City of Miracles

12. Ambassador

Sigrud stares at her. He simply can’t process this. Her death was something he’s lived with every day for the past month, something he woke up to in the morning and fell asleep to at night. To have it proven wrong, to have something he believed in so much blown apart like the head of a dandelion…

“Turyin…Turyin said she saw your body,” he says faintly.

“She probably did,” says Shara, soft yet amused. She sounds exhausted, though, the tone of a sick woman tolerating bedside visitors.

“They had a giant funeral for you in Ghaladesh,” he says.

“Yes, Malwina brought me the paper,” Shara says. “Such lovely flower displays…”

“And they burned you,” says Sigrud, “and put your ashes in a tomb.”

“That they did,” she says, nodding. “I am not arguing with you about any of this, Sigrud.”

“Then…Then…Then who was cremated? Whose ashes are in that urn in that tomb?”

“Mine,” says Shara. She smiles faintly, and her eyes grow a little wider. “Look at you, Sigrud….My goodness. You’re just as I remember you. It’s amazing, isn’t it.”

“Shara,” says Sigrud. “Shara, please—how…How did you survive?”

She sits up a little and gives him a level stare. “Sigrud. Listen to me. I have said this repeatedly. I did not survive. I died. And I am…I am not really Shara Komayd. I am not the woman you knew.”

Sigrud looks at Malwina. “So it is a trick.” He reaches out for Shara’s hand—she does not withdraw—and touches it. It feels warm, though the skin is soft and loose, the hand of an old woman. “But she feels real enough….”

“She is Shara,” says Malwina. “But just a moment of Shara.”

“Specifically, the moment just after the bomb went off,” says Shara. She lifts the right side of her dress. He sees drops of blood along her ribs there, tiny entry wounds and perforations.

He kneels, shocked. “Shara…You are hurt.”

“I am quite aware of that,” says Shara.

He reaches out to her wound. “Here, let me…Let me take a look at it, we can find some bandages and—”

“There’s no need. I’ve been dealing with it for weeks now.” She looks at Malwina. “It has been weeks, right?”

“Just over a month since the assassination,” says Malwina. “It’s been five days since I last woke you.”

“Oh, good,” says Shara. “Not too long, then.” She turns back to Sigrud. “Listen, Sigrud. Sigrud?”

He can’t stop staring at the wound in her side. He can’t understand any of this, so he keeps focusing on this one thing he could fix, maybe, just maybe. “I have a medical kit at the house, I could…I could…”

“Sigrud,” says Shara gently. “Please look at me, and pay attention.”

He blinks, tears himself away, and meets her gaze.

She smiles. “There. Just listen to me. The bomb did go off in Ahanashtan, yes. And I was right beside it, yes. But Malwina got to me right as the bomb went off. She couldn’t save me from its blast, couldn’t shield me from its damage—she could not stop me from dying, in other words. But she could preserve the tiniest sliver of time right as it happened. She took that tiny sliver and kept it going, perpetuating it long past when it would normally expire. And that is what you see before you now. I am not Shara, Sigrud, not truly. I am but a moment from her past, suspended here in the present, stretched out thin among all the seconds you’re experiencing.”

“Which is a tremendous violation,” says Malwina. “And a real pain in the ass to maintain.”

“Malwina bends the past around me, and through me.” Shara groans slightly, as if sensing such a bend. “Certain parts of me progress at different rates—specifically the wounded parts of me, which go very slow. It is not a state I would ever recommend to another person.” She takes a rattling breath. “Not to disparage Malwina’s efforts, but dying is probably preferable. But she protects me, and wakes me at times for counsel. They’ve been kind enough to give me safe harbor.”

“Safe harbor,” scoffs Malwina. “It was your idea to build this little pocket reality within Tavaan in the first place. We’d all be dead if you hadn’t come up with it.”

“How much credit is owed to someone who says, ‘Do this,’ and does very little themselves is debatable,” says Shara.

“So…you can keep it going forever?” says Sigrud.

Malwina and Shara exchange a glance. “Malwina—leave us for a moment, please,” says Shara. “Sigrud and I have a lot to discuss. And much to do.”

Shara pulls her sweater tight around her shoulders. Sigrud drinks in how she sits, how she moves: she rubs her right wrist, which is slightly swollen with arthritis. Her legs are positioned awkwardly in the chair, placed as if to avoid putting further pressure on her back. And her eyes are so terribly sunken and tired, as if she hasn’t slept since he last saw her, in the window aboard his tiny ship outside Voortyashtan thirteen years ago.

She smiles wearily at him. “It is not all the effects of Malwina’s miracle.”

“What?”

“How I look. What Malwina’s done to me is taxing, yes, but…So was my life. I put my body through more than anyone ought to. I am old, Sigrud. Or perhaps I should say I was old. Who knows, with all this Divine trickery. But you…You are…” She searches his face, but unlike Mulaghesh, she doesn’t seem surprised by what she finds. Rather, all the pleasant bemusement evaporates from her face, leaving behind an expression he knows well—Time for business.

“Malwina mentioned you found the Salim,” says Shara. “Which means you must have talked to Turyin. So you must have received my message. Yes?”

Sigrud sits at the foot of her chair, feeling like a child listening to his grandmother tell a tale. “Yes.”

She sits back, looking pained but pleased. “Ah. Good. So satisfying when plans go right—even if you are making plans about your death.”

“You planned to die?”

“Oh, I’ve always planned to die,” says Shara. “That’s always been rather unavoidable. It’s just which death I would meet—that required some thinking. How odd it is, to know what end I found. It seems deserving, doesn’t it? After all our skullduggery, it’s a Saypuri agent who topples Komayd. I’m surprised Khadse was able to get through.”

