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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  But then one day Colonel Adhi Noor was there, offering her a way back into the military in that rundown wine bar, the air full of the stink of smoke and moldering wood. And suddenly she thought she might be able to make it up to everyone. She couldn’t erase the past, but maybe she could keep it from happening again. Some young men and women, Continental and Saypuri, never made it home because of her. The least she could do was make sure others didn’t fall to the same fate. It’d be a way to make the dead matter. A way to put back some of what she’d broken.

  Forty years of training. Forty years of trying. All smashed to pieces in the Battle of Bulikov. And then Shara Komayd whispering in the dark by her hospital bed, telling her about allies and generals and promotions….

  Everything was supposed to change then. But it didn’t. The higher she went in the world, the more useless she felt. These analysts and officers and politicians described the spending of a life with the cold, clinical language of a banker. So far from the front lines, far from the churning, wet earth and the night full of screams. It all just kept happening, only now she didn’t see it in person.

  But even though she was now so far away from it, she began to dream of it more and more, awakening in the night wet with sweat, the sounds of the Battle of Bulikov still ringing in her ears. And her arm ached and ached, yet no medicines would dull it. Some of the doctors suggested, somewhat politely, that perhaps the pain was not in her body, but in her mind. In other words, perhaps it hurt because she needed it to hurt.

  One day she visited a military hospital—the first time she’d seen front-line troops in some time. And all those young men and women lay in bed, looking like they’d been chewed up by some machine….Yet every single one of them struggled to salute her. She was a general, after all.

  And suddenly the pain in her arm was unbearable. As if she had knives in her elbow, sawing into the bone, needles grinding up through her marrow and splintering her humerus like termites. She knelt alone in the staircase of the hospital, white with pain, sweating and gritting her teeth and trying not to scream, not to call to the doctors and say cut it off, cut this thing off of me, cut it out of me now, now, now.

  She passed out. Some orderly found her there, lying on the stairs, looking like a corpse. When he woke her he asked if something was wrong. She said yes.

  Something was wrong. And now she knew what it was.

  What a gutless lie it all was. The battles kept happening, and she was just as helpless as she’d always been. For all her medals and for all her power, she wasn’t making a lick of difference in the lives of those she commanded. Soldiers and civilians alike were still dying. And she couldn’t let herself forget.

  “So I ran,” says Mulaghesh. “I didn’t know what else to do. It hurt to stay. I was lying to myself and to everyone else if I stayed. So I went and hid myself away on a beach.”

  But it didn’t help. Every night she woke up with battle echoing in her ears, and every morning her arm hurt.

  Until one day she got a letter from the prime minister. Deadly little Shara Komayd, the woman who brought down countless governments and officials—even those of her own country, in the end. And somehow Shara knew the three words that would bring Mulaghesh crumbling down too, that one wish Mulaghesh had fervently hoped to fulfill for so many years, the words scrawled on a piece of paper and brought to her by a sweat-soaked Pitry Suturashni…

  “A way out,” Mulaghesh says. “She was offering a way to do what I’ve always meant to. To help make things change. And, by changing, to make everything matter.”

  “Here? In Voortyashtan?”

  Mulaghesh is silent as she stares out at the black waves. “Yes. I think so. If Voortyashtan can change, then anything can change. Right?”

  Signe says nothing as she adjusts the tiller.

  Nothing is everlasting. Nature has proved this to us again and again. Not even the Divinities were everlasting, for they too fell just as the mountains themselves surely will one day.

  If I leave anything behind in this world, I hope it is my work. I hope the streets I helped pave and the water I helped pump and the stone I helped carve speak not my name, but the name of innovation, the name of progress, the name of hope.

  The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.

  —LETTER FROM VALLAICHA THINADESHI TO UNKNOWN RECIPIENT, 1652

  Over the years, General Lalith Biswal has developed quite the delicate nose for smoke, an olfactory palette more refined and developed than the tongues of the most accomplished oenophiles. He can tell in one sniff, for example, if the smoke he’s smelling is coal smoke, charcoal smoke, or wood smoke; and from there he can determine the wood type, be it teak or oak or ash, as well as if the wood in question has been seasoned properly or if it’s green wood.

