City of Blades

10. The Chaff of Many Wars

Mulaghesh burns with anxiety as she walks back into SDC, but no one looks twice at her while she walks through the halls and up the stairs to her room. She opens the door and begins fumbling with her pockets, reaching for the letter, when she spots the washroom door inching open over her shoulder.

She’s not sure how she moves so fast, but suddenly her carousel is in her hand, pointed at the washroom door. Sigrud slowly sticks his head out of the bathroom and cocks an eyebrow at the pistol. “You seem…nervous. Was it a success?”

“That depends on your idea of success,” says Mulaghesh, sighing with relief. “Fuck, Sigrud. I almost shot you! Why don’t you knock or, I don’t know, start the evening outside of my room.”

“Because then my daughter will force me into some other duty: shaking hands, listening to workers.”

“I thought you wanted to get closer to her.”

“I do. She brings me to the people I need to see, then dumps me there, walks away as they begin talking. It is…impolite. But enough of that. You found something of Choudhry’s?”

“A message. In code.” She slides the paper out of her pocket. Sigrud walks forward—she notes that he seems to move silently, even though he’s nearly twice her size—takes it, and moves to the desk in the corner.

“I have laid out the materials we will need,” he says, sitting. “Lots of paper. Lots of pen and ink.”

“Nice to see you’ve set up shop. Shara gave me a codex of all the various encryption metho—”

“That will not be necessary.” Sigrud sits, pulls out a pen, and unfolds Choudhry’s message. “They made me memorize so many codes in my day….This I could do in my sleep. And that is a complaint, not a boast.”

He looks over the codes, then begins making small marks on the paper with a pencil, underlining a stray H or I or 3 or an M. He moves with a quiet, thoughtless grace, as if proofreading a letter.

“That’s not the only thing I found up there.” She groans as she takes off her coat, her back popping and crackling unpleasantly. “Whoever it is we’re hunting drilled a damned hole right down to the thinadeskite mines.”

Sigrud’s brow wrinkles ever so slightly as he mutters numbers to himself. “Mm? What?”

“Someone made a second mine entrance, basically. A little one. Looks like the kind of thing people would carve to escape a prison camp. Biswal and Nadar are convinced the Voortyashtani insurgents used it to bomb the mines, but…”

“But you are still convinced it was a Divinity, or something Divine.”

“Yeah. There’s an ulterior use for thinadeskite besides conducting electricity, or you can have the head off my fucking shoulders.”

He purses his lips, continues writing. “Anything on Choudhry? Besides this?”

“I’m no longer so sure she was mad. Or that she’s behind this, even. She worked her ass off to get this message to me, or someone from the Ministry. That’ll depend on what it says, though…which, we’re making progress on? Right?”

“Progress, yes. It’s a code used for trade delegates in Ahanashtan. Probably the least likely code to be known here. Which is why she used it, to be sure.”

“I don’t like this. I prefer my madwomen to be absolutely fucking stark mad, thank you very much. This takes thinking.”

“There is rice whisky in the washroom,” says Sigrud, “if you would like some.”

“Mm? What? You hid booze in my room?”

“I have booze hidden all over the place. Dead drop training has its uses beyond espionage.”

Mulaghesh finds the jug of whisky—cleverly squirreled away under the sink—and sits and drinks as Sigrud decrypts the message. He shakes his head sometimes, as if what he’s writing confuses him, but keeps going. Then, with something like a cringe on his face, he puts his pen down.

“Finished?” says Mulaghesh.

“I…do not know.”

“How can you not know if you’re finished?”

“Because I am not at all sure what I translated. Perhaps it is in code again, but…If so, it is one I do not know. Come and see.”

Mulaghesh stands and looks over his shoulder, reading:

Listen, listen, little priests

Coming now the bright white shores and all the flock there weeping

Orphans, the disused and forgotten, the chaff of many wars, like snow upon an endless plain

Listen, listen

I’ve spent too much time there. Put too much of myself through. My mind, my thoughts, some part of me, it’s unraveling, and I can’t keep the threads straight. I can feel myself losing myself and I don’t know what that means

No, I do. I know what it means.

I did not kill enough. One confirmed kill, one measly little murder, not enough, not enough to go there. It only accepts the warriors, you see, those whose hands have spilled oceans of blood, lakes of blood

I am trying, I am so sorry

The ore was strange, so peculiar, so odd, and something was amiss. When I neared it, when I sat in their labs and studied it for hours, I dreamed of things, of awful moments of my own past

the pistol barrel trembling as I raised it, her face dumb with surprise, the jolt as the bolt tip pierced my body and then the crack of my weapon in my hand

So I watched the mines. I did not know why. Something was wrong and I had nothing else to watch. I watched and watched and watched.

Saw a lantern. Then gone. Then a lone figure creeping across the hills, to the trees, to the ancient place. Then gone.

gone

I found the secret entrance, the tunnel. I waited to catch them when they exited. I tried to, at least. Fought them. But they struck me, hard, in the head. Lucky hit, lucky

I almost died

I think I almost died then

did I die

how could one even tell

I could go into the tunnels now but I could find no sign of who it was or what they were doing there, so I tried the ritual, the last one that I thought might work. I had sensed it almost working before, almost almost almost, like a key in a lock, all the tumblers almost falling into place

I could sense it wanted to. I just needed to try it in the right place

The mines

I saw them there, the lost army

They’re still there, across the deeps, down in the dark

with Her

someone must stop it, stop what’s coming

There is a man I have learned of, an ancient man who knows the ways of this place from long ago

They say he is a man but others say he is not a man but an idea that wears the image of a man

But perhaps

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps he knows the songs of Voortya’s opposite, the songs of sacrifice

He knows the rituals never written, never recorded, he knows the secret ways in and out of this world and the next world

He knows the way things were

The flow of life to death and death to life

Memory, old and withered, waiting upon the isle

I must find him

I must find him and find the ways across, so I can end them all, kill them all, stop what’s coming before it starts

Remember

Remember me, remember this

Remember that I tried

Sigrud and Mulaghesh are silent while they reflect on this. The room suddenly feels quite small and dark, the fire in the fireplace a low glimmering that gives off barely any light.

“Um,” says Mulaghesh. “Okay. So. Let’s try and extract whatever tangibles we can from this.”

“Good luck,” says Sigrud, standing. He walks to the fireplace and taps his pipe out onto the coals.

Mulaghesh holds up an index finger. “Okay. Um. One—it was not Choudhry who made the tunnel to the thinadeskite mines. Someone else made it, and Choudhry got the jump on them, but they got away. That would be how she received the head wound I’ve been hearing about, and it’s how she got into the mines to perform the Window to the White Shores. Unfortunately, odds are that whoever made the tunnel stopped using it the second they were found out, so I don’t think I can pull off another stakeout, like Choudhry did.”

“What if they left something in the mines to go back for?”

“Then it’s crushed flat as a half-drekel coin under all that rock.”

“Oh. Good point.”

“Second.” Mulaghesh sticks out another finger. “It sounds like Choudhry isn’t the person behind all this. She was hot on the heels of whoever it was, and maybe that’s how she came to find out about the murders—though she doesn’t mention the murders at all here.”

“If her message is true, yes. That is the case.”

“Yeah, and let’s just assume it’s true for now. Because it also suggests that Choudhry left Voortyashtan to go…somewhere. To see someone, some old Voortyashtani who might know rituals and rites even the locals would have never heard of—and likely ones that even Shara wouldn’t know of.”

“Could it even be possible for someone to live that long?” says Sigrud. “The Blink took place almost ninety years ago.”

“Eighty-six, to be exact. The Blink and the Plague wiped out tons of people, but not all of them. Perhaps some survived, had children, passed along secrets. But she also makes him sound strange…an idea wearing the image of a man? What does that mean?”

They sit in silence, each hoping the other will suggest something.

“What we don’t know,” says Sigrud, “we don’t know.”

“True enough. Moving on. Third.” Mulaghesh sticks out her ring finger. “It sounds like Choudhry experienced the same visions I did down in the thinadeskite mines, visions of the most violent moments of her own past, only she saw it in the thinadeskite labs. She mentions shooting someone with a pistol”—she reaches across her desk and flips through Choudhry’s file—“and she did receive a distinguished service award for an ‘altercation.’ You know what that means.”

Sigrud points a finger to the side of his head and drops his thumb, miming the hammer of a gun, and mouths the word Pow!

“Right. So somehow…Somehow the thinadeskite reacts to people who’ve seen combat, who have been forced to take lethal action, reaching out to them and making them remember those moments. Pandey mentioned it, I saw it, and now Choudhry. None of them mention seeing the violence from other eras like I did, though.”

“Maybe,” he says, “it is because you have killed many more people than they have.”

“Mayb—” She stops and looks at him. “Why do you say that?”

“I was a Ministry operative. It was my job to know things. And I mixed with many soldiers.”

Mulaghesh watches him clean the bowl of his pipe, stopping briefly to dig something out from between two of his teeth.

“And…what did you hear?” she asks.

He examines the chunk of food on his thumb and flicks it into the fire, where it sizzles. He regards her with a cold, steady gaze. “Nothing that would make me blush.”

They look at each other for a moment, Mulaghesh concerned and mistrustful, Sigrud blank and indifferent.

“You’re an unusual person, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” she says.

“I feel the same of you,” he says nonchalantly.

“I see.” She clears her throat. “Well. To return to what’s at hand…After these experiences, Choudhry grew suspicious just as I did. Which makes me ask, what the hells is in thinadeskite that does this? And why isn’t it registering as Divine?” She’s reminded of what Rada said while operating on the corpse: Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life. “None of Voortya’s other miracles work, right?”

“No. Voortya’s miracles are used as an example of how a Divinity’s miracles stopped working. That’s what I recall Shara saying. Voortya was, how did she say, the textbook example.”

“Except I saw the damned City of Blades. As well as whatever apparition of Voortya it was that destroyed the mines. And now we know Choudhry saw the city too—which makes me wonder if that’s where she disappeared to.”

Sigrud stops cleaning his pipe. “You think Sumitra Choudhry is in the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

“No one’s seen hide nor hair of her,” says Mulaghesh. “And besides the person she surprised coming out of the tunnel to the mines, I can’t see that she had any real enemies. She explicitly says in the message that she went somewhere. That’s the only logical conclusion, illogical as it may be.”

“So if she did go over to the City of Blades…why?”

“She came to the same conclusion I did—the Night of the Sea of Swords, the Voortyashtani apocalypse. She realized it might be coming, that someone might be trying to trigger it. Maybe Choudhry went there to try to stop it. But how she thought she could do that…I don’t know.” She tosses the decoded message back onto the desk. “Fuck. Not for the first time, I wish Shara were here. She’d know what to do.”

Sigrud packs his pipe until it is overflowing with what smells like abysmally poor tobacco. “Why don’t you just ask her?”

“She’s supposed to be hands-off with me. Industry forces looking over her shoulder, that kind of thing. The only means I have of contacting her is routing a telegram through Bulikov to Ahanashtan. It’d take days.”

“She didn’t tell you about the emergency line?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Her…emergency line. For contacting her.”

“You’re just repeating yourself. No. No, I have no idea what in the hells you’re talking about.”

He sticks his pipe in his mouth and screws up his face as he thinks about it. “Do you really want to talk to her?”

“Well…It’d be nice, sure, so—”

“Say no more.” He walks to the window and licks his finger. “Now…How did this stupid thing start? Ah, yes.” He then begins to draw on one pane of the window, his thick finger making delicate, graceful strokes on the glass.

“What are you doing?” says Mulaghesh. “Are y…Whoa.” She watches as his finger appears to dip into the glass, like it’s not a solid pane but is instead the surface of a puddle, somehow hanging there on the wall.

“It works here,” says Sigrud softly. “Good. It’s one of Olvos’s, who isn’t dead, so it should still work.”

She shivers. Something in the air changes: it’s like the shadows have all turned around, or perhaps the fire has grown larger but is now casting off dimmer light, or light of a hue her eye has trouble catching.

The pane of glass is now dark and opaque: Mulaghesh can see the harbor in the panes on either side of it, but in the one Sigrud touched she can now see nothing but black. She notices she can hear something new, too: a soft clicking, like that of a clock, though there is no clock in the room.

“I…think that worked,” he says slowly, not sounding at all convinced.

There’s the sound of someone muttering, “Hmm…Hunh?”

Mulaghesh looks around, trying to find its source. “What…What did you just do?”

Then the sound of something shifting, but it has a strange quality to it, as if the sound is bouncing up a metal pipe from far away.

“Shara?” says Sigrud. “Are you there?”

And then, somehow, there’s a woman’s voice saying, “What in the hells?”

