City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(101)

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.