City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(107)

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.

She stepped in. There was no light in the room, but she could see the giant man sitting cross-legged in the corner. He had the air of a beaten dog about him: his hair matted and patchy, his skin covered in welts and infections and what she hoped was dirt. His head was bowed, so she could not see his eyes—or eye, she kept reminding herself—but he recoiled at the interruption of light.

She shut the door and sat in the corner opposite him, and waited. He hardly moved at all.

“We are leaving Dreyling waters,” Shara asked him. “Do you not wish to see your country one last time?”

He did not answer.

“You haven’t even been outside your room,” she said. “You are free. Don’t you wish to move about for the first time in what must be years?”

No answer.

“Don’t you at least want to bathe? We do have hot water.”

The giant man grunted slightly, as if he was about to speak but thought better of it.

“Yes?”

His accent was so thick he was almost unintelligible: “This … is not real.”

“What?”

He waved a hand. “Any of it.”

“It is. I promise you, it is. Your door is unlocked. You are free.”

He shook his head. “No. It can’t be. They are … My family …”

Shara waited, but he said no more.

“They are alive, as I told you they were,” she said softly.

“I buried them. I held their bones in my hands.”

“I cannot testify to whose bones those were, but they were not your family’s.”

“You are lying to me.”

“I am not. Your wife, Hild, was smuggled out of the country with your two daughters by a servant of yours before the coup. They crossed the border into Voortyashtan merely two days before the coup was complete. There they lived for the past six years, claiming to be relations of your servant. They had been working as farmers—poor ones, I suspect, as I doubt if someone of your wife’s background ever tilled earth, but they had made do.”

A long silence. Then: “What … ? What proof do you have of this?”

“Your family was not totally safe when I found them. They were, and are, being searched for—there are still many agents seeking any remnant of your family. We have removed your family from Voortyashtan, as I have no longer deemed that location safe. It has not been totally easy—your wife is, how shall I put this, a somewhat strong-willed woman.”

Sigrud smiles slightly.

“But, we got it done. When we did, your wife gave one of our officers a gift, as a gesture of thanks.” Shara reached into her pocket and pulled out a small burlap sack. She opened it and took out a gleaming, woven gold bracelet etched to resemble harsh, choppy waves.

She passed it to him. “Does this mean anything to you?”

He stared at it, the metal so bright and so clean in his filthy, scarred hands. His fingers began to tremble.

“Why don’t you come up to the deck with me?” she asked gently.

He stood up slowly, still staring at the bracelet. She opened the door, and he followed her out and up the stairs with the air of a sleepy child being herded to bed.

The slap of the cold wind was enough to make Shara pause, and she bent double and staggered out onto the deck of the dreadnought. The giant man took no notice, and crossed the threshold of the door and stared up at the sky in awed silence. He had avoided looking up when they brought him on board, and she had wondered about that. Of course, she thought. How long has it been since he’s been outside? The sight of it must terrify him.