City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(93)

He looks east, toward the walls of Bulikov, huge white cliffs glimmering in the moonlight. He glowers at them and says, “I should!” A belch. “I should be forgiven.”

As he watches, he realizes there is a queer, flickering orange light up the hill behind him.

A fire. One of the warehouses in the complex up there is burning, it seems.

“Oh, dear.” He scratches his head. Should he call someone? That seems, at the moment, to be a difficult prospect, so he takes another swig of wine, and sighs and says again, “Oh, dear.”

A dark shadow appears at the chain link fence around the warehouse complex. Something low and huge.

A long, stridulous shriek. The dark shape surges against the chain link fence; the woven wires stretch and snap like harp strings.

Something big comes rushing down the hillside. Vod assumes it is a bear. It must be a bear, because only a bear could be so big, so loud, panting and growling. … Yet it sounds much, much larger than a bear.

It comes to the treeline and leaps.

Vod’s drunken eyes only see it for an instant. It is smoking—perhaps an escapee of the fire above. But through the smoke, he thinks he sees something thick and bulbous, something with many claws and tendrils gleaming in the moonlight.

It strikes the river ice with a huge crack and plummets through into the dark waters below. Vod sees something shifting under the ice: now the thing looks long and flowing, like a beautiful, mossy flower blossom. With a graceful pump, it propels itself against the river current and toward the white walls of Bulikov. As it turns over, he sees a soft yellow light burning on its surface, a gentle phosphorescence that deeply disturbs him.

The creature disappears downriver. He looks at the broken ice: it is at least two feet thick. Suggesting, then, that whatever leaped in was quite, quite heavy. …

Vod lifts his jug, sniffs at it, and peers into its mouth, unsure if he wishes to buy this brand again.

*

Fivrei and Sohvrena sit under the Solda Bridge in a tiny shanty, nursing a weak lamp. It is an unusual time to fish on the Solda, but the two men know a secret few do: directly under the bridge, where the Solda is widest and deepest, dozens of trout congregate, presumably, as Fivrei claims, seeking food and warmth. “As far away from the wind as they can get,” he says each time he drops his black line into his tiny hole.

“And they,” grumbles Sohvrena, “are wise.”

“Do you complain? How many did you catch last night?”

Sohvrena holds his mittened hands closer to the fire in the suspended brazier. “Six,” he admits.

“And the night before that?”

“Eight. But I must weigh the amount of fish I catch against the toes I lose.”

“Pah,” says Fivrei. “A real fisherman must be made of sterner stuff. This is man’s work. It calls for a man.”

But a man’s other work, thinks Sohvrena, lies in the soft, warm arms of a woman. Could he be unmanly for wishing he were there, rather than here?

A soft tapping fills the shanty.

“A catch?” asks Sohvrena.

Fivrei inspects his tip-up, which is suspended over the six-inch hole in the ice; the white flag on the black line quivers slightly. “No,” he says. “Perhaps they play with it.”

Then high-pitched squeaks join the tapping, like someone rubbing their hands against a pane of glass. Before Sohvrena can remark upon it, the flag on his own tip-up starts to dance. “The same here,” he says. “Not a catch, but it … moves.”

Fivrei tugs his black line. “Maybe I am wro— Wait.” He tugs the line again. “It is caught on something.”

Sohvrena watches the flag twitch on Fivrei’s tip-up. “Are you sure it’s not a catch?” asks Sohvrena.

“It does not give. It’s like it’s caught on a rock. What is that intolerable squeaking?”

“Maybe the wind?” Sohvrena, curious, tugs at his own line. It too does not give. “Mine is the same. Both of our lines are caught on something?” He shakes his head. “We had nothing on our lines a few minutes ago.”

“Maybe flotsam is being washed downstream, and our lines are caught.”

“Then why don’t our lines just break?” Sohvrena inspects the ice below them. Perhaps he is imagining things, but he imagines a soft yellow glow filtering through the frost in one spot.

“What is that?” he says, pointing.

Fivrei does a double take, and stares at the yellow light. “What is that?”

“That’s what I just said.”

The two men look at it, then at each other.

The fire in the brazier has melted away some snow on the ice; they stand and begin to clear away more with their feet, until the ice becomes more transparent.

Fivrei gapes. “What on … ? By the heavens, what is … ?”

Something is stuck to the opposite side of the ice, directly underneath them. Sohvrena is reminded of a starfish he once saw, brought back from the coast, but vastly huger, nearly thirty feet in diameter, and with many, many more arms, some of them wide, some of them thin and delicate. And in the center, a bright, glowing eye, and a many-toothed mouth that sucks against the ice, its black gums squeaking.

The taps and pops increase. Sohvrena looks up at the ends of the beast’s arms and sees many tiny claws scraping at the ice around them in a perfect circle.