City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(106)
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. …”