City of Miracles

6. Older Grounds

After the soft rains comes the fog, swelling up from the countless rivers and tributaries winding through Ghaladesh. It fills the yards and county lanes of the eastern portion of the city. Sigrud can tell that this is the astronomically wealthy portion of Ghaladesh, the neighborhoods inhabited by the scions of industry: the actual houses become more and more elusive, hidden far back from the road behind walls and hedges and fences and gates, the barest hint of lit windows in the distant hills. Whereas Mulaghesh lives downtown, close to where all the action is, the people here are so powerful that they force the action to come to them, and can refuse entry to those they disdain.

Sigrud wipes moisture from his brow as he steers the puttering little auto along the lanes. He tries to tell himself it’s just the warmth and the damp. He tries to tell himself he’s not sweating because he just stole an auto, along with a pistol and ammunition, and is now about to bring both of these stolen goods right under the nose of Ministry officers.

Sigrud stops the auto at the top of the hill and surveys his surroundings. He glances at a nearby mailbox and confirms he’s close to Shara’s estate.

He pulls over. Turns out the lights. Then he slips out of the auto.

Sigrud received sparse training on wilderness tactics when he trained for the Ministry, but he’s had a lot, lot more in the past ten years, having spent so much time in the forests north of Bulikov. Those wintry, piney places are about as different from the steamy hills of Ghaladesh as one can imagine—but trees and grasses are still trees and grasses.

He pulls a gray-green cap down low over his head, steps into the brush, takes out his spyglass, and stays low.

For the next three hours he surveys the area. The Komayd estate isn’t the biggest one, but it’s pretty damned big, situated on a seven- or eight-acre lot, with high wooden walls and the main house clinging to a stream that runs across the grounds. His eyes widen when he actually sees the house. He thought it would be big—he recalls Shara acidly saying, Auntie’s sitting on quite the nest egg, I’m told her neighbor’s a steel baron—but not this big. The house is more of a mansion, with dark stone walls on the lower floor and a dark plaster second floor—a common style in Saypur.

Despite its size, the estate is well guarded. Sigrud doesn’t get close, but he manages to count one car at the front gate, one guard on foot at the side gate, and a third guard in a blind set up just behind the estate in the woods. There’s also a roving car that makes runs up and down the country lanes, taking up vantage points to check the area.

It’ll be hard to get in. The walls are watched from all angles. The grounds themselves, though, seem relatively deserted, at least from what he can see.

So how to get in?

He stands on one small hill below a towering teak tree and eyes the stream that runs across the Komayd grounds. It looks deep, maybe six or seven feet.

“Hm,” he says.

He creeps to the south of the estate, listening closely. Brightly colored birds and even the odd monkey stare down at him. The trees are nothing short of tremendous. He’s heard before that Saypur boasts the most impressive foliage in all the world, due to its wet climate, and he can’t disagree. The trees are tall, thick, and, he hopes, concealing.

He cocks his head, listening, and then he hears it: the quiet trickle of water.

He finds the stream and sees that it is deep, or at least deep enough. He wonders how far the stream will take him, how far he’ll have to go. One mile? More? And I’ll have to avoid detection throughout….

He looks up at the sky. Evening will be here soon. He takes off his gray-green coat, then pulls out his pistol. He contemplates bringing it, but he’s had bad luck with wet ammunition before: supposedly some Saypuri-made rounds can fire underwater, but Sigrud’s always found their performance to be spotty. Maybe they’ve made advances since he was in the service, but if so he hasn’t heard of them.

Tsking, he hides the pistol in his coat, then shoves the bundle underneath some ferns. Better to come back to it later, when I know it will work. He checks to make sure his knife is still strapped to his thigh and the waterproof electric torch is strapped to his belt. Then he takes a deep breath, dives in, and begins to swim upriver.

It’s full dark by the time Sigrud emerges onto the Komayd grounds, just beyond the southern wall. He moved upriver agonizingly slowly, swimming and sometimes creeping through the waters. He’s fairly confident he passed under the walls undetected, swimming through the deep shadows of the stream. Now he’s more worried about who could be on the grounds.

Dripping wet, he crawls up to one towering garden hedge and peers at the giant home beyond. He crouches there for a full twenty minutes, watching carefully. The windows of the home are dark and empty. There’s no one he can see. There must not be enough ready personnel to waste time inside the home of a dead politician.

He takes stock of the house. The stream runs across the east grounds of the estate, and a big teak tree stands just beside one of the second-floor windows. He considers shimmying up it and jumping in—but if there’s no one guarding the interior grounds, why not just go in through the back door?

Sigrud slowly stalks up to the Komayd mansion, listening for the errant snap of branches or rustling of leaves. Then he dashes across the back patio, hunches by the back glass doors, and listens.

Nothing. Silence.

He pulls out his lockpicks and goes to work. It’s a weak lock, and in seconds he’s inside, gently closing the doors behind him.

Sigrud turns to get his bearings. Then he stares, perplexed.

The entrance hall is huge and grandiose enough to be startling—but what’s even more startling is that it’s completely and utterly empty. Not a stick of furniture in sight and nothing on the walls, except for the drapes on the far windows and a small round mirror hanging from one of the columns.

Did they move out all her belongings?

Listening for any footfalls, he creeps toward the main hallway. The floor is pink marble and the walls are wood, painted a soft green with crimson crown molding and bright gold gas sconces. The room must have played host to countless paintings, some of enormous size—he can see where the hooks once hung—but they’re gone too.

I am going to feel very stupid indeed, he thinks, if I risked my neck to break into an empty house. He sucks his teeth. But if it is empty…then why guard it at all?

He silently stalks down the main hallway and looks in the first few rooms, parlor rooms and game rooms and libraries and such—or at least that’s what he assumes they are, because they’re all empty as well.

It’s confusing on two levels for him: not only is it odd to find the house empty, with no signs of furniture being here recently, but it’s odd to imagine Shara living here. She always had a deep dislike of large, wide spaces. She never said it, but he suspected it was her training: in a big room, lots of people can see you from far away, where you might not be able to see them.

Odder still—where are her books? Shara loved books more than nearly anything else in the world. As someone who occasionally had to move her belongings, Sigrud—and especially his lower back—can attest to that.

Then he gets an idea. He walks back where he came from, headed toward the dining area. Not in any of the big, wide rooms…But perhaps she lived in—

He freezes as he crosses the entrance hall.

He sinks low and looks over his shoulder. Waits. Watches. But there’s nothing.

He could have sworn he saw movement before the columns by the door. Maybe even a face. But the only things in the room besides him are the sconces, drapes, and the mirror, which is still hanging from one of the entry columns.

He peers at the mirror. Perhaps I glimpsed myself moving in the reflection, he thinks.

That’s possible, he supposes. Though the angles are not at all the right ones for him to have seen himself in the mirror….

“Hm,” says Sigrud softly.

