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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “What is frostbite?” asks Sigrud. “I have never heard of this frostbite.”

  “Are you implying,” says the doctor, “that Dreylings never get frostbite?”

  “There is cold”—Sigrud takes a massive swig of wine—“and less cold.”

  The doctor, flustered, frustrated, says to Shara, “I would say that if he survives the night, then he will survive entirely. I would also say that if he wants to survive in general, he should allow medical professionals to do their job, and not treat us as if we are…molesters.” Sigrud laughs nastily.

  Shara smiles. “Thank you, Doctor. That will be all.”

  The doctor, grumbling, bows, and Shara leads him outside. A crowd is milling in front of the embassy gates, having followed them here from the river. “If you could,” says Shara, “we would appreciate your discretion. If you could avoid discussing any details of what you saw here…”

  “It would be against my profession,” says the doctor, “and more so this examination was conducted so poorly that I would prefer no one ever know about it.” He claps a hat on his head and marches away. Someone in the crowd shouts, “There she is!” And the gates light up with photography flashes.

  Shara grimaces and shuts the door. Photography is a relatively new innovation, less than five years old, but she can already tell she will hate it: Capturing images, she thinks, carries so many complications for my work….

  She reenters and heads up the stairs; the embassy staff watches her go with black-rimmed eyes, exhausted, waiting for permission to turn in; Mulaghesh descends in a harried stomp. “Warehouse fire’s out,” she says. She lifts a bottle to her lips and drinks. “I’m locking down the embassy until we decide if this city will kill us or not for killing their god’s pet, or whatever that was. The City Fathers have elected to deal with the bridge themselves. I’m getting drunk and sleeping here. You can deal with it.”

  “I shall,” says Shara lightly.

  “And you had better make sure I wind up in Javrat when this is all over!”

  “I shall.”

  She leaves Mulaghesh behind, enters Sigrud’s room, and sits at the foot of his bed. Sigrud is running a forefinger around the mouth of the bottle, again and again.

  “Here,” says Shara. She holds out Sigrud’s bracelet and places it in his big palm.

  “Thank you,” he says, and fastens it around his left wrist.

  “Are you really all right?” Shara asks.

  “I think so,” says Sigrud. “I have survived worse.”

  “Really?”

  Sigrud nods, lost in thought.

  “How did you survive?”

  He thinks, then lifts his right hand, which is wrapped in medical gauze. He unravels it to reveal the brilliant pink-red carving of a scale in his palm. “With this.”

  She looks at it. “But that…that isn’t the blessing of Kolkan….”

  “Maybe not. But I think that…being punished by Kolkan, and being blessed by him…They may be the same thing.”

  Shara remembers Efrem reading from Olvos’s Book of the Red Lotus and commenting aloud, The Divine did not understand themselves in the same way we do not understand ourselves, and their unintentional effects often say more about them than their intentional ones.

  Sigrud is staring into the palm of his hand. His eye glitters through its swollen lids like the soft back of a beetle between its wings. He blinks—she can tell he is drunk—and says, “Do you know how I got this?”

  “Somewhat,” she says. “I know it is the mark of the Finger of Kolkan.”

  He nods. Silence stretches on.

  “I knew you had it,” she says. “I knew what it was. But I never felt I should ask.”

  “Wise. Scars are windows to bitterness—it is best to leave them untouched.” He kneads his palm and says, “I don’t know how they got it in Slondheim. Such a rare and powerful instrument—though it looked like no more than a marble—a gray marble with a, a little sign of a scale on it. They had to carry it in a box, with a certain kind of lining in it….”

  “Gray wool, probably,” says Shara. “It held a special esteem, to Kolkashtanis.”

  “If you say so. There were nine of us. They’d kept us in a cell, all together. We drank rusty water from a leaking pipe, shat in the corner, starved. Starved for so long. I don’t know how long they starved us. But one day our jailers came to us with this little stone in the box and a plate of chicken—a whole chicken—and they said, ‘If one of you can hold this little, tiny stone for a full minute, we will let you eat.’ And everyone rushed to volunteer, to do what the jailers said, but I held back because I knew these men. In Slondheim, they played with us. Tricked us into fighting each other, killing each other…” He flexes his left fist; the pink-scarred wastelands of his knuckles flare white. “So I knew this was not right. The first man tried to hold the pebble, and the second he picked it up, he started screaming. His hand bled like he had been stabbed. He dropped it—it sounded like a boulder had struck the floor when it fell—and the jailers laughed and said, ‘Pick it up, pick it up,’ and the man couldn’t. It was like it weighed a thousand tons. The jailers could only pick it up with the gray cloth. We didn’t understand what it was, but we knew we were starving, so we wanted to try again, to eat, just a little….And none of them could. Some got to twenty seconds. Some to thirty. Bleeding rivers from their hands. It wounded them so horribly. And they all dropped this little stone. This tiny little Finger of Kolkan.” He takes another sip of wine. “And then…I tried. But before I picked it up, I thought…I thought about all I had lost. The thing in my heart that made me wish to keep living, that fire, it had gone out. It is still out, even now. And…and I wished this stone to crush me. Do you see? I wished for this pain. So I picked it up. And I held it.” He turns over his scarred hand as if the stone is still there. “I feel it still. I feel like I am holding it now. I held it not to eat, but to die.” The hand turns into a fist. “But eat I did. I bore the Finger of Kolkan for not one, but three minutes. And then they took the stone from me, unhappy, and said, ‘You can eat, for you have won. But before you do, you must decide—will you eat all the chicken, or will you share it with your fellow inmates?’ And they all stared at me…ghosts of men, thin and pale and starving, like they were fading before my eyes….”

