City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  * * *

  “I said I want every soldier available working to help those fire teams!” bellows Mulaghesh downstairs. “Make sure to stress that as much as you can in the telegram! And let the corporal know that if there is any reluctance on his part to put his soldiers to such work, then there will be dire consequences!”

  Shara winces in her office. Mulaghesh has completely taken over the embassy offices downstairs, commandeering every telegraph machine and posting troops at all entrances. Normally she would be doing this from her quarters, but the embassy was much closer. “Contact General Noor at Fort Sagresha,” Mulaghesh shouts. “He needs to be notified of this, and tell him we need all the support he can offer. Interrupt me as soon as you hear, even if I specifically say not to interrupt me!”

  Shara rubs her temples. “By the seas,” she mutters, “can the woman speak no other volume?” Shara is content to let Mulaghesh handle this disaster, and since this is technically Mulaghesh’s jurisdiction, Shara has plenty of reasons to stay out. But privately she wishes Mulaghesh and the rest of them would just leave.

  Sigrud sits in the corner of her office and sharpens his black knife. The skritch-skritch seems to grow until Shara’s head echoes with it.

  “Must you do that now?” she asks.

  Sigrud scrapes the knife a little softer. “You seem to be in a mood.”

  “I was nearly blown up tonight.”

  He shrugs and spits on the knife. “Not the first time.”

  “And we burned down hundreds of years of priceless history!” she hisses, not daring to shout it.

  “So?”

  “So I have … I have never experienced such a failure in my professional career! And I do not enjoy failure. I am unused to it.”

  The skritch-skritch slows as he thinks. “It is true that we have never encountered a mistake such as this.”

  “A mistake? Ever since we’ve set foot in Bulikov, we’ve done nothing but stumble!” She quaffs tea with the air of a sailor drinking whiskey.

  “I suppose it is good to get all of your mistakes out in one run.”

  “Your optimism,” says Shara, “is not appreciated. I almost regret coming here.”

  “Almost?”

  “Yes, almost. Because as … as shit-bedecked as this operation is, I still wouldn’t trust it to anyone else in the Ministry. Think what would happen if Komalta was here, or Yusuf!”

  “I didn’t even know those two were still alive. I would have thought they’d have gotten themselves killed by now.”

  “Exactly!” She stands up, walks to the window, and pushes it open. “I need air. My head is filling up with noise!” She breathes for a moment, listens, and rubs her eyes in exasperation. “Even the streets outside are screaming! Is there no quiet place in this whole damnable ci …” She trails off. “Wait, what time is it?”

  Sigrud joins her at the window. “Late. Too late for such noise.” He tilts his head. “And it is screaming. You were not exaggerating.”

  Shara surveys the dark streets of Bulikov. “What’s going on?”

  Another howl in the night. Someone comes sprinting down the street outside, shrieking incoherently.

  “I’ve no idea,” says Sigrud.

  Downstairs, Mulaghesh is angrily dictating a response to General Noor specifying that this was not a direct attack, because that would be an indictment of their security, but Noor should be responding as if it was a direct attack, as they need assistance immediately.

  Shara opens the window all the way. She hears a rumble toward the river. A cloud of white dust rises above the rooftops. “Did a building just collapse?” she asks.

  More people are running through the streets. Candles are lit in windows; doors are flung open. A man cries out, asking what’s wrong, over and over. Finally someone answers: “There’s something in the water! Something in the water!”

  Shara looks to Sigrud, but can only say, “What?”

  Then a shout from downstairs: “Shara!” cries Mulaghesh’s voice. “There’s some idiot here to bother you!”

  Shara and Sigrud troop downstairs. Pitry stands in the entryway with a very nervous-looking Bulikov police officer.

  “A message from the Bulikov Police Department,” says Pitry, “for Ambassador Thivani from Captain Nesrhev.”

  “Get rid of this guy,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m drowning in enough shit as it is.”

