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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Okay,” says Sigrud. “That is probably bad.”

  He steps on the gas pedal. The wheels of the old auto shriek, and he speeds off toward the gates of Bulikov—which, he can’t help but notice, don’t seem to exist anymore. The entry is now just a solid black wall, leaving him no way into the city.

  I will figure that out, he thinks, when I get there.

  * * *

  —

  “What in hells?” says Ivanya, staring out the window at the growing walls. “What in hells?”

  Shara looks over at Malwina. “Malwina? What’s happening? Can you tell us?”

  Malwina, still pale and red-eyed, screws up her mouth like she’s doing math in her head. “If I had to guess,” she says in a hollow voice, “he’s remaking all the miracles that hold up the walls into one big staircase. Which he’ll then climb. Up to the sky.”

  There’s a long, loud silence. The other Divine children slowly look at one another in horror.

  “And then what?” says Ivanya. “Then what happens?”

  Malwina tosses back a cup of tea. “Then he poisons the sky with darkness. And the endless night begins.”

  “Endless night?” says Taty. “What does that mean?”

  Malwina laughs. “Who the hells are you, girl? You look like me, but I don’t remember you, I don’t smell a whiff of the Divine about you—or, not yet at least—and you obviously can’t tell the Divine from a hole in the ground….”

  “She is the least of your problems,” says Shara sternly.

  Malwina looks at Shara. “She isn’t awake yet, is she?”

  “Malwina.”

  “But you know what it’s going to take to do that.”

  “Malwina.”

  Malwina smirks. “Endless night means that he dilates completely,” she says. “Nokov—I mean, let’s go ahead and say his name, since it’s obvious he’s won—once the world falls under endless night, he controls everything. All of reality becomes a plaything in his hands.”

  “How do we stop him?” asks Ivanya.

  “We don’t,” says Malwina. “He’s devoured so many of the children, and Olvos. He’s unstoppable now, or close enough that it doesn’t matter.”

  “Unstoppable?” says Taty, horrified. “Is he really?”

  “Not…Not necessarily,” says Shara. “This thing he’s doing, this grand act…He’s exposed himself. He’s bent on doing this one, massive thing. He won’t have the attention for anything else. He’s like a surgeon in the middle of an operation.”

  “We could attack him,” says one of the other children. “Gang up on him. Slow him or even stop him.”

  “Slow or even stop the most powerful Divine being in all of history?” says Malwina. She laughs again. “Sure.”

  “We have Sigrud’s guns, don’t we?” says Taty.

  Ivanya nods. “We do. Three pistols, two riflings, and a scatter-gun.”

  “And I can see the foot of the stairway from here,” says Shara. She points toward the gates in the walls, or where the gates used to be, at least. “That’s got to be the way up.”

  “Are you hearing yourselves?” asks Malwina. “Go after what’s now a Divinity with, what, some fucking guns? Chase him up the stairs? That’s madness!”

  The room goes quiet as they try to think.

  “Sigrud would try it,” says Taty quietly.

  There’s a long silence.

  “Sigrud,” says Malwina, “is just a man.”

  “He’s never let that stop him,” says Taty.

  “He’s just a man, and he failed,” says Malwina. “He was supposed to get Olvos on our side! And now she’s dead. There’s nothing left, nothing left!”

  “There was nothing left for him either,” says Taty softly. “He lost everything. Everyone. But he still traveled across the world to help me. I know. He told me so.”

  “So what?” snaps Malwina. “Are we supposed to launch an attack on Nokov himself with nothing more than sheer, bloody-minded stupidity in our pockets?”

  “The alternative, Malwina,” says Shara, “is doing nothing. And I know your heart is broken, my dear. I know you feel bruised and lost. But you and I have been comrades in this fight for a long time now. Tavaan fought and died to make this fight last a little longer. Will you abandon it now?”