He tries to focus on the task at hand. But as impossible as it might be, part of him insists he glimpsed someone in the mirror for one second, someone who was not him: a Saypuri woman, with hard, dark features and amber-gold eyes.

He walks forward and looks closely at the little mirror. All it shows is the empty entrance hall and his own scarred face. Frowning, he retreats to the dining area.

This area is quite empty, but not totally empty: there’s a small table in this room, along with four small chairs. He can see a bit of food stuck to the side of the table, perhaps a smudge of jam. It must have been used within the past few months, possibly.

He goes to the servants’ stairwells and creeps down.

This portion of the house, below the mansion, is shorn of all grandiose displays of wealth and power. It’s white wood, scuffed stairs, and creaky wooden doors. He knows it’s intended to house the servants, so its spaces will be much smaller, much more cramped, and much more hidden.

In other words, he thinks, much more to Shara’s liking.

He comes to the bottom step and pulls out his waterproof torch. He flicks it on, keeping its light trained on the floor. He opens the door to the servants’ quarters and shines the light in.

Inside is a long hallway, but unlike all the others, this one is not empty: it’s lined with bookshelves, tall and towering, each piled high with thick, ancient tomes. He walks down the hallway, shining his light about, and sees that each of the servants’ rooms—small, with a single door—is also filled with bookcases, not to mention countless overstuffed chairs and small side tables, each covered in old tea doilies.

He walks over to one table and picks up the doily sitting there. It’s old, limp, stained, something that really should have been washed and changed, but the person who lived here clearly never had the time.

He holds it to his face, and smells it. The powerful scents of tea fill his nose, sirlang and pochot and jasmine.

Tears well up in his eyes. “Hello, Shara,” he whispers.

Just a little under five hundred miles north, across the South Seas in the dark basement of a small but well-guarded house in Ahanashtan, Captain First Class Kavitha Mishra drums her fingers and grimaces.

Hm, she thinks. This is bad.

She looks at the mirrors before her. There are sixty-one in total, all of varying sizes and widths, all hanging from the moldering brick walls here in the basement. It’s quite dark in the basement, with one tiny candle burning; yet despite this lack of light, sixty of the mirrors are reflecting things that they really should not be reflecting.

Most of the mirrors show nothing but darkness. Others show meeting rooms, doorways, hallways, bedrooms, garages, and one reflects the eye of a telescope, which appears to be pointed at an apartment balcony across a city street. The mirror sits so close to the telescope that she can look right through it and see the magnified windows beyond.

None of this should be possible, of course. There is no conceivable, logical explanation as to why, for example, one mirror appears to be reflecting a forest lane, when there is no forest lane anywhere close to the mirror’s face. What it should be reflecting is Kavitha Mishra, sitting before a small burning candle at the desk, frowning and wondering what to do. But it doesn’t.

She knows how these particular mirrors work. It’s a miracle, of course, one she herself has performed dozens of times.

But she’s never had this happen before.

Did he see me? she thinks. Did I turn it off fast enough? Does he know?

Mishra sighs softly and sits back. It took the better part of three years for her to get the mirrors situated in the right places throughout the Continent and Saypur: by, say, placing a small, tiny mirror in the desk drawer in a meeting room in Parliament, for example, or hanging a small mirror on the trunk of a tree outside a military barracks, or slipping a narrow mirror behind a painting on the wall of a major financial trading firm. Mishra doesn’t have a lot of close allies alongside her in the Ministry, but she had enough for this. And knowing what everyone of importance is doing or thinking at any given moment can make a handful of people far more effective than an entire army.

Though they had to be very careful with where they put the mirrors, since, after all, it’s a two-way connection: just as she can see and hear the things happening on the distant mirrors, the people on the other end could see and hear her in the basement. As such, many of the mirrors act solely as listening devices, hidden away in dark places near important action.

She remembers what the controller said when he first tasked her with this duty: Vinya Komayd used this miracle all the time, when she was in the Ministry. They all did, they were all hypocrites, preaching fear of the Divine while also using it. But this particular one, the Frost of Bolshoni, allowed her to gain control of all of the Ministry, and much of the Saypuri government, peering out of windowpanes and mirrors far away, watching and listening…And her niece, of course, almost certainly did the same….

The thought troubled her deeply at the time. Though she knows the controller is now far more powerful than Vinya or Shara Komayd ever were.

Mishra waits a moment longer. Then she grimaces. No more fretting about it. I’ve got to tell him.

She stands and walks into one of the three broom closets at the far end of the basement. Usually she or whichever other contractor is on duty will use these rooms as a fallback: if one mirror displays a lot of activity—a loud meeting, a fight, people enthusiastically making love—they’ll take the mirror off the wall and sit with it in one of the dark, soundproof closets, so the noises it’s making won’t filter through to any of the other sixty mirrors. But she won’t be using it for such, not today.

She opens the door, steps inside. Total darkness embraces her.

Then she takes a breath, and says one word.

“Nokov.”

There’s a pause, and then from somewhere in the closet there’s the sound of a soft shuffling, like something creeping through nearby weeds.

A high, cold voice wafts through the darkness: “Mishra.”

He chooses not to physically manifest before her. This is increasingly normal now: she senses that, as he grows in power, he also becomes more and more abstract, and harder to comprehend. But understanding it doesn’t make it any less uncanny.

She clears her throat and tries to focus. She definitely tries to ignore the low groans coming from somewhere out in the darkness, like trees weighed down with ice. “I have a report for you, sir.”

“Ah.” The voice is right beside her now. “Excellent. Thank you.”

“I’ve observed an…unwelcome visitor to the Komayd household in Ghaladesh. His appearance matches the man you encountered here in Ahanashtan, at the slaughterhouse.”

A long pause.

“Does it.”

“Yes. Tall. Dreyling. He appears to have infiltrated without the awareness of the Ministry officers stationed there. He was, ah, wet—which makes me think he approached through the stream running by the house.”

A long, long silence. There is a strange, curious rumbling in the darkness, like the sound of a wild boar growling in the undergrowth.

She shivers. Whenever she talks to him like this she can’t help but get the feeling like she’s alone in a deep, ancient forest on a moonless night….

“What…what orders would you have, sir?” asks Mishra.

“Do you have assets in Ghaladesh?” asks the voice, cold and fierce.

“Yes. I can reach out to them with the Frost of Bolshoni. I’ve become somewhat adept at it.” Being as I have to do it about thirty to sixty times a day, thinks Mishra, to maintain the mirrors.

“Can they respond quickly?”

“Quite quickly, sir.”

“How many? Ten? Twenty?”

“I think I have twelve ready contacts, sir.”

“Good. Mobilize all of them.”

“Um. All of them?”

“Yes. And do they have access to the trunk full of soil?” says the voice. “The one we sent along?”

“Yes, sir, they do, but…Are you saying you wish to personally approach this man?”