  Shara fruitlessly searches for her inner calm. “What would be the issue?”

  The officer swallows, sweats. “Ah, w-we’re evacuating all homes and buildings near the river. The embassy’s a priority”—he says this as if to suggest, And I just had to get this duty—“so we need all of you outside, immediately.”

  Mulaghesh finishes another communication, then breaks away. “Wait, what the hells are you talking about? We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Well … Captain Nesrhev—”

  “Is a fine and good officer, but he can’t tell us to do a damn thing. This is Saypuri soil.”

  “We’re … quite aware of that, Governor, but it’s … it’s emphatically suggested that you and the ambassador evacuate.”

  “Why?” Shara asks.

  The officer’s sweating quintuples. “We’re … Well, we can’t quite say just yet.”

  “Would this have to do with what’s happening outside?” asks Shara.

  The officer reluctantly nods.

  “And what is happening outside?”

  The officer appears to debate telling them; then his shoulders slump like he’s about to make an embarrassing confession. “There’s … something in the Solda River,” he says. “Something big.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s … killing people. Snatching them off the banks.”

  Mulaghesh massages the center of her forehead. “Oh, by the seas …”

  “It’s even come up on the shore and attacked the buildings,” says the officer. “It’s … huge. We don’t know what it is, but we’re evacuating every quarter near the river. And that includes the embassy.”

  “And this just started happening very recently?” asks Shara. “Within the past few hours?”

  The officer nods.

  Shara and Sigrud share a silent moment of communication. Shara’s eyes say, From the Warehouse? Sigrud gives a grim nod: Absolutely.

  “Thank you for notifying us, Officer,” says Shara. She extends a hand, and Sigrud tosses her her coat. “We will depart the embassy shortly. Where is Nesrhev now?”

  “He’s staked out on the Solda Bridge, watching for it,” says the officer. “But why d—”

  “Excellent.” Shara pulls her coat on. “We’ll be all too happy to join him.”

  * * *

  The Solda Bridge’s short walls provide no shelter from the cold wind, so nearly everyone crouches down as low as possible. Shara wishes she’d wrapped every extremity in furs, and her feet in a layer of rubber, and Mulaghesh has not stopped swearing since leaving the embassy, though her swears shiver a bit more now. Captain Nesrhev sits against the wall, receiving messages and runners from his officers, who are hidden among the streets and homes that line the river. Only Sigrud leaves his face exposed, kneeling and staring into the bitter wind across the wide, frozen expanse of the river.

  Shara peeps over the wall. The Solda resembles a jigsaw puzzle, with huge holes in the ice in perfect circles and half-moons. On the west bank, two buildings have had their facades and walls completely ripped off: white limestone lies crumbled on the mud like cottage cheese. “And that …” asks Shara. “That was where it attacked?”

  “Yes,” says Nesrhev. “We didn’t see it. We were alerted too late. It’s a miracle”—he checks himself, but Shara waves him on—“it’s a good thing it hasn’t attacked the bridge, whatever it is. Though we hope the bridge is too strong for it. It’s the only way across the Solda for four miles.”

  “How many killed?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “Twenty-seven reported missing or dead, now,” says Nesrhev. “
Plucked from the banks of the river, or sucked through the ice, or ripped from their homes.”

  “My word,” murmurs Shara. “So … what is it?”

  Nesrhev hesitates. “We are told,” he says slowly, “that it is a sea monster, with many arms.”

  There is a pause as Shara absorbs this; Nesrhev and the officers watch, waiting to see how this will be received. “Like a dragon?” she finally asks.

  Nesrhev is relieved to be taken seriously. “No, like … like a sea beast. But enormous.”

  Shara nods, thinking. A many-armed creature of the sea, she thinks. That’s a very short list of possibilities.…

  “So do you know what in all the hells this could be?” asks Nesrhev.

  Shara watches as part of the ruined buildings tumbles off and drops into the river with a plook. “I have some ideas,” she says. “But … Well. I will just say that I suspect this thing is in violation of the WR.”

