“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 kneel 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 hells 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.
I fault no one for praising Saypur’s history—history, after all, is a story, one that is sometimes wonderful. But one must remember it in full—as things really were—and avoid selective amnesia. For the Great War did not start with the invasion of the Continent, nor did it begin with the death of the Divinity Voortya.
Rather, it began with a child.