There’s a click and the black pane changes, suddenly filling with golden light, which appears to be coming from a small electric lamp on a bedside table on the other side of the window.

This is, Mulaghesh knows, impossible: what is on the other side of the window is the harbor and the North Seas. Yet it’s like the pane of glass is a hole, and by looking through the hole Mulaghesh can see…

A bedroom. A woman’s bedroom. A very important woman’s bedroom, judging by the curtained, four-poster bed, the intricately wrought desk, the giant grandfather clock, and the countless paintings of very stern-looking officials wearing sashes and lots of ribbons and medals.

She’s seen this place before, she realizes. This is the prime minister’s mansion….

A face pokes through the curtains of the four-poster bed. It’s a familiar face, though it has far more lines and gray hairs than when Mulaghesh last saw it. It is also fixed in an expression of unspeakable, furious outrage.

“What…What!” says Shara Komayd. “What in hells are you doing, Sigrud?”

Mulaghesh says, “Ah, shit.”

“Turyin?” says Shara. Her voice is distant and wobbly, as if it’s not coming from her mouth but is being pulled out of her room, packaged up, transported to this room in the SDC headquarters, and unwrapped beside Mulaghesh’s ear. But it’s also much, much older and wearier than Mulaghesh remembers, as if Shara has done nothing but talk since they last met. “Turyin, are you mad? This is the one thing we absolutely cannot risk right now!”

“Okay,” says Mulaghesh. “Whoa. Hold on. I had no idea he was going to do that.” She looks at the pane of glass, as if trying to spot any hidden mechanisms. “This…This is a miracle, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s a damnable miracle! It is also three in the morning here! Are there any other obvious matters I need to confirm before you explain why you have interrupted me in a state of…of some serious undress? Assuming you have a reason, that is?”

Sigrud says, “Turyin thinks your officer has gone to the afterlife.”

Shara frowns. “What?”

“Um…Okay,” says Mulaghesh. “Let me start from the beginning here.” She tries to rattle off the current state of things—a much more rambling and disjointed version of the very conclusions she just went through with Sigrud.

Shara listens and grows so distracted she lets the curtains drop, revealing that she is wearing a set of bright pink-and-blue button-up pajamas. “But…But that’s not possible, Turyin,” she says when she finishes. “You can’t have seen her. Voortya is dead.”

“I know.”

“Very dead.”

“I know! You don’t think I’ve been thinking that every day since I’ve been here?”

“Yes, but…I mean, none of Voortya’s miracles work anymore. And I know. I tried them, all over the Continent. It was an easy way to determine if there were any alterations to reality in any given location, certain contortions of physical rules—”

“You’re losing me.”

“Fine. But the Divinity we know as Voortya is very, very much gone from this world.”

“I know that. But I saw what I saw.”

Shara sighs, fumbles with her nightstand, and puts on her spectacles. Then she walks to the window and says, “Press your translation of Choudhry’s message up against the glass. Hurry now. We can’t get caught like this…”

Mulaghesh does so. To her surprise, the surface of the pane of glass is quite hard.

She can’t see her, but she can hear Shara talk as she reads: “My word…Oh, my goodness gracious…What did that poor girl go through?”

“So you get the gravity of our situation.”

“Yes,” says Shara. Her voice sounds like she’s just aged ten years. “You may remove the message now, please.”

Mulaghesh takes it away. Shara is staring into space, blinking wearily. Then there’s a soft sound from the four-poster bed, a quiet coo, and Shara comes to life. She rushes back to the bed, sticks her head through the curtains, and shushes something. After a moment longer she returns to the window.

“You have company?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Something like that.” Her tone makes it clear that she’s not willing to discuss it.

“When’s the last time you got sleep?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Sleep?” asks Shara. She attempts to smile. “What’s that?”

“I take it things aren’t going well.”

“Oh, no. Not well at all. I fully expect this term in office will be my last.”

“What! But what about all your programs? What about the harbor?”

“Oh, well, they’ll be cut. The harbor they’ll keep—they’re contractually obliged to—but they’ll slash it to the bone. Unless whoever inherits the position from me chooses not to, of course, which seems unlikely. Anyway.” She rubs her eyes. “That is not the subject at hand. The subject at hand, I think, is one of sacrifice.”

“Of what?”

“Sacrifice. It grows clearer now. You know the story of Saint Zhurgut? How he fashioned Voortya’s sword from the arm of his son?”

“I’ve heard mention of it.”

“His son—his only child—fell in battle against the Jukoshtanis. This was before the Divinities united, of course. Anyway, instead of mourning and weeping, he struck off the hand of his son and presented it as a sacrifice to Voortya. This act of sacrifice was so great that it was transformed into a weapon for her, a tool of slaughter—the sword of Voortya.”

“Which is her personal symbol,” says Mulaghesh.

“Correct. But what many forget is that that act of sacrifice was done in mimicry of another, much older event—one that took place nearly one hundred years before. Because though it’s true Voortya was the first Divinity to create an afterlife, she could not do it alone. She was the Divinity of destruction. She could not build, or create. Such a capacity was beyond her. So she had to reach out to someone who could. Her opposite, as Choudhry mentions in her message—Ahanas.”

“Ahanas?” says Mulaghesh, confused. “The…the Divinity of plants?”

“Of growth, Turyin. Of fecundity, fertility, life—and creation. In other words, the very antithesis of Voortya in every way. In the very early days of the Continent, before the Divinities even united, it’s recorded that Voortya reached out to her opposite and asked for a truce. And, for a period, Voortya…courted her.”

“Courted her? Like as in—”

“As in romantically,” says Shara. “Sexually. Yes.”

“So Voortya was…”

“She was a Divinity. Which means our terms for whatever actions she might have taken do not have much application. Regardless, it became clear that Voortya had ends beyond romance. She used her relationship with the Divinity Ahanas to create the City of Blades, the ghostly island where her followers would wait for her after their deaths. The most common depiction of its creation has the two Divinities wading out into the sea and the white shores arising under their feet. It was, in some ways, both in accordance with and in complete contradiction to their own natures: life after death, creation beyond destruction. It was a powerfully self-contradictory act, and it required the two Divinities to become so entwined that, on some level, it wasn’t easy to tell one apart from the other. But once Voortya had gotten what she wanted—once she had secured an afterlife for her followers—she separated herself from Ahanas. Which was not an easy thing to do, at this point.”

Mulaghesh remembers the drawings on the walls of Choudhry’s room. “She cut off her own hand, didn’t she?” she says softly.

Shara cocks her head. “How did you know that?”

“Choudhry painted it on her walls. Two figures standing on an island, one severing her hand at the wrist. She cut off her own hand while Ahanas held it, didn’t she?”

Shara pushes her glasses up her nose. “Yes. Yes, she did. This is an interpretation of what, for we mortals, is an inconceivable act. But it is an apt one. Voortya was forced to mutilate herself in some fashion to strip herself away from Ahanas, to stay true to her nature and remain the Divinity her flock had chosen to follow. It was a tremendously traumatic event for both Divinities, and even after the Continent chose to unite, the two Divinities and two peoples refused to have anything to do with one another. But I suspect it was far more traumatic for Voortya.”

“Why?”

“She changed significantly. Before this event, Voortya was always depicted as a four-armed animal, a creature of tusks and horns and teeth. Not unlike a monster. After this, though, she began being depicted as a four-armed human woman dressed in the arrayments of battle: armor and sword and spear. And she never spoke again.”

“Never?”

“Never. There is a lot of speculation about this transformation. Some wonder if her trauma left her mute. But others suggest that her interactions with Ahanas changed her: she tasted, very briefly, life and love. She tasted an existence beyond one of torment and destruction. As a creature of war, she had never imagined that this could even exist. But then, suddenly, she did. She understood what was possible. And then she had to abandon it, and return to what she was.”

“Why did she do that?”

Shara shrugs. “I suspect it was because her people needed her. She had promised them an afterlife, and she was sworn to deliver. These things have a power of their own, you see. Voortya had never been defeated before this moment. She had never lost a battle, nor had her people. But in order to accomplish this victory, in order to win and create this life beyond death for her children, she had to defeat herself, to strike down her own being, to sacrifice herself. Again, the act of self-contradiction: life through death, victory through defeat. And, having done so, I think she never really recovered.”

“So what does this have to do with anything?”

“I suspect,” says Shara slowly, “that if the Voortyashtani afterlife still exists somewhere, then its persistence can somehow be traced back to this one act. A sacrifice is a promise, in a way, a symbolic exchange of power. Voortya gave up immense power to create the afterlife. I suspect that power escaped the wrath of the Kaj, and can still be found somewhere, anchoring her life beyond death to this world.”

“So…where is it?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Where is what?”

“This, I don’t know, power?”

“Oh, I’ve no idea,” says Shara. “We’re far beyond the realm of conventional knowledge here. Voortya’s interactions with Ahanas occurred before Bulikov was even founded. I suspect you’re dealing with something that took place back in the very early days of existence, before the Divinities understood what they themselves really were.”

“Could it be…Could it be the thinadeskite?”

“What, the thinadeskite as the physical manifestation of this power?” asks Shara. “That’s…Well, that’s not a bad idea, Turyin. But that too leaves a lot to be answered for—this thing you saw, this apparition—if it had anything in common with the original Voortya, why would she destroy the mines, the source of her own power?”

“You yourself said she was traumatized,” says Mulaghesh. “Maybe we’re dealing with another mad Divinity.”

“Perhaps. But it doesn’t seem to fit. Voortya never spoke, and in most depictions of her—when she took a comprehensible, humanoid form, that is—she had four arms and one missing hand. None of this matches up with what you saw and heard. And I would need undeniable proof if I were to try to do anything. I am not quite as powerful as when you left me, Turyin.”

“So…So how does that help me figure out what to do next?” asks Mulaghesh, frustrated. “I don’t need stories, I need leads!”

Shara sighs deeply. Mulaghesh is suddenly aware of how frail Shara seems, and she realizes that her demand is likely just one of thousands Shara must hear every single day. “I know. I know it’s not what you wanted. But I suspect it’s all I can give you. It is known that Voortyashtanis possessed a ritual to glimpse into the life beyond death, into the City of Blades—the Window to the White Shores. If there is a ritual that allowed them to fully cross over, I suspect it is a fusion of a Voortyashtani rite and an Ahanashtani rite. And, because of this curious quality, I expect it’s never been recorded. The one person who might know, it seems, is the old man Choudhry mentioned.”

“And he told Choudhry how to cross over. And she went there to…to try to stop whatever’s happening. But obviously she failed somehow.”

“I know,” says Shara. “But you will succeed.”

“I know I have to! You don’t have to tell me that!”

“I did not say you have to succeed,” says Shara. “I said you will. There is not a doubt in my mind, Turyin, that you can resolve this. You have been through far worse trials and faced far more difficult situations than this. You have a military fortress at your disposal, as well as a massive construction fleet. Though they may be unwilling, they are still potential resources.”

“And just how in the hells am I going to use them?” snaps Mulaghesh, furious.

“In Bulikov,” says Shara, “how did you convince me to collapse the tunnel to the Seat of the World, the greatest discovery in modern history, mere moments after I’d discovered it?”

“I…Hells, I can’t remember!”

“You did it,” says Shara, “by being a very belligerent, obnoxious woman.”

Mulaghesh stares at her in disbelief. “Well…Well, thank you very fucking much!”

“You have a talent,” says Shara, “for valuing what you feel is right over anything else, including, occasionally, the people around you. You do what you feel is right not because it is satisfying, but because you find any other option to be intolerable. This makes you incredibly frustrating to deal with. But it also means you find solutions where many others would simply give up.”

“But…But this is a fucking Divinity we’re talking about! Surely if you went to the Ministry and told them what would happen—”

“We have nothing definitive,” says Shara. “No concrete evidence, no proof—only your testimony, and that message of Choudhry’s. A half-coherent letter from an agent who went mad and has vanished, and your story, part of a clandestine operation that is occurring completely off the books. If I were to use what little we have here to mobilize our forces under the precept that another Divine event was imminent, there is a not-insignificant chance that it could result in something very similar to a coup.”

“A coup?” says Mulaghesh, aghast. “In Saypur?”

“I’m sure it would begin as an impeachment,” says Shara wearily. “Or something wearing much more civilized trappings. But I know there are forces in the military and industry that would be the ones to ramrod it through. I’ve broken a lot of rules to put you where you are now, Turyin. Without solid evidence, my opponents in Ghaladesh would say I was fabricating the whole thing, trying to drum up support where I have none. And when the dust settled, it would be these figures that would possess much more global power—something that could be terribly bad for Saypur, and the world.”

