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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “So,” he says slowly when she finishes.

  “So.”

  “You, ah…You believe that the Voortyashtani afterlife—this City of Blades—still exists. Somehow.”

  “Yes. Do…do you believe me?”

  He puffs at his pipe, releasing a huge cloud of smoke. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

  In her relief she chooses not to give him the many, many reasons why a normal person wouldn’t. “I saw it, Sigrud. I saw it. It’s hard to describe what I saw, but…it was real, and I know it was real. They’re all there, all the Voortyashtanis that have lived and fought and died….It’s a…a fucking army, Sigrud! How it’s still around I don’t know, but they’re still out there.”

  “And now, you think they are, how shall I put this…coming through?”

  “That’s my suspicion. Just as I was, I don’t know, pulled through to them, they can maybe be pulled through to here.”

  “And it’s these sentinels who have committed these murders.”

  “Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “A whole family cleanly massacred, then butchered, and all such perfect cuts….It’s not something an ordinary person could do. But a single stroke of a sentinel’s blade, they say, was able to part the trunk of an old oak as if it were but a length of straw.”

  “But how are the sentinels coming through to here?”

  “The strange woman spotted at the charcoal kilns,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s my best guess. She must have found a way to open, I don’t know, a door of some kind and let them through. And I think she’s the same one who butchered that body to throw me off her trail.”

  “And though you have not said so,” says Sigrud, very slowly, “it sounds like you believe this woman to be Sumitra Choudhry.”

  Mulaghesh is silent. The wind slaps the windowpanes.

  “Yes,” she says quietly. “Yes, it seems that way. From the drawings in her room, which seemed so insane, and the way she drew the murder scenes on her very walls…She’s certainly the one person in Voortyashtan who would know the most about the Divine. And who else would want me to think Choudhry is dead besides Choudhry herself?”

  “You think she is mad? That that is why she is doing this?”

  “I don’t know why she’s doing this. But it’s the most obvious answer.”

  “What goal could she have in mind? Why do these things to these families?”

  “I don’t know what her endgame is. But it’s like she’s testing this process, figuring it out, getting better at it. She’s refining her technique, whatever ritual it might be. Something with thinadeskite, though, since we found it at the first murder scene.”

  “The material from the mines,” says Sigrud. “Which you said a Divinity caved in.”

  “Voortya, yes. Some version or rendition of her, at least, and I still don’t understand that one tiny fucking bit. And I don’t know why the sentinels don’t stick around, why they don’t last, but…Maybe that’s why Choudhry keeps trying. She wants to pull them all the way through and keep them here. But damned if I know why.”

  Sigrud slowly sits back, absently carving at the block of cheese.

  “What’s your professional opinion?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “My professional opinion,” says Sigrud, “is that Voortya is dead. That is known. That is undeniable. Shara said Voortya proved the example of what happens when a Divinity dies. None of Voortya’s miracles work anymore.”

  “Yet I walked into one last night.”

  He scratches his eyebrow. “And how this is possible, I do not know. But…I have a troubling idea.”

  “What?”

  “Voortya was the Divinity of death, yes?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, could it be possible for such a Divinity, who aided her own people in defeating death, to do the same for herself?”

  “What are you saying? That I saw Voortya’s ghost on the cliffs?”

  “Is it so mad? If you saw all those souls in the City of Blades, if they still exist, then why not Voortya? Perhaps whatever mechanisms that allow an army of dead warriors to persist could also do the same for a god. If it is really the afterlife of these lands, then the City of Blades must hold, what, millions of souls? Tens of millions? All the dead warriors from centuries and centuries…Many times larger than any standing army in existence today. Keeping them there is no small feat.”

  Mulaghesh goes still. Something in the fireplace pops.

  She sits up, feeling the blood drain from her face. Then she slowly turns to look at Sigrud.

  “What?” says Sigrud, wary.

  “An army,” says Mulaghesh. “An army, you said. And I said it myself not too long ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “And what do armies do?”

  “They, uh…”

  Mulaghesh stands. “That’s what this is all about. It must be! It’s like what Signe said about the Voortyashtani afterlife!”

  He frowns. “What does Signe know about the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

  “Like…everything? You do realize she was raised here, right?” Sigrud is so disconcerted he appears not to have heard her. She ignores him and continues, “Signe said that when Voortyashtani warriors died, their souls went over the ocean to a white island, the City of Blades. She said the Voortyashtanis believed that one day all the souls would sail back over from the City of Blades…and then they’d make war upon all of creation in the Night of the Sea of Swords.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t you see? That’s what she’s trying to do! Sumitra damned Choudhry is trying to trigger the fucking Voortyashtani apocalypse!”

  * * *

  —

  “We need to tell Shara this right away,” says Mulaghesh. “Tell her that her operative hasn’t just gone AWOL, she’s gone fucking mad and wants to start a damned war! A Divine war, the last war!”

