City of Blades

9. A Blast of Silence

She wakes with a start and realizes she’s screaming. She sits up and her hand goes to her hip for the carousel, but it’s not there. She slowly realizes she’s lying on her bed in her room in SDC.

“For the love of…,” says Signe’s voice from nearby. “What is the matter with you?”

Mulaghesh’s head snaps to the side to see Signe sitting in a chair in the corner. From the pile of black cigarette butts in the ashtray on the floor beside it she’s been there for a while.

“The fuck are you doing?” asks Mulaghesh. She sniffs and rubs her eye. “Keeping vigil?”

“Looking after you. You passed out like you had some episode or something. I chose to keep an eye on you while my father began to make the formal rounds.”

“Shit.” Mulaghesh sits forward and rubs the center of her forehead. It feels like insects are trying to gnaw their way out of her skull.

“Head hurt?” says Signe.

“Shut the fuck up for a second.”

“Mm. Aren’t you a pleasant creature in the morning. Though it’s closer to noon.”

Mulaghesh replays the last thing she saw in her head—or what she thought she saw. That moment, that vision, felt like it was beyond seeing, as if she experienced that world with senses beyond the common five.

Her pulse rises immediately. It’s still there. The City of Blades is still out there…somehow.

It’s an absurd idea, yet what she saw doesn’t leave a trace of doubt in her mind. To say otherwise would be like walking through a rainstorm for the first time in your life and then denying you were ever wet.

There’s another world out there, she thinks. There’s a place below this one, floating on an ocean underneath reality.

She thinks of the sentinels, the dismembered bodies, Gozha whispering about the man made of thorns, and everything starts to suggest a dreadful idea to her.

And maybe the boundaries are beginning to blur.

“Are you all right?” says Signe, worried. “Is it…Are you having flashbacks?”

“What?” snaps Mulaghesh.

“Flashbacks. You’re a soldier. I know…What is it they call it…War echoes? Battle echoes?”

“Where’s your dad? With Biswal?”

“No,” says Signe. “That was canceled. And that’s another reason why I’m here. There’s been a…development.”

“Which is?”

“They’ve…found another body. Or parts of another body. Much as you found them at the farmhouse, or so I’m told, but these were on the cliffs west of the fortress.” Signe sucks at a cigarette hard enough for Mulaghesh to hear the crackle across the room. “It’s a Saypuri woman. It was, I mean.”

The pulsing in her ears goes silent.

“Choudhry?” she asks quietly.

“I don’t know, I’m afraid. They haven’t found the head. A patrol discovered it on the cliffs west of the fortress, just where she used to walk. It seems…likely.”

“Where’s the body now?”

“The”—Signe searches for the right word—“parts are with Rada. I suggested to Biswal that this would be wise, as she’s the medical expert here, and I thought you’d wish to do a dissection.”

“Autopsy.”

“Yes. One of those. He consented. The rest of the fortress is quite busy with the collapse of the installation, or so it appears, so he was happy to give this duty to you. He mentioned that there are rather a lot of dead Saypuris for him to worry about these days.”

Mulaghesh tries to leap out of bed, but her legs fail and she almost plummets to the floor.

“By the seas…” Signe stands and helps her up. Mulaghesh is surprised at how strong she is. “You’re not well.”

“You’re damned right I’m not well! Where’s my weapon?”

Signe retrieves the carousel from a drawer and hands it to her. “Off to duel with someone, General?”

“You see your father, you tell him I want to see him,” says Mulaghesh, holstering the pistol.

“And what shall I tell him you wish to see him for?”

Mulaghesh tries to think of how to say this without sounding barking mad. “Tell him it’s Ministry work. Just tell him that.”

Two hours later Mulaghesh knocks on the front door of Rada Smolisk’s house. It’s pouring rain, a bitter thunderstorm suddenly springing on them from offshore, and Mulaghesh is thankful she wore her peaked cap today. Rada’s house is nestled in a small forest just below the clifftops on the northwest side of the city, so it’s somewhat equidistant between the Galleries and fortress, perhaps as a grand metaphor for Rada’s difficult position. The home also overlooks the harbor yards, which lie about five hundred yards below. Mulaghesh can even see the yard of statues, including the tiny hole she carved in its canvas roof last night.

Rada answers her front door wearing a ridiculous and quite ugly fur dress, which she almost completely jumps out of when she sees Mulaghesh standing on her door. “G-General! You’re up. I h-heard you w-weren’t w—”

“Another body?” says Mulaghesh. “Another one?”

Rada nods solemnly. “I’m afraid so. A woman, this time. A S-Saypuri. Biswal and Nadar did g-g-give me p-permission to perform an a-a-uhhh-autopsy, though they s-said to w-wait for—”

“Show me.”

“Certainly. C-Come in.”

Mulaghesh brushes rain off her sleeves and steps over the threshold. The front room is dark, messy, and was obviously never intended to receive visitors, as every surface is concealed by tottering towers of books and cups of tea. It’s terribly cold inside, a common symptom of a lonely house, in Mulaghesh’s experience. But most curiously, Rada’s walls are covered in taxidermied animals: sparrows, thrashing fish, the heads of deer and hogs and certain mountain cats. It’s as if all the fauna of the hillsides crept down her walls and suddenly found themselves frozen.

Mulaghesh says, “Uh. Do you hunt?”

“No. W-Why? Oh, yes, the a-animals. No. Th-Those I do m-myself.”

“You…stuff them yourself?”

“Oh, y-yes. It’s a hobby of m-mine. There’s a lot of hunters here, and they t-tend to d-d-discard much of animals. I f-find a way to use them. I pr-practice in these r-rooms, through here,” she says, leading Mulaghesh through a door. On the other side is a much more normal space—a white, plain, medical office one would normally expect to see when looking for a doctor. “N-no one, um, ever actually c-c-comes to the other d-door.”

“Oh. I’m, uh, sorry.” She coughs. “I didn’t realize.”

“No, it’s qu-quite all right.”

Rada’s taxidermy skills are still on display here, though in a more restrained capacity: the snarling head of a boar and a duck in midflight hang on the walls just beside the entry door. Rada asks Mulaghesh to wait while she changes into something more functional. “The body is qu-kwuhhite, uh, m-messy you see.”

“I see.” Mulaghesh takes off her rain-slick greatcoat and hangs it in the corner.

Rada withdraws while Mulaghesh sits and thinks. She’s more dismayed than she expected: she’d thought for some time that Choudhry was dead, and then after that she thought she was somehow involved in the murders. But to hear she was desecrated so abominably is something Mulaghesh never expected.

Rada returns, now dressed in dark tan clothing with a rubber apron. “She’s in the b-back room. If you’re r-ready.”

“I am.”

Rada nods and leads her through the door. On the other side is a small room that looks fit for surgical or perhaps funerary purposes, and in the center is a large stone slab with drainage holes in it. On the slab are…

Things. That’s all her brain can process them as: items. Objects. Fragments of something. Not a person, certainly not a human being, because she simply can’t conceive of such a thing. To see a fellow person cut down to such crude elements is dehumanizing beyond words.

She tries to get ahold of herself. She focuses, and looks.

