Shara groans.
“Mulaghesh takes it in stride, however. She insists on smoking in the hospital, something that has upset everyone. But she will not listen. Sigrud, however …”
Shara tenses up. Please, she thinks. Not him, too.
“He has stupefied all the doctors.”
“How so?”
“Well, by being alive, first of all,” says Pitry. “And while removing the glass—a full three pounds of glass—and shrapnel from his wounds, they discovered …” The crackle of paper as he pulls out a list. “… four bolt tips, one bullet, five darts—some kind of exotic, tribal things …” From Qivos, thinks Shara. I told him to get a doctor that time. “… and six teeth that appear to be from some kind of shark. The doctors concluded that most of these were from injuries or altercations that took place, ah, well before this battle.”
“That sounds about right. But he will survive?”
“He will. He will probably need to stay in the hospital for some time, but—yes. He looks to make a full recovery, despite everything, unbelievably. And he seems quite … merry.”
“Merry? Sigrud?”
“Ahm, yes. He asked me how I was; then he gave me some money and told me to procure”—Pitry coughs once more—“uh, a woman of the evening.”
Shara shakes her head. My, my. You leave the world for a handful of days and hear rumors of everything changing.
“I am sorry to ask,” says Pitry, “but General Noor has been quite insistent with me on the matter of, erm, the issue of the Divinity, or Divinities, or …”
She does not answer. She slowly sits back in the bath.
“Even if you have no concrete conclusions … Even if you have only guesses about what happened, I’m sure he will be happy to consider those.”
Shara sighs and lets the warm water slosh into her ears. Let it wash away my memories, she thinks. Wash it all away. She summarizes her conclusions about Jukov hiding in the pane of glass with Kolkan. “I suspect it was also Jukov himself who sank the Seat of the World through Divine means, to secure his hiding place. But just before he did so, he sent out a familiar—perhaps a mhovost disguised as himself—to go to the Kaj, and surrender. This was what the Kaj executed, and when he did, Jukov essentially pulled the strings on many of his Divine creations, allowing all he built to fall to ruin … all so no one would believe he was still alive.”
“Why would he do all this?”
“Revenge, I expect,” says Shara. “He could be a very merry Divinity, unless you crossed him. Then he was wildly vindictive. Jukov knew that the Kaj had a weapon against which he had no power, so I believe he opted to wait and return once the threat had passed. I am not sure how he planned to do that. Perhaps he arranged some sort of method of contacting anyone who looked for a Divinity hard enough—that would explain how he reached Volka Votrov, at least. That is just a guess, as I said. But I doubt if Jukov expected the side effects of submitting to imprisonment with Kolkan.”
“Being fused together?”
“Yes. The warped thing I met told me the prison was made for only Kolkan. To stay there, Jukov was slowly but surely melded with Kolkan, perhaps absorbed by him. They were two diametrically opposed Divinities—chaos and order, lust and discipline. … It was Jukov, after all, who convinced the other Divinities to imprison Kolkan in the first place. The end result was the mad, confused thing that begged me to kill it.”
“Noor wishes me to confirm that no more Divinities will be appearing.”
“I can confirm only that no one knows the whereabouts of Olvos, who is now the last surviving Divinity. But no one has seen her for nearly a thousand years, and I doubt if she’d ever be a threat. Olvos has shown no interest in worldly matters since her disappearance, which was well before the Kaj was ever born.”
“And … we also wish to confirm that the powers you experienced using the philosopher’s stones cannot be duplicated.”
“That I cannot say for sure. … But probably. More and more, the Continent is less Divine, which means that the philosopher’s stones allow access to less and less power.”
“Is that all it took back in the Continent’s heyday? Take a handful of those pills, and attain godlike powers?”
Shara smirks. “In case you have forgotten, the Divinity almost crushed me like a bug once I got its attention. My powers were definitively not godlike. But that is how things used to work here: there are records of priests and acolytes taking copious quantities of philosopher’s stones and performing astounding miracles—and frequently dying shortly thereafter.” She rubs her head. “Frankly, I almost envy them.”
Pitry is silent for a few moments. Then: “The papers in Ghaladesh … They think you are a h—”
“Don’t,” says Shara.