few inactive items.”

  Shara nods. She knows the term: “active” items referred to often-mundane things—a box, a pen, a painting—that possessed miraculous properties, obvious or concealed. The paintings of Saint Varchek, for example, were obviously miraculous, as the figures in them would move on the canvas, shuffling about or sharing gossip; whereas the sheets of the Divinity Jukov had less obvious miraculous qualities, until one actually climbed into the bed the sheets were on and instantly found oneself nude on a moonlit beach several miles away.

  But once the Divine power that bestowed the miracle on these items passed—once the god died, in other words—the miraculous properties usually faded quite quickly. These items were considered “inactive”: no longer miraculous, but certainly not trustworthy.

  “I don’t know which ones he looked at,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know much about those things, and I don’t want to know. All that was established back in the Kaj’s age. And nobody’s really been in it, until Pangyui.

  “He understood the dangers. He was remarkably well informed about all of it. I guess he’d read and studied enough of the old stories that he already knew all about them before he walked in the door. He was careful. The ones he took out, he stored and watched safely.”

  “He took some out?”

  Mulaghesh shrugs. “Some. From what he described, a lot of the Warehouse is just junk, really. There are piles and piles and piles of books down there, too. That was what the professor was primarily looking for, he said. He made some careful selections, and he studied them beyond the…circumstances of the Warehouse. Which I guess were pretty oppressive.”

  The safe, thinks Shara. “And do you think his murder had anything to do with the Warehouse?”

  “You might think so,” says Mulaghesh. “But I doubt it. Like I said, no one knows much about the Warehouse. The bunkers it’s part of are monitored very closely. There haven’t been any disturbances. To me, there are a lot more public reasons to have killed him.”

  “But a danger as significant as the Warehouse…”

  “Listen, I can’t do much in Bulikov, but I can watch. And no one’s been tampering with the Warehouse. I’m sure of that. You asked for my advice, and my advice would be to look at the Restorationists.”

  Shara considers it reluctantly. “And I suppose,” she says, “that it wouldn’t be possible to allow me access to this Wa—”

  “No,” says Mulaghesh sharply. “It would not.”

  “I know I do not have approval, but if such a thing were to go unnoti—”

  “Don’t even finish that. It’s treason to suggest it.”

  Shara glares at her. “I am nearly as well informed as Pangyui in such historical matters.”

  “Good for you,” says Mulaghesh. “But you weren’t sent here for this. You don’t have clearance. The way to keep these things secret is to keep people from seeing them. And that includes you, Ambassador Komayd.”

  Shara readjusts her glasses. She defiantly files all this in the back of her head for later perusal. “I see,” she says finally. “So. The Restorationists.”

  Mulaghesh nods approvingly. “Right.”

  “Do you have any sources on them?”

  “Not a single one,” says Mulaghesh. “Or at least not a trustworthy one. I don’t want to wade into that mess and have them start trumpeting that I’m watching them.”

  “I suppose the New Bulikov supporters could be a help.”

  “To an extent. There’s one City Father who’s a big proponent, which is unusual. But he probably doesn’t want to mix too close with Saypuris like us. Collusion, you see. There are some formal opportunities, though. He throws a monthly reception for his party, calling on the supporters of the arts. Sort of a fund-raising thing—it’s an election year. He usually invites me and the chief diplomat, as a formality. So if you wanted a chance to talk to him, that’d be it.”

  “What more can you tell me about him?”

  “He’s old money. Family’s really established. They broke into the brick trade years back, and bricks are useful when you’re rebuilding a whole damn city. They’re political, too. A member of the Votrov family has been a City Father for, shit, sixty years or so?”

  Shara, who has been nodding along with this, freezes.

  She replays what she just heard, then replays it again, and again.

  Oh, she thinks, I badly hope she did not say what I think she said….

  “I’m sorry,” says Shara. “But which family is it?”

  “Votrov. Why?”

  Shara slowly sits back in her chair. “And his name…His first name.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would it happen to be Vohannes?”

  Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow. “You know him?”

  Shara does not answer.

  The words come crashing back down on her as if it’d only been yesterday.

  If you were to come with me to my home, I’d make you a princess, he’d said to her when she saw him last. And she’d answered: What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that. And the cocksure grin had melted off
his face, his blue eyes crackling with brittleness like ice dunked in warm water, and she’d known then that she’d hurt him, really, genuinely hurt him, found someplace deep inside him no one knew about and burned it into ash.

  Shara shuts her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, dear.”

  * * *

  —

  Columns pierce the gray sky again and again, stabbing it, slashing it. It bleeds soft rain that makes the crumbling building faces glisten and sweat. Though the war that littered this city with such wounds is long over, the flesh and bones of the buildings remain broken and exposed. Desiccated children clamber across the ruin of a temple, its collapsed walls dancing with the twinkles of campfires, its cavities and caverns echoing with cries. The wretches make apish gestures to passersby and harangue them for coin, for food, for a smile, for a warm place to sleep; yet there is a glitter of metal in their sleeves, tiny blades hidden among the filthy cloth, waiting to repay any kind gesture with quick violence. The new generation of Bulikov.

  Those few who see Sigrud pass say nothing: they make no plea, no threat. They watch silently until he is gone.

  A crowd of women cross the street before him, shoulders hunched, humble and eyes averted, their figures buried under piles of dark wool. Their necks and shoulders and ankles are carefully obscured. The putter and squeak of cars. The stink of horseshit. Pipes protrude from buildings several stories up, sending waste raining down on sidewalks. A city too old and too established for proper plumbing. Colonnades stacked with faceless statues stare down at him, eyeless, indifferent. Squatting, thick-walled structures with twisting loggias ring with music and laughter, homes of the powerful, the wealthy, the hidden. On their balconies men in thick black coats dotted with medals and insignias glower at Sigrud, wondering, What is this doing here? How could a mountain savage be allowed into this neighborhood? Next to these bulbous mansions might be a puzzle piece of building facade, half a wall with windows empty, a wooden staircase clinging to the frames. And beyond these are winding rivers of stairs, some rounded and aged, some sharp and fresh, some wide, some terribly narrow.