On the table are two torso halves. Dark-skinned, breasts withered and sagging. The hint of thick pubic hair at the crotch. A woman vivisected carefully and cleanly, her arms and legs pruned away. Only her left thigh remains, but this segment too has been dismembered, placed close to the hip as if to try to give these ravaged pieces of a human the semblance of a whole. It only highlights the monstrousness of all of this.

“It’s the s-same as you saw,” says Rada. “Yes?”

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh quietly. “Close. But they left the heads and limbs behind the other times.”

“We’re not wuh-wrong that it’s a S-Saypuri woman, th-though?”

Mulaghesh shakes her head. “No. Even though she’s bloodless now, the skin’s the right tone. They found her on the cliffs?”

“Y-Yes. Where the m-missing M-Ministry officer used t-t-to walk, or so I’m t-told.”

She looks at Rada, breathing hard. “And you can do an autopsy?”

“P-partially, yes. Th-the b-body isn’t f-fresh, so to suh-speak, but…I can t-try. What do you hope t-to find?”

“Anything. Something. I want to find something to use to pin these bastards down.”

Rada nods meekly. “Then we’ll begin.”

Mulaghesh takes a seat on the far wall and pulls up a second chair to prop her feet up. She slouches in the chair, hands resting on her stomach, and watches, much as someone would a spectator sport, as Rada Smolisk carefully and thoughtfully dissects the once-human husk lying on her table. It is not, as Mulaghesh feared, an inhuman, monstrous violation; rather, Rada makes remarks throughout her examination more suggestive of a boat trip through a pleasant and familiar countryside.

“Remarkably clean cuts,” she says quietly. “Almost surgical. Yet even surgical cuts, on this large of a scale, would leave…how shall I put this…sawing marks. It takes work, getting through so much tissue. And yet there’s none here. It’s as if she’s been put through a mill saw.” She rummages about for some ghastly instrument to aid her.

She doesn’t stutter while she works, Mulaghesh notes. It’s as if such close interaction with the corpse transforms her into a completely different person, someone much more confident and focused than she is in waking life.

Mulaghesh herself can hardly focus at all. Through the hours of the autopsy—and it takes far longer than she expected—the echoes of her vision keep screaming in her head. Now that she’s faced with yet another corpse—again, mutilated as a Voortyashtani sentinel would do—she feels as if the entire world is about to fall apart, and they shall all go plummeting into the inky dark sea, past columns of glimmering moonlight, to a strange white island on the other side of reality….

Are they coming through? Are the sentinels poking through bit by bit, to attack anyone they can find? And how is this even possible, if Voortya’s dead?

“I very rarely have an audience for this,” Rada says absently. Her brow is wet with sweat. It must be hard work, Mulaghesh realizes, parsing through all the bone and muscle walls.

Mulaghesh rubs her eyes, trying to focus. “Does an audience make it any better?”

“Perhaps. It’s something I feel better having a witness for, this sort of thing. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

“What? The corpse?”

“No. Well, yes, in a way. It’s this…this opportunity to examine what we are, the many disparate and curious elements that make up our beings.” There is a snap of breaking bone. “So many systems, so many pieces…More complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?”

“I guess that’s a good point,” says Mulaghesh, feeling surprised, impressed, and somewhat discomfited. She wonders if Rada always pontificates during such procedures, either to her trapped patients or to the empty walls.

“What do you think, looking at her?” asks Rada.

“That she could have been one of mine.”

“Interesting. If I might ask—how does it make you feel?”

“How I feel? Like I want to find out who did this.”

“You feel a responsibility to her, then? More than you would any other person?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why?”

“We’ve asked these kids to come all the way across the world to fight and labor for us. Someone has to look after them.” And yet, a tiny voice says inside of her, you walked away from the job that could have helped you do that the most.

Shut up, thinks Mulaghesh.

Does it feel better, being alone? Does it really?

Shut up!

“A thoughtful position,” says Rada as she works. “Few possess your capacity for self-reflection, General. We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.” She sets down a knife, grabs some kind of miniature saw. “Yet when we consider our own existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control….All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious, hidden systems—and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out…” An unpleasant cracking sound as Rada separates something from the body that should never be separated. “What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.”

Mulaghesh can’t help but say it, as the subject weighs so heavily on her mind: “You don’t believe in an afterlife?”

“No,” says Rada. “I do not.”

“Sort of strange, a Continental who doesn’t believe in an afterlife.”

“Perhaps the Divinities made one for us, once,” says Rada. “But they are gone now, aren’t they?”

Mulaghesh does not voice her extreme concerns about this.

“I wonder how cheated the dead must have felt when that afterlife evaporated around them,” says Rada. “It’s like it’s a game,” she says softly. “And no matter how you play it, it ends unfairly.”

“The ending’s not the point,” says Mulaghesh.

“Oh? I thought you were a soldier. Is it not your purpose, to make endings? Is it not your duty to make these”—she taps the corpse—“from the soldiers of the enemy?”

“That’s a gross perversion of the idea of soldiering,” says Mulaghesh.

“Then please,” says Rada, looking up. “Enlighten me.”

She is not being sarcastic or combative, Mulaghesh realizes. Rather, she is willing to follow any string of conversation down the path it leads, much like she’s willing to follow a damaged vein through a desiccated corpse.

The surgery room is quiet as Mulaghesh thinks, the silence broken only by the tinkle of Rada’s utensils and the soft hush of the rain.

“The word everyone forgets,” says Mulaghesh, “is ‘serve.’ ”

“Serve?”

“Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking a city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of ‘taking,’ as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a soldier, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.”

“Gives what?”

“Anything,” says Mulaghesh. “Everything, if asked of us. We’re servants, as I said. A soldier serves not to take, they don’t strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn’t a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That’s what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we’re asked to do.”

“What part do you give up, do you think?” asks Rada.

“Peace, maybe. Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don’t know that they’ve lost something, but they have.”

“That is so,” says Rada quietly. “Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life.”

And with those words Mulaghesh suddenly remembers that the woman before her was once trapped in a collapsed building with the corpses of her family, trapped in the dark with them for days and days. And when she does she realizes that, in some way, little Rada Smolisk might still be trapped in that darkness, and trying to free herself. The surgeries, the humanitarianism, the autopsy, even the taxidermy—all of this could be an effort to literally place her hands upon the raw stuff of life and sort through it, seeking some secret that might unlock her dark prison, and bring in light.

Or perhaps, Mulaghesh thinks, Rada Smolisk feels at home only among the dead. She’s not stuttering at all now, and is actually bordering on erudition; whereas in the waking hours of life, with Signe and Biswal, she is a trembling, nervous thing, far from her normal surroundings. If death echoes, wonders Mulaghesh, perhaps one could get used to it, or even come to love its noise. Much like how Choudhry surrounded herself with sketches and images of this hellish country, and its history.

Then she remembers….

The charcoal sketch in Choudhry’s room—a landscape depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed, and a tower rising behind them…

Mulaghesh sits forward. She saw it, she thinks suddenly. She saw it. She saw the damned City of Blades, just as I did.

It must have been the Window to the White Shores, she realizes: the miracle Signe described. But it must have worked. Choudhry snuck into the statue yard and performed that ancient rite and glimpsed the very island Mulaghesh did; and perhaps the only reason Mulaghesh herself saw the City of Blades last night is because the ritual was still working, like a door left open for anyone to walk through.

So how did she come to die? After all that, how did Sumitra Choudhry come to be murdered just as the other Voortyashtanis?