“Yes, if I can,” says the voice. “I have questions for him—if he survives that long. He’s in Saypur, which makes it difficult for me….Even though I have grown since my last encounter with him, I still cannot extend my influence far beyond the Continent. But he knew Komayd. And one of the others interrupted my time with him. He is valuable, I’m sure of it. We must treat him with the utmost precaution. Tell them to use the trunk to prepare all entrances and exits to the Komayd estate.”

“Certainly, sir. Shall I keep watch on him through the mirror?”

“Yes. And if he tries to leave, stall him if you can.”

“Yes, sir.” As Nokov seems so interested, she opts not to tell him that she might have been seen in the mirror. We’ll just cross that bridge if we come to it. “And…for the assets and contractors you wish to mobilize…”

“Yes?”

“They will expect payment, sir.”

“Oh. Right. Yes.” The voice pauses, as if he’d forgotten about this inconvenience. “How much? And to which bank accounts or locations?”

She gives him the amounts and the accounts.

“One moment,” says the voice.

There’s a pause. The flicker of faint, white stars up above, pinpricks of luminescence that somehow fail to illuminate anything.

Then the voice is back. “It is done,” he says. “As you said. I have also provided you with a sum, in case you need to deal with any…irregularities.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll proceed shortly. And, ah, one last thing?”

“Yes?”

“The Ministry officers there at the Komayd estate?”

“Yes?”

“What should we do with them?”

“Oh.” A pause. “Well. I don’t see another option but to kill them.”

Mishra winces. “I see. Yes, sir.”

“I mean, do you? Do you see another option?”

“I…No. I don’t think so, sir. Not if this man is that valuable.”

“Yes.” A pause. “Mishra…”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you still believe our actions are for the good? That what we are accomplishing here is necessary?”

From his tone, she understands he is not interrogating her: this is a genuine question, as if he’d like to hear her thoughts. “I believe I do, sir.”

“The Divinities failed,” he says. “Now Saypur has failed. You know that. It is just a long, grand cycle of suffering. Someone must end it. I shall take up that task, if no one else will. I never thought it’d be easy. It will test me. And it will test you. Do you see?”

“I see. I think I see, sir.”

“Good. That is good.”

Then silence. It’s difficult to tell, as it always is with him, when he’s really gone.

She opens the door to leave. Light floods in. She’s alone in the tiny room. Except now there are three items on the floor at her feet, items that definitely weren’t there before.

One item is a large burlap sack full of silver drekels—probably a thousand of them or so. The other two items are solid gold bars, about ten pounds each, at least.

She sighs. She appreciates the payments he gives her, being as it’s a fortune every single time—she just wishes he paid her in ways that were easier to hand in at the bank.

Sigrud is very accustomed to moving through the homes and spaces of other people. He’s operated beyond the normal boundaries of law and property for so long that the idea of ownership has faded and blurred for him. If he can grab anything, or break into anywhere, then it’s difficult for him to imagine a real reason not to do so.

Yet he feels a powerful violation here, here in the living quarters of his friend.

Her books, worn but cared-for. A half-finished painting she’d made of a pair of hands—Tatyana’s?—peeling an apple with a knife. Stacks of letters to friends and confidants, none in code, not that they needed it: these are all innocent inquiries and missives, letters of “how are you” and “doing fine, thanks” and “oh my goodness she’s gotten so big.”

And then there are the pictures. Sigrud leans close to one, staring at the woman—and the child—trapped behind the glass, arms thrown about each other as they laugh, unable to bear the ridiculousness of posing for a picture….

By the seas, he thinks, is that old woman really you, Shara?

He stares at her lined skin, her graying hair—prematurely white, surely. The effects of office. Her eyes are still the same, though, large and dark, magnified behind her bulky spectacles. He imagines that, though he hadn’t seen her in a decade and a half, she still looked at the world the same way.

But he looks closer at the girl next to her.

It’s a very curious thing. Tatyana, maybe six in this photo, is obviously adopted: the pale white skin and brown hair, cut in a short, modern bob, make that very clear. Her nose is a little sharp and pointed in a way he finds strangely familiar, yet he can’t place it. But the way she stands, the dresses she wears—all of it is so much like Shara that it’s disorienting to him. It’s as if this little girl wished so much to be like her adopted mother that she took on all of her physical mannerisms.

And the love in their eyes…That is very real. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Shara make such a face in his life.

I should not have come here, he thinks, ashamed. This place is theirs….I should have let it sleep.

He keeps walking, moving silently from room to room.

A half-empty bottle of plum wine. A handful of rings soaking in a cup of cleaner. A bundle of yarn and crochet needles, unused—a hobby picked up but never pursued. Fragments of a life interrupted.

He pauses at Shara’s room. It feels deeply dishonest to do so, but he steps inside. He looks at the books on the desk, and notes one in particular, very worn and stained: Collected Essays Upon the Divine, by Dr. Efrem Pangyui.

Sigrud thinks, then picks up the book and holds it. Then, operating off of a hunch, he holds the book above the table, spine facing down, and lets it fall.

The spine of the book clunks into the table, and the covers fall open. For a moment the pages hang in the air, unsure where to fall, but then they part…

And the book falls open to a well-annotated page, one that Shara must have looked at a lot, slowly breaking the bindings. Sigrud smirks, pleased to see this trick actually work—he wasn’t at all convinced it would—and reads:

Sigrud stands in Shara’s room, thunderstruck.

It all begins to make a terrible sense to him.

“Holy hells,” he whispers. He slowly sits down on the bed.

The two beings he encountered in the slaughterhouse must not have been true Divinities, but children of Divinities. This would be why the Continental girl had such queer control over the past, and the other, the thing in the shadows, had such control over darkness: they each had their specific domains, which would naturally come with boundaries and strictures.

But how could they have survived? He supposes that, since they are very much like a Divinity, then the only way to kill them would be with the Kaj’s black lead—the last piece of which was held by Shara. Yet what she’s done with it he has no idea.

He scratches the stubble on his chin as he thinks. So this Divine child, this Nokov, was fighting a war. Perhaps one against Shara, or one Shara had waded into. But a war over what? And why target Continental adolescents? Why send Khadse out to track down children and teenagers?

He slowly leans forward, elbows on his knees.

Unless, of course—the Continental children he targeted were not really just children.

He remembers the girl from the slaughterhouse, desperately gasping: He’s killed so many of us, and now he might have me….

The gods are dead, thinks Sigrud. And when a ruler dies, what happens? The children fight over the kingdom, eliminating competition. It’s all so startlingly clear now. Perhaps some of these Divine children hid themselves away, pretending to be average, to be normal, to be mortal. But if you wish to rule your parents’ territory, you must be thorough. Every scrap of your family must be eradicated except for you.