“Through the wards around the Golden?”

“Yes. How did he manage to do it? Did you ever find out?”

“Miracles in his coat, and shoes. I used them to help Malwina get out.”

“Ah. Well. There it is.” She looks at him, and her face is no longer half so humorous: she looks hungry, and worried. “And…And Taty. You found her?”

“Yes.”

“And you and Ivanya kept her safe?” she asks quickly.

“Yes. The enemy has not been close to her yet. She’s safe in the Votrov mansion now, here in Bulikov.”

Shara lets out a long, slow sigh. “That I would not have preferred….Just like in the past, all things gather to Bulikov, friend and foe alike. But there are so few safe places in this world anymore. We must all cling to our oases. How is she doing?”

“She is…grieving,” he says. “For you, Shara.”

She sighs slowly. “Yes. As she should. The things I have put her through…”

“She is strong,” says Sigrud. “Or she is learning to be strong. But…Shara…Why did you not tell me who she was?”

“Who she was?” says Shara.

“Yes. That Taty was…” He looks at her. “That she is Divine.”

Shara is silent. Her face is grave, and she suddenly seems terribly frail.

“She is related to Malwina, isn’t she,” says Sigrud. “She looks so much like her….Taty is her sister. Isn’t she?”

Shara’s mouth works, as if disliking the taste of the words she is about to say. “Yes,” she says softly. “Yes, clever Sigrud, you are right. They are twins, in fact. Not identical, but twins.”

There’s a long, long silence.

“Malwina is the child of the past,” says Sigrud. “And Taty…Taty is the Divine child of the future. Isn’t she?”

Something in Shara’s face seems to crumple at these words.

“It was something Malwina mentioned,” Sigrud says. “About domains. That is how Taty can sometimes know what is about to happen.”

Shara is silent for a long time. When she finally speaks, her voice is again but a croak: “I found her in Bulikov, you know. Just before Voortyashtan. I toured the Continent, seeing how my policies were being implemented. The press raved and ranted about it. Thought I was defecting from Saypur, going to the country I truly loved. Such mad stuff…But did you know, I found that things were not much better? Not really, I mean. Refugees everywhere. Starvation. Corruption. And the orphanages…By the seas, so many orphans. I went to one orphanage, and these little creatures were hardly more than skeletons. I could see the bones in their faces, in their shoulders. And then there was this one little girl, coughing….”

She bows her head. “I was drawn to her. I didn’t know why. We talked. She said she liked math a lot. She talked on about it for a while, the way children do. And then she asked if she could come home with me. I said no, because I had to, of course—I was on a damned diplomatic tour, you see, one can’t just swing by and pick up an orphan. But her request stuck with me. The way she looked at me, the way she pleaded to come home with me…It echoed in my head. So when I returned to Ghaladesh, I found myself compelled to put things in motion, and set up an adoption.” She looks at him, her dark eyes sharp and watchful. “Malwina told you, didn’t she? About Jukov’s miracle?”

“Yes. Somewhat.”

“About how it puts the children in some kind of sleepwalking limbo? Drifting from one adoptive family to another?”

“Yes.”

She sits back in the chair. “I worry…I worry if those actions I took, if those were truly mine. Perhaps I was miraculously compelled to adopt Taty, with neither of us knowing. What a dispiriting thought that is…That all your love could be founded on lies.”

“She worries the same of you,” says Sigrud.

“What? What do you mean?”

“She figured out that you have not…not been totally honest with her about your past.”

Shara’s eyes grow wide. “Ah. Ah.” She laughs lowly. “You know, I hadn’t thought about that. It seems obvious now that, when Taty fled Ghaladesh and went out into the wide world, she’d find out who I’d been in my past life….Was she angry?”

“Yes,” says Sigrud.

“Very angry?”

“Yes.”

“She has that right, I suppose,” says Shara quietly. “It was…It was so pleasant, being a civilian. Being a mother. Being just a mother. I just…I just wanted that to keep going. I didn’t want to spoil it.”

“But it did not last,” says Sigrud. “Did it?”

“No,” says Shara. “No. It didn’t.” She licks her lips. “Taty started…predicting things. She told the groundskeeper to go home one day, and it turned out the groundskeeper’s husband was terribly sick, and if she hadn’t made it home she couldn’t have saved him. There were other incidents. She delayed the postman at the house once, just long enough for him to avoid a horrid automobile accident. And then there was her obsession with the markets….That was when I started getting worried. She was good. Too good. She wanted to start investing herself, but I put a stop to that. If people started getting suspicious…”

She shakes her head. “Thank the seas I had her in Saypur. The powers of the Divine children don’t work as well outside of the Continent. Who knows what could have happened if I hadn’t taken her away. But it was around then that I started looking into the orphanages on the Continent, trying to understand if she’d been blessed or charmed somehow by some errant miracle…And that was when I discovered that Taty had been adopted before. Years before. By another family. And when I saw the picture from that adoption, she hadn’t seemed to have aged at all since then.

“I was frightened. Terrified. I reviewed everything I knew about this girl. I asked her questions about her life on the Continent. She had no memory of another family, of another life. So I went looking…and I found more.

“More children. More children who had been drifting from place to place, being taken in by countless families. I resorted to a few Ministry contacts. And that was when I found I was not the only Ministry person who’d been looking into these Continental orphans.”

“Vinya,” says Sigrud.

