Taty narrows her eyes, watching the tops of the tenements down the sights of her rifling. Her right shoulder aches from the recoil, but then she sees the seneschal pop up, and forgets all her pain.
She puts the sights on it and fires. She hits it in the shoulder and it seems to stumble very slightly for a fraction of a second—but hopefully a fraction of a second that Sigrud can use.
“He’s headed toward Ivanya,” says Shara. “I think.”
“Yes.” Taty fires again, this one a miss. “Will he make it?”
“I don’t know,” says Shara.
Taty fires again—the last round in the clip. The empty clip comes shooting out with a ping. “Next one,” she says, extending a hand.
Her mother passes a full clip over. Taty pushes it in until the bolt smoothly slides into place, chambering the top round. She raises the rifling to her shoulder, but then pauses, noticing her mother’s gaze and her broad smile.
“What are you looking at?” Taty asks.
“Nothing,” says Shara. “I just…I just want to remember this. To keep this. We lose so much. I hope I keep this.”
“Keep it until what?” asks Taty.
Shara looks away, face now clouded. “Nothing. Nothing.”
Sigrud makes another corner, now sprinting down the main street that runs along the black wall, back toward the foot of the staircase. He needs to get into position before the yellow brick tenement on the corner, and soon—but the seneschal isn’t running the route he needs it to. He was hoping it’d take the alley running through the tenements, but because it seems to know how to track him, it’s not bothering with this complication, and is instead making for the main road, looking to cut around and through.
He eyes the brick tenement on the corner, its sides painted bright yellow, and the window on the second floor. The seneschal rounds the corner, its spear low, its silence thrumming.
Sigrud considers his options—maybe lead it back down into the warren of tenements?—but he knows there’s no time. He sprints toward the yellow brick building, knowing full well he won’t make it.
Not even with Taty shooting will he make it.
Taty sits up straight. “Something’s wrong.” She aims and fires, hits the seneschal in the belly, but it keeps coming.
“I know,” says Shara.
“He’s too exposed!” says Taty.
“I know!” says Shara.
Taty pulls the trigger, and there’s a click. She blinks and looks down at the rifling. “Misfire!” she cries. “Shit!” She watches in horror as Sigrud sprints down the street, small and tiny before the black form of the seneschal.
“Oh, no,” she says. “Oh, no…”
Shara sits up and looks out the window, her face calm and watchful.
A hundred feet from the tenement. Fifty. He feels the ground shaking with the steps of the seneschal behind him.
Please, Ivanya, he thinks. Please be ready….
Impossibly, he makes it to the yellow brick wall, but he can see from the shadows over his shoulder that the seneschal is going to cut him off, keeping him from escaping down the next alley.
He whirls around, hoping he can perhaps leap aside and dodge under the seneschal’s stance, but…
A flash of darkness.
It’s close, he sees. Too close.
The spear flies at him.
There’s a crunch sound. His right side goes numb.
Sigrud tries to stumble back, but finds he can’t. He can’t move.
He stupidly looks around for the source of the sound, and sees that it came from behind him, where the spear has penetrated the brick wall.
He looks down.
He sees that the spear hit the wall after passing cleanly through his right breast, beside his shoulder. Right where it left that dark little spot just a few days ago.
Sigrud tries to breathe and finds he can’t. His chest is bright with pain.
The seneschal crouches low, its featureless face staring into his own. He can’t help but get the sense that it is wickedly gleeful in its victory.
And it is victory, he knows. Sigrud je Harkvaldsson has seen enough mortal blows to know that this is one.
“No!” screams Taty from the window. “No, no, no!” She drops the rifling, going white as the seneschal impales Sigrud, pinning him to the wall.
Beside her, Shara Komayd silently stands and begins walking downstairs.
The seneschal leans close to him, its silence now an odd purr he can feel in his bones.
He coughs and manages to laugh. He grins at the thing. He hopes she can read his lips as he says, “Don’t get too close. I don’t want to get nicked when she guts you.”
