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 leeched 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 cause 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.