City of Miracles

2. Bringing Battle

The boy’s feet pound on the pavement, his breath burning in his lungs. He ducks under an awning, swings around a lamppost, skids across a cobblestoned street. An old woman carrying her groceries glares at him as he sprints past a display of apples. A shopkeep cries, “Watch it!” But the boy ignores them, paying mind only to the next turn, the next street ahead, his face dripping sweat as the sun beats down on him.

Faster and faster, as fast as he can go. He’s got to lose him, got to.

And he should be losing him: the streets of the city of Bulikov are so tangled and labyrinthine that one could get lost just walking home. Yet so far it’s proven shockingly difficult to lose this particular pursuer.

A turn, a turn again. Then down the stairs, across the vacant lots, and down another side street…

The boy stops, gasping, and staggers into the mouth of an alley. He waits, breathing hard, and pokes his head around the corner.

Nothing. The street is empty.

Perhaps he’s lost him. Perhaps he’s really gone.

“Finally,” he says.

Then the light…shifts. Twists. Changes.

The shadows begin to twirl at his feet.

“Oh, no,” whispers the boy.

He looks up to see an odd sight, but it’s one that he was expecting, even dreading: the clear summer skies directly above him are flooding with darkness, as if evening is being injected into the atmosphere, hues of indigo and dark purple and black swirling amidst the pale blue. He watches, wide-eyed, as the darkness curls around the face of the sun, choking it out and painting over it until it’s as if the sun had never been there at all.

There are stars in the new darkness, which hangs directly above him: cold, distant, glimmering white stars. The boy knows if he waits longer the skies above him will turn pitch-black, and those glinting stars will be the only luminescence remaining.

The boy turns and sprints down the alley. The skies above him clear up as if he were directly under a thundercloud: the sun returns, and the bright blue sky is visible once more.

But too close, thinks the boy. Much too close, much too close…

He’s getting desperate. He knows he has to use one of his tricks. He doesn’t like trying this while running, but he doesn’t have a choice….

He shuts his eyes, envisioning the city around him, seeking them out.

It takes him a while to spot them—he’s not near one of the entertainment districts, so there are very few theaters or restaurants or bars around here—but then he sees one burst into being somewhat close to him, a tangle of something bright and silvery and quivering, quaking merrily amidst all the gloom and sobriety of the city in day.

He reaches out to it. Grasps it.

Becomes it.

The world shifts around him.

He hears the final line in his mind: “…and the shepherdess, of course, says, ‘Well, it ain’t look too much like his father, neither!’ ”

Suddenly the boy’s ears are inundated with a glorious, wonderful, happy sound: the sound of men laughing, cackling, real tears-in-your-eyes laughing, absolutely bent-double laughing, and the boy is there with them, giggling merrily.

He has to force himself to remember what’s going on. He opens his eyes and sees he’s in a fish shanty down by the Solda River, surrounded by filthy fishermen all sipping from bottles of plum wine. None of them have noticed the sudden appearance of this young, pale Continental boy, who has, it seems, popped out of thin air. They act as if he’s always been in the crowd with them. One of the drunken fishermen even offers him a sip of wine, which the boy, still snickering, politely refuses.

It’s far too early in the day for such celebration. But he’s grateful for it. Wine creates merriment, merriment creates laughter, and laughter gives him…

The boy looks out the window of the fish shanty. He’s about three miles away from the alley where he was.

He sighs, relieved. “…a way out,” he says.

But then his brow crinkles. Is it his imagination, or is the sky darkening above him? Just above the fish shanty?

And are those stars shining so coldly and cleanly up above?

He stares as the sky above him floods with solid darkness, like blood leaking through a bandage.

The boy thinks desperately. Another trick, another turn. He doesn’t have a choice.

He shuts his eyes, and searches.

Another tangle of silvery joy. This one isn’t quite so thick, quite so bawdy, but it should still…

The world shifts around him.

…work.

He hears a voice: “Where is Mischa? Where is…Mischa!”

Giggles fill the air. He opens his eyes and sees he’s in a small apartment. A curly-haired infant is lying on a sofa, laughing hysterically as his mother hides behind the sofa’s back and pops out, crying, “Where is my Mischa? Where could my darling boy have gone? Could he be—here?”

