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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Rada withdraws while Mulaghesh sits and thinks. She’s more dismayed than she expected: she’d thought for some time that Choudhry was dead, and then after that she thought she was somehow involved in the murders. But to hear she was desecrated so abominably is something Mulaghesh never expected.

  Rada returns, now dressed in dark tan clothing with a rubber apron. “She’s in the b-back room. If you’re r-ready.”

  “I am.”

  Rada nods and leads her through the door. On the other side is a small room that looks fit for surgical or perhaps funerary purposes, and in the center is a large stone slab with drainage holes in it. On the slab are…

  Things. That’s all her brain can process them as: items. Objects. Fragments of something. Not a person, certainly not a human being, because she simply can’t conceive of such a thing. To see a fellow person cut down to such crude elements is dehumanizing beyond words.

  She tries to get ahold of herself. She focuses, and looks.

  On the table are two torso halves. Dark-skinned, breasts withered and sagging. The hint of thick pubic hair at the crotch. A woman vivisected carefully and cleanly, her arms and legs pruned away. Only her left thigh remains, but this segment too has been dismembered, placed close to the hip as if to try to give these ravaged pieces of a human the semblance of a whole. It only highlights the monstrousness of all of this.

  “It’s the s-same as you saw,” says Rada. “Yes?”

  “Yeah,” says Mulaghesh quietly. “Close. But they left the heads and limbs behind the other times.”

  “We’re not wuh-wrong that it’s a S-Saypuri woman, th-though?”

  Mulaghesh shakes her head. “No. Even though she’s bloodless now, the skin’s the right tone. They found her on the cliffs?”

  “Y-Yes. Where the m-missing M-Ministry officer used t-t-to walk, or so I’m t-told.”

  She looks at Rada, breathing hard. “And you can do an autopsy?”

  “P-partially, yes. Th-the b-body isn’t f-fresh, so to suh-speak, but…I can t-try. What do you hope t-to find?”

  “Anything. Something. I want to find something to use to pin these bastards down.”

  Rada nods meekly. “Then we’ll begin.”

  Mulaghesh takes a seat on the far wall and pulls up a second chair to prop her feet up. She slouches in the chair, hands resting on her stomach, and watches, much as someone would a spectator sport, as Rada Smolisk carefully and thoughtfully dissects the once-human husk lying on her table. It is not, as Mulaghesh feared, an inhuman, monstrous violation; rather, Rada makes remarks throughout her examination more suggestive of a boat trip through a pleasant and familiar countryside.

  “Remarkably clean cuts,” she says quietly. “Almost surgical. Yet even surgical cuts, on this large of a scale, would leave…how shall I put this…sawing marks. It takes work, getting through so much tissue. And yet there’s none here. It’s as if she’s been put through a mill saw.” She rummages about for some ghastly instrument to aid her.

  She doesn’t stutter while she works, Mulaghesh notes. It’s as if such close interaction with the corpse transforms her into a completely different person, someone much more confident and focused than she is in waking life.

  Mulaghesh herself can hardly focus at all. Through the hours of the autopsy—and it takes far longer than she expected—the echoes of her vision keep screaming in her head. Now that she’s faced with yet another corpse—again, mutilated as a Voortyashtani sentinel would do—she feels as if the entire world is about to fall apart, and they shall all go plummeting into the inky dark sea, past columns of glimmering moonlight, to a strange white island on the other side of reality….

  Are they coming through? Are the sentinels poking through bit by bit, to attack anyone they can find? And how is this even possible, if Voortya’s dead?

  “I very rarely have an audience for this,” Rada says absently. Her brow is wet with sweat. It must be hard work, Mulaghesh realizes, parsing through all the bone and muscle walls.

  Mulaghesh rubs her eyes, trying to focus. “Does an audience make it any better?”

  “Perhaps. It’s something I feel better having a witness for, this sort of thing. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “What? The corpse?”

  “No. Well, yes, in a way. It’s this…this opportunity to examine what we are, the many disparate and curious elements that make up our beings.” There is a snap of breaking bone. “So many systems, so many pieces…More complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?”

  “I guess that’s a good point,” says Mulaghesh, feeling surprised, impressed, and somewhat discomfited. She wonders if Rada always pontificates during such procedures, either to her trapped patients or to the empty walls.

  “What do you think, looking at her?” asks Rada.

  “That she could have been one of mine.”

  “Interesting. If I might ask—how does it make you feel?”

  “How I feel? Like I want to find out who did this.”

  “You feel a responsibility to her, then? More than you would any other person?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve asked these kids to come all the way across the world to fight and labor for us. Someone has to look after them.” And yet, a tiny voice says inside of her, you walked away from the job that could have helped you do that the most.

  Shut up, thinks Mulaghesh.

  Does it feel better, being alone? Does it really?

  Shut up!

  “A thoughtful position,” says Rada as she works. “Few possess your capacity for self-reflection, General. We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.” She sets down a knife, grabs some kind of miniature saw. “Yet when we consider our own existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control….All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious, hidden systems—and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out…” An unpleasant cracking sound as Rada separates something from the body that should never be separated. “What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.”

