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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She looks out at the six atria. Each atrium has a different style, presumably aligning with each Divinity, just like the columns holding up the staircase. Shara sees the sigils of Olvos, Taalhavras, Ahanas, Voortya, Jukov, and then…

  “Hm,” says Shara.

  Despite its burial, it seems the Seat of the World is not in perfect condition: one atrium is utterly blank of any engravings at all, as if someone came in and sanded down the floor, ceiling, and walls.

  But Shara sees someone has very recently attempted to restore the floor of this blank chamber, laying out engraved stones of a much darker make than the rest of the temple. The restoration isn’t complete yet, leaving a jumbled and distorted mess of images, words, and sigils on the floor, telling half-stories and partial myths, and leaving huge swaths of the chamber blank.

  Over and over again, these dark new stones show the same image: a human-like figure seated in the center of a room, listening to someone. The accompanying sigil is familiar to her: a scale, represented by two dashes supported by a square fork.

  Kolkan’s hands, she remembers. Waiting to weigh and judge…

  She looks behind her. The pillar corresponding with the blank atrium is missing.

  Shara gets the powerfully absurd feeling that she is staring at edited history.

  This was once as decorated as the other five sections, thinks Shara. But I’m willing to bet it all went blank in 1442, right when Kolkan disappeared from the world. She looks out at the jigsaw collection of new pictograms. But now someone’s come back to correct the record.

  She smirks. Perhaps they’re taking the term “Restorationists” a bit too seriously.

  It’s a futile task. By her estimation, there are thousands of square feet of floor, ceiling, and wall needing to be completely restored. And whoever was attempting to do so obviously had no idea what decorated Kolkan’s chamber. And where did these stones come from, anyway?

  Shara hops down and begins inspecting the new pieces of stone on the floor. The stones themselves are fascinating—a dark, smooth ore of a like she’s never seen before—and their pictograms are of deeds and events Shara has never heard of: Kolkan, depicted as a robed, hooded figure, splits open a naked human form, and a pure, bright light comes spilling out to rain upon the rounded hills.

  It’s from another temple, maybe. She traces one carving with her finger. Someone actually took the stone from one of Kolkan’s surviving temples and tried to rebuild it here, to restore Kolkan in the Seat of the World.

  Could Ernst Wiclov really do something like this?

  She sees movement ahead and slowly looks up. Something is twitching on the wall.

  After a moment’s inspection, she sees there is a large, empty frame of some kind standing upright just a few yards of ahead of her; the quivering candle flames must have caused its shadow to dance on the stone wall behind it.

  She looks around at the other chambers. None of them have a frame of any kind. Whoever tried to restore Kolkan’s chamber—presumably the same person who made the earthen stairway down and also thought to trap the mhovost before it as a revolting sort of watchdog—must have brought it here.

  She walks over to it. It’s a stone door frame, about nine feet tall. But then, she recalls, Continentals generally were much taller in the years before the Blink: they were less malnourished in those days. Like so many things originating during the Divine era, the frame features exquisite stonework that gives it the likeness of thick fur, dry wood, chalky stone, and starlings. Yet none of this artistry has any real relation to Kolkan, at least as far as Shara’s aware: Kolkan generally disdained ornamentation of any kind.

  She touches the carven starlings in the door frame: “And weren’t you a favorite of Jukov?”

  As she touches it, the door slides back. She looks down at its base. The door frame is mounted on four small wheels made of iron. Shara gives it another push—with a squeak, it slides back farther. Why in the world would anyone want a mobile door frame?

  She looks at the window frame in the wall of Kolkan’s atrium. Each atrium had its own window, originally, a stained glass for each Divinity. Shara has read scores of letters describing the beauty of the Divine glass of the Seat of the World—blues and reds the eye could not properly interpret but still feel—and while she is sorry to see it all broken, she’s a bit puzzled to see that Kolkan’s glass remains whole, but is perfectly blank and clear. She slowly waves the candelabra back and forth, watching the reflection: it’s a big, transparent, but otherwise utterly ordinary window. Perhaps it simply went blank, she concludes, when Kolkan vanished. But if so—why is it still whole, and all the others broken?

  She lifts the candelabra and gazes at the other round chambers.

  Once, when she was very young, Aunt Vinya took her to the National Library in Ghaladesh. Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves….Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.

  She felt overwhelmed. It was—she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library—a lot like being in love for the first time.

  And to find this here under the earth, as if all the experiences and words and histories of the Continent could be washed away by the rain to leach through the soil and drip, drip, drip into a hollow in the loam, like the slow calcification of crystal…

  In the dark, under Bulikov, Shara Komayd paces over ancient stones and falls in love again.

  * * *

  —

  The rumble of footsteps. Shara looks up from a pictogram of Olvos to see the staircase glowing bright with candlelight.

  Mulaghesh enters, flanked by Sigrud and two soldiers with candelabras. She takes one glance at the vast temple; her shoulders droop—Oh, what a mess this is—and she sighs: “Ah, shit.”

  “It’s quite a discovery, isn’t it?” calls Shara as she walks across the atria.