Another explosion of delighted squeals. Neither seems to have noticed the boy’s sudden appearance, but perhaps it’s because they’re too involved in their game. The child’s laughter is infectious: the mother begins laughing, which makes the infant laugh even harder.

Remember where you are. Remember what’s going on.

The boy walks to the windows of the apartment. He’s about seven miles from the fish shanty, he guesses. He can still feel that other tangle of laughter out there, the fishermen sharing their bawdy jokes, and he can tell the distance between them. It should be far enough. No one can move that fast that far. And how could his pursuer even know where he’s go—

He freezes.

The shadows on the street outside begin to shift. Darkness floods the skies, as if night itself is manifesting right above him.

“No!” he says. “No, it can’t be!”

The mother and infant laugh hysterically behind him. He can feel the joy in her, feel the pain in her stomach from laughing too hard, all her senses flooded over with merriment.

He wants to stay here. This is what he is, what he does, what he loves. But he has to move on yet again.

Farther this time, he thinks. Go and keep going.

He shuts his eyes. Finds the next laughter, the next bright spark of joy.

The world shifts.

He’s in a house on the outskirts of Bulikov. A man sits on the kitchen floor with a giant pot of pasta spilled all across the tiles, the yellow sauce bright against the white surfaces. His face is red with laughter, and his wife stands at the doorway, howling in amusement.

“I told you it was too heavy!” she says, gasping for air. “I told you it was!”

The boy laughs too, the laughter tasting of shameful glee. Then he shuts his eyes and searches again.

The world shifts.

He’s in a dormitory room beside the university. A young woman sits on the bed, nude and convulsing with laughter. Were you to glance at her it’d be difficult to see what’s so funny—until you saw the young man’s head buried between her thighs, the rest of his body concealed by blankets.

The boy cackles with her. Her laughter is like sunlight and flower petals raining down in his mind. But he knows he must move on.

He shuts his eyes. Reaches out.

The world shifts.

A ball game in an alley, with one young man lying on the ground, clutching his crotch and gasping after a pitch went awry. The other children laugh uproariously, unable to contain themselves, while the young man says, “It’s not funny….It’s really not funny!” but this makes them laugh all the harder.

He smirks. This laughter has a crueler edge to it, the taste of copper and blood. But he knows he must move on.

He shuts his eyes. Searches.

Again, things shift.

He’s in a courtyard. An elderly man and woman sit in wooden wheelchairs in the sun, their legs covered with blankets. They chuckle weakly as they remember some ancient story from days long, long gone.

“She really told me that!” says the woman. “ ‘Hotter than a stiff cock,’ that’s what she said, right in front of everyone. I swear it!”

“I know, I know!” the man says, wheezing but smiling. “But who could ever believe it?”

Laughter of wistful incredulity, basking in the joy of two lives well lived. His heart sings to hear it, to taste it in his mouth. But he must move on.

I am laughter, he says, shutting his eyes. I am wherever there is glee. So he can never catch me….

He reaches out. Another tangle, this one sloppy and drunken and warped, the silvery laughter of someone well sotted.

Any port in a storm, thinks the boy, and he grasps it, pulling himself to it.

The world shifts…

He opens his eyes. He expected to be in a bar or someone’s room, but…this appears to be a basement. A dingy basement with one table and one chair.

In the chair is a cackling Saypuri man, but it’s clear he’s not laughing of his own volition: his eyes have a glazed look to them, and there’s a smear of drool on his chin. Despite this, he has the look of a soldier to him, as does the Saypuri woman standing over his shoulder, who’s holding an empty syringe. They both wear headcloths, for one, which is common to the military, but they’re also trim, muscular creatures, people who have made weapons out of their bodies, especially the woman: there’s something to her hard, dark face and amber-gold eyes that suggests a history of command and lethality to her.

The boy stares at them. But then the woman with the syringe does something very strange: she looks right at the boy, her expression somewhat apologetic. This should be impossible—when the boy shifts he becomes laughter incarnate, the spirit of merriment, invisible to mortal eyes—yet the Saypuri woman just smiles at him with a touch of regret and says, “Hello there.”

“Wh-what?” says the boy.

“He figured that if he kept you jumping you’d come here eventually,” says the woman. “Just had to keep someone laughing long enough.”

The boy then senses something riddling the clothing of the two people, forces and designs and structures woven into the fabric.

