City of Stairs

YOU WILL KNOW PAIN

Vod Drinsky sits on the banks of the Solda and tries to convince himself he is not as drunk as he feels. He has had most of a jug of plum wine, and he tells himself that if he was quite drunk then the wine would start to taste thick and sour, but so far the wine continues to taste quite terribly beautiful and sweet to his tongue. And he needs the wine to survive in the cold—why, look at how his breath frosts! Look at the huge ice floes in the Solda, the way the black water bubbles against the spots as thin and clear as glass! A cold night this is, so he thinks he should be forgiven his indulgence, yes?

He looks east, toward the walls of Bulikov, huge white cliffs glimmering in the moonlight. He glowers at them and says, “I should!” A belch. “I should be forgiven.”

As he watches, he realizes there is a queer, flickering orange light up the hill behind him.

A fire. One of the warehouses in the complex up there is burning, it seems.

“Oh, dear.” He scratches his head. Should he call someone? That seems, at the moment, to be a difficult prospect, so he takes another swig of wine, and sighs and says again, “Oh, dear.”

A dark shadow appears at the chain-link fence around the warehouse complex. Something low and huge.

A long, stridulous shriek. The dark shape surges against the chain link fence; the woven wires stretch and snap like harp strings.

Something big comes rushing down the hillside. Vod assumes it is a bear. It must be a bear, because only a bear could be so big, so loud, panting and growling.… Yet it sounds much, much larger than a bear.

It comes to the tree line and leaps.

Vod’s drunken eyes only see it for an instant. It is smoking—perhaps an escapee of the fire above. But through the smoke, he thinks he sees something thick and bulbous, something with many claws and tendrils gleaming in the moonlight.

It strikes the river ice with a huge crack and plummets through into the dark waters below. Vod sees something shifting under the ice: now the thing looks long and flowing, like a beautiful, mossy flower blossom. With a graceful pump, it propels itself against the river current and toward the white walls of Bulikov. As it turns over, he sees a soft yellow light burning on its surface, a gentle phosphorescence that deeply disturbs him.

The creature disappears downriver. He looks at the broken ice: it is at least two feet thick. Suggesting, then, that whatever leaped in was quite, quite heavy.…

Vod lifts his jug, sniffs at it, and peers into its mouth, unsure if he wishes to buy this brand again.

Fivrei and Sohvrena sit under the Solda Bridge in a tiny shanty, nursing a weak lamp. It is an unusual time to fish on the Solda, but the two men know a secret few do: directly under the bridge, where the Solda is widest and deepest, dozens of trout congregate, presumably, as Fivrei claims, seeking food and warmth. “As far away from the wind as they can get,” he says each time he drops his black line into his tiny hole.

“And they,” grumbles Sohvrena, “are wise.”

“Do you complain? How many did you catch last night?”

Sohvrena holds his mittened hands closer to the fire in the suspended brazier. “Six,” he admits.

“And the night before that?”

“Eight. But I must weigh the amount of fish I catch against the toes I lose.”

“Pah,” says Fivrei. “A real fisherman must be made of sterner stuff. This is man’s work. It calls for a man.”

But a man’s other work, thinks Sohvrena, lies in the soft, warm arms of a woman. Could he be unmanly for wishing he were there, rather than here?

A soft tapping fills the shanty.

“A catch?” asks Sohvrena.

Fivrei inspects his tip-up, which is suspended over the six-inch hole in the ice; the white flag on the black line quivers slightly. “No,” he says. “Perhaps they play with it.”

Then high-pitched squeaks join the tapping, like someone rubbing their hands against a pane of glass. Before Sohvrena can remark upon it, the flag on his own tip-up starts to dance. “The same here,” he says. “Not a catch, but it … moves.”

Fivrei tugs his black line. “Maybe I am wro— Wait.” He tugs the line again. “It is caught on something.”

Sohvrena watches the flag twitch on Fivrei’s tip-up. “Are you sure it’s not a catch?” asks Sohvrena.

“It does not give. It’s like it’s caught on a rock. What is that intolerable squeaking?”

“Maybe the wind?” Sohvrena, curious, tugs at his own line. It too does not give. “Mine is the same. Both of our lines are caught on something?” He shakes his head. “We had nothing on our lines a few minutes ago.”

“Maybe flotsam is being washed downstream, and our lines are caught.”

“Then why don’t our lines just break?” Sohvrena inspects the ice below them. Perhaps he is imagining things, but he imagines a soft yellow glow filtering through the frost in one spot.

“What is that?” he says, pointing.

Fivrei does a double take, and stares at the yellow light. “What is that?”

“That’s what I just said.”

The two men look at it, then at each other.

The fire in the brazier has melted away some snow on the ice; they stand and begin to clear away more with their feet, until the ice becomes more transparent.

Fivrei gapes. “What on …? By the heavens, what is …?”

Something is stuck to the opposite side of the ice, directly underneath them. Sohvrena is reminded of a starfish he once saw, brought back from the coast, but vastly huger, nearly thirty feet in diameter, and with many, many more arms, some of them wide, some of them thin and delicate. And in the center, a bright, glowing light, and a many-toothed mouth that sucks against the ice, its black gums squeaking.

The taps and pops increase. Sohvrena looks up at the ends of the beast’s arms and sees many tiny claws scraping at the ice around them in a perfect circle.

“Oh, no,” says Sohvrena.

The light blinks twice. Sohvrena thinks, An eye. It’s an eye.

With a great crack, the ice gives way below them, and a mouth ringed with a thousand teeth silently opens.

The Vohskoveney Tea Shop always does a roaring trade whenever the weather dips; Magya Vohskoveney herself understands that it is not necessarily the quality of the tea that draws in customers—since she herself holds the opinion that her tea brewers are untalented clods—but between the endless flow of steaming water, the bubbling cauldrons, and the dozens of little gas lamps lit throughout her establishment, Magya’s tea shop is always churning with a sweltering humidity that would seem suffocating in normal weather, yet is downright inviting in the brutal dark of winter.

The tea trade has rocketed on the Continent in the past decades: what was previously considered a distasteful Saypuri eccentricity has become much more appealing as the climate on the Continent grows colder and colder with each year. And there is the additional factor that Magya has discovered a mostly forgotten old bit of folk herbalism: teas brewed with a handful of poppy fruit tend to feel so much more … relaxing than other types of tea. And after implementing this secret recipe, Magya’s trade has quintupled.

Magya squints at the crowd from the kitchen door. Her customers cling to tables like refugees seeking shelter. Their hair curls and coils and glistens in the heat. The brass lamps cast prisms of ocher light on the soaking wood walls. The west windows, which normally look out on a scenic stretch of river, are so fogged over they look like toast with too much cream.

One man at the bar paws his cup limply, blinking owlishly; Magya stops a waiter, nods at the man, says, “Too much,” and sends the boy on his way.

“A good trade, for the hour,” says one of her servers, stopping to mop his brow.

“Too good, in fact,” says Magya. “Everything is full but the second-floor balcony.”

“How is that too good?”

“We shan’t let greed overcome wisdom, my love.” Magya taps her chin, thinking. “No special batches for the next week.”

