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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Were I to open up your chest, would I find naught but gears?”

  He says nothing.

  “I’ve had Dreylings on my teams before, and not a one of them could work a saw like you.”

  Still nothing.

  “Youth, perhaps,” the foreman muses. “To be as young as you, aye, that’s the ticket.”

  Still Sigrud says nothing. Though this last statement troubles him deeply. For he is not a young man by any stretch of the imagination.

  They pause periodically in their sawing, listening: listening for the deep, complaining cracks, like a shelf of ice collapsing. He is reminded of an argument, an old friend reluctantly coming round to your position: Perhaps you’re right, perhaps I should fall….Perhaps I should.

  Then, finally, they hear it: a pop-pop-pop like massive harp strings snapping. The foreman screams, “She falls!” and they scatter away, tin helmets clapped to their heads.

  The old, groaning giant tumbles over, branches snapping as it ploughs to the ground, sending up a great plume of soil. They creep back down to it as the dust settles. The pale circle of wood at the truncated end is bright and soft.

  Sigrud looks at the stump for a moment—the only thing that will mark this tree’s decades of existence here—and notes its countless growth rings. How odd it is to think that such a colossus could be eradicated in a few hours by a handful of fools with axes and a saw.

  “What are you staring at, Dreyling?” says the foreman. “Are you in love? Start buckling the damn thing, or I’ll scramble your brains even more than they already are!”

  The other loggers chuckle as they straddle the fallen tree. He knows what they think of him: that he is slow, demented by some childhood accident. That must be, they whisper among themselves, why he never talks, never takes off his gloves, and why one of his eyes is never quite looking at anything, but rather just to the right; that must be why he never tires at the saw—surely his faculties must not register that he is fatigued. No normal person could silently withstand such punishment.

  He does not mind their chatter. Better to think less of him than too much. Too much attention draws eyes.

  He raises his ax, brings it down, and shears a branch off of the trunk. Thirteen years moving from little job to little job. He does not relish the idea of moving yet again, nor does he wish to alert any authorities to his presence. So he stays quiet.

  He focuses on thinking the same question to himself, over and over again: Will she send for me today? Will today be the day she tells me to come alive again?

  * * *

  —

  The logging crew bags their quota, so they’re all in high spirits come nightfall when they start the journey back to the logging camp, the campfires visible from halfway up the mountain. They make their way down through clear-cut forests, stark wastelands pockmarked with sullen stumps, their tool cart clinking and clanking over the bumps. They hurry as they grow near. Their logging range is not too far outside of Bulikov, so the sack wine is decent even if the food is abominable.

  But as they near the camp, the air is not filled with the usual shouts and songs and raucous cries, celebrating the survival of another day stuck to the handle of an ax. The few loggers they see are clumped together like visitors at a funeral, sharing whispered words.

  “What in all the hells is the matter tonight? Ahoy, Pavlik!” says the foreman, calling to a passing logger with a drooping mustache. “What’s the news? Another casualty?”

  Pavlik shakes his head, his mustache swinging like the pendulum of a long-case clock. “No, not a casualty. Not a casualty here, at least.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “News came of an assassination in Ahanashtan. There’s talk of war. Again.”

  The loggers glance at one another, unsure how seriously to take this.

  “Pah,” says their foreman. He spits on the ground. “Another assassination….They say such things so gravely, as if the life of some diplomat were worth so much. But at the end of the day they’ll all back down again, just you wait.”

  “Oh, I’d agree, if it were just some diplomat,” says Pavlik. “But it wasn’t. It was Komayd.”

  A silence falls over the crew.

  Then a low voice speaks: “Komayd? Komayd who…who did what?”

  The logging crew parts to look at Sigrud, standing up straight by the cart. But they notice that his glance seems much brighter and clearer than they recall, and he stands straighter and taller than before—very tall, in fact, as if he’s unpacked three more inches from somewhere in his spine.

