City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(97)

Two shapes spring up on the banks and run away, screaming. One figure looks to be too slow—a tentacle whips toward it, and the figure spins. “By all the gods, no,” whispers Nesrhev. But another officer comes running up with a flaming torch, which he hurls at the approaching tentacles. The creature pauses at this interruption just long enough for the officers to slip out of reach, up the banks of the Solda.

The creature climbs up farther on the bank and screeches at them with a strangely avian call. Its tentacles search the riverbank, pluck up stones, and hurl them at the retreating officers. None of the stones strike the officers; most find a home in the roof and walls of a small and unfortunate house. Then the creature shrieks twice more before retreating back below the ice, where it drifts downriver.

“My gods,” says Nesrhev. “My gods. What is that thing?”

Shara nods, satisfied that her hunch was correct. “I think I know.” She polishes her glasses on her scarf. He who waits in dark places, she thinks. And pulls down the unworthy, and devours them. … “I believe, Captain Nesrhev, that we have just seen the fabled Urav.”

A brief silence.

“Urav?” asks an officer. “Urav the Punisher?”

Nesrhev swats at him furiously, as if to say, Do you know who you are speaking in front of?

“Don’t stare so, Captain,” says Shara. “It’s perfectly all right for you to admit that you know of it. Even if it is against the WR to acknowledge such a thing. These are … extenuating circumstances.”

“I thought Urav was a fairy story,” one officer reluctantly says.

“Oh, no,” says Shara. “Kolkan was fond of using familiars and Divine creatures to do his work. Urav was the worst, and the most dangerous—and possibly his favorite.” She watches the yellow eye twirl under the ice, perhaps observing the shore, looking for sinners. And to Urav, Shara remembers, who isn’t a sinner? “The creature of the depths, in whose belly the souls of the damned cower under his gaze.”

“Then what the hells is it doing in my city killing innocent people?” demands Nesrhev.

“I can’t immediately say,” says Shara, which is a lie. She recalls something she read in Ghaladesh: after Kolkan’s sudden disappearance, Urav, without the oversight of its creator, reportedly went mad. Jukov was forced to capture it, luring it into a jug of wine distilled from human sin, and trapping it there.

And if all that is true, thinks Shara, then there’s only one likely place where that jug could have been stored.

She silently curses herself for tripping on that wire. Who knows what else I’ve released back into the world?

“What the hells can we do against such a thing?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Well,” says Shara, “Some Divine creatures can be killed by normal means. They have their own agency, to an extent, which makes them vulnerable. I mean, look at the Great Purge—that was done with knives and spears and axes.”

The officers shift uncomfortably to hear such forbidden subjects discussed aloud. Some look outraged, even scandalized; Shara is happy she did not mention she personally accomplished this same feat mere hours ago.

“I do not like the idea,” says Nesrhev, “of putting my officers at risk, and having them shoot at this thing in the ice.”

“Bolts wouldn’t penetrate the ice, anyway,” says Mulaghesh.

“We should wait for the ice to melt,” says Nesrhev, “or maybe start bonfires on it to melt it, and then see what we can do.”

“And what would you do then?” asks Mulaghesh. “Attack it in boats? With spears? Like a whale?”

Nesrhev hesitates; he looks around at his officers, who look none too pleased with the idea.

Sigrud makes another tch, as if weighing something in his mind. Then: “I can kill it.”

Silence.

Everyone slowly turns to look at him.

Shara glances at him, concerned: Are you sure you want to start this? But Sigrud’s expression is inscrutable.

“What?” says Mulaghesh. “How?”

“It is a”—he makes the constipated face that he always does when trying to translate a Dreyling expression—“a thing of the water,” he finishes. “And I have killed many things of the water.”

“But … are … are you serious?” asks Nesrhev.

“I have killed,” says Sigrud, “many things of the water. This would be different. …” He watches, keen-eyed, as Urav considers carving another hole in the ice before abandoning it. “But not that different.”

“What exactly would you have my men doing?” asks Nesrhev.

“I do not really think”—Sigrud scratches his chin, thinking—“that I would need any of your men at all.”

“You are genuinely suggesting that you, by yourself, can kill a Divine horror like that?” asks Mulaghesh.

Sigrud contemplates it; then he nods. “Yes. The circumstances are favorable. The river is not big.”

“The Solda,” says Nesrhev, “is almost a mile wide!”

“But it is not the sea,” says Sigrud. “Not the ocean. Which I am used to. And with the ice …” He shrugs. “It is quite very possible.”

“It’s killed almost thirty people tonight, sir,” says Nesrhev. “It would be an easy thing for it to kill you.”