Shara nods, her eyes steely. “Yes. Vinya had stumbled across one of them before Bulikov. I found her paper trail. And that led me—very windingly—to the Salim. And what she had done there.” She sighs. “He hates me, you know. Our enemy. I can’t blame him. What my aunt did to him…It’s a war crime, is what it is. But he is dreadfully driven, and dreadfully clever. You’ve met him?”

He nods.

“Really,” says Shara softly. “I never have. He’s always eluded me, that bright little boy….What was he like?”

“Young,” says Sigrud. “He was like a teenager. An angry one. A furious child, lashing out. He was especially sensitive about his father—when I mentioned how you had killed him, he lost all control.”

“Did he,” she says. She cocks her head, as if making a mental note of this. “Interesting.”

“Is he…Is he the maimed Divine child you were reading about in your books?”

She fixes him with a keen stare. “How do you know about that?”

“I…I went to your house,” says Sigrud. “I saw your books in your room.”

“Oh. Right.” She relaxes. “Yes, I saw in the papers that my estate had burned down. You’ve lost none of your subtlety, Sigrud. But to answer your question…I’m not sure. I thought he was the maimed child, seeking to reconnect with all the pieces of him that were stolen away by the primary Divinities—yet I could find no evidence of such a thing. I think the primary Divinities resorted to one of their favorite tricks—they edited the past, edited the memory of the maimed child, so he would never remember what he was. So if he is this child, he himself may not know it.”

“But if trauma can make a child remember they are Divine,” says Sigrud, “perhaps the torture in the Salim made him remember much, much more.”

Shara nods slightly. “Perhaps so. I’ve done my hardest to find out more about him, with no success. And he was prepared. After the Salim, I started searching for him. I suppose he must have figured me out, because he staged a minor incident—a minor manifestation of the Divine that was reported back to me through my own channels. I should have known it was a ruse, since only my people heard about it, and no one else noticed. But I investigated, worried it had something to do with him. And I made one critical mistake—I brought my black lead with me.”

Sigrud nods, suddenly understanding. “Which he then stole. Didn’t he? That’s why you never used it on him. I had wondered about it so much.”

She smiles bitterly. “Yes. I hadn’t realized the extent of his powers by then. Anything that is eclipsed in darkness, he controls. And I was hardly going to keep the black lead sitting on the top of the cupboard in total daylight, was I? When I realized it was gone, I discovered the danger we were in—myself and the rest of the Divine children. That was when I tracked down Malwina. And then we really started to organize. But then, unfortunately…”—she smiles sadly—“I died. Which rather complicates things.”

“And…now what do we do?” asks Sigrud.

She thinks for a moment. Then she says, “Here. Help me up.”

“You can stand?”

“With help, yes. I’d like to do something I haven’t done in a long time.” She smiles brightly at him. “I’d like to go on a walk with you, Sigrud.”

They walk along the wall of windows, Shara clutching his right arm, her steps tottering and uneven. Yet there is a queer peacefulness to it all, as if they are a long-married couple in their later years, strolling through a park. Though he can’t quite match it, he senses Shara is…content.

The beds stretch out on their left, the dark room shimmering with soft snores and sighs.

“There are so many,” he says.

“Yes,” says Shara. “Three hundred and thirty-seven, specifically. Only four of the six Divinities were procreative, but…they did get up to rather a lot. Got to do something to fill the time during those thousand or so years, I suppose.”

“Why did you take up their cause?” asks Sigrud. “Why them, of all the wretched people who need help right now?”

“Because they had no one to speak for them,” she says. “No ally, no protector. People either want to control them or kill them. And I suppose living with Taty for so long…I saw what she could have become, had I not been there for her. What if it had been her that Vinya had captured, so many years ago? Though I’m not always sure I’ve done a better job with her…Lying to her, about myself, about the world…Perhaps we Komayds are simply poison for the Divine.”

“She loves you, Shara,” says Sigrud.

Shara looks away. “Does she?” she says.

“Yes. She asked me many questions about you. About who you had been. It was as if I’d done a magic trick for her.”

Shara smiles weakly. “All parents are dull to their children, I suspect. I suppose I was no different from any other parent. I’d watch her sleep, and I’d just wonder—Who’s in there? Who will you be one day? Will you remember me? Or will I be no more than a pleasant shadow, faint and indeterminate, skulking at the borders of your memories as the years stretch on before you?”

“If one were to protest all the injustices of life,” says Sigrud, “great and small, one would have no time for living.”

“Using my own words against me. How cruel of you.”

“They are good words,” he says. “I think about them a lot. More and more, recently. But I do wonder…If Taty believes you’ve died—and she does, as far as I am aware—then why has she not…remembered? Why has she not remembered her Divine power?”

“I’ve debated this endlessly. I suspect that Taty, being Divine, has a lot of senses we don’t. And though these senses are repressed, just like all of her Divine nature, they feed her information subconsciously. And one of those senses knows or understands that…that I am not truly gone from this world. She senses that I have been extended, and stretched, far past my actual death. She knows I am still here. So she knows not to truly grieve.”

“I think you are right,” says Sigrud. “She’s said as much to me. She feels like she’s going mad.”

Shara sighs. “What a trial I’ve put her through….It sounds odd, to feel guilty just for being alive. Even though what I am right now is not technically alive.”

Sigrud looks across the room and sees Malwina and Tavaan sitting side by side on the ground, facing away from them. They’re seated very close. He watches as Malwina puts an arm around Tavaan, and Tavaan leans into the embrace, resting her head on Malwina’s shoulder. Then Tavaan reaches up and grasps Malwina’s hand and holds it tight—a deeply familiar gesture, one so common that neither girl notices it happening.

“Are they sisters as well?” asks Sigrud.

“No,” says Shara.