“I’m s-sorry, General,” says Rada finally. “I’ve l-looked all I could, but I’ve found n-nothing.”

“Nothing?” asks Mulaghesh, dispirited.

“Nothing indicating anything, really. There’s j-just not much to g-go on. P-perhaps I am n-not up to the t-task.”

Mulaghesh stands and walks to the table, surveying Rada’s grisly work. “I hate this so damned much, Rada. I hate it beyond words.”

“D-Did you know her, G-General?”

“No. Never saw her. Just heard about her. But to see someone reduced down to this…” She shakes her head. “We don’t even know it’s her, do we. We can’t even tell her family that she’s really dead. Just that we think so. And it’s not like we could have them look to tell us if it’s really…”

She trails off, thinking.

“G-General?” asks Rada.

Silence.

“Uh. General?”

“She got a Silver Star,” says Mulaghesh quietly.

“Um. What?”

“She got a Silver Star. For heroism after being injured in the line of duty. She got shot, in the, uh…” She snaps her fingers, trying to jog her memory. “In the shoulder. In the left shoulder. I read her reports.”

“Meaning…”

Mulaghesh cranes over the body and gently pushes aside a drooping flap of skin to look at the left shoulder. “It’s smooth. It’s smooth, damn it. No scarring at all!”

“So?”

“So it’s not her!” says Mulaghesh, feeling relieved and baffled and furious. “It’s not her! I don’t know who in the hells this might be, but it’s not Choudhry!”

“B-Because of a m-missing scar?”

“She got shot in the shoulder, just above the collarbone, and she nearly died from it, Governor. It was grisly. They don’t give out the Silver Star for nothing. It’d have left a mark.” She looks up, thinking furiously. “Someone’s fucking with me.”

“I’m…sorry?”

“Someone must…Someone must have known I was looking into Choudhry. They must have! Someone wanted me or us to think she was dead. I’ve got someone out there nervous and they don’t like it one bit. They’re rattled enough to go through the trouble of mutilating a totally different body and staking it out on the cliffs to try and throw me off the trail!”

“Isn’t that, uh, a l-little bit p-paranoid, G-General?”

“Maybe. But paranoia usually doesn’t harm, and often helps.” She only hates herself a little for quoting Signe. “Damn. What time is it?”

“It’s 1900, G-General.”

“Shit. Dark already. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to tell Nadar.” She shoves a thread of wet hair out of her face. “Well, Governor. This has been damn educational, I must say.”

“Always a p-pleasure to, uh, assist,” says Rada, perplexed.

“What will you do with, um, the body?”

“Unfortunately, I am used to d-dealing with c-corpses,” she says. “It will b-be no tr-tr-trouble at all t-to make arrangements w-with the f-fortress.”

Mulaghesh thanks Rada for her help, then braces herself for the cold as she exits Rada’s house. But, strangely, the shock never hits her. She realizes Rada’s house was freezing cold, perhaps inhumanly cold, so she was already accustomed to it. As she crests a wet cliff she looks back and sees Rada standing in the doorway, watching her with her great, sad eyes. Yet up above is her chimney, and from it flows a thick, steady stream of smoke, turned a glowing white by the moonlight.

She wonders who could possibly want to fake Sumitra Choudhry’s death. Then she realizes that the most obvious suspect would be Choudhry herself.

It’s late when she finally fumbles her key into her door and opens it. When she does she freezes, surprised by the roaring fire in her fireplace. Then she sees the mountain of greasy bones and crumbling crusts of bread on her tea table, behind which sits Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, his suspenders dangling from his waist, carving up a forearm-sized hunk of white cheese with his giant black knife. The only remnant of his kingly attire is the white glove on his left hand, concealing the injury he bore long ago.

He jerks his chin at her. “I wondered when you would be back.”

Mulaghesh stares at the mess and holds her hands out, aggrieved. “What…What the fuck?”

“Signe said you wanted to see me.”

“How the hells did you get in here?”

“I picked the lock?” He picks up a clay jug, uncorks it, and takes a massive pull. “How else?”

“By the seas…” She shuts the door and tosses her coat on the bed. “You couldn’t find anywhere else in this giant building for you to eat what looks like three whole chickens?”

“Not anyplace where I wouldn’t get stared at. Or have servants fumbling over me, asking me if I needed things. They treat me like a bomb, waiting to explode. I much prefer your room. No one looks for me in here.”

“Hells, I know I sure wouldn’t! Ah, look, you’ve gotten chicken fat all over the carpet….”

“What was it you wanted to see me about?” He recorks the jug. “Signe mentioned the Ministry, but, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic.”

She flops into a chair beside the fire. “I’m almost not even sure I want to say it aloud. You might think me a fool, or insane. Or, worse, I’d hear it coming out of my mouth and know I’m insane.”

“Shara said that on our first few jobs,” says Sigrud, “tangling with the Divine.” He looks at her, eyebrow cocked. “Which makes me curious to hear what you are about to say.”

There’s a silence. Mulaghesh holds up her hand. Sigrud, without a word, tosses her the jug. She catches it, pulls the cork out with her teeth, spits it into the fire, and takes a long pull.

She shuts her eyes as she swallows. “Grain alcohol,” she says, her voice now raspy. “That shit’s not for the young.”

“That shit is often not even for seasoned Dreyling sailors,” says Sigrud, watching as she takes a second enormous swig. “This makes me think whatever you say is, ah, very bad news.”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

There’s another silence.

“I’ll need you to listen not as a chancellor of a foreign nation,” says Mulaghesh, “but as a former operative. And a friend.”

“So you are saying, do not use this information against you or your country.”

“Yeah, basically. Can you do that?”

He shrugs. “I have always been good at compartmentalization. And, to be frank…I am not particularly interested in the work of a chancellor.”

So she tells him. She tells him everything, from top to bottom, describing Choudhry, the murders, the mutilation of the bodies, her Divine encounter with that apparition that looked like Voortya, and her glimpse into what she now suspects was the Voortyashtani afterlife. And to her relief, he doesn’t look at her like she’s crazy, like she’s absolutely out of her gourd. Instead he just sits there, one eye blinking slowly, as if he’s just heard some rather disappointing gossip.

“So,” he says slowly when she finishes.

“So.”

“You, ah…You believe that the Voortyashtani afterlife—this City of Blades—still exists. Somehow.”

“Yes. Do…do you believe me?”

He puffs at his pipe, releasing a huge cloud of smoke. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

In her relief she chooses not to give him the many, many reasons why a normal person wouldn’t. “I saw it, Sigrud. I saw it. It’s hard to describe what I saw, but…it was real, and I know it was real. They’re all there, all the Voortyashtanis that have lived and fought and died….It’s a…a fucking army, Sigrud! How it’s still around I don’t know, but they’re still out there.”

“And now, you think they are, how shall I put this…coming through?”

“That’s my suspicion. Just as I was, I don’t know, pulled through to them, they can maybe be pulled through to here.”

“And it’s these sentinels who have committed these murders.”

“Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “A whole family cleanly massacred, then butchered, and all such perfect cuts….It’s not something an ordinary person could do. But a single stroke of a sentinel’s blade, they say, was able to part the trunk of an old oak as if it were but a length of straw.”

“But how are the sentinels coming through to here?”

