City of Stairs

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  If Shara finds out her gambit worked, he thinks, there’ll be no living with her.

  The water is churning about him. He feels another tentacle try to grip his ankle; this too slips off. Urav marshals all its attention to him, the countless limbs swirling around, preparing to strike.

  Out, out now, he thinks, and he reaches up with his left hand, finds the sailing rope—it holds fast—and lifts himself up and out of the water, onto the ice.

  His body is partially in shock from the temperature change, but he forces himself to forget about it, and instead focuses on sprinting to the fishing spear on the right. He hears ice shattering behind him, glances back to see Urav struggling against the sailing line, cracking through the ice around it—but the line holds fast.

  Enraged, the creature bursts up onto the ice, its thousands of arms dragging its bulbous head forward. One tentacle pops forward and grasps Sigrud’s left arm; its claw digs a hole in the skin of his bicep; he trips forward and feels himself being dragged back.

  He struggles against it; the tentacle maintains its grip, even though he can see it is sizzling where it touches him. Urav growls in pain and fury, gnaws at the ice, chopping it into coarse snow, No. No, I will not let you go.

  Sigrud hacks at the tentacle once, twice with the halberd. This proves enough to weaken its grip, and with a low pop, Sigrud squirts free.

  Praise the seas, thinks Sigrud as he runs, for cows with rich diets.…

  “Shoot!” shouts Nesrhev from up above. “Pepper the damn thing!”

  Bolts whiz through the air, plunk into the ice. Many bite into Urav’s hide; it screeches wildly, thrashes against the sailing line, which thrums like a guitar string.

  Sigrud reaches the second fishing spear, but Urav is now focused on the men on the bridge. Its tentacles rise like a swarm of cobras and strike at the bridge above. There is a chorus of shrieks; two bodies twirl through the air, falling from the far side of the bridge. Please, thinks Sigrud, do not be Shara.

  One tentacle curls down, a struggling police officer clutched in its grip, and stuffs the man into Urav’s gaping mouth. A huge crack as the ice begins to protest against the battle.

  This, thinks Sigrud, is not what I wanted.

  He runs forward, halberd clutched under one arm, and throws the second fishing spear. He very nearly misses as the creature thrashes against the rope, but the spear finds it way deep into Urav’s back. Urav howls again and whips around. The yellow eye glares at him. Sigrud catches the quickest glimpse of a tentacle speeding at him like a tree trunk rushing down a river; then the world explodes in stars and lights and he goes sliding across the ice.

  He expects another attack: it doesn’t come. Groaning, he lifts his head and sees that Urav has turned in the ropes and is now tangled; the sailing rope from the first spear he threw, however, has snapped, so the tangle is not permanent.

  Sigrud growls, shakes his head, tests his limbs: they work, more or less. The halberd is beside him, but it has snapped, making it more like a short axe. He picks it up and trots toward the third and final fishing spear.

  Get it tangled, he thinks. Let it wear itself out, then beat it to death. Hack at its lungs until it drowns, drowns in its own blood.…

  Stones begin to plummet from the Solda Bridge.

  Unless, he thinks, it tears the bridge apart.…

  He watches as Urav strikes the bridge over and over again. More small stones tumble into the water.

  He wishes Nesrhev had never given the command to fire. He wishes Urav had stayed focused on him, only him.

  This is why I hate being helped.

  Urav’s thrashing has shredded almost all the ice under the bridge; the chunk with Sigrud’s final fishing spear in it bobs up and down like the floater of a fishing pole. With a sigh, Sigrud dives into the water—the cold is like a hammer to his head—swims to it, pulls the spear free, and tugs on the rope until it pulls him to sturdier ice.

  His limbs are numb; his hands and feet report that they no longer exist. Urav twists against the rope, opens its mouth to shriek; Sigrud doesn’t hesitate, and hurls the fishing spear into the roof of the creature’s mouth.

  It wails in pain, twists, fights against its many bonds, exposing its soft, black, jelly-like underside.

  Now.

  He rushes forward with the halberd, dodges a tentacle, slides over on the ice, clambers to his feet.…

  He is past the fence of swirling tentacles. He begins mercilessly hacking at the creature’s belly.