The seneschal cocks its head and looks up…
Just in time to see Ivanya leap from the second-floor window of the tenement, Flame in her hands.
The strike is strong and true. The edge bites through the seneschal’s neck as if it were but a switch of straw.
The head of the seneschal strikes the ground with a loud thump—which means, he dimly realizes, that sound has returned.
The seneschal’s tall, spindly body follows, collapsing before him like a suspension bridge. Ivanya falls beside the carcass, rolling as she lands, but he can tell the fall was rough, maybe spraining or breaking an ankle. She turns to look at him, sees him impaled on the wall, and her mouth opens in horror.
Sigrud tastes blood in his mouth. He tries to smile. “You…You did a very good job,” he says. His voice is a whisper.
“Oh, no,” says Ivanya.
Malwina lies on the black staircase, beaten and bloody and faint. She knew it would be hard. But not this hard.
She looks up to see Nokov run through one of the Divine children with nothing more than a finger, as if his digit were a rapier, then turn and snatch another Divine child out of the air and stuff it into his huge, black maw. Malwina slowly realizes that she is now the only one left—Nokov has proven too strong, too shifting, too mutable, too powerful for them to even make a mark on him.
“I thought I would enjoy this more,” says Nokov. He lifts his finger, the Divine child hanging limp from his knuckle, and stuffs her into his mouth. “But none of you are even much of a challen—”
Then Nokov sits up straight like he’s just heard a terrible sound. He whirls and stares down at the city below. “No,” he whispers. “No, no! Not Mishra, not Mishra!”
It’s at this moment that Malwina summons up all her strength and uses the trick that she’s been sitting on for a while. She’d wished to do it before, but Nokov was too slippery, too fast—yet now he sits stock-still, peering over the side of the staircase in dismay.
Lightning is a curious thing. Most lightning is cloud-to-cloud lightning, dancing through the air. If one were to look back through history, picking a random spot in the skies, and wonder how many times, say, one cubic foot of atmosphere had lightning course through it, the number of instances would be quite extraordinarily high—and the cumulative amount of electricity would be nothing short of inconceivable.
Malwina focuses, and tracks down all the lightning that has ever passed through the spot of air that currently happens to be occupied by Nokov’s head.
She focuses more, and makes past and present twist, just slightly.
Nokov’s skull lights up with a luminescence brighter than a million suns. The force is so great that it blows him forward, shooting him down off of the staircase like he’s been fired out of a cannon, leaving a trail of black smoke in his wake.
Malwina leans over the edge and screams, “That was for Tavaan, you piece of shit!”
Nokov hurtles down toward the city, but his black form slows after about three or four hundred feet. She can see him righting himself, floating above the city, and he turns to look up at her, his face still smoking.
When he speaks, the walls and stairs vibrate with each word. “That,” he says, “was quite tricky.”
Sigrud tugs at the spear lodged in his right breast, but it doesn’
t move. He knows this is the wrong thing to do anyway, since removing the spear will likely cause him to bleed out, but he can’t stop himself from trying. It’s as if he has a piece of food stuck in his teeth and he can’t stop tonguing it.
Ivanya rises and comes to him. “No, no…Don’t. Don’t, Sigrud, you’ll just make it worse.”
“It…It doesn’t hurt that much,” he says to her, his words thick and slow.
“You’re in shock. You don’t know what’s happening.” She looks at his back, where the spear protrudes and enters the brick wall. “Oh, by the seas…Oh, no, Sigrud, oh, no.”
He tries to say, “I saw a man get impaled with a tree when I worked as a logger, and he survived for six hours with the trunk lodged in him,” but he briefly blacks out, and the words are lost to him.
There’s a tremendous boom from above and the world fills up with bright, white light. Sigrud blinks in confusion, wondering if this is what dying feels like. But then the light recedes, and the world coalesces into sense again, though it bursts and warps with blue-black bubbles as his eyes adjust.
