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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “And the little girl?”

  “She was never there….This creature is miraculous by nature, though darkly so.”

  She spits bile on the floor. The mhovost gestures to her belligerently. The human nature of its movements is revolting: she imagines it saying, Come on! Come on!

  “You killed Mrs. Torskeny, didn’t you?” asks Shara. “They led her here and she broke the salt barrier.”

  The mhovost, in a bizarrely effective pantomime, looks at the pile of clothes and shrugs indifferently: That old thing? It waves dismissively: It was nothing. Then, again, it flaps its bill at them.

  “I so wish”—Sigrud is turning his knife over and over in his hand—“that it would stop doing that.”

  “It wants you to break the circle. If it can get at you, it’ll swallow you whole.”

  Fapfapfapfap.

  Sigrud gives her a skeptical look.

  “It’s a creature of skin and bone,” says Shara. “But not its own skin and bone. Somewhere in it, I fear, is the repurposed remains of Mrs. Torskeny.”

  The mhovost prods its belly with its many-jointed fingers, as if probing for her.

  A joker. But it would be, of course, considering who made it.

  “How are you alive?” asks Shara. “Shouldn’t you have perished when Jukov died?”

  It stops. Stares at her, eyelessly. Then it walks backward, forward, backward, forward, as if it’s testing the edges of the salt ring.

  “What is it doing?” asks Sigrud.

  “It’s mad,” says Shara. “One of the creatures made by Jukov in his darker moods—a knuckle-man, a voice under the cloth. It’s meant to mock us, to goad us—the only way to identify them is to ask to see their feet, because that’s the only thing they can never really hide. Though I’ve no idea how it’s alive…Is Jukov dead?” she asks the creature.

  Still pacing back and forth, the mhovost shakes its head. Then it stops, appears to think, and shrugs.

  “How are you here?”

  Again, a shrug.

  “I knew they could last for some time,” says Shara, “but I did not think that a Divinity’s creatures could persist so long after its death.”

  The mhovost extends a repulsively long, flat hand and tilts it back and forth: Maybe. Maybe not.

  “The two men who were here,” says Shara. “Did they trap you here?”

  It resumes pacing back and forth—Shara presumes she’s just angered it, so she must be right.

  “How long have they had you trapped in this building?”

  The creature mimes a laugh—Shara again reflects on what an astonishing pantomime it is—and waves a hand at her: What a silly question!

  “A long time, then.”

  It shrugs.

  “You don’t look underfed. How many others have you killed?”

  It shakes its head, waggles a finger: No no no no. Then it lovingly, thoughtfully caresses its stomach: What makes you think they’re dead?

  Children laugh in the empty chambers of Shara’s mind. She resists the urge to retch again. “How…How many have they pushed within this circle?”

  It flaps its bill. Shrugs.

  “A lot.”

  Another shrug.

  Shara whispers, “How are you alive?”

  The mhovost begins waltzing across the circle, twirling gracefully.

  “I very much wish to kill this thing,” says Sigrud. The mhovost spins around and waggles its bony behind at Sigrud. “Much more than I do most things,” he adds. “And we have killed Divine creatures before….”

  “Listen to me, abomination,” says Shara coldly. “I am descended from the man who killed your race, who pulled your Divinities down and laid them low, who ruined and ravaged this land within weeks. My forebear buried dozens, hundreds of your brothers and sisters in the mud, and there they rot, even to this day. I have no qualms doing the same to you. Now, tell me—is your creator, the Divinity Jukov, truly gone from this world, never to return?”

  The mhovost slowly stands. It appears to reflect on something—for a moment, it almost appears sad. Then it turns around, looks at Shara, and shakes its head.

  “Then where is he?”

  A shrug, but not half so malicious and gleeful as its others: this gesture is doleful, confused, a child wondering why it was abandoned.

  “These two men who were here. One of them was fat and bald, yes?”

  It starts pacing the edge of the ring, walking in a frantic circle.

