City of Blades

4. The Black Room

Mulaghesh sits at the window of her spacious room, staring out. The view is gorgeous—Voortyashtan is like a wall of fireflies below her—but she cannot bring herself to enjoy it. Not after that conversation.

Just what in the hells have I gotten myself into?

She walks back to her bags, rummages about, and takes out something wrapped in an old scarf.

Mulaghesh is not an eager neophile, but she knows efficiency when she sees it, which is why, unlike many commanders her age, she took the time to train in firearms. Her favorite is this particularly vicious little piece of technology: a short, thick, snubby little contraption called a “carousel,” which earned its name because of its cyclic design of five little barrels each containing one shot, rotating to the next with each squeeze of the trigger. The carousel is much easier for a person with one hand to load and unload than most other weapon systems, as you just need to pop off the empty barrel cylinder and pop on a full set. She hasn’t used it on a live target yet, and frankly hopes she never has to, but she places it on her nightstand, just in case.

She lies down on the bed. Tomorrow, she’s decided, she’ll go to the last place Choudhry was seen: Fort Thinadeshi.

She shuts her eyes and tries to listen to the waves outside.

Don’t forget where you are. Don’t forget where you are.

Mulaghesh wakes at 0500, grabs a portfolio for notes, commandeers one of the few telephones in the SDC headquarters, and phones Fort Thinadeshi. The tinny voice of an on-call sergeant answers, surprised: they expected her, but not this soon. She’s in luck, though, as General Biswal is present at the fortress, having returned from a tour of other installations in the region, and can indeed make time on his calendar for her. “Provided the car can make it down to you in time, General,” adds the sergeant.

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Well, there’s really only one road down to the city from the fortress, and it’s a little…variable in quality. It’s the only road in the city that will tolerate an automobile, but even then it’s a stretch.”

“So don’t bring any cups brimming with hot tea, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s about the cut of it.”

“Great.”

When the auto arrives it’s hard to believe there’s a functional vehicle underneath all the mud and moss and sprays of gravel, which stick to the sides like barnacles on a ship. She’s happy she wore her fatigues rather than her dress uniform. “Holy hells,” she says when the driver hops out. “I damned well hope the wheels stay on.”

Then she looks at the driver and does a double take. He’s a young man, short but fit with a well-trimmed beard. He would be considered quite handsome were it not for his rather weak chin. But there’s something familiar in his face, especially in the way he’s grinning at her.

He gives a sharp salute. “Morning, General. Ready for the trip up?”

“I know you,” she says, stepping closer. Then in a flash, she has it. “Damn. Sergeant Major Pandey, isn’t it? From Bulikov. Is that you?”

His grin practically glows, pleased and proud. “It is, ma’am. Happy to see you again.”

She remembers him a little more than some of the other soldiers she had under her command in Bulikov: he was captain of the barracks rowing team, which practiced in the summer on the Solda, much to the displeasure of the Bulikovians. And she remembers he was a wickedly talented swordsman, sparring with a liquid grace that even Mulaghesh, who was no slow hand with a blade herself, found remarkable.

“You went and got yourself all grown up, I see,” she says. “What in the hells are you doing all the way up here?”

“Mostly driving, ma’am,” Pandey says. “Turns out there aren’t too many soldiers up here knowledgeable with automobiles, so I’ve been stuck with this noble duty.”

Instinctively she looks Pandey over, checking his arms and legs for a sign of injury, his cheeks for any hint of malnourishment, his teeth for any sign of scurvy. He’s not yours anymore, she thinks. He’s Biswal’s now—or, perhaps, he’s his own. “Well, I hope you’ve honed your skills. I need to get up the cliffs and quick, but I’d like to do it in one piece.”

Pandey throws open her door. “The road is a vasha string, General,” he says, referring to the Saypuri instrument, “and the auto my bow. I’ll give you a grand performance.”

“If you can drive half as well as you can talk, Pandey,” she says, climbing in, “I expect I’ll be fine.”

Ten minutes later Mulaghesh watches out the window as Voortyashtan lurches by, the auto pitching and yawing like a boat in a storm. She spies tents and yurts and ditches and alleys, makeshift structures that can hardly bear the brunt of the wind. Standing throughout this disordered sprawl are tall, curious stone formations, tottering, misshapen cairns that run in lines along the Solda. Something about the cairns disturbs her, but it’s difficult for her to say what.

“It’s like a damned refugee camp,” says Mulaghesh.

“It would be similar, General,” says Pandey. He points at one of the cairns. “Were it not for those.”

“What do you mean?” She looks closer at one as they drive underneath it. It’s much taller than she’d anticipated, twenty or thirty feet, but she spies the suggestion of human features on the bulbous top of one towering cairn: the shallow dimples of eyes, the soft bulge of what could be a nose. She examines the others in the distance, searching for the divots of shadow at their tops, and sees the same.

“Statues,” says Mulaghesh. “They’re statues, aren’t they?”

“They were, once,” says Pandey. “Rumor has it they guarded the Solda, greeting those who floated down to the old city, passing through the gates.” He nods at the two peaks along the river. “The change in climate’s been none too kind to them.”

She imagines what they might have once been: tall, human figures dotting the shores, perhaps splendid and regal, now beaten and twisted into something barely recognizable, staring down forever at a missing city. “What must it be like, living in the shadows of these things?”

They come to the clifftops. Fort Thinadeshi broods on the horizon like a storm cloud, immense and dark and gleaming wetly, so covered with cannons that it resembles a vast porcupine. “I suppose the shtanis are used to living with threats hanging over their shoulders, General,” says Pandey.

“Shtanis?”

“Oh. Um. It’s what we call the locals here, ma’am.”

Mulaghesh frowns. The word puts a bad taste in her mouth, or perhaps it’s the sight of the fortress looming ahead.

As they approach the first perimeter of fences, Mulaghesh looks northwest of the fortress and sees a curious installation not more than two miles from the fort’s walls. The structure looks bland and benign, a dull, small concrete creation, but it’s got twice as many fences and watchtowers as the rest of the fortress’s perimeters.

“What in the hells is that?” she says. “That’s a damned truckload of wire sitting around it, whatever it is.”

“I believe they’re considering expansion, General,” says Pandey. “Or so I’m told. Haven’t made much progress, though, or so it seems.”

She nods pleasantly, fully aware that this is a cover story—though she can’t tell if Pandey knows that. That little gray button of a building, she suspects, must be the extraction point for whatever ore they discovered out here.

“What brought you here, Pandey?” she asks. “After Bulikov you could have gone anywhere.”

