City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing. This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible. —DREYLING PROVERB, ORIGIN UNKNOWN

“He sounds loony as fuck-all.”

“He is…the night?” asks Sigrud. “Yes,” she says. “The night itself. The purest idea of it, the first night.” “What do you mean?” “The first night humanity experienced. Before light, before civilization, before your kind named the stars. That’s what he is, that’s how he works. He is darkness, he is shadows, he is the primeval manifestation of what’s outside your windows, what’s beyond the fence gate, what lives under the light of the cold, distant moon….All darknesses are one to him. All shadows are one to him. That was his function, as a child of the Divine.”

“I know I’m young,” says Taty softly, “but it feels to me that…that death is but a thunderstorm. Just wind and noise. You can’t ask meaning of such a thing. Not even of your own.”

My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it’ll be here well after they walk away from it. My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective. —UPPER PARLIAMENT HOUSE MINORITY LEADER TURYIN MULAGHESH, LETTER TO GENERAL ADHI NOOR, 1735

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.

“To live with hatred,” says Sigrud, “is like grabbing hot embers to throw them at someone you

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

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.”

Olvos is silent. She takes a deep breath and exhales, smoke pouring out of her nostrils. “Going well or poorly isn’t the point,” she says quietly. “Those are short-term standards for short-term goals.”

“You, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” says Olvos, tapping out her pipe, “are a man that a miracle mistook for a god.”

“I am cursed,” says Mulaghesh, “with an abundance of things I wish to say, as we are well aware, Prime Minister.”

“You did something few could have ever done, Taty,” says Sigrud. “You walked away from power, and gave people choices where they’d never had any before.” “But now what will they do with them?” “I think,” says Sigrud, “that they will be people. As they have always been. For better or worse.”