City of Stairs (35 page)

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 their feet. 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, all 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 two 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, 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.