“Well, when General Biswal took command here, I couldn’t resist. He was your old commander, wasn’t he? It was an education serving under you, ma’am. I suppose I wished to continue it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well…” Pandey struggles for the words. “It seems like there are only a few of the true old heroes still serving today. When they retire, so much history will be forgotten with them.”

Mulaghesh looks out the window toward the fir-dotted hills, stark and looming under the gray skies, and tries not to think of the first time she saw countryside like this. “What a pity that will be.”

Fort Thinadeshi—named after the famed innovator Vallaicha Thinadeshi—is one of the oldest military installations on the Continent, half coastal fortress, half military base. Sporting an immense coastal battery, precipitous battlements, tangles of wire fences, and a sprawling barracks, there is something both grimly majestic and crudely improvised about Fort Thinadeshi, all things for all situations, for all situations are found and met here in Voortyashtan. What a grand and noble mess it is, thinks Mulaghesh as the auto putters through a gate, the dark walls towering over her.

She imagines what Sumitra Choudhry would have thought of it. She thinks back to when she read Choudhry’s files aboard the Kaypee with Pitry. The girl served eighteen months in the Saypuri Military, a common practice undertaken to improve one’s odds of Ministry recruitment. During her time in uniform she received a Silver Star and a Golden Stroke for “Distinguished Service” during an “altercation” when a Continental charged a checkpoint.

Mulaghesh was experienced enough to parse through these neutral phrases. She shot and killed someone, she said aloud, when someone really needed her to do it. She glanced at the Silver Star notation. And she got injured doing it.

Yes, Pitry said. Took a bolt to the left shoulder when a Continental charged a checkpoint, just above the collarbone. Nearly killed her. But she managed to get the shot off after she’d been injured.

She pulled off a killshot after being critically injured? She’s either a hard case or lucky.

From what I’ve heard of her, General, he said mildly, I rather think it’s the former.

They park and Pandey leads her into the headquarters, whose interiors are dank and tomb-like, yawning hallways and tiny, tunnel-like stairways. This part of Thinadeshi, she realizes, was built mere years after the Kaj took the Continent, and is so out of date it’s almost mind-boggling. As someone who’s been part of the planning and construction of multiple installations, the many glaring flaws—this staircase too tight for evacuation, those windows too large and exposed—come leaping out to her, almost causing her to cringe.

“Where are we going?” asks Mulaghesh as they climb up a winding staircase. “I thought Biswal was here.”

“He is, ma’am,” says Pandey. “He’s in the nest, just above us.”

“The what?”

“The nest. The crow’s nest, sorry. General Biswal is, as he puts it, a visual thinker, so he likes a view.”

Mulaghesh is about to ask him to please clarify his damned self when gray light comes spilling in from above, and they emerge into a rounded, glass-walled room like something you’d find at the top of a lighthouse. She glances to the side and has a moment of vertigo when she realizes how high up they are, the battlements sprawling out three hundred feet below her.

“General Biswal,” says Pandey. “General Mulaghesh.”

Mulaghesh looks around. She realizes this chamber—which must be the topmost spire of Fort Thinadeshi—has been converted into something like a makeshift office, with a small desk facing east. Stuck on the windows before the desk are numerous maps of the region, many of which she finds familiar. The wall of colors and images confounds her eyes so much that it takes her a minute to realize there’s someone seated at the desk, wearing a bright orange headcloth.

He grunts and slowly swivels in his chair, turning to look at them.

Mulaghesh’s world seems to spin around her.

He is not the man she remembers. There’s some remaining suggestion of the broad-shouldered, powerfully built man he was once, but he’s got more around the middle now, his carefully manicured beard is now bone white, and small, delicate little spectacles now balance atop his nose.

But his eyes are still the same: still pale, pale gray and somewhat deep-set, as if viewing the world from deep within himself.

General Lalith Biswal smiles—a somewhat forced gesture—and stands. “By the seas,” he says. “By all the seas, Turyin! Turyin, is it really you? How many years has it been? Are you really somewhere in that old woman’s body?”

“I could ask the same of you,” says Mulaghesh. “I remember now why I don’t catch up with my former colleagues. They remind me of how damn old I’ve gotten.”

He shakes her hand and his grip is the same, the fingers of a person meant either to build things or break them. Then, to her surprise, he gently pulls her into an embrace—a gesture of affection she’s never witnessed from him before.

“I don’t care,” says Biswal. “I wish I’d seen you more often.” He holds her by the arms and stares into her face, like a father reviewing a child home from boarding school. “It helps me fight the feeling that I’m a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened.”

Mulaghesh tries to return his affection, but it’s difficult: her left arm hurts, and her right one is making a fist, something she can’t stop. He somehow smells the same: a masculine but not unpleasant musk, dashed with the scent of juniper berries and pine. Yet the faintest ghost of this aroma brings a thousand memories with it: the smell of smoke, ash, rain, animal dung, rotten food, and putrid meat, and with the scents come the sounds, the distant screaming and the mutter of the flames.

Don’t forget where you are, thinks Mulaghesh. Don’t forget where you are.

Biswal releases her. “Sergeant Major Pandey, you’re dismissed. It’s not appropriate for the young to witness the commiseration of the old.” He smiles brightly at Mulaghesh. “How about some tea? After all, up here is the farthest we can get from the problems of this unsightly shithole.”

“As the wise man says,” Biswal says, pouring her a cup, “when the shepherd lies down with his goats, he finds himself listening to them. And soon, who are the shepherds and who are the goats?”

The wind rattles the windows. Mulaghesh tries to tell herself that the swaying sensation she’s feeling is her imagination. She definitely doesn’t want to believe that the tower they’re in is actually moving. “You think of the Voortyashtanis as goats?” says Mulaghesh, watching steam languidly massage the brim of her cup.

“No,” says Biswal, pouring his own. “I think that’s giving them too much credit.” His voice hasn’t changed: it’s still low and husky, like the low groan of a ship’s timbers. He still talks the same way, too, like he’s reluctant to speak but determined to carefully say his piece. Having a conversation with him was always like having a conversation with a bulldozer, slow and indomitable.

“So what’s the situation?”

“It’s simple on the surface. Minister Komayd wants to build a harbor, yes? Open up the Solda, change the Continent forever, yes?”

“Yeah?”

“The problem is, this plays into local politics, if I can even use such a civilized term. Old rivalries, perhaps.” He points to the maps on the glass wall. One features color-coded regions along the Solda and up in the highlands. “There are two types of Voortyashtanis here, Turyin. Those that live in the highlands and those that live along the river. The ones along the river are rich and fat and happy. They have the best pastures and charge everyone an arm and a leg to cross the Solda. Those in the highlands, well. They have it tough, they always have, and they’ve always fought for better land.”