Her server attempts to control his astonishment. “None?”

“None. I’d prefer not to arouse any suspicion.”

“But what will we say when people complain about the … the quality of the tea?”

“We will say,” Magya answers, “that we have been forced to use a new type of barrel that’s affected the flavor. I don’t know, some Saypuri trade rule. They’ll believe that. And we’ll tell them we shall be rectifying the situation shortly.”

Her server is rudely hailed by a couple at the bar, a middle-aged man with an arm thrown around a very giddy and curvy young woman. In my grandmother’s day, thinks Magya, such a public display would get you flogged. How times have changed.… “Go on,” she says. “Give them something to fill their mouths, and shut them up.”

Her server departs. Magya’s eye, always seeking trouble, finds something concerning on the upper balcony: one of the lights in her lamps has begun to flicker.

She grunts, climbs the steps, and sees she is wrong: the lamp is not flickering, but it is jumping on its chain, hopping up and swishing about like a fish on a line.

“What in the world …?” Magya looks up the chain to the beam it is attached to.

She watches, awed, as the beam actually buckles up, as if something on the roof is pulling at it. There are even cracks in the plaster of the roof, which spread like fractures in ice bearing too much weight.

Magya’s first instinct is to look to the window, but she remembers that the windows are opaque with condensation.… Yet she sees she is mistaken again: something has partially wiped the condensation away from the outside of the west windows.

But what could do that, thinks Magya, as we’re on the river, thirty feet up?

She goes to the window, wipes away the inside moisture, and peers through the blurry glass.

The first thing she sees is a single yellow light at the river shore below.

The second thing she sees is something large, black, and glistening stuck to the wall of the shop, like a tree root covered in tar, yet it is uncoiling, adhering itself to more and more of the wall.

And the third thing she sees is right in front of her: what appears to be a long, slender black finger rises up on the other side of the window, and the dark claw at its end reaches forward and delicately taps the glass once.

“What …?” says Magya.

Then a burst of thunder, a rain of plaster dust and wood shards, and the treasured humidity of the Vohskoveney Tea Shop goes ballooning up into the winter night sky in a roiling rush as its ceiling and upper wall are completely torn off.

Magya blinks as the wind assails her. Most of her patrons are too stunned to scream, but some manage to find their throats. The lower wall follows suit, crumbing out onto the frozen river, pulling the second-floor balcony—and Magya Vohskoveney—with it.

As Magya falls, she sees the same fate has befallen many of her customers. We shall be dashed on the ice, she thinks madly, like a handful of eggs. But in those unending seconds as she tumbles over and over, she sees the ice is not there: there is only the yellow light, the churning of many tentacles, and a quivering, many-toothed mouth juddering open.

“I said I want every soldier available working to help those fire teams!” bellows Mulaghesh downstairs. “Make sure to stress that as much as you can in the telegram! And let the corporal know that if there is any reluctance on his part to put his soldiers to such work, then there will be dire consequences!”

Shara winces in her office. Mulaghesh has completely taken over the embassy offices downstairs, commandeering every telegraph machine and posting troops at all entrances. Normally she would be doing this from her quarters, but the embassy was much closer. “Contact General Noor at Fort Sagresha,” Mulaghesh shouts. “He needs to be notified of this, and tell him we need all the support he can offer. Interrupt me as soon as you hear, even if I specifically say not to interrupt me!”

Shara rubs her temples. “By the seas,” she mutters, “can the woman speak no other volume?” Shara is content to let Mulaghesh handle this disaster, and since this is technically Mulaghesh’s jurisdiction, Shara has plenty of reasons to stay out. But privately she wishes Mulaghesh and the rest of them would just leave.

Sigrud sits in the corner of her office and sharpens his black knife. The skritch-skritch seems to grow until Shara’s head echoes with it.

“Must you do that now?” she asks.

Sigrud scrapes the knife a little softer. “You seem to be in a mood.”

“I was nearly blown up tonight.”

He shrugs and spits on the knife. “Not the first time.”

“And we burned down hundreds of years of priceless history!” she hisses, not daring to shout it.

“So?”

“So I have … I have never experienced such a failure in my professional career! And I do not enjoy failure. I am unused to it.”

The skritch-skritch slows as he thinks. “It is true that we have never encountered a mistake such as this.”

“A mistake? Ever since we’ve set foot in Bulikov, we’ve done nothing but stumble!” She quaffs tea with the air of a sailor drinking whiskey.

“I suppose it is good to get all of your mistakes out in one run.”

“Your optimism,” says Shara, “is not appreciated. I almost regret coming here.”

“Almost?”

“Yes, almost. Because as … as shit-bedecked as this operation is, I still wouldn’t trust it to anyone else in the Ministry. Think what would happen if Komalta was here, or Yusuf!”

“I didn’t even know those two were still alive. I would have thought they’d have gotten themselves killed by now.”

“Exactly!” She stands up, walks to the window, and pushes it open. “I need air. My head is filling up with noise!” She breathes for a moment, listens, and rubs her eyes in exasperation. “Even the streets outside are screaming! Is there no quiet place in this whole damnable ci …” She trails off. “Wait, what time is it?”

Sigrud joins her at the window. “Late. Too late for such noise.” He tilts his head. “And it is screaming. You were not exaggerating.”

Shara surveys the dark streets of Bulikov. “What’s going on?”

Another howl in the night. Someone comes sprinting down the street outside, shrieking incoherently.

“I’ve no idea,” says Sigrud.

Downstairs, Mulaghesh is angrily dictating a response to General Noor specifying that this was not a direct attack, because that would be an indictment of their security, but Noor should be responding as if it was a direct attack, as they need assistance immediately.

Shara opens the window all the way. She hears a rumble toward the river. A cloud of white dust rises above the rooftops. “Did a building just collapse?” she asks.

More people are running through the streets. Candles are lit in windows; doors are flung open. A man cries out, asking what’s wrong, over and over. Finally someone answers: “There’s something in the water! Something in the water!”

Shara looks to Sigrud, but can only say, “What?”

Then a shout from downstairs: “Shara!” cries Mulaghesh’s voice. “There’s some idiot here to bother you!”

Shara and Sigrud troop downstairs. Pitry stands in the entryway with a very nervous-looking Bulikov police officer.

“A message from the Bulikov Police Department,” says Pitry, “for Ambassador Thivani from Captain Nesrhev.”

“Get rid of this guy,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m drowning in enough shit as it is.”

Shara fruitlessly searches for her inner calm. “What would be the issue?”

The officer swallows, sweats. “Ah, w-we’re evacuating all homes and buildings near the river. The embassy’s a priority”—he says this as if to suggest, And I just had to get this duty—“so we need all of you outside, immediately.”

Mulaghesh finishes another communication, then breaks away. “Wait, what the hells are you talking about? We’re not going anywhere.”

“Well … Captain Nesrhev—”

“Is a fine and good officer, but he can’t tell us to do a damn thing. This is Saypuri soil.”

“We’re … quite aware of that, Governor, but it’s … it’s emphatically suggested that you and the ambassador evacuate.”

“Why?” Shara asks.

The officer’s sweating quintuples. “We’re … Well, we can’t quite say just yet.”