  Sigrud shakes his head. “But there are too many unknowns here, Turyin. Imagine if we go to the Ministry, and tell Shara and her people to start investigating….She will have to make her case before the authorities, convincing them to act. But she has no case, just…guesses. Speculation. You must find more; you must find something concrete.”

  “What’s more concrete than seeing the damned City of Blades?” says Mulaghesh, frustrated.

  “But I did not see the city in the statue yard. Nor did my daughter. And one cannot initiate a military action based purely on visions. Especially since much of the government is no longer purely under Shara’s control. Many of her powers have been stripped from her in the past year.”

  “So what now! What do we fucking do now! Wait for another murder?”

  “I did not say that,” says Sigrud. “And I may be able to be of some use to you….Let me see your notepad. I wish to see these sketches you described.”

  She hands it to him and he flips through them, examining each mad scrawl.

  “What do you think?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “I think,” he says quietly, “that it was not wise for my people to come here, and unearth the many things that should stay sleeping.”

  “Don’t let your daughter hear that.”

  His face clouds over. She instantly understands that this was the wrong thing to say. She stays silent rather than fall all over herself apologizing.

  The fire crackles and pops. A log gently shifts, sending up a spray of sparks. He flexes his left hand, its white glove rippling. “It still hurts, you know,” he says softly. “My hand. I thought it would go away, after Bulikov, after Kolkan. But it came back.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Perhaps the past cannot be so easily forgotten. Tell me,” he says. “You did not ever have any children, did you?”

  “Natural ones, no.” She snorts. “Had about a few thousand adopted ones, though.”

  He looks at her, perplexed,
then understands. “Ah. Your soldiers. I see.” He turns back to the fire, shaking his head. “I do not understand how to talk to young people.” He rethinks his statement. “Or, I suppose, to young people like her.” Another pause. “Or, perhaps, I do not know how to speak to her, specifically.”

  Mulaghesh is quiet.

  “She does not like me,” he says. “She does not like me coming back into her life.”

  “She doesn’t know you,” says Mulaghesh. “And you don’t know her. But you will, if you want to.”

  “Why would she want to know me?” he says. “How do I tell my daughter what I’ve seen, what I’ve done? How do I tell her that at times, in prison, I…I became so furious that my own blood would leap out of me, pouring out of my nose, and I would go mad with anger, a berserk rage, hurting anyone and everyone around me, even myself? Sometimes innocents. Sometimes mere bystanders. I throttled them to death with my bare hands….”

  He trails off.

  Mulaghesh says, “You’re a different person now.”

  “And so is she,” he says. “I thought I knew her. But I was foolish to think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Well.” He struggles with the words for a moment. “When I was a young man, and she was just a little girl, long ago, I…I used to chase her through the forest near our home. It was a game. She would hide, and I would pretend to chase her. And then she would pretend to chase me. And, later, when I was in prison…when I thought I would go mad…I held on to this very tightly, this memory of the little blond girl laughing as she ran through the forest. This tiny, perfect creature, darting among these great big trees. When the world grinds you down, you pick a handful of fires to hold close to your heart. And that was one of mine. Perhaps the brightest, the warmest. And after Bulikov, after Shara suggested I come back, and find my family and rebuild my country…I suppose I just assumed that she would remember this, too. That she would see me and remember that moment in the trees, laughing as we ran. But she does not remember. And perhaps I was foolish to think she would.” He pauses for a long time. “I have been hurt in many ways in my life, Turyin Mulaghesh. But I have never been hurt in this manner before. What should I do? What should I do with this strange young woman who does not care for me?”

  “Talk to her, I suppose. Start there. And listen to her. Don’t expect her to say things you want to hear, but listen to her. She’s lived a life very separate from yours.”

  “I have tried that. When I try to explain myself, all my words dry up.” He shakes his head. “Perhaps it would have been better for me to have died, after reclaiming my country. End on a high note, as they say. Or escape into the wilderness.”

  “I never figured you as one for self-pity.”

  “And I never thought I would be a father again,” says Sigrud. “Yet here I am.”

  He stares into her notebook, and she suddenly realizes how intensely lonely Sigrud must feel, forced to play many roles—prince, husband, father—that feel hopelessly beyond him.

  Then his eye falls on something: a seven-pointed star Mulaghesh copied in her notes. He sits up and points at it. “Wait. This…This star here. Did you copy it exactly?”

  “Uh, maybe?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so?”

  “And it was found in Choudhry’s room?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  He scratches his beard, anxious. “It’s a…a signal, a piece of tradecraft. She’s telling us what code she’s going to use, what language she’ll speak to us in. This star means she will be using Old Bulikov rules.”

  “Uh, what? Old Bulikov rules? I never heard of those, and I was stuck there for twenty years.”

  “When the Ministry first truly began its intelligence operations,” says Sigrud, “most of its work was focused in Bulikov. But they had no technology then, no signals and lights and telephones or whatnot. So they had to use much cruder means—a stroke of chalk, a pin in a wall, a carving in wood, or a splotch of paint. Things like this. It was mostly used to direct operatives to dead drops, often when someone felt they were being pursued.”