Mulaghesh rubs the center of her forehead. “I thought you were going to toss all those ratfucks out on their ears when you got elected.”

Shara smiles weakly. “There are rather a lot of ratfucks, unfortunately.”

“So I’m on my own,” says Mulaghesh. “Even after this.”

“No, no. Not alone. I do not think you are on your own. On the contrary, you have Sig—”

She stops speaking and looks over Mulaghesh’s shoulder. Mulaghesh turns and sees that Sigrud has leapt to his feet and is silently stalking toward a blank section of wall. He examines the wall, looking it up and down, then looks at Shara in the windowpane and shakes his head.

Shara mouths, “Good luck,” to Mulaghesh, wipes her fingers across the glass, and vanishes. The glass grows transparent yet again.

Sigrud turns to the wall and feels along the crown molding. His finger finds a carving of a whale tooth. He presses it—there’s a click!—and the wall falls back like a door.

Sigrud dives into the gap. There’s a cry of surprise and possibly pain from the other side. Mulaghesh has already grabbed the carousel and is raising it at the secret door, finger close to the trigger but not on it, not yet. She paces to line up along the wall behind the door, holding the carousel just at head-height.

Someone tumbles into the room, stumbling from a hard shove. Mulaghesh’s instincts kick in and she puts the carousel’s sights right on their head, though it takes her a second to realize this particular head possesses bright blond hair arranged in an urbane coiffure, along with two furious blue eyes watching her from behind a pair of severe-looking glasses.

“Shit,” says Mulaghesh. “Signe, between you and your father, I’m wondering if your whole family just doesn’t know how to use a door.”

Sigrud walks back in and shuts the secret door. “How dare you!” Signe says to him. “How dare you treat me like that!”

He ignores her and sits back down on the couch with his back to them, and lights his pipe.

Mulaghesh looks at the panel in the wall. “I guess you forgot to tell me you had one of these in my room.”

“You didn’t ask,” Signe says angrily. “You knew we had servants’ doors all throughout SDC headquarters. Of course we’d have one here; this is a vice-presidential suite”—she looks around at the chicken bones and tobacco—“though I see you have treated it with your usual amount of care.”

“Why would I want one of these in my room?”

“If you had ordered food it’d have come through that very door. It’s all perfectly innocent!”

“I can order food from my room?”

“What else did you think the button in the corner with the sign RING FOR SERVICE is for?” She looks back at Mulaghesh, who has not yet lowered her gun. “Please stop pointing that at me.”

“What did you hear?” asks Mulaghesh.

Signe glances around the room. Looking, Mulaghesh realizes, for the third person she heard. “Nothing.”

“That’s a pretty bold lie.”

“I didn’t come here to eavesdrop!”

“Maybe. But that’s what you wound up doing.” Mulaghesh lowers the carousel and sets two chairs up facing one another. She sits in one and gestures to the other. Signe slowly sits. “So. What’d you hear?”

“You can’t shoot me, you know,” says Signe. “This is my company’s property. I could stand up and leave right now.”

“Try it,” says Mulaghesh. “I might have one hand, but I still know how to restrain someone and not leave a mark.”

Signe looks to her father. “Are you going to allow this?”

“I remember today,” he says, “when you introduced me to the welders here, then abandoned me, leaving me with them. It is no fun, being stuck in a difficult spot.”

“I…I swear,” says Signe, “you two are the most frustrating, useless people alive! But of course you’d gang up on me; you both know each other so well.”

Mulaghesh says simply, “The afterlife.”

With those two words Signe freezes, just for a second, her pale blue eyes flicking away and then back.

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. “You heard. I’m betting you heard a lot. Why don’t we have a civil conversation about this?”

Signe considers her options. Then she takes out her silver box filled with her tiny black cigarettes. She lights a match with a thumbnail—a trick Mulaghesh feels like she’s been sitting on for a while—takes a long drag, and exhales, a seemingly endless river of smoke flowing from somewhere deep inside of her. “All right. I will be direct. You…You think Sumitra Choudhry—poor little mad Sumitra Choudhry—has somehow traveled to Voortya’s City of Blades?”

“She seems to say that’s what she was intending to do,” says Mulaghesh.

“And I assume that what is—or was—being mined up by the fortress was this…thinadeskite you mentioned?”

Mulaghesh grimaces. So much for state secrets. “Yes.”

“And both you and Choudhry believe this material has some kind of connection to the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

“Jury’s still out on that one.”

“At the very least,” says Signe, “you think it is connected to Voortya…whom you said you saw. That you…you saw.” Mulaghesh feels Signe’s bright, hard gaze poring over her, studying her every feature, and she is suddenly aware of how intensely, furiously bright this young woman is. “Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t know what I believe. But I know what I saw.”

Mulaghesh doesn’t like the condescending, dismissive smile creeping into Signe’s face. “You’re mad,” says Signe. “The two of you, if he believes it. The three of you, if Choudhry did too. I’m glad I heard what I did, because now I know I’m dealing with absolute loonies, rather than merely suspecting it!”

“I’ve been there,” says Mulaghesh quietly. “I’ve seen it. Remember when I almost fainted before the statue of Voortya in your yard? It took me there. It showed me something. Sumitra Choudhry had been at that spot before me, performed some rite, and I walked right into its aftereffects.”

“But even the Voortyashtanis believe the afterlife’s gone!” says Signe. “Everyone accepts that now, when you die, you just rot in the damned ground! If these people don’t believe it, why should you?”

“They haven’t seen gods before,” says Mulaghesh fiercely. “And I have. I almost died facing them. You are young and clever and brash. But I have seen so, so much more of life than you have, child. I have been so close to the Divine before, I could smell it. And I smell it again, right now.”

Signe grows sober at this. She looks back and forth between Mulaghesh and Sigrud, who is still facing away. “Do…Do you really believe what you’re saying?”

“I do,” says Mulaghesh. She sits back and watches Signe coldly. “And I also believe that if the Voortyashtani afterlife is possible, the Night of the Sea of Swords is possible as well. I also believe that that makes investing in this harbor a damn stupid idea, isn’t it? And you know there are forces in Saypur just itching to rebuke the prime minister, cut her pet project loose, and walk away from it, leaving it to die. I believe they’re looking for any excuse to scrap it. And I believe I could tell them the CTO of SDC was hiding Voortyashtani artifacts in order to blackmail the locals. I could tell them anything because frankly, Signe, they’re just waiting for an excuse. If one of Shara’s own trusted deputies says it’s over, then it’s over.”

Signe stares at her in horror. “You…You wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t? I just told you what I saw, what I believe. This is my greatest nightmare come to life, Signe Harkvaldsson. Do not trifle with me as I try to amend the situation.”

“What is it you want?” asks Signe, panicked. “To scare me into silence? What would I gain from telling anyone what you believe?”

“I don’t want to scare you. I want you to help, damn it.” She grabs the decoded message and shoves it into Signe’s hands. “You’re Voortyashtani. You were raised here. Look at this and tell me if you see one damn thing that sounds familiar, that means anything. Anything.”

Signe stares at Mulaghesh, confused, then turns to the message. “I have never been told to read something so mad with quite so much pressure. It’s absolut—”

She trails off. Then all the color slowly leaves her face.

“What?” says Mulaghesh.

“Oh, no,” Signe says quietly. “Oh, oh, please no.”

Sigrud turns around, now concerned. “Signe? What is wrong?”

Signe sits frozen for nearly half a minute, then shuts her eyes. “I hoped it wasn’t there. I hoped it’d just disappeared somehow, swallowed by the seas.”

“What are you talking about?” says Mulaghesh.

She says softly, “The Isle of Memory.”

“It’s real?” says Mulaghesh. “This island is real?”

“Of course it’s real,” says Signe. She sounds terribly sad and weary. “I know it is. I’ve been there before.”

“Can you take me there?”

Signe bows her head, and it’s shocking to see someone who is usually the picture of confidence crumple so thoroughly. Then, very quietly, she says, “Yes.”

The aluminum roof of the SDC guard booth plinks and plonks with countless fat raindrops, which sound more like a rain of marbles. Lennart Björck, cursing, maneuvers all his pots and pans so they catch each tiny waterfall. This small armada of crockery is his constant and unwelcome partner during his guard shifts, for though he tries to patch the roof after each torrential downpour, there’s always something he missed.

He does a double take as he dumps one of the larger pots out of the booth window. Someone is walking down the road to them, slipping and sliding in the muck. It seems to be a woman, from their size and the tendrils of wet hair peeking out of their heavy cloak, but he can’t see much else about them. Not that he would expect to in this weather. You want as much between you and the atmosphere in Voortyashtan as you can manage.

He squints. The woman is carrying something very curious: a very large pine box, about four or five feet long. It’s also quite flat, not more than three or four inches thick.

He puts his rifling close, leaning it against the wall. Then he stands at the window and waits for her. She struggles up and maneuvers the pine box around so she can speak to him. It looks like the box is immensely heavy. “Delivery for General Mulaghesh from the fortress!”

“General Mulaghesh?” he says. “The Saypuri?” He looks closer at her. Her face is bound up in a scarf, and he can’t make much out about her. “Who is it from?”

“Captain Nadar.”

“Oh. Well then. Here, hand it here.”

She hesitates. “I’m told it’s a very sensitive item.”

“I can’t allow any items to enter the harbor works without a proper inspection first, miss. We’re at a high security alert.”

She hesitates some more, then reluctantly hefts up the pine box. “It is a very old item, they told me. Not to be touched. Especially with the naked skin. Oils, you see.”

“Yes, yes,” says Björck. He takes the pine box—it easily weighs over fifty pounds—places it on a table, and opens it. He gasps softly. “Oh-hoh.”

Inside is a massive, glimmering sword, over four feet long and thick as a butcher’s cleaver. Its handle is beautiful yet disturbing, featuring patterns of tusks and teeth and chitin. And the blade shines so strangely, as if it’s not a sword but a mirror. He checks the lining—being careful not to touch the sword, following the woman’s instructions—but he sees no hint of explosives or hidden detonation devices.

He stares into his reflection in the blade. He likes what he sees, for some reason. His eyes flash handsomely; his shoulders look broader. Somehow he looks stronger in the blade. Fiercer. Powerful.

“It is not to be touched, they said,” says the woman again.

“Mm?” says Björck, startled. “Oh. Yes, of course.” He shuts the box and rehooks the clasp. “Due to the increased security, I’ll have to be the one to bring the package to her. Unless you have written approval from the fortress…”

“Captain Nadar did not give me any,” says the woman. “But…provided you do not touch it…it should be no issue.” She bows. “Thank you. And good day,” she says, and she turns and walks up the road.

Björck watches her, thinking this all very queer. Then he puts the box under his arm and flags over his supervisor. Upon hearing that it’s from the fortress for the general, he’s given permission to go ahead.

The rain begins to let up as he walks down the seawall road. With each step the box feels a little heavier and a little heavier, as if begging to be dropped, to taste the glint of moonlight, and be held.

I wonder, Björck thinks, why it is I think such things?

“Signe…,” says Sigrud. “Are…Are you sure you—”

“We need to go to my office,” Signe says suddenly. She stands, and suddenly all the fear and anxiety is gone from her. “I’ll need maps.”

“O-Okay,” says Mulaghesh.

“Just one moment, first.” Signe goes back to the secret door, opens it, and grabs a briefcase that was sitting on the stairs. Mulaghesh pauses to wonder exactly what brought Signe to her room in the first place.

Signe’s office lies deep in the recesses of SDC headquarters, which comes as a surprise to Mulaghesh. Someone as high-powered and valuable as Signe Harkvaldsson should surely have an office on the top floor with huge windows. Yet her office is almost in the basement, and resembles a loading dock converted into a loft.

But the room is obscured by what looks like, to Mulaghesh’s eye, racks and racks of clothing, each one labeled with numbered tags, starting at 1.0000 and going up to…well, the biggest number she sees is 17.1382. As she passes one rack Mulaghesh cranes her head to get a look at it, and she sees that they’re not clothes but blueprints, thousands and thousands of plans of things that, from what she sees, never got built.

Signe leads them to a large table in the center, an austere block of white stone that’s covered in yet more blueprints. At the table’s center are square stone cups filled with a variety of drafting materials: pens, pencils, rulers, abacuses, set squares, magnifying glasses, and several types of compasses. Next to these are three ashtrays, all quite full. Signe tsks as she approaches. “I’ll have to remind my assistant to dump these out.”

She makes them wait as she rolls up the blueprints and files them away. “Don’t touch anything!” she warns as she paces away through the racks.

Sigrud stares around himself in awe. “My daughter,” he says slowly, “lives here?”