“The strange woman spotted at the charcoal kilns,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s my best guess. She must have found a way to open, I don’t know, a door of some kind and let them through. And I think she’s the same one who butchered that body to throw me off her trail.”

“And though you have not said so,” says Sigrud, very slowly, “it sounds like you believe this woman to be Sumitra Choudhry.”

Mulaghesh is silent. The wind slaps the windowpanes.

“Yes,” she says quietly. “Yes, it seems that way. From the drawings in her room, which seemed so insane, and the way she drew the murder scenes on her very walls…She’s certainly the one person in Voortyashtan who would know the most about the Divine. And who else would want me to think Choudhry is dead besides Choudhry herself?”

“You think she is mad? That that is why she is doing this?”

“I don’t know why she’s doing this. But it’s the most obvious answer.”

“What goal could she have in mind? Why do these things to these families?”

“I don’t know what her endgame is. But it’s like she’s testing this process, figuring it out, getting better at it. She’s refining her technique, whatever ritual it might be. Something with thinadeskite, though, since we found it at the first murder scene.”

“The material from the mines,” says Sigrud. “Which you said a Divinity caved in.”

“Voortya, yes. Some version or rendition of her, at least, and I still don’t understand that one tiny fucking bit. And I don’t know why the sentinels don’t stick around, why they don’t last, but…Maybe that’s why Choudhry keeps trying. She wants to pull them all the way through and keep them here. But damned if I know why.”

Sigrud slowly sits back, absently carving at the block of cheese.

“What’s your professional opinion?” asks Mulaghesh.

“My professional opinion,” says Sigrud, “is that Voortya is dead. That is known. That is undeniable. Shara said Voortya proved the example of what happens when a Divinity dies. None of Voortya’s miracles work anymore.”

“Yet I walked into one last night.”

He scratches his eyebrow. “And how this is possible, I do not know. But…I have a troubling idea.”

“What?”

“Voortya was the Divinity of death, yes?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So, could it be possible for such a Divinity, who aided her own people in defeating death, to do the same for herself?”

“What are you saying? That I saw Voortya’s ghost on the cliffs?”

“Is it so mad? If you saw all those souls in the City of Blades, if they still exist, then why not Voortya? Perhaps whatever mechanisms that allow an army of dead warriors to persist could also do the same for a god. If it is really the afterlife of these lands, then the City of Blades must hold, what, millions of souls? Tens of millions? All the dead warriors from centuries and centuries…Many times larger than any standing army in existence today. Keeping them there is no small feat.”

Mulaghesh goes still. Something in the fireplace pops.

She sits up, feeling the blood drain from her face. Then she slowly turns to look at Sigrud.

“What?” says Sigrud, wary.

“An army,” says Mulaghesh. “An army, you said. And I said it myself not too long ago.”

“Yes?”

“And what do armies do?”

“They, uh…”

Mulaghesh stands. “That’s what this is all about. It must be! It’s like what Signe said about the Voortyashtani afterlife!”

He frowns. “What does Signe know about the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

“Like…everything? You do realize she was raised here, right?” Sigrud is so disconcerted he appears not to have heard her. She ignores him and continues, “Signe said that when Voortyashtani warriors died, their souls went over the ocean to a white island, the City of Blades. She said the Voortyashtanis believed that one day all the souls would sail back over from the City of Blades…and then they’d make war upon all of creation in the Night of the Sea of Swords.”

“So?”

“So don’t you see? That’s what she’s trying to do! Sumitra damned Choudhry is trying to trigger the fucking Voortyashtani apocalypse!”

“We need to tell Shara this right away,” says Mulaghesh. “Tell her that her operative hasn’t just gone AWOL, she’s gone fucking mad and wants to start a damned war! A Divine war, the last war!”

Sigrud shakes his head. “But there are too many unknowns here, Turyin. Imagine if we go to the Ministry, and tell Shara and her people to start investigating….She will have to make her case before the authorities, convincing them to act. But she has no case, just…guesses. Speculation. You must find more; you must find something concrete.”

“What’s more concrete than seeing the damned City of Blades?” says Mulaghesh, frustrated.

“But I did not see the city in the statue yard. Nor did my daughter. And one cannot initiate a military action based purely on visions. Especially since much of the government is no longer purely under Shara’s control. Many of her powers have been stripped from her in the past year.”

“So what now! What do we fucking do now! Wait for another murder?”

“I did not say that,” says Sigrud. “And I may be able to be of some use to you….Let me see your notepad. I wish to see these sketches you described.”

She hands it to him and he flips through them, examining each mad scrawl.

“What do you think?” asks Mulaghesh.

“I think,” he says quietly, “that it was not wise for my people to come here, and unearth the many things that should stay sleeping.”

“Don’t let your daughter hear that.”

His face clouds over. She instantly understands that this was the wrong thing to say. She stays silent rather than fall all over herself apologizing.

The fire crackles and pops. A log gently shifts, sending up a spray of sparks. He flexes his left hand, its white glove rippling. “It still hurts, you know,” he says softly. “My hand. I thought it would go away, after Bulikov, after Kolkan. But it came back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Perhaps the past cannot be so easily forgotten. Tell me,” he says. “You did not ever have any children, did you?”

“Natural ones, no.” She snorts. “Had about a few thousand adopted ones, though.”

He looks at her, perplexed, then understands. “Ah. Your soldiers. I see.” He turns back to the fire, shaking his head. “I do not understand how to talk to young people.” He rethinks his statement. “Or, I suppose, to young people like her.” Another pause. “Or, perhaps, I do not know how to speak to her, specifically.”

Mulaghesh is quiet.

“She does not like me,” he says. “She does not like me coming back into her life.”

“She doesn’t know you,” says Mulaghesh. “And you don’t know her. But you will, if you want to.”

“Why would she want to know me?” he says. “How do I tell my daughter what I’ve seen, what I’ve done? How do I tell her that at times, in prison, I…I became so furious that my own blood would leap out of me, pouring out of my nose, and I would go mad with anger, a berserk rage, hurting anyone and everyone around me, even myself? Sometimes innocents. Sometimes mere bystanders. I throttled them to death with my bare hands….”

He trails off.

Mulaghesh says, “You’re a different person now.”

“And so is she,” he says. “I thought I knew her. But I was foolish to think so.”

“Why?”

“Well.” He struggles with the words for a moment. “When I was a young man, and she was just a little girl, long ago, I…I used to chase her through the forest near our home. It was a game. She would hide, and I would pretend to chase her. And then she would pretend to chase me. And, later, when I was in prison…when I thought I would go mad…I held on to this very tightly, this memory of the little blond girl laughing as she ran through the forest. This tiny, perfect creature, darting among these great big trees. When the world grinds you down, you pick a handful of fires to hold close to your heart. And that was one of mine. Perhaps the brightest, the warmest. And after Bulikov, after Shara suggested I come back, and find my family and rebuild my country…I suppose I just assumed that she would remember this, too. That she would see me and remember that moment in the trees, laughing as we ran. But she does not remember. And perhaps I was foolish to think she would.” He pauses for a long time. “I have been hurt in many ways in my life, Turyin Mulaghesh. But I have never been hurt in this manner before. What should I do? What should I do with this strange young woman who does not care for me?”

“Talk to her, I suppose. Start there. And listen to her. Don’t expect her to say things you want to hear, but listen to her. She’s lived a life very separate from yours.”

