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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Mulaghesh thinks she can glimpse the features behind that veil, the eyes and the mouth, but…but she doesn’t want to.

  The voice comes again, soft and strangely fluting, as if it’s not being spoken from a human mouth but rather echoing through many pipes, like a pipe organ: “I know you. You’ve been here before.”

  Mulaghesh tries to maintain her composure as she keeps her rifling pointed at this…whatever it is. It doesn’t seem to be a threat: it just impassively stares down at her. After all, if it wanted her dead it could have just stepped on her. “What?”

  “You were here before,” says the creature. “Only you fell through. Just a shade of you. A piece of you. Not the whole you.” The creature looks back over the canal, its posture wistful, thoughtful. “I would remember. We get visitors so rarely these days. Just the few recent ones, really.”

  Mulaghesh thinks rapidly. She remembers the voice from her vision: Are you supposed to be here?

  She asks, “You’re the guardian, aren’t you?”

  The giant head swivels back to look down at her. “I am the Watcher,” she says. “I watch and guard these shores.”

  “Did…Did you kill her?”

  “Her?” The Watcher cranes her head to the side to survey Choudhry’s corpse. “If I had killed her, she’d hardly be in one piece.” She holds up one hand and flexes her numerous bladed fingers. “Would she?”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Hm,” says the Watcher. Her tone suggests she’s intrigued that Mulaghesh would imagine she’d be interested in something so disinteresting. She looks again at Choudhry’s corpse, cocks her head, and says, “Dehydration.”

  “D-Dehydration?”

  “Yes,” says the Watcher, bored. “She came the same way you did, activating the tribute. But she used only her own blood, and when she came through she was weak and panicked. She ran too hard, too fast. Overexerted herself, poor thing. Not enough blood and fluids in that little body to keep it going, you see. I can tell. I am part of this place, so I know. I saw.”

  “What do you mean, activating the tribute?”

  The Watcher carelessly flicks a finger at the horizon. “You came from the city, didn’t you? The flesh place? The place filled with idols, statues, carvings, each attributed to the memory of a great warrior, a great deed? But the carving of the Mother…That is carefully linked to here.”

  “So each one of those white statues memorializes the dead?” asks Mulaghesh.

  The Watcher waves her hand, bored: Of course. Then she looks at Choudhry and cocks her head again. “That one there did not truly belong here. She had slain but one in her life, and that was a panicked, fretful deed. But you…” The Watcher bends down to look into Mulaghesh’s face—her giant body moves with a horrifying silence—and extends one long, needle-like index finger. Mulaghesh stiffens, terrified, and nearly fires, but the Watcher simply brushes a stray hair away from her face with astonishing delicacy. “You belong here. More than most, in my own humble opinion….But you know that already, don’t you?”

  “What’s going on here?” asks Mulaghesh. “How are the dead even still here?”

  “Because the two worlds are tied together,” says the Watcher. “Once they were very, very closely tied.” She demonstrates with her massive, bladed hands, folding all the countless serrated fingers together. “One never forgot about the other. Each was impossible without the other. The living made war because they knew the City of Blades was waiting for them, and the City of Blades existed because the living made war. But then they broke apart—yet not completely apart.” Her fingers snap apart with astonishing speed, leaving only two fingers touching. “Some threads remained. This place persisted, a ghost of itself, but still here. But just a bit ago, someone on the other side started renewing the bonds.” Slowly her fingers extend, until more and more and more begin to touch. “The two worlds grow near again, like a fisherman reeling in a catch. The dead awake, very slowly. And when they wake enough…Well. I doubt I’ll have much of a job anymore. Because then this city will be empty, won’t it?” There’s a bored tone of indifference to her words. Mulaghesh is reminded of an employee whose supervisor has left for the day.

  “How can someone do that?” asks Mulaghesh. “How can someone just…reknit the world like that?”

  “How should I know?” says the Watcher. “I simply watch. I refuse access or I grant it. That is my function, my role. It’s always been this, since time before time.”

