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

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Sigrud rolls over, then stands, Flame leaping to his hand. He grins at the seneschal. “Hello again,” he says, though the words make no sound.

  The seneschal shudders in rage and slashes the spear out at him. Sigrud dodges it and flicks the sword up at the shaft, batting it away. The sword doesn’t destroy the spear, as he hoped it would, but it does seem to have an outsized impact on it, striking it with a force several times greater than he intended, almost knocking the spear from the seneschal’s grasp.

  He looks at the faint, golden blade in his hand. So it still has some bite left, he thinks.

  The seneschal looks surprised by this, but quickly recovers, whirling around and sending its spear shooting at Sigrud’s right shoulder with a strange speed, as if the point is magnetically attracted to him. Sigrud just barely dodges the attack, bats the spear aside again, and darts inward, into the seneschal’s stance, where he flicks the blade up.

  The creature tries to move back, but the blade slashes its right forearm. The silence shudders and quakes, and he knows the thing is screaming in pain. It falls back as Sigrud advances—but he sees that the thing’s arm is healing right before his eyes, the black wound fusing shut. Whatever damage Flame can do to the seneschal, it doesn’t seem to last.

  This is bad, thinks Sigrud.

  Yet the seneschal is learning, and it doesn’t want to be hit again. It assumes a defensive stance, crouched low with its spear point extended a few feet from its body, preventing Sigrud from getting close. He feints left, right, back and forth, but the seneschal isn’t buying it: it wants him to gamble and try something stupid, at which point it’ll run him through. They’re stuck in a stalemate there in the street, two combatants crouched low, shuffling back and forth.

  Ivanya runs around behind the seneschal, waving her hands to get Sigrud’s attention. She’s shouting something, though he can’t hear her. He focuses, trying to read her lips, then understands:

  Get it close to the auto.

  The seneschal takes advantage of the distraction and strikes at him again. He falls backward, barely evading its thrust, then rises and swings Flame—a miss, not even close. The seneschal leaps back and resumes a defensive stance.

  Sigrud glances at his auto, which is still lying on its side. He slowly begins to strafe around the seneschal, positioning himself so he can back it up toward the overturned vehicle.

  He takes a risk, flicks his blade at its spear. It deftly dodges the attack and nearly guts him, but he leaps out of the way and brings his sword down hard on the shaft of the spear. The seneschal roars silently in frustration and backs up. Sigrud feints forward once, then again, until the thing’s back is mere feet from the auto….

  Sigrud drops to the ground.

  The seneschal pauses, confused.

  Then Ivanya—who has been hunched down across the street with a rifling trained on the auto’s exposed petrol tank this entire time—finally pulls the trigger.

  There’s a blast of wild heat. The silent spell vanishes just as a loud whump batters Sigrud’s ears. The seneschal is blown sideways into a shop front, its writhing black form smashing through the wood and glass.

  The heat scalds Sigrud’s feet and legs, which were closest to the car. He sits up and sees his pants are on fire, and dumbly swats at them. Then someone grabs him by the underarms. He looks up to see Ivanya straining to lift him up.

  “Come on, dumbass!” she shouts. “Run!”

  He flips over and staggers to his feet. He looks over his shoulder as they run away and sees the seneschal stirring in the blown-in shop front.

  It isn’t dead, he thinks. Not by a long shot.

  * * *

  —

  Once they’re around a corner—where, he notes, the bloody body of a young boy lies with a hole through its chest—Sigrud hears the screaming. He wonders who else is under attack when he realizes it’s the entire city: the citizens of Bulikov are screaming in naked terror of what’s going on around them, and Sigrud can’t really blame them.

  Someone stands and waves a hand from a building front ahead. They sprint over to find Taty crouched in the doorway. “In here!” she whispers.

  They run inside. On the first floor, Shara, Malwina, and some young people Sigrud doesn’t recognize are all crouched below the windows, out of sight.