“So?”

“You have the reasonable response. So? So what does this backwater nonsense have to do with the harbor? Who cares about these bumpkins? Well, unfortunately, if we want the harbor to work, we’re going to have to live with these people. And if we open up the waters, who will we disturb?”

Mulaghesh grimaces and nods. “Ah.”

“Yes. The river tribes wish to acquire new lands in order to relocate their settlements and farmland. The only decent land available, however, belongs to the highland tribes—in fact, it’s the only arable land they possess. So this leaves the highland clans very upset. The sort of upset that makes you raid military rail shipments, steal a bunch of riflings and explosives, and go to war. The sort of upset that makes you pillage and burn settlements along territorial boundaries. The sort of upset that makes you put a bullet through the face of the previous commander of this damned region. That kind of upset.”

“That’s pretty fucking upset.”

“You have no idea,” he says. “I’ve been here about a year and a quarter now, and I’ve got upcoming negotiations with the tribal leaders to try and get them to stop killing one another. Not to mention us. My hopes are not high. Good choice wearing your fatigues, by the way. Don’t distinguish yourself as an officer at all, if you can help it. Thinadeshi seems secure, but it’s still a combat outpost. There are lots of hidden people in the hills all too happy to reward your decorum with a bullet.”

“So that’s how you came to be here? The previous commander got shot, so they came to you?”

Biswal deflates a little. “No. Not quite. I was teaching. Military history, at Abhishek Academy. The shelf, in other words.”

Mulaghesh nods. “The shelf” is the military term for a state of disuse, when a soldier, operative, or officer is not dismissed but set aside and, likely, forgotten. One can get on the shelf for any reason: some fall out of favor politically, some screw up an operation or make some fatal career flaw….Still others just get old. Very few go to the shelf voluntarily—yet this is precisely what Mulaghesh herself attempted to do. And I couldn’t even get that right….

“No one else wanted the job, so they gave me another look,” says Biswal. “I should have known that if they were willing to give it to me, I shouldn’t take it. This is a daunting task, and the number of souls on my shoulder weighs heavily.”

Mulaghesh glances at a map on the wall detailing the installations throughout Voortyashtan. “How many?”

“Seven thousand here in Thinadeshi. Four thousand in Fort Hadji, where the rails see a lot of action—just north of the highlands, you see. Thirty-five hundred at Fort Lok. More at the border with Jukoshtan. All in all, I find myself commander of twenty-three thousand soldiers here in Voortyashtan, Turyin. A lot, but not as many as we need.”

“No?”

“No. We’re spread too thin. My predecessor tried to disrupt the insurgents’ bastions in the mountains, and that was a miserable failure. Cost him his life. For now, the military council’s orders are strictly to hold on. Fortify. Protect the harbor. As if it needs it. The Dreylings practically have their own army down there. They’ve even got a damned minigun.”

“Really.” Mulaghesh makes a note of this.

“And somehow all the shtanis manage to have firearms, too.” He gives the carousel in her holster the briefest of glances. “I hate them, Turyin. I hate these damned new guns, which suddenly seem to be everywhere.”

“I never figured you for a technophobe,” says Mulaghesh.

“I’m not,” he growls. “But these things make it damned easy to kill a man. With bolts, ammunition is so much more of a hassle. Too much wind and you can’t use them at all. Short-ranged, too. With riflings…Overnight, we’ve gone from bolt-action to fully automatic and beyond. Dying has gotten a whole lot easier all over the world.”

“We’ve always been able to make them,” says Mulaghesh. “We were just never able to scale up production before.”

“Then perhaps we should have left them on the factory floor,” says Biswal. “Are you a convert, Turyin?”

“If you can’t fight the future, you might as well learn the ropes quick as you can. Especially if you’ve got to climb them with a handicap.” She holds up her prosthetic left hand.

“Ah.” His eyes sadden. “I’d heard about that. I’m so sorry for what you went through.”

“And both of us know it wasn’t much. I’m alive. That’s more than most get.”

“Yes. That is true. You always did have a head for priorities, Turyin. It surprised me when I heard you’d walked out on the job. Why did you leave?”

She gives a neutral shrug. “They wanted me to be something I wasn’t.”

“Ah. A politician, then?”

“Something like that.”

“And now you’re here on the shuffle,” says Biswal. “I don’t think anyone’s ever done the touring shuffle in Voortyashtan. Why did they send you here?”

“I pissed on a lot of important shoes when I left,” says Mulaghesh. “They could’ve just waved the discrepancy off, but they didn’t. I don’t think they even wanted to give me the opportunity to get it taken care of, really. I think maybe they sent me up hoping I’d get buried here.”

Biswal’s eyes dim and crinkle. “Yes. I…I wonder that, too. Perhaps they’re just trying to mop us up. Me and you, still being alive—we inconvenience them, don’t we?”

She hesitates. She feels nauseous. She hasn’t discussed this with anyone in over ten years, and she never wanted to break the subject open like this, with the very man who led them all way back when.

She wanted to forget. She did a good job of it. It’s downright obnoxious of the world to remind her that the Yellow March actually happened.

To her relief, they’re interrupted by the sound of steps behind them. Mulaghesh turns to see a Saypuri soldier of about forty mounting the stairs, and from the chevrons on her uniform she’s a captain, first class. But there is an unmistakable air of lethality about this woman that Mulaghesh finds striking: everything about her posture and bearing—jaw set forward, shoulders square, legs spread wide—seems intended to either take or deal damage. Her hair is tied back so tightly it seems to stretch the skin on her forehead, which has a curious whitish streak in the middle. It’s a large scar, like she’s had almost all of her scalp peeled off in some injury. This does nothing to affect her stony, still gaze, though: Mulaghesh only has to glance at her to see that this is a soldier who’s seen a great deal of combat, probably the messy kind.

Once she’s at the top of the steps, the captain swivels on her heel and smartly salutes. “General Mulaghesh. It’s an honor to have you here at Thinadeshi.”

“Ah, you found me, Nadar,” says Biswal.

“When you’re at Thinadeshi, General, you’re almost always in the nest.” She glances around disapprovingly. “Against my advice.”

“Turyin, this is Captain Kiran Nadar, commander of Fort Thinadeshi. Nadar doesn’t admire my makeshift office here. She thinks the shtanis are dangerous and could take advantage of it. But on the contrary, the reason I’m up here is because I know they’re dangerous.” He gazes east, at the ragged, pink peaks of the Tarsil Mountains. “Where else can I get a better look at what we have to deal with?”