“I don’t see a bed,” says Mulaghesh. “But yeah, I get that impression.”

Signe returns with a large, colorful map fluttering in her hands like a flag. “Here we are,” she says. She lays the map out. It’s a map of the coastline, including the flow of the oceanic currents, though there have been some alterations to where the Solda passes Voortyashtan: dozens of little red blocks are clustered together in a manner that reminds Mulaghesh of a child’s strategy game, like Batlan.

“What am I looking for here?” says Mulaghesh.

“This is an SDC map of all the coastlines and currents of the region. But what we’re looking for…” Then she says, “Ah!” and points to a flicker in the thousands of tiny blue lines a few dozen miles southwest of Voortyashtan. “There.”

Mulaghesh peers at where she’s pointing. “There’s nothing there.”

“I know,” says Signe. “But that’s where it is.”

“The Isle of Memory?”

“Yes. It’s real. That’s where it lies.”

“Then why isn’t it on the map?”

“Because I removed it.”

Mulaghesh and Sigrud slowly turn to look at her.

“Some places aren’t worth going to,” says Signe quietly. “Some places deserve to be forgotten. And that’s one of them.”

“What is it?” asks Sigrud. “What is there?”

“It is part of a chain of small islands,” she says. “The last, and the largest. It was a place where the highlanders conducted a…a rite of passage for adolescents. They’d take children down out of the mountains, along the river, and to the shore, where boats would be waiting. Then we’d sail southwest, along the coast, through the islands, until we found it.” Her face is grim and haunted. “They called it the Tooth. At its top was a ruin—an ancient old place made of metal and knives. It was rumored a man lived in it, an old man who remembered everything—a man of memory, in other words—but I thought it was just a story, a myth. We saw no man, and no one seemed to expect us to. I thought at the time that it was a place that once had been Divine and held some specific purpose that was lost—but the highlanders, being traditional, kept coming back, kept fulfilling their oath. Those islands…they are a very strange place.”

“What did they do there?” asks Sigrud. “The highlanders?”

Signe purses her lips and takes out a cigarette. “Bad things.”

Mulaghesh clears her throat. “So that’s where Choudhry went, yes? Then how exactly am I going to get to this Tooth? I don’t know how to sail, and I sure as hells can’t swim that far.”

“You don’t need to know how to sail,” says Signe, lighting yet another cigarette. “Because I do.”

Björck trudges up the muddy pathway to the SDC lighthouse, the seawall tapering off to his left. Someday soon, they say, this will all be paved over and landscaped, a place worthy of being an international embassy, the world’s first impression of SDC’s accomplishments as they begin to sail up the Solda. But for now, it is—like everything in Voortyashtan, in Björck’s opinion—soaking wet and covered with gritty mud.

He hears a shout behind him and awkwardly turns, the heavy pine box slipping down his arm. He frowns when he sees who’s running up.

“Ach, Oskarsson,” he says to himself, dismayed. “Of all the filthy dogs who had to catch me now…”

“Björck!” says the young Dreyling, trotting up. “What in the hells are you doing up here? Why aren’t you at the gate?”

He glowers at Jakob Oskarsson, fifteen years his junior and yet several positions his superior. Björck is keenly aware of the rumors that Oskarsson is the son of one of the Dreyling city leaders who helped drive out piracy, and thus was instrumental to the formation of the United Dreyling States; but Björck is also keenly aware of the other rumors suggesting Oskarsson’s father was in league with the pirates, and only backstabbed them when he saw the writing on the wall. Whatever the cause, Jakob Oskarsson’s father was powerful enough to get his son into a good place at SDC, despite Oskarsson having no experience in construction or seafaring, and certainly no personal virtues of his own.

“Delivery for the general,” says Björck gruffly. Then he adds, “Sir.”

“Delivery?” says Oskarsson. He bites at a fingernail. “How peculiar. Did you check it?”

“Of course I checked it, sir. It is a sword, just a sword.”

“A sword?” says Oskarsson, agog. “Who is sending the general a sword?”

“It comes from the fortress.” Björck shrugs. “I know better than to question that.”

Oskarsson leans back on his heels and scratches his chin, thinking. “A special sword then, from the fortress, for the general…You know, Björck, perhaps I should be the one to deliver this to the general. It would be more befitting of someone of my rank, yes?”

Björck chooses to fix his gaze on a light pole four feet to Oskarsson’s right, fearing that if he were to look at this impudent creature’s face he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from breaking it. “As you wish, sir.” He hands it over. “She did say not to touch it.”

“Who did?”

“The messenger. That is what she said to me. Do not touch the contents.”

Oskarsson thinks about this, then shrugs, laughs, and places the box on the seawall. “Let me at least see what kind of sword this is.” He opens it up and, like Björck, gasps at its beauty. “My word…What a creation of a thing this is.”

“Yes,” says Björck dourly.

“Yet who could possibly wield it? It must almost be too heavy to lift.”

Oskarsson stares down into the mirrored blade, transfixed. Then something changes in his eyes, and Björck realizes what he’s thinking.

“She…She did say not to touch it, sir,” says Björck.

“And this woman, is she deputy security chief? Or better? Is she the CEO of SDC?”

“N-no, sir.”

“And if the deputy security chief wishes to place security first, and hold the sword just to see if it is dangerous, is that a bad thing?”

Björck can tell that security is the farthest thing from Oskarsson’s mind: he wishes to hold this thing, to feel its heft and power. “I…I—”

“No,” says Oskarsson. “No it is not. At least, it is not if any sensible guard does not wish to be placed on suspension without pay, at least.”

Björck knows that Oskarsson does not make idle threats when it comes to suspension. He shuts his mouth and looks away as Oskarsson laughs. “Always so serious, Björck. That is your problem.” He reaches for the sword. “So serious that no one can ever stand to be around y—”

He stops short when his hand touches the sword. Then he just stands there, apparently frozen.

“Uh. Sir?”

Oskarsson stares straight ahead, mouth open, face blank.

“Oskarsson? Sir? Are you all right?”

He does not respond. His throat makes a few low clicks.

“Should I fetch a medic, sir?”

Björck shivers then, not from fear but because it is suddenly bitterly, bitterly cold, as if an icy wind just happened to snake down the shore and through his sleeves. He glances at the sword and pauses, staring at its blade.

Just a few moments ago the blade was facing Oskarsson’s face, the young man’s arrogant eyes reflected back at him. But now it’s different. Now the face in the sword is not human at all.

It is like a mask, perhaps made of metal, wrought in the image of a crude, skeletal face, eyes small and far apart, the nose a tiny slit. Strange, monstrous-looking horns and tusks blossom from the back of the mask, like some kind of depraved substitution for hair.

Björck looks at Oskarsson’s face. It is still the same face, though his gaze is dead and lifeless. Yet the sword now shows this other, distorted creature standing in his place.

All intelligence slowly dies in Oskarsson’s face. A slow exhale escapes from his lips in a hiss. Then the hiss catches voice and becomes a low, loud humming noise—a sustained om that grows and grows. The buzzing, moaning sound does not seem to get louder, but instead seems to burrow within Björck’s ears and even his body, resonating with his feet, arms, bones, then with the very brick of the seawall road, an endless moan that far exceeds the capacity of any human lung.

“Sir,” says Björck. “What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?”

Oskarsson lifts his head to stare at the sky. A waterfall of blood erupts from his eyes and nose and mouth, pouring out of his face to run down his body. Björck watches in horror as the blood twists around Oskarsson’s shoulders, congealing and blackening, turning a rainbow of strange and monstrous colors, almost seeming to harden. It is as if this rain of gore has its own mind and it is cocooning him, remaking him into…something.

Björck shrieks in terror. Perhaps it is out of instinct—or perhaps it is due to his own long-suppressed feelings about Oskarsson himself—but Björck darts forward and shoves Oskarsson, sending the man toppling backward, over the seawall and into the dark waters, still clutching the immensely heavy sword.

There’s a quiet sploosh. Björck looks at his hands, which are covered in dark blood. Then, screaming, he sprints for the nearest guard.

“Hold on,” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes,” says Sigrud, bristling. “Hold on.”

Signe holds her hands up with the air of a schoolteacher asking for silence. “I have already considered your objections. You,” she says to Mulaghesh, “don’t want me around because you don’t trust me. However, I am likely the person who knows the coastline the best, as I’ve been staring at maps of it for what feels like most of my life. And I’m the one who’s been there. And you,” she says to Sigrud, “don’t want me to do it because you think it’s dangerous. You would prefer to do it yourself, because you are used to being in danger, and in fact you prefer to do this sort of dashing skullduggery rather than do what you need to be doing, which is staying here and inspiring the one thousand Dreylings working night and day to keep their national economy afloat. However, having seen morale hugely increase since your arrival, I will not allow it to now fall. Your place is here, with the people who are working for you. In the grand scheme of things, I am”—she grits her teeth, and seems to have to dig the final words out of some nasty part of herself—“less important than you.”

“Aren’t you basically running the harbor?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Somewhat,” she says. “After a few final large obstructions are cleared, we have multiple strategic plans for mopping up, ones that I designed months ago. I can afford to be missing for a few days, or I can soon.”

Sigrud shakes his head. “I do not like this,” he says. “I do not like this plan one bit.”

Signe rolls her eyes. “You forget I have been to some of the most difficult parts of Voortyashtan. I was raised in them.”

“And I have no desire to see you go back to them!”

“If the general here is correct—and I am reluctantly forced to admit that she, at least, believes it to be true—then everything I’ve worked for is in peril,” says Signe. “Everything I’ve spent my life preparing could be destroyed!”

“Your life?” says Sigrud. “You think five years is a life? Five years is no time at all, it is a blink of an eye!”

“Five years for me,” says Signe, “but we are talking billions of drekels hanging in the balance here—fortunes for decades to come!”

“Do you think only in money? Is that what you’ve become?

“Money?” says Signe, furious. “Money? You think I’m here to make money? No, Father dear, what I’m here to do is put you both out of a job!”

Sigrud and Mulaghesh glance at one another.

“Huh?” says Mulaghesh.

“People like you,” says Signe. “You think the world’s decided in fortresses, atop battlements, from far behind razor wire and fences. It’s not, not anymore. The world’s decided in countinghouses. We don’t listen to the march of boots; we listen to type machines and calculation machines pounding out revenues and budgets. This is how civilization progresses—one innovation at the right time, changing the very way the world changes. It just needs one big push to start the momentum. Thinadeshi herself knew that. She tried. And we are left to take up her work.”

Sigrud shakes his head. “I…I do not doubt you. And I do not doubt what you are doing. I commend you for it.”

“Then what?”

“I just…I just wish you to know that there is more to life than this. There is more to life than these…these great tasks we set for ourselves.”

Signe slowly grinds out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You misjudge me.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“You do not know me. If you wanted to, you would.”

“If I could have broken down those prison walls, I—”

“I know you were on the Continent for almost a decade!” shouts Signe. “I know you were free for years, running about with Komayd, doing her dirty work! You could have come home at any time if you wanted to, you could have known us if you wanted to, but you didn’t! You just left us up here, in this…this hell!”

“I did not wish to expose you to what I was!” he says. “The…the things I saw in prison…the things I did, the things they did to me…Your lives were better off without me.”

“Until Komayd said it was time for you to run home,” says Signe. She laughs bitterly. “Here is the truth of it, Father. You are a brave man when you have a knife in your hand. But when faced with another person who truly needs you, I think you are a cowa—”

She stops as they hear the sirens sounding in the harbor, a low, rising wail.

“What in hells is that?” says Mulaghesh.

Signe looks to the windows. “The alert siren,” she says. “Something’s wrong. We…We must be under attack!”

Signe, Sigrud, and Mulaghesh all sprint up toward the first floor of the SDC building, only to find Signe’s chief of security Lem sprinting in the opposite direction. “There you are,” he says, gasping. “We had some…some kind of attack happen.”

“Where?” demands Signe. “What happened?”

“It’s out front. Just in front of the lighthouse, in fact. Should we notify the fortress?”

Signe looks to Mulaghesh, who nods once.

“Yes,” says Signe. “Better safe than sorry. Now show me.”

As they walk, Lem summarizes the events. “…Deputy Chief Oskarsson stopped him just outside to inspect the package, and found it was some kind of…sword.”

“Sword?” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes. A ceremonial sword of some kind.” He looks at her sidelong. “I take it you don’t know about this?”

Mulaghesh grimly shakes her head.

Lem shoves the door open for them as they run outside. “That’s not good.”

“So what?” says Signe. “Someone tried to give Mulaghesh a sword? Exactly how did this constitute an attack serious enough to sound the alarm?”

“Well…Because then this happened.”

