City of Blades

16. Queen of Grief

Vallaicha Thinadeshi struggles to breathe. She thought this would be easy; she thought Mulaghesh would destroy the swords and they would all simply begin to drift once more….But rather than drifting, rather than shifting back into the shadows of reality, she feels them all becoming more real, more themselves, more awake.

And as they do, they grow aware that she is not who they thought she was.

This bleeding, terrified woman is not the Empress of Graves. This is not the Divinity of death and warfare. Why is she here? Why were they listening to her? So they continue to reject her.

The process is agonizing. They reject her like flesh slowly pushing out a thorn. She wasn’t aware she had become a part of them in so many ways, and for them to abandon her, force her away, is like losing a limb she never knew she had.

She finally accepts what’s happened: the strange general has been defeated. She has failed. The swords still persist; they still draw the dead close. And now that Thinadeshi no longer has the sword of Voortya, she’s powerless against them.

She’s dying now. She can feel it. She can feel herself fade, feel the City of Blades itself push down on her, crushing her mind, removing a person who never should have been here in the first place.

She can still hear the sentinels’ thoughts echoing over the beaches: Mother…Mother, we are coming…We are coming for you…And then she feels them begin to leave, departing for the land of the living.

“No,” she whimpers. “Please, no…”

It’s all too much. She shifts sideways and falls over, unable to support herself. She listens to them pleading for their mother. Their voices intermingle in her head, and suddenly she remembers a day long ago, back in Saypur with her children, when they all held hands and ran down the hillside together, laughing with glee, and some of them tumbled and rolled all the way down….

These are her last thoughts: the hot summer sun; the soft embrace of the grass; the tinkle of children’s laughter; and the warm, eager grasp of a tiny hand.

Sigrud normally feels at home in the shadows. To be unseen and occupy the dark interstitial parts of the world is second nature to him. But as he squats in the shadows of the trees outside of Rada Smolisk’s house, he can’t bring himself to feel comfortable.

None of this is right. None of this is what he expected.

He watches as the Saypuri soldiers file out of the house, carrying what appear to be sword racks and then finally two bodies. One of them is Mulaghesh, her hands bound behind her back, with one soldier holding her feet and another holding her by the armpits. Probably alive, he thinks. No one binds the hands of a dead person. But she’s also a deep, dark red color, which is…unusual.

The second body is on a stretcher, covered up. The only thing that he can see is that the person is very short, and, from the drip of blood from the side of the stretcher, probably very dead.

He frowns as they load up and drive away. What happened here? Why would Mulaghesh go to the polis governor’s office? What could she have discovered in the afterlife to send her here and ask him to come here as well?

And where is his daughter?

Biswal exits the house. He’s listening as an officer briefs him on something. Biswal is nodding, though he looks displeased, but not furious: he’s being told of something they can deal with, manage, tolerate, not desired by any means but not of chief concern. The lieutenant keeps pointing to a place in the trees just beyond the house, a thick spot of bracken. Biswal looks at it with flat, cold eyes and nods. He says something short—It is what it is, perhaps—and then climbs into an auto, which speeds off up the road.

There are only a handful of soldiers left in the area. Sigrud waits for them to disperse, then sneaks through the trees.

There’s a guard at the door of the polis governor’s office, so he won’t bother to try to get inside. But he creeps his way toward the spot of bracken, wondering what could have caused such consternation….

He’s ten feet away when he smells it. Blood—a lot of it.

He looks at the area from the shelter of a tree. He can’t fully investigate in these circumstances, but he can see where the bracken’s been crushed, like someone fell back into it.

And he smells something…familiar. The scent of cigarettes. An unusual kind, aromatic and exotic. The exact sort, Sigrud reflects, that his daughter smokes nearly constantly.

Sigrud looks uphill, in the direction of Fort Thinadeshi, and thinks.

Mulaghesh wakes and immediately regrets it. Her brain feels like one giant bruise. She groans and lifts her left hand to touch her brow, and remembers only too late that her hand is made of metal. It clunks into her face, causing her injury to flare up furiously. She moans pitifully and shakes her head. The back of her scalp grinds on a stone floor.

She frowns and opens her eyes. She’s in a jail cell, lit with an electric light. There’s only one place in Voortyashtan she knows of that has electricity….

It all comes back to her like a dream.

The swords.

“Hey!” she says. “Hey, somebody!”

Silence.

She forces herself to sit up. It feels like something in her head is sloshing around uncomfortably, a dense fluid that might break through her skull’s fragile walls. She feels her brow—with the correct hand this time—and finds her face is crusty with blood. Biswal must have nearly cracked her head open.

There’s not much to see through the bars of her cell door: there’s just a blank stone wall on the other side, dark and molded, with a fluttering electric light above it. Mulaghesh stands—this takes a lot longer than she expected—walks to the door, and leans on it.

She checks her pockets. Her holster is gone, of course, as is the rest of her gear. So is the sword of Voortya, she realizes. It could be very bad if someone threw that away, not knowing what it is.

She puts as much of her face as she can through the bars and looks down the hallway. There are just more cells to her left, but to her right about twenty yards down is a private in a dark red beret standing at attention, hands behind her back. She’s too far away for Mulaghesh to see her name, but she can see the chevrons on her uniform, so she knows her rank. The door beside her is thick iron with a small glass window in its center. This must be an old part of the fortress, because none of the doors or bars look at all modern to Mulaghesh.

“Hey,” says Mulaghesh. Her voice hasn’t been used in some time, so she has to clear her throat. “Hey, Private! Listen. Listen, I’ve…Damn, my head hurts…I’ve got to speak to Biswal! I’ve got to! I don’t know what he thinks is going on, but he’s wrong, he’s…he’s wrong!”

The private is completely still. She barely blinks.

“Listen,” says Mulaghesh. “It sounds crazy, Private, but…But we’re about to be under attack. Another Divine attack is about to happen! I swear it’s true, and we’ve got to act now! I wouldn’t believe it, either, but…”

The private slowly blinks again, staring into space.

Mulaghesh summons up all of her air and bellows, “Damn it all, Private! I might be in a jail cell but I am still your superior officer, so you had damned well better hop to an order when it’s given to you! A critical threat is imminent and it is both my duty and yours to respond!”

Nothing. It’s as if the woman’s deaf.

“Ah, hells,” says Mulaghesh. “You’re not going to listen to me no matter what I say, are you?”

The private blinks again.

“Well, shit,” says Mulaghesh, and she sits down on the ground and tries to think.

Captain Sakthi sits in the large conference room of Fort Thinadeshi, trying to stay awake. They’ve been riding nearly all day and all night, so it’s a struggle just to sit upright, let alone remain conscious. He glances around at Major Hukkeri and the other senior officers and can tell right away that they feel the same. They’re already briefed on the new Dreyling threat. What could General Biswal’s meeting possibly be about that could be so important?

The door opens and Biswal walks in, hands thoughtfully clasped behind his back. There is a strange pride and energy to him: his back is a little too straight, his stride a little too jaunty. It’s hard to tell if he’s pleased or furious.

He takes the podium and turns to his officers. “Thank you for being here with me tonight,” he says quietly. “I know the past days have not been easy on you. We do not have much time, so I will cut to the point. We have recently discovered a long-running plot by the Dreylings to conceal Divine Voortyashtani artifacts collected from the ocean floor. My suspicion is that they did so because they feared that we would shut down the harbor project to prevent any unknown side effects. However, their duplicity has had grave effects—for, due to their actions, we are about to witness another Divine attack on our way of life. And it is our duty to defend these shores.”

The room is dead silent.

“General Mulaghesh, I have discovered, was part of the Dreylings’ conspiracy,” says Biswal. “She and CTO Harkvaldsson plotted to assassinate Polis Governor Rada Smolisk, who had deduced their crime. I am grieved now to tell you that General Mulaghesh succeeded in this. And, as there is no honor among thieves or traitors, she also murdered CTO Harkvaldsson in order to cover up her actions. We have apprehended the general, and now have her in holding in the prison.

“Justice will be done. But first, we must fight. The traitorous general confessed that the Divine attack would be coming in by sea, an invasion of Voortyashtan itself. We now have the upper hand, my proud officers of Saypur. We are aware of the attack before it comes. And if we fight, and fight nobly, we will be the victors—and we will be heroes the likes of which will never be forgotten. And all the foolishness our nation has become involved in here on the Continent, all the waste and the stupidity, all of that will end after tonight.”

Sakthi glances around at the other officers. Some stare at the general in naked horror, others in teary-eyed admiration.

“Now, go,” says Biswal. “Go and man the walls, prepare our defenses, and ready your troops. By morning, we will be legends.”

Seventy miles south of the city of Voortyashtan, the cargo ship Heggelund makes its final leg of the trip to the newborn harbor. Captain Skjelstad has made this trip several times in his career, shipping raw goods back and forth between Voortyashtan and Ahanashtan, but this is the largest shipment he’s piloted yet: ten thousand tons of Ahanashtani cement, to be used in the overhaul of the Solda River. By his calculations the Heggelund is set to arrive before 0200, just in time for SDC to begin its work.

At least, that’s what his calculations say. But tonight, something…is not right. As he stands in the bridge, consulting his countless nautical maps and timetables, he tries to prove that the impossible has not happened, even though all of his metrics and equipment says it most definitely has.

He checks the maps again.

Then he checks the barometer and the speed gauges and the fuel supply.

He pushes his hat back and scratches his head. “What in all the hells…”

They’re consuming fuel at an incredibly high rate, but they shouldn’t be—they should be on the Great Western Current, the oceanic current that not only keeps Voortyashtan’s bay warm, but also moves along the coast at a great speed, making it an excellent channel for shipping, meaning they’d use less fuel.

But they aren’t. Over the past two hours they’ve used an absurd amount of fuel, and have been going well under speed.

In fact, given the measurements he’s looking at, it’s almost as if the Great Western Current has completely vanished, or at the very least is in a considerable state of disruption.

His first mate runs in, breathless. “I checked again, sir—six knots.”

“All right?” says Skjelstad, suspicious. “Then why are we going so damnably slow?”

“You didn’t let me finish, sir,” says his first mate. “Six knots south-southeast.”