He thinks for a moment. “Oh. I see.”

“It’s good that they have this,” she says. “Malwina, of all people, deserves a quiet moment of solace.”

“Malwina said she remembers much of the old days…the Divine days, I mean.”

“That she does. Malwina is one of the oldest and most powerful of all the children. She has been fleeing our enemy for some time. But out of all of the children, she is the one who poses the most threat to him.”

“Then why does she not remember her twin sister?” he asks. “I asked her if she thought Taty was Divine, and she said she didn’t think so.”

There’s a brief pause. “I think,” Shara says quietly, “that it is because of their nature. Their domain dictates so much of how they act, you see. Malwina is the spirit of the past, and Taty the future—and the past and the future never seem to acknowledge one another, do they? Certain Divine children and even proper Divinities repelled one another. Voortya and Ahanas certainly hated each other to bits, as one would expect of life and death.”

Yet then Shara does something that’s deeply familiar to him: she reaches up, pushes her glasses up, and rubs her thumb and forefinger along the bridge of her nose, where the nosepiece of her glasses sits. He’s seen her do this a few times in their careers, always in difficult meetings: Shara was terribly good at lying, but when she was quite nervous that her lie would be detected, she’d perform this odd little tell.

“Shara,” he says. “Are you holding anything back from me?”

“Always,” she says immediately. “And for your own good.”

“I…I have fought hard to come to you here….”

“And I have fought hard to keep my most desperate plans at bay,” she says curtly. “There are things, Sigrud, that I would never wish to do. Yet in the future, I may have to do them. And when I do them, I cannot let you stop me. So you cannot know about them. Do you understand?”

“Like the old days.”

“Yes. Just like the old days. And we are in desperate need of some of your old talents.” Shara looks across at the two girls, smiling. “What riddles children are. How time changes them. That’s the real enemy, time. We race against it, then try and slow its arrival.” She sighs. “And time is against us. We can’t win against the enemy alone, not anymore. We need to call in help. And that’s where you come in, Sigrud. You’re good at getting into difficult places. And I need you for one last operation, to go somewhere very difficult indeed, and be our ambassador.”

“Where’s that?”

“Into the Divine sanctum of the Divinity Olvos,” says Shara. “Where you will beg her to help us.”

Voshem walks along the Solda River, disguised once again as a tattered transient, a small smile on his face and a bounce in his step. He is, of course, aware of the gravity of the situation, but it’s very difficult for him to be anything but positive. As the spirit of possibility itself, he tends to feel optimistic even in the direst of situations.

Right now, as he walks past a street full of wine bars and cafés and salons, where women wearing trousers (a very recent development) walk arm in arm with young men in their bright blue coats and fur caps, his mind is absolutely bubbling with potential. Most of those potentials are purely sexual: the fervently wished-for possibility that this night could maybe, just maybe, go right for once, and perhaps you could convince this person to sneak away with you back to your apartments, or at the very least somewhere private and soft and dark, where your fingers could entwine, your shoulder bared and hot breath on your neck…

There are other potentials, of course. Bad ones. The possibility of a drunken word, blurted at the wrong moment. The possibility that you might miss that person who could help you transform and know yourself more than you ever could alone.

All of these possibilities course through Voshem like tributaries pouring into a river. There are certainties too—the certainty of death, for example, the certainty of age, the certainty of the seasons. Some people have deeper fates, events their lives can’t possibly avoid—but Voshem can’t really see any of these. Certainties are almost invisible to the spirit of possibility. They are not his realm. He focuses only on the possibilities, thrumming with their energy, watching these events burst and fade like fireworks in the night sky.

Voshem shuts his eyes. He reviews them all, one by one, dreaming them.

But then one possibility drips into his mind….

He opens his eyes. He watches as the walls of Bulikov ahead turn black—absolutely, perfectly black—and then they begin to…unscroll. They blossom, like a flower petal reaching for the light, but the walls keep reaching up and up, twisting around him until they form a tower, huge and black, rising into the sky….

Voshem blinks. The possibility is gone. The tower vanishes. The walls of Bulikov remain distant and translucent as always. He keeps walking.

Voshem knows of a lot of very strange possibilities floating around out there. This being the Continent, anything is possible.

But that one…That one felt like it just got a little more possible.

It disturbs him. It almost makes him forget that odd feeling he’s had since he walked away from the Solda Bridge: the feeling that he was being watched. He’s looked, of course, and stayed careful, and he’s even searched the possibilities before him. In all cases, he’s found nothing. So he should be safe. Right?

Right?

Voshem keeps walking.

Sigrud walks Shara back to her overstuffed chair. “How can I possibly talk to a Divinity?” he asks.

“I went there once,” says Shara. “Long ago. Toward the tail end of the events in Bulikov. She reached out to me, contacted me, asked me to come. And I did.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” he says, resentful.

She waves a hand. “It was when I was setting up Vinya’s coup, and then your coup in the Dreyling Republics. There was little time for idle chat.”

“Being whisked away by a god sounds like it is well more than idle chat!”

“Suffice it to say,” she says forcefully, “it would have been a complicated subject to broach at the time. But there is a place in the physical world that is connected to her sanctum—just like how this room connects to the physical world beneath the Solda Bridge. But she has set up defenses—Malwina and others have tried to penetrate them, but have had no luck. She is far, far more powerful than they are.”

Sigrud helps ease her down into her chair. “And how will I be any different?”

“That’s a good question. And one that worries me quite a bit.” She groans as she adjusts her side, then sits back. “You are no fool, Sigrud,” she says. “You know you don’t look…wait, how old are you? Fifty? Sixty?”

“Sixty-three,” he says.