The boy blinks. The two soldiers are wearing protective miracles, Divine miracles—but they’re of a type he’s never seen before. So who could have made them?

The Saypuri woman looks at something behind the boy. “Ah. Well. Here we are, then.”

The boy turns around.

Behind him is a wall of darkness—not just shadow but the night itself, a wall of vast, endless black shot through with coldly glittering stars….

A voice echoes out of the darkness, a voice as cold as the light of those stars. “WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?”

The boy screams.

A rattle, a roar, and the train emerges from the tunnel.

Sigrud wakes. It takes longer than it ought for him to remember where he is, what’s happening. He rubs at his eye and glances around at the other passengers on the train, all relaxed or bored. They ignore him, thinking him to be another shiftless Dreyling dockworker, dressed in his blue peacoat and knit cap.

What an odd thing it is, he thinks, to don civilization again as if it were an old jacket, lying unused for years at the back of a closet. Perhaps civilization never truly suited Sigrud, but he must feign it now, after so many years in the wilderness. And after what happened in Voortyashtan, over thirteen years ago now, he is still very much a wanted man. As someone who once worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one thing he knows full well is that the Ministry does not forget.

Nor should they. He remembers that moment as a blur of shadows and screams—he’d been raving mad with grief and fury after the murder of his daughter—but fragments of what happened in Fort Thinadeshi still sear bright and hot in his mind.

Grabbing a soldier’s sword, using it to cleave off the man’s arm below the elbow. Ripping a bayoneted rifling away from another and thrusting it deep into her abdomen.

I didn’t even know their names, he thinks, huddled low. I still don’t even know their names.

The train rushes on.

Back when Sigrud worked as an operative on the Continent, it would have taken two to three weeks to travel from the outskirts of Bulikov to Ahanashtan. Today it seems you can simply buy a ticket, go to a train station, and all the world will shift around you until you find yourself where you wish to be in but a handful of days.

He focuses on his goal. Ahanashtan, he thinks, remembering what he read in the papers. The Golden Hotel.

And then what? he wonders. What will he do there?

He looks at his reflection in the window. The only thing I know how to do anymore.

Sigrud je Harkvaldsson stares at his reflection. He takes in the scars, the wrinkles, the bags under his eyes. He wonders if he has it in him to do this. It’s been years since he worked as an operative—over a decade.

Perhaps this is foolish. Perhaps he’s an old dog insisting he can still perform old tricks.

Yet there’s something curious in his face, something that’s concerned him for a while, something he’s tried to dismiss. But now that he’s faced with mirrored surfaces time and time again—for mirrors were rare in the logging camps—he can tell something is wrong with his appearance.

The face in the reflection is not the face of an aging man. He is much how he remembered himself before he went into hiding: middle-aged, scarred, and bitter—but still middle-aged. Which Sigrud certainly no longer is.

Perhaps it is simply the blessing of good lineage. Perhaps that’s it.

Then Ahanashtan emerges on the horizon. And instantly, he forgets his worries.

“Oh,” he whispers, “by the seas…”

When Sigrud first came to Ahanashtan, over thirty years ago, he regarded it as one of the most impressive metropolises the world had yet produced (behind Bulikov and Ghaladesh, of course). Yet at that time it was still mostly a sea port, devoted to industry and the military—in other words, it was dirty, dank, and dangerous. It had a few skyscrapers then, buildings fourteen, fifteen, even sixteen stories tall, monumental achievements for architects in those days, and everyone agreed that the future had truly dawned on the Continent.

But as Sigrud’s train grows closer to the colossal clutch of towers on the ocean, he sees that the architects and industry magnates of thirty years ago had no idea what was coming.

He tries to count their height. Maybe thirty, forty, or even sixty stories tall? He can’t believe it, can’t fathom the massive stone-and-glass structures that stand so still and perfect against the sea, the sun dappling their crenellated surfaces. Some are tall and straight and square, others are like vast wedges, like a cut of cheese made of granite and glass, and still others look like nothing more than gigantic metal poles, silvery and shimmering, with rows and rows of tiny windows riddled in their sides. Running across the countryside to this cluster of structures is what at first seems to be countless rivers or tiny, shining tributaries, but Sigrud slowly realizes that these are rails: what must be a hundred or more railroads weave and merge until they all, eventually, join together in Ahanashtan.