  Right now, as he walks through the smoldering ruins of the insurgents’ camp, he smells rather a lot of wood smoke, most of it green—but it would be, as the woods are now alight in the east. But he can smell other aromas in the smoke as well—paper and hot metal, broiling soil and gunpowder.

  And flesh. Possibly mutton, as the camp is now flooded with sheep that broke free of their pens—but he doubts it. He knows that somewhere in this camp, a body is burning. Probably more than one.

  He surveys the cavalry’s work, hand on his sword—a nervous tic he acquired on the battlefield. They did a clean job of it, riding around the forest to come up on the north side of the encampment, then attacking in the dark, driving the insurgents south, where they were met by the guns of the 112th Infantry.

  They’d lost a lot of soldiers by then. Picked off in the woods by the shtanis, little bands of fleeing fighters. So the 112th was eager to make someone pay, at least.

  He stares out at the burning tents. An honest war, a real war. A far better thing than the miserable secret wars of spies and diplomats and trade ministers. I wonder, he thinks, if the world will ever see a real, true war again?

  He feels he will. Lalith Biswal believes with all his heart that peace is but the absence of war, and war itself is almost always inevitable. But when it comes, will our politicians admit it is war? He steps lightly over a body. What must I do to wake them?

  How alone he feels, how betrayed. Abandoned by his nation for the second time in his life.

  I will not be shamed like this again.

  He hears a rustling beside him and stops. There’s a twitch from a collapsed tent, just to his right.

  He waits and watches. It could be one of his own soldiers, after all, perhaps wounded.

  The canvas flies back and a Voortyashtani boy leaps up, pistol pointed at Biswal’s chest. The boy hesitates just a little too long, his dark eyes blinking behind his sandy-colored curls.

  There’s the click of Biswal’s sword sliding out of its scabbard. He’s trained for this so much that he’s hardly aware of what he’s doing, his elbow extending and his tricep flexing, wrist rotating just so….

  The boy’s chest and throat turn into a red flash. A fan of hot blood splashes across Biswal’s face. The pistol fires, the round thumping into the soil at the boy’s feet, and the boy tumbles backward into the wreckage of the tent.

  Biswal stands over him and watches silently as the boy’s panicked eyes search the night skies, blood pouring from his neck.

  “General Biswal!” cries a voice behind him. “General Biswal, are you all right?”

  Captain Sakthi appears at Biswal’s elbow, pistol in his hand. He does a double take when he sees the dying Voortyashtani boy, who lies gurgling at his feet.

  “Nothing to worry about,” says Biswal calmly. He takes out a handkerchief and wipes off his sword. “Just another insurgent. Didn’t have the sand to pull the trigger. What are you doing here, Captain? I ordered you to fortify the roadways.”

  “Yes, sir, but I received a message from Fort Thinadeshi,
General. Some…strange information about the harbor.”

  “That damn thing? Has someone finally blown it up, too?”

  “Ah, no, sir.” Sakthi cringes. “You have a little…you have some blood on your face, sir.”

  “Mm? Oh. Thank you. Such a mess…” He wipes his face with the already bloody handkerchief. “Well, if it’s not blown up, then what is it?”

  “An anonymous tip, sir, sent to the fortress…Here, I’ll let you see it.”

  He hands Biswal the envelope, then uses a small torch to illuminate it for him.

  Biswal frowns as he reads. Then he reaches into the envelope and pulls out a small stack of black-and-white photographs. He flips through them, looking at each one. Then he stares into space, thinking.

  “So…someone is claiming that the Dreylings,” he says, “have a secret storeroom full of Divine artifacts?”

  “Yes, and…this anonymous source also seems to claim that General Mulaghesh had full knowledge of the situation, and has abstained from informing us. The photographs are…Well. They are very convincing. Those statues do look Divine.”