  Malwina falls silent. The snarl fades from her face. She bows her head. “I…I didn’t ever think it’d be like this, Shara. I really didn’t.”

  “I know,” says Shara. “But it is.”

  Malwina takes a breath, then grabs another cup of tea, and tosses it back just like the first. “All right. Let’s gear up and get ready to go get ourselves killed.” She smiles a grin full of mad despair. “Maybe we’ll give him a split lip doing it.”

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud slows the auto as he approaches the solid black wall surrounding Bulikov. He has no doubt that this has something to do with Nokov: this is the same color black as he saw in Khadse’s jacket, the same black as that odd sub-reality he tumbled through after he nearly broke Nokov’s hand. An extraordinarily dark blackness, a color that has never known light.

  He steps out of the auto, leaving it running. He looks the wall up and down. It looks solid, but…

  He stoops, picks up a rock, and throws it at the wall. It bounces off with a clack, but leaves no mark.

  He thinks, then places his bare left palm on the black wall. The wall is cool and hard, as if made of obsidian, but despite everything Olvos said, his touch appears to do nothing. But then, she said the thing living in his palm exists mostly just to beat the hells out of him and make sure he survives.

  Then he stops, and remembers.

  It’s a tool. It won’t harm the enemy, but it can destroy his works and machinations.

  Sigrud focuses and reaches into the air, concentrating….

  Suddenly Flame is in his hand. And though its blade is but a dim flicker now, he can’t help but notice that it seems to project a radiance that makes the wall look very…thin.

  Sigrud holds the sword out at the wall. As he does so the wall seems to recede, like shadow before light.

  “Hm,” he says.

  He walks toward the wall. It falls back, as if the sword is projecting a perfect bubble of light around him—much like Malwina did back at the slaughterhouse.

  “Hm,” he says again. He looks at the bubble of light around him. It looks to be ten or fifteen feet across in diameter. Large enough for his small, ramshackle auto, in other words—and who knows where he’ll need to get once he’s inside?

  Sigrud climbs back into the auto and sticks his left arm out the window, holding the sword forward like he’s leading a cavalry charge. He presses the gas pedal very, very slightly, sending it puttering forward into the wall, which draws back like a curtain, allowing the auto through.

  Sigrud smiles, delighted that at least one thing has gone right tonight, and speeds up.

  * * *

  —

  Ivanya and the others trot through the streets of Bulikov, with she and Taty supporting Shara between them. Ivanya’s happy she did so much walking about and stayed fit when she was a shepherd, because between Shara’s weight and the scatter-gun and rifling on her back, she’s sure she’d be dead otherwise.

  The city, unsurprisingly, is in complete uproar. Flashbacks of the Battle, no doubt, thinks Ivanya as they trot through the remains of a street market, its tents and booths overturned, the cobblestones covered in smashed potatoes and shards of porcelain. The city is lit with a queer gray light as the rising walls block out all hint of the dawn. The atmosphere feels so close and thick it nearly chokes the air from her lungs. Someone has turned on a few of the streetlights, but they don’t do much to fight back the pervading darkness.

  “You and I,” says Ivanya to Shara as they help her over a curb,
“are going to have a chat once we’re done here.”

  “Oh, are we,” says Shara.

  “Oh, yes,” says Ivanya, panting. “I fund all your war games for years, and you don’t even tell me what you’re up to? And now you’ve cheated death? And I’m carrying you all the way across Bulikov?”

  Shara groans, cringes, and pales a little. “I can guarantee, Ivanya…I have not cheated death.”

  “Well then, how in hells am I carrying you right now?”

  Shara swallows and takes a shallow breath. “Think of it,” she says, “like a loan I’ve had taken out against it. Which is being paid back with great interest.”

  Ivanya shakes her head. “I fucking hate this Divine nonsense.”

  “I sympathize heartily,” says Shara.

  They turn the corner. The black staircase is only a few blocks ahead. It’s enormous, jutting at least a hundred feet out from the walls.