He gestures ahead to the seawall road, where two SDC trucks sit idling in the road. Beside them stands a crowd of armed Dreylings looking at something on the ground. When they see Lem and Signe they part and stand back.

Something dark and thick lies in puddles on the road. Sigrud sniffs the air. “Blood,” he says softly.

“Yes,” Lem says, leading them over.

“Was someone injured?” asks Mulaghesh.

“That’s…much less clear, ma’am,” says Lem. He points to a group of guards huddled on the other side of the road, then gestures to them. They escort over a tall, jittery Dreyling. The man’s face is pale as snow, and his breath has the sour smell of vomit to it.

“Björck,” says Signe to the pale Dreyling. “What happened?”

He shakes his head. “Jakob…I mean, Deputy Chief Oskarsson…He opened the box, and he touched the sword, and then he just…changed.”

As they listen to his story, Mulaghesh and Sigrud exchange a glance. Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow—Divine?

Sigrud nods once. Almost certainly.

Björck shakes his head. “The sound he made was so horrible…I panicked. I pushed him. He fell over the wall, into the waters. But the sword did something to him. Before I pushed him, when I looked at his reflection in the blade, he…it wasn’t him anymore, it was something else. Something else standing in his place.”

Mulaghesh and Sigrud look over the seawall. The waters are dark and swirling, sloshing up and down a small concrete loading dock just fifteen feet below them. “I assume that would have happened to me if I’d gotten it,” says Mulaghesh. “Who gave you the box to deliver? Was it a woman?”

The Dreyling nods.

“And what did she look like?” asks Mulaghesh.

“I could not see her. She wore a cloak, and a scarf….And it was raining then.”

Sigrud leans out over the water, frowning, though Mulaghesh can’t see what worries him so.

“What did she sound like?” asks Mulaghesh. “Old? Young?”

“She sounded…I do not know. Normal. No strong accent, nothing notable. She was short. Wore dark robes. She just went up to the street there.” He points.

Sigrud cocks his head, still staring at the waters below the seawall.

“We could do searches in the city,” says Signe. “But a fat lot of good that will do. So many people come i—”

Sigrud says, “There is something down there.”

“What? Besides the ocean, you mean?” says Signe.

“Yes…There is something rising u—”

There’s a sudden thrashing sound in the water below them, and something huge goes whirring up into the night sky, bursting from the waters like a startled dove. The crowd of Dreylings gasps and watches its ascent, a spinning, whirring arc of glimmering steel that dances through the air toward one of the SDC cranes—

It’s a sword, thinks Mulaghesh, but who threw it?

—and slices through the crane’s supports like they were made of butter.

There’s a pause as physics decides what to do with the several tons of metal suddenly suspended in the sky. Then the crane tips, yaws, and with the groaning sounds of an old man climbing out of bed, begins to slowly tumble to the ground.

“Run!” screams Signe. “Run! Out of the way, out of the way!”

It seems to happen in slow motion, like a battleship falling from the sky. The very impact is so great it knocks people off their feet. Dust and sea spray washes over them, even though it fell several hundred feet away. Mulaghesh watches in mute terror as some of the closer, unluckier Dreylings fall in a shower of deadly shrapnel.

Mulaghesh continues tracking the sword spinning through the sky as the plume of dust pours over them. She watches as it slashes up, up, up, and finally begins to turn, hurtling back down to them, perhaps threatening to cut the very world in half.

But it doesn’t. Instead its grip smacks into the open palm of someone’s hand, raised up high above the seawater.

She stares at the hand, then at its owner, who is now walking up the dock, water still pouring off their back.

At first the thing seems to be no more than some tangled wreckage washed ashore, a repulsive amalgam of coral and metal and bone. But as the water pours off of it her eyes discern shoulders, arms, and a crude, skeletal face. She sees the back adorned in horns and tusks and blades, the wrists lined with serrated teeth, every inch built to harm, to hurt, to destroy, as if this thing’s mere passage through the world could wreak unspeakable destruction.

The sword hums in the figure’s hand. It looks at the sword, head cocked, as if beholding a beauty it has not experienced in ages.

It is a Voortyashtani sentinel. But it is far larger than the sentinels she saw in her visions, and its armor is far more ornate, far more terrifying.

The sword vibrates, humming and buzzing, and somewhere in that awful sound is a voice—one that does not speak to their minds as much as directly speak to their souls, crying, Battle and war! The last war, the last war!

Suddenly she recognizes the thing standing on the dock, and understands what—or, rather, who—is now striding into Voortyashtan.

“Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t know how but—it’s fucking Saint Zhurgut!”

“Who?” says Sigrud.

“It can’t be!” says Signe. “How is that possi—”

She never finishes the sentence: Saint Zhurgut studies his surroundings, raises his sword, and flings it forward once again. Everyone dives to the ground as the massive arc of steel hurtles through the air. It smashes into the SDC trucks, punching through one of them like it’s made of paper and clipping another, which then slowly tips over from the blow.

They watch as the sword rips through the air with a low om hum that sounds, Mulaghesh realizes, a lot like what Björck described. The sword goes speeding back into the saint’s hand, who then turns at the top of the dock and begins to calmly walk toward them.

Mulaghesh takes a deep breath and bellows, “Open fire!”

She’s not their commander, but the Dreyling guards quickly oblige, lining up along the seawall and opening up on Zhurgut. The sound that fills the air is a dreadfully familiar one to Mulaghesh: it is the sound of countless bullets uselessly bouncing off of Divine armor. She still hears it in her dreams, echoes of the Battle of Bulikov, and even though the bolt-action riflings are far more advanced they don’t seem to do much damage: Saint Zhurgut pauses as if taking a moment to regard this new phenomenon, his masked face swiveling to take in the sparks flying off of his chest and arms. Then he crouches and leaps.

Mulaghesh hears the om sound again, and thinks, The sword’s dragging him. It’s pulling him through the air.

The saint comes plummeting down, his sword moaning and shrieking. Again, Mulaghesh hears words in that strange sound, murmuring, I am battle incarnate. I am a weapon wielded by Her hand.

When he lands one of the SDC guards dissolves in a spray of blood, vivisected from collarbone to crotch. She watches in horror as the man has a moment to take in his situation—his dangling head craning down, wide-eyed—until the two halves of his body fall away and he topples over. The saint rolls forward—dragged, it seems, by some propulsion emanating from his sword—and the giant blade slashes up, around, and through the crowd of SDC guards. Mulaghesh watches as six stout men seem to dissolve, like cloth puppets having their threads pulled apart.

“Fucking hells!” shouts Mulaghesh. “Take cover!”

Sigrud and Signe sprint in one direction toward a rickety fish shop up the hill, while Mulaghesh, Lem, and the other SDC guards take cover down the street. They find an old slate wall along a vacant lot and immediately take up positions. The guards wheel around and aim at the metal figure slowly stalking up the oystershell street.

“Don’t shoot yet!” says Mulaghesh quickly. “Don’t attract his atten—”

Too late: there’s a series of pops as the riflings go off. Saint Zhurgut swivels his crude face to look at them. Then he raises the sword, there’s the droning om sound, and then…

The slate wall seems to explode. A rain of stones shoves her to the ground. Dust clouds her eyes. Then everything goes dark.

Children screaming. Fires dancing beneath the night sky. The bright cold face of the moon and the cold clinging mist.

I always knew I’d come back here, she thinks dreamily. Back to this place, where we wrought death so gladly…

She watches through puffy eyes as a ragged child totters through the firelit streets, screaming for its mother.

It’s good that I’m dying here, she thinks. I deserved it. I deserve it.

“General? General?”

Mulaghesh tries to speak. Her mouth is thick and bloody. “Wh-Where am I?”

“Are you all right, General?”

She opens her eyes to see an unfamiliar face standing over her: a young Saypuri officer, apparently a captain, wearing a closely wrapped headcloth and sporting a trim, neat beard. He has the look of a poet about him—something dreamy to his large, dark eyes—and she wonders who he is. Perhaps he’s one of her long-forgotten comrades who died in some faded conflict or another.

“Am I dead?” she croaks.

He smiles weakly. “No, General. You’re not. I’m Captain Sakthi. I’m here from the fortress.”

There’s a crash and then a rumbling from somewhere behind them.

“What’s going on?” asks Mulaghesh.

“CTO Harkvaldsson sent word up to the fortress of a possible attack….And it seems that the attack is, ah, still ongoing.”

Mulaghesh slowly sits up. Her arms and side scream in anguish. No doubt she got banged up by the raining stones—her nose is broken, for the umpteenth time in her life—but she seems to be in one piece. She appears to be in some sort of temporary housing structure, one that no one ever got around to living in. Fourteen other Saypuri soldiers stand at the windows, riflings ready, though they’re obviously terrified. She also sees Lem, Signe’s security man, sitting at the door, staring out. His face is wildly bruised, and from the feel of it hers isn’t much better.

“How long was I out?” she asks.

“I’m not sure, ma’am. You were carried here by Mr. Lem, who flagged us down. We have not attempted to engage the, ah…the enemy. He seems remarkably difficult to engage at all, as you’ll see.”

He helps her stand and walk to the door. He points out, but he doesn’t need to.

Voortyashtan is under siege. It’s as though it’s been through a day’s worth of shelling. Fires dance and caper in the tattered ruins of countless yurts and tents. She watches as a slate-roofed house collapses in on itself and goes tumbling down the slopes, raining debris on the homes below.

It takes no time to spot the source of all this damage: Saint Zhurgut stands on the corner of a tall, ragged home, hurling his sword out at the city again and again, carving huge swaths through the buildings and people and structures with each toss. The air seems to vibrate with the constant om of his blade’s progress, and she watches, horrified, as he successfully levels most of a city block in barely half a minute.

By all the seas, she thinks. It’s like someone’s anchored a dreadnought in the bay and it’s raining death on us!

It takes a moment for her ears to discern it, but she realizes Zhurgut is singing, chanting through the sword as he flings it across the city:

She watches as the sword slices through one of the malformed statues standing along the Solda. The stone figure—which looks like it was carved to resemble a man drawing the string of an arrow—buckles at the waist and tumbles down the slopes, crushing houses and buildings as if they were no more than toothpicks.

“By the fucking seas,” she whispers. “He means to slaughter every last one of us!”

“And it looks like he can do it, too,” says Lem.

“I’ve called up to the fortress for reinforcements,” says Sakthi. He pats an enormous lead-acid-battery-powered radio on the floor beside him. It must weigh forty pounds, at least. “They’re sending down an entire battalion as fast as they can. Everyone and everything’s on full alert.”

“And what are they supposed to do?” asks Lem. “He shrugged off our fire like it was nothing!”

“I haven’t exactly heard any other options!” says Sakthi.

Mulaghesh spits a mouthful of blood out on the floor. “Divine creatures are tough,” she says. “But they’re not invincible. Do we have anything heavier than riflings?”

“We’ve got the rock guns up in the truck,” says Sakthi. “Could that make any difference?”

“Ponjas?” says Mulaghesh, surprised. “You brought those?”

“Per the general’s orders, it’s SOP for any squadron exiting the fortress,” says Sakthi.

Of course it would be, she thinks. A Ponja rifling would be a pretty standard weapon for this region: firing a half-inch-caliber round, a Ponja can punch through most walls, most light armors, as well as plenty of other obstructions—including stones, which makes it useful when fighting highland insurgents in the upper ranges. After being put to this use by caravans traversing the mountain passes, the Ponja rifling met with great success, earning the nickname “rock gun.” So of course Biswal would make sure his soldiers used them.

Now it’s just a question of whether a Ponja can punch a hole in Divine armor as well as it can stone.

Another om, another rattling crash as a Voortyashtani structure collapses.

“Fuck,” says Mulaghesh. “He’ll tear through this place like tissue paper if we let him!”

“But the second we open up on him, he’ll be on us like a buzz saw,” says Lem.

“The Divine warriors you fought in the Battle of Bulikov…,” says Sakthi.

“What about them?” says Mulaghesh.

“They couldn’t survive artillery fire, could they?”

“No. That they couldn’t. What are you getting at?”

Sakthi glances down at the radio in his hand, then up at Fort Thinadeshi and its countless cannons pointed at them.

“Hold on,” says Mulaghesh. “Are you seriously suggesting we shell the city? With us in it?”

“We could evacuate,” says Sakthi. “Try and keep him contained. Then pound away at him.”

“That would incur the losses of thousands of civilians!” says Mulaghesh angrily. “Not to mention the likely destruction of the harbor, which we’ve spent billions to build!”

“And if the Ponjas don’t work on him?” says Sakthi, with more backbone than she expected. “What then, General?”

Mulaghesh starts thinking. She’ll be damned if she sheds more civilian blood in her lifetime without even trying another way.