He glances back at the page and reads one line that’s been repeatedly underlined: There was one Divine offspring, however, whose domain is unclear, and was particularly dreaded and feared in the Continental texts….

He remembers the scraping and shifting sounds in the shadows, the cold voice whispering in his ear: What I can do will make murder feel like a wondrous blessing….

He shudders. I must find Tatyana, he thinks.

Though now he worries about her too. If some of these children were just pretending to be normal, then…

No, he thinks. It could not be. I saw her as a child, as a little girl. She was hardly more than a toddler. Surely she has aged and grown like any other mortal?

He walks down to Tatyana’s end of the quarters. He expected something strange, something curious, but he finds it is…very average. A bed. Some books, all more or less intended for children or young people. Lots of books and papers about economics, which is a little odd—but not that odd, he supposes. It does not look like the bedroom of a child of the Divinities, in other words.

He shakes his head. You’re going mad with paranoia. Focus on finding her before worrying about such foolishness.

He walks farther down the hallway and comes to the kitchen. It has a gas oven—a rare luxury—and a small, modest table. A drying rack, still full of dishes. Bottles of plum and very potent apple liquor. He peers into the trash can by the far wall. Not much inside: a few napkins, a cracked jar.

Sitting on the counter above the trash can is a folded-up newspaper. He glances at it, and sees it’s old—very old, nearly two years.

Which means Shara kept it…but why?

He picks it up. The paper’s folded back so that whoever was holding it was reading one page, the financial section, and it looks as if they were paying attention to one article in particular. He reads it carefully, wondering if it could have mattered to Shara.

Then his eye falls across one name that sounds familiar, something about land purchases outside the walls of Bulikov:

…however, the deal has been consistently blocked by Ivanya Restroyka, the largest shareholder of the trust company, who refuses to break up any of the parcels for sale, though she has refused to comment on exactly why. Despite having the reputation of being a recluse, Restroyka has consistently been an active and forceful figure in Bulikovian real estate—regardless of whether that real estate lies inside or outside the city’s walls.

Sigrud cocks his head, thinking.

Restroyka…He knows that name. Doesn’t he? He massages his forehead as he thinks. The Ministry trained him for this, trained him to learn how to compartmentalize and then access his memories when needed….

And then it comes to him.

Smoke, wine, a fire. A party. Years ago, in Bulikov, before the Battle. Shara had been there, as had Mulaghesh—the first time he’d ever met her. And the man who had been throwing the party…

“Vohannes Votrov,” Sigrud says quietly.

Speaking the name aloud summons up his face: a handsome Continental man, with curly, brown-red hair and a closely cropped red beard. His jaw is strong, his smile bright, and his blue eyes have an equal measure of confidence and wildness to them.

Sigrud takes a breath as the memories come flooding back to him. Votrov had been Shara’s ex-lover, a Continental construction magnate who’d died during the Battle of Bulikov. Sigrud had not been there to see him die, but Shara had, and the trauma had been terrible for her. The man had given everything for his city, for his nation, for the future he wished to build. Sigrud knows that sacrifice wore off on Shara, catalyzing her to return to Ghaladesh and try to genuinely change things.

Which she had. Though they killed her for it. Much as the Divinities had Votrov.

But Votrov had been engaged before the Battle, to a woman. A girl, really, barely in her twenties. A pretty young Continental thing who wore entirely too much makeup. He remembers meeting her at the party, how she laughed in delight at the sight of him, thinking him—a crude, glowering Dreyling—to be a tremendous amusement.

“Ivanya Restroyka,” he says quietly.

He keeps reading the article. To his surprise, he finds that Restroyka is now one of the richest people in the world. If she inherited all of Votrov’s money, thinks Sigrud, then she is probably the richest Continental alive by leaps and bounds.

Why would Shara keep a two-year-old article about Restroyka?

He remembers Shara’s message: She is with the one woman who has ever shared my love.

The sight of Vohannes’s face swims up in his memories again.

You were Shara’s only love, he thinks, at least as far as I know. And what other woman shared you…

“Could Tatyana Komayd,” he says aloud, “be hiding with your ex-fiancée?”

Sigrud paces back down the hallway, checking each room. He finds nothing more, no sign of a struggle or hidden secrets. Just two women living their lives, hidden from society.

He thinks about Restroyka as he paces from room to room. She’s surely not a girl anymore; she must be in her forties or fifties by now. The more he considers it, the more he’s sure he’s right: if Shara was so intent on building up the Continent’s economy during her time in office, who else would she speak to but the Continent’s foremost millionaire? One with whom she had a personal connection, to boot? And perhaps they became allies, thinks Sigrud, walking toward the stairs. Allies close enough that, if Shara needed to hide her daughter, she felt she could reach out, and ask…

It’s all still theoretical. But it’s also all he has.

“Time to get the hells out of here,” he says, starting up the stairs and switching off his torch.

He comes to the dining area, trots down the hall, and heads toward the glass doors leading to the back patio, and the stream beyond.

He places a hand on the doorknob. Then he hears a voice behind him: “You’re not leaving so soon, are you?”

He leaps to the side, whirls, and pulls out his knife, readying himself for an attack…though now that he looks, there’s no one in the entry hall with him.

A burst of laughter. A voice says: “My, my, you’re quite high-strung, aren’t you? You know what you need? A vacation.”

Sigrud cocks his head. Then he stands and stalks over to the mirror hanging on the wall.

As he approaches, a face comes into view: a middle-aged Saypuri woman with curiously amber eyes. She smiles at him, an expression that’s a mixture of pity and mockery.

He looks at the mirror. The Frost of Bolshoni, he thinks. The very miracle Shara and Vinya used so often…

“You know what this is, don’t you?” says the woman. Her Saypuri accent is guttural, unrefined, from some rural area like Tohmay. She wears a thick coat and scarf. “You’ve seen this before.”

He steps forward, putting his face right up to the mirror, peering in at her room.

“Are you so taken with me?” she says, smirking. “If so, you’re terribly forward, sir.”

He ignores her, craning his head up and looking inside the reflection, taking in the desk beneath the mirror…and the walls on either side, which are also covered in mirrors. His eye widens: the mirrors are all depicting things happening throughout Saypur and the Continent, places like the prime minister’s mansion and the Bulikovian Chamber for the City Fathers.

They’ve been performing the Frost on a level I’ve never seen before, he thinks. A window in every important room in Saypur, or the Continent…

The woman is startled by this—she obviously didn’t expect him to take advantage of the two-way connection—and pulls the mirror off the wall. “Now, now,” she says. “Let’s not get nosy.” He watches, feeling slightly nauseous, as the view pivots wildly. She walks with the mirror to a darkened room.

He can glimpse the ceiling as she does so—he notes the oak, the limestone, the blooming patches of mold.