  “We need a plan of attack,” says Malwina quietly.

  “We’ll have to think of one,” says Ivanya, “once we know what we’re attacking.”

  Shara looks up, and Ivanya does the same. The giant black cylinder is still rising above them, curling around and around at the top. It’s several times taller than the tallest skyscraper Ivanya’s ever seen, and she swears she can see wisps of cloud near the top, like it’s about to breach the bottom of the overcast skies.

  “There he is,” says Shara. She points up.

  Ivanya squints. It takes a while for her to see what she’s pointing at, but then she spots it: a dark figure quietly walking up the stairs curling around the interior of the walls, its movements slow and ceremonial, like a monarch approaching their throne. He looks like he’s nearly a quarter of a mile up by now—which means that the black figure must be very, very, very big.

  “Why doesn’t he just fly up and do it?” asks Ivanya. “I mean—he’s basically a god now, right?”

  “This is heady stuff he’s getting into,” says Malwina. “He’s got to form a connection point with the skies themselves. This is a vast, symbolic act, overlaid on the countless miracles, dead or living, that still function behind the firmaments above.”

  “If you say so,” says Ivanya. “How are you going to get up there?”

  “Using that,” says Malwina. She points to the bottom of the stairs. “The gates of Bulikov used to have towers on either side of them, before the Blink. The towers were Divinely made, so they were incredibly, incredibly tall. They had a chamber inside them that could zip you up to the top in a split second, faster than any elevator in Ghaladesh.”

  “How could that help?” asks Taty.

  “Because it’s in the past,” says Malwina, glaring at her.

  “What?” says Ivanya.

  “Malwina is the Divine spirit of the past,” says Shara. She coughs, her face twisted in pain. “She knows many things that have happened, if not all of them. And she can access the past, and utilize things there to our advantage.”

  “Which I can do now,” says Malwina.

  “So…you take your war party into the past,” says Taty, “put them in that tower, zip them up to the top, then bring everyone back to the present—hopefully on top of the stairs. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” says Malwina. She looks reluctantly impressed with Taty’s deductions. “If I’m in luck, we might actually wind up in front of him, blocking his path.” She looks toward the gates, and her eyes seem to shimmer a little, like they’re filling up with smoke. “Yes, I think so…I can see what the tower was like. It was about halfway up the walls—or at least as tall as the walls are now.”

  “That must have been some tower,” says Ivanya.

  “It was,” says Malwina. They start moving ahead again. “But the problem is that I have to get my people to the base of the stairs, where the tower existed in the past.”

  Ivanya pants as she and Taty haul Shara around an overturned sausage stand. “And what’s the problem with that?”

  They come to a wall alongside a street corner. Malwina holds up a hand, peers around the corner, and quickly draws back. “The problem is,” she whispers, “as I thought, that the base of the stairs is guarded.”

  “Guarded?” says Ivanya. “Guarded by who?”

  Malwina opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. It’s not that she can’t talk—she is talking, her lips moving, but all the sound is gone.

  Ivanya frowns. Now that she notices it, the sound seems to be gone from…everywhere. As if the whole city has gone silent.

  Ivanya turns to Shara. She tries to say, “What’s going on now?” but the words make no sound.

  Nothing makes sound. Not the wind or the screaming people or the automobiles hurtling in panic down the street.

  Nor the huge black spear that comes plunging through the stone wall behind them.

  The spear punches right through the chest of one of the older Divine children, who goes as limp as a rag doll, blood pouring from his mouth. Ivanya blinks in shock as the warmth patters her face and side. The spear passes right behind her head, so close she can see its oily, shifting surface.

  She screams. She can see Taty screaming next to her, but there’s no sound. Everyone turns and begins to run in all directions, with Malwina and her Divine children falling back down the street.

  The spear slides back through the wall. The corpse of the Divine child silently falls to the ground. Something huge and dark steps around the corner.