She remembers, suddenly, Shara’s face, suspended in the pane of glass at the SDC headquarters: You have a military fortress at your disposal, as well as a massive construction fleet. Though they may be unwilling, they are still potential resources.

An idea starts forming in her mind. The harbor’s basically a factory, she thinks. And what’s more dangerous than getting stuck in the machinery?

“Where’s Sigrud and Signe?” she asks.

“The dauvkind and his daughter?” says Sakthi. “I think they’re holed up in the harbor yards. Just down that way.” He points down the street.

“And do we have anyone here who’s a damned good shot with a Ponja?”

“I would say Sergeant Burdar is a capable shot,” says Sakthi, pointing to a short little man with a huge mustache, who gives her a curt nod.

“All right,” she says. “I think…I think I have another option.”

“You do, ma’am?” asks Sakthi.

“Yeah.” Then she thinks and adds, “Maybe.”

Mulaghesh sprints through the streets of Voortyashtan, struggling with the weight of the Ponja gun in her arms. Sergeant Burdar runs alongside her, carrying two Ponja guns as well, one under each arm. When she explained her overall idea to him he seemed to treat the idea of using such a weapon on a saint as no more troubling than dove hunting: “A dancer he isn’t,” the sergeant said. “He hops about a bit, but he’s a slow one. I can plug him pretty ably, marm, if I get a clear shot.”

A clear shot, thinks Mulaghesh as they run up to the harbor yard gates. And the right timing.

She hears an om on her right, up north into the city, and a smattering of screams. The sounds of gunfire are near constant. She keeps waiting for a pause, for Saint Zhurgut to take a breather, but he doesn’t: he is an engine of destruction, and he’s doing what he knows.

“Sigrud, Signe!” Mulaghesh shouts to the harbor gates. “Are you in there? It’s me!”

The gate falls open and she walks in. She sees Signe standing along the wall, pointing a pistol at her. Then Sigrud’s face emerges from behind the gate. He jerks his head impatiently, as if to say, Well, come on.

“Good,” says Mulaghesh. “You’re all alive.”

“He’s paying more attention to the homes and residences,” says Sigrud. “He seems to have forgotten the harbor altogether. So we’re safe, for now.”

“We are, but he’s destroying the city!” says Signe. “He’s killing everyone he can! He’s a damned monster! Where did he come from?”

“From the sword, I suppose,” says Mulaghesh. “You said that in the old days departed sentinels could possess the bodies of the living, yeah? I guess picking up that damned sword was the trick.”

“How the hells could a Voortyashtani sword still be…be, well, active?” asks Signe.

“Beats me,” says Mulaghesh. “But someone meant for me to pick it up. If it’d worked, that’d be me standing on top of that chimney, trying to kill everyone within a mile.”

“Can we stop him?” says Sigrud.

“I have some options,” says Mulaghesh. “And we can stop him. It’s just a matter of simplicity, provided we’re all healthy and willing.” She looks at Signe. “That PK-512 of yours—is it operational?”

“The what?”

“The minigun. The giant fucking cannon you’ve got set up in front of your yard of statues!”

“Yes, I think so….My predecessor had it installed, but…but no one really knew how to use it.”

“Well, I do.” Mulaghesh squats down and starts drawing a map of the harbor in the mud. “Listen. There’s a chance that one of the Ponja guns we’ve brought can maybe penetrate his armor. So there’s a chance there’s literally a one-shot solution to all this.”

“Then why haven’t you shot him?” says Signe.

“Because if it doesn’t work he’s going to know where we are and slaughter us like cattle. If that’s the case, we need a backup.”

“Which is?” asks Sigrud.

Mulaghesh looks at Signe. “You know how to operate that train of yours?”

“The supply train?” asks Signe. “Yes, of course.”

“Good.” Then she looks at Sigrud. “And you—are all your limbs in working order?”

“More or less.”

“And you think you can use one of these?” She lifts one of the Ponjas, which is like a small cannon.

Sigrud shrugs. “I received training on a prototype, long ago.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a maybe.”

“Maybe will have to do. This isn’t Bulikov, Sigrud—I don’t think you can get inside Zhurgut’s gut and carve your way out of him, not this time.” She takes a deep, deep breath. I hope this sounds smarter when I say it, she thinks. Because it sounds damned dumb when I think it. Then she begins speaking and drawing out her plan in the mud at her feet.

Mulaghesh and Signe sprint northwest toward the SDC loading yards, where the supply train runs. Signe hauls Captain Sakthi’s radio box, and Mulaghesh has thrown a Ponja over her shoulder. They’re not going as fast as Mulaghesh would prefer, because for some damned reason Signe insisted on taking along the damned briefcase she brought to Mulaghesh’s room earlier that night.

Mulaghesh tries to ignore how much her feet and arms and back hurt. You’re getting old, girl, she says to herself. You can’t put yourself through a fight like this anymore.

“This,” says Signe, panting, “is maybe one of…of the worst plans I’ve ever…I’ve ever heard of!”

“Just do your part,” says Mulaghesh, “and we’ll see how it goes.”

“But…But the timing of it! The sightlines, the…well, the everything!”

“You spoke your piece back there,” says Mulaghesh, vaulting over a short wall. “Don’t waste your precious breath saying it again now.”

Finally the supply track appears ahead, along with the watchtower. The spotlight in it is dark, the huge PK-512 beside it crouched and silent. Electric lights run along the track, white and buzzing, giving the area a strangely spectral, antiseptic feeling. The two of them slow to a stop before the track, their breath whistling and chests crackling.

Signe sets the radio box down with a thump. “The train’s stationed up ahead,” she says, pointing uphill.

Mulaghesh looks up at the watchtower standing over the train track. “How long will it take you to fire up the train?”

“I’ll make it work,” says Signe.

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“I’ll make it work!”

“You’d better. Because you have to.” Mulaghesh looks back at the city. Saint Zhurgut stands on his perch, continuing his one-man assault on the entire city. Somewhere, Mulaghesh knows, Captain Sakthi and the other Saypuri troops are escorting all the civilians they can find back up to the fortress.

“There’s something else,” says Signe, setting down her briefcase and opening it.

“What?” snaps Mulaghesh. “What now?”

“I figure now’s the time to give you this….Mostly because I’m not sure if I’ll get another chance.” She turns the case around.

Inside the case is one of the most intricate creations Mulaghesh has ever seen: a gleaming steel hand, with jointed fingers and a flexible wrist, and some sort of small lock set in the center of the palm. It’s a false hand, but it’s leagues better than the one she’s using now.

“Wh-Where did you get this?” asks Mulaghesh.

“I made it. I have been observing the way you’ve been trying to compensate. That thing you’re using now is an ornamental piece of shit.” She lifts the hand out of its case. “Adjustable digits that you can lock into any position. Same goes for the wrist. And there is a latch in the center of the palm. Here’s its mate.” She takes a small steel ring out of the case. It has a clasp at the top, and at the bottom is what must be the male end of the latch. “You can slide this down a rifle barrel and tighten it on. Then you can lock it to the false hand. It won’t be as good as a normal hand supporting it, but it’ll be better than what you’re using.”

Mulaghesh stares at it, astonished and confused. “I…Um.”

“I think the words you’re looking for,” says Signe, “are thank you. And also it will make you a better shot, which will be very handy in the next five minutes. Take your shirt off.”

“What?”

“Take your shirt off! You obviously have that awful prosthetic strapped to your back using some kind of horrible rig. Get it off!”

Mulaghesh reluctantly obliges. Signe takes out a small knife, slices through the many straps, and rips the whole thing off her torso. Then she tsks. “It’s been beating you to pieces. I’m surprised you can bear it. Here.” She applies her new prosthetic to Mulaghesh’s arm, does a total of five clasps, and then stands back to admire her work. “There. Much simpler. Much sleeker. And it shouldn’t bruise you quite so badly.”

Mulaghesh looks at the prosthetic, then prods it with her free hand. It’s light but firm. She adjusts some of the fingers. “Damn, girl. You’re a fucking genius.”

Signe blows a thread of hair out of her face. “I know. I hope I survive to keep being one.”

“You listen. The second that train starts moving, you run, okay?”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “You just get out of the city, as fast as you can. And don’t look back. Now go. Get her started. You know what to do.”

Signe gives her a hesitant look, then starts backing away. “It was nice knowing you, General.”

“Likewise.” She watches Signe leave, then stands below the watchtower and pulls out her spyglass. It takes her a moment to find Saint Zhurgut—but he’s still there, of course, straddling the roof of the house like a monstrous rooster crowing at the dawn. She glasses slightly to the right and spies Sergeant Burdar getting into position in the window of a small, leaning cottage about two hundred yards beyond the saint.

Mulaghesh nods, checks her Ponja gun, and confirms it’s ready. She drags the radio box until it sits below the watchtower. Then she pulls out her carousel, draws a bead on one of the electric lights, and fires.

There’s a pop! and the light dies. Mulaghesh does the same for the remaining lights until the whole area is cloaked in darkness. She trots down the track about fifty yards and starts setting up the Ponja gun, unfolding its bipod. From this angle she has an excellent view down the seawall road running alongside the bay, but she has few other sightlines. Saint Zhurgut is perched atop a roof about two hundred yards north of the seawall road, so she can see him but nothing below him.

She runs back to the watchtower, where it’s dark. She faces the city, pulls out her lighter, holds it aloft, and flicks it on and off three times.

She puts the spyglass to her eye and sees Sergeant Burdar peering through a spyglass of his own at her. He takes out his own lighter, flicks it on, and kills it.

Mulaghesh’s breath is shaking now, but it has nothing to do with the run. Rather, she knows that if she doesn’t call up to the fortress in thirty minutes and tell them that Zhurgut’s been put down, those cannons up there are going to open fire and decimate the city—regardless of whether or not anyone in it happens to be alive.

Mulaghesh whispers, “Showtime.”

She watches as Burdar slowly draws a bead on Saint Zhurgut. She can’t see it, but she imagines the sweat running down his temple, the feel of his hand on the grip, his finger resting along the stock above the trigger.

The wind rises, falls.

The om fills the air, a low, dreadful howl as the blade returns from another lethal tour across the city.

Saint Zhurgut plucks his whirling sword out of the air once more and swivels on his perch, his face craning about as he finds a new target. Then he rears up, his massive shoulders twisting, and hurls the blade forward again.

She watches as the metal abomination dips forward on one foot like a dancer, putting his whole shoulder and body into the throw.

I sure hope Sigrud saw that.

The sword buzzes out over the city. Mulaghesh hears echoes of eruptions and screams. Saint Zhurgut stands back up, tall and straight, every inch the proud soldier, and holds his hand out, waiting for his sword to return like a faithful hound.

He stands still for one second. Which is when Sergeant Burdar fires.

The retort of the Ponja gun is a low, deep boom.

Her eye widens as she focuses on Saint Zhurgut.

There’s a loud, hollow crack! as the half-inch round strikes his head. It’s loud enough that it makes her bones hurt just hearing it, even from here.

The saint’s head abruptly tips to the side, like he’s been slapped. He stands up a little straighter, and he seems to hang in the air.

She hopes—really desperately hopes—that he’ll go limp, plummet off the rooftop, and crash to the street in a heap, dead and done with.

But he doesn’t. Instead he slowly, slowly turns to look at Sergeant Burdar’s nest in the cottage. She can see the light striking his helmet and, just slightly above his eye, a shallow dent.

“Fuck!” she says.

The sword comes whizzing back into Saint Zhurgut’s hand. He raises the blade, maybe a bit creakier and slower than he did previously. She knows Sergeant Burdar should have started scrambling away the second he fired the shot, not even looking to see if it worked. She knows that, ideally, he’s about one flight of stairs down in the cottage, maybe one and a half.

She also knows it won’t matter. She knows the saint’s sword will tear through the cottage like a bolt of lightning.

Saint Zhurgut reaches the apex of his windup. He twists his torso forward, ready to bring his wrist down to fling the sword across the city.

One metal boot lifts up from the rooftop…

…and Sigrud pops up just three rooftops away, mounts his Ponja gun on the lip of the roof, and shoots out the rooftop from under the saint’s foot with a single shot.

Saint Zhurgut topples forward and accidentally hurls the sword down through the very building he’s standing on. The building dissolves like it’s been expertly demolished. Tumbling awkwardly ass over head, the saint drops down into the rising cloud of dust.

She hopes that hurt him. Maybe twisted his ankle, at least. But if his helmet was able to deflect a half-inch round, she’s not holding her breath over it.