“I know you, don’t I?” says the woman. “Yes…I saw you in Voortyashtan, ages ago. You’re the dauvkind, aren’t you? You’re the gutless Dreyling son of a bitch who killed those soldiers.” She laughs again, but there’s a touch of anger to it. “I usually enjoy my work, but I’ll enjoy seeing you dead a little more than usua—”

“Ahanashtan,” he says.

“Mm? What’s that?”

“You’re in Ahanashtan,” he says.

“Oh? And what makes you so sure?”

“The limestone,” says Sigrud. “And the red oak. Both common there. And your scarf. Still quite warm in Saypur. And you’re not Ministry, are you.”

She smirks. “What makes you say that?”

“Because if you were,” says Sigrud, “you’d have signaled to your operators working outside, and I would be dead.”

“Oh, that’s a good point. But you’re still dead.”

Sigrud looks at the windows. No movement. He gives the woman a cocked eyebrow.

“You can’t run from him,” she says. “He’s everywhere. He’s in everything. Wherever there’s darkness, wherever light doesn’t reach…That’s where he is.”

“Then why isn’t he here?” asks Sigrud. “The shadows are thick. Where is your master’s whisper?”

Then he hears it: the distant, throaty boom of what he’s sure is a scatter-gun.

Sigrud looks toward the front door, concerned.

The woman laughs. “There,” she says. “That’s where it is!”

Sigrud thinks rapidly. Ministry operators don’t use scatter-guns. There’s another deep boom. It’s from the north, he thinks, toward the estate gates. So whoever’s out there isn’t Ministry….So who are they shooting at?

The woman grins at him. “See?” she says. “I told you you were dead.”

Sigrud smashes the mirror with one fist. Then he runs back to the glass doors before the patio. He crouches, peering out, and then he hears it: the harsh pop-pop of small-arms fire, south of the estate.

“They’re all around me, aren’t they?” he says. “She was stalling me.”

He rubs his chin, wondering what in the hells to do. She must have seen him enter the mansion, then alerted a team to his location. How many, he says, I don’t know…But enough to take on four or five Ministry operatives placed all around the estate walls. And all he has is a waterproof torch and a knife.

He looks around the room, which is totally empty, trying to think of ways he could use the windows, the doors, the drapes, the lamps…

He stares at one gold sconce. The gas lamps.

He thinks about it. It’s an idea, certainly, but…

Just once, he thinks, I would like to think of a solution that does not involve me nearly blowing myself up.

He runs downstairs. Not much time now. The estate is big, so it’ll take time for his assailants to cross to the main house, but he probably has only a handful of minutes.

He sprints down the servants’ quarters to Shara’s kitchen. He grabs the bottles of plum and apple liquor, about ten of them, and tosses them into the oven. Then he shuts the oven and turns the dial up to high. He hears the little gas jets inside flick on and hiss.

This is a stupid idea, he thinks. But he doesn’t stop.

He sprints through the servants’ quarters, turning all the gas lamps up as high as they go but not lighting them. Instead they just keep hissing, filling the hallway with a reeking stench, the air trembling as the fumes keep pouring in.

They’ll have the doors watched, he thinks. And the windows. So how to get outside?

He runs upstairs and turns on all the gas lamps in the entry hall. Then, remembering the layout of the estate—It’s got a second floor, he remembers, with wooden walls—he runs down the main hallway, finds a grand, twisting staircase up, and runs upstairs.

He runs east, away from the servants’ quarters, sprinting past grand bedrooms and salons, all empty. He pauses at one room and creeps over to the window. He braces himself, then peeks out.

He can see the long gravel driveway stretching north to the gates. There are figures walking down the lawn toward the house in a broad formation, sweeping the grounds.

He narrows his eye, trying to see how they’re armed, when there’s a sudden crack! noise.

The glass just above his head explodes. Something cracks into the wooden wall behind him. Sigrud, startled, jumps away, then covers his head as more bullets come cracking through the window, chewing up the frame and the far wall.

Sigrud crawls toward the door, then rolls into the hallway, breathing hard. Okay, he thinks. So. They are pretty good.

But that should draw them into the house. They’ll think he’s cornered upstairs now.

He keeps running east down the hall, though now he makes sure to stay clear of the windows. He slaps his head, trying to remember how close the stream came to the house. When he comes to the far bedroom he drops to all fours and crawls across the floor until he’s clear of the window.

He stands when he gets to the bedroom wall, tapping it as he walks its length, listening. There was a tree out there, he thinks. Out there somewhere close…At least, I’m pretty sure there was a tree, and the stream beside it. If he’s wrong, then this will go quite spectacularly bad.

Finally he knocks on the wall and hears a hollow thump. He nods—sweat pours off his nose with the motion—and he pulls out his knife. Then he begins stabbing at the wood and plaster in a messy line, a drunken, perforated seam. He almost laughs with relief when he sees moonlight shining through the holes.

A crash from downstairs. The chatter of gunfire. Clearing the room, he thinks. Just in case I was hiding behind the door.

Once he’s stabbed a wide, messy circle in the wall, he sheathes his knife, steps back, takes a deep breath, and runs at it.

He lowers his shoulder, pushes forward, and…

Crunch.

The wall falls away like a trapdoor. The next thing he knows he’s tumbling through the night air, then through leaves. Then he’s stopped sharply by a tree branch, which crashes into his left side very, very painfully. He almost cries out, but he keeps his senses. He’s dangling in the air, exposed to everyone, and he needs to get to the stream below.

They must have heard the sound, he thinks. They had to have. Hurry. Hurry…

Groaning with pain, Sigrud drops from branch to branch, trying to descend in a controlled plummet. His side complains each time—probably a cracked rib, but there’s no time for that. He can hear someone shouting on the west side of the grounds, and then gunfire, and something hot and angry parts the air above him…

He hits the ground and rolls.

Run. Run.

He sprints for the stream and dives into it. As he dives he sees there was someone guarding it—They must have known I came from the stream, he thinks as he falls—and watches out of the side of his eye as they raise a rifling…

He plunges deep down into the stream, trying to hug the walls. Soft pops from above. Bullets zip through the moonlit waters, leaving tiny, delicate chains of bubbles.

Sigrud curls into a ball and tries to stuff himself up under a tree root. His side is screaming and his lungs are bursting, as he didn’t take nearly as deep a breath as he should have.

More bullets zip through the waters, curving down in strangely graceful motions. Sigrud waits.

Did my trap work? he thinks. Did it fizzle out or will i—

Then the world above goes bright.

Everything seems to shake. The tree above groans, twists, sags, and Sigrud suddenly wonders if it was wise to take shelter under the root of a tree directly beside a building he was intending to blow up.

He shoves himself out, swimming away. The water fills with silt and soil. The explosion, impossibly, keeps going on, a never-ending roar and a bright orange light filtering through the cloudy water. The surface above sizzles as flaming detritus patters across the stream.

I need air, he thinks, growing faint. Only I hope there is air up there for me to breathe….

