City of Miracles

11. Dreamscapes

They come to the city late the next morning. The tram car crawls down the cables through the Tarsils, then to the foothills, and then, suddenly, there it is.

Bulikov. The City of Stairs.

The sight of it takes his breath away. Sigrud hasn’t been here in twenty years, yet it’s all still the same, this huge, massive, ancient metropolis, with its tremendous dark walls, hundreds of feet tall and dozens of feet thick. He can see strange, tiny, curling structures peeking past the tops of the walls: massive staircases, reaching into the sky to end in nothing at all. The staircases, he knows, are not the most disturbing of the distortions and damages left behind by the Blink. Those he’s seen before, firsthand. Though probably they and nearly half the city were decimated in the Battle of Bulikov.

And yet, Bulikov survived. A city more than a thousand years old, still defiant despite the passage of time.

“It’s so strange,” says Taty, joining him, “to view a city from this angle.”

“I’ve seen it before,” he says lowly.

“What?” says Ivanya. “You have? Ah. Yes. That’s right. The flying ship.”

Ivanya and Sigrud’s moods are significantly darker than Taty’s: despite the conversation the night before, she’s positively bubbling over with excitement as they approach Bulikov. “See the walls there? I read all about those, they’re having immense infrastructural problems because the city needs to expand, to site more industrial facilities, to just do more stuff, and because the walls are nigh impenetrable and also because they’re, well, considered pretty holy, they haven’t made much progress there. Oh! And look there, you can see the tip of the Brost Tower, Auntie! Aren’t your firms the ones doing the financing for that?”

“Yes,” says Ivanya grimly. “Though I frankly never hoped to see it in person….”

Taty ignores her, rattling off facts and figures about Bulikov that do little to impress the adults. Sigrud peers out the window as they make their final approach. He sees their destination is a huge train station, built right up against the side of the walls of Bulikov, an iron-and-glass-roofed structure that’s just as large and beautiful and stately as the one in Ahanashtan. They certainly didn’t have that when he was last in Bulikov—and now that he’s closer to the ground, he realizes he knows this location on the side of the walls.

“Is that…Morov Station?” he says, incredulous.

“Well, of course it is,” says Taty. “What other station would it be?”

“That was the station Shara and I first used when we came to Bulikov,” he says. “It was this tiny, grubby dump of a station….We had to use an old coal train to get here.”

“I keep telling you both that Bulikov has changed,” scoffs Taty. “Everyone knows that!”

Ivanya rolls her eyes. “The girl hasn’t ever even been here before,” she mutters.

Sigrud narrows his eye. There’s a large crowd waiting for them—no doubt due to the disaster on the tram behind them. He can see uniforms, and the odd badge. “Police,” he says. “And the press. They must be waiting to talk to all the passengers.”

“What do we do?” asks Ivanya.

“I’ll find a way to break off from you two,” says Sigrud, “and evade them. Can you take the trunk and arrange for transportation, Ivanya, or should I steal a car?”

“I can get a car!” says Ivanya hastily. “We don’t need you breaking into things!”

“All right, then,” says Sigrud. He goes to the door. “I’ll go first. Meet me outside the train station in thirty minutes. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” says Taty.

Sigrud walks out into the cabin, where all the fretful passengers are gathering their luggage and lining up before the door. He tries to get close to the front. He can hear the crowd at the platform as they make the final stretch of the approach—the crowd must be big and anxious, which means it’ll be difficult to handle.

The doors are flung open, and Sigrud finds his suspicions were right: despite the best efforts of the Bulikovian police, things devolve into total pandemonium within seconds. The passengers bolt out to be greeted by loved ones, lawyers, business associates, members of the press, all shouting, crying, laughing, screaming….Sigrud takes stock of the situation, slinks through the side of the crowd, and makes for the train station doors within seconds.

He keeps walking, doesn’t look to the side, doesn’t look anywhere. No one notices. Everyone’s focused on the raucous chaos beside the tram car. With a slight sigh of relief, he slips into Morov Station.

Sigrud loops through the station, trying to spy out any more of Nokov’s operators. He suspects there aren’t any—after the Saypuri woman’s sudden transformation, he thinks Nokov threw nearly everything he had at them—but it’s best to make sure.

He sees nothing, to his relief. But while he looks, he can’t help but marvel at what a different place Morov Station is now. He compares it to the last time he arrived: stepping off the train to find a trembling little Pitry Suturashni waiting for them, bowing low and mistaking him, impossibly, for Shara. This place had been abandoned, dark, and dingy, yet now it’s full of light and noise and traffic, and shouted questions.

He waits until his time’s almost up, then moves out to the front of the train station. There are no automobiles waiting, except for a thoroughly absurd black limousine. He stops behind a column, frowns, and pulls out his watch, wondering where the two women are. Then he hears a high-pitched whistle.

He looks up to see Taty leaning out the back window of the limousine, smiling and waving to him. Sigrud stares at her, then slowly comes over.

“This is…not quite what I meant when I said transportation,” he says.

“Get in,” says Ivanya crossly from inside. “And stop scowling!”

Sigrud climbs in. The seats are large enough to allow him to sit comfortably. He looks back, befuddled, as the driver of the auto—a short, thickset Continental man in a shiny black cap—starts it up and pulls away.

“How…did we do this?” Sigrud asks.

“Auntie owns it,” says Taty happily.

“It’s the estate car,” explains Ivanya.

“The estate car.” Sigrud flicks a thumb over his shoulder. “And the driver is…”

“Choska,” says Ivanya. “My valet.”

“Your…valet.”

“Yes.”

“You have a valet.”

“Yes. I had to have someone to look after the estate while I was away, after all. It’s not a completely uncommon thing to have,” she says, nettled.

“It seems an uncommon thing for a sheepherder to have.”

“Yes, well, as you are the one who has dragged me back to Bulikov, I don’t believe you have any right to criticize me. I was happy where I was.” She peers out the window. “Or happier than I am here, at least.”

Taty pulls herself close to the window. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it! We’re actually in Bulikov! We’re really here!”

Sigrud can’t help but smile to see her reaction. When he first came here, Shara rode in the auto with her nose practically pressed to the glass, drinking in the sights of this mammoth, historic city—just as Taty acts now. Yet at the time Sigrud could have hardly cared a fig for any of it.

“Look at it!” says Taty in awe. “Just look at it all….”

Sigrud has to duck low to look out. “Yes,” he says, surprised. “Look at it.”

He sees now how different it all is. There are bright, resplendent buildings where there used to be ruins, modern brick structures with large, glass windows—he remembers very few windows had good glass when he was here last. The auto putters through clean, square avenues lined with electric lights, all clear of rubble or blockades. The surfaces of the streets are smooth and unbroken, which is powerfully strange, as he recalls the concrete and paving was as cracked and creaking as a sheet of warm ice. People walk the streets with the casual air of pedestrians going about their daily routines, rather than the anxious skulking that Sigrud remembers.

It’s all so modern, so organized. An elevated tram runs through the tall buildings, a face in every window of every car. Water fountains and shops and trees. An open-air market where people sell meats and fruit—actual, fresh fruit, something unobtainable in the Bulikov he remembers.

Every once in a while they come to some old warping of the world, a bruise in reality from the Blink. Yet they’ve gently papered over these as best as they could, turning these aberrations into small parks with a little sign next to them, stating: This is what happened here, this is what we remember, and this is what we know.

History—a thing so dreadfully suppressed and bickered over in the Bulikov he knew—stands unchallenged in the streets.