  “What do you mean, Komayd who did what?” says Pavlik. “Who died, of course.”

  Sigrud stares at the man. “Died? She was…She is dead?”

  “Her and a bunch of other people. News came through the telegraphs just this morning. They blew her up along with half of a fancy hotel in downtown Ahanashtan, six days ago, lots of people ki—”

  Sigrud steps closer to the man. “Then how are they sure? How are they sure she is dead? Do they really know?”

  Pavlik hesitates as Sigrud nears, until the big Dreyling is looming over him like the firs they fell each day. “Well, uh…Well, they found the body, of course! Or what was left of it. They’re planning a big funeral and everything, it’s all over the papers!”

  “Why Komayd?” says someone. “She was prime minister over ten damned years ago. Why kill someone out of office?”

  “How should I know?” says Pavlik. “Maybe old grudges die hard. She pissed off nearly everyone when she was in office; they’re saying the list of suspects goes twice around the block.”

  Sigrud slowly turns back to look at Pavlik. “So they do not know,” he says quietly, “who…did this to her?”

  “If they know, they aren’t saying,” says Pavlik.

  Sigrud falls silent, and the look of shock and horror on his face gives way to something different: grim resolution, perhaps, as if he’s just made a decision he’s been putting off for far too long.

  “Enough of this,” says the foreman. “Dreyling, quit your damn foolery and help us unpack the cart.”

  The other loggers scurry into action, but Sigrud remains still.

  “Bjorn?” says the foreman. “Bjorn! Damn you, get your ass into gear!”

  “No,” he says softly.

  “What? No? No to what?”

  “No to this,” says Sigrud. “I am not this, not anymore.”

  The foreman strides over to him and grabs his arm. “You’ll be whatever I damned well say you a—”

  Sigrud turns, and suddenly the foreman’s head snaps back sharply. Then Sigrud twists him, turns him, and slams the man down on the ground. The foreman lies on the ground clawing at his neck, choking and coughing, and it takes the other loggers a moment to realize the Dreyling struck him in the windpipe, a single, quick blow that was so fast the eye could hardly perceive it.

  Sigrud walks to the cart, grabs an ax, and walks back to the sprawling foreman. He holds the ax out with one hand until the tip of its blade hovers before the foreman’s nose. The foreman stops coughing and stares at it, eyes wide.

  The ax hangs in place for a long time. Then Sigrud seems to deflate a little, shoulders slumping. He tosses the ax away and strides into the night.

  * * *

  —

  He packs up his tent and belongings before they gather enough sense to come after him. He makes one final stop on the way out of camp, filching a spade from the camp’s wares. He can already hear his foreman’s shouts echoing over the campfires, his voice crackling like wax paper: “Where is the bastard? Where is the bastard?”

  He sprints across the clear-cut fields to the lower forests, a scarred moonscape of ravaged trees, pale and gray in the bright moonlight. He slows down only when he falls into the shadows of the firs. He knows these grounds, knows this terrain. He knows how
to fight in these conditions far more than the loggers do.

  He stops briefly at the top of a gully, boots perched on a coiled root. His heart is hammering. Everything feels faint and distant and horribly wrong.

  Dead. Dead.

  He shakes himself, trying to compartmentalize it. He feels tears on his cheeks and shakes himself again.

  She can’t be dead. She simply can’t be.

  He cocks his head and listens: the loggers aren’t following him, or at least not yet.

  He looks up at the moon and gauges his location. He skulks through the forest, all the old tradecraft returning to him: his toes find soft needles rather than brittle, snapping twigs; he keeps to highways of crisscrossing shadows, mindful of any glinting metals on his person; and when the wind rises, which it rarely does, he is careful to sniff the air, searching for any foreign scents that might betray a pursuer.

  He spies scarred trees, amputated branches—landmarks he left behind to guide him back to what he left here. To lead him back to the man he buried, or tried to.