“Six knots south?” says Skjelstad, boggled. “That can’t be! I…I mean, it simply shitting can’t! They call it the damned Great Western because it runs west, you know!”

“I know, sir,” says the first mate. “I don’t know how it’s possible. But it…it seems like it is. It’s like…”

“Like what?” says Skjelstad.

“Like it’s…been diverted, sir.”

“Diverted?”

“Yes, sir. Blocked, sir. The whole of the Great Western. Like it’s hitting something.”

“Hitting what?” says Skjelstad, furious.

“I’ve checked the horizon, sir, but I haven’t seen an—”

The first mate’s answer is never heard, for at that moment the ship is shook from prow to stern as if they’ve just plowed into another vessel. Captain Skjelstad and his first mate are knocked off their feet and sent rolling over the floor of the bridge. Skjelstad can feel the ship moving under him, tipping to one side at a speed that should never, ever be achievable on even the roughest of waters. It’s like they’ve run ashore—but there is no shore around here, of course, out in the middle of the seas.

The juddering and rocking doesn’t stop, but it slows enough for Skjelstad to clamber over to the window and lift himself up to see.

At first glance it appears that the Heggelund has plowed into a white shard sticking out of the sea, one protruding about a hundred feet above the water line. “An iceberg?” he wonders aloud. “This far south?”

But as he watches, the shard is growing: it’s like some giant aquatic spear being shoved up through the surface of the ocean, rising into the air at an astonishing speed.

“What in all the worlds,” whispers his first mate.

As Skjelstad watches the shard he realizes that it is actually some kind of white tower, for a bit farther down on the far side he sees, impossibly, a window and balcony. As it rises the tower also widens, grating up against the port bow of the Heggelund with a roaring screech and doing enough damage that the ship will soon be unsailable. Skjelstad is initially terrified that the tower will saw right into the hull and the deck, but then a great bubble of water rises up and shoves the Heggelund back, just as the rest of the towers—and there are more, Skjelstad sees, many more—penetrate the waters around them.

“What in all the hells is that?” cries the first mate.

The ship groans, moans, bangs, and clangs, miserably protesting this turn of events.

“I am guessing,” Skjelstad shouts, “that that is what was blocking the Great Western!”

Then there’s a discomfiting crunch and the entire ship is shoved up. This blow is far more violent than when they struck the tower, so much so that Skjelstad and his mate fly up into the air high enough that they nearly strike the ceiling. Then they slam back down, Skjelstad cracking his head so hard he briefly passes out.

When the world obligingly congeals back into a comprehensible series of sights and sounds, Skjelstad blinks and sees his first mate is staring out the window, pale-faced. “Uh, Captain…You’ll want to take a look at this.”

Captain Skjelstad, groaning, slowly rises to his feet. Then he looks out the window and stares.

An island has appeared in the center of the ocean. Its beaches are bone white, and in its center is an ivory-colored citadel large enough to be a small city, with a tall ivory tower in its middle. The ocean is rushing back from it, the waters drawing back like curtains from a stage, and as they withdraw he sees things standing on the white shores….

Thousands upon thousands of…men? People? Are they people? To Skjelstad’s eyes they look more like monsters, swaying amalgamations of horns and teeth, with enormous blades in their hands, staring out at the moonlit sea….And there in the waters are thousands upon thousands of long, thin ships with pale, silvery sails. They glow very faintly, like a massive school of gigantic jellyfish, manifested here on the ocean waves as if they’ve always been here.

It’s a fleet, he sees. A war fleet, the biggest of its kind he’s ever seen.

“Where did it come from, sir?” says his first mate. “Surely all this wasn’t sitting on the bottom of the sea?”

The monstrous figures begin to wade into the sea, moving to board their spectral vessels and rigging them up to disembark.

Well, most of the figures do. Some of them are turning to face the Heggelund.

There is a quiet, low sound, like many voices exhaling at once: a sustained om.

The figures on the beach all move, and it appears as if a flock of birds rises up from them, only the birds are glittery and strange….

No, thinks Skjelstad as the shapes hurtle toward him. Not birds. Swords.

Then there is a crash and everything goes dark.

“Peace,” says a voice, “is but the absence of war.”

Mulaghesh jumps, sniffs, and realizes she’s passed out sitting up against the wall of the jail cell. She looks around. The lights in the prison ward are dim and low, casting coffee-stain luminescence over the grim, dark walls. A figure stands on the other side of the bars of her cell, lost in the shadows of the doorway. She can catch only a glimpse of a craggy forehead and the suggestion of thick, broad shoulders.

“Lalith?” she says groggily.

“The shtanis believe that,” he says. Biswal’s voice is low and husky. “Here in this polis they preached that for hundreds of years. I read it. ‘War and conflict form the sea through which nation-states swim,’ or so Saint Petrenko said. ‘Some who have had the fortune to find clear, calm waters believe otherwise. They have forgotten that war is momentum. War is natural. And war makes one strong.’ ”

“Lalith…What the hells are you doing? Why did you kill Rada? Did you listen to anything I said?”

“I did,” says Biswal quietly. “I listened. I believe you.”

“And the swords? Did you destroy them?”

He shakes his head. The dull light catches a strange gleam in his eye. Mulaghesh is reminded of a ferocious animal watching sulkily from the shadows of its pen. “I’ve had them moved up to the fortress for protection.”

“You’ve what?”

“You say that if these swords exist then war is coming, Turyin,” says Biswal. “And I believe you. But I believe that war has always been coming. Saypur has benefited from a substantial imbalance of power over the past seventy years. Its power and hegemony have been uncontested. But that has made it soft and weak.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve seen the people here,” says Biswal. “You don’t think they’d fight us eventually? They fight us now, with sticks and rocks. Imagine if they ever progress. We haven’t fought a real war in forty years, Turyin, and the last one, the one you and I fought and bled in, our country tries to forget. To discuss the reality of our global position is considered impolite. Sooner or later, Saypur will have to awaken to reality. We will have to fight again. It can no longer allow other states to simply do as they wish. It can no longer be passive, and it certainly can no longer be giving.” He bows his head. “And if I must be the one to wake Saypur from its slumber, then so be it.”

Mulaghesh stares at him in horror. “You want to…to use the Night of the Sea of Swords to start a world war?”

“There already is a world war, Turyin,” says Biswal. “But now it’s a quiet one. The Continent is growing more powerful. It struggles against us. It’s poor now, but it won’t always be that way. We can either act now or pay the price later. I prefer the former option.”

“But…But…This is barking fucking madness!”

“It’s the truth,” he says calmly. “To be a power is to make constant war upon one’s neighbors. We must accept that truth or fail. And tonight will force our nation to make the decision.”

“This is madness!” says Mulaghesh, furious. “And more so, it’s stupid! This will be a fucking slaughter, Lalith, and we’ll be the ones getting slaughtered! They outnumber us a thousand to one, and each of their soldiers is worth a hundred of ours!”

“You doubt us,” says Biswal, with infuriating serenity. “Of course you would. You’ve been living in the shadow of Komayd, and she’s never had much love for the armed services. We have advanced weaponry here, Turyin, and tremendous destructive powers. We have advanced notice. The Voortyashtani army will be drawn to here, where their swords lie, and we will annihilate them. I’ve already ordered the coastal batteries to prepare. And then after this battle Saypuri attitudes concerning this ruined land will change.”

“You’re a damned fool!” says Mulaghesh. “You’re putting the lives of every one of your soldiers in incredible risk due to your own shitting vanity! This isn’t about nation-states, or war, or the balance of power, this is about you!”

Biswal’s huge, gnarled hands grasp the bars of Mulaghesh’s jail cell, but he says nothing.

“You just want your time in the spotlight,” says Mulaghesh. “You’ve never forgiven Saypur for refusing to admit that the Yellow March even happened. You’ve never forgiven me for being lauded as a damned hero of the Battle of Bulikov. You think yourself a hero, but your superiors act as if you were a monster. And you are, Lalith.” Then, quieter, “We are. We both are, for what we did.”

“For what we did?” hisses Biswal. He grips the bars so hard they rattle. “For what we did? Winning the war? Is that such a terrible thing? Saving Saypuri lives, ending conflict? Are we fiends for making this possible? Is it at all right that they should forget us, forget what we did?”

Mulaghesh stands up and shouts into his face, “We razed towns! Destroyed families! We not only killed civilians, but children, as they slept!”

“Because our nation asked it of us! They asked it of us and then they forgot. They forgot those of us who’d thrown our lives away for them! They should have been grateful, but they just forgot!”

“Oh, enough!” says Mulaghesh. “Enough of this! May the seas damn you, Lalith Biswal! May fate damn you a thousand times over for not learning what I’ve learned! We are servants. We serve. We serve as humanely as we can, and we ask nothing of our country. That is what we agree to when we put on the uniform. And all of your posturing and your dreams of conquest don’t belong in this civilized world.”

Biswal stares at her, white with rage. “I was going to ask you to join me,” he says softly. “To help us defend against this attack. Will you refuse me, and abandon your fellow soldiers?”

“I will refuse your foolish war, yes,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t serve you. I serve my country. Kill me if you wish, just as I did Bansa and Sankhar. Dying nobly is preferable to living savagely.”

He steps back from her cell, breathing hard. He whispers, “You aren’t worth the bullet.” Then he turns around, hands in fists at his sides, and walks away.

Sigrud stands in the doorway of the darkened room in the fortress. He stares at the high metal table on the far end, and the figure lying upon it. It was easy to infiltrate—the fortress is in complete turmoil due to some announcement Biswal made—yet now that he’s here he finds he can’t go any farther.

He needs to move—he knows he will move—but he can’t just yet. He can’t bring himself to take a step.

The smell of blood and cigarettes is overpowering. His limbs feel faint; his heart is a hum. Sigrud je Harkvaldsson has never felt he wanted many things in his life, not with the fervent desire that some people wish for things, but right now, more than anything, he wishes to disbelieve reality, to defy what lies before him with such ferocity that the world itself is forced to obey, sending this sight scurrying back into its hole like some creeping vermin.

But he cannot. So he is left alone with the dark, empty room, the smell of cigarettes, and the young woman lying on the table.