  “And what have you seen recently? Has there been anything…strange?”

  “Strange? No. This place is always the same. It always has been this way. Though for so long we had no visitors, no new arrivals, no victorious dead. And then…”

  “And then?”

  She cocks her head again. “And then three came. There’s you, of course; you’ve been here, now and before. And then that one.” She flicks her finger at Choudhry’s corpse. “She came many times, bursting in through the Window, over and over again….It eroded her mind; I felt it. Each time she came here, she was a little worse, a little stranger. And then there was the acolyte.”

  “Who?”

  “The student of old Petrenko, the ancient smithy.”

  “Wait,” says Mulaghesh. “Did you say smithy?”

  “Yes. It was Petrenko who developed the method that the old ones first used to make their swords. He brought an acolyte here, once—I felt their spirit barge into this plane of existence—but because I found them unworthy and unlearned, I banished them and sent them back. Foolish old creature, I’ve no idea what he was playing at….”

  “Their spirit…You mean they used a sword to project themselves here?”

  “Yes. Of course. How else?”

  Mulaghesh’s heart feels like it’s about to hammer its way out of her rib cage. “Wh-Who was this? Do you know?”

  The Watcher looks down at her. “When they project themselves here, I see no face and hear no voice. I only see their thoughts and deeds. And that one was no warrior.” She looks down at Mulaghesh. “You belong here. I assent to your presence. You have killed many, and I sense in your heart, in your spirit, that you will yet kill more. Perhaps many more.” The Watcher draws a single bladed finger across her smooth stomach, creating a high-pitched squeal that sets Mulaghesh’s teeth on edge. “May my mutterings do you well, little warrior. Go and perform your function, as I should do so now. Farewell.” The Watcher turns and begins striding back across the beaches, picking her way among the countless Voortyashtani sentinels.

  “Wait!” cries Mulaghesh.

  The Watcher halts, turning her head very slightly to look back at Mulaghesh.

  “Where is Voortya?” she asks. “Where can I find the citadel?”

  “The citadel?” asks the Watcher. “Oh. Why it’s that way, of course. It always is—isn’t it?” She stabs a finger in one direction, then resumes her journey, humming atonally to herself.

  * * *

  —

  Mulaghesh heads in the direction the Watcher pointed. She can’t even tell if she’s going the right way or not: there’s no real point of reference for her to use here. But the groups of sentinels grow thicker and larger.

  She moves on, and on, and on. Maybe only one mile, maybe forty. She can’t tell. Then it emerges from the swamp of white stone and immense structures, which appear to fall away like supplicants parting before their monarch.

  The citadel seems to unfold or calcify in the very air, growing on the hill before her like coral forming deep underwater, a great, curving, castellated construction blooming in the moonlight. It is osseous, ivory, an alien amalgamation of bone and frills and strange, aquatic apertures, all building to one tall, slender tower in its center, a shard of white rising into the sky. And there at the tip—a window, perhaps?

  Mulaghesh watches the window. Then the light from inside it blinks, blacking out fro
m left to right, as if someone’s pacing before it.

  “So someone’s home after all,” says Mulaghesh. “Goody.”

  But the question remains—who?

  She trots off toward the chaotic base of the structure, full of loops and arches and staggered columns. The sand under her feet turns to stone, or perhaps marble. Smooth, hard steps descend into the belly of the structure, then down into a long tunnel. Mulaghesh checks her surroundings before entering, critically aware she is a bright red splotch in this ivory-colored palace. But it seems to be deserted.

  She isn’t sure what she’s looking for here. Choudhry couldn’t help her, and the Watcher sure as hells couldn’t. But there must be something in here, even if it is Voortya, or perhaps a shadow of Voortya. But what to do when she finds her?

  She exits into what looks like a courtyard and finds she’s in the center of a tangle of staircases. There are so many stairs up and down and some even to the side that they hurt her eyes. For a second she feels like she’s back in Bulikov. More importantly, though, she doesn’t see anyone on the staircases. Again, she’s all alone here.