“I have tried that. When I try to explain myself, all my words dry up.” He shakes his head. “Perhaps it would have been better for me to have died, after reclaiming my country. End on a high note, as they say. Or escape into the wilderness.”

“I never figured you as one for self-pity.”

“And I never thought I would be a father again,” says Sigrud. “Yet here I am.”

He stares into her notebook, and she suddenly realizes how intensely lonely Sigrud must feel, forced to play many roles—prince, husband, father—that feel hopelessly beyond him.

Then his eye falls on something: a seven-pointed star Mulaghesh copied in her notes. He sits up and points at it. “Wait. This…This star here. Did you copy it exactly?”

“Uh, maybe?”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so?”

“And it was found in Choudhry’s room?”

“Yes. Why?”

He scratches his beard, anxious. “It’s a…a signal, a piece of tradecraft. She’s telling us what code she’s going to use, what language she’ll speak to us in. This star means she will be using Old Bulikov rules.”

“Uh, what? Old Bulikov rules? I never heard of those, and I was stuck there for twenty years.”

“When the Ministry first truly began its intelligence operations,” says Sigrud, “most of its work was focused in Bulikov. But they had no technology then, no signals and lights and telephones or whatnot. So they had to use much cruder means—a stroke of chalk, a pin in a wall, a carving in wood, or a splotch of paint. Things like this. It was mostly used to direct operatives to dead drops, often when someone felt they were being pursued.”

“As in, they might not survive, but they still wanted to send a message?”

“To leave behind information,” says Sigrud. “Yes.”

“Can we trust that, though? If all signs point to Choudhry as the suspect, do we really want to believe whatever it is she’s trying to tell us?”

“You said she went mad. So perhaps once she was not mad. Perhaps she did this when she was still a good agent.”

“I wouldn’t know what to look for, though. I don’t know the first thing about Old Bulikov rules.”

“And I cannot go with you. It would be rather difficult to explain away my absence here and my presence there. Even though I would much rather be doing that than this.”

“You’d rather be digging around in the affairs of a madwoman than work here with your daughter?”

Sigrud grumbles to himself. “When you say it like that, I do not sound very reasonable at all.” He sighs. “I wish I did not have to do this. I was never a good controller, never a good case officer. I was always the man down in the muck, not the one waiting at home. That was Shara’s game.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am saying that you are an operative in need of a case officer,” says Sigrud. “You are all alone up here, and maybe this work is so sensitive that Shara could not bring anyone on board….But, you suffer for the lack of one. And I do not exactly see anyone else around who could do the job.”

“You don’t work for Saypur anymore, you know.”

“If what you say is right, then everything happening in Voortyashtan is under threat. Including the harbor, the one thing currently sustaining my whole country’s economy. Frankly, I wish Shara had brought me on sooner—but she likely did not know what you would find here.”

“So what now?”

He looks at the clock. “So now, I suggest you get comfortable. And put the liquor down.”

“Why?”

“Because you are going to have to memorize a lot of tradecraft before morning, if you want to do this right.”

“So it was not Choudhry’s body they found, ma’am?” asks Nadar the next morning as they walk through the fortress.

“No, it wasn’t,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know whose body it was, but it wasn’t hers.” She wipes a bead of sweat from her brow and tries not to shiver. She hiked up here rather than be chauffeured, and now her perspiration grows frigid in the cold air of the fortress, like she’s being wrapped in bedsheets pulled from an icy lake.

“Fucking shtanis,” says Nadar, shaking her head.

“Shtanis?”

“They’re mocking us, ma’am. They must be. A Saypuri corpse, butchered and put on display just beyond where they blew up the mines? They’re showing us how close they can get to us, General. I’ve increased patrols, but as yet we’ve spotted nothing. They’re talented in moving unseen in this terrain.” Nadar shakes out her keys and begins opening the door to Choudhry’s rooms.

“Have you…considered any alternatives?” asks Mulaghesh, uncertain how to phrase this.

“Alternatives, ma’am?”

“Yes. I had been considering that it was Sumitra Choudhry herself who was involved in the murders, Captain,” says Mulaghesh.

“Choudhry?” says Nadar, startled. “Why, General?”

“These murders…They’re like some kind of old Divine ritual.” The door swings open. Both of them stare in at the graffiti-covered room. “And everything here suggests Choudhry was neck-deep in the Divine. To her misfortune.”

Mulaghesh walks into the room, watching Nadar over her shoulder. She can’t tell Nadar everything, but she needs someone in command here to start thinking in the right direction. If she can get Biswal or Nadar to consider it, then perhaps they can call in more Ministry reinforcements, who might be able to find something solid—something verifiably Divine.

But Nadar’s face has gone cold and closed. “It seems unlikely that a Ministry operative could be capable of all that, ma’am.”

“You don’t know Ministry operatives, Captain.”

“And, to be fair, you didn’t know Choudhry, General,” says Nadar. “Whereas I did.”

“What do you mean?”

Nadar hesitates.

“Permission to speak freely, General.”

“Granted.”

“Choudhry was, like many out of Ghaladesh, a somewhat ineffectual officer.”

“Ineffectual.”

“Yes, General. Lots of titles, ma’am, lots of certifications, certainly. But no on-the-ground experience in a combat zone. Experience that we here in Voortyashtan have in excess, General.” She meets Mulaghesh’s eyes very briefly before looking away. “Experience not known in Ghaladesh.”

Mulaghesh steps closer. “You wouldn’t be doubting my combat experience, would you, Captain?” she asks sharply.

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you disagree that what we see on these walls are the markings of a madwoman?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you disagree that the timeline for these murders and the theft of the explosives overlaps with Choudhry’s presence here, and disappearance?”

Nadar’s face twitches. “No, ma’am. But—”

“But what?”

“But…I’ve been at Fort Thinadeshi for six years now, before the Battle of Bulikov, General. And though Bulikov alerted us to threats of the Divine, here in Voortyashtan we’ve only ever seen one threat. The one that’s just beyond our walls.”

“You need to remain mindful of threats beyond the insurgents and the tribes, Captain,” says Mulaghesh. “Otherwise you blind yourself.”

“I have seen our soldiers killed in the wilderness, ma’am,” says Nadar softly. “I’ve held them in my arms as they died. I’ve seen the trains sent back to Ahanashtan, loaded up with coffins. I’ve seen these things time and time again, General. With all due respect, I personally do not believe myself to be blind at all.”

Nadar leaves Mulaghesh alone while she conducts her inspection. Mulaghesh furiously rubs her arm, so angry that it’s difficult to focus. Well, at least I know where Nadar stands. Leaving only Lalith as an option.

She shakes herself and begins to scan the walls of the room, her eyes tracing over the black scrawls and splashes of paint.

Look for things so simple, Sigrud told her, that they seem to have no meaning in themselves.

She asked, What in the hells does that mean?

It will not be a curious picture, or a carving in the wall that seems to communicate something, he said. No riddles or codes, in other words. It will be an ordinary thing that simply does not belong. A stripe of chalk or paint that looks like a painter’s error. Something stuck in the walls, like a staple or a pin, or a nick in the walls like someone banged them while moving furniture. Or a slash in a carpet that looks like someone damaged it.