  It is…feminine, somewhat. Seven feet tall, black as coal, with long, distorted limbs and a totally featureless face. It carries a black spear in one hand, which drips with the blood of its victim. And as they scatter, the thing lifts its head, and appears to scream….

  There is no noise. Just a pulsing silence. Yet in that silence is a message:

 

  The next thing she knows, Ivanya’s in motion. She’s reaching over her back, pulling the scatter-gun from over her shoulder, and lifting it up. Time seems both stupendously slow—slow enough for her to think, Am I really doing this?—and stupendously fast, so fast she can’t stop herself.

  All the years spent training in the ranges come back to her in an instant. She opens fire at the creature, falling back. The shots seem to stun it and irritate it, but little else than that.

  “Shit,” she snarls, though she can’t hear the word. She can see Shara and Taty cowering just to the creature’s right, and realizes it could spear them in a second if it but wished.

  Without even comprehending what she’s doing, Ivanya runs forward, right in front of the creature, trying to draw it away from the corner and across the main road. The creature gives chase, picking its way across the streets like a stork among the reeds, its long, delicate spear slashing through the air.

  As she reloads and runs, Ivanya understands right away that she is not up to this task. Despite all her paranoia, despite all her training, all her worrying and preparations, she is still little more than a farmer with a firearm. She’s shot a few foxes and wolves in her day, but she’s never done anything like this.

  She darts among a parking lot of autos, screaming in silent terror as the creature tears through the vehicles behind her, thinking, Why did I ever come back to Bulikov? Why did I ever, ever come back to Bulikov?

  She turns right, trying to cut around the creature. Yet then the black thing lifts up an auto and overturns it, blocking her exit and trapping her in the middle of the street.

  Ivanya whirls, raises the scatter-gun, and unloads it into the creature, but it’s clear it’s hopeless. The thing raises its spear, preparing to run Ivanya through…

  Which is when something very strange happens to the black walls at the end of the street.

  Something bursts through—an old, rattling auto, with what appears to be a shining flame atop its can
opy. And below it, behind the windshield, is Sigrud’s face.

  * * *

  —

  When Sigrud’s auto finally makes it through the black walls, he’s struck by how different the city now feels: the black tower blocks out the dawn, so the light within has a queer, flimsy quality to it, like an evening storm threatening to turn into a tornado.

  Then he notices his right shoulder hurts, a strange ache just like he had in the aero-tram, when the point of the seneschal’s spear penetrated his skin.

  Then he sees why: the seneschal is in front of him, right now. And unless he’s mistaken, it looks like it’s about to spear Ivanya like a snail on a platter.

  I do not really know what’s going on, he thinks. He stomps the gas pedal and buckles his safety belt. But I hope I live to find out.

  The seneschal turns to look at him, surprised. Sigrud points the auto at its knees.

  Then the world leaps, and he’s hurtling into the steering wheel of his auto, and glass is flying around him. He catches sight of the seneschal tumbling backward, smashing into a lamppost, but he’s snapped around too fast to really see.

  Finally, things stop moving. The world seems to have reorganized itself: the auto is now lying on its passenger side, Flame is gone from his hand, and his chest aches like he took a fierce punch to the solar plexus. Sigrud blinks, coughs, unbuckles himself, and kicks the driver’s-side door open. He tumbles out to see the seneschal lying sideways in the street, slowly gathering itself.

  Ivanya sprints over to him and helps drag him away from the scene. “What in hells!” she says. “What in all the hells! Did you plan that?”

  “No,” says Sigrud. “What is happening?”

  “The end of the world,” says Ivanya. “As far as I understand i—”

  All sound fades before she can finish her sentence. Sigrud shoves her aside just as the black spear comes hurtling down, effortlessly piercing the road where she stood. The black seneschal leaps over them, pulls the spear out, and turns to face Sigrud, twirling its weapon like a baton.