“Would this have to do with what’s happening outside?” asks Shara.

The officer reluctantly nods.

“And what is happening outside?”

The officer appears to debate telling them; then his shoulders slump like he’s about to make an embarrassing confession. “There’s … something in the Solda River,” he says. “Something big.”

“And?”

“And it’s … killing people. Snatching them off the banks.”

Mulaghesh massages the center of her forehead. “Oh, by the seas …”

“It’s even come up on the shore and attacked the buildings,” says the officer. “It’s … huge. We don’t know what it is, but we’re evacuating every quarter near the river. And that includes the embassy.”

“And this just started happening very recently?” asks Shara. “Within the past few hours?”

The officer nods.

Shara and Sigrud share a silent moment of communication. Shara’s eyes say, From the Warehouse? Sigrud gives a grim nod: Absolutely.

“Thank you for notifying us, Officer,” says Shara. She extends a hand, and Sigrud tosses her her coat. “We will depart the embassy shortly. Where is Nesrhev now?”

“He’s staked out on the Solda Bridge, watching for it,” says the officer. “But why d—”

“Excellent.” Shara pulls her coat on. “We’ll be all too happy to join him.”

The Solda Bridge’s short walls provide no shelter from the cold wind, so nearly everyone crouches down as low as possible. Shara wishes she’d wrapped every extremity in furs, and her feet in a layer of rubber, and Mulaghesh has not stopped swearing since leaving the embassy, though her swears shiver a bit more now. Captain Nesrhev sits against the wall, receiving messages and runners from his officers, who are hidden among the streets and homes that line the river. Only Sigrud leaves his face exposed, kneeling and staring into the bitter wind across the wide, frozen expanse of the river.

Shara peeps over the wall. The Solda resembles a jigsaw puzzle, with huge holes in the ice in perfect circles and half-moons. On the west bank, two buildings have had their facades and walls completely ripped off: white limestone lies crumbled on the mud like cottage cheese. “And that …” asks Shara. “That was where it attacked?”

“Yes,” says Nesrhev. “We didn’t see it. We were alerted too late. It’s a miracle”—he checks himself, but Shara waves him on—“it’s a good thing it hasn’t attacked the bridge, whatever it is. Though we hope the bridge is too strong for it. It’s the only way across the Solda for four miles.”

“How many killed?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Twenty-seven reported missing or dead, now,” says Nesrhev. “Plucked from the banks of the river, or sucked through the ice, or ripped from their homes.”

“My word,” murmurs Shara. “So … what is it?”

Nesrhev hesitates. “We are told,” he says slowly, “that it is a sea monster, with many arms.”

There is a pause as Shara absorbs this; Nesrhev and the officers watch, waiting to see how this will be received. “Like a dragon?” she finally asks.

Nesrhev is relieved to be taken seriously. “No, like … like a sea beast. But enormous.”

Shara nods, thinking. A many-armed creature of the sea, she thinks. That’s a very short list of possibilities.…

“So do you know what in all the hells this could be?” asks Nesrhev.

Shara watches as part of the ruined buildings tumbles off and drops into the river with a plook. “I have some ideas,” she says. “But … Well. I will just say that I suspect this thing is in violation of the WR.”

For the first time, the veteran Nesrhev looks shocked. “You’re saying this thing is Divine?”

“Perhaps. Not everything Divine was good or godly,” says Shara.

“So what are you going to do?” asks one of Nesrhev’s lieutenants. “Give it a fine?”

Sigrud makes a tch sound.

Shara sits up. “Do you see it?”

“I see”—he tilts his head, squints—“something.”

Everyone peeks over the wall of the Solda Bridge. Several hundred feet south, a faint yellow light slips under the dense ice toward the east bank.

“Mikhail and Ornost are there,” says Nesrhev, concerned. “Just behind the wall on the bank.”

The yellow light pauses. Then a faint cracking and creaking echoes across the river. Shara watches in amazement as a wide circle appears in the ice, like someone is carefully sawing at it from under the water.

“Viktor,” says Nesrhev to one of his officers, “go over there and tell the two of them to get away, get away now.” The officer sprints away.

The circle of ice slowly sinks and slides underneath the frozen river. A dexterous creature, then, thinks Shara. The yellow light creeps to the center of the hole. Nesrhev lets loose a florid string of curses. Something very small and thin pokes out of the hole in the ice and rotates through the air, as if smelling for something. Then many more thin appendages—tentacles?—appear at the edge of the hole in the ice.

The yellow light sinks lower. It readies, Shara realizes, for a leap.…

It bursts out of the water, sending shards of ice flying; its eruption is so powerful a fine mist washes over them, even from here.

Nesrhev and his officers begin screaming; Mulaghesh’s hand flies to her mouth; Shara and Sigrud, well used to horrors such as this by now, silently watch and observe.

It is not quite a jellyfish, not quite a squid, and nor is it a prawn, exactly, but a thirty-foot combination of all three: a slightly translucent creature with a long, black-shelled back and—maybe—head, with a face almost concealed in a squirming bundle of thrashing tentacles that are long enough to start probing the shore, rising up like the spear points of a phalanx.

Two shapes spring up on the banks and run away, screaming. One figure looks to be too slow—a tentacle whips toward it, and the figure spins. “By all the gods, no,” whispers Nesrhev. But another officer comes running up with a flaming torch, which he hurls at the approaching tentacles. The creature pauses at this interruption just long enough for the officers to slip out of reach, up the banks of the Solda.

The creature climbs up farther on the bank and screeches at them with a strangely avian call. Its tentacles search the riverbank, pluck up stones, and hurl them at the retreating officers. None of the stones strike the officers; most find a home in the roof and walls of a small and unfortunate house. Then the creature shrieks twice more before retreating back below the ice, where it drifts downriver.

“My gods,” says Nesrhev. “My gods. What is that thing?”

Shara nods, satisfied that her hunch was correct. “I think I know.” She polishes her glasses on her scarf. He who waits in dark places, she thinks. And pulls down the unworthy, and devours them.… “I believe, Captain Nesrhev, that we have just seen the fabled Urav.”

A brief silence.

“Urav?” asks an officer. “Urav the Punisher?”

Nesrhev swats at him furiously, as if to say, Do you know who you are speaking in front of?

“Don’t stare so, Captain,” says Shara. “It’s perfectly all right for you to admit that you know of it. Even if it is against the WR to acknowledge such a thing. These are … extenuating circumstances.”

“I thought Urav was a fairy story,” one officer reluctantly says.

“Oh, no,” says Shara. “Kolkan was fond of using familiars and Divine creatures to do his work. Urav was the worst, and the most dangerous—and possibly his favorite.” She watches the yellow eye twirl under the ice, perhaps observing the shore, looking for sinners. And to Urav, Shara remembers, who isn’t a sinner? “The creature of the depths, in whose belly the souls of the damned cower under his gaze.”

“Then what the hells is it doing in my city killing innocent people?” demands Nesrhev.

“I can’t immediately say,” says Shara, which is a lie. She recalls something she read in Ghaladesh: after Kolkan’s sudden disappearance, Urav, without the oversight of its creator, reportedly went mad. Jukov was forced to capture it, luring it into a jug of wine distilled from human sin and trapping it there.