He walks across the room to her.

He remembers when he first saw her. He was young, too young to be a father. A child, really, and his wife Hild the same. He crept into the dark bedroom, feeling he was infringing upon matters forbidden to him, for up until then only women had entered this room, an endless chain of old women and young serving girls and, of course, Hild’s mother, who helped her through her labor. So to open the door to the bedroom was like peeking through to some holy temple, barred to filthy commoners such as he. But instead of any rituals or sacred ceremonies there was just Hild lying in the big bed, wan and sweaty but smiling, and her mother sitting on the side of the bed, and the basket on the table beside them. Hild said, “Come in,” her voice creaky and cracked from exhaustion. “Come in and look at her.” And Sigrud did so. And though he had fought for his father and sailed across many dangerous seas, he suddenly felt deeply confused and afraid, perhaps sensing, unconsciously, that his world was about to change.

And that was exactly what happened as he came to stand over the basket and the tiny pink person swaddled at its bottom, her face crinkled in displeasure, as if her birth had been an intolerable inconvenience to her. And he remembers now, as he crosses the dark room in the fortress, how he reached down to her, his hands suddenly so big and rough and unwieldy as he stroked one soft, pink cheek with his knuckle and said her name.

Sigrud stands over the body on the table.

She is dirty and mussed, her collar askew in a manner she never would have tolerated in waking life. Bits of ferns and bracken cling to her clothing, and her glasses are missing and strands of hair fall around her face. Yet despite all this she is as beautiful as he remembers her, cool and calm and utterly collected, a creature blessed or perhaps cursed with unimpeachable confidence. Even in death she appears sure of herself.

“Signe,” he whispers.

Her left breast is dark with blood. An exit wound—they shot her in the back.

His hands are shaking.

To fight so long to have a thing, and to grasp it so briefly before it is yet again ripped away…

The door of the hospital ward bursts open. Three soldiers move in, riflings ready. “Hands up!” shouts one. “Hands up! Now!”

Sigrud stares down at the face of his daughter.

“We found your damned rope ladder,” says another soldier. “We figured this would be the first place you’d be.”

He strokes her cheek with one big, raw knuckle.

The soldiers draw closer. “Hands up, or are you deaf?”

Something falls with a pat pat onto the table beside his daughter. Sigrud looks at it and realizes it’s blood.

His nose is bleeding. He holds his left hand out and catches three drops in his palm, the white glove turning dark, the scar below throbbing with pain.

He whispers, “I used to chase her through the forest.”

“What?” says one of the soldiers. “What the hells did you say?”

More blood falls into his open palm. Sigrud makes a fist and begins to move.

Mulaghesh is still stewing in her jail cell when she hears the gunshot. It’s muffled by the thick walls of the fortress, but she knows what it is immediately.

“What in hells?” She walks to the bars of her door and looks to the guard. “Hey—what the hells is going on?”

The guard, disconcerted, draws her sidearm. Mulaghesh sees she has lousy trigger discipline, because she puts her finger on the damn thing immediately. The guard takes a step back, looking through the glass window in the door to the prison hallway.

“What the fuck is going on?” says Mulaghesh again.

“Quiet!” says the guard.

There’s silence. Then from somewhere nearby comes a bloodcurdling scream, long and loud.

The scream stops short—too short. Then more silence.

“Shit,” says Mulaghesh.

“Quiet!” shouts the guard.

An enormous crash from outside the hallway door. Someone is screaming, not in threat or assault, but in sheer terror.

Then there’s a face at the door—a young Saypuri soldier, his eyes wide in fright. He pounds on the glass, crying, “Open the door! Open the door, you’ve got to let me in! Let me in, let me in!”

“What?” says the guard. “Pishal, what in hells is happening out there?”

The soldier outside the glass looks over his shoulder at something. “By all the fucking seas, Ananth, let me in!”

The guard glances at Mulaghesh. “This is probably your doing, isn’t it? Some damn shtanis sent here to rescue you…”

“Do I look like I know what’s going on?” says Mulaghesh.

The guard hesitates, then raises her pistol and cautiously opens the door. The Saypuri soldier bursts in, terrified. “Thank the seas!” he cries. “Thank all the seas! Now shut it and—”

The soldier never finishes his sentence, as something bright red—a hand, perhaps?—reaches through the gap and rips him back through the door with terrifying speed, as if there were a rope tied to his waist with an auto at the other end. The soldier screams in terror, flailing uselessly at the door and the frame, but within a fraction of a second he’s gone, the door slamming shut behind him.

“Son of a bitch!” shouts the guard. She pulls the door back open, pistol raised, and leaps through. Once again the door slams shut, its bang echoing down the hallway.

Silence.

Mulaghesh waits. And waits.

There’s a scream from the other side of the door. A fine spray of blood mists over the glass window, and there is a great banging as someone fumbles with the handle. The door flies open, and the guard comes stumbling back through.

Her left arm is bloody and awkwardly twisted, as if it’s been caught in some kind of monstrous machinery. She’s obviously in shock, but she still has wits enough to slam the door shut with her good shoulder and lock it. She doesn’t quite succeed in this last task, leaving the old iron latch just half closed, but she turns and limps down the hall to Mulaghesh.

“What the hells is happening out there, Private?” says Mulaghesh, horrified.

“Help me,” whimpers the guard. “You’ve…You’ve got to help me.”

“What is going on?”

“He’s an animal!” she says, her mouth working to make the words. “He’s a monster! Please, you’ve got to help me!”

“Open the jail cell and I will!”

The guard tries to unclip the ring of keys from her belt, but she’s in too much shock to manage it.

“Hurry, damn you!” says Mulaghesh.

There’s a terrific crash from the door as something on the other side slams into it. The guard stops and stares at it in horror. The door shudders again as another enormous blow strikes it. Then another, and another.

The glass window quivers. There’s a tiny creak as the latch she only half closed slowly begins to give way.

“Oh, no,” whispers the guard.

With one final crash the door flies open. Mulaghesh can hardly see what’s on the other side before there’s a soft thump and the guard begins screaming, not in terror but in agony. She looks at the guard and realizes that a knife has somehow sprouted from the guard’s left side, up under her arm. The knife is huge and thick and black, and is quite familiar to Mulaghesh.

Sigrud je Harkvaldsson walks through the door, his chest heaving with either exertion or wrath. He’s covered from head to toe in blood, his face and chest spattered with fans of gore. His face is bruised and there’s a slash on his left arm, but besides these tokens it is quite clear that he was the decisive victor of whatever fights he’s been in.

“Sigrud, what are you doing?” shouts Mulaghesh. Her fury rises as she realizes who Sigrud must have been fighting—and likely killing. “What have you done, you motherfucker, what have you done!”

Sigrud ignores her and walks to the guard, who is feebly attempting to crawl away. He grasps her by the head and waist and lifts her into the air, and as he does Mulaghesh sees the steady flow of blood pouring from his nose….

He’s in a berserk rage, she realizes. He’s gone mad.

Though she has no idea what would put him in such a state, she rapidly begins to realize that Sigrud is now likely the most dangerous thing in Fort Thinadeshi.

She watches in horror as Sigrud slams the guard’s head into the bars of the jail cell with so much force that the skin on the young girl’s forehead pops open like a bag packed too tight. The guard goes silent and her eyes blank, unconscious or worse.

“Stop it!” screams Mulaghesh. “Stop it!”

But he doesn’t. He slams the guard’s head into the bars over and over again, thrusting forward with one arm, and with each blow her face deforms just a little more, splitting along the temple and the cheek. Blood wells up from around the guard’s right eye as Sigrud pounds her head into the bars with a sickening, steady pace.

“You piece of shit!” screams Mulaghesh. “You stupid bastard!”

When the guard is beaten beyond all recognition, Sigrud tosses her aside and lunges at the bars like a wild animal. Mulaghesh is just barely fast enough to escape the grasp of his fingers, which nearly catch her neck. He screams furiously, straining to reach her, kicking and beating at the bars. Then, growling, he steps back, grasps the bars, and begins to pull.

The jail cell should be too strong for him—it really should. But Mulaghesh knows that Fort Thinadeshi is quite old, so, like the latch on the hallway door, not everything is built to modern engineering standards. This makes her deeply concerned when something in the doorway begins to creak and moan, and puffs of dust come floating down as if the very stone is about to give way.

Sigrud, growling and snarling, digs his heels in and heaves again. The hinges of the door begin to whine.

She knows that if he gets through that door he’ll likely tear her to pieces. Mulaghesh is no slouch at close-quarters combat, but she’s seen Sigrud single-handedly kill half a dozen people in combat, and he’s got an age, weight, and limb advantage. She eyes the guard’s corpse and the knife sticking out of her, which Sigrud has thankfully forgotten, but it’s too far away.

“Sigrud!” she shouts. She steps closer. “Fucking snap out of it already—”

His hand snatches out and grabs her prosthetic hand. He rips her forward, and the buckles along her arm begin to give.

“Fucking do it, then!” she screams at him. “Kill me if you have the guts!”

He rips her prosthetic off, which sends them both stumbling back. Sigrud stands, his face furious, gripping the prosthetic like he plans to crush it, his knuckles white and his fingers flexing.

Yet it holds. The metal does not bend.

Sigrud pauses. He blinks and slowly looks down at the metal hand in his grasp. He stares at the hand like he doesn’t quite understand what it is. Then he begins blinking rapidly, face trembling, and he cradles the prosthetic in his hands as if it were a child.

“No,” he murmurs. “No, no, no…”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” snarls Mulaghesh. “You’re lucky you’re not dead, you stupid bastard! Though you damned well should be! You’ve murdered Saypuri soldiers!”

“She’s gone,” he whispers. It’s like he’s speaking to her prosthetic. “She’s…She’s really gone.”

“She certainly fucking is,” says Mulaghesh. “I hope you’re damned well happy! She was a soldier of Saypur, a soldier of Saypur! An innocent damned bystander and you fucking beat her to death! Do you understand what that means? If this is your idea of a jailbreak, it’s a piss-poor one!”