Finally they come to the Solda River. In his day this had been a field of frozen ice, with tiny fishing shacks and shantytowns clinging to its muddy shores; yet now there are docks, piers, millworks, refineries, industry. He watches as ships and barges slowly poke their way around the winding bends of the Solda. It’s a thriving place, a place people go to toil and work and think, a place where one could live.

“I can’t see the walls anymore!” says Taty. She laughs. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Sigrud turns to look back at the horizon. There’s no hint of the walls in sight: he forgot that they grew transparent once you entered them. “Oh. Right.”

“They’re going to try to drill another aperture in the walls, you know,” says Taty, “to allow passage to the planned industrial sites beyond. Factories and new housing and a larger rail yard.”

“Are they,” says Sigrud.

“Yes,” says Taty. “It’s all gotten too big. Too much is pouring into the city. These giant, Divine walls just can’t hold Bulikov anymore, not since Voortyashtan and the opening of the Solda.”

Sigrud pauses. “The opening of the Solda?” he asks quietly.

“Yes,” says Taty. “It changed everything, you know.”

Sigrud sits in silence, looking out on this thriving metropolis, remembering the young Dreyling woman who once told him: This is how civilization progresses—one innovation at the right time, changing the very way the world changes. It just needs one big push to start the momentum.

Signe, he thinks, did you make this place?

So much of the city is unfamiliar to him now—yet then they turn, and suddenly he recognizes the sight ahead.

He knows this lane, and that alley. He remembers clinging to a speeding auto here once, long ago. The driver had tried to smash Sigrud up against the wall of a building, a fate that Sigrud barely managed to escape.

He looks up at the building ahead. He knows this too.

The Votrov mansion. It’s still the same, from the bars in the gate out front to every brick in the walls. It’s almost exactly as it was when he came here last, so many years ago, except it’s day this time, and the house is totally empty: no laughing dinner guests, no parties, no chauffeurs—and no Shara Komayd to accompany him.

“This feels,” says Sigrud, “incredibly weird. To return to find this one place unchanged, of all places.”

“I quite agree,” says Ivanya. He glances at her. She looks pale and ill, and she keeps pushing back one strand of hair that doesn’t need to be pushed back any.

Sigrud watches her as they approach. She pinches the skin on the back of her hand so hard that her fingers tremble.

He reaches across, grabs her hand, and squeezes it. “It is all right,” he says.

“You say so,” she says. But she gives him the briefest of smiles.

Finally they pull up before the massive front doors. Sigrud tries to open the auto door, but suddenly Choska’s there, opening it with a demure smile before hauling the giant trunk out of the back of the auto. Choska wheels it over to the manor entry and hauls open the front doors. Taty almost skips through them, and Sigrud slowly follows.

He skulks into the entry hall, which is just as grand and strange as he recalls: the chandelier of crystal slabs, the two huge hearths, and the hundreds of gas lamps, all of which are currently unlit.

He stares at one of the hearths, remembering how he glowered into the fire, drinking wine, thinking of his time in Slondheim. Yet Slondheim, he thinks now, would prove to be only a slight misery compared to the years ahead….

“It’s amazing!” says Taty, staring around herself.

“You keep saying that,” says Sigrud.

“Well, it is amazing.”

“You used to live in a mansion,” says Sigrud. “I’m not sure why this one is so amazing to you.”

“You two are no fun at all,” says Taty. “Everything you see you have to glower at.”

“We are not on holiday.”

“You weren’t stuck on Mother’s estate for years,” says Taty. She walks up the mansion stairs, her nose in the air. “I will make do with what’s available. I’m off to find the library, and read something actually decent for the first time in months.”

Sigrud watches her ascend and shakes his head, exasperated. “One must forgive the young,” says Ivanya’s voice behind him.

He turns and sees she’s standing at the threshold of the mansion. “Must one?” he asks.

“Well. It’s the polite thing to do.” She sighs deeply and walks through the door. “Shara told me about this—something Mother Mulaghesh had, and other soldiers. Battle echoes, she called it.”

“Yes,” says Sigrud.

“When everything feels like it’s still happening,” says Ivanya. “Like you’re still there, and it’s still going on.” She looks around. “And now I’m actually here. Did you ever have echoes?”

“Not of the Battle of Bulikov,” says Sigrud.

She sighs again. “The espionage business is a horrid bunch of shit, as far as I say.”

“I agree.”

“Well. The hells with it. Let’s unpack the guns. You and I have work to do, I expect.”

“We do,” he says. “Tomorrow evening I will go to the Solda Bridge to meet Malwina, and I wish to be prepared.”

“And then what?”

“I have no idea. But I would prefer you and Taty stay here. I don’t know what Malwina has planned. But I want Taty someplace defensible, and the bridge is not that.”

Ivanya laughs lowly as they open the trunk. “The sheer silliness of preparing guns,” she remarks, “when a volley of bullets means not one whit to your enemies.”

That night, after they’ve unpacked and washed up and eaten, Sigrud, Taty, and Ivanya sit on the upstairs balcony, looking out at the city. Taty, of course, wants to do nothing more than walk the streets and look at it all—but this Sigrud absolutely refuses to allow. So the balcony becomes something of a compromise, with Taty almost leaning over the railing, pointing out structures and asking questions while Ivanya and Sigrud do their best to answer.

“I remember Vo used to point things out to me,” says Ivanya, sipping wine. “Over there, Ahanas’s Well. And then over there, the Talon of Kivrey. Or, at least his father said those things used to be there.”

“It seems unlikely Vo would have known,” says Taty, “since those things disappeared decades earlier, during the Blink.”

“What happened to those buildings over there?” says Sigrud, pointing. “I remember there was some sort of big temple thing there….”

“It was destroyed during the Battle,” says Ivanya softly. “I know. I watched it happen from this very balcony. The streets filled up with silver soldiers…and the very sky spoke words of wrath.”

Tatyana asks Sigrud about the Battle, about Pangyui, about Vohannes and Shara and all their work here. He does his best to stumble through an explanation, but he suddenly feels like he knows very little. Perhaps he forgot it all, or perhaps he never really understood it to begin with.

He remembers Shara walking alongside him through the snowy streets of Bulikov, pointing out all the relics and historical sites. He’d been so bored, grimacing as she talked, yet his heart aches at the idea of her beside him now, saying her mad things about history or politics, pushing her glasses up her nose, her hair tied back in its messy bun, her movements redolent with the aromas of tea and ink.

What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.

Taty chatters on about all the fabulous things she’s read about Bulikov: all the plans, all the changes, all the developments, a brand-new world blossoming here on the banks of the Solda, things Sigrud and Ivanya barely understand.

“Could it all have been better?” asks Taty. “Could Mother have done a…a better job?”

“I am not one to say,” says Sigrud.

“I wonder if she was too tolerant,” says Taty. “Too indulgent. You have power but for a few brief seconds, and then…”

Sigrud frowns, remembering Taty’s words on the aero-tram—Perhaps the only way to clean a slate is with blood! He understands these were the words of a furious adolescent, but still—they disturb him.

“Things could have been better,” says Ivanya. “But things could also have been much, much worse.”

“Yes,” says Sigrud.

Taty looks out at the cityscape in silence for a moment. “Will I ever stop hating them? For what they did to Mother?”

“To live with hatred,” says Sigrud, “is like grabbing hot embers to throw them at someone you think an enemy. Who gets burned the worst?”

“Quoting Olvos,” says Taty.