Though something has changed: he sees there is someone standing across the street from him. It’s Shara, watching him with solemn eyes.
She limps across the street to him. “I’m so sorry, Sigrud,” she says.
“What was that?” he asks her. He coughs. “Shara, what was that noise? Did we win?”
She shakes her head. “No. I…I thought maybe they’d find a way. But no, we have not won. Not yet.” Her face crumples as she gets close. “Oh, Sigrud…Oh, Sigrud. Look at you.”
“It’s…It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, trying to smile. He feels his face trembling. His legs are giving out, which means he’s leaning more and more on the spear, causing terrible pain.
Shara is standing before him now. How old her face looks, how weary. Yet there’s a resolve there he never saw before.
“It’s time to do my part. The last step in this long dance. But the most dangerous one by far.” Shara reaches forward and takes his black knife from his holster on his thigh. Ivanya moves forward to say something, but stops herself, hesitant.
Sigrud coughs. Blood comes spilling from his lips. “What do you mean?”
“I let Vohannes sacrifice himself to a god for me once here, long ago,” says Shara, “and now I stand before yet more sacrifices. It’s not right, is it?” Shara looks up, the lenses of her glasses reflecting the light of a nearby lamppost. “No. It’s not. Now it’s time for me to give.” Her head moves very slightly as she looks at the window above, where Tatyana watches them. “To give the last thing I have left.”
“What are you doing, Shara?” he whispers.
She kisses him on his brow. “She’ll need guidance,” she says. “She’ll need help. Don’t let her do anything too rash—if you can, Sigrud. If you can.” Then she walks to the foot of the black staircase.
She stands there for a moment, gathering herself.
She says, “We are all but moments.”
Then she raises his knife and screams, “Nokov! Nokov, son of Jukov! I demand you come to me!”
Nokov, smoking and furious, begins to fly up to Malwina, surely to crush her like a bug. Yet then he freezes, head cocked. He turns around and looks back down at Bulikov.
“No,” he whispers. “No, no, it can’t be….I had you killed, I know I had you killed!”
He whirls and streaks back down the city in a bolt of darkness.
Taty goes sheet-white as her mother begins screaming to the sky. “What is she doing?” she asks faintly. “What is she doing?”
She turns and dashes down the stairs.
His coming is like black lightning, like all of the wrath of a thunderstorm channeled into one being. The streetlights of Bulikov flicker and blink, struggling against the sea of darkness brought by his coming. The shadows tremble, quake, and shiver—and then he is there.
Nokov, great and terrible, standing in the streets of the city with a confused look on his face as he stares down at the small woman with snow-white hair, knife in her hand.
Shara Komayd looks up at him, her gaze fierce and steady. “Nokov,” she says. “How long I have wished to meet you face-to-face. After all these years, I find you don’t look much like the picture I found in Vinya’s files. Not too much, at least.”
“This…This isn’t possible,” says Nokov faintly. “I had you killed. I-I had you killed just like I did your aunt….”
“I’ve been learning,” says Shara. She steps closer to him. Nokov glances at her black blade and steps back a little. “I’ve been learning from your father, specifically.”
“My what?” says Nokov, stupefied.
“Jukov was a clever creature,” says Shara. “His backup plans had backup plans.” She takes another step forward. “We thought he was dead. We thought you and all your siblings were dead. Wise to learn from him, then, and trick you into assuming the same of me.”
Nokov takes another step back, away from Sigrud, and Ivanya and Taty’s nest. “This doesn’t change anything,” he says. “I’m…I’m still the last Divinity, I’m still going to kill the skies.”
“And you thought my black lead was gone too,” says Shara. She holds up the knife. “You thought you’d stolen it from me.”
“I-I did!” says Nokov. He stares at Sigrud’s black knife. “I know I did! That’s not…It’s not—”
“But you never knew how much I had in the first place,” says Shara. She takes another step forward. “This is the problem with you and your family—Jukov was so damnably clever that he was actually quite stupid.”
