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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Then a flash, a crash, a bang. She’s slapped with rain, and awakes.

  She is lying on wet earth. Rain patters her back. She remembers, slowly, that she has limbs. She turns herself over, shoulders complaining, and looks up.

  Voortya is gone. A driving rain hammers the clifftops, runlets of water carving through the moist grass to go spiraling off into the sea.

  She hears more shouting, the groan of machinery. She sits up—her whole body hurts as if she’s just fallen out of the sky—and looks behind her.

  A thick plume of smoke is rising from the earth a few miles west of Fort Thinadeshi. It takes her no time at all to realize it’s the thinadeskite mine.

  There are shouts, screams, cries. Automobile lights slash through the swirling dust and smoke. She can see figures sprinting back and forth, pointing, waving their arms. Machinery being set, started, juddering into action. It all has the look of a disaster to her.

  She looks around and sees her carousel lying in a mound of bracken. She picks it up, fingers still dull and stupid, and confirms that it’s empty: she fired all five rounds. She feels the barrels—still warm—which means she fired them recently.

  Though the question remains, she thinks, looking back at the sea, fired them into what?

  She holsters the carousel, stands, and staggers toward the thinadeskite mine, her feet sloshing in the wet earth. As she gets closer she sees there’s an immense hole in the ground, like a sinkhole after a torrential rain, dozens of feet deep. The wire fences have collapsed, allowing her to cross through. One of the figures running around the rim of the hole is unusually agitated, pointing, screaming orders, darting back and forth with their hands clasped around their head. She doesn’t need to get close to know it’s Lieutenant Prathda, head boy of the thinadeskite project.

  “No, no!” he’s crying. “That stone there! It’s clearly blocking the aperture! No, not that one, the one with the orthoclase striations, on the left!”

  One of the soldiers working at the machinery turns to look at Prathda, bewildered.

  “The granite, Private!” he shrieks at the soldier. “The granite slab! Move it, move it!”

  Mulaghesh wipes rain out of her eyes as she approaches. “What the hells happened here?” It looks like someone’s just carved a gigantic trench in the earth. There’s no sign at all that this was once a functioning mine.

  Prathda does a double take. “Where did you come from? The mine’s caved in somehow, the whole damnable mine has just caved in! In the middle of the night! With no warning!”

  “It collapsed?”

  “Yes! Yes! And damned if I know how! We’d done countless integrity reports, brought in all kinds of mining experts to analyze the density of the soil, and now this! This, when we need it least! It’ll flood in minutes if the rain keeps up!”

  “Was anyone inside?”

  “Of course there were! We’d be fools to leave this place unguarded! But…” He looks back at the ruined mine.

  Mulaghesh understands what he’s thinking. “The odds are slim that they’re alive.”

  She steps back to let the emergency crews by and takes stock of her surroundings, doing all she can to defy her whirling head and capture every possible detail. Lightning flickers in the sky, giving her a sliver of illumination. She tries to imagine what could have done this. The only thing she’s ever seen in her life create this kind of destruction is an artillery shell.

  “I guess that solves it,” says a voice over her shoulder.

  She looks around to find Biswal sitting on a stone nearby, staring into the chaos.

  “What?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “The collapse. It answers the question that’s weighed so heavily on my mind.” Biswal still hasn’t made eye contact with her: he just watches as the crews try to haul rubble out of the way. There’s something off-putting about his expression, as if he always expected this calamity, or perhaps some calamity; and now that he’s been proven right, it fills him with a strange energy. “What were the insurgents going to do with all those stolen explosives?”

  “You think they bombed the mine?”

  “You heard Prathda. He’s right. They did countless studies when constructing this thing, took every measure of safety. The only reason it’d collapse is if someone forced it to. And all the damage is in a straight line. That’s no coincidence, and this is no collapse.”

  “Why would they attack the mines?”

  “Why does a rabid dog attack a bull? Don’t give these people too much credit, Turyin. They don’t have strategies, they don’t have goals. That’s why they seem to win.” One of his lieutenants waves to him. Biswal watches him for a moment, his eyes heavy-lidded and face inscrutable. Then he stands. “Whatever happened here, it’s not over yet.” He brushes off his pants and strides away into the chaos.