  Urav howls, yammers, shrieks, struggles. Black blood rains on Sigrud in a torrent. His body reports either icy cold or boiling heat. He keeps slashing, keeps hacking.

  He remembers burying the bones in his courtyard.

  He brings the halberd down.

  He remembers looking up in his jail cell and seeing a needle of sunlight poking through, and trying to cradle that tiny pinhole of light in his hands.

  He brings the halberd down.

  He remembers watching the shores of his homeland fade away from the deck of the Saypuri dreadnought.

  He brings the halberd down. Eventually he realizes he is screaming.

  I curse the world not for what was stolen from me, he thinks, but for revealing it was never stolen long after the world had made me a different man.

  Urav groans, whines. The tentacles go slack. The beast seems to deflate, slowly falling back like an enormous, black tree. The many ropes twang and whine with the weight, and Urav hangs in their net, defeated.

  Sigrud is dimly aware of cheering up on the bridge. But he can still see the organs inside the creature pumping and churning. Not dead, not dead yet …

  A bright gold eye surfaces from the sea of tentacles at his feet. It narrows, examining him.

  Suddenly the limp tentacles are not limp: they fly up, grab the weakest leg of the bridge, and pull.

  Sigrud is briefly aware of a dark shadow appearing on his right, and growing; then a huge stone pierces the ice mere yards away.

  Sigrud says, “Shi—”

  The ice below him tips up like a seesaw, and he is thrown forty feet at least. Then he knows nothing but the cold and the water.

  He feels water beat on his nose and mouth. A stream worms its way into his sinuses, tickles his lungs, almost evoking a cough.

  Do not drown.

  Air burns inside of him. He turns over, looks up; the sky is molten crystal, impenetrable.

  Do not drown.

  He can see Urav above him, fighting against the ropes. Above the creature is a solid black arch: the bridge.

  Sigrud kicks his legs, aims for a widening crack in the ice above.

  The solid black arch of the bridge grows a little … less solid. Through the lens of the churning water and ice, it appears to vanish; then a stone ten feet across bursts into the dark water; ropes of bubbles twist and twirl around it; Sigrud darts away, and is buffeted up by its force.

  Do not drown, he thinks, and do not be crushed.

  More stones crash down, causing enormous concussions that push him up, up.…

  The water surface is a membrane, keeping him trapped; he is not sure if he can break through.

  He claws at it with his hands, opens his mouth, and tastes wintry air.

  Sigrud hauls himself out of the water and onto the ice. This far from the bridge the ice is thankfully solid; he looks back and sees the bridge is not there at all: it is collapsing into the water, causing huge waves … and he cannot see Urav anywhere.

  Sigrud, weak, shivering, kneels on the ice and looks for some sign of hope: a fire, a rope, a boat, anything. Yet all he can see is the orb of soft, yellow light slipping through the water toward him, shoving the chunks of ice aside as if they were tissue paper.

  “Hm,” he says.

  He looks at his hands and arms: the fat has been completely washed away during the fight, presumably taking away whatever protection Shara provided with it.

  Then there is a swarm of tentacles around him, and a trembling, wideni
ng mouth—one that is missing many teeth—and then a soft push on his back, ushering him in.

  * * *

  Sigrud opens his eye.

  He sits on a vast, black plain. The sky above him is just as black; he only knows that the plain is there because on its horizon is a huge, burning yellow eye that casts a faint yellow light across the black sands.

  A voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN.”

  Sigrud looks to his left and right; around him is a vast field of seated corpses, ashen and dry, as if all the moisture has been boiled out of them. One is dressed like a police officer; another holds a fishing trap. All the corpses are seated facing the burning eye, and each face, though desiccated and gray, bears a look of terrible suffering.

  Then he sees that the chests of the corpses are moving, gently breathing.

  Sigrud realizes: They are alive.…

  The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, FOR YOU ARE FALLEN.”

  Sigrud looks down. He is still nude, still wearing only his boots, his knife, and the glove on his right hand.