She looks over the images on the walls, trying not to be disturbed by them. Thousands of swords, stuck in the earth. An arrow piercing the heart of a wave. A face she now knows to be the cold, regal visage of Voortya herself gives her pause—Choudhry did an impressively good job of capturing the Divinity’s likeness.

Perhaps she painted over it, thinks Mulaghesh. Whatever it was. Perhaps her signal’s no longer here at all.

Her eye falls on the window in the far wall. It’s long and thin, the barest slit of glass. Mulaghesh recognizes the intent of the design immediately, built to allow in light and air and nothing else.

Yet in the corner of the window frame, almost tucked out of view, is a tiny white dot.

She steps closer. It’s a thumbtack, she sees, pushed deep into the wall.

Mulaghesh feels the window, testing the frame for any weaknesses or hollows. She finds none, but it does have a clasp that allows you to open it. With a squeak, she jimmies the window open, wincing at the blast of cold air, and feels the outside of the window.

There’s something there, just barely: a piece of string, dangling down. She grabs it and begins to pull it in. It’s long, nearly four feet.

Of course, thinks Mulaghesh. If you’re paranoid about room searches, put whatever it is you want to hide outside your room….

But when she finishes pulling the string all the way in, she’s disappointed: at its end is nothing but a small hook, like a clasp from a woman’s necklace. Something hung here once, clearly, but it’s gone now: maybe she moved it, or maybe it fell.

Tied to the string just above the hook, however, is another white thumbtack.

She remembers what Sigrud said: Ministry officers are trained to leave behind caches. Dead drops. If they disappear or get killed, they want to tell whoever comes next what they were doing.

Mulaghesh asked, So she wouldn’t have hidden anything away in the mines or something crazy like that?

Not if she was following SOP. She will have hidden something in a place accessible to you. And she will tell you what to look for.

Mulaghesh holds the white thumbtack up to the light and begins to understand the message: I moved it. To find it, look for this.

“So search all of Fort Thinadeshi,” says Mulaghesh. “For one white thumbtack.” She bows her head. “Fuck.”

Mulaghesh wanders the innards of Fort Thinadeshi. She can’t help but fight the feeling that she’s stepped back in time. The walls are bulky, thick constructions, an architectural design that was abandoned long ago, as it was forced to create alternatingly huge or tiny rooms. She’s never sure what she’ll find on the other side of any given door: perhaps some dusky, yawning chasm of a room, or a tiny hallway full of cramped offices, like a honeycomb carved in stone. The hallways swim with shadows, for much of Fort Thinadeshi still lacks gas or electric lighting and is forced to use candles and literal torches. All around her are thuds, slams, laughs, and shouts, echoing through the misshapen chambers riddling this vast, crumbling relic.

It’s hardly any different from the ruins in the wilderness, thinks Mulaghesh. It suddenly seems unusual that Choudhry was the only one who went mad here.

But more troubling than the atmosphere of the fortress is the amount of firearms and ammunition she sees in motion. The soldiers here are preparing for something. She doesn’t want to think the word “mobilization” and all that it implies, but she can’t help it.

What is Biswal planning to do in Voortyashtan?

What she hates most, perhaps, is the feeling of distance. She is not truly stationed or in command here, no, and it’s true that no one bothers her or even looks twice as she wanders the winding hallways; but with every step Mulaghesh feels like a thief or a liar, sneaking through the shadows and silently watching these boys and girls, most of them hardly more than children.

I am one of you, she wishes to say to them. I am a soldier just as you. All that has happened to me has not made me any different from you. But beyond a few salutes, she exchanges little with the rank and file.

Mulaghesh is roving through the medical wing when she nearly abandons her search. She can’t imagine a more futile task than this, combing through this ocean of dark stone for a single white dot.

She remembers something Sigrud told her during their hours-long briefing: Assume she knows you. Assume she believed you would know who she was and what she had been doing when you came to look for her. If she has something to hide, she would hide it in a place you know she has been.

But Mulaghesh doesn’t know a damn thing about Choudhry besides what she’s read. All she has are the few communications and requests she sent back to, to…

“To Ghaladesh,” thinks Mulaghesh suddenly. She stops a passing private and asks, “Soldier—what’s the quickest way to your communications department?”

The comms desk has the feeling of an ill-kept library, bookshelf after bookshelf of multicolored files. Mulaghesh searches the shelves for the sign of a white thumbtack, yet finds nothing. Dispirited, she’s about to ask the young private at the front desk if she perhaps saw Choudhry do something here, months and months ago, when she notices something.

She looks at the front of the desk. Right at the bottom, just above the stone floor, is a white thumbtack pressed deep into the wood.

Mulaghesh stares at the tack. Then she looks up at the young private, who’s watching her anxiously.

“Can I…help you, General?” asks the private.

“Uh, maybe.” She wonders what message the tack is trying to convey. Perhaps Choudhry put it here so that Mulaghesh or whoever would stand in this very spot and speak to the soldier at the front desk. “What can you tell me about your operations here, Private?”

“Is there anything specific you’d like to know, General?”

“I…suppose I’m looking for backups or copies of all communications sent out from this station, Private. Specifically sent back to Ghaladesh.”

“Well, each communication that goes out has to be copied and placed into storage, ma’am. If the communication isn’t received, we have to have some record of what was sent so we can resend it.”

“How long do you keep records of the communications?”

“We keep records for up to three years, ma’am, in case of an incident,” says the private. “But only those sent or received within the year are readily available.” She nods at the bookshelves. “The rest are in deep storage.”

“Can you show me the log?”

“Certainly, ma’am. What time period would you be looking for?”

She gives her six weeks on either side of Choudhry’s disappearance. This produces a considerable pile of paper, which Mulaghesh promptly sits down and starts poring through.

Two hours later Mulaghesh is still digging through the logs of communications and telegrams. They’re all categorized by date, then by the last name of the officer who issued the communication. Choudhry’s name is nowhere to be found except for the handful of communications she sent requesting files, which Mulaghesh has already scanned for code, to no avail.

After another hour Mulaghesh is about ready to give it up and try something new when she notices one officer’s name is different: ZHURGUT.

Zhurgut, she thinks. As in Saint Zhurgut? The Voortyashtani?

She looks closer at its log entry. The telegram destination is one she’s never seen before. Most of Fort Thinadeshi’s telegrams only went to five or six locations: Bulikov, Ahanashtan, and Ghaladesh, as well as the other installations throughout the region. This address is completely different.

“Because it doesn’t exist,” says Mulaghesh aloud.

“Pardon, ma’am?” asks the private at the front desk.

“N-Nothing. Never mind. Talking aloud.”

She looks closer at the line in the log. The name of a Voortyashtani saint…And the telegram’s destination doesn’t exist. Choudhry put the telegram through but she never intended it to go anywhere…so there was never anyone to call the comms desk and tell them they never got it!

Mulaghesh walks into the shelves, looking for the failed communication. She feels impressed by her own brilliance, but even more so at Choudhry’s: the girl was clever enough to use the comms desk backup files as her own cache, duping the attendants here into copying down her message under a fictional officer’s name and storing it away. Unless you knew to look for it, you’d never know Choudhry was involved at all.

She finds the file and glances around. The private at the front desk is busy recording something. Mulaghesh slides the file out, pulls out the transcription, and glances at the first line. It reads: “A13F69 12 1IKMN12…”

She sighs. “Ah, for the love of…”

It’s in code. But of course it would be, thinks Mulaghesh. She remembers Shara provided her with a Ministry codex when she first sent her out here. Now it’s just a matter of determining exactly which one Choudhry used.