“I’m guessing this is something of an artifact,” says Mulaghesh, standing and looking around at the little room. “Built before artillery and small arms had quite the reach they do now.”

“Correct,” says Nadar. “And since we lost our last commander to a sharpshooter—may he find peace in his slumber—it makes me nervous that General Biswal chooses to take his tea up here.”

“Perhaps I enjoy spending time in the portions of this fortress,” says Biswal, “which were built when we had clearer aims about what we wished to accomplish here.”

Nadar lowers her gaze. There’s an awkward beat.

“It’s one hell of a place,” offers Mulaghesh. The words seem to die miserably in the air.

“No doubt you’re familiar with more modern installations, General,” says Nadar, with a touch of wounded pride. “But here, we’re forced to make do with what we have.”

“Some of it looks damned modern, though.” Mulaghesh walks to the west side of the spire, which looks toward the ocean and the cliffs. But before the cliffs is the bland little structure she saw on the way up here, lined with miles of razor wire. “What in all the hells is that?”

“A halted attempt at expansion, General,” says Nadar smoothly.

“Expansion?”

“Yes, General.”

Mulaghesh looks at her. “No, it isn’t.”

Nadar’s confident expression wilts. Biswal glances back and forth between the two of them, his face inscrutable.

“I’ve seen expansions before, Captain,” says Mulaghesh. “Lots of them. And that’s not one. More to the point, I spent a lot of time reviewing requests and proposals to try to expand Fort Thinadeshi. None of them broke ground. Which that out there obviously has.”

Nadar looks to Biswal, who looks back at her as if to say, I told you so. Nadar frowns, nettled, and says, “With all due respect, General—and I think this is something you expected—this is an intelligence compartment that I don’t believe you’re read into.”

“Maybe, Captain.” Then, casually, “Is this that thing about the metal?”

Nadar looks like she’s been slapped. “The…The metal?”

“Yeah. The metal you found around here.”

“How…You…” Nadar struggles to control her reactions. “How was it that you came to be, ah, informed about this, General?”

“I’d seen reports on something about it back when I was on the council.” This is a lie, but since very few ever know what powerful people see and do, it’s an easy one to believe. “I suppose that was before it got formally compartmentalized, though. I thought it was just some curiosity. But if it’s big enough for compartmentalization, and for you all to build that out there for it…it must be pretty damn curious indeed.”

There’s a long silence.

Biswal leans back in his chair and chuckles. “The years have been kind to your mind, Turyin. You’re a sight cleverer than I remember.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, sir,” says Mulaghesh.

“General Biswal,” says Nadar, now quite flushed, “I…I do not consider the intelligence orders we have regarding our affairs here to be anything to laugh at. If there has been a breach of this compartment we need t—”

“I recall once hearing a young captain very tactfully tell me,” says Biswal, “that one can both respect and obey Ghaladesh while remembering that it is over a thousand miles away.”

Nadar’s flush deepens. “This is still an alarming revelation. Even if it is General Mulaghesh who’s aware of the situation here. My concern is that, if she knows, someone else could. That poses a serious security breach.”

“You’re right to be worried,” says Biswal. “But this breach didn’t happen on our end—something I’ll happily tell Ghaladesh. Perhaps we ought to be grateful to General Mulaghesh for making us aware of the breach in the first place.”

“I’m just here on the touring shuffle,” Mulaghesh says. “I don’t wish to be an intrusion.”

“You aren’t,” says Biswal. “This project is an intrusion. It’s wise to seek your discretion, though—and the best way to be discreet is to know exactly what it is we need to be discreet about. Captain Nadar, will you please read General Mulaghesh into this compartment and give her the full briefing on Operation Arc Lightning?”

Nadar makes a face as if she’s just been asked to swallow a spoonful of some very foul medicine.

“I don’t wish to waste any more time discussing this absurd diversion,” says Biswal quietly, holding up his hands. “Please, Nadar. Show her the most recent eccentricity our nation has chosen to spend money on, rather than more walls, more soldiers, and more support.”

“With all due respect, General,” says Nadar, “this flies in the face of proce—”

She stops talking as a round of small pops echoes across the battlements. Mulaghesh looks up, alarmed. “Is that gunfire?”

Neither Biswal nor Nadar seem surprised. Biswal checks his watch. “Ah. I’d forgotten what time it is.”

“What the hells is that? It sounded like a volley.”

“Well, it was, in a way.” Biswal takes out a spyglass and walks to the walls. He glasses a yard to the east, behind walls and walls of wire fencing. “Just another daily duty of Fort Thinadeshi.”

He hands Mulaghesh the spyglass. It takes her only a moment to find it, and though it’s hazy with gunsmoke the scene is quite clear.

Nine Saypuri soldiers with riflings stand at one end of the yard; at the other is a tall, earthen berm with dark, stained soil at its bottom. There’s something lying there in the dirt, limp and crumpled, and two Saypuri soldiers run forward and drag it away, leaving behind a streak of red mud.

“They surprised a checkpoint,” says Biswal beside her. “Shot two of the guards there. We only captured them by pure coincidence—a returning patrol happened upon them.”

The two soldiers drag in a filthy, cowering Continental man, his face almost completely obscured with bruises. They put a blindfold on him and stand him up before the berm. The crotch of his pants blooms dark with urine.

“You’re executing them?” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes,” says Biswal. “This is not Bulikov, Turyin. There is no order of law here, beyond tribal law. The only courts here are military courts. And the fortress’s prison is tiny and old. We can’t keep people there indefinitely.”

She watches as the supervisor of the rifling squad shouts orders. The nine soldiers lift their riflings.

“In Voortyashtan,” says Biswal, “we make do with what we can.”

The yard fills with gunsmoke. The Continental man topples over. It takes a little bit longer for the sound of the gunshots to drift up to them.

She lowers the spyglass and slowly hands it back to Biswal.

“Perhaps you can now understand,” says Biswal, “that I have much more important things to care about than any secret science experiments. Captain Nadar—please show General Mulaghesh the laboratories. Perhaps before she retires she can inform the council what a ridiculous burden this all is. And once you’ve done so, report back to me on the status of the eastern perimeter. We still have real work to do.”

Nadar is still composing herself at the foot of the stairs when Mulaghesh gets there. Nadar coughs. “I apologize for that, General. That must have been uncomfortable.”

“I’ll say,” says Mulaghesh darkly. She oversaw executions of her own in Bulikov, of course, but they were far more ceremonial affairs, attended and supervised by civilian officials. What she just witnessed felt as mundane as taking out the day’s trash.