“Oh. I thought Shara had come up with that one.”

“No. It was Olvos.”

“Well. Regardless. When will you lay down your embers, Taty?”

The girl stares out at the city. “I don’t know. Sometimes they’re the only things keeping me warm.”

She falls silent again. Sigrud glances at her sideways, and sees she’s passed out in her chair.

“She’s asleep,” he says, startled.

“It’s been a busy damned day,” says Ivanya. “Come on. Let’s take her to bed.”

Sigrud picks her up and carries her to a bedroom, then lays her on the sheets. She barely stirs. He realizes she must have been terrifically exhausted.

Sigrud and Ivanya return to the balcony in silence. They drink plum wine and watch the dark cityscape, not saying a word, staring out at the faint, shimmering suggestion of the walls of Bulikov.

“The world is no longer for us, is it,” says Ivanya.

“No,” says Sigrud.

“I turned my back on it for a handful of years, and suddenly it belongs to her now.”

“Yes. Perhaps her generation will do a better job with it. If she can learn to forgive.”

“Perhaps. I thought we would do a better job, me and Vo, back before the Battle. We thought we’d change everything. A joyous revolution.”

“So did Shara, I think,” says Sigrud, “when she returned to Ghaladesh.”

“A better world comes not in a flood,” sighs Ivanya, “but with a steady drip, drip, drip. Yet it feels at times that every drop is bought with sorrow and grief. It ruins us.”

“You are not ruined, Ivanya Restroyka,” he says.

She looks at him, first questioning, then half-smiling. “No?”

“No. I think you were asleep. But now you are awake.”

She turns back to the cityscape, bright and fiery in the sunset. “I forgot about the walls….How odd they are. How impossible. How impossible all of it is.”

Sigrud isn’t sure when they start holding hands. It simply happens, a movement as premeditated as a leaf falling from a tree. Her fingers are long and cold and wiry, yet they feel very hard, and real. He can’t remember the last time he held someone’s hand.

He’s also not sure when she kisses him—and it’s she that kisses him, very clearly so. It’s a passionate kiss, yet also a desperate one, as if they were two refugees scrambling across disputed lands, uncertain what tomorrow might bring.

He does not protest as she leads him to a guestroom. Not the master bedroom, he notes—she avoids that space. But as she leads him into the darkened room, he’s suddenly wracked with uncertainty: for so long, Sigrud has felt that his presence has brought nothing but woe to those he’s loved. His efforts at civilization, at domesticity, at intimacy, have all yielded the same result: tragedy and loss, followed by a retreat to the wilderness, to isolation and savagery, wishing that he’d never even tried.

But he doesn’t fight her. He recognizes that she wants to feel something, anything, besides what she’s feeling. And he does not blame her. He feels the same.

Afterward they lie in bed together, looking at the moonlight filtering through the slats in the shutters.

“Today was a good day,” she says. “I wouldn’t have ever thought coming back here would be. Yet here we are.”

“Yes.”

She shifts closer beside him. “We don’t get to choose many things. What happens to us, if we live or die, or who we love. But we can at least choose to admit, sometimes, that things are good. And sometimes, that is enough.”

“Sometimes.”

He lies there, listening to her as she falls asleep, her breaths like the slowing ticks of a metronome.

Then Sigrud hears a tap-tap from downstairs—perhaps footsteps. He tenses, listening more, then rises.

“Oh, what a surprise,” says Ivanya, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Leaving already.”

“I heard something,” he says.

“Sure you did.”

He puts on his trousers and shirt. “I really did.”

“Hmph.”

“I will be back,” says Sigrud, opening the door. “Stay here. And stay quiet.”

He pads outside, across the huge carpets, dancing from shadow to shadow until he comes to the top of the stairs. Then he peers out, and sees her.

Tatyana Komayd sits on the floor of the giant entry hall, wearing her white nightgown. Moonlight spills through the giant window above her, making her form indistinct in the soft illumination, a tiny, white splotch floating in a puddle of gray-blue.

Sigrud walks down the stairs. “Taty?” he asks.

“Hello,” she says softly. Her eyes are open, but her voice is dreamy.

“What are you doing up?”

“I…I had a dream,” she says. “About my mother.”

Sigrud cocks his head.

“Not my birth mother,” says Taty. “Shara, I mean.”

“A nightmare? It woke you?”

“No, not really a nightmare. It was the strangest thing….” Taty sighs deeply. “I dreamed of her here. In Bulikov. She was standing in the street, holding a black blade, and she used it to threaten a god that stood before her. It was all so real….”

Sigrud recognizes it immediately. “You dreamed of the Battle of Bulikov?”

“Mm. No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so. Because her hair was as I knew it, white as snow. And the god was not Kolkan.” She rubs her temple slowly, as if suffering a headache. “A battle of Bulikov, maybe. But not the Battle of Bulikov.”

“What are you saying?”

“What can one possibly say about such a dream?” She climbs to her feet, then stands there, thinking. “I think my mother is dead, Sigrud,” she says. She rises and begins to climb the staircase on the other side of the entry hall. “But I also think she’s still here. It makes no sense. I know it makes no sense. I know it is impossible. Yet in what place could two totally opposite, impossible things be true, besides Bulikov?” She pauses at the top of the stairs. “Maybe Auntie Ivanya was right.”

“Right about what?”

“Maybe we should have never come here. Maybe history weighs a little heavier here.” She looks over her shoulder at Sigrud. “I hope Malwina has something good for you tomorrow night, Sigrud. I hope this all was worth it.” Then she slips away into the shadows, and is gone.

Nokov walks along the walls of Bulikov, alone and troubled. It’s night now, true night, the moon pale and lonely above, wreathed with mist. He could make it night whenever he wished—to do such a thing is no more than a flexing of a muscle to him now—but he’s at his most powerful when true night has fallen, when the shadows lengthen and the forests flood with darkness, and the brightest of bonfires is reduced to a miserable little pinprick. That’s when he feels most at home, if he could be said to even have such a thing.

Winter will be here soon, he can feel it in the air. Winter, when the days grow short and the nights long. When he waxes strong, and encroaches steadily on the day like lines of infantry driving an enemy across a battlefield.

Yet when I succeed, he thinks (and he does not say if he succeeds, for there are no ifs to Nokov), day will be but a memory, and the world will be something bold and new.

But though he feels much at home now, in the depths of true night, he’s not here for comfort: such darkness grants him power, and with such power he can walk the walls of Bulikov, and feel…

Miracles. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, all quaking and whispering within the walls. Miracles of a sort one doesn’t see anymore, ones far beyond his means. The true Divinities wrought these walls long ago, when the world was still hot and fresh and young, as bright and bendable as metal at the forge. Nokov does not know if such miracles, such grand shiftings and warpings of the world, could even be possible nowadays.

He comes here often. Nearly every night, in fact, to walk the walls, and see, and sulk.

I could do it if I knew how, he thinks. If they had taught me how. If they had given me the power that I ought to have.

But he doesn’t know these things. He himself cannot fashion miracles like this. So instead he walks the walls of Bulikov, fingers grazing the surface of these mammoth constructs, and listens to the whispering miracles trapped in their depths….

One day, he thinks to them, you will be part of my domain.

If the miracles hear him, they do not answer.

It’s only because he’s listening so hard that he senses her approach, speeding north out of the mountains. At first he’s startled, even nervous, for her coming is furious and powerful and unmistakably Divine.

He wonders—Is this another child? A sibling? Why would one dare to approach me?

