City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(82)

“Show them to us. Now!”

“I take it,” says Sigrud, “that you do not think that’s a little girl.”

The girl lets out of a long, tortured shriek. Shara grimly shakes her head. “Look. Think. The salt on the ground, ringing her in … Torskeny’s clothes, which look to have been dropped on the ground just where she crossed the salt …” The little girl, still shrieking in pain, tries to crawl over to them. Yet her movements are so odd: she doesn’t use her hands or arms at all (Shara thinks, Does she even have any?), but the girl appears to kick over to them, crawling on her knees. It’s like she’s a cloth puppet with a hard little head on top, yet her cheeks and her tears and her hair all look so real. …

But she never shows her feet. Not once throughout this strange rolling motion.

The taste of dust thickens: Shara’s throat is clay; her eyes, sand.

There is something under the dress. Not a little girl’s body—something much larger …

Oh, by the seas, thinks Shara. It couldn’t be …

“Help me, please!” cries the girl. “I’m in so much pain!”

“Step back, Sigrud. Don’t let it get close to you.”

Sigrud does so. “No!” shouts the girl. Worm-like, the girl crawls to the very edge of the salt ring, mere inches away from them. “No! Please … Please don’t leave me!”

“You’re not real,” Shara says to the little girl. “You’re bait.”

“Bait?” says Sigrud. “For what?”

“For you and me.”

The little girl bursts into tears and huddles at the edge. “Please,” she says. “Please just pick me up. I haven’t been held in so long. …”

“Drop the act,” says Shara angrily. “I know what you are.”

The little girl shrieks; the sound is razors on their ears.

“Stop!” shouts Shara. “Stop your nonsense! We’re no fools!”

The screams stop immediately. The abrupt cessation of sound is startling.

The girl does not look up: she sits bent in half, frozen and lifelessly still.

“I don’t know how you’re still alive,” says Shara. “I thought all of you died in the Great Purge. …”

The thick locks quiver as the girl’s head twitches to one side.

“You’re a mhovost, aren’t you? One of Jukov’s pets.”

The little girl sits up, but there is something disturbingly mechanical about the motion, as if she’s being pulled by strings. Her face, which was once contorted into a look of such heart-piercing agony, is now utterly blank, like that of a doll.

Something shifts under the dress. The little girl appears to drop into the cloth. There is a sudden rush of dust.

Cloth swirling around it, it stands up slowly.

Shara looks at it, and immediately begins to vomit.

*

It is man-like, in a way: it has a torso, arms, and legs. Yet all are queerly long, distended, and many-jointed, as if its body is nothing but knuckles, hard bulbs of bone shifting under smooth skin. Its limbs are wrapped in white cloth stained gray with dust, and its feet are like a blend between a human’s and a goose’s: huge and syndactyly and webbed, with three fat toes, each with tiny perfect toenails on them. Yet its head is by far the worst part: the back is roughly like the head of a balding man, sporting a ring of long, gray scraggly hair around its skull; but instead of a face or jaw, the head stretches forward to form what looks like a wide, long, flat bill—like, again, that of a goose. Yet rather than the tough keratin normally seen in ducks or geese, the bill is made of knuckled human flesh, as if a man’s fingers were fused together, and he brought both hands together to form a joint at the heel of his palms.

The mhovost flaps its bill at Shara, making a wet fapfapfap. Somewhere in her mind she hears echoes of children laughing, screaming, crying. As its fleshy bill wags Shara can see it has no esophagus, no teeth: just more bony, hairy flesh in the inner recesses of the bill.

She spews vomit onto the floor again, but is careful to avoid the salt on the floor.

Sigrud stares blankly at this abomination, pacing in front of him like a bantam cock, daring him to attack it. “Is this,” he asks slowly, “a thing I should be killing?”

“No,” gasps Shara. More vomit burbles out of her. The mhovost flaps its bill at her—again, the echoes of ghostly children. She thinks, It’s laughing at me. “Don’t break the ring of salt! That’s the only thing keeping us alive!”

“And the little girl?”

“She was never there. … This creature is miraculous by nature, though darkly so.”

She spits bile on the floor. The mhovost gestures to her belligerently. The human nature of its movements is revolting: she imagines it saying, Come on! Come on!

“You killed Mrs. Torskeny, didn’t you?” asks Shara. “They led her here and she broke the salt barrier.”

The mhovost, in a bizarrely effective pantomime, looks at the pile of clothes and shrugs indifferently: That old thing? It waves dismissively: It was nothing. Then, again, it flaps its bill at them.

“I so wish”—Sigrud is turning his knife over and over in his hand—“that it would stop doing that.”

“It wants you to break the circle. If it can get at you, it’ll swallow you whole.”