To the northwest is something even stranger: a glittering metal construction that looks almost like utility lines, huge wires mounted on poles, except they’re far too tall…and it looks like little pods are crawling along the wires. He can’t figure it out from this distance.

Sigrud turns back to the metropolis ahead. And I, he thinks, am supposed to find Shara’s killer in there?

He packs up this emotion and shoves it away somewhere in the back of his mind. He has no time for self-doubt.

There is where Shara met her end, he thinks. There is where she was murdered. And there is where I will shed the blood and break the bones of those who cast her down.

The gleaming towers of Ahanashtan swell up before him. He remembers something Shara said when they first came here, she seated at a table, encoding a message; Sigrud on the bed, sewing up a rent in his coat. She said, No one knows what the original Ahanashtan really looked like, back in the Divine days. The historians theorize it was a giant, organic tangle of trees and vines, all of which merged together to create homes and structures. Glowing mushrooms and peaches acting as lights, vines flowing forth with healing waters, that kind of thing. Records suggest it was beautiful. But it all vanished when Ahanas died. Then she paused, and added, And good riddance too.

He looked up from his work. Good riddance? If it was so beautiful?

It was certainly beautiful. But Ahanashtan was also the port where the Continent brought in Saypuri slaves. All these beautiful structures, overlooking a bay teeming with human misery…Even the most beautiful creations cannot wipe away such corruption.

Sigrud watches as the giant towers loom over him. Maybe the change, he thinks, is only superficial.

First, logistics.

A room at the edge of town, close to the docks but not too close. He knows the waterfront, knows its crannies and its smoke and the tang of diesel. He wants to have his back pushed up against known territory.

The room is bare-bones. Walls and a bed and a tiny closet with all the soul and allure of a soiled bar of soap. Not a great place to hide things. So he doesn’t.

He finds an abandoned restaurant down the block. It’s suffered water damage from some past storm, and clearly won’t be occupied anytime soon. He picks the lock on the back door and skulks inside. He assembles a cache in the oven ventilation shaft, the dilapidated kitchen ringing with little clinks and clanks as he works.

Inside he places his handheld bolt-shot, a pistol and ammunition—acquired along the way—and a second, shoulder-mounted bolt-shot, this one much more high-powered than the little handheld one. He stores away his backup POTs, as well: he’s Mr. Jenssen here in Ahanashtan, here to look for work, but he might need to be someone else if the situation calls for it. He also stores away some but not all of his money. He knows to seed that throughout his terrain like a squirrel does nuts. But he’s been without money before. He knows it’s easier to live hand to mouth in the city than in the wilds. Provided you don’t mind what you’re putting in your mouth.

He slips out the window of the restaurant, then stands in the shadows for a moment, watching the streets. No movement, no watchers. In and out and done.

Now to wait for nightfall. And then to visit the Golden.

Midnight in Ahanashtan. The city is largely electrified now, so the streets are never fully dark. It’s a strange feeling for Sigrud, who knows the shadows better than he knows his own skin. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like how the steam and clouds obscure the moon and stars, yet the moisture traps the artificial light of this modern place, smearing the world above with a muddy orange color.

Or perhaps he just doesn’t like being here, being on this street, on this block. Where she was. Where she died.

Sigrud stares at the Golden from a darkened doorway. It is a husk of a building, a corpse, its facade broken and dark. Police ropes, dyed bright red, festoon the streets outside, warning people to keep out.

His eye lingers on the massive rent in the top corner, lined with splintered wood, like broken teeth in a gaping maw.

That was her. That’s where she was.

A few patrolmen lurk in the doorways, Ahanashtani officers keeping watch over the site. Sigrud’s already spotted them, even the ones trying to remain hidden. The Ahanashtani police know as well as anyone that the death of Ashara Komayd is an international incident, so they must deploy their forces as much as possible to stave off any criticism—even if they aren’t quite sure what to do with those forces.

Sigrud slips out of the doorway, satchel over his shoulder. He pads down a back road, ducks through a torn chain-link fence, and weaves down a filthy alley until he approaches the eastern side of the Golden.

He dodges under the police rope and waits in the darkness, head cocked, listening carefully. Nothing. If he’s been seen, they aren’t doing anything about it yet.

He walks along the hotel’s brick wall until he finds a service door. He tries the knob—locked, of course. But after a moment’s work with his torsion wrench and his hook picks, the lock springs open, and he slips inside.