Yet then he realizes what this is, why this feels familiar. It’s a part of himself come to greet him.

She leaps down the mountaintops to him, dark and frantic. He waits at the bottom for her, and watches her approach, trying to understand what’s going on. Finally she stops and stands before him, this tall, oily, faceless figure of a woman, and he slowly understands.

“Mishra?” he whispers, horrified. “Is that you?”

The world stutters around him. Silence fills his ears. Yet in that silence are words:

<good evening sir how are you>

He stares at her, anguished and disgusted. He reaches out with one trembling hand, and she kneels before him. His fingers touch her smooth, featureless face.

“Oh, no,” he moans. “Oh, no, no, no…This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I wanted at all….”

A stutter of silence. Then:

<good evening sir how are you>

He reaches out to her, senses her mind, her spirit, and sees she is not truly Mishra anymore. Some thread of her intelligence remains, some piece of her that he knew and grew close to. But only a fragment. No more than that.

He shuts his eyes. He’d been waiting on her call, having heard about the disaster aboard the aero-tram. He assumed she’d been triumphant. Yet here she is, empty-handed, and so horribly malformed…

He gave her too much, he realizes. Too much of himself, too much for any one mortal to bear. She is now Silence, an aspect of the true night, the dreadful silence in the blackest of nights. Yet she is not completely Silence, for some piece of Mishra is ground into this creature’s being, so it exists in a warped half-state—not quite human, not quite Divine.

“I am so sorry, Mishra,” he says. “I am so, so sorry.”

She bows her head before him. Although she says nothing, he senses that she knows something is wrong, but cannot identify or articulate what it is.

Another stutter of silence:

<good evening sir how are you>

The same words, over and over again. He moans once more, filled with loathing for this marred creature, and himself for making her.

A flash of a memory: Vinya Komayd, standing in the window, smiling at him, gloating. You aren’t a true Divinity, child. Nor will you ever be. You can’t do the things they did. Give it up.

Nokov trembles with fury. His fingers clench into fists.

“This is their fault,” he whispers. “Their fault!” He glances at the walls. “And her fault, too. If they just…If she just…”

Silence looks up at him, head cocked.

“They’re here in Bulikov, aren’t they,” he says. “That’s where the tram was going. They aren’t hidden in the mountains, they aren’t in the depths of the sea, they’re here, right here, under our noses!” Nokov turns to face the walls of Bulikov, eyes burning. “I will find them. I promise, I will. And I’ll make this right.”

Silence leans close, as if trying to say something.

<good evening sir how are you>

“What’s that?” he says gently. “What are you trying to say?”

Silence holds her spear out and points at its very tip. Then she taps her right breast, as if indicating an injury.

She holds the spear blade out to him. Curious, Nokov reaches out and holds the point between his index and thumb.

The spear is as much a part of him as Silence herself is, wrought of his very heart and being. He feels it leap up to him, speak to him, tell him what it’s done….

The spear tells him about how it almost ran the dauvkind through, how it poked its way through his clothing, licked just the slightest few drops of his blood, there on his right breast, and burned and blackened his flesh in turn, putting its own stain within his body…

It hurt him. It touched him. And its taint is still upon him.

Nokov opens his eyes. He realizes that this tiny wound is still festering in the dauvkind somewhere: the spear remembers what it tried so hard to do, and desires to finish it. It’s as if the spear has marked its territory like a dog marking a tree, and now it can catch the scent of its target on the slightest breeze.

“We can feel him, can’t we,” says Nokov. “We can feel the wound we gave him…” He turns back to look at Bulikov. “And he’s here. But where shall he go?”

The next night, Sigrud hunches low as he skulks along the Solda River. A few errant flakes float down to where he stands, as if the wintry clouds above are sending out scouts to enemy territory. The moisture and the cold create a heavy mist that clings to the lampposts in the warrens of Bulikov, making spectral halos among the streets.

But I suppose, thinks Sigrud, it’s somewhat better than how dark everything used to be.

The riverside lanes are crowded with Bulikovians, Saypuris, and the odd Dreyling. How strange it is to see all three peoples here together, none of them attempting to throttle the others. The city facades, like the populace, are an interesting and diverse mix: sometimes there’s a scarred old relic, almost certainly from before the Blink; next, a clean, fresh, brick-and-mortar shop front; then a glass-and-steel construct, something commercial and cutthroat; and then at the end some paved-over lot with a small sign before it, telling the onlooker of what once stood here before the Blink.

The Solda Bridge is just ahead, and what used to be a thin bone of a bridge is now a sprawling, two-hundred-foot-wide thoroughfare with thick concrete supports. He remembers the Saypuri cranes and machines setting up shop before the Battle of Bulikov—they must have done their work and done it well.

But how shall I find Malwina on such a thing?

He climbs the footpath up to the bridge. It’s half auto roads, half market. Clattering autos and buses and limousines buzz past, the air behind them singed with exhaust. Little paper lanterns hang from the roofs of the market stalls. He sniffs: skewers of meat sizzle over bright red coals, coils of steam unfurl from the mouths of copper teapots. A warm, lively scene of a thriving metropolis.

Despite this, he shudders a little. The tiny cut on his chest from the spear aches curiously, burning hot or cold sometimes. He’s considered opening up the wound and trying to squeeze out the blackness like pus, but it hasn’t impeded his fitness yet, and with everything that he’s trying to do right now, it’s certainly not a priority.

He walks to the edge of the bridge and looks out. The waters of the Solda haven’t frozen over yet. But he remembers how they were once, many nights ago, when the Divine horror slunk below the ice and terrorized Bulikov, and he, armed with but some spears and some rope, did his best to battle it.

He lost, though. Urav the Punisher consumed him. And when it tried to subject him to the many hells that dwelled within his belly, somehow he survived, uninjured and defiant….

He looks down at his gloved left hand. And was that luck? Or something more?

A voice behind him: “You’re late, asshole.”

He turns. Malwina Gogacz stands behind him, arms crossed. She’s dressed like a boy, wearing an oversized brown coat, her mane of brown hair stuffed up under a small black cap. Her expression is familiar: impatience and acidic contempt.

“You said evening,” he says.

“Yeah, evening.” She points up at the night sky. “It’s fucking dark! That’s way past evening. How did you ever get anything done with Shara?”

“I’m here,” he says. “And it was not easy to get here. Many people could have died along the way.”

“Yeah, the aero-tram. I heard. It’s all over the papers. So that was you? Were you followed here?”

“I do not think so.”

“You don’t think?”

“I dropped a tram car on our attacker’s head,” says Sigrud. “She might have survived, but I do not think she was happy about it.”

“So…” Her mouth works as if chewing on this news. “She was Divine, eh? Your attacker?”

“She wasn’t at first; at first she was just human. But after I put a few holes in her guts, she panicked and she…ate something. And changed.” He describes the metamorphosis to her.

Malwina spits on the ground. “Shit. That’s bad news. Sounds like he fed her a piece of himself. Dangerous business, that. He’s either desperate or insane.” She turns to look south. “And there’s something…out there. Something new.”

“What is it?” He looks south, but he can’t see a thing. But of course he wouldn’t, as the walls are invisible.

“I don’t know. There’s always pressure on the walls…perhaps his pressure, I suppose. But there’s more of it now. A lot more. It’s bad, whatever it is. And the walls are testy.”

“As in, the walls of Bulikov?”