“I thought…I thought it was all a dream,” says Sigrud. He looks up at Mulaghesh, his one gray eye pale and burning on his bloodied face. “And…And Signe? It wasn’t a dream, was it? She’s…She’s…”

“What are you talking about?”

“I…I dreamed I found her here, dead, lying on a table,” he whispers. “Shot in the back. I dreamt they shot her in the woods outside of Smolisk’s house.”

It feels like Mulaghesh has just swallowed a lump of ice. What Sigrud is describing sounds chillingly plausible.

“Wait. Are you saying she’s…she’s dead? Signe’s dead?”

“I thought I dreamed it.” His voice is a whimper. “But I…I don’t think I did. She’s dead, isn’t she. My daughter is dead. They took her from me just when I got her back.” Then his face twists up and, to her shock, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson begins to weep.

Mulaghesh kneels at the door. She’s not yet forgiven him for what he’s done, but at least now she understands what sent him into a rage. “Biswal had Signe shot?”

“I don’t know,” he says through his tears. “I don’t know. But she is dead. They have her on a table here. They stole her body and hid it away.”

“I’m…I’m sorry, Sigrud,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m truly sorry. I…I would never have asked her to come if…” She trails off. She knows such comments are useless.

“I wasn’t there for her!” he says, sobbing. “I wasn’t there! Never when she needed me, not ever!”

“I’m sorry,” whispers Mulaghesh. “I’m so sorry. But it wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault, Sigrud. It wasn’t.”

Sigrud covers his face, beyond words.

She leans her head up against the bars of her jail cell. “Listen, Sigrud…Listen, she chose to be there. She chose to help me get to Smolisk’s house. She did so because she saw a threat was coming and she wanted to do something to stop it. Signe spent her whole life trying to do something remarkable here, trying to make life better for millions of people. And if we don’t do anything now, she’ll have spent her life in vain.” She reaches through the bars and rests a hand on his leg. “Please, Sigrud. Help me. Help me make what she did matter.”

Sigrud sits up, still weeping. “I don’t…I don’t even understand what is going on.”

“Take the keys and unlock my cell,” she says, “and I’ll tell you.”

Captain Sakthi paces up and down the coastal walls of Fort Thinadeshi, though he is not at all sure what he and his men are doing here. They’re trained for reconnaissance and surveillance, certainly, but not naval reconnaissance and surveillance. Almost no one in Fort Thinadeshi is really, thoroughly trained for naval assault, because no other nation has ever had a real navy besides Saypur, not since the Blink: the idea of any Continental nation ever being rich enough to fund such a venture is absolutely insane.

“See anything, Sergeant?” he asks, stopping behind Sergeant Burdar.

Burdar is currently nestled down atop the coastal battery with a giant telescope on a tripod glued to his eye. “Not a thing, sir,” he says, his cheek crinkled as he watches the horizon. “Though it would help if we knew what we were looking for.”

“Ships, Sergeant,” says Sakthi. “We are looking for ships.”

“That’s what the general said, sure,” says Burdar. “But what kind of ships, I ask you, sir?”

“Continental ones,” says Sakthi. “Voortyashtani ones, I suppose.”

“And those I don’t know the look of,” says Burdar, “being as they haven’t been seen in nearly a hundred years, sir.”

“Well, keep looking. If you see so much as a sole farting swan, I wish to know of it.”

Burdar smirks. “Yes, sir.”

Sakthi paces back over the walls. He has a few other soldiers monitoring the horizon with binoculars and telescopes, but, as Burdar so accurately put it, without knowing exactly what they’re looking for, it’s a little hard to adequately prepare.

Sakthi doesn’t want to admit it—he is, like nearly every Saypur officer, a patriot to the core—but he’s been feeling increasingly ambivalent about his service here in Voortyashtan. From the instant Saint Zhurgut surfaced in the Solda Bay, everything has gone to hells. General Biswal seemed so confident when he led the expedition out into the highlands to pursue the insurgents, but what they met was anything but conventional combat: it was ambush after ambush, and when they began to prepare for the ambushers they found it increasingly difficult to separate civilian from insurgent. And when Sakthi returned with Biswal’s few elite officers, he found it impossible to determine if they were close to fulfilling their primary objective: Had the people they’d driven out of the highlands really been the planners of the attacks? Or had they been just a handful of shepherds with riflings in the wrong place at the wrong time? Either way, Biswal seemed content to treat it as a victory.

But now, to come back and discover some kind of invasion has been brewing on their very doorsteps…It’s unthinkable.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, what in the world is wrong with Sergeant Major Pandey? Ever since the news spread of the polis governor’s assassination, the man has been in a melancholy fury. Burdar even reported he’d stumbled across the sergeant sitting on the edge of the coastal walls, weeping.

Burdar speaks up: “Sir? Sir!”

Sakthi paces over to him. “Do you have something, Sergeant?”

“Things, sir,” says Burdar, squinting into the telescope.

“What?”

“I have somethings, sir,” says Burdar. “Many, ah…Many things…” He positions the telescope just right, then backs away so Sakthi can take his place.

Captain Sakthi crouches down and puts his eye to the telescope. It takes a minute for the optics to make sense to him. At first he thinks he’s seeing a strand of electric lights, dangling out there on the waves, but then he realizes he can see forms in the light.

They’re not lights. They’re ships. Glowing ships, ancient ships with sails and oars and pointed prows, but still ships.

He tries to count their number. His eye flexes in and out of focus. It seems like he’s seeing the night sky, with a million twinkling stars before him.

Sakthi clears his throat. “Sound the alarm,” he says hoarsely. “Now.”

Mulaghesh flips the dead guard over and strips her of her uniform. It feels deeply dishonest to do such a thing, and the uniform is bloodied, but it’s better than running around with her fatigues stained an unearthly red from the City of Blades. And she may have need of the pistol and sword.

Sigrud sits still and placid as Mulaghesh describes what she discovered, what she saw in Rada Smolisk’s house, what Biswal did and said. Sigrud is no longer weeping, but an awful, cold stillness has seeped through him, as if he’s stepped behind a veil of ice and she can no longer see the man behind it.

“So we must destroy these swords,” he says softly.

“Yeah. Biswal has them here, or so he told me. He’ll either have them in his quarters, or he’ll have them in the thinadeskite labs, down below.”

“You’re sure?”

“As sure as I can be. We need to split up. I don’t like it, but time is of the essence—if we even have any left. I might be able to make this uniform work until I get to him. Do you think you can sneak down to the labs on your own?”

Sigrud nods, not a trace of doubt in his face. “Many of the lower parts of the fortress are deserted. Everyone is on the walls, manning the coastal batteries.”

She shakes her head. “By the seas, he’s serious about trying to fight them. Let’s go. If you don’t find the swords, come to Biswal’s quarters. If I don’t, I’ll do the same and come to the labs. Does that work?”

He nods. “Then let’s go. The main stairway is this way.”

They walk down the hallway. Mulaghesh keeps her carousel up and quietly opens the door.

She stares at what lies beyond, turning pale. “By the seas…”

“What?” says Sigrud, behind her. “What is it?”

She looks at him. “You don’t know?”

“Should I?”

She grimaces and pushes the door open. There at the foot of the stairs are four corpses, all Saypuri soldiers, all abominably ravaged and mutilated. One man has been disemboweled, another dismembered. One soldier sits in the corner with a rifling bayonet thrust up into his abdomen. On one, a woman, she sees teeth marks on her face and neck.

Sigrud stares at the carnage. “I…I did this?”

Mulaghesh doesn’t bother answering. They’ll kill him for this, she thinks. There must have been witnesses. They’ll never forgive him, never let this go. Hells, I’m not even sure if I can.

Then the sirens start to wail: a low, rising note of alarm that echoes throughout the hallways of the fortress. The very sound of it makes all of Mulaghesh’s hair stand up on end.

Sigrud looks up at the ceiling. “What is that?”

Mulaghesh listens as more and more sirens begin to join until it’s a shrieking chorus. “Oh, no,” she says quietly. “Oh, no, no no.”

“What is it?”

“Damn! Damn it all! It means the ships must have been spotted!”

“The…Voortyashtani ships?”

“Yes, damn it! It means that even if we did destroy the swords, it’s too late!”

“What options do we have now?”

Mulaghesh is about to say nothing: the invasion is here and there’s nothing they can do about it save fight, and lose. But then she recalls one of the last things Thinadeshi said to her: It’s a token, a symbol. It can be unlocked, unfolded, interpreted to be many things. You can do many deeds with it if you use it the right way, if you think about it the right way.

“Our hand’s all played out,” she says quietly. “Except for one thing. But I’m not sure what I’m even supposed to do with it.”

“Do with what?” says Sigrud.

She looks at him, jaw set. “The sword of Voortya.” She describes what it looks like to him.

“And what will you do with this sword?”

“I’m not sure—but I know it’s a weapon of terrific power. I just don’t know how to activate it….Maybe you have to get close to the sentinels for it to work—it’s almost powered by them, in a way. But if Biswal took it, odds are it’s wherever the swords are, too. So, again—the labs and Biswal’s quarters.”

“The plan hasn’t changed, then.”

“Oh, hells, yes it’s changed,” says Mulaghesh. “It means we need to book it twice as fast! Come on!”

Mulaghesh looks behind her as she trots up the stairs to Biswal’s quarters. It’s hard to sneak about with these sirens wailing all around her, as she can’t hear if anyone’s ahead of or behind her, but so far these areas are deserted. Everyone’s manned the walls, as Sigrud claimed.

She guessed that Biswal wouldn’t keep the swords in his makeshift office at the top of the tower. But she knows where the officers’ quarters are, and due to the lack of available space in Fort Thinadeshi, odds are Biswal’s is there as well.

She knows she’s right when she walks down one empty hallway and hears a voice in the back of her head:

“…and our swords will fall like rains…”

She grits her teeth and keeps moving. The awful, babbling sound of the swords intensifies in her mind. The doors get more and more ornate until finally she comes to one thick oaken door with a bronze handle.

She tries the handle. It’s unlocked. She pushes it open.

The whisper of voices becomes a blast. The room beyond is wide and spacious, with a large fireplace set in the wall. To her surprise, there’s a fire going—but then she sees the room is not unoccupied.