And if all that is true, thinks Shara, then there’s only one likely place where that jug could have been stored.

She silently curses herself for tripping on that wire. Who knows what else I’ve released back into the world?

“What the hells can we do against such a thing?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Well,” says Shara, “some minor Divine creatures can be killed by normal means. They have their own agency, to an extent, which makes them vulnerable. I mean, look at the Great Purge—that was done with knives and spears and axes.”

The officers shift uncomfortably to hear such forbidden subjects discussed aloud. Some look outraged, even scandalized; Shara is happy she did not mention she personally accomplished this same feat mere hours ago.

“I do not like the idea,” says Nesrhev, “of putting my officers at risk, and having them shoot at this thing in the ice.”

“Bolts wouldn’t penetrate the ice, anyway,” says Mulaghesh.

“We should wait for the ice to melt,” says Nesrhev, “or maybe start bonfires on it to melt it, and then see what we can do.”

“And what would you do then?” asks Mulaghesh. “Attack it in boats? With spears? Like a whale?”

Nesrhev hesitates; he looks around at his officers, who look none too pleased with the idea.

Sigrud makes another tch, as if weighing something in his mind. Then: “I can kill it.”

Silence.

Everyone slowly turns to look at him.

Shara glances at him, concerned: Are you sure you want to start this? But Sigrud’s expression is inscrutable.

“What?” says Mulaghesh. “How?”

“It is a”—he makes the constipated face that he always does when trying to translate a Dreyling expression—“a thing of the water,” he finishes. “And I have killed many things of the water.”

“But … are … are you serious?” asks Nesrhev.

“I have killed,” says Sigrud, “many things of the water. This would be different.…” He watches, keen-eyed, as Urav considers carving another hole in the ice before abandoning it. “But not that different.”

“What exactly would you have my men doing?” asks Nesrhev.

“I do not really think”—Sigrud scratches his chin, thinking—“that I would need any of your men at all.”

“You are genuinely suggesting that you, by yourself, can kill a Divine horror like that?” asks Mulaghesh.

Sigrud contemplates it; then he nods. “Yes. The circumstances are favorable. The river is not big.”

“The Solda,” says Nesrhev, “is almost a mile wide!”

“But it is not the sea,” says Sigrud. “Not the ocean. Which I am used to. And with the ice …” He shrugs. “It is quite very possible.”

“It’s killed almost thirty people tonight, sir,” says Nesrhev. “It would be an easy thing for it to kill you.”

“Perhaps. But. If so …” Again, Sigrud shrugs. “Then I would die.”

Nesrhev and the other officers stare at him in disbelief.

Shara clears her throat. “Before we continue down this line of thinking,” she says, “I’d first like to ask if Captain Nesrhev would approve.”

“Why the hells would you care about that?” asks Nesrhev. “It’s up to you if your man wants to get himself killed.”

“Well, despite all the Regulations, that thing under the ice is considered holy by most of the Continent,” says Shara. “It is, after all, a creature of stories and myths valued by your culture. It’s part of your heritage. If you wish us to kill it—to kill what is, in effect, a living legend—we would want to have your express permission to do so.”

Nesrhev’s face sours. “You,” he says, “are trying to cover your ass.”

“Perhaps. But Urav is an integral part to some of your treasured myths. We are not Continentals. To some Continentals, if we are successful in killing Urav, it would be tantamount to destroying a historic work of art.”

“In this case, though,” says Mulaghesh, “it’s a work of art that’s running around killing people.”

Shara nods. “Quite.”

Nesrhev grimaces. As he wrestles with his position, three policemen come staggering up, panting: one of them is Viktor, the officer sent to warn Mikhail and Ornost; the other two are presumably those same two men. One of them is clutching his right arm, which is slick with blood.

“Mikhail’s hurt,” says Viktor. “It got his arm, and it … it took some fingers.”

Nesrhev pauses. He looks out at the soft light under the ice. Then: “Both of you, get back to the station and to the infirmary.” He looks to Sigrud: “What do you need?”

Sigrud looks back out at the river. “I will need,” he says thoughtfully, “two hundred feet of towing rope, three lengths of sailing rope a hundred feet in length, a lantern, a halberd, three strong fishing spears, and several gallons of fat.”

“Of what?” says Mulaghesh.

“Of fat,” says Sigrud. “Animal fat. Whale if you have it—beef or pork if you do not.”

Mulaghesh looks to Shara, who shrugs: I have no idea, either.

Sigrud strokes his beard. “And I will need you to get a good fire going, for when I finish. Because to do this, I will likely have to be nude.”

“Flaxseed,” says Shara, and drops it into the cauldron of warm beef fat. “Willowgrass. Twine of six knots. And cedar pitch.” She looks back at the wheelbarrow of ingredients brought to her from the embassy. Screams echo up the river—again. She ignores them. “Salt and silver … that might be harder.” She slips a tiny silver dessert spoon into a bag of rock salt and shakes it up. “But this, I hope, should do …” She dumps it into the cauldron as well.

Pitry watches her, torn between fascination and disbelief. “You really think this will do something?”

“I hope so,” says Shara. She takes a fistful of arrowroot and drops it in. “The Divine familiars each had aversions to very specific elements.… We’re not sure, as always, if this was intended by the Divinities—maybe as a way to give their mortal followers some method of defense against the Divinities’ own creations, just in case—or if it was purely by accident, something each Divinity, maybe by nature, could never prepare for. Either way, the Divine creatures were strongly repelled by these elements: they caused asphyxiation, burning rashes, paralysis, even death.…”

“Like an allergy?” asks Pitry.

Shara pauses, realizing Pitry has just said something Saypuri historians have been struggling to articulate for years. “Yes. Exactly that.”

“And Urav is allergic to … to all of this?”

“I have no idea. These are some elements that often repelled Divine creatures. I am hoping,” she says as she drops in some wormwood, “that one or two of these will have some effect. A broad spectrum of elements, you could say.”

Sigrud and Nesrhev’s officers are almost finished: they’ve successfully looped the thick towing rope around the bridge itself and fastened it securely. Shara can see the seaman in Sigrud coming out now: he ties knots in seconds, heaves coils of the dense rope around his shoulders, scales the bridge like he has hooks on his toes. He dumps the three lengths of sailing rope over the bridge—they land with a thud on the ice. He lets the remaining length of towing rope drop to the ice as well, nearly a hundred or so feet. Urav, so far, has remained ignorant of their efforts, choosing to harry the docks a mile or so downriver, seeking anyone who’s chosen to ignore the evacuation order.

Sigrud walks over to where the weaponry is wrapped in waxed canvas. He picks up one fishing spear, which has a barbed tip as thick as Shara’s arm; at its back is an iron loop, meant for some incredibly thick line. What sort of fish, Shara thinks, could that possibly be intended for? Sigrud tests its flex, nods in satisfaction, and kneels and runs his finger along the halberd’s blade. “Good steel,” he says. “Good workmanship.”

“And you don’t doubt,” asks Shara, “the wisdom of your course?”

“We have done such things before,” says Sigrud. “What makes this so different?”

“This is not like the mhovost.”