Sigrud stands in the darkness of the hotel, listening once more. He can tell right away that the building is broken: there is a curious way that the wind blows through bombed-out structures, one you only hear when segments of the walls have been torn apart.

He winds through the spacious lobby, then climbs the stairs. He has a torch, but chooses not to use it. The luminescence from the streetlights spills through the Golden’s many windows, and is more than enough to see by.

He climbs to the fourth floor. The wind is stronger now, bearing with it the smell of chimney smoke and burned fabric. He walks down the hallway, his boots sending up plumes of dust from the soiled carpet.

He pauses at one corner and sniffs.

A familiar, coppery smell.

He kneels and touches the carpet at his feet. He pulls out his torch and flicks it on, allowing a narrow beam of light to dance across the fabric.

Blood. A lot of it.

Someone killed the guard on station, he thinks. Then slipped down the hall to plant the explosives.

He stands back up and looks down the hallway. He can see streetlight and faint moonlight spackling the walls outside the ruined rooms. After a few steps, there will be nothing more to explore. Just shattered walls and burned-out rooms.

I must look, he thinks, though he is not sure why. Perhaps it is because he was denied his chance to hold vigil. I must look and see.

He comes to the edge of the devastation and looks out. Shara’s room is completely gone. Nothing left of it, not even a stick of wood. He can see straight through to the city street below. He read in the papers that her two guards died with her, along with a young couple vacationing in the room below. All dead and gone in but a second.

He thinks about Shara. How she moved, how she laughed, how she hunched over a cup of tea. And though he never really knew the girl, he thinks of her daughter—a Continental, adopted. Tatyana, he thinks her name was. Sigrud only saw her for an instant after Voortyashtan. He’d read in the papers—when he could get them in the mountains, that is—that Shara and her daughter had retired to the countryside to live in peaceful seclusion.

Wherever that girl is, she will now go forward in life without a mother.

He remembers Signe, cold and still on that table in the dark. Leaves in her hair and her collar askew.

What a crime it is that creatures of hope and justice fade from this world, he thinks, while those like me live on.

Sigrud stares out at the Ahanashtani cityscape beyond, cheery and glittering with light. He blinks, feeling suddenly very empty, very powerless, very small. There is nothing here for him. But what did he expect from this place? A record, a note, a file, a message? Did he think she would think of him in her last moments? Yet there’s only ash and blood.

He takes a deep breath. Time for a last resort, he thinks.

He sets down his satchel and begins unpacking its contents. He takes out a glass jar, a bag of daisy petals, and a small tin of gray earth.

I saw you do this enough times, Shara, he thinks, working away, that I could do it in my sleep.

He fills the jar with daisy petals, shakes it, then dumps them out. Daisies. Sacred to Ahanas for their willful recurrence.

Then he takes a bit of the gray earth—still moist—and smears it across the bottom of the jar. Grave dust, the final state of all things. He waits a moment, then wipes the earth away. Then he picks up the jar and applies its open end to his eye, as if it were a telescope.

He looks through the jar at the ruined rooms before him, and his heart drops. Nothing looks different. This is an old miracle, of course, an old ritual from back before the fall of the Continent. Shara used to perform it all the time: amplify the glass with the right reagents, then look through it, and any Divine alterations to the world would glow with a bright, blue-green phosphorescence. He remembers her saying that it was almost useless in Bulikov, since the walls there glowed so bright that they hurt her eyes and drowned everything else out.

Yet the shattered rooms before him are as dark and shadowed as they were before. If something miraculous was once here in these rooms, the bomb wiped it away as surely as the lives of the people within them.

He sighs, turns away, and drops the jar.

Then he pauses. He thinks for a moment.

He slowly turns back, and applies the jar to his eye again.

Nothing glows in the ruined rooms before him. It’s all still shadows and ash. But there is something glowing in the streets outside the hotel. He can’t see much of it—just a sliver of the streetscape is visible from this angle—but he can tell that someone has drawn some kind of line or barrier in the concrete.

A line or barrier that must be miraculous, or Divine—for it glows as bright as a lighthouse at sea.

Sigrud slowly lowers the jar. “By the seas,” he whispers. “Someone did something to the streets?”

Though this makes him wonder—was it Shara? Or someone else?