Lalith Biswal looks out of a bay window at the far end, hands clasped behind his back. Between him and Mulaghesh are the racks and racks of Rada’s swords, all of them whispering and muttering in Mulaghesh’s head.

She stands there for a moment, not sure what to do. She thought he’d be up on the walls with everyone else.

Then Biswal says aloud, “They only speak to people who have killed, don’t they.”

Mulaghesh hesitates, then walks in, shuts the door, and locks it. She takes the pistol from its holster and turns to face him. “Yeah. That’s right.”

“I thought as much,” he says. “Most of the soldiers here think they’re a figment of their imagination.” He turns around and looks at her, head cocked, listening to the voices and the rise and fall of the sirens. “It’s happening.”

“Yes.”

“So what are you here for, Turyin? I’ve started it. The first shot in the war. One that should have been fought long ago. There’s no going back now.” His words are soft and airy, and his eyes have a glazed-over look to them, as if he’s on some drug. He looks at the pistol in her hand. “Are you going to shoot me?”

“Not if I don’t have to.” She scans the area, looking for the sword of Voortya. His living quarters aren’t as sparse as she’d imagined them to be: he has a comfortable-looking couch, a few paintings, a nice table, and a half-full bookshelf.

“Are you looking for this?” he asks quietly. He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out something small, black, curved, and strange-looking—something that could resemble a human hand clutching at air if you looked at it the right way.

Mulaghesh goes still when she sees the sword.

“What is it?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer. She can’t tell if he’s armed or not: she doesn’t see a sidearm on him, which is odd.

“What is this thing you had, Turyin? We found it on you at Smolisk’s house.”

Mulaghesh slowly begins moving toward him.

“I felt it ask me a question,” he says softly. “It spoke to me as I carried it in my pocket, when the sirens started going off, when I knew what was coming. It was so startling I had to walk away.”

Mulaghesh’s grip on the pistol tightens. “What did it say, Lalith?”

“It asked me something—it asked if I was it. It asked if I was this…this thing, this thing I was holding, or maybe it asked if it was a part of me or if I was a part of it. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know how to answer. What is it, Turyin? What is this thing you found?”

“Something that doesn’t belong to you. Give it to me. Now. And I’ll leave peacefully.”

“And if I call for the guards?”

“I know there aren’t any. You’re alone here.”

He considers it. “No,” he says. “No, I won’t give it to you.”

She raises the pistol and points it at him. “I’m not joking, Lalith. I don’t have time for this, not while those ships are closing in.”

“I know you, Turyin,” he says. “To murder one’s commanding officer…That’s something you can never come back from.”

“But it wouldn’t be the first time that I killed a comrade,” she says softly.

“I see,” he says. “But I will still not give this to you. Did you think I wasn’t willing to die for this?”

“And all your soldiers with you?”

“I remain confident,” he says serenely, “of our inevitable victory. We are soldiers of Saypur. We have never lost a war.”

“You’ve gone mad.” The pistol trembles in her hand. “Is that why you had Signe killed?”

“Harkvaldsson? It was an accident. An unfortunate casualty.”

“You suffer so many of those, it seems.” Mulaghesh is breathing heavily. “She was my friend.”

“She was a Dreyling. She was in a hostile region. Both you and she were acting against the orders of the Saypuri authority here. But I am attempting to serve the greater good.”

“Your idea of the greater good involves far too many innocent deaths, Lalith,” says Mulaghesh. “Give me the sword, or I swear I will shoot you dead.”

“A sword?” He looks down at it. “Is it a sword? For a second, when it was in my pocket, I got the strangest feeling that it was a human hand….And then when I held it, I looked out on the world, and imagined I saw seas of fire, and thousands of banners in the air….” He looks at her. “It’s not just a sword, is it. It’s more than these things that Rada made. What is it?”

“I’m going to give you one more chance.”

“I’ll tell you what,” says Biswal, suddenly eager. He stows the sword back in his coat. “I remember when you trained under me almost no one could beat you in a sword fight. You used those wooden swords, and I could tell when someone had tangled with you. They’d be moving slow and covered in livid bruises. I remember that.” He walks to one of the racks and picks up a sword—it must be a crude one, one that didn’t work, because he isn’t instantly possessed by a sentinel.

Lucky for him, thinks Mulaghesh, and lucky for me.

“I never contested you, of course. It would have been unseemly for me to do so, an officer so high above your rank. But I did wish to. To test my mettle against the best fighter under my command…We’re both creatures of battle, Turyin, here at what might be the greatest battle of our lives. It seems only just for us to fight for the possession of this thing, this strange, whispering trinket.”

Mulaghesh keeps the pistol pointed on him but doesn’t speak a word.

He smiles and whips his sword through the air. “Rada’s workmanship seems quite capable. Will these things break skin?” His smile dims a little. “Will you still be a worthy opponent, despite being one-handed?” He walks to one side of the room and kicks the couch away, clearing some space. Then he turns to face her, a strange light in his eyes. “Come on. Test yourself. Let the art of combat decide who is the righteous one.”

Mulaghesh pulls the trigger.

The bullet punches through Biswal’s chest and smashes the window behind him. A cold, chilly breeze comes pouring in.

Biswal stares down at himself in astonishment. The wound is bleeding freely, his blood striking the floor below him.

He looks up at her, outraged, shocked. “I can’t believe you…you…”

She shoots again, hitting him again in the chest. He blinks, eyes wide, and the sword in his hand clatters to the floor. He takes one step toward her, then collapses to the ground, pawing limply for the blade that’s now just out of reach.

Mulaghesh keeps the pistol trained on him and slowly walks over.

“You shot me,” he says softly. “I can’t believe you shot me.”

“I’m not quite like you, Lalith,” she says. She holsters the pistol, bends down, and reaches into his coat. “You’ve always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it’s just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do.” She pulls out the sword of Voortya. It’s covered in Biswal’s blood. “So when you need to do it, there’s no need to make a show of it.”

He stares at her in disbelief. Then he says, “I’m…I’m not going to die, am I? I can’t. I just can’t….”

Mulaghesh watches him.

“I wasn’t…I wasn’t supposed to die like this,” he says softly. “I was supposed…to have a hero’s death. I’m owed a better death.”

“There’s no such thing as a good death, Lalith,” she says. “It’s just a dull, stupid thing we all have to do eventually. To ask meaning of it is to ask meaning of a shadow.”

Biswal’s trembling face fills with fury. “I hope there is an afterlife,” he says, his voice shaking. “I hope there is a hell. And I hope you go there soon, Turyin Mulaghesh.” His head falls back, his neck no longer able to support its weight.

“I’ve already been living in one, Lalith,” she says quietly. “Ever since the March.”

She can’t quite tell when he dies. She can tell his vision is failing him, and then perhaps he’s passed out from blood loss but is still alive…and then…

Nothing.

There’s a click from the door. Then it swings open to reveal Sigrud kneeling on the other side, lockpicks in his hand.

He looks at her, then at Biswal’s corpse. “Success?”

Mulaghesh walks away without looking back. “Get me to the coast.”

Captain Sakthi sprints up the steps to the southwest watchtower, his breath hot and burning in his lungs. He can hear the fortress yards behind him, full of soldiers piling in to arm themselves in case of a potential invasion.

Potential, he thinks wildly as he keeps running, or almost guaranteed?

He reviews the situation as he runs. No one knows where the hells Biswal is. The general was last seen reviewing the coastal cannons when he abruptly looked up as if someone called his name, excused himself, and walked away. Colonel Mishwal unfortunately took a bullet to the neck in the highlands, Major Owaisi is suffering from acute pneumonia contracted after tumbling into an icy Voortyashtani stream, and Major Hukkeri is frantically preparing her troops to defend the clifftops south of the fortress.

But this all means that no one is entirely sure whose order they’re waiting on to fire the coastal cannons. This has never been done in the history of the fortress—who’s the authority in such a situation? Yet Captain Sakthi, having seen what is slowly moving across the North Seas to them, is more than willing to abandon all decorum of rank if that means they make it out of here alive.

He finally makes it to the top of the watchtower. The walls of the tower are mostly glass to allow the radio technicians to see into the bay, so he is instantly confronted with the sight he just left.

“Oh, by the seas,” he whimpers. “There’s more of them! And they’re closer!”

The seas west of the fortress, which are often so dark, are now lit up with a queer blue-white luminescence, giving their slow, undulating waves a creamy, green color. This curious effect extends for miles, as if the waters have been invaded by some strange breed of algae.

But the source of the glow is obvious: it comes from the thousands of spectral ships sailing toward them.

They are the most bizarre and terrifying things Captain Sakthi has ever seen, splintery creations of bone and horn and metal, long and thin and positively lethal-looking, as if someone could teach a knife to float. Their sails are huge and billowing, not at all ragged but smooth and silvery. And Sakthi can see someone is rowing their countless oars, hauling at the ocean and driving the ships forward with furious speed.

He takes out a spyglass and squints through it. He can’t quite make out who is rowing, but…but he thinks he can see shadowy, monstrous figures that couldn’t possibly be human….

“By the seas…” He takes the spyglass away. “By the seas! What are you waiting for?” he cries to the technicians. “Why haven’t they fired yet?”

“We haven’t gotten the order yet, Captain,” says one of the technicians sitting at a radio. “General Biswal sa—”

“General Biswal is absent!” says Sakthi. “Radio the damn positions to the artillery and tell them to fire already!”

The technicians look at one another, crouched in their piles and piles of bronzed equipment. To do as Sakthi is asking is the most severe of violations.

Sakthi grimaces, pulls out his sidearm, and points it at them. “Tell them anything afterwards! Tell them I’m culpable! Tell them to hang me! Tell them to put it on my fucking fitness report! Just fire already, fire, fire!”

The technicians grab a radio, turn it on, mutter in a jumble of coordinates, and then finish with, “Fire away.”

There’s a pause.

Then the first cannon fires.

The boom of the cannon is so loud it feels like it will shake Sakthi’s bones to the point of dissolution. The coastal batteries light up with the flare as if a spotlight has shone down on them, and three of the technicians put binoculars to their eyes. Sakthi holsters his weapon, fumbles for his own spyglass, and puts it to his eye just in time to see a column of water erupt up from the ocean.