“That,” says Sigrud contemptuously, “was not even a challenge.”

“Well. It is not like the dornova in Ahanashtan, either,” says Shara. “This is not some … some common imp or wretch for you to brutally execute!”

“Next you will say it is not like that dragon.”

“That was a small dragon,” says Shara. She holds her hands about three feet apart. “And besides, I was the one who finally killed that one.”

“After I did all the work,” says Sigrud with a sniff.

“You aren’t taking this seriously. As entertaining as our exploits may be, that”—she points a finger at the river—“is the closest thing to a walking, talking Divinity the world has seen in decades!”

He shrugs. “As I told you,” he says, “it is a thing of the water. Things of the water, they are all alike, deep down. No matter who made them or where they came from.”

“But are you so terribly sure of yourself that you’re really willing to try this alone?”

“The more you are at sea,” Sigrud explains, “the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more help and assistance is a troublesome bother.” He takes off his coat, shirt, and breeches, revealing some very tight and ancient long underwear. He is covered in rippling muscle, huge in the shoulders and back and neck, yet rather than appearing bulky there is something lean and lupine about Sigrud: he is like an animal that burns far more energy fighting for its food than it gains in consuming it. “Dealing death, after all, is a solitary affair.”

“Sometimes I … I swear, sometimes I tire so much of your posturing!” Shara says.

Sigrud looks up, confused and a little alarmed.

“You may think your laconic ridiculousness is a virtue, but it is not for me—not for anyone who values your life, even if you don’t.” She looks at him, genuinely afraid. “I am not asking you to do this. Do you know that? I would never ask you to do this.”

“I know that,” he says.

“Then why?”

He considers it.

“Why?” she asks again.

“Because it is all I know,” he says with a shrug. “And I am good at it. I could save lives tonight. And the only life risked would be my own.”

Shara is silent.

“Do I have your blessing, Shara Komayd?”

“I am not in the business of giving blessings,” she says. “But I accept what it is that you do. Even if I don’t like it.”

He nods, says, “Good,” and peels off his undershirt. Shara has seen him shirtless—and more—in their time together, but she is always shocked by the variety of horrific scars curling across his arms and back: she can see brands, whips, slashes, stabs … yet she knows the greatest damage he has ever sustained lies hidden behind the glove on his right hand.

He begins stripping off the rest of the long underwear. “I don’t think,” says Shara, “that it will be necessary for you to take off all of your clothi—”

“Bah,” says Sigrud, and drops his drawers, utterly unself-conscious.

Shara sighs. Nesrhev and his officers—all dour, stolid Bulikovians—stare at this frank display of nudity. Mulaghesh grins like a shark. “There are times,” she says, “that I kind of like my job.”

Sigrud is now totally nude except for his boots, the sheath for his knife (which is now strapped around his right thigh), the glove he wears on his right hand, and the gold bracelet on his left. He reaches into the cauldron of fat and scoops up a handful. He cocks an eyebrow at the arrowroot and the other substances floating in it—“Insurance,” explains Shara—and he shrugs and begins to slather it on his shoulders, chest, arms, and thighs. “Uh, let me know if you need help with that,” mutters Mulaghesh. Shara shoots her a scolding glare; Mulaghesh grins again, unrepentant.

Sigrud saves his face and hair for last; with this final touch, he resembles something primeval—a filthy, savage creature humanity left behind long ago. “I think,” he says, “I am ready.” He looks to Nesrhev. “Try to keep the thing toward the bridge, if it comes to it.”

“I don’t know how much we can do,” says Nesrhev. “But we’ll try.”

“Do only that,” says Sigrud. “I want it focused on me. On me, do you hear?” Nesrhev nods. “Good.” Sigrud looks up and down the length of the bridge, as if not quite convinced it will hold. Then he heaves up the armful of weaponry and starts down the bridge toward the shore.

Mulaghesh hands out a lantern, which he takes. “Good luck, soldier,” she says. Sigrud nods absently, as if being greeted by familiar passersby on a contemplative walk.

He stops next to Shara, removes the gold bracelet from his left hand, and hands it to her.

“I’ll keep it safe,” she says.

“I know. If I do die tonight …,” he says. He hesitates, staring out at the icy expanse of the Solda. “My family … Will you …?”

“I will always make sure your family is taken care of,” says Shara. “You know that.”

“But will you tell them … about me? About who I was?”

“Only if it’s safe to do so.”

He nods, says “Thank you,” and starts off down the bridge.

Shara says, “Listen, Sigrud—if it comes to that, it is likely Urav will not kill you.”

He looks back. “Eh?”

“It’s likely the people it’s taken tonight aren’t even dead. They may be worse than dead, actually—according to the Kolkashtava, in Urav’s belly, you are alive, but you are punished, filled with pain, shame, regret.… Under its gaze, no one holds hope.”

“How does it gaze at you,” asks Sigrud, “in its own belly?”

“It’s miraculous by nature. Inside of Urav, I think, is a special kind of hell. And the only thing that saves anyone is the blessing of Kolkan—”

“Which you can give me?”

“—which no one has received since he vanished, nearly three hundred years ago.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I am saying that, if it looks like Urav will devour you”—she looks down at where he has strapped his knife—“then it might be wise to take matters into your own hands.”

He nods slowly. Then, again, he says, “Thank you,” and adds, “It would probably be wise for you to get off the bridge, by the way.”

“Why?”

“One never knows,” says Sigrud, “how a good fight will go.”

Sigrud’s boots make hollow thumps as he walks across the ice. He can tell right away that the ice is slightly less than two feet thick. A good ice, he thinks, for sleighs and horses.

He walks on over the frozen river. The wind bites and snaps at his ears. His arms and legs are bejeweled from millions of ice flecks trapped in the fat on his body: soon he is a glimmering ice-man, trudging across a vast gray-blue field.

He recalls an occasion like this: riding over the ice, the sleigh scraping behind him; the thud of the horse’s hooves; glancing behind and seeing Hild and his daughters buried in a pile of furs in the sled, giggling and laughing.…

I do not wish to think of these things.

Sigrud blinks and focuses on the ropes dangling from the bridge ahead. The lights of Bulikov seem very far away now, as if this massive metropolis is but a small, seaside town on a very distant shore.

How many times did he see such a sight in his sailing days? Dozens? Hundreds? He remembers the enormous cliffs of the Dreyling lands and the glimmer of lights among the tiny huts spread among the shore. Waking to the reel and cry of cliff birds circling the peaks.

I do not wish to think of these things, he says to himself again. But the memories arise painfully, like a thorn working its way free from flesh.

The chuckle of water. The sunless days. The bonfires on the rime-crusted beaches.

He remembers the last time he sailed. A young man he was, returning home, eager to see his family. But when they docked on Dreyling shores, he and the crew found the villages in absolute upheaval:

The king. They have killed the king, and all his sons. They are burning the houses. They are burning the city. What are we to do?

How shocked he was to hear this.… He did not understand then, could not understand how this could happen. And no matter how many times he asked—All his sons? All? Are you sure?—the answer was the same: The Harkvald dynasty is no more. All the kings are dead, gone, and we are lost.