“By the seas…” She adjusts her glasses and blinks at him. “Well. You know that you have not aged appropriately—don’t you?”

Sigrud hesitates, then nods.

“And you are of course aware that you have successfully defied the effects of the Divine an extremely unusual number of times? And each time…Each time it was your left hand, wasn’t it? It played some part in your survival?”

Sigrud nods again. To hear his fears and anxieties spoken aloud is deeply alarming to him.

“Let me see it,” she says. She holds out her own hands, small and brown and wrinkled.

He rests his left hand in her palms. She looks at it, taking in the scars that haven’t changed in decades: the scale of the Divinity Kolkan, waiting to weigh and judge.

“I don’t understand it,” says Shara quietly. “And I’ve no idea how it works. It shouldn’t do anything at all, with Kolkan dead. But…something changed when you were tortured in Slondheim, Sigrud. It’s not that you are immune to the effects of the Divine—otherwise Malwina and the others couldn’t transport you or protect you—but it’s like you can survive them, defy them, dampen them.”

“I don’t understand,” says Sigrud.

“I don’t either,” says Shara. “I’ve never encountered anything like this in the literature before.”

“But you think…you think I could use this to penetrate Olvos’s defenses?”

“Perhaps. It’s a chance we have to take. Our enemy wishes to become a Divinity in his own right. To have our own Divinity on our side…”

“Another Divine war,” says Sigrud darkly.

“I hope to cut it off before that,” says Shara. She sighs. “Perhaps this was unavoidable. Perhaps I should not have been so careful, so cautious. Perhaps I should have made open war upon our enemy immediately. But how many times have we seen children march to war in the garb of soldiers? I look back through the years, and all I see…all I see are maimed children striking out blindly, trying to avenge past misdeeds. I can’t bring myself to perpetuate this, Sigrud. I won’t be a part of that history I know so well. I’ll do whatever I can to avoid it.” She adjusts her glasses. “I hope this is the last battle. One big push.”

Sigrud’s face clouds over. He looks away.

“What’s wrong?” asks Shara.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s clearly not nothing.”

“It’s…That was something Signe said to me once.” He looks at her. “One big push.”

She smiles sadly. “Ah. Quoting Thinadeshi, I expect. I wish I could have met her. She sounds like my kind of person.”

“She was.”

Malwina and Tavaan, perhaps sensing the direction of their discussion, stand and walk over, holding hands. “Are we getting to the desperate part?” asks Tavaan.

“Yes, dear,” says Shara kindly.

“You know I’m several times your age, right?” says Tavaan. “You don’t have to talk to me like you’re my grandmother.”

“Age is just a number, dear,” says Shara in the same maternal tone. “I’ve informed Sigrud of what we need of him.”

“But I still don’t know what I’m doing,” says Sigrud. “You want me to go to this place where Olvos is, and overcome her wards using—what? This thing in my hand that I hardly understand? And what am I even supposed to use it on, exactly?”

“The tethering point is in the woods,” says Malwina. “Just outside of the polis governor’s quarters.”

“A place you know well, Sigrud,” says Shara. “Since you recuperated there after Bulikov.”

“There are layers there,” says Malwina. “Worlds within worlds within worlds. Bands and striae of varying realities. Whatever charm or glamour or miracle you carry with you, you must try to use it to break through them.”

“This is just like the plans you’ve always made, Shara,” says Sigrud, frustrated. “Always lacking the most important part.”

“And yet, in the past, we’ve been triumphant,” she says. Then she adds, “Mostly.”

“We must act now,” says Malwina. “Tonight. I think…I think he is aware of us, somehow. The air outside, in the city, it’s all wrong. We must act before he has time to prepare.”

“Will you do it?” asks Tavaan. “We have no other option.”

“And you are quite talented at improvising,” says Shara.

“Improvising with knives, guns, bombs, yes,” says Sigrud. “But improvising with a god…That is much less certain.” He hesitates, then says, “There is one question you have not answered yet, though.”

“Which is?” asks Shara.

He looks at Shara. “Can Malwina keep this going…Can she keep you going…indefinitely?”

Tavaan and Malwina glance at each other uncomfortably.

Shara smiles at him, her eyes sad. “No, Sigrud. Of course not.”

“But…then what will happen?” he says.

“Then this will end.” She waves at her body. “And it will be as if this thing before you had never been at all.”

“You’ll just be gone?”

“Yes. Gone.”

He bows his head. “But…But that’s not fair.”

She smiles desperately. “I know.”

“It’s not right. It’s not right to lose you and get you back and then lose you again.”

“I know, Sigrud. I know. But it will happen. It will happen.” She reaches out and grasps his hand. “All things must end. You knew that. Even the gods must end eventually. And so I will as well.”

He wipes tears from his eye, ashamed of his weeping. “After you, and Mulaghesh, and Hild and Signe…I…I don’t want to be alone again.”

“I know. I know, Sigrud. And I am so sorry. But listen to me. We are all of us but the sum of our moments, our deeds. I died, Sigrud, and I died doing something I believed in. I will die doing it again. But if I lived my life rightly, what I did during it will echo on. Those I helped, those I protected—they will carry my moments forward with them. And that is no small thing.”

“You say this to me,” says Sigrud, “a man whose moments are little more than slit throats, and sorrow, and skulking in the dark.”

“And if you had not been there to do the things you did,” says Shara, “I certainly would not have lived as long as I did. And I, personally, would not have liked it that much.”

He sniffs. “I hate arguing with you. You always win.”

“Well, console yourself with the fact that this is probably the very last request I make of you,” says Shara.