  This isn’t right, she thinks. This is a damned palace, after all: Where are the servants, the staff? Who lives here? Who works here?

  She screws up her mouth, picks the staircase that seems to go up the highest, and starts off.

  Time seems soft here, so she isn’t sure if she spends a few minutes or a few hours pacing up staircases, stalking from ivory-colored room to ivory-colored room, pausing before each doorway to check the corners. Her legs begin to ache and throb. She feels like she’s climbed up a whole damned mountain.

  Finally she comes to a window. It’s tall and oblong, and lined with carvings that look very much like some kind of carapace growth. But she still stops and looks out, and sees…

  “Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh.

  The whole of the City of Blades lies below her, a forest of towers and statues, the streets tiny and insignificant at their feet. Yet in the streets and the alleys and along the canals are thousands upon thousands of sentinels, perhaps millions of them—more human beings, if they could even be called such, gathered in one place than she’s ever witnessed before.

  But she can also see the edge of the City of Blades from here, the pale white shores sinking into the dark seas. And on those seas she can see something…strange. The surface of the waters are dotted with shapes, long and thin and curiously formed, with one end covered in spears and points, and in their centers a tall, thick pole of some kind.

  They’re boats, she realizes. Voortyashtani longships, each with a weaponized prow for ramming other boats. Yet they seem somewhat ghostly and unreal, as if they’re not quite there, or not quite there yet: they seem to flicker, as if they haven’t made up their minds as to whether or not they exist.

  As such, it’s hard to count them. But she would guess the fleet would be larger than twenty thousand vessels. Enough to sink every Saypuri dreadnought five times over.

  It’s unimaginable. But she doesn’t have to imagine it, because they’re all right there, right in front of her.

  “If those things set sail,” she says quietly, “we’re doomed.”

  She steels herself, grips her rifling harder, and turns to the nearest staircase up. Then she begins ascending again.

  * * *

  —

  The spiral of stairs narrows, tighter and tighter. She’s going up, in smaller and smaller loops. She thinks she’s in the center tower now, finally.

  About a hundred steps up she spots a tiny splash of color in this endless white place: a splotch of blood, right in the center of one of the stairs. It’s crusted over, but she can tell it’s fairly recent. She crouches and peers at it, then looks up the stairs.

  Divinities don’t bleed, she thinks. Not since the last time I checked.

  She continues up the stairs. The droplets of blood increase. Mulaghesh is perversely reminded of a lover leaving a trail of rose blossoms to their bed.

  Finally the stairs end at a large foyer—one that seems far too big for the narrow white tower she saw from the ground. Its ceiling is arched and is covered in what appear to be stone swords, all carved at strange angles, like stalactites dangling from the roof of a cave. Empty, dusty lanterns hang along the wall. She guesses they haven’t seen use in years, maybe decades.

  She walks in, mindful to move quietly. Then she sees the throne.

  It’s difficult for Mulaghesh’s mind to determine exactly how big it is: sometimes it seems to be merely fifteen or twenty feet tall, but then the room will shift and warp, bending at the edges of her vision, and it will seem as if the throne is hundreds of feet tall, even miles tall—a giant, terrible construction that looms over her like a storm cloud. But no matter the size, its features remain the same: a bright red chair formed of teeth and tusks, all crushed or melted together, sticking out at strange angles. Wide arcs of horns and antlers sprout from the throne’s back, curving to form something like a rib cage around the chair. Mulaghesh imagines Voortya taking her place in this terrible seat, her plate mail gleaming and her silent, still face staring out from the cage of antlers like a cold, dark heart.

  She shivers. Then she notices something at the feet of the throne: a pair of shoes. Normal ones, women’s shoes. They’re of a very old fashion, small and brown, featuring a modest heel. She can’t help but get the impression that their owner thoughtlessly kicked them off while taking her seat on the throne.

  What in the hells?