  For the first time, the veteran Nesrhev looks shocked. “You’re saying this thing is Divine?”

  “Perhaps. Not everything Divine was good or godly,” says Shara.

  “So what are you going to do?” asks one of Nesrhev’s lieutenants. “Give it a fine?”

  Sigrud makes a tch sound.

  Shara sits up. “Do you see it?”

  “I see”—he tilts his head, squints—“something.”

  Everyone peeks over the wall of the Solda Bridge. Several hundred feet south, a faint yellow light slips under the dense ice toward the east bank.

  “Mikhail and Ornost are there,” says Nesrhev, concerned. “Just behind the wall on the bank.”

  The yellow light pauses. Then a faint cracking and creaking echoes across the river. Shara watches in amazement as a wide circle appears in the ice, like someone is carefully sawing at it from under the water.

  “Viktor,” says Nesrhev to one of his officers, “go over there and tell the two of them to get away, get away now.” The officer sprints away.

  The circle of ice slowly sinks and slides underneath the frozen river. A dexterous creature, then, thinks Shara. The yellow light creeps to the center of the hole. Nesrhev lets loose a florid string of curses. Something very small and thin pokes out of the hole in the ice and rotates through the air, as if smelling for something. Then many more thin appendages—tentacles?—appear at the edge of the hole in the ice.

  The yellow light sinks lower. It readies, Shara realizes, for a leap.…

  It bursts out of the water, sending shards of ice flying; its eruption is so powerful a fine mist washes over them, even from here.

  Nesrhev and his officers begin screaming; Mulaghesh’s hand flies to her mouth; Shara and Sigrud, well used to horrors such as this by now, silently watch and observe.

  It is not quite a jellyfish, not quite a squid, and nor is it a prawn, exactly, but a thirty-foot combination of all three: a slightly translucent creature with a long, black-shelled back and—maybe—head, with a face almost concealed in a squirming bundle of thrashing tentacles that are long enough to start probing the shore, rising up like the spear points of a phalanx.

  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 minor 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.”

  “Perhaps. But. If so …” Again, Sigrud shrugs. “Then I would die.”

  Nesrhev and the other officers stare at him in disbelief.

  Shara clears her throat. “Before we continue down this line of thinking,” she says, “I’d first like to ask if Captain Nesrhev would approve.”

  “Why the hells would you care about that?” asks Nesrhev. “It’s up to you if your man wants to get himself killed.”

  “Well, despite all the Regulations, that thing under the ice is considered holy by most of the Continent,” says Shara. “It is, after all, a creature of stories and myths valued by your culture. It’s part of your heritage. If you wish us to kill it—to kill what is, in effect, a living legend—we would want to have your express permission to do so.”

  Nesrhev’s face sours. “You,” he says, “are trying to cover your ass.”

  “Perhaps. But Urav is an integral part to some of your treasured myths. We are not Continentals. To some Continentals, if we are successful in killing Urav, it would be tantamount to destroying a historic work of art.”

  “In this case, though,” says Mulaghesh, “it’s a work of art that’s running around killing people.”

  Shara nods. “Quite.”

  Nesrhev grimaces. As he wrestles with his position, three policemen come staggering up, panting: one of them is Viktor, the officer sent to warn Mikhail and Ornost; the other two are presumably those same two men. One of them is clutching his right arm, which is slick with blood.

  “Mikhail’s hurt,” says Viktor. “It got his arm, and it … it took some fingers.”

  Nesrhev pauses. He looks out at the soft light under the ice. Then: “Both of you, get back to the station and to the infirmary.” He looks to Sigrud: “What do you need?”

  Sigrud looks back out at the river. “I will need,” he says thoughtfully, “two hundred feet of towing rope, three lengths of sailing rope a hundred feet in length, a lantern, a halberd, three strong fishing spears, and several gallons of fat.”