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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  An officer refreshes their teapot, which Shara promptly drains. “That’s your fourth pot,” notes Mulaghesh.

  “So?”

  “So, do you normally drink tea like that?”

  “Only when I’m at work.”

  “You seem like the type who is always at work.”

  Shara shrugs mid-sip.

  “If you continue at that pace, Ambassador, I would advise you familiarize yourself with a urologist.”

  “How’s your eye?”

  “Humiliating. But I’ve had worse.”

  “It can’t be too humiliating. He did wind up the loser of your scrap, beyond a doubt.”

  “There was once a day,” sighs Mulaghesh, “when I could dispatch such little cretins without bothering to breathe. No more, I suppose. What I would give”—she winces, prodding her eye—“for the vigor of youth. Though I doubt I could ever match what your man did in that house, even in my prime. Where did you find him?”

  “Someplace quite bad,” says Shara simply.

  Then she slowly retreats back inside herself. The susurrus of faraway shouting fades, and internally she begins to compose a list.

  In Shara’s estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it: who belongs to which group, and why; where are they now, and how are we so sure, and do we have someone else in the region; and now that we have cataloged those groups, what threat level should they be categorized under; and so on, and so on, and so on.

  So whenever Shara is really puzzled by something, she takes her thoughts and sorts them, threshing them out like chaff from wheat, tunneling down and through her mind as she tries to wring truth from everything she knows, a frequently endless list of annotations, qualifications, categorizations, and exceptions all collected as she interrogates herself:

  Fact: I have been attacked less than one week after Efrem Pangyui.

  I. I don’t know for sure if it was me they were attacking.

  A. Then who?

  1. Vo wants to make munitions for Saypur. So that’s ample reason to kill him there.

  a. Then why not simply kill Vo when they had the chance?

  They could have shot him the moment they walked in the room.

  b. His deal is not official, and also not publicly known yet.

  1) Doesn’t mean anything—there could always be leaks.

  II. Efrem was beaten to death with a blunt instrument in his office.

  These men were far more professional.

  A. You think. Whoever attacked Efrem has not been captured, a mark of professionalism if ever there was one.

  1. Professionalism and the incompetence of the local authorities are very different things.

  B. Efrem may have been attacked in connection with the Warehouse. Neither Vo nor I has any such connection.

  1. I know it exists.

  a. Unlikely that that’s enough to get me killed, though.

  2. All three of us are heretical to common Continental sensibilities by nature.

  a. Not an efficient qualifier. What isn’t heretical to common Continental sensibilities?

  Fact: Efrem Pangyui was conducting research at the Unmentionable Warehouse.

  I. Does Vinya know? How could she not?

  A. Efrem working for the Continent? A traitor?

  1. Don’t be an idiot.

  B. Why not tell me? What’s buried in there that I shouldn’t know about?

  1. Probably a lot, of course

  2. Would Continentals have killed him to get access to the Warehouse?

  a. Mulaghesh has asserted no one has gotten into the Warehouse besides Efrem.

  C. If Vinya knows about Efrem’s operation, why is she letting me stay?

  1. Maybe she thinks I’m just too dense to figure this all out.

  2. Is she protecting me? From what?

  a. Don’t be ridiculous. I just got attacked—of course she’s not protecting me.

  3. Does she want to get me killed?

  a. She’s your aunt.

  1) She’s minister first, aunt second.

  a) Okay, then why would the minister want me dead?

  2) If Vinya wanted me dead, I’d be dead, end of story.

  4. Did Vinya want to get Efrem killed?

  a. Seems quite likely Efrem was a Ministry operative. Why would you kill your own operative?

  Fact: I have not slept in twenty-three hours.

  I. I need more damn tea.

  Shara sighs. “No sign of your Captain Nesrhev yet?”

  “No,” says Mulaghesh. “Still not in. But it is four in the morning, and he doesn’t live nearby.”

  “You know where he lives? How would you know that?”

  “Don’t pretend to be such an innocent daisy, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh. “It doesn’t suit you.” Secretly, Shara smiles: Vigor of youth, indeed…“Anyway. Even though Nesrhev and I have…some history together, I’m not sure it’s enough to make him amenable to the idea of a foreign ambassador taking over an investigation as huge as this.”

  “I’m not taking over,” says Shara. “They’ll have their investigation, and I’ll have mine. I just want to talk to the captured man first.”

  How much simpler this would be in Qivos, she thinks. We could have just snatched him off the street and claimed he’d never been there in the first place….She briefly reflects on how civilized countries increasingly pose an inconvenience to her, and for a moment she envies Vohannes for maintaining his idealism—however ineffective it may be.

  An idea strikes Shara, and she grabs an old newspaper from another table. She flips through the pages until she finds an article with the headline CITY FATHER WICLOV OPPOSES IMMIGRANT QUARTERS. Below this is a picture of a man with a round face pinched in a stern expression, and a mountain of a beard. To Shara, he looks like the sort of man who must constantly debate whether he should yell or merely talk very loudly.