  Sigrud begins rewrapping his hand. “I didn’t think about it,” he says softly, “for even a second. The jailers put me in a different cell from the rest of them, and I ate it all, and I slept. And it was not even a week before they started dragging out the bodies from my old jail cell.” He ties the bandage, massaging his palm. “The Divine may have created many hells,” he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.”

  * * *

  —

  Shara shuts the door to Sigrud’s room and pauses in the hall. Her legs tremble, and it takes her a moment to realize she is about to collapse. She sits down in the hallway and takes a deep breath.

  Shara has run many operatives in her career, and she has lost her fair share. And in that time she has come to think she is an immaculate professional: efficient yet personally removed from the details of her work, preserving her conscience and her sanity in a tiny hermetic little bubble buried far away from her grisly reality.

  But to imagine losing Sigrud…She thought she knew horror, but when she saw him disappear into the dark waters of the Solda…

  He’s alive, she tells herself. He’s alive, and he’s going to be fine. At least, as fine as such a man can be, battered and bruised in his tiny, stinking room.

  Shara shakes her head. How the present mimics the past, she thinks. Ten years ago, but today it seems like a lifetime.

  Shara remembers how small the cabin door had been. Tiny, hardly a trapdoor, the tiniest cabin in the Saypuri dreadnought, probably. She knocked at the door, the tap tap echoing down the ship’s hallway, but recei
ved no answer. Then she opened it and the reek hit her, and her legs, already uncertain with seasickness as the dreadnought tipped beneath her, quivered even more at the smell. Then there was the Saypuri lieutenant coughing, advising her, “Please be careful ma’am,” and likely wondering if this girl, hardly twenty-five years old at the time, was looking to get killed.

  She stepped in. There was no light in the room, but she could see the giant man sitting cross-legged in the corner. He had the air of a beaten dog about him: his hair matted and patchy, his skin covered in welts and infections. His head was bowed, so she could not see his eyes—or eye, she kept reminding herself—but he recoiled at the interruption of light.

  She shut the door and sat in the corner opposite him, and waited. He hardly moved at all.

  “We are leaving Dreyling waters,” Shara asked him. “Do you not wish to see your country one last time?”

  He did not answer.

  “You haven’t even been outside your room,” she said. “You are free. Don’t you wish to move about for the first time in what must be years?”

  No answer.

  “Don’t you at least want to bathe? We do have hot water.”

  The giant man grunted slightly, as if he was about to speak but thought better of it.

  “Yes?”

  His accent was so thick he was almost unintelligible: “This…is not real.”

  “What?”

  He waved a hand. “Any of it.”

  “It is. I promise you, it is. Your door is unlocked. You are free.”

  He shook his head. “No. It can’t be. They are…My family…”

  Shara waited, but he said no more.

  “They are alive, as I told you they were,” she said softly.

  “I buried them. I held their bones in my hands.”

  “I cannot testify to whose bones those were, but they were not your family’s.”

  “You are lying to me.”

  “I am not. Your wife, Hild, was smuggled out of the country with your two daughters by a servant of yours before the coup. They crossed the border into Voortyashtan merely two days before the coup was complete. There they lived for the past six years, claiming to be relations of your servant. They had been working as farmers—poor ones, I suspect, as I doubt if someone of your wife’s background ever tilled earth, but they had made do.”

  A long silence. Then: “What…What proof do you have of this?”

  “Your family was not totally safe when I found them. They were, and are, being searched for—there are still many agents seeking any remnant of your family. We have removed your family from Voortyashtan, as I have no longer deemed that location safe. It has not been totally easy—your wife is, how shall I put this, a somewhat strong-willed woman.”

  He smiled slightly.

  “But, we got it done. When we did, your wife gave one of our officers a gift, as a gesture of thanks.” Shara reached into her pocket and pulled out a small burlap sack. She opened it and took out a gleaming, woven gold bracelet etched to resemble harsh, choppy waves.

  She passed it to him. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  He stared at it, the metal so bright and so clean in his filthy, scarred hands. His fingers began to tremble.

  “Why don’t you come up to the deck with me?” she asked gently.

  He stood up slowly, still staring at the bracelet. She opened the door, and he followed her out and up the stairs with the air of a sleepy child being herded to bed.

  The slap of the cold wind was enough to make Shara pause, and she bent double and staggered out onto the deck of the dreadnought. The giant man took no notice: he crossed the threshold of the door and stared up at the sky in awed silence. He had avoided looking up when they brought him on board, and she had wondered about that. Of course, she thought. How long has it been since he’s been outside? The sight of it must terrify him.