  A yes, Shara assumes. “And the other one—what did he look like?”

  The mhovost adds a decidedly swishy step to its pace; it puts one hand on its hip, bends the other hand effeminately at the wrist; as it pivots across the ring, it strokes the bottom of its bill as if luxuriating in its gorgeous features….

  That, thinks Shara, does not sound like the sort of person Wiclov would normally dally about with.

  “How did Wiclov trap you here?” she asks.

  The mhovost stops, looks at her, and bends double in silent laughter. It waves at her as if appreciating a merry joke: What a ridiculous idea!

  “So it wasn’t Wiclov,” says Shara. “Then who?”

  It bends its wrist, affects a feminine posture, and shakes its head in a manner that could only be called “bitchy.”

  “The other man trapped you here. Who is this other man?”

  It performs an agile flip, assumes a handstand, and begins trotting around on its palms.

  “Who was he?”

  The light in the room flickers as the candelabra flames dance. And all the flames bend, Shara notices, at the exact same angle….

  A breeze?

  She examines the walls. In the far corner, deep in amber shadows, she thinks she spies a crack in the stone—perhaps a panel, or a door.

  She looks down at the floor. The salt ring fills the room almost perfectly: it’s impossible to reach the door without going through the mhovost’s little enclosure. Like a guard dog…

  “What’s through that door?” asks Shara.

  The mhovost looks up at her, does yet another flip, and lands on its feet. It cocks its head, canine-like, and theatrically scratches its bald head with one quadruple-jointed finger.

  The Divinities, she remembers, could only be killed with the Kaj’s weaponry. But their minor creatures were more vulnerable, and all had their own weaknesses.

  Shara comes to a decision. “How many have you devoured during your imprisonment here?”

  Again, it doubles over in mock laughter. It dances over to where Sigrud stands and mimes inspecting him, pretending to squeeze his thighs, test his belly….

  “I believe it was many,” says Shara. “And I believe you enjoyed it.”

  In one swoop, the mhovost slides over to her. It runs one finger along the sides of its mouth: a disturbingly sexual gesture.

  Shara looks at a candelabra beside her. “These are very illegal, of course.” She picks up one candle, flips it over. Inscribed on the bottom, as she expected, is a symbol of a flame between two parallel lines—the insignia of Olvos, the flame in the woods. “These candles never go out, and give off such a bright white light.” She holds a hand to its flame. “But the heat they give…That is quite real, and no illusion.”

  The mhovost stops, and slowly withdraws its finger from its mouth.

  “There’s a reason all these candelabras are here, isn’t there?” asks Shara. “Because if by chance you got out of your cage, a dusty, dry creature like you would have to step very carefully to avoid catching alight.”

  The mhovost drops its hand and takes a step back.

  “I bet Mrs. Torskeny ran to you, didn’t she?” says Shara softly. “Seeing a little girl in need.”

  Shara remembers the old woman bent over her coffee: I tried to learn. I wanted to learn to be righteous. I w
anted to know. But I could only ever pretend.

  Angry, the mhovost flaps its bill at her: fapfapfapfa-

  With a flick, Shara tosses the candle at it.

  The creature catches afire instantly: there is a whump sound, and an orange blaze erupts from its chest. Within seconds it is a dark man-figure flailing in a billowing cloud of orange-white.

  Somewhere in the back of her head, Shara hears children screaming.

  She remembers, again, the boy in the jail cell. How I repeat myself.

  The flaming creature veers across the salt ring, seeming to bounce off of invisible walls. Scraps of flickering cloth float away from it like glowing orange cherry blossoms. It grasps its head, its monstrous mouth open in a silent cry.

  Its form fades; the flames die away; a gust of ash dances around the candelabras. Then it is gone, leaving only scorch marks on the floor.