And from the way Sigrud reacts, it didn’t slow the saint down much: Sigrud throws the Ponja gun over one shoulder, sprints forward, and leaps onto the next rooftop. He scrabbles down the slope of the roof, his boots sliding on the slate tiles, then squats and jumps to the next building.

The om sound again, and the sword howls up, shredding the building behind Sigrud. He clatters to the next rooftop in a rain of tiles and debris and dust, briefly using one arm to cover his head. Then he vaults down to the street where she can’t see him.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Mulaghesh says. She runs down the track to where she set up the Ponja gun.

Time for Plan B.

She lies down behind the Ponja gun, takes out the brace Signe made for her, and slides it down the gun’s forestock. She fastens it, then pops the brace into the latch in her false hand. She wriggles it a little and the brace holds fast—though she’s not sure if Signe’s handiwork can take the recoil of a half-inch round going off.

She puts the stock against her shoulder and aims down the seawall road, remembering that she has never personally fired one of these. She knows the general idea, and she knows its loading procedure. But she also knows that assuming you know the right way around a firearm is a great way to get yourself killed.

Though another good way, she thinks, is fucking around with a Voortyashtani saint.

She hears the om again and watches as Saint Zhurgut leaps up into the air above a row of houses to the north, sailing fifteen or twenty feet high in the air, raising his sword for a massive, devastating downward stroke at something she can’t see—but she knows it has to be Sigrud, perhaps trapped in an alleyway between two buildings….

There’s another boom of a Ponja gun. Saint Zhurgut jerks back awkwardly as he’s struck dead-on in the chest. The impact of the round sends him tipping over, his legs lifting up and his head drifting down, and he caroms off the corner of a roof before crashing into a yurt.

Mulaghesh laughs lowly and shakes her head. “Fucking Sigrud…”

The man himself comes dashing out onto the seawall road, his Ponja gun still smoking. He runs toward Mulaghesh, who watches his progression along the sights of her own Ponja.

There’s another om and the massive blade comes crashing out a few yards behind Sigrud, then turns abruptly to go wheeling toward him. Sigrud dives forward, and the blade arcs through the air he just previously occupied. As he’s clambering to his feet Saint Zhurgut bursts through a shop front down the seawall road like a furious bull, bricks and slate tiles clattering over his thorny back. He looks at Sigrud, and though Mulaghesh can’t see his face she can tell he’s mighty pissed.

The saint holds one hand up in the air, and the sword, droning lowly, comes whirling back to his palm. Sigrud has just now managed to start running again, but he’s a slow-moving target in a wide, open space.

Mulaghesh, panicked, tries to get a clear shot at the saint, but Sigrud’s between her and her target, blocking her shot.

“Ah, shit,” she mutters. “Shit!”

Saint Zhurgut raises his blade, spins around, and hurls the sword forward.

Mulaghesh watches, horrified.

The om echoes down the seawall road. The sword rises up, up, fifty feet off the ground, sixty feet off the ground, moving in a wide, graceful arc that will soon collide with Sigrud’s path.

Sigrud stops, turns, and raises the Ponja gun.

He is not, to say the least, following standard operating procedure with a Ponja: any weapon firing a .50-caliber round needs to be ground-mounted. As such, when he pulls the trigger, and the deep-throated boom! echoes down the seawall road, the recoil is so much that it knocks all two-hundred-and-some-odd pounds of him clear on his back, like he’s been hit with a truck.

There’s a high-pitched ping! sound, and suddenly Saint Zhurgut’s sword begins wobbling erratically. The wobbling grows and grows, sending the blade off course, until it flutters into the road nearly half a block short of Sigrud, burying itself in the oystershell pavement.

Her mouth opens. Did he just shoot that damned sword out of the air?

Saint Zhurgut stares, outraged. Then he begins running down the road to Sigrud, hand outstretched.

The om fills the air again. The sword wriggles in its spot in the pavement.

Sigrud hobbles to his feet, clutching his side—Mulaghesh gets the feeling the Ponja broke a rib, at the very fucking least—then limps to the seawall and dives into the ocean.

The sword extracts itself from the pavement and flies back to Zhurgut’s hand like it’s magnetized. Zhurgut turns to face the ocean, raising his sword, looking for Sigrud.

Mulaghesh places the sights of her Ponja on Saint Zhurgut. She moves her finger to the trigger, takes a breath, and fires.

The world seems to leap, like the streets around her are all sitting on a blanket and someone just picked up one end and shook it. She’s frankly not sure what’s worse: being behind the slate wall when it exploded, or firing this big fucking thing.

But she’s granted a moment of satisfaction when she sees Saint Zhurgut stagger with the shot. I might have just broken my clavicle, she thinks, but at least I hit you, motherfucker.

Saint Zhurgut wheels around furiously, looking for the source of the shot. He must have missed seeing her. Mulaghesh miserably realizes she’s going to have to shoot him again.

She waits until he’s facing her, and then—wincing and holding her breath like someone about to jump off of a very tall diving board—pulls the trigger again.

Once more, everything leaps. She groans as her body vocally insists she not do that again.

Saint Zhurgut tumbles backward as the bullet hits him in the lower gut. Then he stares down the street at her, trembling with rage, and hurls his sword.

But because it’s so dark, he can’t see that Mulaghesh has already stood and limped away, up the railway track to the watchtower. The sword crashes into a stack of crates on the other side of the track, but otherwise does no real damage at all.

The sword makes its return journey, fluttering through the air, its grip smacking back into Saint Zhurgut’s open palm. He cocks his head, waiting—maybe for a scream, maybe for another shot—but it doesn’t come.

Mulaghesh quietly, slowly climbs the watchtower.

Zhurgut stalks down the street, sword at the ready, his blank gaze scanning back and forth, seeking out whoever might still have one of those damned guns. He moves so carefully, so slowly, that Mulaghesh can hardly bear it.

He comes to the train tracks and looks them up and down. Perhaps he’s wondering what they are: he probably hasn’t ever seen something like this before. But he wouldn’t care, she realizes. This thing standing below her is a bottomless pit of rage and hunger, and all the world is his sustenance.

He looks at the abandoned Ponja gun on the tracks. He peers at the smashed boxes beyond it. Then he takes one step forward, a second, and a third.

He now has one foot over the first rail. Mulaghesh has to force herself to wait until he lifts his other foot and steps forward until he’s fully standing on the track.

Then Mulaghesh, who has had the PK-512 trained on him for some time now, finally opens fire.

When Mulaghesh had the PK-512 weapon system explained to her, detailing the firing, loading, and safety mechanisms however many years ago, she noticed how much the officer in charge of the demonstration kept talking about its mounting.

“This is most certainly a fixed system,” he kept reiterating. “Most certainly. It’s possible for us to mount it on a tracked vehicle, and we’re researching that currently, but for now, it’s best to consider this a fixed system, because of the unusual mounting issues.”

“What mounting issues?” Mulaghesh asked.

“Well, General…This is a half-ton gun. So the weight of the weapon system itself—especially its barrel motor, fuel tank, and optimal ammunition feed—is extraordinary. We’re working to reduce that—engineering makes leaps all the time—but it’s not easy. But there’s also the issue of propulsion and recoil. The PK features state-of-the-art reduced recoil designs, but we’re still talking about six rotating barrels firing about 2,500 rounds a minute. That puts a lot of pressure on its mounting system. We tried one demonstration integrating what we believed to be a heavy enough vehicle to handle the sudden burst of force, but…Well. It started tipping over, and nearly crushed the gunner.” The officer scratched his chin. “In other words, think of this weapon system as an engine that essentially creates a column of lead in the air, moving at speeds up to two hundred feet per second. That should give you an idea of the physics of this weapon.”

The instant Mulaghesh pulls the trigger on the PK-512, her understanding of the weapon’s physics grows immensely.

The gun whines softly at first, the barrels rotating up to speed—she sees Saint Zhurgut look up at her, surprised—and then the “column of lead” the officer talked about comes into play.

The barrels flare a bright, blinding white, the air is split with a deafening chatter, and Saint Zhurgut is slammed into the ground like he’s had a stack of bricks dropped on him, his body racked with what look like spasms as around fifty bullets strike him every second. But at the same time, the watchtower—which is mostly made out of wood—begins to creak and croak and drift back, like a reed bending in the wind, pushed by the sudden explosion of force from this weapon; which means that Mulaghesh has to raise the aim of the massive gun to keep it trained on the spiky bastard probably now wishing he’d stayed dormant.

This setup, she realizes, has some serious mounting issues. The heat from the gun scorches the floor and rails of the watchtower, licking at the wood and turning it a deep black. Every second threatens to tear the whole watchtower apart.

But Mulaghesh doesn’t care. She hears herself screaming, “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”

She keeps the massive gun trained on Saint Zhurgut, who is slowly, defiantly trying to stand. It’s like his own personal gravity has tripled. His body rattles and shakes and quivers, and she can see myriad dents appearing in his face, his shoulders, his thighs. Yet still he tries to stand.

The train tracks around him are being shredded. The very ground under his feet turns to pulp. An enormous cloud of dust rises up as the PK-512 continues putting hundreds and hundreds of rounds into the skin of the earth, like it’s a pressurized water sprayer sawing through limestone. She’s aware of the rounds ricocheting off of Zhurgut’s Divine armor: a window shatters across the street, a hanging sign is flapping wildly, struck by countless stray rounds. Hot, smoking casings are raining down around her, the legs of the watchtower lost in a pile of broiling brass. The wooden rails of the tower are smoking and, in some places, even on fire. She feels like she’s dangling over the lip of a broiling volcano.

But Mulaghesh still doesn’t care. She’s screaming, shrieking, howling as this terrific, beautiful, monstrous engine of destruction sings, its own low, guttural buzz the perfect countermeasure to Zhurgut’s serene om. For a moment Mulaghesh delights in this savage victory, and she wishes to scream, We’re better at this than you are! We figured war out in ways you stupid bastards never could!

But she is very, very aware of Zhurgut’s right hand, which is slowly, slowly raising his sword.

She swivels the stream of fire, very slightly, to focus on his sword hand. The PK is about as far from a surgical device as one could ever imagine, but she watches with dismay as even this doesn’t stop the sword’s slow ascent.

She hears the sword begin to sing—a low, defiant note breaking through the rage of the PK-512’s buzz: a quiet om….

There is a rumbling to Mulaghesh’s left. Zhurgut’s focus breaks, and he shifts his head…

…and watches, helpless, as the eighty-ton supply locomotive comes thundering down the track toward him at top speed.

She can tell he wants to leap out of the way. But Mulaghesh positions her never-ending column of lead so that he doesn’t have a chance, pinning him to the ground

Mulaghesh howls in triumph. “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”

She halts the stream of fire as the locomotive slams into Zhurgut like he’s a toy soldier. She doesn’t even hear the sound of the impact.

But that might be because the instant that the locomotive hits Zhurgut it suddenly derails, slowly tilting off the shredded, pulped train tracks around Saint Zhurgut and sliding across the muddy harbor yard with a terrific, deafening grinding and screeching. Somehow it manages to miss grazing the watchtower and instead goes sliding into a stack of steel beams and wire coils, which all tumble onto its roof and boiler with a tremendous clanging. Then the locomotive tilts to the left very slightly, threatening to tip over, but instead it hangs there, its right set of wheels suspended in the air, churning to an arrhythmic beat, like a half-squashed beetle pumping its legs, unaware it’s dead.

Mulaghesh watches and realizes the destruction seems somewhat distant to her, and she slowly understands that she’s quite deaf from firing the PK-512.

She lets out a breath. She has to force her hand to release the gun’s right handle, then undoes Signe’s brace holding her false hand to the left handle. She steps back from the weapon. Her whole body is shaking, vibrating, like she’s been put in a can and rattled by a giant, and her skin feels like it’s cracked and sizzling, furious from being exposed to so much heat.

She tries to tell herself, “Stop. Stop. It’s over,” but she can’t find the voice for it.

I’m in shock, she thinks. You know this. You’ve been here before.

She looks at the locomotive, lying across the harbor yards like a beached whale. If Zhurgut had happened to stand just a little closer to the tower, and she’d damaged the rails here instead of there, it would have likely pounded through the supports of the watchtower as it derailed like a bullet through a matchstick—a close shave, in other words.

She slowly climbs down the watchtower ladder, then wanders over to the wreckage. The locomotive’s firebox door has fallen open, and a handful of embers have spilled across its metal floor. The whole contraption glows with a cheery yet hellish red light.

She stops, twists her finger in one ear, and then listens. Despite the blaring “eeeee” in her ears, it doesn’t take her long at all to locate Saint Zhurgut—she just has to follow the sputtering om sound, which now sounds like it’s coming through a bad radio.

