City of Stairs (36 page)

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 leeched 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 cause 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 hells 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.

I fault no one for praising Saypur’s history—history, after all, is a story, one that is sometimes wonderful. But one must remember it in
full
—as things really were—and avoid selective amnesia. For the Great War did not start with the invasion of the Continent, nor did it begin with the death of the Divinity Voortya.

Rather, it began with a child.

I do not know her name. I wish I did—she deserves to be named, considering what happened to her. But from court records, I know she lived with her parents on a farm in the Mahlideshi province in Saypur, and I know that she was a simple child, one touched by nature in a manner to stunt her intelligence. Like many children of a certain age, she had an attraction to fire, and perhaps her simple nature made this attraction even stronger.

One day in 1631, she found an overturned, abandoned wagon in the road. It had been bearing boxes and boxes of paper—and seeing all this paper, I think, and knowing no adult was nearby, was all too tempting for her.

She built a little fire in the road, burning pages with a match, one after the other.

Then the wagon’s passengers returned. They were Continentals, wealthy Taalvashtanis who owned many nearby rice paddies. And when they saw her burning the paper, they became enraged—for she was unknowingly burning copies of the Taalvashtava, the sacred book of Taalhavras, and to them this was a grave transgression.

They took her before the local Continental magistrate and pled for justice for this heretical indiscretion. The girl’s parents begged for mercy, for she was simple and did not know what she had done. The townspeople joined their call, and asked for a light punishment, if any.

The Continentals, however, told the judge that if any Saypuri was willing to put the sacred words to flame, then they should be put to the flame as well. And the judge—a Continental—listened.

They burned her alive in the town square of Mahlideshi with all the townspeople watching; court records tell us they hung her from a tree by a chain, and built a bonfire at her feet—and when she, weeping, climbed the chain to escape the fire, they cut off her hands and feet, and whether she bled to death or burned to death first, I cannot say.

I do not think the Continentals expected the people to react as they did—they were, after all, poor Saypuris, not individuals of any strength or might, and brutal humiliation was the norm for them. But this gruesome sight caused the entire town of Mahlideshi to revolt, tear down the magistrate’s office, and stone its inhabitants to death, including the executioners of the girl.

For one week, they celebrated their freedom. And I would like to say that the Colonial Rebellion started then, that Saypur was so inspired by this brave stand that the Kaj rose up and took the Continent at this moment. But the next week the Continentals returned in force … and Mahlideshi is no longer on any map, save for a charred spot of land along the shore and a lump of earth a sixth of a mile long—the last resting place of the victorious citizens of Mahlideshi.

Word spread of the carnage. A quiet, hateful outrage began to seep through the colonies.

We do not know much about the Kaj. We do not even know who his mother was. But we know he lived in the province of Tohmay, just beside Mahlideshi; and we know that it was just after this massacre that he began his experimentations, one of which must have created the weaponry he would eventually use to overthrow the Continent.

An avalanche dislodges a tiny stone into the ocean; and, through the mysteries of fate, this tiny stone creates a tsunami.

I wish I did not know some parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.

—“Of History Lost,”
Dr. Efrem Pangyui

N
o breaks,” says the doctor. “
Probably
some fractures.
Definitely
bruising, to the point that I would expect some bone bruising as well. I would be able to tell, of course, if the patient would permit me to examine him more closely …”

Sigrud, leaning back in the bed with a pot of potato wine in his lap, allows a grunt. One half of his face is a brilliant red; the other is black and gray, like molded fruit. In the light of the weak embassy gas lamps, he looks positively ghoulish. So far he has only allowed the doctor to prod his stomach and witness that he can move his head, arms, and legs; beyond this, Sigrud only answers the doctor’s requests with sullen grunts.

“He reports no abdominal pain,” says the doctor. “Which is, I must say, unbelievable. And I also see no signs of frostbite—
also
fairly unbelievable.”

“What is
frostbite
?” asks Sigrud. “I have never heard of this frostbite.”

“Are you implying,” says the doctor, “that Dreylings
never
get frostbite?”

“There is cold”—Sigrud takes a massive swig of wine—“and less cold.”

The doctor, flustered, frustrated, says to Shara, “I would say that if he survives the night, then he will survive entirely. I would also say that if he wants to survive
in general
, he should allow medical professionals to do their
job
, and not treat us as if we are … molesters.”

Sigrud laughs nastily.

Shara smiles. “Thank you, Doctor. That will be all.”

The doctor, grumbling, bows, and Shara leads him outside. A crowd is milling in front of the embassy gates, having followed them here from the river. “If you could,” says Shara, “we would appreciate your discretion. If you could avoid discussing any details of what you saw here …”

“It would be against my profession,” says the doctor, “and more so this examination was conducted
so
poorly that I would prefer no one ever know about it.” He claps a hat on his head and marches away. Someone in the crowd shouts, “There she is!” And the gates light up with photography flashes.

Shara grimaces and shuts the door. Photography is a relatively new innovation, less than five years old, but she can already tell she will hate it:
Capturing images,
she thinks,
carries so many complications for my work. …

She reenters and heads up the stairs; the embassy staff watches her go with black-rimmed eyes, exhausted, waiting for permission to turn in; Mulaghesh descends in a harried stomp. “Warehouse fire’s out,” she says. She lifts a bottle to her lips and drinks. “I’m locking down the embassy until we decide if this city will kill us or not for killing their god’s pet, or whatever that was. The City Fathers have elected to deal with the bridge themselves. I’m getting drunk and sleeping here. You can deal with it.”

“I shall,” says Shara lightly.

“And you had better make
sure
I wind up in Javrat when this is all over!”