  And Olvos said:

  “Nothing is ever truly lost

  The world is like the tide

  Returning, for an instant, to the place it occupied before

  Or leaving that same place once more

  Celebrate, then, for what you lose shall be returned

  Smile, then, for all good deeds you do shall be visited upon you

  Weep, then, for all ills you do shall return to you

  Or your children, or your children’s children

  What is reaped is what is sown.

  What is sown is what is reaped.”

  —BOOK OF THE RED LOTUS, PART IV, 13.51–13.61

  RE-CREATIONS

  Shara strides across the room. As her feet cross the salt, she braces for some terrible misfortune—perhaps the thing will resurrect itself and fall upon her—but there is nothing.

  She feels the crack in the wall, pries at it with her fingers, but it does not budge. “Come and look,” she says. “Do you see a handle? Or a button? Or maybe a lever…”

  Sigrud gently pushes her aside with the back of one hand. Then he takes a step back and soundly kicks the door in the wall.

  The crack sounds deafening in this silent place. Half of the door caves in. The remainder, suddenly powdery, shatters and falls to pieces like a mirror. White, acrid clouds come pluming up.

  Shara touches the broken door, which leaves a chalky residue on her fingers. “Ah,” she says. “Plaster.” She cranes her head forward to look into the dark.

  Earthen stairs, going straight down in a steep angle.

  Sigrud picks up one of the sputtering candelabras. “I think,” he says, “we may need one of these.”

  * * *

  —

  The stairs do not end: they stretch on and on, soft and moist, formed of dark, black clay and loam. Neither she nor Sigrud talks as they descend. They do not discuss the horror they just encountered, nor does he ask her how she knew how to dispatch it in such an able fashion: eight or nine years ago, they would have, but not now. Both of them have been at this strange sort of work for so long that there are few surprises left: you encounter the miraculous, do as you need with it, and go back to work. Though that, Shara reflects, was the worst in a long while.

  “What direction do you think we’re going?” asks Shara.

  “West.”

  “Toward the belfry?”

  Sigrud considers it and nods.

  “So, soon we will be…underneath it.”

  “More or less, yes.”

  Shara remembers how the gas company gave up this quarter, choosing to leave what was buried below Bulikov alone.

  “A question comes to me,” says Sigrud. “How could someone make this without anyone noticing?”

  Shara inspects the walls of the tunnel. “It looks like it’s been in use for a while. Much of it’s been worn away. But it almost looks like, when this tunnel was first made, they made it by burning it.”

  “What?”

  She points to the char marks, and the sandier places that are molten, like glass.

  “Someone burned a hole this deep?” asks Sigrud.

  “That’s how it appears,” says Shara. “Like a blowtorch flame through a stack of metal.”

  “Have you seen such a thing before?”

  “Actually…no. Which I find quite troubling, frankly.”

  The white candlelight prances on the earthen walls. A strange breeze caresses her cheek. Shara adjusts her glasses.

  The stairs seem to melt away below her. The walls fall back, then become stone—no, a stone mural, carved in a marvelously intricate pattern. Though the fluttering light makes it hard to see, Shara is sure she spots the slimsy form of Ahanas and the hand point of Taalhavras among the patterns.

  The walls keep falling back. Then they aren’t there at all.

  “Oh my word,” says Shara.

  The candlelight beats back the dark. The shadows withdraw like a curtain to reveal a vast chamber….

  Shara catches glimpses, flashes, flickers of distant stone….

  “Oh, my word.”

  She looks out. The chamber is huge and oddly uterine, from what she can see: both the ceiling and roof are huge and concave, and both come to a point in the exact center, connecting to form something similar to a stalagnate. The chamber has six atria, joining in the center like the petals and stigma of a fabulously complicated orchid bloom. And every single inch of the walls, ceiling, and floors are engraved with glyphs and sigils and pictograms of strange and bewildering events: a man pulls a thorned flower from a skull and ties its stem around his tongue; three vivisected women bathe in a rocky stream, their eyes like glass beads, while a stag watches from the shore; a woman stitches up an incision in her armpit, with the blank face of a man bulging out of the slit, as if he is being stitched up inside of her; four crows circle in the sky, and below them, a man draws water from the ground with a spear….On and on and on—images of great and terrible meaning that are incomprehensible to her.

