“Gray wool, probably,” says Shara. “It held a special esteem, to Kolkashtanis.”
“If you say so. There were nine of us. They’d kept us in a cell, all together. We drank rusty water from a leaking pipe, shat in the corner, starved. Starved for so long. I don’t know how long they starved us. But one day our jailers came to us with this little stone in the box and a plate of chicken—a whole chicken—and they said, ‘If one of you can hold this little, tiny stone for a full minute, we will let you eat.’ And everyone rushed to volunteer, to do what the jailers said, but I held back because I knew these men. In Slondheim, they played with us. Tricked us into fighting each other, killing each other …” He flexes his left fist; the pink-scarred wastelands of his knuckles flare white. “So I knew this was not right. The first man tried to hold the pebble, and the second he picked it up, he started screaming. His hand bled like he had been stabbed. He dropped it—it sounded like a boulder had struck the floor, when it fell—and the jailers laughed and said, ‘Pick it up, pick it up,’ and the man couldn’t. It was like it weighed a thousand tons. The jailers could only pick it up with the gray cloth. We didn’t understand what it was, but we knew we were starving, so we wanted to try again, to eat, just a little. … And none of them could. Some got to twenty seconds. Some to thirty. Bleeding rivers from their hands. It wounded them so horribly. And they all dropped this little stone. This tiny little Finger of Kolkan.” He takes another sip of wine. “And then … I tried. But before I picked it up, I thought … I thought about all I had lost. The thing in my heart that made me wish to keep living, that fire, it had gone out. It is still out, even now. And … and I wished this stone to crush me. Do you see? I wished for this pain. So I picked it up. And I held it.” He turns over his scarred hand as if the stone is still there. “I feel it still. I feel like I am holding it now. I held it not to eat, but to die.” The hand turns into a fist. “But eat I did. I bore the Finger of Kolkan for not one, but three minutes. And then they took the stone from me, unhappy, and said, ‘You can eat, for you have won. But before you do, you must decide—will you eat all the chicken, or will you share it with your fellow inmates?’ And they all stared at me … ghosts of men, thin and pale and starving, like they were fading before my eyes. …”
Sigrud begins rewrapping his hand. “I didn’t think about it,” he says softly, “for even a second. The jailers put me in a different cell from the rest of them, and I ate it all, and I slept. And it was not even a week before they started dragging out the bodies from my old jail cell.” He ties the bandage, massaging his palm. “The Divine may have created many hells,” he says, “but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.”
*
Shara shuts the door to Sigrud’s room and pauses in the hall. Her legs tremble, and it takes her a moment to realize she is about to collapse. She sits down in the hallway and takes a deep breath.
Shara has run many operatives in her career, and she has lost her fair share. And in that time she has come to think she is an immaculate professional: efficient yet personally removed from the details of her work, preserving her conscience and her sanity in a tiny hermetic little bubble buried far away from her grisly reality.
But to imagine losing Sigrud … She thought she knew horror, but when she saw him disappear into the dark waters of the Solda …
He’s alive, she tells herself. He’s alive, and he’s going to be fine. At least, as fine as such a man can be, battered and bruised in his tiny, stinking room.
Shara shakes her head. How the present mimics the past, she thinks. Ten years ago, but today it seems like a lifetime.
Shara remembers how small the cabin door had been. Tiny, hardly a trapdoor, the tiniest cabin in the Saypuri dreadnought, probably. She knocked at the door, the tap tap echoing down the ship’s hallway, but received no answer. Then she opened it and the reek hit her, and her legs, already uncertain with seasickness as the dreadnought tipped beneath her, quivered even more at the smell. Then there was the Saypuri lieutenant coughing, advising her, “Please be careful ma’am,” and likely wondering if this girl, hardly twenty-five years old at the time, was looking to get killed.
She stepped in. There was no light in the room, but she could see the giant man sitting cross-legged in the corner. He had the air of a beaten dog about him: his hair matted and patchy, his skin covered in welts and infections and what she hoped was dirt. His head was bowed, so she could not see his eyes—or eye, she kept reminding herself—but he recoiled at the interruption of light.
She shut the door and sat in the corner opposite him, and waited. He hardly moved at all.
“We are leaving Dreyling waters,” Shara asked him. “Do you not wish to see your country one last time?”