“What other walls might I mean? There’re miracles in them, bouncing through them, keeping them standing. A big, bright chain of agreements and strictures, all of them as flustered and nervous as a bunch of larks in a cage. It’s bad news, whatever it is. I don’t like it. But it’s out of my hands. What about Restroyka and Tatyana? You didn’t think to bring them?”

“I bring them to places that are safe,” says Sigrud. “The last times I’ve seen you, I’ve been nearly set on fire or fallen to my death in an old shipwreck. So, the precise opposite of safe.”

“But they are somewhere secure?”

“For now. They have instructions if I do not return by morning.”

“Good. Your presence has been requested.”

“Where? By whom?”

She rolls her eyes.

“You cannot say,” says Sigrud.

“I can’t speak of the place,” she says, “or anything in it, unless I’m inside it. It’s part of going to ground.”

“Fine. So how do we get there?”

Grumbling, Malwina pulls out a grimy pocket watch. “We’ve got…Four hours to do this. I wanted more, but you were late. After four hours, the window closes, and we have to wait another period for it to open, which is time I don’t want to spend in here with the walls chattering away. Can you still spot a tail in a crowd?”

“Some things,” he says, “you don’t ever forget.”

“Good.” She turns and starts pacing away. “Then come on! Follow me. And watch the streets.”

Sigrud catches up to her. “Four hours to do what?”

“To walk the walls of Bulikov,” she says, “and unlock all the locks.”

What follows is a mad dash through the darkened warrens of Bulikov, keeping to the shadows, the gullies, the forgotten, peripheral parts of the world, the places denizens aren’t supposed to see anymore. Sigrud and Malwina dart across alleys and ditches, slink through streets and gardens, dance along stretches of rusty piping, and, once, climb the supports of the elevated train and sprint a block down the line before climbing back down.

Finally Malwina points at a vacant lot ahead. “There,” she says. She hardly seems winded at all.

They creep to the edge of the vacant lot. Sigrud goes first to check for assailants. Thorny weeds and broken glass litter the mud. Someone made their nest in the corner once, sleeping under an old bed frame that’s been crudely converted into a tent. But they seem to be long gone.

Sigrud waves to Malwina. She hops up, trots across the lot, and walks down the far line of fence boards, all broken and splintered like a mouthful of ill-kept teeth.

She keeps looking back over her shoulder at the walls of Bulikov. They’re quite close to the walls now, so the curve of the huge facades is a little visible, but just barely.

Finally Malwina stops, says, “Ah!” and kneels at the wooden fence.

He watches carefully. She reaches out with her index finger and carefully strokes one insignificant-looking fence board. But her finger leaves a faint dark streak, like her very touch burns it, yet the burn fades quickly.

As she finishes, something…changes. Shifts. Moves. It’s as if the entire city block has been jacked up one quarter inch: the tiniest change to the world, but noticeable.

Sigrud looks around, but whatever the change was, it doesn’t seem to be visible. Yet he’s been around miracles before, so he knows that felt like a very big one. “What was that?”

Malwina stands and walks away. “Come on. We’ve got four more to do.”

“Four?” he says. “What, across the entire city?”

“What other city did you plan on visiting tonight?”

“Why not just get an auto?”

“What? I can’t get an auto. I don’t have a damned automotive permit, or money.”

“I mean steal an auto.”

“I don’t know how to steal an auto.”

Sigrud throws up his hands in frustration and walks away down the street toward a seedy-looking office building.

“Hey!” cries Malwina. “Hey, where are you going? We need to get moving.”

She peers down a dark alley, looking for him among the shadows. She frowns as there’s a clink, then a clank, followed by a loud clunk.

“Sigrud?” she calls.

Then there’s a roar of an engine, headlights blare to life, and a rattling, clattering, ill-maintained automobile comes shooting out of the alley. It screeches to a halt before her. Sigrud sits hunched up in the front seat, almost too big to fit.

He cranks down the driver’s-side window. “Get in. And please tell me where we are going.”

Malwina tenses up as Sigrud wheels the auto around a corner. “How many autos have you stolen before?”

“A lot. They are the lifeblood of an operation. Steal a car, drive it somewhere, kill a man, drive it into the river, and so on, and so on.”

“Uh, how many times have you done that before?”

“What’s this place we’re going to?”

“The opera house. Three blocks ahead.”

Sigrud turns the corner and wheels the auto to a stop a few feet down from the opera house, its alabaster walls gleaming in the mist. The doorman at the front peers at them, wondering what such a junked-up vehicle could be doing coming to the opera, but Sigrud hasn’t parked close enough for him to really care.

Malwina hops out, sprints across a splash of golden light from the opera house’s windows, and examines the gray brick wall with the air of someone reading a newspaper. Then she finds one brick—one that seems no different from the rest—and carefully draws a symbol on it, some kind of loop with a streak through it.

Again, the brick turns dark at her touch. Again, the faint, distant feeling of things…shifting.

Sigrud glances out the window at the nearby walls of Bulikov, which again are hardly visible…except they seem to gleam or glisten very, very slightly.

Malwina hops back in the car. “Let’s go. Old Quarter next. Northwest.”

Sigrud pulls out and starts driving, careful to mind the speed limit. Malwina peers out the back window, watching the traffic behind her.

“There are no tails,” says Sigrud.

“Says you.”

“The streets of Bulikov were not built for autos. If someone was following us in an auto, it would be terribly obvious. We have no tails.”

“You worry about the physical realm,” says Malwina. She narrows her eyes. “I’ll worry about all the other ones.”

Sigrud glances sideways at her, trying not to feel too concerned about that comment.

“It is like tumblers in a lock, is it not?” he asks after a while.

“What?” says Malwina.

“Like tumblers in a lock, or a combination in a lock…A gesture you must make at the specific time and the specific place, using a specific device. And once you’ve done them all, then somewhere a door opens. Is that it?”

Malwina turns away, looking out the window. He expected that she couldn’t discuss this—whatever the Divine strictures were placed on her are, they’d certainly prohibit discussing whatever mechanism she’s manipulating—but it’s still fun to needle her.

“This next stop,” says Sigrud, “in the Old Quarter. Is it close to the walls?”

“Yes.”

“Does this mechanism you’re activating use the walls somehow?”

She glares at him.

“Like you said,” he tells her, “there are lots of miracles bouncing around in them. Maybe if one was clever enough, one could create other miracles to ride off their energy, just a little, to power something secret? Like resting a teapot upon a steamship’s boiler. Not nearly as complicated as powering a whole boat, but it heats the water well enough.”

Malwina clenches her teeth. “You’re not stupid. I can see why she wants to talk to you.”

“Who?” says Sigrud.

She sulks in silence as they drive on into the night.

The auto jumps and quakes as its narrow wheels attempt to navigate the cobblestoned, pockmarked streets of Bulikov. In some places, the city’s worked on the roads; in others, it’s not quite there yet. Though I hope, thinks Sigrud as they hit another pothole, that our vehicle survives the journey.

Malwina sits hunched in the front seat, her pale face almost hidden behind the collar of her oversized coat. “You know about our domains?” she asks.

“Domains?”

“The domains of us, the siblings. The children of the Divine. Our jurisdictions over reality.”

“Somewhat.”

Her queerly colorless eyes stare out at the road ahead, strobed by the lights of oncoming autos. “It’s like this. Some domains are inelastic. They are what they are. They aren’t changing. They can’t be interpreted to be other things, to contain other things. But other domains are elastic. They’re expansive. They can grow. Like a sinkhole in the earth. You know what a sinkhole is? When a salt dome way underground gets penetrated by the tiniest bit of water, and then it just starts eating away at it? The sinkhole grows, and grows, swallowing up anything, everything. Cars. Houses. Whole trees. You name it.” Her face is grim and closed. “That’s what some of those domains are. We are our domains. And some of us are just hungrier than others.”