One of the technicians says, “Miss.”

The cannons fire again and again, targeting the foremost ship. It feels like it takes an agonizingly long time between each blast. Then finally the Voortyashtani ship erupts in a burst of dark smoke, and it begins to drift on the ocean, a flaming, smoking, directionless hulk that now threatens to crash into the other ships.

The technicians cheer, and Sakthi takes away his spyglass to join them. But as he does he sees things in perspective: the smoking, flaming ship is but a fraction of the flotilla, a tiny candle burning in a sea of glittering, soft light.

We’ll have to do that a thousand more times for it to make a difference, he thinks, his stomach sinking. We’re fucked, aren’t we? We’re so desperately fucked.

Mulaghesh and Sigrud are sprinting across the fortress courtyard when the first cannon goes off. It’s incredibly, deafeningly loud, and though the courtyard is full of soldiers preparing for combat it’s immediately clear that they’ve never heard the coastal cannons in use, nor did they ever expect to. They’re unnerved, ragged and exhausted from the highlands excursion, and totally unprepared for what might happen.

I have to stop this, thinks Mulaghesh. Or else those sentinels will cut through these kids like a hot knife through butter.

“They likely took down my rope ladder,” says Sigrud. “So I am not sure how to get out. All gates will surely be watched.”

“All but one on the northern side,” says Mulaghesh.

“There’s a gate on the northern side of the fortress?”

“The loading dock for the thinadeskite mines,” says Mulaghesh. “I can almost guarantee no one’s bothered to put a body on that exit.”

She’s right: in all of the confusion and chaos, there are no guards stationed at the loading dock, though it is still penned in with a canyon of tall, forbidding wire fences held up with tall wooden posts.

“No wire cutters this time,” says Mulaghesh. “Shit!”

Sigrud grunts, takes off his coat, and wraps his hands in it. Then he walks to one of the posts, grabs three strands of the barbed wire, and heaves.

With the plunk sounds of snapping harp strings, the bolts holding the wire to the post pop out. He stomps on the handful of wires with a boot, then grabs another handful of wires, heaves it up, and opens a narrow hole in the fence. Mulaghesh dives through and Sigrud follows, though his hands are now bleeding and the wires manage to score him over his shoulders and back.

They run north and west along the walls of Fort Thinadeshi. These walls are dark and unmanned, as nearly all the fort’s focus is on the west and the south. Yet such is the power of the cannons that each time those on the western walls go off, even here on the opposite side of the fortress, it’s like a miniature sun has risen, the pale, burning light rippling across the harsh cliffs.

Mulaghesh can’t yet see what they’re firing at. She’s not close enough yet. But she knows. She saw them, after all, in the City of Blades.

Then a voice shouts from the walls: “You!”

Mulaghesh looks up and sees the furious face of Sergeant Major Pandey looking down on her. She’s not sure why he looks so angry, but she doesn’t want to wait to find out. “Damn,” she says. “Run.”

They move, sprinting over the cliffs with the boom and flare of the cannons just to the left over their shoulders. The western horizon is lit with a queer, unearthly light, and as they near the cliffs she can see the tips of something glowing out on the waters.

She grips the sword of Voortya in her hand. It’s sticky with Biswal’s blood, but it’s still dead, still dormant. She has no idea what to do with it, or even if there is anything to do with it—it might simply be too late.

There’s a crash from far behind them. She glances back and sees someone has driven one of the fortress autos through the wire fence and is speeding over the rocks at them in pursuit. The driver must not care for their own well-being or the auto’s, as they push the vehicle into terrain most drivers would never attempt. She can hear the tires crunching, the creak of the suspensions, a crack as its bumper dips and smashes into one of the stones. It’s obvious that, whoever it is, they’re pursuing Mulaghesh and Sigrud and will overtake them soon.

Mulaghesh points ahead at a small gully. “There!” she cries.

She can see the auto’s headlights now out of the corner of her eye. Another crunch as it plows over a stone…

She and Sigrud dive into the gully, their elbows banging and scraping on the rocks. The car’s engine roars once more and it surges over them.

There’s an enormous pop as the auto hits the gully, dipping forward enough for its wheels to catch the lip just at the wrong angle. Mulaghesh suspects that the axle has snapped upon impact. More concerning, though, is the spray of rocks and rubble from the impact. She can feel small, stinging stones dappling her body, and nearby Sigrud cries out in real pain.

The auto rumbles and rattles a few feet forward past the gully, awkwardly limping into the brush before coming to a grinding halt. Mulaghesh sits up, pulls out her pistol, and takes stock of herself: she’s got a few cuts and bruises, but nothing serious. Sigrud, however, has taken a sizeable stone to the left forearm and is cradling his hand in his lap, cursing prolifically. She can tell the second she sees it that his arm is broken.

She brings herself up into a kneel and draws a bead on the auto’s passenger door. Someone inside fumbles with the handle, then shoves it open and crawls out. There’s another blast from the coastal cannons, washing the cliffs with pale light, and she watches as a battered, furious Sergeant Major Pandey, his eyes red and his cheeks wet with tears, crawls out to stand on the cliffs.

He draws his sword and advances on her. “You!” he cries. “You!”

“Pandey?” Mulaghesh lowers the pistol. “What the hells are you doing?”

“You’re the reason she died!” he screams at her. “You’re the one who killed her!”

“What are you talking ab—”

Before she can finish speaking Pandey dives at her, thrusting his sword out in a quick, deadly jab. Mulaghesh rolls away, feeling the stones reverberate as the blade scours over them. She holsters her weapon, stands, and backs away, hands up to show she’s no threat. “Pandey! Pandey, what do you think I did?”

“I saw her!” he screams at her. “I saw her on the table! I saw her down there in the dark!” As he screams her nostrils catch the sour tang of alcohol on his breath, and she realizes he’s likely drunk. But if so it hasn’t dampened his sword work any, for he sweeps his blade at her in a lightning-quick strike that nearly guts her.

Mulaghesh dives away again, but she’s forced to use her false hand to help her land, so she falls badly. She can hear him coming at her, his footfalls light and quick, and she draws the sword she took from the guard just in time for its blade to meet his with a ringing snap.

“I didn’t kill Signe,” says Mulaghesh furiously. “I didn’t pull the trigger! I wasn’t even there!”

“You’re a liar!” He disengages, sweeps around, lunging at her exposed breast with a quick thrust. She bats his blade away, rolls backward, and stands, finally assuming a defensive stance.

“You got her mixed up in your conspiracy and then you killed her!” he screams.

“Pandey, damn you, there are more important things happening right now!”

“More important? More important?” He rushes at her, a furious blitz of brutally clever attacks that she only barely manages to defend. “She was the only important thing I ever had!”

Again he lunges at her, piling riposte upon riposte as she just barely manages to parry. She knew Pandey was brilliant with a blade, but she never sparred with him when she was stationed in Bulikov. As her forearm and tricep begin to ache, she begins to doubt if she could have managed to take Pandey even in her prime: he fights with liquid grace, his sword seeming to dance weightlessly through the air. Yet he also fights with the fury of the bereaved: as she sees more and more gaps in his defenses, she becomes aware that Pandey is focused wholly on attack, indifferent as to whether or not she can land a blow, indifferent to his own life. She ignores her instincts and refuses to strike. I’ve killed enough, she thinks desperately. I’ve harmed enough. I won’t do it to you, Pandey, I just won’t.

She’s saved only by the uneven ground, which she uses to her advantage, scrambling over the rocks as Pandey flies at her with the speed and poise of a much, much younger person.

“Do you even know what that’s like?” he cries. “Have you ever had anything in your damnable life besides the service?”

Over Pandey’s shoulder she glimpses Sigrud hauling himself out of the gully and limping at them, clutching his broken arm. “Don’t, Sigrud!” she shouts. “He’ll kill you! I mean it, he wi—”

He forces her into a bind, his blade striking hers with such force that it shakes her all the way up into her shoulder. Again she falls back, and again he pursues.

The cannons boom and shriek, illuminating Pandey from behind with a hellish glow. Behind her the glowing vessels from the City of Blades are less than a quarter mile from the shore, and closing fast. Sometimes the shells strike home and one of the ships explodes, a great fireball laced with black smoke unfurling into the sky, battering them even here with a blast of broiling heat. Yet still Pandey leads his assault, beating down her defenses with seemingly inexhaustible stamina.

She missteps over a slick stone. Pandey jabs at her and her left arm lights up with pain. She can’t take the time to see, but she can tell from how much weaker her arm suddenly feels that he’s likely slashed open her tricep. Too slow, she thinks. Just too damned slow…

“Pandey, stop!” she shouts. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, none of it! Bu—”

“But it happened!” he screams, his face still wet with tears. He slashes forward and she just barely manages to stop his blade.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Pandey!”

“Hurt me?” he cries. “Hurt me?” He slashes down, and she reacts just in time to deflect his blade. “Am I not hurt!” he roars. “Am I not wounded!”

He thrusts forward again, and she bats the point of his sword away. But it’s getting harder and harder each time.

She thinks rapidly. She’s seen enough of his technique that she knows what to expect now: another thrust, turning into her and pushing forward and down with his right shoulder. She has an idea, though it’s a dangerous one: if she’s even slightly wrong about this odds are she’ll take his sword right in the gut. But if it works there’s a chance she can disable his right arm, putting him out of the fight.

“I loved her more than anything in this world!” he says, still weeping. “I loved her!”

“I know,” she says.

“You don’t!” he snarls. “You don’t!”

He attacks, and he does it exactly as she expected: a powerful, deadly thrust down toward her belly.

She uses her own blade to force his sword down to where she’s just placed her metal false hand. The point of his sword sinks an inch or two into the hinge at her false hand’s wrist, but goes no farther—Signe’s metalwork holds fast.

At the same time, Mulaghesh thrusts her own sword up, aiming for Pandey’s armpit….

But then Pandey screams in rage, raises himself up, and tries in futility to force his blade down through her hand; yet as he does he lifts himself up and onto the point of her sword.

The blade smoothly enters his rib cage and sinks a half a foot into his chest, up toward his heart.

Pandey freezes with a choke.