  Sigrud lets out a long breath. “Okay,” he says. “Thank goodness. You are all alive.”

  “All? Not all,” says Malwina grimly. “Only a fraction of us. I take it your meeting with Olvos didn’t work out?”

  “I am not quite sure,” says Sigrud. “She told me many things. But it’s…it’s true what she said, then? The children? Are they…”

  “I don’t know what she told you,” says Malwina. “But…yes. We’re all that’s left.”

  “I…I did not think she was lying,” he says, shocked. “But to hear it’s true…She would not help, and she spoke in riddles. She seemed to suggest we would still have some way to triumph, though.” He looks out the window at the walls of the black tower that surround the city. “But…I am not sure exactly what the battle is.”

  Malwina looks at Shara and sighs. “Do you want to try and explain this, or should I?”

  “Let Shara do it,” says Sigrud. “She knows how to explain things to me.”

  Shara coughs. “We have to get Malwina’s team to the gates,” she says, gesturing to the children behind her, “or where the gates used to be. That thing, the seneschal, is guarding the area. We need to penetrate the enemy’s position, eliminate it, or draw it away. Then it’s in Malwina’s hands.”

  “I see,” says Sigrud, nodding. “Then it is very simple.”

  “What!” says Malwina. “You didn’t say anything about Nokov killing the skies, or the tower, or the world ending, or anything else!”

  “That is because I do not give a shit about that,” says Sigrud. “And we don’t have time for it anyway. Not with that tower getting taller and taller by the second. So—what to do?”

  “Bullets didn’t seem to work on it,” says Shara. “Not from what I saw.”

  “No,” says Ivanya, “but Sigrud’s sword sure seems to make a dent in it.”

  Taty looks at him, bewildered. “Sword? What sword?”

  Sigrud sheepishly reaches into the air and produces Flame, which lights up the room with its golden luminescence.

  “How did you learn to do that?” says Taty, bug-eyed.

  “Never mind that,” says Sigrud. He looks at Malwina. “The sword isn’t as strong as it was, is it? But can it kill the seneschal?”

  Malwina grimaces. “It’d have to be a lethal blow. To the heart, to the head. Nothing else will do it. Lop off a limb and it’ll hurt it, sure, but it’ll just grow back.”

  Sigrud scratches his chin. He dearly wishes he had his pipe with him, but he seems to have lost it somewhere. “And she does not like me at all…Since I’m the one who originally killed her and everything…” He looks at Taty. “I taught you how to shoot.”

  “What?” says Taty, startled.

  “I taught you how to shoot,” he says. “And back aboard the aero-tram, you wished to fight. Now is that time. Do you think you can?”

  “Sigrud…” says Shara. “She is my daughter, after all. Are you sure that you should b—”

  “With all due respect, Shara,” says Sigrud firmly, “I did not ask you.”

  Shara blinks. Then she sits back and looks at her daughter with a slightly shocked expression, as if to say—Well. Never mind, then.

  “Can you shoot now,” Sigrud asks Taty, “as I taught you?”

  “I-I think so,” says Taty.

  “Good,” says Sigrud. “I will draw the seneschal away from the stairs and lead it on a chase. Shara, I will need you and Taty to take up a position in the window on the third floor in the building across from the gates. Taty, once it starts
chasing me, I need you to shoot it and keep shooting it. It is much faster than I am. I will need you to slow it down as much as you can.”

  “Hold on,” asks Ivanya. “Shouldn’t I be the one doing the shooting? I’ve already tangled with the thing.”

  “Which brings me to my next question,” says Sigrud, turning to her. “It is not your skill with firearms that I’m thinking about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said fencing was a time-honored ladies’ sport in Bulikov,” he says. “You said your mother drilled you mercilessly. Do you think you remember what she taught you?”