  “Come,” she said, and she led him to the railing. The dark cliffs of the Dreyling shores lurked far across the waves. “I am told it is not quite so far away as it looks. Though you may know more about that than I do.”

  He looked down at the golden bracelet, snapped it around his wrist, and held up his arm, studying it. “I cannot see them. Can I?”

  She shook her head. “It would not be safe, for you or for them. Not now. But maybe someday.”

  “What do you want of me?” he asked.

  “Want of you? Nothing, for now.”

  “You have saved my family. You have freed me from prison. Why?”

  “I believe that your information on the Dreyling countries will almost certainly be quite valuable,” says Shara. “And it will likely destabilize any relationships the Dreyling Republics have with the Continent.” A hint of smugness crept into her voice: this was the first major intelligence victory of her career, and she was not yet experienced enough to bother to mask her pride.

  “That is not enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “For what you have done for me.”

  Shara paused, unsure what to say.

  “Ask something of me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Ask something of me. Anything.”

  “I don’t need anything from you.”

  He laughed. “Yes, you do.”

  “I am a Saypuri intelligence officer,” she said, nettled. “I have no need of anything you co—”

  “You are a young girl,” said the man, “who cannot sail, who cannot fight, and who has never shed blood in her life. You may be clever, but you need much from me, I think. But you have too much pride to ask for it.”

  Shara glared at him. “What are you proposing to be? My batsman? My secretary? Would you degrade yourself in such a manner?”

  “Degrade?” He looked back across the sea. “Degrade…You do not know the meaning of the word. You do not know what they did to me in there. It is unspeakable. Now, to carry water, to serve food, to fight, to kill—whatever my future holds, I am numb to it. I am numb.” He said it again like he was trying to convince himself, and he turned to stare at her, pale and haunted. “Ask something of me. Ask.”

  Though his face was scarred and filthy, Shara felt she could see through to him, and she understood that in some twisted manner he was asking for her permission to die, because he could no longer imagine doing anything else.

  Shara looked back at the shrinking Dreyling cliffs. And she then did something she would never do now: she bared her heart, and told him the truth, and made a promise she did not know if she could keep. “I ask you, then,” she said slowly, “to know that this is not good-bye for you. One day I will help you come back to your home. I will help you put together what has been broken. I promise I will bring you back.”

  He looked out at sea, his one eye shining. And then, to her complete shock, he knelt to the ground, gripped the railing, and burst into tears.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re positive you won’t reconsider?” says a voice.

  “I’m positive I haven’t been allowed to consider it,” Mulaghesh’s voice says back. “Your damn council didn’t even give me the chance.”

  “They can’t even vote, though!” says the voice. “The assembly was incomplete! You only have to exert some influence, Turyin!”

  “Oh, for the seas’ sakes,” mutters Mulaghesh, weary, intoxicated. “Have I not exerted enough tonight? I will do as I am told, thank you, and they told me very clearly to fuck off.”

  Shara enters the kitchen to see Vohannes Votrov, now clad in his usual white fur coat, standing before Mulaghesh, who eyes him sourly over a brimming glass of whiskey. Votrov’s cane beats an impatient tap-tap against the heel of his boot.

  “I thought we were locking down the embassy and admitting no visitors,” says Shara. “Especially this one.”

  Vohann
es turns and grins at her. “So! Here is the triumphant warrior, fresh off of her conquest. What an epic night you’ve had!”

  “Vo, I honestly do not have time for your supposed charms. How did you get in?”

  “By liberally applying my supposed charms, of course,” says Vohannes. “Please, help me—we must convince Governor Mulaghesh here to get up. You’re all letting a phenomenal opportunity float by!”

  “I will not,” says Mulaghesh, “lift my ass one inch off of this chair. Not tonight.”

  “But the city’s in mad shambles!” says Vohannes. “One half can only get to the other by walking all the way around the walls! I know that Bulikov does not have the resources to begin to reconstruct the Solda Bridge with any speed.”

  “Don’t you own most of the construction companies in the city?” asks Shara.

  “Well, true…But while my own companies could begin to make headway, it’d be nothing compared to the exertion of the polis governor’s office…or the regional governor’s office….”

  “And why would we want to do this?”

  “Do you think you’d have nothing to gain,” asks Vohannes, “by rendering all of Bulikov dependent on your planners and developers?”

  “And we’d have to work with all of his companies, too,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Merely a pleasant bonus,” says Vohannes.

  “Literally, a bonus,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Dozens of people are dead tonight, Vo,” says Shara. “I know you have your mission, your agenda, but can’t you show some modicum of decency? Shouldn’t you be mourning for your people?”

  Vohannes’s grin sours until it’s a vicious rictus. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Ambassador,” he says acidly, “but this is far from the first disaster to befall Bulikov. What about when Oshkev Street, destabilized by a random cavity from the Blink, abruptly collapsed, bringing down two apartment buildings and a school with it? We wept and mourned then, but what good did that do us? What about when the Continental Gas Company fumblingly tried to install a line in the Solda Quarter and started a fire that couldn’t be put out for six days? We wept and mourned then, but what good did that do us?”