The ice crackles underneath Sigrud’s feet. The world is a coward, he thinks. It does not change before your face; it waits until your back is turned, and pounces.…

Sigrud walks on over the Solda. The fat on his limbs is calcified now; he is milky white, crackling, a chandler’s golem. He keeps walking to where the towing rope dangles from the center of the bridge. While he was on it, the Solda Bridge seemed quite narrow, less than forty feet wide. Underneath, it’s a massive black bone arcing across the sky.

He tells himself it will hold. If he does this right, it will hold.

He hears lapping water. He looks to the right, under the shadow of the bridge, and sees a geometrically perfect circle in the ice. A dense layer of wooden flotsam bobs up and down, trapped in the hole. A shanty, probably—and its occupants long gone.

Finally he arrives at the dangling rope. He loops the end of the thick towing rope, then uses the sailing rope to tie it fast, holding the loop. The knot is familiar: his hands move and loop and thread the rope without his even thinking about it.

As he ties the knot, he remembers.

He remembers how he raced to his home after hearing the news of the coup. He remembers finding it blackened and deserted; his farmland scarred, salted.

He remembers unearthing the fragile white bones lost in the moist ashes of his ruined, burned-out bedroom. He remembers digging the graves in the courtyard. The jumble of charred bones, random, incomplete, a tangled human jigsaw.

He could not recognize his wife and daughters in them. But he separated the bones as best he could, buried them, and wept.

Enough. Stop.

Sigrud ties the remaining lengths of sailing rope to the loop, then ties their other ends to the fishing spears. He stabs the fishing spears down in the ice in a line, each fifty feet apart.

Sigrud sets the lantern down before the center spear and uses the point of the halberd’s blade to carve four deep, long lines in the ice, each converging on one point, just before the lantern: when he finishes, it looks like a giant star in the ice. Then he sits on the point, bare buttocks on the ice, halberd across his knees, and waits.

A duck honks disconsolately.

A spatter of screams from the east bank. The blasting wind.

Though he wishes to focus, the memories are merciless.

He remembers when he heard that a new nation had been formed, called the “Dreyling Republics,” but both that name and the title of “nation” were laughable: they were mere pirate states, sick with corruption and avarice.

Sigrud, grieving, raging, chose to fight, like many did. And, like many, he failed, and was thrown in Slondheim, the cliff-prison, a fate worse than death, they said.

And they spoke truth. He was not sure how many years he spent in solitary confinement, living off of gruel, ranting in the dark. Part of this was his own doing, of course: whenever they let him out, he tried to kill anyone who came close to him, and he often succeeded. Eventually they decided he would get no more chances: Sigrud was to live in the dark until he died.

But then one day the slot in his cell door opened, and he saw a face unlike any he’d seen before: a woman’s face, brown-skinned and long-nosed, with dark eyes and dark lips, and she had glass on her face—two little pieces of glass before each eye. Yet all his puzzlement vanished when the face said, “Your wife and children are alive, and safe. I have located them. I will be back tomorrow, if you wish to speak to me.”

The slot slammed shut. Her footsteps faded away.

This was how Sigrud first met Shara Komayd.

How many years has he spent with her now? Ten? Eleven? It does not matter, he finds. These new years have no meaning to him.

Sigrud blinks his eye; the lid sticks from the fat.

He thinks of the children he never knew, now grown, and the young woman who was once his wife. He wonders if she has a new husband, and his children a new father.

He looks down at his scarred, gleaming hands. He does not recognize them anymore.

On the horizon, a soft yellow light blinks below the ice.

Sigrud rubs fat from the palms of his hands, tests the grip on his halberd.

This is as it should be, he thinks. The cold, the dark, and the waiting death.

He waits.

The yellow light swims closer, closer, its movements smooth and graceful. Sigrud hears something tapping the ice, like a blind man with his cane. It listens, he thinks, to the reverberations, to see what lies atop it.

The ice creaks below him. The yellow glow is now twenty feet away; the light itself is nearly a foot wide. Like the eye of a giant squid, he thinks, and remembers, long ago, how he ate one that had been stewed in fish stock. And that one was quite a fighter.…

He cannot see through the ice, but he hears something popping fifteen, maybe ten feet away. He looks and sees a circle is being carved around him, and he also sees he estimated the thing’s breadth well: the edges of the circle all cross the four lines he carved in the ice; it begins to look like he is sitting in the middle of a big white pie with eight slices.

He slowly stands. The ice complains under his feet, weakened by so many carvings. He plucks up the fishing spear and stands in the center of the circle.

Something dark swirls underneath him. The yellow light is almost under his feet.

I wonder, thinks Sigrud, if I will find out how you taste.…

He readies the spear in his right hand. He takes a breath.

Then, well before the thing under the ice is done carving the circle, he raises the halberd in his left hand and swings the massive blade down.

The weakened ice breaks apart underneath him immediately, and he plummets through into the icy water.

Urav—as Shara called it—darts back, surprised by this intrusion. Sigrud is tiny before its huge, swarming bulk, a swallow flying against a black thundercloud.

Sigrud sees a mass of waving arms, a huge, black-veined bright eye, and below that a mouth six feet wide … but it is not yet open.

He whips the fishing spear forward. The barbed blade sinks deep into Urav’s black flesh, mere inches beside its huge eye.

Urav’s mouth snaps open, but in pain rather than attack. Its eye rolls to focus on Sigrud, who swings the halberd forward and cracks the creature in the mouth. Glittering teeth go spinning through the water like fireworks.

Urav writhes in pain and rage. Its tentacles snap out, grip Sigrud’s legs, but the thick layer of fat makes it impossible to find a grip … and more so, the tentacles withdraw suddenly as if the fat itself burns them: Sigrud can see the black skin bubbling where they touched him.

If Shara finds out her gambit worked, he thinks, there’ll be no living with her.

The water is churning about him. He feels another tentacle try to grip his ankle; this too slips off. Urav marshals all its attention to him, the countless limbs swirling around, preparing to strike.

Out, out now, he thinks, and he reaches up with his left hand, finds the sailing rope—it holds fast—and lifts himself up and out of the water, onto the ice.

His body is partially in shock from the temperature change, but he forces himself to forget about it, and instead focuses on sprinting to the fishing spear on the right. He hears ice shattering behind him, glances back to see Urav struggling against the sailing line, cracking through the ice around it—but the line holds fast.

Enraged, the creature bursts up onto the ice, its thousands of arms dragging its bulbous head forward. One tentacle pops forward and grasps Sigrud’s left arm; its claw digs a hole in the skin of his bicep; he trips forward and feels himself being dragged back.

He struggles against it; the tentacle maintains its grip, even though he can see it is sizzling where it touches him. Urav growls in pain and fury, gnaws at the ice, chopping it into coarse snow, No. No, I will not let you go.

Sigrud hacks at the tentacle once, twice with the halberd. This proves enough to weaken its grip, and with a low pop, Sigrud squirts free.

Praise the seas, thinks Sigrud as he runs, for cows with rich diets.…

“Shoot!” shouts Nesrhev from up above. “Pepper the damn thing!”

Bolts whiz through the air, plunk into the ice. Many bite into Urav’s hide; it screeches wildly, thrashes against the sailing line, which thrums like a guitar string.