Sigrud wonders what sort of domain Taty might be. Perhaps something to do with math, or commerce, since she’s so good at economics—or predictions, maybe. “And are you such a domain?”

She scoffs. “Hells no. I’m the past, remember? The past is the past. It’s fixed, unchangeable, unattainable. But our enemy…He’s elastic. Very expansive, so to speak. His domain represents something primitive, something primal. The long night, the first night. That fear you feel when you’re all alone in your house, and all the rooms feel so dark? That’s him. That’s him leaking into your frail little bit of civilization, that first, dangerous night mankind spent out under the skies. You think you’ve walled him out, evolved past such savage peril—but you worry sometimes you haven’t. That’s what that fear is. He’s still out there, circling your walls, trying to find a way in.”

“So how is he so expansive?”

“Because other domains fail before such a thing,” says Malwina. “He’s devoured the siblings that represent innovation, laughter, deep conversation, and many others. Because you don’t laugh or think or talk when in such darkness. He’s even devoured the siblings representing physical phenomena, like Mozshi, who was the Child of the Green Hill Grasses, or Vokayen, the Child of the Icy Mountain Streams. Because these concepts, these meanings stop mattering when eclipsed by the first night. The grass is still there, the streams are still there, sure—but what they mean to people doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters when you’re inside him. Not during the long night. Do you see?”

Sigrud grunts. He’s always had a poor head for such abstractions—and these abstractions are about as abstract as an abstraction could get—but he understands the premise. “He has an edge on all of you. And he is expanding, like an invader.”

“Yes. And with each one of us that he devours, each domain that is merged into his, he grows stronger. He is…” She looks out the window, thinking. “He is reinterpreting himself. Reimagining his domain.”

“Into the last night,” says Sigrud. “As you said.”

“Yes,” she says.

“And what will he do, once he has you all?”

She sits in silence for a lone time. “I worry the very skies will fail,” she says. “All light will perish. And he will become creation incarnate.”

“And then?”

“And then, Mr. Sigrud, there will be no more then.”

They make three more stops, all close to the walls of Bulikov. Malwina runs her finger along the side of a lamppost by the front gates of Bulikov, the back of a bench in the park where the great Seat of the World once stood, and finally at one corner she scrambles out, lifts a manhole, and touches a single rivet in its underbelly. Each time, the world shifts. Each time, things grow a little more and more different. Until finally…

“It’s done,” she says quietly. She looks up at the sky, and he does the same. “Do you feel it?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s like…like the skies are a little bit closer than they ought to be.”

“We’ve brought the gate close. But now we need to meet the gatekeeper.”

“Another step?”

“I don’t know about you,” says Malwina as she climbs back into the auto, “but I take security seriously. Come on. Take us back to the Solda Bridge.”

They ride in silence. Everything feels oppressively close, as if the air is too thick, or the streets too narrow. Even the people on the sidewalks seem to feel it, wrapping their coats tight and shivering.

“It’s the walls,” says Malwina quietly. “They have miracles in them that help people forget that they’re there, miracles on top of the miracles that make them invisible or indestructible or what-have-you. Those miracles, the forgetting ones—they’re getting strained.”

Sigrud pulls over and parks the car a few yards down from the Solda Bridge. “By your locking mechanism.”

Malwina steps out and walks toward the underside of the bridge. Before she enters its shadow, though, she stops and looks up: at the streets, at the rooftops, at the windows and the alleys.

“You see anything?” she asks as Sigrud catches up.

“Nothing that alarms me.”

She crinkles her nose. “Guess it’s just nerves. But I feel like…” She shakes her head. “Never mind. Let’s get to it.”

He follows her under the bridge. There’s a small shantytown of beggars and the destitute under here, taking advantage of the expanded bridge above. They mostly ignore Malwina and Sigrud as they walk through their ranks—but one man stands and walks almost in lockstep beside Malwina, a stooped old creature with rheumy eyes.

“Something’s up,” he says to her in a rattling croak.

“I know,” she says. “I feel it too.”

The old beggar looks back at Sigrud with a curiously keen stare. “This the dauvkind?”

“Yeah. I hope he’s worth it.”

“And you…are the gatekeeper?” says Sigrud.

He smirks. “Something like that.”

They approach the far back wall under the bridge, a blank, dusty concrete surface covered with cobwebs. Sigrud isn’t sure why the two seem to be heading straight for it, as there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly special about it, but then the wall seems to…shiver.

Or quake, maybe. It’s like the wall is the skin of a drum and someone on the other side has just given it a sharp tap, the concrete quivering and shuddering until it’s no more than a blur to his eyes.

Then the wall stops quaking. And when it stops, there’s a door in its middle—a very dull-looking wooden door with a beaten old doorknob.

“Ah. Oh,” says Sigrud.

Malwina lets out a long sigh. “Good. It worked.”

“So we did all that work,” says Sigrud, “for a door?”

“It’s a lot more than just a door,” says the beggar, opening it. “But your eyes see only what your eyes see, I suppose.” He bows low, as if they’re guests at court, and they all walk inside.

Within is a narrow, bland concrete hallway, lit by a single electric light in the otherwise featureless ceiling above. The beggar shuts the door, mutters, “Pardon me,” as he shoulders his way between them, and leads them down the hallway.

The hallway ends in a blank wall. Placed on the ground before the wall, though, is a solitary brick.

The beggar kneels before the brick, then glances back down the hallway, frowning as if he’d just heard something suspicious. Then he shakes his head, reaches down, and places his hands on the brick.

And then the brick…blossoms.

That’s the only word for it. The brick seems to unfold from within itself, frames of brick bursting out from its depth with a chalky, clacking sound. The frames of brick fill the end of the hallway, and then they begin to expand down the hallway, extending it, floors and walls and ceiling appearing out of nowhere….

Though into what, Sigrud can’t see. The end of the hallway is eclipsed by darkness.

“There we go,” says the beggar. Sigrud looks at him, about to ask what in the hells is going on. But then he sees the beggar isn’t a beggar anymore.

Standing in his place is a short, young Continental man, with dark skin, a bald head, and bright brown eyes. His fingers are long and dexterous, and there’s a curious cleverness to his face, as if he’s permanently been struck by a wondrous idea.

“Oh,” says Sigrud.

“Sigrud, this is Voshem,” says Malwina. “The embodiment of possibility.”

Voshem bows before him, again a strangely courtly gesture. “How do you do.”

“Of possibility?” asks Sigrud.

“Yes,” says Malwina. “Voshem’s domain is not over things that are, but rather as they could be. The hallway ahead,” she says, gesturing forward, “isn’t really there, but it could be there. And as long as Voshem is with us, then it’s as if it is there. Do you see?”

“No,” says Sigrud honestly.

Voshem smiles gently. “It is a bit tricky. The touchstones awaken the door, and I connect the door to the sanctuary. A two-step security system. I’ll take you as far as the stairs, and then I will leave you. Not wise to leave the key so close to the lock, one might say.”

The three of them continue on. The hallway doesn’t seem to get any narrower, but suddenly he and Malwina are forced to walk in single file, as if the walls had closed in without their noticing. He had feet of clearance when they first walked in, but now he has mere inches on either side of his shoulders. He worries he’ll have to start walking sideways to get through.