  Mulaghesh can’t help but say it, as the subject weighs so heavily on her mind: “You don’t believe in an afterlife?”

  “No,” says Rada. “I do not.”

  “Sort of strange, a Continental who doesn’t believe in an afterlife.”

  “Perhaps the Divinities made one for us, once,” says Rada. “But they are gone now, aren’t they?”

  Mulaghesh does not voice her extreme concerns about this.

  “I wonder how cheated the dead must have felt when that afterlife evaporated around them,” says Rada. “It’s like it’s a game,” she says softly. “And no matter how you play it, it ends unfairly.”

  “The ending’s not the point,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Oh? I thought you were a soldier. Is it not your purpose, to make endings? Is it not your duty to make these”—she taps the corpse—“from the soldiers of the enemy?”

  “That’s a gross perversion of the idea of soldiering,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Then please,” says Rada, looking up. “Enlighten me.”

  She is not being sarcastic or combative, Mulaghesh realizes. Rather, she is willing to follow any string of conversation down the path it leads, much like she’s willing to follow a damaged vein through a desiccated corpse.

  The surgery room is quiet as Mulaghesh thinks, the silence broken only by the tinkle of Rada’s utensils and the soft hush of the rain.

  “The word everyone forgets,” says Mulaghesh, “is ‘serve.’ ”

  “Serve?”

  “Yes. Serve. This is the service, an
d we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking a city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of ‘taking,’ as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a soldier, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.”

  “Gives what?”

  “Anything,” says Mulaghesh. “Everything, if asked of us. We’re servants, as I said. A soldier serves not to take, they don’t strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn’t a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That’s what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we’re asked to do.”

  “What part do you give up, do you think?” asks Rada.

  “Peace, maybe. Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don’t know that they’ve lost something, but they have.”

  “That is so,” says Rada quietly. “Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life.”

  And with those words Mulaghesh suddenly remembers that the woman before her was once trapped in a collapsed building with the corpses of her family, trapped in the dark with them for days and days. And when she does she realizes that, in some way, little Rada Smolisk might still be trapped in that darkness, and trying to free herself. The surgeries, the humanitarianism, the autopsy, even the taxidermy—all of this could be an effort to literally place her hands upon the raw stuff of life and sort through it, seeking some secret that might unlock her dark prison, and bring in light.

  Or perhaps, Mulaghesh thinks, Rada Smolisk feels at home only among the dead. She’s not stuttering at all now, and is actually bordering on erudition; whereas in the waking hours of life, with Signe and Biswal, she is a trembling, nervous thing, far from her normal surroundings. If death echoes, wonders Mulaghesh, perhaps one could get used to it, or even come to love its noise. Much like how Choudhry surrounded herself with sketches and images of this hellish country, and its history.

  Then she remembers….

  The charcoal sketch in Choudhry’s room—a landscape depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed, and a tower rising behind them…

  Mulaghesh sits forward. She saw it, she thinks suddenly. She saw it. She saw the damned City of Blades, just as I did.

  It must have been the Window to the White Shores, she realizes: the miracle Signe described. But it must have worked. Choudhry snuck into the statue yard and performed that ancient rite and glimpsed the very island Mulaghesh did; and perhaps the only reason Mulaghesh herself saw the City of Blades last night is because the ritual was still working, like a door left open for anyone to walk through.

  So how did she come to die? After all that, how did Sumitra Choudhry come to be murdered just as the other Voortyashtanis?

  “I’m s-sorry, General,” says Rada finally. “I’ve l-looked all I could, but I’ve found n-nothing.”

  “Nothing?” asks Mulaghesh, dispirited.

  “Nothing indicating anything, really. There’s j-just not much to g-go on. P-perhaps I am n-not up to the t-task.”

  Mulaghesh stands and walks to the table, surveying Rada’s grisly work. “I hate this so damned much, Rada. I hate it beyond words.”

  “D-Did you know her, G-General?”

  “No. Never saw her. Just heard about her. But to see someone reduced down to this…” She shakes her head. “We don’t even know it’s her, do we. We can’t even tell her family that she’s really dead. Just that we think so. And it’s not like we could have them look to tell us if it’s really…”

  She trails off, thinking.

  “G-General?” asks Rada.

  Silence.

  “Uh. General?”

  “She got a Silver Star,” says Mulaghesh quietly.

  “Um. What?”

  “She got a Silver Star. For heroism after being injured in the line of duty. She got shot, in the, uh…” She snaps her fingers, trying to jog her memory. “In the shoulder. In the left shoulder. I read her reports.”

  “Meaning…”

  Mulaghesh cranes over the body and gently pushes aside a drooping flap of skin to look at the left shoulder. “It’s smooth. It’s smooth, damn it. No scarring at all!”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not her!” says Mulaghesh, feeling relieved and baffled and furious. “It’s not her! I don’t know who in the hells this might be, but it’s not Choudhry!”