His hands are shaking, partly with excitement, partly with shock. He never encountered such a thing once, not even when he worked with Shara in this very city. He turns to go back downstairs and outside, but pauses again, just as he’s about to take the jar away from his eye.

He didn’t think to look through the jar down the hallway. He didn’t think there’d be anything inside the rest of the hotel. But he sees he was wrong.

Sigrud stares through the little glass jar. There are more miraculous barriers here, more designs, more glowing wards placed in the walls and the floors and the ceilings of the hallway. He walks down the hallway and takes the jar away from his eye, and the wards vanish immediately. He touches one panel in the wall, a spot that glowed bright a mere second ago, but he can’t see anything there, no device or symbol or totem of any kind. Whatever these miracles are, they must be alterations of a kind so faint and so immaterial that they don’t even register to the naked eye.

Which is strange. There is only one Divinity still alive, and that’s Olvos. Her miracles all still work—that would be why the miraculous walls of Bulikov still stand—but they should be the only ones.

Yet Sigrud doesn’t recognize these Divine alterations to the world. He was no expert on the Divine—that was always Shara’s area—but he’s fairly sure that, like altering the streets themselves, he’s never seen miracles or works of this kind.

He stares at the miracles through the glass jar. It’s clear that they’re barriers of a sort, running across the threshold of a hallway, or the top of the stairs, or even in the lobby.

This was not just a hotel, thinks Sigrud, lowering the glass jar. It was a fortress.

He looks back down the hallway, toward the ruined room where Shara died.

Were you waging a war, Shara? And if so—against whom?

Then he hears it: a cough, a shuffle, and the click of a heel from downstairs. Someone’s inside the hotel, someone very nearby.

Sigrud shrinks up behind the corner next to the stairs and slowly slides out his knife. He listens carefully, standing perfectly still.

He can hear them mount the stairs, hear the carpet being crushed under the soles of their shoes. A light springs on downstairs—a torch—and the beam goes bobbing and dancing among the white paneled walls of the Golden.

They’re almost at the top of the stairs, just a few feet away. He crouches, ready to jump, to stab them in between the ribs or slash their neck open—whichever is quieter or quicker.

They come to the top of the stairs and stand there for a moment, shining their torch around, just barely missing Sigrud crouched in the corner beside them. It’s a man, he can tell by the way the person carries himself.

“Huh,” says the man. “Thought I saw…Hm.” He turns around, shaking his head, and walks back downstairs. Sigrud allows himself a quick glance around the corner, and sees the golden epaulets and badge on their chest—an Ahanashtani policeman.

He waits, listening, until he’s sure the policeman’s gone. Then he waits more, another ten minutes, just to be sure. Then he finally lets out a breath.

He looks down at the knife in his hand and sees it’s shaking.

Just a policeman. No one of consequence, no one of note. An innocent bystander, really.

Sigrud sheathes his knife. He wonders—how many innocent lives is he responsible for? How many have fallen simply because they happened to be close to him while he did his work?

He walks back downstairs, trying to ignore the trembling in his hands.

Once he’s outside the hotel and back in the safety of the shadows, Sigrud explores the alterations done to the streets around the Golden. He must look like a madman, standing there with a glass jar stuck to his eye, but there’s no one around to see him at this hour.

Whoever made the miracles in the Golden clearly did far more work to the streets outside. There are barriers and lines and invisible barricades everywhere—some hanging in the air, ghostly modifications to what must be reality itself—and it doesn’t take long for Sigrud to understand what this is.

If the Golden was Shara’s fortress, he thinks, then these must be its moats, its drawbridges, its outer walls and gatehouses. He has no idea what would trigger these miraculous traps. They certainly didn’t do anything to keep him out, or to harm him. But perhaps they were attuned to a specific opponent. The Divinities could change reality as they wished, so they were certainly capable of creating a miraculous defense that would respond to a single, precise enemy.

But it’s still concerning that he’s never seen these miracles before in the whole of his career. Then again, he really only knew what Shara knew—and it’s possible Shara learned a lot of new things during their time apart.

Who was she when she died? Perhaps she was no longer the woman you knew.

The thought troubles him. Yet Sigrud doesn’t think Shara would act too differently. He knew Shara perhaps better than anyone in this world—and an operative is an operative until the day they die.

She must have had some method of communication, he thinks, scanning the streets. Some way of sending messages to clandestine agents and allies. And he has no doubt that if she had access to Divine defenses, she would have used some of those same methods to prepare a communications system.