  He touches the knife and remembers what Shara said: It might be wise to take matters into your own hands.…

  The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, FOR YOU ARE UNCLEAN.”

  Sigrud takes out the knife and considers laying the blade against his wrist, opening up the vein … but something causes him to hesitate.

  The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN, AND THROUGH YOUR PAIN YOU WILL FIND RIGHTEOUSNESS.”

  He waits, the tip of his blade hovering over his wrist. The black plain mixes like paint, swirling until it forms the walls of his old prison cell in Slondheim, where the dark days leached the life out of him bit by bit. Is this, he wonders, the miraculous hells of Urav? It seems so, but he does not lower the knife, not yet.

  Set in the door of his cell is a great yellow eye. The voice says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN. YOU WILL KNOW SUFFERING. YOU WILL BE PURGED OF YOUR SIN.”

  Sigrud waits. He expects that maybe all the old wounds and fractures and injuries he received in this place will suddenly flare to life, aching with all the agony he experienced here … but it doesn’t come.

  The voice, now sounding slightly frustrated, says, “YOU WILL KNOW PAIN.”

  Sigrud looks around, knife point hovering over his wrist. “Okay …” he says slowly. “When?”

  The voice is silent.

  “Is this not hell?” asks Sigrud. “Should I not be suffering?”

  The voice does not answer. Then the walls rapidly transmute to a variety of horrifying situations: he lies upon a bed of nails; he dangles over an active volcano; he is trapped at the bottom of the sea; he is returning to the Dreylands and sees smoke on the horizon; yet none of these scenarios causes him any physical or mental pain.

  He looks around. “What is going on?” he asks, genuinely confused.

  The walls swirl again. He is back on the black plain, with all the wheezing, ashen corpses and the bright yellow eye glaring furiously at him. He wonders, momentarily, if he is immune simply because he is a Dreyling, but this seems unlikely.

  Then he realizes the palm of his right hand is gently throbbing. He looks at his right hand, hidden in its glove, and understands.

  The voice says, “PAIN IS YOUR FUTURE. PAIN IS YOUR PURITY.”

  Sigrud says, “But you cannot teach me pain”—he begins to tug at the fingers of the glove—“because I already know it.”

  He pulls the glove off.

  In the center of his palm is a horrendous, bright red scar that would resemble a brand if it was not carved so deeply in his flesh: a circle with a crude scale in the middle.

  Kolkan’s hands, he remembers, waiting to weigh and judge.…

  He holds up his palm to the bright yellow eye. “I have been touched by the finger of your god,” he says, “and I lived. I knew his pain, and carried it with me. I carry it now. Every day. So you cannot hurt me, can you? You cannot teach me what I already know.”

  The great eye stares.

  Then, it blinks.

  Sigrud lunges forward and stabs it with his knife.

  * * *

  From the riverbank, Shara and Mulaghesh stare at where Urav has retreated below the water. “Go!” shouts Nesrhev. “Go!” Both Shara and Mulaghesh are soaking wet, having hauled Nesrhev from the Solda sporting two broken arms, a broken leg, and mild hypothermia. “For the love of the gods, get me out of here,” he cries, but Shara ignores him, staring at the river, awaiting some unbelievable twist: perhaps Urav will resurface, spit Sigrud out, and send him skipping across the water like a stone.…

  But there is only the gentle bob of the ice on the dark water.

  “We need to get away,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Yes!” shouts Nesrhev. “Yes, by the gods, that’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “What?” asks Shara softly.

  “We need,” says Mulaghesh again, “to get away from the river. That thing is angry now. I know you don’t want to leave your friend, but we need to go.”

  Police officers scream orders to one another from the banks. Nesrhev howls and moans. No one is sure how to get across the Solda. There is no coherent authority to any of it, but the police officers seem to have voted en masse to pour kerosene on the river and set it alight.

  “We definitely need to go now,” says Mulaghesh.

  Shara devises a sling out of her cloak, and the two set Nesrhev in it and begin hauling him up the riverbank. The remaining officers are backing a wagon of barrels up to the river. They do not even try to unload and dump them, they just hack at the barrel sides with an axe until the barrels burst and drain into the river.