  “Why are you reading about Wiclov?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “You know him?”

  “Everyone knows him. Man’s a shit.”

  “It was suggested to me,” says Shara, “that he might have some connection to Pangyui’s murder.”

  “Did Votrov tell you that?”

  Shara nods.

  “I would watch yourself, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh. “Votrov might just be giving you his personal shit list.”

  Shara continues staring at the picture, but Mulaghesh has voiced one of her deepest concerns: I’m flying blind, she thinks. Usually I have six months or six weeks to prepare an operation, not six hours….

  She drinks more tea and chooses not to admit to Mulaghesh that she only inhales caffeine at this rate when her work is going very, very badly.

  Captain Nesrhev—who is quite handsome, and at least ten years Mulaghesh’s junior—finally arrives at five-thirty in the morning. At first he is not amenable to much of anything, as is common among people awoken at such an hour; but Shara is skilled at the shell game of badges and paperwork, and after using the term “international incident” a few times, he reluctantly consents to “one hour, starting now.”

  “That will do,” says Shara, who fully intends to ignore the time limit. “What’s happened to Votrov?”

  “After he gave his statement, his little girlfriend bundled him up and took him home right away,” says Nesrhev. “That man, you could lead him around by the dick, if you got a good grasp on it.”

  He seems to expect a chuckle, but Shara doesn’t even bother to try to pretend.

  * * *

  —

  The captured man, as it turns out, is hardly more than a boy: Shara gauges him at around eighteen when she walks in. He
sits up behind the big wooden table in the cell, glowering at her and rubbing his wrist, and says, “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

  “Mostly to give you medical attention.” She holds the door open for the doctor, who is quite fatigued by now.

  The doctor grows appalled as he examines the captured boy. “Did this child fall through a pane of glass?”

  “He was struck repeatedly with a chandelier.”

  The doctor grumbles and shakes his head: These people find such stupid ways to harm themselves. “Most of this is superficial, it looks like. The wrist is sprained pretty badly.”

  When he is finished, the doctor bows and excuses himself. Shara sits across from the boy and puts her satchel down beside her. It is quite cold in the room: the walls here are made of thick stone, and whoever designed the building opted not to place any heating in here.

  “How are you feeling?” says Shara.

  The boy does not answer, content to sulk.

  “I suppose I could simply be direct,” says Shara, “and ask you why you attacked me.”

  His eyes flick up, hold her gaze for a moment, then flick away.

  “Was that what you were sent there to do? Your colleagues did have ample opportunity.”

  He blinks.

  “What’s your name?”

  “We don’t have names,” says the boy.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He considers answering, but is reluctant.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we are the silenced,” says the boy.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We do not have a past. We do not have a history. We do not have a country.” His words have the beat of highly rehearsed lines. “These things are denied to us. But we do not need them. We do not need these things, to know who we are.”

  “And what are you?”

  “We are the past come to life. We are what cannot be forgotten or ignored. A memory engraved.”

  “You are Restorationists, then,” says Shara.

  The boy is silent.

  “Are you?”

  He looks away.

  “Your weapons, your dress, your car,” says Shara. “All very expensive. Money like that getting moved around, people notice. We are looking now. Who will we find? Wiclov? Ernst Wiclov?” No reaction. “He’s a well-funded supporter of the Restoration, isn’t he? His political posters tend to feature a lot of weapon-oriented imagery, I understand. Will we find him at the back end of this, child?”

  The boy stares into the table.

  “You do not seem to me,” says Shara, “a hardened, violent criminal. Then why act like one? Don’t you have a home to go to? This is all just unpleasant politics. I can make it stop. I can get you out.”

  “I will not talk,” says the boy. “I cannot talk. I am silenced, by you and your people.”

  “I’m afraid you are quite wrong there.”

  “I am not wrong, woman,” says the boy. He glares at her, and as he looks away his eyes trail over her exposed neck and collarbone.

  Ah. Old-fashioned, is he? “I do hope I’m not breaking any rules,” says Shara. “Will you receive some kind of punishment for being alone in a room with an unwed woman?”

  “You are not a woman,” says the boy. “You have to be human first. Shallies don’t count.”

  Shara smiles pleasantly. “If that’s true, then why are you so nervous?”

  The boy does not answer.

  Shara does not consider herself excessively attractive, but she is always willing to try anything. “I find it quite hot in here,” she says. “Don’t you? My hands sweat when I get hot.” She pulls off her gloves, finger by finger, delicately folds them, and places them on the table. “Do your hands sweat?” She reaches out to his injured hand.

  He pulls away as if she’s made of fire. “Do not touch me, woman! And do not try to ply me with your…your secret femininity!”