Sigrud reaches the second fishing spear, but Urav is now focused on the men on the bridge. Its tentacles rise like a swarm of cobras and strike at the bridge above. There is a chorus of shrieks; two bodies twirl through the air, falling from the far side of the bridge. Please, thinks Sigrud, do not be Shara.

One tentacle curls down, a struggling police officer clutched in its grip, and stuffs the man into Urav’s gaping mouth. A huge crack as the ice begins to protest against the battle.

This, thinks Sigrud, is not what I wanted.

He runs forward, halberd clutched under one arm, and throws the second fishing spear. He very nearly misses as the creature thrashes against the rope, but the spear finds it way deep into Urav’s back. Urav howls again and whips around. The yellow eye glares at him. Sigrud catches the quickest glimpse of a tentacle speeding at him like a tree trunk rushing down a river; then the world explodes in stars and lights and he goes sliding across the ice.

He expects another attack: it doesn’t come. Groaning, he lifts his head and sees that Urav has turned in the ropes and is now tangled; the sailing rope from the first spear he threw, however, has snapped, so the tangle is not permanent.

Sigrud growls, shakes his head, tests his limbs: they work, more or less. The halberd is beside him, but it has snapped, making it more like a short axe. He picks it up and trots toward the third and final fishing spear.

Get it tangled, he thinks. Let it wear itself out, then beat it to death. Hack at its lungs until it drowns, drowns in its own blood.…

Stones begin to plummet from the Solda Bridge.

Unless, he thinks, it tears the bridge apart.…

He watches as Urav strikes the bridge over and over again. More small stones tumble into the water.

He wishes Nesrhev had never given the command to fire. He wishes Urav had stayed focused on him, only him.

This is why I hate being helped.

Urav’s thrashing has shredded almost all the ice under the bridge; the chunk with Sigrud’s final fishing spear in it bobs up and down like the floater of a fishing pole. With a sigh, Sigrud dives into the water—the cold is like a hammer to his head—swims to it, pulls the spear free, and tugs on the rope until it pulls him to sturdier ice.

His limbs are numb; his hands and feet report that they no longer exist. Urav twists against the rope, opens its mouth to shriek; Sigrud doesn’t hesitate, and hurls the fishing spear into the roof of the creature’s mouth.

It wails in pain, twists, fights against its many bonds, exposing its soft, black, jelly-like underside.

Now.

He rushes forward with the halberd, dodges a tentacle, slides over on the ice, clambers to his feet.…

He is past the fence of swirling tentacles. He begins mercilessly hacking at the creature’s belly.

Urav howls, yammers, shrieks, struggles. Black blood rains on Sigrud in a torrent. His body reports either icy cold or boiling heat. He keeps slashing, keeps hacking.

He remembers burying the bones in his courtyard.

He brings the halberd down.

He remembers looking up in his jail cell and seeing a needle of sunlight poking through, and trying to cradle that tiny pinhole of light in his hands.

He brings the halberd down.

He remembers watching the shores of his homeland fade away from the deck of the Saypuri dreadnought.

He brings the halberd down. Eventually he realizes he is screaming.

I curse the world not for what was stolen from me, he thinks, but for revealing it was never stolen long after the world had made me a different man.

Urav groans, whines. The tentacles go slack. The beast seems to deflate, slowly falling back like an enormous, black tree. The many ropes twang and whine with the weight, and Urav hangs in their net, defeated.

Sigrud is dimly aware of cheering up on the bridge. But he can still see the organs inside the creature pumping and churning. Not dead, not dead yet …

A bright gold eye surfaces from the sea of tentacles at his feet. It narrows, examining him.

Suddenly the limp tentacles are not limp: they fly up, grab the weakest leg of the bridge, and pull.

Sigrud is briefly aware of a dark shadow appearing on his right, and growing; then a huge stone pierces the ice mere yards away.

Sigrud says, “Shi—”

The ice below him tips up like a seesaw, and he is thrown forty feet at least. Then he knows nothing but the cold and the water.

He feels water beat on his nose and mouth. A stream worms its way into his sinuses, tickles his lungs, almost evoking a cough.

Do not drown.

Air burns inside of him. He turns over, looks up; the sky is molten crystal, impenetrable.

Do not drown.

He can see Urav above him, fighting against the ropes. Above the creature is a solid black arch: the bridge.

Sigrud kicks his legs, aims for a widening crack in the ice above.

The solid black arch of the bridge grows a little … less solid. Through the lens of the churning water and ice, it appears to vanish; then a stone ten feet across bursts into the dark water; ropes of bubbles twist and twirl around it; Sigrud darts away, and is buffeted up by its force.

Do not drown, he thinks, and do not be crushed.

More stones crash down, causing enormous concussions that push him up, up.…

The water surface is a membrane, keeping him trapped; he is not sure if he can break through.

He claws at it with his hands, opens his mouth, and tastes wintry air.

Sigrud hauls himself out of the water and onto the ice. This far from the bridge the ice is thankfully solid; he looks back and sees the bridge is not there at all: it is collapsing into the water, causing huge waves … and he cannot see Urav anywhere.

Sigrud, weak, shivering, kneels on the ice and looks for some sign of hope: a fire, a rope, a boat, anything. Yet all he can see is the orb of soft, yellow light slipping through the water toward him, shoving the chunks of ice aside as if they were tissue paper.

“Hm,” he says.

He looks at his hands and arms: the fat has been completely washed away during the fight, presumably taking away whatever protection Shara provided with it.

Then there is a swarm of tentacles around him, and a trembling, widening mouth—one that is missing many teeth—and then a soft push on his back, ushering him in.

Sigrud opens his eye.

He sits on a vast, black plain. The sky above him is just as black; he only knows that the plain is there because on its horizon is a huge, burning yellow eye that casts a faint yellow light across the black sands.

A voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN.”

Sigrud looks to his left and right; around him is a vast field of seated corpses, ashen and dry, as if all the moisture has been boiled out of them. One is dressed like a police officer; another holds a fishing trap. All the corpses are seated facing the burning eye, and each face, though desiccated and gray, bears a look of terrible suffering.

Then he sees that the chests of the corpses are moving, gently breathing.

Sigrud realizes: They are alive.…

The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, FOR YOU ARE FALLEN.”

Sigrud looks down. He is still nude, still wearing only his boots, his knife, and the glove on his right hand.

He touches the knife and remembers what Shara said: It might be wise to take matters into your own hands.…

The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, FOR YOU ARE UNCLEAN.”

Sigrud takes out the knife and considers laying the blade against his wrist, opening up the vein … but something causes him to hesitate.

The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, AND THROUGH YOUR PAIN YOU WILL FIND RIGHTEOUSNESS.”

He waits, the tip of his blade hovering over his wrist. The black plain mixes like paint, swirling until it forms the walls of his old prison cell in Slondheim, where the dark days leached the life out of him bit by bit. Is this, he wonders, the miraculous hells of Urav? It seems so, but he does not lower the knife, not yet.

Set in the door of his cell is a great yellow eye. The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN. YOU WILL KNOW SUFFERING. YOU WILL BE PURGED OF YOUR SIN.”

