City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(100)

“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 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.