He wanders the darkened streets around the Golden for nearly two hours, the glass jar stuck to his eye. He shies away from any early-morning pedestrians, especially police officers, even though he appears fairly harmless—he cannot risk having a common stop escalate into something nasty.

Then, finally, he spies it: it’s just a dot, a distant blot on a brick wall nearly two blocks away. But it’s there, glowing bright, that same, curious blue-green phosphorescence of the Divine.

He puts the jar away and approaches the brick wall slowly, conscious of any surveillance. If this was part of Shara’s communication methods, it might be compromised.

He takes his time, spending two, three hours circling through the streets surrounding the blue-green blot. He sees nothing, but since he now seems to be dealing with something Divine, not seeing things doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The Divinity Jukov once stowed the body of his lover in a glass bead or something, if he recalls. An assassin could pop out of the walls and cut him down if they had enough miracles at their disposal.

Yet this does not happen. The closer Sigrud gets, the more confident he grows that this site—whatever it is—remains secure.

Sigrud walks toward the wall and casually holds the jar up to his eye, or at least as casually as one could possibly do such a thing.

One brick in the wall glows bright blue-green. Five bricks up from the ground.

Sigrud walks up to it, then scans the streets. There’s no one.

He looks at the brick. Throwing lots of caution to the wind, he touches it.

His fingers pass through it as if it were made of fog, and the instant this happens, it vanishes, leaving a hole in the wall.

Sigrud peers into the hole. There are two objects inside: one is a candle, burning with a strange intensity. The other is an envelope, sealed but unmarked.

He picks up the candle and quickly blows it out, for it’s not wise to be lit up like a firework when you’re trying to go unnoticed. He thinks, then flips the candle over.

Inscribed on the bottom is a symbol of a flame between two parallel lines—the insignia of Olvos, the flame in the woods.

Sigrud grunts, surprised. He’s seen such miraculous candles before, with Shara, in Bulikov—they never burn out, and give off an intense, bright light. But why put one here? Why light up a dead drop?

He drops the candle and picks up the envelope. On its front is a single letter—an S.

He pockets the envelope, turns, and takes a long, circuitous walk back to his rooms. He’s fairly confident he has no tails, no surveillance. One person happens to walk alongside him for a little bit—a pale, young, Continental girl with odd eyes and a queerly upturned nose—but their paths quickly diverge, and he never sees her again.

Once he’s back in his rooms, Sigrud watches the streets for another hour. When he’s satisfied he’s gone unnoticed, he shuts the curtains and opens the envelope.

It contains two letters, both handwritten, though one is in code. Sigrud reads the uncoded one first.

Sigrud rereads the letter. Then he reads it a third, fourth, and fifth time. Then he sits back and lets out a long, slow sigh.

It’s clear now that Shara was working a big operation—especially if she was putting together lists of possible recruits. It’s not at all clear what they were recruiting agents for, but it must have been something specialized, something sought-after—otherwise, their opponent stealing a list of those recruits wouldn’t be such a devastating blow, which this letter makes it sound like it was.

But as to who wrote this letter, and who their enemy is, Sigrud has no idea. Who is “M”? Could that be Mulaghesh, Shara’s longtime military ally? He doesn’t think so. Last he heard, Mulaghesh was still serving in Parliament in Ghaladesh, and was enjoying a surprising burst of popularity—he knows her supporters fondly call her “Mother Mulaghesh,” which amuses him, as Mulaghesh was about as motherly as a dreadnought.

Whoever their enemy is, they penetrated not only Shara’s tradecraft practices, but also the Divine barriers she’d put up around herself in the Golden. Not someone to trifle with, then.

And whoever wrote this message was trying to warn Shara, trying to tell her the sharks were closing in. But it never got to her.

Yet the little Saypuri hood…That rings a bell.

He rereads that line again and again. Sigrud worked with all kinds of Saypuri hoods and operatives and hardliners in his time in the Ministry.

An aging Saypuri hood with a scar on his neck…

The blood on the floor. Dirty work, silent and close—knife work.

The memory of a face comes swimming up in his mind: a thin, wiry, short Saypuri man, with high, sharp cheekbones, a starved face, and burning eyes. And just below his chin, nearly hidden in his collar, a bright, lurid, white scar, running across his throat.