  Mulaghesh watches him go, then turns to look at the collapsed mine. Then she walks away, climbs a nearby hill, and looks down on the damage.

  It is all in a line, as Biswal said. But somehow she gets the impression the destructive force did not come from within but rather from above, as if a tremendous weight struck the earth above the mine with enough power to crack through yards and yards of soil and stone.

  She remembers the sight of Voortya, and the huge sword glinting in her hand.

  Did a Divinity climb up on these cliffs, she wonders, lift her sword high, and bring it down on the mine?

  She jumps down and starts walking toward the cliffs, searching for some sign of a Divinity’s passage, or really anything’s passage. She finds nothing. And besides, this region is covered with patrols, any one of which would have noticed a ten-story metal woman walking around with a sword, which is the kind of thing you mention to your CO.

  She looks back at the mines. If it was indeed Voortya herself who stood here and looked out at all of Voortyashtan, what went through her giant, steel head?

  If she did destroy the mines, why? Why bother with them at all? Wouldn’t Fort Thinadeshi be a much better target for the Divinity of war, sitting there upon the hill, huge and lit up and covered in cannons?

  Was Voortya driven to stop them from mining the thinadeskite? But why would Voortya care about what by all accounts is simply a new type of electromagnetic ore? Are they violating some kind of sacred rule by drilling deep into the earth?

  Even if she saw something, Mulaghesh reasons, it couldn’t have been Voortya. For one thing, the Divinity Voortya had four arms. Mulaghesh doesn’t know much, but she knows that. In every instance when she presented herself, the Divinity of war had four giant, muscular arms, two to a side. And yet the thing she witnessed here on the cliffs had two. It also seemed to react in pain when I popped off some rounds at it, she thinks. Though Saypur’s made some striking breakthroughs in weapon technologies, she doesn’t think small arms fire would make a Divinity pause. Hells, six-incher cannons only stunned Kolkan and Jukov back in Bulikov, but didn’t seem to injure them any.

  And last but certainly not least: it couldn’t have been Voortya, because Voortya is stone-cold fucking dead. A couple hundred Saypuris witnessed the Kaj blow her head clean off her shoulders in the Night of the Red Sands.

  More questions, and no new answers.

  Mulaghesh comes to the cliffs where she dropped the bottle off the edge. She sees nothing: no giant finger marks in the rocks, no footsteps, no churning of the earth. There is no sign, save for her empty, warm carousel, that what she experienced was anything more than a dream.

  Am I going mad?

  The gulls are still shrieking, still wheeling and dipping through the air. They cry to one another in terror, communicating some terrible threat, some passing predator. But Mulaghesh can see no sign of what disturbed them so.

  * * *

  —

  Three hours later Mulaghesh, wheezing and gasping, staggers back through the gates of Fort Thinadeshi. S
he is not at all happy to be parted from the disaster site: though she is ostensibly here as a tourist, she pitched in as much as she could in the recovery effort, trying to locate the bodies of the three guards trapped inside. But then a tremulous Saypuri messenger came up, tapped her on the shoulder, and gave her the request.

  When she gets to the main conference room everything’s in chaos. Runners—Saypuri and Dreyling, mostly, though there are a few Continental ones—keep darting in to deliver messages. The table is an utter mess, covered in cups, papers, pencils, balled-up napkins. It’s clear this has been a point of activity for some time.

  Biswal, Captain Nadar, and Signe are all shouting over one another. Rada Smolisk sits quietly in the corner, attempting to take notes. Nadar, unsurprisingly, looks like shit: red-eyed, soaking wet, with a bandage around her right hand. Her face is flushed, which makes the white scar on her forehead glow white. Biswal grips the edges of the table like he’s about to break it in half over his knee, and stares straight into it as he issues a steady stream of orders. Signe is pacing along the long side of the table, a frenzy of smoke and ash and frantic gestures, pointing to the wall of maps and describing access points.