He nods, sniffs once more, and straightens up. “So. Olvos. She’s at the polis governor’s quarters—yes?”

“Something like that,” says Malwina.

He shakes his head. “How absurd it is to go lurking at a Divinity’s doorstep, as if she were hiding from creditors. How will I get there? Are there any magic doors or stairs that can take me?”

“There’s a secret back exit there,” says Malwina, pointing at a distant, dark fireplace along the far wall. “One only I use and know about.”

“Only you?” says Sigrud. “Not…what was his name…Voshem?”

She shakes her head. “No. Wouldn’t be smart to put so much power into one person’s hands. The exit only leads to a tollbooth in the park next to the Seat of the World, nowhere fancier than that. We’ll use it, as we can’t leave by the Solda Bridge door again—too much traffic there might give watching eyes ideas.”

“And what shall I do once we’re out?” asks Sigrud.

“Well,” says Malwina. “You said you were good at stealing cars, yes?”

“Steal a car and drive it through all those checkpoints to the polis governor’s office…? I will be shot before I get outside the walls.”

“Bulikov isn’t as you remember it anymore, Sigrud,” says Shara. “Those checkpoints are gone, mostly.”

“I’ll get you through the exit,” says Malwina, “and then I’ll stay at the tollbooth in the park, waiting for you.”

“How will I get word back to you if I succeed?” asks Sigrud.

“If you succeed, you’ll have a damned Divinity on your side,” says Tavaan. “She’ll probably drive you across the sky in a chariot pulled by swans.”

“And if I fail?” he asks.

“If you fail…” says Malwina. “If you knock on the door, and there’s no answer…then you just come back, I suppose. And we try and think of something else.”

Sigrud rubs his face. “And do we have any other backup plans?”

Tavaan looks to Malwina. Malwina looks to Shara.

Shara sits very still, staring into space, as if deciding something. And then she does it again: she raises her right hand, lifts her glasses, and wipes the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

She looks at Sigrud. Her eyes are hard and cold. “No,” she says firmly.

He knows she’s lying. He can see she knows that he knows. She has some other trump card she’s holding back. But he can see that she desperately, desperately does not wish to play it.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

“Good.” Shara turns to Tavaan. “Then we need one final thing.”

“What’s that?” asks Sigrud.

“This is war,” says Tavaan. “A poor war, yes, a lopsided one with the odds against us. But this will be the one real strike against our enemy. So if it’s to be war, it’s best to outfit you appropriately.”

Sigrud waits for more. “Meaning we need…”

Malwina gives him a faint smile. “A seneschal.”

Sigrud kneels on the floor of the room, feeling both awkward and confused. Malwina and Tavaan stand before him, holding hands, while Shara looks on from the comfort of her chair. Though no one’s done anything yet, he feels something’s changing in the room. It takes him a while to notice it: the snores and mutterings and gentle sounds of slumber are all fading. The hundreds of sleepers are growing still.

“Are we sure this is necessary?” asks Sigrud.

“It’s likely our enemy knows Olvos’s location too,” says Malwina. “He can’t get to her, just as we can’t, but he’ll know the region. He could have prepared it against you. So you need to be prepared in turn.”

Tavaan looks down at him, her wide, strange eyes filled with a curious light. “Are you ready?”

“And you’re sure I won’t become a monster,” says Sigrud, “like the woman on the aero-tram?”

“You won’t be a true seneschal, Sigrud,” says Malwina. “That’s what the enemy tried to make—a mortal with a piece of a god in them.”

“We aren’t that powerful,” says Tavaan. “Unfortunately.”

“But we do have gifts to impart to you. Yet in order for these gifts to be used to their full effect, they must be transferred with an agreement.”

“These gifts are a part of us,” says Tavaan. “So the gift can only be given to a part of us—an aspect, a facet.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“A lost child,” says Malwina quietly. “That is our communal domain, so to speak. We are refugees. We can only give these gifts to someone of a similar state.”

Sigrud sits in silence.

“Are you ready?” Tavaan says.

“I don’t know,” he says. He looks to Shara. “Am I?”

Shara shrugs. “This is likely the first time such a thing has been attempted in global history.”

“Which means what?” asks Sigrud.

“Which means I’ve no idea what could happen. But I’ve never known you to turn down a weapon, Sigrud.”

He grimaces and scratches his neck. “Fine,” he says.

“Shut your eye, Sigrud,” says Tavaan.

He does so. One of them takes his left hand—Tavaan, maybe. Then he feels cold, hard fingers pressing upon his brow. Then there are voices. He thinks he hears Tavaan’s loudest among them, but he’s not sure—he hears many voices wrapped up in it, like it’s not one person but many speaking at the same time.

“Do you hear us?” ask the voices.

“Yes,” he says.

“Do you feel this?” ask the voices.

A juddering in his skull. He feels like the fingers are penetrating his brain, reaching into the deep, dark caverns in his thoughts, to scrawl upon a secret wall there….

He tries not to gag. “Yes.”

“Good,” say the voices. “Now, listen. You must find a memory in yourself, Sigrud. A memory of desperation, of loss, of hope eclipsed by sorrow.”

More voices chime in: “When you fled. When you ran. When you fought not for pride or for purpose, but simply to live.”

“When you were like us,” the voices say, swelling. “Alone. And forgotten.”

Dozens of voices flit through his mind, whispering: Please. Please, help us…Please, we’ve wandered for so long…

Then he feels them: feels every year, every hour, every minute of their purgatory, the miserable, dispossessed mass of Divine children, all lost, all aimless, mindlessly seeking shelter and warmth.