  * * *

  —

  After checking their gear, they all troop back out into the street in single file, with Sigrud and Ivanya in the lead. Their procession is silent and solemn, warriors young and old trying to come to grips with their situation. Sigrud has seen it before. True fights, real fights, are rarely calculated, choreographed things: they are chaotic, ugly, unpredictable, and quick—lives saved and spent in a handful of screaming seconds. The inexperienced fall first, unprepared for the flurry of action. Today, he knows, will be no different.

  Battle never changes, he thinks. Always about territory and terrain. And now, if we are lucky, to take some from our enemy.

  Taty and Shara split off from them as they approach the apartment building on the corner. Taty pauses in the empty street, looking back at Sigrud uncertainly.

  “Remember to breathe,” says Sigrud. “Remember it is a machine. Remember it does but one thing.”

  She nods. Shara, wheezing, locks eyes with Sigrud. “Did you really teach my daughter to shoot, Sigrud?”

  “It seemed the right thing to do. I knew nothing else worth teaching.”

  Shara smiles. “I don’t think that’s true.” Then she turns and limps toward the apartment building. Sigrud watches as Taty helps her mother into the door and up the stairs.

  How much she’s grown up already, he thinks, in what feels like but a handful of days.

  Sigrud, Ivanya, and the Divine children wait as they get into position. “Have you had much success fighting that thing before?” asks Malwina.

  “Some,” says Sigrud. “But mostly luck.” He glances down at his left hand, looking at the scars there. I wonder, he thinks, will you save me again? Yet he remembers what Olvos said—he is not immortal. If he takes that spear through the throat, no miracle in the world can keep all his blood inside him.

  “That thing has the most powerful Divinity in existence behind it,” says Malwina. “Do you know what that means for you?”

  Neither Sigrud nor Ivanya say anything.

  Malwina looks up, narrowing her eyes as she tries to find Nokov climbing the stairs. “It means the same thing for you as it does for us,” she says softly. “It means we’re dying here today, friends.”

  Sigrud shrugs.

  “Do you know what I thought when I first met you at the slaughterhouse?” asks Malwina. “I thought you looked like a suicidal person. Throwing yourself into danger with a mad gleam in your eye. I guess you’re getting what you want today.”

  “No,” he says. “That day I was fighting because that was all I knew to do. But now I have a reason to fight.”

  “Oh, do you?”

  Sigrud looks up and sees Taty set up the rifling in the window above, her small, pale face serious and grave. “I have failed so many in my life,” he says. “So many people I was not there for, so many missed opportunities, and so much lost because of it…I will not miss another chance. Not now. Not today.”

  “Even if it kills you?” says Malwina.

  “We are not dead yet,” says Sigrud. He holds out a hand, concentrates, and finds Flame, its yellow-gold light leaping forth in his hands. “We spend every second fighting, until we have none left.”

  He looks at Malwina. She looks back, her eyes fierce. Then she nods. “Okay,” she says quietly. “Okay.”

  He squints back up at the windows above. A hand waves out the third-floor window. “Let’s get in position,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Tatyana Komayd fights a brief thrill of guilt as she clears the floor around the window in the empty apartment on the third floor, shoving aside a desk and knocking over a vase. She opens the window and peers out on the group assembling in the street below, gray and tiny in the queer, faint light. Then she looks at her mother. “I need something to kneel on.”

  “I’ll get some pillows,” Shara says.

  They set up her nest silently and carefully, like maids arranging the table before everyone comes down to breakfast.

  “Is this normal for you, Mother?” asks Taty.

  “Normal?” says Shara. “How could it be?”

  “Urban warfare,” says Taty, inserting a clip into the rifling. “Fighting street by street from people’s homes. You never did this?”

  “I…would say I did this very, very rarely, my dear,” says Shara.

  “Very rarely,” says Taty bitterly. She shakes her head as she loads the rifling. “You hid all this from me. You lied to me.”

  “You are right to be angry with me,” says her mother, loading an extra clip. “But I would hardly be the first parent to present themselves to their children as they wished themselves to be, rather than as they are.”