Nokov’s face twists, and suddenly he’s no longer a fearsome, powerful Divinity, but an adolescent trying to control himself after a playground insult. “Shut up!”
“He trapped himself with Kolkan,” says Shara. “And he went mad….”
Nokov falls back another step, but now he’s shaking with fury. “You shut up!”
“And when they emerged, twisted together, and I faced them, seeing them broken and bitter,” says Shara, “do you know what they asked me?”
“Leave me alone!” says Nokov.
“They asked me,” says Shara, her voice growing, “to take my black lead, and draw it across their throats. They begged me to kill them.”
“You and your aunt, you…I hate you so much, I hate you so much!”
“They said they didn’t even want to be Divinities anymore.”
“You’re lying!” cries Nokov.
“I’m not,” says Shara. “You know I’m not.” She takes another step. “It’s fitting, then, that you’re going to die the same way.” She lifts the knife. “Just as pathetic as your father. He imprisoned himself in a box of his own making. And now, Nokov, I’ll put you in a bo—”
Nokov roars with fury and lashes out at her in a desperate, wild strike.
Shara whirls around. She stands still for a moment.
There’s a dim tink as Sigrud’s knife falls to the ground. Shara follows, falling to her knees.
The top of her dress grows a dark, dark red, stained by the blood flowing from her throat.
She looks up, smiling faintly, looking first at Sigrud, then down the street, beyond him. It’s a curious expression, both apologetic and encouraging, regretful but hopeful, wistful and yet full of sorrow.
She collapses—and then she’s gone. She vanishes as if she’d never been there at all.
Nokov stares down at where she was, bewildered. “What?” he says. “What…What was that?”
Then comes the sound of screaming down the street, the high, tinny shrieks of a young woman in horror.
Sigrud looks up as he hears Taty screaming. He can see her, he thinks, standing in the street just a block down from him. Even though he feels faint, he can’t help but feel the urge to go to her, to run to her, to comfort her in her moment of grief.
But then her shrieks…change. They grow deeper. Older.
Stranger.
As if it weren�
��t one girl screaming, but hundreds of them, thousands of them, all overlaid on top of one another.
Then the streets fill up with a bright, bright white light, as if a star has burst into life right there in the middle of the road.
He hears Ivanya screaming nearby, shouting, “What in hells is going on?”
The screaming continues, but the light fades. He opens his eye to see Taty floating there, hanging above the street, arms and legs splayed out and her face lifted to the sky. Even Nokov seems astonished by this turn of events, looking on with a confused expression.
The screaming stops. Taty slowly, slowly floats down to the ground. She crouches there for a moment, head bowed, hair falling in front of her face.
Then she speaks, whispering, “I…I…remember.”
And for some reason her words hurt Sigrud’s ears, or perhaps his mind. At first he thinks they seem to come all at once, but that’s not quite right—rather, it’s as if the words he’s hearing haven’t been spoken yet, like he’s hearing words that will be spoken, perhaps in the next second, or the second after that, and this queer, schizophrenic feeling is breaking him.
Ivanya leans toward her. “Taty?” she asks nervously. “Taty, is that you?”
The girl stands, her face still obscured by her hair. “No,” she says. “No, it’s not.” Then she raises her head and screams up at the tower above, “Tulvos! Tulvos, daughter of the past, do you remember? I remember! I remember everything now!”
Nokov’s jaw drops. Then he snarls and springs at her, “I know you now! I know who you are, I know who you’ve been all along!”
He’s too late, too far away. Taty—or whomever she is now—springs up into the air and shoots up, flying straight for the far wall, right for where the Divine battle was taking place just a few seconds ago.
And as she nears it, things…slow down.
Nokov, who was a shadowy streak mere feet behind Taty, slows until he hangs in the sky, a black insect trapped in amber.
City of Miracles Page 46
