City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(104)

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.