Mulaghesh blinks, staring at what she’s done.

“No,” she whispers.

He coughs faintly. He tugs his sword free of her false hand and steps back, her blade sliding out of him.

Blood spatters onto the stones. His sword clatters to the ground.

“P-Pandey?” says Mulaghesh.

He looks down at himself. Another cannon fires behind them and his features glow with bright white light. All the rage and fury is gone from his face, and instead he looks confused and shocked but also strangely disappointed, as if he’d thought the whole time that this might happen but never quite believed it. He looks at his hand, which is coated in blood as if he’d dipped his fingers in a bucket of it. Then he looks at his side and sees the waterfall of red dribbling out from between his ribs to tumble down his waist to his boots.

His legs go out from under him and he falls to the ground.

“Pandey!” she screams. She throws her sword away and kneels beside him.

Blood is pouring out of his right side. He coughs, and she knows she’s badly punctured a lung. He coughs again, more violently, and blood sprays from his mouth and dribbles down his chin.

He’s drowning in his own blood. She knows he is, but she has no idea what to do.

“Pandey, no,” she says. “No! Keep breathing, Pandey, keep breathing!”

He tries to speak then: he snorts strangely, trying to draw air into himself to form the words, but he only coughs more. Then he mouths six words to her, his eyes shameful and desperate and terrified: I messed up, ma’am. I’m sorry.

Mulaghesh realizes she’s weeping. “Dammit, Pandey. Oh, damn it, I…I didn’t mean to, I didn’t.”

He coughs again. The lower half of his face is slick with blood now, and there’s a shallow pool of it on his side. He tries to speak again, but the effort is agonizing.

She places her hand on his cheek and says, “No. No, don’t talk. Don’t. You don’t need to. It’ll make it worse.”

His eyes are red and watery. He stares at her, afraid, his handsome, boyish face marred by the spray of blood from his mouth. She smooths down his hair and whispers, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. We owed you so much more than you were given. I’m so sorry.”

He seems to lie back a little, to stop struggling to force his lungs clear. He steels himself and shuts his eyes as if preparing for some horrible blow. But then he relaxes, his brow growing smooth, his eyes calm, and Sergeant Major Pandey slowly gains the look of someone who’s just fallen into slightly uncomfortable sleep.

The cannons rage behind her. Just ahead, the ships threaten to land. She can see their decks brimming with Voortyashtani sentinels, ancient warriors eager to leap into the fray.

But she has no attention for any of it. She feels the scream begin to build in her.

Again, a child of her nation she was responsible for. Again, someone who once trusted her with all of their heart. Again, blood on her blade and a body cooling underneath foreign skies.

Again, again, again.

The world is afire. The night is filled with the screams of soldiers and civilians, scrambling and scrabbling in the face of incomprehensible war.

She can see Sigrud watching her, bent double, uncertain what to do.

She wishes to scream to him. Perhaps not just to him, but to the fortress, to the ships, to the terrified people at the base of these cliffs, to the night skies and the pale face of the moon turned a muddy brown behind a veil of smoke.

But then there’s a voice—a voice in her head that is not her own.

The voice whispers to her, very definitely asking her a question, soft and quiet yet filling the whole of her mind:

Are you a part of me? Am I a part of you?

Something nuzzles at her thoughts, something curious and yet welcoming. It is perhaps the strangest sensation she’s ever felt, but she can tell there is some mind or entity reaching out to her—and she has the unshakable feeling that this entity is speaking from her right pocket.

She reaches in and pulls out the sword of Voortya.

The atmosphere in the westernmost watchtower grows grim and desperate as the technicians rattle off positions and coordinates to the coastal cannons, though the ships are now so close and so thick that it would be difficult to miss them. Captain Sakthi watches, gripping his spyglass so hard he’s vaguely concerned it may shatter, as the bay of Voortyashtan lights up again and again as shells strike their targets. The bay now appears to be littered with giant prayer lanterns, the seas dotted with flaming, burning wrecks. Ordinarily this would be enough to stave off any coastal attack, but the other Voortyashtani ships simply shove them aside as they plow toward the coast, limitless and indomitable.

The city of Voortyashtan itself is in a complete uproar as citizens stampede up the cliff roads, led by SDC workers. Major Hukkeri’s battered, exhausted battalion is taking up positions on the southern cliffs, desperately trying to prepare for the impending invasion, but the flood of citizens out of the city has turned her work into utter chaos.

In his head, Sakthi rifles through all the scenarios that were taught to him during training, all the strategies and cunning feints and clever tactics he might employ in the battlefield to turn situations to his favor.

He considers his options, and realizes with a sinking heart that he has none.

Then one of the technicians says, “Who the hells is that on the western cliffs?”

Captain Sakthi wheels around, frowning. He glasses the cliffs and sees two figures just to the northwest of them, on the very point of the rock. It’s hard to make anything out, but one of them has a hand that shines very curiously, as if made of metal.

His mouth opens, surprised. “General Mulaghesh?”

Mulaghesh listens to the sword.

It begins to show her things: sensations, concepts, avenues of reality and emotion that were never accessible to her before, aspects of existence hidden to the mortal mind.

The world flickers around her: for one instant she is back in the City of Blades; in another she is on the cold, damp mountains along the Solda; and in yet another she stands at the bottom of a mass grave, watching as a never-ending cascade of bones pours over the lip, indescribable casualties from an endless war.

Not one war, she realizes—every war, all wars ever fought by humanity. Never one side prevailing over the other, never separate and disparate groups, but a blazing, monstrous act of self-mutilation, as if humanity itself was cutting open its own belly to send its intestines spilling into its lap.

The sword speaks to her: Are you these things? Is this you?

It shows her an image then: a solitary silhouette of a person standing on a hilltop, looking out upon a burning countryside.

She knows, in some wordless, instantaneous fashion, that this figure has not struck every blow in the war it watches, yet it is still responsible for all of them: this person, this entity, has created every battle of this war, caused every scream and every drop of blood. And in its hand the figure holds…

A sword. Not a sword, the sword: bound up in that blade is the soul of every sword and every weapon that has ever been, every bullet and every bolt and every arrow and every knife. When the first human raised a stone and used it to strike down its kin this sword was there, waiting to be born: not a weapon, but the spirit of all weaponry, harm and cruelty both endless and everlasting.

Do I, the sword asks her, belong to you?

The cannons flare around her. Pandey is now pale and cold, just like Signe Harkvaldsson, and long before them Sankhar and Bansa.

Woresk, Moatar, Utusk, Tambovohar, Sarashtov, Shoveyn, Dzermir, and Kauzir.

Weeping, she bends her mind to the sword, and says:

Yes. Yes, you do.

The blade of the sword flickers to life, greedily accepting her, embracing her. And the world begins to change.

Sigrud frowns as Mulaghesh stares down at the black handle of the sword, seemingly in a trance. He begins to say, “What are you doing?” when suddenly something is…different.

Is he going mad, or does the hilt now have a blade? Faint and luminescent, like the flame of a candle just where it touches the wick?

Then there is a blast as if a shell has struck the coast. Sigrud is thrown back, his broken arm howling in pain. A wave of cold air rushes over him. Once it passes he sits up, blinking, and looks to find Mulaghesh, assuming that she is dead.

But she is not dead. He watches as she tears off her false hand and walks to the very edge of the cliff, stalking forward with a curious, menacing swagger, the movements of someone who intends to do violence and do it soon. The strange blade flickers in her hand, its muddy yellow light spilling over the stones.

Yet as she moves he sees something…behind her. Or perhaps over her, as if she is a drawing in a book and someone has laid down a piece of wax paper with something sketched on it, so both images are separate yet visible at the same time….

A figure, huge and tall, arrayed in darkly glittering plate mail.

Mulaghesh stops at the cliffs just over the thousands upon thousands of ships, looks out upon the fleet, raises the sword, and begins to speak to them.

She can feel them now, all of them: her children, her followers, those whom she wrought and yet wrought her in turn. She can feel them on the countless ships: bright, hard diamonds of battle. They are not as they were once, she can tell: they are shadows of themselves, the barest shade of souls. They lost themselves just as the city fell apart in the great cataclysm that brought this nation to its knees. But they are still hers. They are doing what she promised them they would do. And even now they seek her.

She calls to them: “Children of warfare!”

The cannons roar and rage. The ships burn and the people scream. They do not hear her over these joyous sounds.

Again: “Children of warfare!”

The slap of the oars. The howl of the wind. The shriek of the shells. Still they do not hear her.

She takes in a huge breath, the cold, smoky air reaching every inch of her lungs, and howls to them, “Children of warfare! Children of Voortya!”

The call echoes out, out, out, over the seas, through the flames, through the smoke, over the dark waves, until it finally, finally reaches the warriors aboard one single ship.

They stop rowing. They turn to look at the cliffs.

A single thought goes trickling through the vast army below her:

Mother?

They turn their thoughts to her, inspecting her, seeking her out. They parse through her mind, her soul, and slowly, slowly, slowly believe her to be who they wish her to be. And as more and more of them believe, she begins to grow.

The ground falls away below her. She feels the plate mail on her shoulders, the metal boots upon her feet. She feels her neck creak with the weight of the helm upon her brow, and she peers at the world from behind a cold, steel face.

Her face.

SDC Security Chief Lem watches, haggard and pale, as the endless line of citizens and SDC workers toil up the mountain paths. The bay beyond is already bright with the queer, spectral light of the warships, and he knows they’ll be here soon. Though could there even be a safe place now, with so many ships filled with those monsters?

Then someone screams: “Look! Look!”

They look westward, just west of Fort Thinadeshi, and stare as a huge, dark figure swells up against the night sky. The figure is lit from below by the lights of the ships and the flaming wrecks on the waters, but even with these wavering lights one can still see that blank, metal face, dark-eyed and pitiless, and the enormous, terrifying sword in its hand—its one and only hand.

“No,” whispers Lem. “No, it can’t be. It simply can’t be! She’s dead! Everyone knows she’s dead!”

There is a new sound beyond the cannons and the flames and the screaming civilians: a chanting from the bay as the countless warriors aboard the ships sing one word over and over again, or rather one name: a primitive, syncopated chant like the beat of a war drum:

“Voortya! Voortya! Voortya! Voortya!”