  He comes to one leaning, dead pine tree, a long, sloping scar on its face. He sets down his pack and starts to dig. He’s in shock, he can tell, and he digs faster than he means to, using up precious energy that he should be saving. Still he digs.

  Finally the tip of his spade makes a quiet clunk. He kneels and scrapes the rest of the soil away. Inside the hole is a leather-wrapped box, about a foot and a half wide and a half a foot deep. He pulls it out, hands trembling, and tries to unwrap the leather, but his ax gloves are too unwieldy. Glancing over his shoulder, he removes them.

  The bright, shining scar on his left hand seems to glow in the moonlight. He winces at the sight of the scar, which almost has the look of a brand, a sigil seared into his flesh, representing two hands, waiting to weigh and judge. It’s been months since he’s seen it, since he’s revealed it to the waking world. An odd thing, it suddenly seems, to conceal a part of one’s own body for days on end.

  He unwraps the leather. The box is dark wood, its clasp still bright and clean. He’s moved this package several times, whenever he had to move to a new job, but never opened it.

  The trembling in his hands grows as he unclasps the box and lifts the lid.

  Inside the box are many things, any one of which would cause his fellow loggers’ eyes to pop clean out of their heads—most notably, probably, the seven thousand drekel marks wrapped into tight little bands, probably three times what a logger makes in a year. These he goes about stuffing into various hidden places in his clothing: the cuffs of his shirt, his coat, his pants, the false bottom of his pack that he personally stitched into place.

  Next he tends to the seven different POTs wrapped in wax paper: papers of transportation, allowing the holder free passage throughout the Continent and Saypur. He unwraps them, shuffling through the names and identities—all Dreyling, of course, as he can’t exactly hide his race, though he has shaved his head and beard in an effort to distance himself from his old life—not to mention purchasing a false eye. Wiborg, he thinks as he rifles through them, Micalesen, Bente, Jenssen…Which one of you is compromised? Which one of you will they watch for, after all these years?

  He wonders briefly why he’s doing this, what his next step is. But it is easier to just keep moving forward, hurtling through the motions like a stone rolling down a hill.

  Beside the POTs is a bolt-shot pistol: a small, crossbow-like device that falls well short of a true weapon of war, but should be capable of a single silent, lethal shot, provided it has held up in the months underground. The next item at first appears to be a bundle of lambskin, but as he slowly unwraps it, it proves to be an old, well-cared-for knife in a black leather scabbard. He carefully folds the lambskin and stores it away—one never knows what one might need—and pulls the knife out of its scabbard.

  The blade is as black as oil. It has a wicked sheen to it, the glint of metal that has tasted a great deal of blood.

  Damsleth bone, he thinks. He holds up a pine needle and swats at it with the knife, using the barest amount of force; the needle parts cleanly, splitting in half. Retains its edge, he thinks, for decades and decades.

  Though now, he knows, all the damsleth whales are surely gone: some due to whaling, which he himself pursued as a young man, and others either moved away or perished from the changing climate, the cooler waters killing off or dispersing all their food sources. He’s never seen another damsleth weapon besides his own, nor has he ever heard of one still in existence.

  He sheathes the knife and buckles it to his right thigh. The motion comes back to him in an instant, and it brings with it all the memories of those days in the field, waging silent, shadowy warfare against countless enemies.

  And memories of her, the woman who was always by his side for all of it.

  “Shara,” he whispers.

  They were closer than lovers—for love, of course, is a flighty, mercurial thing. They were comrades, fellow soldiers whose literal survival depended on one another, from the moment she dug him out of that miserable little jail cell in Slondheim to the days of reconstruction after the Battle of Bulikov.

  He wilts a little, crumpling over at the edge of the hole.

  I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.

  Sigrud had always felt that, despite his long years in fugitive exile, Ashara Komayd—or just “Shara” to her friends—would reach out to him one day; that she’d somehow ferret him out amidst all the lowlifes and roustabouts he worked alongside, and he would receive some secret message, some letter or a postcard, maybe, saying she’d done her work and cleared his name, and he could come back to her, he could go back to work on one last operation, or perhaps return to his home.