  “As in, they might not survive, but they still wanted to send a message?”

  “To leave behind information,” says Sigrud. “Yes.”

  “Can we trust that, though? If all signs point to Choudhry as the suspect, do we really want to believe whatever it is she’s trying to tell us?”

  “You said she went mad. So perhaps once she was not mad. Perhaps she did this when she was still a good agent.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to look for, though. I don’t know the first thing about Old Bulikov rules.”

  “And I cannot go with you. It would be rather difficult to explain away my absence here and my presence there. Even though I would much rather be doing that than this.”

  “You’d rather be digging around in the affairs of a madwoman than work here with your daughter?”

  Sigrud grumbles to himself. “When you say it like that, I do not sound very reasonable at all.” He sighs. “I wish I did not have to do this. I was never a good controller, never a good case officer. I was always the man down in the muck, not the one waiting at home. That was Shara’s game.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I am saying that you are an operative in need of a case officer,” says Sigrud. “You are all alone up here, and maybe this work is so sensitive that Shara could not bring anyone on board….But, you suffer for the lack of one. And I do not exactly see anyone else around who could do the job.”

  “You don’t work for Saypur anymore, you know.”

  “If what you say is right, then everything happening in Voortyashtan is under threat. Including the harbor, the one thing currently sustaining my whole country’s economy. Frankly, I wish Shara had brought me on sooner—but she likely did not know what you would find here.”

  “So what now?”

  He looks at the clock. “So now, I suggest you get comfortable. And put the liquor down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are going to have to memorize a lot of tradecraft before morning, if you want to do this right.”

  * * *

  —

  “So it was not Choudhry’s body they found, ma’am?” asks Nadar the next morning as they walk through the fortress.

  “No, it wasn’t,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know whose body it was, but it wasn’t hers.” She wipes a bead of sweat from her brow and tries not to shiver. She hiked up here rather than be chauffeured, and now her perspiration grows frigid in the cold air of the fortress, like she’s being wrapped in bedsheets pulled from an icy lake.

  “Fucking shtanis,” says Nadar, shaking her head.

  “Shtanis?”

  “They’re mocking us, ma’am. They must be. A Saypuri corpse, butchered and put on display just beyond where they blew up the mines? They’re showing us how close they can get to us, General. I’ve increased patrols, but as yet we’ve spotted nothing. They’re talented in moving unseen in this terrain.” Nadar shakes out her keys and begins opening the door to Choudhry’s rooms.

  “Have you…considered any alternatives?” asks Mulaghesh, uncertain how to phrase this.

  “Alternatives, ma’am?”

  “Yes. I had been considering that it was Sumitra Choudhry herself who was involved in the murders, Captain,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Choudhry?” says Nadar, startled. “Why, General?”

  “These murders…They’re like some kind of old Divine ritual.” The door swings open. Both of them stare in at the graffiti-covered room. “And everything here suggests Choudhry was neck-deep in the Divine. To her misfortune.”

  Mulaghesh walks into the room, watching Nadar over her shoulder. She can’t tell Nadar everything, but she needs someone in command here to start thinking in the right direction. If she can get Bis
wal or Nadar to consider it, then perhaps they can call in more Ministry reinforcements, who might be able to find something solid—something verifiably Divine.

  But Nadar’s face has gone cold and closed. “It seems unlikely that a Ministry operative could be capable of all that, ma’am.”

  “You don’t know Ministry operatives, Captain.”

  “And, to be fair, you didn’t know Choudhry, General,” says Nadar. “Whereas I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nadar hesitates.

  “Permission to speak freely, General.”

  “Granted.”

  “Choudhry was, like many out of Ghaladesh, a somewhat ineffectual officer.”

  “Ineffectual.”

  “Yes, General. Lots of titles, ma’am, lots of certifications, certainly. But no on-the-ground experience in a combat zone. Experience that we here in Voortyashtan have in excess, General.” She meets Mulaghesh’s eyes very briefly before looking away. “Experience not known in Ghaladesh.”

  Mulaghesh steps closer. “You wouldn’t be doubting my combat experience, would you, Captain?” she asks sharply.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you disagree that what we see on these walls are the markings of a madwoman?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you disagree that the timeline for these murders and the theft of the explosives overlaps with Choudhry’s presence here, and disappearance?”

  Nadar’s face twitches. “No, ma’am. But—”

  “But what?”

  “But…I’ve been at Fort Thinadeshi for six years now, before the Battle of Bulikov, General. And though Bulikov alerted us to threats of the Divine, here in Voortyashtan we’ve only ever seen one threat. The one that’s just beyond our walls.”

  “You need to remain mindful of threats beyond the insurgents and the tribes, Captain,” says Mulaghesh. “Otherwise you blind yourself.”