  Biswal’s face darkens. He begins slowly folding up the paper. “How did we receive this anonymous tip?”

  “It was mailed to Major Hukkeri at the fortress. It might have been a Saypuri, sir, as they certainly knew the correct mailing protocols.”

  Biswal is silent.

  “If we were to do any sort of investigation, sir,” says Sakthi nervously, “if we were to take any kind of action, we’d…we’d need your approval, sir. But it’s an international matter, and the boundaries of authority aren’t implicitly clea—”

  “Aren’t they?” says Biswal. “If the question is what to do about Divine artifacts on the Continent, then we do not need treaties or any diplomatic overtures to establish authority. If I am there, then I am the authority.” He stows the message away in his coat. “And I do plan to be there.”

  “You…You mean to withdraw from the counterattack, sir?”

  “No, no. The work here will continue, Captain, of course it will. But this requires my personal attention.” He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “She talked about how worried she was about the Divine….” He looks back at the photos, staring into those cold, white stone faces. “And why would she do that, unless she knew something I didn’t?”

  * * *

  —

  It’s late afternoon by the time Signe and Mulaghesh return to the SDC dock, exhausted and sunburned but still alive. Either Signe signaled ahead or they were seen coming, because Sigrud awaits them on the dock, waving to them. “Was it a success?” he asks as he helps Signe moor the yacht.

  “That depends on your idea of success,” she says, glancing at Mulaghesh, who has dark rings of fatigue under her eyes.

  She clears her throat. “Yeah. Yeah, it was a success. It’s the next part I’m worried about.”

  As they leave the dock Mulaghesh describes the ritual as told to her by the old man from the Tooth: the basin, the seawater, the materials from the Window to the White Shores, and the goat’s bladder of killer’s blood. And with them together, the passageway through to the City of Blades.

  “A whole goat’s bladder?” says Sigrud.

  “That’s what the man told me,” says Mulaghesh. “Why? How much is that? I don’t know my goat’s biology.”

  “Two to three pints,” says Signe. “At least.”

  “That much?”

  Signe nods. “Old Voortyashtanis used them as water bags. They were big enough to keep a man on his feet for days. I suppose that was their standard amount of measurement.”

  “I guess we don’t know any killer’s corpses we could drain,” says Mulaghesh. “Or any murderous prisoners sentenced to death.”

  “No,” says Sigrud. “Though one wonders how Choudhry got any, in order to perform it herself.”

  Mulaghesh has been wondering the very same thing during her journey back, but it isn’t until she sees Sigrud that she has the idea. “Wait, we talked about this….Choudhry’d been in the military briefly before she joined the Ministry. She’d had to use lethal force once when someone tried to charge through a checkpoint.”

  “Lethal force?” says Signe. “So…you’re saying Choudhry was a killer herself?”

  “Which means she could have used her own blood,” says Sigrud. He pulls a face. “Two or three pints of blood…Very difficult for someone to manage that.”

  “What if she did it over time?” says Mulaghesh. “Bloodletting every couple of weeks?”

  “Still quite difficult, I would imagine,” says Sigrud. “A lot of recovery time needed. Either way, that doesn’t fix our problem. How are we to do this? I suppose you and I could do it, Turyin, but that wouldn’t be an easy thing to split between us.”

  “What if you could split it three ways?” says Signe.

  “That might work,” says Sigrud, “but who would be our third?”

  “I would,” says Signe.

  “You wo…” Sigrud slows and comes to a stop as he processes what Signe said. “You…You would?”

  She meets his gaze. “I would. Yes. I would be able to.”

  Sigrud stares at his daughter for a long time, his face a mix of confusion and anguish as he comes to understand what his daughter is saying. “I did not know.”

  “I know,” she says. “And…I know there’s a lot I don’t know about you.” She puts a hand on his shoulder.

  Sigrud looks at her hand and then at her, his one eye blinking rapidly. “If the world had been different.”