  “You could say that,” Mulaghesh says, “yes.”

  “You have men posted to guard the entrance?”

  “I have five soldiers outside, yes.”

  “This is”—Shara steps around a puddle of mud—“enormous. Enormous! I’d imagine this is the most significant Divine discovery since the War, since the Blink! The greatest historical discovery in…well, history. To discover any piece of this place, any fragment of these pictograms, would be borderline revolutionary in Ghaladesh, but to have found the entire building, whole, and more or less unharmed, is, is…” Shara, breathless, inhales. “It boggles the mind.” Mulaghesh stares at the curving ceiling. She strokes the scars on her jaw with her knuckles. “It sure does.”

  “Here! Look here, at this section!” Shara stoops. “These few yards of carvings offer more knowledge about Ahanas than anyone’s found in years. We know almost nothing about her! Ahanashtan, as you probably know, is one of the places most deeply affected by the Blink—almost all the city seemed to vanish, you see. Almost everything that’s there now was built by Saypur.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But this mural proves why it vanished! It corroborates the theory that Ahanas actually grew the city, sowing miraculous seeds that grew into living buildings, homes, streets, lights….Peaches that glowed at night, like streetlights, vines that funneled in water and away waste…It’s fascinating.”

  Mulaghesh scratches the corner of her mouth. “Yeah.”

  “And when Ahanas died, all of that vanished. What’s more, it provides a second explanation for the gap in knowledge: if what this says is true, Ahanashtanis thought all life and all parts of the body were sacred—they never used medicine, never cut their hair, never shaved, never tr
immed their fingernails, never brushed their teeth, never…well…cleaned their nether parts.”

  “Yeesh.”

  “But that was because they didn’t have to! Ahanas was able to meet every single one of their needs! They lived in complete harmony with this massive, organic city! But after the Blink, when disease started rampaging through the Continent, they must have refused every medicine, every ministration….So nearly every Ahanashtani on the Continent must have died out! Can you imagine! Can you imagine that?”

  “Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. Then, amiably: “So, you know we’re going to have to cave in that tunnel, right?”

  “And this section here,” says Shara, “it…it…” She bows her head and lets out a slow breath. Then she looks up at Mulaghesh.

  Mulaghesh smiles grimly and nods. “Yeah. You know. You know we can’t possibly keep something like this secret. Not something this big. We’d post guards. Then someone would ask questions about those guards, what they’re guarding, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Or we’d try and excavate it, study it, document it, and someone would see all the equipment, all the personnel, and they’d ask questions, and they’d keep asking questions until they found out. Trouble”—Mulaghesh files a rough nail away on the edge of one engraving—“is unavoidable. And worse, Wiclov knows about it, so if we try and stay here and do anything, it’s putting a knife in his hands: ‘Look at Saypur, keeping our most sacred temple secret in the earth, getting their dirty foreign fingers all over it.’ Can you imagine that fallout? Can you imagine what would happen, Ambassador? Not just to your investigation, but to the Continent, to Saypur?”

  Shara sighs. This is an argument she expected, but she’d hoped the solution wouldn’t be quite so drastic. “You really want to…to just cave it in? You think that’s our best option?”

  “I’d prefer to fill the damn tunnel up with cement, but the equipment would attract too many eyes. There are some wooden struts at the door that are definitely load-bearing. It wouldn’t take more than an hour.”

  “There’s evidence, though. Someone’s been here, restoring the Kolkashtani atrium. They even put a stone door frame in here, though I’ve no idea why. It…It must be whoever’s working with Wiclov!”

  “Are you certain of it to the extent that you would risk Continentals discovering this place?”

  Shara rubs her eyes, then sits back and stares out at the Seat of the World. “Looking at it, I just know,” she says, “that I could spend a lifetime studying this.”

  “If you were a historian,” says Mulaghesh. “But you’re not.”

  Shara flinches, stung.

  “You’re a servant, Ambassador,” says Mulaghesh softly. “We both have a duty. Neither of us will be doing it down here.”

  In Shara’s head, Efrem Pangyui is saying, What truth do you wish to keep?

  The candelabras stutter. A thousand shadows dance. Ancient faces glower, vanish.

  “Do it,” says Shara.

  * * *

  —

  The trudge back up the stairway feels interminable. Shara commits herself to memorizing everything she saw, everything she read. By all the seas, she tells herself, we won’t lose this, too.

  “So there was nothing miraculous down there?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “Not that I saw,” says Shara absently.

  “That’s a relief,” Mulaghesh says. She pulls an envelope from her coat pocket and holds it out to Shara. “We’ve been reviewing the stolen pages of the list from the Warehouse. The idea of finding any more of this, out in the open, gives me nightmares. These twenty pages are what we think got the Restorationists so excited—or something in them, at least. But they probably got much, much more.”

  If there is one thing that can break Shara’s concentration, it’s this. She snatches the envelope from Mulaghesh’s hand, tears it open, and reads:

  356. Shelf C4-145. Travertine’s boots: footwear that somehow makes the wearer’s stride miles long—can cross the Continent in less than a day. VERY IMPORTANT to keep one foot on the ground: there were originally two pair, but the testing wearer jumped, and floated into the atmosphere. Remaining pair still miraculous.