And then he remembers something: a moment long, long ago, when he was a young man, barely twenty. Returning from a sea voyage to find his parents murdered, his home reduced to ashes. He remembers sitting on the blackened hillside, staring into the empty, frigid vale before him, and feeling a powerful aloneness, a wordless isolation in whose shadow he has lived his entire life.

If there had been someone there for me then, he thinks, would I be who I am today?

And then he realizes that there had been someone to help him, though it took some time for her to find him: Shara Komayd. Though his life has been far from perfect, it would have been much worse without her chance intervention.

And now, perhaps, he can finally repay her.

“That’s it,” say the voices.

There’s a tremendous pressure in his skull, as if the two fingers there have paused, suspended in his head, waiting to hear his answer.

Then one voice stands out, very slightly. “Is this you, mortal man? Is this memory you? Is this what makes up your heart?”

“Yes,” he whispers. And he knows this is true. “Yes, it is.”

With these words he feels a warmth flooding into his left hand, like he’s holding it close to a fire.

“In your hand is a sword,” say the voices. “Do you feel it?”

Sigrud frowns. At first he felt a hand gripping his own, perhaps Malwina’s or Tavaan’s, but now it feels very…strange. There is something new in his hand, and it is not another hand. It is something hard yet warm, with a slight give to it, like that of wood.

“Do you feel the blade?” the voices whisper. “Do you?”

“I…I think I do,” he says, but he’s not certain.

“Do you see it, Sigrud?” asks Malwina, her voice quiet and close. “Do you see it in your mind?”

Sigrud furrows his brow. He’s not sure what they mean—see in his mind? He doesn’t see anything with his mi—

Then he sees it.

A flicker of gold-white light, just to his left, like the flicker of a candle flame. A golden ribbon, whipping about brightly in a stiff breeze. A blade like the wing of a yellow butterfly, flitting through shafts of sunlight in the forest.

He feels it being bound to him, not to his hand but to him, the idea of him, the thing that makes him who he is.

“A tool,” the voices say, “to find a path in empty shadows. Will you use it wisely and well, to protect us and guide us to a new home?”

“Yes,” says Sigrud. “Yes. I will.”

“Then take the sword,” the voices say. “Take it an—”

Then there’s a sharp cry of pain. The warmth in Sigrud’s hand suddenly vanishes, the pressure in his skull evaporates, and his eye snaps open.

It takes him a moment to get his bearings. Tavaan is kneeling on the floor, cradling her right hand like it’s been burned. Malwina crouches beside her, helping her sit up. His hands are empty, and the sleepers groan quietly.

“What…What happened?” asks Sigrud.

Tavaan swallows and shakes her head. Then she glares at him like he hurt her. “There is something nasty living inside you,” she rasps.

“I felt it too,” says Malwina. She glances back at him, her face troubled. “Whatever it was, it didn’t want us to bind the sword to you. But we did. I think we did.”

“How can you be sure?” asks Shara.

“Ask him if he can find it,” says Tavaan. “Ask him if it’s there.”

“Can you reach out and feel it, Sigrud?” asks Malwina. “Can you find it near you?”

Sigrud’s not sure what they mean. Feeling absurd, he reaches out and paws the space in front of him like someone trying to find a doorknob in a dark room. But then his hand feels magnetically drawn to a spot in the air…

And then it’s there, as if he’d always been holding it: a short, thin blade that looks like it is made of gold or bronze. Its handle is warm, even somewhat hot, as if it were sitting near an open flame.

Malwina and Tavaan let out a breath of relief. “Thank goodness,” says Malwina. “For a moment I thought we’d done all that work for nothing….”

“What…is it?” asks Sigrud, examining its edge.

“Flame,” says Malwina. “That’s the name it chose for itself, when we made it.”

“Like we said,” says Tavaan, “it’s a tool. It won’t harm the enemy, but it can destroy his works.”

“He is here, and he is anxious. The stronger he gets, the more he’ll send at you,” says Malwina. “And us.”

Sigrud tosses the blade back and forth between his hands. It feels solid enough, not at all like how it felt in his mind, where it was an idea rather than a physical object. “How did you two make it?” he asks.

“We didn’t,” says Malwina. She waves at all the sleeping children in the beds. “We all did.”

“In our minds,” says Tavaan. Then she taps her temple. “In our slumber. We dreamed it, you see. There was a reason they put me in charge of this place, after all.”

“Put it away,” says Malwina. “Hide it away again. The more it’s out in the open, the easier it is for him to sense it. It’s Divine, after all.”

Sigrud waves the sword around, trying to feel for that pocket of air again, as if it was an invisible sheath he could just slide it back into. But then something in his mind kicks in, as if he’s remembering a motion he did long ago: it’s not like he’s sheathing the blade, but rather like he’s pressing it into soft mud, submerging it into a pocket in the reality beside him. His hands begin the motion, and then suddenly it’s gone.

Though Tavaan still looks weak, she nods, pleased. “Good.”

“Will it cut flesh?” asks Sigrud. “And metals? Or merely the Divine?”

“It will perform like a very good sword, I suppose I should say,” says Malwina, “and it won’t break. But its primary use will be against the enemy. And it won’t do shit against Olvos’s defenses. She’s far more powerful than we are.”

“What happens if I drop it?” asks Sigrud. “Or someone steals it?”

“It won’t leave you or work for anyone else,” says Malwina. “Unless you give it to them. It’s bound to your will.”

Sigrud nods, impressed. “I could get used to Divine trinkets.”

“Don’t,” says Tavaan. She sits up, shaking her hand like the pain is lingering. “There won’t be any more where that came from. It’s time to go.”