They keep walking. The hallway stretches on and on. He feels like they’ve been walking for ten minutes, maybe longer. Yet when he looks back over his shoulder he sees the door’s still there, a mere fifteen feet behind them.

Yet they are moving, he knows that. Moving through something, under something…

“This is all in the realm of possibility?” asks Sigrud. “So to speak.”

“We are passing through barriers,” says Voshem. “Divine barriers. Barriers that are almost impossible to pass through…”

“Except we have you,” says Sigrud.

“Correct. Much can be done with the slightest shred of possibility.”

Sigrud shuts his eyes and continues walking forward at the same pace, listening to the fall of his footsteps and trying to focus on what this feels like rather than what it looks like. It feels as if he’s walking through a sea of shifting sand, as if the material world is but an idea that hops into place when he looks at it, yet with his eyes shut there’s actually…

He opens his eyes and sees only the hallway.

I am deep in the belly of something Divine, he thinks, and I like it not at all.

“We’re close,” says Malwina.

Sigrud looks ahead and sees only the darkened end of the hallway. Then he looks back and sees they’re still no more than fifteen feet from the door they walked in through. “Are we.”

“Yes,” she says.

Something begins to emerge from the darkness ahead: a metal spiral staircase, which loops up past the ceiling into a blank concrete shaft.

The three of them stop at the foot of the stairs. “I will let you continue on alone now,” says Voshem. “I can’t stay still for long. It’s too dangerous.”

“Go, then,” says Malwina. She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “There’s something strange in the breeze tonight. Move quickly, find your safe places, and do not look back.”

Voshem nods, grim-faced, and turns and trots down the hallway. Malwina watches him until he slips out the door. Then the walls and floor of the hallway begin to quake and tremble….

“You’ll want to step back now,” she says.

Sigrud does so. Then the hallway seems to collapse inward, the long, narrow passageway flooding with dark stone, as if the granite and loam were a liquid, and then…

There’s nothing. Just a blank, dark wall where once there was a way out.

Malwina sighs heavily. She looks up the staircase. “Now we go up.”

The staircase feels a lot more physical and tangible than the hallway did, but this is of little comfort to Sigrud. Mostly because, if he’s gauging distance correctly, by now they’ve climbed enough stairs that they should be several feet above the Solda Bridge. But they’re still in the tall, blank shaft, climbing and climbing. The staircase just keeps going.

Their steps echo on and on. Sigrud’s calves start aching. He wonders if this place would deter Nokov just by how long it takes to get anywhere.

“You seem to be dealing with this all rather well,” says Malwina.

“It is not my first interaction with the Divine,” says Sigrud. “And it is comparably better than what I am used to.”

“Jukov and Kolkan probably don’t make the best impression of us, no.”

“He was the boy’s father, correct?”

“Jukov? Yes. Good guess.”

“Was he your father as well?”

She gags at the idea. “Absolutely not. That man, that thing was madder than a burning hare. No, no. My parents were Olvos and Taalhavras. Hope and order, you see.” She smiles. There’s a touch of acrimony to it, but only the slightest touch. “The past is a harsh, undeniable thing, like Taalhavras. It is what it is. Unrelenting, uncaring, just like all of his machines and devices. So I’m a bit like that. And yet people look back at the past, and in it they see…stories. Fables. Opportunity. Hope. Like her. So I’m a bit like that too.”

“I see.”

They keep climbing the stairs.

“Do you know what the worst part is?” asks Malwina.

“About what?”

“About being awake. About Jukov’s plan to hide us among families, and one day wake us up.”

“No. What?”

“It’s that…It’s that you remember,” says Malwina. “You wake up, and realize your true nature—you remember your Divine parents, the way things used to be….But you also remember your mortal parents. You remember what it was like to just…just be a kid, to be part of a family. You can’t forget that. I don’t think Jukov realized how damaging that would be.”

“Would you prefer to forget it all?”

Malwina sighs. “I don’t know. Sometimes.”

They keep climbing stairs.

“I have a question,” says Sigrud, now panting.

“Go ahead.”

“If Jukov died in the Battle of Bulikov,” he says, “how is it that the Divine children are still asleep? Why didn’t his miracle just vanish? Why didn’t they all wake up, all at once?”

“Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it?” says Malwina. “I wonder about that myself.” Her footsteps have stopped. Sigrud looks up and sees the stairs have finally come to an end in an odd room.

The room is long but narrow. One long side is dominated by two enormous wooden doors, over ten feet tall, with giant iron handles and small flaming sconces on either side. When he looks at the doors he hears a high-pitched eeeee in his ears, a note warbling at some frequency that makes it almost impossible for him to think.

She smirks at him. “Hear the noise?”

“Yes,” he says, wincing.

“Yeah. They don’t want you here. You’ve never been here before. They don’t trust new people. Anyways. You want to know what I think? About why some of the children are still sleeping, even though Jukov’s dead?” She turns to the doors, then pauses, her hands on the iron handles. Her head is slightly bowed, her face concealed by shadow. “I think they like it. They don’t want to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Being human. They like it. Subconsciously, they don’t want to wake up. So they keep dreaming, and remain children. For as long as they can.” She looks at him over her shoulder. “I wouldn’t want to forget.”

“Forget?”

“Everything. You asked me if I wanted to forget. The answer’s no. I want to keep it. Even if it hurts.” Then she hauls the giant doors open and steps inside. “Come in. But don’t touch anything.”

Sigrud steps through the big wooden doors and stares.

He’s standing in a long, low, dark room, like a vast basement, perhaps six or seven hundred feet wide. The far wall is lined with windows, allowing in a soft, blue light, like the light of a distant moon. The ceiling is supported by short, fat stone columns marching in rows across the chamber. And between all the columns are beds.

Dozens of beds. Hundreds of beds. Maybe many hundreds, all spaced out evenly so that to his eye he’s looking out at a huge grid of beds. The beds themselves are unexceptional, the sort of utilitarian cots one would find at a hospital or an orphanage, with plain white linens, plain white pillows, and next to each bed is a plain wooden table, on top of which is a small, flickering lantern.

Lying in every bed is a person. Or, more specifically, a young adult. The youngest occupant he sees looks around eleven; the oldest looks to be about twenty. But they all slumber softly, their dozing faces lit by the soft hues of their bedside lamps. He’s so transfixed he barely notices the huge doors swinging shut behind him.

“Is this a…a hospital?” asks Sigrud.

“No,” says Malwina. “It’s our place of last refuge.” She lets out a breath. “Oh, it’s good to be here, to be able to talk about this now. You’ve no idea how many rules are bound up into this place, it’s like taking off a particularly brutal undergarment….”

Sigrud walks over to one bed and peers at its occupant. It’s a girl of middle teen years, her hair a dull gold, her eyebrows queerly yellow. She mutters something in her sleep and rolls over.

“Don’t touch the bed,” says Malwina.

“Are these children…Divine?” asks Sigrud.

“Yes,” she says, walking over to join him. She looks out on the sea of beds and lanterns, and for the first time she looks vulnerable and uncertain. “All of them. The ones who we could save, at least. Here they live unnoticed by him.”

Sigrud stares into the sleeping girl’s face.

“Why do they sleep?” he asks.

There’s a strange voice from behind him: “It was the simplest solution.”

Sigrud whirls around, surprised. He glimpses someone standing in the darkness beside a nearby column and instinctively reaches for his knife.