He waits. And waits. And waits.

Finally the roar seems to subside, and he swims up to the surface and hauls himself to the shore.

The world is bright and broiling. He draws a deep, gasping breath, and his ribs painfully creak with the inhalation. His breath catches and he starts coughing, which only hurts him worse.

He blinks and looks behind him. The house is a raging inferno. Steam is suddenly pouring off of his arms and legs as the heat boils the moisture out of his clothing.

Sigrud glances around with watering eyes and sees a smoking human form lying about fifteen feet from the stream. He staggers over to it—it’s a woman, very dead—and pulls the rifling from her hands. He hopes it’s still in working condition.

He looks around at the wreckage but can’t see anyone. Better to find out now, he thinks, rather than later. He confirms the rifling’s loaded, figures that the sound of the fire is loud enough to muffle any gunshot, and points the rifling at the water and pulls the trigger.

The rifling jumps in his hands and discharges neatly and cleanly. He reloads, sinks low, and looks back down the river, toward the wall. Most of the gardens are on fire and some of the smaller trees have collapsed into the water, so he doubts if he can go out the way he came in. He hugs the estate wall and makes his way north toward the front gates, where he knows the mercenaries likely wiped out the Ministry operatives—hopefully leaving the way clear.

Once he’s a little north of the house he stoops beside a hedge—which is flaming like a torch—and surveys his work. If it were any other structure, any other place, he’d take a professional pleasure in its utter destruction; but this was Shara’s ancestral home, the place where she raised her child.

He watches as the western roof collapses with a crunch. “I am sorry, Shara,” he whispers.

He approaches the gate, one half of which hangs open. He can see the Ministry auto beyond, riddled with bullet holes, three human forms slumped over in the seats. The ground around the gate is curiously dark—it’s like someone laid mulch while the mercenaries approached—but besides that he can’t see anyone.

He stoops down beside a large stone and sets the rifling’s sights on the gate. Then he lets out a loud groan and calls out, using a rough approximation of a Saypuri accent: “Are you there? We’re hurt! He’s dead, but we’re hurt!”

Nothing.

Sigrud cries, “Please! Please!”

Still nothing for a bit.

Then a man’s head pokes around the corner.

Sigrud puts his finger on the trigger and fires. There’s a spray of blood and the man falls to the ground.

He waits for a good five minutes, not moving a muscle. There’s silence except for the roaring fire behind him. Then he stands, sweeps to the left, crossing before the half-open gate and scanning the drive out front for any movement.

He knows he’ll be vulnerable as he exits, if there’s anyone left out there—which he doubts, but you can never be sure. Slip through the gate, he thinks, take cover next to the guard’s corpse, and watch for any other assailants.

He creeps up, walking along the wall toward the open gate. He keeps his rifling trained on the husk of an auto, which is where he’d be hunkered down if it were him out there.

He creeps forward, taking one step, then another, then another…Then finally he wheels out, rifling ready—only to find the driveway empty, the scene totally still. Just corpses in the auto, and nothing else.

But then he realizes something. The intense blaze from the burning home has been so consistent he’s almost stopped noticing it for the past ten minutes. Yet now as he crosses the gate, the heat fades behind him, the stupefying, broiling warmth abruptly dwindling as if a giant had come along and blown out the fire much as one would a candle flame.

Sigrud pauses. He stays close to the gate. Then he looks behind him.

The fire is gone. No, more than that—the house is gone. The landscape of the estate has faded into darkness behind him, like a cloud passed before the moon and darkened out all light above.

No, it’s even more than that: the world simply stops thirty feet south of where he stands.

Sigrud whirls around, wondering what in hells is going on now, and tries to seek shelter against the wall—but the wall isn’t there. There’s nothing around him but darkness—except for the gates, bizarrely enough. The gates appear to hang on nothing, big rib cages of iron dangling in the air, one half in an open position, the other half closed. There’s nothing beyond them. Just a wall of black.

Then the closed half of the gate opens, its hinges whining softly, as if pushed from behind.

Sigrud whips the rifling up. He keeps it trained on the entryway, unsure what to look for.

Then he sees them. Eyes in the darkness. Eyes like those of a cat, just barely caught by the light. Or perhaps they’re like tiny, distant white stars….

He fires. He fires the rifling at the eyes once, twice, three times, four, five….Then he stops, conscious of his ammunition.

He waits.

The eyes blink, very slowly. Then they begin to advance, one step at a time.

And as they approach they seem to pass some kind of barrier, and a face appears around the eyes: a young man’s face, pale and starved, with ink-black hair and a skinny neck. At first it seems like the young man’s head is hanging in the air just as the iron gates are, but then Sigrud sees that he’s wearing what appear to be black robes, which ripple despite the lack of any wind. And as the young man approaches, Sigrud begins hearing many strange things….

Chirrups and distant rustlings and a curious, arrhythmic tap-tapping. Small stones falling down a slope; the shiver of leaves; the groan of trees; the slow drip of water. Sigrud suppresses a shiver as he hears them: they make him feel like he’s alone in the woods at night, listening to countless invisible watchers circling him.

A thought strikes him as he realizes this.

Circling me…

He looks down. The gates are not quite the only thing persisting in this vast darkness: there’s a wide patch of earth at his feet, the mulch he saw earlier.

“Continental soil,” says the young man, and his high, cold voice is instantly familiar to Sigrud. “It helps me assert myself across the South Seas, you see.”

Sigrud looks at him. “Nokov.”

The young man smiles slightly and nods. “Few would dare to say that word aloud. Were I not here already with you…”

Sigrud smiles back. Then he starts shooting again.

There are only two rounds left in the rifling. They don’t seem to do anything to Nokov: it’s like Sigrud’s firing blanks, or like the bullets vanish the instant they leave the barrel.

Sigrud looks at the empty rifling, grimaces, and hurls it at Nokov. The rifling passes right through him like he’s made of smoke.

Nokov blinks, slightly perturbed. “That was not really necessary.”

Sigrud ignores him, pulls out his knife with his right hand, and lunges at Nokov, slashing and stabbing at the boy. Nokov frowns—again, an expression of the slightest inconvenience—and seems to flicker away each time, evaporating before the blade even comes close to him.

Despite this, Sigrud doesn’t give up. He’s killed Divine creatures with this blade before, so he’s determined to at least try again. Panting and wincing as his ribs creak, he dives at Nokov over and over again.

Finally Nokov sighs. “Enough,” he says.

A frail, white hand flicks out. His knuckles graze Sigrud’s cheek….

It’s like he’s been hit by a stack of bricks plummeting out of the sky. Sigrud crashes to the muddy soil below him, his damaged side shrieking in pain. His knife falls from his grasp and all the air is driven from his body. He tries to roll over but he doesn’t even have the strength for it.

“This is my place,” says Nokov calmly. “You can’t harm me here. You can’t escape from me here. I can do whatever I’d like to you.”