  “If it had been, yes. But it wasn’t.”

  “I hate to interrupt, but,” says Mulaghesh, coughing awkwardly, “split between three—that should be doable, yes?”

  “Maybe,” says Signe. “It’s still a lot. And you’d still be going through into the City of Blades weakened. You’re already exhausted, I can tell. Are you sure you still want to try?”

  “No, I definitely fucking don’t want to try,” says Mulaghesh. “But I don’t see another way. You’d better swing by the SDC infirmary, because we’re going to need some bloodletting tools.”

  “Why not just get Rada Smolisk to help us?” asks Signe. “She’s a doctor.”

  “Because I don’t want anyone else knowing about this beyond us. Doing this would mean taking her to the yard of statues. That’s not safe by a long shot. I know some field medicine, so that should be enough—at least, I hope it will be enough.”

  “So do I,” says Sigrud.

  * * *

  —

  Evening is falling as Sigrud and Mulaghesh wait in the yard of statues. Despite Mulaghesh’s recent interactions with the Divine, they’ve still lost none of their menace: the countless carvings and alien forms disturb her even when she’s not looking at them, like they turn to watch her when she’s not looking.

  The basin to her left is filled with cold seawater, hauled up bucket by bucket by SDC workers. Mulaghesh has already been to the apothecary shop and paid what felt like a few months’ salaries for the reeking, shriveled reagents: rosemary, pine needles, dried worms, grave dust, dried frog eggs, and bone powder, not to mention the sackcloth. Mulaghesh is pretty sure the apothecary sensed her desperation and overcharged her.

  Voortya’s pale white face hangs just over Mulaghesh’s shoulder. She tries to ignore it. She especially tries to ignore how the face seems to be looking into the basin of seawater, where Mulaghesh herself will likely be going very shortly, if all goes to plan. She’s outfitted herself with her carousel and a rifling, though she’s very aware that, if the other sentinels are at all like Zhurgut, these armaments won’t make a dent in them. She’s packed a decent field medical kit as well, though again, from seeing what Zhurgut did to the Dreylings, she doubts she’d be able to self-apply much after tangling with a sentinel. Her primary strategy is to move as undetected as poss
ible. Though in the situation that she is detected, she’s also brought four grenades, but she’s a little reticent to use them: hand grenades are far easier to operate when the user possesses both hands.

  “I’m getting antsy,” she says. “Where’s your daughter? I don’t want to try to bleed myself unless I have the right tools.”

  “She’ll be here. One question on my mind, though, is what do you plan to do once you get to this City of Blades?”

  “Find Choudhry. Find out how the Night of the Sea of Swords works. Then find out how to stop it.”

  Sigrud thinks about it, then shakes his head. “You have picked up Shara’s ability,” he says, “to produce elaborate plans that happen to lack the most important part.”

  “Well, what the hells do you suggest?”

  “Me? Blow it up. Bring explosives over there and mine the place. Then…Ktch.” He mimes pushing down a plunger. “Boom.”

  “You want me to blow up the afterlife.”

  Sigrud shrugs. “It worked for me in Bulikov.”

  The metal door squeaks open and Signe walks in, a small leather satchel hanging from her shoulder. When she sees them she nods and breaks into a run. “Biswal is coming,” she says breathlessly.

  “Eh?” says Mulaghesh. “Retreating from the highlands already?”

  “No, Biswal is coming, and he’s on the warpath. More so than when he left, I mean. He’s making a beeline for here, though I’ve no idea why—though the rumor has it he’s heard about, well…” She glances around at the statues. “This.”

  “He knows about the yard of statues?” says Mulaghesh. “How in hells could that have happened?”

  “Didn’t someone infiltrate this place just days ago?” says Sigrud. “After Zhurgut?”

  “Yeah…But…You think whoever is trying to start the Night of the Sea of Swords is behind the tip-off?” asks Mulaghesh. “Why would they go to Biswal all of the sudden? They haven’t exactly behaved lawfully so far.”