  It was a romantic idea. One she herself often warned against. He remembers her sitting at a window in a checkpoint outside Jukoshtan—thirty years ago, probably, working a dull assignment—blowing steam off her teacup and saying softly: We are neither of us essential, you and I. To what we do, who we work for…She turned to look at him, her dark eyes wide yet hard.…Or to each other. If I am forced to choose between you or the operation, I will choose the operation—and I expect you to do the same for me. Our work asks us to make terrible choices. But make them we shall.

  He smirked then, for at the time he’d always thought as such, resigned to brutal pragmatism; but as the years went by he found himself softened, perhaps by her.

  He looks at the moonlight reflected in the black blade. Now what am I waiting for? Whose call do I wait for now?

  He returns to the box. Hesitates.

  I do not wish to see this, he thinks miserably. Not this.

  But he knows he must.

  He pulls out the last remaining artifact: a cutting from a newspaper, brown with age. It is a photograph, depicting a young woman standing on the deck of a ship, looking at the photographer with a mixture of amusement and measured disdain. Though the photograph is in black and white, it’s clear the woman’s hair is bright blond, and her eyes a pale blue behind the strange pair of glasses fixed on her nose. On her breast is a company crest with the letters “SDC.”

  The caption reads: SIGNE HARKVALDSSON, NEWLY APPOINTED CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER OF THE SOUTHERN DREYLING COMPANY.

  His one eye grows wide as Sigrud takes in the face of his daughter, rendered in the crude stippling of newspaper print.

  He remembers the way she looked when he last saw her, thirteen years ago: cold and pale and still, her face frozen in a look of slight dissatisfaction, as if the exit wound in her chest were a source of only minor discomfort.

  He remembers her. Her, and what he did to the soldiers afterward in a fit of wild rage.

  I was not there to save you, he says to the photograph. I was not there to save Shara. I was never there for any of it.

  He stows the newspaper clipping away in his pocket, then gives the pocket a re
assuring pat, as if ushering the memory back to sleep.

  He grips his knife in his other hand. His grip is tight, his knuckles a bright white.

  Sigrud lunges forward and stabs the dead pine, his knife sinking in almost to the hilt. A sob nearly escapes his mouth, but he retains the sense to strangle it before it can give away his position.

  Wretched is the creature, he thinks, that is not even allowed to weep!

  He flexes his entire body, trying to push the knife in deeper and deeper, his fingers crying out in pain. Then he relents and hangs there, gripping the tree, breathing deep.

  His instincts take over. It was bad, what you did back there in the camp, he tells himself. Cover blown. Again. What a stupid creature he is, driven by rage and emotion.

  Focus. Nothing to do but move on. Move on and keep moving.

  He pulls his knife out, sheathes it, and picks up his pack. Then he starts up the hill into the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  Hours of silent stalking, of careful movement through the midnight darkness of the deep forest. When the trees break he looks up, measures the stars, adjusts his course, and moves on.

  Somewhere close to daybreak he remembers.

  It was in Jukoshtan, he thinks, back in 1712. Someone in the Ministry had been blown and blown quite badly, all of their assets and networks thoroughly compromised by Continental agents, and no one could gauge just how bad it was.

  He and Shara were forced to part, for the Ministry suspected a mole within their ranks—and Sigrud, as a foreigner, was high on the list of suspects. I’ve made all your arrangements for transportation out of the city, Shara told him on the last day together during that rocky stretch, and from there on out you’ll be left to your own devices. Which I think should be quite sufficient.

  He grunted.

  I’ll go back and tell them it wasn’t you, Sigrud, she said. I’ll go back and tell them everything they want to know. I don’t know if they’ll listen, but I’ll try. And I’ll find you and reach out to you the second everything’s clear.