  “But why?” says Taty. “Why not tell me the truth? Why not be honest with me?”

  “Because…” Shara hesitates.

  “Tell me now,” says Taty, “because soon we won’t have another chance.”

  “Because I grew up in the shadow of hard truths,” says Shara. “I was a child who was raised for war and governing. And I did not like it much. And even though I knew the stakes, I thought…Is it so much to ask that my daughter have a normal life? I just…I just wanted a moment alone, a moment apart for you. A moment when we didn’t have to worry about the outside world, all that history and sorrow waiting for us.” She looks at her daughter, and her eyes are full of tears. “I just wanted you to be what you are now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You,” says Shara. “You. A thousand times you. I’m prouder of you than anything I’ve ever done before, Taty. I’m so, so happy that I’ve had the opportunity to say so.”

  “I…What?” Taty frowns in confusion. “But…But you killed gods.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “And saved the world.”

  “That is debatable.”

  “And…And opened the Solda River.”

  “That was the effort of many,” says Shara. “But it was all as forgettable as teatime to me, in comparison to having you in my life.”

  Tatyana Komayd looks at her mother, frail and old and injured. Then, feeling slightly absurd, she places the rifling on the dusty bed beside her. “I’m…I’m sorry for being angry at you.”

  “You don’t need to say you’re sorry,” says Shara. “Not ever.”

  The two embrace, Taty squeezing her mother very, very lightly.

  “Oh, Mother,” says Taty. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well,” says Shara. “You’re going to shoot. And I’m going to reload. All right?”

  * * *

  —

  In the street below, Sigrud begins to move.

  He sprints across one lane, pistol in his hand, then leaps behind a short brick wall. He waits, rises carefully, peeks over the top, and surveys the scene.

  The foot of the black staircase is about three hundred feet away. The seneschal crouches before it like a huge, black beetle laying eggs. Just before the seneschal is a short complex of tenement apartments, low and rambling and disorganized, lots of alleys and passageways. Decent cover, then, and it seems to be evacuated, which is good but expected—waking up and seeing the seneschal out your window would make anyone abandon their property.

  He lo
oks back in the direction he came from. Malwina and the other Divine children are slipping through a back alley, sneaking toward the black wall. Once he’s drawn the seneschal away—if he draws the seneschal away, as that thing isn’t stupid—Malwina should be able to get to the gates, and do whatever Divine trickery they need to transport themselves several thousand feet up the wall to face Nokov.

  He looks up and sees Taty hunkered down in the window of the apartment building. She’s got the rifling aimed at the seneschal and ready, with Shara crouched beside her with a fresh clip.

  He watches her, thinking. Taty, he knows, is an unknown variable. If Malwina dies—which sounds extremely likely, considering what she’s about to do—then she won’t support Shara anymore, and Shara will, as far as he understands it, blink out of existence. And then Taty might “elevate,” ascending to her Divine state—and he has no idea what in the hells that could mean for everyone. Nothing good, probably.

  He focuses back on the job. He can’t see Ivanya anymore, which is good. She seemed to accept his task without hesitation. Hopefully she’s ready.

  Hopefully they all are.

  Sigrud watches the streets. Everything is silent. Everything is still.

  He raises a hand. Then he drops it.

  Taty opens fire, letting off six quick shots at the seneschal, emptying the rifling. She does a good job, with three shots striking the creature in the chest and shoulders, and one in the head. The seneschal recoils, surprised and irritated: he suspects that, for the seneschal, being hit with rifling rounds is a bit like being stung by a wasp.

  As she fires, Sigrud sprints up the street, firing his pistol up at the seneschal, which infuriates it further—but he makes a point of running around it, toward the stairs, as if trying to take advantage of its confusion.

  The seneschal, however, is having none of it: it shakes off its pain and frustration, dives to block his path, and lashes out at Sigrud, forcing him to leap back and roll away.