“Well,” Mulaghesh says. “I guess I know what I’m doing tonight.”

She starts the long walk back down to the harbor, wishing she had Pandey here to drive her again. But she’s happy to steer clear of Fort Thinadeshi for a while, feeling certain she’s increasingly on Captain Nadar’s shit list. And it won’t do to have someone close to Biswal dislike her quite so much.

She should feel excited, she knows. She just figured out Choudhry’s signals and found the one possibly genuine communication that this operative ever made. But everything she saw back there actually makes her more worried.

Because you had to be pretty cunning to think up a scheme like that, and by all appearances Choudhry went the extra mile to make sure whoever came after her would find this. Not exactly the actions of a madwoman, then.

She’s approaching the checkpoint down into Voortyashtan when she glances north toward the thinadeskite mines. The machines are still churning away, hauling rock out of the enormous pit. She glances across the cliffs, absently noting how isolated the mines now seem, and reflects on the tremendous amount of damage this region has taken. Cities collapsing, bays dredged, mines carved and then caved in—it’s as if all the violence the Voortyashtanis once inflicted on the world has been redirected toward their very lands.

Then her eye falls on a little copse of trees about a quarter mile north of the mines.

She pauses. Cocks her head.

For some reason those tall pine trees suddenly seem familiar to her. Strikingly familiar, even.

She walks around the mines and toward the copse, leaning against the wind. It takes a while to get to them, but the closer the pines get the more familiar they seem. There’s something about the way they stand, radiating out in a circle with a gap on one side, like an entrance.

A memory flares inside of her: painting one palm with honey, waiting in the cold and the dark for the wind to carry its scent….

I’ve been here before, thinks Mulaghesh. Haven’t I? But it was very long ago….

The trees loom over her. Suddenly they seem just as ominous and strange as the statues in the SDC yard. She hesitates before walking into their shadows, then chides herself for being silly and steps inside.

It’s surprisingly dark and still inside the copse of pines, as if their trunks and boughs form a solid wall. The vicious coastal wind doesn’t penetrate their perimeter. It’s so dark that she almost walks right into the stone before she sees it, despite its size.

The stone sits in the center of the trees, about man-high and rounded, yet running from its top to bottom are countless thin slashes, as if the stone was put through a carpenter’s router over and over again. There are hundreds of slashes, even thousands of them, scoring it until it looks like some strange, giant nut with a curious shell. Despite these lacerations the stone is still strong: no matter how she pushes or pulls, no part of it crumbles or falls apart.

She remembers it, she realizes. She remembers this stone, remembers coming here in the night, seeing this ritual. They’d take us up here, she thinks. They’d take us up here and show us what they could do with a sword, slashing through six feet of stone with a single stroke. And so precise was the stroke, so perfect, so smooth, that it never crossed over another slash, never damaged the stone so much it fell apart.

She walks around it in a slow circle, fingers trailing over the marks on the stone, the gray light dappling its surface.

Once every three years they took us up here, she remembers. Once every three years they slashed the stones. In gardens like this, all across the cliffs. It was a message to us, to all of us who wished to leave our clans behind: “Do this, and you will no longer be a person. You will be a device. You will be a weapon, perfect and merciless, wielded by Her hand.” And we gladly gave ourselves.

She stops. Steps back from the stone.

She stares around herself, confused and terrified.

This memory she just recovered, she suspects, is over a hundred years old. And it is definitely not hers: this is the first time she’s ever been here in her life, she knows that.

But she thinks she knows whose memory it is. She glances toward the tall, thick pine at the edge of the copse and thinks, I remember hiding in branches like those, my palm slick with honey, my knife in the other hand, and waiting for the stag….

She saw this place when she was in the thinadeskite mines, the vision of the boy with the knife and the white stag, going through some test to prove himself to the sentinels. To imagine that this place is real, still here, and only a few yards away from the mines themselves is dumbfounding to her.

She steps back, aware of her alien reverence for this place and disgusted by it. This awe, this reverence, is not her own. It belongs to some young Voortyashtani boy from hundreds of years ago, and it somehow became trapped inside of her during her short spell in the mines, like some kind of mnemonic transfusion. She wonders what else the mines could have done to her, as well as how they did it, and suddenly she no longer feels too upset that the mines have been obliterated. She keeps backing away, feeling tremendously violated.

But she finds something else isn’t right. Her memory is telling her something here is…new.

She fights against the feeling—she knows her memories of this place aren’t hers—but she can’t deny the sensation that something has changed here, something that shouldn’t have been changed.

It takes her a while, but she finally decides that the small, black boulder about twenty feet to the left of the standing stone is new. It shouldn’t be here; they practiced swordwork around the stone—Not me, she thinks, but whoever’s memory this is—all of them pacing back and forth, and they’d never have placed a rock of such size in the area. It would have been dangerous.

She walks over to the boulder. It could have just rolled here, certainly. But it’s strangely round and flat, as if it was carven. Maybe someone could have left it here…but why would someone do that?

As Mulaghesh steps before it something changes in her footsteps: there’s a hollow thump, as if she’s standing on a wooden platform. Yet this couldn’t be, as she’s standing on dark green grass.

She lifts up the boulder. To her confusion, underneath it is a loop of rope that rises out of the soft, thick turf. She stares at it a second, then shoves the boulder aside and tugs at the rope.

It takes three tugs before a whole section of sod lifts clean up out of the earth. Underneath it is a large hole, about three feet wide and three feet tall.

She looks at the chunk of sod in her hand, confused. It’s a perfect square. She flips it over and sees that it is actually a wooden trapdoor with sod cunningly tied onto the top, and a loop of rope in the center for its handle. It’s like a camouflaged sewer cap, in a way.

“What in all the hells?” she says.

She looks into the hole, wondering if this is some Voortyashtani grave site, but she sees it’s not a hole at all: it’s a tunnel, sloping down sharp and heading south. It’s no small feat, either: she sees wooden support beams lining the tunnel, supporting all those tons and tons of earth.

She sits up and looks south, and sees the excavation machines working away on the mines.

“Ah, shit,” she says. “The mines…”

She sprints off toward the closest checkpoint, thankful that she maintained her running exercises in Javrat, and flags down a guard. “Get word to General Biswal at Fort Thinadeshi immediately,” she pants. “We’ve had a security breach at the mines. And have them bring a torch!”

Nadar and Pandey shine a torch down the tunnel, craning their heads low to see. “Are we certain it goes to the mines?” asks Biswal, looking over their shoulders.

“Hells, I don’t know,” says Mulaghesh. “When I encounter a strange hole in the woods my first instinct isn’t to jump down it.”

Pandey sits back, sighs, and says, “If you would all please give me some room….” Then he stands, shifts the torch around so it’s hanging by his shoulder, and does a graceful hop into the tunnel, sliding down it feetfirst.

Mulaghesh, Biswal, and Nadar watch as the luminescence of his torch grows smaller, until he finally reaches a bend and it vanishes entirely.

“Does it go to the mines, Pandey?” Biswal shouts down.

Pandey’s voice comes echoing up: “It’s…It’s not necessary to talk quite so loud, sir. The tunnel does amplify voices a good bit.”