The soldiers in the westernmost watchtower stare in horror as the giant figure swells until it almost completely blocks out their view of the western seas. It seems to have come from nowhere, sprouting out of the rock itself. Its back is covered in broad plate mail, each segment carved with horrific illustrations of violence and depravity. The burning bay beyond makes the sight even more hellish, a Saypuri nightmare come to life.

The goddess of war, the Divinity of death, reborn upon these savage cliffs in Saypur’s darkest hour.

“By the seas,” whispers Sakthi. “By the seas…It simply can’t be!”

One of the technicians turns to Captain Sakthi. “Should we…ah, fire, sir?”

“We can’t fire on her!” says another. “She’s much too close! We don’t have the right angle!”

They all turn to look at Sakthi.

He sighs. “Oh, dear.”

Mulaghesh faces the fleet of warships and the warriors chanting her name—or what the sword says is her name. It’s hard to tell….The sword says many things to her, whispering to her, urging her to be glad, to be filled with bright, hot, happy fury at this moment, for she is reunited with her army, with those who built her empire.

Yet all Mulaghesh can think of is the body at her feet, and all those she has left in her trail.

She takes a breath and howls out to the sea, “Children of war! Children of Voortya!”

The warriors scream and howl in celebration.

She screams, “Look at me! Look at me and know me!”

The bay falls silent as the warriors await her words.

She cries out, “I am the Empress of Graves! I am the one-handed Maiden of Steel! I am the Queen of Grief, I am She Who Clove the Earth in Twain!”

The world keeps distorting itself around her. She feels huge, gigantic, a titan standing underneath the sky—yet she knows she feels tears on her cheeks, hot and wet and real.

“I am war!” she screams to them. “I am plague and I am pestilence! In my wake is an ocean of blood! I am death, I am death! Listen to me, look at me and know me, for I am death, I am naught but death!”

The Voortyashtani citizens watch in horror as the booming words echo across the waters to them. The figure on the clifftops extends its arms to the sky, as if begging lightning to strike it.

The voice cries: “I have killed countless soldiers! I have left them rotting in the fields, and their mothers never learned where they came to lie! I struck them down even as they begged me to stay my hand! I have broken open the gates of great cities and listened to the citizens weep! I have done these atrocities. I have! Do you hear me?”

The crowd of Voortyashtanis is silent, and yet for some reason they begin to weep as they listen to the figure scream to the seas and the skies. Lem himself finds it strange—these words do not have the ring of a declaration of war, but rather they sound like a confession, full of agony and sorrow.

The voice howls, “I have killed women! I have killed children! Do you hear me? Do you hear me? I have done these things! I have burned down their homes, I have killed them in their beds! I have walked away as they screamed for their loved ones! I have abandoned children to freeze in the dark winter nights! I have done these horrors and countless others!”

The figure holds its sword high in the air and screams, “I am warfare and I am death! I am sorrow never-ending! Look upon me! Look upon me, I beg of you, look upon me!”

Mulaghesh raises the sword. She feels as if it is pulling her, like she is merely its vessel, its instrument. She knows it wants her to turn and bring its edge down upon the fortress, to strike it so hard the very cliffs are sundered beneath it, and then once this is done she shall lead these warriors forward, through Voortyashtan, down the Solda, across the face of the Continent, and from there across the world.

Just as she said she would. Just as she promised them. Just as she swore, just as they are owed.

Yet some part of her resists, thinking only, I am so very tired of this.

And as this thought goes skittering through her mind she suddenly understands that she does not hold the sword: rather, it holds her, imprisoning her like it is a massive, dark cavern, and she is just a tiny creature lost in its darkness, trapped inside of it.

She feels the destruction gathering in the sword.

No, she says to it.

It wants to fall. It wants to cleave flesh from bone. It wants to split the earth in two.

No, she says to it.

She feels all the thoughts and desires of all of her warriors pulling at it, wishing it into movement, forcing her to be the force they expect her to be.

Her arm trembles as she resists. No! No, I won’t let you!

Their thoughts rise up to her in a muttering wave: You must! You must, you must! We did as you asked. We became the warriors you wished us to be! Now give us what we are owed! Give us what you promised!

Her elbow strains against the sword. It’s so heavy it’s as if she holds the moon itself in her hand, her will against the will of the countless dead.

Then she thinks, The warriors I wished them to be…

She remembers Villaicha Thinadeshi in the City of Blades, telling her: … you of all people should know that war is an art requiring decorum and formality. It feverishly adheres to rules and traditions—and that can be used against it.

Yes, she thinks.

She twists her wrist, points the sword down, and diverts all its power, driving it into the cliff at her feet. The stone parts as if it were made of cotton.

The ground trembles underneath her, threatening to collapse. Yet it holds.

The warriors aboard the ships stare at her, confused. Why does she not do as she promised? Why does she not permit them to wage the last war?

Mulaghesh looks out at the bay, sets her jaw, and rips the sword out of the cliff.

Somehow the sword understands what she wishes to do, and cries to her, No, no! You cannot, you must not!

She forces her will upon it, using every measure of her conviction to change it, to unwrap and unfold and redefine and rewrite it and all it stands for—an invisible, agonizing battle that exhausts her, nearly kills her.

The sword cries out: I was meant for death! I was meant for battle! I was meant for war!

Mulaghesh’s answer has the ring of cold iron: Times have changed.

She finishes her work. Then she turns to the warriors below.

She begins to speak, her voice quaking with fury: “Listen to me, my children! Listen to me! You have slain many and taken many lands! You have won countless battles and waged countless wars!” Her voice rises until it echoes like thunder. “Yet I now ask of you—are you marauders or are you servants? Do you give power to others, or do you hoard it? Do you fight not to have something, but rather fight so that others might one day have something? Is your blade a part of your soul, or is it a burden, a tool, to be used with care? Are you soldiers, my children, or are you savages?”

The bay is silent save for the flicker of flames and the slap of the waters. The sentinels stand upon their ships, staring at her in confusion.

Then one sentinel calls to her, “Mother, Mother! What is this you speak of? What is this you describe? That is not what a soldier is! A soldier does not give, they take! A soldier does not serve, but forces others to serve! A soldier does not cede power, but wields it, wrests it from the hands of any who dares lay claim to it! A soldier never gives, a soldier never serves! A soldier fights only to kill, to claim, to take, to conquer! That is what we are!”

The dead murmur their agreement, their low mutterings floating over the waters.

Mulaghesh bows her head. Her disgust and outrage and contempt burn bright within her, and the sword reacts, flaring brighter than the midday sun, a white eruption of purest light, as if she holds in her hand the morning star.

She holds the sword high and screams in fury, “THEN I FIND YOU WANTING! NO SOLDIERS ARE YOU IN MY EYES! NO TRUE SOLDIERS ARE ANY OF YOU! AND SO I SAY OUR AGREEMENT IS BROKEN!”

She hurls the blazing sword down.

Captain Sakthi stares in disbelief as Voortya swings her hand out and throws the glittering, burning sword down to the waters. It is a bolt of lightning, a comet, a blaze of light so bright it’s like the sky has been split open. He raises his hand to shield his eyes, watching through the cracks in his fingers as this fiery, flickering star comes shrieking down to touch the waters at the very center of the fleet.

The horizon erupts. It’s like a thousand shells have gone off, like the death of a star, a wall of purest, bright white light flying at them.

Sakthi shuts his eyes. He cries out and crumples to the ground, covering his face with his arms, bracing for the impact. Surely this explosion will send a crushing wave of water roaring up the shores. Surely shrapnel will fall on them like screaming rains, rending them to pieces. Surely they’ll dissolve in a wave of hot fire that will set the whole of the countryside alight.

But nothing comes.

He waits. Then he lowers his arms, raises his head, and looks.

His eyes are still adjusting, so the dimly lit world bursts with faint blue-green bubbles. Once this passes he sees the bay is covered with thick, curling smoke. But he can’t see a single mast or burning hull in any of it.

The wind picks up. The smoke curls faster, then withdraws like a curtain.

He slowly stands.

The bay is empty. No, not just empty—it’s calm and placid, as it has been nearly every night this week. Not a lick of flotsam or jetsam bobs upon its shores, and the figure of Voortya has vanished with it.

“Gone,” he says. “They’re all gone.”

He is still too stunned to react when all of the technicians begin cheering.

Sakthi tries to run faster, but his body is rebelling against him now. He’s been racing about for nearly four hours, moving at breakneck speeds since Biswal first mentioned this mad night was happening, and now his feet ache and his knees creak and some of his lower vertebrae are complaining terribly. Yet he knows his fellow soldiers must be as exhausted as he is as they sprint over the rocks to where they saw the Divinity, their torches bobbing up and down in the dark, so he pushes himself a little harder, raising the guttering red flare in his hands and crying, “To me, to me! Hurry, my boys and girls, hurry!”

It’s all so impossible. He’s thinking the same thing everyone else is: Did they really see the Divinity of war tonight? And did she really strike down her own army, wiping them out in a single blow? Or did something…else happen tonight?

Sergeant Burdar flings out a finger. “There, Captain! Over there!”

There, on the farthest point, the shape of a single person sitting on the cliffs.

Captain Sakthi sprints toward them, crying, “Don’t shoot, damn you, don’t shoot a damn thing unless you have to! Don’t you damned well fire a shot, my boys and girls!”

They drop back, allowing him to be first on the scene. He’s not sure what he’s expecting: perhaps they’ll find the sword of Voortya still buried in the side of the cliffs up to the hilt. Or perhaps they’ll find some unearthly, Divine wound in reality, like they have in Bulikov. Or perhaps the cliffs will be sloughing away entirely, unable to support the madness of this evening.

But as his soldiers encircle the people on the cliffs, he finds it is nothing so strange, nothing so surreal. Captain Sakthi is a veteran of combat, so the sight is not unfamiliar: a young soldier, lying on the ground, pale and still with a wound in his side; and there next to him curled over double is a woman, sobbing hysterically, as if it were she, not the soldier, who was mortally wounded.

She says the same words over and over again: “No more, no more. Please, please, no more.”