Together the four of them walk to the fireplace, which is huge and old and dark. As they walk, Sigrud realizes how much this exchange has drained Shara: she seems faint, and she blinks repeatedly, as if fighting back a stupor.

“Do you know…I wonder if this will make a difference,” she says.

“Why else would we do it?” asks Sigrud.

“I mean in the lives of average people,” says Shara. “We do our backstage skullduggery in the halls of power…but little changes for the people in the streets. They live their lives at the mercy of people like our enemy…and people like me. I worry Vinya was right.”

“About what?” says Malwina.

“That power doesn’t change. It just changes clothes. The Divinities formed reality for their people. And when they were gone, government picked up where they left off. Few have any choice in how they live. Few have the power to decide their own realities. Even if we are victorious—will that change?”

“We focus on the tasks at hand,” says Sigrud. “Such grand problems are beyond us.”

“You’re right, Sigrud. Of course you are.” Shara sighs as they approach the fireplace. “I don’t know how you do it, Sigrud.”

“Do what?”

“Keep going,” says Shara. “There are some crimes that you don’t understand the awfulness of until you’re older. I sit here now, separated from Taty, knowing that…knowing that it is likely I will not see her again. I won’t hear her voice, smell her hair, feel her fingers in mine. And it is as if someone buried a thorn deep within me, and I feel it pressing on my heart with every breath. And then I worry you were right.”

Malwina climbs into the fireplace and gestures to Sigrud to do the same. He does so, but looks back at Shara, confused and concerned. “Right about what?” he asks.

“When you said to me that the fight could not ever be worth it,” Shara says, “when it asks us for our children.” She looks at him, her tired eyes burning in her lined face. “I’m sorry about Signe. I regret so many things. But that I regret more than any other.”

They share one moment longer, each looking at the other across the boundary of the fireplace, separated by years and sorrow and death itself. Sigrud tries to think of something to say, but the words do not come.

Malwina touches the side of the fireplace. The world twists.

Sigrud finds himself toppling out of the shadows and into the night air. He manages to catch himself before he falls, staggering forward a few more steps. He stops and looks around—they’re in the park, just as Malwina said they would be. He looks back to see a small, abandoned tollbooth standing by a little concrete path. There’s a shiver in the shadows in its doorways, and then Malwina steps out, looking grim.

She looks him up and down. “Are you ready?”

Sigrud walks over to the tollbooth to find it’s a simple, empty wooden structure. He feels the walls with one hand, perhaps wishing he could reach through them, find Shara, and touch her once more, just one moment longer with his friend.

“I said, are you ready?” says Malwina.

Sigrud drops his hand. “Yes.”

“Good. Then listen.”

Voshem slips through the streets of Bulikov like a mote of dust through a sunbeam. He moves cautiously now, listening to the crackling hum of electric lights and the honk and putter of distant automobiles. He’s walked these paths many times before, and everything seems the same, but that vision lingers in his mind: the walls turning into the dark base of a tower, which stretched toward the skies….

He shivers as he comes to his apartment building—one of them, at least, as one must stay mobile to stay safe—but pauses before the door.

He looks up and down the street. He searches the possibilities afloat in the air.

Being stopped by police. A stray question from the old woman who lives downstairs. Corroded plumbing causing a cave-in, the couple next door violently fighting, a beggar spilling an oil lamp in the alley two blocks over…

Could any of these midnight wanderers threaten him? Is such a thing possible? If so, he doesn’t see it. And if it was there, he would.

He enters and walks quickly down the hallway. He comes to his door, slips in the metal key, and also wipes his finger along one piece of brown veneer. It grows slightly hot under his touch, recognizing him, welcoming him. The door falls open before him.

Voshem looks in at his apartments. They’re empty, but he prefers it that way: sometimes he sits back and bathes in the possibilities one could do with such an empty place. He smiles, takes a relieved breath, steps in, and flicks on the light.

It doesn’t come on.

He looks at it, confused.

Then the door slams shut behind him.

Voshem whirls around. Though it’s dark, he can dimly perceive a black, female-like form standing behind him, her arms long and stringy, her face as blank as a piece of polished stone. One dark, clawed hand digs into the wood of the door, and the thing stands up to its full height, several feet above Voshem’s head.

Voshem stares at her. He can’t understand it. “How…How…”

“How did you not see,” says a soft, cold voice behind him, “that this was possible?”

He slowly turns. A young man stands in the center of Voshem’s empty apartment. His skin is pale, his hair is dark, and his eyes are like crude oil. His right hand is hidden in the folds of his dark robes, which quiver and quake with the sound of distant cheeping and rustling, like the forest at midnight.

Voshem searches the air for possibilities, and finds that there are none. There are only inevitabilities—which, to his eyes, are almost invisible.

“We watched the Dreyling,” says Nokov, stepping close. “Saw where he went. And who should come out of that same door but merry old Voshem, who laughed so gaily so many years ago?” Nokov attempts to smile, but it’s as if he’s not quite sure how to do it. “From that moment, there were no possibilities, Voshem. Only certainties.”

He steps closer. Voshem realizes he has to keep looking up to see Nokov’s face, as if he’s suddenly terribly, terribly tall.

“I’d ask you where they are,” says Nokov, “and how to get to them. But I don’t need to.”

The stars begin to fail above them.

“Once you dwell within the night,” whispers Nokov’s voice, “it will be as if I’ve always known.”

The shadows close in like crumbling walls.

“And all your safeguards, which should be almost impossible to penetrate…” Nokov’s face dissolves into the shadows. “Well, when I have your talents at my disposal—that won’t matter at all, will it?”

Darkness fills Voshem’s mind.