“I shall.”

She leaves Mulaghesh behind, enters Sigrud’s room, and sits at the foot of his bed. Sigrud is running a forefinger around the mouth of the bottle, again and again.

“Here,” says Shara. She holds out Sigrud’s bracelet and places it in his big palm.

“Thank you,” he says, and fastens it around his left wrist.

“Are you
really
all right?” Shara asks.

“I think so,” says Sigrud. “I have survived worse.”

“Really?”

Sigrud nods, lost in thought.

“
How
did you survive?”

He thinks, then lifts his right hand, which is wrapped in medical gauze. He unravels it to reveal the brilliant pink-red carving of a scale in his palm. “With this.”

She looks at it. “But that … that isn’t the
blessing
of Kolkan. …”

“Maybe not. But I think that … being punished by Kolkan, and being blessed by him … They may be more or less the same thing.”

Shara remembers Efrem reading from Olvos’s Book of the Red Lotus and commenting aloud,
The Divine did not understand themselves in the same way we do not understand ourselves, and their unintentional effects often say more about them than their intentional ones.

Sigrud is staring into the palm of his hand. His eye glitters through its swollen lids like the soft back of a beetle between its wings. He blinks—she can tell he is drunk—and says, “Do you know how I got this?”

“Somewhat,” she says. “I know it is the mark of the Finger of Kolkan.”

He nods. Silence stretches on.

“I knew you had it,” she says. “I knew what it was. But I never felt I should ask.”

“Wise. Scars are windows to bitterness—it is best to leave them untouched.” He kneads his palm and says, “I don’t know
how
they got it in Slondheim. Such a rare and powerful instrument—though it looked like no more than a marble—a gray marble with a, a little sign of a scale on it. They had to carry it in a box, with a certain kind of lining in it. …”

“Gray wool, probably,” says Shara. “It held a special esteem, to Kolkashtanis.”

“If you say so. There were nine of us. They’d kept us in a cell, all together. We drank rusty water from a leaking pipe, shat in the corner, starved. Starved for so long. I don’t know how long they starved us. But one day our jailers came to us with this little stone in the box and a plate of chicken—a
whole chicken
—and they said, ‘If one of you can hold this little, tiny stone for a full minute, we will let you eat.’ And everyone rushed to volunteer, to do what the jailers said, but I held back because I knew these men. In Slondheim, they played with us. Tricked us into fighting each other, killing each other …” He flexes his left fist; the pink-scarred wastelands of his knuckles flare white. “So I knew this was not right. The first man tried to hold the pebble, and the second he picked it up, he started screaming. His hand bled like he had been stabbed. He dropped it—it sounded like a
boulder
had struck the floor, when it fell—and the jailers laughed and said, ‘Pick it up, pick it up,’ and the man couldn’t. It was like it weighed a thousand tons. The jailers could only pick it up with the gray cloth. We didn’t understand what it was, but we knew we were starving, so we wanted to try again, to eat, just a little. … And none of them could. Some got to twenty seconds. Some to thirty. Bleeding rivers from their hands. It wounded them so horribly. And they all dropped this little stone. This tiny little Finger of Kolkan.” He takes another sip of wine. “And then … I tried. But before I picked it up, I thought … I thought about all I had lost. The thing in my heart that made me wish to keep living, that fire, it had gone out. It is
still
out, even now. And … and I
wished
this stone to crush me. Do you see? I
wished
for this pain. So I picked it up. And I held it.” He turns over his scarred hand as if the stone is still there. “I feel it still. I feel like I am holding it now. I held it not to eat, but to
die
.” The hand turns into a fist. “But eat I did. I bore the Finger of Kolkan for not one, but three minutes. And then they took the stone from me, unhappy, and said, ‘You can eat, for you have won. But before you do, you must decide—will you eat all the chicken, or will you share it with your fellow inmates?’ And they all stared at me … ghosts of men, thin and pale and starving, like they were fading before my eyes. …”

Sigrud begins rewrapping his hand. “I didn’t think about it,” he says softly, “for even a second. The jailers put me in a different cell from the rest of them, and I ate it all, and I slept. And it was not even a week before they started dragging out the bodies from my old jail cell.” He ties the bandage, massaging his palm. “The Divine may have created many hells,” he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.”

* * *

Shara shuts the door to Sigrud’s room and pauses in the hall. Her legs tremble, and it takes her a moment to realize she is about to collapse. She sits down in the hallway and takes a deep breath.

Shara has run many operatives in her career, and she has lost her fair share. And in that time she has come to think she is an immaculate professional: efficient yet personally removed from the details of her work, preserving her conscience and her sanity in a tiny hermetic little bubble buried far away from her grisly reality.

But to imagine losing Sigrud … She thought she knew horror, but when she saw him disappear into the dark waters of the Solda …

He’s alive,
she tells herself.
He’s alive, and he’s going to be fine.
At least, as fine as such a man can be, battered and bruised in his tiny, stinking room.

Shara shakes her head.
How the present mimics the past,
she thinks. Ten years ago, but today it seems like a lifetime.

Shara remembers how small the cabin door had been. Tiny, hardly a trapdoor, the tiniest cabin in the Saypuri dreadnought, probably. She knocked at the door, the
tap tap
echoing down the ship’s hallway, but received no answer. Then she opened it and the reek hit her, and her legs, already uncertain with seasickness as the dreadnought tipped beneath her, quivered even more at the smell. Then there was the Saypuri lieutenant coughing, advising her, “Please be careful ma’am,” and likely wondering if this girl, hardly twenty-five years old at the time, was looking to get killed.