Nokov stoops and grasps Sigrud under his jaw. Though Nokov appears to be a young man just barely out of adolescence, he lifts all two hundred and seventy pounds of Sigrud like he’s no more than a child’s stuffed animal. He slaps at Nokov’s wrist with his right hand, but his fingers pass right through as if the boy’s limb isn’t even there. His ribs on his left side yammer and yowl as he’s lifted up, and he’s forced to keep his left arm awkwardly pinned to his torso, which twists him and makes him gag in Nokov’s grasp.

Nokov stares into Sigrud’s reddening face. His eyes are hooded in shadow, as if no matter where he stood they’d be lost in darkness. Yet Sigrud can see two very distant specks of light glimmering from somewhere deep within his skull….

“Where are the others?” asks Nokov softly. “Where are they hiding?”

Sigrud has no idea what he’s talking about, but he taps his throat, signaling he cannot talk.

Nokov frowns and removes his hand. Sigrud, however, keeps dangling in the air, as if he’s hung on invisible strings.

Sigrud stares down at himself, hanging several feet above the ground. Are you so sure, he thinks, that he is not a Divinity? He certainly seems capable of changing reality at his will….

“Tell me,” says Nokov.

“Tell you what?” gasps Sigrud.

“You work with the others. That is clear. So where are they? Where are they hiding from me?”

“W-What?”

“What function do they use? Which wrinkle in reality do they hide behind?”

Sigrud wonders what to say. He only got into this because of Shara’s death. But he suspects Nokov might be looking for these other Divine children. Including Tatyana Komayd, whom Nokov likely believes to be one of them—and he’ll be damned if he gives Nokov her location.

Keep him talking.

Sigrud wheezes and says, “You…You killed Shara, didn’t you? You paid Khadse to.”

Nokov just watches Sigrud, his face queerly clean of emotion.

“Why?” says Sigrud. “What threat could she have posed to you?”

“Threat?” Nokov’s tone is politely puzzled. “I hated her, certainly. Just as I hated her aunt. But she was no threat to me.”

“Then why kill her?”

“She was…a requirement. A step in a process, I should say.” The distant stars in his eyes seem to flare, just ever so slightly. “It is, after all, a terribly complicated thing, to kill a god.”

“Was it for Tatyana?” asks Sigrud. “Is that why you did it? First you kill the parents, then you target the child?”

“Why pretend to be so foolish?” asks Nokov. “You work with them, you worked with her. You know what it is I hunger for.” He leans closer. “I will find them. And I will devour them. You know this. It is inevitable.”

“Tatyana Komayd,” says Sigrud, “is not Divine.”

Nokov laughs. “I almost believe you when you say it.”

“I do believe that.”

“Perhaps so. But have you seen her?”

“What do y—”

“Enough of this,” snaps Nokov. “Tell me. Tell me where the others are.”

Sigrud tries to think. His left side throbs, yet his left hand aches even more. It’s an old pain, a familiar one, but it’s at an intensity he hasn’t felt in a long time: his hand hasn’t hurt this bad since the days when it was first maimed in prison…or, he realizes, when he was this close to a Divinity.

“I’ll find them eventually,” says Nokov. The boy steps closer. “They can’t hide forever. Each one I find, I grow stronger and stronger.” He leans forward, his queer dark eyes like deep chasms in his face. “They will dwell within me eventually. It’s just a matter of time. And once they do, I will right all the countless wrongs that have been done in this world. I will right them, one by one. A just world. A moral world. That is what I will make.”

Sigrud remembers what the pale Continental girl told him: When he catches you, he’ll pull out every secret you’ve got hidden away in your guts.

Sigrud realizes that, though he’s been captured before, he’s never been captured by a Divinity.

I’m going to die here, aren’t I?

“I can dash you against all the stones of this world,” whispers Nokov fiercely, “and make it so that you stay alive, feeling each burst of pain, each crack of rock. And when I have broken every bone in your body, I will find some forgotten shadow deep within the world, and I will leave you there, forever. Do you hear me? I will visit every pain and every torture upon your head that was visited upon mine. Do you understand me?”

Sigrud hears him. If I am to die, he thinks, I should at least die without telling him a thing.

He shuts his eyes.

He thinks of the ocean. Of the waves, alternately harsh and gentle, spreading themselves out across smooth white sands. And the smell of salt on the air…

He opens his eyes. “Jukov.”

Nokov blinks. “What?”

“Jukov,” says Sigrud. His voice is hoarse and raspy. “He was your father, wasn’t he? You are a child of Divinities, aren’t you?”

Nokov’s face darkens.

“Jukov could bear a grudge,” says Sigrud. “And like you he was a wild, dark thing….I know. Because I saw him. I was there when the last shred of him died.” He grins. “I was the one who piloted a ship full of explosives right into his face. Did you know that?”

Nokov’s lip curls. “Enough,” he says. “Tell me. Tell me everything you know!”

“I destroyed his army,” says Sigrud. “It was me. He and Kolkan made their army, but I dashed it all to pieces with but a single broadside.”

“Shut up,” says Nokov.

“They were mad,” says Sigrud. “But even mad gods couldn’t hold a candle to the modern world…”

“Shut up!” cries Nokov. He snatches Sigrud out of the air and slams him to the ground, both hands around his throat. The impact is like being run over by a train. “You shut your mouth!”

Do it, thinks Sigrud. Kill me. Kill me before you torture me into telling you a thing.

He can barely speak, but he manages to laugh and gasp, “He was barely Jukov anymore by then….He made such a mistake, you see. Imprisoning himself with Kolkan, he was crushed into him, the two smashed together over decades….”

“Shut up!” says Nokov. He picks Sigrud up by the throat and slams him down again.

Sigrud coughs and says. “Your father was barely recognizable….It was almost all Kolkan, at the end….”

“You shut up!” cries Nokov. His face twisted in adolescent fury, he raises his right hand to bring it down on Sigrud’s skull with a devastating blow.

Sigrud thinks of the ocean.

He thinks of Signe’s face, bathed in the dawning sun, the day when he and she swore to rebuild Voortyashtan. How proud he was of her, and she of him.

Do it, he thinks. Just do it.

Yet as Nokov’s hand comes hurtling down at him, Sigrud can’t resist his training: even though it’s sure to do nothing, he reaches out with his left hand, his side screaming in pain, and tries to block the boy’s blow.

Nokov’s hand flies down at him with all the speed of a lightning bolt.

Sigrud’s left hand rises…

And catches the boy’s fist.

Nokov blinks, startled, and stares at his hand, which is now held in Sigrud’s grasp.

Sigrud frowns, confused. Previously when Nokov touched him it was either like being struck by a falling tree or trying to grab smoke. But now Sigrud’s left hand holds Nokov’s right fist, and it definitely feels…

Well, human. It feels like the fist of a very young man. And, he notes, it didn’t feel like some superhuman punch when he grabbed Nokov’s fist: rather, it felt like a teenager’s awkward, ungainly swing.