He remembers the man tapping that scar once and saying, I got this in Jukoshtan. Fucking Kolkashtani took exception to the way I was walking. Too much pride for a Saypuri, he said. But I survived. Found him later. Gutted him like a pig. Never forgot that he tried to do that to me. Whenever I get a contract for a Continental…Why, I grab my knife, and remember…

“Ah,” he says. “Khadse. Of course.”

Lieutenant Rahul Khadse of the Saypuri Navy. Sigrud remembers him. Nasty little man, one of Vinya’s pets. When Shara took the prime minister’s seat, he’d been one of the first to go. But if it’s him—and Sigrud only has this mysterious testimony suggesting so—then it seems he found a home here in Ahanashtan, practicing his grisly trade.

Sigrud puts down the handwritten note and looks at the copy of the coded message. It appears to be a copy of a telegram, which would have been sent through the normal channels—so the date is there in plain text at the top. It looks like it was sent the week before Shara’s death.

He sighs and scratches his head. I thought I’d never have to decrypt anything again, he thinks, yet here I am once more. He rummages around in his room for a pencil and paper. How I hate codes.

It takes him the whole morning to decrypt it. He tries some standard methods, but none make any headway. He tries some systems Shara devised, but those don’t work either.

I should sleep, he thinks, rubbing his eyes. I must sleep….

But whenever he thinks of sleep, he remembers the sight of the Golden, its walls ruined and torn, and he has no appetite for rest.

It’s only when he starts really thinking about who this message was intended for—Khadse, likely—that he has any ideas.

If Khadse was the hood that Shara’s enemy was working with, then he probably would not have his own encryption team. Maybe he would have twenty years ago, when he was still in the folds of the Ministry and had access to resources—but not now. So he’d need something familiar. And what sort of code would be familiar to Khadse?

After one more hour, he stops, thunderstruck.

He knows this. He’s used this code before.

He tries out one key.

The first few lines of the original order begin to materialize:

“Shit,” says Sigrud. He can’t believe it. It’s a code that was used by Bulikovian partisans twenty-five years ago, when the capital of the Continent occasionally resisted Saypuri rule. He can’t blame Khadse for using it—it’s an obscure one, one broken by the Ministry long ago, and used in a region fairly far from here. It’s likely any contemporary Ministry operatives would be stumped by it. But Khadse likely didn’t think there’d be any aging operatives like Sigrud on his tail.

He decodes the rest of the message, and reads:

Sigrud rereads the message, then reads it a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time.

The 28th of Bhovra…He has to do some math, since he usually thinks in Saypuri months, not Continental months—but he eventually realizes that’s in three days. So he still has time. Not much, but some.

He has a time, a date, and he knows one half of who will be there—Khadse and his team. Likely a lot of them, judging by the last sentence—“highest possible security.”

He looks down at his hands. Scarred, worn, ugly things—the left, especially, its palm brutally mutilated using a Divine torture method long, long ago. I was only ever meant for one thing, he thinks. He slowly makes fists. The knuckles pop and creak unpleasantly. Meant to practice one art. How just it feels that now I shall do so.

He goes to bed, and sleeps deeply for the first time in weeks.

The Suvin Warehouse proves to be an old coal facility, situated on a stretch of docks on the eastern end of Ahanashtan—very sketchy, very dangerous, very old and dilapidated. An odd choice for an exchange: usually they’d pick someplace more accessible.

No simple dead drop, then, he thinks. Whoever is giving this information to Khadse, they mean to make him work for it.

But if Khadse is being put through his paces, it means there’s much, much more to protect. Shara was just one facet of all this, and Khadse was but a tool in a larger game.

I must meet this employer of Khadse’s, he thinks. And ask him many, many questions.

He walks along the perimeter. Bolts, he thinks, looking at the niches and shadows. Radios…Rope…Explosives, perhaps. He looks around at the nearby crumbling lots. And I’ll need a safe house. And probably to steal an auto too.

He has work to do, things to buy, things to make. And not much time to get them.

He returns to the streets to find his way home. But as he does he checks his periphery, doubles back, and performs some quick maneuvers to see if he has a tail.

He doesn’t. But he could have sworn he saw a familiar face: the pale, young Continental woman with the upturned nose and queerly colored eyes.

He shakes himself.

Time to go to work.