  It takes a lot of effort for Shara not to laugh. She has not heard that term spoken aloud outside of her history classes, and she’s never heard it spoken with such sincerity. “For someone who refuses to talk, you’re talking quite a bit now. But, I admit, you’re still talking less than your friend.” She pulls a file out of her satchel and consults it.

  “Who?” says the boy suspiciously.

  “The other one we captured,” says Shara. “He wouldn’t give us his name, either. Even though he was close to death. But he talked about many other things.” Of course, none of this is true—Sigrud very much killed all of the other attackers, except for the one who vanished—but she smiles at the boy, radiating cheer, and asks, “How does the disappearing trick work?”

  The boy flinches.

  “I know that’s how you get across the city,” says Shara. “Cars. People. They find some street or alley, head down it, and then poof. They’re gone. It’s quite…miraculous.”

  There is a gleam of sweat next to the boy’s ears.

  “He was rambling,” says Shara. “Weak from blood loss, you see. I wasn’t quite sure what was true and what wasn’t, but…I’m tempted to think almost all of it is. Which would be quite remarkable, really.”

  “That…that can’t be true,” says the boy. “None of us would ever talk. Even when dying. Throw us in Slondheim, and we still wouldn’t talk.”

  “I could make that happen, actually,” says Shara. “I’ve been to that prison. It’s worse than you can imagine.”

  “We would never talk.”

  “Yes, but if you don’t possess full control of your faculties…It’s perfectly understandable. What else will he tell us? If you tell us now, and tell it to us honestly, we’ll be lenient on you. We will make sure you get home. We can put all of this behind us. But if you don’t…”

  “No,” says the boy. “No. We could never…We will be rewarded.”

  “With what?”

  The boy takes a breath, disturbed, and begins to chant.

  “What’s that?” says Shara. She leans in to listen.

  The boy is chanting, “On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies. On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies.”

  “Rewarded with jail, death…,” says Shara. “So many of you died already. I saw it. I know you did, too. Are they rewarded? Did they get what they wished?”

  “On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies,” says the boy, louder. “On the mountain, by the stone, we will be rewarded, holiest of holies.”

  “Are their families rewarded? Their friends? Or do they not even have these?”

  But the boy simply keeps chanting, over and over again. Shara sighs, thinks, and excuses herself from the room.

  * * *

  —

  “I have need of you, soldier,” says Shara.

  Sigrud cracks an eye. He is slumped in the corner of his cell. His hand is wrapped in bandages, and he has been scrubbed somewhat clean of blood. Shara can tell he is awake, though: his pipe is still smoking.

  “They will be releasing you in just a short while,” she says. “I’ve managed to get all that arranged despite the…casualties. Hostages corroborate that you acted like a hero.”

  Sigrud shrugs, indifferent, contemptuous.

  “Right. Now. I asked you to send feelers out and look at hiring a few contractors. Did you have any luck?”

  He nods.

  “Good. We’ll need some thuggish assistance, if you please. When you’re released, I want you to snatch up that maid from the university. The one who worked alongside Pangyui, the one who was tailing us the other day. We should have done it immediately, but we were…occupied. Grab her, and get her to the embassy. I want to question her myself. I want your contractors to stay back and watch her apartment, and
see if anyone comes or goes. I will need this done by…” She consults her watch. “…six in the evening. And you must be discreet. Assume both you and her are being watched. Understand?”

  Sigrud sighs. Then he pulls a face, as if mulling over his options and realizing he really had nothing better to do tonight. “Six in the evening.”

  “Good.”

  “The survivor,” he asks. “Is he talking?”

  “No. And I can tell he’s not the talking type.”

  “Then what?”

  Shara adjusts her glasses. “I’ve stalled for more time, but not nearly enough to crack him via the normal means.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well.” She stares off into the corner of his cell in thought. “I think I’m going to have to dose him.”

  Sigrud grows much more awake. He looks at her, disbelieving. Then he smiles. “Well, then. At least you will have entertainment.”

  * * *

  —

  Shara stands at the cell door, watching the captured boy through the viewing slot. She checks her watch—forty minutes. The boy shakes his head as if shaking off a chill, then takes his cup of water and sips it. Seven sips so far, thinks Shara. If only he were utterly parched…

  The boy slowly droops forward more and more, as if deflating. She checks her watch again: it’s not going unusually slowly, but she wouldn’t mind if it were quicker.

  “This couldn’t possibly be all that riveting,” says Mulaghesh, joining her.

  “It isn’t,” says Shara.

  “Mm. I’d heard our survivor wasn’t talking.”

  “No. He’s a fanatic—unfortunate, but expected. I don’t think he’s the sort who’s afraid of death. He’s more worried about what happens after.”

  The boy in the cell raises his head to stare into the wall. His face is awed, horrified, fascinated. He starts to tremble a little.

  “What’s wrong with him?” says Mulaghesh. “Is he mad?”

  “No, no. Well, maybe, considering what he did. But that’s not what this is.”