“The thing is, I agree with him,” says Nadar. She begins walking down the hall, and Mulaghesh follows. “Operation Arc Lightning places a great burden on us when we need it least.”

“But?”

“But, Biswal has…little patience for any issue that isn’t actively posing a threat.”

“When your predecessor got shot in combat, I can see why a clandestine mining operation might not top your list of priorities.”

“General Raajhaa…Yes, he was a great leader, General. He was much admired. His loss changed many minds about what we’re doing here.” She shakes herself and begins taking a long staircase down. “How much do you know about Arc Lightning, General?”

“I know it’s a metal. I know it’s in the ground. That’s about the run of it. I didn’t even realize it’d gotten a fancy code name yet.”

“I see. And how much do you know about electrical engineering?”

“Nothing. Maybe less than nothing.”

“Well, that’ll make this easier,” says Nadar. “It’ll mean fewer questions.”

They walk down the hallway to the lab doors. The ceilings here are covered with pipes and tubes, all sighing or squeaking or softly bubbling.

“You are probably aware that electrification promises to be the next great step for our nation,” says Nadar.

“I read about it in the papers from time to time. I thought Vallaicha Thinadeshi had tried it before and failed.”

“True, but she only made small inroads. Yet now, as you might’ve seen in Ghaladesh, entire homes and buildings run off of it.”

“Yes,” says Mulaghesh, who’s honestly never really cared for electrical light. It somehow seems to bring out the flaws in the human face.

“The main issue right now is transmission,” says Nadar. “We have coal, we have dams. But scaling up transmission to match Saypur’s industries…that’s proving difficult.” She throws open a wooden door on the other side of the hallway. Inside is a pristine white laboratory featuring all kinds of complicated equipment: pumps and processors and something that has an inordinate amount of tubing. Four attendants are perched over glass dishes containing various amounts of gray, unimpressive powder. They look up, startled.

“Lieutenant Prathda,” says Nadar. One of the attendants stands up straight and salutes. “This is General Mulaghesh. I’m giving her a tour of the facilities. Why don’t you give her the technical rundown of what we’re doing here?”

Prathda—a gangly, odd peacock of a man—paces over and salutes Mulaghesh directly. “Certainly, General. An honor to have you with us. How technical would you like me to be?”

“Just give her the general rundown,” says Nadar. “And no charts this time, Lieutenant.”

“I see,” says Prathda. He bites his lip. “But, Captain, I did some additional production work on one, and I think this chart really clarifies how—”

“No charts, Lieutenant,” says Nadar forcefully. “Just the five-minute tour.”

“Certainly, Captain.” Then he thinks for a moment and says, “A demonstration would probably be simplest.” He turns to his attendants. “Please get me the components for the Aamdi test, if you could.” One of the attendants leaps up and digs underneath the counter until she produces a very large lightbulb that’s more than two feet long, a bulky battery, and two sets of thick cables. “Thank you,” says Prathda, and he picks them up and carries them to a dense door with a sign reading TESTING ROOM FOUR. “This way, General,” he calls over his shoulder.

Mulaghesh follows, but Nadar hangs back. “I’ve seen this show, General,” she explains. “I’ll, ah, hang out here in the hallway, if that’s all right.”

Concerned, Mulaghesh walks into the testing room. “Please shut that door securely,” Prathda says. “Thank you, General.”

She notices the door has a layer of steel on the interior, like a blast door. “Uh…Is there anything we need to be, uh, shielded from?”

“I assure you, it’s all quite safe. Now, we have here two very ordinary components—a bulb, and a battery. The battery is large and has a very large charge, and the bulb is from a high-powered street lamp in Ghaladesh—so its capacity for taking in electricity and putting out light is very, very high. Am I clear?”

Mulaghesh grunts.

“Excellent. Now, these cables are of common copper—the sort of copper that is currently being used in most electrical practices. If I apply them to the battery’s connectors like so…And then, of course, to the lightbulb’s base…” The bulb, lying on its side on the counter, flickers with a faint yellow light, which grows as Prathda adjusts the cables until it’s a flat, somewhat decent source of light in this rather dark room.

“Right,” says Prathda. He removes the cables, killing the light. “It functions, carrying the charge to and from the bulb. However, there is considerable loss—hence why the bulb does not glow particularly brightly. But these cables”—he holds the two other cables up so that Mulaghesh can see that they’re flagged red—“are an alloy, mixing copper with a very recently discovered element.”

“And what is this new element?”

“It’s something that was found nearby in Voortyashtan, totally by accident,” says Prathda, fixing the cables to the battery. “We were originally helping SDC source the materials for the harbor. The harbor project, it was thought, would likely need a large amount of stone, so we considered siting a quarry near the fortress. Our engineers went digging, and found…this. A seam of ore the likes of which has never been discovered before.” Prathda looks up, smiling beatifically. “Are you ready, General?”

Mulaghesh nods.

He touches the cables to the bulb’s base.

And then…

Mulaghesh’s eyes interpret what is happening as an explosion, but one that is silent and pristine. She fights the impulse to dive to the floor—she imagines the cough and shriek of shells, the rumble of nearby blasts—and keeps watching.

The bulb fills up with a white, white hot light, a bursting, blinding eruption of pure incandescence that’s so intense Mulaghesh can almost feel it on her skin. It’s so bright it’s like the light is shooting back into her head and out the other side, and she cries out and looks away as the walls themselves begin to glow, reflecting this terrible light.

There’s a pow! as the filament in the bulb gives out. Mulaghesh shouts, “Fucking hells!” and holds up her portfolio to shield herself from the shattered glass—but it doesn’t come. She slowly lowers it. The bulb is whole but dark, the interior of its glass scarred and smoky. Prathda has his face turned away as well, but when he looks back at her he has a dazed smile, as if having just swallowed some wonderful drug.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he says. “We call it thinadeskite. After the engineer, you see.”

“This bulb,” says Prathda, unceremoniously dumping it in a trash can, “should have been capable of handling 110 kilomundes. It’s an electrical term. Enough to light up a goodish portion of your average city park, I should say. So the fact that the thinadeskite was able to blow that out is…significant. However, we did use a very refined portion of thinadeskite in these cables. If you would, General—I have a few more interesting things to show you.”

He walks out the door without looking back. She starts to follow, then stops and picks up the battery. It’s warm. She turns it over and sees a label on its bottom reading 90 KM. KM standing for kilomundes, presumably, a terminology she’s never heard of before, but then she’s no scientist.

“Hm,” she says. She replaces the battery and follows.