  Shara rifles her mind for some solution, some arcane trick—a prayer of Kolkan, a word from the Jukoshtava—but nothing comes.

  Fire crawls across the river in snaking coils. River ice hisses, turns smooth as marble, and beats a rapid retreat.

  They’ve almost reached the river walk when the blanket of fire begins to dip violently. “Look!” Shara says.

  The fire begins to churn and hiss.

  “Oh, please,” whines Nesrhev. “Please don’t stop.”

  The writhing form of Urav bursts up through the Solda, shrieks horribly, and begins battering the surface with its many arms.

  “The fire!” cries a voice. “It works!”

  Yet Shara is not so sure. Urav does not seem to be reacting to anything: rather, it appears to be having an attack of some kind. She is reminded of an old man she once saw have a stroke in a park, how his limbs trembled and flailed.…

  Urav, screaming and gurgling, carves through the ice, splashes through the lake of fire, beats its arms on the riverbank, caroms into the remnants of the Solda Bridge, before finally beaching itself on the river walk, its great, trembling mouth opening and closing, whining and keening like a frightened dog.

  “What in hells is going on?” asks Mulaghesh.

  Urav opens its mouth, screeches a long, sustained pitch … and a tiny black tooth pops out of its belly, just below its gaping maw.

  No—not a tooth: a knife.

  “No,” says Shara. “No, it can’t be.…”

  Urav shrieks again; the knife wriggles, then slowly begins sawing its way down the creature’s belly. Hot blood splashes to the ground, sizzles on the icy river. A hand, fingers clenched together to form a blade, punches through the long slash.

  “You have got,” says Mulaghesh, “to be joking.”

  In what can only be described as a horrific perversion of a vaginal birth, there is a spurt of viscera, a flood of putrid entrails, and then the fat- and blood-drenched form of Sigrud slips out of the gash in the dying monster to lie on the ground and stare up at the sky, before rolling over, getting onto his hands and knees, and vomiting prolifically.

  * * *

  Shara is dimly aware of distant cheering as she sprints down the river walk to where Sigrud lies. She is forced to slow down once she nears him: the stench is powerful enough to be nigh impenetrable, but she fights through it to knee
l beside him.

  “How!” she cries. Some tiny gland dangles from his ear; she delicately removes it. “How did you do it? How could you have possibly survived?”

  Sigrud rolls onto his back, gulping air. He coughs and hacks and reaches into his mouth to pull out some kind of long, stringy gray tissue. “Lucky,” he gasps. He throws the tissue away; it strikes a puddle of entrails with a wet flup. “Lucky and stupid.”

  Something inside of Urav’s dead bulk shifts, and more viscera slips out in an oozing landslide. Shara pulls Sigrud to his feet before it can pool around them. She notices he is not wearing his glove on his right hand, something she has never seen him go without.

  Sigrud looks back at Urav with disbelief. “To think …” He applies a finger to his right nostril and blows a small ocean of brackish blood from his left. “To think that whole place was inside that creature.…”

  “What was it? Was it really hell in there, Sigrud?”

  Sigrud kneels as another cough grips him. A gathering crescendo of cheers and whoops echo across the Solda. Shara looks up to see not only scores of police officers gathering on the shores to celebrate, but also common citizens, men and women and children pouring out of their homes to clap and sing.

  Oh dear, thinks Shara. This was rather public, wasn’t it?

  A series of flashes from her left: three photographers have set up their tripods and are winding up their cameras to take another round of snapshots.

  And behind them is someone she did not expect to see.

  Vohannes Votrov stands at the back of the crowd. He appears to have eschewed his normally ostentatious wardrobe in favor of a dark brown coat and a black shirt buttoned up to the neck. He looks gaunt and pale, and he watches Shara with an expression of placid disdain, as one would watch an insect beat against the pane of a window. It takes her a moment to notice that he does not have his cane.

  The crowd surges around Vohannes and the photographers. Sigrud and Shara are swept up in the tidal wave of claps on the back and bellowed congratulations. When she manages to look back at the photographers, he is gone.