  For a moment Mulaghesh just watches this scene and drips on the floor. The topic of discussion appears to be throwing up roadblocks, barricades, and traffic stops in order to try to catch whichever perpetrators could be responsible for this.

  “…very few weak points at the harbor,” Signe is saying indignantly. “The entirety of the harbor works is self-contained.”

  “Per your testimony,” says Biswal. “You have not permitted Saypuri officers to tour the harbor works in over four months, so we have no way of knowing that for ourselves.”

  “This is because we are at the height of the dredging operations!” says Signe. “We can’t stop now to allow a top-to-bottom security assessment!”

  “Well, you may have to, CTO Harkvaldsson,” growls Biswal. “I have three dead soldiers and a caved-in installation on my hands. I expect your full cooperation.”

  “And I would expect yours,” says Signe. “You tell me that this is an ‘installation’ or an ‘expansion,’ but it’s clear to everyone that it’s some kind of mine! But what you’re mining you won’t say.”

  “I cannot say,” says Biswal. “That is privileged information. And it should not affect how we conduct the search in the harbor works.”

  Nadar shakes her head. “We can throw up as many dragnets as we’d like, General, but I am convinced the perpetrators are long gone. It cannot be a coincidence that the very day we allow all the tribal leaders into the city is the same day that the mines get bombed. Whoever did this left early today, with the procession out of the city.”

  “Your suspicions are noted, Captain,” says Biswal. “But we still must at least try.”

  So far, Mulaghesh seems to be invisible. She waits, then pulls out a chair and sits. The scrape of the chair leg makes the four of them jump, and they turn to look at her as if she just appeared out of thin air.

  “Don’t mind me,” she says, taking out a cigarillo. “I’d hate to interrupt.”

  “General Mulaghesh,” says Biswal, suddenly formal. “Kind of you to join us. You were with us at the scene just after the cave-in, correct?”

  “You saw me, General Biswal,” says Mulaghesh. “Unless you’ve already forgotten.”

  “I haven’t. But your appearance on the scene was quite quick, by my estimation. Word had hardly broken out before you were there. My question is—where were you when the collapse occurred?”

  “What, am I a suspect?” says Mulaghesh. She lights her cigarillo. She’s suddenly very aware of Rada Smolisk in the corner scribbling down her words.

  “We have no witnesses, General,” says Nadar. “If you were in the area, ma’am, we’d appreciate hearing anything you have to say.”

  Mulaghesh sucks on her cigarillo, flooding her mouth and nose with the pungent aroma of tobacco. She swallows, thinking what to say.

  She can’t tell them what she saw, she decides. Not after Choudhry already went mad up here, painting up the walls with her visions. They’d think her a lunatic and block her out from the investigation. And besides—she herself doesn’t know what to make of what she saw.

  So what to tell everyone now?

  “I was sitting on the cliffs,” says Mulaghesh, “watching the storm rolling in, and drinking wine. Probta wine, specifically,” she says, remembering the label.

  Signe pulls a face. “Ugh. You know there’s fish oil in that, right?”

  “It got me pretty drunk,” says Mulaghesh, “so I can’t fault it.”

  “So you were drunk while the mines exploded, General?” says Nadar. She does a good job of keeping some contempt out of her words, but not all of it.

  “I figured I’d take a day off,” says Mulaghesh. “I wasn’t the only one out there, so you can ask them. I fell asleep. I woke up with the rain and thought I heard thunder. It didn’t take long to realize what it really was.”

  “So you did not see anything suspicious in the area after the explosion?” asks Biswal.

  “No. I saw what happened and came running. I’ve been pitching in at the site ever since.” She glances around. “So you think insurgents snuck in with the tribal leaders and did this?”

  “It’s the only theory that makes sense, General,” says Nadar.

  “How many tribal meetings have you had since the explosives were stolen?”

  Biswal frowns as he considers it. “A dozen, maybe. More.”

  “So they’ve had a dozen opportunities to pull this off, and only just managed it now?”