  She takes stock of the room. The door on the opposite side is far, far too large for a person, nearly four times as tall as the tallest man. Still not big enough for the Divinity she glimpsed on the cliffs, but couldn’t a Divinity change their size at will? Couldn’t they do more or less anything at will, really?

  Mulaghesh looks down. The trail of blood leads across the receiving room and through the giant door to the chambers beyond.

  She looks at it for a long time, thinking. Then she slowly stalks through the columns and through the door, rifling raised. The trail of blood droplets leads through a large door on the other side, then around the corner and down the hall.

  She hears someone talking, or rather muttering. They’re cursing, it sounds like. And there’s a quiet clanking, too, as if they’re wearing armor.

  Mulaghesh puts her back to the wall and slowly creeps through the doorway, rifling trained on the space ahead.

  She reflects that this is possibly an incredibly bad idea. The only thing she knows about anything Divine is to stay away from it, as far away from it as one possibly can. As this person (if it is a person) seems to be occupying Voortya’s throne room, or private chambers, or something very personal to that Divinity, then all logic suggests she should back away now.

  But she doesn’t. Something is moving down the hallway. Mulaghesh abandons all protocol and puts her finger right on the trigger: she’s willing to abandon trigger discipline in a situation like this.

  She thins her eyes, watching. The person paces into view, then back out.

  It’s a woman, she sees, a human woman, or at least she appears to be. The first thing Mulaghesh notices is that she’s both wounded and unarmed, clutching her left shoulder. Blood drips from her fingertips in a slow leak. But the second thing Mulaghesh sees is that she’s dressed…well, like Voortya: she wears the ceremonial plate armor Mulaghesh glimpsed days ago on the cliffs outside of Fort Thinadeshi, covered with horrific images of conquest and sacrifice. It’s just that this suit of armor is about one one-hundredth the size of that one, and there appears to be a bullet hole drilled into the left pauldron.

  The woman is turned around so that Mulaghesh can’t see her face. A tall window is on her opposite side, allowing the pale moonlight to pour in, making it even harder for Mulaghesh to see, but she can make out that the woman’s hair is dark, as is her skin.

  A Saypuri? How cou
ld that be?

  What in all the fucking hells, thinks Mulaghesh, is going on in this mad place?

  Whatever this woman’s story is she’s definitely no god, no Divinity, and certainly no sentinel. And she can bleed, which means Mulaghesh’s rifling might be an actual threat.

  The next time the woman paces into view, Mulaghesh barks, “Freeze. Hands where I can see them.”

  The woman nearly jumps out of her skin. She cries out, as this jolt obviously hurts her shoulder.

  “Hands where I can see them!” says Mulaghesh again. “And turn around!”

  The woman stiffens, then slowly does so, rotating on the spot.

  Mulaghesh’s mouth opens, and she almost drops the rifling.

  The woman’s face is familiar, but of course it is: Hasn’t Mulaghesh seen that visage in paintings and murals in schools and courtrooms and city halls, staring out with steely eyes on any number of estimable proceedings? Hasn’t she seen this woman in countless history books, the face that emblematizes one of the most important periods in the history of Saypur? And, more recently, hasn’t Mulaghesh seen this woman’s face every single time she paged through Sumitra Choudhry’s files?

  “Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh. “Vallaicha…Thinadeshi?”

  Thinadeshi glares back. It’s unmistakably her: the high, aristocratic cheekbones, the sharp nose, the piercing eyes, the face of the woman who in so many ways built Saypur itself, and tamed much of the Continent.

  Thinadeshi looks her up and down. “You!” she says angrily. “You’re the one who shot me!”

  The Divine world is largely incomprehensible to us, truly, a world of arbitrary and capricious miracles. But it did have rules, countless ones, all dictated by the Divinities—yet in many cases the Divinities could not break the rules they themselves had created.

  What a Divinity said was true, was instantly, irrefutably true. In saying this they overwrote reality—including their own. In some ways the Divinities were slaves of themselves.