Suddenly Malwina’s on him, shoving his hand away. “No! No. Trust me, you don’t want to do that.”

Sigrud looks closer at this new person. She steps forward, into the light. She’s a short, teenage Continental girl, with big, wide-set eyes and a crooked mouth. She has no hair: she seems to have shaved it all off. She wears loose-fitting, white linen clothing, and though normally her appearance would cause Sigrud to think of someone in a mental ward, there is a calm, steady sanity in her gaze. Unnervingly steady.

She doesn’t do or say anything. She just watches Sigrud with her big, calm, wide-set eyes.

“Who is this, Malwina?” asks Sigrud.

The new girl blinks, looks at Malwina in surprise, and smiles. “Malwina?” she says, incredulous.

“Shut up,” says Malwina. “Some of us like our mortal names.”

“Some of the mortal names are pretty good. That one, though, is not.” She turns her unblinking stare back on Sigrud. “So this is the dauvkind?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that,” says Malwina. “Yes. Who else would it be? Sigrud, this is Tavaan, the spirit of slumber and dreams. She has control over this place.”

“Control?” he asks.

“This place exists within her reality,” explains Malwina. “Within her mind, in a way.”

“That sounds very painful,” says Sigrud. “I hope it at least has some benefits.”

Tavaan lifts a hand and snaps once.

Sigrud looks at her hand, curious, and sees it’s gone. Actually, now that he looks, Tavaan and Malwina are both gone. He looks around himself and sees he’s somehow been instantly transported to the other side of the chamber, far away from them, without his even noticing. Tavaan and Malwina are tiny dots in the distance, though he can see Malwina whirling around, looking for him.

Tavaan’s voice echoes over to him: “It has a few.”

Another snap, this one much fainter, and he’s back where he was. Again, his senses report no change in the air or sound or gravity. It’s as if the room moved around him without his being aware of it at all.

“I…see,” says Sigrud.

“She’s trying to intimidate you,” says Malwina, glaring at Tavaan. “Don’t let her.”

“And yet you were the one warning him not to pull a knife on me,” says Tavaan.

“I didn’t want you to put him in deep sleep,” says Malwina. “That’d be hazardous for his damned health! That one woman fell over and broke her jaw!”

“But according to what you say,” says Tavaan, “it might not work on him.”

Sigrud glances between the two young women. “You know I can hear you—yes?”

Tavaan sighs and rolls her eyes. “Did she tell you not to sit in the beds?”

“She said not to touch them….”

“Good,” says Tavaan. “You’ll pass out, and it’ll be tricky for us to wake you up. They’re intended to knock out someone Divine, so a mortal like you…it might make your heart stop.”

“So the beds are miraculous?”

“Yes,” says Tavaan. She walks down one line of beds, gazing at the sleeping occupants. “When we use our Divine abilities, when we warp and change reality around us, our enemy senses it. He smells it. That’s how he got the jump on us in the first place. For those who were awake, we could just sit around existing and he’d pick up on it. Those who slept, unaware of what they are, they could remain hidden from him, but those of us who knew ourselves…The very world changes as we merely walk through it. And when we congregated, meeting in groups of twos and threes, we were lit up bright before him, targets painted on our foreheads.”

“Are you not vulnerable here?” asks Sigrud.

“This place exists inside my domain,” says Tavaan. She taps the side of her head. “Inside of me. It’s not quite so attached to reality. So it’s much harder for him to feel us here.”

“So it’s like her domain,” says Sigrud. “Like the shadow place the enemy pulled me into.”

“Not quite that intense,” says Tavaan. “But close to it.”

“It’s a dangerous play,” says Malwina, “maybe a desperate one, but we’ve kept them alive for years doing it. The ones who didn’t opt in to Tavaan’s sanctuary…they didn’t last long. He got to them quick. We take what victories we can get.”

“Yes, such a grand victory,” says Tavaan. “You get to run around and make a mess of things out there, while I’m stuck in here all alone.”

“I did visit you,” says Malwina.

“Three times,” says Tavaan. “Three times in the past year!”

“I brought you hot chocolate!”

“Yes, but no hot water to make it with.”

“I said I was sorry about that.”

“Sorries,” says Tavaan, “don’t taste nearly as good as hot chocolate.”

Sigrud loudly clears his throat. “Why am I here?”

“Why?” snorts Tavaan. “To try something damned desperate.”

“That’s because we’re damned desperate,” says Malwina. “Tavaan, listen to me—he tried to make a seneschal.”

Tavaan’s eyes widen. “He what?”

“You heard me. It sounds like it didn’t go right, but the fact that he even tried…”

“He thinks he’s as powerful as a Divinity,” says Tavaan.

“And he almost is. It almost worked. We’re not winning this fight alone.”

“Is that why you asked for me to come?” Sigrud says to Tavaan. “To help you plan a strategy?”

Tavaan looks surprised. “Me? I didn’t ask you to come here.”

Sigrud turns to Malwina, frowning. “You said…You said she wants to talk to me. Who is this ‘she’?”

Tavaan’s expression softens. “Ah. He doesn’t know.”

“No,” says Malwina darkly. “He doesn’t.” She sighs a little, then says, “The Divine children…they’re not the only people we’ve hidden here. Follow me. Just a bit farther.”

Sigrud follows her, still feeling bewildered. Between their strange journey to unlock the door under the Solda Bridge, then to travel through it to this bizarre sub-reality, and then to meet this mad-looking girl who claims to be slumber incarnate…He can’t fathom what he’s doing here or how they expect him to help, especially when he can hardly understand what’s going on at any given moment.

He sees Malwina is leading him to the far wall, where the windows are. The windows look out on a navy-blue night sky, alight with stars, but situated before the largest one in the middle is a large overstuffed chair, facing away from him.

There is someone sitting in the chair: he can see a hand on the armrest, small and brown, with ink-stained fingers.

They get closer. And then he smells something…familiar.

Tea. Pochot tea, powerful and acrid.

Ink, lots of it, thick and dark.

And then there’s the smell of very old parchment, and books, and dust, the scents of a library and all its musty tomes….

Sigrud stops walking.

“No,” he says. “No. It cannot be.”

Malwina rounds the chair, then looks over its top at him. “Come on, Sigrud,” she says gently. “Come here.”

“I can’t believe it,” he says. His face is trembling. “I…I can’t, I can’t. It is a trick.”

Malwina shakes her head. “No trick. Just come here. I’ll only be able to wake her up for a short period. So hurry.”

Wobbling, Sigrud walks over to the overstuffed chair and slowly steps around it. And he sees her.

Though she has aged, she is still very much the woman he once knew: small, unassuming, with a closed face and large eyes, magnified even larger behind her thick glasses. Her eyes are closed, as if dozing. Her face has many, many more lines than he remembers, and her hair, done up in a haphazard bun, is the sort of white one can only get prematurely, a sort of snowy mane that contrasts brilliantly with her dark skin. She wears a plain blue dress and a white button-up sweater, and she leans against the side of the chair with her temple resting against the left wing, face pinched as if the position is slightly uncomfortable to her.

The woman who made his life as he knows it now. The person who saved him from the depths of prison after he’d lost everything, and given him hope.

“Shara,” whispers Sigrud. His mouth is dry. He looks at Malwina and swallows. “How can this be? How…How can she be alive?”

Then Shara stirs, taking in a long, slow, rattling breath. She says in a croaking voice, “I’m not.” She opens her eyes, blinking in the light of the windows. “I’m not. I died, you see.”