  357. Shelf C4-146. Kolkan’s carpet: Small rug that MOST DEFINITELY possesses the ability to fly. VERY difficult to control. Records indicate Kolkan blessed each thread of the rug with the miracle of flight, so theoretically each thread could lift several tons into the air—though we have not yet attempted such, nor will we. Still miraculous.

  358. Shelf C4-147. Toy wagon: disappears on nights of a new moon, reappears on the full moon full of copper pennies bearing the face of Jukov. Once returned with a load of bones (not human). Still miraculous.

  359. Shelf C4-148. Glass window: originally was the holding place of numerous Ahanashtani prisoners, trapped inside the glass. When Ahanas perished, the panes bled for two months—prisoners were never recovered. No longer miraculous.

  360. Shelf C4-149. Edicts of Kolkan: Books 237 to 243. Seven tomes on how women’s shoes should be prepared, worn, discarded, cleaned, etc.

  “Oh,” says Shara softly. “Oh my word.”

  Mulaghesh stops briefly to light a match on a stone protruding from the tunnel wall. “Yeah.”

  “This is what’s in the Warehouse?”

  “They just had to get ahold of a part of the list with an unusually large amount of active, miraculous items. A lot of glass pieces, though.”

  “The Divinities were fond of using glass as a safe place,” Shara murmurs.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They stored things in them, hid in them. All Divine priests knew many Release miracles—they’d be sent a simple glass bead, perform the appropriate miracle, break the glass, and then”—she waggles her fingers—“mountains of gold, a mansion, a castle, a bride, or….whatever.” She trails off as she reads, struggling between fascination and horror as she flips through the rest of the entries. She’s barely aware when they emerge from the tunnel, registering only the bright light from the candelabras in the mhovost’s room.

  Mulaghesh nods to two young soldiers with axes and sledgehammers. “Go on,” she says.

  The soldiers enter the tunnel.

  Shara reads the last pages.

  Her hands clench: she nearly rips the paper in half.

  “Wait!” she says. “Wait, stop!”

  “Wait?” asks Mulaghesh. “For what?”

  “Look,” says Shara. She points at one entry:

  372. Shelf C5-162. Ear of Jukov: an engraved, stone door frame that contains no door. Iron wheels on the base. Speculated that it has a twin, and no matter where the other Ear is, if the doors are operated in the correct manner one can pass through one and come out the other. We speculate that the twin has been destroyed. No longer miraculous.

  “Do you remember,” Shara asks, “the stone door in the Kolkashtani atrium we just saw?”

  “Yeah…” Mulaghesh’s face does not change as she lifts her eyes from the page to Shara. “You…You think…”

  “Yes.”

  Mulaghesh has to think for a moment. “So if that’s the other Ear down there…”

  “And if its twin is still in the Warehouse…”

  The two stare at each other for one second longer. Then they dash back down the stairway.

  Sigrud and the other two soldiers watch, bewildered, before following.

  * * *

  —

  “Taking everything into account, it still seems wisest,” Mulaghesh intones from the shadows, “to just destroy the damn thing.”

  Shara holds the candelabra higher to inspect the door frame. “Would you prefer that we leave not knowing if someone used the door to access the Warehouse?”

  A click as Mulaghesh sucks on her cigarillo. “They could have gone in there, touched something they shouldn’t have,
and died.”

  “Then I, personally, would like to have a body.” She studies the sculpted door, looking for a word, a letter, a switch, or a button. Though they wouldn’t need anything mechanical, she reminds herself. All mechanics of the miraculous operate in a much more abstract manner…

  Sigrud lies on the temple floor, staring up as if it’s a sunny hillside with a blue sky above. “Maybe,” he says, “you must do something to the other door.”

  “I would prefer that, yes,” says Shara. She mutters a few lines from the Jukoshtava: the door remains indifferent. “Then this door would be more or less useless. Provided security is firm at the Warehouse.”

  “And it is,” snaps Mulaghesh.

  Shara tries praising the names of a few key Jukoshtani saints. The door is unmoved. This must be what it’s like, she thinks, to be a lecher trying out lines on a girl at a party.

  “I rather think,” she says finally, “that I am going about this wrong.”

  Mulaghesh suppresses a ferocious yawn. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  Shara’s eye strays across a distant pictogram in Jukov’s atrium depicting an orgy of stupendous complexity. “Jukov did not respect words, or shows of fealty. He was always much more about action, wildness, with nothing planned.” At the head of the orgy, a figure in a pointed hat holds aloft a jug of wine and a knife. “Sacrifice through blood, sweat, tears, emotion…”

  She remembers a famous passage from the Jukoshtava: “Those who are unwilling to part with their blood and fear; who refuse wine and wildness; who come upon a choice, a chance, and tremble and fear—why should I allow them in my shadow?”

  Wine, thinks Shara, and the flesh.