Nadar stands outside with a smile on her face. “Still have your eyebrows, General?”

“I kind of wish we’d gone with the charts,” says Mulaghesh.

“Trust me,” says Nadar, “you don’t.”

“As you can see, its conductivity is staggering,” Prathda is saying as he walks ahead. “Simply staggering. The Department of Reconstruction is very interested in this, as are countless industry representatives, though we’ve only been allowed to give them very limited reports, of course. Just think of every power need of all of Ghaladesh, met by one centralized little plant—or even distributed plants! Imagine miles and miles of wiring and cabling, made of thinadeskite! Imagine a whole factory powered by a piece of wire no thicker than your finger!”

“It certainly is a lot to think about,” says Mulaghesh. They pass by a window looking into a strange laboratory with lots of microscopes. Lots of lenses, lots of bulbs, lots of wire, lots of refining. She takes a careful look at the raw material itself in one glass tank: it looks a little like ordinary graphite to her. “How does the stuff work?”

Prathda coughs, suddenly awkward. “Well, that is a subject of some controversy. There are a lot of theories. The right one is currently being determined.”

“You don’t know?”

“We’re working on it. We think it might be an alteration to a commonly found dielectric compound, or it might have something to do with oscillations in the spin of certain subnuc—”

“You don’t know.”

“Um. No. We don’t. Not yet, anyway.”

Mulaghesh knew all that, of course. But it’s quite something to see Prathda collapse so quickly.

“Prathda and the rest of our science department here are working away on that,” says Nadar.

“Sure, but that must put a kink in your production plans,” says Mulaghesh. “You can’t build a completely new power system out of shit no one understands.”

“It’s true that, like any good scientist, we need to be thorough,” says Prathda. “And we are trying to be. I know what Ghaladesh is concerned about, and”—he shakes his head, laughing in frustration—“and we have confirmed, repeatedly—repeatedly!—that it is of no concern: they are worried that this material is Divine, somehow.”

“I guess I can see why they’d be concerned about that,” says Mulaghesh, as if she’d only just heard the idea.

“But, it cannot be. Not only because the Divinity of these lands, Voortya, is most certainly, undeniably dead—Saypur would not be a free state if the Kaj had not struck her down at the very start of the War, of course—but also because we have conducted numerous tests endorsed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself to ascertain the Divine nature of a substance or event, and each test has come back irrefutably negative. The Ministry’s own tests!”

“Okay, but…to be clear, thinade…What is it, again?”

“Thinadeskite.”

“Right. Beyond the conductivity, thinadeskite doesn’t do anything else inexplicable, right?”

“Well. That…depends on your definition of inexplicable.”

“I would define it,” says Mulaghesh, “as something you do not know how to explain.”

He pauses. She watches as his eyes search the upper left corner of the room: a habit, she’s learned in her time, of someone trying to navigate a difficult truth.

What Mulaghesh really wants to do right now is, as it is delicately expressed in reports, “apply the full measure of her authority”—that is, get right up in Prathda’s face and chew him out at maximum volume until he’s good and rattled. This is often the simplest way of dealing with a soldier tiptoeing around a hard truth, she’s found, and it’s definitely what she would do if she were in Bulikov with the full backing of the polis governor’s office.

But she doesn’t do that. Mulaghesh forcibly reminds herself that she is not in command here, and she isn’t here to clean house, to take command, to report back to any oversight committee on the workings of Fort Thinadeshi. She’s not here to be a commander, but an operative, a spy. And these people think her to be no more than a tourist, someone here for a month or two before saying farewell and sailing off into obscurity.

A molar on the right side of her jaw pops as she grinds her teeth. I cannot think of someone more ill-suited to this task.

She asks herself—what would Shara do?

She’d keep him on the hook and string his dumb ass along.

So instead of physically assaulting Prathda and bellowing questions at him, she slowly asks, “Would it have something to do with how your 110 kilomundes bulb got blown out by a 90 kilomundes battery—20 kilomundes less than what I’m guessing is the full capacity of the bulb?”

Prathda looks at her with the face of someone who is slowly realizing that this person is much smarter than he gave them credit for. Captain Nadar tenses up slightly, surprised at this turn in the discussion.

“Does thinadeskite conduct electricity, Prathda,” Mulaghesh asks, “or does it generate it?”

He thinks for a long time. “We…haven’t determined that yet.”

“Okay.”

“But in a refined state, it…amplifies the charge. Considerably.”

Mulaghesh is silent. Prathda shifts on his feet, uncomfortable.

“Should that be possible?” she asks.

“Well. No.”

“This subject area,” says Nadar, “is a little…sensitive, General.”

“I can understand that,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t like the impossible more than anyone else does.”

“It does defy our current understanding of physics,” Prathda admits. “Electricity cannot just come from nowhere. It has to be generated from some phenomenon. But our understanding of physics is changing all the time. We learn new things every day,” he says as he leads them back through the labs. “This is the goal of Arc Lightning. Science is like a glacier: slow and indomitable. But it will get to where it’s going.”

“Thank you for that eloquent speech, Prathda,” says Nadar curtly. “And for the tour. Very informative, as always.”

Prathda bows expansively, thanks them both, and returns to his work.

“He’s a nice enough guy,” says Nadar as they exit. “But it’s hard to get top-grade scientific talent out here.”

“I see. So until we can verify exactly how thinadeskite does what it does, it’s not hitting any factory floors.”

“Correct, General. And we have all kinds of industry muck-a-mucks clawing at our backs to get their own people in here to run their own tests. But I’m not playing babysitter for a bunch of damned tweedy civilians.” Nadar says the word with a surprising amount of disdain. “We have enough problems here. We don’t need academics or scientists getting gutted or shot on our back door as well. Not to mention the security risks that poses, letting industry get their say in military matters.”

“Any security issues with Arc Lightning?”

“No serious ones, at least.”

“Serious ones?”

“Well. Truth be told, there was one odd incident a few months back that now seems to have been somewhat harmless. Some of our operations crew noticed signs that someone had started a fire in one of the branches. Not as sabotage, it seems, because there’s not much to burn down in a tunnel underground, but…Something like the ruins of a campfire. A very small one.”

“That is odd.” Mulaghesh makes a note of it.

“Yes, I went and looked myself. It looked as though whoever had done it had been burning just…well, plants, I suppose. Leaves. Some cloth. Things like that. As if someone had camped out down there, trying to escape the rain, perhaps.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Oh, months…Probably four or five months ago. We checked the fences, checked the security checkpoints, checked the tunnels, but found no sign of forced entry or tampering. It was strange, but it’s never happened again. It’s weak tea in comparison to the other issues pressing on us.”