  “There’s a lot of speculation here, ma’am,” says Nadar. “If I may say so. The explosives might have been passed throughout the tribes until the right person got ahold of it. Or perhaps they needed the right timing device, or the right access. Or the explosives were only recently stolen from the fortress. There are many reasons why they could have waited so long.”

  “Are there any reasons why they’d target the mines?” says Mulaghesh. “And not the fortress, or the Galleries, or the harbor? Or any of their enemy tribes?”

  “We can’t discuss this in front of CTO Harkvaldsson or Governor Smolisk,” says Biswal. “The nature and value of the mines is classified.”

  “So you’re telling me that it was valuable enough,” Signe says languidly, “that the insurgents might know it’d hurt you if they blew it up?”

  Biswal glares at her.

  “If you’re not convinced the insurgents did this, General,” says Nadar, “do you have any alternate theories?”

  Mulaghesh hesitates. She still has no desire to tell them about her vision. “I’m just saying we might need to keep an open mind he—”

  The door bursts open and Sergeant Major Pandey sprints in. Without a word of apology he trots up to Biswal and hands him a note. Biswal, frowning, takes it, opens it, and begins to read. In the time it takes him to do so, two more runners sprint in—one Voortyashtani, one Dreyling—and each hand off messages to Rada and Signe, respectively.

  Some big news just came down the pipeline, thinks Mulaghesh.

  The room is almost completely still as the messages are opened and read. Pandey glances at Signe, who looks back as she opens her envelope. There’s a queer moment of connection between the two: Signe’s brow arches, as if asking a question, and Pandey gives the tiniest shake of his head, as if saying, Not now.

  Mulaghesh frowns. What the hells was that?

  “What’s this?” says Biswal. “This doesn’t make sense. Harkvaldsson is already here. She’s sitting right there, for the seas’ sakes.” He nods at Signe.

  Pandey coughs a little, leans down, and mutters, “If you’ll read the preceding part of the message, sir, it does not concern CTO Harkvaldsson….”

  Biswal angrily adjusts his tiny spectacles. “We
ll, then who the hell is supposed to be showing up on our doorstep?”

  Rada is reading her own message. “W-Wait,” she says, horrified. “Ch-Chancellor je Harkvaldsson is g-going to be here? Tomorrow night?”

  “Who?” demands Biswal, furious.

  Signe’s voice is like an arctic wind: “My father.”

  Everyone turns to look at her. She’s opened her own letter and is reading it with furious eyes, fingers clutching the paper as if imagining a throat. “My father is coming.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Oh, shit,” says Mulaghesh. “Sigrud?”

  * * *

  —

  Pandemonium ensues. To Mulaghesh’s confusion—and terrific amusement—they keep referring to “Chancellor je Harkvaldsson” as a high-level diplomatic personage. The message, Mulaghesh understands, suggests that Sigrud is pulling into Voortyashtan within a matter of hours because his ship took some damage pursuing Dreyling pirates, and is in need of repairs. This is slightly plausible—a damaged ship would be desperate to dock anywhere, including Voortyashtan. But no one seems to believe it. Everyone assumes Sigrud’s arrival has something to do with the harbor’s construction schedule or the collapse of the thinadeskite mines.

  What a minefield this little polis is, Mulaghesh thinks. So many sensitive subjects.

  It’s hard not to laugh: she knew Sigrud took some political office up in the brand-new United Dreyling States, but she hadn’t expected him to be walking around with a word like “Chancellor” swinging in front of his name. She tries to imagine him sitting in some bureaucratic office, reading reports. As she has, in her time, seen Sigrud je Harkvaldsson nude, covered in blood, and, on one occasion, both, the idea is downright hilarious.

  She watches Signe and Pandey as the discussion mounts. There’s something off about them. They don’t quite look at each other, but look toward each other. They have the air of two people trying very hard not to acknowledge one another.

  Something’s up, she thinks. And I don’t like it. She thinks back to what Biswal just said: Signe hasn’t let anyone from Fort Thinadeshi tour the harbor works in months. Maybe it’s because their schedule’s too tight, sure…Or maybe it’s because Signe doesn’t want anyone sniffing around her “test assembly yard,” or whatever it really is.