  “What—” Sigrud snorts, hawks, swallows it with a gulp. “What is this place?”

  Around the center, where the “stalagnate” forms, Shara sees soft earth has collected on the ground. But, she wonders, where did it come from? She paces forward, taking halting steps as she crosses the sloping floors.

  The stalagnate, she sees, is actually a curling stairway, with five columns holding it up: it originally had six; but one, she sees, has been removed.

  Six atria, she thinks, six columns, and six Divinities….

  The stairway ends in a blocked gap in the ceiling, filled with loose stone and crumbling loam, as if whatever was above caved in.

  “Of course,” she says. “Of course!”

  “What?” asks Sigrud.

  She examines one column: it is beautifully wrought, engraved to resemble the trunk of a pine tree, with a line of flame crawling up its bark. The next column is straight and rigid and features a complicated repetitious design, like the visual expression of many mathematical formulas. The next column is carved to resemble a pillar of teeth or knives, thousands of blades melted together and pointing up, like the trunk of a palm tree. The next looks like a twisted loop of old vines, with many woody stems curled around one another: there is a slight bend in the column, artfully suggesting some flex. And the final of the five remaining columns is a twisting, chaotic tornado of blossoms, fur, leaves, sand, anything and everything.

  Shara bunches her fists and trembles like a schoolgirl. “This was it!” she cries. “This had to be it! Really it! Down here, all along!”

  “It being what?” says Sigrud, who remains unimpressed.

  “Don’t you see? Everyone says the bell tower of the Seat of the World shrank during the Blink! But that’s not true! Because that’s the base of the bell tower!” She points at the columns around the staircase. “Those stairs are the way up!”

  “So…”

  “
So the tower never shrank! The whole temple must have sunk into the mud! That shabby little clay shack up in the park was never the true Seat of the World! Which is what everyone, even everyone in Bulikov, still thinks. This is it! This is the Seat of the World! This is where the Divinities met!”

  As Shara has devoted most of her adult life to history, she can’t help but be overwhelmed with giddiness, as unpatriotic as it may be; but one unmoved part of her mind speaks up:

  This can’t all be coincidence. The most sacred structure in Bulikov just happened to sink so it remained hidden for nearly eighty years? And Ernst Wiclov was the one to tunnel underground to reach it? You don’t do something like that unless you know about it—and you wouldn’t know about it unless someone told you.

  Shara plucks one candle out of Sigrud’s candelabra. “Go and send word to Mulaghesh. Now. If word gets out to the general populace of Bulikov that this is still here, and we have to publicly seize this place, it’ll be the Summer of Black Rivers all over again. And have her throw up a net for Wiclov. All checkpoints around and inside Bulikov will need to be on the lookout for him. We’ve got enough to at least bring him in for questioning.”

  “What will you do?” asks Sigrud.

  “Stay down here, and inspect.”

  “Will that candle be enough for you?”

  “This is actually for you.” She holds the lone candle out to him and points to the candelabra. “I’ll be needing that, please.”

  Sigrud cocks an eyebrow, shrugs, and hands her the candelabra. He retreats up the earthen tunnel. The faint white light comes bouncing down the stairs, then dims, leaving Shara alone in the vast chamber.

  The candles fizz and spit. Somewhere, the limp plink of dripping water. And a thousand stone eyes watch her silently.

  * * *

  —

  It takes some time to recalibrate her manner of thought: the chamber was not an underground cave, she reminds herself, but a temple meant to be aboveground. This explains the huge, gaping holes in the walls of each bulging atrium: they were once giant windows, and though it’s difficult to tell from where she stands on the staircase, all but one of them is now broken. So this is what happens to the storied stained glass of the Seat of the World, she thinks. Broken and buried in the mud of Bulikov….