“If you could have your way, Captain—what would you do with this project?”

Nadar blinks. Her heavy, dark eyes flick back and forth over the floor. “If I can speak freely, General?”

“You may.”

“I’d mothball this. Shut it down. Now’s not the time to play scientists.”

“And what would you do instead?”

Her response is immediate: “Arm and train the river clans, and coordinate with them to drive the highlanders out of the Tarsil Mountains entirely.”

“No more negotiations, then?”

Nadar scoffs. “It’s just a front. The highland tribes use the talks to stall just long enough until they can make their next move. They disassociate themselves from any conflict, of course. ‘That wasn’t us who did it, just people who happen to fervently agree with us—and how can we control them?’ Very convenient.”

“I see.” Mulaghesh clears her throat. “One last thing, Captain…”

“Yes?”

“I know you said that you’d used tests to confirm that this material was not Divine…but when they sent me here, I saw a record of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs representative coming here to do some additional tests.”

Nadar’s face darkens.

“But,” says Mulaghesh, “there was some kind of note that she went AWOL. Is that correct?”

Nadar thinks for a long time, her mouth working. “This, too,” she says finally, “is probably something that can be explained with a simple demonstration.”

She leads Mulaghesh to a small dormitory hallway. “This wing is for senior officers,” she explains, “as well as a few technicians and guests.” She comes to one room door and sorts through a ponderous ring of keys, procured from a maintenance worker. “We still haven’t cleaned it up, under my orders. I had a feeling someone would want to come looking for her.” She unlocks the door. “Though I suspect, General, you’ll want to just glance and move on until your pension’s earned out…with all due respect, of course.”

She pushes the door open.

Mulaghesh’s mouth twists as she looks into the room. “By the seas…”

Sumitra Choudhry, it seems, did a lot of redecorating before her disappearance: all the furniture has been removed except for a mattress, and a four-foot-wide black stripe with oddly fuzzy edges runs along the bare white walls. Mulaghesh notes that the stripe goes from about waist-height to shoulder-height…and as she looks closer she sees that it is not one solid stripe but writing, endless scribblings overlaid on one another until they become a dense, black fog, thousands and thousands of words running along the walls. Above and below this stripe, on the ceiling and on the floors, are drawings and sketches that leap out of the wandering black ribbon to stretch across the corners, until nearly three-quarters of the room is covered in black ink.

“She did all this?” asks Mulaghesh.

Nadar nods. Some of the writings must have needed censoring, for they’ve had whole bottles of black ink dumped out onto them, concealing their message. The ink has dripped down the walls in thin, tapered lines, reminding Mulaghesh of icicles running along a roof edge. In the center of the black-smeared floor is the bare, gray mattress.

“So,” says Mulaghesh. “She went mad.”

“So I would conclude, General,” says Nadar.

Mulaghesh walks in. The ink has puddled so thickly on the floor that it’s dried and cracked, like the parched ground of some wasteland. Some of the ink must have dried while Choudhry was still here, for Mulaghesh can see numerous tiny carvings of faces gouged into the calcified ink.

She stands in the center of Choudhry’s old mattress—which is nearly as ink-stained as the rest of the room—and looks around. It’s as if she painted her own nightmare, she thinks, and crawled inside.

The paintings and drawings have a handful of similarities. There are a lot of images of people holding hands, many of them standing on what looks like water. In some, one person—somewhat female looking—is wounding themselves, cutting off their arm or maybe their hand, while a second woman looks on in horror. There are countless images of weapons: swords, daggers, spears, arrows. Some drawings are less clear: one set in the corner looks like four chicken wings on kebab sticks, though there’s something disgustingly strange about them.

But one sketch is strangely arresting to Mulaghesh: it is a landscape, quite well done in comparison to some of the other drawings, depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed. Rising behind them is a tower, and though the outline is done in black ink, somehow it’s been drawn so that Mulaghesh feels the tower is purest white, reflecting the light of a cold winter moon.

“What happened?” says Mulaghesh.

“She came here about half a year ago to research the thinadeskite. Her efforts yielded the same results as ours—nothing. Nothing Divine about it. But then her research got a little…extracurricular. She started leaving the fort, going out to the city and some of the countryside. She stopped visiting the labs completely. She spent some time at the harbor, I am told. We thought it was odd, and I worried she was a security risk, though if you can’t trust a Ministry officer…” She sighs. “But we never ventured into her room here. She was a Ministry officer, after all. So we didn’t know how bad she’d gotten. Then one day, she never came back. We conducted a search, and found this. I’ve no idea what happened to her. But then, she did disappear right when another spate of fighting broke out.”

Mulaghesh steps on the mattress and slowly looks around. “And she left no paperwork trails? Nothing in your labs or in the fort that she was unusually fixated on?”

“She stopped coming to the labs mere weeks after arriving,” says Nadar. “Soon she was like a ghost. We rarely saw her, and she rarely engaged with us. Though some patrols mentioned she was sometimes seen walking the cliffs, holding a lantern. But that could have been anyone, General.”

“What sorts of tests did she run?”

Nadar runs through a litany of tests Mulaghesh hasn’t ever heard of, things involving lily petals and graveyard mud and silver coins. “What’s more,” says Nadar, “she went beyond the thinadeskite itself, and started testing the fort. The stones in the walls, the dirt, the trees…She tested all of this region, practically, for any trace of the Divine—and found nothing. It was like living with a madwoman.”

“Who was the last person to see her alive?”

“That’s difficult to say, because we aren’t totally sure when she disappeared. We had some reports of a Saypuri woman being sighted on the shore down in Voortyashtan, but no one could confirm if it was Choudhry or not. That’s the last hint of her movements that I have.”

Mulaghesh makes a note of this. “And is there any cause for this?”

“Cause?”

“Any, I don’t know…abuse or injury or trauma that could have given her this break from reality?”

“She did receive some kind of wound at some point….A head trauma, though she made up several stories about how she got it.”

“Is that the reason for her behavior?”

“I doubt it. Her change was much more gradual.”

“Then what?”

“General…” Nadar sighs and smiles weakly at her. “If you figure it out, you’d be the first. But this place puts pressure on a mind. A lot of awful things happened here. A lot are still happening. And if I can speak freely, General…” She glances around the room. “This shit frankly gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Mulaghesh can certainly see why. She tries to memorize everything she’s seeing, all the sketches, all the strange glyphs. She tries to make some copies in her portfolio, but they feel clumsy and crude. I wish Shara was here, she thinks. She knows about everything Divine. Or I wish I knew a Voortyashtani to ask about this….