He’s been cut in two, she sees, vivisected by one of the train’s wheels. His intestines have unspooled like rice noodles, and though his arm is obviously broken in several places, it’s still reaching for his giant sword, which lies on the ground several feet away.

She cocks her head: the sword is still singing, murmuring, I am Her brightest blade. I am the distant star of war. I am conquest everlasting….

“I sure wish you would shut the fuck up,” she says.

There’s a splash of water from the shore. Sigrud staggers up, one arm folded in close to his chest. He limps over, and his mouth moves.

“What?” shouts Mulaghesh.

“Did we get him?” shouts Sigrud back.

“Kind of,” says Mulaghesh. She points to the twitching body on the ground. “But that’s not Saint Zhurgut.” Her finger moves to the giant sword lying on the ground. “That’s Saint Zhurgut.”

Sigrud frowns. She can’t hear him, but she can tell he says, “What?”

“He said he was Voortya’s blade. I think he meant it both metaphorically and literally. His heart and soul and mind are bound up in that metal.”

She takes off her coat, walks to the sword, and—pausing as she realizes this might kill her, as it was likely intended to—picks the sword up with it, making sure not one piece of metal touches her skin. To her relief, nothing happens, but the sword is terrifically, burningly cold. She sees the blade is cracked, the barest hairline running from its base to its point.

She begins dragging the sword back toward the locomotive. “Come on. Help me get this big fucking thing up in the train. But don’t touch your skin to it. Use your coat or something.”

The two of them lift the sword up into the locomotive door. It takes Sigrud a minute to find the right position, as he’s favoring his left side.

“Broken rib?” asks Mulaghesh.

He nods. “Not a bad one, though.”

“There are good broken ribs?”

“Sometimes. Also a sprained shoulder, I think. I was lucky. Pull harder on your end.”

Once they get it in the locomotive they stand before the firebox, and then—with Mulaghesh muttering, “Ah-one, ah-two, and ah-three”—they hurl the giant sword inside.

Instantly the sword’s om begins to sputter, scream, rise and fall, like a radio frequency oscillating wildly. They watch through the hatch as the cracks in the sword’s blade grow, like thin ice under too much pressure, until it finally dissolves, falling away to nothing but the hilt, which slowly begins to melt, like a wax candle set too close to the fireplace.

“Not normal metal,” says Sigrud.

“No. Definitely not. I’ve got to hand it to your daughter. She got this fucking thing hot.” She watches as the sword appears to disintegrate, dissolving not into bubbling metal but clumps of something soft and powdery, almost like graphite.

She stares into the boiler, leaning in until it’s so hot that her skin can’t bear it anymore.

“Holy shit,” she says. “Holy shit! It’s…It’s damned thinadeskite, isn’t it!”

“What?” says Sigrud.

“Thinadeskite!” shouts Mulaghesh. “His fucking sword is made out of thinadeskite! That means that…” She jumps out of the locomotive and runs to where Saint Zhurgut lay.

But Zhurgut is gone. In his place is a young Dreyling man’s body, thickset and red-haired and very dead. His corpse, however, is maimed just as Zhurgut’s was, vivisected at the waist.

Sigrud walks to stand beside her. She sees him mouth the words, What happened to him?

“That’s what happened in the countryside!” shouts Mulaghesh. She’s no longer sure if she’s shouting because she’s deaf or because she’s excited. “At the farmhouses, at the charcoal kilns! There were the butchered bodies, but nearby, on the same property, was a man’s corpse, dead but uninjured! That’s what must have happened!”

“I…do not understand,” says Sigrud.

“Listen—someone came to these families, gave them a present—a sword—then hid nearby and watched! Then, when the man of the house picked up the sword—”

“He transformed into a sentinel,” he says slowly. “And killed his own family, just as Zhurgut tried to kill all of us.”

“Butchered them just as a sentinel would Saypuris,” says Mulaghesh. “Because it was a sentinel! A man made of thorns, just as Gozha said!”

“Wasn’t the thinadeskite found at only one of the murder scenes?”

“Yeah, the one that didn’t go right,” says Mulaghesh. “Back when they were sloppy, whoever they are. On this last one, at the farmhouse, they must’ve been smart enough to clean up after themselves.”

“Then why did the sentinels stop?” says Sigrud. “Why did they die? Why did they not keep killing?”

“I don’t know! It must have failed somehow. The swords couldn’t keep them here, I guess, and their—hell, I don’t know, their hosts—died from the sheer stress of it. I said it seemed like the killer was testing something—maybe some swords work, and others don’t.” She looks up at the devastation of Voortyashtan. “But it sure fucking worked tonight. They’ve figured out how to do this right.”

“But where are they getting the swords from? How could they have persisted after Voortya died?”

“I don’t know that, either. But…But thinadeskite must be what the Voortyashtanis made their swords out of! A special ore, just for them to use. We need to tell someone at the fo—”

She looks up to see one of the cannons of Fort Thinadeshi slowly rotating to point at their very location.

“Shit!” she says. “I forgot!” She sprints off toward the watchtower, which is now on fire around the PK-512.

“Where are you going?” Sigrud calls after her.

“I’m keeping us from getting blown to pieces!” she shouts over her shoulder.

She runs up to the radio box, sits, and holds its receiver up to her head. “He’s down!” she shouts. “Hold your fire, he’s down!”

There’s a tinny voice on the other end, but she can’t hear it.

“What?” she says into it. “I’m nearly fucking deaf, speak up!”

“Can you confirm, General?” says the tinny voice, much louder. “Can you confirm that the threat is eliminated?”

“Confirmed!” shouts Mulaghesh back. “Confirmed! The threat is…” She pauses as a piece of flaming timber falls to the ground near her. “Shit! Anyway, yeah, the threat is eliminated!”

There’s static. She hears the voice say: “—econdary assault?”

“What?” says Mulaghesh.

More static. Then: “—ssault in progr—”

Then the static dies. Mulaghesh kicks the big metal box, but the receiver is silent. However gigantic the lead-acid battery in this thing is, it was never meant to last so long.

She sits on the ground, fumbling for a cigarillo. She settles for a half-crushed one found in her inside coat pocket, but she can’t find her lighter.

A pigeon alights on a nearby shop rooftop. It coos twice, then sits and watches her with one bemused eye, as if to say, What was that all about?

Lennart Björck has been hiding in a hole in the ground for nearly two agonizing hours when he hears the crash. It’s an enormous, skull-rattling sound, loud enough to knock him down even while standing in a hole, and it makes him wonder if there’s some new Divine monstrosity now causing havoc in the city.

He pokes his head up and sees a tremendous column of steam and dust pouring up near the train tracks…and just to the west, he can see the very tip of the number three locomotive pointing up past the top of a house, though it seems to be on its side, like a beached whale.

“What in the hells…?” Björck climbs out and begins to run to the crash, wondering what could have caused this new headache. Yet as he runs by the test assembly yard he stops and slowly turns around.

He saw something out of the corner of his eye—a flash of light.

The door to the test assembly yard stands open—something that should normally never, ever happen—and someone is lying in the mud before it.

Another victim of that monstrosity? It seems unlikely, as this body is in one piece.

Björck slowly walks toward the test assembly yard. Then there’s another flash, illuminating the dark interior of the yard….

Involuntarily, he shouts, “Hey!”

A figure darts from the door of the yard and sprints up the street. Björck gives chase, but finds he’s unwilling to go too far into Voortyashtan, much of which is on fire or falling apart.

He looks at the body lying in the mud. It’s one of the higher-ranking SDC guards…Karl, he thinks the man’s name was. A bolt is sticking out of his neck.

Björck walks into the yard. He knows what’s in here, and knows not to turn on the light. Yet there’s an aroma in the air, a pungent, sulfurous smell he actually finds familiar—he smelled it once, long ago, when he went to a carnival in Jukoshtan with his then-sweetheart, and a man on the pier produced this strange device and said he could capture their images for them for only a few drekels.

“A camera?” says Björck aloud. He scratches his head.

After a while the watchtower, still ablaze, begins creaking in a very disturbing fashion. Mulaghesh imagines the PK-512 plummeting to the ground, all of its ammunition spilling into open flame, and decides to seek refuge in the locomotive. Walking, she finds, hurts tremendously. She can’t remember where she got all these injuries from.

Sigrud is sitting on the edge of the locomotive door, smoking his pipe, arm held close to his body. “Is this victory?” he asks.

“Harbor’s still intact,” she says, groaning as she sits beside him.

“Harbor, yes. But…” He gestures toward Voortyashtan with the bowl of his pipe. He doesn’t need to say anything more. It looks like some impossibly large piece of farming equipment has mown great swaths through the city’s crude architecture.

“Where the hells are Biswal’s troops?” asks Mulaghesh. “I thought they were sending a whole battalion.”

“I don’t know. I thought that…Wait.” He cocks his head. “Do you hear that?”

“I can’t hear much, period. I should have worn ear protection, using that thing. What are you hearing?”

“Gunfire. And…screaming.”

“What? Where?”

He points up the cliffs, at the passage to Fort Thinadeshi.

“But that’s outside the city,” says Mulaghesh. “What could be happening there?”

The two stare up at the cliffs.

Mulaghesh realizes what the voice on the radio said: Secondary assault.

“Come on,” she says, and the two hop down and begin limping up the cliff paths to the first of the checkpoints.

The city is like a ghost town, a nightmare cityscape, dark and ruined. The only sounds she hears are distant cries and moans and the constant wind. Just an hour ago it was a bustling if unsightly little town: now it is inconceivable that people once lived and worked here.

“I smell gunpowder,” says Sigrud suddenly. “And blood.”

“Blood?”

“Yes. Blood.” He lifts his head, catching the wind. “Lots of it.”

They run up to the first checkpoint and find it abandoned, though the door and side are riddled with bullet holes. Then when they rise up to the top of the first hill they stop, look out, and see.

The hills are a cold, dark gray in the moonlight. Mulaghesh sees many still, dark forms lying where the road slashes through the countryside. Figures sprint back and forth atop the hills before the fortress. There is the sporadic flash of gunfire, like distant lightning, and screams—some bellowing orders, others in pain or fear.

“No,” whispers Mulaghesh. Suddenly she is running, running toward the group of soldiers she sees gathered ahead.

“Stop!” shouts Sigrud. “Stop, Turyin!”

As she runs her mind takes in all the signs, reading the story written in the countryside: she can see where the Saypuri battalion was marching down the road; she sees where the first volley hit them from the east; she can see where the Saypuris—surprised, terrified—took cover among the dales just west of the road; and she can see where the enemy—whoever it was—took positions north of them, cutting them off from the fortress, leaving them to either stay where they were, retreat to the cliffs, or descend to Voortyashtan, and expose themselves to Saint Zhurgut’s hellish assault.

A simple maneuver, really. But a very successful one.

Someone shoves her from behind and falls on top of her. She can tell by the way the impact pains them that it’s Sigrud.

“They will shoot you,” he croaks.

“Get off me!”

He groans as she pushes against his bad side, but he doesn’t budge. “They will shoot you dead on sight.”

“Let me go, let me go!” she cries. “I need to help them, I need to—”

“There is nothing to do. The enemy has fled. But the soldiers are wary. They will not take any more chances.”

Mulaghesh relents and lies there on the ground, helpless and miserable. He’s right, of course: whatever happened here, there’s not much for her to do now. She despises feeling so useless.

“Find me a body,” she says.

“What?” asks Sigrud.

“There’ll be an aid kit on one of the Saypuri soldiers. Yellow rubber thing, waterproof. Inside of that are some flares and a flare gun. Bring it here. You’re better at sneaking than I am.”

“You ask much of an injured man.” But he releases her and withdraws into the darkness. She sits up and stares around herself, mindful now that someone out in the shadows might take a shot at her. She recognizes the movements of the shapes in the distance: infantry securing the perimeter, closing down points of entry and escape.

Sigrud rises up out of the shadows, dragging something behind him. He drops it with a heavy thump. It reeks of sweat and coppery blood. She can see the outline of a cheek and a clutched fist in the darkness.

“That doesn’t look like a flare gun,” she says.

“No,” he says. “I thought you would like to see for yourself.”

He takes out a flare gun and hands it to her. She hesitates before pointing into the air and firing.

The flare is bright and brilliant, a festive cherry red, and as its light flickers across the hillsides it touches upon the face of the young man lying on the ground: a Voortyashtani boy of about fifteen, his neck elegantly tattooed, a perfectly round entry point drilled just below his collarbone. Strapped to his chest is a Saypuri pistol. He had to adjust the holster considerably to allow for this slight, boyish frame, perhaps two or three years from truly being a man. Mulaghesh is still staring into his face when the Saypuri troops surround them.