“Oh.” Biswal clears his throat. “Apologies.”

“But, yes, sir…It does seem to run into the remnants of a cave-in down here, sir. So it probably once did go to the mines, sir.”

“Damn,” mutters Nadar. “Damn it all, damn it all! Another breach! Another one!”

“This, I would assume,” says Biswal, “is how they managed to bomb the mine.”

“It must be, sir,” says Nadar. “That’s the only possible way. I suppose we didn’t find the entrance to the mine down in the tunnels because it must have been as well camouflaged as this damned trapdoor.” She kicks the door hard enough to send it pinwheeling through the glen.

“Yes,” says Biswal. “How did you manage to spot it, Turyin?”

“Sheer chance,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s a long walk back down to the city, and, ah, no lavatories along the way.” She hopes this sounds believable: she’s certainly not willing to tell them she miraculously received this memory down in the mines.

“Ah,” says Biswal. “I see.”

“And you just happened to spot it?” asks Nadar.

“I tripped over it, frankly. Once I was here I came in to look at that.” She nods at the scarred stone. “Whatever the hells that is.”

“Another damned relic,” says Nadar.

Nadar and Mulaghesh squat to help Pandey out of the tunnel. He rises, dusts himself off—a useless gesture, considering the amount—and nods at them. “Thank you, Captain, General.”

“How long do you think it took to make this thing?” Mulaghesh asks. She squats to peer inside. “Half a year? More? It’s no shallow hole in the ground, I’ll tell you that.”

“True. What are you getting at, Turyin?” asks Biswal.

“I’m just saying this took a long time to make,” she says. “And I don’t think they made it to be used once, to drop off one bomb. You saw those support beams in there, didn’t you, Pandey?”

“I did, ma’am.”

“This is a serious undertaking. They basically built their own mine, in secret, underneath our noses! And they built it to last.” She peers down into the darkness of the tunnel. “Whoever made this wanted frequent access to what we were doing down there, I think.”

Nadar can barely suppress her scoff. “Why would they want that, General?”

“I don’t know. But I wonder if that’s why we found thinadeskite at the murder scene in Ghevalyev, which took place months ago. They took it directly from the mines themselves.”

“But again, General—why would they want that?”

“Why would they murder those farmers? Why would they blow up the mines, as you suggested? I don’t hear anyone proposing any motivations for those two crimes.”

“The reason is clear to me, General,” says Nadar. “They are savages. They seek to harm everyone that opposes them, ma’am, however they can. They think no more than that.”

Mulaghesh stands. “Captain, you’ve had three serious security breaches in the past months,” she says. “Someone stole explosives from you, someone stole extremely sensitive experimental materials from you, and now someone’s dug a hole into your mine shaft a quarter mile from your secured site. And you still have no idea who’s behind any of it! If anyone here isn’t thinking, Captain, it’s not the Voortyashtanis.”

Captain Nadar opens her mouth, furious. Before she can speak, Biswal leaps in. “That’s enough, Captain. I will stop you there before you say something insubordinate. You are dismissed.”

Nadar looks back and forth between the two of them before giving a ferocious salute, turning on her heel, and marching back to the fortress.

Biswal nods to Pandey and says, “You too, Sergeant Major.”

“Yes, sir.” Pandey salutes and sprints through the trees after Nadar.

Biswal looks at Mulaghesh with the air of a man who has heard his quota of bullshit for today and is all too unwilling to hear any more. “You, Turyin, are riling up the natives. I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have to live with them.”

“Your captain might be an excellent officer, Biswal, but she’s still biased and single-minded. How long has she been rattling her saber in your ear, begging you to go after the shtanis?”

“She’s not the only one,” says Biswal. “It’s the opinion of many of my advisers that we cannot be diplomatic with the insurgents.”

Mulaghesh nods at the scarred stone behind them. “But you can’t look at that and tell me that isn’t the product of something Divine.”

A pause.

“You think…You think this all has something to do with the Divine?” Biswal looks at her side-eyed, as if waiting for the punchline. “That the Divine is still possible here, in Voortya’s backyard, the one Divinity we’re sure is dead?”

Mulaghesh can’t tell him the truth, she knows that. But if she can get him to request backup from the Ministry, there’s a chance she could get more resources behind her investigation. “I think someone thinks they’re doing something Divine. Ritually mutilated corpses, with thinadeskite sitting next to them—and now we find a tunnel to the thinadeskite mines, in the shadow of that bizarre totem there. Whoever made this tunnel, I think, did not want the mines to collapse. They had free access to the thinadeskite—for unknown purposes, sure, but there’s plenty of unknowns when it comes to the Divine. Maybe this stuff was considered miraculous to them once. And even though now we know it’s no longer miraculous—you’ve tested it, after all—maybe they’re just choosing to act like it is, going through the motions. But I can’t get your captain to consider anything besides the insurgents.”

Biswal sighs deeply. He shuts his eyes, and she sees there’s something starved to his face now, as if all his worries have scored away layers of his flesh. Then he squats and sits on the ground, groaning as his lower vertebrae rebel. “Come on. Let’s take a seat.”

“Um. Okay.” Mulaghesh sits beside him.

He reaches into his pocket and takes out a flask. “I think I might have actually funded some piracy, buying this,” he says. “Rice wine.”

“What brand?”

“Cloud Story.”

Mulaghesh whistles. “Shit. I only ever drank that twice, and both times it was my birthday.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“Same person each time. Me.”

He hands her the flask. The rice wine is like milky gold, and it makes her head thrum pleasantly. “Better than I remember.”

“It’s your palate. You’re too used to the shit food and shit drink we get up here. It could be boat fuel and it’d still taste like a prized vintage.” He sighs again and looks at her. “Nadar is not alone in mistrusting the shtanis. Other officers have lost friends and comrades here. We’re in a war, Turyin. Maybe the first of many, as the Continent grows stronger. Ghaladesh might not want to admit it. The prime minister might not want to admit it. But the shtanis are fine with doing so. And someone in command must have the courage to admit it as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve seen some movements from the insurgents. Watching us, trying to find weaknesses. They keep withdrawing whenever we respond.” He sighs. “But you don’t think that this”—he nods to the tunnel—“and the murders have anything to do with the insurgents?”

“Maybe not nothing. But not as much as Nadar wishes.”

“I must be insane. But I’m willing to let you keep following this lead, wherever it goes. You’ve found out a lot of things no one else has, Turyin. I just hope you don’t find something that brings ruin down on our heads.”

“Me, too.”

Biswal looks down at the bottle of wine. “I wonder who they’ll replace me with. When I catch my own bullet here.”

“If you keep getting melancholy, Lalith, I’ll have to take that bottle away.”

“I’m not joking, Turyin. They boxed up my predecessor quick as a flash and replaced him—him and a dozen other officers here. It’s like the world just forgot them.” His eyes have a curious light to them, one Mulaghesh has only seen once here, when Biswal danced around the topic of the Summer of Black Rivers. “The least they can do is remember us. Remember those who took on the sins of our nation to keep it safe. Not all of us get a Battle of Bulikov, Turyin—a battle our people acknowledge and glorify. We’re not all so lucky as you. The rest of us are like the cartridge of a bullet, cast away once used. And we are asked to silently bear that burden. Which we, as patriots, do gladly.” Then he stands, turns, and walks back to the fortress.