She then realizes that she does—or, rather, she knows a Dreyling who grew up in Voortyashtan.

She grimaces. Playing with Signe Harkvaldsson, she feels, is playing with fire.

Then she notices a stack of papers lying in the corner. She walks over, picks them up, and does a double take.

“What the hells?” she mutters.

Mulaghesh knows Choudhry graduated with top honors from the Fadhuri Academy with a discipline in history—so why was she reading about a historical subject every schoolchild in Saypur knows backward and forward?

Mulaghesh stares down at the painting of Vallaicha Thinadeshi, perhaps the most famous woman in Saypuri history, and the person Fort Thinadeshi is named after.

When Mulaghesh was in school—which was so long ago that she doesn’t even want to think about it—there were two kinds of kids: those that worshipped the Kaj and those that worshipped Thinadeshi. Most flocked to the Kaj: the man was, in a way, the savior of Saypur, a brilliant martial leader who freed them from bondage.

But what children eventually realized was that the Kaj never came back: he died on the Continent, less than a year after his final victory. He never saw the founding of Saypur. He never had any idea that their country could ever happen. He didn’t build; he only destroyed.

Which was where Vallaicha Thinadeshi came in. As the Continent had relied on Saypur to provide a huge amount of resources without Divine assistance for hundreds of years, Saypuris had been forced to grow pretty canny about engineering and planning. And Vallaicha Thinadeshi proved to be the canniest: when Saypur was finally founded in 1648, she led the effort to build roads, develop irrigation and farming, and set up urban planning practices that could deal with the millions of Saypuri slaves suddenly set free. Saypur’s sudden freedom wasn’t easy, but it would have been a hell of a lot harder if Vallaicha Thinadeshi hadn’t been there to get the right things in the right places.

But she didn’t stop at that: she was also an innovative genius. It was Thinadeshi and her cadre of engineers who developed the railways and the telegraph systems. Her protégé had been the one to bring running water to Ghaladesh. And when Saypur opted to continue occupying the Continent in 1650, and “reconstruct,” it had been Vallaicha Thinadeshi who sailed over and brought railways to the Continent—though Mulaghesh now knows this was chiefly so Saypur could quickly move troops throughout the polises, as they did not trust the Continent to remain passive.

It’s this era of Thinadeshi’s life that’s endured, this image of her as adventurer and inventor, braving strange, hostile lands and bringing enlightenment with her. Mulaghesh knows the image is only somewhat true: Thinadeshi brought her family on her travels, and lost two children to plague, something she never forgave herself for. But perhaps the most mystifying and fixating thing about Thinadeshi’s life is how it ended. And it is this subject that Choudhry was apparently reading about.

Mulaghesh reads.

By 1661, Thinadeshi had brought railways and some basic infrastructure to every Continental polis except one—Voortyashtan. She finally ventured into Voortyashtan in order to, as one journalist put it, “bind the most monstrous Continental state beneath the noble steel of the Saypuri rails,” but it was during this expedition that Vallaicha Thinadeshi suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. Her scouting team searched for her and questioned the locals, but found no sign of Thinadeshi anywhere. It was as though she simply vanished. After months of searching they returned to Ghaladesh, and the country mourned the loss of a national hero.

Mulaghesh flips back to look at the painting of Thinadeshi: proud, regal, fearless, aristocratically thin and brown from the sun.

And both she and Choudhry, she reminds herself, vanished without a trace in this place, over sixty years apart.

“Any other interesting reading habits?” says Mulaghesh.

“It’s all we found,” says Nadar. “We think she burned the rest, though we’re not sure when. Or why.”

There’s one final page to the stack of papers, a sketch of something Mulaghesh’s eyes can’t quite interpret: it looks like a black hand holding a sword blade, but the hand has been fashioned to become the hilt. It’s a severed hand, she realizes, the severed wrist of the hand serving as the grip and pommel, with the clutching fingers acting as the blade’s cross-guard.

Below this sketch of the sword are two smaller sketches, one of the sword blade alone, the other of the disturbing hand-hilt. Below this is a note, torn out from some other publication:

Mulaghesh doesn’t have to think hard to realize whose initials “EP” are. Efrem Pangyui, she thinks. You still haunt me to this day….

Mulaghesh looks up at the sound of a door slamming outside, followed by the patter of sprinting footsteps in the hall. Sergeant Major Pandey appears at the open door, panting. “Captain Nadar…I’m sorry, I’ve been looking all over for you, ma’am.”

“Yes?” says Nadar. “What is it, Pandey? What’s the matter?”

“It’s…It’s, ah, happened again, Captain.”

“What has?”

Pandey frowns as he tries to think of how to phrase this. He says, “Another family north of here.”

Nadar goes terribly still. Slowly she turns to Mulaghesh and says, “Will you excuse us?”

“Certainly.”

Nadar and Pandey exit and stand in the hall, quietly conferring. Mulaghesh grabs Choudhry’s notes and stuffs them in her portfolio, but she makes sure to tilt her head toward the door, listening. She can’t catch any clear words—the one she can make out over and over again is “victim” or “victims”—but when she glances out Nadar’s face is pale and her mouth is pulled tight in distaste.

Mulaghesh sticks her head out the door. Pandey is nervously watching Nadar, waiting for an answer but too frightened to ask further. Mulaghesh walks over to them. “Something up?”

Nadar shakes her head, furious. “Fucking shtanis…”

“Eh?”

“I apologize, General. There’s…A report just came in about an attack. A family on an isolated farm north of here. Four of them. Town called Poshok.” She pauses. “We are told it’s quite gruesome.”

“I see. So. What are you going to do?”

Nadar sighs. “There’s an upcoming meeting of clan leaders that will surely feature a lot of difficult negotiation.”

“Biswal mentioned that.”

“Right. And this is the last thing we need, especially if it was one clan killing another.”

“So. What are you going to do?”

“Ride out there and look at it. Try and find the perpetrators, and put them on the gallows or in the ground. The faster this dies, the better.”

“Want me to come along?” asks Mulaghesh.

Nadar looks at her, surprised. “You’d want to do that, ma’am?”

“Really, I’m here to do whatever needs doing,” she says. “I might have dealt with a few things like this as polis governor. And, frankly, I think Biswal would prefer it if I wasn’t up under his feet. Besides, you’re all busy. I’m not.”

“I’m…I’m told the scene is quite upsetting, General,” Nadar says.

“I’ve dealt with my share of upsetting scenes,” says Mulaghesh. “Odds are this won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”

Nadar considers her words very carefully. “I’m…not so sure of that.”