  “B-Because of a m-missing scar?”

  “She got shot in the shoulder, just above the collarbone, and she nearly died from it, Governor. It was grisly. They don’t give out the Silver Star for nothing. It’d have left a mark.” She looks up, thinking furiously. “Someone’s fucking with me.”

  “I’m…sorry?”

  “Someone must…Someone must have known I was looking into Choudhry. They must have! Someone wanted me or us to think she was dead. I’ve got someone out there nervous and they don’t like it one bit. They’re rattled enough to go through the trouble of mutilating a totally different body and staking it out on the cliffs to try and throw me off the trail!”

  “Isn’t that, uh, a l-little bit p-paranoid, G-General?”

  “Maybe. But paranoia usually doesn’t harm, and often helps.” She only hates herself a little for quoting Signe. “Damn. What time is it?”

  “It’s 1900, G-General.”

  “Shit. Dark already. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to tell Nadar.” She shoves a thread of wet hair out of her face. “Well, Governor. This has been damn educational, I must say.”

  “Always a p-pleasure to, uh, assist,” says Rada, perplexed.

  “What will you do with, um, the body?”

  “Unfortunately, I am used to d-dealing with c-corpses,” she says. “It will b-be no tr-tr-trouble at all t-to make arrangements w-with the f-fortress.”

  Mulaghesh thanks Rada for her help, then braces herself for the cold as she exits Rada’s house. But, strangely, the shock never hits her. She realizes Rada’s house was freezing cold, perhaps inhumanly cold, so she was already accustomed to it. As she crests a wet cliff she looks back and sees Rada standing in the doorway, watching her with her great, sad eyes. Yet up above is her chimney, and from it flows a thick, steady stream of smoke, turned a glowing white by the moonlight.

  She wonders who could possibly want to fake Sumitra Choudhry’s death. Then she realizes that the most obvious suspect would be Choudhry herself.

  * * *

  —

  It’s late when she finally fumbles her key into her door and opens it. When she does she freezes, surprised by the roaring fire in her fireplace. Then she sees the mountain of greasy bones and crumbling crusts of bread on her tea table, behind which sits Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, his suspenders dangling from his waist, carving up a forearm-sized hunk of white cheese with his giant black knife. The only remnant of his kingly attire is the white glove on his left hand, concealing the injury he bore long ago.

  He jerks his chin at her. “I wondered when you would be back.”

  Mulaghesh stares at the mess and holds her hands out, aggrieved. “What…What the fuck?”

  “Signe said you wanted to see me.”

  “How the hells did you get in here?”

  “I picked the lock?” He picks up a clay jug, uncorks it, and takes a massive pull. “How else?”

  “By the seas…” She shuts the door and tosses her coat on the bed. “You couldn’t find anywhere else in this giant building for you to eat what looks like three whole chickens?”

  “Not anyp
lace where I wouldn’t get stared at. Or have servants fumbling over me, asking me if I needed things. They treat me like a bomb, waiting to explode. I much prefer your room. No one looks for me in here.”

  “Hells, I know I sure wouldn’t! Ah, look, you’ve gotten chicken fat all over the carpet….”

  “What was it you wanted to see me about?” He recorks the jug. “Signe mentioned the Ministry, but, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic.”

  She flops into a chair beside the fire. “I’m almost not even sure I want to say it aloud. You might think me a fool, or insane. Or, worse, I’d hear it coming out of my mouth and know I’m insane.”

  “Shara said that on our first few jobs,” says Sigrud, “tangling with the Divine.” He looks at her, eyebrow cocked. “Which makes me curious to hear what you are about to say.”

  There’s a silence. Mulaghesh holds up her hand. Sigrud, without a word, tosses her the jug. She catches it, pulls the cork out with her teeth, spits it into the fire, and takes a long pull.

  She shuts her eyes as she swallows. “Grain alcohol,” she says, her voice now raspy. “That shit’s not for the young.”

  “That shit is often not even for seasoned Dreyling sailors,” says Sigrud, watching as she takes a second enormous swig. “This makes me think whatever you say is, ah, very bad news.”

  “Yes. Yes it is.”

  There’s another silence.

  “I’ll need you to listen not as a chancellor of a foreign nation,” says Mulaghesh, “but as a former operative. And a friend.”

  “So you are saying, do not use this information against you or your country.”

  “Yeah, basically. Can you do that?”

  He shrugs. “I have always been good at compartmen­talization. And, to be frank…I am not particularly interested in the work of a chancellor.”

  So she tells him. She tells him everything, from top to bottom, describing Choudhry, the murders, the mutilation of the bodies, her Divine encounter with that apparition that looked like Voortya, and her glimpse into what she now suspects was the Voortyashtani afterlife. And to her relief, he doesn’t look at her like she’s crazy, like she’s absolutely out of her gourd. Instead he just sits there, one eye blinking slowly, as if he’s just heard some rather disappointing gossip.