Sigrud waits. He expects that maybe all the old wounds and fractures and injuries he received in this place will suddenly flare to life, aching with all the agony he experienced here … but it doesn’t come.

The voice, now sounding slightly frustrated, says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN.”

Sigrud looks around, knife point hovering over his wrist. “Okay …” he says slowly. “When?”

The voice is silent.

“Is this not hell?” asks Sigrud. “Should I not be suffering?”

The voice does not answer. Then the walls rapidly transmute to a variety of horrifying situations: he lies upon a bed of nails; he dangles over an active volcano; he is trapped at the bottom of the sea; he is returning to the Dreylands and sees smoke on the horizon; yet none of these scenarios causes him any physical or mental pain.

He looks around. “What is going on?” he asks, genuinely confused.

The walls swirl again. He is back on the black plain, with all the wheezing, ashen corpses and the bright yellow eye glaring furiously at him. He wonders, momentarily, if he is immune simply because he is a Dreyling, but this seems unlikely.

Then he realizes the palm of his right hand is gently throbbing. He looks at his right hand, hidden in its glove, and understands.

The voice says, “PAIN IS YOUR FUTURE. PAIN IS YOUR PURITY.”

Sigrud says, “But you cannot teach me pain”—he begins to tug at the fingers of the glove—“because I already know it.”

He pulls the glove off.

In the center of his palm is a horrendous, bright red scar that would resemble a brand if it was not carved so deeply in his flesh: a circle with a crude scale in the middle.

Kolkan’s hands, he remembers, waiting to weigh and judge.…

He holds up his palm to the bright yellow eye. “I have been touched by the finger of your god,” he says, “and I lived. I knew his pain, and carried it with me. I carry it now. Every day. So you cannot hurt me, can you? You cannot teach me what I already know.”

The great eye stares.

Then, it blinks.

Sigrud lunges forward and stabs it with his knife.

From the riverbank, Shara and Mulaghesh stare at where Urav has retreated below the water. “Go!” shouts Nesrhev. “Go!” Both Shara and Mulaghesh are soaking wet, having hauled Nesrhev from the Solda sporting two broken arms, a broken leg, and mild hypothermia. “For the love of the gods, get me out of here,” he cries, but Shara ignores him, staring at the river, awaiting some unbelievable twist: perhaps Urav will resurface, spit Sigrud out, and send him skipping across the water like a stone.…

But there is only the gentle bob of the ice on the dark water.

“We need to get away,” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes!” shouts Nesrhev. “Yes, by the gods, that’s what I’ve been saying.”

“What?” asks Shara softly.

“We need,” says Mulaghesh again, “to get away from the river. That thing is angry now. I know you don’t want to leave your friend, but we need to go.”

Police officers scream orders to one another from the banks. Nesrhev howls and moans. No one is sure how to get across the Solda. There is no coherent authority to any of it, but the police officers seem to have voted en masse to pour kerosene on the river and set it alight.

“We definitely need to go now,” says Mulaghesh.

Shara devises a sling out of her cloak, and the two set Nesrhev in it and begin hauling him up the riverbank. The remaining officers are backing a wagon of barrels up to the river. They do not even try to unload and dump them, they just hack at the barrel sides with an axe until the barrels burst and drain into the river.

Shara rifles her mind for some solution, some arcane trick—a prayer of Kolkan, a word from the Jukoshtava—but nothing comes.

Fire crawls across the river in snaking coils. River ice hisses, turns smooth as marble, and beats a rapid retreat.

They’ve almost reached the river walk when the blanket of fire begins to dip violently. “Look!” Shara says.

The fire begins to churn and hiss.

“Oh, please,” whines Nesrhev. “Please don’t stop.”

The writhing form of Urav bursts up through the Solda, shrieks horribly, and begins battering the surface with its many arms.

“The fire!” cries a voice. “It works!”

Yet Shara is not so sure. Urav does not seem to be reacting to anything: rather, it appears to be having an attack of some kind. She is reminded of an old man she once saw have a stroke in a park, how his limbs trembled and flailed.…

Urav, screaming and gurgling, carves through the ice, splashes through the lake of fire, beats its arms on the riverbank, caroms into the remnants of the Solda Bridge, before finally beaching itself on the river walk, its great, trembling mouth opening and closing, whining and keening like a frightened dog.

“What in hells is going on?” asks Mulaghesh.

Urav opens its mouth, screeches a long, sustained pitch … and a tiny black tooth pops out of its belly, just below its gaping maw.

No—not a tooth: a knife.

“No,” says Shara. “No, it can’t be.…”

Urav shrieks again; the knife wriggles, then slowly begins sawing its way down the creature’s belly. Hot blood splashes to the ground, sizzles on the icy river. A hand, fingers clenched together to form a blade, punches through the long slash.

“You have got,” says Mulaghesh, “to be joking.”

In what can only be described as a horrific perversion of a vaginal birth, there is a spurt of viscera, a flood of putrid entrails, and then the fat- and blood-drenched form of Sigrud slips out of the gash in the dying monster to lie on the ground and stare up at the sky, before rolling over, getting onto his hands and knees, and vomiting prolifically.

Shara is dimly aware of distant cheering as she sprints down the river walk to where Sigrud lies. She is forced to slow down once she nears him: the stench is powerful enough to be nigh impenetrable, but she fights through it to kneel beside him.

“How!” she cries. Some tiny gland dangles from his ear; she delicately removes it. “How did you do it? How could you have possibly survived?”

Sigrud rolls onto his back, gulping air. He coughs and hacks and reaches into his mouth to pull out some kind of long, stringy gray tissue. “Lucky,” he gasps. He throws the tissue away; it strikes a puddle of entrails with a wet flup. “Lucky and stupid.”

Something inside of Urav’s dead bulk shifts, and more viscera slips out in an oozing landslide. Shara pulls Sigrud to his feet before it can pool around them. She notices he is not wearing his glove on his right hand, something she has never seen him go without.

Sigrud looks back at Urav with disbelief. “To think …” He applies a finger to his right nostril and blows a small ocean of brackish blood from his left. “To think that whole place was inside that creature.…”

“What was it? Was it really hell in there, Sigrud?”

Sigrud kneels as another cough grips him. A gathering crescendo of cheers and whoops echo across the Solda. Shara looks up to see not only scores of police officers gathering on the shores to celebrate, but also common citizens, men and women and children pouring out of their homes to clap and sing.

Oh dear, thinks Shara. This was rather public, wasn’t it?

A series of flashes from her left: three photographers have set up their tripods and are winding up their cameras to take another round of snapshots.

And behind them is someone she did not expect to see.

Vohannes Votrov stands at the back of the crowd. He appears to have eschewed his normally ostentatious wardrobe in favor of a dark brown coat and a black shirt buttoned up to the neck. He looks gaunt and pale, and he watches Shara with an expression of placid disdain, as one would watch an insect beat against the pane of a window. It takes her a moment to notice that he does not have his cane.

The crowd surges around Vohannes and the photographers. Sigrud and Shara are swept up in the tidal wave of claps on the back and bellowed congratulations. When she manages to look back at the photographers, he is gone.