Nokov looks positively alarmed. “What…How did you do that?” He tugs at his hand. Sigrud’s grip holds fast. “How…What’s going on?”

Sigrud doesn’t know. But he knows that it feels like he’s holding a flesh-and-blood hand in his.

So he squeezes it. Hard.

Nokov gags, shocked, and releases his hold on Sigrud’s neck, trying to use his free hand to pull away.

But Sigrud holds fast. He keeps squeezing, his big, hard fingers crushing Nokov’s skinny, frail fist.

Nokov cries out in pain. He falls to his knees. “Stop!” he pleads. The cry is so plaintive, so pathetic, Sigrud is almost taken aback by it.

Hold on to your rage, thinks Sigrud. Remember what he did to you.

“Stop!”

Shara, thinks Sigrud. A black rage begins to fill him, a familiar one. You killed Shara, boy….

He feels his teeth grinding in fury, feels blood beginning to flood out of his nose. He thinks of Shara’s house aflame, of Mulaghesh old and stooped and tired, of Khadse’s neck, slashed open and pouring blood….

“Let me go!” screams Nokov. “Let me go, let me go!”

Sigrud squeezes harder.

Something crackles unpleasantly in Nokov’s right hand. The boy screams in agony. The shadows begin trembling all around them.

Nokov, howling, brings his free hand down on the ground.

The shadows break apart.

It’s as if Sigrud were standing on top of a black glass surface and it just shattered underneath him. He lets go of Nokov and the boy seems to vanish, sinking back into an errant shard of shadow.

Sigrud falls.

That’s what he thinks is happening, at least. It’s hard to tell if you’re falling when there are no air molecules hitting you. He realizes he’s falling through some kind of shadowy sub-space, probably not the reality he knows but the reality Nokov occupies and moves through. He knows this because he heard Shara talk about such things during his time with her—but though she described these facets of reality, she neglected to mention how to get out of them.

And he feels terribly cold. Terribly, terribly cold.

I am not supposed to be here, he thinks. Mortals were never supposed to be in such a place….

He looks down. Shards of broken shadow spin around him, different shades of black flittering across a deep darkness.

He shifts and twists, and tries to dive toward one big shard, as if he’s aiming for a deep pool of water to break his fall.

He shuts his eyes, and…

He starts shooting up.

The temperature changes around him: it’s no longer that queer, frigid void, but a chilly, clammy night. And Sigrud can tell he’s flying up because the second he passes through that shard of darkness, gravity violently reasserts itself. He starts spinning around, catching glimpses of his surroundings—dark trees, leafy undergrowth, the moon above—before he starts falling down again, finally crashing to the cold, wet earth.

Sigrud lies on the ground, groaning. His left side feels like it is made of barbed wire. Then something shoots up out of a shadow beside him.

He can see it spinning and twirling in the air, moonlight gleaming on its black blade. He recognizes it right away.

His eyes widen as his black knife rises high, and then starts falling back down—specifically, back down at him. He tries to move, but he’s too weak.

The knife thumps into the soil about three feet to the left of Sigrud’s head. He slowly turns his head to stare at it, and lets out a huge sigh.

Groaning and whimpering, Sigrud forces himself to sit up and look around.

He appears to be in a dark forest—and if he understands everything that just happened to him, it seems he got here by being ejected out of the shadow of a tall tree cast on the forest floor.

He remembers what the woman in the mirror said: He’s everywhere. He’s in everything. Wherever there’s darkness, wherever light doesn’t reach…That’s where he is.

He rubs his aching face. His understanding of all this is rudimentary at best: but he suspects that Nokov resides in some shadowy sub-reality, one connected to all shadows everywhere. That would explain how he could hear his name being mentioned across the Continent, and how he could arrive instantaneously. It would also explain how Sigrud and his knife were just spat out of a shadow on the ground like a farmer spitting out pumpkin seeds.

He crawls over on all fours to pick up his knife. At least this isn’t the strangest thing that happened to me today.

He shivers as he sheathes his knife. He feels cold and weak, as if his heart has dropped a few degrees while the rest of his body has stayed the same temperature. He tries to tell himself it’s just shock, or perhaps a side effect of the injury done to his left side, where he is now certain that he’s broken a rib or two.

It will pass, he thinks, shivering again. He flexes his fingers, listening to the knuckles crackle. And it’s a cold night. It will pass.

He fashions a walking stick out of a sapling and uses it to stagger out of the forest. He can see he’s on the Continent somewhere by the way his breath is frosting, but there’s no telling exactly where on the Continent.

The forest ends and he comes to a stretch of farmland. Bales of hay glow silver and spectral under the moon. He looks at the sky, still shivering a little. He’s heading west, if he’s reading his stars right.

Before he starts off across the pasture, he pauses, pulls off the glove on his left hand, and looks at his palm.

The scar there shines in the moonlight. He can still remember that day in prison as if it was yesterday: the guards, cackling wickedly, goading the starving inmates to pick up what they claimed was just a little pebble, saying that whoever could hold it would be rewarded with food. Neither Sigrud nor the other prisoners knew it was the Divine tool of punishment known as the Finger of Kolkan, causing unbearable pain when touched to flesh. None of them knew how horribly it could harm them.

And yet he had done it. He’d succeeded. Sigrud had held the pebble, blood streaming through his fingers, for three minutes. It had scarred him forever, and its damage has never truly faded: though the pain has sometimes receded, it’s never wholly gone.

He thinks about how it was his left hand that was able to grab Nokov and hurt him, not his right. And this isn’t the first time his injury aided him: before the Battle of Bulikov, the touch of the Finger of Kolkan helped him carve his way out of the belly of a Divine monstrosity named Urav.

He stares at his palm. What else was done to you in that prison? What else changed?

He thinks on it, troubled. Then he pulls back on the glove and starts across the pasture. He shivers again and rubs his arms, trying to beat back the cold. Eventually he comes to a wooden fence and beyond it a road, running north-south. He walks south, since that’s often where civilization lies on the Continent. It’s not too long before he sees a city in the distance, an orange halo of artificial light brightening the horizon.

He comes to a tiny intersection, finds a rickety wooden road sign, and reads the sign pointing south: AHANASHTAN.

He groans. I did not want to come back here, he thinks, limping in its direction. I did not like approaching this town with money in my pocket and a pistol in my belt. I like it even less now that I’m injured, penniless, and almost completely unarmed.

He glances back at the forest and thinks of the queer, dark sub-reality of Nokov.

But it’s better than the alternative.

He limps ahead. With each step, Nokov’s words echo in his mind: Where are the others? Where are they hiding?

He trembles again. It’s as if he has snowmelt in his veins. Shara, he thinks, what were you doing here?